Her Body Knows

Her Body Knows

She interrupts me after the third sentence: "I saw something on TV yesterday and I thought of you."

I put down the pages. I can't believe she's cutting me off like that.

"I woke up and it was 3 a.m.," she says, "and I had nothing to do." She laboriously moves her swollen face on the pillow and turns to me. "It was something about a bunch of hippies in America. Saving birds that keep crashing into towers." -

I wait. I can't see the connection.

"I thought you could have been with them."

"Me?"

Her hands make jittery fists on the blanket. Nervous flutters, a little like the ones you get after a nice dose of Haldol, although that's the one drug she isn't taking. I try to disassociate myself from those movements of hers, remind myself that they have nothing to do with me and that it's not a criticism of my story. Just jumpy little tics that will drive me insane in a few seconds.

"Every day at four in the morning, they walk past the skyscrapers." Then she explains: "That's because the birds migrate at night."

"Well, now it's clear," I say as I emphatically straighten my stack of papers. I'll never understand her way of taking in information or, even less, her way of spewing it out. It's taken me two months to prepare for this evening, and she just cuts me off like that.

"They collect the remains and put them in plastic bags," she continues, "and if there's a need, they treat them. I even saw them giving cortisone to one bird." Her common lot with the bird amuses her.

"Then they fling them back, set them free." She is astonished. "They look like normal people, they all have jobs, one's a lawyer, another one I saw was a librarian, but they're also, how should I put it, kind of principled."

"With that sort of self-righteous expression?" I ask slyly.

"What. yes," she admits, embarrassed. She herself probably didn't know why she had connected me with them.

I laugh, somewhat desperately. She is my mother, the ultimate seer, and yet she's a complete ignoramus when it comes to me. "I actually tend to side with the tower colliders," I tell her.

"No, no." She shakes her head heavily. "You're strong, very strong."

She says "strong." I hear "cruel." She dives a little deeper inside, where she may come across another crumb of memory to salvage. We are both quiet. I haven't seen her for two years, and there are moments when I can't reconcile her with the woman she used to be. Her lips move, mumbling thoughts, and I make sure not to read them. She turns her head and looks at me. "Why do you think we have eyelids?" I used to yell at her, and now I say nothing, dutifully taking what I deserve. It's one thing to sit at home in London and write the story, and feel shitty for half a day after our weekly phone calls because she doesn't even imagine what I'm doing to her in my writing, and it's a completely different thing to sit here and read it to her, word for word, as she suggested, as she demanded, as she compelled me to do with all the force of her dying.

"Okay," she sighs, "I interrupted you. From now on I'll be quiet. Read it again, from the beginning."

A small man with bulging eyes, crude lips, and large hands stands and looks at her. She senses him before she can see him. An ill breeze invades the circle that surrounds her. She opens her eyes and sees him upside down, leaning against the doorframe in shorts and a floral shirt, with very red lips, as if he has just consumed his prey. She calmly pushes her feet away from the wall and descends, one leg at a time, then gets up and stands tall. The man lets out a soft whistle of admiration that sounds like contempt.

"Once," he says, "when I was little, I could do that. Headstand too. The whole deal."

Nili makes no response. Maybe he just came into the wrong room. Must be looking for the gym.

"Well, then," he says with that same forced tone, tranquil and yet threatening. "Yoga, eh?"

She starts rolling up the mats left out from the morning. Three vacationing ladies had decided to refresh their bodies in her class. They hadn't stopped giggling and chattering, and couldn't even get one leg up in the air.

"Yes," she tells him with a "You got a problem with that?" voice. "Yoga."

"And yoga is what exactly, remind me." He takes out a pack of cheap Noblesse cigarettes, taps it a couple of times, and pulls one out.

"Yoga is- Would you mind not smoking in here?"

Their looks collide. He shakes his head slowly from one side to the other, as if reprimanding a very small child. His lips curl into a mocking kiss: "Anything for you, honey" She feels every inch of her body being surveyed in a brisk appraisal, and she is trapped, unable to move, and anger begins to ferment in her.

"So tell me-is yoga kind of like massage?"

"Massage is down the hall on the right." She can't resist adding, "The medical kind."

"And this, whatsitcalled, it's not medical?"

Okay, she thinks, I can be over and done with this in a flash. I have plenty of experience with these guys. She straightens up, a whole head taller than him, and crosses her arms over her chest. "No sir," she articulates clearly for him, "the kind of massage you want is not here." She flashes her matter-of-fact smile-broad, glowing, thirty-two splinters of contempt digging straight into his face.

But he's not all that impressed. On the contrary, he looks amused. His tongue travels serenely around his mouth, under his lower lip, making little swellings that shift around, and Nili thinks of the wavelike motion of puppies in a pregnant tummy.

He snickers. "But I didn't ask you what it's not, I asked what it is."

Deep breath. Wait. Don't give him the satisfaction. Answer him from your quiet place. Let's see you when you're not sitting on top of a mountain, alone among the pale blue clouds. Do it here, with this.

"So you don't know what yoga is?" Again his tongue twists around in his lustful mouth. "Then how come the sign says 'Yoga Room?"

"Because this is where we teach yoga, y-o-g-a, and for the massage you want"-she thrusts her head out, almost touching his forehead with her own, and her broad feline face bristles-"you can order someone over the phone. Ask them for the number at the front desk, there are girls around these hotels who would be happy to oblige. Now, please excuse me." She goes back to angrily rolling up the mats.

"But it's not for me," he slurs, and shifts from one foot to the other. "It's … to tell you the truth, it's for my son."

"Your son?" She slowly straightens up and plants her strong hands on her hips. "You want me to. for. What do you think I am?" She throws her head back, her cropped hair bristles with electricity. In New York and Calcutta that stance, along with her large, strong body, did wonders when problems came up or if someone was harassing her. Her girls would be amazed, she thinks, if they saw her like this, with the crudeness that slips out of her as swiftly as a switchblade. She herself is surprised at how easy it is for her to revert to that role.

The small man is impressed too. He takes half a step back, but still stares ahead with determination and seems to be forcing himself to deliver his message to completion. "He's. he's turning sixteen soon, on Passover, that's the situation. And he doesn't have a mother. I thought …"

"Yes? What did you think? That I would take your kid-and what? What exactly?" Her face turns red in disbelief at his insolence. But what can you expect when you agree to endure this humiliation for two weeks every year, with all the package tours and the union workers' vacations, employees from Hamashbir and Delek and who knows where else, to do the "yoga thing" for them.

From within her anger she observes: the crooked line that emerges and breaks under his mouth, the frequent blinking, the hand that starts to finger a thin gold chain on his chest; a rapid collapse, almost imperceptible, that suddenly occurs in him right in front of her eyes. His face becomes even more unsightly, more insidious and miserable. He must be on the workers' union board, she thinks, from the metal factories in Haifa or the warehouses in Lod. Mistreats his subordinates and flatters his superiors. Who do you think you're intimidating here? I can read you like an open book, with your taut little muscles, that swagger you picked up from the movies and, on top of everything else, your flat feet, lower back pain, and hemorrhoids.

He stands shriveled and shrunken beneath her gaze, and it only increases her desire for revenge, makes her feel like telling him sweetly what he really is. Or maybe I was just in the mood-she later thinks despondently-to patronize someone a little, to remember the taste of it. But then finally, something he said before penetrates her brain: what had he mumbled about the mother? (And what are you doing getting mixed up with him?) "And what am I supposed to do, in your opinion?" she asks, still preserving the frost in her voice. "With your son."

He looks at her with his rooster eyes. "He's a good kid. Look, he won't make any trouble, I guarantee it. The smallest problem, come straight to me."

"Problem?" She laughs despite herself. "What problem?"

"No, no, he's good, really. He just has. it's … he has ideas, he has bees in his bonnet"-the creases of anger and craftiness on his forehead loosen up a little, and between his eyes she sees a pained and startled furrow of recognition-"and he's been with me since infancy, seeing as his mother died, bless her, when he was one month old, and I thought …"

He stops and gives her a look of stupidity and helplessness. She senses that he is a man with no echoes in his body. She crosses her arms and deliberates with herself. She has three girls, sixteen and a half, eleven, and eight, from three men, the last of whom left five years ago, and she knows what it's like, day by day, hour by hour. And this guy here, with his fleshy lips and crooked legs, with the "unloved" sign tacked to his back and chest. But who the hell is she to judge him?

"So what exactly were you thinking?"

He immediately senses her voice softening. A little hanger-on such as himself must be alert to any change. He quickly-too quickly for her taste-lets his shoulders relax, crosses his feet. "Well, I thought-now, don't get angry again, hear me out-I saw the sign here, yoga, so what did I think? That we're here for a week, me and the boy, and he's a good kid, honestly, but he doesn't have any friends. You see where I'm going with this?" And here he must sense that he's managed to cast an anchor in her, and he hurries to deepen it excitedly. "He's all alone. Nothing. He doesn't communicate. He can go a whole week-no communication!" He starts getting his confidence back, something about the goods he's selling her is going down well. "And he's a kid, believe me, you'll see him and you'll understand. You-you have a good eye. I could tell that about you as soon as I saw you." He leans forward slightly, lowering his voice. "The thing is that he's alone. No girls, girlfriends, that sort of thing. Nothing. So what did I think, what did I say to myself, I thought if you, if. "

"Come on already, spit it out!" Nili groans, growing tired of his transparent haggling, but possibly also tickled by hearing the words explicitly, like a scene from a B movie; after all, how many times in a lifetime do you get to hear a thing like this?

He swallows and tenses up. "I thought maybe you'd take him, take him privately, for money, make him a man."

He withdraws immediately and stretches out his small stature as tall as he can, and again he looks like a little rooster to her, feathers bristling, his fear making him dangerous. His narrow chest puffs up, he breathes rapidly, and one of his eyes starts to wander.

She stands with her arms crossed, nodding something to herself.

"Forget it," he suddenly bursts out. "Didn't happen. Never mind. Forget about it." And he turns to walk out of the room. He must have scared himself, Nili thinks. Must have been alarmed by his own proposal, by what his ears heard his mouth say. She doesn't know what's come over her-even later, when she reports the events to Leora, she finds it difficult to explain what happened, just that she suddenly knew it would be all right-more than all right, that it would be good. "It was like I guessed," she tells Leora, "like I guessed through him what was waiting for me there." She sighs deeply and her shoulders slouch. "And besides, me?" {Who has done it all, with all sexes and all colors, Leora silently completes her sentence.) "To be scared off by the idea of this kid?" Leora, on the phone at home, quickly wets her lips in preparation for an intense discussion, but Nili always knows when to simply close her eyes in enjoyment and hug herself. She laughs quietly. "So I thought to myself, Let the kid come, we'll have a little talk with him, give him the facts of life, and let him know what's what. What's the worst thing that could happen?" And so she hurries after the man who is now fleeing her, and once more she feels as if something was revealed when he said those things to her. When he turns to her, she sees shame in his red brimming eyes, and she says to him softly, deeply regretting what she had done to him thus far, "Send him over now, I'll wait for him."

"Okay, but I'm paying," he almost shouts.

"You're not paying anything, it's on the house." She laughs.

"But it's extra," he insists, sniffling.

"No need. Send the kid over."

He stands confused for a moment, suspicious, unable to comprehend the economic logic. But he still wants to thank her somehow, so he digs through the pockets of his too-tight pants and cannot find what he's looking for, doesn't even know what he's looking for. He finally tries to shake her hand, but their fingers miss each other. "Listen, if you ever need anything up north, at the quarries …"

I put down the pages, lunge for the cup, grab it with both hands, and drink huge gulps of water. I haven't dared to look at her until now. And I'm dying for a cigarette. Dying. How silent she was while I read. Abysmally silent. And I held the pages up between myself and her the whole time, with both hands, but the trembling only let up for the last few lines-

"Until this moment," she says softly, "I didn't know what it would be like."

"And now?" I force myself to look straight at her. Now the criticism will come. She'll say it's not her taste, it's too complicated for her now. "Smart aleck," she'll say, and she'll tell me to leave it. What does she know? What can she really make of all this, in her condition? And if you think about it honestly, when was the last time she held a book in her hand since high school?

"For a few months now, I've been lying here and thinking, What, she'll sit here next to me and read, and then what? What will happen to me?" Her voice is distant and stiff. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what would happen to me. Old habits die hard. "So you wrote that story, after all," she says slowly.

I can't decipher her reaction. I have no idea whether what I've read up to now reminds her in any way of what happened there, if I'm even close. If that was how they spoke, she and his dad, if that was what went through her mind when he came to her with his proposition. I know so little, almost nothing. "Take him privately, make him a man"-that happened, she told me that as a kind of joke, I suppose, the day she came home. Maybe she thought it would en-

tertain me, an amusing anecdote from her job; it had turned my stomach. There were another couple of details that trickled down to me, even though I tried hard not to let them, and of course I know the ending. But in the middle there was a black hole, the chasm of her silence that stretched out from then until today. And now too, in fact, what is she telling me? Nothing. She breathes heavily. Not because of me. I hope it's not because of me right now. Every breath costs her an effort. She's very large and bulky. Fills up the whole bed. I arrange my pages for the third time, not knowing whether I should go on reading or wait for her to say something, give me a sign, a direction. Nothing comes. The most exasperating thing for me is to discover how little I had imagined while I was writing at home in London, what I would feel here when I read to her. My pretension horrifies me, and my brilliant stupidity: did I really think I could sit here with my legs crossed and tell her a story I'd made up about her and him?

"And you made me seem so angry," she says.

"It's a story," I remind her dryly, but I suddenly feel a pang, as if I'd missed something.

"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 be-

cause 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. "Um. 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 says 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.

It's dark outside now. Behind my back, beyond a heavy door, the guest room stretches out, massive and dim, padded with thick rugs, crowded with sculptures and heavy, ornate furniture. It's certainly the most opulent house she's ever lived in, and the moment I came in I knew: this house cannot revive her. I get up and close the electric blinds, and turn on the little iron lamp. It's sculpted in the shape of a man and woman embracing, their faces turned to the light, and I get stuck there for a minute. Where does she find the strength to stay so quiet, I wonder. How can she not say a word about the story? About the boy in my story. It is, after all, the first time he has had a voice between us. The first time he's talking, saying things. I ask myself whether she's even capable of grasping what it means to me to give him a voice and words. And a body. The body was the hardest. I tried all sorts of bodies and none of them was right. For weeks I walked around London looking for a body that would be right for him, and when I found one I started to vomit. I hadn't been that sick even in my worst times. For days and nights I wrote and vomited, and thought of how my body wasn't willing to let me give him a body. And one so beautiful, at that.

"And you gave yourself two sisters," she says. She must have only just realized.

"Yes, congratulations to us!"

She used to burst out laughing at every silly joke I made. It was the easiest thing in the world to make her laugh, like making a little girl giggle. In elevators with strangers or during grave discussions with my teachers, one quiet word of mine was enough to send her into uncontrollable fits of laughter. On Passover seder nights at Leora's she was completely taken hostage by me, begging with terrified looks for me not to use my influence over her. Now it was as if I'd touched a patch of dead skin, with no nerves or sensations.

"Me, I don't know from writing," she says in the slightly stammering talk, serious and strange, which the disease has enforced on her. "But I'm curious, why did you think you needed to?"

"I just … I don't know. The pair of them just leaped onto the page, like two peas in a pod: Inbal and Eden."

Her head moves slowly. Her eyes pierce me, a little dim and colorless, but not letting up.

"I really don't know." I titter, stupidly embarrassed. "Maybe I also thought. "

"What." Now, with the last of her strength, she's not always able to bend her words into questions.

I can tell I won't get out of this easily, so I try to reconstruct what really happened. "I guess I thought I needed another two around me. To be with me. Picture it"-I try to wake her up, to find some warmth in her-"you and me, and another two. Another two the whole time. Why not?"

"Poor things," she groans. It may only be a joke, but it still shocks me. The unwritten rule says only I am allowed to say things like that about us.

The second class goes exactly like the first one, and Nili makes a note to herself that the young man is somehow managing to set her off-balance. It's not clear how-he's not doing anything to annoy her intentionally, but he seems to be enveloping himself intensely in a coat of boredom and dreariness. Yet still not willing to give up. With a stiff and ungraceful kind of determination he attempts the exercises and poses she suggests, slowly shifting from one to the next, as if trying on shoes in a store, and every so often he grabs hold of one of them and sinks into a particular pose for several moments, closing his eyes in a way that prompts in her the crazy thought that maybe he is trying to remember something through this. But then, all at once, he turns off and covers himself again with his obtuseness.

Toward the end of the hour she explains to him about the benefits of blood flowing to the brain, and to demonstrate, she does a handstand. In fact, she does this to relax herself as well, and at the same time she tells him her favorite story, the one about Nehru-or was it Gandhi? Suddenly even the most secure facts are undermined, the anecdotes she's recited thousands of times, even they roll down with rapid erosion, sending cracks up and down her consciousness. Nehru, she decides, I'm sure it was Nehru. She used to have some kind of code for remembering it. His baldness, because of the head-stands. But Gandhi was bald too. Oh dear.

"While he was in prison, he did headstands and handstands every day, because he discovered that those poses filled him with a sense of inner freedom." Even though her muscles are engaged, her words have a soft, prolonged sound. From her upside-down position she can see his expression change, as if someone had turned on a dusty lamp, and he asks if he can do it too.

Nili stands up on her feet again. A slight tension pulls through her body. "A handstand isn't as easy as it looks," she explains, "and it's usually best to build up to it after a year or two of practice. I suggest that …" But he isn't listening to her, he just asks if he can try, and his face is suddenly focused and intense. She spreads her hands out and doesn't know what to say. She has bad experience with new-bies doing handstands, most of them don't have the courage to really kick up, they falter with one leg in the air and fall, or their hands give way, and others are so afraid that they toss their legs up wildly-one of them broke her nose once. But the boy, Kobi, repeats his request a second time, and Nili gives in. She leans against the wall and prepares to catch his legs, ready to have her face kicked in, and knows that she deserves anything she gets. She is amazed to see him lightly and gracefully propel his left leg up, then add the right leg, and reach her outstretched arms with the precision of an acrobat or a dancer.

He stands that way for a few seconds. She didn't believe he'd be capable of that, and even when his arms start shaking, he doesn't give up, seems to be waiting for the borderline to be clearly marked between his weak body and his willpower, and only then does he come down with precise motions, his legs straight and his feet held together. He sprawls on the floor between her legs, his forehead resting on his hands, and Nili quickly massages his back between the shoulder blades, among the vertebrae, to dissipate the strain. This time he doesn't flinch at her touch; she thinks he even enjoys it. But when he doesn't move for several more minutes, she becomes afraid for some reason and turns him over sharply and sees his eyes looking at her, clear and completely open, pleading.

"For what exactly?" Leora demands to know on the phone, refusing to be impressed by Nili's interpretations. "I have no idea," Nili mumbles, and immediately gathers into herself-why the hell did I tell her, why her of all people, why don't I ever learn? — "but it was as if he was asking me for something, I mean"-she gulps, oh God, we're not going to go through our ritual dance again-"something he can't ask for explicitly?"

Leora-three years her senior, her sister, and from the age of seven also her mother, and from the age of forty-two, because of a miserable embroilment with the bank, also a kind of forced custodian in financial matters-stretches out her gaunt, laconic body. "And the massages, what about those? Did you get to that?"

"No, no." Nili pulls back, as if something had been desecrated. "Look, a second after he came in I completely forgot that that's what. No, I'm really just teaching him yoga." She laughs with surprise, but then turns very serious. "In fact, I'm just reminding him."

"Ni-li," Leora sighs, and Nili can almost sense her sister leaning over her like an evil teacher waking up a snoozing student.

Nili unconsciously hunches her shoulders, puts a hand over her wide, expressive mouth. The large face, the freckled lioness face, becomes lost for a moment. "Lilush, what did you ask?"

I lower the page a little and look at her. She lies with open eyes, staring at the ceiling. "Does it bother you that I wrote about her like that?"

"No."

"No? I thought-I was sure you would actually-"

She turns her head with great effort and looks at me, surprised. "I don't care with Leora."

"Every time I tried to change the names," I explain to her, angry at myself for needing to justify my decision, "it somehow sounded like a lie to me, but maybe in the final draft I'll change them. I don't know."

"Don't change." She doesn't suggest. She orders. I've never heard that tone from her. She shuts her eyes painfully, or weakly. "Everything should be like in life."

Like in life?! I can barely prevent myself from shouting; for the last two months I've been begging her to tell me something, to give me a hint, a direction.

She hears my silences very clearly. With them she always had a good flow of communication. She purses her lips and sticks them out. I've noticed she has a new expression now, an indescribably irritating one. An air of rebellion that is at once childish and elderly. She didn't use to be like that with me. So assertive. And callous and unreasoning. Unhesitatingly employing the exclusive entitlement awarded to those facing death.

She takes hold of his shoulders and helps him up, and asks hesitantly if he'd ever done a handstand before. He says he hadn't.

"And what did you feel now when you did it?"

He stammers. "I don't know. Everything was upside down, I saw everything upside down …"

"And at school you never did it?"

"I'm not in school."

"Then where are you?"

"At boarding school." He buries his voice again, evading her.

"Boarding school? Which one?"

"Hessedavraham."

"What did you say?"

"Hessed Avraham."

"A religious school?"

"Yes."

"Are you religious?"

"No."

"Oh." She falls quiet, trying to digest. Too much information flowing at once. "Wait, but don't you have P.E. at the boarding school?"

"Yeah, but I cut class."

"I can't hear you, what did you say?"

"I said I skip class."

"Why do you skip class?"

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. "I don't … I don't really like gym. " He stands tensed, without looking at her.

She shakes herself off and says, "You know what, let's try and repeat the things we did before, and we'll see how it goes."

She sits him on the mat with his legs stretched forward, and asks him to try to reach up and bring his whole body, length and width, over his legs. He slowly leans and stretches his arms, inch by inch, and his fingers finally touch his toes. Then there is quiet. Nili, in a restrained voice, asks him to try to stay like that for one moment longer, despite the prickling she senses in his shoulders and his short hamstrings. He stays, lingering inside the pain for a long time, much longer than she thought he'd be able to, until she feels, together with him, the pain slowly melting and disappearing, and she comes and sits next to him until its final echoes are gone.

"What do you think, maybe you can try a shoulder stand now?" In the last class he kept falling, and once he even tumbled backwards and hit himself. Now he lies on his back, concentrating on his body, and then-calves, knees, thighs-lifts easily as if something is pulling him up, and positions himself upright and precise, a vertical human line, and his hands don't slide down as they support his back. They are both quiet, both perusing him silently, and after nine breaths in that position she suggests he try lowering his left leg into a bridge pose. "Be careful," she says, "it's a powerful pose." She supports his back with her hand, but there is no need. He descends slowly, with an almost perfect motion, then brings his right leg down too and stays arched like that, his face with an expression of deep contemplation.

That is when their first lesson really starts, because now he's there, in full, responding with enthusiastic shyness to what she has to offer him, and even though he does not utter a word or smile even once, she feels his limbs learning to delight in their movements, stretching and moving and expanding like unborn chicks filling their shells. Time after time she reminds herself not to rush so much with him, he's a complete novice, be careful, tomorrow he won't be able to wiggle a finger, he'll be in so much pain. But she can't resist his innocent enthusiasm and her growing feeling that in each of his motions and twists he seems to be trying to reach deeper inside and massage within himself some hidden, tightly held kernel. That feeling also sends warm ripples through her own body, which become broader and broader until they touch the pleasurable spot that has no name in any language, deep down inside, on the border between tickling and longing. What's amazing, she thinks, is how he seems to be remembering something through his body alone. She also notices how supple he is, as if he'd been exercising his whole life, but he as-

sures her, "No, I hate exercising." She decides not to push him for now-maybe later it will turn out that he does do some kind of sport or dance-no way he's a dancer, she laughs, you saw how he walks, completely frozen like a zombie. But what else could explain that smooth, musical movement, as if an entire secret life is preserved inside him, on ice. She keeps trying to understand what had occurred that had suddenly brought on the change; she cannot identify it, but every time she thinks he's about to slip through her fingers, she has him stand on his hands again, and he remembers at once, and they are carried away again, and the room fills with their breath, because she too has started working alongside him without even noticing. It's hard for her to resist, her body moves of its own accord, as if to a musical beat; it's been ages since something like this happened to her, here or anywhere. And time after time she scolds herself for going too far, for not protecting him. This is not yoga, she knows, this is not the way you studied, not how you taught, but she's a little intoxicated by now-no wonder, such sharp happiness on an empty stomach. With boundless passion she consumes the moments and tries to engrave them on her memory like a surprising answer she had found in a dream, a decisive and final resolution to an argument she thought she had lost long ago, and soon she will wake up and forget everything.

She inhales the bold new scent of his body, and at the same moment he-as if sensing each one of her sensations and every fragment of a thought-mumbles, "Sorry."

"Sorry for what?" she asks.

"For me, you know, sweating."

She is moved. "No, don't apologize, sweat is our body's oil, our body's good oil." And even that sentence, which she's said thousands of times to her students over two decades of teaching, now sounds light and novel to her. "Rub it hard, spread it all over your skin, enjoy it, delight in it, there simply is no better smell than the smell of our sweat."

He looks at her, confused, and hesitantly rubs the sweat on his arms into his skin. For a fleeting instant his face changes, becomes soft and exposed, and weak, and Nili sees for the first time the sadness concealed in the depth of his eyes, and thinks, Even yoga can't reach that deep. She stands opposite him with her legs spread wide, generously rubbing herself, and her wide face slowly opens up, expanding like a huge hot-air balloon that has been crumpled up in a warehouse all winter. Be careful, she says to herself. This is not a game, give him only what he needs, remember what we said, life or death.

"That hunger," she remembers again when I stop for a moment to breathe. "Of the orphans," she reminds me. Her thoughts, as usual, sail this way and that along different currents. I wonder what she's even heard during the last half hour, since I threw him down between us. "It's so true what you said there, how you described it." Her eyes dig into me, begging me to tell her how I know, to exonerate her from the suspicion that it's from her.

"Sometimes"-I wriggle-"you can even feel orphaned by yourself, can't you?"

"You?" She sounds surprised. "You were always so strong, never needed anyone. Even when you were a kid, I was jealous of you for that."

Silent and restrained, I suck in all the air the room has to offer. It surprises me how, still, every miss of hers hammers another nail into me. Then I ask her in no uncertain terms not to try and make any more sketches of my character. "My perverse character," I add with a sweet smile. I could have said "reprehensible" or "depraved." I could have said nothing. In "perverse" there is something different, something condescending, status-setting, that slices the air between us.

"We're not going to fight now, Rotem."

"Why would we?"

I look through the pages. Wait for it to sink in a little. I leaf back a few pages after all, to the place where I mentioned that hunger, which for years had led her astray like a junkie. On the plane coming here, I had erased the words that came next: "and had thrown her repeatedly into the rows of people who hit and used and abused her." Why did I erase them? I suppose I didn't want to hurt her too much. But why did I really erase them? Perhaps it occurred to me that I had stood there in those rows myself, more than once. And that it had led her to me, among other people. My mother's orphan hunger.

At four in the afternoon he suddenly remembers that his dad wanted him to come and cheer him on in the backgammon championship, and Nili goes up to her room, and in the shower she thanks God for not forgetting her even in this remote dump, and for sending her another gift from His lost-and-found collection; she prays that He will keep sending them to her, and that she will keep learning and growing and becoming more bountiful.

Then, to dry off, she walks around her little room in the nude, reflected in the closet door mirror and the mirror on the wall. It is her little rebellion against Rotem, who follows her from room to room when she walks around at home like this, closing the blinds and drapes as she goes, with the fanaticism and indignation of a harem eunuch. Nili stops, sits down with a sigh, and dials home, and hears the forty-nine seconds of violent music which Rotem recorded on the answering machine and her hostile, barking voice: "Leave a message if you must, but between you and me, you're better off managing on your own." She tries to plan out what to say and how not to be annoying and not to make a mistake that would force her to drive home to Rishon immediately and get there to erase the message before it's played. She's so busy thinking and licking her lips that she doesn't notice the beep, and then she is propelled from inside and says with a tense, reprimanding voice, "Roti? Roti, honey? Are you there? Girls? It's me, Mom. I hope everything's okay at home, that you're getting along and having fun on your vacation …" The words sound like gravel to her. Lines out of a phrase book for tourists. She has a feel-

ing-no, she knows-that Rotem is there by the phone, listening to her with her mocking smile. She can see the mouth, slightly swollen with bitterness, peeking out between the curtains of long hair, lying in wait for her slightest slip, even a minor mistake in her Hebrew. The mouth of a supreme-court judge, Nili thinks, and her hand reaches out to smooth it over, to soften its tiny crevices and angles, and Rotem pulls back-God forbid she should touch her: there must be no contact between bodies. "Listen, sweeties, I have to run now, I have a ton of work here, but I'll call tomorrow and we'll talk, and on Friday I'll be home. It's only a few more days, easy as pie, and on Saturday we'll have a wild time." She finishes quickly, relieved, and puts on a new white cotton shirt, smooths both hands over her bust and stomach and legs, as if erasing the creases of her soul, ironing herself and being reborn. The two of them, he and she, get back to the yoga room at exactly the same time. They meet at the door twenty-five minutes before the time they had arranged, and she sees that he's changed into shorts and an orange T-shirt that dances in his charcoal eyes, and he's wearing flip-flops that expose long, graceful toes. Again the words "Egyptian prince" twinkle inside her. When she shuts the door behind them, she asks matter-of-factly why he wore long pants up till now in this heat.

He chuckles sharply and smoothly. "Because of my dad, it gets on his nerves."

They keep working, an hour-long class and a fifteen-minute break, and when evening falls, they go on without stopping, instead diving into a long relaxation after their prolonged effort, lying beside each other on their mats, looking at the ceiling, hazing over a little together.

"And don't you get tired out?" asks Leora, who calls again at eleven that night, worried after their first conversation.

"Tired out? But I'm recharging the whole time! I'm full of energy, I don't even think I'll be able to fall asleep tonight."

Leora, the sandbag of this hot-air balloon for the past forty-seven years, squints her eyes suspiciously. "Now concentrate," she says, as she employs the deft movements of a sidewalk cardsharp to fold the dozens of freshly laundered socks and underwear-Dovik's and Ofer's and Ronnie's and Shachar's-"and try to explain to me, without using any Sanskrit or any cauliflower, what his story is."

"That's the thing-I have no idea." Nili spreads her fingers out helplessly. "But he just knows, he knows his body from inside. How can I explain it to you? It's like his spirit can easily reach any part of him …" Her voice trails off. "Cauliflower" was the name Leora had given, years ago, to all of Nili's "spiritual dealings," and even Nili herself had become resigned to it, with a forced sense of self-derision. "And what's interesting, Lilush, is that the strengthening poses-all those push-ups and sit-ups and all that stuff that guys usually do like crazy and mess up their backs for the rest of their lives? All that's not for him, and the truth is that he's really weak for a boy of his age. He's a real weakling"-as if he's deliberately let his body atrophy, a strange, chilling thought enters her mind-"but he has such flexibility, such flow, it's amazing, a kind of rejoicing of the body. I rarely find such a thing even in people who have been doing yoga for ten years." (There's that voice, Leora thinks, and feels a stinging sensation all over, that veiled voice.) "But it's not just the body with him, see? It's from a completely different place with him, it's as if he"-and she stops, and through all the mountains that separate them she gives Leora a look that she can aim only at her sister, a look that seems not to have matured even a day since the age of seven, the stubborn and rebellious look of a little girl who had a hand placed over her mouth so she'd finally stop talking nonsense, but her eyes are very bright, shooting sparks of words. Then suddenly, in complete opposition to the rules of the dance, she stops herself, and with a cunning that she's very proud of, she sighs. "You know what, never mind. Maybe it really is all in my head. Tell me, Lilush, how are the kids?"

I glance sideways at her and see a smile. A full smile. The old Nili. And at once I become filled with pathetic and irreparable pride. It's unclear to me exactly what I'm proud of. Of the fact that she thinks I've finally written a good piece? About inserting a little revenge against Leora on her behalf? I don't know. I only know that it's not really my pride, it's her pride in me, which is almost the real thing, and I quickly bury my secondhand pride deep down, as deep as possible, with the other emergency supplies I've never used. The shelves there are laden with sealed jars full of preserved pride (and joy, and enthusiasm, and the purpose of life, and various other delicacies), and she mustn't know of them, and I mustn't either. Maybe one day, I don't know, maybe after, or when it's easier. Meaning never.

With closed eyes, she immediately responds to my molecular changes. "What can I say, I never thought I'd have a writer daughter."

There is tenderness in her voice, and I am quick to pounce on her. Don't be a bitch, I command myself, let her have her moment of pride. But there is provincial, illiterate satisfaction in her voice. It seems to be rising and arching toward me, and a large fleshy tongue pokes around inside me, searching for a crack. And the flames of age fifteen, the grumble in my stomach that calls out immediately: Stop her now! It doesn't matter what she wants, stop whatever you can! Annihilate the greasy waves of high tide and longing with a look or a comment or a scornful silence! For a long moment I actually fight myself, using both hands to secure my soul as it arches and trembles in reaction to that voice, to the price it exacts, even during phone calls to London-yes, that far away-when in mid-sentence she would stop, focus inward, and apparently incapable of restraining herself, she would emerge with the pronouncement, like some gullible prophet, with that hearty, fluttering voice: "Sweetie pie, you're getting your period soon." I would lose my temper, scream at her to stop pushing her way into my soul and get the hell out of my womb, and besides, it's not even my day-and of course, an hour later, like clockwork.

"You know," I say to my complete surprise-and it's clear to me that what I courageously sealed off in one place has immediately started leaking from another-"you never said anything to me about that book of mine that came out, the one I wrote, the Troubled Tourist one."

She doesn't answer. I decide to leave it and move on. But what about the cigarettes, I ask myself, how do I get through this night without a cigarette? "I asked you to read it," I remind her, knowing exactly how I sound.

She beats me off, of course, pouting. "But I told you. Don't you remember I told you?"

I do. I don't. What difference does it make? Why am I picking on her?

"I tried, Rotem, twice even. I just didn't get it. I don't. What can I tell you. I'm too old for that putz-modernist style."

"That's not exactly it, but never mind now. Let's go on."

"I felt," she sighs, "I felt as if … as if you didn't want me to understand." Then she corrects herself: "As if you wanted me not to understand."

I laugh. "I wanted you not to-? But why would I …" I fall silent, amazed. What is she talking about anyway. In the blink of an eye we both inhale and swell up. All the sighs of the past in our sails. I remember that later on, soon, there is a sentence that describes a ridiculous and slightly distorted face of hers, a sock-puppet face, and I wonder whether I should skip it, save her from it now, and more than anything, I think of her reading my book, I see her struggling with it line after line, I see the wrinkle deepening between her eyes.

Once she looked like Simone Signoret. People would come up to her on the street and tell her that. Now her large bald head moves slowly on the pillow and turns to me. "Rotem, enough. You can't go backwards to fix things."

But a friend of mine who works at the Steimatsky's branch in Ri-shon told me that when the book came out, Nili would go into the store twice a day, stealthily, with her transparent slyness, and make sure two copies were on the display tables, so they'd stand out.

His snickering when he had said "It gets on my dad's nerves" had distressed her. It had made him sound like his father, with his splinters of malice and pettiness. And so, toward the end of the class, she asks him to stand across from her and stretch his arms out to the sides. "Really open up," she urges him, and lifts his arms higher, higher. "Imagine you're yawning with your armpits. Now close your eyes. Now smile."

His eyes shoot open. "What for?"

"I want you to smile. What do you care? Just so you'll see what a smile does to us inside."

"But how, just like that?"

"Yeah. What's the big deal? Even just the beginning of a smile. See what happens."

He looks at her worried, almost suspicious. "I can't do it just like that, without …"

They stare at each other for a moment, their looks casting about over each other and pulling back like strangers, and Nili thinks sometimes he's a bit thick. "Maybe think about something funny, like something funny that happened to you." Then she grows alarmed. "You have had at least one funny experience in your life, haven't you?"

"Sure, what do you mean? Loads."

"Well, then."

"But I can't laugh at the same thing twice."

"I can laugh ten times at the same thing," she tosses out with clumsy cheerfulness. "But that's not saying much with me, I can also cry about the same thing ten times."

The joke, which isn't a joke at all, doesn't go down well, and even seems to cause him pain. Nili sees the slight tension in the shadow behind his eyes and falls quiet, and all at once what little they had starts to melt away. As he stands, his shoulders seem to hunch up of their own accord. She sees him getting further away, unattainable. Within the blink of an eye, he is a stranger, and she guesses that this instinct of foreignness is perhaps the essence of his life wisdom. For a long moment she freezes helplessly, and feels the pulsating of a scar that has reopened and rehealed in her countless times, in her abandoned, pained place, but then she shakes out of it, takes a deep breath, puts two long fingers in the sides of her mouth and pulls it out to the sides, rolls her eyes around rapidly, dances her eyebrows up and down, and flaps her ears charmingly.

He examines her, and his face widens in surprise, shock even. She sees his pupils darting around. A quick internal debate is occurring: Should I surrender to her or not? Can I believe in a woman who makes a fool of herself with such ease? Another long gaze, slightly confused, trying to resist her but being pulled toward her as she holds her clown face, and then he shuts his eyes, spreads his arms to the sides, dives into himself, and disappears. For a long time nothing happens, and Nili holds her expression, exaggerated, like a sock puppet stretched over a hand that's too fat. After an eternity-she has never failed at this little trick-a tiny smile sprouts at the corners of his lips, quivering a little, then increasing and opening up as if the smile is making itself laugh, delighting itself. His lips spread and his eyeballs flutter beneath his slender eyelids, and a tingle of pleasure rolls down from the back of Nili 's neck to the edges of her buttocks.

"Well, what did you feel?" she asks when he opens his eyes.

"It's great!" He laughs and pulls his head up with a motion she had not yet seen and would not have expected in him, and his eyes narrow into cracks of glowing pleasure. "It's like I could see these kinds of little clouds inside my brain, with a purple color, I've never-"

But upon seeing the reflection of his joy in her eyes, he sharply purses his lips and stands quietly again. Very polite and differentiated. Well-groomed, with no frayed edges. For a moment he reminds her of herself at the bank after she realized she was overdrawn.

"To the wall, quickly!" she orders in a panic. "On your hands!"

"Rotem, I have a request." "What?"

"Don't turn."

"What do you mean?"

"You keep turning away from me."

"Sorry." I straighten up embarrassedly, only now realizing that my whole body is stiff.

"I want to see your face."

"Oh, come on, what is there to see in my face?"

"That's not true." Veteran soldier that she is, she immediately enlists her last remaining strength to protect me from myself. "In fact, you've become much prettier since last time you were here. And with your short hair, you can finally see your face."

Before I can cancel out the compliment, ridicule her, make myself ugly, Melanie floats up and fills me. Nili must see it happen, because she turns her head away from me.

"But he has some issue with his stomach," she ponders out loud the next morning at six-fifteen, still half asleep, alarmed by the telephone ring that had unraveled her dream. "He has this kind of nervous tic, he keeps touching it, as if he's making sure it's there." As she talks, she knows she doesn't want to say any more, not to Leora. She doesn't want to let her get a foot in the door between them, but in the mornings she is always spineless. "And yesterday evening I showed him how I suck my stomach in and roll it"-and again she sees his eyes pulling back in fear at seeing the hard, vertical roll of her muscles, turning right and left along her stomach-"and he really started feeling ill."

Leora, at home in Jerusalem, standing opposite the open fridge, is putting together the day's shopping list as they talk; she absent-mindedly touches her little belly, the only drop of flaccidity in her body, and pulls it in, conquering a sigh.

"That's exactly it." Nili quickly picks up on the sigh, compelled to briefly wade with Leora into the same warm, sisterly blister of anguish. "Because with us, stomachs are always a big deal. I mean, ten times a day I come across it at work"-she purposely emphasizes the word "work" to Leora-" 'My stomach is too big,' 'It sags,' 'It's like jelly'. And all the emotions, and the insults, and the pregnancies, and afterward, and empty stomachs. But for men? And a kid of his age?"

"Lovely." Leora throws her out of the niche she was trying to creep into. "So now you're his therapist too?"

Silence. Only her heavy respirations saw through the air. I can't take it anymore. I'm going to ask her about him, about the kid, the boy. He was no more than a boy. I take a deep breath. Her breathing stops. I ask her if they talked like that, or kind of like that, she and Leora.

"No," she says cautiously, closing but not locking. "Leora, she only knew at the end. Only after it all happened."

I try to understand what this new information says about my story. Or about my imagination. For some reason that possibility never entered my mind, and I think I'm actually relieved inside, relieved at having been so far off. As if a wing that was tied to me has been released.

"And let's say, the boy, in the story-does he even remind you in any way of.?"

She thinks. It takes her a long time to think now. Why did I need to ask her that? So miserable of me, beggarly. For years I used to erase him, but he would crawl right back in. Changing shapes, changing states, appearing in the rain, in the earth, in a cup of black coffee, in tree trunks. And always stubborn, dark, with the desperation of someone afraid to be forgotten. Later, when I discovered the potential he held, our relationship began to stabilize; I already knew where to find him whenever I needed a quick whirl, and at a more advanced stage I even knew how to produce him myself. A revolving door at the hardware store in Finchley that you had to spin through quickly a few times (it was the rapid motion coupled with the reflections); or bending down, supposedly to tie a shoelace, next to the exhaust pipe of a car whose engine has just been turned off (ten, fifteen quick breaths was all it took; European cars were preferable to American ones for this purpose). There was also an ivy bush in the garden of a church in Hen-don, a huge one, diseased, maybe dead already, but still imperial and abundant with intricate dry branches that created an entire audience of almost-human faces. And there were these sores of a particular, terrible kind, which I saw only on the faces and arms of retarded kids taken out for walks on Primrose Hill; they would walk by, always at the same time, opposite the courier's office where I worked. And a few other hidden reconstruction methods that would take me out of context for a few seconds and let me gallop along a sideline with a sense of dizziness and rapid depletion, a unique and exclusive epileptic seizure, not entirely unpleasant, which I invented for myself-my own private high, my little creation, which grew more and more sophisticated every day.

"The boy. I'm getting used to him."

Getting used to? I try to understand what she's telling me. It doesn't sound good. It's not like getting Leora wrong. At once I'm desperately removed from reality again, as remote as I was back then, when it happened. I put the pages down on the coffee table nearby, take my glasses off, and rub my eyes, which are starting to sting. Again the familiar pinch, that the world is a kind of huge game of musical chairs and I can never get a chair, not even with her-especially not with her. I can already see so clearly that she's not even capable of entering my story. She's always just looking at it from the side, remembering what really happened and scorning my pathetic, limited imagination. She doesn't have to be a seer-she must tell herself after every piece of nonsense I utter-I gave up on that a long time ago, but at least a drop of intuition?

"When you read," she says in a slow, grating voice, lethargic from the disease and the medication, "I feel as if the things you're saying really happened."

My mouth is dry. My left foot is really going wild. I wait for details. Maybe she'll finally say something about what really happened. She gestures for me to go on.

Sometimes, at the end of class, she puts him on a chair and teaches him the secret of correct sitting, how to lengthen his thigh muscles, his hands and calves, and she draws the root pulled down from his tailbone into the earth, sucking energy from it and discharging the toxins of body and soul into it. Then she kneels at his feet and checks to see if his long, brown bare feet are planted firmly on the ground. She plants them by pressing each toe separately. "Is this yoga too?" he asks, and she says it's her yoga, even though she's never sat a student as young as him on a chair in class, always on the floor, but perhaps of all the things she's teaching him, it will be the memory of this simple white plastic chair that he'll take with him when he leaves, she thinks. Like that man she read about once-she doesn't even try to remember where, no chance-who dreamed that he came to Paradise and was given a flower there, and when he awoke he was holding a flower. "The most important thing is to remember how to step properly," she says. "Spread your toes, hold on to the earth happily, delight in it with every step." She recites to him: "Death begins in the feet, that's where our self-neglect develops from, our surrender."

From one hour to the next, she starts to see his body from the inside, the colors of his different senses. His points of resistance, rough and dark. Thrills of amazement and happiness pass through him like rays of light, and they instantly ignite a spark in her. She opens her eyes, and he does too-perhaps he heard my eyelashes, or maybe he's just trained always to be on guard, she thinks-and she smiles her warm smile at him, the one she has recently been feeling on her face like the tattered grimace of a tired clown, a dried-up old Pollyanna. She asks what he'd like to do now, what he'd like to change, to fix, to learn.

"Whaddayoumean?" He raises his lovely eyebrows in wonder. "You can fix things with yoga?"

She smiles. "Of course you can. Yoga is-" Where to begin? she wonders. And how? We have so little time to be together, and anything I say will be superficial and cheap. She breathes deeply. "Yoga is a system, it's just a system that helps us increase our physical and spiritual strengths, and the connection between our soul and our-"

And she stops, because his pupils are lifting as if pulled by a string, and his eyes almost close with pleasure. Enchanted, she watches his fluttering eyelashes until his look returns.

"Say it again."

She says the words slowly, looks at his face with tense expectation: open sesame. And again she sees the magic work. Sensing an urge to bring it about again, she adds something else that used to hang on her studio wall in Jerusalem: "When my consciousness is clear and pure, reality will be precisely reflected in it." There were times when the meaning of that sentence was as real and lucid to her as a bodily sensation, as taste or scent. Now she feels only the bite of emptiness, but when she sounds the saying in his ears, word after word, she can feel his soil moistening. It's unbelievable, she thinks, and strains her brain to fish out something from her first teacher: "A mistaken thought is incorrect knowledge, which is not based on the shape of the thing." But this time he looks at her without any expression. There is a long and empty silence, and Nili becomes worried. "Do you understand what that means?"

"No. What's it mean?"

"I don't. Look, once, years ago …" She stops again, embarrassed, because even ten and twenty years ago, even when she recited it to her students, she didn't completely understand. In fact, it was always that way, not just where yoga was concerned. Always, when the air vibrates from the gong of a polished and determined sentence, or some hammered-out, echoing truism, Nili feels a kind of dull sting in her left temple, the singe of an already familiar insult, and she closes off and the words dissipate and float in her mind with a kind of weary surrender, turning into soft clouds of impressions that slowly evaporate. That's the way I take things in, everything with me is intuition, she explains to herself and to her loved ones, with a shrug of her shoulders. I'm a seer, not a knower.

"Listen, the truth is, I don't really go in for abstract things, and anyway, I'm not that great with theory," she bursts out with strange eagerness. "Or with facts, actually," she is somehow driven to add with a well-practiced, crooked little smile. "Facts somehow never really sink in with me. That's it, that's the situation." And she is quiet, amazed at herself.

Her confession confuses him. "But to teach yoga, don't you need to know these kinds of things? Quotes and all that?"

"Look," she says simply what she should have said instead of the whole speech, "when I do things, I understand. I understand through my body."

Almost before she's done speaking he gets up, hurries to the wall, and hurls himself on his hands, tossed like a luscious fruit ready to burst. He stands straight for one minute, then one more. His arms are already shaking, his forehead is wrinkled with effort, and he breathes laboriously, looking at her without seeing. Something catches her attention. The watch, which he forgot to take off. A clumsy old watch which he always wears the wrong way, so it covers the inside of his wrist, is now turned to her and showing the wrong time. Three hours fast.

He comes down one leg after the other and lies on the floor, relaxing. With his head between his hands he moans, "I want you to teach me, if there is such a thing in yoga, to make me not. like, how to not suffer from noise."

She whispers, "Explain to me a little. I think I understand, but-"

He straightens up. She already knows: as soon as she doesn't understand him, he loses his patience, immediately.

"There's noise the whole time, right? So how. how can you make it so you can, so in the noise-"

A little wave beats in her throat, still she checks carefully, he's only fifteen for God's sake-okay, and a half. "What noise exactly do you mean?" She remembers the quarries. "You live in a kind of noisy area, don't you?"

He gives her a look she'll never forget, a piercing look of disappointed rebuke. Almost desperate. She shrinks in. Stupid. What were you thinking? Wake up. Get with the picture.

She shakes it off. "You know what? We'll learn together. Sit on the mat, sit opposite me."

They both sit cross-legged. Erect. Nili shuts her eyes, focuses inside. "It's as if I have a place there, a quiet place, and I can reach it instantly, in any situation almost." Or at least I used to be able to, she thinks instantly. "Slowly but surely you'll also be able to find your place." She makes an effort to smile, and her hand pulls down an invisible thread opposite the center of his chest, and she can feel the thread trembling, can hear with her fingers the humming fluctuations in his body. She senses them constantly, as if there's another heart beating in him, but a distant, underground one. "And it's a matter of practice, years of practice, knowing where your quiet is located, and then you can get there from wherever you are, in the loudest noise, in the midst of filth and crudeness," she whispers, and her eyes are closed tight. "You can put yourself in there and be protected." She breathes slowly, the bitterness of the words seeping into her throat. What's left of that? Only talk, words, cauliflower. She doesn't even want to think of how many times she's really been able to go in and stay there since she left Jerusalem, since she was exiled from Jerusalem, from her beloved little apartment that was too expensive, from the students who stayed with her for years. From her glory days. Her hands tighten on her knees. Her fingers draw two zeros. All she had now was a tiny, insulting apartment in Rishon, and the misery of the girls, uprooted because of her, because of her criminal ineptness in managing her affairs. And more than anything, Rotem, the waste of Rotem, the hatred of Rotem, the terrible drawing Rotem hung in her room, which keeps presenting itself like a curse in almost all of Nili's contact with the world: My family in the food chain. For three years now, she's been running around with her yoga in a town where no one has even heard of it, haggling over every penny with treasurers of moshavim and community center directors. But he, Kobi, wants to know what it's like in there, when she's in her quiet place, and Nili shakes her head with closed eyes. What can she tell him? How can she describe her place that has become a den? What can she tell him of the little beast that lurks for her there?

Even so, again, as always, she closes her eyes, lifts her head a little, her face looks ready for a kiss, and to her surprise she is there in the blink of an eye, an unexpected and so attainable gift. And the place is vacant, waiting for her with a bright welcome, and she squeezes her eyelids and tightens, knowing that shortly the sharp little teeth will sink in-

Total silence. She breathes deeply, enveloped in a dense pink sensation. God, she thinks, and chokes up a little, where were you all this time? I almost lost you.

Only after a few minutes does she remember Kobi, and sadly forces herself to climb back into her pupils, and he is waiting, a little hurt at being left outside, but eager, like a man aboard a ship who sees the diver coming back up. "What's it like down there? What did you see?"

"I can't explain it with words." She smiles, refreshed, distributing herself around like the scent of peeled mandarins. "When you get there you'll know, you'll sense it yourself." And when she sees the disappointment on his face, she hurriedly adds, "But there's something that maybe you can feel: my hands get warmer when I'm there, a lot of energy builds up in them, sometimes my skin actually quivers. It truly does." She smiles as he purses his lips in amazement.

"Can I touch?" He hasn't asked to touch her until now; only she has touched him, carefully, correcting a pose, straightening a foot, and his skin always shrinks away a little, as if from a light electric shock, the skin of a child who wasn't touched enough.

"Of course, touch."

He reaches out and touches the edge of her open palm. He announces immediately: "I don't feel anything," and pulls his hand back.

"Give it a minute." She smiles, pressing his hand to hers, magnetizing inside, taking with her the touch of his marvelously soft fingers, and within a moment she becomes focused, brimming with warmth inside; long threads of glowing tenderness flow through her limbs, and she walks around inside her body, inside the beautiful city of Brahma, and she is full and generous with herself all the way to the edges of her fingers. "Here, feel now."

"Wow. Can I get that way too?"

"If you practice, it will be even stronger with you," she says gravely.

"Really? How do you know?" He giggles, and for a moment he exposes something childish, the sudden twittering of milk teeth.

"I know. See, that kind of thing I do know."

A phone rings in one of the distant rooms of the house. She blinks at me not to answer it. We sit and count the rings and guess who might be calling.

"No phone calls until we're done," she decrees.

"Maybe it's Walter?" His name tastes uncomfortable in my mouth.

"I told him not to call, and he won't."

Walter was the attachй for commercial affairs at the German embassy in Israel. At the end of his service here he had conducted a private little defection. He's a tall man, delicate and hesitant. A little frail for my taste, and somewhat short even by her standards. On top of everything else, he doesn't look you in the eye. He met her five years ago on the street and fell in love with her in an absolute Siegfried-like way; this was also, it later transpired, the first love of his life. They had one year of bliss. Then she got ill. She points out again and again that it was when she became ill that he began to love her even more. She finds it strange. "It's as if he loves my illness too," she says. "As if he would be willing to make a deal, you know, to actually be ill instead of me." And I know her voice and know what troubles her, and do not enter with her into the alliance she wants to create. But she can't let it go, looking askance at me: "Doesn't it strike you as an oddity?" I play innocent: "What's odd about it? He loves you. When you love someone it includes everything." "Even so," she murmurs, "what does he need this for?"

Silence. Something damp and murky in the air. I realize I'm sitting with my back to her again. Why am I drawn there like that, to the anger at her, over and over again, as to a yearned-for childhood memory that burns my throat? She sinks into herself too. I have no idea where she is, and for a minute I don't care either. I'm fighting against an ancient whirlwind, superfluous now, which still sucks me inside with glee. The thing is that she always knew how to protect herself from the torments of others.

People who know her wouldn't believe it, but she had built a fortress, and I had encountered it, really slammed into it. Sometimes crashed. It was like a transparent protection layer, spiritual of course, but very dense, ironclad, which surrounded her entirely; she would hunch behind it, and no thing or person was allowed to penetrate it. When I finally dared to ask, I was about twelve-just to think that I could once talk with her like that, just come to her and ask directly- and she explained that thanks to that defense, that barrier of hers, she could give of herself to more and more people, she could flow freely. Precisely because none of them could take any of the powers she held there. When I insisted, because that one time I did-I remember the vague and frightened sense of churning that rose from the bottom of my stomach, and how what she said suddenly congealed into a lump inside me, into words, into a verdict-she explained with total honesty, with her criminal innocence, that if she let anyone infiltrate it and take things from there, she would no longer be herself. And she wouldn't be pure, she added, and wouldn't be able to be the utterly clear vessel, the transparent conduit for the healing powers that passed through her.

I understood, and yet I didn't. How could I understand such a thing? She tried to explain. She told me about the ocean of nectar inside the heart. About the island made of precious stones. She said I also had a place like that inside me. I tried to feel it, but all I found was darkness. She went on talking and I saw her on her island like a round, perfect animal, a mythological circle-creature, smooth with closed eyes, sprawled in complete and eternal rest, with its tail in its mouth. But what will happen if I'm sick? I wanted to ask. What will happen if I need all your powers, even your powers from there? I didn't ask. One touch of the electrified fence was enough for me. And she, as usual, heard my silence, and instead of answering, she kept trying to teach me how to take care of myself, how not to let the sorrow of the world, or anything else, penetrate my private place. "Not even the love of your life," she used to emphasize again and again, and I had not a single soul in the world to love back then. "Even your most beloved love of all-don't let him in there." And then she would smile her most charming, tempting smile and say, "Don't even let me in there."

On the third day, at the end of an exhausting class during which she had tired him out with fifty-four consecutive "sun salutations," and after bringing him to the place where his brain simply emptied of all thoughts-and that is when it occurs, when she feels it spreading through him, throughout all of him, the shine, the quiet, the internal crystal-he lies on the mat, a pillow under his head and one beneath his knees, and she softly guides him to relaxation. In the silence that descends, she thinks it was worth coming to this awful hotel for six years, two weeks every year, and suffering the rudeness and the contempt and the ignorance, just so that she could improve him like this. And it's good for her too, she knows, to see him this way,

opening up like a flower in her hands. Her voice sweetens with happiness and gratitude as she tells him about the soles of his feet relaxing, about his knees slowly sinking, about his hips loosening, his chest. "The body is so beautiful," she says with the newly found wonder she senses. "So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet." She whispers, "It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we're only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what's really good for us." She relaxes, opens up. "If we only understand what it's trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is. "

The sound of gulping opens her eyes. His face is tensed like a tightly clenched fist. His shoulders are hunched up almost to his ears, and his legs twist and squeeze each other forcefully.

"What's the matter, Kobi?"

He opens his eyes. His look is dark, confused. "What? Why did you stop?"

"I thought you. Do you feel okay?"

"Yes, I don't know …" He gets up with a wild look. "Let's take a break. I'm hungry."

"Wait"-she hurries to the door after him, not willing for him to leave in this state. Not understanding what happened, she suspects herself, maybe when she surrendered to herself for a moment it went wrong.

But he's already rushing away, and when he reaches the hallway he starts running. She goes back and sits down. You're using him, the probes in her stomach tell her; you can't resist it, can you? From the minute he walked in here you've been using him, that's what you're doing, a piece of easy prey for your ravenous ego fell from the sky at your feet. Haven't you ever heard of "erasing the self"? Isn't that the essence of yoga? And what about canceling out individual will, pettiness, competition, endless settling of accounts with the world? Just look at how every cell in your body keeps shouting out me me. That's not true, she protests weakly, backed against an in-

ner wall. But if she were to admit it, even a little. Why should she admit it, what is there to admit, goddammit, what crime has she committed here?

She gets up abruptly, extricates herself, and walks briskly around the room, pacing in truncated lines. "All these years," she mumbles to herself, and shakes her hands in front of her, "all these years, from the very first class, I always said I disagreed with yoga about this bit, and I said that I, personally, was not willing to erase myself for yoga. Didn't I say that all these years? And that yoga has to accept us as we are, with our stories and all our complications and our little screw-ups and our urges-our human story-did I or did I not say that?

"Because maybe according to the books and the theories, and according to everything you've heard until today, I may in fact not be teaching you yoga." She stops suddenly and announces with a soft voice to the empty walls, showering them with her warm, broad smile, her introductory smile: "But I'll certainly teach you my yoga. Yoga as I see it, as I believe in it." She keeps on talking calmly, in her saturated voice, linking her hands with humility and depositing all her little secrets, her hearty shortcomings. She will let them choose whether or not to accept her as she is, thus easily overcoming the evil voices of her colleagues, who always accused her of being a charlatan, an ignoramus, lacking any theoretical or philosophical basis. She summons up her goodness to come to her aid-her horn of plenty, which shuts up all the cowardly mouths. And she summons the dozens or even hundreds of admiring students to testify on her behalf, and the patients she has treated with infinitely enduring work, thousands of hours of exercises and poses and breaths and massages and guided imagery for a sprained ankle, a pulled muscle, blocked intestines, a broken heart. And the terminally ill, whom she compassionately and courageously accompanied to their deaths, who became more addicted to her than to sedatives and painkillers-to her voice, to the touch of her hands on their tortured bodies. There were those who wanted only her at their side during their final hours; one young woman, whom she treated in the last months of her life, begged her to adopt her son, a three-year-old. "Be a mother to him like you've been to me." She walks around the bare room for a long time, the mist of memory enveloping her sweetly. She smiles at this one, caresses that one, drawn in a kind of self-inhalation, until she stops where she is, tilts her head a little, and from inside, without even meaning to, she produces the old sparkle, almost forgotten, her sparkle of charm and seduction, which sprays out and dances like a ray of light over the four walls. And Nili stands, a slightly dreamy smile on her face, and looks at it.

She breathes heavily. Opens her eyes. Her look says, You're killing me, but with her hand she gestures for me to go on, quickly. I'm not sure I'll have the energy. It's getting harder from one page to the next. And it seems so pathetic to heap all those words and long sentences on the pages just to try to capture one live moment, or a spark of her emotion. I grab the pen and cross out the whole last section, and she says, "Don't you dare." There is sharpness in her voice, as if I've stolen something from her, and I loosen my grip on the pen and sit there, reprimanded, staring at the page. What does she really want and why is she being stubborn? As if punishing both of us together. Putting us both on trial.

"About the yoga," she groans after a minute. Completely ignoring, in her usual evasive, feline way, the heaviness that accumulated over the last few minutes.

I fake an apologetic laugh. "I know. I got everything from one book for beginners that I found in a London library. You'll have to help me with that a little."

A sentence with a future-tense verb. A crude mistake on my part. She tightens her eyelids in pain. I move my chair closer to her-how to comfort? How to compensate for what I'm doing to her in writing and in person?

"But listen. When I wrote it, I realized how much yoga I had absorbed after all, without even noticing it, just from hearing you talk,

from watching you, from the millions of lessons when I was in the background in the studio and the apartment in Jerusalem-in fact, ever since I was born."

"You would lie there in your baby seat," she says, immediately tempted by me, by the warmth that had suddenly flickered in me. It's so easy for me to win her over, still, she's so thirsty for me, still, still. How has she not grown sick of me? "You'd lie there with your pacifier, with your eyes wide open, huge. People in the classes couldn't get over how quiet you were."

But I never took a class with you, I tell her silently.

Or a massage, she replies with her eyes, and shakes her head on the pillow. "It's a pity you wouldn't let me give you a massage. I gave the whole world massages, except you."

I reach out and touch her hand. I don't want to make a big deal out of it, but it's the first time I've touched her in years. Somehow I never adopted the habit of touching with her. When we met, the day before yesterday, I stood next to her bed amazed, trying to find Nili inside her. Walter had prepared me for it on the way from the airport, but I wasn't prepared. I stood for a few moments, unable to move a finger, barely breathing, until Walter let out a kind of sob behind me, almost comical, and left. And then I sat down and we started talking, untouched by human hands.

Now I somehow find my fingers and hers intertwined. Hers are huge, thick and swollen, and my red ones peek through them. Not a beautiful scene. I rub them for her a bit. Searching for the joints within the swollen flesh. I can't find them. My motions are clumsy, they don't help at all. I don't have it, there's nothing I can do about that. And besides, I don't seem to be a particularly compassionate person by nature. I'm afraid that if I give her a squeeze of encouragement it might hurt her, or she'll think for some reason that I want to hurt her.

But she does not let go, she holds on. All of a sudden I sense her fear. For the first time. There's no mistaking it. Like white jet streams splitting off and flowing into me, and there are cold stripes of white-

ness quickly spreading throughout me, and it's as if she's already calling to me from there, from beyond the gates. For a moment it actually paralyzes me, sucks me back into a bad place, and I can clearly tell what it will be like when she's gone, and how much strength I will need to not be carried away there again. I quickly pull myself together. I'm really not sure that what is occurring here is a good thing. Mainly, I'm afraid of the effect it has on her: she may think that if she and I have reached this state, it must mean the end is really near.

"Should we go on?" I ask.

Slowly and with an encouraging smile, I release her fingers from my own. Avoiding her look. Unbelievable how I can put on the exact, precise expression I encountered years ago on the face of a nurse at the mental ward in Homerton Hospital in Hackney. She would twist my arm back easily-I weighed barely ninety pounds then-and jab me with a needle full of Rohypnol containing at least five hours of sleep, and still smile at me with the serpentine smile of a member of some exclusive club: "It's all right, love, we're almost there." And now it's me, now it's my turn-how wonderful is the recycling of life in nature. From a great distance I can see my hand giving her arm two or three caring pats, and I hear myself laugh out loud. "Do you know what it meant to me to write about yoga?"

She lingers a little. Digesting what has just flowed between us. In her body, she is still perceptive and bright as always. Certainly more than I am. And perhaps not only in her body. I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe I'm the one who doesn't get anything. And maybe it was me who, in my stupidity, screwed everything up for us. Because sometimes, like now, when she purses her lips like that and turns herself off, it pains me to see how disciplined she is, the way she has trained herself to stop so as not to know me completely. Because that's what I demand of her, those are the terms of the contract, and that is how I always wanted it. And then of course I scorn her, because for a second she looks like a little lab animal, a mouse or a rat, trained never to enter one particular cell that she especially likes. But that's how I wanted it, I recite to myself what I can never forget even for a minute, that is exactly how I wanted it. In the meantime, it turns out that I've suddenly become witty, and I am cheerfully chatting with her about my short research into yoga, and how I got myself into it. I quote a playwright-I can't remember who it is, he was English or Irish, his name escapes me now; with names it really is the worst- who said that the most complicated thing for him, always, is writing about his enemy "from the inside."

"I hope you mean yoga," she murmurs.

Four or five times during their days together, someone registers for her class at the front desk or knocks on the door and asks if they can take a lesson, and Nili grits her teeth and signs them up for the lunch hour or the dinner hour. She never eats in the dining room anyway. And then, during the imposed lesson-if you can call it a lesson, those dollish limbs dangling and that pathetic displacement of fat-she keeps stealing looks at the little alarm clock and counting the minutes, amazed at her inner rudeness, and announcing to herself that she must have reached the end of her professional road if she is putting all her money on him, with the odds stacked against her as they are. She reminds herself constantly not to make comparisons, to give herself fully to anyone who needs her, but at the end of every disturbance, after the nuisance has left, she hears a soft knock on the door, not shy and not demanding, just I'm here. She bounds up off her mat, full of the sweetness of acquiescence.

"So you've just fallen in love with him a little," Leora says sting-ingly in her role as sobriety inducer, stabbing at Nili with the entire length of the word as if she's pinning down a butterfly. She is astonished again, for the thousandth time, at the unbelievable variety of her sister's talent for imbroglio, and wonders how she'll get her out of this one and how much it will cost.

But Nili knows with absolute certainty that no, it's not love, not even attraction. "And don't worry, he's not falling in love with me either." She chuckles. "I'm too old for him, and anyway, it's happening in a completely different place, it belongs to a different department. Lilush, what do you think, let's talk after he leaves?"

"I don't understand how he isn't falling in love with you." Leora spits out the words like a pit and laughs clumsily and accusingly, but Nili also hears a surprising little sigh slip through the words, and for a moment she thinks Leora, in her indirect way, seems to be making some admission here, finally. But even that doesn't really make her happy now, she just thinks of how two minutes of conversation with her sister exhausts her more than a whole day of work. Then Leora suddenly flares up, hissing at her that she's playing with fire again, and that as usual she thinks there will be someone to clean up after her. She brings up some of her past sins, and Nili listens to the list, and quite a few of the items actually raise a little smile of pleasure on her face. But she is depressed by the thought that it's been three years now since the sweet little Trinidadian who worked at the building across the street; he wrote her lovely poetry in English with chalk on the scaffolding, and left her penniless on the beach at Rosh Hanikra. Since that time, her CV has included no significant transgressions that you could really dig your teeth into. But Leora persists, spitting out chains of words, and Nili guesses how her gaze is wandering now, without seeing, over the walls of her home, objects and furniture and housewares, and as she talks she seems to inhale the strengths of the day-to-day from them with a joyless longing. Nili knows how Leora looks at this moment too-just as she did when she used to have hysterics as a little girl, and later as an adolescent, when she suspected that Nili was seducing and stealing away the few boys that dated her. In an instant she would go berserk, turn into an ugly old lady, and Nili, eyes closed in fear, would walk into the storm of limbs and screams and spitting as into a burning house, and wrap her arms around her, and Leora would freeze in mid-diatribe, afraid, as if someone had woken her out of a hypnotic state. She would stand like that for a long time, lost.

Later that evening, he's in a great mood. Nili is confused; she thought he might not even come back, that she must have touched some open wound when she spoke of his body. But here he is, refusing to talk about what happened, taking large strides around the room, waving his arms widely, demanding that she teach him everything she knows. "Everything?" She smiles. "Yes, everything." She laughs, telling him, "My best students-listen to this carefully now-if after ten years of studying they begin to understand that they know almost nothing, then I'm a truly fortunate teacher. But you still want to know everything now, do you?" "Yes, yes," he enthuses, and she stops for a moment as a cold hand touches her, because perhaps he, in his strange rawness, feels that he doesn't have much time. But he seems so alive and blossoming to her now that she immediately erases her fear, and with a flood of pleasure she encounters within her that forgotten motion, where she tips the vase of her soul toward him.

"Come here," she orders cheerfully, and places a hand on his back and a hand on his chest, and shows him how to stand, how to bend over to pick something up off the floor. She hints at something about yin and yang, and gives practical little tips: which exercises for massaging the internal organs you can do while you brush your teeth in the morning, and how important it is to brush your tongue too, to clean the night's germs away-her modest treasure of knowledge- and in between she tells him carefully, so as not to scare him, about the sun nostril and the moon nostril, and about the two halves of the body, which are two separate and different entities. He listens with grave alertness and his lips repeat her words, reciting, swallowing. "And that thing you said yesterday, the chakras?" She points to each one of them and touches the tip of his head with its short buzz cut, amazingly soft. "From this chakra you can connect to the infinite cosmic," she says, and makes sure he's not pulling away yet-after all, Leora isn't the only one who makes a sour face when she starts flowing toward the universe, and Rotem just puts her hands over her ears and starts singing loudly. But he has the opposite reaction: every such idea excites him and stirs him, and awakens in her the desire to give him more, to empty her knowledge out into him.

How little time they have! In two or three days he'll disappear and she'll never see him again. But wait, why must that be? Why don't you ask him for his address? No, that can't be done. But why not? You can send him books and tapes about all sorts of things, not just yoga, give him some enrichment, put together a personal survival kit for his disaster areas. Stop, you fishwife, down! Why don't you find out his contact information from the front desk? At least so you'll have it just in case. Because no, she presses herself between two strong fingers, because something within him dissuades her, because she knows that the secret of their encounter is in its nonrecurrence. But more than anything, because perhaps it's best for him, perhaps she shouldn't burden him with everything she contains. She knows exactly what she's talking about, there's no need to go into detail, but for example, when she's here in the hotel, far away from the girls, she might ultimately be doing them some good. In other words, it's very possible that in her absence, yes, she is doing them more good than-take a deep breath-in other words.

"Should we take a break?" I ask hoarsely. I can't do it, I have to get some different air. Preferably smoke.

She is quiet. Her face is strained with pain.

When I can no longer bear the silence, I say, "To be honest, there were at least twenty times when I thought you'd stop me."

"Why?" Her voice comes from very far away.

Oh God, I think, what have I done? What have I written here and how deeply have I hurt her now? If I had children, I remind myself, maybe I would know how to behave in these situations. If I knew how to behave in these situations, I answer myself, great wit that I am, maybe I would have children. I attempt to refresh my voice after all, to find a warm tone that will not sound as if I had just killed her. "I thought you'd at least say what's going through your mind when you hear all these. these hallucinations of mine."

"Rotem," she says, as if in that word she has summed up the discussion.

I remain quiet. Any further questions would sound idiotic, would sound hungry, and there is no power in this world that could make me ask her about him and her. But for example, I think of her in my heart, for example, when I described the singe you feel in your brain every time you miss some fact, every time you expose your ignorance and stupidity, how is it that you don't ask me where I, your genius, your walking encyclopedia, the prodigy of your hometown, learned to describe that so precisely?

"I have to know, Nili," I finally blurt out. "It's enough. I have to hear now if anything I've been babbling here for the last two hours is even a little bit close to reality."

"But it is reality," she says slowly, with unexpected tenderness. Almost with compassion she says it. "It's exactly the reality I want to hear."

At 10 p.m., before they part, he suddenly remembers. "Listen," he says, and hesitantly takes two fifty-shekel bills out of his pocket, looking aside. "My dad said to give you this."

"I don't want money from you." But she lingers for a moment, sadly contemplating her nominal value as a woman to his father.

He pushes it into her hands. "Take it, you should."

"Why should I?"

"You know, for the yoga. for us. so we can go on."

And he explains to her, squirming and embarrassed. "He"-he usually refers to his father as just he-"doesn't understand this kind of thing."

"What kind of thing?"

"This. Doing something without money." And he giggles. "He has this saving, that there's no such thine as a free lunch."

Nili hesitates for a moment, caressing herself with these words: "for us to" (or maybe it was "for the two of us to"? What was it exactly? Never mind. The point is.). "Tell me, do you tell him what we do?"

He shoots her a sly look that encompasses everything, and she grasps that he tells his father, or at least hints at, exactly what his father wants to hear.

She takes the bills from him with a conspiratorial smile. After he leaves, she shoves them into her bra, laughing in the face of the bespectacled income tax inspector who has been hounding her for three years. Sorry, gifts are exempt.

A thin whistling sound, almost a whinny. She laughs softly with her eyes closed, and warm circles spread inside me.

She asks for a cup of tea. Just hot water and mint leaves. It's the only thing I've seen her consume these past two days, other than pills and yogurt. In the kitchen I scan the set of polished dishes. There are dishes and implements in there I don't even recognize, that could furnish any institution from a beauty parlor to a torture den. For some reason this fills me with joy. I take piece after piece into Nili's room, and she squints at them and proclaims: "Lettuce spinner," "melon scoop," "apple corer."

"Well, what do you expect," she says, teased, when I wave something made out of stainless steel and rubber that looks like an enema for birds. "I'm not going to change him now."

Walter, she means. She always had a rare talent, shameless and boundless, for attracting men and turning them into patrons. It always made me sick, even as a child, her ingratiating feminine game, and so did the men themselves, of course. But Walter, for a change, didn't take off at the moment of truth, and for that I am indebted to him. "Your mother is a wonderful woman," he said to me when he picked me up at the airport early the other morning. And he paid for my ticket. Every time he tried to talk about her, his eyes filled with tears and he choked up (I recognized it the second I saw him for the first time: a certified orphan. From birth). "She really is something," I said, and concentrated on the road blurring in front of his eyes. Then we kept on driving in silence, and I fought off the temptation to turn his wheel around and catch the first plane home. Ever since I was born, all my life, people who had met her would come up to me and recite these phrases to me, as if someone had dictated them from the concise dictionary of clichйs: Larger than life. Straight out of the movies. Mother Earth.

Now she explains in a cautious voice that she's fairly used to him and to his habits, and to his tears when he steals a look at her. "And to his taste in art," she adds dryly. "All these statuettes. So maybe he has a few drawbacks, Walter," and we both agree with a silent nod of the head, but he promised her he would keep her at home until the last minute. She motions at the crowded rooms which spread into each other in the gloom and says, "At least I'll die against a nice backdrop."

"You'll die?"

Just like that, suddenly, stupidly, helplessly, with the voice of a three-year-old. It just popped out of my mouth.

The next morning he shows up looking pale and green, and apologizes. "It's my stomach, it really hurts. I didn't sleep all night."

"I knew it."

"What did you know?"

"That you weren't feeling well."

"How did you know?"

"I knew, I just knew." She walks around him worriedly. "At night I felt it too, and now, before you came in, it was really strong."

"But how did you know?" he demands, and she explains distractedly that every time before he comes, she sits quietly for a few min-

utes and tries to feel what he feels. His mouth opens wide, his pain seemingly letting up for a minute. "Even when I'm not here you sit here and think about me?"

"Tell me, do you have a lot of stomachaches?"

"Yeah, sometimes. But yesterday was the worst, I really didn't sleep."

"So do you want to leave it for today?"

"No, I don't know, it really hurts." As he talks, his pain seems to increase, or perhaps the talking incites the pain, and the wretchedness.

"Show me where it hurts." But her hand is already reaching out to touch the exact spot, beneath the rounding of his left ribs, deep inside.

He groans. "How did you know where-" He grabs her wrist hard, his eyes digging wildly into hers, with that hunger of orphans. But with suspicion too. "How did you know?"

"Lie down now. Don't speak." He obeys her and lies down. Every movement hurts him. She kneels by his mat, her buttocks resting on her heels. She passes her right hand over the core of the pain. Starts pulling into herself, drawing from him. A long time goes by. She doesn't move. She plays a quiet, monotonous tune to herself. She asks herself who raised him-certainly not that father of his; maybe some grandmother or an aunt. Or no one. He falls in and out of sleep. His body is limp, his forehead perspires. She wipes the sweat off with her hand and notices that he follows her with his gaze to see if she wipes her hand off on the mat. As he does so, she checks his wristwatch out of the corner of her eye, the one he wears on his right hand and obstinately refuses to take off. Now it's set five hours ahead. Maybe Thailand? Korea? Is New York ahead of us or behind us? He groans weakly. Opens miserable eyes, then falls into a brief slumber. She hears the hum, his two hearts beating, one large one, heavy, and one little one, straggling behind. If only she knew what he was really going through, who was wrestling inside him. She massages him tenderly and wonders if he himself knows; sometimes she thinks he's completely ignorant of everything that goes on inside him, and sometimes she's convinced that he knows very well. At this moment, for instance, even though he is giving himself over to her hands, she guesses that he'll allow her only to help him bear his heavy baggage, just for a few days, on condition that she never try to glimpse inside him even once.

His abdomen rises and falls. His stomach and intestines almost turn over, and sink and create whirlwinds on his velvety, perspiring skin. "Now, slowly, try to breathe into it."

"Into what?" He is alarmed.

"Into your pain." Her voice is soft and sweet, she refuses to get caught up in his alarm, she can't recall seeing such panic in any of the boys she's treated. "Now exhale it into my hands." He holds on to her arm, his head stretches back, and his fingers pinch her skin with a twitch. She steadies her kneeling position again. Her body is uncomfortable, and she soon knows something is wrong. There is some deceit here. The pain has already melted, she is certain, but it seems to be having trouble leaving his body. She touches, presses, and releases, listens with her fingers. Strange-as if it is the body which is now clinging with all its might to the pain, unwilling to give it up. "I'm here," she tells Kobi when she finally understands. "Let it go, you don't need it. I'm staying." And after a moment's hesitation she adds, "And I'll stay."

Over and over, reassuring, promising, repeating with pangs of guilt the promises she must not make. And slowly, like a tight fist painfully opening up, finger by finger, the pain breaks free. She feels the truncated billows absorbed in her palms dissolving. The face on the mat becomes calmer, consoled. She rounds her hands over his stomach, using wide, slow circles, and does this for several minutes, until his head falls to one side and his mouth opens slightly with a slight snore, tranquil.

Two hours later, she wakes up. She sees him sitting in a corner of the room with his knees folded into his chest, looking at her. She gets up slowly, sits, rubs her scalp. "Was I asleep?"

He celebrates his little victory. "When I woke up I saw you sleeping."

She yawns, opening her huge mouth wide, remembering too late to cover it. ("Even Einstein didn't look all that intelligent when he yawned," Rotem once explained to her sweetly.) "Wow, are you crazy? It's already lunchtime! We've missed half a day. Help me up."

He reaches out his hand, helps her stand up, but she sits down again. She collapses, scattering embarrassed smiles, and he stands above her, smiling at her confusion. There is a certain tender, cowlike grace to her slow heaviness right now. She holds her gaze on the two mats, realizes that she and he were sleeping here, side by side. She wonders what he thought when he saw her lying there like that, exposed to him.

"You know what I remembered?" he says, as if answering her thought. "Once, when I was three or four, more than four, at the water park this one time, my dad took me there once, and I got totally freaked out."

"From the water slides?" Nili asks supportively, recalling herself with the girls in that watery hell, guessing what a child like him must have felt there.

"No. All of a sudden I started"-he laughs to himself-"I had this idea: what if everyone in the whole world except me was dolls? Like, not real people."

She laughs. "That's quite an idea. And what did your dad say about that?" (He's talking, a little wheel in her head starts spinning faster than the others. Listen, he's telling you something.)

He gets down on one knee next to her, speaking with a strange, foreign satisfaction that frightens her a little. "My dad, he grabbed hold of me here with his hand"-he grasps the thin skin on the back of his forearm as he speaks-"and pinched me, and twisted his fingers around like this until I cried, and he kept laughing and asking me, Is this real? If this is real, then everything's real!"

As her eyes clear, she sees. A large scythe shape lightens on his dark skin, then disappears. She rubs her face and thinks vaguely, The fact that I slept here, the fact that he saw me asleep, it's as if it opened him up more than anything I've done or said.

"Wanna know the truth?" He smiles to himself. "To this day I sometimes think that, about people. Like dolls. Except now I don't care."

"And what about me," she asks, regretting it immediately, "am I real?"

He looks at her from a few inches away. Unseen fingers move inside her, leaving little indentations at the bottom. Finally, not with any ease, he says, "You are."

Then, with a sudden urge, she grasps his hand above the watch and quickly unfastens the thick leather strap; microscopic quivers of fear and refusal and imploring scurry between their hands, but he doesn't pull his hand away. She takes off the watch and turns his wrist over to see, fearfully, and she sees, and somehow she is not surprised, as if she had known all along.

His lips turn white. His look is wild, warning her not to ask anything. Not to dare. She drops his hand. Thinks dimly, It's still fresh, as if the skin there is still brittle, as if he's just been pinched; this happened not long ago, six months, a year, no more. She takes his hand again and lays it exactly over her left wrist, on the inside, and carefully and gently rubs the soft skin of her hand on his, absorbing into it, massaging and absorbing, absorbing and softening. She thinks, This child has been to hell and back, this child knows the way. She shuts her eyes and sees in front of her, for some reason, the showers at his boarding school, an iron pipe coming from the ceiling, a pink soap dispenser, torn around the edges, and a gray cement floor with thick drops of rust dripping onto it.

"We're getting closer," she says. Or asks-it's hard to tell. "Don't be afraid," I say, compelled to protect her. "I haven't hurt you in there."

"No, it's not that." She looks surprised to discover how poorly I comprehend what is really worrying her now.

I drink some more tea. As I look at her from the side, stealthily, it flashes through my head that she's mature. That's it. That's the change. Perhaps even more than the illness. She is simply a mature person. She is, finally, more mature than I am.

That thought undermines me a little. I sink down for a minute, entangled in myself. Where does this place me now? And it's a little unfair, I think, for it to happen at this point, when there's no time left for me to get used to it and reorganize. How can I relearn, at my age, how to walk, talk, and be?

Suddenly, a memory: When I used to wake up in the mornings, she would already be doing a headstand. Her vest would fall down and cover her face, and her large breasts, which looked so soft, would drop and lengthen toward her neck. I would stand and stare at them as in a continuation of the night's dream-

A sweet drop of memory. Who sent it? And why now?

I serve her the day's last battery of pills. Twenty-one, I count. Almost every pill has a counterpill, intended to cancel out its side effects. "If only," she laughs. "If only it canceled them out, but it doesn't cancel anything. The only thing they're canceling out is me, slowly and thoroughly, but when I die-poof! That'll close down their playground." She whistles her new laugh, delighting in the revenge. Once, she wouldn't even swallow an aspirin, not even when she had a migraine. She would beat any pain she had on her own, through meditation and relaxation.

I give her the pills and glance at the piles in the drawer. There are a few there that I remember from here and there, them and their creative richness of expression: the worms that would crawl deep inside my throat from the Anafranil, or the messed-up feeling in the morning after spending a stormy night with Elavil, and various other episodes. But she doesn't know anything about that chapter of my life, and I am careful, of course, not to demonstrate any knowledge. But my poisoned brain starts investigating the option of whisking away a few of her pills for use in times of trouble, and makes loathsome calculations about the quantities she'll still need and what they'll do with the scandalous leftovers. No matter how hard I try, I can't control these thoughts, and I console myself that this too is one of those survival habits that troubled tourists are apparently unable to be weaned from, but it's clear that I'd never be a good character witness for myself, in all honesty.

"Rotem," she moans softly, "shut the drawer already." She asks me to moisten her lips with a damp cloth. Then she dozes off for a while. Or sinks into her thoughts. I have no way of knowing. She now has long disappearances when she simply is not there. Whisked away. I sit and watch her, and try to recover from the little class reunion I've had here. I see her breaths relaxing, and I breathe along with her, the way she used to relax me when I was little. I try to engrave her on my memory that way, to store up supplies. I know how people get erased from my mind after a while. Even now, a second after we spoke, I can't remember what it's like when her eyes are open and looking at me. And no matter how hard I try, I keep getting pushed out of that look, and that in and of itself is starting to annoy me so much that I almost make the mistake of waking her. But then her breaths do start working on me, and I sit and slowly manage to enjoy the situation, even becoming addicted to some suspicious tranquillity, as if all at once a true calm has prevailed inside. Perhaps it's because when she's sleeping I don't keep feeling as if particles of me are being sucked toward her without any control, and there is a somewhat stolen pleasantness about it, being near her like that, like watching the sun during an eclipse.

I think about what I just read to her, about the doll-people, about the watch she took off his wrist. I turn over my hands and look at the place that should have long ago developed a scar just from the thoughts I've transmitted to it. Nili sighs in her sleep, a thin sigh like a whimper, and I become uncalm again, pins and needles all over my body, and then the whole mess of my thoughts, and I don't seem able to rationally comprehend that in a short while, maybe weeks or days, she will not be. This person will be no more. There will be no such Nili in the world. This entity. My mother. I get up and leave the room, almost running.

In Walter's bathroom I try, unsuccessfully, to compose myself. I sit there on a padded wooden toilet seat, decorated with purple tassels of some sort, and marvel at the advances humanity has made in the field of toilet bowls and their accoutrements while I was wallowing in the latrines of my own income bracket. I think of what my life will be like very soon, after her. For example, a marginal matter- what connection will I have to this country? Will I ever want to come back here, even for a visit? Is it possible that this is my next-to-last time here? My chest starts to feel tight, but I don't leave. It looks as if my fingers have swollen a little on this visit. They look even redder than they normally do. Maybe it's just because of the bordello light in here. Their skin is peeling more than usual, my washerwoman's fingers. During the past few weeks I've gone back to biting my nails like a starved rabbit. I'll calm down soon. I rock myself back and forth, humming something to myself, and it doesn't help. A cigarette would help. A joint would be salvation. This house is driving me mad. With Walter, I don't even have to straighten the little pictures of shepherds hanging in the bathroom.

I think about things that won't exist anymore. There are things that exist only between me and her, and maybe I'll forget them when she's not around. I know I will. My heart suddenly turns sour at the thought that I have only a few times left, for example, to feel that breeze, the exhalation of the little lab animal passing in front of the forbidden cell. That occurrence, which lasts at most for a tenth of a second-her sorrowful sniffle, the little wave that rises in me when I sense her standing at my doorway and know she may take a wrong turn, and then the second wave that swells when she finally obeys and turns to leave submissively, like someone shrugging her shoulders and-what? Giving up? Abandoning? Deserting? A stupid thought goes through my mind: How will my body know how to create those materials on its own from now on? It may turn out that it needs them, that they're essential, that they are the only reason I am able to maintain some degree of balance. But I protest immediately: What is this nonsense? How can you just write yourself off like that as if you have no existence without her? You've been getting along without her for years. But the weakness persists, weakness of body and weakness of mind, and I sit and sob a little, to my surprise. I was hoping to avoid it; this must be a preview of the grief, the opening act for the great orphanhood, and it might actually be a good sign, like my happiness when I found my first gray hair and felt that I was part of their biology after all. But even that encouraging contemplation doesn't get me up off the toilet seat, and I sit there and cry silently, so she won't hear, and scratch my legs all down the back with ten open fingers. That takes me to exactly the right place, plowing me deep with pleasure until I bleed uncontrollably-because of her, and because of what will disappear with her, those materials that only she can produce in me, and also because even now it infuriates me to think of the secondhand things you get used to when you stand in the shade for too long, the way you become accustomed to getting secondhand light because someone else is standing in it, and to being silent and faded while she fills the room, any room, with her voice and her laughter and her colors. And the way you slowly turn this into ideology, espousing the shade, swearing by the faded, abstaining with stupid and pauperish pride from anything that is firsthand, and later-it happens very quickly-forgetting what you are allowed to ask for, forgetting that you even can ask, growing used to photosynthesizing by the light of the moon.

But that's enough now-what's the matter with you? It's time to go back. I wash the blood off my legs, stick some bits of toilet paper on them to dry and absorb the blood, clean the floor around me, calculate how many days I need for the sores to heal so Melanie won't find out. Let her find out, for all I care-I haven't done it for almost a year and I don't regret it. This is exactly what I needed now, like a good bout of masturbation. I wash my eyes with cold water and blink excessively, and restore my face, redesign the slightly bitter, hurt expression, so Nili won't be suspicious.

The night before coming here, when I had already been reduced to a state of ashes and dust, after packing and unpacking three times and announcing that that was it, I couldn't go, Melanie sat me down on a chair and started cutting my hair. Once every two months or so, when I quietly fall apart, she does it, and somehow, it's not clear why, it settles me, purifies me. Not the final result, which I don't particularly care about anyway, but just the feeling of her working on my head, tidying it for me, and the sense that for one whole hour that head isn't mine, not my responsibility, not my fault. Now, in the mirror, I try to see myself completely from the outside, and as usual, I decide I don't really like the woman I see. Not that I don't like her exactly, I just feel sorry for her. I know what I would think if I saw her passing on the street or if she squeezed past me on the Tube. "Lady," I would whisper to her, "relax, get the stick out of your ass."

I lean against the mirror and cool my forehead. I breathe warm vapors on the glass and write on it, Melanie. I like writing her name in Hebrew. I don't have many opportunities to do it. I like the way the spelling is similar to the Hebrew for my angel.

"And about that Melanie person," she asks the second I get back from the toilet, "have you written anything yet? Is she already in your stories too?"

I wait for a moment, counting to one million. "Not yet. But I'm gathering material about that Melanie person."

"Sorry."

We sit. Silent. A faint gurgling sound comes from somewhere beneath her. Her fluids are drained by means of a complex plumbing system which I was only just able to prevent her from explaining to me and demonstrating all its mysteries. I scan the walls around us with fascination.

"Were you crying?" she asks.

"A little."

"That's good. You should cry. Afterward too, don't hold it in. But remember always to bathe your eyes with chamomile."

She had never hidden her opinion of Melanie from me. She of all people, who had done everything with everyone and so forth, suddenly, when it came to me, her open-mindedness ran out. With surprising creativity she would pull out arguments and recite them sternly, with an assertion of responsibility I had never known in her: Melanie is an affair with no future and no continuity, meaning, no next generation, and in fact, Melanie is preventing you from finally finding true love, with all the perfection and depth that can exist only between a man and a woman, believe me. And there were all sorts of other dialectics hashed out in the darkest workshops of Rishon LeZion.

I deliberate for a while over whether this is the right time to open a debate. I suspect she has no grasp of where I've been and what I've done during my years in the Diaspora, while I was producing exciting material for my stories-the writings of a whacked-out tourist. I feel like simply telling her, without blaming and without whining, about all the years I lived without love, not for anyone, and how I taught myself to desalinate bodily fluids, and how I trained my blood to flow only through bypasses surrounding the intended areas. And how I looked at couples in love as if they were sick, crazy people, each consuming the other's soul through their lips. And how when I took a bath, I could convince myself to see a halo of bluish rot emanating from my body.

Or I could tell her the story of how I almost adopted a little girl because I thought that at least then I would have a girl with me, a living creature, verifiably alive. That through her I would be able to touch the artery that surely must pass through every human being. I'd already contracted with a lawyer who had deigned to mortgage all my assets in return for turning a blind eye when we came to the "medical history" section, ignoring the telling tremble of my fingers. But at the last moment I gave up, chickened out. And anyway, I knew I was only trying to fake my membership card in the human race. I still carry the picture of a one-year-old Filipina girl in my purse. She's seven and a half now, just this week. I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.

Maybe I'll just give her an abbreviated list of events, crashes, and wallowings; fortunately, I can't remember the details anymore anyway, only the names and the faces, and above all the various backs that were turned on me. And it's also true that sometimes I confuse what happened with what I invented around it later, in stories, in writing, but there's no doubt that I spent three or five years like that, being passed from hand to hand and broken up into small change. I scrubbed the bottom of the barrel really thoroughly, until one day I heard a voice next to me that said, "I think it's enough." And when I resisted and kicked and screamed, she said, "If you needed to prove something to someone, I think you've done that." And with complete serenity she added, "You've proven it so well, in fact, that you've almost refuted your own argument." And I barked, "Go away, get out of here, I'm incurable." She laughed and just hoisted me on her back like a sack, and carried me like a casualty through a few deserts, quietly absorbing the toxins I released, and explained to me the whole time that this was all because I was completely ignorant, I was like a child raised by wolves when it came to living together, living as a couple, and that it would gradually stop hurting me so badly, the kindness.

Then all of a sudden I give up. Regretting the harshness of my heart, I turn to her, extricating myself again from the twist I had unknowingly placed myself in. I put my papers aside and stretch out. Enough, I say to myself, and then to her too. "Enough already." She doesn't ask enough of what. I tell her about Melanie's dad's farm in Wales, with its green pastures where, as I told her family, "they maketh me lie down." And the creek that just runs innocently through the yard, and the sheep, which are the most sheeplike sheep in the world. I explain to her that when the cows sit down, it means it's go-

ing to rain, and if the sky is red like fire at dusk, that means it will rain, and if the sky is bright-it will also rain. From my purse I take out a stone I brought back from there; it is black and white and looks like half an apple, and in its center, like an open eye, is my birthstone. Melanie suggested I take it with me on the trip; I place it next to her on the nightstand. It warms my heart to say her name out loud. I'm less lonely when her name is in my mouth. I tell her how Melanie has already grown used to the way whenever she tells me something special, a story or a childhood memory, I pull out a pen and write it down. She even made up a saying: Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket.

Nili digests. Slowly and strenuously, the words pass through the cords that are gradually stopping up in her brain. But when she finally laughs, she laughs from the bottom of her heart, and a bright spark manages to burst through the haze of her eyes, and instead of being burned, I surprise myself by being flooded with happiness for them both.

She shows him the exercise they used to call "airplane" when she was a kid. She lies down on her back with her legs straight up in the air, and he puts his stomach on the soles of her feet and holds on to her hands. "Are you sure I can't fall like this?"

"Don't worry, I'm strong."

"But is this yoga too?"

"It's my yoga." She smiles, sparing him the whole speech. "Come on, get up."

And he does, surprising her with his lightness. His bones are so weightless, she thinks. But then he contorts his face in terrible pain and hisses through clenched teeth that his whole inside is tearing up from this.

"Do you want to come down?"

"No, not yet."

The soles of her feet can feel his stomach tightening against her.

He groans and his face looks twisted and flushed, but still he stays up there a moment longer, and then, when the pain is almost intolerable, he suddenly gasps a first breath, then another, and another, and giggles, surprised. He tries a few bolder breaths, broader and deeper, and she smiles, and he hovers and breathes above her face with his eyes closed, focused on himself, and his stomach becomes soft and starts to flow, cradled in her feet. She tries to feel what he has in there, what the story is with his stomach, but she is unable to. He glides above her, then lets his hands and head drop, and smiles to himself as in a dream. She looks at him and sighs softly to herself.

Once, in Dharamsala, in a little market where she sold potatoes and Reiki lessons, with baby Rotem tied to her back with a large shawl like the local women did, she first heard the story of how the Dalai Lama was chosen at the age of four, when he could point to the set of false teeth that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama. There, in Dharamsala, very far from home and from the man who had informed her that if she left she'd have nowhere to come back to, she often thought about the wonder of being chosen. She told herself hopefully that it must have something to do with the ability to choose correctly from among the multitude of possibilities. She had long ago given up the hope of, for once in her life, making the truly correct choice, one that time and life would not eventually disprove and make subject to mockery in some way or another. And of course she had already given up the foolish and pretentious wish that she would herself be chosen for something. But as she grew older, she often liked to fantasize about the happiness of the Tibetan monks at the moment they made the correct choice: how they laughed and glowed at each other, and the relief they must have felt when they realized they had once again been redeemed from loneliness, from barrenness, from the fear of living in a world with no such child.

She breathes deeply, her feet spreading out in his stomach as in a pair of slippers, familiar guests. His arms float over her, their joints so thin and delicate. He is incredibly beautiful right now, permitting himself to loosen up, to forget, to mist over. And out of the relax-

ation a speck of saliva drops from his mouth onto her, and he stiffens up at once. His eyes open wide, she can actually hear the alarm sounding inside him, alerting him to a dangerous leakage, and he leaps off her and kneels at her side and quickly wipes her with his hands, just a tiny drop of saliva on her forehead, but Nili sees his expression as she lies there, dejected, and she feels a cold metallic touch.

Fifteen minutes later he is happy again. For the first time he is able to fold his legs into an almost perfect lotus position, and he bravely withstands the pain in his foot muscles as they stretch unbearably, then undoes his legs and lies on his back, slowly letting go of the pain. Suddenly-she doesn't know why, perhaps out of gratitude for having kept quiet about other things-he tells her that his greatest dream is that one day he'll own a restaurant. "A restaurant?" she repeats, astonished. Why a restaurant? What would he have to do with a restaurant? Yes, but first he has to study. Prepare himself. Next year he's already going to start waiting tables. "And what about school?" He waves his hand dismissively, he's planning on leaving the boarding school. They're a bunch of religious fanatics over there, and he doesn't even believe in God. "You don't believe in-" She straightens up and looks at him. "Then what are you doing there?!"

"He makes me go, but starting next year I'm only doing what I feel like."

"Wait, wait." She perks up, recognizing the edge of a thread, trying to undo the knot. "Explain to me why you don't believe in God."

But he has no interest whatsoever in conducting a theological debate. "There's this guy in the neighborhood, he used to work at Greenberg's, and he just opened a Chinese restaurant and he's willing to take me on for a trial period starting in April, and I'm already memorizing the menu and the dishes and the prices." He smiles sheepishly. "Wanna hear something funny? When you said yin and yang, at first I thought they were names of dishes."

At once she feels space inside, because he's planning a future for himself. She breathes as if he had held her hand and helped her jump over the chasm of that scar.

He gets up. "Could you do me a favor?"

"Whatever you want."

"Hang on a sec, don't leave."

He runs out. She stays there, lying on the floor, a little confused, then laughs quietly. She basks in the pride every adult in the world must feel when an adolescent places his trust in them. Especially me, she recalls jarringly. "And what are you thinking of doing when you grow up, Nili?" Rotem had inquired with a poisonous smile a few days ago when Nili tried to have a simple, normal, mother-daughter conversation with her. Nili tenses around the acidic thread twisting through her stomach. She's lost count of the number of times she has asked and demanded that Rotem stop calling her by her name; now the little ones are starting to experiment with it too, and when she corrects them, she feels like an impostor, unworthy of her title.

Fortunately he returns soon, cutting off the sword dance. He's holding a long menu, bound in fake leather, with clumsy imitations of Chinese script. "Okay, test me."

She laughs. "What should I do?"

"Ask me. I'm worst at remembering the numbers of the dishes."

She peruses the menu gravely. "Six," she declares.

He responds immediately. "Shark-fin soup."

"Hmmm. nice. Twenty-one."

"Chow mein. Those ones are easy, do the expensive ones."

She dives in again, and surfaces victoriously: "Forty-nine!"

"Forty-nine. " He furrows his brow. "Wait a minute, wait a minute-yes! Duck with bean sprats, portion for two."

Nili laughs. "Great job, but it's bean sprouts, not bean sprats."

He shrugs his shoulders. "How should I know?"

"Well, haven't you ever had Chinese food?"

He smiles. "Ask me the wines now."

She tests him on each dish, reciting with him and correcting his mistakes. She comes up with funny mnemonics to help him remember, giving him all her secret tricks for memorizing tricky facts, wondering where all this educational talent of hers has been hiding, and why in fact she didn't use it at home when she was helping the girls study for exams.

I find myself talking, orating with a zeal that surprises me. "I'm not blaming you, I'm absolutely not blaming you for what happened anymore. And I don't want you to be in suspense until the end of the story. You'll see by the way I ended it, the exact point I chose to end it, and from my perspective this is really what I'm saying to you here. " I'm so nervous that my glass starts jolting around in my hand, drops of water fly onto the page, and I stare at my hand and finally grasp that something is approaching, my reliable date is coming, it will happen soon. It must have been the scratching before in the bathroom that brought it on. "And it's not just in the story that it's like that." I'm almost yelling now, trying to get it out before it paralyzes me. "It's not like that in life either. This is it, Nili, it's over and done with. I've thought about it a lot, it's the main thing I thought about while I was writing, and today I'm so sure that you gave yourself to him with abundance and generosity, because you're like that, that's what you are and you just couldn't do it any other way-" My words are becoming garbled, clambering over one another. My voice is hoarse as if I've been screaming for hours, and I don't know how much of all this is actually getting through, because my jaw is locked now, and soon the burping noises will start, and I have to get it out because we've never talked about this, even when she wanted to at first, after the incident, I wouldn't let her, I shut her up, I would throw tantrums, call her a murderer. Now the trembling is already climbing up from my feet with its pincerlike movements, swinging from my neck. "Because maybe it's your generosity, in fact," I shout, "and the power of your touch, the touch, your power, maybe because of that he maybe didn't maybe he couldn't bear. "

I can still see her terrified look. I think I somehow manage to tell her not to worry, but I'm already at the flamenco climax, just trying not to fall off my chair, not to fall, it keeps slipping out from under me, I don't have any hands to grab it with and keep my head from being thrown and my jaw hurts and I try to focus myself on having finally said it, gotten it out, given it to her, the gift I gave her, and someone is shouting and I'm not sure if it's me or her, and then the bitter taste spills into my mouth from both sides, and I know I'm over the climax, this time I was let off easy, just another minute or two, it's almost comical to see how my shoulders and arms are spread out in little sections in all directions. Now it's more like break dancing than flamenco. You can even hear my teeth, which means my jaw has unlocked, and this time somehow it's all shorter than usual, I'm already doing the finale, including a curtain call with a grunting crescendo-

Now it's quiet, and kind of pleasant. The warmth slowly returns to all my limbs, and there are pins and needles, but they are very soft, gently licking different spots. It's an almost humorous thing that the body does-not great humor, perhaps, but at least you can see it's trying. What's new here is that I don't really care that she saw it. It's as if I suddenly realize that she's already guessed I have these numbers in my repertoire anyway, and that I haven't been inactive since the convulsions, the blueness, the fits and vomiting of ages five and fifteen, and that during my foreign sojourns I have even enhanced my methods. I examine myself again and find that no, I am not troubled by realizing that she must have known long ago-not all the details perhaps, but the essence; she must know about the creative blackness inside. Who am I kidding? I try to guess what else she knows, and think she is extraordinarily wise for not having said anything to me about it, ever. And now a narcotic calm descends upon me, as it always does afterward. Here and there I release another graceful flutter forgotten in the cellars, but the worst is behind me, and I sit there exhausted, drenched in sweat, like jelly, incapable of opening my eyes because my eyelids weigh a ton. I laugh to myself about how everything turns around and is eventually restored to its natural order: she is the healthy one and I am the sick one. She is health and I am sickness. She reaches out and gently caresses my hand up and down repeatedly, twenty, a hundred times, so gently and quietly, and so right that it somehow reaches me through all the trembling fortifications inside.

After she does her favorite back-opening exercise on him, he says, "Now I'll do it for you."

"Are you sure? I'm heavy."

"It'll be fine."

"I'm much heavier than you are."

He's already standing with his back to her, spreading his arms. She comes and stands behind him, back to back. His hair touches hers. They interlace their arms. His warm skin is on hers.

"Slowly," she says. She's afraid he'll be humiliated if he can't lift her.

The two of them, in silent coordination, strengthen the grip of their arms. He inhales calmly. Steadies his feet. He seems so mature to her at this moment. She glances back at his watch. In the country he's living in today, she guesses, it's lunchtime now. She smiles to herself. It's nice for her to be there with him, without his knowledge, a stowaway in his secret travels. In mid-thought he bends over and her feet are lifted off the floor, and a delightful sensation, mingled with slight panic, spreads through her. She is still cautious, wanting to be sure he can take it. He turns out to be stronger than she thought. Sometimes in strengthening exercises, even the moderate ones, she can see the hems of his shorts trembling from the effort, and her heart goes out to him.

"Is it hard for you?"

"No."

"Tell me when it is."

In response, he leans over a little more, lifting her higher. She allows herself to relax her body. Closes her eyes. She is amazed at his ability to find their shared balance, and at how wise his back is. She decides to give him another thirty seconds, for his self-respect, but then the room slowly fills with a silence disturbed only by their softly intertwining breaths. Without realizing it, she has become completely relaxed, unable to resist goodness when it comes. Her back cracks and opens up, her internal organs slowly release from the grasp of consciousness, flowing to the sides. His breaths fill her up. They are effortless. Her lower jaw drops. She sighs softly, thoughts slowly waft up inside her, disconnected. Soon it will be good, she knows, precious memories, beloved images. She relaxes her body, making space for the pleasure, but as usual, a moment before it becomes good, and much like anyone sailing away or taking off, she must pass the customs officer and pay the tax: the oven has been broken for six months and there's no money for repairs, the antique fridge she bought from some Russian widow is making her life a misery: if she doesn't defrost it for a week she has the entire Siberian wilderness in her kitchen. And where is she going to find the money to pay the repairmen, those sons-of-bitches, and what should she straighten first, Eden's teeth or Inbal's lazy eye-she could have at least bequeathed them good teeth and eyes. And the daily phone calls from the bank, and the long-reaching arms of the landlord, who is willing to make all sorts of arrangements with her, but that's not it, she explains to herself for the thousandth time with a kind of false as-sertiveness, as if she just needs to tell it to herself rationally and then she'll somehow be able to unravel the thicket. The cutbacks are the thing, and the way poverty is breaking her up into small change, that's the thing, and her paralyzing fear that perhaps she no longer even has a life of the soul. "Worry about making sure I have a pair of underwear without holes first," Rotem jabs at her, and Nili groans. Rotem again, Rotem from every direction. Stop, please, I don't have the strength to carry her on my back anymore. Rotem with her principles and her cold, twisted rationalism, finding the most painful way to take her revenge on me, with her bodily destruction, thickening and bloating herself-when did this happen? When did she slip through my fingers like this? But now she's hazy already, finally, the tax is paid, relatively quickly. After all-she breathes a sigh of relief-there are some advantages to being like one of those Weeble toys. The thoughts descend, soon they'll disappear beneath words, the morphine of pleasure starts spreading through her veins, her breath becomes light as a feather. It's been years since she's been able to relax like this, in this pose. Her body is still and floating and entirely open. Underneath, somewhere down there, his back is supporting her, but without demanding a thing of her. He's there. She's here. They touch only at one tiny point, two people in the universe touching each other for a moment in goodness. You can go a whole lifetime without knowing this kind of touch. Usually you must go through a whole life in order to be able to give such a touch. She asks herself where he has this knowledge from. What age he has come to her from. She feels as if she is barely putting any weight on him. For a moment she can imagine them spinning around and around in the air, and now she is the one carrying him with that same ease. Silence. Breaths. Floating. Her soul fills, drop by drop, with the rare nectar of trust.

"Who are you studying with?" she asks tightly when I turn the page.

"What?" I perk up. "What?"

"Rotem," she says wearily.

I gulp. Consider carefully, decide there's no point. "I took a few classes."

"Did you at least find a good teacher?"

"Yes." I wonder how long she's known, from which moment in the story. "Someone Melanie recommended. He's Japanese."

"The Japanese are a bit dry," she declares, and shuts her eyes. "You told him about me?"

"Yes. A little."

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing. He listened. He heard. He usually doesn't say much."

I can feel her scanning inside my head. My thoughts leap inside and I close the door behind them in a split second. Once, in a nature movie, I saw tiny little fish swarming into a sea anemone to escape a preying fish, and I recognized their movement of evasion and the motion of the anemone itself-a fleshy, complex mind, rushing to hide them. My Japanese yoga teacher had listened to what I told him and said, "The woman you spoke of doesn't work right. She relies on her intuition too much, and she's not at that stage yet." Then, at the end of the class, he came up to me again and said, "That woman, she works like someone who doesn't have a teacher. If she had a teacher he would reprimand her."

"I wanted so badly," she says finally.

"I only took a few classes, it's really not-"

"And are you going to continue?"

"I don't know." And I forced a laugh. "It's easier for me to write it than do it."

"No, no," she sighs, "you should keep doing it, it's good, it will be good for you."

She just lies there. Completely still. Because of her condition she has the strange ability to be present without being. In the space that now opens up between my chair and her bed, I remember the nights when Melanie taught me how to sleep together. I don't know why that comes into my mind. She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can't fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, "Come on, try a little longer." And so for a few bleary-eyed, sleepwalking weeks-and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning-she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement-even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced. Now, when I smile, Nili looks at me, and I can't escape in time.

But as if operating her immediate healing mechanism, she remembers something. "There's something you should add."

"Where?"

"When you say what my face is like, how my jaw drops, you know, when I'm on his back."

"What should I add?"

"Write that when I'm like that, I mean she, then she thinks to herself that that's how she'll look when she dies."

"No, no."

"And then write: And she thinks of how everyone will see then that she really was a complete idiot. Write it. Now."

His ignorance amazes her. When she tells him she lived in India for three years, he asks if it's true that everyone there is black. When they talk about vegetarianism, he suddenly claims, with a strange fervor and a kind of vexation, that elephants are carnivores. "Elephants?" She doesn't know where to start refuting such nonsense, but he refuses to be convinced by all evidence she provides, slams his face closed, and locks himself up to her: that's what he's decided, and that's that. What are they teaching them at that boarding school? she wonders. Then something else happens, something trivial, that depresses her for the rest of the day.

While they're doing breathing exercises, sitting across from one another, she presses three fingers below his navel, in the body's furnace, seemingly searching for something. She doesn't find it, and hes-

itates; a moment later, she intuitively pushes her thumb hard into his navel. "When I press here, exhale and push out at me with your breath."

But he turns pale with the first sign of pressure, depleted. "I think I'm going to pass out."

"Lie down, you're just dizzy," she says as she supports his back and calms him, contemplatively; she is surprised again at how quickly he melts and starts to whine, as if the entire complex, delicate structure that he maintains hidden inside himself collapses in an instant upon contact with danger, with fear. He moans, and she rubs his shoulders distractedly. "Don't tense up, relax, relax. It'll pass." But she senses something else, as if whatever secret he is hiding is there, very close to the surface of his skin, and the slightest touch might tear its outer layer. For the hundredth time she wonders how he came to cut himself like that, on his wrist, and why, what had caused him to go so far. She murmurs, "Don't fight, you're fighting. Just get into it, into this feeling, I'm here, I'm with you, protecting you." A pallor spreads beneath his brown complexion. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead. What's going on here? Nili wonders, tightly pressing a finger beneath his nose. We must have done something bad, or premature. Or maybe I frightened his tender stomach again. She tries to recall what had suddenly caused her to change the three-finger pressing and proceed with such certainty to his navel. His hand flutters like the wing of an injured bird. He keeps trying to remove her hand from his navel, even though it is no longer there. Nili stares at the strange, compulsive motion and feels his panic inflaming itself rapidly, like a little fire. He grunts, starts to choke, and Nili finally breaks free and wakes up, quickly lifting his feet onto a chair. She slaps his cheeks lightly, rubs his temples, calls out his name, shouting, "Kobi, Kobi." That seems to help, the color starts coming back to his face, his breath stabilizes, the muscle spasms let up gradually. She caresses his damp forehead and, vaguely guessing, starts to repeat his name over and over, gently, compassionately, smiling. She can see his eyes flutter every time she calls his name, eagerly pulsat-

ing against his tight eyelids, and she thinks how strange it is that she has hardly called him by his name until now.

When she tries to stand up, he reaches out blindly and feels for her hand, grasping it tightly, signaling for her to continue. She recites his name to him like a mantra, moaning, singing a little tune, but inside her something is already darting around the edges, grumbling and thorny. It's my fault this happened, it's unprofessional, the whole thing is unprofessional. I'm going too fast with him and doing too many experiments and forgetting that he's only a kid. I've really gone too far, seriously. She keeps rubbing his chest, trying not to infect him with her anger at herself or any other random angers, until she notices that his eyes are open with the damp sparkle of a smile: "You know you're talking to yourself the whole time?"

"I am?"

"Yeah, with your lips. You keep doing it."

She kneads his shoulders with threatening force. "Well, just don't tell anyone." But after a moment she can't resist: "So what do you know about me now?"

He sits up, delaying his exciting discovery for a while, then throws it at her: "You're going to buy something big."

"Me?" She bursts out laughing. "Yeah, right!"

"Yeah, a house or a car. Something awesome. A Mercedes?" He is unconvinced by her peals of laughter, enjoying his role as the all-knowing. "A ton of money. You were making calculations with your lips."

Her laughter breaks off at once. Her heart sinks and crashes. That's the end, really. If I'm bringing all that into my work now, even into my work with him. That's it. Give the keys back to the management, go and be a secretary, do telemarketing, clean houses, things you can handle. She gets up and walks over to sit in the corner. He stays on his mat, looking at her, not understanding what's going on. She lets her head drop back against the wall with her mouth open. Rotem and Einstein can both take a flying leap. She remembers how she once swore, years ago-yes, yes, when she was standing in the light-that as soon as the yoga became nothing more than a living, a craft, she'd get up and leave. "I'm not buying a house," she says to him, to her surprise, knowing that if she doesn't talk now she'll scream. "And I'm sure as hell not getting a Mercedes. I'm actually trying to figure out where I'll find the money to pay next month's rent."

She tells him about herself. About the expulsion from Jerusalem. Even about Inbal's father, who disappeared, leaving her with a huge debt she had guaranteed for him. She even tells him about the broken fridge, and that the stereo system doesn't work and they haven't had any music at home for a year. And then, because what difference does it make now, she also lets him in on the hostile suspicion she's developing toward the other appliances; she has a whole conspiracy theory about them and their allies, the repairmen, and every time she turns on an appliance, even a light switch, her heart skips a beat. Then she tells him about the girls. In detail or in abstract, probably in abstract-she knows she must maintain some separation, because here she belongs only to him. It's only the two of them.

The sun sets and a pleasant dimness settles in the room. He lies there, resting on his elbows and listening. It's clear to her that he thought she was in a completely different place in life, and that now he is trying to figure out what this means about her, and maybe about both of them. He may even be recalculating his own position in relation to her, on the chain. Nili gets up, goes over to the mirror, and prods her scalp and hair a little. She looks into her eyes. Have I made a mistake by telling him? She finds it hard to read an answer. Lately she doesn't trust herself even with smaller things than this. As if with every movement she makes in the world she is scattering breezes of hurt and damage and failing. Midas and his leaden touch.

She goes over and collapses on her mat, knowing that something bad is happening to her, as if somewhere along the way she has lost the most basic confidence, the most natural and primal sense. As if every choice she makes immediately becomes a mistake, just because she made it. Go figure out what's right and what isn't, she thinks with her head lowered, what you can say to someone and what you can't. Is it even permissible to give advice to someone? To guide them, God forbid, along some path? Not to mention the truly unbelievable accomplishment of bringing a human creature into the world. How did I dare? She suddenly panics and pulls back and straightens up. How did I do it? How did I have the audacity?

Her hand moves over the blanket until she touches my knee and holds on to it. She doesn't say anything, and I don't ask. I have a thousand questions, but I don't ask. You can't go backwards to fix things.

Later, when everything between them settles, she says in a very tired voice, "You still haven't said what you felt before."

"When?"

"When you weren't feeling well."

"I don't know, I don't know," he mutters, and she gets the feeling he is avoiding her, and it annoys her that she's so transparent to him, while he is able to conceal and compartmentalize.

"I don't know," he says. "Your finger, like … I thought it was going into my stomach, like making a hole in it."

He lies on his back, relaxed, quiet. It's so quiet in the room that she thinks she can hear his hearts beating. A minute goes by, then another, and his breathing becomes tranquil. Then hers does too. The darkness thickens. Nili hugs her knees. Her eyes, which have dulled a little, brighten. The panic that flooded her earlier begins to melt away. Her lungs expand and she spreads out her inner limbs. Every so often she looks at him and feels that now another knot has been tied between them, because they are both, in their own way, downtrodden. It's strange that she'd never thought of herself in that way before, and yet now, because of him, it actually moves her, gives her strength.

He asks sleepily, "Hey, I forgot how it goes-the umbilical cord, do they cut it off both of them at the belly button?"

"What do you mean, both of them?"

"The baby and her?"

"The mother, you mean?"

"Yeah."

"Are you serious?"

He lifts up on his elbows, surprised at her tone of voice, almost hurt. It takes her a minute to grasp, and then she sees with painful clarity the impression sketched inside him: a thread stretching from his navel to his mother's.

She falters briefly. He looks at her with penetrating eyes, and a sudden and decisive urgency darts between them. She smiles at him, her pros and cons get mixed up, and somehow, out of the smile, an answer escapes. She could never tell lies, but she was an expert at giving little gifts like this.

As I reach the last word, she sighs. I don't ask. I wait. It occurs to me that we've actually been living apart for longer than we lived together. You could say that for a long time we've known each other only in chapter headings. But how could that be? I mean, how could such a reduction occur between us? Or between her and anyone.

Reduction is not the right word, though. It's more as if over the years we've become two polite tour guides at a disaster site, but one that destroyed our lives. After the incident she retired. Stopped teaching. He was, in fact, her last student, and I think she also stopped doing yoga herself. I'm not sure about that; I've never been able to ask her, and now it's too late. She made a living doing odd jobs. She modeled for art classes. She was a salesclerk in a housewares store. Then she sold paintings for an old artist, going from door to door asking people to just take a look at the pictures. I left her on my seventeenth birthday, my gift to myself. Then I came back, or was sent back, with my tail between my legs. Then I left again, and the same thing all over again. She once said, with uncommon sobriety, "Our umbilical cord has shriveled up." Years later, during one of the disconnects, when I was already deep in my London life, I found out from a friend that she was ill. We developed a tolerable routine: one conversation a week. She would give me a sign with two rings, and if I felt like it, I'd call her back. Once I came to visit her, courtesy of Walter Tours. It wasn't a good visit. ("Cursed is the parent," she told me then, before I left in the middle of a horrible row, "who can be objective about his own child.") During those years, in my rare flashes of composure, I wrote the tourist stories and collected them into a book. I tried to dabble with cinema a little, and journalism, and I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there's no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn't wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything.

"Within every effort there has to be calm," she recites for him. "Always, in every pose, you have to stop just before the effort becomes pain."

"Sometimes I think … a bird, for example," he says.

"Yes, what about it?"

"To fly, it has to keep flapping its wings, right?"

"Definitely," she agrees gravely.

"I'm not talking about gliding," he says fussily, and her ear opens a little at the sound of the new word. "There are birds that glide without making any effort, but I'm talking about a bird that has to make an effort to fly up."

"Okay." Nili shrugs, wondering where he himself is flying with this.

"And a bird that lives, say, for a year? Two?"

"Let's say."

"And all that time it has to make an effort with its wings, otherwise it'll fall?"

"Definitely."

"But maybe once, like one time in its whole life, it happens that it can fly up high, the highest-for maybe a whole minute-without making any effort at all with its wings?"

She leans forward, shrinking the crease between her eyes, sensing something approaching. "And how exactly does that happen?"

He takes on a mysterious expression. "It gets it from the air."

"I don't get it."

"Like once in every bird's life, the air lets it fly up without making any effort."

She blinks. What is it with these aerodynamic theories all of a sudden?

But he's very serious and focused. "It's like …" He searches for an example, his fingers moving, pulling something from the air. "It's like, say … a holiday bonus, like the air is giving it a bonus. A discount. Once in a lifetime."

"Oh." Nili laughs with sudden comprehension. "And does it know, the bird? Does it understand?"

He falters. "That's what I keep wondering. 'Cause if it doesn't understand, then it's like the air's efforts are wasted on it, no?"

"I guess so," she answers, delighted.

"And if it does understand, then. No, that can't be. No. It must not understand, 'cause it's just a bird, with a bird brain. Sure." He gets excited; now that he's made up his mind, his face lights up. "It's something the air just does for fun!"

From the great relief on his face she guesses how long the question has preoccupied him.

"It doesn't even realize it at all! Just that suddenly it feels light, but it's the air that decides: Okay, now you. Now you. Playing with its birds, you see?"

Do I see? Nili wonders, looking at him contemplatively.

"And by the way," he adds gravely after a minute, "it's the same with the sea and the fishes."

"Okay," she sighs, "tell me about her."

I tell her. "She's huge, Melanie, tall and wide, even a little scary at first, but she is such a soul, and warm and honest and"-for some reason the word in Hebrew escapes me-"kind of tangible?"

She is surprised. It's not how she'd imagined Melanie. She refused to even look at a picture. So I tell her more. Little things, like her work at the rehab institute, and the way she rides her purple bike around the streets of London. And her simple, healthy self-confidence-if only I had a quarter of it-and her masses of energy, which, to me, are sometimes simply paralyzing. "That woman needs almost no sleep." I laugh. "And there is her absolute honesty toward any person-no one gets off easy. And sometimes, here and there, there's a toughness," I say, then add, "a kind of intransigence," surprised at how a little spray of betrayal has escaped me. "She has these definitive principles which sometimes, to be honest, can make life pretty complicated. Actually, Melanie could easily fit in with that gang of yours, the ones that collect birds at four in the morning."

Nili hears everything, including the crumple in the middle of my laugh. The intransigence and toughness-it flashes in my mind-of someone who has never yet broken down, not even cracked.

"And does she know what the story is about?"

"She knows everything that happens in my life."

I shouldn't have said that, certainly not that way, but I knew why I had to say it that way, to correct a mistake with an error. I could actually hear a little sound from within her, like a match snapping.

Now there is silence. Her feet are exposed at the bottom of the blanket. They are huge, swollen. Bluish yellow. I stare at them. The toes look joined into one mass.

"And what did she say?"

Her voice can't fool me. I want to change the subject, but I'm also not able to completely give up, pulled this way and that, feeling like a child of divorced parents forced to convey messages between them. "What did Melanie say? She said that I should have written it years ago." She said something else too, but I don't have the guts to convey that. She thought that if Nili had read this story years ago, maybe she wouldn't have gotten ill.

When her head sinks, her goiter looks huge, red, crisscrossed with veins. Tiny waves travel through it. What is she thinking now? Strange how difficult it is for me to guess her when I'm sitting right next to her.

Melanie was angry about me hiding from Nili that I was writing about her. In her lucid and balanced world there was no room for such miserable little acts of deception. Nor for my sense of relief at having managed again, with the help of a little disguise or a slight paring down of the facts, to protect my little piece of often-looted privacy. She could not understand why I keep up these concealments even now, why I need to. We never fought so much as during the months when I was writing about Nili. I never felt that she was so close to giving up on me and on my lousy personality. After every phone call to Israel I would hang up and curse myself, and let her know that she should chalk up another week of punishment for me on the list hanging on our fridge.

For a minute I steal a quick immersion into her. Melanie studying at night, her large body curled up on the rocking chair we found on the street. Or cooking lamb curry for us at five in the morning, wearing headphones and dancing. Or standing in front of a photograph in an exhibition from Kosovo, crying loudly with her mouth open and her nose streaming, until you literally had to drag her away. Or her irresistible motion when she rubs one of her lotions onto her hands before a massage. And her murderous workout every morning, with exercises that doctors would forbid me even to watch, and her pagan lunar worships-if I even dare smile at them, I'm dead. And the Tottenham soccer games she dragged me to week after week-me-

until I was forced to admit that there was something about them, I couldn't say exactly what, maybe seeing Melanie roaring and going wild and cursing in Welsh. And the moments when you can't tell which of our stomachs is grumbling. And my place in the world, my home, a preserve meant for only one protected animal, me, in the indentation of her shoulder. And not to be taken lightly are also the salt and pepper shakers we bought on Portobello Road, and our antique claw-foot bathtub, which was the real reason we rented the apartment. And our sixty-seven CDs, and the copper tray, and the two big orange mugs we bought on our first anniversary-

When you look at it that way, I think to myself carefully, we really have our own little household.

As time runs out, hour by hour, he thaws. When she reminds him of how he walked into her room the first time, all hunched over, he jumps up and corrects her, showing her exactly how he held his shoulders and how his chest caved in. Nili is amazed. "Do you walk like that on purpose?"

He smiles proudly, as if he had been complimented on his acting. "I can walk however I want." And he shows her his imitations of an old man, a drunk, an important man, the school rabbi. In two or three movements, with talent as sharp as a knife, he cuts the whole character out of the air. He is especially cruel to his father, with his bombastic way of standing, his lazy eye, and his roosterlike expression.

Nili laughs wholeheartedly and senses again the discomfort he arouses in her sometimes; she would never think to fake a walk. "And how do I walk?"

"You?" He smiles calmly, deliberating with himself, maybe even enjoying how it unsettles her. Because there is that part of him, she senses, that can't resist the temptation to give someone a little pinch, and twist it around, supposedly in jest.

"Yes, me." She thrusts her chin out, prepared.

He walks around her for a few seconds with his hands behind his back, and she already regrets asking, afraid that something will be broken, but also childishly eager to see herself in his eyes. He takes his time, immersed, pulling her out of himself, and slowly he changes. She doesn't even understand exactly how and where, but she suddenly feels a chill, because he is different. His body rushes up from inside, fills up, rounds out. He lifts his head with a gesture she knows well and walks past her with suppleness, in her lioness stride. His toes are spread and they hug the floor, his face slowly takes on a complex and alarmingly precise expression, the face of the woman she is, with her smile, still innocent, offered generously, and with the permanent wrinkle of effort between her eyes, the wrinkle that is also the place where she shrinks inside, afraid that you can already see the rapid reduction, the hiding ruses, the ignorance, and here it is, revealed to all, everyone can see it, you can stop trying so hard.

Even so, despite everything, something about herself pleases her; she is definitely still alive, still bold and undefeated, with that walk, that flexibility. I would hit on me, she thinks, I'd give myself a look on the street. Even the strained, slightly frightened spot between her eyes, it too may disappear in time, when things get better. She applauds him and thanks him for presenting her to herself like that, mercilessly, even generously. "You're so talented," she says with wonder. "You could be an actor."

He recoils. "No, no, I'm gonna have that restaurant. And anyway, actors are fags."

"Really? Says who?"

"Everyone knows they are." He thinks for a minute. "The supervisors at school. And my dad."

"Oh yeah? And who else is a fag, according to your dad?"

"I dunno. Dancers, for sure."

"Who else?"

He smiles; wearing his father's character again, he spreads his feet and places his hands on his knees and leans forward as if crudely watching a soccer game. The slightly devious twinkle appears in his eyes. "Singers."

"And who else?" She also crouches down with her hands on her knees. "Who else?!"

"Lefties."

"And?"

"Hairdressers!"

She roars, laughing, her perfect white teeth sparkling. "And who else?"

"Waiters."

"And?"

"Noncombat soldiers! Professors! Ashkenazis! And Hapoel Tel-Aviv! And everyone is a fag!"

"So says your dad," she sums up, standing straight.

"So says my dad."

Silence.

"And what do you say?"

He slowly straightens up, flashing her a well-practiced, cartoon-ish smile. But it seems to her that in the depths of his eyes-perhaps just an illusion-she sees the flashing movement of a long, supple beast, slinking between dark trees, its lazy tail wrapped around a trunk for a minute, then pulled away and slowly disappearing.

"But who's looking out for us?" she asks on the second-to-last day, after interrogating him again so that she could be with him once more in that place of the air-and-birds game. "Who looks out for us poor human beings?"

He thinks for a long time, brooding and deliberating, but Nili knows he already has the answer-he's just deciding whether or not to let her in on it. "What looks out for people is. "

"The earth!" She jumps up, shooting her hand into the air like a good student.

He seems surprised. "Why the earth?"

"I thought. " She is embarrassed. "The air looks after its birds, and the sea …"

"With people"-he glances at her, inspecting, and she knows she's about to enter into another of his mazes-"with people it's something totally different. With people it's talking."

"Talking?" She swallows. She's not sure she understands him, but she definitely feels a warm, slender finger touching the depths of her being for an instant.

He hesitantly presents his thoughts to her. "Every day, it's like there's one word-"

"And if I say it-"

"Then you win!" His black eyes glow in front of hers; for a second he is open to her, and she sees inside, into his darkness, and a tiny spot of gold flickers there.

"But what? What do I win?"

"I dunno." He laughs softly, insolently, and walks around the room with his arms outstretched to the sides. "How should I know? Maybe you win the lottery? That kind of thing, perks."

Or fall in love, Nili sighs deep inside. "But tell me, who's the person who knows what the winning word is on a given day?"

She should have guessed his response: he smiles mysteriously and keeps flying around the room. She almost bursts out laughing at the ridiculous, arrogant importance he puts on. But he is also so exposed and transparent at this moment that her heart goes out to him. "Cheapskate! At least tell me what today's word is."

"No."

"Then just tell me if during the days we've been here I've ever said the right word."

He remains mute, lifting his arms up high, delighting in the suppleness of his limbs. "I can't tell you, it's against the rules. But if you happen to say it today, then this evening I'll be allowed to tell you that you said it."

They shake hands ceremoniously, and as they look into each other's eyes, his coal-black wades into her green. But he never told her before he left. Maybe he forgot, or maybe she really didn't say the word.

She smiles. "All that, all that whole last bit, I don't know where you came up with it. It's a thousand percent unlike him."

That's how she says it, and I close my eyes, not in pain, but as if I can't go on seeing from the outside. And I don't want to either, because I can almost feel him in me. It finally happens, out of the blue. And it was her negation, her absolute certainty of what was unlike him, that did it. For a moment I feel him hovering in front of me and existing independently and almost without any connection to me. And so for the first time he is suddenly with us in the room, more alive than he had been in all the words I had written, all the thoughts I had imagined and tortured myself with. Out of negation comes affirmation, just because she is so sure of what is a thousand percent unlike him. Eighteen years later, she still knows him with such confidence.

It used to be that just that thought could have shattered me, but now I stand outside my pain for an entire minute, not even caring whether the other things I had imagined weren't like him either, and I even manage not to ask her about the rest of it, about the Chinese restaurant, for example. I think that's unlike him too-so what? I just sit and delight in how much it doesn't hurt, and I am even capable of thinking that everything I'd written and imagined isn't like him. That he was an utterly different kid. A thousand percent. That he was a macho kid, loud and boisterous and wild, for example, or dumb and dense, or even sly and conniving-a bastard who abused her the way they all did. An array of princes and jokers in his image fans out like a pack of cards, and with wonderful peace of mind I close the circle segment and choose one card with my eyes shut, and that is him, my kid-

I dare to breathe in the place that even the writing hadn't opened up for me. It had been sewn up with iron wires, and he-the boy, the kid-is in front of me, alive and sharp, and then, unhurriedly, he changes his shape as in a dream, and now he is a young bird at night, emerging from the darkness into the light of my window, curiously drawn to the light, and we both look at each other through the glass and see each other, and the bird gets scared first and disappears again, and I am left with my longings, but it doesn't kill me now, I don't know why not, it just doesn't kill me anymore.

"So should I take out that whole bit?" I ask in a voice struggling to be dry, and what comes out is a squeaky, choking sound, and I am also stung by a different kind of disappointment. "To tell you the truth, I also felt that it wasn't really him, the whole thing with the winning word, but I really don't want to give up that bit."

"God forbid, don't take anything out."

We both say nothing as we quiet ourselves. I've started getting used to these silences, and I even like them. They're so different from the noise we used to share. I also notice how quiet it is here. It's strange that you can't hear any sounds from the street. Exemplary Walter has done a wonderful job of sealing off his house. No world.

I moisten her lips. My eyes are very close to hers. I ask softly how she feels. She makes an effort to smile. "I wouldn't recommend it." She asks if it's hard for me. I say it isn't. It is. That it's really mixed up. I still can't tell her how it moves me, to be exposed to her like this, as if without my knowledge, and also somehow, without being able to prevent it, with a kind of self-anesthetization or self-abandon, to feel her finally reading my story.

"Listen, you don't happen to have any cigarettes in the house, do you?" And before I can apologize for the stupid question, she digs her hand beneath the mattress with a seductive smile and pulls out a crushed pack of Marlboros, not even Lights.

"Just open the window afterward. He mustn't find out or he'll kill me." She chokes down a giggle. "He might drown me in tears."

I light one for myself and one for her, and take a long drag. I haven't smoked for three months. It was part of the rehab I was asked to do, required to do, and I was hoping it was behind me, that I'd overcome it, but then suddenly this sucking urge came over me. I inhale and look at her. I watch the way her eyes shrink as she takes a drag, the sluttish pleasure of a huntress of delights lighting up in her. Her whole vitality is now contained in the cracked lips that pull on the reddish glow, and for an instant it's as if a curtain has been opened and I can see her as she is, as she should be, as would make her happy, probably, were she not trapped in my little dictatorship.

As always when we reach this juncture, I am struck by the thought that maybe I never really understood what I had been given in the blind lottery of life-what I had won. And again, as usual during these attacks of mental weakness, it's a short road from here to wallowing in the swamp of if-only: How did it happen that I am the only person on the face of this earth whom she is somehow incapable of completely reading? What rare misfortune placed me in her blind spot? And yet I know that even that is not completely accurate, because that is exactly how I wanted it, that's what I fought for, and was slaughtered for. To strengthen my failing soul, I remind myself of all her transgressions, and remember with horror that I have a fairly long list of them further on, a choice little minefield. I sigh and say, "Okay, well, don't tell Melanie either."

"She doesn't let you smoke?"

"Are you kidding!"

We both inhale with a strange delight, somewhat hysterically, filling the room with clouds of smoke and choking with laughter.

"When you were born, you were a little pint-size thing, and you were in the preemie ward for three weeks. I wouldn't let you stay there alone."

"Really?" Instinctively I straighten up in my chair, already hearing the impatient dryness in my voice. You're such a shit, I think to myself, why are you fighting her? Give her the pleasure now, gift-wrapped.

"And I plunked myself down there for three weeks, and the nurses yelled and the doctors threatened, but it didn't do any good, I got under their feet in there for twenty-one days, sunrise, sunset,

drove them all mad. Well, that father of yours was always very busy, and I wouldn't have trusted him with something like that anyway."

The shadow of a smile filled with satisfaction, almost craftiness, passes over her face. That's how I should have taken a picture of her, assimilating the smoke and passing it through her corroded windpipe and bronchi, happily scorching them.

"At night I would sit among the incubators with the preemies and talk to you, and sing to you, and tell you about Siddhartha and Vishnu and Parvati. I told you all the stories I knew. They thought I was crazy. They weren't the only ones." She titters. "They said to me, What can a little thing like that understand? There was this one nurse there, Kurdish, I think, but a real sharp woman, and she said to me back then, Your girl will grow up, she'll be a writer."

"Oh, so now we know."

"I even gave you massages in there."

"Massages? But how. it's supposed to be sterile!"

"Well, you turned out all right, didn't you?" Her thick fingers stretch and move around of their own accord. "I would put my hands through the rubber circles on the sides. You were like a little chick, and you were a bit translucent too, I could see all your veins."

A warm fingerling darts through my stomach. Me? Translucent?

As he arches his back, she inquires again, matter-of-factly, whether his father asks about what he's doing here all these days. He laughs. "My dad can ask all he wants." She tries carefully to understand the nature of their relationship, tries to paint his world, to guess what might nourish him when he goes back there.

"What do you do, say, when you go home for Shabbat? Are there any friends that you-"

"No friends." He cuts her off and drops his pose, and Nili feels his heart chakra constricting in him with a quick spasm.

"Then what?"

"Nothing." He sits with his legs crossed, puts his head on his hand, and stares at the floor tiles. "We maybe go get lunch at the Burger Ranch, and that's about it. He sits in his room listening to the game, and I sit in mine, with headphones on so I won't hear."

"And you don't talk?"

"What do you want us to talk about?"

"Don't you have any-I don't know-topics of conversation?"

He stares at her intently. He has a kind of look, sometimes, as if he's peering at her over a thin glasses frame. You saw him, didn't you, his look says. Yes, she answers, I most definitely did. She tries delicately to explain to him, without explicitly using any cauliflower, that even our parents are somehow chosen by us. Meaning, we choose parents who will help us grow, gain strength, sometimes even overcome what they do to us.

"And do we choose our kids too?" he asks with bitter mockery.

She is confused until she realizes he means only his father and himself. She slowly absorbs his pain. "Yes, kids too." Then she assails him again: "But he loves you, you can't understand that yet, but when you have children …" She inflames herself, recalling his father's surprising tears of shame when he came to give her his proposal. Only now does she recognize the familiar combination, the mixture of immeasurable compassion and cruelty that only parenthood, it seems, can produce. "And just so you know, he may not know exactly how to say it to you, but I'm sure you are the most precious person in the world to him."

"He hates me, he hates me!" His voice rises and turns into a wail. "If he could make it so I would die, so I wouldn't ever shame him. You know what he calls me?"

She says nothing, remaining alert and tense. For a moment she can almost read his father's derogatory name for him in his eyes, but the word is quickly erased before she can get it-again that tail, the speckled one, wrapped around a tree, lingering, then disappearing.

He gets up, walks around, and lifts his T-shirt up. For the first time since they met she sees his bronzed, velvety back, ripped up and down and across with long stripes of strange scabbed pinkness. "He only stopped when I got taller than him."

As if he had been listening in on their conversation, his father comes to see her after their class. He slips inside the room. Her whole body is on edge. He stands with his rooster chest puffed up, a smile smeared on his indecent lips. When he sees her face he falters; he thought she'd be happy, that she'd tell him something about the kid. Still, he makes an attempt. "What's up? Since he's with you we don't see anything of him. He's a real handful, my son, hey?"

Her eyes dry up the words in his throat. "Get the hell out of here."

Absorbing the punch, he utters, "What the-?"

"You heard me. Go."

"But what's the matter with you? Did I say something wrong again?"

"Leave, or I'll. " She starts moving toward him.

He moves to the door in alarm.

Nili stumbles back in and slams the door. She leans over the little sink, her whole body shaking. I could have murdered him.

Her hands were always drawn to touch. If anyone's body made some gesture or expression of pain, her hand would instantly be drawn to massage, to melt. With everyone: strangers, acquaintances, a girl from my class who brought me my homework when I was sick, a lonely neighbor, a hairless dog racked with scoliosis who adopted her and became addicted to her massages. Her hands were a natural extension of her gaze, her talk. Once, she did it with my school principal: in the middle of a discipline talk in her office, the two of us were sitting there innocently when suddenly the Tyrant put her hand on the back of her neck and moved it around, sighing. Nili was behind her in a flash, at the ready with her ten fingers, while I measured the distance to the window and a redemptive leap. But then there was a strange struggle among the principal's facial features, and an unbelievable fraction of a minute during which Nili, alone, almost beat the entire system.

Time is running out; they both feel it and think of it, and he, almost eagerly, tells her more and more: the studies at the boarding school, the wild boys who live there with him, who've already been kicked out of every other institution, the friend he once had there-

"A friend?" She perks up. "Wait, you didn't tell me about him, who is he?"

But he ignores her-and the Arab who converted to Judaism and is now his roommate. And running away nights to go and play pool, and the punishments they endure, and the supervisors' beatings, each one with his own method, and the obligatory fasting days, the spiritual reinforcements, and the card games in the basement, where the loser has to give someone a blow job.

"And you take part in this?"

"Not in that." He looks straight at her, a look that is too horizontal and congealed.

She becomes alarmed. "But in what?"

He wants to tell her, but he resists it too. She can feel the pressure mounting at once between the joints of his fingers, in his shoulder muscles. "There's an old guy," he finally says, looking at her fearfully, "a little old midget of a guy, Iraqi, he's maybe fifty, lives near the market, and he pays."

"For what?"

He gets up and walks around the room quickly. Then he stops and stands in warrior pose, with his arms reaching out to the sides. "All kinds of stuff. He gives me clothes to wear, you know, girls' clothes. He doesn't touch. Just watches and jerks off."

"And you?"

"Nothing. I what?"

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Are you kidding? It's for money. Twenty shekels every time."

But she already knows the changing tones of his voice, and she senses the skin of her scalp stretching; her heart feels crushed. He shifts his weight to the other foot. His eyes are focused on his fingertips. She glances at him. Somehow it doesn't surprise her. She thinks about herself at his age. What did her father know of what she was going through? And what does she know now about what's really happening to Rotem? (If only, oh God, if only Rotem is hiding a stormy love story from me, if only the whole world knows about it but me. Not even stormy, as long as there is some love there, some affection, friendship, one single drop flowing beneath the layers of flesh, behind her antibiotic look.)

But she won't let him off this time, it's too late, and she goes back and insists: "And that friend you mentioned?"

"It's nothing." There is already a slight darkening in the shadow behind his eyes.

"A friend is good," she insists, and knows that he can sense every time her voice tries to conceal an ambiguity. "It's good to have someone to pour your heart out to, isn't it?"

"I'm hitting the showers," he says, and leaves her feeling as if her fingertips had touched a glowing ember.

Two hours later, they relax at the end of an exhausting class in which she seemed to be trying to polish and peel him. He is tired out and glistening with sweat, and she sits beside him and tries to direct herself to what he needs most (remembering that as a girl she was always surprised at how the medicine she swallowed knew exactly how to reach the hurting part of her body). If only he would tell her explicitly what he needs. But he is taking, she thinks, he is definitely taking something. It's not clear what, but something is being taken from her, her exhaustion today tells her that, a little like when she gets her period. And she thinks that since yesterday, since he mimicked her, he has really started consuming something from her, but in his own way, he is careful to keep his content a secret, incredibly trained, trained to conceal. Sometimes when she's with him, she feels like a big city, abundant and serene and innocent, and he is a stealthy guerrilla, emaciated and glowing, who slips into her every so often from his forest, grabs something he needs to survive, then disappears. And maybe it has nothing to do with her yogi qualities, this thing that he is taking? She opens her eyes in wonder: What, then?

"Is there perhaps something you'd like to tell your body?" The question pops out of her mouth and surprises her, and he hardens a little. "You can say it now," she suggests, recalling how he had almost cried when she talked with him about his body two days earlier. Still, she feels something has opened up in him since then. "Say it silently or out loud. Tell it what the problem is." She sees a slight furrowing of his brow, and quiet. Then he lets out a very small smile.

She holds back, and the class goes on, but before he goes off for lunch, he stops at the door. "Know what I said before to. my body?"

"What?"

He laughs, kicking at the tiles. "Nothing really, I just asked if it was happy with me." She doesn't understand, but he eagerly explains: "I always thought of it the other way around, like whether I'm happy with it. But suddenly, when you said to ask it, I felt sorry for it, you know, that it had to be mine, like …"

She smiles with him and still doesn't comprehend. Such a beautiful body, refreshed, etched, and it responds to him with suppleness and harmony. For a minute-without even feeling it-she stretches out her healthy, gloriously beautiful body like a person taking a deep breath after leaving a sick friend's house.

Later, when she's alone again, she throws herself into her weekly room cleaning-her little display of freedom against the manager and the cleaning staff. Something disturbs her: the permanent, insulting thought that she is, in some way, not complicated enough. Apparently not messed up enough either. There are clubs, she knows, that wouldn't let her in; the people she feels closest to and loves most have whole areas she is forbidden to enter, and all her seeing skills aren't enough to even guess at what goes on in their twisted, sophisticated crevices. She will never know what they really think of her there, and she has always had a gnawing suspicion that those are the places where she is being betrayed. Now that she has come this far, her thoughts already know their own way home: maybe one day, years from now, the girls will finally appreciate her true value. They'll grow up-

"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 hap-

pened 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 know 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 fool-

ish 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 thtough 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 the 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."

"But how long can you talk like that? What can you say?" she asks, beginning to emerge from her tears, large and bright and yellow, with her innocent Weeble smile.

He suddenly gets excited. "Wanna try it?"

"Do you think I can?"

"Haven't you noticed you're already doing it?"

"Me?"

She smiles with cracked lips and looks at me, and her look says, Oh my, you're such an inventor. Then she says, "You really have a whole world in there." She gestures at my head with her bald eyebrows. Only then does she let out a deep sigh, and my first thought is that somehow by chance my story did touch her, kissing some dormant memory. I become alarmed, not wanting her to suffer from it too much.

"Look, I mean, we don't really know what motivated him, and sometimes you can die just from sudden abundance, like the survivors from the camps." I explain to her (as if I need to): "There were survivors who gorged themselves to death after years of starvation. Or at least you can want to die." Like me, for example, I think. Like me, during my first period with Melanie, and even today, sometimes, at moments of mortal excitement, I really want to die, because how can you bear all this unfounded goodness, this scandal of goodness-

There is a heavy silence soaked with words, absolutely dripping with them. I sit there exposed, urgently needing to be grounded somehow. To one particular body.

Then she sighs again, a long, horrible sigh. She lies on her back, broken in two right in front of me, and I suddenly realize it's not oniy the sorrow, the grief, and the guilt-it's also that she has missed him all these years, simply missed a person who touched her life in a place no one else ever had.

Three days after she came home from the Dead Sea, he disappeared. He ran away from the boarding school on Monday evening through a hole in the fence, and that was it. They never saw him again. And now it comes back to me as in a nightmare, how she cried then, for weeks. She talked to herself, cried out in her sleep, slammed her head against the wall, on the table, on doors, dozens of times, impervious as a piston, and she sprayed out words like shavings. Then suddenly Leora and Dovik showed up, their debut appearance in Rishon, to figure out what had happened, and while they were there they held a field court-martial for her in the kitchen, for all her crimes, no statute of limitations. I hung around downstairs outside the building until I couldn't take it anymore, and then I burst inside and screamed at them to leave her alone and get the hell out of our house and our lives. Go back to civilization. And they really did, with an imposing air of offense like two righteous cardinals, and Nili sat fatigued in a corner of the kitchen and looked at me with boundless gratitude. She had no strength to speak, but I'll never forget that look.

Then came the journey, her private journey to search for him all over the country, hitchhiking. It was long after the official search was over. They had searched for him for three or four days, police and army and volunteers. Then they gave up, added him to the missing-person statistics-how much effort can you invest in a kid from that kind of boarding school, a kid who isn't worth anything? At that point she finally woke up out of her shock and decided that everyone was wrong, because they didn't know him, and that he hadn't fallen into a pit or jumped off a cliff, he hadn't been kidnapped and he hadn't drowned. He had gone underground, she determined with a crazed kind of self-persuasion, and her eyes glistened with wonder at his resourcefulness. "He's hiding behind a different identity," she explained, as if she had free access to his center of consciousness. "That kid has an immense talent for camouflage and acting. He just disappeared himself, and when he feels like coming back, he will." And with a secretive Moneypenny look in her eyes, she determined that if he happened to see her anywhere, he would come to her. To her, he would come.

Then she surpassed herself by coming up with the brilliant idea that I should go with her to look for him. Me-with her-for him. Of course, I laughed in her face and turned my back on her, and when she realized there was no chance, she begged me to at least help her pack, because I was always a champion packer (no one can outdo me at stuffing an infinite number of things into a tiny space). I was so psychotic that I went and packed her a bunch of scarves. I pulled out all her dozens of scarves and shawls from the closet and stuffed them into a tattered backpack, not even a single pair of underwear or a bra or a dress, or toiletries. I fastened the backpack and shoved it at her: "Now go." When she came back a week later, in the middle of the night, I woke up immediately. I could smell her on the stairs, the whole space was flooded, she'd never had such a scent, an almost inhuman smell, the smell of an animal grasping that this time it has really made the mistake of its life. She didn't have the strength to even make it to the bath or to bed. She collapsed on the orange couch and slept for twenty hours straight. Every so often she would mumble something in her sleep about how they had tossed her from one place to another, laughed at her, treated her like a madwoman. Over the next few days she didn't talk, as if she were dried up. All the juice had run out of her. She even became practical and tried to throw herself into home-improvement projects. She cleaned out years' worth of dirt, tidied closets, clothes, kitchen utensils. If I could have allowed myself to feel anything then, if it weren't so beyond my capabilities, I might have felt sorry for her, because even I could see how much she was suffering through her exercises in acquired motherhood. But we stopped talking completely. There were no words for her story with him, and later not for all the rest either, and then I left. I couldn't go on living within the mourning for her catastrophe-it had nothing to do with me, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

We've never spoken of it since, even during the last two months, when she knew I was writing the story, and when I begged her to give me a hint, something, she claimed she had erased it all, that from her point of view it was over. She, who was incapable of keeping a secret for a second, never betrayed that secret, his and hers. So all I have is fragments, no more, the normal fragments of mosaic from which children somehow piece together the mystery of their parents' lives. "But that's it, it's over," I tell her, and then I say it again, as if one of us is not completely convinced. "Enough, it's enough, it's over, and just think what price you paid." Maybe even the illness too-this I don't say, of course, but I'm certain it's gone through her mind too-because how could one conceive that she, of all people, and at such a young age.

On the last evening she gets an idea-what an idiot for only thinking of it now-to suggest to him that they work at night too. He rejoices-yes! And he dances around her. She's never seen him this way. She asks if he's not tired, and he laughs-he'll keep going all night, right up until he leaves.

The spa area is locked at night, so she invites him to come to her room. She nervously tidies it in anticipation, until she hears a soft knock at the door, and he comes in hesitantly. As he did when he first entered the yoga room, he takes a few sliding steps until he is standing exactly in the right place for her, in the solar plexus of her round straw mat. He stands there for a moment absorbing, unconsciously, and only then he suddenly wakes up and is surprised to find her room so small-it doesn't look anything like a hotel room, with her Indian fabrics hanging on the walls, which suddenly look pathetic to her: the mattress on the floor, the plastic bags bursting with all kinds of foods he doesn't recognize-her seeds-and the spice jars arranged on the bureau. He walks around slowly inspecting. By all means, let him look, it's all part of learning. He even peeks in her ashtray and finds the cigarette butt from lunchtime. He looks at her slightly shocked. "Are cigarettes allowed in yoga?"

She shrugs her shoulders. "What can I do? Don't tell on me. I only have one a day. But when I do, I want the smoke to fill every single cell of my lungs!"

They work enthusiastically and with a kind of pre-separation euphoria. They repeat things she taught him and she finds that he hasn't forgotten any of the poses, not even the more complex ones, and that his body seems to have recorded every nuance: when to breathe and when to hold the breath, where the foot points when the fingers of the opposite hand are stretched out. And she thinks, not for the first time, that perhaps she did not teach him anything, just blew some dust off an ancient manuscript lying inside him.

An hour goes by, then another. They move quietly, almost in silence. They feel as if they are the beating heart of the huge, unfeeling hotel. Every so often they rest, talk a little, sink into relaxation, tell each other that it's all right if they fall asleep for a few minutes, and after the relaxation their bodies start moving again of their own accord, pulled from one pose to the next, choosing their favorite asanas. Nili asks him not to try too hard. He has a long day of traveling ahead of him. He says again that he's willing to go all night like this, and in fact she is too. She wants to equip him with as much as possible, with the richest supplies, with her royal jelly, and she can already see that she won't have time to even touch the tip of the iceberg, and she is sorry for that, and consoles herself, and is happy and sad and a little drunk.

During one of their sleepy nocturnal conversations, he tells her that every week he sends a letter to a different country, in alphabetical order, with the name of his friend but no address, just the country name. Then he waits. He knows there's no chance-but maybe there is? Sometimes miracles happen, don't they? She says nothing, glancing at his watch, imagining to herself his secret, persistent wanderings among the countries, and now she sees in her mind's eye a completely different boy-short, with brown curly hair, a refined and slightly lost boy with a birdlike face, huge eyes, and lips that always seem poised to question.

He suddenly fills up with freshness and even becomes garrulous, and he tells her about the restaurant he's going to open. He'll build it in the most remote place in the world, on a cliff in the desert, or even in Eilat, as long as there aren't a lot of people there. "But there are people in Eilat, loads of people," she is forced to point out. "No," he says firmly, "what do you mean? There aren't any people there at all, Eilat is a wilderness." "That's not true," she retorts, "what are you talking about?" He is quiet for a minute as he lies on his back, holding his left arm straight up in the air. That's how he likes to think. He can even fall asleep that way. At boarding school they're used to it now, but at home, with his dad, it really gets on his nerves, and he always goes into his room and knocks his arm down. "Then more remote than Eilat," he finally gives in, "on Mount Sinai even. Or on Venus." But there aren't any people at all on Venus, she thinks, but doesn't say it. "There are people," he says argumentatively, as if she had tried to refute him; "they sent spaceships there and now there are people." She listens to his voice and wonders what she's hearing now, and if she should perhaps save him a little from embarrassing ignorance-who better than her to know how embarrassing. But suddenly, in a moment of illumination, she blurts out: "Of course there are people on Venus, how could I forget? They sent a spaceship there from India." That's just it, he says, and she hears him making an ef-

fort to turn off any hint of a smile in his voice. "And the Indians are all black," he continues the thread she has given him, "because Venus is close to the sun." "Assuming, of course, that the elephants don't eat them," she cheerfully summarizes, and senses his hidden laughter, like a boy squirming beneath a blanket. She trembles in delight at the little discovery he has allowed her about his secret life, his underground, his anarchic struggle against dry, hateful facts-

"Why did you stop?"

"I thought you were asleep."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because. " My eyes suddenly well up.

She looks at me and understands. "It wasn't really like that." She sighs. I sense she is being cautious with me now, and that's even more painful. "You're the one who invented the whole business with the spaceship and the elephants and the facts," she explains to me as if to a child, trying to console, to go backwards and correct.

"Yes, of course. I don't know." I stand up and sit down again, fighting with all my power against an idiotic sob that has suddenly erupted in my nose, completely out of season. "Just the fact that you laughed with him there, it doesn't matter over what, but you must have laughed at something together, that's the most-"

"Yes," she says quietly, looking at me as if she is photographing something and taking it with her for the road. She closes her eyes, tightens her large face, and I don't know where she is; perhaps she is seeing my side of the story for a moment, perhaps for once she sees only my side. What do I know? What can you know about another person, even if they're your mother? Ultimately, the umbilical cord is cut off or shrivels up and a glacial loneliness surrounds you. This immersion of hers goes on for a long time, and I suddenly get scared that now is the moment the illness will really defeat her, all of a sudden, and I say, "Stop, Nili, Mom, let's go on."

"So who's going to come to your restaurant?" she asks with a smile, and he sits up on his elbows.

"See, that's the thing. I don't care if only one person comes once a year, but when he does, I'll lay out a twenty-foot table for him and give him the feast of his life, with all the dishes made just for him, and all the sides and the sorbets. I'll put out the whole menu for him."

"Wait, but what will you do the rest of the time?"

He ponders. She thinks the dream is a little vague for him. "It's not like that. You don't get it. I make him the meal every day. Every single day. But he only comes one day a year."

"And what about the other days?" She still doesn't comprehend.

"The other days I wait for him."

She is quiet, thinks that if she's lucky, she may happen upon his restaurant one day and be rewarded with the meal of her life. She deliberates again, thinking maybe she should give him her phone number, but again she decides not to, and reminds herself of her great talent, the art of separation, and her heart aches with the pain of giving up. I mustn't, she recites to herself. He has such a clear and unique destiny, and just like he found me, he'll keep going and find his path. Because it is clear to her now that that is his great talent: finding his true path, listening inside and knowing. She sighs loudly, and he asks what happened, and she says, "Nothing, you know," and looks at him, and knows she was only a station on his long journey, and that she must bless her good fortune and not expect anything more; an evil voice hisses inside her, "As always." And a very un-yogi-like prod of simple and raw hostility passes through her toward everyone who will meet him later on, as he continues on his way.

"Hey," he drawls, and turns his back to her. "Is yoga also massage?"

"What?" She opens her eyes. "What did you say?" She raises her arms to hug her body. She suddenly feels cold.

He says nothing.

"Yes. With me at least, in my yoga."

Silence.

"So. you know how to?"

"Yes. In Jerusalem I did it all the time. In hospitals too, when I was working. And for my students." It seems strange to her for him to be closing the circle his father had opened. She knows she will consent to anything he asks. He sits down. His eyes don't look at her. "Do you. Have you ever had a massage?"

"No."

"Because you didn't want to, or it never worked out?"

"Both."

"It can be very nice."

"Is it like in. you know, in those clubs?"

"There are all kinds. Are you talking about clubs with girls?"

"There's one in the neighborhood. A massage parlor. Some guys went to check it out."

"Did you?"

"No. But listen"-he quickly runs his tongue over his upper lip-"No. Never mind."

"What, what did you want?"

"I was just thinking." He looks closely at the tips of his fingers and the air around him thickens. "I dunno, is there a difference between how you give a massage to a man and a woman?"

She giggles, embarrassed, unsure of whether she's understanding him correctly. "Of course there's a difference, but it's hard to put into words." She can feel she's getting a little entangled. "Look, I never really give a massage 'to a man' or 'to a woman,' I just give it to the particular person who …" She stops, and starts drifting away, and he gives her a longing and frightened look, which slowly steadies in front of her and becomes clear. Then he nods once, almost imperceptibly, like a spy signaling from a dark forest.

"Lie down," she says as she stands up. "Lie on the mattress and take your clothes off, just leave on what you're comfortable with. I'll be right back."

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 tough-

ness 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 ques-tioningly: 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 clichйs 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."

Then she lay down beside him on the floor. She was so exhausted, so full and engorged, that she couldn't open her eyes to take in one more image. He got up and dressed with an odd, panicked speed. Then he lingered by the door for a long time, as if he already knew something and was afraid to step outside the place where everything was possible. She was surprised that he said nothing to her, and thought vaguely that perhaps he needed to be alone with himself for a while. She heard the door click shut behind him and smiled, and told herself with her seer's certainty that he'd be back soon, and then they'd say goodbye properly. And although she didn't have a drop of imagination, she fantasized about how they would stand facing each other, how they would be so embarrassed that they'd almost shake hands, and then she'd grasp him in her arms and they would embrace, and she'd feel the flutter of his lips against her neck for an instant.

That was what she thought, that was what she hallucinated and dreamed, and that was what she tormented herself with later, during all the years to come-the years of aridity, of longing, in a world which perhaps did not contain another boy like him. When she opened her eyes, she found the hotel already bustling with its daily noise; the quarry workers from the north had gone on their way long ago. She lay on her back for several more minutes, extremely quiet, and lamented something very transparent and rare that had passed her by, hovered for a moment, and disappeared.

I put down the last page. My neck and shoulders are hard as stone. Only after several breaths do I dare look up. Her lips are pursed. She's focused on something.

"You and Melanie," she says finally, shocking me by being completely unpredictable. "You're happy together."

She doesn't ask. She asserts. I find it difficult to talk, so I nod my head.

"You and she, you're good for each other." She looks up at the ceiling with her eyes wide open, and I am completely shaken: How is it that she doesn't talk about him? Or about him and her? How can she not say a single word about the ending I gave her and him? As if it has no importance to her, as if that is not the story now.

"I felt it so intensely all of a sudden when you were reading," she sighs, "in the massage, at the end. I felt so strongly what you have between you."

"Really?"

We are both quiet. Each submerged in herself. My heart suddenly flutters twice. A skip ahead and a skip back.

"Tell her to take care of you. Tell her from me."

"I will."

She reaches out. I put my face close to her. She runs her finger over my forehead. My eyes, my nose. My mouth.

"That mouth." She smiles.

Which is slightly swollen with bitterness, I quote myself. Her hand climbs up. I put my head down. She draws wavy lines on the back of my skull. With her last remaining strength, she presses my throbbing painful spots. Even now her finger is smarter than my whole brain. Then, for an eternal length of time, roughly my whole childhood, I just sit there bent over, inhaling her touch. Her finger traverses with angelic gentleness, walking over the winding crevices of my brain, in the cold and sad regions, in the places that were always closed off to her, the places where-as she always knew, without resentment and without bearing grudges-she was betrayed. "I'm so glad we finally talked," she says.

June 2001