But my mother’s cousin had paid a visit and looked at my finger disapprovingly.
“Your husband doesn’t mind?” she asked, in a voice so shrill it was almost a whistle.
“Why should he?” I said. “I don’t think so. He never said anything.”
“It’s a sign of respect, that’s all. But if he doesn’t mind, then that’s fine, and anyway it’s none of my business,” she said, with the air of someone who never truly believes that anything is none of her business.
That same week I toured the jewelry makers of Ben Yehuda. There was a designer who made rings in beaten, crumpled gold; I walked in, got sized, picked up the ring two weeks later. The saleswoman congratulated me; I didn’t bother to correct her. It was as though, without having ever consciously thought of leaving, I had finally decided to stay.
30.
If the year seemed to pass more quickly after the war, it was because Simon and I were no longer strangers to the country. The days went faster because they were more familiar. School, work, home: life.
Raquel’s divorce date had finally arrived, and she dressed up for it: white stockings and loafers and a beige A-line skirt embellished with buttons and a big, new, floppy straw hat, an Easter hat, as if she was dressed for a festival or funeral. She didn’t seem nervous. She seemed giddy. We were early, and stopped at a cafe. The large glass windows made the shop a stage for the sidewalk. Customers grouped around small tables, framed like a Hopper painting. Despite the windows, it was dark inside, and the space was too large and full of echoes. As we ordered, a Chasidic man walked in.
“I can’t believe it. He’s here. With his lawyer.” Raquel whispered, and grabbed my wrist.
I was watching for our coffee, and hadn’t been paying attention—besides, in a way, men like that were invisible.
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Here,” she hissed more fiercely, and as I wheeled she said, “For God’s sake, don’t turn around.”
They were right behind us. Two of them: the lawyer, a pretty, dark-haired, powdered woman, large and forceful though also flouncy, and lurking behind her like an awkward teenager a large, bearish man, red-faced, in a long coat and shtreimel. Now it was hard not to stare at him through his reflection in the glass. His eyes kept darting between us, but his head was down, so that it seemed like he was looking at us despite himself, and like his eyes could not bear staying on either of us for very long. He had plump cheeks behind his thick beard and seemed the kind of overgrown boy the yeshivas specialized in manufacturing, man-children, their tsitsis flying behind them, their manner a hot mix of shyness and clumsy ardor. His peyos were long and curled; Raquel had told me her oldest son wanted to have his peyos permed. I’d never thought of it, how they achieved those vain, perfect curls. Of course.
“Raquel,” the woman exclaimed, as if she was a friend and not an enemy. “How are you? You look so cute! I love your hat!”
“Don’t,” Raquel muttered under her breath. “Don’t tell me I’m cute in front of him.”
Her almost-ex-husband shuffled his feet. There was something unnerving about the way his eyes darted back and forth, down, a kind of scattered, vicious quality to his attention. He didn’t speak, but his breathing was heavy. He seemed like a large animal caught in a trap, inarticulate, suffering, and still dangerous. When they had sex, she said, she cried. Every time.
Though it was morning, in the room it felt like dusk. The cafe tables and chairs were rickety and placed just far enough away from one another for the place to seem bare and empty. The coffee tasted a little bitter, like chicory, and I put one and then two spoonfuls of sugar in my cup. “They’re still here,” Raquel hissed. My back was to the counter, but I could feel their eyes.
“We’ll see you inside,” the lawyer called out, jolly, as if we were to meet for cocktails rather than at the divorce proceedings. As they opened the door the noise of the street came rushing in.
On the street Raquel said, “He was trying to figure out who you are and why you’re here. It threw him a little bit. That’s good, I think.” The court was decrepit, a squat building begrimed by the dust and pollution of downtown Jerusalem. I had just dropped off my son at the YMCA and it seemed strange: walk to the daycare, walk to the divorce court, back before lunch. The security guard was cute and wore a nose ring. He smiled at us as he rifled through our bags. Raquel seemed a little giddy. “Did you see him look at me?” she said. “He’s adorable.” It was as if after all of these years of marriage and confinement, with her legs swathed in tights and her hair tightly covered, she wanted to stretch again, to bask in attention, and become visible. She wanted to take off her layers and walk in the sun, as if she was coming out of a long winter.
As we waited for the elevator, she said, “Your job is to keep me off the second floor. I cannot see the mediators today—my only reason to be here is the get. He’s going to try to get me renegotiating, but you can’t let me do it.” As the doors slid shut she said, “No second floor. No more negotiating. This ends today.” She gripped my wrist, too hard.
On the third floor, the divorce floor, there was no real waiting room, just a couple of benches cushioned in a cheap green laminate. The carpet was a nubby coarse weave of nondescript colours, beige and black and a pinkish brown like dried blood, and it was coming up a bit at the edges. The walls were scuffed and yellowing, and only some of the neon lights in the ceiling worked. The doors were painted baby blue with panels in dark blue fake suede, lending a false touch of regality to the shabby bureaucratic space.
Her legal aid lawyer met us there. He was sloppy and seemed already defeated; he spoke with a vague fatalism that boded ill, as if he had long ago given up on making any kind of intervention. Her husband needed to supervise the inscription of the writ of divorce, he said. Of his own free will. That happened first. Then Raquel would go into the courtroom. She needed to physically accept the document from him. And then she would be pronounced “permitted to all men.”
She nodded, and I winced at the phrase.
I looked for the table. I had been told that there was a table where the women abandoned their hats after they left the divorce court. Fedoras, wide brimmed hats, headscarves, severe black turbans, even wigs sometimes, left limp and inanimate as if the women had been scalped. They took off their hats and they walked into the street and felt the sun and wind in their hair. Perhaps for the first time in ten years, twenty, thirty, forty years, their heads breathed in the open air. That feeling of lightness. But I couldn’t spot the table, and there wouldn’t have been place for it. The narrow hallways were windowless and airless, and aside from their benches, unfurnished.
The halls were full of women and men waiting for their divorces. Some were secular and some were religious, and some joked and others sat silently, and rabbis wandered the narrow halls with file folders and jars of ink. This was the mandated divorce court: there was no other way to sever that relationship in Israel, no marriage or divorce for Jews except through the Rabbinic court. I had read that the word “Get” came from “agate,” because of the repellent properties of the stone; after the document was handed to the no-longer wife, the rabbis tore it in two as if to rend the relationship.
We were standing on either side of the doorway and Raquel moved across as her husband walked through, on his way to supervise the scribe’s inscription.
She said to me, “Did you know? Men aren’t allowed to walk between two women or two pigs.”
She said, “I’m afraid. He isn’t going to do it. I can feel it.”
His lawyer had told him if he didn’t give her the get, this time he would go to jail. There was no way to force a man to give a get but there were loopholes, ways to pressure him. Shunning, fines, wage garnishment. Prison. Underground methods, too: beatings, threats. In the past, rabbis had forced unwilling husbands to spend the night in the graveyard as a warning of what might happen to them if they didn’
t come around. You had to be sane to grant a divorce, so women married to men who were considered mentally ill had no way out. Raquel had been in a support group for agunot, other women denied their freedom: one of the women was married to a man who was both abusive and insane. She called her husband crazy, but a diagnosis was the worst thing that could happen to her; it was tricky, because she needed him mentally unstable enough to deny him custody of their children, but well enough to let her go.
Raquel had a spy, a rabbi from her community who sat with the judges. He had called her the night before.
“Your husband is the devil incarnate,” he said. “He told me, ‘I’m going to make her wait for her divorce until she’s fifty or sixty and then I’ll throw her in the garbage.’”
Her friend had followed the husband into the scribe’s room, as judge and supervisor. As he passed us he’d glanced at Raquel.
“It’s taking too long,” Raquel said. “Something’s not right.”
After about twenty minutes, her husband stormed out. The rabbi followed him, talking to him rapidly, but Samson shook him off and vanished down a hallway.
The rabbi came back, shaking his head.
“What’s going on?” Raquel said, and he replied, “He’s playing with us—it’s not going to happen today. We need the lawyer.”
He pulled his cellphone out of the pocket of his long black coat and called her.
“We’re lucky,” he said as he hung up. “She’s down the street. She’s going to try to intercept him.”
Ten minutes later Samson reappeared, his lawyer beside him. She wasn’t touching him—that wasn’t allowed. But it was just like she had dragged an unwilling child back by the arm. The door swung open to the court, and I glimpsed a tribunal of men in black hats and black coats before it swung back shut.
I waited and watched a Sephardic couple on the opposite bench. They were both handsome and perhaps in their fifties, and they joked around with the witnesses that they had brought. She sat beside him and checked his file like a dutiful spouse. Their friend, the witness, looked at the stained carpet, the flickering neon lights, and said, “Oh, so this is where you get divorced—how pleasant. What a lovely place to spend a sunny morning.”
The husband saw me watching them and said, “After 29 years of marriage we’re getting divorced. Maybe,” he said, looking at his elegant wife, “we should hold out until the summer to make it to thirty years. We could have a party.” He laughed loudly, and she echoed his laugh. They were dressed alike, in crisp white shirts and dark slacks. They resembled each other. They had three children—all grown now—and grandchildren. Their lives had intertwined like tree roots.
He leaned towards me and said, more seriously, “I am giving it to her because I respect her, it’s her choice—we are still friends,” and she nodded, her knees tightly pressed together on the bench, her hands firmly clasped on her lap.
The hall was so narrow we were almost knee to knee. Beside me, a woman sat alone. Her back was straight and her hands were shaking. She looked at me and said, “This too shall pass.”
This was a place of endings and beginnings. The only room I had ever been in that had felt similarly fraught and transitional was the delivery ward.
Something was going on behind the blue door. It opened and closed and opened again, like a mouth that was uncertain about whether or not to speak, and then it finally swung open all the way. A rabbi poked out his head and called me in. The witness had not shown up and they said I needed to come in. They asked for my passport, but I didn’t have it. They spoke among themselves quickly, and then accepted my driver’s license. I stood before the tribunal, feeling exposed and sweaty and bare.
The rabbi said, “Do you know this man and his wife?”
“Yes,” I said.
Behind me, Samson, loud and angry, said, “She doesn’t know me.”
“I know his wife,” I said.
I realized I didn’t know her married name, didn’t know the Hebrew name she had taken on, didn’t know anything about her anymore. If they had been interested in credible witnesses they would have kicked me off the stand, but they were interested only in closing the case.
“What is the name of the husband,” the rabbi said.
“Samson,” I said.
Behind me he was muttering loudly. At one point he half stood, and his lawyer put out a hand to restrain him. The threat of her touch was enough to make him sit back down.
The rabbi turned to the tribunal.
“Samson,” he said, “listen how she says it. They say Samson in America.” He turned back to me. “His name is Shimshon.” They chuckled together at the unlikeliness of it. Samson, who brought a temple down on his head rather than surrender.
“And the wife, what is her name?”
“Raquel,” I said.
They said, “Also, Rachel,” and I said, “Yes, sometimes.”
They said, “Also Rochelle,” and I didn’t say anything, having never known her by that name. They wrote it down.
“And what is the name of her father?”
I couldn’t remember. I reached back and nothing came to me. Finally, tentatively, I said “Joseph?” and behind me I heard expostulations of disgust.
“No,” I corrected myself, “Joseph is her brother, not her father.”
They didn’t care. They told me to sign my name and sent me out. Then Raquel and I had to wait. The Sephardic wife was still sitting outside, in her bright white shirt and burnished face. Her husband had gone to
supervise the writing of the get, and her expression had changed. She leaned towards me and said, “He told you we’re friends? We’re not friends. I feel like a cancer has been cut out of me.” She stared into my eyes intently and said, “Today is like the day of your birth.”
“I’m not—” I started, but then I stopped myself. There was no need to tell her.
Then she leaned back on the bench and said, “He’s not a bad man, but nobody else exists for him. You have to treat each other with only respect, not put each other down in front of other people.” She shut her lips tightly, and I realized he had returned. “All done!” he said cheerfully. He tried to sit beside her and she hissed and feinted, and changed benches so she could not see him.
“I pray to God,” she whispered to me, “but after this I believe only in civil marriage.”
They called Raquel back in. It felt like they were in the room much too long. I could hear someone shouting and the door swung open again for a moment. I saw Raquel’s face, angry and despairing. Samson’s lawyer came out and sat heavily onto the bench, her face flushed.
She said to me, “How do you think she’s doing?”
I said, “Well, she looks pretty angry to me.”
She said, “But why? She’s getting what she wants. He is too, but she’s doing alright. I’m not going to go home feeling like I screwed her over tonight.”
The door swung open again, and I could hear Raquel, angry and atonal, saying loudly, “I have not had relations with anybody else.”
It closed again, and about five minutes later she re-emerged.
“It’s done,” she said.
Samson’s lawyer leaned toward Raquel and said, “I tell you, I’ve never had a client as difficult as this one,” and Raquel said, “Tell me about it.”
I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but Raquel and Jenna were somehow alike. They made reckless decisions, they lied to people they loved, they thought last, they led from the heart. They had made a church of impulsiveness and an altar out of need. They led big and colourful lives, crashed dramatically and learned no lessons. Still, they were braver than I was.
31.
I hadn’t seen Jenna for a couple of weeks, and when Yumiko called me to tell me about the accident, I imagined disaster. But Jenna was alright, Yumiko said: scared, but alright. She had been nursing her
baby in the front seat. Noor was sandwiched between Jenna’s lap and the steering wheel as the truck in front of her suddenly stopped. Jenna’s car folded right into the back of the truck, steel crumpling like tissue as the airbags inflated around her. She claimed the doctor said that holding the baby in her lap had protected the child from whiplash. I had a hard time imagining a doctor who would say that, though a lot that Jenna said challenged my imagination. And they were both somehow almost unhurt.
Jenna showed up at the daycare the next day with scratches on her collarbone and on her face, her neck in a grey foam brace.
“Aden hates taking the kids,” she explained. “Anyways, he thinks it’s important that I get back in the car right away, you know, like getting back on a bike. But I was shaking, a little,” she admitted.
She was driving a rental car; the next week Aden bought her a new one.
“This one has TVs right in the back seats, so they each have their own screen,” she explained. “It’s much better.”
We had been spending less time together, I wasn’t sure why. We had decided to get together one last time, because I’d soon be leaving. Jenna picked me up in her new car. It was one of those bullying black SUVs, raised off the ground by tires that claimed the road so that it seemed when you drove you were floating over all of the little tin cans beside you. The car was a shinier, blacker, larger version of her last car, totally impractical for the donkey roads of Jerusalem. We drove with the windows closed, because she liked the new car smell.
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