Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  Wait a minute, she said later, blinking. What did you say before?

  What did I say?

  You said, she carefully reconstructed, that you can imagine.

  Imagine what?

  Her life with him.

  He was quiet.

  Because all this time I thought that you and she … that you—

  She doesn’t know that I know, he said. I thought you understood that. He started gnawing at his upper lip and did not look at her.

  Esti felt the blood pulsing quickly in her knuckles as they grasped the wheel. The thought was so foreign that her tongue and lips moved with it in a slow chewing motion.

  But how?

  He nodded, defeated.

  I don’t understand. Her voice faded, lost. You just sit at home—

  He wiped his face with both hands. His burning forehead, his temples.

  Why? she practically yelled.

  Why? He spoke into himself, sealed and dark. Why indeed?

  Like a man shouting into a well, she thought.

  It’s been at least ten years that this thing of theirs has been going on, he said after a few moments. Don’t you think I know her well enough?

  And you never—

  Never.

  But how can you not? she whispered again, suddenly disbelieving him, recoiling, disgusted by him, and immediately also struck by a lightning bolt of loathsome pictures, soap operas and hidden cameras and people being paid to spy and rob other people of their intimacy and spoil their moments of sweetness. Secrets defiled in the light. She was horrified to think of innocent Elisheva, whose purse might contain a bug—for all she knew he had bugged every room in that apartment too, certainly the bedroom. Her stomach turned. Perhaps he just sits and watches her from the moment she leaves the house—

  I’ve never followed her even once all these years, he said quietly, then almost whispered, But, Esther, please, she cannot know that I know.

  Her pulse beat in her neck with crazed speed and her eyes became covered with a film. Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estheronautiness, and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that it was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin’s surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat.

  His voice was tired, crushed. You know, I could drive after her when she says she’s going to the pool, couldn’t I? Any normal person in my situation would do it, wouldn’t they? Maybe even you would.

  Yes, she thought quickly. No, of course I wouldn’t. Maybe just once, to see a different Micah—

  Just follow her there and confront her, do it and be done with all this mess. And he laughed dully. You know, when Tom was injured on a school trip in the eleventh grade and they called me to the hospital, I didn’t even phone the swimming pool for them to page her. I didn’t want to embarrass her in any way, Esther.

  And when he said it that way, simply, but also proudly, she saw inside him, and in a blinding flash, his insides were lit up for her like a drawing in an old nature book, a cross section of the soul, the secret soul, and for a moment she pulled back from this forbidden sight. Then she looked again, hypnotized, and knew he was giving her something that had no name, with a generosity that was also horrifying. She could see the negative image of her own reflection somewhere on the edge of his pupil, she had a place there, and with the instinct of a seed she held on and struck roots; only then, finally, did she extricate herself from the dullness that had enveloped her all evening and truly grasp the gift he was offering, his one-time invitation, and with both hands outstretched, she caught it quickly and resourcefully, with the same agility with which she catches the yolk of a broken egg. Then she sat and drove in a kind of hovering state, almost without touching the wheel, and wondered how an expanse could be made up of so many twisted damp crevices, because she suddenly felt an expanse, and drunkenness, and was amazed at how from misery and distortedness such as his, he had managed to lead her astray into this open space, a tortured and miserable place, but also uninhibited and possessed of a passion to destruct—a healthy passion to destruct, whose sharp, burning pleasure she had long ago forgotten. She thought he was mad, Shaul, and unbearable, and indefatigable, and that’s what she told herself the next morning—that she had suddenly found one place in him where, in defiance of all logic, he was free.

  He asked for some water and she passed him the bottle. He said the pain was returning, and she suggested he take two pills. He said, Yes, why not, and drank the water, and thanked her for it, and asked if she wanted the bottle next to her. She said, No, actually yes, and he gave it to her, and she drank and said he should raise the pillow under his leg a bit, and everything they said and did occurred outside them, in a kind of hollow practicality. They drove slowly along an almost empty road. Every so often they passed a semitrailer or a pickup truck loaded with crates. Esti suggested they stop along the side of the road so he could rest a little or change positions, and he said there was no need, that he was all right, but perhaps she had an apple. She did, and before passing it to him she polished it absentmindedly on her sleeve, as she did when she gave fruit to her children, and he held it in front of his slightly open mouth as if he had forgotten what to do with it

  Out there in the shadows at the edge of the chaotic camp, one man stops running and turns to look back. Bewildered, he searches, guided toward a voice or a scent, or a slight tremble in the air. Next to the acacia tree another man slows down and freezes in midmotion, and he too turns to look back and search. One after another, seemingly unconnected and unplanned, they all slow down and halt their movements, and silence descends and envelops them. Men stand in amazement all around the small camp, seeking out something in the air with their noses. Shaul grows excited: perhaps they can smell her, perhaps somehow, in some incomprehensible way, they are qualified to pick up every whiff of her scent; they must have all gone through special training. After a moment they begin to move, all of them, from all ends of the camp, with hesitant, cautious steps, their heads nodding like blind men’s, and he realizes with a fright that they are walking toward him and getting nearer and closing in on him.

  With unnatural slowness, their calves and thighs ascend and descend rhythmically, their eyes blink lazily, their tongues move and lick their lips with strange restraint, and he thinks perhaps he should start backing away from them a little, because he suddenly has an odd feeling, completely unfounded, that they will try to do something to him, although he has no idea what. But it would be ridiculous to flee them, these people who have come from all over the country to look for his wife. They did not respond to any public draft issued with some secret code word—rather, they hurried here as soon as they somehow found out about her, swept to this place even before he himself arrived. He scrutinizes their faces to discern their intentions as they storm him in a daze, and a nighttime breeze rises and ruffles his thin hair, which he immediately smooths down to cover his bald spot. They are already gathering around him, silent, grave, and he smiles with embarrassed politeness, nodding at this man or that, but not a single one of them responds, and soon a chilling fear rips through his innards, because in their eyes, in the eyes of each and every one of them, he reads something murky that cannot be translated into words, and that is difficult to even conceive …

  Later, much later, he asked if she had something he could use to scratch his leg under the cast. She leaned over as she drove, rummaged in the glove compartment, and found a knitting needle—who knew how long it had been there waiting to be discovered at this very moment. He practically snatched it from her, and inserted it between the cast and hi
s calf and scratched vigorously, addictively, and said he had no idea how he would survive with this cast for several weeks. She told him she’d once broken her arm when she was doing a back bend in school, and he said, Oh really, and after a minute he said, Do you remember how we talked a bit about that school once? She said she did, and he was quiet, and then he said, I was a nuisance, wasn’t I? She said yes, and he said, Sometimes, when I latch onto an issue, I can be … And he sighed deeply, and she smiled and said, Yes, you certainly can. He said, It must have been torture for you, and she didn’t know whether he meant the school or his interrogation, and she said, Yes, it was. After a moment he added that what stuck with him after that meeting was that she had told him how she’d been held back a year, and she choked and asked why that of all things, and he answered, I don’t know, it’s amazing that it even came to me, but I can clearly remember how hard it was for you to talk about it. To her surprise, she quickly told him that Micah didn’t know about that to this day, that for some reason she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him. She took a deep breath and said, smiling tensely, They thought I was retarded in that place, handicapped, that’s why they held me back. Retarded or handicapped, she repeated, and her eyes brimmed over, and he, behind her, was quiet, and for an instant everything hung from a flimsy thread. He said, That’s hard to believe, and the wonderment with which he said it filled her with quiet joy, as well as the fact that he said nothing else. She nodded to herself a few times, and found herself back in the morass of those years for a moment, back in the six-block radius of the neighborhood that had been her world then. With a toneless and quiet voice, she told him about the walk she had invented, and about the game she called “letter fasting,” when she would say only words that didn’t contain a certain letter, and as Shaul looked at her from his vantage point, he saw a small, thin girl hovering over a vast cement surface—

  And who is he? she asked when she had calmed down. Tell me a little about him. And she silently tasted the name: Paul.

  Shaul shook off her question. What is there to tell? Then he tittered softly. He’s not me.

  That’s it, isn’t it? she thought.

  But sometimes, he said, I ask myself what there is in him. Not just “What does he have that I don’t?” but really what is it about him that attracts her to him so strongly? Attracts her so much that … For a moment Esti felt that for some reason he was expecting her to validate what he was saying, to assure him assertively of this man’s absolute superiority over him. Honestly, he continued when she said nothing, I suddenly realized what they mean when they talk of falling under someone’s spell. He laughed and leaned his head back against the window. And then I realized that he is simply a person at peace with himself, you see, and that is why everything he does, no matter what, will always have flair, a kind of grace and style. Yes, something polished, nonchalant. She glanced back and saw that his eyes were closed again and his lips were pursed and slightly protruding, like the lips of someone pouring something out of a wide pitcher into a narrow bottle. People like him, he went on, people with such crystallized internal perfection, they just don’t care what other people think about them or how others see them. Me, for example—he chuckled dismissively—at every step I wonder what people will think of me, what they’ll say. But this guy just does exactly what he wants, he has no fears. If he wants something, he just does it. And everything within him is in harmony, you see. A man like him, he didn’t even need to tell her he wanted her—I mean at the very beginning, when they had just met. She sensed it straightaway, on her own, from the inside. Because this perfection of his contains a kind of force of—how can I put it—necessity? Yes, yes, he has complete confidence in the fact that just wanting something turns his desire into an inevitability. It’s simply charisma. Shaul sounded suddenly gleeful. That’s the word I was looking for. Not style, forget style, charisma is what he has, and a man who has charisma, well … anything he wants immediately becomes the right thing, the inevitable thing. It’s like a force of nature, charisma, like an act of God. His voice became louder and fuller: You see, he wanted her, and she got up and went to him. Well, obviously at this point it’s her desire as well, but at the beginning? The moment he wanted her, at that very second, she could no longer resist his desire. She got up and went to him. But now still, when he suddenly wants something new from her—not something big, I’m not even talking about in bed, but let’s say he suddenly wants her to, I don’t know, make him some soup? He feels like soup, he wants it so badly that he’s willing to waste their entire fifty minutes on it that day, and it’s not because of the soup, believe me—after all, he knows she’s not exactly the world’s best cook. But he feels like seeing her standing in the kitchen and cooking, seeing her chopping vegetables, stirring, spicing, seeing those motions of her body, of a woman making soup for her man—

  He went on in that same strange voice, alternately tense and relaxed, as if carried on some endless internal current, and Esti drove slowly and thought the Volvo was barely moving. It seemed as if it were only the huge hills around them that were stretching out into the darkness and changing into plains that slowly flattened backwards, only to be swallowed up by new plains, and she no longer knew whether Shaul was opening up to her with this sorrow that had been crammed and trapped inside him for so many years, or whether something completely different was going on here, on frequencies that her brain could not pick up but in which her soul was trembling with pain. Every few moments a question would come to her lips, an absolutely logical question, such as: But how can you be certain that … ? Or: How can you hide from her? And: What would happen if you just told her you knew everything? And even: Why do you let it go on and torment the three of you like this? But her tongue was heavy and thick, and she’d forget, and soon a new question would collect in her like a drop of water

  They link to form rows around him, crowded, silent, breathless. Their eyes burn, almost red. He can smell their breath. A few of them look familiar, or almost familiar, or like the rough draft of someone familiar, but all their faces are distorted into one eager, wolfish expression. Tell us, a weak voice whispers from behind. Tell, another adds. Tell, tell, tell, they add one voice to another, spark whisper to whisper, and the dull grumble surrounds him and intertwines into a long, throaty growl mixed with crushed words, and he listens and tries to decipher word fragments, breaths, sighs. They want him to tell them about her, that must be it, that’s all, and it certainly makes sense and is even legitimate—clearly the most important details are the ones given by the missing person’s relatives. That must be what they are demanding from him with their warm, sour breaths, and it’s probably worth their while to delay the search for another few moments so they can equip themselves—they breathlessly tell him as one—with information that only the husband can provide, and here they fall silent and gaze at him with tense expectation.

  But how and what should he tell them? he wonders, and they lean in toward him even closer, as if they had heard his precise thought, and ready themselves to pounce, each and every one of them, to be the first to snatch every crumb of a thought that may pass through his mind. He decides he must focus, so he can finally be of some use, and he sucks his cheeks in as he always does when he thinks, and shifts from one foot to the other, and embarrassed by their penetrating looks, he lets out a silly twittering sound in a high squeaky voice and they quickly draw back and then lean in again. Then he realizes that they have already begun to “equip themselves” with information, that in fact they are already in the midst of the process and that even now, in the way he stands, in his hesitant shifting, his sudden screech, he is probably telling them something important about her, about his Elisheva, and perhaps about her uncontrollable urge to go off into the distance every so often and be alone.

  Tell me—she could no longer bear what she thought he was doing to himself with a kind of tortured lust, so she dove into his silence and tore him out of it and brought him to the surface—that man, Paul, is he
married? Does he have a family?

  Shaul said, No, he isn’t married. Because of her, I think. He sighed helplessly. I’m telling you, Esther, this is not just a fling. She is his great love. He paused, then sighed again with absolute sincerity. She is the love of his life— The Volvo suddenly rocked violently and leaped forward as she slammed on the brakes. What happened? Shaul shouted.