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 are serious about peace, then we’ll wait a year or two and open negotiations with them about the future of the West Bank.”