Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Shaul, and all her expressions are revealed to him. Save me, she begs with her eyes, and this is the last moment he can save her, but he doesn't, not now, not with the wail which emerges inside him and tears him apart as the two huge twisted arms grasp her hips from behind and wrap and crush and flail in the air. A foreign flesh is now becoming acquainted with her soft, round touch, a foreign flesh is learning her, and her flesh tenses toward him for a stolen, infinite instant, and a force unfamiliar to her flings her on the ground-as it should, a voice in his throbbing head rejoices with parched desperation-such a force that she had not even imagined could exist in a man, and a double, hoarse roar knifes the desert in half, the roar of two beasts, male and female

How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? she thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way, and she sensed a new fear, that he was traveling to hurt Elisheva. Or her and the man. Before she had time to hesitate, she asked if Elisheva was there with him, in the place they were going to.

With him?. No, not with him, he said as he tore himself from the scene with all his remaining energy, and buried his face in his hands and pressed hard on his eyeballs. What was the matter with him? It was too early to be seeing such things, they still had almost two hours to go, and he'd lose his mind if he gave in to them this early. I don't think she's there with him, she goes there to be alone.

Alone? Her voice trailed off at the end of the word, and her heart shrank again, like before, when she had thought "her boyfriend." Shaul mistook her yearning for surprise. Yes, he said, what's wrong with that? She's entitled to be alone once a year, isn't she?

In fact, he was quoting Elisheva, who went on a four-day vacation every year, to a different place in Israel each time, and was not willing under any circumstances to give up these days; they were as essential to her as the air she breathed, she said quietly and with unusual force. And every year she had to have the argument with Shaul, who would be driven insane by the mere thought of it, months before. But now he spoke as if Micah or his parents were there. He knew exactly what they thought with their petty, provincial, ignorant views about these vacations and about what went on during them, and he arrogantly demonstrated to Esti how wholeheartedly he agreed with Elisheva and how he understood her need to be alone for a few days a year, and thus seemed to decree some moral superiority, a hierarchy of emotional development and enlightenment as compared to Micah, his parents, and the entire Kraus tribe. Because still, in everything he did and thought, both large and small, he had never stopped wrestling with them in his mind and taunting them in any way he could. What, he added generously, don't you sometimes feel like being alone? Just you, without Micah and the kids?

She heard all the streams churning in his voice and was not taken aback this time, and with a sudden urge she felt around and switched on the little ceiling lamp, flooding the space with light; they both squinted and Shaul did not protest or ask why she had done it, and she encountered his distorted, conflicted look and then turned off the light, and her eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the road again. For a moment she could not comprehend why they had avoided and deterred one another all those years, almost from the first, and had jabbed each other continually, without anyone else noticing, with a look that only the two of them knew how to conjure up and where exactly to aim it.

I spend a lot of time alone, she said, and when he looked up, she heard the echo that surrounded the word and immediately gave him another of her light, glossy, misleading smiles. Look, when you work at home you spend a lot of time alone.

But she knew very well that Shaul was not talking about that kind of alone, not her alone, which was crowded to the brim and buzzing with a drone that erupted from her even at nights now. Not the alone of always lying in wait, alert among the reeds, to ensure, for example, the routine of the refrigerator that filled up and emptied out with large, rapid breaths-even though she would never admit the almost physical pleasure she derived from the resuscitation and the whisper of its regular respirations: they are eating well, growing up nicely-and not the alone from which she leaped up in the blink of an eye with ridiculous fervor, she knew, to find a lost sock or a baseball cap or a bicycle pump or last year's report card or a military ID card or keys or soy sauce or a fine-tooth comb for lice. Her alone was alert, she jumped out of it at the sound of their calls a hundred times a day: they couldn't find it themselves, wouldn't remember where, wouldn't know how much water to dilute the antibiotics in or how to wrap the fish in Saran wrap, or where exactly you added softener to the washing machine. Nor would they know the small pleasure that occurred even in the rhythmical life cycle of doing tax returns, making down payments, depositing monthly amounts in the savings account, servicing the car, changing the water filters twice a year, exchanging summer clothes for winter clothes and vice versa, the list of regular visits for each of them to the dental hygienist- even Ido's daily insulin shots, with all the tumult they entailed. And she hated all this with all her heart, and had not a drop of talent for it; but even so, it was her alone. She longingly breathed in the smell of breast-feeding that filled the air after her counseling work, the drops of sour breast milk on the chairs after the new mothers left, the large green fan of a garden, the fruit trees, the rows of vegetables and flowers and herbs, the mother-in-law apartment in the yard, for which she was also responsible, the seven rooms in her house, each containing- hush, little baby -a child playing an instrument or sitting at the computer or dreaming or doing homework or sulking. And there was Ido, her chocolate boy, her divided twin, with whom you always had to listen for the things he was quiet about, and at least one child was always sprawled on her and Micah's bed at any time of day or night, and someone always needed you to help study for an exam on the Weimar Republic or interpret a difficult dream. And there was Yoav, the big twin, too big, who had to be taken to a dietitian twice a week and fought with over every meal and in between meals, and Na'ama, with whom everything was red-headed and stormy and fluid, who would summon her now, right now, urgently, to the treehouse, to listen to selected excerpts from her very private diary. And for the last six months a telephone cable had been strung through one of the five umbilical cords to connect her to a child-soldier who rang almost hourly to talk about courses and guard duty and to sob and boast and be spoiled. And at least once a week someone strolled down from the main road into the yard, a boy or girl come to spend the night or a couple of weeks: friends, or friends of friends, they slept in the basement or on the lawn or on the mats out on the porch, or just in the living room. They raided the fridge at night, played music, smoked-bronzed, half-naked gods walking in on her in the shower by mistake, shaming her flesh with the exact same suspicious look with which they examined the expiration dates on a container of cheese or yogurt. And within all this there was Micah, who called five or ten times a day from work to chat with her, to pass the time on his long journeys, striking up soul-baring conversations (never his own soul, though), giving her live reports from the road and taking her with him to the sites where he fought gaseous clouds, polluted estuaries, and containers carrying toxins, which always seemed to turn up in the most respectable places. For years he had made her a partner in his daily inventory, huge piles of mundane crumbs which he poured forth at her feet, piled up around her, tamping softly, affectionately, thoroughly, quoting for her what they just said on the radio or the latest rumors on his possible promotion, telling her of the accident he saw just now on Gehah Highway and the argument the guys at the office had about the movie on TV, relentlessly reporting the excruciating details of every meal he ate, with a strange sense of loyalty, and in his endearing and devoted and modest way he constantly sketched and copied for her a portrait of himself with a thousand light brushstrokes, and handed her his events for safekeeping and remembering, thus also relieving himself of any responsibility for them, so he could forget everything immedi-