“But it is reality,” she says slowly, with unexpected tenderness. Almost with compassion she says it. “It’s exactly the reality I want to hear.”
At 10 p.m., before they part, he suddenly remembers. “Listen,” he says, and hesitantly takes two fifty-shekel bills out of his pocket, looking aside. “My dad said to give you this.”
“I don’t want money from you.” But she lingers for a moment, sadly contemplating her nominal value as a woman to his father.
He pushes it into her hands. “Take it, you should.”
“Why should I?”
“You know, for the yoga … for us … so we can go on.”
And he explains to her, squirming and embarrassed. “He”—he usually refers to his father as just he—“doesn’t understand this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“This. Doing something without money.” And he giggles. “He has this saying, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Nili hesitates for a moment, caressing herself with these words: “for us to” (or maybe it was “for the two of us to”? What was it exactly? Never mind. The point is …). “Tell me, do you tell him what we do?”
He shoots her a sly look that encompasses everything, and she grasps that he tells his father, or at least hints at, exactly what his father wants to hear.
She takes the bills from him with a conspiratorial smile. After he leaves, she shoves them into her bra, laughing in the face of the bespectacled income tax inspector who has been hounding her for three years. Sorry, gifts are exempt.
A thin whistling sound, almost a whinny. She laughs softly with her eyes closed, and warm circles spread inside me.
She asks for a cup of tea. Just hot water and mint leaves. It’s the only thing I’ve seen her consume these past two days, other than pills and yogurt. In the kitchen I scan the set of polished dishes. There are dishes and implements in there I don’t even recognize, that could furnish any institution from a beauty parlor to a torture den. For some reason this fills me with joy. I take piece after piece into Nili’s room, and she squints at them and proclaims: “Lettuce spinner,” “melon scoop,” “apple corer.”
“Well, what do you expect,” she says, teased, when I wave something made out of stainless steel and rubber that looks like an enema for birds. “I’m not going to change him now.”
Walter, she means. She always had a rare talent, shameless and boundless, for attracting men and turning them into patrons. It always made me sick, even as a child, her ingratiating feminine game, and so did the men themselves, of course. But Walter, for a change, didn’t take off at the moment of truth, and for that I am indebted to him. “Your mother is a wonderful woman,” he said to me when he picked me up at the airport early the other morning. And he paid for my ticket. Every time he tried to talk about her, his eyes filled with tears and he choked up (I recognized it the second I saw him for the first time: a certified orphan. From birth). “She really is something,” I said, and concentrated on the road blurring in front of his eyes. Then we kept on driving in silence, and I fought off the temptation to turn his wheel around and catch the first plane home. Ever since I was born, all my life, people who had met her would come up to me and recite these phrases to me, as if someone had dictated them from the concise dictionary of clichés: Larger than life. Straight out of the movies. Mother Earth.
Now she explains in a cautious voice that she’s fairly used to him and to his habits, and to his tears when he steals a look at her. “And to his taste in art,” she adds dryly. “All these statuettes. So maybe he has a few drawbacks, Walter,” and we both agree with a silent nod of the head, but he promised her he would keep her at home until the last minute. She motions at the crowded rooms which spread into each other in the gloom and says, “At least I’ll die against a nice backdrop.”
“You’ll die?”
Just like that, suddenly, stupidly, helplessly, with the voice of a three-year-old. It just popped out of my mouth.
The next morning he shows up looking pale and green, and apologizes. “It’s my stomach, it really hurts. I didn’t sleep all night.”
“I knew it.”
“What did you know?”
“That you weren’t feeling well.”
“How did you know?”
“I knew, I just knew.” She walks around him worriedly. “At night I felt it too, and now, before you came in, it was really strong.”
“But how did you know?” he demands, and she explains distractedly that every time before he comes, she sits quietly for a few minutes and tries to feel what he feels. His mouth opens wide, his pain seemingly letting up for a minute. “Even when I’m not here you sit here and think about me?”
“Tell me, do you have a lot of stomachaches?”
“Yeah, sometimes … But yesterday was the worst, I really didn’t sleep.”
“So do you want to leave it for today?”
“No, I don’t know, it really hurts.” As he talks, his pain seems to increase, or perhaps the talking incites the pain, and the wretchedness.
“Show me where it hurts.” But her hand is already reaching out to touch the exact spot, beneath the rounding of his left ribs, deep inside.
He groans. “How did you know where—” He grabs her wrist hard, his eyes digging wildly into hers, with that hunger of orphans. But with suspicion too. “How did you know?”
“Lie down now. Don’t speak.” He obeys her and lies down. Every movement hurts him. She kneels by his mat, her buttocks resting on her heels. She passes her right hand over the core of the pain. Starts pulling into herself, drawing from him. A long time goes by. She doesn’t move. She plays a quiet, monotonous tune to herself. She asks herself who raised him—certainly not that father of his; maybe some grandmother or an aunt. Or no one. He falls in and out of sleep. His body is limp, his forehead perspires. She wipes the sweat off with her hand and notices that he follows her with his gaze to see if she wipes her hand off on the mat. As he does so, she checks his wristwatch out of the corner of her eye, the one he wears on his right hand and obstinately refuses to take off. Now it’s set five hours ahead. Maybe Thailand? Korea? Is New York ahead of us or behind us? He groans weakly. Opens miserable eyes, then falls into a brief slumber. She hears the hum, his two hearts beating, one large one, heavy, and one little one, straggling behind. If only she knew what he was really going through, who was wrestling inside him. She massages him tenderly and wonders if he himself knows; sometimes she thinks he’s completely ignorant of everything that goes on inside him, and sometimes she’s convinced that he knows very well. At this moment, for instance, even though he is giving himself over to her hands, she guesses that he’ll allow her only to help him bear his heavy baggage, just for a few days, on condition that she never try to glimpse inside him even once.
His abdomen rises and falls. His stomach and intestines almost turn over, and sink and create whirlwinds on his velvety, perspiring skin. “Now, slowly, try to breathe into it.”
“Into what?” He is alarmed.
“Into your pain.” Her voice is soft and sweet, she refuses to get caught up in his alarm, she can’t recall seeing such panic in any of the boys she’s treated. “Now exhale it into my hands.” He holds on to her arm, his head stretches back, and his fingers pinch her skin with a twitch. She steadies her kneeling position again. Her body is uncomfortable, and she soon knows something is wrong. There is some deceit here. The pain has already melted, she is certain, but it seems to be having trouble leaving his body. She touches, presses, and releases, listens with her fingers. Strange—as if it is the body which is now clinging with all its might to the pain, unwilling to give it up. “I’m here,” she tells Kobi when she finally understands. “Let it go, you don’t need it. I’m staying.” And after a moment’s hesitation she adds, “And I’ll stay.”
Over and over, reassuring, promising, repeating with pangs of guilt the promises she must not make. And slowly, like a tight fist painfully
opening up, finger by finger, the pain breaks free. She feels the truncated billows absorbed in her palms dissolving. The face on the mat becomes calmer, consoled. She rounds her hands over his stomach, using wide, slow circles, and does this for several minutes, until his head falls to one side and his mouth opens slightly with a slight snore, tranquil.
Two hours later, she wakes up. She sees him sitting in a corner of the room with his knees folded into his chest, looking at her. She gets up slowly, sits, rubs her scalp. “Was I asleep?”
He celebrates his little victory. “When I woke up I saw you sleeping.”
She yawns, opening her huge mouth wide, remembering too late to cover it. (“Even Einstein didn’t look all that intelligent when he yawned,” Rotem once explained to her sweetly.) “Wow, are you crazy? It’s already lunchtime! We’ve missed half a day. Help me up.”
He reaches out his hand, helps her stand up, but she sits down again. She collapses, scattering embarrassed smiles, and he stands above her, smiling at her confusion. There is a certain tender, cowlike grace to her slow heaviness right now. She holds her gaze on the two mats, realizes that she and he were sleeping here, side by side. She wonders what he thought when he saw her lying there like that, exposed to him.
“You know what I remembered?” he says, as if answering her thought. “Once, when I was three or four, more than four, at the water park this one time, my dad took me there once, and I got totally freaked out.”
“From the water slides?” Nili asks supportively, recalling herself with the girls in that watery hell, guessing what a child like him must have felt there.
“No. All of a sudden I started”—he laughs to himself—“I had this idea: what if everyone in the whole world except me was dolls? Like, not real people.”
She laughs. “That’s quite an idea. And what did your dad say about that?” (He’s talking, a little wheel in her head starts spinning faster than the others. Listen, he’s telling you something.)
He gets down on one knee next to her, speaking with a strange, foreign satisfaction that frightens her a little. “My dad, he grabbed hold of me here with his hand”—he grasps the thin skin on the back of his forearm as he speaks—“and pinched me, and twisted his fingers around like this until I cried, and he kept laughing and asking me, Is this real? If this is real, then everything’s real!”
As her eyes clear, she sees. A large scythe shape lightens on his dark skin, then disappears. She rubs her face and thinks vaguely, The fact that I slept here, the fact that he saw me asleep, it’s as if it opened him up more than anything I’ve done or said.
“Wanna know the truth?” He smiles to himself. “To this day I sometimes think that, about people. Like dolls. Except now I don’t care.”
“And what about me,” she asks, regretting it immediately, “am I real?”
He looks at her from a few inches away. Unseen fingers move inside her, leaving little indentations at the bottom. Finally, not with any ease, he says, “You are.”
Then, with a sudden urge, she grasps his hand above the watch and quickly unfastens the thick leather strap; microscopic quivers of fear and refusal and imploring scurry between their hands, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. She takes off the watch and turns his wrist over to see, fearfully, and she sees, and somehow she is not surprised, as if she had known all along.
His lips turn white. His look is wild, warning her not to ask anything. Not to dare. She drops his hand. Thinks dimly, It’s still fresh, as if the skin there is still brittle, as if he’s just been pinched; this happened not long ago, six months, a year, no more. She takes his hand again and lays it exactly over her left wrist, on the inside, and carefully and gently rubs the soft skin of her hand on his, absorbing into it, massaging and absorbing, absorbing and softening. She thinks, This child has been to hell and back, this child knows the way. She shuts her eyes and sees in front of her, for some reason, the showers at his boarding school, an iron pipe coming from the ceiling, a pink soap dispenser, torn around the edges, and a gray cement floor with thick drops of rust dripping onto it.
“We’re getting closer,” she says. Or asks—it’s hard to tell.
“Don’t be afraid,” I say, compelled to protect her. “I haven’t hurt you in there.”
“No, it’s not that.” She looks surprised to discover how poorly I comprehend what is really worrying her now.
I drink some more tea. As I look at her from the side, stealthily, it flashes through my head that she’s mature. That’s it. That’s the change. Perhaps even more than the illness. She is simply a mature person. She is, finally, more mature than I am.
That thought undermines me a little. I sink down for a minute, entangled in myself. Where does this place me now? And it’s a little unfair, I think, for it to happen at this point, when there’s no time left for me to get used to it and reorganize. How can I relearn, at my age, how to walk, talk, and be?
Suddenly, a memory: When I used to wake up in the mornings, she would already be doing a headstand. Her vest would fall down and cover her face, and her large breasts, which looked so soft, would drop and lengthen toward her neck. I would stand and stare at them as in a continuation of the night’s dream—
A sweet drop of memory. Who sent it? And why now?
I serve her the day’s last battery of pills. Twenty-one, I count. Almost every pill has a counterpill, intended to cancel out its side effects. “If only,” she laughs. “If only it canceled them out, but it doesn’t cancel anything. The only thing they’re canceling out is me, slowly and thoroughly, but when I die—poof! That’ll close down their playground.” She whistles her new laugh, delighting in the revenge. Once, she wouldn’t even swallow an aspirin, not even when she had a migraine. She would beat any pain she had on her own, through meditation and relaxation.
I give her the pills and glance at the piles in the drawer. There are a few there that I remember from here and there, them and their creative richness of expression: the worms that would crawl deep inside my throat from the Anafranil, or the messed-up feeling in the morning after spending a stormy night with Elavil, and various other episodes. But she doesn’t know anything about that chapter of my life, and I am careful, of course, not to demonstrate any knowledge. But my poisoned brain starts investigating the option of whisking away a few of her pills for use in times of trouble, and makes loathsome calculations about the quantities she’ll still need and what they’ll do with the scandalous leftovers. No matter how hard I try, I can’t control these thoughts, and I console myself that this too is one of those survival habits that troubled tourists are apparently unable to be weaned from, but it’s clear that I’d never be a good character witness for myself, in all honesty.
“Rotem,” she moans softly, “shut the drawer already.”
She asks me to moisten her lips with a damp cloth. Then she dozes off for a while. Or sinks into her thoughts. I have no way of knowing. She now has long disappearances when she simply is not there. Whisked away. I sit and watch her, and try to recover from the little class reunion I’ve had here. I see her breaths relaxing, and I breathe along with her, the way she used to relax me when I was little. I try to engrave her on my memory that way, to store up supplies. I know how people get erased from my mind after a while. Even now, a second after we spoke, I can’t remember what it’s like when her eyes are open and looking at me. And no matter how hard I try, I keep getting pushed out of that look, and that in and of itself is starting to annoy me so much that I almost make the mistake of waking her. But then her breaths do start working on me, and I sit and slowly manage to enjoy the situation, even becoming addicted to some suspicious tranquillity, as if all at once a true calm has prevailed inside. Perhaps it’s because when she’s sleeping I don’t keep feeling as if particles of me are being sucked toward her without any control, and there is a somewhat stolen pleasantness about it, being near her like that, like watching the sun during an eclipse.
I think about what I just read to her, about
the doll-people, about the watch she took off his wrist. I turn over my hands and look at the place that should have long ago developed a scar just from the thoughts I’ve transmitted to it. Nili sighs in her sleep, a thin sigh like a whimper, and I become uncalm again, pins and needles all over my body, and then the whole mess of my thoughts, and I don’t seem able to rationally comprehend that in a short while, maybe weeks or days, she will not be. This person will be no more. There will be no such Nili in the world. This entity. My mother. I get up and leave the room, almost running.
In Walter’s bathroom I try, unsuccessfully, to compose myself. I sit there on a padded wooden toilet seat, decorated with purple tassels of some sort, and marvel at the advances humanity has made in the field of toilet bowls and their accoutrements while I was wallowing in the latrines of my own income bracket. I think of what my life will be like very soon, after her. For example, a marginal matter—what connection will I have to this country? Will I ever want to come back here, even for a visit? Is it possible that this is my next-to-last time here? My chest starts to feel tight, but I don’t leave. It looks as if my fingers have swollen a little on this visit. They look even redder than they normally do. Maybe it’s just because of the bordello light in here. Their skin is peeling more than usual, my washerwoman’s fingers. During the past few weeks I’ve gone back to biting my nails like a starved rabbit. I’ll calm down soon. I rock myself back and forth, humming something to myself, and it doesn’t help. A cigarette would help. A joint would be salvation. This house is driving me mad. With Walter, I don’t even have to straighten the little pictures of shepherds hanging in the bathroom.
I think about things that won’t exist anymore. There are things that exist only between me and her, and maybe I’ll forget them when she’s not around. I know I will. My heart suddenly turns sour at the thought that I have only a few times left, for example, to feel that breeze, the exhalation of the little lab animal passing in front of the forbidden cell. That occurrence, which lasts at most for a tenth of a second—her sorrowful sniffle, the little wave that rises in me when I sense her standing at my doorway and know she may take a wrong turn, and then the second wave that swells when she finally obeys and turns to leave submissively, like someone shrugging her shoulders and—what? Giving up? Abandoning? Deserting? A stupid thought goes through my mind: How will my body know how to create those materials on its own from now on? It may turn out that it needs them, that they’re essential, that they are the only reason I am able to maintain some degree of balance. But I protest immediately: What is this nonsense? How can you just write yourself off like that as if you have no existence without her? You’ve been getting along without her for years. But the weakness persists, weakness of body and weakness of mind, and I sit and sob a little, to my surprise. I was hoping to avoid it; this must be a preview of the grief, the opening act for the great orphanhood, and it might actually be a good sign, like my happiness when I found my first gray hair and felt that I was part of their biology after all. But even that encouraging contemplation doesn’t get me up off the toilet seat, and I sit there and cry silently, so she won’t hear, and scratch my legs all down the back with ten open fingers. That takes me to exactly the right place, plowing me deep with pleasure until I bleed uncontrollably—because of her, and because of what will disappear with her, those materials that only she can produce in me, and also because even now it infuriates me to think of the secondhand things you get used to when you stand in the shade for too long, the way you become accustomed to getting secondhand light because someone else is standing in it, and to being silent and faded while she fills the room, any room, with her voice and her laughter and her colors. And the way you slowly turn this into ideology, espousing the shade, swearing by the faded, abstaining with stupid and pauperish pride from anything that is firsthand, and later—it happens very quickly—forgetting what you are allowed to ask for, forgetting that you even can ask, growing used to photosynthesizing by the light of the moon.
Lovers and Strangers Page 21