After navigating a venerable and intricate bureaucracy—securing an admissions ticket, a towel ticket, a ticket for a massage, this key available from that clerk, that key from this clerk—he was eventually permitted to execute a shallow dive into the most beautiful swimming pool he had ever had the privilege of enjoying. For a few moments, he kicked lazily, gazing up at the glass vault of the ceiling, then settled down to business with a strong and serviceable freestyle. He had large hands that plowed deep furrows in the thermal-heated water. His kick was smooth and had a lot of muscle behind it. But the wound in his shoulder, though healed twenty years ago, gave his left arm stroke a hitch as it came up out of the water. The wound in his leg, where bits of shrapnel still lurked and made periodic, painful journeys to the surface, caused his right leg to be slightly weaker than the left. Yet even without lane markers, he kept to a straight line, and when he reached the wall his flip turns were crisp and wakeless.Compensating for his injuries enough to swim true and turn cleanly required intense concentration, and at the end of his sixty laps Amitai was shaking with exhaustion and had not thought of Natalie, of the balsam smell of her hair, the salt taste of her tongue, for a full forty minutes.
