"What you have written down."
I don't get it. "What-"
"Don't say 'she.' Say 'you.' Talk to me."
I shrug my shoulders and quickly scan the next lines with my eyes. I don't know where she got the idea, and I briefly consider objecting in the name of artistic freedom. I decide to give her the "you," but certainly not to compromise on the other protagonists. "Maybe one day years from now"-I read to her, hesitating a little at first, checking every stone before stepping on it, but then it starts to flow-"the girls will finally appreciate your true value. They'll grow up, they'll be mothers too, their eyes will open … Is it all right like that? Is this what you meant?"
"Yes." Her eyes are closed. "Go on."
You lean on the mop, dreaming up scenes from their future motherhood, conjuring up for them a quiet smiling man with broad shoulders, a Lego house with a red roof, and two or three kids, maybe even four, why not. There will be joyful moments on the playground and at the dinner table, and there will also be arguments over what to wear to kindergarten and when to go to bed, and then over what time to come home from parties, whether or not to smoke, and what to smoke, when to start having intercourse, and with whom, and then a new understanding will emerge in them, and they'll suddenly comprehend the gift of motherhood you bequeathed them. The internal liberation you gave them with your ostensible anarchy, and with the absolute equality that prevailed between mother and daughter in your home. You sigh quietly: it is true that sometimes, if you were to look at things unflatteringly, from an external and foreign point of view, it may seem as if you and they are in fact the same age, helpless and scared subjects of the arbitrary and misunderstood adult world.
"Yes," she murmurs, her eyes still closed, her lips moving along with mine.
But then, out of the murkiness of your blessed forgetting, you see a row of what look like humps-different-sized islands of memory, both the inconsequential and the criticaclass="underline" the lunchboxes taken to kindergarten and found to be empty at lunchtime, the puddles of urine gathering next to the front door when you were late getting home. The furious quarrels that erupted every time you tried to help them with their homework, and the boredom and suffocation that took hold of you when you were forced to sit with them for even ten minutes and study for an exam. Every minute seemed like an eternity to you. And the slap you once gave Rotem while she was struggling through the Pythagorean theorem. Your insistence on treating her only with homeopathic medicine, even when she had strep throat, and the horrible comment made by the doctor at the ER, who hap-
pened to be a former classmate of yours, giving you a broad perspective on your character-
I keep on reading the long and fairly tedious list. I enjoyed writing it, and I felt just and strong and full of self-pity, and I thought what fun it was that everything was behind me and I could be happily embittered over every episode as if it had just happened yesterday. But now my insides are shrinking with insipidness and shame as I realize that this is the hot air I've been existing on for thirty-five years. Even so, I keep on reading to her, setting off land mine after land mine in her face, but preserving the same voice and clean staccato I've been using all evening, not a single word emphasized, no blaming and no apologizing, no influencing and no bribery. I present her with my text without interfering, and I have lots of experience doing that, because in some sense, that has been the way we have talked in recent years, the method I developed so as not to flare up when she would invade me in mid-conversation and hover around my allergic areas with her criminal innocence. But when I have almost reached the end of the list, my mouth starts to grow dry and I glance feebly at the clock. It's ten now in London. Melanie gave me unequivocal instructions about the next few lines. She talked about the need for total honesty, even now, especially now; "It will purify," she said. "It will liberate you both." But I'm not Melanie, and I fix my gaze strongly on the dark corner of the lie, and pathetically skip to the beginning of the next section.
Nili, with her eyes closed, grasps my wrist with a strength she does not have and says, "All the way, Rotem, read until the last line."
. And men staying the night, trapped in front of torn childish eyes as they walk out of the shower naked, relaxed, staring in embarrassment; and the nights Rotem sobbed as she banged on your locked bedroom door, lashing out against everything that was stormily occurring inside it; and that cursed week, which should have been shoved into a place it could never emerge from in any therapy, when you stayed in the apartment getting high with two of them, two animals-oh God, what did you do to her?
Silence. She finally lets go of my hand, and I have shrunken to the size of a foundling. It scares me to see what she is capable of knowing if she only wants to. That's exactly how it was when, suddenly, in the middle of a normal phone conversation two months ago, she said, "You're writing that story, aren't you?" I choked and tried to squirm my way out of it, and she asked, "Why that of all things? Don't you have any other stories?" And I said I simply had to, and she asked, "Now?" And I said, "Yes," and I wanted to scream. How can you not understand that it's my last chance, while you're still with me a little. I won't be able to do it later. But all I could say, with a kind of embarrassing squeak, was "Please, Nili, just don't tell me not to." Melanie, making a salad behind me, stopped and didn't move; she understood from my voice what the conversation was about. Nili was quiet, then she took such a deep breath that she seemed to be inhaling me through the line, and said, "But afterward come to Israel and read it to me, as a farewell gift."
Now, with a voice that is quiet but tight, she admits, "It's good that you said it."
"Really?"
"When you started with that list, I was afraid you wouldn't say it."
I shrug my shoulders weakly. "Well, now I've said it."
"Thank you."
We both sit quietly and I think about Melanie. I touch her, refuel, and come back. Then suddenly, unrelated to anything, I think, That's enough. How long can you keep towing that childhood around? How long can you be enslaved to it? You have to move on, have to start somehow letting it go.
Nili says dryly, "And those two peas in a pod, your sisters in the story-you don't need them anymore."
"So you have nothing to worry about," she reassures Leora, who calls again at some impossible hour of the morning. "I'm not falling in love with him, and he's not exactly falling in love with me either; it's not at all about that, but I may help him love himself a little more." Leora doesn't answer, embarrassed for some reason; she swore to herself that she wouldn't phone again, and it's not clear to her how it happened that she did, or what is really happening to her, what has been unsettling her all these days that Nili has been there with him.
Nili forces herself to talk, to break the silence. "Maybe I need to try and influence him more, direct him a little, advise him maybe, I don't know. Maybe make him see that he needs to protect this gift God has given him. He should study yoga up there in the north, or find some dance or movement class-what do you think, Lilush?" She almost shouts, angry at herself for being frightened like a child because of Leora's ominous silence.
Leora finally comes around, lurching forward with a grimace of resentment. "You know, now that I think of it-why not? I mean, if you're going to create a human being, go all the way with it, play God all the way, don't even take Friday off."
"No, no," Nili says with utter seriousness and gravity, "I'm not creating him, he's the one who knows exactly what he needs all by himself. He's always driving at something. And look, even if he doesn't really know it now, even if he has to spend years making mistakes, and even if he forgets it all along the way, and forgets this week too-in the end he'll get to what he was supposed to be. You'll see."