Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She never forgot, despite her sieve brain, and for years afterward, in good and in bad moments, mainly in bad, she would recall the flash of emotions and scenes: the neck, for example, how she slid it between her fingers over and over, up and down along its stem, lengthening and refining it, touching its artery every so often with fluttering touches like drops of perfume. Then his chest, the dark brilliance of his chest, how she circled the mounds of his boyish breasts with a thousand patient movements and leavened them and molded and cupped them to each other, and the flesh was now soft and supple and responded to her hungrily, with the happiness of an innocent creature. Then she turned him over and massaged and spread his flexed buttocks, and enlivened the tight hills around the two beauty spots he had there, on his cheeks, until they acquiesced and melted at her touch. And in between, she sculpted his hips, arching them further and further, smoothed the glistening, violin-shaped plots of flesh with smooth, slow movements. She thought of the hands that would hold him there one day, and prayed that they would be good and right, and thought of the men who had held her like that, and of women whose hips she had known. Without any difficulty she remembered-she has a wonderful memory for this-the touch of beloved bodies, their smell and warmth and the music of their movement in her body, and sweet dizzying pleasure poured into her, and with all her might she emptied herself into him and diluted his body with a thousand lovers, of all colors, all languages and continents and sexes, as if wanting to alleviate his going out into the world, and the pain of translating his unique body into all the clichйs of flesh he would encounter. Then she rubbed her favorite jasmine oil into her hands, the most pleasurable and profound of all the oils, and asked him to turn around again. He turned over slowly, and she went down to his feet and drew again, precisely, his thin ankles, and in her heart she blessed each and every toe and rubbed them with oil and rolled them between her joints, and powerfully rubbed his hard heels and his tensed arches, and wished for those feet that they would walk in beautiful places and dance with cherished souls. She smoothed his thin, youthful calves with quick, uplifting motions, rubbed his childish knees a little, and prayed for them that they never kneel or bow, and that they have the strength to proudly and bravely bear their wonderful, unique person.

With two strong hands she rubbed and rounded and leavened his narrow thighs, and was glad that he was giving his body to her completely, as if having emptied out all his desires and knowledge and slyness and secrets, with immense relief, as if he had retreated into the roots of his innocent being. Inside her, a fullness began to form, as if she were filling up with milk, and it occurred to her that she had never done anything like this for anyone. A fragment of a sensational image sparked in her, of her and Rotem this way, her giving Rotem a massage like this, carving out of Rotem the girl she used to be and finally liberating the young woman from within her, the woman she was meant to be. Because maybe it's not too late yet, she thought, to try and direct the vessel that she is, that grumbling little stomach which always seems to strike just next to the correct note-why not save her from a few bad years of unhappiness and loneliness and wandering, why not fight for her, goddammit, force her to give herself over to her, for once overcome her infantile fear; after all, she is nothing but a hardened little kitten, yearning, lost. She wondered how that had never happened.

Then she repelled the thought immediately, knowing that now she must be only with him, fight only for him, with her entire being, and she swiftly erased the image from within her, and with a brief motion she ironed out her body with both hands, from top to bottom, finally wrapping her fingers around her toes. She felt warm, madly warm, and for a moment she almost took her clothes off, but she remembered what she had sworn on the first day: give him only what he needs. She stopped and cooled herself off and let it sink in, as he lay on his back, fantasizing, dreamy, murmuring word fragments to himself. She ran her hands over his stomach, which no longer flinched at her touch but spread out for her like a taut little valley, waiting for its own blessing. She touched it and her fingers were light and became excited at once, and he started mumbling, "Good, good, good." She listened with wonder. This wasn't like the moans she had heard from thousands of others, but like someone suddenly recognizing something they had previously only heard about, like a boy who sees an airplane in the sky for the first time, not in a storybook, and he stands and cries out: Airplane, airplane! When she looked at him, a sigh escaped her. He was so beautiful at that moment, as if a boy and a girl were twisting inside him like two ropes or braids, intertwined, like something you see only in dreams, she thought, or in the Indian shrines, and even there it's not like this, not this pure and whole and glowing. She whispered to him eagerly,

"You can do everything, you'll see, nothing will stand in the way of your courage." She saw that he was moving his lips, repeating her words, moving in hallucinatory slow motion, with closed eyes; he looked as if he were swimming inside a bubble or a large drop. And she, spontaneously (because that may be the best way for me to give to him, she thought), talked to him within herself, perhaps also saying things out loud: "Never mind man, never mind woman, never mind what they told you, what they laughed or mocked, never mind what your dad calls you, what names, and why he hits you, and why they took Kobi away from you, they don't understand anything, they're just on the outside, they're in the noise, they can't hear what you can, and you can hear wonderfully, I want you to know that I haven't met many people who can hear like you do, just don't give up, don't give in to them." Then she became alarmed. What nonsense am I saying? What gives me the right? "You'll have a difficult path, very difficult, I hope you make it, you have to be as strong as Hercules to get out of there, to escape all that and remain who you are." And when she said it to him like that, she felt something occurring within him. His body began to squirm and spasm at her touch, his face twisted in strange, tormented labor pains, and she removed her hand and saw him massage within himself, painfully and passionately, the hidden, covered pit that she had sensed in their first class, which now seemed to be swelling by the minute, heating up and ripening and becoming golden and bursting and finally erupting with a bitter, broken sigh that passed through his body like a chilling furrow from head to toe. Her fingers were drawn after the sigh, strumming up and down with rapid touches to his body, as if she wanted to replay the new tune to him as it sounded outside his body. She saw a glimpse of the boarding school's filthy showers again, with their strange rust stains dripping on the floor, and his father's stupid, covetous face, asking her to make him a man.

She wailed with the fury of a beast: "Forget about them, it's all you, only you"-and she went on talking deliriously, massaging his entire body, but almost without touching him now, with fragments of thoughts, with heat waves that erupted from her, and only after several minutes was she able to calm down and sit at his side, large and stormy and breathless. She realized that he was already lying completely still, with his knees pulled into his chest, and his eyes were open and looking at her with a focused and slightly amazed look, as if he had only just finally grasped something that had been hidden from him, that had never been so revealed and clarified for him, like a promised land, or perhaps a verdict. There was no way to tell what was going on inside him, in his dark shell; maybe he was only thinking dully: The road home will be so long, and tomorrow it's Shabbat, and me and him alone at his place, and then I have to go back to boarding school. Nili smiled at him happily, compassionately, and took his limp, long-fingered hand and placed it on her blouse for a moment, on her left breast, which she thought of as the prettier one, the one that gave more milk when she breast-fed, so he would feel the touch and the warmth and the power. "Touch," she whispered, "see how sweet our body is, how much happiness it can give us."