Between the Lines

They entered as they always did. He went first, and at once sat down and spread both hands on the armrests of the chair, like a man sitting in a relative's living room. She came after him, and sat at the edge, and did not remove her coat.

I looked at this coat and thought a thought I did not speak aloud. The room is warm. A person keeps a coat on for only one of two reasons: either he does not mean to stay, or he carries his walls with him wherever he goes, for he does not lean on another person's walls.

I asked how the week had been.

He said: It was good. Except for Tuesday.

She said: It was fine.

And those two answers were given about the very same week, and I know nothing finer than this for opening a session.

I asked what had happened on Tuesday.

He said: I got annoyed about something in the house. I raised my voice, yes, but not at her. Just into the air. In our home there was always volume. Singing, laughing, arguing—everything at the same volume.

I said: Singing.

And here his face opened, the way a person's face opens when something opens for him. He said: Father would put on Kobi Peretz, "Balbeli Oto," at full volume, and everyone would come into the kitchen. In our house there was no accounting. We love and we don't keep count.

And when he said and not counting, I saw that he meant it in truth, and that he was proud of it, and rightly so. There are homes whose whole goodness rests on there being no scales in them. The shout and the kiss come from the same throat and with the same force, and since there is no counting, neither is held to account. And whoever grows up in such a home is confident all his days that the whole world knows how to read this script.

I said: And angry, and not counting.

He said: That too. But after half an hour it is over, and they eat.

I asked her: And in your home.

She said: In mine there was quiet.

And I did not add that there is a quiet one does not ask about the first time. Instead I asked something else, and from the side: When he raises his voice on Tuesday, where are you.

She said: I am in the living room.

I said: And where are you, truly.

And she sat. And then she took her hand out of her coat pocket, and said: I have a coin.

And he turned his head toward her as one who hears a third voice in the room.

She said: From childhood. I always worried I would have a coin within reach. That if Mother started, I would have something to press.

I said: To press.

She said: Hard. So it would hurt in my palm.

And I was silent, for this is among the places where the questioner spoils things.

And she continued on her own, the way a person continues who has held something for years and has now been permitted to speak. Mother was ill, she said, and they did not know then what to call it, and when it came—it came. And I would hold the coin, and when she grabbed me I would press it until it went into my flesh.

And here I set down my pen, and I do not know if they noticed.

For I sat and thought: A little girl who has in the world neither strength nor a door nor anyone who will come, and no power to stop what is coming upon her—and she does not close her eyes and does not leave her body the way one leaves from there. Instead she acts. In a time of peace, in the morning, she prepares a small instrument for herself and puts it in her pocket, and waits. And when the hour arrives she takes hold of it. And no one in the world knows that within that hour, in a closed palm, a small and ordering institution of faith is taking place: this pain is mine, and I chose it, and it tells me there is something else in the world. Pain heals nothing and does not come to heal. It comes to tell her there is another voice in the room besides that voice.

And many come to me and tell how they ran away. And she did not run away—she organized. And I do not know where children learn such a thing, and it seems to me they do not learn it at all, but that there are souls born from engineering.

I said to her: And you still hold it to this day.

And she showed it to me. A small and worn coin, with which one buys nothing, and it is no longer possible to read what is engraved on it. And I thought: All its wear comes from much use, and so what held her for so long is precisely what lost its inscription. And so it is with most of the things that saved us.

I said to him: You know what happens to her when you raise your voice.

He said: She shuts down. I know. I tell her a million times it is not about her.

I said: And what does she hear.

He said: That it is not about her.

I said: She hears a loud voice in the room. And the explanation you give afterward—she receives it in her head. Her head agrees with you completely. Only her hand has already gone on its way before you spoke.

And he turned to her and said: But you know that I love you.

And she said: I know.

And I said to her: Show me what your hand does when he raises his voice.

And she looked at her hand as one looks at a ring, and opened it, and in it remained those two red lines that have no name.

And here was the moment. And I do not count many of the moments I count, and this one I count.

For I saw him seeing the hand. Before that he knew in his mind that she had a past, and every person has a past, and that knowledge is worth nothing. And now he saw skin and flesh and two red lines made there, in this room, in real time, and not twenty years ago. And all those days he had believed he was shouting into the air, and here was revealed to him where the air falls.

And a thought rose in me that I would never tell him: that a man whose entire childhood home was volume has in the world no other way to show he is alive. For him the shout is a sign that he is at home. Had I told him to stop shouting, I would have taken from him the only language he has to say here I am, and that language his father took from his father, and I do not know where it came from in the first place. And I do not take languages from human beings. I seek to add one word to them.

And therefore I said to him thus, and I said to him gently:

I am not asking you to stop shouting. I know you will not stop, and perhaps there is no need. But when you are angry at her—look at her hand. Find it. And if it is closed, and you will know it is closed because the coin is there—ask her one thing: that you hold it together, both of you.

And he was silent.

I said: Place your hand on her hand, around the coin, and continue saying what you have to say. Do not soften your voice. Do not ask forgiveness in the middle. Only that two hands be there on that small thing.

And he asked: And what does that give.

And I said: All her days she has held it alone. And all her days, every time a weight rises in the room, she returns to that place where there is no one but her. And if you place your hand there, something will happen that has never happened to her—the anger will remain in the room, and she will not remain alone with it. And that, and not the reconciliation afterward, is what we call intimacy: not that the two agree, but that both hold the same pain from the same side.

And she turned to him and took out the coin and placed it in his hand for a moment. And said nothing.

And he turned it and looked at it as one who seeks to see what is written on it, and nothing was written, and he said: It's small.

And she said: It's what I had.

And I do not end here, for this session does not end a thing.

For Tuesday will come again, and he will not remember. Such is the way of men like these, and I do not come to him with accusation—a man whose entire childhood passed in volume does not hear himself begin. He hears himself only when he has already finished.

And when he left, he told me at the door that he writes everything down for himself on the phone and that he forgets nothing. And I, who had seen this man search for his glasses while they were on his head, told him very well. There are things one does not answer, for there are people who remember four thousand digits of pi, and one woman's hand sitting across from them for thirty years—not so much.

And yet.

What happened today in this room—she will not forget. And that is all that was done here today, and it is enough.

For this woman saw, for the first time in her life, another hand offered upon her hand in a place no man had touched. And even if it does not return for months; even if Tuesday passes and another Tuesday passes and he shouts and cannot find her hand—this does not undo what was burned in.

For that girl knew there was such a thing as love in the world, yet had never seen it in all her days. And today she saw. And it became evidence, and evidence cannot be erased from her.

And the coin is no longer hers alone.