Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  And she loves them both, he went on, but apparently—he hesitated, searching for the words—there is, after all, a difference between the way she loves her husband and her love for him. It’s hard to explain, he sighed, it’s something different, two completely different dimensions. She seems to need them both, together, but it’s actually more complicated for her with the husband, somehow with him she always takes it less for granted …

  His mouth was dry and his forehead burned, and for the first time since they left he felt he had managed to capture the longed-for thread of emotion, and knew he had to make every effort to safeguard its purity, its pure opacity, and he groped for it and attached himself to it the way he sometimes attached himself—when he slept with Elisheva—to an evasive, dying firebrand of desire.

  Esti had still not said a word. This sudden new talk of his, she thought, his talk, as if he’s reading to me from a book he’s been hiding. Who would have thought he was capable of articulating these words out loud, or even thinking them? She smelled the sweat on him and inhaled curiously, because even after all the years of knowing him she always avoided, for some reason, imagining his body completely, as if the very thought that he had a body was an intolerable invasion of his privacy. But now his pungent odor, of all things, softened something in her toward him, and of course she thought of Micah, who certainly did have a body and who, like all the men in the Kraus family, had become heavyset at a very young age, right after their wedding. He swelled up even more with each of her pregnancies, and went bald quickly, and his face and body became covered with large round beauty spots like nipples sprouting up everywhere. Something flashed in her, how sometimes in the rare family meetings imposed on Shaul, his shin would be exposed, between his sock and trouser leg, a white, smooth shin, and she would peek at it and tremble.

  Her prolonged silence misled him. For a moment he believed he had somehow managed to defrost her doubtful, resolute presence, and he hoped he would be able to keep talking like this, unload the whole story that was buried alive inside him in one stream of vomit, just as he needed to and without any disturbances, by the time they arrived—

  What you … what you said, Esti blurted uneasily, it’s not … not by any chance you and Elisheva?

  Yes, he said immediately, surprised like a sleepwalker who awakes to find himself on the edge of a rooftop. To his astonishment he felt immense relief, as if he’d paid a heavy tax and had managed to cross an impassable border, and now he was there, beyond. But how, he asked with absolute innocence, how did you know?

  Were she not so distraught she would have laughed at his touching astonishment, his lack of street smarts. Come on, Shaul.

  That’s it, then, he said, and loosened his aching body and closed his eyes. Enough, he thought, you’ve ruined everything. You’ve defiled Elisheva and yourself, now you can tell her to go back.

  I just can’t see how … Esti said softly. No, no, no.

  It really is hard to believe, he whispered.

  She was quiet. She fixed her eyes on the yellow stripe along the shoulder of the road and let it pull her into the darkness. She gradually sat taller, filled up without realizing it. Her tongue ran over her lips, around and around. There was something there that opened up to her.

  And I must ask, Shaul said softly.

  She nodded, still distracted. Too many echoes were breaking inside her head.

  Not even to Micah, he said.

  I don’t tell Micah everything. She thought she saw him shaking his head doubtfully. We’re not Siamese twins, she said, surprised at the sharpness and aggression in her voice.

  Look, his voice almost breaking, I told you because I was simply—and he stopped, and she finished his sentence herself: I was simply bursting, I would have lost my mind if I hadn’t talked now, right this minute, with someone. Not just anyone. It’s lucky you were here.

  It’s good that you told me, she said.

  And a moment later, as if to herself: Thank you.

  She knew it would take her weeks to become accustomed to what had happened here, to the strange sense that he was now pulling her toward him and out of herself, out of the domain of the family, and in the fog inside her head, the image of a sick, starving wolf flickered, howling in the valley and attracting a heavy domesticated bitch, weary and slightly tattered. Every so often she wondered, in a disjointed sort of way, how Elisheva had the courage to fall in love so powerfully that she could no longer hide it and had to share it with Shaul. It must be an enormous love for her to fight for it like this and maintain this relationship for so many years despite the pain it caused Shaul. How could he tolerate it? Where was he leading his terrible loneliness? She thought of Elisheva’s breasts, which might have been the most beautiful she had ever seen. On the few occasions when she had seen them, she had actually gasped, and she once told an embarrassed Micah that they were Shaul’s great hope and that if he suckled on them perhaps the toxins would evaporate from within him. But now she thought of the pain they must cause him, and Elisheva, how could she stand the never-ending longings of a life such as this, a life torn. She sighed softly, and a strange sweetness gathered beneath her tongue.

  As always when she heard something new, she was quiet for a long time. She preferred not to hear too many details at first, just tried to see it in her mind’s eye. Sometimes she would dive into herself like that even after hearing a joke, trying to imagine what the characters in the joke did after it was over, after the people on the outside had laughed. She tried to guess how this open and long-awaited talk was made possible, between Elisheva and Shaul, about everything she does with the other man, with her lover, her boyfriend—

  Her boyfriend—

  That stung. Even more than “lover.”

  Perhaps he forced her to tell him, she thought, and another globule of grudge against him rose to the surface. Yes, that was possible too. Much more logical than the invention that had rippled through her before, whereby Elisheva, in her absolute forthrightness, simply told him everything. She turned the picture over, and now Elisheva was sitting on a chair, a chair with a high back, and Shaul was standing over her wagging his finger. Perhaps this is the tax he levies on her in return for his consent? Yes, that seemed even more fitting, that he would torture her and himself every day by exacting precise, detailed descriptions. She pursed her lips, recalling how he had once interrogated her, years ago, about the religious school she went to in Beersheba; she was willing to bet he’d already forgotten that encounter. He was waging a private war against religious education at the time, one of those principled battles he used to conduct in the name of science, and he needed any possible information about the treatment of female students. She fell into his lap, as they say, from the empty skies above. As soon as she saw that he was equipped with a little black tape recorder and a yellow legal pad, she wanted to get up and leave, but she couldn’t disappoint Micah, and a moment later she could no longer escape. He didn’t just ask, he attacked and bombarded her with questions from every angle, digging out of her things she had preferred to bury, and she sat there answering all his questions with clenched teeth, paralyzed because of something primal, insulting, in some way related to status, which grew and swelled in her toward him like a poisonous cloud. And when she stupidly revealed some needless old story about something the teachers and the headmistress had done to her there, he fell upon the trivial anecdote almost gleefully and wanted to know all the hows and the whys, and who had determined and who had decreed, and she became confused and stuttered—even Micah didn’t know about that affair—and though she squirmed he would not let up, opening up scars and churning the shame they bled, and every time she searched for his eyes she found a magnifying glass. Now she tried to imagine how it must occur between him and Elisheva, how Elisheva sits and tells him, in the kitchen, say, or in any other room within the brutal order imposed in that house, which words she uses in her descriptions, whether she runs her fingers through her thick graying hair with that embarrassed, to
uching gesture. She couldn’t summon up the image, even the thought of it was intolerable, so she escaped and tried to imagine Elisheva’s boyfriend, tried to guess whether he was dark or light, younger or older than Elisheva, but she couldn’t see, because another man kept cutting in front of him. In some side pocket of her soul, she was also annoyed because she had never imagined that something so exciting was occurring right before her eyes, between two people she knew, and she was even more surprised at having been so wrong about them, because they both seemed so drained, especially in recent years. She knew very well why she had failed to see it, and of course she did not spare herself from the conclusion, she even spent a long time immersed in it—after all, the sin had been committed, now she could linger over the punishment—because somewhere, sometime, who knew where or when it had happened, she had given up even the will to imagine such things. The imagination itself pained her, there was an ache in the part of her brain where she once had incessantly hallucinated little, mischievous fantasies, much as the whole body can sometimes hurt at the sensation of a missing hug, especially in the morning, right before opening one’s eyes. Especially at night, at the last moment of sleepy wanderings. And perhaps because of this, without noticing, she had almost stopped fighting and had started to accept the simpler version of reality, without trying to save it from itself. Now she stared at the road as it was swallowed up beneath her, and her shoulders drooped a little, then the corners of her mouth and of her eyes.

  The silence was insufferable, and Esti asked gingerly if he had ever asked Elisheva to stop seeing the man, but this wasn’t the question she wanted to ask either, and a dull sourness filled her mouth. She thought to herself that she was already submerged in the viscous oil—the cholesterol of the soul, someone had once called it, a guy she knew long ago—and her body could tangibly sense the oil surrounding her heart, filling its chambers with thick, creeping layers.

  And if I asked? Shaul sighed. Even if, let’s say, I gave her some kind of ultimatum, would she stop loving him?

  She turned around to face him almost completely; she wanted to see him, but not in the mirror, with his long face, elderly for his fifty-five years, the sad clown wrinkles around his mouth, the empty space, too large, between his nose and upper lip, and his unlovely skin, withered a little and translucent, which always seemed like a snakeskin ready to be shed, a kind of dry membrane that stored all his theoretical knowledge. She knew it would be a long time before she was able to truly comprehend, because that was the way she did things, slowly and in waves, the way her dead mother’s face had suddenly emerged, years later, in an omelet burning in the frying pan, with her precise mouth that looked as if it were blowing her a kiss, the kiss she held back during her life. Or the way the humpbacked kid who had once molested her in the lot behind the bowling alley had come to apologize thirty-five years later, not in a dream but in a salad—Quasimodo showing through a crooked piece of red pepper. Even the children made fun of her sudden brooding disappearances—“space cadet,” “flake,” Shira would mock in her army-speak. “Estheronaut,” Eran wrote in a limerick for her birthday. How could she even comprehend that Elisheva had such a hidden, full life? And what was this vicious pang at the bottom of her stomach? It had been going on for so many years, ten years of this, a whole decade of love, of life without compromise, in absolute honesty and without hiding. How could Shaul live with it? she wondered again. How great his love for Elisheva must be. Suddenly, in the same swing and in midmotion, she veered and thought maybe he was lying, simply lying, because it was so implausible to think of innocent, transparent Elisheva as someone capable of tolerating even for one day the burden of such complications, or as someone capable of causing any person—especially Shaul—such suffering. For a moment she oscillated between the possibilities, but then the scales were tipped because of his previous explanation, the way he’d said, “And if I asked, would she stop loving him?” with complete simplicity and wisdom she never imagined he possessed. He sometimes seemed so obtuse when it came to human beings. All his titles and the research he had published in physics and education, all the senior offices he had held at the university and now in the Ministry of Education, had never made an impression on her. I don’t care if he has an education as broad as a peacock’s tail, she would say bombastically to Micah when he tried to defend him, if that’s how he treats you and your parents. While she relived that anger for a moment, even clung to it a little, Shaul sank his head between his shoulders and, completely swept up within himself, muttered, What can I do? After all, I have no ownership of her emotions. She’s entitled to love whomever she wants, isn’t she?

  She moistened her dry lips and took a deep breath. From one moment to the next, his body seemed to be presenting her with a newer, wider space, as if until now she had not understood or known anything about Shaul, and now she had to re-create him from scratch. When had he found the time to learn these things? she wondered. Maybe he really did need to distance himself from everyone, from the family, she thought warmly, because he had something to protect and he could not under any condition let them see inside him. She knew only too well how his story would have been related by them had they found out, how it would have been chewed and shredded and digested and ruminated. With lucid clarity she saw the looks exchanged around the dinner table, the head shaking of Grandma Hava, her mother-in-law, with her small, suspicious, bitter face, and her look, a flash of blue that burned and classified and defined and sentenced at the speed of light—and with the force of a spell, Esti sometimes felt, if not of mutilation.

  She was already alert and upset, knowing as always that it was all signs, all hints and clues left for solitary spies, and she wished the night would not be over too soon; this night was very important to her. She inhaled into a spot deep inside her that was a glowing ember, carefully covered with heaps of cold ashes, and felt it blushing and flaring into a tiny flame. She looked in the mirror and adjusted it so she could stare straight into his eyes and said, Tell me, Shaul.

  He twittered in surprise. But how? he asked. How can I tell someone a thing like this? And he added that ultimately a person was always alone in this kind of affair.

  You can, she said with odd confidence, and when she did, she remembered the self she used to be, the one with whom you really could do anything. And I want you to know, she added excitedly, that everything stays here, just between the two of us. No matter what happens, it has nothing to do with anything or anyone, only me and you and only here.

  He stopped her: But wait a minute. He was embarrassed and surprised at her outpouring. I’m still trying to grasp that I’m even …

  She leaned back and rested the back of her neck on the seat, and her head pulsated with thoughts of suddenly, suddenly.

  They sat in silence for a long while, breathing deeply, not believing this was happening. Shaul said, Look, Esther, I think I’ll try to sleep a little, I haven’t slept a wink since yesterday morning. And Esti said, Of course, sleep. She was disappointed, but also a little moved by the way he said her name: he had always avoided saying it, and now, of course, he chose the one name no one had called her for years and which was more precious to her than any of her nicknames. She slowed down so they wouldn’t arrive, and as she passed by an avenue of wispy trees, her eyes lingered on a large road sign pointing to Beersheba. Whenever she went near there, she felt a little girl darkening inside her, and he said, If I don’t wake up by the time we get to Kiryat Gat, wake me. He laced his fingers together tightly and closed his eyes, and his head shifted from side to side, searching for an invisible point in space

  And immediately Elisheva surfaces on the bare hills in front of him, running, stripped of almost all her clothes, floating again with an odd lightness, defiant, and that same large shadow dislodges itself from behind one of the rocks, and she immediately hears the quiet, brisk beating of the stampede of large legs, or senses the pursuer, picks up his pulse in the open pores of her skin and the shivers running through her body.
How can she sense him like that? He’s still so far away from her. But suddenly the whites of her eyes start to glow—who would have guessed she still had such bold luster? Why does it seem to him as if this running is a form of conversing between herself and the pursuer, as if they are conducting an entire complex conversation, in a language and grammar to which he is not privy, and which no one in the world apart from them can understand. That’s it, she’s no longer mine, he admits with quick acquiescence, almost excitement. She belongs to this chase now, to the hunter, to the laws of predator and prey. If only he could see the pursuer, finally see his face for once, but the pursuer is hidden from him, always. He can divine his presence only from Elisheva, from the way the hairs on her skin stand on end and her pupils widen, the terrifying size of his arms and the imprint of his bare feet in the earth, the long, fleshy thumbs. He can also guess how those thumbs must bend to grasp the rocks with a kind of natural wisdom, like the talons of a wild beast, and in front of his torn eyes Elisheva sheds all the wrappings of their shared life as she runs—twenty-five years shed away one by one, they linger in midair for a moment and drop, and now she is truly naked; the body of his wife is naked, at night, on the hillsides along an unfamiliar road, his wife’s magnificent body moves in the dark of night with determination and a wildness he has never known in her. But she has no chance, he can clearly see. Her steps are too small and she’s too heavy, that much is clear. She’s lost, it’s over, and her breasts burden her too, of course, jiggling, hitting her ribs with a thud, and here, now, this is it, this is the end: a shadow falls on her calves from behind, her fair skin, her soft flesh, her flesh which was once so contained within the palm of the house—Why did you go out? Why did you even go out?—and the shadow floats above her back, a very large head with frizzy hair is displayed on her back, and two bony, massive arms reach out in mid-stride toward her waist, and only now does she finally turn to face Shaul, and all her expressions are revealed to him. Save me, she begs with her eyes, and this is the last moment he can save her, but he doesn’t, not now, not with the wail which emerges inside him and tears him apart as the two huge twisted arms grasp her hips from behind and wrap and crush and flail in the air. A foreign flesh is now becoming acquainted with her soft, round touch, a foreign flesh is learning her, and her flesh tenses toward him for a stolen, infinite instant, and a force unfamiliar to her flings her on the ground—as it should, a voice in his throbbing head rejoices with parched desperation—such a force that she had not even imagined could exist in a man, and a double, hoarse roar knifes the desert in half, the roar of two beasts, male and female