Fima Read Free Page A

save himself from idleness he decided to call Yael. If her husband answered, he would hang up. If she was there, the inspiration of the moment would tell him what to say. Like that time, after a terrible fight, when he had mollified her with the words: If only we weren't married, I'd ask you to be my wife. And she, smiling, had answered through her tears, If you weren't already my husband, I think I might say yes. After ten or twenty hollow rings Fima understood that Yael did not want to speak to him, unless Ted was leaning on the phone to prevent her picking up the receiver.
    He felt weary. His long nocturnal prowl through the alleys of Valladolid had ruined his whole morning. At one o'clock he had to be at his post behind the reception desk of the private clinic where he worked in Kiryat Shmuel, and already it was twenty past nine. Fima crumpled up the headings for his article and his electricity bill and his shopping list and his computerized bank statement and tossed them all in the trash can: clearing his desk for action at last. He went to the kitchen to make himself a fresh cup of coffee, and while he was waiting for the water to boil, he stood in the half-darkness remembering the evening light in Jerusalem some thirty years before, in Agrippa Street outside the Eden cinema a few weeks after his trip to Greece. Yael had said then, Yes, Effy, I do quite love you and I like loving you and I like it when you talk, but what makes you think that if you stop talking for a few minutes you'll stop existing? And he had shut up like a child scolded by its mother.
    When after a quarter of an hour the kettle was still not boiling, even though he had remembered twice to plug it in, he finally realized that without electricity he would never have his coffee. So he lay down again, fully dressed under the heavy winter blanket, set the alarm for quarter to twelve, hid his dream book under the pile of newspapers and magazines at the foot of his bed, covered himself up to his chin, and concentrated his thoughts on women until he managed to arouse himself. He clasped his organ with all ten fingers, like a burglar climbing a drainpipe or, rather—he chuckled—like a drowning man clutching at a straw. But fatigue was much stronger than desire, and he let go and dropped off. Outside, the rain grew heavier.

3. A CAN OF WORMS
    O N THE MIDDAY NEWS HE HEARD THAT AN A RAB YOUTH HAD BEEN hit and killed that morning by a plastic bullet fired presumably from a soldier's rifle in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp in the course of a stone-throwing incident, and that the corpse had been snatched from the hospital in Gaza by masked youths. The circumstances were being investigated. Fima considered the wording of the announcement. He particularly disliked the expression "killed by a plastic bullet." And the word "presumably" made him seethe. He was angry, too, in a more general way, about the passive verbs that were beginning to take over official statements and seemed to be infecting the language as a whole.
    Although in fact it might be a healthy and wholly laudable sense of shame that prevented us from announcing simply: a Jewish soldier has shot and killed an Arab teenager. On the other hand, this polluted language was constantly teaching us that die fault lay with the rifle, with the circumstances that were being investigated, with the plastic bullet, as if all evil was the fault of Heaven and everything was predestined.
    And in fact, he said to himself, who knows?
    After all, there is a sort of secret charm in the words "the fault of Heaven."
    But then he was angry with himself. There was no charm and it was not secret. Leave Heaven out of it.
    Fima aimed a fork at his forehead, at his temple, at the back of his head, and tried to guess or sense what it must feel like the instant the bullet pierces the skull and explodes: no pain, no noise, perhaps, so he imagined, perhaps just a searing flash of incredulity, like a child prepared for a slap in the face