"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.