Eshkol Nevo - Homesick

He opened the door and said, come in. And I forgot all the promises I’d made to myself and walked inside, flustered by the smell of his aftershave. (What? Did he put it on for me?)

Thank you, he said, taking the box from me.

I put Lilach on the floor and she started crawling. I looked at the walls of the apartment. Here’s that picture of the sad man I heard them arguing about. It really is a gloomy picture. And Noa must have taken those photos. Where’s that from? India? Thailand? She really is talented. But why aren’t there any pictures of them together? When Moshe and I lived here, there were three pictures of us in the living room, two from the wedding and one from our honeymoon in Antalia, and they don’t even have one.

Amir came back from the kitchen, got down on all fours and started crawling in front of Lilach. She was so surprised that she stopped for a minute, then started crawling again, more slowly this time, until she reached him and touched his face with her fingers. He closed his eyes and let her investigate, put a finger in his ear, his nose, his mouth. Hit him lightly on the cheek.

Hey, I told her. Don’t do that.

It’s all right, Amir said, stroking the fuzz on her head.

I felt silly, standing when everybody was crawling, so I sat down on the rug too. I planned to sit far away from him, but the minute I crossed my legs, Lilach started crawling towards me with Amir right behind her.

She came to me, touched my knees, and he did the same. At first, I thought he was planning to climb on me too, and I got scared. I imagined what it would be like under his body, to grab his shoulders, to tussle with him a bit. To surrender.

He stopped a minute before his head touched my thigh, and sat up. I rubbed my thigh as if he had really touched it, and he said: does she always have this much energy?

Only in the morning, I said. Then I added: and also when Moshe comes home from work.

He leaned on his arms as if Moshe’s name had pushed him back. Lilach’s fingers played with my nipples, and I could see how uncomfortable he felt about watching, but still couldn’t pull his eyes away.

So, I said, moving her hand away, how’s your studying going?

It’s not, he said, sighing and picking up a fat book. You see this? I have to know all of it for tomorrow’s exam.

Why don’t you study with other people?

They’re all in Tel Aviv, and I’m here, in the Castel. It’s too far for them to come over and study with me.

Yes, it really is far.

You see? he said, smiling, and Noa claimed that the Castel was half-way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Well, there really is no such thing as the exact middle, I said, suddenly defending her. Like my mother used to say: you can’t cut a watermelon into two completely equal parts.

Isn’t that funny, he said and laughed, my mother says the same thing, but about grapefruit.

Lilach laughed too, and gave two short shrieks of happiness. He reached out to stroke her cheek, and on the way, brushed the exposed part of my arm. By mistake. It had to be by mistake.

I have an idea, I said. Pick a subject and teach me.

He gave me a funny look.

It’s really a good idea, I said. You’ll remember it better, I added, unfolding my leg. I was careful not to move it too close to him. But not too far away, either.

You know what? You have a deal, he said and started thumbing through the book. His shoulders contracted, and he rubbed his chin with his free hand. Most of all, I love looking at men when they’re concentrating on something.

OK, he mumbled a minute later. What would you like to hear about? Franz Anton Mesmer, who treated people with huge magnets at the beginning of the eighteenth century? Or Joseph Breuer, who used hypnosis to treat people at the end of the nineteenth century?

What do you say, Lilach, I asked, consulting my little girl: magnets or hypnotism?

*

Sima’s foot landed right next to me and kept me from concentrating. I wanted to bend over and put cuffs around her ankle. I could actually imagine the touch of her skin, but instead of doing that, I started talking to save myself. I tried to remember without looking at the book. I tried to explain it to her as if it were a story, not a collection of facts I had to memorise for a multiple choice test.

That Mesmer, I started, finished studying medicine at the age of thirty-two. He did his doctorate on ‘The Effect of the Planets on the Human Body’.

Like the horoscope, Sima said.

More or less.

What sign are you?

Scorpio. What does that have to do with anything?

Just tell me what sign Noa is.

Also Scorpio.

A Scorpio with a Scorpio, uh-oh!

Lilach, tell your mother not to interrupt. Quiet in the classroom, please, I’m continuing. After Mesmer completed his doctorate, he began to enquire into the possible effects of magnets on the body and claimed he’d discovered something he called ‘animal magnetism’.

Which means?

Which means that we have a substance in our bodies, or an energy, that responds to magnetic force and can be changed by magnets.

What?!

It sounds weird to me too, but the thing is that the treatment he developed actually worked. He treated mentally disturbed patients and women who suffered from hysteria or depression, and cured them.

What do you mean, treated?

He had a kind of bathtub full of magnetised water. Iron rods stuck out of the tub in every direction and Mesmer showed his patients how to put the tip of the rod on the area that hurt them.

And it worked?

Looks like it. Or people convinced themselves that it worked. When I was little and my mother used to take me to the clinic, to Dr Shneidshter, I felt better straight away.

My mother didn’t believe in medicine at all. She had her own medicine for every sickness. And we were never sick for more than a day or two, not me and not my sister Mirit.

That mother of yours sounds interesting, but still, if we can just finish the story about Mesmer … He kept getting more and more patients, and people used to wait months for an appointment with him. Finally, he founded an organisation and a school where he taught people how to use his method of treatment and they attracted more and more patients –

Until …

How did you know there was an until?

There’s always an until in this kind of story.

Until the medical establishment in Paris got sick and tired of him stealing away their patients and they formed a special committee to check out his methods and the committee decided that the magnets had no therapeutic value and ordered him to stop using them.

Did he?

Yes. But his students kept on using them. Secretly. And the book says there are rumours to this day, two hundred years later, that Mesmer’s followers meet secretly in the forests of Europe and treat each other with those magnetic rods.

Wow, that’s interesting. You told that really well. Seriously, you made me want to go back to college.

So go back.

Don’t rub salt in my wounds. But I think you’re well prepared for the exam.

Not really, but it’s fun to study like this. Do you want to hear about Breuer too?

Sima looked at her watch and her face tensed in alarm: shit! I have to pick up Liron from kindergarten in two minutes. He hates me to be late. He starts breaking toys if I’m not there on time.

She took Lilach into her arms and got up from the rug. I got up too. Now that we were standing, I noticed how small she was. I could peek down her neckline and see that she was wearing a black bra today.

Thanks for the cutlets, I said.

You’re welcome, she said. We stood like that, facing each other, embarrassed, and suddenly I had the weirdest feeling in the world, that a kiss had to come now. I can’t explain it, but it was like a date, like the end of a date when two people feel there’s a kind of magic between them. You can’t photograph that feeling or break it down into parts. It’s just there, in the night air, and suddenly, in the middle of the day, out of the blue, it was there between Sima and me. My eyes were drawn to her full, dim sum lips, and I leaned forward …