Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Shaul cannot understand what the stranger wants from him or what he's supposed to do now. Should I leave? he asks the man. No, Paul says, surprised. Why leave, sir? Is your house. Shaul smiles gratefully and looks around in a daze. Elisheva and Paul talk. There. He has put it into one sentence that doesn't immediately crack open: Elisheva and the-stranger-who-burst-into-their-kitchen talk. He hears the sounds of the stranger and Elisheva and does not comprehend. Maybe it's Hebrew, but he knows Hebrew. No, her stranger is talking with her in a language he does not know. And she's answering him. It's not Hungarian, of that Shaul is certain. He knows her Hungarian a little. And it's not Russian, or English or French; or Portuguese, he now adds to the list, or any civilized language. And when did she have time to learn another language? He listens with surprise to their strange dialect, full of breathing and soft consonants, and comprised mostly of gestures. He tries to follow, but cannot. Elisheva and the stranger even try to make it easier for him, slowing down their speech a little for his benefit. Sometimes they raise their voices, arguing. Elisheva seems to lose her patience. She is angry at something, and the man is sorry. God, Shaul thinks, so many shared emotions they have! And once in a while Shaul notices some pet name of hers, it seems, which the man repeats over and over again. It's unlike her name, and coming from him it sounds a little prolonged, seems foggy and melting at the edges: belo. belo. Shaul watches their lips attentively and devotedly. He has a vague feeling that if he is a good student they won't kick him out, that they'll let him stay in their house and abandon the idea of sending him to boarding school.

The stranger looks at Elisheva. A tortured look. Asking for mercy. He says something that even Shaul, who has not learned the language, understands is a huge request, something like: Teach me, Elisheva, teach me so I'll also know. Elisheva doesn't answer. Her head is bowed, her hair, still golden, hides her face. Shaul watches them both with his mouth open. They freeze that way, the three of them, for a long time. Then the man sighs, nods at Elisheva and Shaul without seeing them at all, mumbles "Sorry" to the air, and turns and leaves.

For the first time in several minutes, Shaul breathes a sigh of relief-at it all being over, with no blows exchanged or blood shed. Things like this can sometimes end in murder, after all. He is also relieved because in fact you could say that he beat the intruder, did he not? He managed this little conflict fairly wisely, did not lose his cool, and in the end he banished the man from his territory.

When the door shut behind the stranger, everything went back to normal at once. The radio came on, the neon light shone again, and Elisheva-as if everything that had happened hadn't-went on chatting and told Shaul about the man, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, the son of a French father and a Russian mother. She knew everything about him. He was a fairly well-known cartoonist in Riga, certainly an original artist, she said, but it had been a year and a half and she hadn't been able to find him a job in a suitable place, or even a newspaper to publish his cartoons or a gallery to show his famous creations. Who needs a cartoonist these days? She sighed. She'd already been through numerous job interviews with him, and begged curators and gallery owners and weekly editors, but nothing. Shaul did not look at her or listen to her words. His whole body trembled like a tiny animal cowering in a riverbed, listening to an oncoming torrent.

Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he'd felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland. He realized that everything was beginning now. That up until now he must have been living only in the introduction. Elisheva said she wanted to go to sleep early, she had a crazy day ahead. Shaul nodded. She asked if he felt all right. Yes, he said. Yes, sure. She asked him not to be upset because of that Paul bursting in. Sometimes they can't take all the humiliations we put them through, she said, and with Paul it's somehow more complicated, it's really hard to find a place to match his talents and his principles. Shaul looked at the way her lips, when they said his name, rounded as if in a kiss. He imagined that her lips were cutting this strange name out of his own flesh: he was like a rolled-out ball of dough onto which she placed an upside-down cup, flattened it down tightly, and used it to cut circles of Paul out of him. She told him he'd already lost two of the jobs she'd managed to get him. He's a difficult one, she sighed. He's such an individualist, and he has such a special way of thinking. Shaul nodded obediently and threw her looks with eyes torn wide with amazement, as if he had never seen her like this. He said to himself, In fact, you've only just met her. You are only now meeting as you were really supposed to. And what was everything that came before? Perhaps just a preparatory meeting. Yes, a very long preparatory meeting between two slightly faded representatives of yourselves. You always sensed it and couldn't put a name to it, and now the real thing is starting. The battle, the game, the hunt.

He got up, slightly dizzy. Went to the bathroom, leaned both hands on the sink, and looked in the mirror. He suddenly understood that face of his, the elongated face with the sunken cheeks and the sad clown expression. Everything became clear. With complete simplicity he realized what his role in the play was, why he was designed this way, and what he had really been training for his entire life. Elisheva came in and asked if he was all right again. Shaul said yes. She asked if he needed the car the next evening, because "the girls" were meeting for one of their birthdays. It's okay, he said with pent-up cheer, I don't need the car tomorrow night. Beneath each of her words a small fire suddenly danced. Over and over he thought of how she had described Paul to him. An extreme individualist, a man of principle, and an idealist, a rare way of thinking. That was how she used to think of him, of Shaul, that's what drew her to him, but it turned out there was someone who offered her more. Strange, he always thought that if she found herself another man he would be completely different from him, someone physical and worldly in all his being, a farmer or a tour guide or an army man, certainly someone younger than him. To think that she had ended up going for someone of his ilk, only she had sought out a man who would be even more extreme than he was.

Later that night, when Elisheva undressed, he looked at her and immediately averted his eyes as if he had seen something forbidden. Every one of her movements was part of a dance that only now, apparently very late in the day, had revealed its complexity to him, its mystery. He looked at her with Paul's eyes, and she was attractive, ravishing. He stole looks at her. Her breasts fit Paul's large hands far better than his own. Maybe that's why they had grown after their marriage, not because of what he had always believed. He hugged his knees to his stomach, and like a lost and misguided bolt of lightning that had flashed in him years after the thunder had sounded, he felt what he had unknowingly expected, the cutting and painful snap of a huge and eternal whip-the law of nature itself. He closed his eyes and gloomily welcomed the sensation, the surrendered acceptance with which a crippled, damaged deer realizes that it must be shredded by the claws of a tiger.

She came and lay next to him with a sigh of relief, and clung to him as usual, and he flinched and withdrew and felt every hair on his body stand on end. What's going on? she asked, still tender. It's not because of that man, is it? Rubbish, someone squeaked from far away in the bends of his throat. That's your deal, not mine, please don't involve me in it. Elisheva propped herself up on one elbow and examined him closely: What do you mean, my deal? She laughed in surprise. It's your deal, he repeated, looking at the ceiling with a congealed smile, not mine. Just don't tell me about it. I don't want to know, he said. What I don't know won't hurt me. What are you talking about? she asked, and her forehead all at once became dark. What have you already been telling yourself? I'm not telling myself any-