Husband and Wife

by Zeruya Shalev

  Why, I ask, why there of all places? And he groans, because they can’t find anything wrong, don’t you understand, all the tests are fine but my legs aren’t fine, and I remember the square blank back, the hasty steps, I won’t let them have him, I’ll take him out of here, his personality is unique, complex, I haven’t succeeded in deciphering it in a lifetime, so how will they succeed in a single day, I have to get him out of here before they destroy him. How are your hands, I ask, and he moves his fingers slowly, a little better, he says, and I fill with happy confidence, then your legs will come right too, you’ll see, the important thing is that they didn’t find anything serious, all you need is rest, we’ll pamper you at home and in a few days it will be all right. Suddenly everything is clear to me, a bright light illuminates the threatening laboratories with their test tubes full of blood and germs trapped in cultures, the X-ray tubes whirling in the CT tunnels, suddenly a knot has been untied, if the body’s healthy I can handle the mind.

  Why don’t I take you out for a while, with the bed, it’s such a lovely day, I suggest brightly, and he hesitates, I don’t know, the light bothers me, and at that moment the nurse comes into the room, with a number of stern-faced white gowns in her wake, and she says to me, please leave the room, and I protest, I want to understand what’s going on here, why doesn’t anyone explain it to me, he’s my husband, I’m his wife, I add to emphasize the banal words which fall from my mouth to the floor, cheeping feebly at the doctors’ feet like baby birds, unable to rise, but the doctors gather round his bed, ignoring me, and only the youngest, who came in last, says to me, wait outside, after the visit someone will talk to you.

  I get up tensely and retreat to the door, why did I bring him here, it’s not for him, I have to rescue him, and already I’m imagining how I’ll smuggle him out of here, wheel him secretly to the car, separate him from the disease, push it out of our lives, and then the phone rings in the depths of my bag and I hear Anat’s voice, where are you, she complains, we need you here, Galya gave birth the day before yesterday, and she won’t stop crying, you have to come and talk to her, and I say, I can’t come, Udi’s in the hospital, I let Hava know yesterday, but Anat is clearly not impressed, you can leave him for half an hour, nothing will happen, you have to talk to her or it will end badly, and at that moment I see them emerging from the room, a crowded delegation, impermeable as a secret sect, and I run after them, tug at the gown of the one bringing up the rear, tell me what’s the matter with him, and he mutters reluctantly, we’re not sure yet, it looks like conversive paralysis. What paralysis, I ask, and he says, conversive, when the body converts mental stress into a physical problem, a conversive reaction, and he looks round apprehensively as if he’s just disclosed a closely guarded secret, and hurries off to join the delegation, leaving me with the new word. So that’s what she’s called, his new woman, conversion, I taste the letters, dark smells rise from it, the smell of torture dungeons in the distant past, the screams of terrified converts, forced to change their religion, to accept the creed of a foreign faith, but what does it mean exactly, and how long will it last, and how does it go away, I think I once learned about this phenomenon, but I scarcely remember, and all the time I can hear Anat’s voice throbbing in my hand, gagged by my fist, Na’ama, she cries, you have to come, everything we invested in her is going down the drain, and I turn off the phone and push it back into my bag, closing the clasp on poor fifteen-year-old Galya with her gigantic belly, and hurry into the room.

  What did they say, I ask, maybe he knows more than I do, but he seems less interested than I am in the diagnosis, they hardly spoke, they ran through all the results of the tests and examined my legs again. I managed to move them a bit, he adds proudly, look, and indeed I can see a feeble movement in his feet, like a breeze blowing between his toes, and I ask, so what happens now, what are they waiting for, and he whispers, they want to see if there’s any improvement in the next few hours, and if there isn’t they’re transferring me to the psychiatric department, and I hold his hand, Udi you have to make an effort, concentrate, you have to, and he says, I know, I’m trying, and at last I feel that we’re together, that we have a common goal, we’re fighting side by side, not in opposite camps.

  Do you want to go outside for a bit, I ask again, and he shakes his head, no, I want to rest, you go down if you like, and I ask, should I bring you a paper, and he says, no, not a newspaper, have you got a book with you? And I say, no, nothing, and then I remember, yesterday I put your Bible in your bag, and his face lights up at the sight of the shabby book that accompanies him on all his trips, once Noga yelled at him, why do you take it with you and not me, and she threw it on the floor and trampled on it, and I think of her anxiously, she hasn’t eaten a thing, you know, I could hardly make her drink chocolate milk this morning, but he’s already turning the pages, she’ll be all right, one day’s fast won’t hurt her, and his face relaxes as he immerses himself in the ancient stories. I’m going down for a minute to have a cup of coffee, I say quickly and leave the room, but I don’t go to the cafeteria, I go to the car parked in the shadow of the mountains. He won’t know that I paid a hasty visit to the shelter, even though he’s the one that disappears for days on end, he still allows himself to relate to my work with hostility, as if it’s at our expense, as if I’m more committed to the miserable, lonely women with the secret swelling inside their bellies than I am to him.

  From the outside it looks like any other house, our shelter, nobody could guess how different it is, and I go in quickly, Anat comes out of one of the rooms to meet me, as always with jeans and a white shirt on her lean body, cropped gray hair round a clean face, which always looks as if it has just been washed in soap and cold water, everything about her is straight and spare, not like my wastefulness, with my long hair that takes up so much space, and full lips, and round face, and she says, it’s great you came, and she doesn’t ask about Udi, and I hold back from telling her, because we’re no longer friends. Whenever I see her this fact takes me by surprise again, the fact that our friendship is over, it ended one morning, a few months ago, when I came to work with my eyes red from crying, after a quarrel with Udi, and I drew her aside and started to tell her in the usual frantic gabble, he said and I said, he insulted me and I was insulted, she suddenly interrupted me with her clean voice, Na’ama, I really don’t want to hear any more, and I protested indignantly, what do you mean, why?

  Because it’s pointless, she said, you complain about him all the time but you don’t do anything, you let him control your life, you’re incapable of confronting him and you’re incapable of leaving him, maybe you’re not sick of it yet but I am, and for weeks I went about stunned and hurt, with no one to confide in about it, and in the end I told Udi, of all people, and he said, why are you so upset, she’s just jealous because you’ve got a family and she’s alone, and he couldn’t hide his satisfaction. But I knew that he was wrong, and I knew that she was right, and I went on conducting a dialogue with her in my head, her side so familiar to me already that I could say the words in her place, sometimes it was easier for me to formulate her arguments than my own, and that’s what was left of our friendship, not a little, in fact, and ever since we’ve only been colleagues, and like a divorced couple making an effort for the sake of the children, we make an effort for the sake of the girls in the shelter, and I try to hide my hurt, and only sometimes, at the first moment of the day, it seems to me that I’ve been stabbed in my sleep.

  How’s Galya, I ask, and she says, not good, she refuses to give up the baby, denies everything we agreed on, and I hurry upstairs to her room, she looks so lost without her mountainous belly, as if she has been robbed of half her body, her eyes shine with a red light and when she sees me she begins to cry again, sobbing into my outspread arms, I’m not giving my baby to anyone, she’s mine, I’ve already picked a name for her, if anybody wants to adopt her they can adopt me too, and I hug her, if only that were possible, I whisper, but you know it isn�
��t, the question is if you can raise her by yourself. Like one more contraction in her labor the convulsive sobbing grips her, I can’t give her up and I can’t raise her, she cries, and I stroke her hair, we’ve talked about it a lot, Galya, you know that it’s your decision, you have to think about what’s best for the baby, and she screams, I forgot everything we talked about after I saw her face, they shouldn’t have let me see her, and I look at her face spotted with the first pimples of adolescence, she’s a child, barely fifteen, a child who fell into a trap, and I say, you still have time to make up your mind, you’re still exhausted from the birth, rest for a while and perhaps things will become clearer, and I glance at my watch, she may have time but I don’t. I have to run, Galya, my husband’s in the hospital, we’ll talk tomorrow, I whisper and kiss her on the forehead, and I hurry out of the room, almost colliding with the director, Hava, who’s standing at the door, as if she’s been eavesdropping on our conversation, but her authoritative, official face immediately banishes all suspicion. Na’ama, she says in surprise, I didn’t think you would make it today, how’s your husband? And I say, he’s still in the hospital, I have to get back to him, and she releases me with a faintly resentful air, my colleagues always treat family demands with disdain. Will you come to work tomorrow, she asks, and I reply, I don’t know yet, it depends on his condition, but when I leave the shelter I am accompanied by the suspicion that this time she actually hoped that I wouldn’t come tomorrow, that she prefers to put pressure on Galya without my knowledge, to get her to sign the waiver forms without my mediation.

  Luckily for me he’s asleep, I’m as flushed as if I’ve come back from meeting a lover, it seems that over the course of the years I have resigned myself resentfully to his feeling that anything unconnected to him is a betrayal, for years I’ve been coming home from work with something approaching guilt, and now I’ve been wondering all the way here whether I should tell him that I paid a flying visit to the shelter or perhaps that I fell asleep in the cafeteria, which would insult him less, but when I penetrate his tent I see him sleeping with the red Bible covering his face, more flushed than me, as if they’ve cut off his head and replaced it with a fat book, and I heave a sigh of relief and turn round to leave the room, this time making in truth for the cafeteria, only to be stopped in my tracks by a weak, solemn voice from the opposite bed. He walked, he walked, the old man proclaims, as if announcing a miracle, take up your bed and walk, your sins are forgiven, and I ask, who walked, and he says, your husband, he took three steps, with the walker, and indeed, next to his bed the walker stands like a faithful dog waiting for his master, and I ask, when was this, and the old man recounts with the pride of a sole eyewitness, they brought some important professor from another department to talk to him, and then they tried with the walker and it worked, three steps, he repeats in excitement, and now the book sways and slips down sideways, and Udi sits up in bed, with a panic-stricken expression in his eyes.

  Everything’s going to be okay, I announce, but Udi rejects the good news, they don’t believe me that I can hardly move, he complains, they think I’m pretending, and I stroke his arm, don’t take any notice of them, Udi, as long as they let you go, the main thing is that I believe you, but in me too the old doubt arises, glancing mockingly at the wheelchair and the walker, a small doubt to be sure, mostly hidden, like a rat in the depths of the kitchen cabinet, never seen, but the certain knowledge of its presence there is so oppressive, it grows so great that in the end it seems that the house no longer belongs to you, but to the rat.

  Six

  And already the hospital is behind our backs, getting smaller and smaller as we climb the hill, full of anxious glee, like children running away from school, breathless with the exhilaration of the moment, but knowing that it will end badly. Udi is sitting next to me, holding in stiff fingers his discharge letter, we waited for it for hours, this letter, while they conferred in whispers behind our backs, suddenly disappearing and reappearing, without a decision, and I put on a show of confidence, let him go home, I know what’s good for him, and he stared blankly, his wishes unclear, apparently unwilling to stay in the hospital but not eager to go home either, searching with lowered eyes for some other alternative, but I could see the way they looked at him, I had no doubt that if they didn’t let him go today they would transfer him to the psychiatric department, because they didn’t believe him, attacking him with insulting questions, chasing him out of their department, which was meant for really sick people, decent people who had earned their attention honestly, and not for someone who had misled them and abused their trust. The perfect test results had exposed the deception, and now he was sentenced to wander in the ambivalent gray area between the sick and the healthy, belonging neither here nor there, and I can see it all in his embarrassed face, he himself is ashamed of his disgraced body, his cheating legs, of this miserable return home, almost as surprising as the departure from it only the day before.

  His eyes are frightened, like little Noga’s eyes when we brought her home, I sat on the backseat, holding her on my lap, and Udi drove in silence, the back of his neck tight, we were like a broken vase then, fragments longing to be stuck together, and perhaps precisely now it will happen, perhaps now we will be reunited in the bosom of his illness, and I stroke his hand, Udigi, don’t worry, the main thing is that we’re out of there, you’ll rest for a few days and it will all come right, but he fingers the letter discharging him from the hospital, ashamed, like a child bringing a bad report home from school, I don’t know, he says, as long as I don’t know what it was I can’t be sure that it won’t come back, I feel unprotected, I don’t know how you get cured from something like this at all, but I still cling to the comforting illusion that as long as it’s in the mind I can handle it. Don’t exaggerate, it happens to everybody in one way or another, the main thing is that it’s over, the main thing is that we’re home, I announce in relief as I get out of the car, bending down so that he can put his arms around my neck and stand up, he walks so slowly, like an old man at the end of his strength, leaning on me with his feeble limbs, burying his face in the sidewalk, ashamed of being seen in his disgrace, the hero who was carried proudly away on a stretcher, fighting a mysterious disease, returning home in disgrace, thrown out of the hospital.

  It seems to me that I can see a curtain parting and the downstairs neighbors’ daughter peeping out of the window for a moment, the bells in her hair accompanying our labored steps, and we pause to rest between the stairs, his legs almost folding under him, his joints creaking discordantly, and then our front door opens, there’s a blue balloon hanging on it, and Noga comes out, an orange balloon in her hands, we’ve surprised her in the middle of her preparations for a festive welcome home, and in her surprise she lets go of the balloon and it blows away in the wind, getting smaller and smaller until it’s the size of a little orange, caught up in the branches of the Persian lilac next to the building, miraculously transforming it into a proud orange tree. Noga looks from us to the balloon, her sorrow at its loss mingling with her joy at seeing us, until she chooses joy and says, Daddy, you’re better, and then she examines him and adds, you’re better, aren’t you? Otherwise they wouldn’t have let you go, trying unsuccessfully to convince herself as his face turns green in front of her and his matchstick legs collapse on the threshold.

  With four hands we drag him to his bed, Udi heavy in spite of his thinness, as if his bitterness fills his body and doubles its weight, and Noga sprawls out beside him, so pale that she’s almost transparent. Have you eaten anything, I ask, and she says, not yet, I wanted to make sure Daddy was well first, and I say, so come and eat now, you can’t go on like this, he’s all right now, but she looks at him doubtfully and says, not yet, and then she begins to sob, I ate an apple at school, she wails, I forgot I wasn’t allowed to and I ate an apple at recess, and that’s why Daddy didn’t get well.

  I’m sick of your nonsense already, I burst out, when will you understand that there’s
no connection between your stomach and his legs, you can starve yourself to death and it won’t make any difference, and I slam the door shut on both of them and go to the kitchen, luckily there are still a few pieces of schnitzel in the freezer left over from our previous life, and I fry them, and start collecting vegetables for a salad, I’m so tense that I begin to talk to myself, where are the tomatoes, I ask aloud, I saw them a second ago, I look in the fridge and then discover them waiting on the counter, a little wrinkled, surrounding the single aging cucumber, and soon the bowl is full, and I open a bottle of wine, perhaps with its help we’ll convince ourselves that the evil has passed, and I put everything on the outsize tray we received as a wedding gift, and like a waitress new on the job I stumble to the bedroom, where they are lying in a gloomy silence, and set the tray down on the bed, encouraging them to eat, pouring wine. To life, I urge, to us, and Noga raises an empty glass, for Daddy to be healthy, she insists, as if she’s blown out the candles on a cake and it’s time to make a wish, and then she adds humbly, knowing that she’s asked for too much, for all of us to be.

  All of us together in one room, on one bed, as if outside the room a war is raging and we’re in hiding, the plates and blankets overlap, and I eat quickly, as usual, to finish before somebody wants something from me, drinking more and more wine, and a moment before I stretch out on the edge of the bed and fall asleep I see the schnitzel on her plate getting bigger and bigger, whole and untouched, its shape reminiscent of some distant land, almost empty of inhabitants, a conquered, suffering land, and it seems to me as if I’m walking barefoot on the giant, blazing schnitzel, for days and days without seeing a living soul, until I meet a red-robed monk, and he whispers to me with parched lips, escape from here, run for your life, anyone who’s caught here is forced to convert, and I ask, where am I, what country is this, and he says, it’s called Conversion, haven’t you ever heard of it?