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wanted to. He would spend the entire morning prowling around the flat, listening to every news broadcast, raiding the fridge and eating standing up, arguing aloud with himself and with the newscasters, furiously making the bed that Yael had not managed to make before she went out, in fact couldn't, because he was still asleep in it. Then he would finish reading the morning paper, go out to buy one or two things at the grocer's, come back with two afternoon papers, immerse himself in them until the evening and leave their pages scattered all over the flat. Between reading the papers and listening to the news, he made himself sit down at his desk. For a while he was occupied by a Christian book, the
Pugio Fidei
of Father Raymond Martini, published in Paris in 1651 to refute once and for all the faith of the "Moors and the Jews." Fima was contemplating a fresh study of the Christian originsof anti-Semitism. But his work was interrupted by an interest in the idea of the Hidden God. He plunged himself into the biography of the hermit Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, who learned Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, settled in Bethlehem in 386, translated both Testaments into Latin, and may have deliberately deepened the rift between Jews and Christians. But this study did not quench Fima's thirst. Lassitude got the better of him, and he sank into idleness. He would leaf through the encyclopedia, forget what he was looking for, and waste a couple of hours reading through the entries in alphabetical order. Almost every evening he would pull on his battered cap and go out to visit his friends, chatting till the early hours about the Lavon affair, the Eichmann trial, the Cuban missile crisis, the German scientists in Egypt, the significance of the Pope's visit to the Holy Land. When Yael got home from work in the evening and asked if he had eaten, Fima would reply irritably, Why? Where does it say I've got to eat? And then, while she was in the shower, he would explain to her through the closed door who was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Later, when she asked if he was going out to debate again with Uri or Tsvika, he would answer, No, I'm going to an orgy. And he would ask himself how he had allowed his father to attach him to this woman. But there were other times when he suddenly fell in love all over again with her strong fingers as they rubbed her small ankles at the end of the day, or with her habit of stroking her eyelashes, lost in thought, and he would court her like a shy, passionate youth until she allowed him to give pleasure to her body, and then he would thrill her eagerly and precisely, with a sort of profound attentiveness. Sometimes he would say to her, as some petty quarrel brewed, Just wait, Yael, it'll pass. It won't be long before our proper life starts. Sometimes they would go for a walk together in the deserted lanes of north Jerusalem on a Friday evening, and he would talk to her with barely suppressed excitement about the union of body and light according to the ancient mystics. This made her feel so joyful and tender that she snuggled against him and forgave him for putting on weight, for forgetting to change his shirt again for the weekend, for his habit of correcting her Hebrew. Then they would go home and make love as if they were beyond despair.
    In 1965 Yael went to work, on special contract, at the Boeing research center in Seattle. Fima declined to join her, arguing that a period of separation might do them both good. He stayed behind in the two-room flat in Kiryat Yovel. He had a modest post as receptionist in a private gynecological clinic in Kiryat Shmuel. He kept his distance from academic life, unless Tsvi Kropotkin dragged him to a one-day conference on the importance of personality in history, or on the notion of the historian as eyewitness. On weekends he would turn up at Nina and Uri Gefen's or at other friends', and was easily caught up in their political discussions; he would