Grossman David - Her Body Knows

In Walter's bathroom I try, unsuccessfully, to compose myself. I sit there on a padded wooden toilet seat, decorated with purple tassels of some sort, and marvel at the advances humanity has made in the field of toilet bowls and their accoutrements while I was wallowing in the latrines of my own income bracket. I think of what my life will be like very soon, after her. For example, a marginal matter- what connection will I have to this country? Will I ever want to come back here, even for a visit? Is it possible that this is my next-to-last time here? My chest starts to feel tight, but I don't leave. It looks as if my fingers have swollen a little on this visit. They look even redder than they normally do. Maybe it's just because of the bordello light in here. Their skin is peeling more than usual, my washerwoman's fingers. During the past few weeks I've gone back to biting my nails like a starved rabbit. I'll calm down soon. I rock myself back and forth, humming something to myself, and it doesn't help. A cigarette would help. A joint would be salvation. This house is driving me mad. With Walter, I don't even have to straighten the little pictures of shepherds hanging in the bathroom.

I think about things that won't exist anymore. There are things that exist only between me and her, and maybe I'll forget them when she's not around. I know I will. My heart suddenly turns sour at the thought that I have only a few times left, for example, to feel that breeze, the exhalation of the little lab animal passing in front of the forbidden cell. That occurrence, which lasts at most for a tenth of a second-her sorrowful sniffle, the little wave that rises in me when I sense her standing at my doorway and know she may take a wrong turn, and then the second wave that swells when she finally obeys and turns to leave submissively, like someone shrugging her shoulders and-what? Giving up? Abandoning? Deserting? A stupid thought goes through my mind: How will my body know how to create those materials on its own from now on? It may turn out that it needs them, that they're essential, that they are the only reason I am able to maintain some degree of balance. But I protest immediately: What is this nonsense? How can you just write yourself off like that as if you have no existence without her? You've been getting along without her for years. But the weakness persists, weakness of body and weakness of mind, and I sit and sob a little, to my surprise. I was hoping to avoid it; this must be a preview of the grief, the opening act for the great orphanhood, and it might actually be a good sign, like my happiness when I found my first gray hair and felt that I was part of their biology after all. But even that encouraging contemplation doesn't get me up off the toilet seat, and I sit there and cry silently, so she won't hear, and scratch my legs all down the back with ten open fingers. That takes me to exactly the right place, plowing me deep with pleasure until I bleed uncontrollably-because of her, and because of what will disappear with her, those materials that only she can produce in me, and also because even now it infuriates me to think of the secondhand things you get used to when you stand in the shade for too long, the way you become accustomed to getting secondhand light because someone else is standing in it, and to being silent and faded while she fills the room, any room, with her voice and her laughter and her colors. And the way you slowly turn this into ideology, espousing the shade, swearing by the faded, abstaining with stupid and pauperish pride from anything that is firsthand, and later-it happens very quickly-forgetting what you are allowed to ask for, forgetting that you even can ask, growing used to photosynthesizing by the light of the moon.

But that's enough now-what's the matter with you? It's time to go back. I wash the blood off my legs, stick some bits of toilet paper on them to dry and absorb the blood, clean the floor around me, calculate how many days I need for the sores to heal so Melanie won't find out. Let her find out, for all I care-I haven't done it for almost a year and I don't regret it. This is exactly what I needed now, like a good bout of masturbation. I wash my eyes with cold water and blink excessively, and restore my face, redesign the slightly bitter, hurt expression, so Nili won't be suspicious.

The night before coming here, when I had already been reduced to a state of ashes and dust, after packing and unpacking three times and announcing that that was it, I couldn't go, Melanie sat me down on a chair and started cutting my hair. Once every two months or so, when I quietly fall apart, she does it, and somehow, it's not clear why, it settles me, purifies me. Not the final result, which I don't particularly care about anyway, but just the feeling of her working on my head, tidying it for me, and the sense that for one whole hour that head isn't mine, not my responsibility, not my fault. Now, in the mirror, I try to see myself completely from the outside, and as usual, I decide I don't really like the woman I see. Not that I don't like her exactly, I just feel sorry for her. I know what I would think if I saw her passing on the street or if she squeezed past me on the Tube. "Lady," I would whisper to her, "relax, get the stick out of your ass."

I lean against the mirror and cool my forehead. I breathe warm vapors on the glass and write on it, Melanie. I like writing her name in Hebrew. I don't have many opportunities to do it. I like the way the spelling is similar to the Hebrew for my angel.

"And about that Melanie person," she asks the second I get back from the toilet, "have you written anything yet? Is she already in your stories too?"

I wait for a moment, counting to one million. "Not yet. But I'm gathering material about that Melanie person."

"Sorry."

We sit. Silent. A faint gurgling sound comes from somewhere beneath her. Her fluids are drained by means of a complex plumbing system which I was only just able to prevent her from explaining to me and demonstrating all its mysteries. I scan the walls around us with fascination.

"Were you crying?" she asks.

"A little."

"That's good. You should cry. Afterward too, don't hold it in. But remember always to bathe your eyes with chamomile."

She had never hidden her opinion of Melanie from me. She of all people, who had done everything with everyone and so forth, suddenly, when it came to me, her open-mindedness ran out. With surprising creativity she would pull out arguments and recite them sternly, with an assertion of responsibility I had never known in her: Melanie is an affair with no future and no continuity, meaning, no next generation, and in fact, Melanie is preventing you from finally finding true love, with all the perfection and depth that can exist only between a man and a woman, believe me. And there were all sorts of other dialectics hashed out in the darkest workshops of Rishon LeZion.

I deliberate for a while over whether this is the right time to open a debate. I suspect she has no grasp of where I've been and what I've done during my years in the Diaspora, while I was producing exciting material for my stories-the writings of a whacked-out tourist. I feel like simply telling her, without blaming and without whining, about all the years I lived without love, not for anyone, and how I taught myself to desalinate bodily fluids, and how I trained my blood to flow only through bypasses surrounding the intended areas. And how I looked at couples in love as if they were sick, crazy people, each consuming the other's soul through their lips. And how when I took a bath, I could convince myself to see a halo of bluish rot emanating from my body.

Or I could tell her the story of how I almost adopted a little girl because I thought that at least then I would have a girl with me, a living creature, verifiably alive. That through her I would be able to touch the artery that surely must pass through every human being. I'd already contracted with a lawyer who had deigned to mortgage all my assets in return for turning a blind eye when we came to the "medical history" section, ignoring the telling tremble of my fingers. But at the last moment I gave up, chickened out. And anyway, I knew I was only trying to fake my membership card in the human race. I still carry the picture of a one-year-old Filipina girl in my purse. She's seven and a half now, just this week. I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.