Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? she thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way, and she sensed a new fear, that he was traveling to hurt Elisheva. Or her and the man. Before she had time to hesitate, she asked if Elisheva was there with him, in the place they were going to.

  With him? … No, not with him, he said as he tore himself from the scene with all his remaining energy, and buried his face in his hands and pressed hard on his eyeballs. What was the matter with him? It was too early to be seeing such things, they still had almost two hours to go, and he’d lose his mind if he gave in to them this early. I don’t think she’s there with him, she goes there to be alone.

  Alone? Her voice trailed off at the end of the word, and her heart shrank again, like before, when she had thought “her boyfriend.” Shaul mistook her yearning for surprise. Yes, he said, what’s wrong with that? She’s entitled to be alone once a year, isn’t she?

  In fact, he was quoting Elisheva, who went on a four-day vacation every year, to a different place in Israel each time, and was not willing under any circumstances to give up these days; they were as essential to her as the air she breathed, she said quietly and with unusual force. And every year she had to have the argument with Shaul, who would be driven insane by the mere thought of it, months before. But now he spoke as if Micah or his parents were there. He knew exactly what they thought with their petty, provincial, ignorant views about these vacations and about what went on during them, and he arrogantly demonstrated to Esti how wholeheartedly he agreed with Elisheva and how he understood her need to be alone for a few days a year, and thus seemed to decree some moral superiority, a hierarchy of emotional development and enlightenment as compared to Micah, his parents, and the entire Kraus tribe. Because still, in everything he did and thought, both large and small, he had never stopped wrestling with them in his mind and taunting them in any way he could. What, he added generously, don’t you sometimes feel like being alone? Just you, without Micah and the kids?

  She heard all the streams churning in his voice and was not taken aback this time, and with a sudden urge she felt around and switched on the little ceiling lamp, flooding the space with light; they both squinted and Shaul did not protest or ask why she had done it, and she encountered his distorted, conflicted look and then turned off the light, and her eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the road again. For a moment she could not comprehend why they had avoided and deterred one another all those years, almost from the first, and had jabbed each other continually, without anyone else noticing, with a look that only the two of them knew how to conjure up and where exactly to aim it.

  I spend a lot of time alone, she said, and when he looked up, she heard the echo that surrounded the word and immediately gave him another of her light, glossy, misleading smiles. Look, when you work at home you spend a lot of time alone.

  But she knew very well that Shaul was not talking about that kind of alone, not her alone, which was crowded to the brim and buzzing with a drone that erupted from her even at nights now. Not the alone of always lying in wait, alert among the reeds, to ensure, for example, the routine of the refrigerator that filled up and emptied out with large, rapid breaths—even though she would never admit the almost physical pleasure she derived from the resuscitation and the whisper of its regular respirations: they are eating well, growing up nicely—and not the alone from which she leaped up in the blink of an eye with ridiculous fervor, she knew, to find a lost sock or a baseball cap or a bicycle pump or last year’s report card or a military ID card or keys or soy sauce or a fine-tooth comb for lice. Her alone was alert, she jumped out of it at the sound of their calls a hundred times a day: they couldn’t find it themselves, wouldn’t remember where, wouldn’t know how much water to dilute the antibiotics in or how to wrap the fish in Saran wrap, or where exactly you added softener to the washing machine. Nor would they know the small pleasure that occurred even in the rhythmical life cycle of doing tax returns, making down payments, depositing monthly amounts in the savings account, servicing the car, changing the water filters twice a year, exchanging summer clothes for winter clothes and vice versa, the list of regular visits for each of them to the dental hygienist—even Ido’s daily insulin shots, with all the tumult they entailed. And she hated all this with all her heart, and had not a drop of talent for it; but even so, it was her alone. She longingly breathed in the smell of breast-feeding that filled the air after her counseling work, the drops of sour breast milk on the chairs after the new mothers left, the large green fan of a garden, the fruit trees, the rows of vegetables and flowers and herbs, the mother-in-law apartment in the yard, for which she was also responsible, the seven rooms in her house, each containing—hush, little baby—a child playing an instrument or sitting at the computer or dreaming or doing homework or sulking. And there was Ido, her chocolate boy, her divided twin, with whom you always had to listen for the things he was quiet about, and at least one child was always sprawled on her and Micah’s bed at any time of day or night, and someone always needed you to help study for an exam on the Weimar Republic or interpret a difficult dream. And there was Yoav, the big twin, too big, who had to be taken to a dietitian twice a week and fought with over every meal and in between meals, and Na’ama, with whom everything was red-headed and stormy and fluid, who would summon her now, right now, urgently, to the treehouse, to listen to selected excerpts from her very private diary. And for the last six months a telephone cable had been strung through one of the five umbilical cords to connect her to a child-soldier who rang almost hourly to talk about courses and guard duty and to sob and boast and be spoiled. And at least once a week someone strolled down from the main road into the yard, a boy or girl come to spend the night or a couple of weeks: friends, or friends of friends, they slept in the basement or on the lawn or on the mats out on the porch, or just in the living room. They raided the fridge at night, played music, smoked—bronzed, half-naked gods walking in on her in the shower by mistake, shaming her flesh with the exact same suspicious look with which they examined the expiration dates on a container of cheese or yogurt. And within all this there was Micah, who called five or ten times a day from work to chat with her, to pass the time on his long journeys, striking up soul-baring conversations (never his own soul, though), giving her live reports from the road and taking her with him to the sites where he fought gaseous clouds, polluted estuaries, and containers carrying toxins, which always seemed to turn up in the most respectable places. For years he had made her a partner in his daily inventory, huge piles of mundane crumbs which he poured forth at her feet, piled up around her, tamping softly, affectionately, thoroughly, quoting for her what they just said on the radio or the latest rumors on his possible promotion, telling her of the accident he saw just now on Gehah Highway and the argument the guys at the office had about the movie on TV, relentlessly reporting the excruciating details of every meal he ate, with a strange sense of loyalty, and in his endearing and devoted and modest way he constantly sketched and copied for her a portrait of himself with a thousand light brushstrokes, and handed her his events for safekeeping and remembering, thus also relieving himself of any responsibility for them, so he could forget everything immediately—faces, names, stories—as if he’d already made up his mind that he was only the conduit through which his life flowed on its way to her, that only upon reaching her did it become real—she even knew his childhood memories better than he did. And she resisted and yet surrendered to his transparent and ample minutiae, to the warmth he pooled every day between her hands like a huge ball of dough—a soft man, always being baked and risen, steaming in anticipation of her.

  Sometimes before going to bed at night she stands on the porch for a few minutes, hands on the railing, the exhausted captain of a large ship that roars beneath her, and it’s good, it is the abundance of life, and a salty happiness beats in her throat, and it is more wonderful th
an she had ever dared to dream of in the miserable nothing she came from, and then all of her is there, she is the core of the fruit, and there is nothing better than to feel her blood pulsing and to know that she, only she, is the power that, in its warmth and persistence, allows the billions of molecules of the home and the family to keep adhering to one another, that she is a sole warrior against the massive forces of destruction which lie waiting to pounce on her every distraction and neglect. (But this week, when she was playing with the twins in the park, a Russian nanny asked her innocently if she got paid double, and everything fell apart again.)

  She often catches herself making petty calculations: the twins will leave home for the army only in another thirteen years, but by that time, one hopes, there will be grandchildren from the big kids, and she may never stop running up and down the steps and around the yard, picking up toys and paper and paints and half-eaten rolls and gnawed peaches and flea collars and sheet music and Pokémon cards and widowed socks and heavy diapers and receipts and zit cream and bottle tops for prize drawings and hair scrunchies and coins and dust bunnies and little bras. And a hundred times a day she’ll check off every task she completes—“Life is like a check-off play,” Hagai used to joke—and the buzz she produces will never stop, God forbid it should stop, she thought, and in the momentary internal quiet she heard the truth she could never forget: that since being born, since being who she was, she’d been pursuing the human race, wide-eyed, and that Micah and the kids were the closest she’d ever come, and that no mortal could reasonably be asked to give up such an accomplishment.

  She knows that if they even picked up a hint of these thoughts—Micah may sense something but he’d never say a word, not even to himself—they would not be merely astonished and hurt, they would simply shatter into pieces, disappear, evaporate before her very eyes like soap bubbles. These children she had stealthily made for herself, stolen or smuggled out of nothingness, and whom she protects like a wild animal, reviving them over and over again with an infinite series of acts and thoughts and intentions and deeds, conjugated in a maternal list of verbs. Again and again she gathers them up in defense against the treacherous urge to crumble that she senses in them constantly as it lurks beneath their skin, waiting for the one and only moment when she will tire. But she won’t, not ever, she won’t tire, but will also not be able to give up that bitter thought. She thought Shaul would understand this, and glanced at him and discovered with surprise that he was looking at her deeply, as if he had been following her changing expressions for a long time. Without thinking, she said, You know, sometimes after everyone goes inside, I stay in the garden for a while, beneath the willow branches, and if I need something more solid, I go right inside the rosemary bush, and for a few moments I watch the house from there, with its lit-up windows, the silhouettes of Micah and the kids, and I have this thing where I go backwards until I disappear.

  He was quiet; his eyes seemed wistful to her. Then he said, It’s getting crowded in that rosemary bush. And from far away he mustered up a shy, shaky smile for her.

  Then he sank back in his place and withdrew into himself, trying to overcome the waves of pain that throbbed through his leg, making it swell until he felt it would burst. He wondered whether to take another pill, but decided it was not yet time, better to wait awhile. Instead, as always, he slowly fused his aches into a completely different pain, nameless and sharp, and he cautiously walked it—according to a precise plan whose details he knew well—over his entire body and soul and right into his burning eyes, and now, here

  He is somewhere else, somewhere new, a sprawling flatland at the foot of shadowy masses, bordered by desert and mountains. He is surrounded by people, dozens, perhaps hundreds of volunteers come to search for his Elisheva. Every year they come, every year when Elisheva goes off. He tries to follow one of them, but it’s like tracking a single ant in an ants’ nest, and he persists and catches sight of a well-built young man wearing blue overalls and sticks with him. This man looks slightly familiar, a bit like the guy who once helped Elisheva and him when their car got stuck on the way up north; he had smiled as he swiftly maneuvered and explained, and as an afterthought had also helped them dislodge a jammed cassette from the tape deck and fixed a crooked windshield wiper, and only after they said goodbye had they discovered that he’d left them in a bit of a jam because he’d slid the driver’s seat back to accommodate his long legs, and they couldn’t get it forward again, and then Shaul had to drive all the way as if he were standing on tiptoe. The guy in the blue overalls rushes over to one of the parked trucks, climbs up on its back, and a moment later jumps down with a big, stuffed kit bag and runs over to a little water reservoir next to an acacia tree, his head thrust forward so he looks as if he is already in the midst of a furious search, lacking only his tongue sticking out of his mouth. He runs past another man, thicker and slower, and something about him vaguely recalls the Arab guy from the deli at the supermarket—Elisheva likes to quote the ambiguous idioms he produces as he tempts the customers to taste the goods, particularly the women, of course, but even with Shaul he jokes in amazing Hebrew about the salami and the quail eggs—he is also running here, carrying a kit bag; strange that even Arabs would come on this kind of search. He stops by another truck, and someone from inside it hands him a rifle, which is somewhat surprising—after all, he is an Arab—but this search must be beyond any national conflict, a clear humanitarian issue that unites all peoples, although it’s unclear to Shaul why they even need weapons here. Who are they all going to fight, and over what, or whom? Not far from him a few men are quickly uncoiling huge rolls of barbed wire, setting up a fence and turning the site into a small, protected camp—but from whom? Two men who walk past him carry a large, sharpened wooden post. They shout to each other from either end, Where are you from? Netanya. I’m from Metulla, I was fast asleep, the first says. And me, I was in the middle of dinner, an omelet, and just the way I was, I got up and left. It just gets hold of you suddenly, the first one growls, just drops on you. They slow down and stop for a minute as if they’ve forgotten where they are headed; they lower their heads and a strange quiet surrounds them, a gloomy, intimate silence like the one that takes hold of your heart when twilight descends and the night becomes at once inevitable.

  As he watches, a slight, feathery sense of worry emerges in him, and he brushes it off: they’re here to help, to find her … Although of course, he concedes, ultimately it will be one, one of all these hundreds of men, who will find her, who will get to her first, who will stand in front of her alone and absorb her abundant gratefulness, the image of her chest swelling at him with excitement. And what will happen then? What will we do with that one? But it’s too early to worry, he thinks. Before we can get to that one, we need the many, the multitudes. We need to filter them out slowly, propel them in their souls like a thousand grains of sand in a fine sieve to finally find within them the one golden grain for which Elisheva will sparkle, almost despite herself

  There was a contradiction, she felt. There were facts that grated on one another. And in the days that followed she did not stop thinking of how she had wanted to be pulled after him into the story, and that was probably why she did not ask him how the two could be reconciled, Elisheva’s explicit desire to be alone and his rushing toward her. Shaul opened his murky red eyes and seemed immediately to sense the doubt that had resurfaced in her, and he mumbled that it was something between himself and Elisheva. She asked if Elisheva knew about his visit, and he said no, and she cautiously remarked that Elisheva might be scared to death by his arrival in the middle of the night. He scratched around the edge of his cast and said very slowly, Please don’t put pressure on me. Then he spat out, Well, it’s really getting ridiculous that you don’t even know where we’re going. But at that very moment she almost interrupted him to ask him not to tell her yet, so she could keep going like this a little, driving with no borders and no purpose. He said, Have you heard of a place called Orcha, near t
he Ramon Crater? She breathed deeply, bade farewell to sweet ignorance, and told him she used to dream of going there alone to spend a few days in a cabin, to cleanse herself of all human contact. She always comes up with these godforsaken places, he said, and in his voice she heard something that reminded her that he was, after all, a Kraus—a vengeful tone, petty and calculating, and she thought of Elisheva, who was now in her own cabin in the heart of the desert, far and isolated from the other cabins, and she became concerned again. What would happen when he went into her cabin? What might he find there? And what was he intending to do? Shaul seemed unable to resist her thoughts, and immediately shrank and turned his face away like an escapee and moaned into the upholstery. Tell me, she said quickly, before he slipped away from her again. What is there to tell? he sighed. Tell me. Tell you what? About them, she ventured, surprised by the force that pushed her toward him unhindered. He must have sensed the slight tremor in her voice, and the tremor was familiar to him, because he smiled at it wearily and unhappily, the smile of a man who is lost, impure, who has corrupted a child.