Amos Oz - Fima

With that, Fima decided to stop standing idly at the window and to start getting the place ready for the painters, who were coming after the weekend. The pictures would have to come down off the walls. Also the map of Israel on which he had once penciled reasonable compromise borders. All the furniture would have to be moved into the middle of the room and covered with plastic sheeting. The books would have to be put away. So would all the dishes and the pots and pans. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to get rid of the piles of old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and newsletters? The bookcases would have to be dismantled, and that would mean enlisting Uri's help. Is it tonight he's coming back? Or tomorrow? Or the day after? And then Nina could deliver her detailed report of how she tried not once but twice to give me my regular service and how she found the tap blocked. Perhaps Shula Kropotkin could be brought in as reinforcement to help with putting all the kitchen things away. Possibly Annette Tadmor would be glad to lend a hand. And the Pizantis also expressed a readiness to help, provided they didn't murder each other first. And Teddy would willingly come to take down the curtains and the wall lights. Maybe he'd bring Dimi with him. The old man was quite right: it's well over twenty years since this den was last spruced up. The ceiling's filthy, grubby from the kerosene heater. There are cobwebs in the corners. There's mold in the bathroom. The ceramic dies are cracked. The plaster is peeling. There are patches of mildew. There's a dank, sweaty smell here the whole year, an old bachelor's smell. It's not only the bottle of worms on the balcony that smells bad. You've grown so used to it that you don't even care.

Surely habit is the root of all evil. It's precisely what Pascal was thinking of when he wrote about the death of the soul.

In a comer of his desk Fima found a green advertisement announcing huge discounts at the local supermarket. On a comer of this notice he scribbled the words:

Habit is the beginning of death. Habits are a fifth column.

And underneath:

Routine = lies.

Habituation — deterioration — dilapidation.

His intention was to remind himself to improve and develop these thoughts over the weekend. And since he had remembered that tomorrow was Saturday, he deduced that today was Friday, from which he inferred that he ought to do some shopping. But Friday was his free day, the clinic was closed, so why should he hurry? Why start pushing furniture around at seven in the morning? Best wait for the reinforcements to arrive. There was no urgency. Even though when he glanced at his watch, he saw that it was not seven o'clock but twenty past eight. Time to have a word or two with Tsvika, who would have finished his shaving ritual by now.

Had there been any further improvement in the condition of the telephone? Fima tried again. He could hear a faint sound, but it had not yet rallied to the point of being a dial tone. Despite which, he dialed Yael's number. And concluded that he ought to wait for the patient to make a full recovery, because his impatient attempts might delay the process. Or was Yael's phone also out of order? Was the whole city cut off? Could it be a strike? Sabotage? Sanctions? Had the exchange been blown up in the night? Had a right-wing terrorist group seized all the means of communication and the other centers of power? Had there been a Syrian missile attack? Unless Ted Tobias was leaning on the phone again and preventing Yael from picking it up. Fima felt disgusted, not with Ted but with his own word games. He twisted up the supermarket advertisement and threw it at the wastepaper basket. He missed, but could not be bothered to crawl under the desk to look for it. No point. The whole place was going to be turned upside down to prepare for the painters.

He made himself another cup of coffee, ate a few slices of black bread and jam to quell the hunger pangs, took a couple of tablets to quell the heartburn. Then he went to have a piss. He felt furious with his body, always bothering him with its needs, and preventing him from following through a single thought or observation. He stood for a few moments without moving, his head to one side, his mouth half open, as though deep in thought, and his penis in his hand. Despite the pressure in his bladder he was unable to release a single drop. He resorted to his usual subterfuge, pulling the handle in the hope that the sound of rushing water would remind his sluggish organ of its duty. But it refused to be impressed by that old and well-worn stratagem. It seemed to be saying: It's time you thought up a new game for me. Grudgingly it released a brief, thin trickle, as a special favor. As soon as the tank stopped, this pathetic trickle stopped too. His bladder remained urgently full. Fima shook the offending member gently, then more violently, but nothing happened. Finally he pulled the handle again, but the tank had not had time to fill, and instead of a roaring cascade it gave a sort of hollow, contemptuous grunt, as though it was mocking Fima in his misfortune. As though in its defiance it was showing solidarity with the telephone.

Nevertheless he persisted. He did not retreat. He would wage a war of attrition against this recalcitrant organ. We'll see who cracks first. The limp, shellfish-like flesh between his fingers suddenly put him in mind of a lizard, some kind of grotesque creature that had emerged from the depths of the evolutionary process and now clung irritatingly to his body. In another century or two people would probably be able to replace this troublesome appendage with a neat mechanical device that would drain the body's superfluous fluids at a touch. The whole absurd association between the processes of urination and copulation in a single organ struck him as a crude expression of vulgar adolescent humor, in poor taste: it would be no more distasteful if humans reproduced by spitting into each other's mouths or by blowing their noses into each other's ears.

Meanwhile the cistern had refilled. Fima pulled the handle again, and succeeded in releasing another intermittent jet, which once again ceased the moment the water stopped pouring. He was furious: to think of all the massive efforts he had invested over the past thirty years in gratifying every whim and appetite of this pampered, selfish, corrupt, insatiable reptile, which turned you into a mere vehicle created for the sole purpose of conveying it comfortably from female to female, and after all that it repaid you with such ingratitude.

As though addressing a naughty child, Fima said:

"All right, You've got exactly one minute to make your mind up. In another fifty-five seconds by my watch I'm zipping up and going, and after that you can burst for all I care."

This threat only seemed to reinforce the reptile's recalcitrance: it seemed to shrivel between his fingers. Fima was determined not to yield this time. Furiously he zipped up his fly and banged down the lid of the toilet. He slammed the bathroom door behind him. Five minutes later he slammed the door of the flat, strode past the mailbox without succumbing to the temptation to take out the newspaper, and marched resolutely toward the shopping center. He had made up his mind to go to the bank to see to four transactions, which he recited to himself as he walked along, so as not to forget. First, draw some cash. He had had enough of going around without a penny in his pocket. Second, pay all his bills: telephone, water, kerosene, sewage, gas, electricity. Third, find out at last the state of his account. By the time he reached the newspaper-and-stationery shop on the corner, he had forgotten the fourth thing. He strained his mind, but it was no good. On the other hand he noticed a new issue of Politics displayed on the inside of the closed door of the shop. He went in and perused it for a quarter of an hour, shocked to read Tsvi Kropotkin's article, which maintained that the chances of peace were nil, at least for the foreseeable future. He must go and see Tsvika this very morning and read the riot act to him about the defeatism of the intelligentsia: not the kind of defeatism that our opponents on the hawkish right so stridently accuse us of, but something else, something deeper and in the long term more serious.