Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  He opens his eyes. His look is dark, confused. “What? Why did you stop?”

  “I thought you … Do you feel okay?”

  “Yes, I don’t know …” He gets up with a wild look. “Let’s take a break. I’m hungry.”

  “Wait”—she hurries to the door after him, not willing for him to leave in this state. Not understanding what happened, she suspects herself, maybe when she surrendered to herself for a moment it went wrong.

  But he’s already rushing away, and when he reaches the hallway he starts running. She goes back and sits down. You’re using him, the probes in her stomach tell her; you can’t resist it, can you? From the minute he walked in here you’ve been using him, that’s what you’re doing, a piece of easy prey for your ravenous ego fell from the sky at your feet. Haven’t you ever heard of “erasing the self”? Isn’t that the essence of yoga? And what about canceling out individual will, pettiness, competition, endless settling of accounts with the world? Just look at how every cell in your body keeps shouting out me me … That’s not true, she protests weakly, backed against an inner wall. But if she were to admit it, even a little … Why should she admit it, what is there to admit, goddammit, what crime has she committed here?

  She gets up abruptly, extricates herself, and walks briskly around the room, pacing in truncated lines. “All these years,” she mumbles to herself, and shakes her hands in front of her, “all these years, from the very first class, I always said I disagreed with yoga about this bit, and I said that I, personally, was not willing to erase myself for yoga. Didn’t I say that all these years? And that yoga has to accept us as we are, with our stories and all our complications and our little screw-ups and our urges—our human story—did I or did I not say that?

  “Because maybe according to the books and the theories, and according to everything you’ve heard until today, I may in fact not be teaching you yoga.” She stops suddenly and announces with a soft voice to the empty walls, showering them with her warm, broad smile, her introductory smile: “But I’ll certainly teach you my yoga. Yoga as I see it, as I believe in it.” She keeps on talking calmly, in her saturated voice, linking her hands with humility and depositing all her little secrets, her hearty shortcomings. She will let them choose whether or not to accept her as she is, thus easily overcoming the evil voices of her colleagues, who always accused her of being a charlatan, an ignoramus, lacking any theoretical or philosophical basis. She summons up her goodness to come to her aid—her horn of plenty, which shuts up all the cowardly mouths. And she summons the dozens or even hundreds of admiring students to testify on her behalf, and the patients she has treated with infinitely enduring work, thousands of hours of exercises and poses and breaths and massages and guided imagery for a sprained ankle, a pulled muscle, blocked intestines, a broken heart. And the terminally ill, whom she compassionately and courageously accompanied to their deaths, who became more addicted to her than to sedatives and painkillers—to her voice, to the touch of her hands on their tortured bodies. There were those who wanted only her at their side during their final hours; one young woman, whom she treated in the last months of her life, begged her to adopt her son, a three-year-old. “Be a mother to him like you’ve been to me.” She walks around the bare room for a long time, the mist of memory enveloping her sweetly. She smiles at this one, caresses that one, drawn in a kind of self-inhalation, until she stops where she is, tilts her head a little, and from inside, without even meaning to, she produces the old sparkle, almost forgotten, her sparkle of charm and seduction, which sprays out and dances like a ray of light over the four walls. And Nili stands, a slightly dreamy smile on her face, and looks at it.

  She breathes heavily. Opens her eyes. Her look says, You’re killing me, but with her hand she gestures for me to go on, quickly. I’m not sure I’ll have the energy. It’s getting harder from one page to the next. And it seems so pathetic to heap all those words and long sentences on the pages just to try to capture one live moment, or a spark of her emotion. I grab the pen and cross out the whole last section, and she says, “Don’t you dare.” There is sharpness in her voice, as if I’ve stolen something from her, and I loosen my grip on the pen and sit there, reprimanded, staring at the page. What does she really want and why is she being stubborn? As if punishing both of us together. Putting us both on trial.

  “About the yoga,” she groans after a minute. Completely ignoring, in her usual evasive, feline way, the heaviness that accumulated over the last few minutes.

  I fake an apologetic laugh. “I know. I got everything from one book for beginners that I found in a London library. You’ll have to help me with that a little.”

  A sentence with a future-tense verb. A crude mistake on my part. She tightens her eyelids in pain. I move my chair closer to her—how to comfort? How to compensate for what I’m doing to her in writing and in person?

  “But listen. When I wrote it, I realized how much yoga I had absorbed after all, without even noticing it, just from hearing you talk, from watching you, from the millions of lessons when I was in the background in the studio and the apartment in Jerusalem—in fact, ever since I was born.”

  “You would lie there in your baby seat,” she says, immediately tempted by me, by the warmth that had suddenly flickered in me. It’s so easy for me to win her over, still, she’s so thirsty for me, still, still. How has she not grown sick of me? “You’d lie there with your pacifier, with your eyes wide open, huge. People in the classes couldn’t get over how quiet you were.”

  But I never took a class with you, I tell her silently.

  Or a massage, she replies with her eyes, and shakes her head on the pillow. “It’s a pity you wouldn’t let me give you a massage. I gave the whole world massages, except you.”

  I reach out and touch her hand. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but it’s the first time I’ve touched her in years. Somehow I never adopted the habit of touching with her. When we met, the day before yesterday, I stood next to her bed amazed, trying to find Nili inside her. Walter had prepared me for it on the way from the airport, but I wasn’t prepared. I stood for a few moments, unable to move a finger, barely breathing, until Walter let out a kind of sob behind me, almost comical, and left. And then I sat down and we started talking, untouched by human hands.

  Now I somehow find my fingers and hers intertwined. Hers are huge, thick and swollen, and my red ones peek through them. Not a beautiful scene. I rub them for her a bit. Searching for the joints within the swollen flesh. I can’t find them. My motions are clumsy, they don’t help at all. I don’t have it, there’s nothing I can do about that. And besides, I don’t seem to be a particularly compassionate person by nature. I’m afraid that if I give her a squeeze of encouragement it might hurt her, or she’ll think for some reason that I want to hurt her.

  But she does not let go, she holds on. All of a sudden I sense her fear. For the first time. There’s no mistaking it. Like white jet streams splitting off and flowing into me, and there are cold stripes of whiteness quickly spreading throughout me, and it’s as if she’s already calling to me from there, from beyond the gates. For a moment it actually paralyzes me, sucks me back into a bad place, and I can clearly tell what it will be like when she’s gone, and how much strength I will need to not be carried away there again. I quickly pull myself together. I’m really not sure that what is occurring here is a good thing. Mainly, I’m afraid of the effect it has on her: she may think that if she and I have reached this state, it must mean the end is really near.

  “Should we go on?” I ask.

  Slowly and with an encouraging smile, I release her fingers from my own. Avoiding her look. Unbelievable how I can put on the exact, precise expression I encountered years ago on the face of a nurse at the mental ward in Homerton Hospital in Hackney. She would twist my arm back easily—I weighed barely ninety pounds then—and jab me with a needle full of Rohypnol containing at least five hours of sleep, and still smile at me with the serpentine smil
e of a member of some exclusive club: “It’s all right, love, we’re almost there.” And now it’s me, now it’s my turn—how wonderful is the recycling of life in nature. From a great distance I can see my hand giving her arm two or three caring pats, and I hear myself laugh out loud. “Do you know what it meant to me to write about yoga?”

  She lingers a little. Digesting what has just flowed between us. In her body, she is still perceptive and bright as always. Certainly more than I am. And perhaps not only in her body. I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get anything. And maybe it was me who, in my stupidity, screwed everything up for us. Because sometimes, like now, when she purses her lips like that and turns herself off, it pains me to see how disciplined she is, the way she has trained herself to stop so as not to know me completely. Because that’s what I demand of her, those are the terms of the contract, and that is how I always wanted it. And then of course I scorn her, because for a second she looks like a little lab animal, a mouse or a rat, trained never to enter one particular cell that she especially likes. But that’s how I wanted it, I recite to myself what I can never forget even for a minute, that is exactly how I wanted it. In the meantime, it turns out that I’ve suddenly become witty, and I am cheerfully chatting with her about my short research into yoga, and how I got myself into it. I quote a playwright—I can’t remember who it is, he was English or Irish, his name escapes me now; with names it really is the worst—who said that the most complicated thing for him, always, is writing about his enemy “from the inside.”

  “I hope you mean yoga,” she murmurs.

  Four or five times during their days together, someone registers for her class at the front desk or knocks on the door and asks if they can take a lesson, and Nili grits her teeth and signs them up for the lunch hour or the dinner hour. She never eats in the dining room anyway. And then, during the imposed lesson—if you can call it a lesson, those dollish limbs dangling and that pathetic displacement of fat—she keeps stealing looks at the little alarm clock and counting the minutes, amazed at her inner rudeness, and announcing to herself that she must have reached the end of her professional road if she is putting all her money on him, with the odds stacked against her as they are. She reminds herself constantly not to make comparisons, to give herself fully to anyone who needs her, but at the end of every disturbance, after the nuisance has left, she hears a soft knock on the door, not shy and not demanding, just I’m here. She bounds up off her mat, full of the sweetness of acquiescence.

  “So you’ve just fallen in love with him a little,” Leora says stingingly in her role as sobriety inducer, stabbing at Nili with the entire length of the word as if she’s pinning down a butterfly. She is astonished again, for the thousandth time, at the unbelievable variety of her sister’s talent for imbroglio, and wonders how she’ll get her out of this one and how much it will cost.

  But Nili knows with absolute certainty that no, it’s not love, not even attraction. “And don’t worry, he’s not falling in love with me either.” She chuckles. “I’m too old for him, and anyway, it’s happening in a completely different place, it belongs to a different department. Lilush, what do you think, let’s talk after he leaves?”

  “I don’t understand how he isn’t falling in love with you.” Leora spits out the words like a pit and laughs clumsily and accusingly, but Nili also hears a surprising little sigh slip through the words, and for a moment she thinks Leora, in her indirect way, seems to be making some admission here, finally. But even that doesn’t really make her happy now, she just thinks of how two minutes of conversation with her sister exhausts her more than a whole day of work. Then Leora suddenly flares up, hissing at her that she’s playing with fire again, and that as usual she thinks there will be someone to clean up after her. She brings up some of her past sins, and Nili listens to the list, and quite a few of the items actually raise a little smile of pleasure on her face. But she is depressed by the thought that it’s been three years now since the sweet little Trinidadian who worked at the building across the street; he wrote her lovely poetry in English with chalk on the scaffolding, and left her penniless on the beach at Rosh Hanikra. Since that time, her CV has included no significant transgressions that you could really dig your teeth into. But Leora persists, spitting out chains of words, and Nili guesses how her gaze is wandering now, without seeing, over the walls of her home, objects and furniture and housewares, and as she talks she seems to inhale the strengths of the day-to-day from them with a joyless longing. Nili knows how Leora looks at this moment too—just as she did when she used to have hysterics as a little girl, and later as an adolescent, when she suspected that Nili was seducing and stealing away the few boys that dated her. In an instant she would go berserk, turn into an ugly old lady, and Nili, eyes closed in fear, would walk into the storm of limbs and screams and spitting as into a burning house, and wrap her arms around her, and Leora would freeze in mid-diatribe, afraid, as if someone had woken her out of a hypnotic state. She would stand like that for a long time, lost.

  Later that evening, he’s in a great mood. Nili is confused; she thought he might not even come back, that she must have touched some open wound when she spoke of his body. But here he is, refusing to talk about what happened, taking large strides around the room, waving his arms widely, demanding that she teach him everything she knows. “Everything?” She smiles. “Yes, everything.” She laughs, telling him, “My best students—listen to this carefully now—if after ten years of studying they begin to understand that they know almost nothing, then I’m a truly fortunate teacher. But you still want to know everything now, do you?” “Yes, yes,” he enthuses, and she stops for a moment as a cold hand touches her, because perhaps he, in his strange rawness, feels that he doesn’t have much time. But he seems so alive and blossoming to her now that she immediately erases her fear, and with a flood of pleasure she encounters within her that forgotten motion, where she tips the vase of her soul toward him.

  “Come here,” she orders cheerfully, and places a hand on his back and a hand on his chest, and shows him how to stand, how to bend over to pick something up off the floor. She hints at something about yin and yang, and gives practical little tips: which exercises for massaging the internal organs you can do while you brush your teeth in the morning, and how important it is to brush your tongue too, to clean the night’s germs away—her modest treasure of knowledge—and in between she tells him carefully, so as not to scare him, about the sun nostril and the moon nostril, and about the two halves of the body, which are two separate and different entities. He listens with grave alertness and his lips repeat her words, reciting, swallowing. “And that thing you said yesterday, the chakras?” She points to each one of them and touches the tip of his head with its short buzz cut, amazingly soft. “From this chakra you can connect to the infinite cosmic,” she says, and makes sure he’s not pulling away yet—after all, Leora isn’t the only one who makes a sour face when she starts flowing toward the universe, and Rotem just puts her hands over her ears and starts singing loudly. But he has the opposite reaction: every such idea excites him and stirs him, and awakens in her the desire to give him more, to empty her knowledge out into him.

  How little time they have! In two or three days he’ll disappear and she’ll never see him again. But wait, why must that be? Why don’t you ask him for his address? No, that can’t be done. But why not? You can send him books and tapes about all sorts of things, not just yoga, give him some enrichment, put together a personal survival kit for his disaster areas. Stop, you fishwife, down! Why don’t you find out his contact information from the front desk? At least so you’ll have it just in case … Because no, she presses herself between two strong fingers, because something within him dissuades her, because she knows that the secret of their encounter is in its nonrecurrence. But more than anything, because perhaps it’s best for him, perhaps she shouldn’t burden him with everything she contains. She knows exactly what she’s talking a
bout, there’s no need to go into detail, but for example, when she’s here in the hotel, far away from the girls, she might ultimately be doing them some good. In other words, it’s very possible that in her absence, yes, she is doing them more good than—take a deep breath—in other words …

  “Should we take a break?” I ask hoarsely. I can’t do it, I have to get some different air. Preferably smoke.

  She is quiet. Her face is strained with pain.

  When I can no longer bear the silence, I say, “To be honest, there were at least twenty times when I thought you’d stop me.”

  “Why?” Her voice comes from very far away.

  Oh God, I think, what have I done? What have I written here and how deeply have I hurt her now? If I had children, I remind myself, maybe I would know how to behave in these situations. If I knew how to behave in these situations, I answer myself, great wit that I am, maybe I would have children. I attempt to refresh my voice after all, to find a warm tone that will not sound as if I had just killed her. “I thought you’d at least say what’s going through your mind when you hear all these … these hallucinations of mine.”

  “Rotem,” she says, as if in that word she has summed up the discussion.

  I remain quiet. Any further questions would sound idiotic, would sound hungry, and there is no power in this world that could make me ask her about him and her. But for example, I think of her in my heart, for example, when I described the singe you feel in your brain every time you miss some fact, every time you expose your ignorance and stupidity, how is it that you don’t ask me where I, your genius, your walking encyclopedia, the prodigy of your hometown, learned to describe that so precisely?

  “I have to know, Nili,” I finally blurt out. “It’s enough. I have to hear now if anything I’ve been babbling here for the last two hours is even a little bit close to reality.”