The Book of Intimate Grammar

by David Grossman

  Love made him gentle and happy. He suddenly remembered howhappy he could be. In the morning, before dressing, he would lie in bed with his hand under his head and stare up at the bright blue sky, feeling as though about to return from a long, long journey. And then he would jump out of bed to greet the new day. One evening, when he got a splinter in his finger and Mama was sterilizing a needle over the burner to take it out for him, he almost started crying, his throat felt choked, and Mama thought he was scared or something and started teasing him, though he was really moved to tears that she cared about him and loved him so. From one day to the next he dropped his secret experiments, forgot about them, blotted them out. Once when he found a couple of cigarette butts in his school-bag pocket, he blithely tossed them away. As though they happened to get there by chance. He dismissed the things of the past. Even that strange last summer and his winter hibernation. A new leaf. A new leaf. When they sent him out to buy something at the corner grocery, he volunteered to go all the way to the shopping center just to be able to pass her house and smell the flowering honeysuckle in the yard. There was a place in his stomach, under his heart, that would glow with pain whenever he longed for Yaeli, and at recess one time he agreed to join the kids for soccer, and showed them how a real champion plays, and reveled in the game, running and kicking, and even scored a goal, and everyone sighed: what a waste that someone like Arik Kleinfeld should hang up his shoes, maybe there’s some way we can convince him to start practicing with the team again for the eighth-grade cup at the end of the year. He left the field flushed and exhilarated, and ran to the water fountain, where out of the corner of his eye he saw she had broken away from a cluster of girls and was coming over to drink. His courage failed. He leaned over nervously and took a sip, and saw her wavy black mane so near he closed his eyes, and drank up vigorously, till he remembered the falling water level in the Sea of Galilee.

  They peeked at each other, and Aron blushed as he blurted out, “I saw you at Madame Nikova’s.” Her lip swelled, and her teeth sparkled like pearls for him. How could she be so calm. Calmer than he was. Quietly she said, “I want to be a dancer when I grow up.” “I used to play the guitar,” said Aron, all aflutter. “But you quit.” She didn’t ask. She knew. Maybe she was even chiding him for it. She knew everything about him. It was no use trying to improve his image in her eyes. I stand before you. Help me. You must have noticed what I’m goingthrough. It’s a good thing I don’t have to say it in words. But I am getting better now, it’s still a secret, Yaeli, but I feel I really am. Everything is opening up inside me. Thanks to you-know-who. “I’m going to take it up again,” Aron mustered the strength to answer. “I got a new guitar for my bar mitzvah and I’m going to start playing it soon.” Yaeli smiled at him. She believed him. The magic would work. Their hands lingering on the water fountain were twins, and Aron, who knew exactly what his hands looked like, didn’t pull them back, with all his strength he didn’t pull them back, so she would know everything about him, from her he would keep no secrets, so that a standard of absolute truth and sincerity would prevail from the start, even if it hurt. “My name is Aron,” he foolishly blurted, but it wasn’t foolish at all: he was offering his name to her, his name with everything in it. She smiled. Again her netherlip protruded, curiously, affectionately. The janitor rang the school bell.

  It was the same the day after. And the day after that. A fine, transparent web. The kids walked home amid the usual clamor, laughing, shouting, fooling around, with every word a silent clue, the cooing of a carrier pigeon: Did you hear what he said? Remind you of anything? What do they understand, these dimwits, these outsiders.

  And meanwhile, unconsciously, unintentionally, Gideon slows his pace from time to time, hanging back till Aron catches up with him, and then, what do you know, he wants to talk, it’s been months since he and Aron talked so familiarly, in front of everyone yet, and Zacky Smitanka stares at them dumbfounded, shrinking and lowering as if the spark of life has gone out of him, his little black eyes drying up in the desert of his face, and then he punches gangly Michael Carny on the back of the neck. What’s happening, Giraffe, how’s the weather up there? And a minor skirmish follows which Gideon doesn’t even notice; he’s talking to Aron, peering into his face, inspecting it so closely Aron has to practice some complicated maneuvers to win a glance from her eyes, but subterfuge is also a spice, she’s ready, at last, and Aron feels rewarded for having kept himself pure throughout the difficult times; he never once sullied himself, in word or deed, was never so much as tempted to rub down there; he knew how he would feel if he did it without a real urge, and even in the days of the maddening fear, his heart had told him how much he would hate himself if he ever gave in like certain others who sell themselves with lust and shame and receivetheir sticky voucher in return; but not him; he never succumbed. Never cheapened himself. And now therefore his joy is resurrected, the dead letter of his childhood lost so long in the mazes of bureaucracy had at last been delivered. Careful now! A chill was sneaking up; a beady eye, a cruel Cyclopean eye slowly opened inside his head, searching for him: What’s all this happiness? Who’s that there being so happy? And right away—like a spy destroying his documents before the authorities catch him—he banishes Yaeli from his thoughts. And walks ahead with a swagger. And then it flickers tentatively deep in his stomach, exactly where it burned when he used to think about his problem; yes, that’s where his joy is coming from. Hush, that’s classified, he must never let anything imperil his love; he will fight this time. Indeed he will.

  “Hey, what if”—he says at the top of his voice to Gideon, who is trying to catch up with him. (What if what? He only said that to distract them)—“what if there were these people, see, people you could rent your pimples to if you wanted?” Gideon laughs. “You and your ideas,” and turns to Michael Carny, who has approached for protection against Zacky’s punches, saying, “Kleinfeld and his zany ideas!” The first kind word in a long long time. “No, seriously, Gideon, what if there were these people who could take over your pimples and pains, say, even for a week. So if you had a school trip to go on and you broke an arm, all you’d have to do is deposit it with this person for a week …” Gideon laughs again and pats Aron on the shoulder. Aron, deeply thrilled, peeks over and knows she’s heard, and, best of all, that she’s witnessed Gideon’s hand touching his shoulder, the electric circuit closing between their bodies, without a hiss; it was like, say, in physics, with object A and object B, any two objects, only one of them was Aron’s body, and it was so bright, so accessible and unreserved, that another boy, a certain object A, could simply reach out and touch him, pat him on the shoulder. And overwhelmed with joy, he leaps up waving his hands in the air, doing his impersonation of Rodensky, the comedian, and Gideon, who has been watching attentively, responds with his own rather lame imitation.

  And now that astute and sober-minded Gideon had given the go-ahead, they started romping, flying like a storm through the paths of Memorial Park, frightening a group of kindergarten children, shaking down the fruit from a carob tree, and Hanan Schweiky and Meirky Blutreich flanked the war monument with an empty bottle in one handand a rolled-up sweater for a soccer ball, and everyone guessed what they were spoofing and shouted the movie advertisement in unison, “We call it near-beer!” And Yaeli watched this hullabaloo with a placid expression, a smile tapering at the corners of her mouth, as though she guessed whose anonymous presence had launched this merry ship. But don’t think about it, not in your head, under the gaze of the evil eye. Still the firecracker whistled, flashed red in his belly, scorched beneath his heart, where it might yet spontaneously, effortlessly, burst into being amid many little pinpricks of pleasure, exactly where it burns when he eats an omelette fried in oil; forget the details, look over there, see Hanan Schweiky jumping up on the bench to do that routine from Comedy Night,puffing his cheeks and sticking out his stomach, and Aron and the others join in, oh, please let his voice crack now, please, God, it’s coming,
it’s coming—and Gideon casts an anxious glance at him, flowing back to his friend over bubbly streams, detecting the gleam of a tiny vein in the heart of a derelict gold mine.

  27

  Gideon and Aron are friends again. He repeats this in various ways to himself: Hey! They’re friends again! Or (coolly offhanded): You know those two guys, What’s-his-name and What’s-his-name, who used to hang around together and then sort of didn’t, well, now they do again. He laughs happily to himself. Open-armed they ran toward each other like actors in a movie, like children in a drawing with O-shaped mouths, as if they hadn’t seen each other every day for the past two years, as if there hadn’t been an understanding between them throughout the separation that once or twice a week Aron would hand Gideon a yellow pill which he swallowed without water, oh, if only he hadn’t, but now they met like travelers returning from afar, unpacking their suitcases together: naturally Gideon did most of the talking, because Aron didn’t have much to say. But Gideon didn’t mind that: he told Aron about being a leader in the youth movement, and about his brother Manny’s maneuvers in the Fouga Magister squadron, and about Manny’s new girlfriend and about the Lambretta Zacky put together out of junk; Aron merely nodded his head and listened intently, and again Gideon told about Manny’s girlfriend, who was from Kibbutz Bet Zera and who slept overnight in his and Manny’s room, and he told him about the air force youth battalion, and that after Independence Day they were going to learn how to shoot a Czech rifle, and about how Manny kicked him out of the room when his girlfriend slept over, and Aron listened and kept silent. Together they rambled through the streetsof the workers’ neighborhood, and Gideon told him casually that a boy and girl in his youth group had started going together, and he intended to have a serious talk with the kids about the social implications of pairing up at their age. Aron let nothing show on his face. Then Gideon launched the subject of Anat Fish, who did in the end go with her boyfriend Mickey Zik to the beach in Eilat, and shared a sleeping bag with him; this wasn’t Gideon’s usual way of speaking, he seemed to be winding himself around Aron and pleading for help, but Aron couldn’t figure out why. He said nothing. Gideon too fell silent and yawned widely. For a moment their new thread of intimacy seemed to slacken, everything turned gray and saggy, but it was enough for Aron to think Yaeli, to pull in his stomach so that it tickled in that new place under the heart, hush, mum’s the word; but now Gideon was warming up to him again, displaying exuberant signs of closeness, gabbing about some girl from another class who dropped out of the youth movement and joined the social set, and Aron thought, After all this time, Gideon doesn’t shave yet either, still has last year’s peach fuzz over his lip, though his eyebrows are thicker now, soon they’ll grow together over the bridge of his nose and then Gideon will look more serious than ever, but there’s plenty of time till then, okay, his voice has changed, but that’s not new, we’re used to that, when Aron would phone him —in the days of their estrangement—and hang up right away, he wasn’t always sure who’d answered, Gideon or his father, Gideon had taught himself to speak in an indifferent, expressionless voice without a smile or question mark at the end of a question, and then there was the matter of height; he was almost a whole head taller than Aron by now, though maybe he would stay there for a while, and if you looked at it objectively, he really wasn’t that far ahead of him, he just had a little more confidence, that’s all, a few more bones in his face, and he walked like a cowboy, spread-legged, and if God forbid the pills worked, but they wouldn’t, would they, his heart contracted, they were way past the prescription date, so they couldn’t affect him one way or another, and there was another explanation, just a hunch really, which Aron whispered to himself in a language he didn’t know: maybe, deep down inside, Gideon was waiting for him to catch up. And with a wild burst of enthusiasm Aron suggested that they go to Mandelbaum Gate tomorrow and watch the police convoy come down from the Israeli enclave on Mt. Scopus after a two-week shift; he always liked to read the newspaperdescription of the tension in the air as they crossed through Jordanian territory, peering through the holes in their armored vehicles till they were safely over the border, but Gideon didn’t seem to be listening and started in again about Zacky Smitanka, who made himself, yeah, we know, a Lambretta, how could Aron forget, they were out there every Friday, Zacky and his new buddies, hoody types like him with Lam-brettas and motorbikes and leather jackets, driving the neighbors crazy with the noise, and Papa comes down in his undershirt and says, Hey, gang, what’you doing, busting our heads with all that noise, but they know him and they’re not afraid, they crowd around him like puppy dogs, ask him for advice, and he teaches one guy how to tune the carburetor and change the plugs, and eventually he hops on for a trial spin, and the biker rides behind him, hugging his waist, and Papa tears down the street like a hooligan, roaring with laughter, and don’t forget that Zacky let Papa take the first run on his illegitimate Lambretta; Aron was peeking from behind the curtain just then and saw the look on Zacky’s face, the way Papa smiled at him and the way Zacky smiled at Papa, like a real moron who finally manages to bring home a good report card; and Gideon said that, by the way, he heard it from reliable sources, Zacky himself, what Zacky did with What’s-her-name, that cow, Dorit Alush, something called “between the legs.” He blurted the news out quickly, looking away, desperate for Aron to say something quickly and dispel the foul sound of those words, the kind of words that had never passed between them, and Aron didn’t respond; so that’s what Gideon was getting at, that’s why he was beating around the bush, he had broken their tacit agreement again, he was a traitor, always stretching the delicate membranes of their friendship to the limit, he was getting to be so darn tough, growing from the inside and breaking out, and Gideon sensed that Aron was withdrawing from him and tried to repair the damage by saying that in his opinion kids their age weren’t mature enough for real love, and that he’d vowed not to fall in love until after flight school, and then he would marry his first girlfriend, not someone easy like Manny’s girlfriend, uh-uh; Gideon turned to Aron, his face aglow with inner conviction, his sincere and honest face again, and he swore to him that he would never debase the most sacred thing of all; friendship with a girl—sure, definitely, but nothing dirty or nasty, and Aron nodded with all his might, to signal Gideon that he was on the right track, and Gideon kept watching Aron’s expressions,which guided him, and then said slowly, as though deciphering a secret bulletin from deep inside Aron, that he wished he could persuade the kids in the movement to obey the tenth commandment of socialist youth, sexual purity, and Aron almost shouted, Me too, I swear it, and his eyes were moist and shiny as Gideon looked into them and remarked much to his own surprise, You notice that kid, What’s-her-name, Yaeli, she’s really starting to grow up, isn’t she?

  Aron turned aside and looked into the distance, feeling a little like someone trying to keep the pupil in the next seat from copying, but since this was Gideon, his good friend Gideon, he forced himself to turn back and asked weakly if Gideon really thought so, and Gideon said, Absolutely, haven’t you noticed, there’s something about her, she keeps to herself a lot but she has this quiet smile, too bad she’s a bourgeois Scout instead of a socialist. Well anyway, she’s still young enough to win over to the movement. Aron could no longer contain his myriad emotions and fervently confessed his love for her to Gideon, telling him about their secret glances and the conversation full of hidden meanings by the drinking fountain. He described the nights he lay awake and saw her dance before his eyes. He told him about the scraps of paper with her name written on them that he stuck in his sandwich at school and swallowed, sitting right next to her during recess, and how he went to the nurse’s room with some excuse and stole Yaeli’s dental records, and then hid them, and look, these are flowers from the honeysuckle bushes in front of her house, I keep them in my handkerchief.

  Gideon slapped his knee with a loud laugh, and Aron too began to laugh uproariously, listening to himself in pure am
azement, and they ran together, breathless, on fire, all the way to their rock in the valley, where they sat down with tears of laughter in their eyes; what a laugh that was, not the kind he could squeeze from the glands in his armpits and squirt out through his mouth in a dirty artificial spray, and Gideon was all eyes, his pupils darting around in search of the fine gold vein. Go on, tell, describe some more, and Aron, drunk and princely, prodigal as the forces of nature, told everything: about her face when she danced for him, the way she suddenly appeared in her leotard, extending’her slender leg in the air, noble and free, the way, the way, the way; as he spoke he felt the agreeable prickling sensation in the new place, her place, somewhere to the south, as they say in the army, the root of thesecret shining over the point he had established there, beware! The cruel eye is watching, the wind of ruin blows hither, freezing everything, and down below, a round new world is floating inside him, an adorable bubble, with a tiny dancer tapping her toes inside it; wait, she isn’t really in there yet, she keeps disappearing every minute, maybe he’d been too explicit in his thoughts, maybe the suspicious eye had stirred beneath its marbly lid, tracing every spark of light, tracking radarlike after the waves of heat and joy; this is nonsense, gobbledygook, so he told Gideon only what he was allowed to tell him, and used his mouth to etch the lips pouting over her chin, to whittle the arching muscle of her calf, the sweet little space between her big toe and the others … Gideon’s eyes grew round as he watched Aron’s lips dripping the first words of love he had ever spoken aloud, words imbued with what they described, and Gideon too could taste her skin, her rounded cheeks, the sweetness of her childish lips, the lower one swollen and smiling. Sometimes Gideon seemed to be trying to control himself, to protect himself, to draw comparisons, whether out of pettiness or concern, between Aron’s description and the girl he knew, but gradually the pendulum stopped swinging, he forgot the little girl and her slender legs, absented himself completely from the green eyes in which only Aron was reflected now, a tiny figure paddling relentlessly, and Aron too could not help marveling how the words coming out of him not only showed Yaeli as she was but beautified and refined her, transforming her into a vision of who she would shortly become, eliminating a flaw or two, the proud smile as a possible foreshadowing of conceit, a certain note of resolve and worrisome striving in her nose, and even her wonderful lower lip, which at times, from a certain angle, appeared too full, too earthy for a girl like her; these he mercifully concealed from Gideon, erased them with a wag of his magic tongue, and now he was worthy to love her unto death in the rosy future to which they would jointly aspire.