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.