Fima - Amos Oz [90]
Fima thought about it, and ordered the stew and an omelette, and a mixed salad, and a fruit compote. At another table sat a small, wrinkled man who struck Fima as glum and unwell. He was lazily reading Yediot Aharonot, turning the pages, staring, picking his teeth, and turning the pages again. His hair seemed to be stuck to his forehead with engine grease. Fima weighed for a moment the chances that it was just he himself, glued to that table since yesterday or the day before, and that all the events of the night and the morning had never taken place. Or that they had happened to somebody else, who resembled him in some ways and differed from him in a few details that didn't matter.
The whole distinction between open possibilities and closed accomplished facts was simplistic. Perhaps his father was right after all: There is no such thing as a universal map of reality; it simply cannot exist. Everyone has to find his own way somehow through the forest with the help of unreliable, inaccurate maps that we arc born wrapped in or that we pick up here and there along the way. That is why we are all lost, wandering in circles, bumping into one another unawares, and losing one another in the dark, without so much as a distant glimmer of the supernal radiance.
Fima was almost tempted to ask the proprietress who the other gentleman was, and how long he had been sitting like that, squandering life's rich treasure at the green-and-white-oilcloth-covered table. Eventually he decided to make do with asking her what she thought should be done to bring peace nearer.
Mrs. Scheinmann reacted with suspicion. She glanced all around apprehensively, before replying shyly:
"What do we understand? Let the higher-ups decide. The generals in our government. God should only give them good health. And he should give them also plenty good sense."
"Should we make some concessions to the Arabs?"
Apparently afraid of spies, or of tripping herself, or simply of words themselves, she glanced toward the door and the curtain to the kitchen before whispering:
"We need to have some pity. That is all we need."
Fima persisted:
"Pity for the Arabs or pity for ourselves?"
She gave him another timid, coquettish smile, like a peasant girl disconcerted by a sudden question about the color of her underwear or the distance from here to the moon. She replied with graceful shrewdness:
"Pity is pity."
The man at the next table, who looked emaciated and tortured, with his greasy hair stuck to his skull, and who Fima imagined to be a petty clerk with hemorrhoids, perhaps a retired sanitation officer, intervened in the conversation with a Romanian accent and a flat intonation, picking his teeth all the time:
"Sir. Excuse. Please. What Arabs? What peace? What state? Who needs it? While we live, we must enjoy. Why you give a damn for the rest of the world? What, the rest of the world give a damn for you? Just enjoy. The most you can do. Just have good time. All the rest, you waste your time. Excuse for interrupting."
Fima did not think the speaker looked much like someone who had a good time; more like someone who made a few pounds now and then by informing on his neighbors to the Income Tax Department. The man's hands shook.
Fima inquired politely:
"You're saying we should trust to the government in everything? We should look after our own affairs and not meddle in public matters?"
The doleful informer said:
"Best is from the government also they go have a good time. And from the government of the Arabs also. And same thing from the goyim. All happy all the day. Anyway we all dies."
Mrs. Scheinmann smiled conspiratorially at Fima, ignoring the dismissed clerk. Obsequiously, as though to apologize for what he was obliged to listen to here, she said:
"Pay no attention, Doctor.