Abortion and the single woman as literary tropes in the works of Amos Oz — Page 4:
16 Oz skirts along this edge most overreachingly in Fima: "Was it not possible that the child Yael had not wanted might have grown up to be world famous?" (284), he ponders. Elsewhere, he and his former wife Yael muse about the possibility that if Yale would not have undergone the abortion, they could have had a son or a daughter. Here are two sequences that are an excellent illustration of the technique mentioned earlier. First Yael:
He could have been a boy of twenty six by now. He could be a father himself, with a child or two of his own. The eldest might be Dimi's age. And you and I would go into town to buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for the grandchildren. Where do you think the drains of Jerusalem empty out? Into the Mediterranean, via Nahal Shorek? And the sea joins up with Greece, and there the King of Ithaca's daughter might have picked him up out of the waves. Now he's a curly-haired youth sitting playing the lyre in the moonlight on the water's edge in Ithaca. (245)
Then Fima:
As he walked up towards the Histadrut building, it occurred to him that this obsequious, overfed young man with the sausagelike fingers and starched shirt that had grimy collar and cuffs was more or less the same age as the son that Yael had got rid of two minutes away from here at some clinic [...] However, Fima thought wryly, it might have been a girl. A miniature Giulietta Masina with a soft bright hair. She could have been named after his mother Liza, or in its Hebrew mutation, Elisheva. Although it is certain Yael would have vetoed this. (270)
17 In another scene, Fima wonders whether, an aborted foetus in the clinic may not be Yoezer's (Yoezer being a phantom being Fima imagines will live in his apartment hundred years from now) father or grandfather. Furthermore, following Yael's earlier outburst, quoted in length in the previous paragraph, Fima sinks into despair, "And why does Yael assume it was a boy? What if it was actually a girl? A little Yael with soft long hair and a face like Giulietta Masina? He laid his arms on the table and without opening his eyes hid his weary head on them" (245). One could venture the observation that these meta-textual-discourses, draped in a fictional garb, emblemize quintessential antiabortion propaganda in castigating the practice and maintaining a male preserve, rather than considering both sides of this dispute.
18 Oz's novels capture in miniature, all be it in grandiose strokes, the larger conflation of personal morality and sensational psychological warfare of the antiabortion leaders. In one text Oz parades in the most prosaic fashion heart-wrenching verbose when describing abortion clinics and the simple and safe procedure, so that the reader is invited to conclude that it is executions and butchery that are taking place.
19 The specific text that resides in the centre of this discussion is Fima. Since Fima takes place in gynaecologist’s clinic (termed the “abortion inferno” (195)), it is inevitable that abortion becomes an underlying subtext. For example, in one segment, Fima chances upon the operating table, detailing in not-so-subtle terms the instruments of 'destruction' :
[...] he felt a dull pang of revulsion in his stomach [...] Laid out with obsessive precision beside the speculums were long bladed scissors, forceps, IUDs hermetically sealed in sterile plastic. To the left behind the doctor's desk, on a small trolley, stood the suction pump that was used, Fima knew, to terminate pregnancy by means of suction. He shuddered at the though that this was a kind of enema in reverse, and that womanhood was an irreparable injustice. (121)
20 At another extreme, in My Michael it is a female voice that is employed to present abortion as an ordinary, unemotional act: "The whole thing is just a simple matter of a twenty minute operation, now worse than having your tonsils out. But there are some complicated women who won't understand the simplest things" (49). In another passage, Fima reflects on the fate of the foetuses:
And what did they do with the foetuses? Put them in a plastic bag and drop them into the rubbish bins that he and Tamar emptied at the end of the day? Food for alley cats? Or did they flush them down at the lavatory and rinse them with disinfectant? Snows of yesteryear. If the light within you darkens, it is written, how great is the darkness. (121)
Yael too, has similar thoughts: "To this day I don't want to know what they do with them. Tinier than a day-old chick. Do they flush them down the lavatory? We both murdered it" (244).