Men of every shape and color—tall, short, thick, supple, crude, neglected, handsome, elderly, refined, boyish, feminine, muscular, limp, chickenlike—a massive flow of masculinity in all its guises pours out toward him down the main street of the desert market. It is a hairy, sinewy, grumbling, throaty human throng, and the more he watches it, the more it loses its separate features and congeals into a mass of silt that fans out over a wide river, moving here and there, thick furrowed peels of skin with nervous looks darting around, excited and suspicious, and frizzy bushes of hair sprouting on the stump of a leg or a large arm, oversized lumps of mud from which reliefs of swollen arteries spring out, and sideburns and bald spots in a multitude of shapes, and sweat stains, and a convex skull and a molded forehead and a nervous muscle that tightens in the jaw, and throbbing biceps, and beneath the thick sludge a throng bubbles up toward him, like the permanent rumble of a river, the hum of covetousness and disquiet and short barks of deterrence, and also a deep comradeship, noisy, like in barracks or a stadium. Strange men and semi-familiar men, and men who look like men he knows, hurrying, rushing, touching, smelling the goods, haggling over a green wool glove, from which Elisheva’s reddish fingers used to peek out during winter, or bickering over the gray-white pullover his mother knitted for her years ago, or holding up a thrilling little pair of underwear to the light, dancing drunkenly in the brilliance that shines through them, and in their brutalization they become beautiful for a moment through their contact with the splendor that enveloped her, refined as they touch the flimsy fabric—
When she had almost reached the door, after paying the guy at the counter for the phone call, she turned and went back to the phone and stood staring for a moment, as if wondering what she was doing there. Beyond two panes of glass she saw Shaul in the car, with his head leaning back, and she guessed that his lips were moving. Of their own accord, her fingers dialed the digits, and she knew the music the buttons produced from any telephone she’d ever been at. He lifted the receiver immediately, just as Micah had done before, and it was as if he’d been waiting for her by the phone all these years.
His voice was quick, even when he’d been sleeping: a low, penetrating “Hello.” She froze. He was quiet for a long time, did not breathe, surrounded her with deep, dense quiet, then just said “Hello” again, a completely different one this time, almost defeated, and she hung up quickly and only then grasped what she had done. She stood with weak knees and didn’t know what to do or where to go. She almost dialed the number again, her fingers seemed drawn to the buttons, but then she clutched the handset with both hands and pressed her mouth hard into the receiver, which stank from the saliva of strangers. Over the sound of the dial tone, she poured herself into him wordlessly. Unable to stop, she emptied her very core into him, and yelled and sobbed and laughed and promised and begged, and explained why and why not, and why they must and why they couldn’t, and why there was no life without and how everything is always ripped in the same place and how she curses the moment and is resurrected over and over again endlessly
The most difficult times are when she comes home after being with him, Shaul said later, with a sigh, and Esti shook herself awake with fright and almost swallowed the candy she was sucking. It’s not easy then, for me or for her, he said. She’s always refreshed when she gets back, from the swim, of course, and her hair is a little damp, but she never looks me in the eye. It’s not … and he laughed glumly, sliding pleasantly like a sleepwalker into their conversation, which was full of silences and deep valleys alongside each other, as in a prayer where everyone stands together but each person is on his own—and each of them, Esti thought, prays to a different God.
She was still quiet, barely holding her body up straight at the wheel. What had happened at the inn had exhausted her more than the long drive. She tried to guess what he was going through now. Saw him lying awake with his eyes open and sparkling in the dark, his tongue clicking between his cheeks, in his thinking position. She wondered whether he guessed it was her. Or perhaps he knew straightaway, as soon as he heard her silence. She kicked herself too, of course: maybe he thought it was someone else, a lover he had after her, whose call he had been waiting for. But she held her head up straight and shook it firmly: No.
Part of her brain repeatedly turned over his “hello,” playing both instances of it again and again, the sigh and his voice, which was so old now, and the tiredness, which may not have been simply because it was late, and which sounded to her as if he were announcing that he was giving up something precious. How could he give up like that? she thought. He mustn’t give up. And she answered herself, What gives you the right to even … ? She was frightened to think that he could be that way without her having known about it. Here you go again, she scolded herself, writing dissertations on the crumbs of his life. She drove around a bend and thought of how for years she had tried to imagine their reunion. It would be an accidental one, and she smiled because for some reason she was always convinced it would happen in a supermarket, that their eyes would rapidly scan the produce in each other’s shopping carts, their families’ tastes in breakfast cereals, dairy products, and meat. And more than that: the plenty and the abundance, which she always thought seemed a little defiant in her cart, a little too prepared for waving in front of his eyes. She knew she would be disoriented and stutter, that her legs would melt, and she knew how she would consume his face and his new wrinkles with her eyes, and try to guess which of them belonged to her.
She tormented herself with the memory of the one meeting she had agreed to after they broke up, at a little café on the banks of the Yarkon River. He looked ill, his fingers trembled, and he mumbled things that horrified her—that he had told her a thousand times she was the love of his life, but now it was clear to him that she was even more than that, that she was his life itself. He looked at her, frightened, and she alienated him with all her strength, with a cruelty she never imagined she possessed, so determined was she to finally start living her own life, unhidden. She sat opposite him, foreign and cold, trying to prove to him that there was no point, that he was completely wrong about her, and the more he begged, the more she hardened, like a heartless warden who keeps sending the wrong prisoner into a visitor’s booth.
She still couldn’t comprehend how it had even happened that she’d called him. How she had shattered years of restraint, of sometimes daily battles, and the regular torture of birthdays, his and hers, and their anniversaries, and when Shira went into the army, and when Na’ama was about to have surgery, and when there was a big terrorist attack on his street—she almost lost her mind that time, but she didn’t call. She exhaled in amazement and a smile escaped, and she felt that perhaps even the dialing was enough for her, perhaps she did not need any more than that after so many years, because he raged within her now exactly as she remembered, with no partitions, just as it had always been, body and soul. She remembered with a smile how he had inquired euphorically as to whether he’d reached her pancreas yet; and again the breathless silence of them both, the electricity of mutual knowledge, and the sensation that never deadened in her that their love continued to exist as it was, in all its purity and fervor, just laid aside for a while, for an entire life even, on a shelf at a pawnbroker’s, waiting for Esti to gather up the courage to reclaim it.
Startled, she leaned forward, her muscles tensing around the internal mouth that had let out the secret, but in her inner space a man and a woman flew around in colorful revelry; like cutouts of a Keith Haring drawing, they hugged, danced, laughed, tossed handfuls of their love-stamen into the air. Those moments of lovemaking, she thought longingly, where the more you gush the more you fill up; she inhaled with an excited sound, and her heart dug at the walls of her body, and she blushed and was hot and girlish, and again she awoke herself and reminded herself of vows and engraved on her mind in cuneiform script that there was no place for this, none, no place for this, for this there was no place … And how once, just before they br
oke up, she called him at home when she knew he was out, and the bright voice of a woman answered “Hello,” and again and again, the voice of a woman that gradually became small and sad, and the voice was like a slap on her cheek that she had been wanting for a long time, and she put down the receiver and laid her heart down on the table and took a meat mallet and smashed it with all her merciless strength: there is a woman there and there are children, and what are you doing?
It’s not easy for me when she gets back from there, Shaul said, and she turned to him eagerly. I’m listening, she said, begging, almost demanding. A few days ago she happened to hear on the radio that there was a way to cheat a polygraph: you put a thumbtack under your foot and step on it during the test, and the pain alters all your reactions.
Shaul told her that when she comes home, he hugs and kisses her, and he always thinks she tenses up for a moment, in her stomach and shoulders. But he does not always find the strength to go to her, because not every day, he admitted, is he capable of the exhausting effort of pretending. There are days when the anticipation of her drives him out of his mind to such an extent that he is unable to even get up and open the door for her. He pulls her head onto his shoulder and is repeatedly amazed at her professionalism and perfectionism, because her hair smells like chlorine. He holds her face back from his and looks into her eyes and smiles, and she nods with a kind of distant sadness, pained, as if she understands exactly what he is doing and yet does not stop him. Then she breaks away from him with an apologetic smile, releases herself from the embrace, and he manages to keep his smile and dam his lips against the torrent of filth which almost erupts when he thinks about where she’s come from and what she did there. But she’s already far away, Shaul sees, very active and busy, rushing around the rooms, tidying up, making calls, while he has to pretend to have just woken up from an afternoon slumber. I’m quite good at doing that, he told Esti with a crooked smile, I actually find it easy to masquerade as a husband turned silly from too much sleep. Over the years he discovered that even if he were a less convincing actor, she wouldn’t have noticed, because she was so busy avoiding him, hiding the excitement that still colored her cheeks a vivid red. After a few minutes of hurrying around she is suddenly spent and collapses as if her last drop of energy has run out, and she lies down to rest. It’s very difficult to catch the moment when this occurs: she disappears into her room—for some reason she does not take her siestas in their double bed but rather on the daybed in her little study—and instantly dives into an abyssal sleep, the sleep of a baby or an adolescent. He then—not out of nosiness, but out of amazement, out of true admiration for her thoroughness—quickly looks through her gym bag, and sees that the towel is wet as it should be, the bathing cap is damp, there is slightly less shampoo in the tube. He goes through this same routine every day, keeping his end of the bargain. He mustn’t become sloppy and he will never give in, because, after all, these minute signs and tokens are as he well knows, his one and only proof of her guilt.
Because, he thought, she has protected her secret perfectly over the years, and also with great elegance and professionalism, qualities which she has certainly picked up from her contact with paul, who is an absolute perfectionist. It was this, in fact, which had eventually failed her and exposed her to Shaul, because it stands to reason—this was how he had formulated things a long time ago—that over the course of their twenty-five years together, there must have been at least a few cases, two, three, four, which should have aroused his suspicion. After all, she is not living in a bubble: she goes to the mall, to the bank, the garage, the clinic, lectures on all kinds of things, neighborhood committee meetings; every so often she takes part in professional conferences, sometimes out of town; she has meetings with the day-care parents, some of them men, and she and Shaul have three or four couples of friends, and in fact there are men everywhere. But she, in her determination to protect what she truly cherishes, has never once tripped up, never given anything away in her tone of voice or in a blush, or a choked-back gasp. Never has Shaul come home to catch her quickly hanging up the phone or covering a piece of paper on her desk with her hand. Never has he found a note with a suspicious phone number in her purse, or in the pockets of her clothes, and even when that man Paul burst into their kitchen, Elisheva was remarkably calm and businesslike, he has to admit, and she treated the incident as if it were a purely professional matter. She was generally so innocent and transparent and clear throughout that Shaul began to wonder what was going on and what she was hiding so perfectly.
Of course, he could not really believe that the moment a woman stepped out of her normal life, out of her trajectory, her furrow, she began to scatter—involuntarily, of course, without knowing it—some kind of chemical or biological substance which unconsciously affected every man around her, so that each one of them, every male Elisheva passed on her way from home to that “alone” of hers, was somehow influenced by this radiation, by the involuntary evaporation and percolation of primary essences, some sort of übermammal pheromones. But even so, was it really a stretch to assume that the first ones to be swept toward the stamen of this hidden radiation, during those four days of hers each year, would be those who come in daily contact with her? Even if that contact is minor and perfectly innocent? Shop clerks, supermarket employees, the bank teller, the gardener who worked for them until Shaul fired him not long ago, her hairdresser, the guy who delivers rolls in the morning … And without her or them knowing a thing, their pheromones were aroused to create a chain reaction whereby they both interpreted signals transmitted to them from their complementary genomes. And of course these messages are not only limited to the men who are close to her, because evolution, Shaul knows, cannot suffice with such a limited number of contacts. And so the pheromones spread with ever-widening ripples, and mate with the sensitive receptors of every man in their way, and these men too are swept after her without even understanding what is happening, without even knowing whom they are following. Because what attracts them, of course, is not one private Elisheva but the attractants she emits from the moment she is not within the circle of the man she lives with—or the two men, in her case. That is what they react to. That sexual gravitation, that horizontal gravity, all those men who experience a seemingly inexplicable, mysterious shockwave, the ones who are uprooted from their homes, their lives, or their dinners every time Elisheva leaves her life and goes off to be alone.
He sighed a deep “oh,” and something sparked in Esti, the way the grin on the guy at the counter had suddenly changed after the second time she dialed. She smiled, because his eyes had followed her as she walked to the door and stayed on her through the window when she left.
And while she takes her afternoon nap, Shaul recounted, he sits on the porch drinking his coffee—that coffee, Esti thought, so solitary and bitter, while at her place they’re all in the backyard enjoying Grandma Hava’s tart—and tries to imagine what she talked about with Paul today, and hopes no one calls him during this hour, which is even more precious to him than the hour she spent with Paul, because now, when she is so close—he thought to himself—when her body is breathing beyond a thin wall, he feels he can know much more, that her substances are projected at him freely, and all he has to do is not resist them, allow himself to be invaded, be borderless. He can feel her and Paul and their day flowing and filling him up, slowly at first, like a thin trickle coming from far away, then becoming wild and frothy, and finally flooding him with hot torrents, in vibrant colors and scents and sounds. And I have these moments—Shaul laughed embarrassedly—which I would call, maybe, let’s say, moments of inspiration. I have no illusions, of course—Esther mustn’t think he has any such pretensions, because he doesn’t, but sometimes, in these moments, he feels as if he could, for example, do something completely different with his life, be a sculptor, for instance, or draw or even write poetry—why not? He resisted telling her how his brain fills up and is compressed with warm blood and rich oxygen and dizziness,
and his entire body sizzles with a cocktail of toxins and sweetness. But he could not stop himself from telling her that he himself barely exists at these moments, as do all the other elements of his being: the circumstances, the details, the facts that somehow stick to him day by day, even the worries for Tom, who can’t find himself in Paris and is so lonely there that it breaks his heart, and the fight with the academic board that has been refusing to award him seniority for five years because of a dearth of publications, because of a complete lack of publications. I haven’t even advanced one project all these years, did you know that? He sniggers. No, of course you didn’t. I haven’t had a single original idea. He tapped his head with his fingers. Ah! Empty. Completely emptied out. I don’t know, sometimes I wonder how long they’ll keep me on there. I’ve already heard talk of early retirement, and I’m not even fifty-five, you know? Esti listened in shock and wondered what would happen to them the next time they met with the whole family, how she would look at him, if he would evade her looks as usual, and how every word in the conversation would sound to him, and every laugh and sigh of Elisheva’s, and if they would ever again enjoy another taste of this night’s grace.
Shaul tensed his body as if trying to squeeze out a few more drops of the moments of elation during which everything sheds from him and he himself is everything and nothing, he is the stage and the play and the playwright and the director and the audience, and inside him a man and a woman rage in all their animalism and their beauty, she and he, grown adults, with developed emotions and ripe limbs, and the market is abuzz. Rows of stalls and tents and huts set up in minutes, in the blink of an eye. And it’s all hers, it’s all Elisheva. As if all the thousands of details that had ever made up her material life are spread out and itemized here in a wonderful kind of simultaneity. How did they get their hands on all this? When had they had time to plunder? Is it possible that the minute she “goes off to be alone,” a temporary liquidator is appointed for everything that ties her to the mundane? Shocked and morose, he wanders through the crowds, turning down TEXTILE AVENUE, as the sign proclaims. A colorful whirlwind rises up around him, composed of towels and coverlets and handkerchiefs and scarves and tablecloths and napkins and tapestries and rugs and sheets, his and her sheets—
Lovers and Strangers Page 13