Three

by D. A. Mishani

  The therapist tried in vain to reassure her. “There’s no chance he’ll give you up,” he said, and she heard: “There’s no chance he’ll also give you up.” But why shouldn’t he, if that’s what Ronen had done? At the end of the session, the therapist said, “Ronen has been a bad father to Eran in the past year. Very bad. But you sat here many times and told me that in the eight years prior to that he was a devoted father, and now he’s trying to be a good father again and it would be wonderful for Eran if that happens, don’t you agree? Parents have crises, too, and it’s possible that Ronen overcame his and you have to give him a chance to make amends, for Eran’s sake. We’ll be cautious, Orna. We won’t do anything that might hurt Eran. And don’t forget that you’re not alone in all this: I’m here.”

  But she was alone. Completely alone. Alone with Eran in the mornings, which were more frenzied because she went to bed late and woke up in a rush, already tired. Every time she stroked his thin back under the blanket and whispered, “Good morning, Erani,” she thought it might be one of the last times.

  Eran was excited, counting the days and hours, and she could see that the excitement was bringing out something good in him. He got up quickly, got dressed and organized as if they were leaving for the airport any minute to greet Ronen rather than going to school. He did his homework diligently, without jumping up every few seconds, as if Ronen’s eyes were watching him work. The notebook she’d given him turned into his preparation book for the visit, where every evening he wrote down how many days and hours were left until Dad came. She now spent all afternoon with him, as if their time were running out, and did her own work for the next day’s teaching in the evening, after he went to bed. But even then she couldn’t concentrate, and kept imagining Ronen and Ruth and her children in her own home, playing with Eran’s toys. That was bearable compared to the moments when she imagined them all on the moshav, playing outside with a water hose, swinging in a hammock, eating supper on the lawn, with Ronen playing the guitar for them. What chance did she have against all that? And how was she supposed to survive Eran’s time away without being driven mad by jealousy and anxiety?

  One evening, as she was exchanging text messages with Sophie, she caught sight of Gil’s last text message, the one she hadn’t answered, and she suddenly felt able to reply. She wrote:

  Your absurd explanations are unconvincing, Gil. If I was a different person I would have told your wife everything long ago, and maybe I still will. I hope your marriage crumbles like you want it to, and that you won’t have to lie to yourself and others any more.

  9

  The next time they met, it was in the morning.

  Gil said it was complicated for him to see her during work hours, but Orna wasn’t about to give up her evenings with Eran or tell anyone that she was meeting Gil again, and in order to go out in the evenings she would have had to get a babysitter or her mother, who would ask questions. So they arranged for Monday, her day off teaching. Half past ten. Two days before Erev Yom Kippur.

  Gil was waiting in the hotel lobby, and she was almost twenty minutes late but did not send him a message. He said he hadn’t booked a room because he wasn’t sure if she wanted him to, and when she said, “Then let’s see if they have one,” he went over and spoke to the receptionist in a low voice. They took the small lift up to the third floor without exchanging a word, and as soon as they got to the room he went into the bathroom. She sat down on a wooden chair at the desk and waited. He seemed awkward, unsure what to say, and finally asked, “So how are you?”

  She wasn’t planning to tell him anything about Ronen’s visit. She remembered a brief relationship she’d once had before Ronen, with a man almost fifteen years older than her. She had been a twenty-two-year-old student, working as a flight attendant in her free time, and the man, Yigal, was a senior service manager at the airline. He was single, with a hairy body that disgusted her, and bad breath.

  Gil said, “So would you like to explain why we’re meeting here? Have you decided to give me another chance or is this coming from somewhere else?” Orna replied, “A chance for what, exactly? I’ve decided to let you keep lying to your wife. For now.”

  They had sex without pretending that either of them wanted it or understood why. His erection was weak, barely enough to enter her, and he came quickly and outside of her, on the bed, because that was what she asked him to do. This time he didn’t shower, perhaps because he was afraid to leave Orna alone in the room with his phone, which was on the bedside table, just as she remembered, underneath his brown wallet. He got dressed before she did and said, “I don’t know exactly what you want from me, Orna, but I’d be happy to see you again.” She replied with a question: “So what are you going to tell your wife today?”

  He said nothing.

  When she asked, “You haven’t got divorced yet, have you?” Gil replied, “Not yet, but it’ll happen.” Orna laughed and said, “Not because of me, I hope.” All this reminded her so much of her meetings with that man Yigal, and of the sense of disgust she had in and on her body after they had been together. She felt that everything she’d believed was behind her was now coming back, as if nothing had changed.

  Then she said to Gil, “But I have to ask you something. The flat I was in that time, where you kept inviting me—it’s not really yours, is it?” Gil said it was. He’d rented it when he and Ruthi separated and had decided to keep it after he moved back home, knowing it was only going to be a temporary reconciliation.

  She thought he must be lying and that he would continue to lie because he could do nothing else, but now she had an advantage, she had power, and perhaps that is what propelled her towards Gil in those days when she felt so weak ahead of Ronen’s looming visit. She amused herself with the notion that she could blackmail him. Demand that he pay her a not-unreasonable sum of money, which he clearly had, in return for not telling his wife and daughters. If she asked for five thousand dollars, not fifty thousand, he would probably be tempted to give it to her because that wasn’t a sum worth risking your marriage for if you didn’t want it to fall apart. She might even do better: she could force Gil to pretend they were a couple when Ronen came. She could ask him to be at home with her when he visited, to play the role of her boyfriend, and then drive her to the moshav in his red Kia Sportage to pick up Eran.

  She only noticed the odd coincidence—that Gil’s wife was named Ruthi, just like Ronen’s German wife—on the way home from the hotel. The first Ruth, the German one, had destroyed Orna’s family when she’d met Ronen in Nepal, fallen in love with him, taken him away from Orna and started a new family with him. Orna would probably have to meet her soon, after having seen her only in pictures and twice on Skype when she’d quickly walked past Ronen on the screen. But for the second Ruth, Gil’s Ruth, it was Orna who was in the role of “destroyer.” That was completely different, though, because their marriage had apparently been over long ago, and she wasn’t planning to start a new family with Gil.

  He called her the evening after their meeting in the hotel, but she didn’t answer. He called again the next day. “I was glad to see you yesterday, Orna, even though I understand you’re still angry at me,” he said. In a tone she didn’t even know she possessed, she replied, “Gil, you and I shouldn’t pretend any more. Just get together and that’s it. Until we get sick of that and then we’ll stop. But you don’t have to call me, okay? Or be nice. You and I are beyond the courtship stage.”

  When Ronen arrived, as soon as Yom Kippur ended, Eran was waiting for him at the window.

  It was late, almost ten o’clock, but neither of them wanted to postpone the meeting. Ronen was driving his father’s pick-up truck, and Eran saw him get out and rushed to unlock the front door, but he stayed in the doorway rather than running downstairs. The light came on in the stairwell, and Orna got up from the desk, where she’d been sitting with two textbooks and her computer. She stood awkwardly behind Eran.
/>   Ronen hugged Eran and swung him up in the air. He was obviously keeping Orna at a safe or polite distance. They did not hug or kiss, and of course they did not shake hands. They stood some distance from one another, she with her hands in her pockets, he holding Eran’s little hand, as if they’d come home together from a long trip. He said, “It’s good to see you, Orna, you look great,” and she said, “Thanks.” He looked older than she remembered, his black hair a little more silver, and he also looked suddenly short—perhaps because not only was he half a metre or so shorter than her, but he was at least four inches shorter than Gil.

  Eran hadn’t let go of Ronen’s hand yet. He took him on a tour of the flat so he could see what had changed, even though almost nothing had, except little details that only Eran noticed. Ronen walked around the home he himself had bought with Orna twelve years ago—the home that no longer belonged to him, because she had bought him out with her mother’s help—and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time.

  Everything in this flat used to be his, and no longer was.

  At the blue Formica dining table in the kitchen he had drunk his coffee every morning for more than a decade. On the green couch in the living room he had sat every evening. In front of the old mirror in the bathroom they’d never renovated, he’d brushed his teeth twice a day. She, too, used to be his, and now she wasn’t. Only Eran was still his, just as he used to be, and that was clear. Eran was the only thing Ronen wanted to take from his old home to his new family and his new life. Orna offered Ronen coffee, and he said, “No, thanks. I don’t drink coffee any more. Just hot water.” She poured him some boiling water from the new filter system into a new mug, not one of the ones he used to drink out of, so he wouldn’t think she was trying to make him nostalgic. When she took his drink to Eran’s room, she found them sitting next to each other on Eran’s bed. Eran was showing him the drone his grandmother had given him for his birthday and some of the model cars from his classmates. She put the mug of hot water on the floor by Ronen’s feet and left to give them privacy, and also because it was too painful. While they stayed in Eran’s room, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  Sophie sent her a message: “Is he there yet?”

  She wrote back that he was.

  “Holding up? Want me to come over?”

  “Holding up for now. We’ll see how it goes later.”

  When they came out of the room, hand in hand again, Ronen suggested that he put Eran to bed, but Eran said he wasn’t tired yet. Ronen said, “Then can you wait for me in your room for a minute? I want to talk to Mum.” They sat down next to each other on the living-room couch, opposite the computer, rather than at the dining table the way they used to do when they had serious talks, like the one when he first told her about Ruth.

  “Something happened to me on my last trip, Orna. Something that I have no idea how to explain to you and that I never thought would happen, but it did.” That was what he’d said then.

  Now he said, “Thanks for agreeing to let me come so late. And in general thank you for letting me and Eran have all this. I really appreciate it, Orna. I’m not taking it for granted. I’ve been through a serious crisis in the past few months, and that’s why I disappeared. I wasn’t sure whether I’d done the right thing and if I was supposed to be where I was, and I thought I might come back, but I didn’t want to drive you crazy, you or Eran, and in the end everything worked out for us there. I’m happy now, and I want to be part of Ran-Ran’s life again, as much as possible.”

  She kept her cool. All the shouts had already been shouted, all the curses hurled, all the tears shed. It was all behind her. And Eran was standing at his bedroom door listening.

  Since the drive to the moshav took more than two hours, she thought Ronen would ask to sleep over, but he said, “I want to come tomorrow, too, maybe in the afternoon, if that works for you. And after that, if you’re willing, I’d like to drop by with Ruth and the kids so that Ran-Ran can meet them. If everything goes well, then I’d love to have him with us on the moshav when he’s on school holidays, like we talked about. Is that okay with you? The kids really want to meet him and I think it’ll be nice for him.”

  She said, “Let’s start with tomorrow and see how it goes, okay? You haven’t talked to him about the moshav yet, have you?” Ronen shook his head and said, “Of course not.”

  They sat silently for a while. Orna stared at Ronen’s legs, folded beneath him on the couch, and he searched for her eyes. Eran’s voice came from behind them: “Mum and Dad, can I come in?”

  10

  Ruth was tall and broad, with pale muscular legs and thick hands and feet. Blond. Not very pretty, but with an unignorable presence, something peasant-like, earthly, perhaps maternal, although mothers in Israel look different. Her pregnant belly was large and prominent. You could understand why Ronen was attracted to her, but perhaps less so why she was attracted to him, even though he was a few years younger than her. Orna couldn’t help briefly imagining Ruth walking around naked through the rooms of their house in Nepal. Eran was less interested in her than in any of the other guests. She came in last, after Ronen and the four children. Two of them were really young men, roughly fourteen and sixteen. Kurt and Thomas. There was a little boy, Peter, who was not four years old and clung to Ruth, and the girl Orna had seen on Skype, Julia, who now looked older, perhaps Eran’s age. She was a curious and vibrant girl who seemed less shy than the others. Eran followed her with his gaze when she burst into the living room and looked around as if searching for something she knew was there.

  Despite Orna’s natural inclination to be a friendly hostess, there was not going to be any small talk between these two women, and she did not ask Ruth to sit down or offer her a drink. Ronen did not either because it was no longer his home, and Ruth stood in the corner of the living room with little Peter clinging to her knee. She didn’t want to be there, that was plain to see. The older boys didn’t seem to either. When Ronen introduced Ruth to Eran she smiled, held out her hand and said, in English, “Hello, Eran, very nice to meet you,” but she did not try to interest him or talk to him any further; she certainly didn’t try to win him over. She only followed him with her eyes when he was still in the living room, as though she knew this was not the time to befriend him but was planning for the days to come, when she would be able to. Ronen took Eran and Julia to Eran’s room so that Eran could show her his toys, and then he called Ruth to join them. Ruth took little Peter with her, and maybe she did talk to Eran or play with him then, but Orna didn’t see it.

  Even though she had been prepared for the visit, Orna did not know how she was going to get through it now. Perhaps it really would have been better for them to have taken Eran from the start. They seemed awkward and cautious, apparently grasping the significance of the visit for her, and they hardly moved around, apart from Julia. But still, since there were five of them, or six with Ronen, and they whispered to each other in German, their presence in her home was aggressive and violent—more so than she had imagined in her most frightening moments. It filled the place, occupied it, turned the home into theirs and made Orna want to disappear. But she had nowhere to go. She didn’t want to retreat into her bedroom and shut herself in there, that would be too exposed and humiliating, so she called Eran to the living room so as not to go near his room, which had been expropriated. He finally came after she called a few times, and she told him she was going out for half an hour to get some groceries and that he should stay with Dad—with Dad and his family, she almost said. Eran nodded and seemed completely indifferent to her leaving, as though he couldn’t understand why she was even bothering to tell him. She updated Ronen, who asked if she was all right, and then she went out to the street, where she had nothing to do. She walked for a few moments and sat down on a bench.

  Even her mother could have offered some comfort, but she was on her package tour of Slovenia and Croatia, and like most people i
n their seventies she had refused to buy a roaming package on her phone and had informed Orna she would be reachable only in the evenings, assuming the hotel had free Wi-Fi. Orna had hinted to her mother that she wasn’t sure how she would get by when Ronen and his family came and took Eran to the moshav, but the tour was already paid for and couldn’t be cancelled, and anyway it wouldn’t have helped—on the contrary. She turned her phone on and off. A group of girls who from afar looked like her pupils walked down the street shrieking and disappeared into a building. She imagined Kurt and Thomas opening the fridge to look for something to eat, but she knew that wouldn’t happen. They were too polite, and Ruth wouldn’t allow them to do that, even if they wanted to. A few minutes later Ronen called, said he felt bad about her leaving and asked if they could take Eran to sightsee in Tel Aviv with them and have dinner. She had him put Eran on the phone and asked if he wanted to go. Eran said yes, but he wanted her to come too. She said she couldn’t. Did he still want to go? Eran thought for a moment and then said yes. Ronen asked if she’d taken her keys and whether he should lock the door, and he promised they’d be gone in five minutes. She asked how they were getting there and he said he’d brought the van so that everyone could fit in. If it was okay with her, they’d bring Eran home at nine or ten, or whenever she said.

  When she got back they were gone, and even though they hadn’t left a mess she felt as if they were still there. Half-full glasses of water were in the sink, and on the living-room couch there was a red rubber ball of Eran’s, and the walls spoke their German, and she had no space to move among them or air to breathe. She wanted to call Ronen and ask who Eran was sitting next to in the car. They’d probably put him between the pretty girl and Ruth. She had a few hours to kill, so she called Gil and asked him to come over. “Are you sure?” he said, “Isn’t Eran there?” She replied, “Come now, he’ll be out till nine. He’s coming home at nine.”