Fima - Amos Oz [91]
Fima scrabbled in his pockets but found only loose change, so he asked the proprietress to put it on his account. Next week, when he was paid ... But she interrupted him blithely:
"Never mind. Don't worry. Everything is fine."
And without being asked she brought him a glass of sweet lemon tea and added:
"Anyway, everything come from Heaven."
He did not agree with her on this point, but the music of her words touched him like a caress, and he suddenly placed his fingers on her veined hand and thanked her. He praised the food and expressed enthusiastic agreement with what she had said earlier: "Pity is pity."
Once, when Dimi was eight, Ted and Yael had called him in a panic at ten in the morning to ask him to help search for the child, who apparently ran away from school because the other children had been bullying him. Without a moment's hesitation Fima called a taxi and hurried to the cosmetics factory in Romema. And indeed he found Baruch and Dimi shut up together in the small laboratory, bent over a bench, silvery mane touching albino curls; they were distilling a bluish liquid in a test tube over a burner. As he entered, the old man and the child both fell silent, like conspirators caught in the act. In those days Dimi was still in the habit of calling both Baruch and Fima "Granpa." The father, with his Trotsky beard curving upward like a Saracen scimitar, refused to reveal to Fima the nature of their experiment: there was no way of knowing whose side he was on. But Dimi, serious and secretive, said he trusted Fima not to give them away. Granpa and me arc developing an antistupidity spray. Wherever stupidity shows up, you can pull out a little canister, give a squirt, and it's gone. Fima said: You'll have to manufacture at least a hundred thousand tons of it in the first batch. Baruch said: Maybe we're wasting our time, Diminka. Clever people don't need the treatment, and as for fools, tell me, my dears, why should we weary ourselves for fools? Why don't we have some fun instead? At once he rang for a tray of candy, nuts, and fruit. With a sigh he took a bundle of little sticks out of a drawer and told the child to lock the door; the three of them spent the rest of the morning absorbed in a spillikins contest. The memory of that illicit morning's fun shone in Fima's mind as a patch of happiness such as he had never known even in his own childhood. Then, at midday, he had had to stir himself and return Dimi to his parents. Ted sentenced the child to two hours' solitary confinement in the bathroom and a further two days of house arrest. Fima also received a reprimand. He was almost sorry they had abandoned work on the antistupidity spray.
In the bus on the way to work he thought over what Mrs. Schoenberg had said about the doleful informer, and said to himself: To be forgotten by God is not necessarily to be doomed. On the contrary, it may mean becoming as light and free as a lizard in the desert. He brooded on the similarity between two Hebrew verbs, the one meaning "forget" and the other "dwindle" or "die away." The most wretched fate was not to be forgotten but, precisely, to fade away. Will, longings, memories, carnal desires, curiosity, passion, gladness, generosity—everything gradually faded. As the wind died in the mountains, so the spirit too expired. Indeed, even pain decreased somewhat with the passage of the years, but then, together with pain, other signs of life also declined. The simple, silent, primal things, those things that every child greeted with excitement and wonderment, such as die succession of the seasons, a kitten scampering in the yard, a door swiveling on its hinges, the life cycle of plants, swelling fruit, whispering pines, a column of ants on the veranda, the play of light on the valleys and the hillsides, the pallor of the moon and its halo, spiders' webs laden with dewdrops in the early morning, the miracles of