The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  And that’s precisely what I need: to understand calmly the necessity of our separation, so that I can say good-bye for good, graciously and with a light heart.

  It seems, Galya, that your kind of love has to do with choice. That’s the great difference. Perhaps yours is the more developed variety, skipping love’s primitive and dangerous “fall” for what is deliberately and courageously chosen—not because it is the best choice, since there is always a better one, but because it has potential. (I once watched a nature program on television about a certain species of duck or swan that takes four years of painstaking investigation to choose a mate—the longest aptitude test on record.) Rather than marriage as a first flowering of feeling that lasts only until the next falling-in-love, the love of choice offers something less passionate but more stable: responsibility. In a moment of crisis the first kind of lover declares emotionally, “What’s done is done—I fell in love with you, and so I forgive you,” but whereas the second kind says coolly, “Yes, what’s done is done—I chose you, and I am responsible for my choice.” But—and here’s the rub—while love of the first kind can by its nature overlook what it doesn’t like, love of the second kind is incapable of such evasions. And so when something bad shakes the foundations, “responsible love” is too weak to support it—and at that point the whole structure collapses, and all that’s left to say is, “You’d better pack your things, Ofer, and go to your grandmother’s.”

  Once, some two years ago, a month or two after I arrived in France, in a moment of deep sadness but also of intermittent hope (I didn’t know you were about to remarry), I decided to write an itemized account of the horribly quick parting that you subjected me to after forty-two days of struggle. I bought a big yellow notebook, which went well with the yellow light of gray Paris in August ’93, where I found myself after my expulsion from the Paradise in which you lived with your father, mother, and sister (who to this day can inspire in me, along with horror and revulsion, a good, stiff erection).

  Anyway, you and your family, even your hotel, were cloaked by my imagination in the late-summer light that I remembered from the brambly little hill near the gazebo under which we were married. That’s how I had imagined Paradise back in Bible class in grade school, perhaps so as to give it a Middle Eastern touch: a lush green oasis fed by springs and surrounded by soft, friendly desert.

  And so I began to write the story of our separation, from the first moment: thoughts, conversations, facts, things we did, the weather, the political situation, even a dream or two that I remembered, such as one in which I forced your father to let me shave him with an old electric shaver found in a room of the hotel.

  I wrote from the heart. The result was an indictment, a defense plea, perhaps even a proposal for an out-of-court settlement—but only on the left-hand page, because the right-hand page was for your use, so you could add your story to mine. I still hoped against hope that setting down our two versions in the same notebook might help us reach a new understanding.

  I filled page after page, quickly, in less than a week. I wanted so badly to prove that you had acted rashly that I remembered all kinds of things I had forgotten. And I had insights I had never had before into the predicament of your making (for example, your insomnia, which started at that time and kept you up all night in my parents’ home in Haifa). It was exciting to put everything down clearly on paper and give my suffering a form. I was so involved in it that I went on writing during my French lessons at the Alliance Française, to the delight of the students from Japan, China, and Indonesia, who were happy to see that the brown and yellow races were not the only ones with languages that looked nothing like French.

  I still didn’t know you were about to get married—

  And then my father told me over the telephone that my grandmother had died, and I could hear the relief in his voice. She had already lost the last of her independence after falling and breaking her pelvis and being brought from Jerusalem to a nursing home in Haifa—and, as impossible as she had been when she still could stand on her own two feet, she then became such a horror that she kept having to be moved from one institution to another.

  But it wasn’t just my father who was relieved. So was I. Not because I ever suffered from her. On the contrary. She always showered my brother and me with love and presents, not only because she really loved us, but also because she hated to waste on us a drop of the special venom that she kept for the issue of her own womb. The relief came from my fear that in the heat of one of her daily spats with my father, she might, in order to show that I trusted her more than him, blurt out the secret I had made her promise to tell no one.

  You see, Galya, the time has come for a confession. There was one person in the world (though she is in it no longer) from whom I was unable to conceal the truth. Because back when we agreed to “mutually disengage” in order to gain some perspective, I on my “fantasy” and you on your “fantasy of my fantasy,” and decided to separate and move out of our apartment—you into the hotel and I to my grandmother’s—my parents, although upset by our unexpected breakup, maintained (mostly at my mother’s insistence) a gallant distance while hoping that the crisis (about whose cause they knew nothing) would blow over by itself. On the other hand, my grandmother had no faith in spontaneous reconciliations. Her gloomy, suspicious nature, which always made her expect (sometimes rather eagerly) the worst, led her to demand that I do something practical to restore us to Paradise Lost.

  Yes, us. For as upset as she was by our separation, she was also upset by the loss of the hotel, which she had hoped, rather bizarrely, to use as a halfway house in departing this life. Did your parents ever tell you that after our wedding she took to dropping by the hotel in the morning for coffee and cake and, sometimes, for a chat with a lounging customer, knowing that Fu’ad would not take money from a “member of the family”?

  My three weeks with her were both sad and strange. In her old apartment in the dowdy old downtown of Jerusalem, nothing had changed: I stayed in my father and aunt’s childhood room, stared at from the shelves by their old dolls and toy animals, painted weird colors by Tsakhi, and regressed, at the hands of this shrewd, bossy woman (I think my father is afraid of her to this day) to the little boy my parents used to leave with her when they came to Jerusalem on their own affairs.

  There I was, sitting naked again in the old bathtub I once showed you, the one with those monster legs cast in lead that my father called “Mephistopheles’ feet,” once more throwing my dirty laundry into the big old straw basket, with its cracked, white enamel top that in our boyhoods, both my father and I had made believe was the steering wheel of a bus. Returning to her place late at night—because after work I always went first to our empty apartment on the pretext of having to get something from it—I would find her, in her nightgown, waiting tensely in the kitchen. She would serve me my supper while grilling me like a patient police detective, trying to worm out of me what had really happened between you and me—not for curiosity’s sake, but in order to know how to get the two of us together again so that she could have one more dance, like the dance she danced at our wedding, with “that perfect gentleman, Mr. Hendel.”

  One autumn evening, after I had given up all hope of running into you in the apartment or of ambushing you near the hotel, and had begun to accept that we were permanently separated and that I would have to settle for my share of the apartment and find a place of my own, I was overcome by the urge to shock the old woman with the truth and make her realize once and for all what kind of “Paradise” she had lost. First, though, I made her swear on a Bible that if she broke her vow and told anyone what I was going to reveal to her, she would be personally responsible if God punished us by making something bad happen to Tsakhi in the army. (He was a junior in high school and worrying us all with his talk of volunteering for a commando unit. Who could have imagined that he’d end up in the safest place in the country?) And then, right there in her kitchen, late at night, as downtown Jeru
salem was emptying out, I told her the whole story. It was the second time (it won’t be the last) that I had told it to someone else, rather than just to myself in my thoughts.

  I didn’t spare her any of the details. I knew she would argue with me, as she did with everyone, and I wanted to expose her to the whole tawdry reality. With a twisted pleasure, I shone a light for her on the sick roots of Paradise—roots I was willing to live with, but only on the condition that you acknowledged them.

  Well, she listened to my story, right there in her kitchen, with the bored look of a mother blessed with an overimaginative child, sighed when I reached the end of it, like an old woman who has seen everything, and stunned me with her response. You would have loved it. (If, that is, you had known about it, which you never will, because this letter will never reach you.)

  It went like this:

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Ofer. How can you dare accuse a decent man like Mr. Hendel of such a thing? Galya is right. It’s all in your imagination. Whenever your parents brought you here as a boy, your grandfather would complain that you drove him crazy with your fibs. You would stand outside on the terrace and pretend that scenes from some movie you had seen were taking place in the offices of the National Trade Union Headquarters across the street, all kinds of horrible things that people were doing. It’s your imagination, sweetheart. Ask your wife to forgive you and tell her that even as a child . . .”

  You get the idea.

  So you see, Galya, I found for you an unexpected ally. If only she hadn’t been buried next to my grandfather for the past two years. . . .

  “Say you’re sorry, boy!”

  And then I remembered, with a slight feeling of panic, how as a boy, especially on my visits to Jerusalem, I really did make up strange stories to entertain my grandfather, who lived in dread of his horrible wife. At which point I surprised her by revealing that I had already asked you to forgive me and had been, quite rightly, turned down.

  I repeat: quite rightly.

  (I hope you’ve noticed, Galya, how objective I’m trying to be.)

  It wasn’t so easy to explain that to her after our last meeting in that little café—when, in a desperate attempt to save our marriage, I took back everything I had said and apologized in the most groveling manner. You had four perfectly logical rebuttals, all mutually reinforcing, like four cogwheels in a machine to crush all hope. And if your answer, which deserves to appear as a special section in The Guide to Marital Warfare, was not entirely clear to my grandmother, this was only because it was raining out and she had stuffed her infection-prone ears with absorbent cotton upon hearing the first spatter of drops on the window.

  Rebuttal 1: “If you were telling an out-and-out lie, Ofer, you don’t deserve to be forgiven, ever. In that case, what you did was such a low blow that I can never trust you anymore. Even if I forgave you, it wouldn’t last.”

  Rebuttal 2: “On the other hand, if you were the victim of a fantasy, then the mind that fantasized is still there. How can you ask to be forgiven for something that’s still in you and that you’re still trying to prove?”

  Rebuttal 3 (bravely honest to a fault): “And suppose it turns out that you’ve told the truth? Then it’s not you who have to ask for forgiveness, but I, for involving you with such a pathological family. And why, really, should I be forgiven for that?”

  I shuddered. You must remember how I answered, in a choked voice, “That’s true. But I do forgive you, because I want to. And from now I’ll love not only you, but whatever is yours, even your father and sister, more than ever. . . . ”

  Coldly and calculatedly (after a year of marriage you knew me well enough to be prepared for such a lunatic promise), you delivered the coup de grâce,

  Rebuttal 4: “I know you mean every word of it, Ofer. And believe me, it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve heard from you yet.”

  I didn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral. My mother left the decision up to me, and my father advised against it—and not just because of the plane fare. To tell you the truth, apart from my mild and rather foolish relief that our story belonged just to the two of us again, which left me a ghost of a chance of getting you back, I felt real sorrow for the death of a woman I had spent so much time with as a child and had returned to after my separation from you for a sad yet warm and intense reunion. And because I could think of no other way to mourn in Paris, I bought a black ribbon and tied it to my arm in the Catholic fashion that you see in old French movies. I even went around with it longer than I had planned to, in part because I noticed that it made people more patient with my bad French.

  About half a year later, over the phone, my mother told me in passing that she had heard you were getting married and thought I should know about it, even if it was painful, since it might make it easier for me to free myself from you. I was too stunned to say anything, and so she said, “Don’t take it so hard. You deserve a better and more dependable wife than Galya, and you’ll find her.” That helped me to get a grip on myself. “Thank you, Ima,” I said. “I’m glad you told me. Even if it’s only a rumor, I’ve been waiting for the chance to finally mourn for Galya.” And I put the black ribbon back on and started wearing it again. After a week, though, when I realized I still wasn’t over you, I took it off.

  Stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck! That’s frightening, because five years have gone by with nothing to celebrate. Good and stuck.

  So you see, it’s not my fault if I can’t stop the words that are flowing so easily from me now, so pleasurably and without anger, onto the screen of a computer that someone forgot to turn off in the Youth Department of the Jewish Agency. I didn’t even have to open a new file, but just squeezed myself in between two memos on Hebrew-speaking summer camps. There’s still time to decide whether to print this “pointless and oppressive” letter or to hit Delete, just as, after my mother informed me that you really were remarried, I threw “our” yellow notebook into the oven of the Cooking Academy, which cheerfully roasted it to a crisp.

  (I like my work as a night guard at the Jewish Agency, which occupies—a bequest from a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor—an apartment building in a fashionable bourgeois district that has a large park nearby. It’s a comfortably posh, three-story nineteenth-century building with attractively oak-paneled lobbies and stairways, and old chairs and tables that were divided up among the different offices on a political basis. You have to spend time in a place like this, Galya, and use your master key to visit all its rooms, in order to appreciate that despite its bureaucratic morass there’s something soothing, even comforting, about its old Jewish National Fund maps of Palestine hanging on the walls. There is a Zionism, old, innocent, and heartwarming, that will last not only another century, but another millennium, even if the State of Israel goes under in the meantime.)

  When my grandmother heard (we’re back to that autumn night in her kitchen) that I had gone and asked for forgiveness without waiting for her advice and had been turned down, she was flustered. But since the logic of your four rebuttals failed to move her and she wasn’t a quitter, she simply ignored them and instructed me quite shamelessly to ask forgiveness from Mr. Hendel himself. She was sure, she said, that he could talk you into clasping me to the family bosom again. . . .

  She certainly did want to dance in your hotel again!

  I didn’t answer her. I went to my bedroom and shut the door. I don’t know whether she changed her mind, but I did manage to scare her, because her demeaning proposal was not repeated the next morning. I was running a fever that day and thought I had the flu, and I stayed in bed until noon. Then I went to the office, phoned your father, and made an appointment with him that same night.

  A week later (with his encouragement, if not necessarily on his initiative) you filed for a divorce. Yet I remain confident (for some reason) that he never told you about our meeting until the day he died, which means that you’ll never know about it now, either.

  (Because this letter, as I’ve said, will
not be sent.)

  And yet nevertheless—

  My Impossible Meeting with Your Father

  Actually, only the dreariness of those days in dowdy downtown Jerusalem could have brainwashed me into putting my grandmother’s grotesque idea into practice. (In one of her nursing homes, an old staff member said to my father: “I’ve never in my life seen anyone like your mother. Tell me, Professor, how did you manage to come out normal?” To which, without cracking a smile, he replied: “I didn’t.”) I can still see her sitting in her kitchen on that revolving high chair of hers, like a pilot or an aeronautical engineer, surrounded by walls and shelves lined with knives, cleavers, ladles, spatulas, graters, mixing bowls, and appliances, all covered with the colorful little jackets she sewed for them. It was only in Paris that I realized that the idea of studying restaurant architecture first came to me, not from your hotel, whose old building plans I went looking for on that infamous morning, but from her cluttered kitchen.

  Your father hesitated for a moment and agreed. Our tragic encounter had prepared him for the possibility of a private meeting, even though he had done his best to avoid it. And when it dawned on him, though he still knew nothing specific, that you were about to eliminate the threat to him by ditching me for good, he didn’t have the heart to refuse me.