Copyright

Copyright © 1991 by Arnos Oz and
Maxwell-Macmillan-Keter Publishing Ltd.
English translation copyright © 1993 by Nicholas de Lange

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

Translation of The Third Condition by Amos Oz, originally published in Israel in 1991.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Oz, Amos.
[Matsav ha-shelishi. English)
Fima/Amos Oz: translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas
de Lange.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”
ISBN 978-0-15-189851-0
ISBN 978-0-15-600143-4 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PJ5054.O9M3513 1993
892.4’36—dc20 92-44200

Author photo © Colin McPherson

eISBN 978-0-547-63059-5
v5.1118

1

Promise and Grace

FIVE NIGHTS BEFORE THE SAD EVENT, FIMA HAD A DREAM WHICH he recorded at half past five in the morning in his dream book, a brown notebook that always lay beneath an untidy heap of old newspapers and magazines on the floor at the foot of his bed. In this book Fima had made it his habit to write down, in bed, as the first pale lines of dawn began to appear between the slats of his blinds, whatever he had seen in the night. Even if he had seen nothing, or if he had forgotten what he had seen, he still switched on the light, squinted, sat up in bed, and, propping a thick magazine on his knees to serve as a writing desk, wrote something like this:

“Twentieth of December—blank night.”

Or:

“Fourth of January—something about a fox and a ladder, but the details have gone.”

He always wrote the date out in words. Then he would get up to relieve himself and lie down in bed again until the cooing of the doves came into the room, with a dog barking and a bird nearby that sounded surprised, as though it could not believe its eyes. Fima promised himself he would get up at once, in a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, but sometimes he dropped off again and did not wake till eight or nine. His shift at the clinic started only at one o’clock. He found less falsehood in sleeping than in waking. Even though he had long ago come to understand that truth was beyond his reach, he wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the petty lies that filled his everyday life like a fine dust that penetrated even to the most intimate crannies.

On Monday morning early, as a murky orange glimmer began to filter through the blind, he sat up in bed and entered the following notes in his book: