Free Fima by Amos Oz Page B

squat block of fiats in Kiryat Yovel. She would be carrying two baskets full of food and cleaning materials bought on her way from the office. She would look like a social worker boldly taking her life in her hands as she entered the front lines of deprivation. After coffee she would stand up and remove her clothes purposefully, almost without a word. They would have sex hurriedly and get up the moment it was finished, like a couple of soldiers in a trench hastily consuming food between bouts of shelling.
    Immediately after the lovemaking Nina would shut herself in the bathroom. After scrubbing her skinny body, she would proceed, as a sort of followthrough, to scrub the toilet and the sink. Only then would they sit down to have another cup of coffee and chat about poetry engagé or the coalition of national unity, with Nina chain-smoking and Fima gulping down one slice of black bread and jam after another. He could never resist the strong warm black bread she brought him from a Georgian bakery.
    Fima's kitchen always looked as though it had been abandoned in haste. Empty bottles and eggshells under the sink, open jars on the countertop, blotches of congealed jam, half-eaten yogurts, curdled milk, crumbs, and sticky stains on the table. Sometimes Nina, smitten with missionary fervor, rolled up one sleeve, put on rubber gloves, and with a lighted cigarette protruding from the comer of her mouth and seemingly glued to her lower lip, would set upon cupboards, refrigerator, surfaces, and tiles. In half an hour she could transform Calcutta into Zurich. During this combat, Fima would lounge in the doorway, redundant yet willing, debating with Nina and himself the collapse of Communism or the school of thought that rejects Chomsky's linguistic theories. When she went on her way, he would be overcome with a mixture of shame, affection, longing, and gratitude;
he wanted to run after her with tears in his eyes, to say Thank you, my beloved, to say I am not worthy of these favors, but then he would pull himself together and hurriedly throw open the windows to expel the cigarette smoke that polluted his kitchen. He had a vague fantasy of lying ill in bed while Nina tended him, or else of Nina on her deathbed and himself wetting her lips and wiping the perspiration from her brow.
    Within ten minutes of coming in out of the rain, Fima, in Uri's shirt, trousers, and red sweater, which were too big but felt good, was sitting in Uri's ingenious armchair, which Fima described as "a cross between a hammock and a lullaby." Nina served him a bowl of steaming, well-seasoned pea soup and refilled his whisky glass. She had encased his feet in a pair of furry slippers that Uri had brought back from Portugal. His own clothes were hung up to dry on a chair in front of the fire. They talked about recent Latin-American literature, about magical realism, which Nina saw as a continuation of the tradition of Kafka, whereas Fima tended to attribute it to a vulgarization of the heritage of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and he managed to annoy Nina by stating that, for his money, he would give the whole of this South American circus, with all its fireworks and cotton candy, for a single page of Chekhov.
A Hundred Tears of Solitude
for just one
Lady with the Little Dog
.
    Nina lit another cigarette and said:
    "Paradoxes. Okay. But what's going to become of you?"
    And she added:
    "When arc you going to take yourself in hand? When arc you going to stop running away?"
    Fima said:
    "I've noticed at least two signs lately that Shamir is beginning to realize that without the PLO it won't work."
    And Nina, through her thick lenses and the cigarette haze:
    "Sometimes I think you're a lost cause."
    To which Fima riposted:
    "Aren't we all, Nina?"
    At that moment he felt as affectionate and tender toward the person sitting opposite him, dressed in a well-worn pair of men's jeans with a zipper fly and a wide-cut man's shirt, as he would if she were his own sister. Her lack of