A DEMANDING REGIMEN by Elisha Porat

A DEMANDING REGIMEN
by Elisha Porat
Translated from the Hebrew by Alan Sacks

With the trepidation I still feel each morning at those moments of waking that once were so sweet. I am a witness to my presence in depressing events. I feel I've been cast into a demanding regimen. For this I don't blame anyone or the one who exists above us. I write the word "cast" with an acute sense that I'm the raw material being wrought. I find my self jammed into agonizing recesses of the forge as though all avenue of escape has deliberately been sealed. Someone is pounding my face and fingertips. Someone is painfully searing my elbows and knees. I can't get escape even by crawling out because the distance id too great for my aching bones. before i fell ill, I was never thrown into so strict a regimen, and definitely not into so demanding and painful a schedule. But my self-withdraw, a search for shelter and refuge, has pathologically addicted me to one thing: the inviolability of my regimen.

At the table in my small kitchen, I'm able to set before me the electronic wristwatch my beloved family gave me about a month before I became sick. I can sit by my green stationary pad and marvel at length without feeling any movement of the watch hands. This modern timepiece has a dual display. below the white face marked with the familiar numbers is a digital display of pulsing, flickering seconds and minutes. I also can mange two tasks, perhaps even three. First, I jot down on the page the precise hour and date. Second, opposite the numbers I record the jobs I'm doing. I do the same ones each morning, the same move nets of my hands and legs matched to the motion of the watch hands circling in electronic precision. And last, I gloomily ponder how I've fallen - willingly surrendered myself, to tell the truth - into the prison of my demanding regimen; how I've unflinchingly been cast into this without even seeking help from my family.

Perhaps I should be more specific at this point. I get out of bed at 6:30. It's early, exercise time in the youth movement days. While still in bed, a moment or two before rising, I stretch myself and roll towards the window. If it wasn't open while I slept, I open it now. I curl my frail body into the pillows, which reek from my incessant nighttime sweating. I inhale and exhale very deeply. Scorning the complaints of my neighbors on the other side of the thin wall, I do extra, take another breath and grunt loudly. I focus myself on my breathing machine, which is barely working. This is neither pleasure nor pain, a sort of total separation from the ominous morning and the wearying day. I close my eyes, opening and shutting every orifice. The fresh, damp air seeping through the cracks in the shutter flows through my body. I follow its course as it refreshes me, from the soles of my itching feet to the thinning hair on my head. Inhaled and exhaled, drawn in and doled out, consumed and absorbed again and again and again.

In the rehabilitation guide that a young friend gave me when I left the hospital, I find a complete philosophy distilled into dry rules. It had never occurred to me that the air flowing through my passages could purify and cleanse me. If I adhere to the prescribed course, but only this one, all my ailments will be cured by breathing in the morning air each day. But if I break the rules, or I'm not careful God forbid, or say to hell with the directions and ignore them, or worse that that, adopt a program of rehabilitation other than the one in this book, I'm destined from the start to fail and remain tainted. The same air, the same body, the same man lying shrunken in his bed fearing the day compressed between the windows. And yet, just one little thought, one genuine intention, and everything can change, for good or bad. The plan is for everyone, to master evil and make it serve the good. And now, with the reins seemingly in my hands, now that I have the means for complete salvation not only of my soul but of my body as well, will I through this away?

My bones ache from my morning breathing exercises. For some reason, the pain lingers. I hear a faint creak of bones popping when I suck fresh air from my chest into the hollow of my belly. Am I doing this wrong? It says here clearly that everything turns on execution. Good intentions aren't enough. The entire world could be filled with nothing but good intentions and results still would depend on execution. It make the difference between the lower world of suffering in which we exist, our daily world of filth and illness, and higher halls of purity that start in a healthy body and end in firmaments never envisioned.

What am I to do? To whom do I turn in my misfortune? Who will still my doubts? And while I suffer through steadying my breathing, my strict regimen has consumed my early waking minutes. Already I must bend over the cracked sink and the leaky faucet and peer again at my face reflected in the mirror. This moment when I stand before the mirror is the most difficult of the entire morning. Gripped by an inexplicable fear, I survey my image in the glass. What has changed in me since last night? Have bad signs appeared in me overnight? And what is the meaning of all these premature wrinkles and blotches? Where is the oversize, up-to-date map of my face that I put way for safekeeping in my medicine cabinet? I must hastily pull it out and compare it immediately with what I see.

Now my breathing, purified by my exercises and toothpaste and mouth rinse, is racing along on its own. Why the hell is thee bathroom light bulb so weak? Why, this is where I most need a strong light now. A pure, white glow by which I can contemplate again and again how fearful I've been for no reason, how wrong I've been about the darkness of the wrinkles and the fuzz on my spots. Well, I really do look fine this chilly morning.

On my bed lies a new book that our worried librarian gave me. I haven't managed to read it yet. I did take a quick look at the author's biography. In some books, the author's life story is more interesting that the contents. A remarkable, eccentric writer can grab you instantly at first sight. Someone whose life falls into three clear, distinct periods. Childhood and youth to the age of 20, with a few unsuccessful stabs at writing; then 20 years of hard work and fruitful production; and when he is 40, by my reckoning, childless and prey to dark moods, he abandons himself to his beloved family, which leads him to shelter in a closed institution. There, miraculously, he becomes a hero as the days and years go by. Riches and security are his within the walls. He passed the years in good health, never suffering a serious illness till the day he dies.

How did he maintain his body through all those long years? What preserved his spirit over the course of time? Only one thing: his uncompromising regimen, a daily routine that he obeyed to the letter as he would a religious ritual. before I became ill, I was quick to mock a writer like that. How pleasant is it to pawn one's freedom for a life confined to an institution? How did he scorn his written work and refuse to be seen with his books? How did he vow never to hold a pen and magnanimously decline the work room offered him by the institution's physician for his writing? Today, however, it is easier for me to respect and even admire him. The way he found precisely the right moment in which to sever a way of life he no longer desired.

How he aimed, fired and didn't miss. Exactly on the day when he abandoned himself to his family, which placed him within the walls, that is the moment he realized how vapid his writing till then had been and how vain were his literary aspirations. I bow to his greatness of spirit in that submission. he struck at the right moment and didn't leave even a single empty day in his life. and if the plan for his new life had been revealed to him one night, he wouldn't have walked to the mirror above his sink the very next morning after finishing his exhausting breathing exercises. he would have surrendered himself instead with raised hands to the eternal ritual of an exacting regimen.

Yes, I can understand him now. More than that, I can taste some of his twisted pleasures. Without taking a small step towards the other side, no one can understand the exhilaration he can feel from meticulous attention to a daily regimen's smallest details, the satisfaction both spiritual and physical from submitting to a timetable, the joy of humbling oneself before the passage of minutes and the ticking of seconds. True, others, those who remain outside the walls, will shake their heads at him. "A broken man", they'll say of him. A loser, someone who yielded to the terror of life. But I, who am I to judge him? I see him worshiping the narrow confines of his room. I see hi gliding over the floor, on his face a look of absolute bliss from the humility of obedience.

I'm not as flawless as he. I still stray frequently from my schedule. I've never been his kind of perfectionist. Careless I was born and careless I remain. But even I, for all that, have started counting my steps when I rush to the dining room early in the morning to perform a daily ceremony: taking the morning newspaper from the rack and carrying a bowl of sweet porridge to my room.

Tattoo City