Once in a while, he whispered, tugging a loose end out of his dream and threading it into the conversation, she surprises him by asking him to turn the TV on. Is there something special on? And she says, No, I just want us to be like this, the two of us sitting together on the couch, cuddling up, as if, as if. And when she says "as if," her voice cracks and she bursts into tears, and when she comes home she has to hide those tears and the puffy eyes, or at least excuse them-"Don't ask, they put loads of chlorine in the water today"- and the thought of having to do that humiliates her even more. As if, as if. she sobs. As if everything, as if we, as if happiness. And Paul says nothing, because there's nothing he can say. It's her decision to go on like this, in this duplicity, for years, without telling Shaul, so his innocent faith in her will not be damaged. Paul hugs her for a long time, fighting off the urges that the closeness of her body arouses in him. Then he gets up, Shaul said, and with a movement that is difficult to believe in a bear like him-but apparently there are many things you wouldn't believe about him, things that have enabled him to thrash me with such elegance for ten years at least. Where was I? And Esti, who could not follow the fragments of his thoughts, suddenly knew what he reminded her of: the scorpions in Beersheba, which the neighborhood children used to surround with a circle of burning rope, and they would make the circle smaller and smaller until the scorpion aimed its tail at its own head and stung itself. Then he gets up, Shaul recalled, and gets her up too, and with his hand on her back they go for a walk in the apartment, he and she; it's a sad little joke they play sometimes. Let's go for a little walk, he says to her on days when he too is suffocating, and they walk the seven or eight steps down the hallway, arm in arm, then into his messy study, flooded with papers and piles of books-he whispered with the voice of someone trying to seduce, though it was mostly himself, and Esti wondered how he could be both the scorpion and the burner and the circle of fire-and then they turn around and go back into the hallway, three, four, six steps, trying not to trample all the stuff that's scattered there-it's an indescribable mess, Shaul noted disapprovingly, with clothes and books and newspapers and rags just lying everywhere; I can't understand how they live like that, how she, in that jungle-and continue to the bedroom, and turn around in front of their huge bed and go back to the hallway, and his hand is on her the whole time, and her hand is on his waist, and they walk very slowly. They're like a couple of elderly teenagers, Shaul thought, and Esti could sense with her whole being how Elisheva and Paul listened together to a sound that only they could hear, and that if they stopped hearing it they would become a joke even to themselves. Shaul closed his eyes and accompanied them to the kitchen, where they circle the table to gain another two or three steps, and Paul, said Shaul, leans over and whispers in her ear, You see, Sheva- that's what he calls her-don't say I never take you out, and Elisheva smiles, and her chin quivers slightly.
Then they do the whole path back again, Shaul saw, and his lips moved but he made no sound. And in the hallway, Paul stops to shake hands formally with the sleeve of his coat, which hangs there, and he chitchats with a neighbor and introduces him to Elisheva: Meet the woman in my life, this is the woman I've been waiting for here, twenty-three hours a day, for ten years. Elisheva puts her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes, and lets him walk her around. She would go anywhere in the world with him, blindfolded, because she trusts him, that's the thing-his voice suddenly lifted and extracted itself from the knot of his thoughts with a strange cheerfulness-here we are, Esther, it's a good thing we talked, because in the course of talking I've defined it for myself: there's something in him that gives her a sense of confidence, fills her with confidence, and that is something I have somehow been unable to give her. That's the thing, with me she is evidently never completely confident.
And perhaps because of his voice at that moment, or the look on his face, a thought flies through her, sudden, wounding-
Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. How is it that her heart goes out to him? She should be angry at him now, should feel shocked and cheated, should disdain him, recoil from him. But she is at once utterly exhausted and also incapable of remembering where exactly one finds the conviction to be disdainful, or righteous, or to know something with any certainty. He has a singular obsession, she thinks. Or a singular genius. And the blood pulses hard, too hard, and some sweet internal assailant comes and quickly shreds the muscles of her shoulders and neck, and soon everything will fall and dissipate, nose and ears and the three gray cells she has left, and with all her strength she tries to calm down, she must stop this, but she is unable to give up these heartbeats, the forgotten, precise heartbeats which reply as an echo, and she remembers his hand upon the tablets of her heart, her hand on his chest--feel it, our prisoners are corresponding. But how? She is amazed. How did I let Shaul lead me on like this? Where have I been all evening? But she knows exactly how and where, what she was listening to and what her heart went out to. Look at you, she sighs. No, really, look at you, you and your reaching heart.
She feels for the bottle, and as she drives she pours some water into her palm and wets her forehead and then trickles a few drops down her nape, and stretches her legs and wiggles her toes in her shoes. Back to life, she commands, and for a start she tries to reconstruct their conversation since leaving. The announcer on the radio had talked about that police officer in Madrid, and since then almost nothing, she can't remember anything, only heat waves exchanging, growing hotter and dissipating, and it's as if that was the only thing. She takes a deep breath, finally breathing, like the first breath, and hears him mumbling to himself. How can he do it? How does he survive a whole life of this? She looks in the mirror and sees his face concentrating, trapped in the fiery ring of his hermetic torments. Tell me, she says in her heart, don't stop. She keeps asking against the backdrop of his whispers, and is carried away on his waves and hunches over, absorbed in herself, a little more, until she has to understand, to wake up.
What now? Shaul wonders, wanting to go back to sleep, to forget, to silence the voices, to subdue the flames which constantly demand new, richer burning material. Maybe I'll tell her to go back, he suggests to himself weakly. I'll tell her to turn around and go back at once, yes, before we get there, he says to himself, and swells up with a surge of power. I'll tell her to go back home. And deep in his mind a cold, mocking bolt of lightning strikes-who is he kidding? After all, even the supposed restraint of the present is an integral part of the complex and meticulous process of complete surrender, and besides, he knows that if something happens to her there, to Elisheva, it will happen tonight. It has to happen. Day one: acclimatization, checking out the field and filtering candidates. Day two: bonding with two or three of them. And on the last night, tonight, the implementation. The one. The speck of gold. What are you talking about? Elisheva smiles compassionately, with quiet desperation. Why are you torturing yourself with these thoughts? I really just go there to rest, to read, to clear my mind. In that case, he replies calmly, wrapping his voice with a falseness as it trembles with fury, in that case, you're just wasting your vacation and our money-what's the point of you even going every year if you don't find yourself someone there? Why all the bother? Why do you think people go to these kinds of places alone? Precisely for this, she replies, and her look smooths over his conflicted face. Why can't you believe that I just want to be with me, just me with myself, once a year?