Grossman David: Her Body Knows

She suddenly feels a tremendous weight. She leans back against the door and looks at him, and he is imploring her to understand, to relieve him of the need to tell. With great effort, she makes her way through everything that's spinning around inside her and asks a question, already knowing the answer: "So tell me, when did it happen? When did he leave? When did they take him?"

"I don't know. A year ago maybe." He surreptitiously threads his arms together behind his back and sees her look, and puts them back in front submissively. She sees his unraveled flesh through the watch and the scar. Then he says softly, "Seven months. Plus a few days. Twenty maybe. Twenty-two."

Nili stands motionless. Dying to sit down. Collapsing under his pain, his insult, his longings. After a prolonged silence, she asks, "And what is his name?" Because she suddenly has a reckless, mad thought-Nili the savior, the all-powerful-that she'll find his friend for him. She'll investigate and detect and use all her connections, enlist all the freaks she's met during her travels, and she'll locate him, and respin the thread between them. She can already see how her broken mailbox becomes the secret nest for their encounter and their relationship.

But he hesitates. His eyes roll down.

Nili looks at him imploringly. "Well? Don't tell me his name is a secret too!"

"No, not a secret."

"Then?"

"Kobi."

She laughs. "He's also Kobi? Two Kobis?"

"No, he's Kobi."

"And you?" Now the laughter hangs emptily on her face.

"I'm not."

"Why. How can that be?"

"I'm Tzachi."

This is too much for her. She sits down on the floor. A strange nausea burns her throat, a roux of emotions undigested and regurgitated into her throat by a stubborn diaphragm. How could he be Tzachi? That name doesn't suit him at all. She remembers how he told her his name the first time. Remembers a second of hesitation.

Amazed at how, in the blink of an eye, he had decided to lie; she no longer understands anything, and doesn't wish to, and thinks how easily she is conned-what the hell is it about her that makes people take her for a fool? She curses the twisted crevices in which she is always betrayed, and remembers with some torn and final train of thought how he had impelled her to call him Kobi. The vague trembling around his eyes when she had said the name. "Listen, um …" She refuses to force the false name through her lips. "Maybe at least you'll tell me about him now?"

"Not now, maybe later." But he's alert to what is occurring within her, to her hurt face as it falls, and he gets up irritably and walks to the door. Just don't let him leave now, I can't be alone. He must sense her thoughts, because he stops and turns to the grunting air-conditioning unit and stands there playing with its buttons. Off and on. "I pissed you off."

"Well, do you think I like being-" Then she grumbles, "Why didn't you tell me at first?! Why did you have to cheat me like that?"

He half turns to her. "Should I tell you how we used to talk?"

"Go on." She wants to and yet doesn't. She already knows his tricks. The quick slalom moves of a liar as he pulls a rabbit out of his hat in mid-conversation, relying on her infantile curiosity.

"With questions. You're only allowed to use questions."

She relaxes her shoulders. What does he want from me now? Why can't he be direct? She can't be bothered with his riddles.

"Right from the start it was that way," he tells her, his excitement rising. "That's what we decided. Actually no, first it was his idea, he always has ideas, that one"-a yearned-for smile lights up the corners of his eyes-"and as soon as he saw me there in the yard? As soon as I first got there? And he was already there two years, he's older than me, I was ten when I came, and he right away started talking to me like that, with questions." His voice rose and became thin, and Nili also thought he was starting to talk in a different kind of dialect, from another place. "And I straightaway answered right, 'cause I read him in two seconds. Till I came along they thought he was crazy, and they none of them would answer him, just kept beating him up. But me, as soon as I got off the bus and he saw me, he came right over to me. Well, it doesn't matter." It does matter, she knows, hearing the exposed note of pride, and a large warm bubble bursts and drips down inside her. "I was only ten years old, and since then it was like that all the time, in our room too, and in class. And say when he was having one of his fits? He would fall down, he has that disease where you keep falling, and as soon as he'd come back? Again the same thing, a question from him, a question from me …" His eyes gleam, he runs his hand through his short hair, and Nili senses the tenderness of the touch, and with her seer's eyes she sees an image of a boy taller than him, thin and supple and restless, with a sharp face and a tortured, tense look, moving like a cheetah pacing around in its cage. "So that's how it was, always only with questions all the time. Questions, nothing else is allowed." He breathes rapidly and gives her a sad smile. "For maybe five years, we never tripped up."

"But how long can you talk like that? What can you say?" she asks, beginning to emerge from her tears, large and bright and yellow, with her innocent Weeble smile.

He suddenly gets excited. "Wanna try it?"

"Do you think I can?"

"Haven't you noticed you're already doing it?"

"Me?"

She smiles with cracked lips and looks at me, and her look says, Oh my, you're such an inventor. Then she says, "You really have a whole world in there." She gestures at my head with her bald eyebrows. Only then does she let out a deep sigh, and my first thought is that somehow by chance my story did touch her, kissing some dormant memory. I become alarmed, not wanting her to suffer from it too much.

"Look, I mean, we don't really know what motivated him, and sometimes you can die just from sudden abundance, like the survivors from the camps." I explain to her (as if I need to): "There were survivors who gorged themselves to death after years of starvation. Or at least you can want to die." Like me, for example, I think. Like me, during my first period with Melanie, and even today, sometimes, at moments of mortal excitement, I really want to die, because how can you bear all this unfounded goodness, this scandal of goodness-

There is a heavy silence soaked with words, absolutely dripping with them. I sit there exposed, urgently needing to be grounded somehow. To one particular body.

Then she sighs again, a long, horrible sigh. She lies on her back, broken in two right in front of me, and I suddenly realize it's not oniy the sorrow, the grief, and the guilt-it's also that she has missed him all these years, simply missed a person who touched her life in a place no one else ever had.

Three days after she came home from the Dead Sea, he disappeared. He ran away from the boarding school on Monday evening through a hole in the fence, and that was it. They never saw him again. And now it comes back to me as in a nightmare, how she cried then, for weeks. She talked to herself, cried out in her sleep, slammed her head against the wall, on the table, on doors, dozens of times, impervious as a piston, and she sprayed out words like shavings. Then suddenly Leora and Dovik showed up, their debut appearance in Rishon, to figure out what had happened, and while they were there they held a field court-martial for her in the kitchen, for all her crimes, no statute of limitations. I hung around downstairs outside the building until I couldn't take it anymore, and then I burst inside and screamed at them to leave her alone and get the hell out of our house and our lives. Go back to civilization. And they really did, with an imposing air of offense like two righteous cardinals, and Nili sat fatigued in a corner of the kitchen and looked at me with boundless gratitude. She had no strength to speak, but I'll never forget that look.