"When you read," she says in a slow, grating voice, lethargic from the disease and the medication, "I feel as if the things you're saying really happened."
My mouth is dry. My left foot is really going wild. I wait for details. Maybe she'll finally say something about what really happened. She gestures for me to go on.
Sometimes, at the end of class, she puts him on a chair and teaches him the secret of correct sitting, how to lengthen his thigh muscles, his hands and calves, and she draws the root pulled down from his tailbone into the earth, sucking energy from it and discharging the toxins of body and soul into it. Then she kneels at his feet and checks to see if his long, brown bare feet are planted firmly on the ground. She plants them by pressing each toe separately. "Is this yoga too?" he asks, and she says it's her yoga, even though she's never sat a student as young as him on a chair in class, always on the floor, but perhaps of all the things she's teaching him, it will be the memory of this simple white plastic chair that he'll take with him when he leaves, she thinks. Like that man she read about once-she doesn't even try to remember where, no chance-who dreamed that he came to Paradise and was given a flower there, and when he awoke he was holding a flower. "The most important thing is to remember how to step properly," she says. "Spread your toes, hold on to the earth happily, delight in it with every step." She recites to him: "Death begins in the feet, that's where our self-neglect develops from, our surrender."
From one hour to the next, she starts to see his body from the inside, the colors of his different senses. His points of resistance, rough and dark. Thrills of amazement and happiness pass through him like rays of light, and they instantly ignite a spark in her. She opens her eyes, and he does too-perhaps he heard my eyelashes, or maybe he's just trained always to be on guard, she thinks-and she smiles her warm smile at him, the one she has recently been feeling on her face like the tattered grimace of a tired clown, a dried-up old Pollyanna. She asks what he'd like to do now, what he'd like to change, to fix, to learn.
"Whaddayoumean?" He raises his lovely eyebrows in wonder. "You can fix things with yoga?"
She smiles. "Of course you can. Yoga is-" Where to begin? she wonders. And how? We have so little time to be together, and anything I say will be superficial and cheap. She breathes deeply. "Yoga is a system, it's just a system that helps us increase our physical and spiritual strengths, and the connection between our soul and our-"
And she stops, because his pupils are lifting as if pulled by a string, and his eyes almost close with pleasure. Enchanted, she watches his fluttering eyelashes until his look returns.
"Say it again."
She says the words slowly, looks at his face with tense expectation: open sesame. And again she sees the magic work. Sensing an urge to bring it about again, she adds something else that used to hang on her studio wall in Jerusalem: "When my consciousness is clear and pure, reality will be precisely reflected in it." There were times when the meaning of that sentence was as real and lucid to her as a bodily sensation, as taste or scent. Now she feels only the bite of emptiness, but when she sounds the saying in his ears, word after word, she can feel his soil moistening. It's unbelievable, she thinks, and strains her brain to fish out something from her first teacher: "A mistaken thought is incorrect knowledge, which is not based on the shape of the thing." But this time he looks at her without any expression. There is a long and empty silence, and Nili becomes worried. "Do you understand what that means?"
"No. What's it mean?"
"I don't. Look, once, years ago …" She stops again, embarrassed, because even ten and twenty years ago, even when she recited it to her students, she didn't completely understand. In fact, it was always that way, not just where yoga was concerned. Always, when the air vibrates from the gong of a polished and determined sentence, or some hammered-out, echoing truism, Nili feels a kind of dull sting in her left temple, the singe of an already familiar insult, and she closes off and the words dissipate and float in her mind with a kind of weary surrender, turning into soft clouds of impressions that slowly evaporate. That's the way I take things in, everything with me is intuition, she explains to herself and to her loved ones, with a shrug of her shoulders. I'm a seer, not a knower.
"Listen, the truth is, I don't really go in for abstract things, and anyway, I'm not that great with theory," she bursts out with strange eagerness. "Or with facts, actually," she is somehow driven to add with a well-practiced, crooked little smile. "Facts somehow never really sink in with me. That's it, that's the situation." And she is quiet, amazed at herself.
Her confession confuses him. "But to teach yoga, don't you need to know these kinds of things? Quotes and all that?"
"Look," she says simply what she should have said instead of the whole speech, "when I do things, I understand. I understand through my body."
Almost before she's done speaking he gets up, hurries to the wall, and hurls himself on his hands, tossed like a luscious fruit ready to burst. He stands straight for one minute, then one more. His arms are already shaking, his forehead is wrinkled with effort, and he breathes laboriously, looking at her without seeing. Something catches her attention. The watch, which he forgot to take off. A clumsy old watch which he always wears the wrong way, so it covers the inside of his wrist, is now turned to her and showing the wrong time. Three hours fast.
He comes down one leg after the other and lies on the floor, relaxing. With his head between his hands he moans, "I want you to teach me, if there is such a thing in yoga, to make me not. like, how to not suffer from noise."
She whispers, "Explain to me a little. I think I understand, but-"
He straightens up. She already knows: as soon as she doesn't understand him, he loses his patience, immediately.
"There's noise the whole time, right? So how. how can you make it so you can, so in the noise-"
A little wave beats in her throat, still she checks carefully, he's only fifteen for God's sake-okay, and a half. "What noise exactly do you mean?" She remembers the quarries. "You live in a kind of noisy area, don't you?"
He gives her a look she'll never forget, a piercing look of disappointed rebuke. Almost desperate. She shrinks in. Stupid. What were you thinking? Wake up. Get with the picture.
She shakes it off. "You know what? We'll learn together. Sit on the mat, sit opposite me."
They both sit cross-legged. Erect. Nili shuts her eyes, focuses inside. "It's as if I have a place there, a quiet place, and I can reach it instantly, in any situation almost." Or at least I used to be able to, she thinks instantly. "Slowly but surely you'll also be able to find your place." She makes an effort to smile, and her hand pulls down an invisible thread opposite the center of his chest, and she can feel the thread trembling, can hear with her fingers the humming fluctuations in his body. She senses them constantly, as if there's another heart beating in him, but a distant, underground one. "And it's a matter of practice, years of practice, knowing where your quiet is located, and then you can get there from wherever you are, in the loudest noise, in the midst of filth and crudeness," she whispers, and her eyes are closed tight. "You can put yourself in there and be protected." She breathes slowly, the bitterness of the words seeping into her throat. What's left of that? Only talk, words, cauliflower. She doesn't even want to think of how many times she's really been able to go in and stay there since she left Jerusalem, since she was exiled from Jerusalem, from her beloved little apartment that was too expensive, from the students who stayed with her for years. From her glory days. Her hands tighten on her knees. Her fingers draw two zeros. All she had now was a tiny, insulting apartment in Rishon, and the misery of the girls, uprooted because of her, because of her criminal ineptness in managing her affairs. And more than anything, Rotem, the waste of Rotem, the hatred of Rotem, the terrible drawing Rotem hung in her room, which keeps presenting itself like a curse in almost all of Nili's contact with the world: My family in the food chain. For three years now, she's been running around with her yoga in a town where no one has even heard of it, haggling over every penny with treasurers of moshavim and community center directors. But he, Kobi, wants to know what it's like in there, when she's in her quiet place, and Nili shakes her head with closed eyes. What can she tell him? How can she describe her place that has become a den? What can she tell him of the little beast that lurks for her there?