Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) by Mois Benarroch Page B

shirt, and no one will see us. We will be invisible to the other humans, another two characters that came out of a book. I want to talk with him on the phone more, but it’s very expensive. He’s calling me from a cell phone from another country, but from the same city, Mynonbeing, the same large city everywhere in the world. I’d like to talk to you more, he calls me from the train. The line cuts out, he disappears, I send him a message. Overwhelmed by shyness I wait for our meeting in the hotel cafe. What hotel? Every hotel in the world, and in Mynonbeing. An entryway, a lobby, an exit, rooms, a restaurant downstairs, a bellboy, the receptionist in a bad mood and the Jew coming to the city. That’s him, and I’m the Jewish woman of the city. The small Jewish community that moves the world and the economies as if it were something genetic, moving from city to city and in the city from one place to another and moving everything that is sold and bought, transferring ideas, hoping everything gets worse.
    It’s Friday and I’m preparing the Shabbat meal, the bread. I knead the bread and think about his bread and the bread we make together all the time through our chat conversations. Suddenly both of us have to get up to see how the bread is coming along. It rose well this time, and this time again. You see, everything has its logic. I write and minutes and hours pass, but I don’t quite know whether I want them to pass by or to stretch out infinitely. I want to taste every minute of waiting, every second of knowing he’s going to come today, every step, every action, every movement of my body, every time my eyes look into nothing. He doesn’t respond to my message but he calls me again to tell me he’s trying, that he can’t send messages although he did receive mine. He’s in the train restaurant and he’s smoking a cigar, the last one in the box I sent him months ago. That’s what he tells me, and that it has a special flavor. My husband calls me and wants to eat something for breakfast. As I walk to the kitchen, I feel the lips of my sex rubbing together like they’ve never done before, thirsty and hungry to talk, just like the lips on my mouth that want to ask him many things. I would make a list of questions, but I already know the answers. I just want to see his face when I ask him about his lovers, about the last time we saw each other at school before my parents left Benxauen, the city where we were both born, the city where we attended the same school. I like the word attend. I want to see his eyes, blue or green, I want to see them responding, talking about me.  At this very moment he’s thinking about me, about making love to me, but then he withdraws his thoughts. He knows there will be no sex between us, so he prefers not to think about it. He thinks about taking my hand, he thinks about my smile, about my face when he first sees it. He thinks about my lips, and he feels them, he feels them kissing him non-stop, over and over again, rubbing together and filling the void in our lives, in our encounters. Mois thinks it’s on Fridays like this one when the most important things always happen to him. On Fridays like today he always made the decisions that changed his life. Why on Friday and not other days? We don’t have an answer; the last day of the week, the last day before resting.
    I prepare the pants and the shirt. These two pieces of clothing will be connected to him from today on and I will no longer be able to wear them without thinking of him. This is the clothing of sin. In Hebrew the words ‘clothing’ and ‘cheat’ come from the same root. Mois told me and I immediately thought about my need to be nude, to be naked all the time, to get rid of the things that cheat and trick us. Clothing always lies. Of course it’s been years since I walked around my house naked. With two children who are getting older things are more difficult, but I remember the first years when my husband would