Yesterday she rang in the afternoon, even though he had told her he didn't want to talk to her for the entire four days. She wanted to hear how he was. He spoke curtly Asked if she'd met him. Met who? she asked wearily. I don't know his name, he rolled out a laugh. You want me to give you his name too? There was a long silence. Then Elisheva said, Shaul, really.
Listen, he said seriously, I love you, I even miss you, but I'm entitled not to be a part of what you're going through there. I'm entitled to protect myself from all that, aren't I?
What am I going through here? she asked tiredly, and he could see her grimacing. What do you think I'm going through?
No, no, he laughed bitterly, I don't want to hear about it.
They were quiet again together, and there was a shared tenderness or sadness. Their love escaped for an instant from the jaws of a large vise grip, relaxed between the two of them, searched for shelter. He held his breath for a moment, wanting Elisheva to yell at him, to scream, to hurl her fury at him. Perhaps all they needed was a few words from her to redeem them both.
He grumbled, Why did you even call?
I wanted to hear how you were. I suddenly had a bad feeling.
I feel wonderful.
Tell her now, without thinking, tell her everything: Listen, Elisheva, it's not just these seasonal attacks around your trip every year, it's more than that at this point. It's life itself, the way it gets dragged around everywhere. You have a right to know. I'm the sick one, but you're dying from it too. If only you knew. If only I could just sit down and tell you, talk with you the way I talk with myself, the way we used to be able to, about everything, maybe I could still get out of it somehow and wake up, go back to being a human being.
Look, all I need is one final, decisive piece of evidence to convince me that I'm wrong. I know I'm wrong, I'm almost a hundred percent certain that I'm wrong, so I'm willing to believe anything, even the feeblest, most unfounded proof, if you only give it to me with a truly pure heart, if you are still capable of that, if it's even possible to ask that of you anymore. Why are you so quiet? What do you have to be quiet about-
He said, Leah phoned for you about next year's program, and another young couple want to register their daughter who hasn't even been born yet. She smiled to herself with a certain sense of pride, and he heard her smile and couldn't help smiling with her. And again, for a fleeting instant, they were so close to relief, and he closed his eyes and saw her beloved face, but it was far above him, as if he were lying at the bottom of a well. If only she had the courage to descend, to bring him up with her. Why doesn't she come down? There's always a place where she stops. He knows the place where she shrinks back a little as if she'd met a ghost. They sighed together. For an instant they were both shown with biting tangibility how, for these past twenty-five years, the sediments of their sorrow and bitterness had crystallized, drop after drop, into a massive stalagmite of marriage.
Heavily, he put on his foreign voice again like a uniform, his robe of duress: We'll talk about the rest when you get home. Oh, Tom didn't call today either. And she said, He called me here. He's all right. He says hi to you. Shaul swallowed another small lump of insult and declared, That's it, I think that's it. Nothing else happened. Then he stopped and squeezed his eyelids as tight as he could to cap the lid on the unbearable simmering. He gave in, and having sworn to himself not to, he reminded her about the little package he'd thrown into her suitcase before she left. By now he was entirely consumed by that dark sweetness, its toxins seeping into its depths, the drug of an ancient lust for revenge-but on whom? he moaned when she hung up on him. On whom was he taking this revenge, always, all his life? On her? Why her? Why had it always been like this, from the first moment, ever since a great wave of love had come and washed him toward her, together with an unfamiliar rage that had also not dulled in him since the moment he knew she was the woman of his life, and which had caused him to first scorn her because she had settled for so little-settled for him
And his selfhood mounts all at once into a fierce erection. He is the living, pulsing seed of the faceless swarm that hums around him in its strange mating flight. All these people here, the soldiers, the men, are devoid of volition against what pours forth out of him-they are a thousandfold stronger than him and yet submissive and passive, pliable to him. He repels and retreats as if to taunt them, and they stay with him, move with him, guessing his next steps. Their senses open up to him: they see, listen, and inhale. Eyes dart over his body and face, scan his hands, his feet, the thinning hair on his head. Conclusions are gathered, important material collected, analyzed somewhere, but what is it? For a moment he is dazzled by the power of the presence of all these bodies, the smells, the pressure and force of so many wills and desires-
I find her beautiful, he quickly stresses. Some might disagree, but there are certain situations, he says, where she is truly beautiful. He grins at them defiantly from ear to ear, lips slightly quivering, and he knows that beyond the frozen masks of their faces they are smiling at this idiot-idiot'e'le, as his mother says-because while he was busy finding nice words to say, his wife ran away and left him with his dick in his hand and his tongue twirling. He is talking, naively, of her soft feet-an architectural wonder, he waxes poetic, apart from the second toe, of course, the one that climbs over the big toe on her left foot. It's hereditary-all the women in her family have it, he adds, and from this point on he continues talking and tells them everything, illustrates her entire body for them, every crease and wrinkle, every freckle and birthmark, and from one moment to the next he becomes more and more vibrant and stormy, giving them more and more. An indescribably dark transaction is occurring here tonight: he gives her to them so they can bring her back to him. And all this time their eyes are practically closed, their mouths open, they move with him in waves, they and their uniforms and their solidity and their field scent, spreading around him like a circular trail, the hem of a wide dress, as he twirls them around himself with a very slight movement of his hips, almost imperceptible, and proves to them without words that they are mistaken if they mean to judge him by the normal rules, by the acceptable regulations of human taxation, whereby he is nothing but an unyoung, unlovely man whose wife has decided to leave him ("to go away for four days and be alone, just me with myself, once a year, what's the big deal").
Tell me, Esti said with strange urgency. He pulled himself out of his depths and re-emerged in the car. There was almost begging in her voice, and they both pulsated now to the same heartbeat.
Tell me what you want to hear.
At first she thought he'd said "what you'd like to hear," like a salesman in the recesses of a dubious store, testing out a shy customer's preferences.
How they met, she said.
Oh. Well, it so happens that I don't exactly know the answer to that. In the darkness of the car he stared at her thoughtfully and seriously. Do you really want to hear?
Really. Really but not truly, she thought.
She met him when she still worked at the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, he said, at least that's what she told me. She handled his case there. But one day he just came into our house.