“Rotem.”
“What?” She alarms me when she stops me like that in mid-sentence.
“I have a request.”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t read now. Speak it to me.”
“Speak what?”
“What you have written down.”
I don’t get it. “What—”
“Don’t say ‘she.’ Say ‘you.’ Talk to me.”
I shrug my shoulders and quickly scan the next lines with my eyes. I don’t know where she got the idea, and I briefly consider objecting in the name of artistic freedom. I decide to give her the “you,” but certainly not to compromise on the other protagonists. “Maybe one day years from now” —I read to her, hesitating a little at first, checking every stone before stepping on it, but then it starts to flow—“the girls will finally appreciate your true value. They’ll grow up, they’ll be mothers too, their eyes will open … Is it all right like that? Is this what you meant?”
“Yes.” Her eyes are closed. “Go on.”
You lean on the mop, dreaming up scenes from their future motherhood, conjuring up for them a quiet smiling man with broad shoulders, a Lego house with a red roof, and two or three kids, maybe even four, why not. There will be joyful moments on the playground and at the dinner table, and there will also be arguments over what to wear to kindergarten and when to go to bed, and then over what time to come home from parties, whether or not to smoke, and what to smoke, when to start having intercourse, and with whom, and then a new understanding will emerge in them, and they’ll suddenly comprehend the gift of motherhood you bequeathed them. The internal liberation you gave them with your ostensible anarchy, and with the absolute equality that prevailed between mother and daughter in your home. You sigh quietly: it is true that sometimes, if you were to look at things unflatteringly, from an external and foreign point of view, it may seem as if you and they are in fact the same age, helpless and scared subjects of the arbitrary and misunderstood adult world …
“Yes,” she murmurs, her eyes still closed, her lips moving along with mine.
But then, out of the murkiness of your blessed forgetting, you see a row of what look like humps—different-sized islands of memory, both the inconsequential and the critical: the lunchboxes taken to kindergarten and found to be empty at lunchtime, the puddles of urine gathering next to the front door when you were late getting home. The furious quarrels that erupted every time you tried to help them with their homework, and the boredom and suffocation that took hold of you when you were forced to sit with them for even ten minutes and study for an exam. Every minute seemed like an eternity to you. And the slap you once gave Rotem while she was struggling through the Pythagorean theorem. Your insistence on treating her only with homeopathic medicine, even when she had strep throat, and the horrible comment made by the doctor at the ER, who happened to be a former classmate of yours, giving you a broad perspective on your character—
I keep on reading the long and fairly tedious list. I enjoyed writing it, and I felt just and strong and full of self-pity, and I thought what fun it was that everything was behind me and I could be happily embittered over every episode as if it had just happened yesterday. But now my insides are shrinking with insipidness and shame as I realize that this is the hot air I’ve been existing on for thirty-five years. Even so, I keep on reading to her, setting off land mine after land mine in her face, but preserving the same voice and clean staccato I’ve been using all evening, not a single word emphasized, no blaming and no apologizing, no influencing and no bribery. I present her with my text without interfering, and I have lots of experience doing that, because in some sense, that has been the way we have talked in recent years, the method I developed so as not to flare up when she would invade me in mid-conversation and hover around my allergic areas with her criminal innocence. But when I have almost reached the end of the list, my mouth starts to grow dry and I glance feebly at the clock. It’s ten now in London. Melanie gave me unequivocal instructions about the next few lines. She talked about the need for total honesty, even now, especially now; “It will purify,” she said. “It will liberate you both.” But I’m not Melanie, and I fix my gaze strongly on the dark corner of the lie, and pathetically skip to the beginning of the next section.
Nili, with her eyes closed, grasps my wrist with a strength she does not have and says, “All the way, Rotem, read until the last line.”
… And men staying the night, trapped in front of torn childish eyes as they walk out of the shower naked, relaxed, staring in embarrassment; and the nights Rotem sobbed as she banged on your locked bedroom door, lashing out against everything that was stormily occurring inside it; and that cursed week, which should have been shoved into a place it could never emerge from in any therapy, when you stayed in the apartment getting high with two of them, two animals—oh God, what did you do to her?
Silence. She finally lets go of my hand, and I have shrunken to the size of a foundling. It scares me to see what she is capable of knowing if she only wants to. That’s exactly how it was when, suddenly, in the middle of a normal phone conversation two months ago, she said, “You’re writing that story, aren’t you?” I choked and tried to squirm my way out of it, and she asked, “Why that of all things? Don’t you have any other stories?” And I said I simply had to, and she asked, “Now?” And I said, “Yes,” and I wanted to scream. How can you not understand that it’s my last chance, while you’re still with me a little. I won’t be able to do it later. But all I could say, with a kind of embarrassing squeak, was “Please, Nili, just don’t tell me not to.” Melanie, making a salad behind me, stopped and didn’t move; she understood from my voice what the conversation was about. Nili was quiet, then she took such a deep breath that she seemed to be inhaling me through the line, and said, “But afterward come to Israel and read it to me, as a farewell gift.”
Now, with a voice that is quiet but tight, she admits, “It’s good that you said it.”
“Really?”
“When you started with that list, I was afraid you wouldn’t say it.”
I shrug my shoulders weakly. “Well, now I’ve said it.”
“Thank you.”
We both sit quietly and I think about Melanie. I touch her, refuel, and come back. Then suddenly, unrelated to anything, I think, That’s enough. How long can you keep towing that childhood around? How long can you be enslaved to it? You have to move on, have to start somehow letting it go.
Nili says dryly, “And those two peas in a pod, your sisters in the story—you don’t need them anymore.”
“So you have nothing to worry about,” she reassures Leora, who calls again at some impossible hour of the morning. “I’m not falling in love with him, and he’s not exactly falling in love with me either; it’s not at all about that, but I may help him love himself a little more.” Leora doesn’t answer, embarrassed for some reason; she swore to herself that she wouldn’t phone again, and it’s not clear to her how it happened that she did, or what is really happening to her, what has been unsettling her all these days that Nili has been there with him.
Nili forces herself to talk, to break the silence. “Maybe I need to try and influence him more, direct him a little, advise him maybe, I don’t know. Maybe make him see that he needs to protect this gift God has given him. He should study yoga up there in the north, or find some dance or movement class—what do you think, Lilush?” She almost shouts, angry at herself for being frightened like a child because of Leora’s ominous silence.
Leora finally comes around, lurching forward with a grimace of resentment. “You know, now that I think of it—why not? I mean, if you’re going to create a human being, go all the way with it, play God all the way, don’t even take Friday off.”
“No, no,” Nili says with utter seriousness and gravity, “I’m not creating him, he’s the one who knows exactly what he needs all by himself. He’s always driving at something. And look, even if he doesn’t really kn
ow it now, even if he has to spend years making mistakes, and even if he forgets it all along the way, and forgets this week too—in the end he’ll get to what he was supposed to be. You’ll see.”
“But what? What is he supposed to be? A yogi? A guru? Hare Krishna?”
“No. I think he’s looking somewhere completely different. Somewhere even deeper than that.”
“You—” Leora shakes her head and is suddenly flooded, to her complete surprise, with a burning sense of jealousy toward this foolish boy and his scandalously good luck. “You seem to be forgetting again that we’re talking about a boy. He’s fifteen!” (Nili, with her last remaining strength, manages to restrain herself from mumbling “and a half.”) “And you attribute so much to him, and load him with tons of, of”—and for a minute Leora sees a picture of a hesitant, slender, hunched young man, and someone using a thick pipe to pour the entire content of Victoria Falls down his throat—“now, you listen to me and try to answer me honestly: don’t you think you’re making a little too much of him with all these—forgive me for saying this—but these inscrutable interpretations?”
There is a long pause. Leora repeats her question, now in a slightly feeble, almost trembling voice.
“No,” Nili says eventually. For the millionth time, but somehow always the first time, she clearly grasps the huge effort she has to invest to keep Leora from ever penetrating her. “It’s not at all something I can be wrong about,” she says softly, cleanly, giving up any argumentativeness. “It’s something that either I know completely, all the way, or I have no sense about at all. You know, that’s how it is with me when I’m inseminated”—or at least, when I used to be, she silently rephrases—“and that’s how it is when I’m in love, and then it’s immediate, on the spot, bingo!”
A pause, then silence. Leora, at home, raises two well-plucked arches over her eyes, slender and ironic, and ticks silently like a tact-bomb.
“Okay, okay,” Nili accedes, “so I’ve made some mistakes here and there—who hasn’t?”
I haven’t, Leora thinks sourly, and a horrible headache suddenly erupts on the edges of her skull and advances quickly, and a lump in her throat starts darting up and down like a little devil stomping his feet furiously. Me! I haven’t!
“But I’m not making a mistake with him. And I’ll tell you something else”—her eyes shine and her chest swells, and Leora knows how beautiful she is in her feverish state, in her sudden change of seasons, when all her emotions are portrayed on her face, her honesty, simple and innocent—“and you can laugh all you want, but I feel as if I had to go through all these twenty years of hard labor, and not a second less, so that I’d be completely prepared when he arrived.”
She slowly turns her heavy head to face me. Her eyes are bloodshot, but her face is soft. I recall her response—three years ago? four?—when I first told her I was writing. “What do you want to be a writer for now, at your age?” she had asked innocently. “When you get old, like Agnon or Bialik, then you can write!” I had practically wailed, because of the vast distance, unbridgeable, lost. Because of the hunger of orphans. Now I tell her, with a relief uncommon in these lands, about the feeling I had during the last weeks of writing. “It was as if someone were grabbing me hard by my neck and taking off with me. Honestly, like they were actually forcing me to leap out of my skin and take off …”
Her eyes glimmer. “That’s happiness, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I admit. “It’s the best.”
For a minute she fills with light, you can really feel her spirit awakening and moving freely, illuminated within the impervious tissue of her flesh. I too open up inside, all my particles start to spin, and we get closer and pull back and are drawn into each other, and we can’t look into one another’s eyes, and my throat is gripped with the familiar burning pain, which once, in one of the Tourist stories, I called “the cry of a disillusioned infant.”
“Rotem,” she murmurs, “Rotem, Rotem.” Motionless, we both are gathered and drawn to the same exact place, and I close my eyes, and we are briefly together, within a huge embrace that is the embrace of—insane as it may sound—Mother.
The mother we never had.
“And that friend of yours?” she asks as soon as they meet, willing to get slapped but absolutely needing to find him someone close, at least one person in the world with whom he can abate his loneliness a little.
His shoulders arch up instantly. His eyes grow dark, peering out at her from a cave. But this time, to her surprise, he answers, “He’s not at boarding school anymore. He left.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Again that smirk spreads over his face, revealing a foreign object, sharp and injuring, which is pinned inside him. “ ’Cause they said I was no good for him. That I was doing him harm. That’s why.”
“What were you—?” It flashes through her: the speck of saliva that fell from him and dropped on her face. The way he leaped to wipe it off. “But why?”
“How should I know? Ask them.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know. His parents came, took him away. That kind of stuff. He was also a little crazy.”
“Also? What else was he?”
“No …” He laughs, embarrassed. “I meant I am too. Aren’t I?”
“No, you’re not. God forbid. You shouldn’t have those kinds of thoughts. But where is he now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe France. They didn’t say. He has a sister in France, and some aunt in Canada. Maybe there. Maybe he’s even here. What difference does it make?”
“Don’t you have an address for him, a phone number, anything?”
He seems engrossed in his long fingers.
“And he didn’t write to you, didn’t leave any sign?”
“I …” Then he falls silent. Breathes rapidly. His lips turn pale. “They probably told him we weren’t allowed to be in touch. I don’t know, I think so.” He shrugs his left shoulder in a round, gloomy way.
She suddenly feels a tremendous weight. She leans back against the door and looks at him, and he is imploring her to understand, to relieve him of the need to tell. With great effort, she makes her way through everything that’s spinning around inside her and asks a question, already knowing the answer: “So tell me, when did it happen? When did he leave? When did they take him?”
“I don’t know. A year ago maybe.” He surreptitiously threads his arms together behind his back and sees her look, and puts them back in front submissively. She sees his unraveled flesh through the watch and the scar. Then he says softly, “Seven months. Plus a few days. Twenty maybe. Twenty-two.”
Nili stands motionless. Dying to sit down. Collapsing under his pain, his insult, his longings. After a prolonged silence, she asks, “And what is his name?” Because she suddenly has a reckless, mad thought—Nili the savior, the all-powerful—that she’ll find his friend for him. She’ll investigate and detect and use all her connections, enlist all the freaks she’s met during her travels, and she’ll locate him, and respin the thread between them. She can already see how her broken mailbox becomes the secret nest for their encounter and their relationship.
But he hesitates. His eyes roll down.
Nili looks at him imploringly. “Well? Don’t tell me his name is a secret too!”
“No, not a secret.”
“Then?”
“Kobi.”
She laughs. “He’s also Kobi? Two Kobis?”
“No, he’s Kobi.”
“And you?” Now the laughter hangs emptily on her face.
“I’m not.”
“Why … How can that be?”
“I’m Tzachi.”
This is too much for her. She sits down on the floor. A strange nausea burns her throat, a roux of emotions undigested and regurgitated into her throat by a stubborn diaphragm. How could he be Tzachi? That name doesn’t suit him at all. She remembers how he told her his name the first time. Remembers a second of hesitation. Amazed at how, in th
e blink of an eye, he had decided to lie; she no longer understands anything, and doesn’t wish to, and thinks how easily she is conned—what the hell is it about her that makes people take her for a fool? She curses the twisted crevices in which she is always betrayed, and remembers with some torn and final train of thought how he had impelled her to call him Kobi. The vague trembling around his eyes when she had said the name. “Listen, um …” She refuses to force the false name through her lips. “Maybe at least you’ll tell me about him now?”
“Not now, maybe later.” But he’s alert to what is occurring within her, to her hurt face as it falls, and he gets up irritably and walks to the door. Just don’t let him leave now, I can’t be alone. He must sense her thoughts, because he stops and turns to the grunting air-conditioning unit and stands there playing with its buttons. Off and on. “I pissed you off.”
“Well, do you think I like being—” Then she grumbles, “Why didn’t you tell me at first?! Why did you have to cheat me like that?”
He half turns to her. “Should I tell you how we used to talk?”
“Go on.” She wants to and yet doesn’t. She already knows his tricks. The quick slalom moves of a liar as he pulls a rabbit out of his hat in mid-conversation, relying on her infantile curiosity.
“With questions. You’re only allowed to use questions.”
She relaxes her shoulders. What does he want from me now? Why can’t he be direct? She can’t be bothered with his riddles.
“Right from the start it was that way,” he tells her, his excitement rising. “That’s what we decided. Actually no, first it was his idea, he always has ideas, that one”—a yearned-for smile lights up the corners of his eyes—“and as soon as he saw me there in the yard? As soon as I first got there? And he was already there two years, he’s older than me, I was ten when I came, and he right away started talking to me like that, with questions.” His voice rose and became thin, and Nili also thought he was starting to talk in a different kind of dialect, from another place. “And I straightaway answered right, ’cause I read him in two seconds. Till I came along they thought he was crazy, and they none of them would answer him, just kept beating him up. But me, as soon as I got off the bus and he saw me, he came right over to me. Well, it doesn’t matter.” It does matter, she knows, hearing the exposed note of pride, and a large warm bubble bursts and drips down inside her. “I was only ten years old, and since then it was like that all the time, in our room too, and in class. And say when he was having one of his fits? He would fall down, he has that disease where you keep falling, and as soon as he’d come back? Again the same thing, a question from him, a question from me …” His eyes gleam, he runs his hand through his short hair, and Nili senses the tenderness of the touch, and with her seer’s eyes she sees an image of a boy taller than him, thin and supple and restless, with a sharp face and a tortured, tense look, moving like a cheetah pacing around in its cage. “So that’s how it was, always only with questions all the time. Questions, nothing else is allowed.” He breathes rapidly and gives her a sad smile. “For maybe five years, we never tripped up.”