Fima - Amos Oz [3]
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