Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"Me, I don't know from writing," she says in the slightly stammering talk, serious and strange, which the disease has enforced on her. "But I'm curious, why did you think you needed to?"

"I just … I don't know. The pair of them just leaped onto the page, like two peas in a pod: Inbal and Eden."

Her head moves slowly. Her eyes pierce me, a little dim and colorless, but not letting up.

"I really don't know." I titter, stupidly embarrassed. "Maybe I also thought. "

"What." Now, with the last of her strength, she's not always able to bend her words into questions.

I can tell I won't get out of this easily, so I try to reconstruct what really happened. "I guess I thought I needed another two around me. To be with me. Picture it"-I try to wake her up, to find some warmth in her-"you and me, and another two. Another two the whole time. Why not?"

"Poor things," she groans. It may only be a joke, but it still shocks me. The unwritten rule says only I am allowed to say things like that about us.

The second class goes exactly like the first one, and Nili makes a note to herself that the young man is somehow managing to set her off-balance. It's not clear how-he's not doing anything to annoy her intentionally, but he seems to be enveloping himself intensely in a coat of boredom and dreariness. Yet still not willing to give up. With a stiff and ungraceful kind of determination he attempts the exercises and poses she suggests, slowly shifting from one to the next, as if trying on shoes in a store, and every so often he grabs hold of one of them and sinks into a particular pose for several moments, closing his eyes in a way that prompts in her the crazy thought that maybe he is trying to remember something through this. But then, all at once, he turns off and covers himself again with his obtuseness.

Toward the end of the hour she explains to him about the benefits of blood flowing to the brain, and to demonstrate, she does a handstand. In fact, she does this to relax herself as well, and at the same time she tells him her favorite story, the one about Nehru-or was it Gandhi? Suddenly even the most secure facts are undermined, the anecdotes she's recited thousands of times, even they roll down with rapid erosion, sending cracks up and down her consciousness. Nehru, she decides, I'm sure it was Nehru. She used to have some kind of code for remembering it. His baldness, because of the head-stands. But Gandhi was bald too. Oh dear.

"While he was in prison, he did headstands and handstands every day, because he discovered that those poses filled him with a sense of inner freedom." Even though her muscles are engaged, her words have a soft, prolonged sound. From her upside-down position she can see his expression change, as if someone had turned on a dusty lamp, and he asks if he can do it too.

Nili stands up on her feet again. A slight tension pulls through her body. "A handstand isn't as easy as it looks," she explains, "and it's usually best to build up to it after a year or two of practice. I suggest that …" But he isn't listening to her, he just asks if he can try, and his face is suddenly focused and intense. She spreads her hands out and doesn't know what to say. She has bad experience with new-bies doing handstands, most of them don't have the courage to really kick up, they falter with one leg in the air and fall, or their hands give way, and others are so afraid that they toss their legs up wildly-one of them broke her nose once. But the boy, Kobi, repeats his request a second time, and Nili gives in. She leans against the wall and prepares to catch his legs, ready to have her face kicked in, and knows that she deserves anything she gets. She is amazed to see him lightly and gracefully propel his left leg up, then add the right leg, and reach her outstretched arms with the precision of an acrobat or a dancer.

He stands that way for a few seconds. She didn't believe he'd be capable of that, and even when his arms start shaking, he doesn't give up, seems to be waiting for the borderline to be clearly marked between his weak body and his willpower, and only then does he come down with precise motions, his legs straight and his feet held together. He sprawls on the floor between her legs, his forehead resting on his hands, and Nili quickly massages his back between the shoulder blades, among the vertebrae, to dissipate the strain. This time he doesn't flinch at her touch; she thinks he even enjoys it. But when he doesn't move for several more minutes, she becomes afraid for some reason and turns him over sharply and sees his eyes looking at her, clear and completely open, pleading.

"For what exactly?" Leora demands to know on the phone, refusing to be impressed by Nili's interpretations. "I have no idea," Nili mumbles, and immediately gathers into herself-why the hell did I tell her, why her of all people, why don't I ever learn? — "but it was as if he was asking me for something, I mean"-she gulps, oh God, we're not going to go through our ritual dance again-"something he can't ask for explicitly?"

Leora-three years her senior, her sister, and from the age of seven also her mother, and from the age of forty-two, because of a miserable embroilment with the bank, also a kind of forced custodian in financial matters-stretches out her gaunt, laconic body. "And the massages, what about those? Did you get to that?"

"No, no." Nili pulls back, as if something had been desecrated. "Look, a second after he came in I completely forgot that that's what. No, I'm really just teaching him yoga." She laughs with surprise, but then turns very serious. "In fact, I'm just reminding him."

"Ni-li," Leora sighs, and Nili can almost sense her sister leaning over her like an evil teacher waking up a snoozing student.

Nili unconsciously hunches her shoulders, puts a hand over her wide, expressive mouth. The large face, the freckled lioness face, becomes lost for a moment. "Lilush, what did you ask?"

I lower the page a little and look at her. She lies with open eyes, staring at the ceiling. "Does it bother you that I wrote about her like that?"

"No."

"No? I thought-I was sure you would actually-"

She turns her head with great effort and looks at me, surprised. "I don't care with Leora."

"Every time I tried to change the names," I explain to her, angry at myself for needing to justify my decision, "it somehow sounded like a lie to me, but maybe in the final draft I'll change them. I don't know."

"Don't change." She doesn't suggest. She orders. I've never heard that tone from her. She shuts her eyes painfully, or weakly. "Everything should be like in life."

Like in life?! I can barely prevent myself from shouting; for the last two months I've been begging her to tell me something, to give me a hint, a direction.

She hears my silences very clearly. With them she always had a good flow of communication. She purses her lips and sticks them out. I've noticed she has a new expression now, an indescribably irritating one. An air of rebellion that is at once childish and elderly. She didn't use to be like that with me. So assertive. And callous and unreasoning. Unhesitatingly employing the exclusive entitlement awarded to those facing death.

She takes hold of his shoulders and helps him up, and asks hesitantly if he'd ever done a handstand before. He says he hadn't.

"And what did you feel now when you did it?"

He stammers. "I don't know. Everything was upside down, I saw everything upside down …"

"And at school you never did it?"

"I'm not in school."

"Then where are you?"

"At boarding school." He buries his voice again, evading her.

"Boarding school? Which one?"

"Hessedavraham."

"What did you say?"

"Hessed Avraham."

"A religious school?"

"Yes."

"Are you religious?"