Lovers and Strangers

by David Grossman

  Her hand moves over the blanket until she touches my knee and holds on to it. She doesn’t say anything, and I don’t ask. I have a thousand questions, but I don’t ask. You can’t go backwards to fix things.

  Later, when everything between them settles, she says in a very tired voice, “You still haven’t said what you felt before.”

  “When?”

  “When you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he mutters, and she gets the feeling he is avoiding her, and it annoys her that she’s so transparent to him, while he is able to conceal and compartmentalize.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Your finger, like … I thought it was going into my stomach, like making a hole in it.”

  He lies on his back, relaxed, quiet. It’s so quiet in the room that she thinks she can hear his hearts beating. A minute goes by, then another, and his breathing becomes tranquil. Then hers does too. The darkness thickens. Nili hugs her knees. Her eyes, which have dulled a little, brighten. The panic that flooded her earlier begins to melt away. Her lungs expand and she spreads out her inner limbs. Every so often she looks at him and feels that now another knot has been tied between them, because they are both, in their own way, downtrodden. It’s strange that she’d never thought of herself in that way before, and yet now, because of him, it actually moves her, gives her strength.

  He asks sleepily, “Hey, I forgot how it goes—the umbilical cord, do they cut it off both of them at the belly button?”

  “What do you mean, both of them?”

  “The baby and her?”

  “The mother, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He lifts up on his elbows, surprised at her tone of voice, almost hurt. It takes her a minute to grasp, and then she sees with painful clarity the impression sketched inside him: a thread stretching from his navel to his mother’s.

  She falters briefly. He looks at her with penetrating eyes, and a sudden and decisive urgency darts between them. She smiles at him, her pros and cons get mixed up, and somehow, out of the smile, an answer escapes. She could never tell lies, but she was an expert at giving little gifts like this.

  As I reach the last word, she sighs. I don’t ask. I wait. It occurs to me that we’ve actually been living apart for longer than we lived together. You could say that for a long time we’ve known each other only in chapter headings. But how could that be? I mean, how could such a reduction occur between us? Or between her and anyone.

  Reduction is not the right word, though. It’s more as if over the years we’ve become two polite tour guides at a disaster site, but one that destroyed our lives. After the incident she retired. Stopped teaching. He was, in fact, her last student, and I think she also stopped doing yoga herself. I’m not sure about that; I’ve never been able to ask her, and now it’s too late. She made a living doing odd jobs. She modeled for art classes. She was a salesclerk in a housewares store. Then she sold paintings for an old artist, going from door to door asking people to just take a look at the pictures. I left her on my seventeenth birthday, my gift to myself. Then I came back, or was sent back, with my tail between my legs. Then I left again, and the same thing all over again. She once said, with uncommon sobriety, “Our umbilical cord has shriveled up.” Years later, during one of the disconnects, when I was already deep in my London life, I found out from a friend that she was ill. We developed a tolerable routine: one conversation a week. She would give me a sign with two rings, and if I felt like it, I’d call her back. Once I came to visit her, courtesy of Walter Tours. It wasn’t a good visit. (“Cursed is the parent,” she told me then, before I left in the middle of a horrible row, “who can be objective about his own child.”) During those years, in my rare flashes of composure, I wrote the tourist stories and collected them into a book. I tried to dabble with cinema a little, and journalism, and I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there’s no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn’t wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything.

  “Within every effort there has to be calm,” she recites for him. “Always, in every pose, you have to stop just before the effort becomes pain.”

  “Sometimes I think … a bird, for example,” he says.

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “To fly, it has to keep flapping its wings, right?”

  “Definitely,” she agrees gravely.

  “I’m not talking about gliding,” he says fussily, and her ear opens a little at the sound of the new word. “There are birds that glide without making any effort, but I’m talking about a bird that has to make an effort to fly up.”

  “Okay.” Nili shrugs, wondering where he himself is flying with this.

  “And a bird that lives, say, for a year? Two?”

  “Let’s say.”

  “And all that time it has to make an effort with its wings, otherwise it’ll fall?”

  “Definitely.”

  “But maybe once, like one time in its whole life, it happens that it can fly up high, the highest—for maybe a whole minute—without making any effort at all with its wings?”

  She leans forward, shrinking the crease between her eyes, sensing something approaching. “And how exactly does that happen?”

  He takes on a mysterious expression. “It gets it from the air.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Like once in every bird’s life, the air lets it fly up without making any effort.”

  She blinks. What is it with these aerodynamic theories all of a sudden?

  But he’s very serious and focused. “It’s like …” He searches for an example, his fingers moving, pulling something from the air. “It’s like, say … a holiday bonus, like the air is giving it a bonus. A discount. Once in a lifetime.”

  “Oh.” Nili laughs with sudden comprehension. “And does it know, the bird? Does it understand?”

  He falters. “That’s what I keep wondering. ’Cause if it doesn’t understand, then it’s like the air’s efforts are wasted on it, no?”

  “I guess so,” she answers, delighted.

  “And if it does understand, then … No, that can’t be … No. It must not understand, ’cause it’s just a bird, with a bird brain. Sure.” He gets excited; now that he’s made up his mind, his face lights up. “It’s something the air just does for fun!”

  From the great relief on his face she guesses how long the question has preoccupied him.

  “It doesn’t even realize it at all! Just that suddenly it feels light, but it’s the air that decides: Okay, now you. Now you. Playing with its birds, you see?”

  Do I see? Nili wonders, looking at him contemplatively.

  “And by the way,” he adds gravely after a minute, “it’s the same with the sea and the fishes.”

  “Okay,” she sighs, “tell me about her.”

  I tell her. “She’s huge, Melanie, tall and wide, even a little scary at first, but she is such a soul, and warm and honest and”—for some reason the word in Hebrew escapes me—“kind of tangible?”

  She is surprised. It’s not how she’d imagined Melanie. She refused to even look at a picture. So I tell her more. Little things, like her work at the rehab institute, and the way she rides her purple bike around the streets of London. And her simple, healthy self-confidence—if only I had a quarter of it—and her masses of energy, which, to me, are sometimes simply paralyzing. “That woman needs almost no sleep.” I laugh. “And there is her absolute honesty toward any person—no one gets off easy. And sometimes, here and there, there’s a toughness,” I say, then add, “a kind of intransigence,” surprised at how a little spray of betrayal has escaped me. “She has these definitive principles which sometimes, to be honest, can make life pretty
complicated. Actually, Melanie could easily fit in with that gang of yours, the ones that collect birds at four in the morning.”

  Nili hears everything, including the crumple in the middle of my laugh. The intransigence and toughness—it flashes in my mind—of someone who has never yet broken down, not even cracked.

  “And does she know what the story is about?”

  “She knows everything that happens in my life.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, certainly not that way, but I knew why I had to say it that way, to correct a mistake with an error. I could actually hear a little sound from within her, like a match snapping.

  Now there is silence. Her feet are exposed at the bottom of the blanket. They are huge, swollen. Bluish yellow. I stare at them. The toes look joined into one mass.

  “And what did she say?”

  Her voice can’t fool me. I want to change the subject, but I’m also not able to completely give up, pulled this way and that, feeling like a child of divorced parents forced to convey messages between them. “What did Melanie say? She said that I should have written it years ago.” She said something else too, but I don’t have the guts to convey that. She thought that if Nili had read this story years ago, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten ill.

  When her head sinks, her goiter looks huge, red, crisscrossed with veins. Tiny waves travel through it. What is she thinking now? Strange how difficult it is for me to guess her when I’m sitting right next to her.

  Melanie was angry about me hiding from Nili that I was writing about her. In her lucid and balanced world there was no room for such miserable little acts of deception. Nor for my sense of relief at having managed again, with the help of a little disguise or a slight paring down of the facts, to protect my little piece of often-looted privacy. She could not understand why I keep up these concealments even now, why I need to. We never fought so much as during the months when I was writing about Nili. I never felt that she was so close to giving up on me and on my lousy personality. After every phone call to Israel I would hang up and curse myself, and let her know that she should chalk up another week of punishment for me on the list hanging on our fridge.

  For a minute I steal a quick immersion into her. Melanie studying at night, her large body curled up on the rocking chair we found on the street. Or cooking lamb curry for us at five in the morning, wearing headphones and dancing. Or standing in front of a photograph in an exhibition from Kosovo, crying loudly with her mouth open and her nose streaming, until you literally had to drag her away. Or her irresistible motion when she rubs one of her lotions onto her hands before a massage. And her murderous workout every morning, with exercises that doctors would forbid me even to watch, and her pagan lunar worships—if I even dare smile at them, I’m dead. And the Tottenham soccer games she dragged me to week after week—me—until I was forced to admit that there was something about them, I couldn’t say exactly what, maybe seeing Melanie roaring and going wild and cursing in Welsh. And the moments when you can’t tell which of our stomachs is grumbling. And my place in the world, my home, a preserve meant for only one protected animal, me, in the indentation of her shoulder. And not to be taken lightly are also the salt and pepper shakers we bought on Portobello Road, and our antique claw-foot bathtub, which was the real reason we rented the apartment. And our sixty-seven CDs, and the copper tray, and the two big orange mugs we bought on our first anniversary—

  When you look at it that way, I think to myself carefully, we really have our own little household.

  As time runs out, hour by hour, he thaws. When she reminds him of how he walked into her room the first time, all hunched over, he jumps up and corrects her, showing her exactly how he held his shoulders and how his chest caved in. Nili is amazed. “Do you walk like that on purpose?”

  He smiles proudly, as if he had been complimented on his acting. “I can walk however I want.” And he shows her his imitations of an old man, a drunk, an important man, the school rabbi. In two or three movements, with talent as sharp as a knife, he cuts the whole character out of the air. He is especially cruel to his father, with his bombastic way of standing, his lazy eye, and his roosterlike expression.

  Nili laughs wholeheartedly and senses again the discomfort he arouses in her sometimes; she would never think to fake a walk. “And how do I walk?”

  “You?” He smiles calmly, deliberating with himself, maybe even enjoying how it unsettles her. Because there is that part of him, she senses, that can’t resist the temptation to give someone a little pinch, and twist it around, supposedly in jest.

  “Yes, me.” She thrusts her chin out, prepared.

  He walks around her for a few seconds with his hands behind his back, and she already regrets asking, afraid that something will be broken, but also childishly eager to see herself in his eyes. He takes his time, immersed, pulling her out of himself, and slowly he changes. She doesn’t even understand exactly how and where, but she suddenly feels a chill, because he is different. His body rushes up from inside, fills up, rounds out. He lifts his head with a gesture she knows well and walks past her with suppleness, in her lioness stride. His toes are spread and they hug the floor, his face slowly takes on a complex and alarmingly precise expression, the face of the woman she is, with her smile, still innocent, offered generously, and with the permanent wrinkle of effort between her eyes, the wrinkle that is also the place where she shrinks inside, afraid that you can already see the rapid reduction, the hiding ruses, the ignorance, and here it is, revealed to all, everyone can see it, you can stop trying so hard.

  Even so, despite everything, something about herself pleases her; she is definitely still alive, still bold and undefeated, with that walk, that flexibility. I would hit on me, she thinks, I’d give myself a look on the street. Even the strained, slightly frightened spot between her eyes, it too may disappear in time, when things get better. She applauds him and thanks him for presenting her to herself like that, mercilessly, even generously. “You’re so talented,” she says with wonder. “You could be an actor.”

  He recoils. “No, no, I’m gonna have that restaurant. And anyway, actors are fags.”

  “Really? Says who?”

  “Everyone knows they are.” He thinks for a minute. “The supervisors at school. And my dad.”

  “Oh yeah? And who else is a fag, according to your dad?”

  “I dunno. Dancers, for sure.”

  “Who else?”

  He smiles; wearing his father’s character again, he spreads his feet and places his hands on his knees and leans forward as if crudely watching a soccer game. The slightly devious twinkle appears in his eyes. “Singers.”

  “And who else?” She also crouches down with her hands on her knees. “Who else?!”

  “Lefties.”

  “And?”

  “Hairdressers!”

  She roars, laughing, her perfect white teeth sparkling. “And who else?”

  “Waiters.”

  “And?”

  “Noncombat soldiers! Professors! Ashkenazis! And Hapoel Tel-Aviv! And everyone is a fag!”

  “So says your dad,” she sums up, standing straight.

  “So says my dad.”

  Silence.

  “And what do you say?”

  He slowly straightens up, flashing her a well-practiced, cartoonish smile. But it seems to her that in the depths of his eyes—perhaps just an illusion—she sees the flashing movement of a long, supple beast, slinking between dark trees, its lazy tail wrapped around a trunk for a minute, then pulled away and slowly disappearing.

  “But who’s looking out for us?” she asks on the second-to-last day, after interrogating him again so that she could be with him once more in that place of the air-and-birds game. “Who looks out for us poor human beings?”

  He thinks for a long time, brooding and deliberating, but Nili knows he already has the answer—he’s just deciding whether or not to let her in on it. “What looks out for people is …”

  “T
he earth!” She jumps up, shooting her hand into the air like a good student.

  He seems surprised. “Why the earth?”

  “I thought …” She is embarrassed. “The air looks after its birds, and the sea …”

  “With people”—he glances at her, inspecting, and she knows she’s about to enter into another of his mazes—“with people it’s something totally different. With people it’s talking.”

  “Talking?” She swallows. She’s not sure she understands him, but she definitely feels a warm, slender finger touching the depths of her being for an instant.

  He hesitantly presents his thoughts to her. “Every day, it’s like there’s one word—”

  “And if I say it—”

  “Then you win!” His black eyes glow in front of hers; for a second he is open to her, and she sees inside, into his darkness, and a tiny spot of gold flickers there.

  “But what? What do I win?”

  “I dunno.” He laughs softly, insolently, and walks around the room with his arms outstretched to the sides. “How should I know? Maybe you win the lottery? That kind of thing, perks.”

  Or fall in love, Nili sighs deep inside. “But tell me, who’s the person who knows what the winning word is on a given day?”

  She should have guessed his response: he smiles mysteriously and keeps flying around the room. She almost bursts out laughing at the ridiculous, arrogant importance he puts on. But he is also so exposed and transparent at this moment that her heart goes out to him. “Cheapskate! At least tell me what today’s word is.”

  “No.”

  “Then just tell me if during the days we’ve been here I’ve ever said the right word.”

  He remains mute, lifting his arms up high, delighting in the suppleness of his limbs. “I can’t tell you, it’s against the rules. But if you happen to say it today, then this evening I’ll be allowed to tell you that you said it.”