But that’s enough now—what’s the matter with you? It’s time to go back. I wash the blood off my legs, stick some bits of toilet paper on them to dry and absorb the blood, clean the floor around me, calculate how many days I need for the sores to heal so Melanie won’t find out. Let her find out, for all I care—I haven’t done it for almost a year and I don’t regret it. This is exactly what I needed now, like a good bout of masturbation. I wash my eyes with cold water and blink excessively, and restore my face, redesign the slightly bitter, hurt expression, so Nili won’t be suspicious.
The night before coming here, when I had already been reduced to a state of ashes and dust, after packing and unpacking three times and announcing that that was it, I couldn’t go, Melanie sat me down on a chair and started cutting my hair. Once every two months or so, when I quietly fall apart, she does it, and somehow, it’s not clear why, it settles me, purifies me. Not the final result, which I don’t particularly care about anyway, but just the feeling of her working on my head, tidying it for me, and the sense that for one whole hour that head isn’t mine, not my responsibility, not my fault. Now, in the mirror, I try to see myself completely from the outside, and as usual, I decide I don’t really like the woman I see. Not that I don’t like her exactly, I just feel sorry for her. I know what I would think if I saw her passing on the street or if she squeezed past me on the Tube. “Lady,” I would whisper to her, “relax, get the stick out of your ass.”
I lean against the mirror and cool my forehead. I breathe warm vapors on the glass and write on it, Melanie. I like writing her name in Hebrew. I don’t have many opportunities to do it. I like the way the spelling is similar to the Hebrew for my angel.
“And about that Melanie person,” she asks the second I get back from the toilet, “have you written anything yet? Is she already in your stories too?”
I wait for a moment, counting to one million. “Not yet. But I’m gathering material about that Melanie person.”
“Sorry.”
We sit. Silent. A faint gurgling sound comes from somewhere beneath her. Her fluids are drained by means of a complex plumbing system which I was only just able to prevent her from explaining to me and demonstrating all its mysteries. I scan the walls around us with fascination.
“Were you crying?” she asks.
“A little.”
“That’s good. You should cry. Afterward too, don’t hold it in. But remember always to bathe your eyes with chamomile.”
She had never hidden her opinion of Melanie from me. She of all people, who had done everything with everyone and so forth, suddenly, when it came to me, her open-mindedness ran out. With surprising creativity she would pull out arguments and recite them sternly, with an assertion of responsibility I had never known in her: Melanie is an affair with no future and no continuity, meaning, no next generation, and in fact, Melanie is preventing you from finally finding true love, with all the perfection and depth that can exist only between a man and a woman, believe me. And there were all sorts of other dialectics hashed out in the darkest workshops of Rishon LeZion.
I deliberate for a while over whether this is the right time to open a debate. I suspect she has no grasp of where I’ve been and what I’ve done during my years in the Diaspora, while I was producing exciting material for my stories—the writings of a whacked-out tourist. I feel like simply telling her, without blaming and without whining, about all the years I lived without love for anyone. And how I looked at couples in love as if they were sick, crazy people, each consuming the other’s soul through their lips. And how when I took a bath, I could convince myself to see a halo of bluish rot emanating from my body.
Or I could tell her the story of how I almost adopted a little girl because I thought that at least then I would have a girl with me, a living creature, verifiably alive. That through her I would be able to touch the artery that surely must pass through every human being. I’d already contracted with a lawyer who had deigned to mortgage all my assets in return for turning a blind eye when we came to the “medical history” section, ignoring the telling tremble of my fingers. But at the last moment I gave up, chickened out. And anyway, I knew I was only trying to fake my membership card in the human race. I still carry the picture of a one-year-old Filipina girl in my purse. She’s seven and a half now, just this week. I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.
Maybe I’ll just give her an abbreviated list of events, crashes, and wallowings; fortunately, I can’t remember the details anymore anyway, only the names and the faces, and above all the various backs that were turned on me. And it’s also true that sometimes I confuse what happened with what I invented around it later, in stories, in writing, but there’s no doubt that I spent three or five years like that, being passed from hand to hand and broken up into small change. I scrubbed the bottom of the barrel really thoroughly, until one day I heard a voice next to me that said, “I think it’s enough.” And when I resisted and kicked and screamed, she said, “If you needed to prove something to someone, I think you’ve done that.” And with complete serenity she added, “You’ve proven it so well, in fact, that you’ve almost refuted your own argument.” And I barked, “Go away, get out of here, I’m incurable.” She laughed and just hoisted me on her back like a sack, and carried me like a casualty through a few deserts, quietly absorbing the toxins I released, and explained to me the whole time that this was all because I was completely ignorant, I was like a child raised by wolves when it came to living together, living as a couple, and that it would gradually stop hurting me so badly, the kindness.
Then all of a sudden I give up. Regretting the harshness of my heart, I turn to her, extricating myself again from the twist I had unknowingly placed myself in. I put my papers aside and stretch out. Enough, I say to myself, and then to her too. “Enough already.” She doesn’t ask enough of what. I tell her about Melanie’s dad’s farm in Wales, with its green pastures where, as I told her family, “they maketh me lie down.” And the creek that just runs innocently through the yard, and the sheep, which are the most sheeplike sheep in the world. I explain to her that when the cows sit down, it means it’s going to rain, and if the sky is red like fire at dusk, that means it will rain, and if the sky is bright—it will also rain. From my purse I take out a stone I brought back from there; it is black and white and looks like half an apple, and in its center, like an open eye, is my birthstone. Melanie suggested I take it with me on the trip; I place it next to her on the nightstand. It warms my heart to say her name out loud. I’m less lonely when her name is in my mouth. I tell her how Melanie has already grown used to the way whenever she tells me something special, a story or a childhood memory, I pull out a pen and write it down. She even made up a saying: Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket.
Nili digests. Slowly and strenuously, the words pass through the cords that are gradually stopping up in her brain. But when she finally laughs, she laughs from the bottom of her heart, and a bright spark manages to burst through the haze of her eyes, and instead of being burned, I surprise myself by being flooded with happiness for them both.
She shows him the exercise they used to call “airplane” when she was a kid. She lies down on her back with her legs straight up in the air, and he puts his stomach on the soles of her feet and holds on to her hands. “Are you sure I can’t fall like this?”
“Don’t worry, I’m strong.”
“But is this yoga too?”
“It’s my yoga.” She smiles, sparing him the whole speech. “Come on, get up.”
And he does, surprising her with his lightness. His bones are so weightless, she thinks. But then he contorts his face in terrible pain and hisses through clenched teeth that his whole inside is tearing up from this.
“Do you want to come down?”
“No, not yet.”
The soles of her feet can feel his stomach tightening against her. He groans and his face looks twisted and flushed, but still he stays up the
re a moment longer, and then, when the pain is almost intolerable, he suddenly gasps a first breath, then another, and another, and giggles, surprised. He tries a few bolder breaths, broader and deeper, and she smiles, and he hovers and breathes above her face with his eyes closed, focused on himself, and his stomach becomes soft and starts to flow, cradled in her feet. She tries to feel what he has in there, what the story is with his stomach, but she is unable to. He glides above her, then lets his hands and head drop, and smiles to himself as in a dream. She looks at him and sighs softly to herself.
Once, in Dharamsala, in a little market where she sold potatoes and Reiki lessons, with baby Rotem tied to her back with a large shawl like the local women did, she first heard the story of how the Dalai Lama was chosen at the age of four, when he could point to the set of false teeth that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama. There, in Dharamsala, very far from home and from the man who had informed her that if she left she’d have nowhere to come back to, she often thought about the wonder of being chosen. She told herself hopefully that it must have something to do with the ability to choose correctly from among the multitude of possibilities. She had long ago given up the hope of, for once in her life, making the truly correct choice, one that time and life would not eventually disprove and make subject to mockery in some way or another. And of course she had already given up the foolish and pretentious wish that she would herself be chosen for something. But as she grew older, she often liked to fantasize about the happiness of the Tibetan monks at the moment they made the correct choice: how they laughed and glowed at each other, and the relief they must have felt when they realized they had once again been redeemed from loneliness, from barrenness, from the fear of living in a world with no such child.
She breathes deeply, her feet spreading out in his stomach as in a pair of slippers, familiar guests. His arms float over her, their joints so thin and delicate. He is incredibly beautiful right now, permitting himself to loosen up, to forget, to mist over. And out of the relaxation a speck of saliva drops from his mouth onto her, and he stiffens up at once. His eyes open wide, she can actually hear the alarm sounding inside him, alerting him to a dangerous leakage, and he leaps off her and kneels at her side and quickly wipes her with his hands, just a tiny drop of saliva on her forehead, but Nili sees his expression as she lies there, dejected, and she feels a cold metallic touch.
Fifteen minutes later he is happy again. For the first time he is able to fold his legs into an almost perfect lotus position, and he bravely withstands the pain in his foot muscles as they stretch unbearably, then undoes his legs and lies on his back, slowly letting go of the pain. Suddenly—she doesn’t know why, perhaps out of gratitude for having kept quiet about other things—he tells her that his greatest dream is that one day he’ll own a restaurant. “A restaurant?” she repeats, astonished. Why a restaurant? What would he have to do with a restaurant? Yes, but first he has to study. Prepare himself. Next year he’s already going to start waiting tables. “And what about school?” He waves his hand dismissively, he’s planning on leaving the boarding school. They’re a bunch of religious fanatics over there, and he doesn’t even believe in God. “You don’t believe in—” She straightens up and looks at him. “Then what are you doing there?!”
“He makes me go, but starting next year I’m only doing what I feel like.”
“Wait, wait.” She perks up, recognizing the edge of a thread, trying to undo the knot. “Explain to me why you don’t believe in God.”
But he has no interest whatsoever in conducting a theological debate. “There’s this guy in the neighborhood, he used to work at Greenberg’s, and he just opened a Chinese restaurant and he’s willing to take me on for a trial period starting in April, and I’m already memorizing the menu and the dishes and the prices.” He smiles sheepishly. “Wanna hear something funny? When you said yin and yang, at first I thought they were names of dishes.”
At once she feels space inside, because he’s planning a future for himself. She breathes as if he had held her hand and helped her jump over the chasm of that scar.
He gets up. “Could you do me a favor?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Hang on a sec, don’t leave.”
He runs out. She stays there, lying on the floor, a little confused, then laughs quietly. She basks in the pride every adult in the world must feel when an adolescent places his trust in them. Especially me, she recalls jarringly. “And what are you thinking of doing when you grow up, Nili?” Rotem had inquired with a poisonous smile a few days ago when Nili tried to have a simple, normal, mother-daughter conversation with her. Nili tenses around the acidic thread twisting through her stomach. She’s lost count of the number of times she has asked and demanded that Rotem stop calling her by her name; now the little ones are starting to experiment with it too, and when she corrects them, she feels like an impostor, unworthy of her title.
Fortunately he returns soon, cutting off the sword dance. He’s holding a long menu, bound in fake leather, with clumsy imitations of Chinese script. “Okay, test me.”
She laughs. “What should I do?”
“Ask me. I’m worst at remembering the numbers of the dishes.”
She peruses the menu gravely. “Six,” she declares.
He responds immediately. “Shark-fin soup.”
“Hmmm … nice. Twenty-one.”
“Chow mein. Those ones are easy, do the expensive ones.”
She dives in again, and surfaces victoriously:
“Forty-nine!” “Forty-nine …” He furrows his brow. “Wait a minute, wait a minute—yes! Duck with bean sprats, portion for two.”
Nili laughs. “Great job, but it’s bean sprouts, not bean sprats.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “How should I know?”
“Well, haven’t you ever had Chinese food?”
He smiles. “Ask me the wines now.”
She tests him on each dish, reciting with him and correcting his mistakes. She comes up with funny mnemonics to help him remember, giving him all her secret tricks for memorizing tricky facts, wondering where all this educational talent of hers has been hiding, and why in fact she didn’t use it at home when she was helping the girls study for exams.
I find myself talking, orating with a zeal that surprises me. “I’m not blaming you, I’m absolutely not blaming you for what happened anymore. And I don’t want you to be in suspense until the end of the story. You’ll see by the way I ended it, the exact point I chose to end it, and from my perspective this is really what I’m saying to you here …” I’m so nervous that my glass starts jolting around in my hand, drops of water fly onto the page, and I stare at my hand and finally grasp that something is approaching, my reliable date is coming, it will happen soon. It must have been the scratching before in the bathroom that brought it on. “And it’s not just in the story that it’s like that.” I’m almost yelling now, trying to get it out before it paralyzes me. “It’s not like that in life either. This is it, Nili, it’s over and done with. I’ve thought about it a lot, it’s the main thing I thought about while I was writing, and today I’m so sure that you gave yourself to him with abundance and generosity, because you’re like that, that’s what you are and you just couldn’t do it any other way—” My words are becoming garbled, clambering over one another. My voice is hoarse as if I’ve been screaming for hours, and I don’t know how much of all this is actually getting through, because my jaw is locked now, and soon the burping noises will start, and I have to get it out because we’ve never talked about this, even when she wanted to at first, after the incident, I wouldn’t let her, I shut her up, I would throw tantrums, call her a murderer. Now the trembling is already climbing up from my feet with its pincerlike movements, swinging from my neck. “Because maybe it’s your generosity, in fact,” I shout, “and the power of your touch, the touch, your power, maybe because of that he maybe didn’t maybe he couldn’t bear …”
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