Fima also noted in his book:

“My bedclothes smell. I ought to take a bundle of washing to the laundry today. Yet there was something: I was left with a longing for those barren mountains and the weird light, and especially for the tolling of the bell that echoed in the deserted valleys with very long pauses between the strokes, and seemed to be coming to me from an unimaginable distance.”

8

A Disagreement on the Question of who the Indians Really Are

AT TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AS HE WAS STANDING AT THE window counting the raindrops, he saw Baruch Nomberg taking his leave of the taxi driver. Fima’s father was a dapper old man in a suit and bow tie, with a pointed white beard that curved upward like a Saracen scimitar. At the age of eighty-two he still kept a firm hold of the reins of the cosmetics factory he had set up in the ’thirties.

His father was bending over the window of the taxi, apparently lecturing the driver, with his white hair waving in the breeze, his hat in his left hand and his carved stick with the silver band in the other. Fima knew that the old man was not haggling about the fare or waiting for his change; he was finishing an anecdote he had started telling on the way. For fifty years now he had been conducting an extended seminar with Jerusalem taxi drivers on Hasidic tales and pious stories. He was a dedicated storyteller. And he had a fixed habit of commenting on every anecdote and pointing up the moral lesson. Whenever he told a joke, he would follow it by explaining what the point was. Sometimes he would also explain both the apparent point and the real point. His commentaries always made his listeners laugh, which encouraged the old man to tell more stories and explain them too. He was convinced that the point of the stories had escaped everybody, and that it was his duty to open their eyes.