"Come here," she orders cheerfully, and places a hand on his back and a hand on his chest, and shows him how to stand, how to bend over to pick something up off the floor. She hints at something about yin and yang, and gives practical little tips: which exercises for massaging the internal organs you can do while you brush your teeth in the morning, and how important it is to brush your tongue too, to clean the night's germs away-her modest treasure of knowledge- and in between she tells him carefully, so as not to scare him, about the sun nostril and the moon nostril, and about the two halves of the body, which are two separate and different entities. He listens with grave alertness and his lips repeat her words, reciting, swallowing. "And that thing you said yesterday, the chakras?" She points to each one of them and touches the tip of his head with its short buzz cut, amazingly soft. "From this chakra you can connect to the infinite cosmic," she says, and makes sure he's not pulling away yet-after all, Leora isn't the only one who makes a sour face when she starts flowing toward the universe, and Rotem just puts her hands over her ears and starts singing loudly. But he has the opposite reaction: every such idea excites him and stirs him, and awakens in her the desire to give him more, to empty her knowledge out into him.
How little time they have! In two or three days he'll disappear and she'll never see him again. But wait, why must that be? Why don't you ask him for his address? No, that can't be done. But why not? You can send him books and tapes about all sorts of things, not just yoga, give him some enrichment, put together a personal survival kit for his disaster areas. Stop, you fishwife, down! Why don't you find out his contact information from the front desk? At least so you'll have it just in case. Because no, she presses herself between two strong fingers, because something within him dissuades her, because she knows that the secret of their encounter is in its nonrecurrence. But more than anything, because perhaps it's best for him, perhaps she shouldn't burden him with everything she contains. She knows exactly what she's talking about, there's no need to go into detail, but for example, when she's here in the hotel, far away from the girls, she might ultimately be doing them some good. In other words, it's very possible that in her absence, yes, she is doing them more good than-take a deep breath-in other words.
"Should we take a break?" I ask hoarsely. I can't do it, I have to get some different air. Preferably smoke.
She is quiet. Her face is strained with pain.
When I can no longer bear the silence, I say, "To be honest, there were at least twenty times when I thought you'd stop me."
"Why?" Her voice comes from very far away.
Oh God, I think, what have I done? What have I written here and how deeply have I hurt her now? If I had children, I remind myself, maybe I would know how to behave in these situations. If I knew how to behave in these situations, I answer myself, great wit that I am, maybe I would have children. I attempt to refresh my voice after all, to find a warm tone that will not sound as if I had just killed her. "I thought you'd at least say what's going through your mind when you hear all these. these hallucinations of mine."
"Rotem," she says, as if in that word she has summed up the discussion.
I remain quiet. Any further questions would sound idiotic, would sound hungry, and there is no power in this world that could make me ask her about him and her. But for example, I think of her in my heart, for example, when I described the singe you feel in your brain every time you miss some fact, every time you expose your ignorance and stupidity, how is it that you don't ask me where I, your genius, your walking encyclopedia, the prodigy of your hometown, learned to describe that so precisely?
"I have to know, Nili," I finally blurt out. "It's enough. I have to hear now if anything I've been babbling here for the last two hours is even a little bit close to reality."
"But it is reality," she says slowly, with unexpected tenderness. Almost with compassion she says it. "It's exactly the reality I want to hear."
At 10 p.m., before they part, he suddenly remembers. "Listen," he says, and hesitantly takes two fifty-shekel bills out of his pocket, looking aside. "My dad said to give you this."
"I don't want money from you." But she lingers for a moment, sadly contemplating her nominal value as a woman to his father.
He pushes it into her hands. "Take it, you should."
"Why should I?"
"You know, for the yoga. for us. so we can go on."
And he explains to her, squirming and embarrassed. "He"-he usually refers to his father as just he-"doesn't understand this kind of thing."
"What kind of thing?"
"This. Doing something without money." And he giggles. "He has this saving, that there's no such thine as a free lunch."
Nili hesitates for a moment, caressing herself with these words: "for us to" (or maybe it was "for the two of us to"? What was it exactly? Never mind. The point is.). "Tell me, do you tell him what we do?"
He shoots her a sly look that encompasses everything, and she grasps that he tells his father, or at least hints at, exactly what his father wants to hear.
She takes the bills from him with a conspiratorial smile. After he leaves, she shoves them into her bra, laughing in the face of the bespectacled income tax inspector who has been hounding her for three years. Sorry, gifts are exempt.
A thin whistling sound, almost a whinny. She laughs softly with her eyes closed, and warm circles spread inside me.
She asks for a cup of tea. Just hot water and mint leaves. It's the only thing I've seen her consume these past two days, other than pills and yogurt. In the kitchen I scan the set of polished dishes. There are dishes and implements in there I don't even recognize, that could furnish any institution from a beauty parlor to a torture den. For some reason this fills me with joy. I take piece after piece into Nili's room, and she squints at them and proclaims: "Lettuce spinner," "melon scoop," "apple corer."
"Well, what do you expect," she says, teased, when I wave something made out of stainless steel and rubber that looks like an enema for birds. "I'm not going to change him now."
Walter, she means. She always had a rare talent, shameless and boundless, for attracting men and turning them into patrons. It always made me sick, even as a child, her ingratiating feminine game, and so did the men themselves, of course. But Walter, for a change, didn't take off at the moment of truth, and for that I am indebted to him. "Your mother is a wonderful woman," he said to me when he picked me up at the airport early the other morning. And he paid for my ticket. Every time he tried to talk about her, his eyes filled with tears and he choked up (I recognized it the second I saw him for the first time: a certified orphan. From birth). "She really is something," I said, and concentrated on the road blurring in front of his eyes. Then we kept on driving in silence, and I fought off the temptation to turn his wheel around and catch the first plane home. Ever since I was born, all my life, people who had met her would come up to me and recite these phrases to me, as if someone had dictated them from the concise dictionary of clichйs: Larger than life. Straight out of the movies. Mother Earth.
Now she explains in a cautious voice that she's fairly used to him and to his habits, and to his tears when he steals a look at her. "And to his taste in art," she adds dryly. "All these statuettes. So maybe he has a few drawbacks, Walter," and we both agree with a silent nod of the head, but he promised her he would keep her at home until the last minute. She motions at the crowded rooms which spread into each other in the gloom and says, "At least I'll die against a nice backdrop."