Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Her confession confuses him. "But to teach yoga, don't you need to know these kinds of things? Quotes and all that?"

"Look," she says simply what she should have said instead of the whole speech, "when I do things, I understand. I understand through my body."

Almost before she's done speaking he gets up, hurries to the wall, and hurls himself on his hands, tossed like a luscious fruit ready to burst. He stands straight for one minute, then one more. His arms are already shaking, his forehead is wrinkled with effort, and he breathes laboriously, looking at her without seeing. Something catches her attention. The watch, which he forgot to take off. A clumsy old watch which he always wears the wrong way, so it covers the inside of his wrist, is now turned to her and showing the wrong time. Three hours fast.

He comes down one leg after the other and lies on the floor, relaxing. With his head between his hands he moans, "I want you to teach me, if there is such a thing in yoga, to make me not. like, how to not suffer from noise."

She whispers, "Explain to me a little. I think I understand, but-"

He straightens up. She already knows: as soon as she doesn't understand him, he loses his patience, immediately.

"There's noise the whole time, right? So how. how can you make it so you can, so in the noise-"

A little wave beats in her throat, still she checks carefully, he's only fifteen for God's sake-okay, and a half. "What noise exactly do you mean?" She remembers the quarries. "You live in a kind of noisy area, don't you?"

He gives her a look she'll never forget, a piercing look of disappointed rebuke. Almost desperate. She shrinks in. Stupid. What were you thinking? Wake up. Get with the picture.

She shakes it off. "You know what? We'll learn together. Sit on the mat, sit opposite me."

They both sit cross-legged. Erect. Nili shuts her eyes, focuses inside. "It's as if I have a place there, a quiet place, and I can reach it instantly, in any situation almost." Or at least I used to be able to, she thinks instantly. "Slowly but surely you'll also be able to find your place." She makes an effort to smile, and her hand pulls down an invisible thread opposite the center of his chest, and she can feel the thread trembling, can hear with her fingers the humming fluctuations in his body. She senses them constantly, as if there's another heart beating in him, but a distant, underground one. "And it's a matter of practice, years of practice, knowing where your quiet is located, and then you can get there from wherever you are, in the loudest noise, in the midst of filth and crudeness," she whispers, and her eyes are closed tight. "You can put yourself in there and be protected." She breathes slowly, the bitterness of the words seeping into her throat. What's left of that? Only talk, words, cauliflower. She doesn't even want to think of how many times she's really been able to go in and stay there since she left Jerusalem, since she was exiled from Jerusalem, from her beloved little apartment that was too expensive, from the students who stayed with her for years. From her glory days. Her hands tighten on her knees. Her fingers draw two zeros. All she had now was a tiny, insulting apartment in Rishon, and the misery of the girls, uprooted because of her, because of her criminal ineptness in managing her affairs. And more than anything, Rotem, the waste of Rotem, the hatred of Rotem, the terrible drawing Rotem hung in her room, which keeps presenting itself like a curse in almost all of Nili's contact with the world: My family in the food chain. For three years now, she's been running around with her yoga in a town where no one has even heard of it, haggling over every penny with treasurers of moshavim and community center directors. But he, Kobi, wants to know what it's like in there, when she's in her quiet place, and Nili shakes her head with closed eyes. What can she tell him? How can she describe her place that has become a den? What can she tell him of the little beast that lurks for her there?

Even so, again, as always, she closes her eyes, lifts her head a little, her face looks ready for a kiss, and to her surprise she is there in the blink of an eye, an unexpected and so attainable gift. And the place is vacant, waiting for her with a bright welcome, and she squeezes her eyelids and tightens, knowing that shortly the sharp little teeth will sink in-

Total silence. She breathes deeply, enveloped in a dense pink sensation. God, she thinks, and chokes up a little, where were you all this time? I almost lost you.

Only after a few minutes does she remember Kobi, and sadly forces herself to climb back into her pupils, and he is waiting, a little hurt at being left outside, but eager, like a man aboard a ship who sees the diver coming back up. "What's it like down there? What did you see?"

"I can't explain it with words." She smiles, refreshed, distributing herself around like the scent of peeled mandarins. "When you get there you'll know, you'll sense it yourself." And when she sees the disappointment on his face, she hurriedly adds, "But there's something that maybe you can feel: my hands get warmer when I'm there, a lot of energy builds up in them, sometimes my skin actually quivers. It truly does." She smiles as he purses his lips in amazement.

"Can I touch?" He hasn't asked to touch her until now; only she has touched him, carefully, correcting a pose, straightening a foot, and his skin always shrinks away a little, as if from a light electric shock, the skin of a child who wasn't touched enough.

"Of course, touch."

He reaches out and touches the edge of her open palm. He announces immediately: "I don't feel anything," and pulls his hand back.

"Give it a minute." She smiles, pressing his hand to hers, magnetizing inside, taking with her the touch of his marvelously soft fingers, and within a moment she becomes focused, brimming with warmth inside; long threads of glowing tenderness flow through her limbs, and she walks around inside her body, inside the beautiful city of Brahma, and she is full and generous with herself all the way to the edges of her fingers. "Here, feel now."

"Wow. Can I get that way too?"

"If you practice, it will be even stronger with you," she says gravely.

"Really? How do you know?" He giggles, and for a moment he exposes something childish, the sudden twittering of milk teeth.

"I know. See, that kind of thing I do know."

A phone rings in one of the distant rooms of the house. She blinks at me not to answer it. We sit and count the rings and guess who might be calling.

"No phone calls until we're done," she decrees.

"Maybe it's Walter?" His name tastes uncomfortable in my mouth.

"I told him not to call, and he won't."

Walter was the attachй for commercial affairs at the German embassy in Israel. At the end of his service here he had conducted a private little defection. He's a tall man, delicate and hesitant. A little frail for my taste, and somewhat short even by her standards. On top of everything else, he doesn't look you in the eye. He met her five years ago on the street and fell in love with her in an absolute Siegfried-like way; this was also, it later transpired, the first love of his life. They had one year of bliss. Then she got ill. She points out again and again that it was when she became ill that he began to love her even more. She finds it strange. "It's as if he loves my illness too," she says. "As if he would be willing to make a deal, you know, to actually be ill instead of me." And I know her voice and know what troubles her, and do not enter with her into the alliance she wants to create. But she can't let it go, looking askance at me: "Doesn't it strike you as an oddity?" I play innocent: "What's odd about it? He loves you. When you love someone it includes everything." "Even so," she murmurs, "what does he need this for?"