Esther, he said later weakly, I think we can go back.
She found it hard to wake up. She started the engine and maneuvered the car clumsily onto the road and drove slowly, avoiding looking in the little mirror.
Stop for a minute, he said when they were some distance away, I want to move up front.
She stopped on the shoulder of the empty road. He opened the door and pushed himself out and stood leaning on the car with his leg slightly folded in midair. She got out and went to him and stood in front of him, enveloping herself in his arms, breathing the sharp air, rocking slowly. They stood together for a moment within the night’s shell and did not know where to look. She extricated herself and hurried over to move the passenger seat back and lower the back down at an angle. She padded the floor with a coat and a blanket.
You can get in, she said, as he walked to the open door.
Wait, she murmured as he walked by her, and without thinking she pulled him in for an embrace.
What do you think? he said hesitantly when they were moving again and had been quiet for several miles. Maybe we can go through Beersheba? And she, alert at once, asked why. He said, I just thought maybe you’d show me your old places. She considered his offer. But it’s nighttime, she said. And he said, Yes. She nodded slowly to herself a few times, thoughtfully, wondering where to begin.
February 2002
Her Body Knows
She interrupts me after the third sentence: “I saw something on TV yesterday and I thought of you.”
I put down the pages. I can’t believe she’s cutting me off like that.
“I woke up and it was 3 a.m.,” she says, “and I had nothing to do.” She laboriously moves her swollen face on the pillow and turns to me. “It was something about a bunch of hippies in America. Saving birds that keep crashing into towers.”
I wait. I can’t see the connection.
“I thought you could have been with them.”
“Me?”
Her hands make jittery fists on the blanket. Nervous flutters, a little like the ones you get after a nice dose of Haldol, although that’s the one drug she isn’t taking. I try to disassociate myself from those movements of hers, remind myself that they have nothing to do with me and that it’s not a criticism of my story. Just jumpy little tics that will drive me insane in a few seconds.
“Every day at four in the morning, they walk past the skyscrapers.” Then she explains: “That’s because the birds migrate at night.”
“Well, now it’s clear,” I say as I emphatically straighten my stack of papers. I’ll never understand her way of taking in information or, even less, her way of spewing it out. It’s taken me two months to prepare for this evening, and she just cuts me off like that.
“They collect the remains and put them in plastic bags,” she continues, “and if there’s a need, they treat them. I even saw them giving cortisone to one bird.” Her common lot with the bird amuses her. “Then they fling them back, set them free.” She is astonished. “They look like normal people, they all have jobs, one’s a lawyer, another one I saw was a librarian, but they’re also, how should I put it, kind of principled.”
“With that sort of self-righteous expression?” I ask slyly.
“What … yes,” she admits, embarrassed. She herself probably didn’t know why she had connected me with them.
I laugh, somewhat desperately. She is my mother, the ultimate seer, and yet she’s a complete ignoramus when it comes to me. “I actually tend to side with the tower colliders,” I tell her.
“No, no.” She shakes her head heavily. “You’re strong, very strong.”
She says “strong.” I hear “cruel.” She dives a little deeper inside, where she may come across another crumb of memory to salvage. We are both quiet. I haven’t seen her for two years, and there are moments when I can’t reconcile her with the woman she used to be. Her lips move, mumbling thoughts, and I make sure not to read them. She turns her head and looks at me. “Why do you think we have eyelids?” I used to yell at her, and now I say nothing, dutifully taking what I deserve. It’s one thing to sit at home in London and write the story, and feel shitty for half a day after our weekly phone calls because she doesn’t even imagine what I’m doing to her in my writing, and it’s a completely different thing to sit here and read it to her, word for word, as she suggested, as she demanded, as she compelled me to do with all the force of her dying.
“Okay,” she sighs, “I interrupted you. From now on I’ll be quiet. Read it again, from the beginning.”
A small man with bulging eyes, crude lips, and large hands stands and looks at her. She senses him before she can see him. An ill breeze invades the circle that surrounds her. She opens her eyes and sees him upside down, leaning against the doorframe in shorts and a floral shirt, with very red lips, as if he has just consumed his prey. She calmly pushes her feet away from the wall and descends, one leg at a time, then gets up and stands tall. The man lets out a soft whistle of admiration that sounds like contempt.
“Once,” he says, “when I was little, I could do that. Headstand too. The whole deal.”
Nili makes no response. Maybe he just came into the wrong room. Must be looking for the gym.
“Well, then,” he says with that same forced tone, tranquil and yet threatening. “Yoga, eh?”
She starts rolling up the mats left out from the morning. Three vacationing ladies had decided to refresh their bodies in her class. They hadn’t stopped giggling and chattering, and couldn’t even get one leg up in the air.
“Yes,” she tells him with a “You got a problem with that?” voice. “Yoga.”
“And yoga is what exactly, remind me.” He takes out a pack of cheap Noblesse cigarettes, taps it a couple of times, and pulls one out.
“Yoga is— Would you mind not smoking in here?”
Their looks collide. He shakes his head slowly from one side to the other, as if reprimanding a very small child. His lips curl into a mocking kiss: “Anything for you, honey.” She feels every inch of her body being surveyed in a brisk appraisal, and she is trapped, unable to move, and anger begins to ferment in her.
“So tell me—is yoga kind of like massage?”
“Massage is down the hall on the right.” She can’t resist adding, “The medical kind.”
“And this, whatsitcalled, it’s not medical?”
Okay, she thinks, I can be over and done with this in a flash. I have plenty of experience with these guys. She straightens up, a whole head taller than him, and crosses her arms over her chest. “No sir,” she articulates clearly for him, “the kind of massage you want is not here.” She flashes her matter-of-fact smile—broad, glowing, thirty-two splinters of contempt digging straight into his face.
But he’s not all that impressed. On the contrary, he looks amused. His tongue travels serenely around his mouth, under his lower lip, making little swellings that shift around, and Nili thinks of the wavelike motion of puppies in a pregnant tummy.
He snickers. “But I didn’t ask you what it’s not, I asked what it is.”
Deep breath. Wait. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Answer him from your quiet place. Let’s see you when you’re not sitting on top of a mountain, alone among the pale blue clouds. Do it here, with this.
“So you don’t know what yoga is?” Again his tongue twists around in his lustful mouth. “Then how come the sign says ‘Yoga Room’?”
“Because this is where we teach yoga, y-o-g-a, and for the massage you want”—she thrusts her head out, almost touching his forehead with her own, and her broad feline face bristles—“you can order someone over the phone. Ask them for the number at the front desk, there are girls around these hotels who would be happy to oblige. Now, please excuse me.” She goes back to angrily rolling up the mats.
“But it’s not for me,” he slurs, and shifts from one foot to the other. “It’s … to tell you the truth, it’s for my son.”
“Your son?” She slowly straightens
up and plants her strong hands on her hips. “You want me to … for … What do you think I am?” She throws her head back, her cropped hair bristles with electricity. In New York and Calcutta that stance, along with her large, strong body, did wonders when problems came up or if someone was harassing her. Her girls would be amazed, she thinks, if they saw her like this, with the crudeness that slips out of her as swiftly as a switchblade. She herself is surprised at how easy it is for her to revert to that role.
The small man is impressed too. He takes half a step back, but still stares ahead with determination and seems to be forcing himself to deliver his message to completion. “He’s … he’s turning sixteen soon, on Passover, that’s the situation. And he doesn’t have a mother. I thought …”
“Yes? What did you think? That I would take your kid—and what? What exactly?” Her face turns red in disbelief at his insolence. But what can you expect when you agree to endure this humiliation for two weeks every year, with all the package tours and the union workers’ vacations, employees from Hamashbir and Delek and who knows where else, to do the “yoga thing” for them.
From within her anger she observes: the crooked line that emerges and breaks under his mouth, the frequent blinking, the hand that starts to finger a thin gold chain on his chest; a rapid collapse, almost imperceptible, that suddenly occurs in him right in front of her eyes. His face becomes even more unsightly, more insidious and miserable. He must be on the workers’ union board, she thinks, from the metal factories in Haifa or the warehouses in Lod. Mistreats his subordinates and flatters his superiors. Who do you think you’re intimidating here? I can read you like an open book, with your taut little muscles, that swagger you picked up from the movies and, on top of everything else, your flat feet, lower back pain, and hemorrhoids.
He stands shriveled and shrunken beneath her gaze, and it only increases her desire for revenge, makes her feel like telling him sweetly what he really is. Or maybe I was just in the mood—she later thinks despondently—to patronize someone a little, to remember the taste of it. But then finally, something he said before penetrates her brain: what had he mumbled about the mother? (And what are you doing getting mixed up with him?) “And what am I supposed to do, in your opinion?” she asks, still preserving the frost in her voice. “With your son.”
He looks at her with his rooster eyes. “He’s a good kid. Look, he won’t make any trouble, I guarantee it. The smallest problem, come straight to me.”
“Problem?” She laughs despite herself. “What problem?”
“No, no, he’s good, really. He just has … it’s … he has ideas, he has bees in his bonnet”—the creases of anger and craftiness on his forehead loosen up a little, and between his eyes she sees a pained and startled furrow of recognition—“and he’s been with me since infancy, seeing as his mother died, bless her, when he was one month old, and I thought …”
He stops and gives her a look of stupidity and helplessness. She senses that he is a man with no echoes in his body. She crosses her arms and deliberates with herself. She has three girls, sixteen and a half, eleven, and eight, from three men, the last of whom left five years ago, and she knows what it’s like, day by day, hour by hour. And this guy here, with his fleshy lips and crooked legs, with the “unloved” sign tacked to his back and chest. But who the hell is she to judge him?
“So what exactly were you thinking?”
He immediately senses her voice softening. A little hanger-on such as himself must be alert to any change. He quickly—too quickly for her taste—lets his shoulders relax, crosses his feet. “Well, I thought—now, don’t get angry again, hear me out—I saw the sign here, yoga, so what did I think? That we’re here for a week, me and the boy, and he’s a good kid, honestly, but he doesn’t have any friends. You see where I’m going with this?” And here he must sense that he’s managed to cast an anchor in her, and he hurries to deepen it excitedly. “He’s all alone. Nothing. He doesn’t communicate. He can go a whole week—no communication!” He starts getting his confidence back, something about the goods he’s selling her is going down well. “And he’s a kid, believe me, you’ll see him and you’ll understand. You—you have a good eye. I could tell that about you as soon as I saw you.” He leans forward slightly, lowering his voice. “The thing is that he’s alone. No girls, girlfriends, that sort of thing. Nothing. So what did I think, what did I say to myself, I thought if you, if …”
“Come on already, spit it out!” Nili groans, growing tired of his transparent haggling, but possibly also tickled by hearing the words explicitly, like a scene from a B movie; after all, how many times in a lifetime do you get to hear a thing like this?
He swallows and tenses up. “I thought maybe you’d take him, take him privately, for money, make him a man.”
He withdraws immediately and stretches out his small stature as tall as he can, and again he looks like a little rooster to her, feathers bristling, his fear making him dangerous. His narrow chest puffs up, he breathes rapidly, and one of his eyes starts to wander.
She stands with her arms crossed, nodding something to herself.
“Forget it,” he suddenly bursts out. “Didn’t happen. Never mind. Forget about it.” And he turns to walk out of the room. He must have scared himself, Nili thinks. Must have been alarmed by his own proposal, by what his ears heard his mouth say. She doesn’t know what’s come over her—even later, when she reports the events to Leora, she finds it difficult to explain what happened, just that she suddenly knew it would be all right—more than all right, that it would be good. “It was like I guessed,” she tells Leora, “like I guessed through him what was waiting for me there.” She sighs deeply and her shoulders slouch. “And besides, me?” (Who has done it all, with all sexes and all colors, Leora silently completes her sentence.) “To be scared off by the idea of this kid?” Leora, on the phone at home, quickly wets her lips in preparation for an intense discussion, but Nili always knows when to simply close her eyes in enjoyment and hug herself. She laughs quietly. “So I thought to myself, Let the kid come, we’ll have a little talk with him, give him the facts of life, and let him know what’s what. What’s the worst thing that could happen?” And so she hurries after the man who is now fleeing her, and once more she feels as if something was revealed when he said those things to her. When he turns to her, she sees shame in his red brimming eyes, and she says to him softly, deeply regretting what she had done to him thus far, “Send him over now, I’ll wait for him.”
“Okay, but I’m paying,” he almost shouts.
“You’re not paying anything, it’s on the house.” She laughs.
“But it’s extra,” he insists, sniffling.
“No need. Send the kid over.”
He stands confused for a moment, suspicious, unable to comprehend the economic logic. But he still wants to thank her somehow, so he digs through the pockets of his too-tight pants and cannot find what he’s looking for, doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. He finally tries to shake her hand, but their fingers miss each other. “Listen, if you ever need anything up north, at the quarries …”
I put down the pages, lunge for the cup, grab it with both hands, and drink huge gulps of water. I haven’t dared to look at her until now. And I’m dying for a cigarette. Dying. How silent she was while I read. Abysmally silent. And I held the pages up between myself and her the whole time, with both hands, but the trembling only let up for the last few lines—
“Until this moment,” she says softly, “I didn’t know what it would be like.”
“And now?” I force myself to look straight at her. Now the criticism will come. She’ll say it’s not her taste, it’s too complicated for her now. “Smart aleck,” she’ll say, and she’ll tell me to leave it. What does she know? What can she really make of all this, in her condition? And if you think about it honestly, when was the last time she held a book in her hand since high school?
“For a few months now, I’ve been lying here and thi
nking, What, she’ll sit here next to me and read, and then what? What will happen to me?” Her voice is distant and stiff. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder what would happen to me. Old habits die hard. “So you wrote that story, after all,” she says slowly.
I can’t decipher her reaction. I have no idea whether what I’ve read up to now reminds her in any way of what happened there, if I’m even close. If that was how they spoke, she and his dad, if that was what went through her mind when he came to her with his proposition. I know so little, almost nothing. “Take him privately, make him a man”—that happened, she told me that as a kind of joke, I suppose, the day she came home. Maybe she thought it would entertain me, an amusing anecdote from her job; it had turned my stomach. There were another couple of details that trickled down to me, even though I tried hard not to let them, and of course I know the ending. But in the middle there was a black hole, the chasm of her silence that stretched out from then until today. And now too, in fact, what is she telling me? Nothing. She breathes heavily. Not because of me. I hope it’s not because of me right now. Every breath costs her an effort. She’s very large and bulky. Fills up the whole bed. I arrange my pages for the third time, not knowing whether I should go on reading or wait for her to say something, give me a sign, a direction. Nothing comes. The most exasperating thing for me is to discover how little I had imagined while I was writing at home in London, what I would feel here when I read to her. My pretension horrifies me, and my brilliant stupidity: did I really think I could sit here with my legs crossed and tell her a story I’d made up about her and him?
“And you made me seem so angry,” she says.
“It’s a story,” I remind her dryly, but I suddenly feel a pang, as if I’d missed something.
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