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."