Fima - Amos Oz [9]
spent the night in some highland valley or sacred grove. Liat Sirkin taught Fima one or two unusual, exquisite pleasures, but he felt, beyond the carnal thrills, faint hints of a more spiritual elation: almost day by day he fell under the spell of a secret mountain joy mingled with a sense of exaltation which endowed him with heightened powers of vision such as he had never experienced before or since. During these days in the mountains of northern Greece he was able, looking at the sunrise over a clump of olive trees, to sec the creation of the world. And to know with absolute certainty, as he passed a flock of sheep in the midday heat, that this was not the first time he had lived. And actually to hear, sitting on the vine-shaded terrace of a village tavern, over wine and cheese and salad, the roar of a snowstorm in the polar wastes. He played tunes to the girls on a pipe he had fashioned from a reed, and was not ashamed to leap and whirl in front of them like a crazy child until he brought them to peals of childlike laughter and simple happiness. All that time he could see no contradiction between pining for Ilia and sleeping with Liat, but he barely noticed the third girl, who mostly chose to stay silent. Though she was the one who dressed his foot when he cut it on a piece of broken glass. These three girls, with the previous women in his life, including his mother, who had died when he was ten, almost merged into a single woman in his mind. Not because he thought that a woman is only a woman, but because with his inner illumination he sometimes felt that the differences between people, any people—men, women, or children—were of no consequence except perhaps for the outermost layer, the ephemeral surface. Just as water took the form of snow or mist or steam, or a lump of ice, or clouds or hailstones. Or just as the bells of the monasteries and village churches differed only in their pitch and rhythm, all having the same meaning. He shared these thoughts with the girls, two of whom believed, whereas the third called him a simpleton and contented herself with patching his shirt; in this too Fima saw only different expressions of a single statement. This third girl, Yael Levin from Yavne'el, did not refrain from joining in their nude swimming on warm moonlit nights if they found a spring or stream. Once, they watched stealthily, from a distance, a fifteen-year-old shepherd boy satisfying his urges on a nanny goat. And once, they saw a pair of pious old women in widow's weeds with large wooden crosses on their chests sitting silently on a rock in the middle of a field in the noonday heat, motionless, their fingers interlaced. One night they heard sounds of music coming from an empty ruin. And one day a wizened old man walked past them, going the other way, playing on a broken accordion that made no sound. The next morning there was a brief cloudburst, and the air became so clear that they could see the shadows of trees shifting on the red-tiled roofs of little villages in distant valleys, and almost make out the individual needles of the cypress and pine trees on the flanks of the mountains. One of the peaks still wore a cap of snow, which looked silver rather than white against the deep blue of the sky. Flocks of birds were performing a sort of scarf dance overhead. Fima, for no particular reason, suddenly said something that made all the girls laugh:
"This," he said, "is where the dog is buried."
Ilia said: "I feel dreamier than in a dream and more awake than waking. I can't explain it."
Liat said: "It's the light. That's all."
And Yael: "Who's thirsty? Let's go down to the water."
Less than a month after the conclusion of this trip Fima went to Yavne'el to look for the third girl. He discovered that Yael Levin was a graduate of the aeronautical engineering department of Haifa Technion and worked in a top-secret air force installation in the hills west of Jerusalem. After a few meetings he found that her presence made him feel restful, while his presence amused her in her placid way. When he asked her, hesitantly,