Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  It’s dark outside now. Behind my back, beyond a heavy door, the guest room stretches out, massive and dim, padded with thick rugs, crowded with sculptures and heavy, ornate furniture. It’s certainly the most opulent house she’s ever lived in, and the moment I came in I knew: this house cannot revive her. I get up and close the electric blinds, and turn on the little iron lamp. It’s sculpted in the shape of a man and woman embracing, their faces turned to the light, and I get stuck there for a minute. Where does she find the strength to stay so quiet, I wonder. How can she not say a word about the story? About the boy in my story. It is, after all, the first time he has had a voice between us. The first time he’s talking, saying things. I ask myself whether she’s even capable of grasping what it means to me to give him a voice and words. And a body. The body was the hardest. I tried all sorts of bodies and none of them was right. For weeks I walked around London looking for a body that would be right for him, and when I found one I started to vomit. I hadn’t been that sick even in my worst times. For days and nights I wrote and vomited, and thought of how my body wasn’t willing to let me give him a body. And one so beautiful, at that.

  “And you gave yourself two sisters,” she says. She must have only just realized.

  “Yes, congratulations to us!”

  She used to burst out laughing at every silly joke I made. It was the easiest thing in the world to make her laugh, like making a little girl giggle. In elevators with strangers or during grave discussions with my teachers, one quiet word of mine was enough to send her into uncontrollable fits of laughter. On Passover seder nights at Leora’s she was completely taken hostage by me, begging with terrified looks for me not to use my influence over her. Now it was as if I’d touched a patch of dead skin, with no nerves or sensations.

  “Me, I don’t know from writing,” she says in the slightly stammering talk, serious and strange, which the disease has enforced on her. “But I’m curious, why did you think you needed to?”

  “I just … I don’t know. The pair of them just leaped onto the page, like two peas in a pod: Inbal and Eden.”

  Her head moves slowly. Her eyes pierce me, a little dim and colorless, but not letting up.

  “I really don’t know.” I titter, stupidly embarrassed. “Maybe I also thought …”

  “What.” Now, with the last of her strength, she’s not always able to bend her words into questions.

  I can tell I won’t get out of this easily, so I try to reconstruct what really happened. “I guess I thought I needed another two around me. To be with me. Picture it”—I try to wake her up, to find some warmth in her—“you and me, and another two. Another two the whole time. Why not?”

  “Poor things,” she groans. It may only be a joke, but it still shocks me. The unwritten rule says only I am allowed to say things like that about us.

  The second class goes exactly like the first one, and Nili makes a note to herself that the young man is somehow managing to set her off-balance. It’s not clear how—he’s not doing anything to annoy her intentionally, but he seems to be enveloping himself intensely in a coat of boredom and dreariness. Yet still not willing to give up. With a stiff and ungraceful kind of determination he attempts the exercises and poses she suggests, slowly shifting from one to the next, as if trying on shoes in a store, and every so often he grabs hold of one of them and sinks into a particular pose for several moments, closing his eyes in a way that prompts in her the crazy thought that maybe he is trying to remember something through this. But then, all at once, he turns off and covers himself again with his obtuseness.

  Toward the end of the hour she explains to him about the benefits of blood flowing to the brain, and to demonstrate, she does a handstand. In fact, she does this to relax herself as well, and at the same time she tells him her favorite story, the one about Nehru—or was it Gandhi? Suddenly even the most secure facts are undermined, the anecdotes she’s recited thousands of times, even they roll down with rapid erosion, sending cracks up and down her consciousness. Nehru, she decides, I’m sure it was Nehru. She used to have some kind of code for remembering it. His baldness, because of the head-stands. But Gandhi was bald too. Oh dear.

  “While he was in prison, he did headstands and handstands every day, because he discovered that those poses filled him with a sense of inner freedom.” Even though her muscles are engaged, her words have a soft, prolonged sound. From her upside-down position she can see his expression change, as if someone had turned on a dusty lamp, and he asks if he can do it too.

  Nili stands up on her feet again. A slight tension pulls through her body. “A handstand isn’t as easy as it looks,” she explains, “and it’s usually best to build up to it after a year or two of practice. I suggest that …” But he isn’t listening to her, he just asks if he can try, and his face is suddenly focused and intense. She spreads her hands out and doesn’t know what to say. She has bad experience with newbies doing handstands, most of them don’t have the courage to really kick up, they falter with one leg in the air and fall, or their hands give way, and others are so afraid that they toss their legs up wildly—one of them broke her nose once. But the boy, Kobi, repeats his request a second time, and Nili gives in. She leans against the wall and prepares to catch his legs, ready to have her face kicked in, and knows that she deserves anything she gets. She is amazed to see him lightly and gracefully propel his left leg up, then add the right leg, and reach her outstretched arms with the precision of an acrobat or a dancer.

  He stands that way for a few seconds. She didn’t believe he’d be capable of that, and even when his arms start shaking, he doesn’t give up, seems to be waiting for the borderline to be clearly marked between his weak body and his willpower, and only then does he come down with precise motions, his legs straight and his feet held together. He sprawls on the floor between her legs, his forehead resting on his hands, and Nili quickly massages his back between the shoulder blades, among the vertebrae, to dissipate the strain. This time he doesn’t flinch at her touch; she thinks he even enjoys it. But when he doesn’t move for several more minutes, she becomes afraid for some reason and turns him over sharply and sees his eyes looking at her, clear and completely open, pleading.

  “For what exactly?” Leora demands to know on the phone, refusing to be impressed by Nili’s interpretations. “I have no idea,” Nili mumbles, and immediately gathers into herself—why the hell did I tell her, why her of all people, why don’t I ever learn?—“but it was as if he was asking me for something, I mean”—she gulps, oh God, we’re not going to go through our ritual dance again—“something he can’t ask for explicitly?”

  Leora—three years her senior, her sister, and from the age of seven also her mother, and from the age of forty-two, because of a miserable embroilment with the bank, also a kind of forced custodian in financial matters—stretches out her gaunt, laconic body. “And the massages, what about those? Did you get to that?”

  “No, no.” Nili pulls back, as if something had been desecrated. “Look, a second after he came in I completely forgot that that’s what … No, I’m really just teaching him yoga.” She laughs with surprise, but then turns very serious. “In fact, I’m just reminding him.”

  “Ni-li,” Leora sighs, and Nili can almost sense her sister leaning over her like an evil teacher waking up a snoozing student.

  Nili unconsciously hunches her shoulders, puts a hand over her wide, expressive mouth. The large face, the freckled lioness face, becomes lost for a moment. “Lilush, what did you ask?”

  I lower the page a little and look at her. She lies with open eyes, staring at the ceiling. “Does it bother you that I wrote about her like that?”

  “No.”

  “No? I thought—I was sure you would actually—”

  She turns her head with great effort and looks at me, surprised. “I don’t care with Leora.”

  “Every time I tried to change the names,” I explain to her, angry at myself for needing to justify my decision, �
�it somehow sounded like a lie to me, but maybe in the final draft I’ll change them. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t change.” She doesn’t suggest. She orders. I’ve never heard that tone from her. She shuts her eyes painfully, or weakly. “Everything should be like in life.”

  Like in life?! I can barely prevent myself from shouting; for the last two months I’ve been begging her to tell me something, to give me a hint, a direction.

  She hears my silences very clearly. With them she always had a good flow of communication. She purses her lips and sticks them out. I’ve noticed she has a new expression now, an indescribably irritating one. An air of rebellion that is at once childish and elderly. She didn’t use to be like that with me. So assertive. And callous and unreasoning. Unhesitatingly employing the exclusive entitlement awarded to those facing death.

  She takes hold of his shoulders and helps him up, and asks hesitantly if he’d ever done a handstand before. He says he hadn’t.

  “And what did you feel now when you did it?”

  He stammers. “I don’t know. Everything was upside down, I saw everything upside down …”

  “And at school you never did it?”

  “I’m not in school.”

  “Then where are you?”

  “At boarding school.” He buries his voice again, evading her.

  “Boarding school? Which one?”

  “Hessedavraham.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Hessed Avraham.”

  “A religious school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” She falls quiet, trying to digest. Too much information flowing at once. “Wait, but don’t you have P.E. at the boarding school?”

  “Yeah, but I cut class.”

  “I can’t hear you, what did you say?”

  “I said I skip class.”

  “Why do you skip class?”

  He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I don’t … I don’t really like gym …” He stands tensed, without looking at her.

  She shakes herself off and says, “You know what, let’s try and repeat the things we did before, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  She sits him on the mat with his legs stretched forward, and asks him to try to reach up and bring his whole body, length and width, over his legs. He slowly leans and stretches his arms, inch by inch, and his fingers finally touch his toes. Then there is quiet. Nili, in a restrained voice, asks him to try to stay like that for one moment longer, despite the prickling she senses in his shoulders and his short hamstrings. He stays, lingering inside the pain for a long time, much longer than she thought he’d be able to, until she feels, together with him, the pain slowly melting and disappearing, and she comes and sits next to him until its final echoes are gone.

  “What do you think, maybe you can try a shoulder stand now?” In the last class he kept falling, and once he even tumbled backwards and hit himself. Now he lies on his back, concentrating on his body, and then—calves, knees, thighs—lifts easily as if something is pulling him up, and positions himself upright and precise, a vertical human line, and his hands don’t slide down as they support his back. They are both quiet, both perusing him silently, and after nine breaths in that position she suggests he try lowering his left leg into a bridge pose. “Be careful,” she says, “it’s a powerful pose.” She supports his back with her hand, but there is no need. He descends slowly, with an almost perfect motion, then brings his right leg down too and stays arched like that, his face with an expression of deep contemplation.

  That is when their first lesson really starts, because now he’s there, in full, responding with enthusiastic shyness to what she has to offer him, and even though he does not utter a word or smile even once, she feels his limbs learning to delight in their movements, stretching and moving and expanding like unborn chicks filling their shells. Time after time she reminds herself not to rush so much with him, he’s a complete novice, be careful, tomorrow he won’t be able to wiggle a finger, he’ll be in so much pain. But she can’t resist his innocent enthusiasm and her growing feeling that in each of his motions and twists he seems to be trying to reach deeper inside and massage within himself some hidden, tightly held kernel. That feeling also sends warm ripples through her own body, which become broader and broader until they touch the pleasurable spot that has no name in any language, deep down inside, on the border between tickling and longing. What’s amazing, she thinks, is how he seems to be remembering something through his body alone. She also notices how supple he is, as if he’d been exercising his whole life, but he assures her, “No, I hate exercising.” She decides not to push him for now—maybe later it will turn out that he does do some kind of sport or dance—no way he’s a dancer, she laughs, you saw how he walks, completely frozen like a zombie. But what else could explain that smooth, musical movement, as if an entire secret life is preserved inside him, on ice. She keeps trying to understand what had occurred that had suddenly brought on the change; she cannot identify it, but every time she thinks he’s about to slip through her fingers, she has him stand on his hands again, and he remembers at once, and they are carried away again, and the room fills with their breath, because she too has started working alongside him without even noticing. It’s hard for her to resist, her body moves of its own accord, as if to a musical beat; it’s been ages since something like this happened to her, here or anywhere. And time after time she scolds herself for going too far, for not protecting him. This is not yoga, she knows, this is not the way you studied, not how you taught, but she’s a little intoxicated by now—no wonder, such sharp happiness on an empty stomach. With boundless passion she consumes the moments and tries to engrave them on her memory like a surprising answer she had found in a dream, a decisive and final resolution to an argument she thought she had lost long ago, and soon she will wake up and forget everything.

  She inhales the bold new scent of his body, and at the same moment he—as if sensing each one of her sensations and every fragment of a thought—mumbles, “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” she asks.

  “For me, you know, sweating.”

  She is moved. “No, don’t apologize, sweat is our body’s oil, our body’s good oil.” And even that sentence, which she’s said thousands of times to her students over two decades of teaching, now sounds light and novel to her. “Rub it hard, spread it all over your skin, enjoy it, delight in it, there simply is no better smell than the smell of our sweat.”

  He looks at her, confused, and hesitantly rubs the sweat on his arms into his skin. For a fleeting instant his face changes, becomes soft and exposed, and weak, and Nili sees for the first time the sadness concealed in the depth of his eyes, and thinks, Even yoga can’t reach that deep. She stands opposite him with her legs spread wide, generously rubbing herself, and her wide face slowly opens up, expanding like a huge hot-air balloon that has been crumpled up in a warehouse all winter. Be careful, she says to herself. This is not a game, give him only what he needs, remember what we said, life or death.

  “That hunger,” she remembers again when I stop for a moment to breathe. “Of the orphans,” she reminds me. Her thoughts, as usual, sail this way and that along different currents. I wonder what she’s even heard during the last half hour, since I threw him down between us. “It’s so true what you said there, how you described it.” Her eyes dig into me, begging me to tell her how I know, to exonerate her from the suspicion that it’s from her.

  “Sometimes”—I wriggle—“you can even feel orphaned by yourself, can’t you?”

  “You?” She sounds surprised. “You were always so strong, never needed anyone. Even when you were a kid, I was jealous of you for that.”

  Silent and restrained, I suck in all the air the room has to offer. It surprises me how, still, every miss of hers hammers another nail into me. Then I ask her in no uncertain terms not to try and make any more sketches of my c
haracter. “My perverse character,” I add with a sweet smile. I could have said “reprehensible” or “depraved.” I could have said nothing. In “perverse” there is something different, something condescending, status-setting, that slices the air between us.

  “We’re not going to fight now, Rotem.”

  “Why would we?”

  I look through the pages. Wait for it to sink in a little. I leaf back a few pages after all, to the place where I mentioned that hunger, which for years had led her astray like a junkie. On the plane coming here, I had erased the words that came next: “and had thrown her repeatedly into the rows of people who hit and used and abused her.” Why did I erase them? I suppose I didn’t want to hurt her too much. But why did I really erase them? Perhaps it occurred to me that I had stood there in those rows myself, more than once. And that it had led her to me, among other people. My mother’s orphan hunger.