Fima by Amos Oz Page B

abhorrent but wonderfully perfect: a representative of a hated race, persecuted and confined to the drains, excelling in the an of stubborn survival, agile and cunning in the dark; a race that had fallen victim to primeval loathing born of fear, of simple cruelty, of inherited prejudices. Could it be that it was precisely the evasiveness of this race, its humility and plainness, its powerful vitality, that aroused horror in us? Horror at the murderous instinct that its very presence excited in us? Horror because of the mysterious longevity of a creature that could neither sting nor bite and always kept its distance? Fima therefore retreated in respectful silence. He replaced his shoe on his foot, ignoring the rank smell of his sock. And he closed the door of the cupboard under the sink gently, so as not to alarm the creature. Then he straightened up with a grunt and decided to put off the household chores to another morning, because there were so many of them and they seemed unfairly burdensome.
    He switched the electric kettle on to make himself a cup of coffee, turned the radio to the music program, and managed to catch the beginning of Fauré's Requiem, whose tragic opening notes made him stare out the window for a while in the direction of the Bethlehem hills. Those people of the future his father had mentioned, who a hundred years from now would live in this very flat without knowing anything about him or his life, would they really never feel any curiosity about who had lived here at the beginning of 1989? But why should they? Was there anything in his life that might be of use to people whose parents had not even been born yet? Something that might at least provide them with food for thought as they stood at this window on a winter's morning in the year 2089? No doubt in a hundred years' time jet-propelled vehicles would have become so commonplace that the people living here would have no special reason to remember Yael and Teddy, or Nina and Uri and their crowd, or Tamar and the two gynecologists. Even Tsvi Kropotkin's historical research would probably be out of date by then. At most all that would remain of it would be a footnote in some obsolete tome. His envy of Tsvi seemed pointless, vain, and ridiculous. That envy that he obstinately denied, even to himself, and whose insidious nibbling he silenced with endless arguments, calling Tsvi up on the phone and slipping in a question, out of the blue, about the exiled king of Albania, entangling them in a bad-tempered argument about Albanian Islam or Balkan history. After all, in the B.A. exams Fima had had slightly better marks than his friend. And he was the one who had had certain brilliant insights that Tsvi had made use of, insisting despite Fima's protestations on acknowledging him in footnotes. If only he could overcome his tiredness. He still had it in him to leap ahead, make up the time lost in the billy-goat year, and in a couple of years overtake that spoiled, conventional professor, clad in his sporty blazer and whining out his bland truisms. Not a stone would be left standing of all Kropotkin's edifices. Fima would smash and flatten the lot like a hurricane. He would cause an earthquake and establish new foundations. But what was the point? At the very most some student at the end of the next century would refer in passing, in a parenthesis, to the outmoded approach of the Nisan-Kropotkin school which enjoyed a short-lived vogue in Jerusalem in the late twentieth century, in the declining phase of the socioempiric period, which was marred by hyperemotionalism and the use of clumsy intellectual tools. The student would not even take the trouble to distinguish between them. He would link them together with a hyphen before closing the brackets on the two of them.
    The student, who would live in this flat a century from now, suddenly took on in Fima's mind the name Yoezer. He could see him in his mind's eye standing at this same window and staring out at those