"Sure, what do you mean? Loads."
"Well, then."
"But I can't laugh at the same thing twice."
"I can laugh ten times at the same thing," she tosses out with clumsy cheerfulness. "But that's not saying much with me, I can also cry about the same thing ten times."
The joke, which isn't a joke at all, doesn't go down well, and even seems to cause him pain. Nili sees the slight tension in the shadow behind his eyes and falls quiet, and all at once what little they had starts to melt away. As he stands, his shoulders seem to hunch up of their own accord. She sees him getting further away, unattainable. Within the blink of an eye, he is a stranger, and she guesses that this instinct of foreignness is perhaps the essence of his life wisdom. For a long moment she freezes helplessly, and feels the pulsating of a scar that has reopened and rehealed in her countless times, in her abandoned, pained place, but then she shakes out of it, takes a deep breath, puts two long fingers in the sides of her mouth and pulls it out to the sides, rolls her eyes around rapidly, dances her eyebrows up and down, and flaps her ears charmingly.
He examines her, and his face widens in surprise, shock even. She sees his pupils darting around. A quick internal debate is occurring: Should I surrender to her or not? Can I believe in a woman who makes a fool of herself with such ease? Another long gaze, slightly confused, trying to resist her but being pulled toward her as she holds her clown face, and then he shuts his eyes, spreads his arms to the sides, dives into himself, and disappears. For a long time nothing happens, and Nili holds her expression, exaggerated, like a sock puppet stretched over a hand that's too fat. After an eternity-she has never failed at this little trick-a tiny smile sprouts at the corners of his lips, quivering a little, then increasing and opening up as if the smile is making itself laugh, delighting itself. His lips spread and his eyeballs flutter beneath his slender eyelids, and a tingle of pleasure rolls down from the back of Nili 's neck to the edges of her buttocks.
"Well, what did you feel?" she asks when he opens his eyes.
"It's great!" He laughs and pulls his head up with a motion she had not yet seen and would not have expected in him, and his eyes narrow into cracks of glowing pleasure. "It's like I could see these kinds of little clouds inside my brain, with a purple color, I've never-"
But upon seeing the reflection of his joy in her eyes, he sharply purses his lips and stands quietly again. Very polite and differentiated. Well-groomed, with no frayed edges. For a moment he reminds her of herself at the bank after she realized she was overdrawn.
"To the wall, quickly!" she orders in a panic. "On your hands!"
"Rotem, I have a request." "What?"
"Don't turn."
"What do you mean?"
"You keep turning away from me."
"Sorry." I straighten up embarrassedly, only now realizing that my whole body is stiff.
"I want to see your face."
"Oh, come on, what is there to see in my face?"
"That's not true." Veteran soldier that she is, she immediately enlists her last remaining strength to protect me from myself. "In fact, you've become much prettier since last time you were here. And with your short hair, you can finally see your face."
Before I can cancel out the compliment, ridicule her, make myself ugly, Melanie floats up and fills me. Nili must see it happen, because she turns her head away from me.
"But he has some issue with his stomach," she ponders out loud the next morning at six-fifteen, still half asleep, alarmed by the telephone ring that had unraveled her dream. "He has this kind of nervous tic, he keeps touching it, as if he's making sure it's there." As she talks, she knows she doesn't want to say any more, not to Leora. She doesn't want to let her get a foot in the door between them, but in the mornings she is always spineless. "And yesterday evening I showed him how I suck my stomach in and roll it"-and again she sees his eyes pulling back in fear at seeing the hard, vertical roll of her muscles, turning right and left along her stomach-"and he really started feeling ill."
Leora, at home in Jerusalem, standing opposite the open fridge, is putting together the day's shopping list as they talk; she absent-mindedly touches her little belly, the only drop of flaccidity in her body, and pulls it in, conquering a sigh.
"That's exactly it." Nili quickly picks up on the sigh, compelled to briefly wade with Leora into the same warm, sisterly blister of anguish. "Because with us, stomachs are always a big deal. I mean, ten times a day I come across it at work"-she purposely emphasizes the word "work" to Leora-" 'My stomach is too big,' 'It sags,' 'It's like jelly'. And all the emotions, and the insults, and the pregnancies, and afterward, and empty stomachs. But for men? And a kid of his age?"
"Lovely." Leora throws her out of the niche she was trying to creep into. "So now you're his therapist too?"
Silence. Only her heavy respirations saw through the air. I can't take it anymore. I'm going to ask her about him, about the kid, the boy. He was no more than a boy. I take a deep breath. Her breathing stops. I ask her if they talked like that, or kind of like that, she and Leora.
"No," she says cautiously, closing but not locking. "Leora, she only knew at the end. Only after it all happened."
I try to understand what this new information says about my story. Or about my imagination. For some reason that possibility never entered my mind, and I think I'm actually relieved inside, relieved at having been so far off. As if a wing that was tied to me has been released.
"And let's say, the boy, in the story-does he even remind you in any way of.?"
She thinks. It takes her a long time to think now. Why did I need to ask her that? So miserable of me, beggarly. For years I used to erase him, but he would crawl right back in. Changing shapes, changing states, appearing in the rain, in the earth, in a cup of black coffee, in tree trunks. And always stubborn, dark, with the desperation of someone afraid to be forgotten. Later, when I discovered the potential he held, our relationship began to stabilize; I already knew where to find him whenever I needed a quick whirl, and at a more advanced stage I even knew how to produce him myself. A revolving door at the hardware store in Finchley that you had to spin through quickly a few times (it was the rapid motion coupled with the reflections); or bending down, supposedly to tie a shoelace, next to the exhaust pipe of a car whose engine has just been turned off (ten, fifteen quick breaths was all it took; European cars were preferable to American ones for this purpose). There was also an ivy bush in the garden of a church in Hen-don, a huge one, diseased, maybe dead already, but still imperial and abundant with intricate dry branches that created an entire audience of almost-human faces. And there were these sores of a particular, terrible kind, which I saw only on the faces and arms of retarded kids taken out for walks on Primrose Hill; they would walk by, always at the same time, opposite the courier's office where I worked. And a few other hidden reconstruction methods that would take me out of context for a few seconds and let me gallop along a sideline with a sense of dizziness and rapid depletion, a unique and exclusive epileptic seizure, not entirely unpleasant, which I invented for myself-my own private high, my little creation, which grew more and more sophisticated every day.
"The boy. I'm getting used to him."
Getting used to? I try to understand what she's telling me. It doesn't sound good. It's not like getting Leora wrong. At once I'm desperately removed from reality again, as remote as I was back then, when it happened. I put the pages down on the coffee table nearby, take my glasses off, and rub my eyes, which are starting to sting. Again the familiar pinch, that the world is a kind of huge game of musical chairs and I can never get a chair, not even with her-especially not with her. I can already see so clearly that she's not even capable of entering my story. She's always just looking at it from the side, remembering what really happened and scorning my pathetic, limited imagination. She doesn't have to be a seer-she must tell herself after every piece of nonsense I utter-I gave up on that a long time ago, but at least a drop of intuition?