Now I somehow find my fingers and hers intertwined. Hers are huge, thick and swollen, and my red ones peek through them. Not a beautiful scene. I rub them for her a bit. Searching for the joints within the swollen flesh. I can't find them. My motions are clumsy, they don't help at all. I don't have it, there's nothing I can do about that. And besides, I don't seem to be a particularly compassionate person by nature. I'm afraid that if I give her a squeeze of encouragement it might hurt her, or she'll think for some reason that I want to hurt her.
But she does not let go, she holds on. All of a sudden I sense her fear. For the first time. There's no mistaking it. Like white jet streams splitting off and flowing into me, and there are cold stripes of white-
ness quickly spreading throughout me, and it's as if she's already calling to me from there, from beyond the gates. For a moment it actually paralyzes me, sucks me back into a bad place, and I can clearly tell what it will be like when she's gone, and how much strength I will need to not be carried away there again. I quickly pull myself together. I'm really not sure that what is occurring here is a good thing. Mainly, I'm afraid of the effect it has on her: she may think that if she and I have reached this state, it must mean the end is really near.
"Should we go on?" I ask.
Slowly and with an encouraging smile, I release her fingers from my own. Avoiding her look. Unbelievable how I can put on the exact, precise expression I encountered years ago on the face of a nurse at the mental ward in Homerton Hospital in Hackney. She would twist my arm back easily-I weighed barely ninety pounds then-and jab me with a needle full of Rohypnol containing at least five hours of sleep, and still smile at me with the serpentine smile of a member of some exclusive club: "It's all right, love, we're almost there." And now it's me, now it's my turn-how wonderful is the recycling of life in nature. From a great distance I can see my hand giving her arm two or three caring pats, and I hear myself laugh out loud. "Do you know what it meant to me to write about yoga?"
She lingers a little. Digesting what has just flowed between us. In her body, she is still perceptive and bright as always. Certainly more than I am. And perhaps not only in her body. I don't know. Sometimes I think maybe I'm the one who doesn't get anything. And maybe it was me who, in my stupidity, screwed everything up for us. Because sometimes, like now, when she purses her lips like that and turns herself off, it pains me to see how disciplined she is, the way she has trained herself to stop so as not to know me completely. Because that's what I demand of her, those are the terms of the contract, and that is how I always wanted it. And then of course I scorn her, because for a second she looks like a little lab animal, a mouse or a rat, trained never to enter one particular cell that she especially likes. But that's how I wanted it, I recite to myself what I can never forget even for a minute, that is exactly how I wanted it. In the meantime, it turns out that I've suddenly become witty, and I am cheerfully chatting with her about my short research into yoga, and how I got myself into it. I quote a playwright-I can't remember who it is, he was English or Irish, his name escapes me now; with names it really is the worst- who said that the most complicated thing for him, always, is writing about his enemy "from the inside."
"I hope you mean yoga," she murmurs.
Four or five times during their days together, someone registers for her class at the front desk or knocks on the door and asks if they can take a lesson, and Nili grits her teeth and signs them up for the lunch hour or the dinner hour. She never eats in the dining room anyway. And then, during the imposed lesson-if you can call it a lesson, those dollish limbs dangling and that pathetic displacement of fat-she keeps stealing looks at the little alarm clock and counting the minutes, amazed at her inner rudeness, and announcing to herself that she must have reached the end of her professional road if she is putting all her money on him, with the odds stacked against her as they are. She reminds herself constantly not to make comparisons, to give herself fully to anyone who needs her, but at the end of every disturbance, after the nuisance has left, she hears a soft knock on the door, not shy and not demanding, just I'm here. She bounds up off her mat, full of the sweetness of acquiescence.
"So you've just fallen in love with him a little," Leora says sting-ingly in her role as sobriety inducer, stabbing at Nili with the entire length of the word as if she's pinning down a butterfly. She is astonished again, for the thousandth time, at the unbelievable variety of her sister's talent for imbroglio, and wonders how she'll get her out of this one and how much it will cost.
But Nili knows with absolute certainty that no, it's not love, not even attraction. "And don't worry, he's not falling in love with me either." She chuckles. "I'm too old for him, and anyway, it's happening in a completely different place, it belongs to a different department. Lilush, what do you think, let's talk after he leaves?"
"I don't understand how he isn't falling in love with you." Leora spits out the words like a pit and laughs clumsily and accusingly, but Nili also hears a surprising little sigh slip through the words, and for a moment she thinks Leora, in her indirect way, seems to be making some admission here, finally. But even that doesn't really make her happy now, she just thinks of how two minutes of conversation with her sister exhausts her more than a whole day of work. Then Leora suddenly flares up, hissing at her that she's playing with fire again, and that as usual she thinks there will be someone to clean up after her. She brings up some of her past sins, and Nili listens to the list, and quite a few of the items actually raise a little smile of pleasure on her face. But she is depressed by the thought that it's been three years now since the sweet little Trinidadian who worked at the building across the street; he wrote her lovely poetry in English with chalk on the scaffolding, and left her penniless on the beach at Rosh Hanikra. Since that time, her CV has included no significant transgressions that you could really dig your teeth into. But Leora persists, spitting out chains of words, and Nili guesses how her gaze is wandering now, without seeing, over the walls of her home, objects and furniture and housewares, and as she talks she seems to inhale the strengths of the day-to-day from them with a joyless longing. Nili knows how Leora looks at this moment too-just as she did when she used to have hysterics as a little girl, and later as an adolescent, when she suspected that Nili was seducing and stealing away the few boys that dated her. In an instant she would go berserk, turn into an ugly old lady, and Nili, eyes closed in fear, would walk into the storm of limbs and screams and spitting as into a burning house, and wrap her arms around her, and Leora would freeze in mid-diatribe, afraid, as if someone had woken her out of a hypnotic state. She would stand like that for a long time, lost.
Later that evening, he's in a great mood. Nili is confused; she thought he might not even come back, that she must have touched some open wound when she spoke of his body. But here he is, refusing to talk about what happened, taking large strides around the room, waving his arms widely, demanding that she teach him everything she knows. "Everything?" She smiles. "Yes, everything." She laughs, telling him, "My best students-listen to this carefully now-if after ten years of studying they begin to understand that they know almost nothing, then I'm a truly fortunate teacher. But you still want to know everything now, do you?" "Yes, yes," he enthuses, and she stops for a moment as a cold hand touches her, because perhaps he, in his strange rawness, feels that he doesn't have much time. But he seems so alive and blossoming to her now that she immediately erases her fear, and with a flood of pleasure she encounters within her that forgotten motion, where she tips the vase of her soul toward him.