"Sometimes I think … a bird, for example," he says.
"Yes, what about it?"
"To fly, it has to keep flapping its wings, right?"
"Definitely," she agrees gravely.
"I'm not talking about gliding," he says fussily, and her ear opens a little at the sound of the new word. "There are birds that glide without making any effort, but I'm talking about a bird that has to make an effort to fly up."
"Okay." Nili shrugs, wondering where he himself is flying with this.
"And a bird that lives, say, for a year? Two?"
"Let's say."
"And all that time it has to make an effort with its wings, otherwise it'll fall?"
"Definitely."
"But maybe once, like one time in its whole life, it happens that it can fly up high, the highest-for maybe a whole minute-without making any effort at all with its wings?"
She leans forward, shrinking the crease between her eyes, sensing something approaching. "And how exactly does that happen?"
He takes on a mysterious expression. "It gets it from the air."
"I don't get it."
"Like once in every bird's life, the air lets it fly up without making any effort."
She blinks. What is it with these aerodynamic theories all of a sudden?
But he's very serious and focused. "It's like …" He searches for an example, his fingers moving, pulling something from the air. "It's like, say … a holiday bonus, like the air is giving it a bonus. A discount. Once in a lifetime."
"Oh." Nili laughs with sudden comprehension. "And does it know, the bird? Does it understand?"
He falters. "That's what I keep wondering. 'Cause if it doesn't understand, then it's like the air's efforts are wasted on it, no?"
"I guess so," she answers, delighted.
"And if it does understand, then. No, that can't be. No. It must not understand, 'cause it's just a bird, with a bird brain. Sure." He gets excited; now that he's made up his mind, his face lights up. "It's something the air just does for fun!"
From the great relief on his face she guesses how long the question has preoccupied him.
"It doesn't even realize it at all! Just that suddenly it feels light, but it's the air that decides: Okay, now you. Now you. Playing with its birds, you see?"
Do I see? Nili wonders, looking at him contemplatively.
"And by the way," he adds gravely after a minute, "it's the same with the sea and the fishes."
"Okay," she sighs, "tell me about her."
I tell her. "She's huge, Melanie, tall and wide, even a little scary at first, but she is such a soul, and warm and honest and"-for some reason the word in Hebrew escapes me-"kind of tangible?"
She is surprised. It's not how she'd imagined Melanie. She refused to even look at a picture. So I tell her more. Little things, like her work at the rehab institute, and the way she rides her purple bike around the streets of London. And her simple, healthy self-confidence-if only I had a quarter of it-and her masses of energy, which, to me, are sometimes simply paralyzing. "That woman needs almost no sleep." I laugh. "And there is her absolute honesty toward any person-no one gets off easy. And sometimes, here and there, there's a toughness," I say, then add, "a kind of intransigence," surprised at how a little spray of betrayal has escaped me. "She has these definitive principles which sometimes, to be honest, can make life pretty complicated. Actually, Melanie could easily fit in with that gang of yours, the ones that collect birds at four in the morning."
Nili hears everything, including the crumple in the middle of my laugh. The intransigence and toughness-it flashes in my mind-of someone who has never yet broken down, not even cracked.
"And does she know what the story is about?"
"She knows everything that happens in my life."
I shouldn't have said that, certainly not that way, but I knew why I had to say it that way, to correct a mistake with an error. I could actually hear a little sound from within her, like a match snapping.
Now there is silence. Her feet are exposed at the bottom of the blanket. They are huge, swollen. Bluish yellow. I stare at them. The toes look joined into one mass.
"And what did she say?"
Her voice can't fool me. I want to change the subject, but I'm also not able to completely give up, pulled this way and that, feeling like a child of divorced parents forced to convey messages between them. "What did Melanie say? She said that I should have written it years ago." She said something else too, but I don't have the guts to convey that. She thought that if Nili had read this story years ago, maybe she wouldn't have gotten ill.
When her head sinks, her goiter looks huge, red, crisscrossed with veins. Tiny waves travel through it. What is she thinking now? Strange how difficult it is for me to guess her when I'm sitting right next to her.
Melanie was angry about me hiding from Nili that I was writing about her. In her lucid and balanced world there was no room for such miserable little acts of deception. Nor for my sense of relief at having managed again, with the help of a little disguise or a slight paring down of the facts, to protect my little piece of often-looted privacy. She could not understand why I keep up these concealments even now, why I need to. We never fought so much as during the months when I was writing about Nili. I never felt that she was so close to giving up on me and on my lousy personality. After every phone call to Israel I would hang up and curse myself, and let her know that she should chalk up another week of punishment for me on the list hanging on our fridge.
For a minute I steal a quick immersion into her. Melanie studying at night, her large body curled up on the rocking chair we found on the street. Or cooking lamb curry for us at five in the morning, wearing headphones and dancing. Or standing in front of a photograph in an exhibition from Kosovo, crying loudly with her mouth open and her nose streaming, until you literally had to drag her away. Or her irresistible motion when she rubs one of her lotions onto her hands before a massage. And her murderous workout every morning, with exercises that doctors would forbid me even to watch, and her pagan lunar worships-if I even dare smile at them, I'm dead. And the Tottenham soccer games she dragged me to week after week-me-
until I was forced to admit that there was something about them, I couldn't say exactly what, maybe seeing Melanie roaring and going wild and cursing in Welsh. And the moments when you can't tell which of our stomachs is grumbling. And my place in the world, my home, a preserve meant for only one protected animal, me, in the indentation of her shoulder. And not to be taken lightly are also the salt and pepper shakers we bought on Portobello Road, and our antique claw-foot bathtub, which was the real reason we rented the apartment. And our sixty-seven CDs, and the copper tray, and the two big orange mugs we bought on our first anniversary-
When you look at it that way, I think to myself carefully, we really have our own little household.
As time runs out, hour by hour, he thaws. When she reminds him of how he walked into her room the first time, all hunched over, he jumps up and corrects her, showing her exactly how he held his shoulders and how his chest caved in. Nili is amazed. "Do you walk like that on purpose?"
He smiles proudly, as if he had been complimented on his acting. "I can walk however I want." And he shows her his imitations of an old man, a drunk, an important man, the school rabbi. In two or three movements, with talent as sharp as a knife, he cuts the whole character out of the air. He is especially cruel to his father, with his bombastic way of standing, his lazy eye, and his roosterlike expression.
Nili laughs wholeheartedly and senses again the discomfort he arouses in her sometimes; she would never think to fake a walk. "And how do I walk?"