This morning, even his exercises in front of the mirror annoyed and tired him. After a minute or two he stopped. Calling himself lazybones again. He panted and added mockingly:
"That's your problem, pal."
He was fifty-four, and during his years of living alone he had fallen into the habit of talking to himself. He reckoned this among his old bachelor's foibles, along with losing the lid of the jam, trimming the hair in one of his nostrils and forgetting to do the other, unzipping his fly on the way to the bathroom to save time but missing the bowl when he started to piss, or flushing in the middle in the hope that the sound of rushing water would help him overcome his stuttering bladder. He would try to finish while the water was still running; so there was always a race between his own water and that from the tank. It was a race he always lost, and he would be faced with the infuriating alternative of standing there, tool in hand, until the tank refilled and he could have another go, or admitting defeat and leaving his urine in the bowl till next time. He did not like to admit defeat or to waste his time waiting, so impatiently he would pull the handle before the tank was full again. This would provoke a premature eruption which was insufficient to flush, and again he had the abhorrent choice between waiting longer or giving up and going away.
In the course of his life he had had several love affairs, several ideas, wrote a book of poems that aroused some expectations, thought about the purpose of the universe and where the country had lost its way, spun a detailed fantasy about founding a new political movement, felt longings of one sort or another, and the constant yearning to open a new chapter. And here he was now in this shabby flat on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release the comer of his shirt from the zipper of his fly. While outside some soggy bird kept repeating the same-three note phrase over and over again, as though it had come to the conclusion that he was so dimwitted he would never understand.
In this way, by painstakingly identifying and classifying his middle-aged bachelor habits, Fima hoped to distance himself from himself, to open up a space for mockery and so defend his longings and his self-respect. But there were times when this obsessive pursuit of the ridiculous or compulsive in him appeared to him, in a kind of illumination, not a line of defense between himself and the middle-aged bachelor but in fact a stratagem employed by that bachelor to get rid of him and usurp his place.
He decided to return to the wardrobe and take a look at himself in the mirror. And he also decided to view his body not with disgust, despair, or self-pity, but with resignation. In the mirror he beheld a pale, rather overweight clerk with folds of flesh at the waist, whose underwear was none too fresh, who had sparse black hair on white legs that were too skinny in relation to the belly, and graying hair, weak shoulders, and flabby male breasts growing on a chest dotted with pimples, one of which was surrounded by redness. He squeezed the pimples between his forefinger and thumb, watching in the mirror. The bursting of the pimples and the squirting of the yellowish pus afforded a vague, irritable pleasure. For fifty years, like the gestation of an elephant, this faceless clerk had been swelling inside the womb of child and youth and grown man, and now the fifty years were up, the gestation was complete, the womb had burst open, the butterfly had begotten a chrysalis. In this chrysalis Fima recognized himself.
He also saw that now the roles were reversed, that from here on, in the depth of the cocoonlike womb, the wide-eyed child with the gawky limbs would be forever hiding.
Resignation accompanied by faint mockery sometimes contains its opposite: an inner craving for the child, the youth, the grown man out of whose womb the chrysalis emerged. And so sometimes he experienced, for an instant, the restoration of that which could never be restored, which was pure, consistent, immune to decay, proof against longing and sorrow. As though trapped inside a glass bubble, for an instant Yael's love was restored to him, with the touch of her lips and tongue behind his ear and her whispered, "Here, touch me here."
In the bathroom Fima was put in a quandary when he discovered that his shaving foam had run out, but he had the bright idea of trying to shave with a thick layer of ordinary toilet soap. Except that the soap turned out to have a rancid smell, like armpits in a heat wave. He scraped his jaws till they were raw but forgot to shave the bristles under his chin. Then he took a hot shower and found the courage to end with thirty seconds of cold water, and for a moment he felt fresh and vigorous and ready to open a new chapter in his life, until the towel, which was damp from the day before and the day before that and more, wrapped him again in his own stale night smell, as though he had put on a dirty shirt.
From the shower he made for the kitchen and put on the water for coffee; he washed a dirty cup from the sink, put two saccharin tablets and two spoonfuls of instant coffee in it, and went to make his bed. His struggle with the bedspread lasted several minutes. When he returned to the kitchen, he saw that he had left the refrigerator door open overnight. He took out the margarine and the jam and a yogurt he had started the day before, but it turned out that some feeble-minded insect had for some reason selected the yogurt to commit suicide in. He attempted to fish the cadaver out with a teaspoon, but succeeded only in drowning it.
He
dropped the yogurt jar in the trash can and made do with black coffee, assuming, not checking, that the milk turned sour because the fridge door had been left open.
He would turn on the radio and listen to the news. The Cabinet had been sitting late into the night. Had the special airborne commando been parachuted into Damascus and captured President Assad? Or did Yasser Arafat want to come to Jerusalem and address the Knesset? Fima imagined that at most the news would be about a devaluation of the shekel or some case of corruption. He saw himself convening his cabinet for a midnight sitting. An old revolutionary sentiment from his days in the youth movement made him hold this meeting in a classroom in a run-down school in Katamon, with peeling benches and sums chalked on the blackboard. He himself, wearing a workman's jacket and threadbare trousers, would sit not at the teacher's desk but on the windowsill. He would paint a pitiless picture of the realities, startle the ministers with his description of the impending disaster. Toward dawn he would secure a majority for a decision to withdraw all our armed forces, as a first step, from the Gaza Strip, even without an agreement. "If they fire on our settlements, I'll bomb them from the air. But if they keep quiet, if they demonstrate that they arc serious about peace, then we'll wait a year or two and open negotiations with them about the future of the West Bank."
After his coffee he put on a worn brown sweater, the chunky one Yael had left behind for him, looked at his watch, and saw he had missed the seven o'clock news. So he went downstairs to collect the morning paper from the mailbox. But he had forgotten the key and had to tug the paper through the slit, tearing the front page in the process. On his way upstairs, reading the headlines as he climbed, he concluded that the country had fallen into the hands of a bunch of lunatics, who went on and on about Hitler and the Holocaust and always rushed to stamp out any glimmer of peace, seeing it as a Nazi ploy aimed at their destruction. By the time he reached his front door, he realized that he had contradicted himself again, and he warned himself against the hysteria and whining that were so typical of the Israeli intelligentsia: We must beware of the foolish temptation to assume that history will eventually punish the guilty. As he made himself a second cup of coffee, he rehearsed the argument he tended to use in his political discussions with Uri Gefen and Tsvika and the rest of the group: We've got to learn at long last how to exist and operate in interim circumstances that can drag on for years, instead of reacting to reality by sulking. Our lack of mental readiness to live in an open-ended situation, our desire to reach the bottom line immediately and decide at once what the ending will be, surely these are the real causes of our political impotence.
By the time he had finished reading what the television critic had to say about a program he had meant but forgotten to watch the previous evening, it was past eight o'clock and he had missed the news again. Angrily he decided that he ought to sit down to work right away. He repeated to himself the words from die dream, Have to separate. Separate what from what? A warm, tender voice that was neither male nor female but held a deep compassion said to him, And where are you, Efraim? A very good question, Fima replied.
He sat at his desk and saw the unanswered letters and the shopping list he had written Saturday evening, and remembered he was supposed to phone someone this morning about something that could not wait, but he could not for the life of him recall who it was. So he dialed Tsvika Kropotkin's number, woke him up, and stammered a long embarrassed apology, but still kept Tsvi on the line for a good twenty minutes about the tactics of the left and the new changes in the U.S. position and the time bomb of Islamic fundamentalism that was ticking away all around us, until Tsvi interrupted: "Fima, I'm sorry, don't be mad, but I simply have to get dressed. I'm late for a class." Fima concluded the conversation as he had begun it, with an excessively long apology, and he still could not remember if he was supposed to call somebody this morning or instead wait for the call, which he might have missed now because of his chat with Tsvi. Less a chat than a monologue. So he dropped his idea of calling Uri Gefen as well, and checked over his computerized bank statement, but he couldn't tell if six hundred and fifty shekels had been credited to his account and four hundred and fifty debited or the other way around. His head sank on his chest, and inside his closed eyes passed crowds of Muslim fanatics excitedly chanting suras and shouting slogans, smashing and burning everything that stood in their way. Then the square was empty, with only tatters of yellowed paper fluttering in the breeze and blending with the pattering rain that fell all the way from here to the Bethlehem hills swatched in gray mist. Where are you, Efraim? Where is the Aryan side? And if she is chilly, why is she?
Fima woke to the touch of a heavy warm hand. He opened his eyes and saw his father's brown hand resting like a tortoise on his thigh. It was an old, thick hand with yellowing nails, a hand with hills and valleys, crisscrossed with dark blue blood vessels, dotted with patches of pigment and sparse tufts of hair. For a moment he panicked. Then he realized that the hand was his own. He woke and read over, three times, the headings he had written down Saturday for an article he had promised to turn in by today's deadline. But what he had intended to write, what had excited him to polemical impishness, today seemed totally flat. The very urge to write had been dulled.
A little reflection revealed that all was not lost: it was nothing more than a technical difficulty. Because of the overcast sky and the heavy mist there was not enough light in the room. He needed light. That was all. He switched on his desk lamp, hoping by so doing to make a fresh start on his article, his morning, his life. But the lamp was broken. Or perhaps it needed a new light bulb. Angry, he hurried to the cupboard in the hall, where, contrary to his expectation, he actually did find a bulb, and he managed to replace the old one with it. But the new bulb must have been defective, or perhaps it had fallen under its predecessor's influence. He went back to look for a third one, and on the way it occurred to him to try the light in the hall, and then he had to exonerate both bulbs, because it turned out there was a power cut. To save himself from idleness he decided to call Yael. If her husband answered, he would hang up. If she was there, the inspiration of the moment would tell him what to say. Like that time, after a terrible fight, when he had mollified her with the words: If only we weren't married, I'd ask you to be my wife. And she, smiling, had answered through her tears, If you weren't already my husband, I think I might say yes. After ten or twenty hollow rings Fima understood that Yael did not want to speak to him, unless Ted was leaning on the phone to prevent her picking up the receiver.
He felt weary. His long nocturnal prowl through the alleys of Valladolid had ruined his whole morning. At one o'clock he had to be at his post behind the reception desk of the private clinic where he worked in Kiryat Shmuel, and already it was twenty past nine. Fima crumpled up the headings for his article and his electricity bill and his shopping list and his computerized bank statement and tossed them all in the trash can: clearing his desk for action at last. He went to the kitchen to make himself a fresh cup of coffee, and while he was waiting for the water to boil, he stood in the half-darkness remembering the evening light in Jerusalem some thirty years before, in Agrippa Street outside the Eden cinema a few weeks after his trip to Greece. Yael had said then, Yes, Effy, I do quite love you and I like loving you and I like it when you talk, but what makes you think that if you stop talking for a few minutes you'll stop existing? And he had shut up like a child scolded by its mother.
When after a quarter of an hour the kettle was still not boiling, even though he had remembered twice to plug it in, he finally realized that without electricity he would never have his coffee. So he lay down again, fully dressed under the heavy winter blanket, set the alarm for quarter to twelve, hid his dream book under the pile of newspapers and magazines at the foot of his bed, covered himself up to his chin, and concentrated his thoughts on women until he managed to arouse himself. He clasped his organ with all ten fingers, like a burglar climbing a drainpipe or, rather—he chuckled—like a drowning man clutching at a straw. But fatigue was much stronger than desire, and he let go and dropped off. Outside, the rain grew heavier.
O
N THE MIDDAY NEWS HE HEARD THAT AN
A
RAB YOUTH HAD BEEN
hit and killed that morning by a plastic bullet fired presumably from a soldier's rifle in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp in the course of a stone-throwing incident, and that the corpse had been snatched from the hospital in Gaza by masked youths. The circumstances were being investigated. Fima considered the wording of the announcement. He particularly disliked the expression "killed by a plastic bullet." And the word "presumably" made him seethe. He was angry, too, in a more general way, about the passive verbs that were beginning to take over official statements and seemed to be infecting the language as a whole.