Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Then they do the whole path back again, Shaul saw, and his lips moved but he made no sound. And in the hallway, Paul stops to shake hands formally with the sleeve of his coat, which hangs there, and he chitchats with a neighbor and introduces him to Elisheva: Meet the woman in my life, this is the woman I've been waiting for here, twenty-three hours a day, for ten years. Elisheva puts her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes, and lets him walk her around. She would go anywhere in the world with him, blindfolded, because she trusts him, that's the thing-his voice suddenly lifted and extracted itself from the knot of his thoughts with a strange cheerfulness-here we are, Esther, it's a good thing we talked, because in the course of talking I've defined it for myself: there's something in him that gives her a sense of confidence, fills her with confidence, and that is something I have somehow been unable to give her. That's the thing, with me she is evidently never completely confident.

And perhaps because of his voice at that moment, or the look on his face, a thought flies through her, sudden, wounding-

Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. How is it that her heart goes out to him? She should be angry at him now, should feel shocked and cheated, should disdain him, recoil from him. But she is at once utterly exhausted and also incapable of remembering where exactly one finds the conviction to be disdainful, or righteous, or to know something with any certainty. He has a singular obsession, she thinks. Or a singular genius. And the blood pulses hard, too hard, and some sweet internal assailant comes and quickly shreds the muscles of her shoulders and neck, and soon everything will fall and dissipate, nose and ears and the three gray cells she has left, and with all her strength she tries to calm down, she must stop this, but she is unable to give up these heartbeats, the forgotten, precise heartbeats which reply as an echo, and she remembers his hand upon the tablets of her heart, her hand on his chest- -feel it, our prisoners are corresponding. But how? She is amazed. How did I let Shaul lead me on like this? Where have I been all evening? But she knows exactly how and where, what she was listening to and what her heart went out to. Look at you, she sighs. No, really, look at you, you and your reaching heart.

She feels for the bottle, and as she drives she pours some water into her palm and wets her forehead and then trickles a few drops down her nape, and stretches her legs and wiggles her toes in her shoes. Back to life, she commands, and for a start she tries to reconstruct their conversation since leaving. The announcer on the radio had talked about that police officer in Madrid, and since then almost nothing, she can't remember anything, only heat waves exchanging, growing hotter and dissipating, and it's as if that was the only thing. She takes a deep breath, finally breathing, like the first breath, and hears him mumbling to himself. How can he do it? How does he survive a whole life of this? She looks in the mirror and sees his face concentrating, trapped in the fiery ring of his hermetic torments. Tell me, she says in her heart, don't stop. She keeps asking against the backdrop of his whispers, and is carried away on his waves and hunches over, absorbed in herself, a little more, until she has to understand, to wake up.

What now? Shaul wonders, wanting to go back to sleep, to forget, to silence the voices, to subdue the flames which constantly demand new, richer burning material. Maybe I'll tell her to go back, he suggests to himself weakly. I'll tell her to turn around and go back at once, yes, before we get there, he says to himself, and swells up with a surge of power. I'll tell her to go back home. And deep in his mind a cold, mocking bolt of lightning strikes-who is he kidding? After all, even the supposed restraint of the present is an integral part of the complex and meticulous process of complete surrender, and besides, he knows that if something happens to her there, to Elisheva, it will happen tonight. It has to happen. Day one: acclimatization, checking out the field and filtering candidates. Day two: bonding with two or three of them. And on the last night, tonight, the implementation. The one. The speck of gold. What are you talking about? Elisheva smiles compassionately, with quiet desperation. Why are you torturing yourself with these thoughts? I really just go there to rest, to read, to clear my mind. In that case, he replies calmly, wrapping his voice with a falseness as it trembles with fury, in that case, you're just wasting your vacation and our money-what's the point of you even going every year if you don't find yourself someone there? Why all the bother? Why do you think people go to these kinds of places alone? Precisely for this, she replies, and her look smooths over his conflicted face. Why can't you believe that I just want to be with me, just me with myself, once a year?

Yesterday she rang in the afternoon, even though he had told her he didn't want to talk to her for the entire four days. She wanted to hear how he was. He spoke curtly Asked if she'd met him. Met who? she asked wearily. I don't know his name, he rolled out a laugh. You want me to give you his name too? There was a long silence. Then Elisheva said, Shaul, really.

Listen, he said seriously, I love you, I even miss you, but I'm entitled not to be a part of what you're going through there. I'm entitled to protect myself from all that, aren't I?

What am I going through here? she asked tiredly, and he could see her grimacing. What do you think I'm going through?

No, no, he laughed bitterly, I don't want to hear about it.

They were quiet again together, and there was a shared tenderness or sadness. Their love escaped for an instant from the jaws of a large vise grip, relaxed between the two of them, searched for shelter. He held his breath for a moment, wanting Elisheva to yell at him, to scream, to hurl her fury at him. Perhaps all they needed was a few words from her to redeem them both.

He grumbled, Why did you even call?

I wanted to hear how you were. I suddenly had a bad feeling.

I feel wonderful.

Tell her now, without thinking, tell her everything: Listen, Elisheva, it's not just these seasonal attacks around your trip every year, it's more than that at this point. It's life itself, the way it gets dragged around everywhere. You have a right to know. I'm the sick one, but you're dying from it too. If only you knew. If only I could just sit down and tell you, talk with you the way I talk with myself, the way we used to be able to, about everything, maybe I could still get out of it somehow and wake up, go back to being a human being.

Look, all I need is one final, decisive piece of evidence to convince me that I'm wrong. I know I'm wrong, I'm almost a hundred percent certain that I'm wrong, so I'm willing to believe anything, even the feeblest, most unfounded proof, if you only give it to me with a truly pure heart, if you are still capable of that, if it's even possible to ask that of you anymore. Why are you so quiet? What do you have to be quiet about-

He said, Leah phoned for you about next year's program, and another young couple want to register their daughter who hasn't even been born yet. She smiled to herself with a certain sense of pride, and he heard her smile and couldn't help smiling with her. And again, for a fleeting instant, they were so close to relief, and he closed his eyes and saw her beloved face, but it was far above him, as if he were lying at the bottom of a well. If only she had the courage to descend, to bring him up with her. Why doesn't she come down? There's always a place where she stops. He knows the place where she shrinks back a little as if she'd met a ghost. They sighed together. For an instant they were both shown with biting tangibility how, for these past twenty-five years, the sediments of their sorrow and bitterness had crystallized, drop after drop, into a massive stalagmite of marriage.