Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  I can still see her terrified look. I think I somehow manage to tell her not to worry, but I’m already at the flamenco climax, just trying not to fall off my chair, not to fall, it keeps slipping out from under me, I don’t have any hands to grab it with and keep my head from being thrown and my jaw hurts and I try to focus myself on having finally said it, gotten it out, given it to her, the gift I gave her, and someone is shouting and I’m not sure if it’s me or her, and then the bitter taste spills into my mouth from both sides, and I know I’m over the climax, this time I was let off easy, just another minute or two, it’s almost comical to see how my shoulders and arms are spread out in little sections in all directions. Now it’s more like break dancing than flamenco. You can even hear my teeth, which means my jaw has unlocked, and this time somehow it’s all shorter than usual, I’m already doing the finale, including a curtain call with a grunting crescendo—

  Now it’s quiet, and kind of pleasant. The warmth slowly returns to all my limbs, and there are pins and needles, but they are very soft, gently licking different spots. It’s an almost humorous thing that the body does—not great humor, perhaps, but at least you can see it’s trying. What’s new here is that I don’t really care that she saw it. It’s as if I suddenly realize that she’s already guessed I have these numbers in my repertoire anyway, and that I haven’t been inactive since the convulsions, the blueness, the fits and vomiting of ages five and fifteen, and that during my foreign sojourns I have even enhanced my methods. I examine myself again and find that no, I am not troubled by realizing that she must have known long ago—not all the details perhaps, but the essence; she must know about the creative blackness inside. Who am I kidding? I try to guess what else she knows, and think she is extraordinarily wise for not having said anything to me about it, ever. And now a narcotic calm descends upon me, as it always does afterward. Here and there I release another graceful flutter forgotten in the cellars, but the worst is behind me, and I sit there exhausted, drenched in sweat, like jelly, incapable of opening my eyes because my eyelids weigh a ton. I laugh to myself about how everything turns around and is eventually restored to its natural order: she is the healthy one and I am the sick one. She is health and I am sickness. She reaches out and gently caresses my hand up and down repeatedly, twenty, a hundred times, so gently and quietly, and so right that it somehow reaches me through all the trembling fortifications inside.

  After she does her favorite back-opening exercise on him, he says, “Now I’ll do it for you.”

  “Are you sure? I’m heavy.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “I’m much heavier than you are.”

  He’s already standing with his back to her, spreading his arms. She comes and stands behind him, back to back. His hair touches hers. They interlace their arms. His warm skin is on hers.

  “Slowly,” she says. She’s afraid he’ll be humiliated if he can’t lift her.

  The two of them, in silent coordination, strengthen the grip of their arms. He inhales calmly. Steadies his feet. He seems so mature to her at this moment. She glances back at his watch. In the country he’s living in today, she guesses, it’s lunchtime now. She smiles to herself. It’s nice for her to be there with him, without his knowledge, a stowaway in his secret travels. In mid-thought he bends over and her feet are lifted off the floor, and a delightful sensation, mingled with slight panic, spreads through her. She is still cautious, wanting to be sure he can take it. He turns out to be stronger than she thought. Sometimes in strengthening exercises, even the moderate ones, she can see the hems of his shorts trembling from the effort, and her heart goes out to him.

  “Is it hard for you?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me when it is.”

  In response, he leans over a little more, lifting her higher. She allows herself to relax her body. Closes her eyes. She is amazed at his ability to find their shared balance, and at how wise his back is. She decides to give him another thirty seconds, for his self-respect, but then the room slowly fills with a silence disturbed only by their softly intertwining breaths. Without realizing it, she has become completely relaxed, unable to resist goodness when it comes. Her back cracks and opens up, her internal organs slowly release from the grasp of consciousness, flowing to the sides. His breaths fill her up. They are effortless. Her lower jaw drops. She sighs softly, thoughts slowly waft up inside her, disconnected. Soon it will be good, she knows, precious memories, beloved images. She relaxes her body, making space for the pleasure, but as usual, a moment before it becomes good, and much like anyone sailing away or taking off, she must pass the customs officer and pay the tax: the oven has been broken for six months and there’s no money for repairs, the antique fridge she bought from some Russian widow is making her life a misery: if she doesn’t defrost it for a week she has the entire Siberian wilderness in her kitchen. And where is she going to find the money to pay the repairmen, those sons-of-bitches, and what should she straighten first, Eden’s teeth or Inbal’s lazy eye—she could have at least bequeathed them good teeth and eyes. And the daily phone calls from the bank, and the long-reaching arms of the landlord, who is willing to make all sorts of arrangements with her, but that’s not it, she explains to herself for the thousandth time with a kind of false assertiveness, as if she just needs to tell it to herself rationally and then she’ll somehow be able to unravel the thicket. The cutbacks are the thing, and the way poverty is breaking her up into small change, that’s the thing, and her paralyzing fear that perhaps she no longer even has a life of the soul. “Worry about making sure I have a pair of underwear without holes first,” Rotem jabs at her, and Nili groans. Rotem again, Rotem from every direction. Stop, please, I don’t have the strength to carry her on my back anymore. Rotem with her principles and her cold, twisted rationalism, finding the most painful way to take her revenge on me, with her bodily destruction, thickening and bloating herself—when did this happen? When did she slip through my fingers like this? But now she’s hazy already, finally, the tax is paid, relatively quickly. After all—she breathes a sigh of relief—there are some advantages to being like one of those Weeble toys. The thoughts descend, soon they’ll disappear beneath words, the morphine of pleasure starts spreading through her veins, her breath becomes light as a feather. It’s been years since she’s been able to relax like this, in this pose. Her body is still and floating and entirely open. Underneath, somewhere down there, his back is supporting her, but without demanding a thing of her. He’s there. She’s here. They touch only at one tiny point, two people in the universe touching each other for a moment in goodness. You can go a whole lifetime without knowing this kind of touch. Usually you must go through a whole life in order to be able to give such a touch. She asks herself where he has this knowledge from. What age he has come to her from. She feels as if she is barely putting any weight on him. For a moment she can imagine them spinning around and around in the air, and now she is the one carrying him with that same ease. Silence. Breaths. Floating. Her soul fills, drop by drop, with the rare nectar of trust.

  “Who are you studying with?” she asks tightly when I turn the page.

  “What?” I perk up. “What?”

  “Rotem,” she says wearily.

  I gulp. Consider carefully, decide there’s no point. “I took a few classes.”

  “Did you at least find a good teacher?”

  “Yes.” I wonder how long she’s known, from which moment in the story. “Someone Melanie recommended. He’s Japanese.”

  “The Japanese are a bit dry,” she declares, and shuts her eyes. “You told him about me?”

  “Yes. A little.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Nothing. He listened. He heard. He usually doesn’t say much.”

  I can feel her scanning inside my head. My thoughts leap inside and I close the door behind them in a split second. Once, in a nature movie, I saw tiny little fish swarming into a sea anemone to escape a preying fish, and I recogni
zed their movement of evasion and the motion of the anemone itself—a fleshy, complex mind, rushing to hide them. My Japanese yoga teacher had listened to what I told him and said, “The woman you spoke of doesn’t work right. She relies on her intuition too much, and she’s not at that stage yet.” Then, at the end of the class, he came up to me again and said, “That woman, she works like someone who doesn’t have a teacher. If she had a teacher he would reprimand her.”

  “I wanted so badly,” she says finally.

  “I only took a few classes, it’s really not—”

  “And are you going to continue?”

  “I don’t know.” And I forced a laugh. “It’s easier for me to write it than do it.”

  “No, no,” she sighs, “you should keep doing it, it’s good, it will be good for you.”

  She just lies there. Completely still. Because of her condition she has the strange ability to be present without being. In the space that now opens up between my chair and her bed, I remember the nights when Melanie taught me how to sleep together. I don’t know why that comes into my mind. She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can’t fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, “Come on, try a little longer.” And so for a few bleary-eyed, sleepwalking weeks—and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning—she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement—even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced. Now, when I smile, Nili looks at me, and I can’t escape in time.

  But as if operating her immediate healing mechanism, she remembers something. “There’s something you should add.”

  “Where?”

  “When you say what my face is like, how my jaw drops, you know, when I’m on his back.”

  “What should I add?”

  “Write that when I’m like that, I mean she, then she thinks to herself that that’s how she’ll look when she dies.”

  “No, no.”

  “And then write: And she thinks of how everyone will see then that she really was a complete idiot. Write it. Now.”

  His ignorance amazes her. When she tells him she lived in India for three years, he asks if it’s true that everyone there is black. When they talk about vegetarianism, he suddenly claims, with a strange fervor and a kind of vexation, that elephants are carnivores. “Elephants?” She doesn’t know where to start refuting such nonsense, but he refuses to be convinced by all evidence she provides, slams his face closed, and locks himself up to her: that’s what he’s decided, and that’s that. What are they teaching them at that boarding school? she wonders. Then something else happens, something trivial, that depresses her for the rest of the day.

  While they’re doing breathing exercises, sitting across from one another, she presses three fingers below his navel, in the body’s furnace, seemingly searching for something. She doesn’t find it, and hesitates; a moment later, she intuitively pushes her thumb hard into his navel. “When I press here, exhale and push out at me with your breath.”

  But he turns pale with the first sign of pressure, depleted. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

  “Lie down, you’re just dizzy,” she says as she supports his back and calms him, contemplatively; she is surprised again at how quickly he melts and starts to whine, as if the entire complex, delicate structure that he maintains hidden inside himself collapses in an instant upon contact with danger, with fear. He moans, and she rubs his shoulders distractedly. “Don’t tense up, relax, relax. It’ll pass.” But she senses something else, as if whatever secret he is hiding is there, very close to the surface of his skin, and the slightest touch might tear its outer layer. For the hundredth time she wonders how he came to cut himself like that, on his wrist, and why, what had caused him to go so far. She murmurs, “Don’t fight, you’re fighting. Just get into it, into this feeling, I’m here, I’m with you, protecting you.” A pallor spreads beneath his brown complexion. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead. What’s going on here? Nili wonders, tightly pressing a finger beneath his nose. We must have done something bad, or premature. Or maybe I frightened his tender stomach again. She tries to recall what had suddenly caused her to change the three-finger pressing and proceed with such certainty to his navel. His hand flutters like the wing of an injured bird. He keeps trying to remove her hand from his navel, even though it is no longer there. Nili stares at the strange, compulsive motion and feels his panic inflaming itself rapidly, like a little fire. He grunts, starts to choke, and Nili finally breaks free and wakes up, quickly lifting his feet onto a chair. She slaps his cheeks lightly, rubs his temples, calls out his name, shouting, “Kobi, Kobi.” That seems to help, the color starts coming back to his face, his breath stabilizes, the muscle spasms let up gradually. She caresses his damp forehead and, vaguely guessing, starts to repeat his name over and over, gently, compassionately, smiling. She can see his eyes flutter every time she calls his name, eagerly pulsating against his tight eyelids, and she thinks how strange it is that she has hardly called him by his name until now.

  When she tries to stand up, he reaches out blindly and feels for her hand, grasping it tightly, signaling for her to continue. She recites his name to him like a mantra, moaning, singing a little tune, but inside her something is already darting around the edges, grumbling and thorny. It’s my fault this happened, it’s unprofessional, the whole thing is unprofessional. I’m going too fast with him and doing too many experiments and forgetting that he’s only a kid. I’ve really gone too far, seriously. She keeps rubbing his chest, trying not to infect him with her anger at herself or any other random angers, until she notices that his eyes are open with the damp sparkle of a smile: “You know you’re talking to yourself the whole time?”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, with your lips. You keep doing it.”

  She kneads his shoulders with threatening force. “Well, just don’t tell anyone.” But after a moment she can’t resist: “So what do you know about me now?”

  He sits up, delaying his exciting discovery for a while, then throws it at her: “You’re going to buy something big.”

  “Me?” She bursts out laughing. “Yeah, right!”

  “Yeah, a house or a car. Something awesome. A Mercedes?” He is unconvinced by her peals of laughter, enjoying his role as the all-knowing. “A ton of money. You were making calculations with your lips.”

  Her laughter breaks off at once. Her heart sinks and crashes. That’s the end, really. If I’m bringing all that into my work now, even into my work with him. That’s it. Give the keys back to the management, go and be a secretary, do telemarketing, clean houses, things you can handle. She gets up and walks over to sit in the corner. He stays on his mat, looking at her, not understanding what’s going on. She lets her head drop back against the wall with her mouth open. Rotem and Einstein can both take a flying leap. She remembers how she once swore, years ago—yes, yes, when she was standing in the light—that as soon as the yoga became nothing more than a living, a craft, she’d get up and leave. “I’m not buying a house,” she says to him, to her surprise, knowing that if she doesn’t talk now she’ll scream. “And I’m sure as hell not getting a Mercedes. I’m actually trying to figure out where I’ll find the money to pay next month’s rent.”

  She tells him about herself. About the expulsion from Jerusalem. Even about Inbal’s father, who disappeared, leaving her with a huge debt she had guaranteed for him. She even tells
him about the broken fridge, and that the stereo system doesn’t work and they haven’t had any music at home for a year. And then, because what difference does it make now, she also lets him in on the hostile suspicion she’s developing toward the other appliances; she has a whole conspiracy theory about them and their allies, the repairmen, and every time she turns on an appliance, even a light switch, her heart skips a beat. Then she tells him about the girls. In detail or in abstract, probably in abstract—she knows she must maintain some separation, because here she belongs only to him. It’s only the two of them.

  The sun sets and a pleasant dimness settles in the room. He lies there, resting on his elbows and listening. It’s clear to her that he thought she was in a completely different place in life, and that now he is trying to figure out what this means about her, and maybe about both of them. He may even be recalculating his own position in relation to her, on the chain. Nili gets up, goes over to the mirror, and prods her scalp and hair a little. She looks into her eyes. Have I made a mistake by telling him? She finds it hard to read an answer. Lately she doesn’t trust herself even with smaller things than this. As if with every movement she makes in the world she is scattering breezes of hurt and damage and failing. Midas and his leaden touch.

  She goes over and collapses on her mat, knowing that something bad is happening to her, as if somewhere along the way she has lost the most basic confidence, the most natural and primal sense. As if every choice she makes immediately becomes a mistake, just because she made it. Go figure out what’s right and what isn’t, she thinks with her head lowered, what you can say to someone and what you can’t. Is it even permissible to give advice to someone? To guide them, God forbid, along some path? Not to mention the truly unbelievable accomplishment of bringing a human creature into the world. How did I dare? She suddenly panics and pulls back and straightens up. How did I do it? How did I have the audacity?