“It’s a lucky thing,” Rivlin teased his sister-in-law good-naturedly, “that you people have an occasional wedding in this country. Otherwise we’d never see you at all. . . .”
Ofra acknowledged the justice of his reproach. And since he knew she was too tactful to mention Ofer’s wedding festivities of six years ago, to which she and Yo’el had dedicated a month of their lives, he took the liberty of telling her about his former in-law’s sudden death. Unlike Hagit, she took in stride his desire to revisit the original site of Ofer’s botched marriage. She remembered it vividly and listened attentively to his descriptions of the new swimming pool, the refurbished garden, the bereaved ex-daughter-in-law, and her tall second husband with the ponytail.
He was tempted to relate his conversation with Galya. It might serve, he mused, as a trial balloon to gauge Hagit’s probable reaction. But Ofra had already shut her eyes and was enjoying, between Zichron Ya’akov and Atlit, one final nap, as though on the last leg of her flight. He glanced at her slender sixty-year-old form. The years were embalming her as an eternal adolescent. He really should get up the courage someday, Rivlin thought as the lights of Haifa came into view, to ask Yo’el about their married life. Perhaps there were a few useful lessons in it for him.
29.
THE APARTMENT HAD even more sparkle now than in the morning. Brightly lit and adorned with flowers, it awaited the arrival of the guest who, having followed via floor plans and telephoned reports the tortuous drama of its construction, was now seeing it for the first time.
The two sisters threw their arms around each other. Happy tears mingled with sad ones. Rivlin deposited the cheese fritters on the food-laden table and went to bring Ofra’s suitcases to his top-floor study, which had been further transformed in his absence. The big desk had been pushed to one side, the table lamp was replaced by a reading light, and a third pillow now graced the royal bed. Beside it lay folded a new woolen blanket from which the price tag had yet to be removed.
He proceeded to the bedroom, turning off two or three unnecessary lights on the way while grumbling about the lengths to which his wife was prepared to go in order to appease the critical eyes of visitors, even her own sister’s. Without taking off his shoes he lay down on the bed, careful not to rumple the covers before his sister-in-law’s tour of inspection was over.
He thought with a smile of Akri. At this very moment his skull-capped colleague was bending cautiously over Tedeschi’s rotting feet to confirm the dark prognosis of the translator of Jahaliya poetry. He let his thoughts wander. Across them fell the shadow of the bereaved hotel.
What bizarre inner devil had driven him, in his quest for sympathy, to invent a fatal disease? Would this succeed in extracting his ex-daughter-in-law’s secret? Yet perhaps she herself had no comprehension of what she had done.
One way or another, he would have to warn her to say nothing.
Gently and reasonably.
Had she believed him? Or had she thought he was hallucinating?
But hallucinations are an illness too.
Take the asthmatic Tedeschi in his oxygen mask. Or Samaher and her grandmother with the narghile.
Hagit would hit the ceiling.
How could he have sunk so low?
A trap. That was what it was. And his wife wanted them to wait patiently until their son-in-exile found someone else, even though the five years that had gone by had led to nothing. Ofer was at the end of his rope. He was nearly thirty-three. What good was patience? It wasn’t time that freed you from traps. It was truth. And he would fight for it. Cunningly and untiringly.
He mustn’t give up. Never mind the eternal judge below, whose ringing laughter was now calling him to come down and join them for supper.
“Don’t you first want to show your sister the bedroom and the Jacuzzi?” he called down from above.
“Soon. There’s no hurry. Let’s have a bite first.”
She was in a good mood, wide awake from her long nap and her sister’s arrival. Rivlin turned on his side to reflect on an ancient and unrealized ambition that thirty-five years of marriage had not quelled. He still hoped one day to persuade his wife to share a bubble bath with him.
It was midnight when they remembered him and went to look for him.
“So you conked out, eh?” laughed Hagit. “My poor darling . . . and with your shoes on, yet. You didn’t even shower.”
He opened his eyes, feeling their radiant sisterly warmth.
“How do you like the apartment?” he asked his sister-in-law of the brightly jet-lagged cheeks.
“It’s much nicer than I imagined from the floor plans.”
“Well, I paid for it with my mental faculties,” he said, not for the first time. “I’ve lost my power of concentration. While Hagit was having a fine time with her criminals in court, I was jousting over every brick, faucet, and electric socket with a crooked Jewish contractor and his wily Arab workmen.”
“At least it ended well,” Ofra said comfortingly.
“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Hagit added. “Go to sleep. You ran yourself ragged today with all your needless expeditions. And last night,” she told her sister with satisfaction, “we went to an Arab wedding in the Galilee and came home late.”
“An Arab wedding?” marveled Ofra. “How come?”
He tried picturing Samaher’s wedding. It seemed to have taken place, not a day, but a year ago.
PART II
Jephthah’s Daughter
AND YET IF there had been advance signs, as Galya claimed, how had he and Hagit failed to notice them? Had they been so subtly concealed? Or had Ofer and Galya, too, not wanted to see them?
And what made a sign a sign? His meeting with Galya in the hotel garden had been so hurried and emotional that he had had no chance to ask. The time she had refused to wake up, for example: was that a sign? Now, thinking about it, he was inclined to believe it was.
A few weeks before the separation, Rivlin took part in a day’s conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Bored by the lectures, all rehashes of familiar material, he’d decided to skip the concluding session and visit his son and daughter-in-law. Galya answered the telephone. “We’d love to see you,” she told him. “Let’s have an early supper.” “Make it a light one,” he cautioned, not because he wasn’t hungry but because he didn’t wish to inconvenience her.
Yet when he arrived, Galya was in the bedroom, asleep or pretending to be. A glum-looking Ofer gave him an absent-minded hug. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes, the living room was untidy, and there was no sign on the table of even the lightest supper. “I’m really not hungry,” he reassured his son, who seemed upset by something. “I just wanted to say hello. A glass of tea will be fine. Although maybe,” he added quietly, “we should wait for Galya to wake up. After all, she knew I was coming.”
But Galya did not wake up. They sat in the living room over tea and cake, listening to the sounds that came intermittently from the bedroom. Ofer made no attempt to investigate them and responded curtly to his father’s attempts at conversation, as if keeping him at arm’s length. “It’s certainly an odd time of day to sleep,” Rivlin remarked after a while, with a smile, albeit in an injured tone. “Isn’t she afraid of being kept up at night?” “Would you like me to wake her for you?” Ofer asked. “For me?” Rivlin said. “What for? I’ll be heading home in a minute.”
Was this a sign?
He arrived back in Haifa and was told by Hagit that right after he’d left Jerusalem Galya had telephoned to apologize for her ill-mannered slumber. Ofer got on the phone, too.
“How did they sound to you?” he asked anxiously.
“The usual. Nice and friendly.”
“Are you sure?” he persisted. “Are you sure?”
OR PERHAPS THIS was a sign.
At the opera in Tel Aviv, during the intermission, they suddenly noticed, a few rows ahead of them, their daughter-in-law sitting with her father. Her long hair, usually done up in a
bun, fell glamorously over her shoulders. He and Hagit had hurried over, uncertain whether to be delighted or worried by this unexpected encounter. Where, they asked, was Ofer? Hagit gave Galya a kiss. Rivlin, self-conscious in her father’s presence, made do with a comment about her hair. Galya blushed awkwardly. Her father came to her defense. It was his idea to let it down, he said.
They returned to their seats. As the lights slowly dimmed, Rivlin saw his daughter-in-law throw him a fearful glance, as if feeling guilty for the husband left at home. Her hands quickly gathered her hair into a bun.
Was this what she meant by a sign?
OF ONE SIGN, at any rate, he had no doubt.
Some three weeks before the separation, Galya spent a weekend with her parents in the Galilee. There was a small hotel there that her father was thinking of acquiring. Having been to see their in-laws in Haifa only once since the wedding, the Hendels suggested dropping by on their way back to Jerusalem. That morning, however, a few hours before they were due, Galya telephoned to say they would not be coming. She offered no explanation and no apology.
Which was why, on the terrible Saturday when Ofer broke the news of the divorce, Rivlin had remarked cuttingly, “Maybe you just found out, but her parents knew long ago.” Ofer denied it. “They didn’t know a thing,” he insisted. “They were in shock just like you. Her mother burst into tears right in front of me.”
A sign? Or a coincidence?
AND PERHAPS SHE meant subtler signs, like the Friday night a month before the separation.
The young couple had slept over at their home. In the middle of the night, on his way to the bathroom, Rivlin spied the glimmer of a white nightgown in the living room. Although the intimate circumstances made him shy of approaching her, he felt Galya’s eyes on him. “How long have you been awake?” he asked. “I never fell asleep,” she answered brusquely. He took a step toward her. “Is anything wrong?” As though he were to blame for her insomnia, she shrugged like a stubborn child and looked at him accusingly. “Why don’t you wake Ofer?” he asked. She shrugged again. “Would you like me to sit up with you?” he inquired gently. “You needn’t bother,” she said. “It’s no bother,” Rivlin replied. He sat down across the room from her, at first silent and then feebly trying to make conversation. Her head drooped. Her eyes shut, and her breathing grew deeper. Slowly she drifted back to her lost sleep. Yet when he suggested she go back to bed, she refused. All she wanted was a blanket, she said.
Was that a sign of things to come? But how?
HE REMEMBERED, TOO, a strange dream of Ofer’s. It was Galya who told it to them, as if to warn them of something.
In his dream Ofer was in an inner room of the hotel, sitting by the bed of Galya’s father, who lay pale and indisposed. No one else in the family was there. Not knowing how to call for help, he roamed the hotel. There were no guests. The staff had vanished, too. The rooms were empty. Some were missing their tables and beds. Fixtures were ripped from the bathrooms.
He returned to the inner room, in which the sick man had risen from his bed and was sitting in an armchair. Deciding to bring him a glass of water, he went to the bathroom to see if the sink had a faucet. It did, but only one. As he wasn’t sure whether it was for hot water or cold, he abandoned the idea and picked up an old electric shaver from the marble counter. He blew away the hairs that adhered to it, went to the sick man, and started shaving him.
It must have been a dream with signs, Rivlin thought. Why else would he remember it so many years later?
1.
THAT SATURDAY MORNING they were back in the Galilee. Hagit’s sister, who had yet to see her favorite nephew in uniform, let alone with his officer’s bars, had gently but firmly turned down several weekend invitations in order to visit Tsakhi at his army base. Not that the Rivlins needed a special reason to make the trip. Even their car, to judge by the alacrity with which it took the twisting road to the large intelligence base on Mount Canaan, was eager to see their youngest son.
They were not the first parents to park outside the base, whose green gate had a double entrance in keeping with its top-secret nature. A few early birds had arrived before them and were already feeding their fledglings snacks, soft drinks, and even hamburgers.
“The army has gone soft,” Rivlin observed disdainfully. “If anyone like us had turned up at the gate of an army base in my soldiering days, they would have been mowed down at once.”
Half-hidden behind the gate, surrounded by ferns in a thick stand of oak trees, was a small shack whose pastoral innocence camouflaged the real entrance to the underground base. Carved into a mountain, the installation was covered by tall antennas and giant satellite dishes that ran in a silver forest to a nearby second hilltop. Rivlin, amused by the thought of an elevator inside a mountain, had once asked his son whether there was one. But Tsakhi had only smiled, refusing to disclose even so innocent a fact. Nor had he reacted when Rivlin accused the army of being “hysterically hush-hush.” Without bothering to defend either it or himself, he had merely dipped his head in sorrow at being unable to satisfy his father’s curiosity.
“Sometimes,” the judge liked to remark, in a doting tone very different from her clipped severity on the bench, “I think I gave birth to a saint.”
“What’s so saintly about him?” Rivlin would protest, while hoping that his son’s beatification might reflect creditably on him, too. “What good does it do to be a saint nowadays? Let’s just hope that nothing spoils him.”
Despite having been on duty all night, the young officer who emerged from the mountain in crisp, spotless fatigues did not look spoiled at all. Beaming in the dewy morning light, he hurried—oblivious to the glances of other soldiers, some of them under his command—to give his notoriously fragile aunt a gentle hug.
“So he’s not a saint,” the judge had conceded. “But he does have a sense of boundaries. He knows right from wrong, and he doesn’t care what others think of him, unlike you and Ofer. You needn’t worry about him. Compliments don’t go to his head. Nothing will spoil him or throw him off stride.”
As if to prove her right, the saint, approached by a blond, baby-faced sergeant hoping to take advantage of the family reunion by asking his commanding officer for a favor, cut him off sharply and sent him on his way.
2.
“AS LONG AS I’m here, why don’t we take a little walk and see the spring flowers. What do you say?”
The son to whom Rivlin extended this invitation was being fawned upon by a fond mother and aunt, who no doubt saw in him the reincarnation of an old photograph of their father mounted on a horse in a Russian cavalry uniform.
“But why take a walk?” objected Hagit, who had already placed a large bag of cherries on the grass. “Ofra has come especially to see Tsakhi. If you’re restless, go yourself.”
The young officer glanced ingenuously from one parent to the other, wondering how to satisfy two such contradictory desires at once. Rivlin, who wanted to be alone with his son in order to get his appraisal, or even approval, of the conversation in the hotel garden in Jerusalem, was forced to yield. Making his way among picnicking parents spreading checked tablecloths and coaxing blue flames from gas burners, he wandered off on his own.
Deprived of a conversation partner, he soon found himself on the mountainside, slowly but steadily climbing a path. For a while his rapid pace seemed about to carry him to the summit—where perhaps, he mused, amid the silent chatter of the antennas, satellite dishes, and smart sensors, he might find inspiration for his unfinished book. But the summit was farther away than it looked, and he soon came to a high military fence in a field of flowering bindweed and squirrel grass. Fearing mines, he picked a spot beneath an old oak tree and sat down quietly in the fresh grass, the last of the morning dew glinting on his shoes. Far beneath him, the entrance to the base looked like the opening of an anthill. His affectionate glance made out his son. Seated between his aunt and his mother, the young officer was probably being fed a banana.
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Despite Hagit and Ofra’s twice-weekly international phone calls, the two never tired of retrieving from oblivion, with an intimacy born of the bedroom shared by them as children, all that had fallen since their last meeting into the stormy crevices of time. They never had looked like sisters, and they resembled each other even less after so many years of being apart. Tall, thin, and stooped, Ofra, the eternal product of the left-wing youth movement in which she had met her husband, dressed with a mousy simplicity. Plump, merry, vivacious, opinionated, and pampered Hagit, on the other hand, wore fancy clothes, liked expensive makeup and perfumes, and smoked with the flair of a juvenile delinquent. Perhaps she was still trying to compensate her father for his disappointment in having a second daughter.
Early that morning, at a dawn hour rarely suitable for love, Rivlin had overcome her defenses. “I hope you’ve noticed how nice I’ve been to your sister,” he had begun, following up on this advertisement for himself by quickly stripping off his pajamas and diving beneath the blankets. Forced to admit his model behavior, Hagit, thinking she heard a noise from her sister’s room, tried fending him off with hugs and kisses. But Rivlin would not take no for an answer. “If you use your sister as an alibi, I’ll end up hating her,” he said. “But can’t you hear that she’s up?” Hagit whispered. “You’ve gone deaf from thinking too much.” Throwing off the blanket, he ran naked to the door of his expropriated study and put his ear to it to demonstrate that she was imagining things.
The Liberated Bride Page 8
