Grossman David - Her Body Knows

A few minutes later they drove past the entrance gate and into the cabin area. They saw no one. The headlights lit up a cabin wall every so often, or a tent, or a hut covered with palm fronds.

Straight and farther down, he said, no lights.

The car rocked heavily. Gravel flicked under the wheels.

Farther, farther down.

The path became a slope, twisted and more rocky.

Farther, all the way down.

Esti thought she'd never be able to get back up. It seemed to her as if the entire desert could hear the Volvo screeching and groaning.

That's it.

They were on the edge of a cliff.

Turn it off.

She killed the engine, straightened up a bit, and saw, on the plain beneath her, a small dark cabin. Bamboo walls, a roof of mats and branches.

The sudden silence filled up quickly with crickets and nocturnal rustles. She saw his face come and go in the mirror, and then settle there, a pale yellowish stain against the back window. They sat quietly. The mist had lifted and the sky over the desert was cloudless. Esti thought about Elisheva breathing beyond those thin walls. Asleep or awake. Maybe watching them.

Do you need help? she whispered.

What? Her voice had shocked him, and only then did she realize she was disturbing him.

I thought-should I help you out of the car?

No … I don't need anything.

His eyes were closed tight, and he bit his lower lip. Maybe he needs me to get out, she thought, maybe he wants to be left alone. But she didn't move, not wanting to disturb him. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. And felt him erase her again. She did not exist, and for a long moment she delighted in the feeling.

She lost track of time. Years shed away from her. She might have slept. Maybe just hallucinated. When she opened her eyes once in a while, she saw his constricted face, and no longer tried to guess what was going through his mind. She was part of his imagination, an image flickering at the edge of his hallucinatory scene. She closed her eyes again and gave herself over to him and became the thing he saw, the back hiding the cabin in which Elisheva was writhing on her bed with a man, perhaps two, perhaps with all the men in the world.

Esther, he said later weakly, I think we can go back.

She found it hard to wake up. She started the engine and maneuvered the car clumsily onto the road and drove slowly, avoiding looking in the little mirror.

Stop for a minute, he said when they were some distance away, I want to move up front.

She stopped on the shoulder of the empty road. He opened the door and pushed himself out and stood leaning on the car with his leg slightly folded in midair. She got out and went to him and stood in front of him, enveloping herself in his arms, breathing the sharp air, rocking slowly. They stood together for a moment within the night's shell and did not know where to look. She extricated herself and hurried over to move the passenger seat back and lower the back down at an angle. She padded the floor with a coat and a blanket.

You can get in, she said, as he walked to the open door.

Wait, she murmured as he walked by her, and without thinking she pulled him in for an embrace.

What do you think? he said hesitantly when they were moving again and had been quiet for several miles. Maybe we can go through Beersheba? And she, alert at once, asked why. He said, I just thought maybe you'd show me your old places. She considered his offer. But it's nighttime, she said. And he said, Yes. She nodded slowly to herself a few times, thoughtfully, wondering where to begin.

February 2002

She interrupts me after the third sentence: "I saw something on TV yesterday and I thought of you."

I put down the pages. I can't believe she's cutting me off like that.

"I woke up and it was 3 a.m.," she says, "and I had nothing to do." She laboriously moves her swollen face on the pillow and turns to me. "It was something about a bunch of hippies in America. Saving birds that keep crashing into towers." -

I wait. I can't see the connection.

"I thought you could have been with them."

"Me?"

Her hands make jittery fists on the blanket. Nervous flutters, a little like the ones you get after a nice dose of Haldol, although that's the one drug she isn't taking. I try to disassociate myself from those movements of hers, remind myself that they have nothing to do with me and that it's not a criticism of my story. Just jumpy little tics that will drive me insane in a few seconds.

"Every day at four in the morning, they walk past the skyscrapers." Then she explains: "That's because the birds migrate at night."

"Well, now it's clear," I say as I emphatically straighten my stack of papers. I'll never understand her way of taking in information or, even less, her way of spewing it out. It's taken me two months to prepare for this evening, and she just cuts me off like that.

"They collect the remains and put them in plastic bags," she continues, "and if there's a need, they treat them. I even saw them giving cortisone to one bird." Her common lot with the bird amuses her.

"Then they fling them back, set them free." She is astonished. "They look like normal people, they all have jobs, one's a lawyer, another one I saw was a librarian, but they're also, how should I put it, kind of principled."

"With that sort of self-righteous expression?" I ask slyly.

"What. yes," she admits, embarrassed. She herself probably didn't know why she had connected me with them.

I laugh, somewhat desperately. She is my mother, the ultimate seer, and yet she's a complete ignoramus when it comes to me. "I actually tend to side with the tower colliders," I tell her.

"No, no." She shakes her head heavily. "You're strong, very strong."

She says "strong." I hear "cruel." She dives a little deeper inside, where she may come across another crumb of memory to salvage. We are both quiet. I haven't seen her for two years, and there are moments when I can't reconcile her with the woman she used to be. Her lips move, mumbling thoughts, and I make sure not to read them. She turns her head and looks at me. "Why do you think we have eyelids?" I used to yell at her, and now I say nothing, dutifully taking what I deserve. It's one thing to sit at home in London and write the story, and feel shitty for half a day after our weekly phone calls because she doesn't even imagine what I'm doing to her in my writing, and it's a completely different thing to sit here and read it to her, word for word, as she suggested, as she demanded, as she compelled me to do with all the force of her dying.

"Okay," she sighs, "I interrupted you. From now on I'll be quiet. Read it again, from the beginning."

A small man with bulging eyes, crude lips, and large hands stands and looks at her. She senses him before she can see him. An ill breeze invades the circle that surrounds her. She opens her eyes and sees him upside down, leaning against the doorframe in shorts and a floral shirt, with very red lips, as if he has just consumed his prey. She calmly pushes her feet away from the wall and descends, one leg at a time, then gets up and stands tall. The man lets out a soft whistle of admiration that sounds like contempt.

"Once," he says, "when I was little, I could do that. Headstand too. The whole deal."

Nili makes no response. Maybe he just came into the wrong room. Must be looking for the gym.

"Well, then," he says with that same forced tone, tranquil and yet threatening. "Yoga, eh?"

She starts rolling up the mats left out from the morning. Three vacationing ladies had decided to refresh their bodies in her class. They hadn't stopped giggling and chattering, and couldn't even get one leg up in the air.