Grossman David - Her Body Knows

His mouth was dry and his forehead burned, and for the first time since they left he felt he had managed to capture the longed-for thread of emotion, and knew he had to make every effort to safeguard its purity, its pure opacity, and he groped for it and attached himself to it the way he sometimes attached himself-when he slept with Elisheva-to an evasive, dying firebrand of desire.

Esti had still not said a word. This sudden new talk of his, she thought, his talk, as if he's reading to me from a book he's been hiding. Who would have thought he was capable of articulating these words out loud, or even thinking them? She smelled the sweat on him and inhaled curiously, because even after all the years of knowing him she always avoided, for some reason, imagining his body completely, as if the very thought that he had a body was an intolerable invasion of his privacy. But now his pungent odor, of all things, softened something in her toward him, and of course she thought of Micah, who certainly did have a body and who, like all the men in the Kraus family, had become heavyset at a very young age, right after their wedding. He swelled up even more with each of her pregnancies, and went bald quickly, and his face and body became covered with large round beauty spots like nipples sprouting up everywhere. Something flashed in her, how sometimes in the rare family meetings imposed on Shaul, his shin would be exposed, between his sock and trouser leg, a white, smooth shin, and she would peek at it and tremble.

Her prolonged silence misled him. For a moment he believed he had somehow managed to defrost her doubtful, resolute presence, and he hoped he would be able to keep talking like this, unload the whole story that was buried alive inside him in one stream of vomit, just as he needed to and without any disturbances, by the time they arrived.

What you. what you said, Esti blurted uneasily, it's not. not by any chance you and Elisheva?

Yes, he said immediately, surprised like a sleepwalker who awakes to find himself on the edge of a rooftop. To his astonishment he felt immense relief, as if he'd paid a heavy tax and had managed to cross an impassable border, and now he was there, beyond. But how, he asked with absolute innocence, how did you know?

Were she not so distraught she would have laughed at his touching astonishment, his lack of street smarts. Come on, Shaul.

That's it, then, he said, and loosened his aching body and closed his eyes. Enough, he thought, you've ruined everything. You've defiled Elisheva and yourself, now you can tell her to go back.

I just can't see how. Esti said softly. No, no, no.

It really is hard to believe, he whispered.

She was quiet. She fixed her eyes on the yellow stripe along the shoulder of the road and let it pull her into the darkness. She gradually sat taller, filled up without realizing it. Her tongue ran over her lips, around and around. There was something there that opened up to her.

And I must ask, Shaul said softly.

She nodded, still distracted. Too many echoes were breaking inside her head.

Not even to Micah, he said.

I don't tell Micah everything. She thought she saw him shaking his head doubtfully. We're not Siamese twins, she said, surprised at the sharpness and aggression in her voice.

Look, his voice almost breaking, I told you because I was simply-and he stopped, and she finished his sentence herself: I was simply bursting, I would have lost my mind if I hadn't talked now, right this minute, with someone. Not just anyone. It's lucky you were here.

It's good that you told me, she said.

And a moment later, as if to herself: Thank you.

She knew it would take her weeks to become accustomed to what had happened here, to the strange sense that he was now pulling her toward him and out of herself, out of the domain of the family, and in the fog inside her head, the image of a sick, starving wolf flickered, howling in the valley and attracting a heavy domesticated bitch, weary and slightly tattered. Every so often she wondered, in a disjointed sort of way, how Elisheva had the courage to fall in love so powerfully that she could no longer hide it and had to share it with Shaul. It must be an enormous love for her to fight for it like this and maintain this relationship for so many years despite the pain it caused Shaul. How could he tolerate it? Where was he leading his terrible loneliness? She thought of Elisheva's breasts, which might have been the most beautiful she had ever seen. On the few occasions when she had seen them, she had actually gasped, and she once told an embarrassed Micah that they were Shaul's great hope and that if he suckled on them perhaps the toxins would evaporate from within him. But now she thought of the pain they must cause him, and Elisheva, how could she stand the never-ending longings of a life such as this, a life torn. She sighed softly, and a strange sweetness gathered beneath her tongue.

As always when she heard something new, she was quiet for a long time. She preferred not to hear too many details at first, just tried to see it in her mind's eye. Sometimes she would dive into herself like that even after hearing a joke, trying to imagine what the characters in the joke did after it was over, after the people on the outside had laughed. She tried to guess how this open and long-awaited talk was made possible, between Elisheva and Shaul, about everything she does with the other man, with her lover, her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend-

That stung. Even more than "lover."

Perhaps he forced her to tell him, she thought, and another globule of grudge against him rose to the surface. Yes, that was possible too. Much more logical than the invention that had rippled through her before, whereby Elisheva, in her absolute forthrightness, simply told him everything. She turned the picture over, and now Elisheva was sitting on a chair, a chair with a high back, and Shaul was standing over her wagging his finger. Perhaps this is the tax he levies on her in return for his consent? Yes, that seemed even more fitting, that he would torture her and himself every day by exacting precise, detailed descriptions. She pursed her lips, recalling how he had once interrogated her, years ago, about the religious school she went to in Beersheba; she was willing to bet he'd already forgotten that encounter. He was waging a private war against religious education at the time, one of those principled battles he used to conduct in the name of science, and he needed any possible information about the treatment of female students. She fell into his lap, as they say, from the empty skies above. As soon as she saw that he was equipped with a little black tape recorder and a yellow legal pad, she wanted to get up and leave, but she couldn't disappoint Micah, and a moment later she could no longer escape. He didn't just ask, he attacked and bombarded her with questions from every angle, digging out of her things she had preferred to bury, and she sat there answering all his questions with clenched teeth, paralyzed because of something primal, insulting, in some way related to status, which grew and swelled in her toward him like a poisonous cloud. And when she stupidly revealed some needless old story about something the teachers and the headmistress had done to her there, he fell upon the trivial anecdote almost gleefully and wanted to know all the hows and the whys, and who had determined and who had decreed, and she became confused and stuttered-even Micah didn't know about that affair-and though she squirmed he would not let up, opening up scars and churning the shame they bled, and every time she searched for his eyes she found a magnifying glass. Now she tried to imagine how it must occur between him and Elisheva, how Elisheva sits and tells him, in the kitchen, say, or in any other room within the brutal order imposed in that house, which words she uses in her descriptions, whether she runs her fingers through her thick graying hair with that embarrassed, touching gesture. She couldn't summon up the image, even the thought of it was intolerable, so she escaped and tried to imagine Elisheva's boyfriend, tried to guess whether he was dark or light, younger or older than Elisheva, but she couldn't see, because another man kept cutting in front of him. In some side pocket of her soul, she was also annoyed because she had never imagined that something so exciting was occurring right before her eyes, between two people she knew, and she was even more surprised at having been so wrong about them, because they both seemed so drained, especially in recent years. She knew very well why she had failed to see it, and of course she did not spare herself from the conclusion, she even spent a long time immersed in it-after all, the sin had been committed, now she could linger over the punishment- because somewhere, sometime, who knew where or when it had happened, she had given up even the will to imagine such things. The imagination itself pained her, there was an ache in the part of her brain where she once had incessantly hallucinated little, mischievous fantasies, much as the whole body can sometimes hurt at the sensation of a missing hug, especially in the morning, right before opening one's eyes. Especially at night, at the last moment of sleepy wanderings. And perhaps because of this, without noticing, she had almost stopped fighting and had started to accept the simpler version of reality, without trying to save it from itself. Now she stared at the road as it was swallowed up beneath her, and her shoulders drooped a little, then the corners of her mouth and of her eyes.