Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  Heavily, he put on his foreign voice again like a uniform, his robe of duress: We’ll talk about the rest when you get home. Oh, Tom didn’t call today either. And she said, He called me here. He’s all right. He says hi to you. Shaul swallowed another small lump of insult and declared, That’s it, I think that’s it. Nothing else happened. Then he stopped and squeezed his eyelids as tight as he could to cap the lid on the unbearable simmering. He gave in, and having sworn to himself not to, he reminded her about the little package he’d thrown into her suitcase before she left. By now he was entirely consumed by that dark sweetness, its toxins seeping into its depths, the drug of an ancient lust for revenge—but on whom? he moaned when she hung up on him. On whom was he taking this revenge, always, all his life? On her? Why her? Why had it always been like this, from the first moment, ever since a great wave of love had come and washed him toward her, together with an unfamiliar rage that had also not dulled in him since the moment he knew she was the woman of his life, and which had caused him to first scorn her because she had settled for so little—settled for him

  And his selfhood mounts all at once into a fierce erection. He is the living, pulsing seed of the faceless swarm that hums around him in its strange mating flight. All these people here, the soldiers, the men, are devoid of volition against what pours forth out of him—they are a thousandfold stronger than him and yet submissive and passive, pliable to him. He repels and retreats as if to taunt them, and they stay with him, move with him, guessing his next steps. Their senses open up to him: they see, listen, and inhale. Eyes dart over his body and face, scan his hands, his feet, the thinning hair on his head. Conclusions are gathered, important material collected, analyzed somewhere, but what is it? For a moment he is dazzled by the power of the presence of all these bodies, the smells, the pressure and force of so many wills and desires—

  I find her beautiful, he quickly stresses. Some might disagree, but there are certain situations, he says, where she is truly beautiful. He grins at them defiantly from ear to ear, lips slightly quivering, and he knows that beyond the frozen masks of their faces they are smiling at this idiot—idiot’e’le, as his mother says—because while he was busy finding nice words to say, his wife ran away and left him with his dick in his hand and his tongue twirling. He is talking, naively, of her soft feet—an architectural wonder, he waxes poetic, apart from the second toe, of course, the one that climbs over the big toe on her left foot. It’s hereditary—all the women in her family have it, he adds, and from this point on he continues talking and tells them everything, illustrates her entire body for them, every crease and wrinkle, every freckle and birthmark, and from one moment to the next he becomes more and more vibrant and stormy, giving them more and more. An indescribably dark transaction is occurring here tonight: he gives her to them so they can bring her back to him. And all this time their eyes are practically closed, their mouths open, they move with him in waves, they and their uniforms and their solidity and their field scent, spreading around him like a circular trail, the hem of a wide dress, as he twirls them around himself with a very slight movement of his hips, almost imperceptible, and proves to them without words that they are mistaken if they mean to judge him by the normal rules, by the acceptable regulations of human taxation, whereby he is nothing but an unyoung, unlovely man whose wife has decided to leave him (“to go away for four days and be alone, just me with myself, once a year, what’s the big deal”).

  Tell me, Esti said with strange urgency. He pulled himself out of his depths and re-emerged in the car. There was almost begging in her voice, and they both pulsated now to the same heartbeat.

  Tell me what you want to hear.

  At first she thought he’d said “what you’d like to hear,” like a salesman in the recesses of a dubious store, testing out a shy customer’s preferences.

  How they met, she said.

  Oh … Well, it so happens that I don’t exactly know the answer to that. In the darkness of the car he stared at her thoughtfully and seriously. Do you really want to hear?

  Really. Really but not truly, she thought.

  She met him when she still worked at the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, he said, at least that’s what she told me. She handled his case there. But one day he just came into our house …

  How did she know to ask that? he wondered. How did she ask that question at precisely the right moment, the right point in his chain of thoughts and terrors? Because that is the thing that has remained fresh and new ever since things were first revealed to him in their true light. It is the point to which he can always return, even in his sleep, in the greatest desperation, when he needs to refuel his passion for her, and it is the minute that never ends, the eternal present that has been going on for ten years: Shaul and Elisheva are in the kitchen of their old house on Rachel Imenu Street, chopping vegetables for a salad, as they do every evening, chatting about how the day went and what will happen tomorrow and who paid what and who will take Tom to the dentist, when all of a sudden the door swings open to reveal a man Shaul has never seen before. He walks straight into the kitchen and says, with a heavy Russian accent, that he can’t take it anymore.

  No, no. Not so fast. Better to rewind and play it again, slowly and in the correct order. Shaul stands there wearing Elisheva’s floral apron, holding a small bunch of dill ready to be chopped, and looks at Elisheva questioningly with a slightly amazed smile: Perhaps it’s a prank or a joke? But why would she play a joke on him? Even so, he still tries to solve this nightmare in a positive way: maybe it’s some aggressive marketing campaign for a vacation package to Izmir, or maybe the cable company is offering a new deal. But it seems pretty clear that that’s not it. The man stands in their kitchen, filling it with his presence, with his quiet bearishness, and he is serious and somber, so somber that his tanned face is pale. Shaul also notices that his fingers are shaking a little, which must be a good sign, because it means the man is afraid of confronting him. Although, on the other hand, perhaps it says something about how acute his condition is. Meanwhile, the two of them, Shaul and he, do not move, and that’s good too, because the stranger’s element of surprise is becoming less of an advantage. Although, on the other hand, he is still in Shaul’s kitchen rather than Shaul being in his kitchen. The man is slightly taller than him, but much more solid and broader, with a thick neck and a large face. He is not handsome but certainly powerful, no longer a young man, several years older than Shaul, ten at least, and he looks a little sad even, and here is where Shaul begins to sense that he’s right for her. She likes the ones with sober and grave expressions. And it is his graveness which is in fact most confusing, because you can tell just by looking at him that he deliberated a lot before taking this step, that he carefully evaluated the chances and the risks, and if he still decided to burst in here—the word “burst” is exaggerated; the truth is that he knocked on the door, so hesitantly in fact that they barely heard him, and Shaul went to open the door, and the guy said, Excuse me, and asked if Elisheva was home, and she called out from the kitchen, Yes, who is it? Come in, please, in a surprised and cheerful voice, the voice she had back then, and the man murmured something to Shaul and walked past him with a kind of apologetic bow and went into the kitchen—and if all that has happened, it must mean the man estimated he would get what he wanted, and that means Shaul will lose.

  But what did “lose” mean? And how could he lose his life like this to a complete stranger? If indeed he is a complete stranger to Elisheva too, and this Shaul still cannot determine. But let’s assume he really does lose, and that after the brief confrontation which will shortly occur—but how? Will they throw punches? Use knives? Like two deer locking antlers?—Shaul may have to leave this house. What would become of everything then? What would become of the house? And Elisheva? And the seven years of mortgage they still owe? And the large salad bowl and the silly apron Shaul is still wearing around his waist? Action must be taken now, immediately, and he surreptitiously grasps
the edge of the table and clears his throat to restore his power of speech, and demands that the man explain what he is doing here. He already knows that this is a mistake, because he should have just gotten up and grabbed him by the shirt collar and thrown him down the stairs (although there were only two in that house), but instead, by the mere fact of his prolonged silence, it was as if he had already entered into negotiations over something, and had seemingly granted him what little legitimacy he needed as a stranger from the outside.

  The man has still not moved. He sinks his head between his shoulders, and his entire posture is that of an overgrown foster child who has tired of being shifted around and uprooted and has come and planted himself down somewhere, with some family, wordlessly proclaiming that this is his final station, that he will not budge from here. Listen, he whispers to Elisheva without looking up, listen, I’m really sorry, but it’s just no longer bearable. He falls silent and bows his head, and his lower jaw drops.

  Slowly, almost stealthily, Shaul removes his apron. He regrets that he is not wearing shoes or something more solid than the brown plaid slippers. They were a gift from his parents for some anniversary, two matching pairs, his and hers, which his dad had gotten hold of in one of the barter transactions he advocated as a way of resisting income tax. But at least the slippers represent a silent, forceful declaration that they belong to each other, Elisheva and he, that they are far more like each other than Elisheva could ever be like a man with a heavy jaw and dark baggy eyes and a doglike and bitter look in his eyes, a man who makes a surprise infiltration into someone else’s kitchen and demands Elisheva for himself. Shaul already realizes that he’s not such a big hero, that he seems to have already used up most of his reserves of courage with his melodramatic bursting into the kitchen, and now he is trembling no less than Shaul, because most likely he has never been in such a situation either.

  Out of embarrassment or weakness, the man leans against the fridge, but it seems to Shaul as if he has already taken this stance before, with this same fridge, as if he’s used to standing there like that, among all the notes and the phone numbers and the pizza magnets. Shaul is amazed to think of how many times he himself has touched that same fridge without suspecting that perhaps an hour or two earlier, in his absence, another man had touched it for a minute. At once his mind becomes crowded with treacherous furniture, tables, bureaus, and couches that conspire against him, not to mention the double bed and even the air in the house—who knows how many times this man has touched them all and then left and closed the door behind him softly, without leaving any footprints? Elisheva herself walks in this space and breathes it inside her, and Shaul suddenly understands the significance of her soft touch, the way she always caresses everything she touches, any item or furnishing, even mugs and teaspoons that she holds with softly drawn fingers and a slight linger, which until now has always secretly delighted him. The man, with a mouth that looks torn from being stretched, says he doesn’t have the strength to wait any longer, that he’s losing his mind.

  And Elisheva? What is she going through? Shaul doesn’t look at her. Strange how he can’t bring himself to turn his head to her, and the man can’t either, so neither of them knows what she is showing them; they are both temporarily equal to each other in their inability to turn their heads and look at her. Shaul resents the unfounded comparison with a stranger, with someone who is an immigrant in every sense of the word, and he tosses a sighed question into the air: Does Elisheva even know him? The stranger, for the first time since coming in, manages to turn his head with great effort, beating Shaul to it, and looks straight at her. This causes Shaul to look too, and he sees with surprise how from the weary Elisheva of 8 p.m., another woman suddenly shines out from beneath her married skin. This is a woman Shaul does not know. She is transparent and light, and her thin silhouette twitches inside his Elisheva like a dragonfly caught in a paper lantern, and all at once he is filled with an unknown strength and is willing to fight for her and be killed and even kill. But then he thinks perhaps this internal revelation of hers is not intended for him but for the strange man, who is practically subdued by the image of the illuminated dragonfly, his slightly crude face turning soft and weak, the face of a man looking at a particularly beloved scene. Shaul has no doubt of this, and Elisheva smiles softly and says yes, she knows him.

  You know him? Shaul lets out a deep groan. How? Where from? For he, in his innocence, in his boundless stupidity, imagined at the time that he knew every person in her life, and as far as he knew, she had never mentioned this stranger, who looked as if he was about to collapse on the floor, but for now was leaning over their dinner table on both hands and looking at Elisheva with a huge face and weighted, sagging cheeks. He is a sad-looking man, with silver stubble from a particularly sloppy shave, a pack of cigarettes crushed in his shirt pocket, dressed simply and almost neglectfully, like a Russian teacher from a lost generation, carrying a shopping bag from the neighborhood grocery. Shaul now thinks he looks like a work-weary family man, or perhaps a forlorn bachelor who lives a meticulous life, a kind of devoted workhorse who was suddenly stung by a wasp of madness and tore himself away from the furrow and started running amok, until he arrived here to tell Shaul’s wife in a choked voice and for the third time, Elisheva, I can’t go on like this anymore.

  The fact that he knows her name. And the way he says it. Shaul’s knees give in and he sits down, and the man stands, and the two of them breathe heavily, without looking at each other. The man’s breath is heavy and wheezy and his face turns red. Elisheva whispers from her place by the sink, But you have to be patient, I keep telling you. In the end we’ll find you a good place. Now go home, Paul. Come to the office tomorrow and we’ll talk.

  Shaul lowers his head and stares at the table. He slowly freezes and tightens on the chair. His feet barely reach the floor. His feet are swinging in the air. The man turns to him and says he is sorry. Shaul barely comprehends. The man’s Hebrew is new but surprisingly fluent, and he explains to Shaul that it’s already been a year and a half and they still haven’t found a job for him. That he’s not willing to make compromise— Is that how you say it? He turns to Elisheva questioningly, and she proudly confirms with a warm smile, Yes—with his art.

  He’s a cartoonist, Shaul explained to Esti with a Russian accent, mimicking Paul’s speech with surprising mischief: “And I to know that Mrs. Elisheva making very much for that me have job, but year and a half I am inemployed, not employed, because is principle for me to work only art, only art!” Esti looked and saw his face change, become heavier and more daring. “And government here give to me—or office job, or guard job, or driving job! So what? Like that, no job, no art, and also no life!”

  Shaul cannot understand what the stranger wants from him or what he’s supposed to do now. Should I leave? he asks the man. No, Paul says, surprised. Why leave, sir? Is your house. Shaul smiles gratefully and looks around in a daze. Elisheva and Paul talk. There. He has put it into one sentence that doesn’t immediately crack open: Elisheva and the-stranger-who-burst-into-their-kitchen talk. He hears the sounds of the stranger and Elisheva and does not comprehend. Maybe it’s Hebrew, but he knows Hebrew. No, her stranger is talking with her in a language he does not know. And she’s answering him. It’s not Hungarian, of that Shaul is certain. He knows her Hungarian a little. And it’s not Russian, or English or French; or Portuguese, he now adds to the list, or any civilized language. And when did she have time to learn another language? He listens with surprise to their strange dialect, full of breathing and soft consonants, and comprised mostly of gestures. He tries to follow, but cannot. Elisheva and the stranger even try to make it easier for him, slowing down their speech a little for his benefit. Sometimes they raise their voices, arguing. Elisheva seems to lose her patience. She is angry at something, and the man is sorry. God, Shaul thinks, so many shared emotions they have! And once in a while Shaul notices some pet name of hers, it seems, which the man repeats over and over agai
n. It’s unlike her name, and coming from him it sounds a little prolonged, seems foggy and melting at the edges: belo … belo … Shaul watches their lips attentively and devotedly. He has a vague feeling that if he is a good student they won’t kick him out, that they’ll let him stay in their house and abandon the idea of sending him to boarding school.

  The stranger looks at Elisheva. A tortured look. Asking for mercy. He says something that even Shaul, who has not learned the language, understands is a huge request, something like: Teach me, Elisheva, teach me so I’ll also know. Elisheva doesn’t answer. Her head is bowed, her hair, still golden, hides her face. Shaul watches them both with his mouth open. They freeze that way, the three of them, for a long time. Then the man sighs, nods at Elisheva and Shaul without seeing them at all, mumbles “Sorry” to the air, and turns and leaves.

  For the first time in several minutes, Shaul breathes a sigh of relief—at it all being over, with no blows exchanged or blood shed. Things like this can sometimes end in murder, after all. He is also relieved because in fact you could say that he beat the intruder, did he not? He managed this little conflict fairly wisely, did not lose his cool, and in the end he banished the man from his territory.

  When the door shut behind the stranger, everything went back to normal at once. The radio came on, the neon light shone again, and Elisheva—as if everything that had happened hadn’t—went on chatting and told Shaul about the man, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, the son of a French father and a Russian mother. She knew everything about him. He was a fairly well-known cartoonist in Riga, certainly an original artist, she said, but it had been a year and a half and she hadn’t been able to find him a job in a suitable place, or even a newspaper to publish his cartoons or a gallery to show his famous creations. Who needs a cartoonist these days? She sighed. She’d already been through numerous job interviews with him, and begged curators and gallery owners and weekly editors, but nothing. Shaul did not look at her or listen to her words. His whole body trembled like a tiny animal cowering in a riverbed, listening to an oncoming torrent.