Her eyes dry up the words in his throat. "Get the hell out of here."
Absorbing the punch, he utters, "What the-?"
"You heard me. Go."
"But what's the matter with you? Did I say something wrong again?"
"Leave, or I'll. " She starts moving toward him.
He moves to the door in alarm.
Nili stumbles back in and slams the door. She leans over the little sink, her whole body shaking. I could have murdered him.
Her hands were always drawn to touch. If anyone's body made some gesture or expression of pain, her hand would instantly be drawn to massage, to melt. With everyone: strangers, acquaintances, a girl from my class who brought me my homework when I was sick, a lonely neighbor, a hairless dog racked with scoliosis who adopted her and became addicted to her massages. Her hands were a natural extension of her gaze, her talk. Once, she did it with my school principaclass="underline" in the middle of a discipline talk in her office, the two of us were sitting there innocently when suddenly the Tyrant put her hand on the back of her neck and moved it around, sighing. Nili was behind her in a flash, at the ready with her ten fingers, while I measured the distance to the window and a redemptive leap. But then there was a strange struggle among the principal's facial features, and an unbelievable fraction of a minute during which Nili, alone, almost beat the entire system.
Time is running out; they both feel it and think of it, and he, almost eagerly, tells her more and more: the studies at the boarding school, the wild boys who live there with him, who've already been kicked out of every other institution, the friend he once had there-
"A friend?" She perks up. "Wait, you didn't tell me about him, who is he?"
But he ignores her-and the Arab who converted to Judaism and is now his roommate. And running away nights to go and play pool, and the punishments they endure, and the supervisors' beatings, each one with his own method, and the obligatory fasting days, the spiritual reinforcements, and the card games in the basement, where the loser has to give someone a blow job.
"And you take part in this?"
"Not in that." He looks straight at her, a look that is too horizontal and congealed.
She becomes alarmed. "But in what?"
He wants to tell her, but he resists it too. She can feel the pressure mounting at once between the joints of his fingers, in his shoulder muscles. "There's an old guy," he finally says, looking at her fearfully, "a little old midget of a guy, Iraqi, he's maybe fifty, lives near the market, and he pays."
"For what?"
He gets up and walks around the room quickly. Then he stops and stands in warrior pose, with his arms reaching out to the sides. "All kinds of stuff. He gives me clothes to wear, you know, girls' clothes. He doesn't touch. Just watches and jerks off."
"And you?"
"Nothing. I what?"
"Do you enjoy it?"
"Are you kidding? It's for money. Twenty shekels every time."
But she already knows the changing tones of his voice, and she senses the skin of her scalp stretching; her heart feels crushed. He shifts his weight to the other foot. His eyes are focused on his fingertips. She glances at him. Somehow it doesn't surprise her. She thinks about herself at his age. What did her father know of what she was going through? And what does she know now about what's really happening to Rotem? (If only, oh God, if only Rotem is hiding a stormy love story from me, if only the whole world knows about it but me. Not even stormy, as long as there is some love there, some affection, friendship, one single drop flowing beneath the layers of flesh, behind her antibiotic look.)
But she won't let him off this time, it's too late, and she goes back and insists: "And that friend you mentioned?"
"It's nothing." There is already a slight darkening in the shadow behind his eyes.
"A friend is good," she insists, and knows that he can sense every time her voice tries to conceal an ambiguity. "It's good to have someone to pour your heart out to, isn't it?"
"I'm hitting the showers," he says, and leaves her feeling as if her fingertips had touched a glowing ember.
Two hours later, they relax at the end of an exhausting class in which she seemed to be trying to polish and peel him. He is tired out and glistening with sweat, and she sits beside him and tries to direct herself to what he needs most (remembering that as a girl she was always surprised at how the medicine she swallowed knew exactly how to reach the hurting part of her body). If only he would tell her explicitly what he needs. But he is taking, she thinks, he is definitely taking something. It's not clear what, but something is being taken from her, her exhaustion today tells her that, a little like when she gets her period. And she thinks that since yesterday, since he mimicked her, he has really started consuming something from her, but in his own way, he is careful to keep his content a secret, incredibly trained, trained to conceal. Sometimes when she's with him, she feels like a big city, abundant and serene and innocent, and he is a stealthy guerrilla, emaciated and glowing, who slips into her every so often from his forest, grabs something he needs to survive, then disappears. And maybe it has nothing to do with her yogi qualities, this thing that he is taking? She opens her eyes in wonder: What, then?
"Is there perhaps something you'd like to tell your body?" The question pops out of her mouth and surprises her, and he hardens a little. "You can say it now," she suggests, recalling how he had almost cried when she talked with him about his body two days earlier. Still, she feels something has opened up in him since then. "Say it silently or out loud. Tell it what the problem is." She sees a slight furrowing of his brow, and quiet. Then he lets out a very small smile.
She holds back, and the class goes on, but before he goes off for lunch, he stops at the door. "Know what I said before to. my body?"
"What?"
He laughs, kicking at the tiles. "Nothing really, I just asked if it was happy with me." She doesn't understand, but he eagerly explains: "I always thought of it the other way around, like whether I'm happy with it. But suddenly, when you said to ask it, I felt sorry for it, you know, that it had to be mine, like …"
She smiles with him and still doesn't comprehend. Such a beautiful body, refreshed, etched, and it responds to him with suppleness and harmony. For a minute-without even feeling it-she stretches out her healthy, gloriously beautiful body like a person taking a deep breath after leaving a sick friend's house.
Later, when she's alone again, she throws herself into her weekly room cleaning-her little display of freedom against the manager and the cleaning staff. Something disturbs her: the permanent, insulting thought that she is, in some way, not complicated enough. Apparently not messed up enough either. There are clubs, she knows, that wouldn't let her in; the people she feels closest to and loves most have whole areas she is forbidden to enter, and all her seeing skills aren't enough to even guess at what goes on in their twisted, sophisticated crevices. She will never know what they really think of her there, and she has always had a gnawing suspicion that those are the places where she is being betrayed. Now that she has come this far, her thoughts already know their own way home: maybe one day, years from now, the girls will finally appreciate her true value. They'll grow up-
"Rotem."
"What?" She alarms me when she stops me like that in mid-sentence.
"I have a request."
"I'm listening."
"Don't read now. Speak it to me."
"Speak what?"