The wind subsided. A frozen quiet reigned. At a quarter to eleven Fima changed his mind, put his cap and coat on, went into the empty street, where the cold was sharp and biting. He went to the public call box in the shopping center at the other end of the houses. But when he lifted the receiver, the public telephone too gave only a deathly silence. Maybe there was a problem in the whole district. Had the public telephone been vandalized? Or was the whole of Jerusalem cut off from itself and from the outside world again? He gave up and gently replaced the receiver. Shrugging his shoulders he said, “Well done, pal,” as he remembered that in any case he did not have a token.

Tomorrow he would get up early and explain everything to his two lovers.

Or he would get out of here and go away.

The whispering of the drenched pines, the raw cold, the emptiness of the streets, all this suited Fima well. He wandered toward the slope and the fields. His mother had a strange habit of blowing on her food, even if it had already cooled, or if it was cold, such as a salad or fruit compote. When she blew, her lips pursed into a kiss. His heart ached because at that moment, forty-five years after her death, he wanted to kiss her back. He wanted to turn the world upside down to find the blue baby bonnet with the loose pompom and give it back to her.

When he reached the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of the city, Fima became aware of something transparent filling the whole universe. As if thousands of soft silken footsteps were whispering on every side. As if his face were being touched by fingers that were no fingers. When his wonderment passed, he managed to identify tiny snowflakes. Very fine snow was beginning to fall on Jerusalem. Though it melted as soon as it touched anything. It did not have the power to whiten the gray city.

Fima returned home and began searching in the wastepaper basket under his desk for the telephone bill he had screwed up and thrown away yesterday or the day before. He did not find the bill, but he did pick out a crumpled page of Ha’arets. He smoothed it out and took it to bed with him, and read about present-day false messiahs until his eyes closed and he fell asleep with the newspaper over his face. At two o’clock the light snow stopped. Jerusalem stood frozen and empty in the dark, as though the catastrophe had happened and all the people had been exiled again.

26

Chili