“Thanks, Teddy,” he said, “No. I’m sorry I flew off the handle. I had a bad dream last night, and today just hasn’t been my day. All I’ve done is kept you from working. Tell Yael I’m free to look after the kid any evening you need me. I can tell you the Hebrew word for ‘commitment’ but I can’t think of the one for ‘deadline.’ Maybe you can translate it literally, a dead line. By the way, what do we need jet-propelled vehicles for? Don’t we rush around enough as it is? Why don’t you invent something that’ll make us just sit quietly? Sorry. Bye, Teddy. You shouldn’t have given me that brandy. I talk enough nonsense as it is.”

As he stepped out of the elevator, he bumped into Yael in the dark. She was carrying Dimi, fast asleep, wrapped in her bomber jacket. Yael let out a little cry of alarm, and almost dropped the child. Then, recognizing Fima, she said in a tired voice, “What an ass you are.”

Instead of apologizing, Fima embraced them roughly with his free arm and his crippled sleeve, and covered the drowsy Challenger’s head with frantic pecks, like a starving chicken. He kissed Yael too, whatever he could lay hold of in the dark: not finding her face, he bent over and kissed her wet back, wildly, from shoulder to shoulder. Then he rushed outside to look for the bus stop in the dark in the pouring rain. Because in the meantime his prophecy had come true, when he said to Ted, “Raining? A deluge, more like.” And at once he was soaked to the skin.

6

As if She Were His Sister

AND IN FACT HE DID END UP HAVING A KIND OF DATE THAT EVENING. Soon after half past ten, frozen and drenched, with his shoes oozing water, he rang the bell at the Gefens’ garden gate. They lived in a secretive, thick-walled stone house in the German Colony, surrounded by old pines, set deep inside a large plot protected by a stone wall.

“I was just passing and I saw a light on,” he explained hesitantly to Nina, “so I decided to bother you for a minute or two. Just long enough to collect that book about Leibowitz from Uri and to tell him that on second thought we were both right about the Iran-Iraq War. Should I come back another time?”

Nina chuckled, grabbed his arm, and rugged him indoors.

“But Uri’s in Rome,” she said. “You phoned yourself on Saturday night to say good-bye to him, and you gave him a whole lecture on the telephone about why it would be better for us if Iraq defeated Iran. Just look at you: what a sight! And am I really supposed to believe that you just happened to be strolling down our road at eleven o’clock at night? Whatever will become of you, Fima?”