Fima - Amos Oz [92]
This morning I was told, and said myself: "I'm late, I must run." But why? Run where? For what? Surely even Minister Rabin must have been excited by those primal things once, as he stood a thousand years ago, a withdrawn, ginger-haired child, a thin, freckled child with no shoes on, in a back yard in Tel Aviv, among the clotheslines, at six o'clock on an autumn morning, when suddenly a flock of cranes flew past overhead, white against the dawn clouds, promising him, like me, a pure world, hill of silence and blueness, far from words and lies, if only we dare leave everything behind and get up and go. But here we are, this minister of defense just like the rest of us who attack him daily in the newspapers, we've all forgotten and we've all faded. We are all dead souls. Everywhere we go, we leave behind us a trail of lifeless words, from which it is only a short way to the corpses of Arab children killed daily in the Territories. A short way to the fact that a man like me erases from the register of the dead, without thinking, the children of the family of settlers burned alive the day before yesterday by a Molotov cocktail on the road to Alfei Menashe. How could I have forgotten? Was their death insufficiendy innocent? Unworthy to enter the shrine of suffering of which we have, as it were, made ourselves the guardians? Is it just that the settlers frighten and infuriate me, whereas the Arab children weigh on my conscience? Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not-so-intolerable killing of children? Justice itself sounded forth from the mouth of Mrs. Schoenberg when she said to me simply: "Pity is pity." Minister of Defense Rabin is betraying our basic values ct cetera, whereas in Rabin's view I and my ilk are betraying the fundamental principles et cetera. But in relation to the distant call of the primal splendor of an autumn morning, in relation to that flight of cranes, surely we are all traitors. No difference between the minister and me. We have even poisoned Dimi and his friends. Therefore I ought to write a few lines to Rabin, to apologize, to try to explain that we are in the same boat after all. Or perhaps to ask for a meeting?
"That's enough." Fima smiled wryly. "We have sinned. We have transgressed. That's enough."
When he got off the bus, he muttered like a captious old man: "Wordplay. Empty wordplay." Because suddenly his earlier juggling with the words for "forget" and "dwindle" or "die away" struck him as so cheap that he did not even say thank you or good-bye to the driver as he got off the bus, which he was always very particular about doing, even in moments of absent-mindedness, including yesterday when he inadvertently got off at the wrong stop.
Fima stood in the gray street for a moment or two, among dead leaves and scraps of paper blowing in the wind. He concentrated on the whisper of damp pines behind the stone walls, and he stared at the departing bus. What had he left on the bus? A book? An umbrella? An envelope? Perhaps a small package? Something belonging to Tamar? Or to Annette Tadmor? "Cranes wheel and whirl": a forgotten line from an old children's song suddenly came back to him. He consoled himself with the hope that what he had forgotten on the seat was merely the copy of Ma'ariv that he found there. Thanks to the minister and the cranes, he could not even remember the headlines.
24. SHAME