"Not now, maybe later." But he's alert to what is occurring within her, to her hurt face as it falls, and he gets up irritably and walks to the door. Just don't let him leave now, I can't be alone. He must sense her thoughts, because he stops and turns to the grunting air-conditioning unit and stands there playing with its buttons. Off and on. "I pissed you off."
"Well, do you think I like being-" Then she grumbles, "Why didn't you tell me at first?! Why did you have to cheat me like that?"
He half turns to her. "Should I tell you how we used to talk?"
"Go on." She wants to and yet doesn't. She already knows his tricks. The quick slalom moves of a liar as he pulls a rabbit out of his hat in mid-conversation, relying on her infantile curiosity.
"With questions. You're only allowed to use questions."
She relaxes her shoulders. What does he want from me now? Why can't he be direct? She can't be bothered with his riddles.
"Right from the start it was that way," he tells her, his excitement rising. "That's what we decided. Actually no, first it was his idea, he always has ideas, that one"-a yearned-for smile lights up the corners of his eyes-"and as soon as he saw me there in the yard? As soon as I first got there? And he was already there two years, he's older than me, I was ten when I came, and he right away started talking to me like that, with questions." His voice rose and became thin, and Nili also thought he was starting to talk in a different kind of dialect, from another place. "And I straightaway answered right, 'cause I read him in two seconds. Till I came along they thought he was crazy, and they none of them would answer him, just kept beating him up. But me, as soon as I got off the bus and he saw me, he came right over to me. Well, it doesn't matter." It does matter, she knows, hearing the exposed note of pride, and a large warm bubble bursts and drips down inside her. "I was only ten years old, and since then it was like that all the time, in our room too, and in class. And say when he was having one of his fits? He would fall down, he has that disease where you keep falling, and as soon as he'd come back? Again the same thing, a question from him, a question from me …" His eyes gleam, he runs his hand through his short hair, and Nili senses the tenderness of the touch, and with her seer's eyes she sees an image of a boy taller than him, thin and supple and restless, with a sharp face and a tortured, tense look, moving like a cheetah pacing around in its cage. "So that's how it was, always only with questions all the time. Questions, nothing else is allowed." He breathes rapidly and gives her a sad smile. "For maybe five years, we never tripped up."
"But how long can you talk like that? What can you say?" she asks, beginning to emerge from her tears, large and bright and yellow, with her innocent Weeble smile.
He suddenly gets excited. "Wanna try it?"
"Do you think I can?"
"Haven't you noticed you're already doing it?"
"Me?"
She smiles with cracked lips and looks at me, and her look says, Oh my, you're such an inventor. Then she says, "You really have a whole world in there." She gestures at my head with her bald eyebrows. Only then does she let out a deep sigh, and my first thought is that somehow by chance my story did touch her, kissing some dormant memory. I become alarmed, not wanting her to suffer from it too much.
"Look, I mean, we don't really know what motivated him, and sometimes you can die just from sudden abundance, like the survivors from the camps." I explain to her (as if I need to): "There were survivors who gorged themselves to death after years of starvation. Or at least you can want to die." Like me, for example, I think. Like me, during my first period with Melanie, and even today, sometimes, at moments of mortal excitement, I really want to die, because how can you bear all this unfounded goodness, this scandal of goodness-
There is a heavy silence soaked with words, absolutely dripping with them. I sit there exposed, urgently needing to be grounded somehow. To one particular body.
Then she sighs again, a long, horrible sigh. She lies on her back, broken in two right in front of me, and I suddenly realize it's not oniy the sorrow, the grief, and the guilt-it's also that she has missed him all these years, simply missed a person who touched her life in a place no one else ever had.
Three days after she came home from the Dead Sea, he disappeared. He ran away from the boarding school on Monday evening through a hole in the fence, and that was it. They never saw him again. And now it comes back to me as in a nightmare, how she cried then, for weeks. She talked to herself, cried out in her sleep, slammed her head against the wall, on the table, on doors, dozens of times, impervious as a piston, and she sprayed out words like shavings. Then suddenly Leora and Dovik showed up, their debut appearance in Rishon, to figure out what had happened, and while they were there they held a field court-martial for her in the kitchen, for all her crimes, no statute of limitations. I hung around downstairs outside the building until I couldn't take it anymore, and then I burst inside and screamed at them to leave her alone and get the hell out of our house and our lives. Go back to civilization. And they really did, with an imposing air of offense like two righteous cardinals, and Nili sat fatigued in a corner of the kitchen and looked at me with boundless gratitude. She had no strength to speak, but I'll never forget that look.
Then came the journey, her private journey to search for him all over the country, hitchhiking. It was long after the official search was over. They had searched for him for three or four days, police and army and volunteers. Then they gave up, added him to the missing-person statistics-how much effort can you invest in a kid from that kind of boarding school, a kid who isn't worth anything? At that point she finally woke up out of her shock and decided that everyone was wrong, because they didn't know him, and that he hadn't fallen into a pit or jumped off a cliff, he hadn't been kidnapped and he hadn't drowned. He had gone underground, she determined with a crazed kind of self-persuasion, and her eyes glistened with wonder at his resourcefulness. "He's hiding behind a different identity," she explained, as if she had free access to his center of consciousness. "That kid has an immense talent for camouflage and acting. He just disappeared himself, and when he feels like coming back, he will." And with a secretive Moneypenny look in her eyes, she determined that if he happened to see her anywhere, he would come to her. To her, he would come.
Then she surpassed herself by coming up with the brilliant idea that I should go with her to look for him. Me-with her-for him. Of course, I laughed in her face and turned my back on her, and when she realized there was no chance, she begged me to at least help her pack, because I was always a champion packer (no one can outdo me at stuffing an infinite number of things into a tiny space). I was so psychotic that I went and packed her a bunch of scarves. I pulled out all her dozens of scarves and shawls from the closet and stuffed them into a tattered backpack, not even a single pair of underwear or a bra or a dress, or toiletries. I fastened the backpack and shoved it at her: "Now go." When she came back a week later, in the middle of the night, I woke up immediately. I could smell her on the stairs, the whole space was flooded, she'd never had such a scent, an almost inhuman smell, the smell of an animal grasping that this time it has really made the mistake of its life. She didn't have the strength to even make it to the bath or to bed. She collapsed on the orange couch and slept for twenty hours straight. Every so often she would mumble something in her sleep about how they had tossed her from one place to another, laughed at her, treated her like a madwoman. Over the next few days she didn't talk, as if she were dried up. All the juice had run out of her. She even became practical and tried to throw herself into home-improvement projects. She cleaned out years' worth of dirt, tidied closets, clothes, kitchen utensils. If I could have allowed myself to feel anything then, if it weren't so beyond my capabilities, I might have felt sorry for her, because even I could see how much she was suffering through her exercises in acquired motherhood. But we stopped talking completely. There were no words for her story with him, and later not for all the rest either, and then I left. I couldn't go on living within the mourning for her catastrophe-it had nothing to do with me, and I wanted nothing to do with it.