Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Nili hesitates for a moment, caressing herself with these words: "for us to" (or maybe it was "for the two of us to"? What was it exactly? Never mind. The point is.). "Tell me, do you tell him what we do?"

He shoots her a sly look that encompasses everything, and she grasps that he tells his father, or at least hints at, exactly what his father wants to hear.

She takes the bills from him with a conspiratorial smile. After he leaves, she shoves them into her bra, laughing in the face of the bespectacled income tax inspector who has been hounding her for three years. Sorry, gifts are exempt.

A thin whistling sound, almost a whinny. She laughs softly with her eyes closed, and warm circles spread inside me.

She asks for a cup of tea. Just hot water and mint leaves. It's the only thing I've seen her consume these past two days, other than pills and yogurt. In the kitchen I scan the set of polished dishes. There are dishes and implements in there I don't even recognize, that could furnish any institution from a beauty parlor to a torture den. For some reason this fills me with joy. I take piece after piece into Nili's room, and she squints at them and proclaims: "Lettuce spinner," "melon scoop," "apple corer."

"Well, what do you expect," she says, teased, when I wave something made out of stainless steel and rubber that looks like an enema for birds. "I'm not going to change him now."

Walter, she means. She always had a rare talent, shameless and boundless, for attracting men and turning them into patrons. It always made me sick, even as a child, her ingratiating feminine game, and so did the men themselves, of course. But Walter, for a change, didn't take off at the moment of truth, and for that I am indebted to him. "Your mother is a wonderful woman," he said to me when he picked me up at the airport early the other morning. And he paid for my ticket. Every time he tried to talk about her, his eyes filled with tears and he choked up (I recognized it the second I saw him for the first time: a certified orphan. From birth). "She really is something," I said, and concentrated on the road blurring in front of his eyes. Then we kept on driving in silence, and I fought off the temptation to turn his wheel around and catch the first plane home. Ever since I was born, all my life, people who had met her would come up to me and recite these phrases to me, as if someone had dictated them from the concise dictionary of clichйs: Larger than life. Straight out of the movies. Mother Earth.

Now she explains in a cautious voice that she's fairly used to him and to his habits, and to his tears when he steals a look at her. "And to his taste in art," she adds dryly. "All these statuettes. So maybe he has a few drawbacks, Walter," and we both agree with a silent nod of the head, but he promised her he would keep her at home until the last minute. She motions at the crowded rooms which spread into each other in the gloom and says, "At least I'll die against a nice backdrop."

"You'll die?"

Just like that, suddenly, stupidly, helplessly, with the voice of a three-year-old. It just popped out of my mouth.

The next morning he shows up looking pale and green, and apologizes. "It's my stomach, it really hurts. I didn't sleep all night."

"I knew it."

"What did you know?"

"That you weren't feeling well."

"How did you know?"

"I knew, I just knew." She walks around him worriedly. "At night I felt it too, and now, before you came in, it was really strong."

"But how did you know?" he demands, and she explains distractedly that every time before he comes, she sits quietly for a few min-

utes and tries to feel what he feels. His mouth opens wide, his pain seemingly letting up for a minute. "Even when I'm not here you sit here and think about me?"

"Tell me, do you have a lot of stomachaches?"

"Yeah, sometimes. But yesterday was the worst, I really didn't sleep."

"So do you want to leave it for today?"

"No, I don't know, it really hurts." As he talks, his pain seems to increase, or perhaps the talking incites the pain, and the wretchedness.

"Show me where it hurts." But her hand is already reaching out to touch the exact spot, beneath the rounding of his left ribs, deep inside.

He groans. "How did you know where-" He grabs her wrist hard, his eyes digging wildly into hers, with that hunger of orphans. But with suspicion too. "How did you know?"

"Lie down now. Don't speak." He obeys her and lies down. Every movement hurts him. She kneels by his mat, her buttocks resting on her heels. She passes her right hand over the core of the pain. Starts pulling into herself, drawing from him. A long time goes by. She doesn't move. She plays a quiet, monotonous tune to herself. She asks herself who raised him-certainly not that father of his; maybe some grandmother or an aunt. Or no one. He falls in and out of sleep. His body is limp, his forehead perspires. She wipes the sweat off with her hand and notices that he follows her with his gaze to see if she wipes her hand off on the mat. As he does so, she checks his wristwatch out of the corner of her eye, the one he wears on his right hand and obstinately refuses to take off. Now it's set five hours ahead. Maybe Thailand? Korea? Is New York ahead of us or behind us? He groans weakly. Opens miserable eyes, then falls into a brief slumber. She hears the hum, his two hearts beating, one large one, heavy, and one little one, straggling behind. If only she knew what he was really going through, who was wrestling inside him. She massages him tenderly and wonders if he himself knows; sometimes she thinks he's completely ignorant of everything that goes on inside him, and sometimes she's convinced that he knows very well. At this moment, for instance, even though he is giving himself over to her hands, she guesses that he'll allow her only to help him bear his heavy baggage, just for a few days, on condition that she never try to glimpse inside him even once.

His abdomen rises and falls. His stomach and intestines almost turn over, and sink and create whirlwinds on his velvety, perspiring skin. "Now, slowly, try to breathe into it."

"Into what?" He is alarmed.

"Into your pain." Her voice is soft and sweet, she refuses to get caught up in his alarm, she can't recall seeing such panic in any of the boys she's treated. "Now exhale it into my hands." He holds on to her arm, his head stretches back, and his fingers pinch her skin with a twitch. She steadies her kneeling position again. Her body is uncomfortable, and she soon knows something is wrong. There is some deceit here. The pain has already melted, she is certain, but it seems to be having trouble leaving his body. She touches, presses, and releases, listens with her fingers. Strange-as if it is the body which is now clinging with all its might to the pain, unwilling to give it up. "I'm here," she tells Kobi when she finally understands. "Let it go, you don't need it. I'm staying." And after a moment's hesitation she adds, "And I'll stay."

Over and over, reassuring, promising, repeating with pangs of guilt the promises she must not make. And slowly, like a tight fist painfully opening up, finger by finger, the pain breaks free. She feels the truncated billows absorbed in her palms dissolving. The face on the mat becomes calmer, consoled. She rounds her hands over his stomach, using wide, slow circles, and does this for several minutes, until his head falls to one side and his mouth opens slightly with a slight snore, tranquil.

Two hours later, she wakes up. She sees him sitting in a corner of the room with his knees folded into his chest, looking at her. She gets up slowly, sits, rubs her scalp. "Was I asleep?"

He celebrates his little victory. "When I woke up I saw you sleeping."

She yawns, opening her huge mouth wide, remembering too late to cover it. ("Even Einstein didn't look all that intelligent when he yawned," Rotem once explained to her sweetly.) "Wow, are you crazy? It's already lunchtime! We've missed half a day. Help me up."