"But what? What is he supposed to be? A yogi? A guru? Hare Krishna?"
"No. I think he's looking somewhere completely different. Somewhere even deeper than that."
"You-" Leora shakes her head and is suddenly flooded, to her complete surprise, with a burning sense of jealousy toward this fool-
ish boy and his scandalously good luck. "You seem to be forgetting again that we're talking about a boy. He's fifteen!" (Nili, with her last remaining strength, manages to restrain herself from mumbling "and a half.") "And you attribute so much to him, and load him with tons of, of"-and for a minute Leora sees a picture of a hesitant, slender, hunched young man, and someone using a thick pipe to pour the entire content of Victoria Falls down his throat-"now, you listen to me and try to answer me honestly: don't you think you're making a little too much of him with all these-forgive me for saying this- but these inscrutable interpretations?"
There is a long pause. Leora repeats her question, now in a slightly feeble, almost trembling voice.
"No," Nili says eventually. For the millionth time, but somehow always the first time, she clearly grasps the huge effort she has to invest to keep Leora from ever penetrating her. "It's not at all something I can be wrong about," she says softly, cleanly, giving up any argumentativeness. "It's something that either I know completely, all the way, or I have no sense about at all. You know, that's how it is with me when I'm inseminated"-or at least, when I used to be, she silently rephrases-"and that's how it is when I'm in love, and then it's immediate, on the spot, bingo!"
A pause, then silence. Leora, at home, raises two well-plucked arches over her eyes, slender and ironic, and ticks silently like a tact-bomb.
"Okay, okay," Nili accedes, "so I've made some mistakes here and there-who hasn't?"
I haven't, Leora thinks sourly, and a horrible headache suddenly erupts on the edges of her skull and advances quickly, and a lump in her throat starts darting up and down like a little devil stomping his feet furiously. Me! I haven't!
"But I'm not making a mistake with him. And I'll tell you something else"-her eyes shine and her chest swells, and Leora knows how beautiful she is in her feverish state, in her sudden change of seasons, when all her emotions are portrayed on her face, her honesty,
simple and innocent-"and you can laugh all you want, but I feel as if I had to go thtough all these twenty years of hard labor, and not a second less, so that I'd be completely prepared when he arrived."
She slowly turns her heavy head to face me. Her eyes are bloodshot, but her face is soft. I recall her response-three years ago? four? — when I first told her I was writing. "What do you want to be a writer for now, at your age?" she had asked innocently. "When you get old, like Agnon or Bialik, then you can write!" I had practically wailed, because of the vast distance, unbridgeable, lost. Because of the hunger of orphans. Now I tell her, with a relief uncommon in these lands, about the feeling I had during the last weeks of writing. "It was as if someone were grabbing me hard by my neck and taking off with me. Honestly, like they were actually forcing me to leap out of my skin and take off. "
Her eyes glimmer. "That's happiness, isn't it?"
"Yes," I admit. "It's the best."
For a minute she fills with light, you can really feel her spirit awakening and moving freely, illuminated within the impervious tissue of her flesh. I too open up inside, all my particles start to spin, and we get closer and pull back and are drawn into each other, and we can't look into one another's eyes, and my throat is gripped with the familiar burning pain, which once, in one of the Tourist stories, I called "the cry of a disillusioned infant."
"Rotem," she murmurs, "Rotem, Rotem." Motionless, we both are gathered and drawn to the same exact place, and I close my eyes, and we are briefly together, within a huge embrace that is the embrace of-insane as it may sound-Mother.
The mother we never had.
"And that friend of yours?" she asks as soon as they meet, willing to get slapped but absolutely needing to find him someone close, at least one person in the world with whom he can abate his loneliness a little.
His shoulders arch up instantly. His eyes grow dark, peering out at her from a cave. But this time, to her surprise, he answers, "He's not at boarding school anymore. He left."
"Why?"
"Why?" Again that smirk spreads over his face, revealing a foreign object, sharp and injuring, which is pinned inside him. " 'Cause they said I was no good for him. That I was doing him harm. That's why."
"What were you-?" It flashes through her: the speck of saliva that fell from him and dropped on her face. The way he leaped to wipe it off. "But why?"
"How should I know? Ask them."
"I'm asking you."
"I don't know. His parents came, took him away. That kind of stuff. He was also a little crazy."
"Also? What else was he?"
"No. " He laughs, embarrassed. "I meant I am too. Aren't I?"
"No, you're not. God forbid. You shouldn't have those kinds of thoughts. But where is he now?"
"I don't know. Maybe France. They didn't say. He has a sister in France, and some aunt in Canada. Maybe there. Maybe he's even here. What difference does it make?"
"Don't you have an address for him, a phone number, anything?"
He seems engrossed in his long fingers.
"And he didn't write to you, didn't leave any sign?"
"I. " Then he falls silent. Breathes rapidly. His lips turn pale. "They probably told him we weren't allowed to be in touch. I don't know, I think so." He shrugs his left shoulder in a round, gloomy way.
She suddenly feels a tremendous weight. She leans back against the door and looks at him, and he is imploring her to understand, to relieve him of the need to tell. With great effort, she makes her way through everything that's spinning around inside her and asks a question, already knowing the answer: "So tell me, when did it happen? When did he leave? When did they take him?"
"I don't know. A year ago maybe." He surreptitiously threads his arms together behind his back and sees her look, and puts them back in front submissively. She sees his unraveled flesh through the watch and the scar. Then he says softly, "Seven months. Plus a few days. Twenty maybe. Twenty-two."
Nili stands motionless. Dying to sit down. Collapsing under his pain, his insult, his longings. After a prolonged silence, she asks, "And what is his name?" Because she suddenly has a reckless, mad thought-Nili the savior, the all-powerful-that she'll find his friend for him. She'll investigate and detect and use all her connections, enlist all the freaks she's met during her travels, and she'll locate him, and respin the thread between them. She can already see how her broken mailbox becomes the secret nest for their encounter and their relationship.
But he hesitates. His eyes roll down.
Nili looks at him imploringly. "Well? Don't tell me his name is a secret too!"
"No, not a secret."
"Then?"
"Kobi."
She laughs. "He's also Kobi? Two Kobis?"
"No, he's Kobi."
"And you?" Now the laughter hangs emptily on her face.
"I'm not."
"Why. How can that be?"
"I'm Tzachi."
This is too much for her. She sits down on the floor. A strange nausea burns her throat, a roux of emotions undigested and regurgitated into her throat by a stubborn diaphragm. How could he be Tzachi? That name doesn't suit him at all. She remembers how he told her his name the first time. Remembers a second of hesitation.
Amazed at how, in the blink of an eye, he had decided to lie; she no longer understands anything, and doesn't wish to, and thinks how easily she is conned-what the hell is it about her that makes people take her for a fool? She curses the twisted crevices in which she is always betrayed, and remembers with some torn and final train of thought how he had impelled her to call him Kobi. The vague trembling around his eyes when she had said the name. "Listen, um …" She refuses to force the false name through her lips. "Maybe at least you'll tell me about him now?"