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.