Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Heavily, he put on his foreign voice again like a uniform, his robe of duress: We'll talk about the rest when you get home. Oh, Tom didn't call today either. And she said, He called me here. He's all right. He says hi to you. Shaul swallowed another small lump of insult and declared, That's it, I think that's it. Nothing else happened. Then he stopped and squeezed his eyelids as tight as he could to cap the lid on the unbearable simmering. He gave in, and having sworn to himself not to, he reminded her about the little package he'd thrown into her suitcase before she left. By now he was entirely consumed by that dark sweetness, its toxins seeping into its depths, the drug of an ancient lust for revenge-but on whom? he moaned when she hung up on him. On whom was he taking this revenge, always, all his life? On her? Why her? Why had it always been like this, from the first moment, ever since a great wave of love had come and washed him toward her, together with an unfamiliar rage that had also not dulled in him since the moment he knew she was the woman of his life, and which had caused him to first scorn her because she had settled for so little-settled for him

And his selfhood mounts all at once into a fierce erection. He is the living, pulsing seed of the faceless swarm that hums around him in its strange mating flight. All these people here, the soldiers, the men, are devoid of volition against what pours forth out of him-they are a thousandfold stronger than him and yet submissive and passive, pliable to him. He repels and retreats as if to taunt them, and they stay with him, move with him, guessing his next steps. Their senses open up to him: they see, listen, and inhale. Eyes dart over his body and face, scan his hands, his feet, the thinning hair on his head. Conclusions are gathered, important material collected, analyzed somewhere, but what is it? For a moment he is dazzled by the power of the presence of all these bodies, the smells, the pressure and force of so many wills and desires-

I find her beautiful, he quickly stresses. Some might disagree, but there are certain situations, he says, where she is truly beautiful. He grins at them defiantly from ear to ear, lips slightly quivering, and he knows that beyond the frozen masks of their faces they are smiling at this idiot- idiot'e'le, as his mother says-because while he was busy finding nice words to say, his wife ran away and left him with his dick in his hand and his tongue twirling. He is talking, naively, of her soft feet-an architectural wonder, he waxes poetic, apart from the second toe, of course, the one that climbs over the big toe on her left foot. It's hereditary-all the women in her family have it, he adds, and from this point on he continues talking and tells them everything, illustrates her entire body for them, every crease and wrinkle, every freckle and birthmark, and from one moment to the next he becomes more and more vibrant and stormy, giving them more and more. An indescribably dark transaction is occurring here tonight: he gives her to them so they can bring her back to him. And all this time their eyes are practically closed, their mouths open, they move with him in waves, they and their uniforms and their solidity and their field scent, spreading around him like a circular trail, the hem of a wide dress, as he twirls them around himself with a very slight movement of his hips, almost imperceptible, and proves to them without words that they are mistaken if they mean to judge him by the normal rules, by the acceptable regulations of human taxation, whereby he is nothing but an unyoung, unlovely man whose wife has decided to leave him ("to go away for four days and be alone, just me with myself, once a year, what's the big deal").

Tell me, Esti said with strange urgency. He pulled himself out of his depths and re-emerged in the car. There was almost begging in her voice, and they both pulsated now to the same heartbeat.

Tell me what you want to hear.

At first she thought he'd said "what you'd like to hear," like a salesman in the recesses of a dubious store, testing out a shy customer's preferences.

How they met, she said.

Oh. Well, it so happens that I don't exactly know the answer to that. In the darkness of the car he stared at her thoughtfully and seriously. Do you really want to hear?

Really. Really but not truly, she thought.

She met him when she still worked at the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, he said, at least that's what she told me. She handled his case there. But one day he just came into our house.

How did she know to ask that? he wondered. How did she ask that question at precisely the right moment, the right point in his chain of thoughts and terrors? Because that is the thing that has remained fresh and new ever since things were first revealed to him in their true light. It is the point to which he can always return, even in his sleep, in the greatest desperation, when he needs to refuel his passion for her, and it is the minute that never ends, the eternal present that has been going on for ten years: Shaul and Elisheva are in the kitchen of their old house on Rachel Imenu Street, chopping vegetables for a salad, as they do every evening, chatting about how the day went and what will happen tomorrow and who paid what and who will take Tom to the dentist, when all of a sudden the door swings open to reveal a man Shaul has never seen before. He walks straight into the kitchen and says, with a heavy Russian accent, that he can't take it anymore.

No, no. Not so fast. Better to rewind and play it again, slowly and in the correct order. Shaul stands there wearing Elisheva's floral apron, holding a small bunch of dill ready to be chopped, and looks at Elisheva questioningly with a slightly amazed smile: Perhaps it's a prank or a joke? But why would she play a joke on him? Even so, he still tries to solve this nightmare in a positive way: maybe it's some aggressive marketing campaign for a vacation package to Izmir, or maybe the cable company is offering a new deal. But it seems pretty clear that that's not it. The man stands in their kitchen, filling it with his presence, with his quiet bearishness, and he is serious and somber, so somber that his tanned face is pale. Shaul also notices that his fingers are shaking a little, which must be a good sign, because it means the man is afraid of confronting him. Although, on the other hand, perhaps it says something about how acute his condition is. Meanwhile, the two of them, Shaul and he, do not move, and that's good too, because the stranger's element of surprise is becoming less of an advantage. Although, on the other hand, he is still in Shaul's kitchen rather than Shaul being in his kitchen. The man is slightly taller than him, but much more solid and broader, with a thick neck and a large face. He is not handsome but certainly powerful, no longer a young man, several years older than Shaul, ten at least, and he looks a little sad even, and here is where Shaul begins to sense that he's right for her. She likes the ones with sober and grave expressions.

And it is his graveness which is in fact most confusing, because you can tell just by looking at him that he deliberated a lot before taking this step, that he carefully evaluated the chances and the risks, and if he still decided to burst in here-the word "burst" is exaggerated; the truth is that he knocked on the door, so hesitantly in fact that they barely heard him, and Shaul went to open the door, and the guy said, Excuse me, and asked if Elisheva was home, and she called out from the kitchen, Yes, who is it? Come in, please, in a surprised and cheerful voice, the voice she had back then, and the man murmured something to Shaul and walked past him with a kind of apologetic bow and went into the kitchen-and if all that has happened, it must mean the man estimated he would get what he wanted, and that means Shaul will lose.