The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  He felt his confidence shaken by her firmness. He reached out a fatherly hand that fell short of touching her. In the mirror he saw Fu’ad moving slowly across the empty dining room. The maître d’ cast a glance at their dark corner and disappeared.

  “Listen carefully, Galya. If I thought for a moment that he understood why you left him, or had come to terms with it, I’d never have stooped to come here again.”

  “But why is it stooping?” she protested hotly. “You mustn’t say such things, Yochanan. I was very touched by your last visit. I’m touched by this one, too. We’re all grateful. If only there were some way I could help. . . . But you mustn’t try to make me feel guilty or take your anger out on me. I have enough problems.”

  A desert wind riffled the curtain. Rivlin took the plunge.

  “I’ve already told you . . .”

  “What?”

  “That I haven’t much time left.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I told you.”

  “But what’s wrong with you?”

  “The details don’t matter. I don’t like to discuss them. I’m not asking for pity, only for justice.”

  “But what does this have to do with justice?”

  He bowed his head and said nothing, feeling a stirring in her.

  “You’re torturing yourself for no reason. What does it matter? People get together and break up all the time. I left your son because we couldn’t go on the way we were. Because it would have been wrong to. Ask him. Why should I tell you what he won’t?”

  “He would like to. He can’t.”

  She made no reply.

  In the mirror behind her Rivlin saw her ponytailed husband peer into the dining room.

  “Fine. I won’t bother you again. Just do me one last favor. Answer his letter.”

  “But he told me not to,” she said with a triumphant gleam. “Those were his last words.”

  “Never mind.” His anger turned against his son. “Write him. It doesn’t matter what. Just give him a sign. If he swallowed his pride enough to send you a condolence note, he must want an answer even if he denies it. Give him one. Anything. A few words. It makes no difference what they are. Do it for my sake. You owe me that much.”

  “Owe you?” He felt her waver.

  “Morally. We treated you like a daughter from the minute you set foot in our home. We couldn’t have loved you more. Whatever you wanted, whatever you asked for, even hinted at, was yours. We never said a word when you broke up the marriage. We just gritted our teeth, Hagit and I. We tried being high-minded about it.”

  She nodded slowly in confirmation. The word “high-minded” swept him along.

  “Even if you think you owe us nothing, do it for your father’s sake. Don’t leave me in the dark. I won’t come again, I promise. This is the last time. Not even Hagit knows I’m here. She would be furious if she saw me pleading with you like this. Promise you’ll write to Ofer. Even if he doesn’t want you to. Just this once.”

  “But what should I say?” she whispered despairingly, like a student bewildered by a teacher’s demands.

  “Anything. Make him realize he understands.” She weighed his words carefully before making a movement with her head. He couldn’t tell if she was nodding it or shaking it. Her eyes were damp with what looked like old tears. Again, something told him that she was pregnant.

  The tall husband passed again across the mirror. The two blue-eyed, evangelical elephants reentered the dining room and wandered slowly through it, lifting the tablecloths as though looking for something they had lost.

  20.

  “YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE me. Well, now you’ve seen for yourself. She gets more lucid from day to day. She even remembered the names of places in South America that Yo’el told her about three years ago. It’s not just her memory, either. She can explain things, see connections. And she’s so funny! She has a sense of humor she never had before. Did you hear what she said about Yochi? It’s too bad, Yochi, that you weren’t there. Where were you all that time? You would have enjoyed her. Imagine: she not only thought of asking about your work, she even remembered it had to do with Algeria. At first she said Morocco and then she caught herself. When I told her you were stuck she asked me to tell you she understood. She has real empathy. I’m sorry you didn’t stay. Where on earth did you disappear to? To think that for years the psychiatrists sent her from one institution to another without holding out any hope! It’s no wonder I bristle whenever one of them gets on the witness stand and spouts some diagnosis.”

  “Don’t generalize.”

  “You’re right. One mustn’t. But I’ve seen enough to be skeptical about the experts. I can understand wanting to make a science of mental disorder. But do it modestly, with a sense of proportion. After all, they’re not pathologists analyzing DNA in a lab. How can they label every hoodlum psychotic or schizophrenic or posttraumatic?”

  “Give us the bottom line,” Rivlin said, accelerating as they came out of the last turn of the descent from Jerusalem. “What are you saying, Hagit? That your aunt was making believe? That all the time we ran after her from asylum to asylum we were really going from theater to theater?”

  “She wasn’t making believe. I’m not saying that. Her torment was real. She didn’t believe she deserved the love that our mother and all of us gave her, and that drove her to extremes of anxiety. It never occurred to her that we needed her love, too. Did we ever tell you, Ofra, how we first realized she was getting better?”

  Ofra nodded. Although she had heard the story many times, she was always ready to hear it again.

  The road to the airport was lightly traveled on Saturday afternoons. The anticipation of seeing Yo’el made the trip a pleasant one. Hagit was still too full of the lunch with her aunt and the family anecdotes to probe where her husband had been. It was just as well, Rivlin thought. Although he could have padded his account of the time he had spent with the Suissas, he preferred not to. His failure at the hotel only made him feel more guilty.

  “Actually,” he said, interrupting his wife’s entertaining but familiar account of her aunt’s recovery, “Hagit owes her aunt a great deal.”

  “How is that?” Hagit asked.

  “Didn’t she once shock some sense into you as a child by telling you how awful you were?”

  Like a healthy person recalling past illnesses, the judge liked to be reminded of a time when she hadn’t been nice. Now, she looked lovingly at the husband who—if only to tease her—remembered her childhood so well.

  “When was that?” Ofra asked, glowing in the backseat at the thought of Yo’el’s arrival.

  “Don’t you remember how our parents used to send me to her in Jerusalem during summer vacations? I spent weeks there. Once she told me I wasn’t nice to be with. It made a big impression.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About twelve. I worshiped her then. Every word of hers was holy. It had a great effect.”

  “It’s too bad it didn’t last,” joked her husband.

  “But it did. Really. You could have used an aunt like that, someone to hold up a mirror to you. Yochi’s mother”—Hagit turned around to her sister—“kept him tied to her apron strings, summer vacations included. He wasn’t insurable, and she never gave him a chance to grow up.”

  A jumbo jet passed overhead, in one line with the road. For a second they seemed to keep up with it.

  “Maybe that’s Yo’el’s plane,” Ofra said.

  “Perfect timing!”

  But Yo’el’s plane had landed a quarter of an hour early, and since he had only hand luggage, he was out of the terminal and perched on a low wall by a fountain, looking suntanned and refreshed, when they arrived. Reading a Hebrew paper, his toes sticking out of his biblical sandals, he did not look as if he had been away for three years.

  21.

  HER HUSBAND’S LARGE hands alone, in Ofra’s opinion, could handle her fragile body without breaking it. Although they had been separated for
only ten days, she and Yo’el clung to each other tightly, as if also embracing the children never born to them. It was a while before Yo’el turned to Hagit and gathered her, too, in his arms, after which he clapped Rivlin on the back and asked what was new in Algeria.

  A spring dusk was descending when they reached Haifa. Gazing from their terrace at some trees bordered by two streets that ran down toward the sea, the distant gleam of which was invisible in the twilight, Yo’el—having been taken on a tour of the duplex by his now knowledgeable guide of a wife—acknowledged that the loss of their old wadi was not so grievous. Then, over bowls of grapes and cherries, the forgotten taste of which quickened the senses of the Israeli émigré, Rivlin decided that the time had come to relate the story of their moving.

  “It’s pure theory until you have to do it. You know, we lived in our old place for nearly thirty years. We thought we had some control, or at least some idea, about what went into it. A total illusion! Even the mover, who came to give us an estimate, turned out to be a wild optimist.

  “The day before we packed was a Saturday in spring, just like now. We were sitting on our terrace overlooking the wadi, saying good-bye to our view of the sea. The apartment was still in one piece behind us. The pictures were still on the walls, the wineglasses were in the cupboard, the cheeses and the soft drinks and the containers of food were in the refrigerator, the books were on the shelves next to the photo albums—just the way it is now. Except, that is, for the sacks and the folded cartons, which were waiting in a corner for the packers to arrive the next day. Suddenly I had a mild attack of panic. ‘Hagit,’ I said. ‘How can we be sitting here sitting here so calmly? Before the storm strikes, don’t you think we should at least sort through what we’re taking?’ But in the immortal words of Oblomov in the Russian novel, ‘If there’s work to be done, let someone else do it.’ We went on sitting on the terrace.

  “Early the next morning, we’re drinking our coffee and reading the newspaper while listening to the birds in the wadi, not at all like two people whose lives are about to be turned upside down, when in walk two packers. They looked like two little ants, a dark woman of about thirty-five, a chain-smoker as thin as a match, and her scrawny twelve-year-old son, a boy with a black skullcap on a black head of hair. ‘How will just the two of you manage?’ I asked. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ the woman says. ‘Just tell us where to start.’

  “Well, they attacked the house like two locusts. A pair of zombies couldn’t have gone around with less plan or method, stuffing everything into sacks the way they did. The boy flew everywhere without a sound. He was like some blind, wingless grub, grabbing one thing after another and filling sack after sack. Imagine, I’m shaving in the bathroom when he walks in after me and scoops up whatever he can, the toothbrushes, the shaving cream, my bifocals, everything. I barely managed to retrieve my glasses from his sack. We spent the first two weeks after moving trying to figure out into which of dozens of sacks and crates our lives had been thrown by those maniacs and sprinkled with the mother ant’s cigarette ashes.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. The next morning six Arab moving men show up with a big truck and a little Jewish driver. Our new apartment was so close by that I was sure we’d be done by the afternoon. Well, by the time the first truckload pulled out it already was the afternoon, and the apartment was as full as ever. And when evening came and a second big truckload left, we still hadn’t made a dent in anything, I started to cringe every time I saw a moving man. Something, humanly, had gone wrong. I mean, naked we come into this world and naked we leave—what were we doing with so many things? Were they all to prove our existence or simply to maintain it?

  “The movers, every one of whom we now knew by name, address, and individual moving style, were getting restless. Halfway between the two apartments, the Jewish driver, who had been declaring all day that he had never been given such a job in his life—four flights of stairs from the wadi to the street, and four more from the street to the duplex, and with ‘all those goddamn books’—threatened to quit on us. And when the new owner turned up with three workers with hammers, who began knocking down the walls for his renovation while we were still moving out, I began to feel my whole life was a mistake. Luckily, Hagit took command at that point and calmed the mutiny with a smile and a pay raise. The extra money did wonders. By midnight the old apartment was empty, and the last truckload had arrived with that big bookcase over there. The only problem was that it didn’t fit into the stairway and had to be hoisted onto the terrace with ropes and pulleys.

  “It was now two A.M. I was standing on the terrace with the head mover, who was having a fine time giving orders how to maneuver a bookcase that no one could see in the darkness. You could only hear it lifting off the ground, gaining altitude, and banging into things as it rose. I was too happy we were finished to give a damn. I felt so grateful to the movers for not abandoning us in the middle that I said to them in Arabic, ‘You’re fantastic! We could conquer the world between us. Let’s draft you all into the Israeli army and march on Iraq.’”

  “Iraq?”

  “Iraq.”

  “Why Iraq?”

  “Why not? Search me. I was punch-drunk by then. That must have been when I began losing my faculties. Since then I’ve lost a little more of them every month trying to get this place into shape.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Who?”

  “The Arab movers.”

  “What should they have said? They were so glad to be done that they would have taken on Iran too. . . .”

  22.

  AS DARKNESS DESCENDED, Yo’el fell merrily asleep in the middle of a sentence, and Hagit went hurriedly off to make a second bed in the study—which, Rivlin announced, hoping thus to prevent the long-dreaded judicial inquiry into his free hours in Jerusalem, he was donating to his in-laws for the remainder of their stay. Not that he could work in his office at the university, where the students, secretaries, and teachers gave him no peace. But in any case, he intended to spend the next few days in the library with the journals and newspapers he had brought from Jerusalem, even though they were unlikely to be of great value.

  The judge, stretched out fully dressed on their bed after a delightful day, agreed at once to his proposal. However, not only did she appear to take it quite for granted, but it did nothing to prevent her from wanting to know what he had done in Jerusalem. By way of reply, Rivlin invented a long stroll taken by him on the promenade south of the Old City. Since the two of them had once walked there together, he would not be asked for an account of it.

  But Hagit was not through with him. “Is that all you did?”

  For good measure he decided to throw in a visit to the Agnon House in Talpiyot, if only to demonstrate that he didn’t need her agreement to go there.

  “The Agnon House? It wasn’t nice of you to go by yourself.”

  “But you never wanted to come.”

  “Only because I didn’t want to run into Galya or her parents.”

  “What would have happened if you did?”

  “Nothing. I just didn’t want to see her.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t care. She’s ancient history.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “Of course I can.” Hagit yawned. “What’s the Agnon House like?”

  “I don’t know. It was closed,” he said, realizing in the nick of time that he would have to describe a place he had never been in.

  “So what did you do then?”

  “Then I rejoined you and Ofra.”

  23.

  IN HIS ROOM in the university tower, facing the bald top of Mount Hermon in the distance, he tore open, with a slight trepidation, the wrapping paper containing the scholarly remains of the Jerusalem prodigy. The old, moth-eaten pages, many from the house organs of North African trade unions, were mimeographed or printed on rough paper. How could he tell the old stains from new ones made by blood or spattered brain? Si
nce, like the blots in a Rorschach test, the dim yellow marks could tell him only about himself, he decided to ignore them and concentrate on the printed words.

  The Tedeschis had been right. The amount of fiction and poetry in old North African newspapers and publications from the 1950s and ’60s was amazing. It left the impression that the Arabs of the Maghreb had cared less for their struggle for independence than for their own private lives—their personal loves, friendships, and griefs, and the villages and landscapes they inhabited. Many of these compositions, marked in red by the murdered scholar, had been singled out by him for analysis.

  But an analysis pointing to what?

  A spark of inspiration, Rivlin concluded after leafing through the old pages, which left his fingers smelling of an unfamiliar spice, would not be found here. He was too much a believer in the tried-and-tested approaches to history to have much faith in the potential of such writings. Still, it might be possible, as Tedeschi had suggested, to use the odd poem or story to illustrate popular attitudes discussed in his book. Yet this called for precise translation, and the marked passages, though written in standard literary Arabic, had, as he had anticipated, expressions in local dialect that would give his critics a field day if he misconstrued them. Of course, he could always consult Ephraim Akri, who was a better philologist than intellectual historian. Yet a full professor had to be careful about exposing his academic weaknesses to a junior colleague eager for promotion.

  So intense was his concentration as he labored to decipher, without noticeable success, the murdered Arabist’s motives for singling out certain passages, the strange smell of whose paper was now on his face as well, that he failed to hear the light knock on his door. As though in a dream, a nervously smiling woman in her middle forties, well groomed and perfumed, slipped into the seat across from him and began to inquire, in typical Arab fashion, about him and his family without bothering to introduce herself or explain why she had come.