The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Even though I don’t depend on your answer, the decision being entirely my own, I’m curious to know why you think I shouldn’t be released from the silence I agreed to in the mad, vain hope that I’ve walked around with for the last five years—that this alone, if anything, could make you come back to me.

  That’s all. A simple question calling for a simple answer—yes or no.

  I don’t suppose my reply to your last letter made you happy. You should realize, however, that it’s you who first played with fire by asking my father, quite astonishingly and unnecessarily, whether I knew that your father had died and how I had reacted.

  What exactly were you hoping to find out? What difference did it make to you what I thought about your father’s death?

  Which is why you owe me a straight answer to a straight question. Am I or am I not absolved of my silence? Because my anger and my longing for you, which have awakened all over again, make me a dangerous man. So much so that, for my own good, I have had to put my pistol in a drawer and make sure the drawer is locked. . . .

  Ofer

  PART IV

  A Fantasy?

  14.6.98

  Ofer,

  You asked for a short answer to a short question. Well, here it is. No.

  My father’s death cannot absolve you of a promise made not only to me, but to yourself. A dead man’s honor is no less precious than a living one’s, and there is no reason to trash him now, when he can no longer defend himself against your fantasies, old or new.

  That’s my answer to your question. It’s also, if I may say so, my request (if my requests still matter to you).

  But if you nevertheless believe that you’re free to break your promise and make your fantasies known, at least do me the favor of sparing me your decision, as well as your oppressive and above all pointless letters.

  Galya

  20.6.98

  Dear Galya,

  1. Your answer was appreciated.

  2. Your reply and its reasoning (and most of all, its request) are clear.

  3. Even though your father’s death absolves me of my commitments (which were, by the way, only to you. How could they have been to myself?), I will continue to keep silent for the time being (the last words need to be stressed) even with my parents, and especially with my father—who, I hope, will get over the frenzy that his meeting with you put him into.

  4. I think that’s all.

  5. And again, I appreciate the fact that you overcame your negative (and to an extent, justifiable) reaction to my letter enough to answer it. Perhaps you recognized some of the old pain in my anger. I won’t bother you anymore.

  Ofer

  P.S. For the past five years I’ve fought (with a resolve I didn’t always understand myself) to keep my promise to you. I’ve told no one what went wrong with our marriage, not even those women who have mattered to me (and these were not as rare as you may—or may not—think), even though I know this may have harmed my chances for a new and honest relationship. Because while it may seem (but only seem) that a marriage lasting no more than a year can be explained by a simple sentence like “It didn’t take us long to realize we weren’t meant for each other,” or “I thought I loved her but I didn’t,” or, on the contrary, “It turned out that she didn’t love me back and so we decided to split before we ruined the life of some unnecessary child,” this doesn’t work with a woman interested in a relationship with a divorced no-account like myself. On the contrary, any serious, deeply feeling person has to be more worried by someone who divorces quickly than by someone whose marriage falls apart bit by bit, because being mistaken in the first place is more damning than experiencing the gradual attrition of love. Whoever dramatically misjudges his first partner may do so again. That’s why I think highly of any woman who wants to know why my marriage didn’t work.

  The fact is that I’ve encouraged them to ask. Those who didn’t, even if we got along well, didn’t last long. (Most of them, by the way, were young, a new generation—yes, there already is one—that’s quick to start up and quick to break off and doesn’t care who’s married and who’s divorced. It surprised them, even upset them, when I insisted on telling them about my divorce on our first or second date, because they couldn’t understand why this mattered.)

  So I’m sorry—no, glad—to inform you that I’ve had not a few women in my life, especially in the first years after our breakup. It was as if, in leaving me, you also left me with a master key like the one I give every evening to the African woman who cleans the offices, or the one Fu’ad opens every door in the hotel with. My wanting revenge on you only increased my masculine charms, which were assumed to come with a high degree of technical proficiency because I had been married for a year. Which is how I, who, before you and I met, would get involved in torturous love affairs with the most impossible types, now became a butterfly flitting from flower to flower for the nectar.

  But I soon tired of all this, Galya. I wanted a real connection in place of the one we had had, and I believed it would come because I had proved that I was capable of it and that what went wrong was not my fault. I started looking for a lifetime relationship (with a lot of short-lived women), and the first test I gave everyone was to see who wanted to know about my marriage. After all, unless you know something about the past (ask my father: he makes his living from it), it’s hardly possible, and certainly not easy, to make any headway in the present. That’s what I told every woman whom I wanted and tried to fall in love with.

  And so over and over I found myself harping on our divorce without being able to touch on its real cause—that is, what I saw that day with my own eyes. And although there was perhaps something noble in the discretion of a divorced man who refused to say a bad word about his ex, there was also something strange and suspicious about it, and, in the end, aggravating. After all, you can’t come asking for comfort, and keep saying that you need to understand what happened before you can start a new life, while deliberately avoiding the heart of the matter. All you’re doing is putting obstacles in your own way and letting the other person know that you still have hopes for the woman who said to you when you parted—

  word for word—

  “Perhaps in the end I’ll miss you so much that I’ll beg you to take me back. But if I ever find out that you told anyone, one single person, about your insane fantasy, there’s no chance of that ever happening.”

  Word for word, right?

  Not that it’s so difficult to figure out what I’ve been hiding. Women smart enough to realize that I need to be released from some horrible scandal should be able to use their imaginations. And in fact, among the many possibilities that have occurred to them (it’s amazing how fertile the imagination is when it comes to the sordid things people do), one or two of them, like little birds pecking at garbage, have come close to the truth. But even then I didn’t let on that they did. “The details don’t matter,” I told them. “I made a promise I’m not ready to break. Just convince me that I couldn’t have prevented my divorce and I can start thinking about marriage again.”

  Not many women are prepared to deal with such a devious neurotic.

  But there was one who rose to the challenge. Not as a prospective wife, but as a friend. She was a true Parisian, a class behind me in school, who tried to free me by means of that logical French mind that hones itself on the subtleties of sex. Without knowing the details of our case, which I never revealed to her, she constructed a psychological model proving almost mathematically that despite our great love (and that, at least, you never denied), our separation was inevitable. Her analysis concluded that whether I had actually seen something or just fantasized it, our marriage never stood a chance. Even had I not (she argued), by sheer coincidence, on a Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock, left my office to look for some old building plans in the basement of your father’s hotel, I was by then so involved in his project to expand the kitchen and dining room that sooner or later I would have gone down there anyway—if
not to look for the plans, then, say, to check the foundations—and seen or fantasized the same thing.

  That was just her initial premise. For even (her theorem continued) had I never descended to the basement, eventually I would have guessed what was going on, since anyone joining a new family, no matter how blindly enthusiastic he may be about it (as I was about yours, if only because of my love for you), develops a sixth sense that in time becomes as sharp as a laser beam. Even without my unexpected discovery, I would have begun to wonder.

  In fact (continued my shrewd Parisian), who could say that the building plans were my real objective on that awful Tuesday when I left the office and went to the hotel without you? (Wasn’t the whole point to be there without you?) Perhaps the real reason was a vague suspicion in my subconscious or unconscious mind. (Here in Paris, those old ghosts are still believed in. . . . )

  And suppose (my Parisian friend went on) I had said nothing to you and kept what I saw and understood to myself. The whole incredible story would have come out in the end anyway, because how long could I have held it in? I was raised and educated by my parents to believe in open dialogue and in the need—no, the duty—to discuss even the most difficult subjects honestly. And although, superficially, my mother may seem the stronger of the two, my father, too, is no innocent and has his own shrewd sophistication. They were equal partners in a total intimacy—and since such intimacy, which we both believed in and wanted, was my model for our relationship, one that would only have grown stronger with the years, what chance would I have had of hiding something that was consuming me? Even in an ordinary quarrel, the most happily married couple can work itself up to a point, absurd but unavoidable, at which whole families—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even aunts and uncles—are invoked in support of one person’s virtues or the other person’s vices. Could I have listened and said nothing, for example, if you had argued—as you sometimes did—that you were naturally generous like your father and easygoing like your mother, as opposed to my father’s gloom-and-doom and my mother’s prudery? Could I have resisted the temptation to shake you up with the hidden truth, which would have jumped out of me like an angry grasshopper? And then—yes, then—you would have been fully justified in regarding such a revelation, coming totally out of the blue, as not even a “pathetic fantasy” but quite simply a revolting lie invented in the heat of the argument. . . .

  And let’s suppose (let’s!) that in spite of all this I not only tried but succeeded in keeping the truth to myself, in bad times as well as in good, without a word about what I saw that day. I still couldn’t have forgotten it, especially not when it involved people I saw every day who were continuing their sordid behavior. And since I couldn’t have relieved the burden by telling anyone, not even my own parents, since this would have totally estranged them from your parents, the truth would have gone on seething in me and so poisoned my love for you that in the end I would have suspected you too (why not?)—yes, you too—of knowing and hiding it from me, or even (for now that everything is possible, who knows?) of being involved in it yourself and—if only in your thoughts—even enjoying it.

  I had to speak out. And immediately. The twenty-four hours that passed from the time I saw what I did until the time I told you about it seem unbearably lonely even now. And above all, you wouldn’t have wanted me to keep quiet. Never, in all the harsh, bitter quarrels we had afterward—and I say this to your everlasting credit, Galya—never once did you say, “Why did you go and tell me all this? What possessed you to do it?” You understood the obligations (yes, obligations!) of intimacy. And from your shock when I told you, and the scene you made (you may remember how my father was attending some conference in Jerusalem that day and turned up at our apartment and you refused to come out of the bedroom even to say hello), I knew that you, at least, were innocent. . . .

  Which was a relief. . . .

  And so (argued my Parisian), concluding this part of her theorem (there’s another part still to come), the moment I realized what I had seen was the moment our marriage was over. After that, it was only a question of time.

  Part Two

  And now let’s look at it from your point of view. My Parisian is a serious woman. Even without knowing what it was that I saw (as I say, I never told her), she managed to prove that our marriage was doomed from the opposite end, too—that is, starting from the assumption that it was all a “revolting fantasy,” as you claimed from the first. In the forty-two days that followed, in which you systematically demolished your love for me, you never budged from that position.

  Five years have passed since then, and ultimately all will be forgotten and perhaps even forgiven except for one thing—the insult and even the contempt of your self-righteousness. I’ll never forget you sitting tense and pale, although perfectly patient, your feet beneath you on the couch, listening stonily, without interrupting, without asking questions, without even turning off the radio. (Yes, I remember how grotesque it was to be telling you such a thing to soft background music.) When I finished, there was a moment (but too short, too short!) of silence before you reacted. I would have thought that something so incredible needed more than that. The fact was that, in my naïveté, I had expected only one of two possible reactions.

  Either—

  “I’m stunned. Give me a minute to catch my breath.”

  Or at the very worst—

  “It’s none of your business, Ofer. I’m warning you. Stop opening doors in this hotel without knocking or asking permission. You don’t own it or my family just because you’re married to me.”

  But you took another line. Without hesitating, you chose to defend your family to the hilt, even if it meant destroying our relationship. You said—

  word for word—

  “You have no idea, Ofer, of what you’re getting us into. I’m asking you to drop this whole revolting fantasy of yours, to say you’re sorry, and never to mention it again.”

  Word for word, right?

  (Relax. This letter will never reach you.)

  And now listen to the theorem of my Parisian (an ugly little bird, pecking away):

  “Let’s assume that your ex-wife was right and that you concocted a fantasy for reasons of your own. Let’s also assume that in the end you would have been forced to admit it. Then, too, your marriage was doomed. Because to judge by your anger and obsessive behavior, your case involved two different conceptions of love. There’s first love and there’s second love. The experts can distinguish between them, even if sometimes they’re hard to tell apart, because each has a logic of its own. They can exist side by side, not without conflict, until something comes along to turn them against each other. And then it’s good-bye.

  First love (my Parisian explained) preserves throughout a marriage the bright, living kernel of the falling-in-love that engendered it, that outgoing of the heart by which the lover recognizes, sometimes instantly and sometimes by progressive stages, the human being who can soothe or satisfy his deepest desires—the one person with whom he can redemptively re-create the primeval love for a father, mother, sister, brother, or other family member that could never be fulfilled. And though, when he falls in love, the lover may know little about the beloved, whose soul may be a mystery and whose body may hide beneath its clothes an ugly defect or scar yet to be uncovered by his desire, still he is bonded to his beloved blindly and trustingly and is ready to die for her even before he has seen her nakedness. This is the meaning of the expression “falling in love,” found in so many languages, for the lover has as it were fallen into a deep pit (at the bottom of which may lurk a snake or scorpion), and there must build his love for himself.

  And even after (my Parisian continued) the outward signs have yielded their inner promise in all its glory or poverty, its undreamed-of heights or insufferable depths, the glow of the first falling-in-love continues everywhere and all the time. Yes, even when the beloved is in a wheelchair in an old-age home, diapered and connected to tubes, even then the fla
sh of a smile in moldering eyes, the ancient movement of a veiny hand, the heard-again lilt of a dear voice, even a single sentence containing the right words, can resurrect the first falling-in-love in a twinkling—that love that unconditionally and in advance forgives every weakness and failing, if only for the reason that in advance it knew nothing about them.

  Indeed (in my Parisian’s opinion), nothing is more democratic than this total embrace of the beloved; for just as the state, or the republic, can never revoke the citizenship of a citizen, be he a spy, traitor, rapist, or murderer, so first love forbears in all things because the first, unconditional falling-in-love persists.

  Such (thinks my wise Parisian) was my love for you. This is why I am still stranded in it, waiting for another falling-in-love to set me free. . . .

  (And it will—)

  And yet, says my Parisian, who is four years older than I am even though she’s a class lower—because she has a rich father who periodically treats her to a new career—“your story makes clear that your ex-wife’s conception of love is of the other variety.” And this is why, she explains, what happened to us was inevitable.