Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She stretches up tall, sucking strength from the earth. There must have been some trickery here, maybe she herself caused it by being so tense about his coming. Yes, it must be just her and her imagination, and her infantile desires. She massages the joints of her fingers, cracks her knuckles, goes back to being a devoted craftsman preparing his tools; she doesn't even allow herself to revisit the strange moments when he had first entered the room, when she felt a sense of rejuvenation, because it was the hunger she had sensed in him that had brought back long-forgotten things in her. Strange, that hunger which for years had led her astray like a junkie, misguiding her toward any pair of open arms. Only recently-maybe she was getting old, maybe the fire was dying out-had the needy hunger, like a deceitful charmer, begun to loosen its grip on her a little. Where are you, my darling? she wondered, laughing to herself sadly.

"Come on, then," she says to the boy with forced cheer in her voice. "Let's find out if you can be a yogi."

"Wow," she says, and tries to raise herself up a little in bed. "I didn't imagine it would be so. "

"So what?" I shout. I have to get up, walk around, do something with my hands.

She sighs. "So … so uncomfortable, this pillow."

I rearrange the pillow again. "Improve" is the word, and I have another chance here to experience her with my own hands, but that's not what I seem to be doing, because once again I lament the special smell she has lost, a mixture of orange and jasmine and health, and she feels it, of course, and sees my face, and again I have improved nothing. Her few hairs are fine and fragile; for some reason they are drawn to my hand, and that tiny movement confuses me. What do they want from me, they must not have heard about me yet. Soft baby hairs, seemingly asking to be caressed. I stare at them and collapse on the chair in front of her, suddenly exhausted and emptied, and she too looks even sicker, as if a small private illness is emerging within the large disease. I feel as if it is only now becoming clear to both of us what we've gotten ourselves into and what is awaiting us.

"It's so true what you wrote about that hunger," she says later. "But I keep asking myself how you know."

"How I know what?" I tense up, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

She doesn't answer. I don't ask. It hits me again, how little she knows me. Or is even capable of knowing. On the other hand, I remind myself, I could see that as an accomplishment-more than an accomplishment, a little life's work. She looks at me and I at her, and suddenly, in silence, and with no demarcation of time, as if eighteen years have not gone by, the fat and troubled girl I was comes home and finds her sitting in the kitchen with her robe half open, with eyes completely dead, saying with a stony face, "Listen, Rotem, something has happened."

"You'd better not have taken any pity on me in the story," she says immediately. "I'll know right away if you did."

They start with some light stretching, gently bending knees into stomach, side twists, lengthening arms and legs. But a moment later she stops, remembering something. She sits him down. She tells him who her teachers were, where she comes from, where she studied. She listens to her own voice, to the gentle, prolonged names that erupt from her mouth. Names of teachers, regions, ashrams. Once, she used to begin every first class with a new student this way, weaving him into her dynasty. Now she hears the accumulations of her stress in the joints of the soft sounds, and looks nervously into the boy's eyes to see if he noticed anything. "Stand up," she says, and corrects the way he stands. She shows him how to make proper transitions from one position to another, and thinks, What's come over me? Why did I tell him about them? What does he care about them? She harshly admonishes herself: In fact, what do I care about them? What do all those names have to do with what I'm doing here? And how much longer can I keep brandishing these expired letters of reference?

There is a strange quiet in the room. Now she teaches with cautious restraint, not her usual way, and he cooperates unenthusiastically, as if caught in some forced experiment. The standing poses tire him out, and the twisting poses embarrass him, and every so often he loses concentration and starts to daydream. But when she asks if he wants to stop, he shrugs his shoulders and says, in that same dim, obstructed voice, that they can go on a little longer.

Nili grows impatient. Twice she glances at the alarm clock next to the sink, and both times he notices it. It's not just another usual-bad-class. There's something else here, something troubling, like a long gaze at an unfocused photograph. Everything is clumsy, his long, stiff pants prevent him from moving, he flinches at every touch of hers, and every time she talks about his body-when she describes for him, for example, how his thigh muscles stretch when he bends over-he giggles embarrassedly and disconnects again. "You're not here," she scolds him. "Where are you?" He doesn't answer, and she feels as if she's preventing him from concentrating on something, and resents him for the disappointment he caused her after what he had ostensibly promised when he came into the room. She is amazed that she could have been so mistaken about him, and at the pathetic longing that had inflamed her imagination and made her almost believe.

Again and again she jabs herself with that choice quote from Swami. oh, come on, what the hell is his name, with the names it's getting worst of all. "The dog that sucks a dry bone imagines that the blood oozing from its mouth is coming from the bone," or something like that. But when the hour is finally up, to her surprise, he asks with a muffled mumble if he can come again. Nili hesitates for a moment, for an instant, but of course cannot withstand the shrinking pain in his eyes, and more than that-the speed with which he is trained to hide that pain. She says, "Sure, why not? Come tomorrow, I'm here all the time." He looks at the floor and asks if it can be today, now. And Nili almost shouts, "Already? Where's the fire?" But again, she gives in to his expression, perhaps to the strange obligation she feels to arm him with something to use against his father.

It's dark outside now. Behind my back, beyond a heavy door, the guest room stretches out, massive and dim, padded with thick rugs, crowded with sculptures and heavy, ornate furniture. It's certainly the most opulent house she's ever lived in, and the moment I came in I knew: this house cannot revive her. I get up and close the electric blinds, and turn on the little iron lamp. It's sculpted in the shape of a man and woman embracing, their faces turned to the light, and I get stuck there for a minute. Where does she find the strength to stay so quiet, I wonder. How can she not say a word about the story? About the boy in my story. It is, after all, the first time he has had a voice between us. The first time he's talking, saying things. I ask myself whether she's even capable of grasping what it means to me to give him a voice and words. And a body. The body was the hardest. I tried all sorts of bodies and none of them was right. For weeks I walked around London looking for a body that would be right for him, and when I found one I started to vomit. I hadn't been that sick even in my worst times. For days and nights I wrote and vomited, and thought of how my body wasn't willing to let me give him a body. And one so beautiful, at that.

"And you gave yourself two sisters," she says. She must have only just realized.

"Yes, congratulations to us!"

She used to burst out laughing at every silly joke I made. It was the easiest thing in the world to make her laugh, like making a little girl giggle. In elevators with strangers or during grave discussions with my teachers, one quiet word of mine was enough to send her into uncontrollable fits of laughter. On Passover seder nights at Leora's she was completely taken hostage by me, begging with terrified looks for me not to use my influence over her. Now it was as if I'd touched a patch of dead skin, with no nerves or sensations.