She goes into the bathroom and chooses some bottles from her collection of oils, and leans heavily for a moment, with two fists, on the marble shelf below the mirror. She asks herself what has really happened to him with her these past few days, and what it was that her yoga massaged and softened and released in him so that he is now capable of asking her these questions, voicing them. And she thinks, Oh God, how far he’s come—much further than I imagined, much more yogi than I thought. She tilts her head to the room, but there is no sound coming from there. I wish I knew what I’ve given him, she thinks, suddenly tired; maybe I could give some of it to myself. She fills her lungs with air and looks in the mirror, which her breath has fogged over, and for a minute she sees nothing.
When she comes back from the bathroom with her massage bag, he is still sitting as she left him. She asks if he’s changed his mind, and he says no. She arranges the bottles of oil on a chair, the jars of creams and lotions, and two clean towels. Then she turns away and messes with the bottles for a while, so as not to embarrass him, and lights some incense sticks and a few vanilla-scented candles, which she places in different corners of the room. When she turns back to him, he’s already lying on his stomach, wearing only his shorts, with his forehead resting on his hands.
“Rotem.”
“Yes.”
“If it’s hard for you, you don’t have to.”
“It is hard for me, and I do have to.”
We’re both slightly short of breath, but she still has the strength to give me a little smile, of encouragement, I think. I look at her again before diving into the final pages. Her hands are folded over her chest. Her face, beneath the fringes of white hair, is calm and almost beautiful now, the Simone Signoret face she used to have. I wonder if this is the time to tell her things I never have. Not dark secrets, just little things that may comfort her, ease her, or even make her laugh. For example, that I’m far more similar to her than she imagines, and that the similarities are actually in areas I always tormented her over. That I’m not much smarter than her, for example. That my brain is also weak, that I forget a lot, maybe even more than she did at my age. Maybe it’s because of the pills during my tourist season, or maybe I’m also lacking the protein that ties fact molecules together. Maybe this is the time to tell her that my legendary strength, which she was so afraid of, and my infamous determination are now like melted butter. Just so she knows that time is equalizing us.
“Rotem?” she asks gently, extracting me.
I rearrange my pages, and that motion organizes me, and suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am. That is the reality—she herself said so when I asked before. “That’s exactly the reality I want to hear.” My reality. Firsthand.
She sits down beside him and touches the back of his neck, and feels him shudder. For several minutes she slowly runs her hands over his body, balancing the chakras and reading with her eyes closed. Then she pours some thick oil in her palm and rubs her hands together to warm the oil a little, so it won’t chill him, and starts slowly rubbing the sides of his neck.
“What kind of lotion is that?”
“It’s grape-seed oil, feel it.” She lets him smell her palm. “It’s not a very strong scent, is it? I didn’t want the scent to be too strong in here, what with the candles, so it won’t distract us.”
She concentrates on his back, on the place where he hunches, pressing and kneading first, then switching to more gentle motions, squeezing his flesh between her fingers, gathering up knots of toughness and anger and protest, and giving them back to him soft, appeased. Then with her knuckles, she prods the flesh on both sides of his spine, from top to bottom and back again, and for a long while she tries to soften the stubborn muscles around his neck. Only after making friends with his back does she dare to touch its scars, oiling them and rubbing in circles; she can’t understand what his father used to beat him with, and she wonders what his dad knows about him and what he guesses.
His spine is like a thread, and she moves away from it to the outer areas of his body and rolls out his flesh to the sides with her palms, enjoying the way it springs back and swells and turns red and dark. She makes notes of the spots where the muscles are tense, and can’t understand how he’s capable of such flexibility with the mess he has in there, between his shoulder blades, where the scaffolding of his hunchback costume twists and turns like tendrils. As she works, his body becomes more awake and alert, unlike other people who sometimes drift off the moment she touches them and spend the rest of the massage floating in and out of sleep. Now she thinks she can sense his question about men and women throbbing along his body, and she hesitates a little over which one to start with. She grasps his shoulders and starts kneading hard, one shoulder after the other, pulling them up and back until it almost hurts, crushing and pushing with all her strength. Then she slowly fills them with broadness and power, and digs with her demanding fingers beneath his shoulder blades and muscles, and bends his arms back, and with her elbows she presses the lumps of tension and melts them into his flesh. She stops for a minute to wipe the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand—she, who never perspires during a massage, and yet as soon as she started with him there was concentrated, sharp sweat. She smiles inside, because it occurs to her that men, if she’s not powerful enough, don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth. A moment later she’s unsure of whether that had been only a thought or whether she had said it out loud, because with his mouth flattened against the mattress he grunts at her to rub hard, but looking at the other side of his face, she can immediately see a thin smile, mocking, directed at them or at himself, she doesn’t know. She fills with cheer and new energy, and blows on his neck: “Get ready, here it comes,” and she showers his back and shoulders with a hail of rapid punches, sideways and lengthwise. His muscles tense at her, surprised, and deep from his throat comes a moan of desire and permission, and she feels he is responding to her strength, to the galloping intensity of her hands. He moans dimly beneath her, squirming and stretching and rounding, and wants her to hurt him, to dig into him, to bring something up out of him. She grows stronger and more vigorous by the minute, her stomach muscles rising and falling; she bares her teeth from the effort, and for several minutes she works like that, without a break, at times barely distinguishing his body from her own. Everything in her is overflowing, and she moans rhythmically, hoarse and sweaty, and with fingers that seemed to have suddenly become thicker and rougher, she carves out the biceps on his forearms and the long braids of muscle along his back, and shapes the tendons on his neck and arms, take, take—
Until she feels his body relaxing, as if he has disconnected from something, and for a minute or two he sprawls under her, breathing heavily, and she holds her hands up over him without touching, waiting to know his desire. He slowly calms down; he does not move, but he is unstill, because when she places her hands on his back he flows smoothly between her fingers, arching and streaming in waves beneath his skin, and her hands inquire, spreading over his skin questioningly: What do you want now? What are you telling me? His body clings and twists into her hands and begins rubbing against them, and his skin is made of a thousand little mouths, trembling and leaping toward her with the desperate eagerness of fledglings who hear their mother’s wings. “But what do you really want?” she murmurs. “Tell me, you’re telling me all sorts of things, and I don’t want to get it wrong.”
He stops at once and buries his face in the mattress, and she suspects he already knows the answer but wants to hear it from her, that he needs her to guess his innermost yearnings without having to tell her. A familiar fear awakens inside her, the life-or-death fear, because who better than she knows how deep you can reach with a touch, all the way to the places that are completely helpless and that don’t even have names or words to protect them, to insulate them or blur the roads that lead to them. Perhaps, she
thinks suddenly, perhaps that is why Rotem has always resisted and recoiled and never allowed me all these years. She weakens briefly, looks at the boy lying there, and knows that he too is one of those people created by touch. She is afraid that if she makes the smallest mistake now, if she makes the wrong choice out of all her options, she will lose him, and this moment of grace will also be lost—and he may not have any more of them in the places he goes to.
She gathers up her body and closes her eyes, trying to think, but the thoughts scatter and her body lifts itself up and carries her to the window. She stands and stares at the red lights marking the shoreline, and breathes quietly for a few minutes, summoning all her ancient strengths to return, if only for one final time, to be with her here. When she turns around, she sees that he has taken his shorts off and now he is lying on his stomach, his buttocks like a beautiful, heart-shaped bright spot on his body. She stops and looks, despite herself, at the delicate way his ankles are crossed, at the silky quality flowing on his skin. Her gaze slides over him and she reads in him sign after sign of loneliness and longing, and his protest, so fragile, transparent, and brave. Then he slowly turns over and lies with his eyes closed, his body taut and his slim member folded in a plume of hair, and now he looks so young to her, so soft and helpless.
She sits by his head with her legs on either side of his shoulders, and his head is heavy and dense in her hands. She gently rubs his scalp and massages his ears, the fetus image folded inside them; she presses and rubs them until they become warm, and feels the heat flowing from them to his entire body. She softly caresses his face, his eyes, and knows that in his quiet, mysterious way, he has managed to seep into her, into the place from which her strengths emanate, and that he is taking from them boundlessly; she can feel them dwindling, but she cannot keep them from him, because someone that brave or desperate, reaching that far, is entitled to everything. She lays her hand on his high forehead, full of thoughts and secrets and innocence and schemes, and makes circles around the third eye between his eyes, the one that watches the universe, the eye that in my body, she thinks, is becoming covered with cataracts. But even so, I was capable of seeing you. His cheeks are smooth to her touch, and his lips, which she now touches for the first time, are two rolls of velvet. She has never touched lips so exposed in a man or a boy, and the thought passes through her that his mouth is already prepared, and she is happy, as if something has gone right for her, easily, and now the road is open. She bends over him and rubs her short hair against his, gently at first, then forcefully, wildly, growling like an animal rubbing its body against its pup, to infuse it with the essence of its knowledge. When she moves her face away from his, she finds in his eyes the look she saw after he came down from his first handstand. Her heart leaps, and she already knows what she must do, and she knows that this time she is not wrong.
She never forgot, despite her sieve brain, and for years afterward, in good and in bad moments, mainly in bad, she would recall the flash of emotions and scenes: the neck, for example, how she slid it between her fingers over and over, up and down along its stem, lengthening and refining it, touching its artery every so often with fluttering touches like drops of perfume. Then his chest, the dark brilliance of his chest, how she circled the mounds of his boyish breasts with a thousand patient movements and leavened them and molded and cupped them to each other, and the flesh was now soft and supple and responded to her hungrily, with the happiness of an innocent creature. Then she turned him over and massaged and spread his flexed buttocks, and enlivened the tight hills around the two beauty spots he had there, on his cheeks, until they acquiesced and melted at her touch. And in between, she sculpted his hips, arching them further and further, smoothed the glistening, violin-shaped plots of flesh with smooth, slow movements. She thought of the hands that would hold him there one day, and prayed that they would be good and right, and thought of the men who had held her like that, and of women whose hips she had known. Without any difficulty she remembered—she has a wonderful memory for this—the touch of beloved bodies, their smell and warmth and the music of their movement in her body, and sweet dizzying pleasure poured into her, and with all her might she emptied herself into him and diluted his body with a thousand lovers, of all colors, all languages and continents and sexes, as if wanting to alleviate his going out into the world, and the pain of translating his unique body into all the clichés of flesh he would encounter. Then she rubbed her favorite jasmine oil into her hands, the most pleasurable and profound of all the oils, and asked him to turn around again. He turned over slowly, and she went down to his feet and drew again, precisely, his thin ankles, and in her heart she blessed each and every toe and rubbed them with oil and rolled them between her joints, and powerfully rubbed his hard heels and his tensed arches, and wished for those feet that they would walk in beautiful places and dance with cherished souls. She smoothed his thin, youthful calves with quick, uplifting motions, rubbed his childish knees a little, and prayed for them that they never kneel or bow, and that they have the strength to proudly and bravely bear their wonderful, unique person.
With two strong hands she rubbed and rounded and leavened his narrow thighs, and was glad that he was giving his body to her completely, as if having emptied out all his desires and knowledge and slyness and secrets, with immense relief, as if he had retreated into the roots of his innocent being. Inside her, a fullness began to form, as if she were filling up with milk, and it occurred to her that she had never done anything like this for anyone. A fragment of a sensational image sparked in her, of her and Rotem this way, her giving Rotem a massage like this, carving out of Rotem the girl she used to be and finally liberating the young woman from within her, the woman she was meant to be. Because maybe it’s not too late yet, she thought, to try and direct the vessel that she is, that grumbling little stomach which always seems to strike just next to the correct note—why not save her from a few bad years of unhappiness and loneliness and wandering, why not fight for her, goddammit, force her to give herself over to her, for once overcome her infantile fear; after all, she is nothing but a hardened little kitten, yearning, lost. She wondered how that had never happened.
Then she repelled the thought immediately, knowing that now she must be only with him, fight only for him, with her entire being, and she swiftly erased the image from within her, and with a brief motion she ironed out her body with both hands, from top to bottom, finally wrapping her fingers around her toes. She felt warm, madly warm, and for a moment she almost took her clothes off, but she remembered what she had sworn on the first day: give him only what he needs. She stopped and cooled herself off and let it sink in, as he lay on his back, fantasizing, dreamy, murmuring word fragments to himself. She ran her hands over his stomach, which no longer flinched at her touch but spread out for her like a taut little valley, waiting for its own blessing. She touched it and her fingers were light and became excited at once, and he started mumbling, “Good, good, good.” She listened with wonder. This wasn’t like the moans she had heard from thousands of others, but like someone suddenly recognizing something they had previously only heard about, like a boy who sees an airplane in the sky for the first time, not in a storybook, and he stands and cries out: Airplane, airplane! When she looked at him, a sigh escaped her. He was so beautiful at that moment, as if a boy and a girl were twisting inside him like two ropes or braids, intertwined, like something you see only in dreams, she thought, or in the Indian shrines, and even there it’s not like this, not this pure and whole and glowing. She whispered to him eagerly, “You can do everything, you’ll see, nothing will stand in the way of your courage.” She saw that he was moving his lips, repeating her words, moving in hallucinatory slow motion, with closed eyes; he looked as if he were swimming inside a bubble or a large drop. And she, spontaneously (because that may be the best way for me to give to him, she thought), talked to him within herself, perhaps also saying things out loud: “Never mind man, never mind woman, never mind what they
told you, what they laughed or mocked, never mind what your dad calls you, what names, and why he hits you, and why they took Kobi away from you, they don’t understand anything, they’re just on the outside, they’re in the noise, they can’t hear what you can, and you can hear wonderfully, I want you to know that I haven’t met many people who can hear like you do, just don’t give up, don’t give in to them.” Then she became alarmed. What nonsense am I saying? What gives me the right? “You’ll have a difficult path, very difficult, I hope you make it, you have to be as strong as Hercules to get out of there, to escape all that and remain who you are.” And when she said it to him like that, she felt something occurring within him. His body began to squirm and spasm at her touch, his face twisted in strange, tormented labor pains, and she removed her hand and saw him massage within himself, painfully and passionately, the hidden, covered pit that she had sensed in their first class, which now seemed to be swelling by the minute, heating up and ripening and becoming golden and bursting and finally erupting with a bitter, broken sigh that passed through his body like a chilling furrow from head to toe. Her fingers were drawn after the sigh, strumming up and down with rapid touches to his body, as if she wanted to replay the new tune to him as it sounded outside his body. She saw a glimpse of the boarding school’s filthy showers again, with their strange rust stains dripping on the floor, and his father’s stupid, covetous face, asking her to make him a man.
She wailed with the fury of a beast: “Forget about them, it’s all you, only you”—and she went on talking deliriously, massaging his entire body, but almost without touching him now, with fragments of thoughts, with heat waves that erupted from her, and only after several minutes was she able to calm down and sit at his side, large and stormy and breathless. She realized that he was already lying completely still, with his knees pulled into his chest, and his eyes were open and looking at her with a focused and slightly amazed look, as if he had only just finally grasped something that had been hidden from him, that had never been so revealed and clarified for him, like a promised land, or perhaps a verdict. There was no way to tell what was going on inside him, in his dark shell; maybe he was only thinking dully: The road home will be so long, and tomorrow it’s Shabbat, and me and him alone at his place, and then I have to go back to boarding school. Nili smiled at him happily, compassionately, and took his limp, long-fingered hand and placed it on her blouse for a moment, on her left breast, which she thought of as the prettier one, the one that gave more milk when she breast-fed, so he would feel the touch and the warmth and the power. “Touch,” she whispered, “see how sweet our body is, how much happiness it can give us.”