sures her, "No, I hate exercising." She decides not to push him for now-maybe later it will turn out that he does do some kind of sport or dance-no way he's a dancer, she laughs, you saw how he walks, completely frozen like a zombie. But what else could explain that smooth, musical movement, as if an entire secret life is preserved inside him, on ice. She keeps trying to understand what had occurred that had suddenly brought on the change; she cannot identify it, but every time she thinks he's about to slip through her fingers, she has him stand on his hands again, and he remembers at once, and they are carried away again, and the room fills with their breath, because she too has started working alongside him without even noticing. It's hard for her to resist, her body moves of its own accord, as if to a musical beat; it's been ages since something like this happened to her, here or anywhere. And time after time she scolds herself for going too far, for not protecting him. This is not yoga, she knows, this is not the way you studied, not how you taught, but she's a little intoxicated by now-no wonder, such sharp happiness on an empty stomach. With boundless passion she consumes the moments and tries to engrave them on her memory like a surprising answer she had found in a dream, a decisive and final resolution to an argument she thought she had lost long ago, and soon she will wake up and forget everything.
She inhales the bold new scent of his body, and at the same moment he-as if sensing each one of her sensations and every fragment of a thought-mumbles, "Sorry."
"Sorry for what?" she asks.
"For me, you know, sweating."
She is moved. "No, don't apologize, sweat is our body's oil, our body's good oil." And even that sentence, which she's said thousands of times to her students over two decades of teaching, now sounds light and novel to her. "Rub it hard, spread it all over your skin, enjoy it, delight in it, there simply is no better smell than the smell of our sweat."
He looks at her, confused, and hesitantly rubs the sweat on his arms into his skin. For a fleeting instant his face changes, becomes soft and exposed, and weak, and Nili sees for the first time the sadness concealed in the depth of his eyes, and thinks, Even yoga can't reach that deep. She stands opposite him with her legs spread wide, generously rubbing herself, and her wide face slowly opens up, expanding like a huge hot-air balloon that has been crumpled up in a warehouse all winter. Be careful, she says to herself. This is not a game, give him only what he needs, remember what we said, life or death.
"That hunger," she remembers again when I stop for a moment to breathe. "Of the orphans," she reminds me. Her thoughts, as usual, sail this way and that along different currents. I wonder what she's even heard during the last half hour, since I threw him down between us. "It's so true what you said there, how you described it." Her eyes dig into me, begging me to tell her how I know, to exonerate her from the suspicion that it's from her.
"Sometimes"-I wriggle-"you can even feel orphaned by yourself, can't you?"
"You?" She sounds surprised. "You were always so strong, never needed anyone. Even when you were a kid, I was jealous of you for that."
Silent and restrained, I suck in all the air the room has to offer. It surprises me how, still, every miss of hers hammers another nail into me. Then I ask her in no uncertain terms not to try and make any more sketches of my character. "My perverse character," I add with a sweet smile. I could have said "reprehensible" or "depraved." I could have said nothing. In "perverse" there is something different, something condescending, status-setting, that slices the air between us.
"We're not going to fight now, Rotem."
"Why would we?"
I look through the pages. Wait for it to sink in a little. I leaf back a few pages after all, to the place where I mentioned that hunger, which for years had led her astray like a junkie. On the plane coming here, I had erased the words that came next: "and had thrown her repeatedly into the rows of people who hit and used and abused her." Why did I erase them? I suppose I didn't want to hurt her too much. But why did I really erase them? Perhaps it occurred to me that I had stood there in those rows myself, more than once. And that it had led her to me, among other people. My mother's orphan hunger.
At four in the afternoon he suddenly remembers that his dad wanted him to come and cheer him on in the backgammon championship, and Nili goes up to her room, and in the shower she thanks God for not forgetting her even in this remote dump, and for sending her another gift from His lost-and-found collection; she prays that He will keep sending them to her, and that she will keep learning and growing and becoming more bountiful.
Then, to dry off, she walks around her little room in the nude, reflected in the closet door mirror and the mirror on the wall. It is her little rebellion against Rotem, who follows her from room to room when she walks around at home like this, closing the blinds and drapes as she goes, with the fanaticism and indignation of a harem eunuch. Nili stops, sits down with a sigh, and dials home, and hears the forty-nine seconds of violent music which Rotem recorded on the answering machine and her hostile, barking voice: "Leave a message if you must, but between you and me, you're better off managing on your own." She tries to plan out what to say and how not to be annoying and not to make a mistake that would force her to drive home to Rishon immediately and get there to erase the message before it's played. She's so busy thinking and licking her lips that she doesn't notice the beep, and then she is propelled from inside and says with a tense, reprimanding voice, "Roti? Roti, honey? Are you there? Girls? It's me, Mom. I hope everything's okay at home, that you're getting along and having fun on your vacation …" The words sound like gravel to her. Lines out of a phrase book for tourists. She has a feel-
ing-no, she knows-that Rotem is there by the phone, listening to her with her mocking smile. She can see the mouth, slightly swollen with bitterness, peeking out between the curtains of long hair, lying in wait for her slightest slip, even a minor mistake in her Hebrew. The mouth of a supreme-court judge, Nili thinks, and her hand reaches out to smooth it over, to soften its tiny crevices and angles, and Rotem pulls back-God forbid she should touch her: there must be no contact between bodies. "Listen, sweeties, I have to run now, I have a ton of work here, but I'll call tomorrow and we'll talk, and on Friday I'll be home. It's only a few more days, easy as pie, and on Saturday we'll have a wild time." She finishes quickly, relieved, and puts on a new white cotton shirt, smooths both hands over her bust and stomach and legs, as if erasing the creases of her soul, ironing herself and being reborn. The two of them, he and she, get back to the yoga room at exactly the same time. They meet at the door twenty-five minutes before the time they had arranged, and she sees that he's changed into shorts and an orange T-shirt that dances in his charcoal eyes, and he's wearing flip-flops that expose long, graceful toes. Again the words "Egyptian prince" twinkle inside her. When she shuts the door behind them, she asks matter-of-factly why he wore long pants up till now in this heat.