Grossman David - Her Body Knows

comprehensible pleasure creeps into him and sprawls on the floor of his body, where it curls up lazily.

And she's a fairly tall woman, he tells them silently and feverishly, adding that she's even a little taller than him. And quite large, he emphasizes. But don't get me wrong-her body is still firm and supple. Even her chest, relatively. Slightly less perhaps in the last few years, but it certainly was until recently. Perhaps because as a girl she was a late bloomer, he says, carefully hiding the fact that he had always secretly believed it was him, with his caresses and his sucking, who had caused her hidden breasts to finally erupt into their present state. He falls silent with fright when a heavy, hoarse moan cleaves them at once as if with an ax. He takes a step back and titters. What is it? What have I said?

But they, the people-the soldiers, actually, because now he sees that they are all in uniform. He hadn't noticed that before, but now he sees identical dark clothing, camouflaged even. They bray at him to go on, and he cringes at the touch of a crude animal breeze that suddenly blows on him. When he steps back, they walk over and close in on him. When he tries to get away, the circle does not let up, it moves with him, around him, demanding with rhythmic brays that he tell more, that he continue to describe her. Give it to us, they yell, and he has no choice but to continue, and he hopes the little details he gives them honestly and forthrightly will somehow help the search, and that seems to be the case. It's hard to understand exactly how, but his words seem to somehow fan them in her direction, making her more tangible to them, even fleshy, because they look at him with yearning and complete self-oblivion, and he feels a desire to increase the stimulation even more, so they will be even more qualified for the search mission they face. Maybe that is in fact why they brought him here-yes, he finally understands-because now, indeed, it all depends on him, on the power of his description and his ability to impassion them, like a general energizing his troops for battle

Esther? he called out weakly, trying to calm his stubborn heart. Esther?

She did not answer. She drove very slowly, almost bending over the wheel as her strained eyes tried to penetrate the darkness, and he looked at her from the side, and something in the mirror at that moment looked familiar to him, and painful and beloved. Her body language, her mouth slightly open as if about to be kissed-

At nineteen she was a waitress in a banquet hall in Beersheba, and she was late for work that day. Just like that, running through the lobby, she pulled her sweater over her head, briefly exposing her stomach. Hagai gave her one glance and got up from his table and followed her into the kitchen and stayed with her for nine and a half years. He was a small, concentrated man, with an alert foxlike face and sharp features, and long hands, as if everything lacking in his body had flown into those fingers-

Shaul nodded slowly, distractedly, with rounding eyes, and through a veil of bewilderment he saw her almost erupting from her shell, sweetening.

We laughed so much together, she thought with a smile, and most of all we laughed at ourselves. Her eyes sparkled and she stretched out unknowingly, indulging her limbs. She had never been with a man so daring, in every way. (Men, Hagai used to joke. They call them that because they're a bad omen?) Together they delighted in his penis, which he thought was tiny, and her short legs, and his crooked fingers, and her ass, which developed nicely under his supervision and nurturing-"a fine posterior," he called it, and devotedly cultivated it-and his narrow girlish shoulders, and her Indian face.

She looked in the mirror, but Shaul was lost in himself. She grinned as she thought of how all her men always had to change her position when she stood in front of them, so that she faced them at a certain angle. They would actually take hold of her shoulders and shift her a little, as if casually-Micah did it to this day, without even realizing it-because she must seem very unbeautiful to them, grating even, unless she faced them with that good angle, the one particular one. But Hagai was the only one who was always interested in all 360 degrees of her, and he would describe her from every angle and with every nuance, the refractions of her beauty and oddness through the prism of his gaze, never tiring and never repeating himself. He excited her body and her mind because she saw how important it was for him to be precise about her, to be punctilious, with the seriousness of a painter waiting for the moment at which Indian red becomes purplish, Venetian, lilac and resin, just as her chin changes when his look catches it-that round and heavy chin that, from here, sometimes looks like a weight drawing her mouth slightly open with an expression that used to drive her mother crazy, and because of which they probably thought what they had thought at school. From one particular angle, that very same chin becomes a concentrated, almost masculine fruit, eager to prove something to someone-Why are you so combative, Esther? — and from a different angle it's like a little fist, a kind of protesting block of spite. And from this angle it softens into a virginal breast, tiny and tight-

They dance there sometimes, Shaul whispered to himself and to her. His voice was soft and seemed to have been disrobed of all that had stuck to it and twisted it over the years. You hear me? She and he, they dance-

Tell me, she said, urging him. Tell.

Shaul thought it was Portuguese music. Elisheva had often said she liked fado, had even mentioned some names of singers, and he deliberately wondered out loud where she had heard of them, and Elisheva said, Oh, here and there. He made secret notes to himself- there was one called Ramos, and another called Max, and of course Amalia Rodrigues-and decided to buy her a few CDs. He wanted to make her happy, but then thought he would not be able to stand the pain every time she listened to them at home. And that thought had unintentionally led him to formulate the source of his never-ending torment: everything she does with me, he told Esti, reminds her of what she does there, or of what she doesn't do there. And I can't understand how she stands it, because Paul winks at her from every cup of coffee we drink together, he sighed. From every smile she gives me, from every bowl of soup she serves me and every dinner we make together. His voice sank, mumbled, and melted. And every time we take a walk through the neighborhood after the news, he thought, and every time I hand her the phone to talk to someone, and when we undress for bed or brush our teeth together or change the sheets together, and when she rests her head on my shoulder at the movies-

He murmured, and Esti felt as if she were standing on tiptoe and glancing through their window, and she knew he was telling her everything as it was. For a moment she could not see how things could be reconciled, but she knew that it was possible, of course it was possible-there is a lot of human being in one couple, she thought, and felt consumed with longing and became even more despondent.

And when I read her the headlines from the paper in the morning, Shaul thought to himself, and when I squeeze her some orange juice or when she asks from the kitchen in her happy singsong voice which cake she should bake for Shabbat, and when we sometimes go down to the day care to clean up the mess from the morning, to rake the sand in the sandbox, to gather up toys, and when I cover her feet with a blanket when she falls asleep on the couch. His face softened and he smiled. When she helps me find my glasses, and when I make her laugh while she's on the phone, and just in general, he thought, every time she laughs or is happy, or forgets herself for a moment, or gets carried away or becomes alarmed at being carried away and not being on her guard, and of course, every time she sleeps with me and thinks of him, and every time she is careful not to touch me in some special way he taught her. And also every time I touch her, each part of her body I touch or am careful not to touch, because of him, and when I am careful not to kiss or suck and leave marks on her neck or breasts, so I won't have to sense her pulling away-not because of the pain but because of her inherent instinct to conceal. Shaul chokes up and holds his throbbing head. Oh, what a good life we could have had! What happiness there could have been. Simple happiness, without complications. The happiness I so wanted, which could have changed my entire life from one end to the other. I was so close to it.