Even so, again, as always, she closes her eyes, lifts her head a little, her face looks ready for a kiss, and to her surprise she is there in the blink of an eye, an unexpected and so attainable gift. And the place is vacant, waiting for her with a bright welcome, and she squeezes her eyelids and tightens, knowing that shortly the sharp little teeth will sink in-
Total silence. She breathes deeply, enveloped in a dense pink sensation. God, she thinks, and chokes up a little, where were you all this time? I almost lost you.
Only after a few minutes does she remember Kobi, and sadly forces herself to climb back into her pupils, and he is waiting, a little hurt at being left outside, but eager, like a man aboard a ship who sees the diver coming back up. "What's it like down there? What did you see?"
"I can't explain it with words." She smiles, refreshed, distributing herself around like the scent of peeled mandarins. "When you get there you'll know, you'll sense it yourself." And when she sees the disappointment on his face, she hurriedly adds, "But there's something that maybe you can feeclass="underline" my hands get warmer when I'm there, a lot of energy builds up in them, sometimes my skin actually quivers. It truly does." She smiles as he purses his lips in amazement.
"Can I touch?" He hasn't asked to touch her until now; only she has touched him, carefully, correcting a pose, straightening a foot, and his skin always shrinks away a little, as if from a light electric shock, the skin of a child who wasn't touched enough.
"Of course, touch."
He reaches out and touches the edge of her open palm. He announces immediately: "I don't feel anything," and pulls his hand back.
"Give it a minute." She smiles, pressing his hand to hers, magnetizing inside, taking with her the touch of his marvelously soft fingers, and within a moment she becomes focused, brimming with warmth inside; long threads of glowing tenderness flow through her limbs, and she walks around inside her body, inside the beautiful city of Brahma, and she is full and generous with herself all the way to the edges of her fingers. "Here, feel now."
"Wow. Can I get that way too?"
"If you practice, it will be even stronger with you," she says gravely.
"Really? How do you know?" He giggles, and for a moment he exposes something childish, the sudden twittering of milk teeth.
"I know. See, that kind of thing I do know."
A phone rings in one of the distant rooms of the house. She blinks at me not to answer it. We sit and count the rings and guess who might be calling.
"No phone calls until we're done," she decrees.
"Maybe it's Walter?" His name tastes uncomfortable in my mouth.
"I told him not to call, and he won't."
Walter was the attachй for commercial affairs at the German embassy in Israel. At the end of his service here he had conducted a private little defection. He's a tall man, delicate and hesitant. A little frail for my taste, and somewhat short even by her standards. On top of everything else, he doesn't look you in the eye. He met her five years ago on the street and fell in love with her in an absolute Siegfried-like way; this was also, it later transpired, the first love of his life. They had one year of bliss. Then she got ill. She points out again and again that it was when she became ill that he began to love her even more. She finds it strange. "It's as if he loves my illness too," she says. "As if he would be willing to make a deal, you know, to actually be ill instead of me." And I know her voice and know what troubles her, and do not enter with her into the alliance she wants to create. But she can't let it go, looking askance at me: "Doesn't it strike you as an oddity?" I play innocent: "What's odd about it? He loves you. When you love someone it includes everything." "Even so," she murmurs, "what does he need this for?"
Silence. Something damp and murky in the air. I realize I'm sitting with my back to her again. Why am I drawn there like that, to the anger at her, over and over again, as to a yearned-for childhood memory that burns my throat? She sinks into herself too. I have no idea where she is, and for a minute I don't care either. I'm fighting against an ancient whirlwind, superfluous now, which still sucks me inside with glee. The thing is that she always knew how to protect herself from the torments of others.
People who know her wouldn't believe it, but she had built a fortress, and I had encountered it, really slammed into it. Sometimes crashed. It was like a transparent protection layer, spiritual of course, but very dense, ironclad, which surrounded her entirely; she would hunch behind it, and no thing or person was allowed to penetrate it. When I finally dared to ask, I was about twelve-just to think that I could once talk with her like that, just come to her and ask directly- and she explained that thanks to that defense, that barrier of hers, she could give of herself to more and more people, she could flow freely. Precisely because none of them could take any of the powers she held there. When I insisted, because that one time I did-I remember the vague and frightened sense of churning that rose from the bottom of my stomach, and how what she said suddenly congealed into a lump inside me, into words, into a verdict-she explained with total honesty, with her criminal innocence, that if she let anyone infiltrate it and take things from there, she would no longer be herself. And she wouldn't be pure, she added, and wouldn't be able to be the utterly clear vessel, the transparent conduit for the healing powers that passed through her.
I understood, and yet I didn't. How could I understand such a thing? She tried to explain. She told me about the ocean of nectar inside the heart. About the island made of precious stones. She said I also had a place like that inside me. I tried to feel it, but all I found was darkness. She went on talking and I saw her on her island like a round, perfect animal, a mythological circle-creature, smooth with closed eyes, sprawled in complete and eternal rest, with its tail in its mouth. But what will happen if I'm sick? I wanted to ask. What will happen if I need all your powers, even your powers from there? I didn't ask. One touch of the electrified fence was enough for me. And she, as usual, heard my silence, and instead of answering, she kept trying to teach me how to take care of myself, how not to let the sorrow of the world, or anything else, penetrate my private place. "Not even the love of your life," she used to emphasize again and again, and I had not a single soul in the world to love back then. "Even your most beloved love of all-don't let him in there." And then she would smile her most charming, tempting smile and say, "Don't even let me in there."