Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She breathes heavily. Opens her eyes. Her look says, You're killing me, but with her hand she gestures for me to go on, quickly. I'm not sure I'll have the energy. It's getting harder from one page to the next. And it seems so pathetic to heap all those words and long sentences on the pages just to try to capture one live moment, or a spark of her emotion. I grab the pen and cross out the whole last section, and she says, "Don't you dare." There is sharpness in her voice, as if I've stolen something from her, and I loosen my grip on the pen and sit there, reprimanded, staring at the page. What does she really want and why is she being stubborn? As if punishing both of us together. Putting us both on trial.

"About the yoga," she groans after a minute. Completely ignoring, in her usual evasive, feline way, the heaviness that accumulated over the last few minutes.

I fake an apologetic laugh. "I know. I got everything from one book for beginners that I found in a London library. You'll have to help me with that a little."

A sentence with a future-tense verb. A crude mistake on my part. She tightens her eyelids in pain. I move my chair closer to her-how to comfort? How to compensate for what I'm doing to her in writing and in person?

"But listen. When I wrote it, I realized how much yoga I had absorbed after all, without even noticing it, just from hearing you talk,

from watching you, from the millions of lessons when I was in the background in the studio and the apartment in Jerusalem-in fact, ever since I was born."

"You would lie there in your baby seat," she says, immediately tempted by me, by the warmth that had suddenly flickered in me. It's so easy for me to win her over, still, she's so thirsty for me, still, still. How has she not grown sick of me? "You'd lie there with your pacifier, with your eyes wide open, huge. People in the classes couldn't get over how quiet you were."

But I never took a class with you, I tell her silently.

Or a massage, she replies with her eyes, and shakes her head on the pillow. "It's a pity you wouldn't let me give you a massage. I gave the whole world massages, except you."

I reach out and touch her hand. I don't want to make a big deal out of it, but it's the first time I've touched her in years. Somehow I never adopted the habit of touching with her. When we met, the day before yesterday, I stood next to her bed amazed, trying to find Nili inside her. Walter had prepared me for it on the way from the airport, but I wasn't prepared. I stood for a few moments, unable to move a finger, barely breathing, until Walter let out a kind of sob behind me, almost comical, and left. And then I sat down and we started talking, untouched by human hands.

Now I somehow find my fingers and hers intertwined. Hers are huge, thick and swollen, and my red ones peek through them. Not a beautiful scene. I rub them for her a bit. Searching for the joints within the swollen flesh. I can't find them. My motions are clumsy, they don't help at all. I don't have it, there's nothing I can do about that. And besides, I don't seem to be a particularly compassionate person by nature. I'm afraid that if I give her a squeeze of encouragement it might hurt her, or she'll think for some reason that I want to hurt her.

But she does not let go, she holds on. All of a sudden I sense her fear. For the first time. There's no mistaking it. Like white jet streams splitting off and flowing into me, and there are cold stripes of white-

ness quickly spreading throughout me, and it's as if she's already calling to me from there, from beyond the gates. For a moment it actually paralyzes me, sucks me back into a bad place, and I can clearly tell what it will be like when she's gone, and how much strength I will need to not be carried away there again. I quickly pull myself together. I'm really not sure that what is occurring here is a good thing. Mainly, I'm afraid of the effect it has on her: she may think that if she and I have reached this state, it must mean the end is really near.

"Should we go on?" I ask.

Slowly and with an encouraging smile, I release her fingers from my own. Avoiding her look. Unbelievable how I can put on the exact, precise expression I encountered years ago on the face of a nurse at the mental ward in Homerton Hospital in Hackney. She would twist my arm back easily-I weighed barely ninety pounds then-and jab me with a needle full of Rohypnol containing at least five hours of sleep, and still smile at me with the serpentine smile of a member of some exclusive club: "It's all right, love, we're almost there." And now it's me, now it's my turn-how wonderful is the recycling of life in nature. From a great distance I can see my hand giving her arm two or three caring pats, and I hear myself laugh out loud. "Do you know what it meant to me to write about yoga?"

She lingers a little. Digesting what has just flowed between us. In her body, she is still perceptive and bright as always. Certainly more than I am. And perhaps not only in her body. I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe I'm the one who doesn't get anything. And maybe it was me who, in my stupidity, screwed everything up for us. Because sometimes, like now, when she purses her lips like that and turns herself off, it pains me to see how disciplined she is, the way she has trained herself to stop so as not to know me completely. Because that's what I demand of her, those are the terms of the contract, and that is how I always wanted it. And then of course I scorn her, because for a second she looks like a little lab animal, a mouse or a rat, trained never to enter one particular cell that she especially likes. But that's how I wanted it, I recite to myself what I can never forget even for a minute, that is exactly how I wanted it. In the meantime, it turns out that I've suddenly become witty, and I am cheerfully chatting with her about my short research into yoga, and how I got myself into it. I quote a playwright-I can't remember who it is, he was English or Irish, his name escapes me now; with names it really is the worst- who said that the most complicated thing for him, always, is writing about his enemy "from the inside."

"I hope you mean yoga," she murmurs.

Four or five times during their days together, someone registers for her class at the front desk or knocks on the door and asks if they can take a lesson, and Nili grits her teeth and signs them up for the lunch hour or the dinner hour. She never eats in the dining room anyway. And then, during the imposed lesson-if you can call it a lesson, those dollish limbs dangling and that pathetic displacement of fat-she keeps stealing looks at the little alarm clock and counting the minutes, amazed at her inner rudeness, and announcing to herself that she must have reached the end of her professional road if she is putting all her money on him, with the odds stacked against her as they are. She reminds herself constantly not to make comparisons, to give herself fully to anyone who needs her, but at the end of every disturbance, after the nuisance has left, she hears a soft knock on the door, not shy and not demanding, just I'm here. She bounds up off her mat, full of the sweetness of acquiescence.

"So you've just fallen in love with him a little," Leora says sting-ingly in her role as sobriety inducer, stabbing at Nili with the entire length of the word as if she's pinning down a butterfly. She is astonished again, for the thousandth time, at the unbelievable variety of her sister's talent for imbroglio, and wonders how she'll get her out of this one and how much it will cost.

But Nili knows with absolute certainty that no, it's not love, not even attraction. "And don't worry, he's not falling in love with me either." She chuckles. "I'm too old for him, and anyway, it's happening in a completely different place, it belongs to a different department. Lilush, what do you think, let's talk after he leaves?"