“When have you ever seen me angry like that?”
“It’s just a story, Nili,” I say, annoyed. In my mouth I already feel the saliva of a foreknown failure. And really, where did I come up with her anger there? That righteous indignation I stuck on her is so unlike her—
“And you mention Leora by name.”
“I didn’t change any real names. Not Leora’s, not yours, not mine either.”
She contemplates at length, slowly absorbing. “You’re in the story too?”
My heavy heart tramples over a particularly fragile joint on the way to her. “Yes, I’m in the story too.”
But now she surprises me. I think I see a shadow of a smile, almost a satisfied expression. “Go on.”
She sobers up, of course, the second he’s gone. Have you lost your mind? What exactly are you going to do? This is a child we’re talking about. How old did he say? Sixteen at Passover. Meaning he’s now fifteen and a half. That’s just great. A year younger than Rotem, and you’re only three times his age. Congratulations. She walks around the room nervously, gathering up mats, laying them down again, regretting, standing, staring off into a bubble of the moment. What does this have to do with yoga? She sighs, and her heart starts sliding down the familiar slope. What does this have to do with the vows you once swore to yourself, when you were standing in the light? She sits down on a plastic chair in the corner. A slight chill seeps into her stomach, the coldness of a liar finally caught. And anyway, what is all that rubbish about standing in the light? she jabs at herself. When exactly have you truly stood in the light? She straightens her back, spreads out her hands on her hips, and searches for calmness inside, an indentation, even a small hollow of relief, of momentary forgetfulness. But a thick-necked little animal leaps out of there and expertly sinks its teeth into her. And let’s assume that there was a time when you stood there, in your light—well, that simply means you were casting a shadow on someone else, weren’t you? Isn’t that the defective logic of “standing in the light”? She gets up, walks around the room, leans her back against the wall. And something else stings her from within: Why did he come to her with this proposal? What did he sense about her? What do people sense about her from the outside? She pushes herself away from the wall, the poison of the stupid, random insult already spreading through her. How do these twisted things always stick to you? No matter how far you run and how much you try to hide from them, it won’t do any good, the magnet is working. She finds herself standing opposite the little mirror over the sink, her intense green eyes shooting sparks back at herself. She furiously freshens up her short-cropped hair, looks to the side, then back, and looks sideways at her impressive nose, slightly broken at the base. You thought it was safe for you here, didn’t you, with all these vacationing families, a Mecca of boredom. She closely examines her large, beautiful teeth and licks her lips and hides a smile and is taken aback: wait a minute, what do you think you’re doing?
She flees to the window. She opens it, chokes, and slams it shut. Her yoga room is located directly above the parking lot for the tour buses, and when she complained recently about the exhaust fumes and the noise, the activities manager smiled at her—she’s at least five rungs above her on the food chain—and said, “The choice is yours, sweetie.” Four buses spit out another cycle. The new arrivals stand for a minute, stunned and slowed down by the heat, looking like groups of refugees beginning to digest their catastrophe. Only one boy, who got off barefoot, hops crazily from one foot to the other. She reads the signs: NETANYA MUNICIPALITY EMPLOYEES, DEAD SEA VACATION. The heat vapors blur the mountains behind the buses. This is it, this is the last time. She’ll buy new glasses for Inbal and then to hell with the money. Her arms hug her body tightly, but even it, the pride and joy of her life, seems suddenly a little strange and heavy, and when she walks, it moves with her in the room as if enclosed in a thick frame with a gilded caption beneath that says: Woman’s Body. Maybe she’ll call Leora, she thinks at first, because the moment she says it to someone out loud—especially to Leora—everything will cool down and dissipate. But the boy, she perks up, he may already be on his way here. Just think what’s going through his mind. And Leora—oh yes, she’s a real authority on these matters—stuck with the same Dovik since age seventeen. She is suddenly struck with horror: What did he mean, “doesn’t communicate”? Could he be retarded? Think, Nili, think quickly, this is no joke, and it’s certainly no joke for him, it’s life or death.
With that phrase in her mind she finally realizes she is afraid, and she stands for a moment, trapped. She, who really has done it all, in lands near and far, and who has gladly and generously taught beloved men and women, and several students too, how to excite their partners and when to hold back and how to drive someone wild. Even when she gave classes in hospitals, even in old-age homes, she would pour forth her experience with deliberation and faith, teaching them where to touch and how to caress and where only to flutter like eyelashes, because it would always keep them happy and fresh, always. But here, suddenly, something else entirely, and even if nothing happens—and it obviously won’t, you fool—oh hell, what did I need this for.
“You’re not taking any pity on me,” she says when I stop to take a drink. But there is no complaint in her voice—quite the opposite.
“Should we stop?”
“No. The pillow.”
I rearrange the pillow under her head. When I lean over her, it smothers me.
“I smell it too,” she murmurs. “That’s the way it always is at the end.”
She would certainly know. She has accompanied so many men and women right up to the final gates. Taught them to say goodbye, to release their hold on life without anger or resentment. She was proud of this great talent of hers, her art.
“And the way you invent things. Where did you get such an imagination? Not from me, that’s for sure.”
I translate for myself: there’s no resemblance, she means. No resemblance whatsoever to what went on there.
“And you know what else I remembered?” She laughs softly to herself. “While you were reading, I remembered how you used to make things up when you were little. You were such a fibber …”
When she says that, the shameful coil of dishonesty stretches out from the depths of my stomach to my tear ducts, and for a minute I delight in it, and think of Melanie, and how she is slowly but surely redeeming me, even from that.
“The bottom line is that I’m a person without a drop of imagination. That father of yours, too, I don’t remember imagination being his strong suit.”
Perhaps because of what she said before about lying, or just because of the unbearable contact that had been created inside me between her and Melanie, I pounce on her: “Did you ever think it might be something I didn’t get from anyone? Maybe it happens to be something private of my own?”
“That really is what I think.” She surprises me by circumventing the provocation, refusing to charge into our normal catfight. “I’ve been, you know, looking at you, since you came here the day before yesterday. I look at you and I think, That’s it, I’m not in pain anymore, the birth is over.”
“It’s about time,” I reply briskly. “Thirty-five years in the delivery room is certainly long enough.” I stab at her some more and flash her a broad grin, but we both sense that I am suddenly talking like a character in a movie where the lip sync has gone wrong.
“The birth is over,” she says.
She’s different, I realize. She’s different from the woman I knew, and not just because of the disease. There’s something else about her, and I don’t know what it is, and it annoys me and jolts my foot mercilessly.
She perks up. “What’s the matter, what did you see?”
“What, nothing,” I mumble, and she anxiously digs into my eyes.
“No, just now, when you looked—what did you see?”
We stare at each other for a minute. Scanning and being scanned without pity. Making sure neither one of us has
used the forbidden weapon.
An hour later, when it’s already obvious that the boy won’t show up, she begins to calm down and even work it into a good story for anyone who may one day show an interest in her memoirs (“And then he says to me, I would really like you to help my son be …” No, wait a minute, how exactly had he put it? And the little pang of remorse comes, biting and familiar—shit, there goes another anecdote). She hears a gentle knock on the door and there he is, standing in the doorway, tall and thin, and Nili thinks, It can’t be, his father isn’t his father. Egyptian prince pops into her mind, and even the faint hint of a mustache doesn’t give his face a stupid look—not that of his father or that of youth. He stands looking down, and because of his short black hair he somehow looks older than he is, and slightly gloomy.
“My dad said you’d give me something.”
A closed, coiled voice that reminds her of her Rotem, who has also recently adopted a nasal way of talking, as if to block off yet another opening to the outside. Nili stares and doesn’t know what to do with him. She folds her arms in front, then behind, and he doesn’t budge, letting her review him, and for a minute she is led astray by his limp arms and lowered head. He is so loose that there must be defiance in him. Yes, just like Rotem, who seems to enjoy projecting defiance from her bulky body. “What a bummer,” she always seems to be taunting, “the yogini’s daughter is a fish out of water.” But at the same time her other senses are alerted, the more delicate ones. Her skin first begins to absorb his extraordinary heat—maybe he’s ill, she thinks—and then she actually bangs into the thin, transparent wall that surrounds him, thrusting and deterring. At that moment something within him lunges at her, and Nili freezes, her nostrils turn black, and she inhales with a deep, animal concentration: hunger. Undoubtedly. The hunger of an orphan. She recognizes it, an old friend, and it’s strong with him, and tyrannical like passion, and much older than his age. If it even has an age, that hunger, she thinks, and her mouth becomes suddenly dry. What’s going on here? Who is he?
He still doesn’t say a word, only shrinks a little when she approaches him with her hands held up with a dreamy motion. She slowly waves them in front of his face and around his shoulders and chest, then pulls back at once, amazed and also pained; it can’t be, she thinks as she folds in her singed fingers. But it’s a fact, you sensed it. She distractedly takes a few steps back. She feels as if her knees will give in, and she looks at him again from the side: just a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old kid, wearing long pants—who wears pants in this heat wave?—and black shoes. Shoes? Here?
She makes an effort to smile. “Come on, please come in.”
He walks in obediently, stiffly, with shoulders hunched up high. Even so, he is extremely handsome, she thinks as she looks with sweet shock at his sculpted nape. She shuts the door behind him, then leans against it and takes a deep breath: what now, what to do. He takes a few more steps, as if being pulled inside, and stops only when he’s standing on the little Peruvian rug she brought with her, spread out exactly on her spot in the room. Then he turns his body a little, unaware, with the naturalness of a sunflower, and stands facing the high little window from which—if you stand on a chair—you can see a stripe of sea, and which is her spring of life and energy here. She watches his motions, cautious and surprised: how does he know? She decides he is a hunchback, like many adolescents, especially the tall ones—lots of pressure between the shoulder blades, weak knees, all the weight on the lower back. But those last three or four steps were completely different. He truly slid inside, and there was something soft, almost snakelike, in the flow of his limbs, but as soon as he stopped, he stiffened again and his shoulders crept up.
A dryness takes hold of her throat. “Urn … what’s your name?”
“Kobi.”
“I’m Nili. Your father—did he tell you what I do?”
“Yoga.”
“Do you know what yoga is?”
“No.”
“And you want to learn yoga?”
“Whatever.” He shrugs his shoulders, thrusting his neck down between them. “My dad, he said that I, that you’d give me …”
During those moments, with the uproar inside her, she thinks yoga might actually be very good for him. It might straighten his posture, for example, and increase his self-confidence, and even create a place for him that would be completely free of his father, a space of his own. She briefly considers that perhaps it’s time she came up with new, fresher names for her usual formulas, the class mantras. She notices that he still has not looked at her since coming in, he just stands there with his dark eyes, tight and unbelonging, as if someone had played a magic trick on him, uprooting him from his natural place and throwing him into a forsaken land. At once she feels sad and insipid, over him being forced to come here by his father, and over herself having to be here in a bare and ugly room, with a strange boy, instead of spending the last week of summer vacation with the girls. But she pulls herself together and checks to see whether those vivid, confusing breezes are still swirling around him: there is nothing. Gone, as if a switch was turned off in him, as if they never existed.
She stretches up tall, sucking strength from the earth. There must have been some trickery here, maybe she herself caused it by being so tense about his coming. Yes, it must be just her and her imagination, and her infantile desires. She massages the joints of her fingers, cracks her knuckles, goes back to being a devoted craftsman preparing his tools; she doesn’t even allow herself to revisit the strange moments when he had first entered the room, when she felt a sense of rejuvenation, because it was the hunger she had sensed in him that had brought back long-forgotten things in her. Strange, that hunger which for years had led her astray like a junkie, misguiding her toward any pair of open arms. Only recently—maybe she was getting old, maybe the fire was dying out—had the needy hunger, like a deceitful charmer, begun to loosen its grip on her a little. Where are you, my darling? she wondered, laughing to herself sadly.
“Come on, then,” she says to the boy with forced cheer in her voice. “Let’s find out if you can be a yogi.”
“Wow,” she says, and tries to raise herself up a little in bed. “I didn’t imagine it would be so …”
“So what?” I shout. I have to get up, walk around, do something with my hands.
She sighs. “So … so uncomfortable, this pillow.”
I rearrange the pillow again. “Improve” is the word, and I have another chance here to experience her with my own hands, but that’s not what I seem to be doing, because once again I lament the special smell she has lost, a mixture of orange and jasmine and health, and she feels it, of course, and sees my face, and again I have improved nothing. Her few hairs are fine and fragile; for some reason they are drawn to my hand, and that tiny movement confuses me. What do they want from me, they must not have heard about me yet. Soft baby hairs, seemingly asking to be caressed. I stare at them and collapse on the chair in front of her, suddenly exhausted and emptied, and she too looks even sicker, as if a small private illness is emerging within the large disease. I feel as if it is only now becoming clear to both of us what we’ve gotten ourselves into and what is awaiting us.
“It’s so true what you wrote about that hunger,” she says later. “But I keep asking myself how you know.”
“How I know what?” I tense up, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
She doesn’t answer. I don’t ask. It hits me again, how little she knows me. Or is even capable of knowing. On the other hand, I remind myself, I could see that as an accomplishment—more than an accomplishment, a little life’s work. She looks at me and I at her, and suddenly, in silence, and with no demarcation of time, as if eighteen years have not gone by, the fat and troubled girl I was comes home and finds her sitting in the kitchen with her robe half open, with eyes completely dead, saying with a stony face, “Listen, Rotem, something has happened.”
“You’d better not have taken any pity on me in the story,” she sa
ys immediately. “I’ll know right away if you did.”
They start with some light stretching, gently bending knees into stomach, side twists, lengthening arms and legs. But a moment later she stops, remembering something. She sits him down. She tells him who her teachers were, where she comes from, where she studied. She listens to her own voice, to the gentle, prolonged names that erupt from her mouth. Names of teachers, regions, ashrams. Once, she used to begin every first class with a new student this way, weaving him into her dynasty. Now she hears the accumulations of her stress in the joints of the soft sounds, and looks nervously into the boy’s eyes to see if he noticed anything. “Stand up,” she says, and corrects the way he stands. She shows him how to make proper transitions from one position to another, and thinks, What’s come over me? Why did I tell him about them? What does he care about them? She harshly admonishes herself: In fact, what do I care about them? What do all those names have to do with what I’m doing here? And how much longer can I keep brandishing these expired letters of reference?
There is a strange quiet in the room. Now she teaches with cautious restraint, not her usual way, and he cooperates unenthusiastically, as if caught in some forced experiment. The standing poses tire him out, and the twisting poses embarrass him, and every so often he loses concentration and starts to daydream. But when she asks if he wants to stop, he shrugs his shoulders and says, in that same dim, obstructed voice, that they can go on a little longer.
Nili grows impatient. Twice she glances at the alarm clock next to the sink, and both times he notices it. It’s not just another usual-bad-class. There’s something else here, something troubling, like a long gaze at an unfocused photograph. Everything is clumsy, his long, stiff pants prevent him from moving, he flinches at every touch of hers, and every time she talks about his body—when she describes for him, for example, how his thigh muscles stretch when he bends over—he giggles embarrassedly and disconnects again. “You’re not here,” she scolds him. “Where are you?” He doesn’t answer, and she feels as if she’s preventing him from concentrating on something, and resents him for the disappointment he caused her after what he had ostensibly promised when he came into the room. She is amazed that she could have been so mistaken about him, and at the pathetic longing that had inflamed her imagination and made her almost believe. Again and again she jabs herself with that choice quote from Swami … oh, come on, what the hell is his name, with the names it’s getting worst of all … “The dog that sucks a dry bone imagines that the blood oozing from its mouth is coming from the bone,” or something like that. But when the hour is finally up, to her surprise, he asks with a muffled mumble if he can come again. Nili hesitates for a moment, for an instant, but of course cannot withstand the shrinking pain in his eyes, and more than that—the speed with which he is trained to hide that pain. She says, “Sure, why not? Come tomorrow, I’m here all the time.” He looks at the floor and asks if it can be today, now. And Nili almost shouts, “Already? Where’s the fire?” But again, she gives in to his expression, perhaps to the strange obligation she feels to arm him with something to use against his father.