They shake hands ceremoniously, and as they look into each other’s eyes, his coal-black wades into her green. But he never told her before he left. Maybe he forgot, or maybe she really didn’t say the word.
She smiles. “All that, all that whole last bit, I don’t know where you came up with it. It’s a thousand percent unlike him.”
That’s how she says it, and I close my eyes, not in pain, but as if I can’t go on seeing from the outside. And I don’t want to either, because I can almost feel him in me. It finally happens, out of the blue. And it was her negation, her absolute certainty of what was unlike him, that did it. For a moment I feel him hovering in front of me and existing independently and almost without any connection to me. And so for the first time he is suddenly with us in the room, more alive than he had been in all the words I had written, all the thoughts I had imagined and tortured myself with. Out of negation comes affirmation, just because she is so sure of what is a thousand percent unlike him. Eighteen years later, she still knows him with such confidence.
It used to be that just that thought could have shattered me, but now I stand outside my pain for an entire minute, not even caring whether the other things I had imagined weren’t like him either, and I even manage not to ask her about the rest of it, about the Chinese restaurant, for example. I think that’s unlike him too—so what? I just sit and delight in how much it doesn’t hurt, and I am even capable of thinking that everything I’d written and imagined isn’t like him. That he was an utterly different kid. A thousand percent. That he was a macho kid, loud and boisterous and wild, for example, or dumb and dense, or even sly and conniving—a bastard who abused her the way they all did. An array of princes and jokers in his image fans out like a pack of cards, and with wonderful peace of mind I close the circle segment and choose one card with my eyes shut, and that is him, my kid—
I dare to breathe in the place that even the writing hadn’t opened up for me. It had been sewn up with iron wires, and he—the boy, the kid—is in front of me, alive and sharp, and then, unhurriedly, he changes his shape as in a dream, and now he is a young bird at night, emerging from the darkness into the light of my window, curiously drawn to the light, and we both look at each other through the glass and see each other, and the bird gets scared first and disappears again, and I am left with my longings, but it doesn’t kill me now, I don’t know why not, it just doesn’t kill me anymore.
“So should I take out that whole bit?” I ask in a voice struggling to be dry, and what comes out is a squeaky, choking sound, and I am also stung by a different kind of disappointment. “To tell you the truth, I also felt that it wasn’t really him, the whole thing with the winning word, but I really don’t want to give up that bit.”
“God forbid, don’t take anything out.”
We both say nothing as we quiet ourselves. I’ve started getting used to these silences, and I even like them. They’re so different from the noise we used to share. I also notice how quiet it is here. It’s strange that you can’t hear any sounds from the street. Exemplary Walter has done a wonderful job of sealing off his house. No world.
I moisten her lips. My eyes are very close to hers. I ask softly how she feels. She makes an effort to smile. “I wouldn’t recommend it.” She asks if it’s hard for me. I say it isn’t. It is. That it’s really mixed up. I still can’t tell her how it moves me, to be exposed to her like this, as if without my knowledge, and also somehow, without being able to prevent it, with a kind of self-anesthetization or self-abandon, to feel her finally reading my story.
“Listen, you don’t happen to have any cigarettes in the house, do you?” And before I can apologize for the stupid question, she digs her hand beneath the mattress with a seductive smile and pulls out a crushed pack of Marlboros, not even Lights.
“Just open the window afterward. He mustn’t find out or he’ll kill me.” She chokes down a giggle. “He might drown me in tears.”
I light one for myself and one for her, and take a long drag. I haven’t smoked for three months. It was part of the rehab I was asked to do, required to do, and I was hoping it was behind me, that I’d overcome it, but then suddenly this sucking urge came over me. I inhale and look at her. I watch the way her eyes shrink as she takes a drag, the sluttish pleasure of a huntress of delights lighting up in her. Her whole vitality is now contained in the cracked lips that pull on the reddish glow, and for an instant it’s as if a curtain has been opened and I can see her as she is, as she should be, as would make her happy, probably, were she not trapped in my little dictatorship.
As always when we reach this juncture, I am struck by the thought that maybe I never really understood what I had been given in the blind lottery of life—what I had won. And again, as usual during these attacks of mental weakness, it’s a short road from here to wallowing in the swamp of if-only: How did it happen that I am the only person on the face of this earth whom she is somehow incapable of completely reading? What rare misfortune placed me in her blind spot? And yet I know that even that is not completely accurate, because that is exactly how I wanted it, that’s what I fought for, and was slaughtered for. To strengthen my failing soul, I remind myself of all her transgressions, and remember with horror that I have a fairly long list of them further on, a choice little minefield. I sigh and say, “Okay, well, don’t tell Melanie either.”
“She doesn’t let you smoke?”
“Are you kidding!”
We both inhale with a strange delight, somewhat hysterically, filling the room with clouds of smoke and choking with laughter.
“When you were born, you were a little pint-size thing, and you were in the preemie ward for three weeks. I wouldn’t let you stay there alone.”
“Really?” Instinctively I straighten up in my chair, already hearing the impatient dryness in my voice. You’re such a shit, I think to myself, why are you fighting her? Give her the pleasure now, gift-wrapped.
“And I plunked myself down there for three weeks, and the nurses yelled and the doctors threatened, but it didn’t do any good, I got under their feet in there for twenty-one days, sunrise, sunset, drove them all mad. Well, that father of yours was always very busy, and I wouldn’t have trusted him with something like that anyway.”
The shadow of a smile filled with satisfaction, almost craftiness, passes over her face. That’s how I should have taken a picture of her, assimilating the smoke and passing it through her corroded windpipe and bronchi, happily scorching them.
“At night I would sit among the incubators with the preemies and talk to you, and sing to you, and tell you about Siddhartha and Vishnu and Parvati. I told you all the stories I knew. They thought I was crazy. They weren’t the only ones.” She titters. “They said to me, What can a little thing like that understand? There was this one nurse there, Kurdish, I think, but a real sharp woman, and she said to me back then, Your girl will grow up, she’ll be a writer.”
“Oh, so now we know.”
“I even gave you massages in there.”
“Massages? But how … it’s supposed to be sterile!”
“Well, you turned out all right, didn’t you?” Her thick fingers stretch and move around of their own accord. “I would put my hands through the rubber circles on the sides. You were like a little chick, and you were a bit translucent too, I could see all your veins.”
A warm fingerling darts through my stomach. Me? Translucent?
As he arches his back, she inquires again, matter-of-factly, whether his father asks about what he’s doing here all these days. He laughs. “My dad can ask all he wants.” She tries carefully to understand the nature of their relationship, tries to paint his world, to guess what might nourish him when he goes back there.
“What do you do, say, when you go home for Shabbat? Are there any friends that you—”
“No friends.” He cuts her off and drops his pose, and Nili feels his heart chakra constricting in him with a quick spasm.
“Then what?”
“And you don’t talk?”
“What do you want us to talk about?”
“Don’t you have any—I don’t know—topics of conversation?”
He stares at her intently. He has a kind of look, sometimes, as if he’s peering at her over a thin glasses frame. You saw him, didn’t you, his look says. Yes, she answers, I most definitely did. She tries delicately to explain to him, without explicitly using any cauliflower, that even our parents are somehow chosen by us. Meaning, we choose parents who will help us grow, gain strength, sometimes even overcome what they do to us.
“And do we choose our kids too?” he asks with bitter mockery.
She is confused until she realizes he means only his father and himself. She slowly absorbs his pain. “Yes, kids too.” Then she assails him again: “But he loves you, you can’t understand that yet, but when you have children …” She inflames herself, recalling his father’s surprising tears of shame when he came to give her his proposal. Only now does she recognize the familiar combination, the mixture of immeasurable compassion and cruelty that only parenthood, it seems, can produce. “And just so you know, he may not know exactly how to say it to you, but I’m sure you are the most precious person in the world to him.”
“He hates me, he hates me!” His voice rises and turns into a wail. “If he could make it so I would die, so I wouldn’t ever shame him … You know what he calls me?”
She says nothing, remaining alert and tense. For a moment she can almost read his father’s derogatory name for him in his eyes, but the word is quickly erased before she can get it—again that tail, the speckled one, wrapped around a tree, lingering, then disappearing.
He gets up, walks around, and lifts his T-shirt up. For the first time since they met she sees his bronzed, velvety back, ripped up and down and across with long stripes of strange scabbed pinkness. “He only stopped when I got taller than him.”
As if he had been listening in on their conversation, his father comes to see her after their class. He slips inside the room. Her whole body is on edge. He stands with his rooster chest puffed up, a smile smeared on his indecent lips. When he sees her face he falters; he thought she’d be happy, that she’d tell him something about the kid. Still, he makes an attempt. “What’s up? Since he’s with you we don’t see anything of him. He’s a real handful, my son, hey?”
Her eyes dry up the words in his throat. “Get the hell out of here.”
Absorbing the punch, he utters, “What the—?”
“You heard me. Go.”
“But what’s the matter with you? Did I say something wrong again?”
“Leave, or I’ll …” She starts moving toward him.
He moves to the door in alarm.
Nili stumbles back in and slams the door. She leans over the little sink, her whole body shaking. I could have murdered him.
Her hands were always drawn to touch. If anyone’s body made some gesture or expression of pain, her hand would instantly be drawn to massage, to melt. With everyone: strangers, acquaintances, a girl from my class who brought me my homework when I was sick, a lonely neighbor, a hairless dog racked with scoliosis who adopted her and became addicted to her massages. Her hands were a natural extension of her gaze, her talk. Once, she did it with my school principal: in the middle of a discipline talk in her office, the two of us were sitting there innocently when suddenly the Tyrant put her hand on the back of her neck and moved it around, sighing. Nili was behind her in a flash, at the ready with her ten fingers, while I measured the distance to the window and a redemptive leap. But then there was a strange struggle among the principal’s facial features, and an unbelievable fraction of a minute during which Nili, alone, almost beat the entire system.
Time is running out; they both feel it and think of it, and he, almost eagerly, tells her more and more: the studies at the boarding school, the wild boys who live there with him, who’ve already been kicked out of every other institution, the friend he once had there—
“A friend?” She perks up. “Wait, you didn’t tell me about him, who is he?”
But he ignores her—and the Arab who converted to Judaism and is now his roommate. And running away nights to go and play pool, and the punishments they endure, and the supervisors’ beatings, each one with his own method, and the obligatory fasting days, the spiritual reinforcements, and the card games in the basement, where the loser has to give someone a blow job.
“And you take part in this?”
“Not in that.” He looks straight at her, a look that is too horizontal and congealed.
She becomes alarmed. “But in what?”
He wants to tell her, but he resists it too. She can feel the pressure mounting at once between the joints of his fingers, in his shoulder muscles. “There’s an old guy,” he finally says, looking at her fearfully, “a little old midget of a guy, Iraqi, he’s maybe fifty, lives near the market, and he pays.”
“For what?”
He gets up and walks around the room quickly. Then he stops and stands in warrior pose, with his arms reaching out to the sides. “All kinds of stuff. He gives me clothes to wear, you know, girls’ clothes. He doesn’t touch. Just watches and jerks off.”
“And you?”
“Nothing. I what?”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Are you kidding? It’s for money. Twenty shekels every time.”
But she already knows the changing tones of his voice, and she senses the skin of her scalp stretching; her heart feels crushed. He shifts his weight to the other foot. His eyes are focused on his fingertips. She glances at him. Somehow it doesn’t surprise her. She thinks about herself at his age. What did her father know of what she was going through? And what does she know now about what’s really happening to Rotem? (If only, oh God, if only Rotem is hiding a stormy love story from me, if only the whole world knows about it but me. Not even stormy, as long as there is some love there, some affection, friendship, one single drop flowing beneath the layers of flesh, behind her antibiotic look.)
But she won’t let him off this time, it’s too late, and she goes back and insists: “And that friend you mentioned?”
“It’s nothing.” There is already a slight darkening in the shadow behind his eyes.
“A friend is good,” she insists, and knows that he can sense every time her voice tries to conceal an ambiguity. “It’s good to have someone to pour your heart out to, isn’t it?”
“I’m hitting the showers,” he says, and leaves her feeling as if her fingertips had touched a glowing ember.
Two hours later, they relax at the end of an exhausting class in which she seemed to be trying to polish and peel him. He is tired out and glistening with sweat, and she sits beside him and tries to direct herself to what he needs most (remembering that as a girl she was always surprised at how the medicine she swallowed knew exactly how to reach the hurting part of her body). If only he would tell her explicitly what he needs. But he is taking, she thinks, he is definitely taking something. It’s not clear what, but something is being taken from her, her exhaustion today tells her that, a little like when she gets her period. And she thinks that since yesterday, since he mimicked her, he has really started consuming something from her, but in his own way, he is careful to keep his content a secret, incredibly trained, trained to conceal. Sometimes when she’s with him, she feels like a big city, abundant and serene and innocent, and he is a stealthy guerrilla, emaciated and glowing, who slips into her every so often from his forest, grabs something he needs to survive, then disappears. And maybe it has nothing to do with her yogi qualities, this thing that he is taking? She opens her eyes in wonder: What, then?
“Is there perhaps something you’d like to te
ll your body?” The question pops out of her mouth and surprises her, and he hardens a little. “You can say it now,” she suggests, recalling how he had almost cried when she talked with him about his body two days earlier. Still, she feels something has opened up in him since then. “Say it silently or out loud. Tell it what the problem is.” She sees a slight furrowing of his brow, and quiet. Then he lets out a very small smile.
She holds back, and the class goes on, but before he goes off for lunch, he stops at the door. “Know what I said before to … my body?”
“What?”
He laughs, kicking at the tiles. “Nothing really, I just asked if it was happy with me.” She doesn’t understand, but he eagerly explains: “I always thought of it the other way around, like whether I’m happy with it. But suddenly, when you said to ask it, I felt sorry for it, you know, that it had to be mine, like …”
She smiles with him and still doesn’t comprehend. Such a beautiful body, refreshed, etched, and it responds to him with suppleness and harmony. For a minute—without even feeling it—she stretches out her healthy, gloriously beautiful body like a person taking a deep breath after leaving a sick friend’s house.
Later, when she’s alone again, she throws herself into her weekly room cleaning—her little display of freedom against the manager and the cleaning staff. Something disturbs her: the permanent, insulting thought that she is, in some way, not complicated enough. Apparently not messed up enough either. There are clubs, she knows, that wouldn’t let her in; the people she feels closest to and loves most have whole areas she is forbidden to enter, and all her seeing skills aren’t enough to even guess at what goes on in their twisted, sophisticated crevices. She will never know what they really think of her there, and she has always had a gnawing suspicion that those are the places where she is being betrayed. Now that she has come this far, her thoughts already know their own way home: maybe one day, years from now, the girls will finally appreciate her true value. They’ll grow up—
Lovers and Strangers Page 25