On the third day, at the end of an exhausting class during which she had tired him out with fifty-four consecutive "sun salutations," and after bringing him to the place where his brain simply emptied of all thoughts-and that is when it occurs, when she feels it spreading through him, throughout all of him, the shine, the quiet, the internal crystal-he lies on the mat, a pillow under his head and one beneath his knees, and she softly guides him to relaxation. In the silence that descends, she thinks it was worth coming to this awful hotel for six years, two weeks every year, and suffering the rudeness and the contempt and the ignorance, just so that she could improve him like this. And it's good for her too, she knows, to see him this way,
opening up like a flower in her hands. Her voice sweetens with happiness and gratitude as she tells him about the soles of his feet relaxing, about his knees slowly sinking, about his hips loosening, his chest. "The body is so beautiful," she says with the newly found wonder she senses. "So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet." She whispers, "It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we're only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what's really good for us." She relaxes, opens up. "If we only understand what it's trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is. "
The sound of gulping opens her eyes. His face is tensed like a tightly clenched fist. His shoulders are hunched up almost to his ears, and his legs twist and squeeze each other forcefully.
"What's the matter, Kobi?"
He opens his eyes. His look is dark, confused. "What? Why did you stop?"
"I thought you. Do you feel okay?"
"Yes, I don't know …" He gets up with a wild look. "Let's take a break. I'm hungry."
"Wait"-she hurries to the door after him, not willing for him to leave in this state. Not understanding what happened, she suspects herself, maybe when she surrendered to herself for a moment it went wrong.
But he's already rushing away, and when he reaches the hallway he starts running. She goes back and sits down. You're using him, the probes in her stomach tell her; you can't resist it, can you? From the minute he walked in here you've been using him, that's what you're doing, a piece of easy prey for your ravenous ego fell from the sky at your feet. Haven't you ever heard of "erasing the self"? Isn't that the essence of yoga? And what about canceling out individual will, pettiness, competition, endless settling of accounts with the world? Just look at how every cell in your body keeps shouting out me me. That's not true, she protests weakly, backed against an in-
ner wall. But if she were to admit it, even a little. Why should she admit it, what is there to admit, goddammit, what crime has she committed here?
She gets up abruptly, extricates herself, and walks briskly around the room, pacing in truncated lines. "All these years," she mumbles to herself, and shakes her hands in front of her, "all these years, from the very first class, I always said I disagreed with yoga about this bit, and I said that I, personally, was not willing to erase myself for yoga. Didn't I say that all these years? And that yoga has to accept us as we are, with our stories and all our complications and our little screw-ups and our urges-our human story-did I or did I not say that?
"Because maybe according to the books and the theories, and according to everything you've heard until today, I may in fact not be teaching you yoga." She stops suddenly and announces with a soft voice to the empty walls, showering them with her warm, broad smile, her introductory smile: "But I'll certainly teach you my yoga. Yoga as I see it, as I believe in it." She keeps on talking calmly, in her saturated voice, linking her hands with humility and depositing all her little secrets, her hearty shortcomings. She will let them choose whether or not to accept her as she is, thus easily overcoming the evil voices of her colleagues, who always accused her of being a charlatan, an ignoramus, lacking any theoretical or philosophical basis. She summons up her goodness to come to her aid-her horn of plenty, which shuts up all the cowardly mouths. And she summons the dozens or even hundreds of admiring students to testify on her behalf, and the patients she has treated with infinitely enduring work, thousands of hours of exercises and poses and breaths and massages and guided imagery for a sprained ankle, a pulled muscle, blocked intestines, a broken heart. And the terminally ill, whom she compassionately and courageously accompanied to their deaths, who became more addicted to her than to sedatives and painkillers-to her voice, to the touch of her hands on their tortured bodies. There were those who wanted only her at their side during their final hours; one young woman, whom she treated in the last months of her life, begged her to adopt her son, a three-year-old. "Be a mother to him like you've been to me." She walks around the bare room for a long time, the mist of memory enveloping her sweetly. She smiles at this one, caresses that one, drawn in a kind of self-inhalation, until she stops where she is, tilts her head a little, and from inside, without even meaning to, she produces the old sparkle, almost forgotten, her sparkle of charm and seduction, which sprays out and dances like a ray of light over the four walls. And Nili stands, a slightly dreamy smile on her face, and looks at it.
She breathes heavily. Opens her eyes. Her look says, You're killing me, but with her hand she gestures for me to go on, quickly. I'm not sure I'll have the energy. It's getting harder from one page to the next. And it seems so pathetic to heap all those words and long sentences on the pages just to try to capture one live moment, or a spark of her emotion. I grab the pen and cross out the whole last section, and she says, "Don't you dare." There is sharpness in her voice, as if I've stolen something from her, and I loosen my grip on the pen and sit there, reprimanded, staring at the page. What does she really want and why is she being stubborn? As if punishing both of us together. Putting us both on trial.
"About the yoga," she groans after a minute. Completely ignoring, in her usual evasive, feline way, the heaviness that accumulated over the last few minutes.
I fake an apologetic laugh. "I know. I got everything from one book for beginners that I found in a London library. You'll have to help me with that a little."
A sentence with a future-tense verb. A crude mistake on my part. She tightens her eyelids in pain. I move my chair closer to her-how to comfort? How to compensate for what I'm doing to her in writing and in person?
"But listen. When I wrote it, I realized how much yoga I had absorbed after all, without even noticing it, just from hearing you talk,
from watching you, from the millions of lessons when I was in the background in the studio and the apartment in Jerusalem-in fact, ever since I was born."
"You would lie there in your baby seat," she says, immediately tempted by me, by the warmth that had suddenly flickered in me. It's so easy for me to win her over, still, she's so thirsty for me, still, still. How has she not grown sick of me? "You'd lie there with your pacifier, with your eyes wide open, huge. People in the classes couldn't get over how quiet you were."
But I never took a class with you, I tell her silently.
Or a massage, she replies with her eyes, and shakes her head on the pillow. "It's a pity you wouldn't let me give you a massage. I gave the whole world massages, except you."
I reach out and touch her hand. I don't want to make a big deal out of it, but it's the first time I've touched her in years. Somehow I never adopted the habit of touching with her. When we met, the day before yesterday, I stood next to her bed amazed, trying to find Nili inside her. Walter had prepared me for it on the way from the airport, but I wasn't prepared. I stood for a few moments, unable to move a finger, barely breathing, until Walter let out a kind of sob behind me, almost comical, and left. And then I sat down and we started talking, untouched by human hands.