Grossman David: Her Body Knows

I don't get it, she whispered. Tell me.

Then everything slowed down in him. His eyeballs grew heavy and seemed to harden. I'm telling it now, he thought with a strange calm-the tranquillity of the inevitable-and I'm telling it to her, of all people. Of all people, her. The terrible mistake spread like a sweet narcotic through the twisted innards of his thoughts, and he stared at the ceiling of the car and for a long moment did not breathe at all, until he felt a delicate shudder through his entire body, from the tip of his head to his toes, and he leaned his head against the cool window and closed his eyes, and slowly but surely his face relaxed and he focused inward, as if in anticipation of a naked pleasure.

He even knows, he mumbled, every time she goes to see the other guy. He even wants to know. And he sighed. He-how can I put this-he must know, everything.

She swallowed. Asked feebly if he wanted something to drink. He didn't answer and she didn't dare turn to face him. They sat this way for a long time, lost in themselves, slightly shocked, as in the moment between a blow and the pain that follows, until Shaul turned his head with immense exhaustion and met her large black eyes in the mirror, eyes that were always surrounded with shadows, and whispered that she should keep driving, there was no time to lose.

Warmth radiated from him and enveloped the back of her neck and flowed beneath her dress. Even the plaster cast suddenly emitted fresh ripples of smell. She drove the Volvo onto the road and proceeded slowly, in a daze, and felt that she was filling up with a dust of floury stupidity that rendered her incapable of thought. She only vaguely guessed that the fact that he was even telling her these things was somehow connected to the injury; his talking reminded her of the children's babble when they got hurt, when they would pour forth a flow of hysterical chatter. She remembered Micah telling her that Shaul never got hit and never hit anyone, even as a boy. He never fought, never broke a hand or sprained an ankle, Micah said with wonder and a hint of admiration, as if Shaul were an exquisite museum piece. Esti now imagined how in an instant yesterday his skin and flesh were torn and his bones broken. Perhaps he's not really in control of himself now, she thought. She wanted to tell him to be careful not to say things he would regret tomorrow. But she waited, silenced, for what emerged from him, and was repelled and drawn, like eyes to a disaster.

He sits at home and waits for her, Shaul continued; he seemed serene, but every tendon in his body was rigid. He knows exactly how long it takes her to get to his house, to the second, and he sits and accompanies her on her journey until she arrives, and knows where she parks outside the house, and how she goes up the stairs, and knows exactly how many floors (four) and how many steps.

Esti waited for a moment, on the edge of her seat. He didn't say the number of steps, and only this allowed her to breathe again. Because if he had said the number of steps, she would have screamed.

So he. follows her? she asked when it was no longer possible to allow this distorted silence between them, but that was not the question she wanted to ask. Other things washed over her, and from the margins of her body, her elbow or her ankle, there also came a slight sigh of relief for Elisheva, that she had such a story in her life and that she was apparently not sick, as everyone had started to fear.

Shaul said, What? No, he doesn't follow her, of course not, and Esti thought he seemed angry at the question, or not at the question itself, but that another voice had intruded and prevented him from settling into his story. He doesn't have to follow her, he mumbled: he knows. He said these words softly but with decisive confidence, like someone placing a winning card on the dark red velvet of the table.

But how. she whispered and glanced over her shoulder, and was amazed to see in the darkness the change that had occurred in him during the last few minutes: his white face, with eyes shut, was strained and pulled forward as if seized by bold, merciless fingers. It's not true, she thought, it can't be, not Elisheva. He's not talking about him and her at all, that's just you and your screwed-up imagination. But why not, she argued-is anyone immune to it? And maybe that's why she's always been so sad and quiet for years now, ten years, he said. Maybe she's hiding a huge secret like this from the whole world. She sniffled, and Shaul furrowed his brow at the sound and begged himself as if pleading with a tyrant, Shut up now, shut up, you've done enough damage, you won't even be able to repair what you've already done.

And what's amazing, he continued, is that they have very little time to be together, the couple, because she leaves the house for an hour every day, an hour and ten minutes, no more, but every single day, supposedly to go to the pool, that's the official story, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

The pool, she thought, Elisheva's sacred daily swim. Why is he telling me this? Why hasn't he ever told Micah? Would he even tell Micah if he were here with him instead of me? She opened the window a crack and breathed in the damp air and closed it again, as if she had done something forbidden, and asked herself if he might be flirting with her, because that was also a strange potential that now hovered around them in circles of heat. It occurred to her that this had always been there among the array of his many possibilities. There were evasive hints, stolen looks, moist and slightly surrendered-never at her, of course (it took a heart far wiser and more insightful than his to discover her, she thought as she exhaled lightly), but certainly at other women. Even so, it seemed to her that in the last few moments he had plucked some new string in her and in himself, and the image of two animals who had previously been indifferent and foreign to each other passed through her mind. They shook themselves, stomped their feet, and exhaled, as if a spark had lit up something that had been completely extinguished in them.

And listen to something funny-he leaned forward a bit, as far as his pain and the cast would allow him, and there was no smile on his quivering face-if you deduct the time it takes for her to get there and back from the hour-and-a-bit, even though he doesn't live far, quite close in fact, and then she has to look for parking, and climb up the stairs, and all the rest of it, before and after-how much time are we left with? Forty minutes? Fifty?

She examined him intently for a moment and knew he was not flirting with her. She was not having that bristling reaction. But even so, there was a flirtation here, slithering like a rattlesnake, but not with her. With whom, then? she thought, upset. With whom or with what was he flirting this way? She drove without seeing the road, and once in a while she opened her mouth to ask, then closed it and swallowed. Suddenly, as if a spear aimed at her from a great distance, years ago, had finally caught up with her, she groaned with a sharp pain, and for a second or two she clasped the wheel with both hands to stick to the road, then felt the sorrow and longing spread inside her. But Shaul, she thought with alarm, as if she had abandoned him, and she looked and saw him lost in himself, cramped and twisted like a crooked hieroglyph or a damaged chromosome.

And she loves them both, he went on, but apparently-he hesitated, searching for the words-there is, after all, a difference between the way she loves her husband and her love for him. It's hard to explain, he sighed, it's something different, two completely different dimensions. She seems to need them both, together, but it's actually more complicated for her with the husband, somehow with him she always takes it less for granted.