Grossman David - Her Body Knows

His voice was quick, even when he'd been sleeping: a low, penetrating "Hello." She froze. He was quiet for a long time, did not breathe, surrounded her with deep, dense quiet, then just said "Hello" again, a completely different one this time, almost defeated, and she hung up quickly and only then grasped what she had done. She stood with weak knees and didn't know what to do or where to go. She almost dialed the number again, her fingers seemed drawn to the buttons, but then she clutched the handset with both hands and pressed her mouth hard into the receiver, which stank from the saliva of strangers. Over the sound of the dial tone, she poured herself into him wordlessly. Unable to stop, she emptied her very core into him, and yelled and sobbed and laughed and promised and begged, and explained why and why not, and why they must and why they couldn't, and why there was no life without and how everything is always ripped in the same place and how she curses the moment and is resurrected over and over again endlessly

The most difficult times are when she comes home after being with him, Shaul said later, with a sigh, and Esti shook herself awake with fright and almost swallowed the candy she was sucking. It's not easy then, for me or for her, he said. She's always refreshed when she gets back, from the swim, of course, and her hair is a little damp, but she never looks me in the eye. It's not. and he laughed glumly, sliding pleasantly like a sleepwalker into their conversation, which was full of silences and deep valleys alongside each other, as in a prayer where everyone stands together but each person is on his own-and each of them, Esti thought, prays to a different God.

She was still quiet, barely holding her body up straight at the wheel. What had happened at the inn had exhausted her more than the long drive. She tried to guess what he was going through now. Saw him lying awake with his eyes open and sparkling in the dark, his tongue clicking between his cheeks, in his thinking position. She wondered whether he guessed it was her. Or perhaps he knew straightaway, as soon as he heard her silence. She kicked herself too, of course: maybe he thought it was someone else, a lover he had after her, whose call he had been waiting for. But she held her head up straight and shook it firmly: No.

Part of her brain repeatedly turned over his "hello," playing both instances of it again and again, the sigh and his voice, which was so old now, and the tiredness, which may not have been simply because it was late, and which sounded to her as if he were announcing that he was giving up something precious. How could he give up like that? she thought. He mustn't give up. And she answered herself, What gives you the right to even …? She was frightened to think that he could be that way without her having known about it. Here you go again, she scolded herself, writing dissertations on the crumbs of his life. She drove around a bend and thought of how for years she had tried to imagine their reunion. It would be an accidental one, and she smiled because for some reason she was always convinced it would happen in a supermarket, that their eyes would rapidly scan the produce in each other's shopping carts, their families' tastes in breakfast cereals, dairy products, and meat. And more than that: the plenty and the abundance, which she always thought seemed a little defiant in her cart, a little too prepared for waving in front of his eyes. She knew she would be disoriented and stutter, that her legs would melt, and she knew how she would consume his face and his new wrinkles with her eyes, and try to guess which of them belonged to her.

She tormented herself with the memory of the one meeting she had agreed to after they broke up, at a little cafй on the banks of the Yarkon River. He looked ill, his fingers trembled, and he mumbled things that horrified her-that he had told her a thousand times she was the love of his life, but now it was clear to him that she was even more than that, that she was his life itself. He looked at her, frightened, and she alienated him with all her strength, with a cruelty she never imagined she possessed, so determined was she to finally start living her own life, unhidden. She sat opposite him, foreign and cold, trying to prove to him that there was no point, that he was completely wrong about her, and the more he begged, the more she hardened, like a heartless warden who keeps sending the wrong prisoner into a visitor's booth.

She still couldn't comprehend how it had even happened that she'd called him. How she had shattered years of restraint, of sometimes daily battles, and the regular torture of birthdays, his and hers, and their anniversaries, and when Shira went into the army, and when Na'ama was about to have surgery, and when there was a big terrorist attack on his street-she almost lost her mind that time, but she didn't call. She exhaled in amazement and a smile escaped, and she felt that perhaps even the dialing was enough for her, perhaps she did not need any more than that after so many years, because he raged within her now exactly as she remembered, with no partitions, just as it had always been, body and soul. She remembered with a smile how he had inquired euphorically as to whether he'd reached her pancreas yet; and again the breathless silence of them both, the electricity of mutual knowledge, and the sensation that never deadened in her that their love continued to exist as it was, in all its pu-

rity and fervor, just laid aside for a while, for an entire life even, on a shelf at a pawnbroker's, waiting for Esti to gather up the courage to reclaim it.

Startled, she leaned forward, her muscles tensing around the internal mouth that had let out the secret, but in her inner space a man and a woman flew around in colorful revelry; like cutouts of a Keith Haring drawing, they hugged, danced, laughed, tossed handfuls of their love-stamen into the air. Those moments of lovemaking, she thought longingly, where the more you gush the more you fill up; she inhaled with an excited sound, and her heart dug at the walls of her body, and she blushed and was hot and girlish, and again she awoke herself and reminded herself of vows and engraved on her mind in cuneiform script that there was no place for this, none, no place for this, for this there was no place. And how once, just before they broke up, she called him at home when she knew he was out, and the bright voice of a woman answered "Hello," and again and again, the voice of a woman that gradually became small and sad, and the voice was like a slap on her cheek that she had been wanting for a long time, and she put down the receiver and laid her heart down on the table and took a meat mallet and smashed it with all her merciless strength: there is a woman there and there are children, and what are you doing?

It's not easy for me when she gets back from there, Shaul said, and she turned to him eagerly. I'm listening, she said, begging, almost demanding. A few days ago she happened to hear on the radio that there was a way to cheat a polygraph: you put a thumbtack under your foot and step on it during the test, and the pain alters all your reactions.

Shaul told her that when she comes home, he hugs and kisses her, and he always thinks she tenses up for a moment, in her stomach and shoulders. But he does not always find the strength to go to her, because not every day, he admitted, is he capable of the exhausting effort of pretending. There are days when the anticipation of her drives him out of his mind to such an extent that he is unable to even get up and open the door for her. He pulls her head onto his shoulder and is repeatedly amazed at her professionalism and perfectionism, because her hair smells like chlorine. He holds her face back from his and looks into her eyes and smiles, and she nods with a kind of distant sadness, pained, as if she understands exactly what he is doing and yet does not stop him. Then she breaks away from him with an apologetic smile, releases herself from the embrace, and he manages to keep his smile and dam his lips against the torrent of filth which almost erupts when he thinks about where she's come from and what she did there. But she's already far away, Shaul sees, very active and busy, rushing around the rooms, tidying up, making calls, while he has to pretend to have just woken up from an afternoon slumber. I'm quite good at doing that, he told Esti with a crooked smile, I actually find it easy to masquerade as a husband turned silly from too much sleep. Over the years he discovered that even if he were a less convincing actor, she wouldn't have noticed, because, she was so busy avoiding him, hiding the excitement that still colored her cheeks a vivid red. After a few minutes of hurrying around she is suddenly spent and collapses as if her last drop of energy has run out, and she lies down to rest. It's very difficult to catch the moment when this occurs: she disappears into her room-for some reason she does not take her siestas in their double bed but rather on the daybed in her little study-and instantly dives into an abyssal sleep, the sleep of a baby or an adolescent. He then-not out of nosiness, but out of amazement, out of true admiration for her thoroughness-quickly looks through her gym bag, and sees that the towel is wet as it should be, the bathing cap is damp, there is slightly less shampoo in the tube. He goes through this same routine every day, keeping his end of the bargain. He mustn't become sloppy and he will never give in, because, after all, these minute signs and tokens are, as he well knows, his one and only proof of her guilt.