Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him. They found they could multiply their pleasure, because every inch of the body had its own private name, every wrinkle and mole and freckle, every movement and touch and stroke and lick and tingle, and she could murmur in his ear how she wished he had a little tongue just above his penis, and hear him understanding and laughing softly in her ear. And she could call him, with a mouth full of yearning, My darling, my softness, my beloved, my endearment. Or leave him a note under his windshield wiper, with words that only he could understand: “This time tomorrow we’ll be snuggling snugly.” And together they could elevate a screw into lovemaking, a quickie to a flicker, climaxing to gushing. Look how beautiful you are, Esther, he would whisper to her in the middle of lovemaking, propping himself up on his arms over her and looking at her excitedly. Look. And she would smile and lift her head a little and look into his eyes to see.

  Quiet in the car now. Shaul is in his circles, and she is distant, swiftly borne across great expanses, full of momentum, carrying Shaul like a burning torch above her head, stealing a few sparks of fire for herself from the hidden parts of their trail.

  She thinks with surprise of how complete she was with him during those years, the first ones, so much so that she thoroughly loved his family too, and stealthily crept into it from outside, with self-effacement and childish excitement. And he, in his way, talked with her about everything, and shared with her everything he thought would not be too painful for her, even though she was gladly willing to pay the pain levy, which was sometimes unbearable, only so that he would not for a moment stop the flow of his talk with her, so he would not filter or protect her or think twice. With thirsty shyness and the gratitude of an illiterate, she learned from him the meaning of home and family, parents and children, and the wonderfully complex relationships between siblings. She adopted them all without their knowledge, and lived their eating disorders and their little illnesses and their parent-teacher meetings and their jazz classes and their nightmares, and clung to their minutiae with an enthusiasm that he might have found touching, but perhaps also embarrassing. She was certain back then, her bitter heart told her, that this was the greatest closeness to a family she would ever achieve, and during those years there was even some relief in that knowledge, and a feeling that it was precisely the right place for her. And when sometimes the light in the window went out and she was left in the dark, she also believed that it was what she deserved. Her eyes are almost closed to the road, her heart flinches to think of the girl she used to be, a kitten, not much older than Shira …

  Because she and I always used simple language, he went on with a voice full of knots. We spoke without witticisms and euphemisms, and that’s what she loved in me, once. Once, my scientific talk was fine for her. That’s what she called it: functional language, rational, the language of human beings. And I always thought this language of ours was enough for her, and it was how we made Tom, and set up a decent home, and lived together, and you could even say we developed and grew together, she in her field and I in mine. But apparently she needed another language, he mumbled, and withdrew into himself again, and Esti watched briefly and thought about Elisheva’s “field,” and how surprised she had been when Elisheva had decided, years ago, to get up and leave her wonderful job at the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and open a little day-care center in their backyard. How could Shaul agree to this? she had wondered then. How would he tolerate a day-care center right under his office window?

  Perhaps they even have a different language between them, a third one. Shaul revived himself and Esti didn’t answer. Something almost became clear to her, then fogged over again, a scene she had once seen: Elisheva at the day care, tired and gray-faced, surrounded on all sides by toddlers who clung to her happily and noisily, and above her, behind the window, Shaul’s shadow.

  It suddenly makes sense to me, he whispered with wonder. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it at the time: three years ago she got a bee in her bonnet and signed up for that Portuguese class, which was completely unnecessary—what use would Portuguese be for her in day care? Esti glanced and saw his face light up for an instant, viciously focused, as if he were a collector who had discovered a rare butterfly and was chasing it so he could pin it to one of his boards. Maybe they both decided to learn a language that would be theirs? Do you see? A language that would be clean of me, so they could listen to their fado together. Because that man, he hissed, has all the time in the world to spare. Twenty-three hours a day he does nothing but wait for her. I have no idea how he lives, what he lives on, who finances him, and if you ask me, the only thing he does all day is wait for her, prepare himself for her, fill himself up for her.

  A swift, soulful impression passed through both travelers at once, of a creature-person who is nothing but a long tube of skin, pale and swollen, sprawled like a blind ant-king in the thick of the earth, in dank dimness, fed with the richest of foods; every day he discharges one white, round egg, and that is the course of his life and he cannot live without it. But Shaul was thinking of Elisheva’s man, and Esti was thinking of Shaul, and she almost choked as she imagined the damp burrows. She practically shouted, Let’s go back, Shaul! What do you need this for? It will only torture you even more to be there. But he said, No, no, I told you, she’s not with him there, I’m almost certain she’s without him. Esti was confused. Without him? Why would she be without him, when that’s where they could …

  Shaul took a deep breath and patiently explained again that Elisheva wanted to be there alone, had to be there alone. Without me and without him. She just wants quiet from both of us. He chuckled. But to tell you the truth, he later spat out, maybe she has someone there too, a third guy—who knows? Maybe he’s the reason she insists on this trip. He closed his eyes as if he had just made a huge effort, and then apparently fell asleep. Every so often his head would fall forward and his body would shake, but still he continued to sleep as if he had to store up strength for the final and most difficult part of the journey.

  She remembered how, during their first years together, he was happy with her like a child, and she was as happy as she knew how to be. Still, she was careful not to take too much, not to overdose. He was completely unable to understand why she held herself back, and she explained that she would gradually become more daring, but in the meantime he had to watch her like you watch a hungry survivor who mustn’t be allowed to eat too much at first. You love me more than I’m capable of loving myself, she warned him. Even now, in the car, her fingers felt the touch of his small, pointed head, which she had held then between her hands. She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she’d been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts “the baby teeth of a snake,” and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn’t even have to explain to her what he meant by “the opposite”; she knew it was the opposite of her.

  Once in a while, he whispered, tugging a loose end out of his dream and threading it into the conversation, she surprises him by asking him to turn the TV on. Is there something special on? And she says, No, I just want us to be like this, the two of us sitting together on the couch, cuddling up, as if, as if … And when she says “as if,” her voice cracks and she bursts into tears, and when she comes home she has to hide those tears and the puffy eyes, or at least excuse them—“Don’t ask, they put loads of chlorine in the water today”—and the thought of having to do that humiliates her even more. As if, as if … she sobs. As if everything, as if we, as if happiness. And Paul says nothing, because there’s nothing he can say. It’s her decision to go on like this, in this duplicity, for years, without telling Shaul
, so his innocent faith in her will not be damaged. Paul hugs her for a long time, fighting off the urges that the closeness of her body arouses in him. Then he gets up, Shaul said, and with a movement that is difficult to believe in a bear like him—but apparently there are many things you wouldn’t believe about him, things that have enabled him to thrash me with such elegance for ten years at least … Where was I? And Esti, who could not follow the fragments of his thoughts, suddenly knew what he reminded her of: the scorpions in Beersheba, which the neighborhood children used to surround with a circle of burning rope, and they would make the circle smaller and smaller until the scorpion aimed its tail at its own head and stung itself. Then he gets up, Shaul recalled, and gets her up too, and with his hand on her back they go for a walk in the apartment, he and she; it’s a sad little joke they play sometimes. Let’s go for a little walk, he says to her on days when he too is suffocating, and they walk the seven or eight steps down the hallway, arm in arm, then into his messy study, flooded with papers and piles of books—he whispered with the voice of someone trying to seduce, though it was mostly himself, and Esti wondered how he could be both the scorpion and the burner and the circle of fire—and then they turn around and go back into the hallway, three, four, six steps, trying not to trample all the stuff that’s scattered there—it’s an indescribable mess, Shaul noted disapprovingly, with clothes and books and newspapers and rags just lying everywhere; I can’t understand how they live like that, how she, in that jungle—and continue to the bedroom, and turn around in front of their huge bed and go back to the hallway, and his hand is on her the whole time, and her hand is on his waist, and they walk very slowly. They’re like a couple of elderly teenagers, Shaul thought, and Esti could sense with her whole being how Elisheva and Paul listened together to a sound that only they could hear, and that if they stopped hearing it they would become a joke even to themselves. Shaul closed his eyes and accompanied them to the kitchen, where they circle the table to gain another two or three steps, and Paul, said Shaul, leans over and whispers in her ear, You see, Sheva—that’s what he calls her—don’t say I never take you out, and Elisheva smiles, and her chin quivers slightly.

  Then they do the whole path back again, Shaul saw, and his lips moved but he made no sound. And in the hallway, Paul stops to shake hands formally with the sleeve of his coat, which hangs there, and he chitchats with a neighbor and introduces him to Elisheva: Meet the woman in my life, this is the woman I’ve been waiting for here, twenty-three hours a day, for ten years. Elisheva puts her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes, and lets him walk her around. She would go anywhere in the world with him, blindfolded, because she trusts him, that’s the thing—his voice suddenly lifted and extracted itself from the knot of his thoughts with a strange cheerfulness—here we are, Esther, it’s a good thing we talked, because in the course of talking I’ve defined it for myself: there’s something in him that gives her a sense of confidence, fills her with confidence, and that is something I have somehow been unable to give her. That’s the thing, with me she is evidently never completely confident.

  And perhaps because of his voice at that moment, or the look on his face, a thought flies through her, sudden, wounding—

  Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. How is it that her heart goes out to him? She should be angry at him now, should feel shocked and cheated, should disdain him, recoil from him … But she is at once utterly exhausted and also incapable of remembering where exactly one finds the conviction to be disdainful, or righteous, or to know something with any certainty. He has a singular obsession, she thinks. Or a singular genius. And the blood pulses hard, too hard, and some sweet internal assailant comes and quickly shreds the muscles of her shoulders and neck, and soon everything will fall and dissipate, nose and ears and the three gray cells she has left, and with all her strength she tries to calm down, she must stop this, but she is unable to give up these heartbeats, the forgotten, precise heartbeats which reply as an echo, and she remembers his hand upon the tablets of her heart, her hand on his chest—feel it, our prisoners are corresponding. But how? She is amazed. How did I let Shaul lead me on like this? Where have I been all evening? But she knows exactly how and where, what she was listening to and what her heart went out to. Look at you, she sighs. No, really, look at you, you and your reaching heart.

  She feels for the bottle, and as she drives she pours some water into her palm and wets her forehead and then trickles a few drops down her nape, and stretches her legs and wiggles her toes in her shoes. Back to life, she commands, and for a start she tries to reconstruct their conversation since leaving. The announcer on the radio had talked about that police officer in Madrid, and since then almost nothing, she can’t remember anything, only heat waves exchanging, growing hotter and dissipating, and it’s as if that was the only thing. She takes a deep breath, finally breathing, like the first breath, and hears him mumbling to himself. How can he do it? How does he survive a whole life of this? She looks in the mirror and sees his face concentrating, trapped in the fiery ring of his hermetic torments. Tell me, she says in her heart, don’t stop. She keeps asking against the backdrop of his whispers, and is carried away on his waves and hunches over, absorbed in herself, a little more, until she has to understand, to wake up.

  What now? Shaul wonders, wanting to go back to sleep, to forget, to silence the voices, to subdue the flames which constantly demand new, richer burning material. Maybe I’ll tell her to go back, he suggests to himself weakly. I’ll tell her to turn around and go back at once, yes, before we get there, he says to himself, and swells up with a surge of power. I’ll tell her to go back home. And deep in his mind a cold, mocking bolt of lightning strikes—who is he kidding? After all, even the supposed restraint of the present is an integral part of the complex and meticulous process of complete surrender, and besides, he knows that if something happens to her there, to Elisheva, it will happen tonight. It has to happen. Day one: acclimatization, checking out the field and filtering candidates. Day two: bonding with two or three of them. And on the last night, tonight, the implementation. The one. The speck of gold. What are you talking about? Elisheva smiles compassionately, with quiet desperation. Why are you torturing yourself with these thoughts? I really just go there to rest, to read, to clear my mind. In that case, he replies calmly, wrapping his voice with a falseness as it trembles with fury, in that case, you’re just wasting your vacation and our money—what’s the point of you even going every year if you don’t find yourself someone there? Why all the bother? Why do you think people go to these kinds of places alone? Precisely for this, she replies, and her look smooths over his conflicted face. Why can’t you believe that I just want to be with me, just me with myself, once a year?

  Yesterday she rang in the afternoon, even though he had told her he didn’t want to talk to her for the entire four days. She wanted to hear how he was. He spoke curtly. Asked if she’d met him. Met who? she asked wearily. I don’t know his name, he rolled out a laugh. You want me to give you his name too? There was a long silence. Then Elisheva said, Shaul, really …

  Listen, he said seriously, I love you, I even miss you, but I’m entitled not to be a part of what you’re going through there. I’m entitled to protect myself from all that, aren’t I?

  What am I going through here? she asked tiredly, and he could see her grimacing. What do you think I’m going through?

  No, no, he laughed bitterly, I don’t want to hear about it.

  They were quiet again together, and there was a shared tenderness or sadness. Their love escaped for an instant from the jaws of a large vise grip, relaxed between t
he two of them, searched for shelter. He held his breath for a moment, wanting Elisheva to yell at him, to scream, to hurl her fury at him. Perhaps all they needed was a few words from her to redeem them both.

  He grumbled, Why did you even call?

  I wanted to hear how you were. I suddenly had a bad feeling.

  I feel wonderful.

  Tell her now, without thinking, tell her everything: Listen, Elisheva, it’s not just these seasonal attacks around your trip every year, it’s more than that at this point. It’s life itself, the way it gets dragged around everywhere. You have a right to know. I’m the sick one, but you’re dying from it too. If only you knew. If only I could just sit down and tell you, talk with you the way I talk with myself, the way we used to be able to, about everything, maybe I could still get out of it somehow and wake up, go back to being a human being. Look, all I need is one final, decisive piece of evidence to convince me that I’m wrong. I know I’m wrong, I’m almost a hundred percent certain that I’m wrong, so I’m willing to believe anything, even the feeblest, most unfounded proof, if you only give it to me with a truly pure heart, if you are still capable of that, if it’s even possible to ask that of you anymore. Why are you so quiet? What do you have to be quiet about—

  He said, Leah phoned for you about next year’s program, and another young couple want to register their daughter who hasn’t even been born yet. She smiled to herself with a certain sense of pride, and he heard her smile and couldn’t help smiling with her. And again, for a fleeting instant, they were so close to relief, and he closed his eyes and saw her beloved face, but it was far above him, as if he were lying at the bottom of a well. If only she had the courage to descend, to bring him up with her. Why doesn’t she come down? There’s always a place where she stops. He knows the place where she shrinks back a little as if she’d met a ghost. They sighed together. For an instant they were both shown with biting tangibility how, for these past twenty-five years, the sediments of their sorrow and bitterness had crystallized, drop after drop, into a massive stalagmite of marriage.