Grossman David - Her Body Knows

With that phrase in her mind she finally realizes she is afraid, and she stands for a moment, trapped. She, who really has done it all, in lands near and far, and who has gladly and generously taught beloved men and women, and several students too, how to excite their partners and when to hold back and how to drive someone wild. Even when she gave classes in hospitals, even in old-age homes, she would pour forth her experience with deliberation and faith, teaching them where to touch and how to caress and where only to flutter like eyelashes, because it would always keep them happy and fresh, always. But here, suddenly, something else entirely, and even if nothing happens-and it obviously won't, you fool-oh hell, what did I need this for.

"You're not taking any pity on me," she says when I stop to take a drink. But there is no complaint in her voice-quite the opposite.

"Should we stop?"

"No. The pillow."

I rearrange the pillow under her head. When I lean over her, it smothers me.

"I smell it too," she murmurs. "That's the way it always is at the end."

She would certainly know. She has accompanied so many men and women right up to the final gates. Taught them to say goodbye, to release their hold on life without anger or resentment. She was proud of this great talent of hers, her art.

"And the way you invent things. Where did you get such an imagination? Not from me, that's for sure."

I translate for myself: there's no resemblance, she means. No resemblance whatsoever to what went on there.

"And you know what else I remembered?" She laughs softly to herself. "While you were reading, I remembered how you used to make things up when you were little. You were such a fibber. "

When she says that, the shameful coil of dishonesty stretches out from the depths of my stomach to my tear ducts, and for a minute I delight in it, and think of Melanie, and how she is slowly but surely redeeming me, even from that.

"The bottom line is that I'm a person without a drop of imagination. That father of yours, too, I don't remember imagination being his strong suit."

Perhaps because of what she said before about lying, or just be-

cause of the unbearable contact that had been created inside me between her and Melanie, I pounce on her: "Did you ever think it might be something I didn't get from anyone? Maybe it happens to be something private of my own?"

"That really is what I think." She surprises me by circumventing the provocation, refusing to charge into our normal catfight. "I've been, you know, looking at you, since you came here the day before yesterday. I look at you and I think, That's it, I'm not in pain anymore, the birth is over."

"It's about time," I reply briskly. "Thirty-five years in the delivery room is certainly long enough." I stab at her some more and flash her a broad grin, but we both sense that I am suddenly talking like a character in a movie where the lip sync has gone wrong.

"The birth is over," she says.

She's different, I realize. She's different from the woman I knew, and not just because of the disease. There's something else about her, and I don't know what it is, and it annoys me and jolts my foot mercilessly.

She perks up. "What's the matter, what did you see?"

"What, nothing," I mumble, and she anxiously digs into my eyes.

"No, just now, when you looked-what did you see?"

We stare at each other for a minute. Scanning and being scanned without pity. Making sure neither one of us has used the forbidden weapon.

An hour later, when it's already obvious that the boy won't show up, she begins to calm down and even work it into a good story for anyone who may one day show an interest in her memoirs ("And then he says to me, I would really like you to help my son be. " No, wait a minute, how exactly had he put it? And the little pang of remorse comes, biting and familiar-shit, there goes another anecdote). She hears a gentle knock on the door and there he is, standing in the doorway, tall and thin, and Nili thinks, It can't be, his father isn't his father. Egyptian prince pops into her mind, and even the faint hint of a mustache doesn't give his face a stupid look-not that of his father or that of youth. He stands looking down, and because of his short black hair he somehow looks older than he is, and slightly gloomy.

"My dad said you'd give me something."

A closed, coiled voice that reminds her of her Rotem, who has also recently adopted a nasal way of talking, as if to block off yet another opening to the outside. Nili stares and doesn't know what to do with him. She folds her arms in front, then behind, and he doesn't budge, letting her review him, and for a minute she is led astray by his limp arms and lowered head. He is so loose that there must be defiance in him. Yes, just like Rotem, who seems to enjoy projecting defiance from her bulky body. "What a bummer," she always seems to be taunting, "the yogini's daughter is a fish out of water." But at the same time her other senses are alerted, the more delicate ones. Her skin first begins to absorb his extraordinary heat-maybe he's ill, she thinks-and then she actually bangs into the thin, transparent wall that surrounds him, thrusting and deterring. At that moment something within him lunges at her, and Nili freezes, her nostrils turn black, and she inhales with a deep, animal concentration: hunger. Undoubtedly. The hunger of an orphan. She recognizes it, an old friend, and it's strong with him, and tyrannical like passion, and much older than his age. If it even has an age, that hunger, she thinks, and her mouth becomes suddenly dry. What's going on here? Who is he?

He still doesn't say a word, only shrinks a little when she approaches him with her hands held up with a dreamy motion. She slowly waves them in front of his face and around his shoulders and chest, then pulls back at once, amazed and also pained; it can't be, she thinks as she folds in her singed fingers. But it's a fact, you sensed it. She distractedly takes a few steps back. She feels as if her knees will give in, and she looks at him again from the side: just a fifteen-

and-a-half-year-old kid, wearing long pants-who wears pants in this heat wave? — and black shoes. Shoes? Here?

She makes an effort to smile. "Come on, please come in."

He walks in obediently, stiffly, with shoulders hunched up high. Even so, he is extremely handsome, she thinks as she looks with sweet shock at his sculpted nape. She shuts the door behind him, then leans against it and takes a deep breath: what now, what to do. He takes a few more steps, as if being pulled inside, and stops only when he's standing on the little Peruvian rug she brought with her, spread out exactly on her spot in the room. Then he turns his body a little, unaware, with the naturalness of a sunflower, and stands facing the high little window from which-if you stand on a chair-you can see a stripe of sea, and which is her spring of life and energy here. She watches his motions, cautious and surprised: how does he know? She decides he is a hunchback, like many adolescents, especially the tall ones-lots of pressure between the shoulder blades, weak knees, all the weight on the lower back. But those last three or four steps were completely different. He truly slid inside, and there was something soft, almost snakelike, in the flow of his limbs, but as soon as he stopped, he stiffened again and his shoulders crept up.

A dryness takes hold of her throat. "Um. what's your name?"

"Kobi."

"I'm Nili. Your father-did he tell you what I do?"

"Yoga."

"Do you know what yoga is?"

"No."

"And you want to learn yoga?"

"Whatever." He shrugs his shoulders, thrusting his neck down between them. "My dad, he said that I, that you'd give me …"

During those moments, with the uproar inside her, she thinks yoga might actually be very good for him. It might straighten his posture, for example, and increase his self-confidence, and even create a place for him that would be completely free of his father, a space of his own. She briefly considers that perhaps it's time she came up with new, fresher names for her usual formulas, the class mantras. She notices that he still has not looked at her since coming in, he just stands there with his dark eyes, tight and unbelonging, as if someone had played a magic trick on him, uprooting him from his natural place and throwing him into a forsaken land. At once she feels sad and insipid, over him being forced to come here by his father, and over herself having to be here in a bare and ugly room, with a strange boy, instead of spending the last week of summer vacation with the girls. But she pulls herself together and checks to see whether those vivid, confusing breezes are still swirling around him: there is nothing. Gone, as if a switch was turned off in him, as if they never existed.