Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  “The boy. I’m getting used to him.”

  Getting used to? I try to understand what she’s telling me. It doesn’t sound good. It’s not like getting Leora wrong. At once I’m desperately removed from reality again, as remote as I was back then, when it happened. I put the pages down on the coffee table nearby, take my glasses off, and rub my eyes, which are starting to sting. Again the familiar pinch, that the world is a kind of huge game of musical chairs and I can never get a chair, not even with her—especially not with her. I can already see so clearly that she’s not even capable of entering my story. She’s always just looking at it from the side, remembering what really happened and scorning my pathetic, limited imagination. She doesn’t have to be a seer—she must tell herself after every piece of nonsense I utter—I gave up on that a long time ago, but at least a drop of intuition?

  “When you read,” she says in a slow, grating voice, lethargic from the disease and the medication, “I feel as if the things you’re saying really happened.”

  My mouth is dry. My left foot is really going wild. I wait for details. Maybe she’ll finally say something about what really happened.

  She gestures for me to go on.

  Sometimes, at the end of class, she puts him on a chair and teaches him the secret of correct sitting, how to lengthen his thigh muscles, his hands and calves, and she draws the root pulled down from his tailbone into the earth, sucking energy from it and discharging the toxins of body and soul into it. Then she kneels at his feet and checks to see if his long, brown bare feet are planted firmly on the ground. She plants them by pressing each toe separately. “Is this yoga too?” he asks, and she says it’s her yoga, even though she’s never sat a student as young as him on a chair in class, always on the floor, but perhaps of all the things she’s teaching him, it will be the memory of this simple white plastic chair that he’ll take with him when he leaves, she thinks. Like that man she read about once—she doesn’t even try to remember where, no chance—who dreamed that he came to Paradise and was given a flower there, and when he awoke he was holding a flower. “The most important thing is to remember how to step properly,” she says. “Spread your toes, hold on to the earth happily, delight in it with every step.” She recites to him: “Death begins in the feet, that’s where our self-neglect develops from, our surrender.”

  From one hour to the next, she starts to see his body from the inside, the colors of his different senses. His points of resistance, rough and dark. Thrills of amazement and happiness pass through him like rays of light, and they instantly ignite a spark in her. She opens her eyes, and he does too—perhaps he heard my eyelashes, or maybe he’s just trained always to be on guard, she thinks—and she smiles her warm smile at him, the one she has recently been feeling on her face like the tattered grimace of a tired clown, a dried-up old Pollyanna. She asks what he’d like to do now, what he’d like to change, to fix, to learn.

  “Whaddayoumean?” He raises his lovely eyebrows in wonder. “You can fix things with yoga?”

  She smiles. “Of course you can. Yoga is—” Where to begin? she wonders. And how? We have so little time to be together, and anything I say will be superficial and cheap. She breathes deeply. “Yoga is a system, it’s just a system that helps us increase our physical and spiritual strengths, and the connection between our soul and our—”

  And she stops, because his pupils are lifting as if pulled by a string, and his eyes almost close with pleasure. Enchanted, she watches his fluttering eyelashes until his look returns.

  “Say it again.”

  She says the words slowly, looks at his face with tense expectation: open sesame. And again she sees the magic work. Sensing an urge to bring it about again, she adds something else that used to hang on her studio wall in Jerusalem: “When my consciousness is clear and pure, reality will be precisely reflected in it.” There were times when the meaning of that sentence was as real and lucid to her as a bodily sensation, as taste or scent. Now she feels only the bite of emptiness, but when she sounds the saying in his ears, word after word, she can feel his soil moistening. It’s unbelievable, she thinks, and strains her brain to fish out something from her first teacher: “A mistaken thought is incorrect knowledge, which is not based on the shape of the thing.” But this time he looks at her without any expression. There is a long and empty silence, and Nili becomes worried. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “No. What’s it mean?”

  “I don’t … Look, once, years ago …” She stops again, embarrassed, because even ten and twenty years ago, even when she recited it to her students, she didn’t completely understand. In fact, it was always that way, not just where yoga was concerned. Always, when the air vibrates from the gong of a polished and determined sentence, or some hammered-out, echoing truism, Nili feels a kind of dull sting in her left temple, the singe of an already familiar insult, and she closes off and the words dissipate and float in her mind with a kind of weary surrender, turning into soft clouds of impressions that slowly evaporate. That’s the way I take things in, everything with me is intuition, she explains to herself and to her loved ones, with a shrug of her shoulders. I’m a seer, not a knower …

  “Listen, the truth is, I don’t really go in for abstract things, and anyway, I’m not that great with theory,” she bursts out with strange eagerness. “Or with facts, actually,” she is somehow driven to add with a well-practiced, crooked little smile. “Facts somehow never really sink in with me. That’s it, that’s the situation.” And she is quiet, amazed at herself.

  Her confession confuses him. “But to teach yoga, don’t you need to know these kinds of things? Quotes and all that?”

  “Look,” she says simply what she should have said instead of the whole speech, “when I do things, I understand. I understand through my body.”

  Almost before she’s done speaking he gets up, hurries to the wall, and hurls himself on his hands, tossed like a luscious fruit ready to burst. He stands straight for one minute, then one more. His arms are already shaking, his forehead is wrinkled with effort, and he breathes laboriously, looking at her without seeing. Something catches her attention. The watch, which he forgot to take off. A clumsy old watch which he always wears the wrong way, so it covers the inside of his wrist, is now turned to her and showing the wrong time. Three hours fast.

  He comes down one leg after the other and lies on the floor, relaxing. With his head between his hands he moans, “I want you to teach me, if there is such a thing in yoga, to make me not … like, how to not suffer from noise.”

  She whispers, “Explain to me a little. I think I understand, but—”

  He straightens up. She already knows: as soon as she doesn’t understand him, he loses his patience, immediately.

  “There’s noise the whole time, right? So how … how can you make it so you can, so in the noise—”

  A little wave beats in her throat, still she checks carefully, he’s only fifteen for God’s sake—okay, and a half. “What noise exactly do you mean?” She remembers the quarries. “You live in a kind of noisy area, don’t you?”

  He gives her a look she’ll never forget, a piercing look of disappointed rebuke. Almost desperate. She shrinks in. Stupid. What were you thinking? Wake up. Get with the picture.

  She shakes it off. “You know what? We’ll learn together. Sit on the mat, sit opposite me.”

  They both sit cross-legged. Erect. Nili shuts her eyes, focuses inside. “It’s as if I have a place there, a quiet place, and I can reach it instantly, in any situation almost.” Or at least I used to be able to, she thinks instantly. “Slowly but surely you’ll also be able to find your place.” She makes an effort to smile, and her hand pulls down an invisible thread opposite the center of his chest, and she can feel the thread trembling, can hear with her fingers the humming fluctuations in his body. She senses them constantly, as if there’s another heart beating in him, but a distant, underground one. “And it’s a matter of practice, years of
practice, knowing where your quiet is located, and then you can get there from wherever you are, in the loudest noise, in the midst of filth and crudeness,” she whispers, and her eyes are closed tight. “You can put yourself in there and be protected.” She breathes slowly, the bitterness of the words seeping into her throat. What’s left of that? Only talk, words, cauliflower. She doesn’t even want to think of how many times she’s really been able to go in and stay there since she left Jerusalem, since she was exiled from Jerusalem, from her beloved little apartment that was too expensive, from the students who stayed with her for years. From her glory days. Her hands tighten on her knees. Her fingers draw two zeros. All she had now was a tiny, insulting apartment in Rishon, and the misery of the girls, uprooted because of her, because of her criminal ineptness in managing her affairs. And more than anything, Rotem, the waste of Rotem, the hatred of Rotem, the terrible drawing Rotem hung in her room, which keeps presenting itself like a curse in almost all of Nili’s contact with the world: My family in the food chain. For three years now, she’s been running around with her yoga in a town where no one has even heard of it, haggling over every penny with treasurers of moshavim and community center directors. But he, Kobi, wants to know what it’s like in there, when she’s in her quiet place, and Nili shakes her head with closed eyes. What can she tell him? How can she describe her place that has become a den? What can she tell him of the little beast that lurks for her there?

  Even so, again, as always, she closes her eyes, lifts her head a little, her face looks ready for a kiss, and to her surprise she is there in the blink of an eye, an unexpected and so attainable gift. And the place is vacant, waiting for her with a bright welcome, and she squeezes her eyelids and tightens, knowing that shortly the sharp little teeth will sink in—

  Total silence. She breathes deeply, enveloped in a dense pink sensation. God, she thinks, and chokes up a little, where were you all this time? I almost lost you.

  Only after a few minutes does she remember Kobi, and sadly forces herself to climb back into her pupils, and he is waiting, a little hurt at being left outside, but eager, like a man aboard a ship who sees the diver coming back up. “What’s it like down there? What did you see?”

  “I can’t explain it with words.” She smiles, refreshed, distributing herself around like the scent of peeled mandarins. “When you get there you’ll know, you’ll sense it yourself.” And when she sees the disappointment on his face, she hurriedly adds, “But there’s something that maybe you can feel: my hands get warmer when I’m there, a lot of energy builds up in them, sometimes my skin actually quivers. It truly does.” She smiles as he purses his lips in amazement.

  “Can I touch?” He hasn’t asked to touch her until now; only she has touched him, carefully, correcting a pose, straightening a foot, and his skin always shrinks away a little, as if from a light electric shock, the skin of a child who wasn’t touched enough.

  “Of course, touch.”

  He reaches out and touches the edge of her open palm. He announces immediately: “I don’t feel anything,” and pulls his hand back.

  “Give it a minute.” She smiles, pressing his hand to hers, magnetizing inside, taking with her the touch of his marvelously soft fingers, and within a moment she becomes focused, brimming with warmth inside; long threads of glowing tenderness flow through her limbs, and she walks around inside her body, inside the beautiful city of Brahma, and she is full and generous with herself all the way to the edges of her fingers. “Here, feel now.”

  “Wow. Can I get that way too?”

  “If you practice, it will be even stronger with you,” she says gravely.

  “Really? How do you know?” He giggles, and for a moment he exposes something childish, the sudden twittering of milk teeth.

  “I know. See, that kind of thing I do know.”

  A phone rings in one of the distant rooms of the house. She blinks at me not to answer it. We sit and count the rings and guess who might be calling.

  “No phone calls until we’re done,” she decrees.

  “Maybe it’s Walter?” His name tastes uncomfortable in my mouth.

  “I told him not to call, and he won’t.”

  Walter was the attaché for commercial affairs at the German embassy in Israel. At the end of his service here he had conducted a private little defection. He’s a tall man, delicate and hesitant. A little frail for my taste, and somewhat short even by her standards. On top of everything else, he doesn’t look you in the eye. He met her five years ago on the street and fell in love with her in an absolute Siegfried-like way; this was also, it later transpired, the first love of his life. They had one year of bliss. Then she got ill. She points out again and again that it was when she became ill that he began to love her even more. She finds it strange. “It’s as if he loves my illness too,” she says. “As if he would be willing to make a deal, you know, to actually be ill instead of me.” And I know her voice and know what troubles her, and do not enter with her into the alliance she wants to create. But she can’t let it go, looking askance at me: “Doesn’t it strike you as an oddity?” I play innocent: “What’s odd about it? He loves you. When you love someone it includes everything.” “Even so,” she murmurs, “what does he need this for?”

  Silence. Something damp and murky in the air. I realize I’m sitting with my back to her again. Why am I drawn there like that, to the anger at her, over and over again, as to a yearned-for childhood memory that burns my throat? She sinks into herself too. I have no idea where she is, and for a minute I don’t care either. I’m fighting against an ancient whirlwind, superfluous now, which still sucks me inside with glee. The thing is that she always knew how to protect herself from the torments of others.

  People who know her wouldn’t believe it, but she had built a fortress, and I had encountered it, really slammed into it. Sometimes crashed. It was like a transparent protection layer, spiritual of course, but very dense, ironclad, which surrounded her entirely; she would hunch behind it, and no thing or person was allowed to penetrate it. When I finally dared to ask, I was about twelve—just to think that I could once talk with her like that, just come to her and ask directly—and she explained that thanks to that defense, that barrier of hers, she could give of herself to more and more people, she could flow freely. Precisely because none of them could take any of the powers she held there. When I insisted, because that one time I did—I remember the vague and frightened sense of churning that rose from the bottom of my stomach, and how what she said suddenly congealed into a lump inside me, into words, into a verdict—she explained with total honesty, with her criminal innocence, that if she let anyone infiltrate it and take things from there, she would no longer be herself. And she wouldn’t be pure, she added, and wouldn’t be able to be the utterly clear vessel, the transparent conduit for the healing powers that passed through her.

  I understood, and yet I didn’t. How could I understand such a thing? She tried to explain. She told me about the ocean of nectar inside the heart. About the island made of precious stones. She said I also had a place like that inside me. I tried to feel it, but all I found was darkness. She went on talking and I saw her on her island like a round, perfect animal, a mythological circle-creature, smooth with closed eyes, sprawled in complete and eternal rest, with its tail in its mouth. But what will happen if I’m sick? I wanted to ask. What will happen if I need all your powers, even your powers from there? I didn’t ask. One touch of the electrified fence was enough for me. And she, as usual, heard my silence, and instead of answering, she kept trying to teach me how to take care of myself, how not to let the sorrow of the world, or anything else, penetrate my private place. “Not even the love of your life,” she used to emphasize again and again, and I had not a single soul in the world to love back then. “Even your most beloved love of all—don’t let him in there.” And then she would smile her most charming, tempting smile and say, “Don’t even let me in there.”

  On the third day, at the
end of an exhausting class during which she had tired him out with fifty-four consecutive “sun salutations,” and after bringing him to the place where his brain simply emptied of all thoughts—and that is when it occurs, when she feels it spreading through him, throughout all of him, the shine, the quiet, the internal crystal—he lies on the mat, a pillow under his head and one beneath his knees, and she softly guides him to relaxation. In the silence that descends, she thinks it was worth coming to this awful hotel for six years, two weeks every year, and suffering the rudeness and the contempt and the ignorance, just so that she could improve him like this. And it’s good for her too, she knows, to see him this way, opening up like a flower in her hands. Her voice sweetens with happiness and gratitude as she tells him about the soles of his feet relaxing, about his knees slowly sinking, about his hips loosening, his chest … “The body is so beautiful,” she says with the newly found wonder she senses. “So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet.” She whispers, “It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we’re only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what’s really good for us.” She relaxes, opens up. “If we only understand what it’s trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is …”

  The sound of gulping opens her eyes. His face is tensed like a tightly clenched fist. His shoulders are hunched up almost to his ears, and his legs twist and squeeze each other forcefully.

  “What’s the matter, Kobi?”