Amos Oz - Fima

Bending down, Fima gently picked up the cockroach in a piece of newspaper folded into a funnel. Instead of disposing of it in the trash, he dug it a grave in the flowerpot that stood on the windowsill with nothing growing in it. After the funeral he attacked the pile of dishes in the sink. He washed the plates and mugs. When he reached the frying pan, which was thick with congealed fat, he got tired of scouring it and decided that the pan would have to wait patiently with the rest of the dirty things until the next day. He could not make tea, because the electric kettle had boiled itself dry while he was peering into the abyss of evolution and searching for a common denominator. He went to piss, but his patience ran out and he pulled the lever in the middle to encourage his stuttering bladder. He lost the race again, but instead of waiting for the cistern to refill, he retreated, turning the light off behind him. Must try to play for time, he said to himself. And he added, If you know what I mean.

Shortly before midnight he put on the flannel pajamas that Annette had thrown down on the rug, got into bed, and enjoyed the clean sheets as he began reading Tsvi Kropotkin's article in Ha'arets . He found it academic and bland, like Tsvika himself, but he hoped it would help him get to sleep. When he turned the light out, he remembered the soft cry of pleasure full of childlike excitement that had suddenly burst from Annette's throat as her thighs tightened around his finger. Desire surged again, along with resentment and a sense of grievance. Almost two months had gone by since he had last slept with a woman, and now he had missed two on successive nights, even though he had actually had both of them in his arms. Because of their selfishness he would not be able to get to sleep now. For an instant he thought Yeri, Dr. Tadmor, was right to leave Annette, because he was suffocated by the lies. And almost at once he said to himself: You bastard. Unconsciously his hand began slowly comforting his penis. Then a stranger, a moderate, reasonable man whose parents were not even born yet, the man who would be in this room on a winter's night a hundred years from now, was watching him out of the darkness with eyes that seemed skeptical, only half-curious, almost amused. Fima let go of his penis and complained aloud:

"Don't you go judging me."

Then he added sardonically:

"Anyway, in a hundred years there won't be anything here. Everything will have been destroyed."

And he added:

"Shut up, you. Who was talking to you?"

At this they both fell silent, Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Cafe Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for. a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than your defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.

Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.

Jauntily wide awake, oblivious to the chill of the night air, intoxicated with the silence and emptiness, Fima marched down the road as though to the sound of a military band. There was not a soul in the sodden streets. Jerusalem had been handed over to him, to protect it from itself. The blocks of flats stood heavy and massive in the darkness. The streetlights were shrouded in a pale yellow haze. At the entrance to each staircase the numbers glimmered with a dim electric glow, which was reflected here and there off the windows of a parked car. Automatic living, he thought, a life of comfort and achievement, accumulating possessions, honors, and the routine eating, mating, and financial habits of prosperous people, the soul sinking under folds of flesh, the rituals of social position; that was what the author of the Psalms meant when he wrote, "Their heart is gross like fat." This was the contented mind that had no dealings with death and whose sole concern was to remain contented. Herein lay the tragedy of Annette and Yeri. It was the crushed spirit that knocked in vain, year after year, tapping on inanimate objects, pleading for the locked door to be reopened. Whistling sarcastically through the gap between its front teeth. The snows of yesteryear. The bones of yesteryear. What have we to do with the Aryan side?

And how about you, my dear Prime Minister? What have you ever done? What did you do today? Or yesterday?

Half-unconsciously Fima kicked at a can, which went rolling down the street and startled a cat in a trash can. You made fun of poor Tamar Greenwich simply because, due to a fluke of pigmentation, she was born with one brown eye and one green one. You detested Eitan and Wahrhaftig, but how exactly are you better than they? You were gratuitously rude to Ted Tobias, an honest, hard-working man who has never harmed you. Another man in his place would not have allowed you so much as to set foot in his home. Not to mention the fact that thanks to him and Yael we may soon have jet-propelled vehicles.

What have you done with life's treasure? What good have you done? Apart from signing petitions.

And as if that were not enough, you needlessly distressed your father, who feeds you and whose generosity benefits dozens of people every day. When you heard on the radio about the death of the Arab boy from Gaza, whom we shot in the head, what exactly did you do? You got worked up about the style of the announcement. And the way you humiliated Nina, after she took you in off the street all wet and filthy in the middle of the night and gave you light and warmth and even offered you her body. And how you hated that young settler, who, after all, even when you make allowances for the stupidity of the government and the blindness of the masses, has no choice but to carry a gun, because he really does risk his life driving at night between Hebron and Bethlehem. What do you want him to do — stick his neck out to be slaughtered? And what about Annette, you guardian of morality? What did you do today to Annette? Who trusted you from the first glance. Who had faith in your healing powers, like a simple peasant woman prostrating herself at the feet of a holy man in some Orthodox monastery and pouring her heart out to him. The only woman in your whole life ever to call you brother. You will never receive such a gift again, to be called brother by a strange woman. She trusted you without knowing you, so much so that she let you undress her and put her in your bed, and called you an angel, and you cunningly dressed yourself up as a saint to conceal your lust. Not to mention the cat you startled just a moment ago. And that is, more or less, the sum total of your latest exploits, you chief of the Revolutionary Council, you peacemaker, you comforter of deserted wives. To which we might add taking time off from work on false pretenses, and an unconsummated act of self-abuse. Plus the piss that's still sitting in the toilet bowl and the funeral you gave to the first insect in history to have died of filth.