David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

“That’s beside the point.” She waved her hand impatiently. “The point is, you’ll be staying here, and we don’t want you getting any silly ideas.”

“I’ll be staying here? And you … Where?”

“Weren’t you listening? What’s the matter with you? The Scouts and the youth movements are going together.”

He turned his leaden head from Gideon to Yaeli and back again. Something inside him creaked and groaned. Slowly, like a clumsy submarine, his disaster surfaced from the darkest depths.

“We just wanted you to know that nothing’s changed as far as we’re concerned,” said Yaeli, sounding relieved, and she added with a little giggle, “Would you believe we’ve been debating how to tell you for a week already?”

Aron stumbled backward till his foot hit a low stone wall, which he found himself sitting on. What an idiot he’d been to feel happy. Would he never learn.

“The first night we’re sleeping at the Kadouri Agricultural High School near Mt. Tabor, and from there they’ll send us to different kibbutzim.” Yaeli chattered and her eyes shone. “Listen, Arik,” Gideon interrupted anxiously, more familiar than she with Aron’s silences. “The three of us have to trust each other, that’s what counts, we can’t let anything spoil that for us, that’s more important to me than anything, Ari.”

Ah, he’s bribing me with “Ari.” What his mother said had come to pass. Something inside him, like a dim ray of light, sank down down down, to the bottomless depths of eternity. They’ve shot a bird, hethought. It’s over, he thought, as the cold, shadowy grid of his mother’s prophecies hovered over him and clanked down upon his dream. Yes, she was right. She won. And what was worse, he wasn’t the only one she had vanquished.

“Listen, Ari.” The tips of her little shoes were facing his. She had never called him Ari before. “If it means that much to you, I’ll stay behind. We’ve already discussed it. Gideon has to go because he’s a youth group leader, but I could stay if you insist.”

He shook his head, listening to the intimation of closeness in these plans they had made without him. “No no,” he said, mustering his strength. “You go, both of you.” He really was that old man on his deathbed, giving his blessings to a guilty young couple.

“But you have to promise us not to torment yourself, okay? We do know how you get.”

He smiled crookedly. Now he could stretch his neck over the lump that was choking him. “Go, go. Why are you making such a fuss about it? How long is it for, anyway?”

“No time at all,” said Gideon hastily. “About eight days. Maybe a bit more. From just before Independence Day till a few days after.” “But what about school?” he asked in despair. “Aa-bullshit, they’re letting us off because it’s work. Hey, don’t get the wrong impression, we’re really going to hustle there.”

A minute ago she said one week, thought Aron, and they’ll be staying at the Kadouri School, a place Yaeli’s mother told them about, having parties and campfires and stealing chickens and showering together in the middle of the night.

“Go, go.”

“What did I tell you!” cried Yaeli, clapping Gideon on the shoulder, her underlip swollen, inflamed. “I told you we were making a mountain out of a molehill!”

His fingers groped between the stones of the wall. Come on, snake, bite me. Eight days. If Gideon betrays me, he thought in silence, and gulped, “No sweat.” His tongue went hack to the empty hole where the tooth had been. His heart sank. At school they read a story once about a woman who slaved her youth away to pay for a string of pearls she’d lost, and in the end she found out the pearls were fake. Suddenly he felt her hand fluttering in his. Gideon turned away. Aron squeezed it, imploring. But she freed herself from his grip.

She’s playing with the two of you, she can twist you around her little finger, thought Aron, and loved her more than ever.

“Why are we so glum all of a sudden?” wheedled Yaeli. “Look at you, your faces are as flat as a pita! And we still have a few days left before the trip.”

“The work camp,” Gideon and Aron corrected her in a whisper, each one to himself.

They said goodbye to Yaeli and turned the corner together. Silence surrounded them, and neither spoke. Gideon ran back for a sprig of honeysuckle; he practically tore off half the bush, crushed it and spread it over his face, and suddenly started talking, lecturing non-stop in a forced-sounding voice as he fanned himself with the leafy branch. And then he stopped, let the fan drop, and in a different voice, a friendly voice, said he hoped Aron would let him have a couple of pills for his eyes, to take with him to work camp, and Aron thought, What’s the point? For some time he had suspected that Gideon threw the pills away, that he only pretended to swallow them, probably a good thing, too, but he knew he’d let him have some anyway, did he have a choice? Then Gideon started again, saying that in his opinion a work camp joining Scouts and youth movements was the perfect implementation of the Zionist ideal. Aron chewed the sticky words over in his mind but still couldn’t figure out what they meant. He was trying to convince himself that he could trust Gideon. That Gideon was perfectly trustworthy. That his mother would turn out to be wrong. That the world would turn out to be wrong. And that thanks to this switch in the way of things, an evil spell would be lifted from the world and Aron too would be redeemed. You idiot, you jerk, he jeered at himself; they were laughing at the fool, yet in the very same breath he was angry with himself because even if he were to lose everything else, he would still have something no one could take away from him, the love he’d known over the past few weeks, a love which they could never corrupt. Oh? Couldn’t they just? You child. You child. He strode ahead on iron legs, barely noticing that Gideon had left him, slowing down steadily as he approached the entrance. Surely she was home, he thought dejectedly, waiting with his lunch. And she would take one look at him and know. He quietly walked out to the asphalt strip behind the building and sat down on the crooked stairs, covered with dry leaves. He slapped his knee and watched it kick. His lips moved quickly as he talked to himself,made plans: too much time wasted lately. Now he had to start everything all over again. More daring would be required. More ruthlessness toward himself. Where are your ideas; but how would he make it from one minute to the next in the weeks to come? They laughed at you. Enough. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. He pursed his lips and made a mental note to look for cigarette butts. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. That gesture was from Papa. At least something was. Again he slapped his knee. It jerked. It’s an involuntary movement, it’s a reflex. It isn’t the brain that wants it but Aron who makes it happen with his hand, like switching on a machine. And he went on rhythmically slapping his kneecap. It jerked. And jerked again. No doubt his brain was ready to pop because it couldn’t stop it from jerking. And he slapped again. Jeering aloud. With all the contempt in him. So it would hear and know Aron was mocking it. A weak man’s weapon, but at least it was something. A little revenge for the suffering it had caused. A few more slaps. Precise and baneful. And now he felt the bubble filling with life down there, and the warm blood circulating through the membrane that covered it; and a rustling inside, his secret headquarters preparing for battle. Mutiny, mutiny, groaned Aron, slapping his knee and forcing himself to watch with open eyes: there was nothing even faintly humorous anymore about the knee jerking up and down. Again he slapped it, and a faint, far-off nausea threatened, but nausea was his inner weapon, which he used to scare it away, to keep it from sticking its nose in where it didn’t belong or from accidentally divulging secrets, and now he slapped some more, moving his hand up and down like a conductor, like a general, like a little tin soldier in the service of love. Over and over the knee jerked in his trouser leg, bouncing, twisting, he never knew it could bounce like that, bouncy bouncy, bouncing backward, in time, in space, into the mist, with a slap, his kneecap jerking, unrelenting, because when it bounced like a toy, with that soldierly woodenness, it began to spill the secret, to admit what it was in reality, and he slapped it again and again and again; oh, please don’t let the nausea break him down now, because it’s sickening to watch it jerk, and his hand moved up and down and jerked his knee while the aborted fetuses of misbegotten notions ran through his mind, as though his leg were madly spinning a reel of film, and through the blue of daylight he envisioned hazy shadows you could guess about like clouds; maybe in the shadows there were chained black men stumblingover each other while a villain whipped them like in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and then he saw a man in rags lying prostrate in the street of a distant land, and the indifferent parade marches past and then halts, exclaiming in unison, saluting in unison, and marching on, and when they have passed he suddenly spies a distant field where overgrown men and women, giants maybe, or maybe they were just healthy peasants, were celebrating something, having a wonderful time; again he slapped and then again, maybe they were torturing someone, but who? — a tiny unknown animal, without a skin, and their mouths brim with brutal laughter, and their ears grow longer and longer with the pleasure that could find nowhere else to lodge, and he sobbed in silence: Stop, stop, stop it right now, but he didn’t stop, no, he wanted more, more, but his hand hurt, and his knee was turning red, and he slapped it again, alert with fear: Stop it, stop it, but all the while, all through the disaster there had been a comforting aura about him, a corridor of hope, the secret wish of a tunnel from which he would emerge a new and different being, and maybe somewhere, amid the darkness and confusion, a miracle would occur, an invisible hand would reach out and switch the suitcase, and wave a wand and change the secret orders, so that when Aron reached the light he would meet the new him out there; yes yes, Aron slapped his knee as hard as he could. Maybe it’s all a dream, maybe he was only in prison for one night, for one tunnel length, and then maybe he would be like a blind man when the great surgeon takes off the bandages and hands him a mirror and says, Look, here is your face, a human face like everyone else’s; that’s how he always wished it would happen, that’s what kept him sane; and now he whacked and thwacked, and lucidly, with helpless grief, began to realize that this was just the prelude, that night for him was day, and that there would be no vindication for his abhorrent body, it would emerge from the tunnel with Aron, as himself, not the exuberant, solid piece of life he used to be, and inwardly he still hoped to fuse again, to unite unto death, in a oneness of flesh; and still he continued smacking his knee, thirty times, forty times, till it was raw, a slab of meat and bone, fifty, seventy; and every time it jerked, involuntarily, with no relation to him, it was coming to seem more and more like an artificial limb, all of his body was artificial; the real Aron would force it to confess, he would put his soul into the mutiny from now on, with new ideas and inventions, with a life-or-death cruelty and contempt! The inward Aron cried and cried,and through his sweat-blinded eyes and twitching face he imagined a gloomy little cloud there, a puff of loss and loneliness, and he smacked it harder, ruthlessly, with a groan from the heart, torturing the hostage of the hated enemy, the faithless lover who gradually stopped pretending, and confessed a horrible thing — that she had never ever been his; whose then? He bashed her, feeling nothing in either hand or knee, dry leaves and gray dust swirled beneath her; whose then? Somebody else’s? Up and down she went, loath to answer, forced to answer in the end, Another being’s? Tell me, tell me! Yes yes, another being’s. Whose, whose? I don’t remember. And before that? What were you before? Before, before, what was she before, oh yes, perhaps, quite, yes, before that she was probably the death of the other being. He groaned. And before that? What were you before that? Before that and that. And that. Out of the void she spoke, jerking out the monotonous answers: more, more, more, his death, his death. He stopped. All at once. With a long groan. His body collapsing. What was happening? Someone might see him like this. Like what? Like this, acting crazy. Cautiously he glanced at his leg, sticking out from the curb. He got up, putting his weight on the other. He didn’t want to stay here alone. Alone with her. Again he laughed with astonishment. He wished someone would call him: “Come to me,” or punish him for being a naughty, stupid child, even if it wasn’t fair, a punishment that would make him cry bitterly and stagger away sobbing into the thick of sleep, till at last he reached oblivion, nestling in the sweetness of consolation, sucking his thumb, hugging a cuddly puppy, protected by the talismans of childhood … Wearily he climbed the steps, trying to iron his face out with his hands. Mama would know right away that they went to camp together, that was the kind of thing she would feel in her bones. He stopped at the door and coughed his cough, preparing himself to hide from her eyes, from the look that would see and understand, immediately, without mercy.