Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She dialed home, pausing after each digit, giving him time to get back, to sink deep into his and her daily sludge again. I can't be bothered with this now, she thought; she wished everything would remain exactly as it was, that Micah would remain Micah, that he would transport her home just by virtue of his Micah-ness.

He had been there for a long time and was waiting for her nervously; he could never fall asleep without her or without hearing her voice. He wanted to know how the trip was, how Shaul was, what this injury was all about, where they were going anyway, and where she was calling from. She listened to his voice and yearned for him. Micush, she said, I'll tell you everything tomorrow. He wouldn't let go: But are you talking with him? Is he telling you anything? Yes, she said, we're definitely talking. Are you really? And in his voice she heard a familiar tinge of pain. What are you talking about?

She made a note to herself that she would have to make up some story to tell him the next day, and the thought turned to metallic saliva in her mouth. More rhan usual, she needed Micah to be there with her, physically, if only for a minute, to hold her with all his great might, to cork her, or fling her, or suddenly turn her upside down and shake her hard until all the little thefts fell out of her pockets. She asked about the overturned container and he told her at length, in great detail and with sufficient modesty, but she knew that without him the container would still be out there spilling its toxins. When he finished, she asked what was going on at home, and he reported all the events, major and minor, and she listened with cursory attention, bathing herself in his warm, smiling voice as in a solution that would envelop and seal all her cracks, so her soul would not escape again. She thought of how his simplicity had won her over, slow and heavy, and still enabled him to tie her down to his earth with five strong cords, and for a moment she could almost not resist asking him what he thought about when he thought about her, and what he saw when he looked at her, and what he saw beyond her. From among his words came foundling memories and orphaned thoughts to scurry around inside her, and the four men sitting at the table yelled at each other, and anorexic girls walked down a narrow catwalk on the TV above her head, wearing clothes that revealed their unattractive bodies and vacant expressions, and Micah talked on and on, and she wearily wondered how, despite all the dreams she'd had, she had ended up being stuck for years in the only job she'd ever liked, as a lactation consultant, surrounded by women.

But something had gone irretrievably wrong-Shaul felt a twinge and looked worriedly at the door of the inn where Esti had disappeared a long time ago-some correct order had been disrupted tonight because of their conversation and her endless questions, and her presence in general. Not that her presence was so bad for him- on the contrary-but lots of time had been wasted on chatter and disturbances. And he had omitted quite a few essential details, as well as some scenes that should not, could not, be skipped. He quickly ran them through his mind: the bazaar, for example, the big market, the stalls that had been quickly set up in the search camp, the men hurrying with a strange glee of looting in their eyes, carrying racks filled with colorful clothes, hats, baskets laden with objects, a new colorfulness suddenly abounds … He tries to stop someone to find out what this place is now. And no one notices him. Everyone is hurrying, running around. Submissively, he walks among the stalls, trying to push his way through the people raiding the goods, but it's hard to reach, it's crowded and chaotic, a lot of money is changing hands. Suddenly he perks up: he thinks he recognizes something-a dress of hers! His heart leaps with joy. A flowery sundress, green and flimsy, with round wooden buttons down the front. What is her dress doing here? Maybe it's just a coincidence, he reassures his nay-saying heart, but very soon, on a nearby rack, he sees her white blouse with the high collar and the pattern of lemons, and in the nearby stall he finds the soft cotton shirt she bought on a trip to Venice, and above it hangs her loose purple dress, bursting with womanhood-

They're selling everything. There's a stall with her purses, a stall for glasses, one for jewelry and little knickknacks, another for combs and makeup, and one selling footwear, where he finds her sandals, almost new, and a pair of Palladium hiking boots she'd bought for the eleventh-grade camp at Kibbutz Mahanayim, and clumsy orthopedic shoes ("Golda shoes," he remembers they used to call them), and a pair of high heels she almost never wore because they made her taller than him, and green felt shoes, and sexy orange boots. The salesman waxes poetic: Every shoe still has her footprint in it. He fingers the shoes and feels the touch of her soles-they had always stayed smooth, always delightful; sometimes when he holds her foot in his sleep, he feels a rush of love for her and amazement that almost fifty years of walking and running and trampling through the world has left the soles of her feet as soft as a baby's. And they're selling her socks here, long ones and short ones, in all colors, a whole stall full of nylons from all ages, some stretched over shoe trees in risquй poses, some crumpled and torn, and here are two people haggling loudly over the pair of dark nylons she once agreed to rip for him right down the middle, when they were on their honeymoon in Amsterdam.

Men of every shape and color-tall, short, thick, supple, crude, neglected, handsome, elderly, refined, boyish, feminine, muscular, limp, chickenlike-a massive flow of masculinity in all its guises pours out toward him down the main street of the desert market. It is a hairy, sinewy, grumbling, throaty human throng, and the more he watches it, the more it loses its separate features and congeals into a mass of silt that fans out over a wide river, moving here and there, thick furrowed peels of skin with nervous looks darting around, excited and suspicious, and frizzy bushes of hair sprouting on the stump of a leg or a large arm, oversized lumps of mud from which reliefs of swollen arteries spring out, and sideburns and bald spots in a multitude of shapes, and sweat stains, and a convex skull and a molded forehead and a nervous muscle that tightens in the jaw, and throbbing biceps, and beneath the thick sludge a throng bubbles up toward him, like the permanent rumble of a river, the hum of covetousness and disquiet and short barks of deterrence, and also a deep comradeship, noisy, like in barracks or a stadium. Strange men and semi-familiar men, and men who look like men he knows, hurrying, rushing, touching, smelling the goods, haggling over a green wool glove, from which Elisheva's reddish fingers used to peek out during winter, or bickering over the gray-white pullover his mother knitted for her years ago, or holding up a thrilling little pair of underwear to the light, dancing drunkenly in the brilliance that shines through them, and in their bru-

talization they become beautiful for a moment through their contact with the splendor that enveloped her, refined as they touch the flimsy fabric-

When she had almost reached the door, after paying the guy at the counter for the phone call, she turned and went back to the phone and stood staring for a moment, as if wondering what she was doing there. Beyond two panes of glass she saw Shaul in the car, with his head leaning back, and she guessed that his lips were moving. Of their own accord, her fingers dialed the digits, and she knew the music the buttons produced from any telephone she'd ever been at. He lifted the receiver immediately, just as Micah had done before, and it was as if he'd been waiting for her by the phone all these years.