Grossman David: Her Body Knows

His brother was supposed to drive him, but at the last minute he was called away to handle an acetone spill on the Coastal Highway, and Esti had turned up at his door. She stood with her arms at her sides, apologizing for not being Micah, and bothered by a vague sense that she and Shaul were staring at each other as if looking into a funhouse mirror. She took a deep breath and unconsciously hunched her shoulders in anticipation of the approaching storm, and at first he seemed not to understand who she was. Then he was taken aback: No, no, thank you, I need Micah, only Micah. But as he spoke he took a step forward, as if to push his way outside to leave, then went back inside and grasped the door handle and stood with his head down, trying to recall something.

But where is Elisheva? she asked urgently, as if wanting to know why his mother wasn't looking after him. She had always thought he seemed lost without her, and even more so now, with his bruised face and one leg in a cast. He did not answer but just stood and stared at her, at her nomadic features, suddenly sharper now. This was exactly how she had first arrived in the family years ago, standing next to Micah in this posture with the same frightened, wild expression. "From the slums," his mother had decreed at the time, and Esti knew perfectly well what he was seeing now. She planted her feet firmly. Inside, she searched frantically for her ore of survival skills, for the unloved but stubborn little girl who had known how to turn herself, when necessary, into a tiny fistful of a human being, one who comes along and joins in precisely where she is unwanted, then stands there and slows her pulse down to a standstill, until somehow everyone becomes accustomed to her presence and to what little she has to offer, and finally cannot manage without her.

She had risen above all that, with all her years and all her children and Micah and the fullness of her flesh, and she crossed her arms beneath her chest and said perhaps he shouldn't go in this condition, just hours after such a bad accident, and she cautiously asked just how it had happened. He withdrew again, retreated into the house, and almost collapsed, still unskilled with the crutches, seeming not to have heard her at all. His eyes were red, from crying or from lack of sleep, and from something else that burned in them and that she did not recognize. He whispered hoarsely that he had to go and that she couldn't possibly drive him. Skirting his unconcealed hostility, she asked where exactly he wanted to go, and he said, South. Then all at once he waved a crutch in the air with a ludicrous birdlike motion and said, All right, we're going. He tried to fake a merry laugh and announced that the whole situation was completely crazy but he had to be there tonight, it was a case of force majeure, he enunciated in an accent which sounded to her under the circumstances like the rustle of a ruined nobleman's silk robe. Explaining the obvious, he told her he simply could not get there on his own in his condition, and that this was why he had asked Micah to take him. She tried again to understand where exactly he expected her to drive him in the middle of the night on such short notice, but he did not answer, and she silently fumed at him, but even more so at Micah, who had sent her on this mission only to please his brother, who would never do such a thing for him, much less for her. Shaul sobered for a moment, as if her silent anger had managed to trickle through the chaos within him, and he glanced at her with a look that almost shattered her with its misery and said, I know this is hard for you, but I really don't have any choice. She nodded, confused and slightly alarmed at what she saw. On the way, he said, I'll explain on the way.

Sometimes they have calm days over there, truly peaceful, Shaul reminds himself as he lies feverishly in the back of the old Volvo, trying with all his might to rid himself of the presence of the silent driver and rhe swarms of invisible ants crawling along his leg beneath the cast. Like the day before yesterday, for example-or was it four days ago? — when Elisheva walks into that apartment through the door left ajar for her, saunters with her shoulders tilted provocatively (who knew she still had this sense of playfulness in her?), and smiles with relief at being back there, where she is free from pretending and faking, from the endless effort of her other life. She pauses for a minute to get her breath back, and wonders how many more years she'll be able to run up the four flights of stairs like that. Perhaps it will not be long now until they have to look for another place again; they had already had to change apartments six or seven times, they were unlucky with real estate, but perhaps you could not be lucky with everything. She puts down her blue gym bag and quietly clicks the front door shut and is filled with new joy, because she knows that he, her man, can hear even this soft sound, and that his eyes are squeezed shut as if they could no longer contain anything more, and that his flesh is straining toward her like the needle of a compass. But he doesn't know she has other plans today.

She slowly walks down the hallway, wondering how to convince him to let it go today, unaware of the effect of her slow walk, which seems deliberately feline to him, twisting the tendons of his passion until it hurts. She stops when she reaches the room and leans against the doorway and looks at him tenderly. I'm here, she says quietly. He turns around slowly, as if surprised by her presence, carefully holding in his gut. Here you are, he says, unable to hide his happiness, his face actually opening up and shining, and she still does not move as she inhales the scene, absorbing and carefully distributing it to every cell in her body, provisions that must last her for a long time, for another whole day of hunger and thirst. She envelops his entirety with her gaze, from the soles of his large and venerable-looking feet, with toes splayed out, to his luminous face, and smiles as she whispers again, Here I am. The man does not think there is anything superfluous in her utterance; on the contrary, he expands his chest to take in everything contained in those three words. Here I am, here is all of me for you, here I am as I truly am, here I am-unpeel me. His face says yes, his body says yes, and his heart and eyes and breath, everything says yes, and for the thousandth time he marvels at how even when she says something simple and obvious, as she often does, it is always followed by an echo of wonder. After all, Shaul thinks, that is precisely it: everything she says there is somehow composed of these two elements, the obvious and the wondrous. In the corner of her tired smile, a rosy freshness now glitters, and the man smiles too. His entire face changes when he smiles at her, and Shaul's face unwittingly forms the same smile. As she drives, Esti, troubled by Shaul's continuing silence, turns to him for a moment and recoils from what she sees, as if she had opened someone else's letter. She looks back at the road with large, dark eyes, and realizes that is exactly how he used to look at Elisheva, years ago, and almost unconsciously she readjusts the rearview mirror and uses it to frame his face, his closed eyes still covered with the same hypnotically foreign expression, a mixture of happiness and loneliness and supplication.

Shaul had been in such a hurry to leave that he forgot to lock the door, and only realized it when they were standing by the car. Esti said, Wait, I'll go, but before she locked the door she went inside and darted through the rooms as if looking for something. She hadn't been to visit for three or four years, even had trouble remembering the last time they had invited the family over; Elisheva may have wanted to, but Shaul probably objected. She noticed how the house had changed-the spaces between the objects seemed much larger, the furniture was arranged with a kind of violent precision-and the thought slowed her movements. She trod carefully, turning away with a strange feeling, as if only a moment ago someone had cracked a whip in the air and every piece of furniture had snapped into place and frozen. It's him, she thought, it can't be her, because Elisheva always had a charming sloppiness about her, and everywhere she went she left a trail of forgotten objects-keys, a purse, a comb, a scarf and whenever she spent time in a room she left a soft imprint of scat-teredness. Where are you? Esti thought. You've grown so distant.