Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  Meanwhile, Elisheva kneels—he had almost forgotten—by the record cabinet, leafing through his hundreds of albums, and now Shaul feels like seeing her in a long dress, homely but with a mischievous slit up to the knee, no higher—he always protects the varicose veins on her thighs from the other guy’s look, as if they were one last secret, private and modest, between Shaul and her, and as if they also embodied the final chance that she would one day return and be only his, when she gets old, when she loses her beauty, when the other guy gets tired of her, if that is even possible. But all signs point to him loving her more and more as she gets older, as more wrinkles appear on her face and neck, and in truth, Shaul has long ago lost hope that Paul is a man who likes younger women. Perhaps he once was, but she changed him, that’s clear. She showed him the forgiving tenderness of growing old together, the shared relinquishing of the body that used to be, Shaul thinks, and his throat burns and he stops and stares for a moment, freezing her as she crouches by the record cabinet

  He stands across from her, and out of all the hundreds of men waiting with their mouths wide open and strands of saliva glistening between their lips, he alone can see her and feel the warmth of her body and the slight shudder that passes through her. Without looking at her closed eyes, he slowly unbuttons her blouse and unfastens her belt and clasps, and realizes that until he began to undress her, he had not known she was dressed like this, wearing unfamiliar clothes—lace and embroidery and paper-thin muslin, appetizing garments of seduction—and he assumes she brought her clothes from there, from her other home; she must have wanted to look charming and wonderful. He kneels at her feet as she holds out one foot as if in her sleep, her head held up slightly like a sunflower to the moon, lips barely spread, and he pulls off a soft, velvety boot to reveal a white lace stocking, which he slowly rolls down her long golden leg. The shiver in her body intensifies, becoming a shudder now—why is she shaking so badly? Perhaps from cold, or from shame, or perhaps the looks coming from so many eager men are arousing and flustering her? To present her at her best, he softly pushes to turn her a little and hide her sweet little paunch from them. Then he displays her fully naked body to them, with the disdain they deserve, but as his finger points, he unwittingly adds an inviting little twirl, and against his will, a strange kind of belching utterance escapes his mouth: She’s not bad, eh? And some devil pushes him to add: Look at those lips! See how long those legs are! He notices the shock that runs through their bodies when he says it, and he gulps down a smile and glances at them. He sees their eyelids closed tightly and many nostrils moving in front of him in damp shadowy pairs. All of a sudden the fear lets go of him and incomprehensible pleasure creeps into him and sprawls on the floor of his body, where it curls up lazily.

  And she’s a fairly tall woman, he tells them silently and feverishly, adding that she’s even a little taller than him. And quite large, he emphasizes. But don’t get me wrong—her body is still firm and supple. Even her chest, relatively. Slightly less perhaps in the last few years, but it certainly was until recently. Perhaps because as a girl she was a late bloomer, he says, carefully hiding the fact that he had always secretly believed it was him, with his caresses and his sucking, who had caused her hidden breasts to finally erupt into their present state. He falls silent with fright when a heavy, hoarse moan cleaves them at once as if with an ax. He takes a step back and titters. What is it? What have I said?

  But they, the people—the soldiers, actually, because now he sees that they are all in uniform. He hadn’t noticed that before, but now he sees identical dark clothing, camouflaged even. They bray at him to go on, and he cringes at the touch of a crude animal breeze that suddenly blows on him. When he steps back, they walk over and close in on him. When he tries to get away, the circle does not let up, it moves with him, around him, demanding with rhythmic brays that he tell more, that he continue to describe her. Give it to us, they yell, and he has no choice but to continue, and he hopes the little details he gives them honestly and forthrightly will somehow help the search, and that seems to be the case. It’s hard to understand exactly how, but his words seem to somehow fan them in her direction, making her more tangible to them, even fleshy, because they look at him with yearning and complete self-oblivion, and he feels a desire to increase the stimulation even more, so they will be even more qualified for the search mission they face. Maybe that is in fact why they brought him here—yes, he finally understands—because now, indeed, it all depends on him, on the power of his description and his ability to impassion them, like a general energizing his troops for battle

  Esther? he called out weakly, trying to calm his stubborn heart. Esther?

  She did not answer. She drove very slowly, almost bending over the wheel as her strained eyes tried to penetrate the darkness, and he looked at her from the side, and something in the mirror at that moment looked familiar to him, and painful and beloved. Her body language, her mouth slightly open as if about to be kissed—

  At nineteen she was a waitress in a banquet hall in Beersheba, and she was late for work that day. Just like that, running through the lobby, she pulled her sweater over her head, briefly exposing her stomach. Hagai gave her one glance and got up from his table and followed her into the kitchen and stayed with her for nine and a half years. He was a small, concentrated man, with an alert foxlike face and sharp features, and long hands, as if everything lacking in his body had flown into those fingers—

  Shaul nodded slowly, distractedly, with rounding eyes, and through a veil of bewilderment he saw her almost erupting from her shell, sweetening.

  We laughed so much together, she thought with a smile, and most of all we laughed at ourselves. Her eyes sparkled and she stretched out unknowingly, indulging her limbs. She had never been with a man so daring, in every way. (Men, Hagai used to joke. They call them that because they’re a bad omen.) Together they delighted in his penis, which he thought was tiny, and her short legs, and his crooked fingers, and her ass, which developed nicely under his supervision and nurturing—“a fine posterior,” he called it, and devotedly cultivated it—and his narrow girlish shoulders, and her Indian face.

  She looked in the mirror, but Shaul was lost in himself. She grinned as she thought of how all her men always had to change her position when she stood in front of them, so that she faced them at a certain angle. They would actually take hold of her shoulders and shift her a little, as if casually—Micah did it to this day, without even realizing it—because she must seem very unbeautiful to them, grating even, unless she faced them with that good angle, the one particular one. But Hagai was the only one who was always interested in all 360 degrees of her, and he would describe her from every angle and with every nuance, the refractions of her beauty and oddness through the prism of his gaze, never tiring and never repeating himself. He excited her body and her mind because she saw how important it was for him to be precise about her, to be punctilious, with the seriousness of a painter waiting for the moment at which Indian red becomes purplish, Venetian, lilac and resin, just as her chin changes when his look catches it—that round and heavy chin that, from here, sometimes looks like a weight drawing her mouth slightly open with an expression that used to drive her mother crazy, and because of which they probably thought what they had thought at school. From one particular angle, that very same chin becomes a concentrated, almost masculine fruit, eager to prove something to someone—Why are you so combative, Esther?—and from a different angle it’s like a little fist, a kind of protesting block of spite. And from this angle it softens into a virginal breast, tiny and tight—

  They dance there sometimes, Shaul whispered to himself and to her. His voice was soft and seemed to have been disrobed of all that had stuck to it and twisted it over the years. You hear me? She and he, they dance—

  Tell me, she said, urging him. Tell …

  Shaul thought it was Portuguese music. Elisheva had often said she liked fado, had even mentioned some names of singers, and he delibe
rately wondered out loud where she had heard of them, and Elisheva said, Oh, here and there. He made secret notes to himself—there was one called Ramos, and another called Max, and of course Amália Rodrigues—and decided to buy her a few CDs. He wanted to make her happy, but then thought he would not be able to stand the pain every time she listened to them at home. And that thought had unintentionally led him to formulate the source of his never-ending torment: everything she does with me, he told Esti, reminds her of what she does there, or of what she doesn’t do there. And I can’t understand how she stands it, because Paul winks at her from every cup of coffee we drink together, he sighed. From every smile she gives me, from every bowl of soup she serves me and every dinner we make together. His voice sank, mumbled, and melted. And every time we take a walk through the neighborhood after the news, he thought, and every time I hand her the phone to talk to someone, and when we undress for bed or brush our teeth together or change the sheets together, and when she rests her head on my shoulder at the movies—

  He murmured, and Esti felt as if she were standing on tiptoe and glancing through their window, and she knew he was telling her everything as it was. For a moment she could not see how things could be reconciled, but she knew that it was possible, of course it was possible—there is a lot of human being in one couple, she thought, and felt consumed with longing and became even more despondent.

  And when I read her the headlines from the paper in the morning, Shaul thought to himself, and when I squeeze her some orange juice or when she asks from the kitchen in her happy singsong voice which cake she should bake for Shabbat, and when we sometimes go down to the day care to clean up the mess from the morning, to rake the sand in the sandbox, to gather up toys, and when I cover her feet with a blanket when she falls asleep on the couch … His face softened and he smiled. When she helps me find my glasses, and when I make her laugh while she’s on the phone, and just in general, he thought, every time she laughs or is happy, or forgets herself for a moment, or gets carried away or becomes alarmed at being carried away and not being on her guard, and of course, every time she sleeps with me and thinks of him, and every time she is careful not to touch me in some special way he taught her. And also every time I touch her, each part of her body I touch or am careful not to touch, because of him, and when I am careful not to kiss or suck and leave marks on her neck or breasts, so I won’t have to sense her pulling away—not because of the pain but because of her inherent instinct to conceal. Shaul chokes up and holds his throbbing head. Oh, what a good life we could have had! What happiness there could have been. Simple happiness, without complications. The happiness I so wanted, which could have changed my entire life from one end to the other. I was so close to it …

  He thought of what had happened to them a few weeks ago when they were sleeping together in their way—meaning, they had woken up from sleep and found themselves entwined in each other. For some reason Shaul was unable to maintain his determined slumber, instead arousing himself with thoughts of her man. And he knew with certainty—from her movements and her rhythm and her tightly shut eyes and her guardedness that was let down, and her lips that rounded and her body that clung to him with desperate addiction and her fingers, which suddenly touched him in a different way, at once daring and tender, as if plucking a tune on a completely different scale, and her hands, which suddenly pushed his head down to lick the tip of her pleasure until she cried out—he knew so absolutely and without any doubt that she was, in her entirety, having sex not with him, that when he finally managed to blind and stupefy himself enough to come, he almost called out Paul’s name with a frightened moan.

  She’s really girlish when she dances with him, he said. I didn’t know her as a girl, only from pictures, but he … he peels away all her years when they dance. And he strips her of the lie too, he thought to himself. What he’s really peeling away is the thousands of lies that suffocate her. Something cold passed over his face, desperation or revulsion at himself, at letting her torment herself like this for years without telling her how transparent she was to him, and that he knew all her moves and acts, and even derived bitter satisfaction from her tortured twists every time she traveled from one man to the other, each time she was scanned at his secret customs station. He shut his eyes tightly, as if in prayer, and Elisheva danced, erect, light, all smiles, and Paul saw it too and let go of her and stepped back and opened the blinds up without thinking. They never opened the blinds there, so that no one would look in on them, but now at once it was clear that this could not be hidden; it was a sin to hide such beauty.

  The afternoon sun rushed in through the window that had always been forbidden. Elisheva danced, slowly lifting her arms over her head, and two fair, downy plumes nestled in her armpits. She turned her face up to bathe in the honeyed light, her eyes lightly shut, her fingers moving of their own accord, and her eyelashes and ankles and delicate knees and her hips … The sun in the window rebelled for a moment, sighed, and climbed back up a few degrees in the sky to see better, and clung to every limb of her body. All her limbs were curved, from the soles of her feet to her forehead, and the sun lingered like a handmaiden bathing her princess. Shaul was unable to move or breathe, and he consumed her with his gaze, and Paul did the same from his place, and between them, with herself, was Elisheva.

  No, he’s really something, he then declared with a bitter sigh. There’s no doubt about that. Look, only an extraordinary man could justify what she has to go through to be with him. Feeling too exposed, he silently summoned up a distant flash of her to prick himself with quickly, from years ago when, as he says, they were still young and she was still beautiful. They had gone to see a movie about a grotesque hunchback hypnotist who mesmerized a woman from his audience. The woman got on stage, noble and restrained, but within minutes she was responding to all the hypnotist’s disgusting advances, dancing and gyrating with him with a joyful smile on her face. Right in front of her husband and the entire audience, the hunchback kissed her on the mouth with his painted lips, a long and lustful kiss. Shaul looked away from the screen to glance sideways at Elisheva. As he looked at her face, at the very slight movement that passed through her lips, he knew with certainty that she too had a place in her soul where all her fairness and loyalty would be of no use to him, a place unruled by logic or even love, a kind of no-man’s-land where any bastard could do as he wished. And he knew how easy it would be to penetrate that place, knew that there were people who could easily be there with one knock at the door—

  Sometimes, he told Esti impetuously, when we’re in bed, I think that if only I could take her body to the other room and question it, interrogate it, you know, get it to tell me everything it’s learned there with him—Esti was shocked by the pain flowing from him in waves, like blood pulsating rhythmically—and forgive me for even letting you in on this, but you can already see where it leads me, because then I wonder how it can be possible that everything she hides—her life, her real life, I mean—everything is so close to me, behind perhaps one millimeter of skin, and yet I can’t read it. It’s all a total riddle to me.

  But you do know everything, she whispered.

  And their little customs, he went on as if he hadn’t heard, their whole routine—that’s the most difficult thing. Or words she only uses with him, he laughed: “ticklish,” for example. What does that mean? Esti asked, momentarily lost in another place, in her own private dictionary. It’s an English word. It means, let’s say, a place that tickles if you touch it, and one day when we’re in bed, she says to me about some spot on her waist that it’s ticklish, and I tell you that’s a word that was never even in our vocabulary—I never heard her say “ticklish”! Or once she described someone as being “seized with a frenzy.” Can you hear her saying “seized with a frenzy”? Elisheva? But I suppose it’s the same with me, he laughed. My lexicon has also changed, you must have noticed, because until all this happened to me I was half-mute, especially on these kinds of things. Really, even in m
y dreams I wasn’t capable of being like this, like I am with you here.

  He was quiet, and she was too, and he swallowed a hard lump and said, Yes, a whole dictionary has sprung up for me since then, and if Elisheva knew how I could speak, if she guessed I wasn’t giving her any of it … He thought Esti asked why not, and even if she hadn’t asked he replied immediately, firmly: Because words are his and her territory, that much is clear to me. But why is it so clear? Esti wondered. Oh, it’s very clear, he answered. Maybe it’s because they have so little time and opportunity for doing, so they talk. And therefore, he added, if she and he have words, I keep quiet. I—with all due respect—stay out of their domain! I don’t step on his territory, get it? I don’t get in their way and I don’t invade their privacy. She pricked up her ears, perplexed by the dry argumentativeness that had suddenly taken hold of him, and even more so by his strange eagerness to be banished and exiled from that “territory” of theirs. She realized with surprise that he was practically forcing them to stand across from him with a flaming sword which turned every way, as if that were the deepest purpose of their love: to banish him from there.

  A light fog covered the windows. They drove slowly, in a cloud. They did not see any other vehicles for a long while, and Esti thought maybe they should stop and wait for the fog to lift. But she too was being sucked in by the end, the end of the road, and she felt strips of heat on her skin as if she were jumping through his burning hoop again and again. Her whole body was different tonight. She suddenly felt heat in her shoulder, or her inner thigh, or felt she was being kissed fervently on her neck, or that a tongue was sliding over her ear—