Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She beats me off, of course, pouting. "But I told you. Don't you remember I told you?"

I do. I don't. What difference does it make? Why am I picking on her?

"I tried, Rotem, twice even. I just didn't get it. I don't. What can I tell you. I'm too old for that putz-modernist style."

"That's not exactly it, but never mind now. Let's go on."

"I felt," she sighs, "I felt as if … as if you didn't want me to understand." Then she corrects herself: "As if you wanted me not to understand."

I laugh. "I wanted you not to-? But why would I …" I fall silent, amazed. What is she talking about anyway. In the blink of an eye we both inhale and swell up. All the sighs of the past in our sails. I remember that later on, soon, there is a sentence that describes a ridiculous and slightly distorted face of hers, a sock-puppet face, and I wonder whether I should skip it, save her from it now, and more than anything, I think of her reading my book, I see her struggling with it line after line, I see the wrinkle deepening between her eyes.

Once she looked like Simone Signoret. People would come up to her on the street and tell her that. Now her large bald head moves slowly on the pillow and turns to me. "Rotem, enough. You can't go backwards to fix things."

But a friend of mine who works at the Steimatsky's branch in Ri-shon told me that when the book came out, Nili would go into the store twice a day, stealthily, with her transparent slyness, and make sure two copies were on the display tables, so they'd stand out.

His snickering when he had said "It gets on my dad's nerves" had distressed her. It had made him sound like his father, with his splinters of malice and pettiness. And so, toward the end of the class, she asks him to stand across from her and stretch his arms out to the sides. "Really open up," she urges him, and lifts his arms higher, higher. "Imagine you're yawning with your armpits. Now close your eyes. Now smile."

His eyes shoot open. "What for?"

"I want you to smile. What do you care? Just so you'll see what a smile does to us inside."

"But how, just like that?"

"Yeah. What's the big deal? Even just the beginning of a smile. See what happens."

He looks at her worried, almost suspicious. "I can't do it just like that, without …"

They stare at each other for a moment, their looks casting about over each other and pulling back like strangers, and Nili thinks sometimes he's a bit thick. "Maybe think about something funny, like something funny that happened to you." Then she grows alarmed. "You have had at least one funny experience in your life, haven't you?"

"Sure, what do you mean? Loads."

"Well, then."

"But I can't laugh at the same thing twice."

"I can laugh ten times at the same thing," she tosses out with clumsy cheerfulness. "But that's not saying much with me, I can also cry about the same thing ten times."

The joke, which isn't a joke at all, doesn't go down well, and even seems to cause him pain. Nili sees the slight tension in the shadow behind his eyes and falls quiet, and all at once what little they had starts to melt away. As he stands, his shoulders seem to hunch up of their own accord. She sees him getting further away, unattainable. Within the blink of an eye, he is a stranger, and she guesses that this instinct of foreignness is perhaps the essence of his life wisdom. For a long moment she freezes helplessly, and feels the pulsating of a scar that has reopened and rehealed in her countless times, in her abandoned, pained place, but then she shakes out of it, takes a deep breath, puts two long fingers in the sides of her mouth and pulls it out to the sides, rolls her eyes around rapidly, dances her eyebrows up and down, and flaps her ears charmingly.

He examines her, and his face widens in surprise, shock even. She sees his pupils darting around. A quick internal debate is occurring: Should I surrender to her or not? Can I believe in a woman who makes a fool of herself with such ease? Another long gaze, slightly confused, trying to resist her but being pulled toward her as she holds her clown face, and then he shuts his eyes, spreads his arms to the sides, dives into himself, and disappears. For a long time nothing happens, and Nili holds her expression, exaggerated, like a sock puppet stretched over a hand that's too fat. After an eternity-she has never failed at this little trick-a tiny smile sprouts at the corners of his lips, quivering a little, then increasing and opening up as if the smile is making itself laugh, delighting itself. His lips spread and his eyeballs flutter beneath his slender eyelids, and a tingle of pleasure rolls down from the back of Nili 's neck to the edges of her buttocks.

"Well, what did you feel?" she asks when he opens his eyes.

"It's great!" He laughs and pulls his head up with a motion she had not yet seen and would not have expected in him, and his eyes narrow into cracks of glowing pleasure. "It's like I could see these kinds of little clouds inside my brain, with a purple color, I've never-"

But upon seeing the reflection of his joy in her eyes, he sharply purses his lips and stands quietly again. Very polite and differentiated. Well-groomed, with no frayed edges. For a moment he reminds her of herself at the bank after she realized she was overdrawn.

"To the wall, quickly!" she orders in a panic. "On your hands!"

"Rotem, I have a request." "What?"

"Don't turn."

"What do you mean?"

"You keep turning away from me."

"Sorry." I straighten up embarrassedly, only now realizing that my whole body is stiff.

"I want to see your face."

"Oh, come on, what is there to see in my face?"

"That's not true." Veteran soldier that she is, she immediately enlists her last remaining strength to protect me from myself. "In fact, you've become much prettier since last time you were here. And with your short hair, you can finally see your face."

Before I can cancel out the compliment, ridicule her, make myself ugly, Melanie floats up and fills me. Nili must see it happen, because she turns her head away from me.

"But he has some issue with his stomach," she ponders out loud the next morning at six-fifteen, still half asleep, alarmed by the telephone ring that had unraveled her dream. "He has this kind of nervous tic, he keeps touching it, as if he's making sure it's there." As she talks, she knows she doesn't want to say any more, not to Leora. She doesn't want to let her get a foot in the door between them, but in the mornings she is always spineless. "And yesterday evening I showed him how I suck my stomach in and roll it"-and again she sees his eyes pulling back in fear at seeing the hard, vertical roll of her muscles, turning right and left along her stomach-"and he really started feeling ill."

Leora, at home in Jerusalem, standing opposite the open fridge, is putting together the day's shopping list as they talk; she absent-mindedly touches her little belly, the only drop of flaccidity in her body, and pulls it in, conquering a sigh.

"That's exactly it." Nili quickly picks up on the sigh, compelled to briefly wade with Leora into the same warm, sisterly blister of anguish. "Because with us, stomachs are always a big deal. I mean, ten times a day I come across it at work"-she purposely emphasizes the word "work" to Leora-" 'My stomach is too big,' 'It sags,' 'It's like jelly'. And all the emotions, and the insults, and the pregnancies, and afterward, and empty stomachs. But for men? And a kid of his age?"

"Lovely." Leora throws her out of the niche she was trying to creep into. "So now you're his therapist too?"

Silence. Only her heavy respirations saw through the air. I can't take it anymore. I'm going to ask her about him, about the kid, the boy. He was no more than a boy. I take a deep breath. Her breathing stops. I ask her if they talked like that, or kind of like that, she and Leora.