Husband and Wife

by Zeruya Shalev

  Udi, what happened, I fall on him, crouching down beside him, how are your eyes, can you see anything? And he groans, my eyes are okay, but I can’t breathe, I feel nauseous, and I ask, why did you go out, why didn’t you wait for me in the room, I brought you a lemon, and he wheezes, I couldn’t stay there, I had to get out, there wasn’t any air. I look round at a loss, the sun is already burning my back, there seems to have been a coup last night in which summer seized power, and I say to him, let’s go back to the hotel, I’ll bring you water and something to eat, and he straightens up, leaning on me tall and heavy, but he refuses to move, and I plead with him, Udi, you have to drink something, it will help you, and he mumbles, but it’s forbidden for me to go back to the hotel with you, and it’s forbidden for me to eat or drink, and I say, yes, yes, as if to a small child, and then I take it in, what did you say? Who forbade you? And he continues in the same submissive tone, completely different from the aggressive tone of this morning, when I was waiting for you I remembered a story from the book of Kings about the man of God who came out of Judah to Beth-el and God forbade him to eat bread or drink water there or to return by the same way that he came. And what’s that got to do with you, I ask impatiently, and he says, I feel that it relates to me, I’m not allowed to eat or drink here, I have to leave this place before somebody succeeds in making me sin like they did that prophet, you know what happened to him in the end? A lion slew him, and his carcass came not unto the sepulchre of his fathers. He sends me a frightened, crazy look, and I try to repulse the sticky arms of fear, maybe he’s really not right in the head, maybe the doctors were correct, I should have let them put him in the psychiatric ward, how could I have been so foolish as to think that I could handle his mind.

  Help me to the car, he groans, I’ll wait for you there until you finish packing, I can’t stay here any longer, and I lead him to the car which is rapidly heating up, no doubt about it, summer has already seated its burning behind on its throne, and I help him to lie down on the backseat and return disconsolately to the hotel. Why do I have to pack, why do we have to leave, again everything is ruined beyond recognition, my chin sags in a new movement of resignation, how badly I want to stay, to drink coffee in the quiet lobby, or outside, on that bench, but it’s really quite clear, it should be quite clear, that the more I want to stay the more he’ll want to leave. Maybe I’ll refuse this time, I’ll tell him that I’m staying till tomorrow as planned, let’s see what he’ll do then, he isn’t really me, after all, so how can he affect my life like this, but I immediately remember that he’s ill, I have no choice but to give in to him, perhaps he’s ill precisely so that I will give in to him, but that would be hard to prove, and I go into the room, from minute to minute I grow more reluctant to leave, I haven’t even had a chance to sit on this armchair, or at the table opposite the window, and with growing regret I throw the clothes into the traveling bag, mixing his with mine. The closet is empty and now to the bathroom, toothbrushes and toothpaste and shaving gear, and here on the night table, face cream and deodorant and hairbrush, and on his side the reddish rectangle of his Bible, and I leaf through it resentfully, yellow grains of sand trickle from the pages, where the hell is that story that’s to blame for us leaving here, what did he say, the man of God who came out of Judah to Beth-el, or the opposite, I was hardly listening, I have no idea where to look, I haven’t got a hope of finding it, the pages are tricking me on purpose, stinging my fingers, and in my rage I throw the book violently to the floor, as if it contains the roots of the madness that has taken over my life, quickly close the traveling bag, before I can change my mind, this will be his punishment, this book will stay here forever.

  Before I leave I scan the room again, to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, peek under the bed, between the towels, and again I see that red brick, the book he was given at the high school graduation ceremony, I remember him going up to the stage, and the principal shaking his hand, reluctant to let go of the outstanding student of his year, ceremoniously presenting him with the book, I lost mine years ago but he kept his, took it with him to the army, and then on all his tours, whipping it out of his pocket and reading it to his tourists, explaining and pointing, and already I want to pick it up in spite of everything, but the distance between us is unbridgeable, especially when I shut the door, frightened but gloating, what does he think, that he can hurt me without me hurting him back, and it seems to me that I can hear a piping cry behind me, as of an abandoned baby, but I’m not sorry, let him be sorry.

  Sure you didn’t forget anything, he asks, determined to be in control even from the depths of the backseat, and I answer aggressively, if you don’t trust me go and check for yourself, and he falls silent, his hollow cheeks flushed red with the heat, like two wilted roses, and I push the traveling bag into the back and sit down as usual in the passenger seat next to the driver, and only then I realize that there’s no other driver now but me, that I am supposed to drive down all that dizzying road on the steep mountainside myself, me with my fear of heights and depths. I look at him imploringly, willing him to pull himself together and rescue me, but he lies fainting on the backseat and the driver’s seat waits only for me, as in the nightmare that has haunted me for years, driving a car with most of its limbs amputated but it goes on traveling nevertheless, unable to stop, around me the cars roar like hungry lions, cutting into me on all sides, I have no choice but to go on, and I ask in a hoarse voice, is there another road, and he mumbles, there has to be another road, I’m forbidden to return the way we came, and I sigh, he no longer knows what he’s saying, and I look at the abyss beneath us, in the sharp clear daylight it looks less frightening but more cruel, waving its wide hips, telling us to give up in advance, to take the shortcut that will spare us the hardships of tomorrow and the next day, minute by minute its powers of seduction increase, like a woman who grows more confident as she feels her victims responding to her wiles.

  Nine

  Like an ancient lizard, a fossil from primeval times, an extinct species, he lies motionless in the dark bedroom, separated from the sun he loved by heavy blinds, his skin fading, his body covered with scales of dust, as if he is an exhibit in a museum that nobody comes to see, and only Noga looks in at him almost wordlessly when she returns from school, hungry and worried, to make sure that he is still there, lying on his back with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

  His long body is growing shorter, his shoulders are shrinking, day by day he seems to be reverting to the dimensions of his boyhood, and when I walk past him in the morning, wrapped in a towel, to get my clothes from the closet, I am as embarrassed as I was then, a tall, broad girl with that skinny little boy, because the smaller he gets the bigger I grow, both of us are returning to the dimensions of our early youth, as if everything that has happened to us since then is temporary, easy to deny, for suddenly I have discovered, after years of thinness, the delights of the refrigerator, compulsively filling my belly before going in to him when I come home from work, especially with buttered toast, like the stacks my father used to pile up for us on Saturday mornings, crooked, toppling towers of thin slices of toast with lumps of butter melting between them, and Noga watches in astonishment as they fly out of the toaster like burning slaps, how can you eat toast when it’s so hot, and I smile apologetically and send her out for ice cream bars, the sweeter the better, I am especially addicted to the ones with the chocolate inside, that take the longest to eat, and we sit opposite each other and lick them, like two little sisters whose parents are too busy to supervise their children’s diet. Once upon a time he would scold me, how can you eat that junk, taking the wrapper and reading me the ingredients in disgust, but now he is utterly indifferent to our acts, if we took poison he wouldn’t notice, and only my clothes protest, nothing fits me anymore, the jeans haven’t got a hope of closing, the new suit despairs of encasing my burgeoning body, and only a couple of hastily purchased, wide, shapeless summer dresses cover my sweating nakedness as I ent
er the shelter, and the girls look at me in surprise, at first they thought that I was pregnant, like them, and a new sisterhood grew up between us, until they realized that their pointed, arrowlike bellies were quite different from my slack, humiliated one, where nothing floated but lumps of lifeless food.

  And the new girls that come to us think that I was always like this, that this is how I really am, and only Hava and Anat sometimes say reprovingly, what’s happening to you, Na’ama, what are you doing to yourself, before they hurry off to take care of more urgent matters. Once in a while I catch Anat’s eyes resting on me with a compassionate, almost inviting look, but I avoid her, now it’s my turn to hurry off, so as not to hear her thoughts screaming at me, deafening my ears, I told you to leave him, you should have left him years ago, and what will become of you now, you see, when you build a house on hollow foundations it’s doomed to collapse, you thought that goodwill and guilt were enough to build a family on, and I protest in silent indignation, you won’t tell me what to do, you never even tried, what do you know about real life, but she isn’t the only one I avoid, I avoid friends with husbands and children too, how can I sit opposite them in cafes, and hear their complaints about their husbands who are always at work, when my life is disintegrating before my eyes, and I have no way of picking up the pieces and putting them together again, like the drops of mercury scattered throughout the house on my wedding day.

  When people ask me about him I keep my answers brief and stiff, trying to blur the facts as best I can, and to my relief nobody insists, nobody is really eager to hear about the suffering of his fellows. Some of them say, let time take its course, he’ll get over it in the end, and some say, the more you devote yourself to him the longer he’ll keep it up, you should try to be indifferent, so he’ll understand he has nothing to gain from this madness, while others take the opposite view, you have to support him, make him feel secure, he’s your husband, for better or worse, and I listen silently, changing my opinion from one day to the next, one minute to the next, I’ve tried so hard to please him, to surprise him with small gifts, to pamper him, to cook him special dishes, and the results have been so disappointing that I no longer have the strength to try. When I enter the room he rebukes me with a hostile, demanding look, the demands are undefined and cannot be satisfied, whatever I do only arouses his resentment. When I invite him to come and eat with us in the kitchen he refuses, and when we come and sit next to him he complains that we’re disturbing him, when I go to work he complains that I’m neglecting him, and if I take a day off and stay home with him he ignores me resentfully. Sometimes on my way home I hope against hope for a miracle, perhaps he will open the door bathed and scented, wearing clean clothes instead of the stinking rags he refuses to change, and he’ll embrace me and drag me to bed like he did once upon a time, quickly before Noga comes home, or just sit on the balcony with a book in his hand, and read his favorite bits out loud to me, nag me with all kinds of stories from the Bible, get in my way when I’m cooking, as long as he shows a spark of life, of interest, in me, in Noga, in the world around him, in all the things that used to fill his life.

  But he’s always in bed when I come home, and only a murky yellow film in the toilet bowl bears witness to the fact that he was there and didn’t flush the water, he refuses to flush because the noise hurts his ears, just as the sunlight hurts his eyes. He refuses to eat too, and only rarely he asks me to make him semolina with grated chocolate on top, the cereal he loved so much when he was a child, and his mother, who was afraid of spoiling him, agreed to make it for him only when he was really sick. No doubt about it, these are our meager moments of grace, when I bring a steaming bowl of cereal to his bed, and Noga joins in, and sometimes I do too, and we sit at his bedside and we all swallow in silence, and he sends us a sad, triumphant smile, like a sick little boy, exposing yellowing teeth.

  Sometimes I forget to ask him how he is, because it doesn’t make any difference anymore, whether it’s his hands he can’t move today, or his eyes that can hardly see, or his toes, or his neck that hurts, or his head, the same devastating incapacity seems to be floating through his body, like a cloud in the sky, settling first here, then there, and he too, who at the beginning enjoyed describing his aches and pains in detail, has already stopped attending to them, because what has taken over here is the general tone, the sum of all the details, I’m not well, he’s not well, Daddy isn’t well yet.

  But what’s wrong with him, Noga would persist in the beginning, after we came home defeated from our spring vacation, and I would say, it’s nothing serious, and she would nag, so why is he in bed if it’s nothing, is he well or not? And I would try to reassure her, he’s not really well and he’s not really ill, and she would reproach me, so why don’t you take him to see a doctor, why don’t you do something? And I would say apologetically, he won’t go back to the hospital, he doesn’t want to be examined, I can’t take him by force. Sometimes I reproached myself too, do something, don’t give in to him, and I would stand resolutely in the doorway, Udi, it can’t go on like this, you have to take more tests, to find out what’s happening to you, you’re becoming addicted to this illness, and he would look at me coldly, I’m not going to any psychiatric ward, if I bother you then you go, and I threaten weakly, I will go, if you don’t look after yourself I’ll really go, what do you think, that you’ll lie in bed all day and I’ll look after you like a nurse, and he immediately defends himself, I don’t need you to look after me, what do you do for me already, and I look at him helplessly, I’m not keen to take him back to the hospital either, but we have to find some solution, there has to be some cure for this collection of symptoms, and apprehensively I remember the depressing name of his disease, Conversion, as if I’ve suddenly remembered the name of the other woman.

  Even my mother who hardly ever interferes began to pester me, what’s happening to him, you have to do something, and one evening she turned up with her friend, a psychiatrist, we just dropped in for a minute, she announced in a meaningful voice, to see what’s new, and Udi immediately jumped out of bed and sat with us in the living room, full of smiles, and he made such an effort to prove that everything was fine that the doctor looked at me suspiciously, as if I were the sick one here, and at the door she whispered to me, he looks a little run-down, but I can’t see any problem, and I cheered up immediately, sinking into pleasant daydreams of his imminent recovery, but he was already back in bed, exhausted by the effort, and for a week he refused to speak or eat, though in the mornings I would find a cabinet open in the kitchen, a shrinking loaf of bread, seeking signs of his life as if trying to track down a mouse.

  Sometimes I ask him in the tone of a kindergarten teacher, so what did you do all day, and he defends himself aggressively, nothing, as if there is nothing on earth worth doing. Ever since his beloved Bible disappeared he refuses to open a book, and I who had regretted it the next day and phoned the hotel and begged them to look for the Bible and send it to me look in guilty remorse at his empty nightstand, how could anyone have stolen a shabby old Bible with sand trickling from its pages. I immediately bought him a new one, but he shoved it into the drawer without opening it, as if his beloved stories were to be found only in the old Bible, and he does the same with the other books I buy him from time to time, he doesn’t even open them, he just lies on his back with his eyes open, at night too, with the reading lamp on, heating up the air around him, like the little lights next to the sepulchres in the city of the dead, that only emphasize the darkness.

  Every night after putting Noga to bed I open up the living room sofa, cover it with a sheet and lie there like a guest, far from the bedroom that has turned into his sickroom, and there is a certain relief in the night sea of loneliness, to sleep alone, not to consider him, not to wait for the light to go off, just me by myself, in the living room sweltering even at night, the two parts of the sofa drawing my back crookedly into the dent between them, and it’s only at daybreak that I wake up in a panic, wha
t’s happened to my life, remembering him with a shock, as if I’ve read something that has shaken me in the newspaper, what does he do all day, what does he think about, what does he want, what is he planning to do, what can he do, but when I go into the room and see his gloomy face, smell his bad smell, I answer myself with his aggressiveness, nothing, he does nothing, he thinks nothing, he wants nothing, and then I remember myself with the same shocked dismay, what will become of me, of the rest of my life, I’m like a deserted wife who can’t get married again until her husband shows up, alive or dead, and I try to clarify what remains of my love for him which is almost as old as I am, what remains of all we did, learned, accumulated, all these years, and again that word echoes in my ears, nothing, nothing remains.

  Because every feeling is contradicted by another feeling which negates it, and so on and so forth until the love rots, like stagnant water, a stinking swamp swarming with mosquitoes, and the attraction which sometimes flickers like the glimmering of a delightful memory is repulsed by the aversion, when I see him lying on the sheets he refuses to let me change, and the pity and compassion are contradicted by the anger and resentment, how dare he ruin our lives, and even the question that troubled me so much at the beginning, what is the meaning of his illness, is there really something physically wrong with him or is he only pretending, even this suddenly makes no difference to me, for I am equally helpless before both, there’s nothing I can do anymore, nothing, only watch the summer advancing, gathering force and cruelty, digging yellow claws into my eyes, mottling my skin with sunspots that will never go away, boiling my blood until steam rises from me, unfamiliar vapors of envy and hatred.

  Because I envy almost everybody now, I wander round the supermarket like a sleepwalker, talking to myself between the shelves, and every woman who passes me seems luckier than me, this one fills her cart with beer cans, when the hot evening falls she will sit on the porch with her husband and drink the cold beer, like we did, summer after summer, sometimes slouching on the sofa to watch a disappointing movie on the television, there’s a great movie on tonight, he would tell me enthusiastically, but after half an hour he would fall asleep, and I would go on watching alone, faithful to the characters who were offering me their lives, and at the end of the movie he would wake up, smile at me apologetically, pour us more beer, stroke my bare thighs. I even dare to envy the girls in the shelter, those young girls, almost children, whose lives have been distorted like their bodies, with the little bump in the middle, menacing as a growth. Suddenly I grow a hard shell round my heart, and I look at them indifferently, it’s true that it’s hard for them now, but in a few weeks’ time their problem will be solved, the baby hiding in their bellies will be born, handed over to the adoptive parents who have been waiting for years, and everything will return to normal. It’s true that every baby they see in the street will make their hearts tremble, it’s true that even if they get married and have families, the lost baby will always accompany them, waking them up with its silence at night, sliding down giant chutes between heaven and earth, but in spite of everything they have a choice, their lives are still open, and mine is already closed.