He sits up, delaying his exciting discovery for a while, then throws it at her: "You're going to buy something big."
"Me?" She bursts out laughing. "Yeah, right!"
"Yeah, a house or a car. Something awesome. A Mercedes?" He is unconvinced by her peals of laughter, enjoying his role as the all-knowing. "A ton of money. You were making calculations with your lips."
Her laughter breaks off at once. Her heart sinks and crashes. That's the end, really. If I'm bringing all that into my work now, even into my work with him. That's it. Give the keys back to the management, go and be a secretary, do telemarketing, clean houses, things you can handle. She gets up and walks over to sit in the corner. He stays on his mat, looking at her, not understanding what's going on. She lets her head drop back against the wall with her mouth open. Rotem and Einstein can both take a flying leap. She remembers how she once swore, years ago-yes, yes, when she was standing in the light-that as soon as the yoga became nothing more than a living, a craft, she'd get up and leave. "I'm not buying a house," she says to him, to her surprise, knowing that if she doesn't talk now she'll scream. "And I'm sure as hell not getting a Mercedes. I'm actually trying to figure out where I'll find the money to pay next month's rent."
She tells him about herself. About the expulsion from Jerusalem. Even about Inbal's father, who disappeared, leaving her with a huge debt she had guaranteed for him. She even tells him about the broken fridge, and that the stereo system doesn't work and they haven't had any music at home for a year. And then, because what difference does it make now, she also lets him in on the hostile suspicion she's developing toward the other appliances; she has a whole conspiracy theory about them and their allies, the repairmen, and every time she turns on an appliance, even a light switch, her heart skips a beat. Then she tells him about the girls. In detail or in abstract, probably in abstract-she knows she must maintain some separation, because here she belongs only to him. It's only the two of them.
The sun sets and a pleasant dimness settles in the room. He lies there, resting on his elbows and listening. It's clear to her that he thought she was in a completely different place in life, and that now he is trying to figure out what this means about her, and maybe about both of them. He may even be recalculating his own position in relation to her, on the chain. Nili gets up, goes over to the mirror, and prods her scalp and hair a little. She looks into her eyes. Have I made a mistake by telling him? She finds it hard to read an answer. Lately she doesn't trust herself even with smaller things than this. As if with every movement she makes in the world she is scattering breezes of hurt and damage and failing. Midas and his leaden touch.
She goes over and collapses on her mat, knowing that something bad is happening to her, as if somewhere along the way she has lost the most basic confidence, the most natural and primal sense. As if every choice she makes immediately becomes a mistake, just because she made it. Go figure out what's right and what isn't, she thinks with her head lowered, what you can say to someone and what you can't. Is it even permissible to give advice to someone? To guide them, God forbid, along some path? Not to mention the truly unbelievable accomplishment of bringing a human creature into the world. How did I dare? She suddenly panics and pulls back and straightens up. How did I do it? How did I have the audacity?
Her hand moves over the blanket until she touches my knee and holds on to it. She doesn't say anything, and I don't ask. I have a thousand questions, but I don't ask. You can't go backwards to fix things.
Later, when everything between them settles, she says in a very tired voice, "You still haven't said what you felt before."
"When?"
"When you weren't feeling well."
"I don't know, I don't know," he mutters, and she gets the feeling he is avoiding her, and it annoys her that she's so transparent to him, while he is able to conceal and compartmentalize.
"I don't know," he says. "Your finger, like … I thought it was going into my stomach, like making a hole in it."
He lies on his back, relaxed, quiet. It's so quiet in the room that she thinks she can hear his hearts beating. A minute goes by, then another, and his breathing becomes tranquil. Then hers does too. The darkness thickens. Nili hugs her knees. Her eyes, which have dulled a little, brighten. The panic that flooded her earlier begins to melt away. Her lungs expand and she spreads out her inner limbs. Every so often she looks at him and feels that now another knot has been tied between them, because they are both, in their own way, downtrodden. It's strange that she'd never thought of herself in that way before, and yet now, because of him, it actually moves her, gives her strength.
He asks sleepily, "Hey, I forgot how it goes-the umbilical cord, do they cut it off both of them at the belly button?"
"What do you mean, both of them?"
"The baby and her?"
"The mother, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Are you serious?"
He lifts up on his elbows, surprised at her tone of voice, almost hurt. It takes her a minute to grasp, and then she sees with painful clarity the impression sketched inside him: a thread stretching from his navel to his mother's.
She falters briefly. He looks at her with penetrating eyes, and a sudden and decisive urgency darts between them. She smiles at him, her pros and cons get mixed up, and somehow, out of the smile, an answer escapes. She could never tell lies, but she was an expert at giving little gifts like this.
As I reach the last word, she sighs. I don't ask. I wait. It occurs to me that we've actually been living apart for longer than we lived together. You could say that for a long time we've known each other only in chapter headings. But how could that be? I mean, how could such a reduction occur between us? Or between her and anyone.
Reduction is not the right word, though. It's more as if over the years we've become two polite tour guides at a disaster site, but one that destroyed our lives. After the incident she retired. Stopped teaching. He was, in fact, her last student, and I think she also stopped doing yoga herself. I'm not sure about that; I've never been able to ask her, and now it's too late. She made a living doing odd jobs. She modeled for art classes. She was a salesclerk in a housewares store. Then she sold paintings for an old artist, going from door to door asking people to just take a look at the pictures. I left her on my seventeenth birthday, my gift to myself. Then I came back, or was sent back, with my tail between my legs. Then I left again, and the same thing all over again. She once said, with uncommon sobriety, "Our umbilical cord has shriveled up." Years later, during one of the disconnects, when I was already deep in my London life, I found out from a friend that she was ill. We developed a tolerable routine: one conversation a week. She would give me a sign with two rings, and if I felt like it, I'd call her back. Once I came to visit her, courtesy of Walter Tours. It wasn't a good visit. ("Cursed is the parent," she told me then, before I left in the middle of a horrible row, "who can be objective about his own child.") During those years, in my rare flashes of composure, I wrote the tourist stories and collected them into a book. I tried to dabble with cinema a little, and journalism, and I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there's no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn't wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything.
"Within every effort there has to be calm," she recites for him. "Always, in every pose, you have to stop just before the effort becomes pain."