At four in the afternoon he suddenly remembers that his dad wanted him to come and cheer him on in the backgammon championship, and Nili goes up to her room, and in the shower she thanks God for not forgetting her even in this remote dump, and for sending her another gift from His lost-and-found collection; she prays that He will keep sending them to her, and that she will keep learning and growing and becoming more bountiful.
Then, to dry off, she walks around her little room in the nude, reflected in the closet door mirror and the mirror on the wall. It is her little rebellion against Rotem, who follows her from room to room when she walks around at home like this, closing the blinds and drapes as she goes, with the fanaticism and indignation of a harem eunuch. Nili stops, sits down with a sigh, and dials home, and hears the forty-nine seconds of violent music which Rotem recorded on the answering machine and her hostile, barking voice: “Leave a message if you must, but between you and me, you’re better off managing on your own.” She tries to plan out what to say and how not to be annoying and not to make a mistake that would force her to drive home to Rishon immediately and get there to erase the message before it’s played. She’s so busy thinking and licking her lips that she doesn’t notice the beep, and then she is propelled from inside and says with a tense, reprimanding voice, “Roti? Roti, honey? Are you there? Girls? It’s me, Mom. I hope everything’s okay at home, that you’re getting along and having fun on your vacation …” The words sound like gravel to her. Lines out of a phrase book for tourists. She has a feeling—no, she knows—that Rotem is there by the phone, listening to her with her mocking smile. She can see the mouth, slightly swollen with bitterness, peeking out between the curtains of long hair, lying in wait for her slightest slip, even a minor mistake in her Hebrew. The mouth of a supreme-court judge, Nili thinks, and her hand reaches out to smooth it over, to soften its tiny crevices and angles, and Rotem pulls back—God forbid she should touch her: there must be no contact between bodies. “Listen, sweeties, I have to run now, I have a ton of work here, but I’ll call tomorrow and we’ll talk, and on Friday I’ll be home. It’s only a few more days, easy as pie, and on Saturday we’ll have a wild time.” She finishes quickly, relieved, and puts on a new white cotton shirt, smooths both hands over her bust and stomach and legs, as if erasing the creases of her soul, ironing herself and being reborn. The two of them, he and she, get back to the yoga room at exactly the same time. They meet at the door twenty-five minutes before the time they had arranged, and she sees that he’s changed into shorts and an orange T-shirt that dances in his charcoal eyes, and he’s wearing flip-flops that expose long, graceful toes. Again the words “Egyptian prince” twinkle inside her. When she shuts the door behind them, she asks matter-of-factly why he wore long pants up till now in this heat.
He chuckles sharply and smoothly. “Because of my dad, it gets on his nerves.”
They keep working, an hour-long class and a fifteen-minute break, and when evening falls, they go on without stopping, instead diving into a long relaxation after their prolonged effort, lying beside each other on their mats, looking at the ceiling, hazing over a little together.
“And don’t you get tired out?” asks Leora, who calls again at eleven that night, worried after their first conversation.
“Tired out? But I’m recharging the whole time! I’m full of energy, I don’t even think I’ll be able to fall asleep tonight.”
Leora, the sandbag of this hot-air balloon for the past forty-seven years, squints her eyes suspiciously. “Now concentrate,” she says, as she employs the deft movements of a sidewalk cardsharp to fold the dozens of freshly laundered socks and underwear—Dovik’s and Ofer’s and Ronnie’s and Shachar’s—“and try to explain to me, without using any Sanskrit or any cauliflower, what his story is.”
“That’s the thing—I have no idea.” Nili spreads her fingers out helplessly. “But he just knows, he knows his body from inside. How can I explain it to you? It’s like his spirit can easily reach any part of him …” Her voice trails off. “Cauliflower” was the name Leora had given, years ago, to all of Nili’s “spiritual dealings,” and even Nili herself had become resigned to it, with a forced sense of self-derision. “And what’s interesting, Lilush, is that the strengthening poses—all those push-ups and sit-ups and all that stuff that guys usually do like crazy and mess up their backs for the rest of their lives? All that’s not for him, and the truth is that he’s really weak for a boy of his age. He’s a real weakling”—as if he’s deliberately let his body atrophy, a strange, chilling thought enters her mind—“but he has such flexibility, such flow, it’s amazing, a kind of rejoicing of the body. I rarely find such a thing even in people who have been doing yoga for ten years.” (There’s that voice, Leora thinks, and feels a stinging sensation all over, that veiled voice.) “But it’s not just the body with him, see? It’s from a completely different place with him, it’s as if he”—and she stops, and through all the mountains that separate them she gives Leora a look that she can aim only at her sister, a look that seems not to have matured even a day since the age of seven, the stubborn and rebellious look of a little girl who had a hand placed over her mouth so she’d finally stop talking nonsense, but her eyes are very bright, shooting sparks of words. Then suddenly, in complete opposition to the rules of the dance, she stops herself, and with a cunning that she’s very proud of, she sighs. “You know what, never mind. Maybe it really is all in my head. Tell me, Lilush, how are the kids?”
I glance sideways at her and see a smile. A full smile. The old Nili. And at once I become filled with pathetic and irreparable pride. It’s unclear to me exactly what I’m proud of. Of the fact that she thinks I’ve finally written a good piece? About inserting a little revenge against Leora on her behalf? I don’t know. I only know that it’s not really my pride, it’s her pride in me, which is almost the real thing, and I quickly bury my secondhand pride deep down, as deep as possible, with the other emergency supplies I’ve never used. The shelves there are laden with sealed jars full of preserved pride (and joy, and enthusiasm, and the purpose of life, and various other delicacies), and she mustn’t know of them, and I mustn’t either. Maybe one day, I don’t know, maybe after, or when it’s easier. Meaning never.
With closed eyes, she immediately responds to my molecular changes. “What can I say, I never thought I’d have a writer daughter.”
There is tenderness in her voice, and I am quick to pounce on her. Don’t be a bitch, I command myself, let her have her moment of pride. But there is provincial, illiterate satisfaction in her voice. It seems to be rising and arching toward me, and a large fleshy tongue pokes around inside me, searching for a crack. And the flames of age fifteen, the grumble in my stomach that calls out immediately: Stop her now! It doesn’t matter what she wants, stop whatever you can! Annihilate the greasy waves of high tide and longing with a look or a comment or a scornful silence! For a long moment I actually fight myself, using both hands to secure my soul as it arches and trembles in reaction to that voice, to the price it exacts, even during phone calls to London—yes, that far away—when in mid-sentence she would stop, focus inward, and apparently incapable of restraining herself, she would emerge with the pronouncement, like some gullible prophet, with that hearty, fluttering voice: “Sweetie pie, you’re getting your period soon.” I would lose my temper, scream at her to stop pushing her way into my soul and get the hell out of my womb, and besides, it’s not even my day—and of course, an hour later, like clockwork …
“You know,” I say to my complete surprise—and it’s clear to me that what I courageously sealed off in one place has immediately started leaking from another—“you never said anything to me about that book of mine that came out, the one I wrote, the Troubled Tourist one.”
She doesn’t answer. I decide to leave it and move on. But what about the cigarettes, I ask myself, how do I get through this night without a cigarette? “I asked you to read it,” I remind her, knowing exactly how I sound.
>
She beats me off, of course, pouting. “But I told you. Don’t you remember I told you?”
I do. I don’t. What difference does it make? Why am I picking on her?
“I tried, Rotem, twice even. I just didn’t get it. I don’t … What can I tell you. I’m too old for that putz-modernist style.”
“That’s not exactly it, but never mind now. Let’s go on.”
“I felt,” she sighs, “I felt as if … as if you didn’t want me to understand.” Then she corrects herself: “As if you wanted me not to understand.”
I laugh. “I wanted you not to—? But why would I …” I fall silent, amazed. What is she talking about anyway. In the blink of an eye we both inhale and swell up. All the sighs of the past in our sails. I remember that later on, soon, there is a sentence that describes a ridiculous and slightly distorted face of hers, a sock-puppet face, and I wonder whether I should skip it, save her from it now, and more than anything, I think of her reading my book, I see her struggling with it line after line, I see the wrinkle deepening between her eyes.
Once she looked like Simone Signoret. People would come up to her on the street and tell her that. Now her large bald head moves slowly on the pillow and turns to me. “Rotem, enough. You can’t go backwards to fix things.”
But a friend of mine who works at the Steimatsky’s branch in Rishon told me that when the book came out, Nili would go into the store twice a day, stealthily, with her transparent slyness, and make sure two copies were on the display tables, so they’d stand out.
His snickering when he had said “It gets on my dad’s nerves” had distressed her. It had made him sound like his father, with his splinters of malice and pettiness. And so, toward the end of the class, she asks him to stand across from her and stretch his arms out to the sides. “Really open up,” she urges him, and lifts his arms higher, higher. “Imagine you’re yawning with your armpits. Now close your eyes. Now smile.”
His eyes shoot open. “What for?”
“I want you to smile. What do you care? Just so you’ll see what a smile does to us inside.”
“But how, just like that?”
“Yeah. What’s the big deal? Even just the beginning of a smile. See what happens.”
He looks at her worried, almost suspicious. “I can’t do it just like that, without …”
They stare at each other for a moment, their looks casting about over each other and pulling back like strangers, and Nili thinks sometimes he’s a bit thick. “Maybe think about something funny, like something funny that happened to you.” Then she grows alarmed. “You have had at least one funny experience in your life, haven’t you?”
“Sure, what do you mean? Loads.”
“Well, then.”
“But I can’t laugh at the same thing twice.”
“I can laugh ten times at the same thing,” she tosses out with clumsy cheerfulness. “But that’s not saying much with me, I can also cry about the same thing ten times.”
The joke, which isn’t a joke at all, doesn’t go down well, and even seems to cause him pain. Nili sees the slight tension in the shadow behind his eyes and falls quiet, and all at once what little they had starts to melt away. As he stands, his shoulders seem to hunch up of their own accord. She sees him getting further away, unattainable. Within the blink of an eye, he is a stranger, and she guesses that this instinct of foreignness is perhaps the essence of his life wisdom. For a long moment she freezes helplessly, and feels the pulsating of a scar that has reopened and rehealed in her countless times, in her abandoned, pained place, but then she shakes out of it, takes a deep breath, puts two long fingers in the sides of her mouth and pulls it out to the sides, rolls her eyes around rapidly, dances her eyebrows up and down, and flaps her ears charmingly.
He examines her, and his face widens in surprise, shock even. She sees his pupils darting around. A quick internal debate is occurring: Should I surrender to her or not? Can I believe in a woman who makes a fool of herself with such ease? Another long gaze, slightly confused, trying to resist her but being pulled toward her as she holds her clown face, and then he shuts his eyes, spreads his arms to the sides, dives into himself, and disappears. For a long time nothing happens, and Nili holds her expression, exaggerated, like a sock puppet stretched over a hand that’s too fat. After an eternity—she has never failed at this little trick—a tiny smile sprouts at the corners of his lips, quivering a little, then increasing and opening up as if the smile is making itself laugh, delighting itself. His lips spread and his eyeballs flutter beneath his slender eyelids, and a tingle of pleasure rolls down from the back of Nili’s neck to the edges of her buttocks.
“Well, what did you feel?” she asks when he opens his eyes.
“It’s great!” He laughs and pulls his head up with a motion she had not yet seen and would not have expected in him, and his eyes narrow into cracks of glowing pleasure. “It’s like I could see these kinds of little clouds inside my brain, with a purple color, I’ve never—”
But upon seeing the reflection of his joy in her eyes, he sharply purses his lips and stands quietly again. Very polite and differentiated. Well-groomed, with no frayed edges. For a moment he reminds her of herself at the bank after she realized she was overdrawn.
“To the wall, quickly!” she orders in a panic. “On your hands!”
“Rotem, I have a request.”
“What?”
“Don’t turn.”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep turning away from me.”
“Sorry.” I straighten up embarrassedly, only now realizing that my whole body is stiff.
“I want to see your face.”
“Oh, come on, what is there to see in my face?”
“That’s not true.” Veteran soldier that she is, she immediately enlists her last remaining strength to protect me from myself. “In fact, you’ve become much prettier since last time you were here. And with your short hair, you can finally see your face.”
Before I can cancel out the compliment, ridicule her, make myself ugly, Melanie floats up and fills me. Nili must see it happen, because she turns her head away from me.
“But he has some issue with his stomach,” she ponders out loud the next morning at six-fifteen, still half asleep, alarmed by the telephone ring that had unraveled her dream. “He has this kind of nervous tic, he keeps touching it, as if he’s making sure it’s there.” As she talks, she knows she doesn’t want to say any more, not to Leora. She doesn’t want to let her get a foot in the door between them, but in the mornings she is always spineless. “And yesterday evening I showed him how I suck my stomach in and roll it”—and again she sees his eyes pulling back in fear at seeing the hard, vertical roll of her muscles, turning right and left along her stomach—“and he really started feeling ill.”
Leora, at home in Jerusalem, standing opposite the open fridge, is putting together the day’s shopping list as they talk; she absent-mindedly touches her little belly, the only drop of flaccidity in her body, and pulls it in, conquering a sigh.
“That’s exactly it.” Nili quickly picks up on the sigh, compelled to briefly wade with Leora into the same warm, sisterly blister of anguish. “Because with us, stomachs are always a big deal. I mean, ten times a day I come across it at work”—she purposely emphasizes the word “work” to Leora—” ‘My stomach is too big,’ ‘It sags,’ ‘It’s like jelly’ … And all the emotions, and the insults, and the pregnancies, and afterward, and empty stomachs. But for men? And a kid of his age?”
“Lovely.” Leora throws her out of the niche she was trying to creep into. “So now you’re his therapist too?”
Silence. Only her heavy respirations saw through the air. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to ask her about him, about the kid, the boy. He was no more than a boy. I take a deep breath. Her breathing stops. I ask her if they talked like that, or kind of like that, she and Leora.
“No,” she says cautiously, closing but not lockin
g. “Leora, she only knew at the end. Only after it all happened.”
I try to understand what this new information says about my story. Or about my imagination. For some reason that possibility never entered my mind, and I think I’m actually relieved inside, relieved at having been so far off. As if a wing that was tied to me has been released.
“And let’s say, the boy, in the story—does he even remind you in any way of … ?”
She thinks. It takes her a long time to think now. Why did I need to ask her that? So miserable of me, beggarly. For years I used to erase him, but he would crawl right back in. Changing shapes, changing states, appearing in the rain, in the earth, in a cup of black coffee, in tree trunks. And always stubborn, dark, with the desperation of someone afraid to be forgotten. Later, when I discovered the potential he held, our relationship began to stabilize; I already knew where to find him whenever I needed a quick whirl, and at a more advanced stage I even knew how to produce him myself. A revolving door at the hardware store in Finchley that you had to spin through quickly a few times (it was the rapid motion coupled with the reflections); or bending down, supposedly to tie a shoelace, next to the exhaust pipe of a car whose engine has just been turned off (ten, fifteen quick breaths was all it took; European cars were preferable to American ones for this purpose). There was also an ivy bush in the garden of a church in Hendon, a huge one, diseased, maybe dead already, but still imperial and abundant with intricate dry branches that created an entire audience of almost-human faces. And there were these sores of a particular, terrible kind, which I saw only on the faces and arms of retarded kids taken out for walks on Primrose Hill; they would walk by, always at the same time, opposite the courier’s office where I worked. And a few other hidden reconstruction methods that would take me out of context for a few seconds and let me gallop along a sideline with a sense of dizziness and rapid depletion, a unique and exclusive epileptic seizure, not entirely unpleasant, which I invented for myself—my own private high, my little creation, which grew more and more sophisticated every day.
Lovers and Strangers Page 18