A Late Divorce (21 page)

I went to get lunch and returned with it. I said nothing, watching them remotely from some tenuous, still point inside me. Gaddi stared at the loaded tray that I'd brought. Father forced some pound notes on me. Kedmi grinned. Ya'el kept her eyes silently on father. Where is Dina now? People came and went. Dishes clattered. Jerusalem seemed a world away. The morning's lesson. Kedmi scurried about, conversing with people, scanning newspapers. At one point he furtively slipped me some document. “If you can catch her between the acts, see if you can't gently get her to sign this. It's a copy of the agreement that I gave her. If you don't stay cool, who will?”

I said nothing.

At two o'clock we were standing by the train. Kedmi put us aboard as though we were luggage, finding us our seats, buying us our tickets. He'd put father's valise in his car and given him a yellow cardboard file holder which said
Chief Rabbinate
on it. There was nothing he hadn't made his business in his revoltingly jovial way. How did the two of them live together? But Ya'el was her usual patient, passive self, thoroughly held in check, always ready to give in, to let him poke his nose everywhere, even go through her purse.

“Why do you all look so alarmed?” he called to us from the platform. “Don't worry. It's an honest-to-goodness train. It will be an experience. I'll come to get you at five, five-thirty. Gaddi, don't forget your locomotive on the train. And ask your uncle to show you around it.”

He waved at us and departed, leaving us out of time in the still, empty train. A hell of an experience to have to go through for the boy's sake. What was I doing here? I wondered. I felt paralyzed, dog-tired. I watched Ya'el open a large plastic bag and take out a big blue woolen shawl and a flowery robe to give father to give mother as presents. He accepted them gratefully, and together they removed the Israeli labels. Slowly the train began to move. It crept along through the freight yards of the port, among cranes, past ugly factories, warehouses and grim garages, stopping for no reason and starting up again, nearing some blocks; of public housing. Father was restless. He chain-smoked, asked about relatives, sighed, combed his hair. “I won't say a word there,” he promised again. “I'll let you do the talking. Asa will go first.” He opened the cardboard file holder that Kedmi had given him and studied its contents.

I took Gaddi for a tour of the train. We walked to the last car and, from a rattling passage by the rear window, watched the unweeded rails slowly receding. The boy stood silently by me, a softer edition of Kedmi but terribly earnest, the locomotive still in one hand and the other on his chest. He stood glued to the window. I took out the document that Kedmi had given me and leafed through it. Their divorce agreement. Brutal legal phraseology spelled here and there by sentimental cliches. The last page enumerated the joint property to be divided. With what perverse pleasure Kedmi had listed all the furniture, inventoried everything, estimated its value down to the last cent. I shook with anger. Where is Dina now? What am I going to do with her?

It took us a ridiculous hour to reach Acre. At the station we found a taxi and drove to the rabbinate building in the walled seaport, not far from the old citadel. “Here you'll leave it to me,'' announced father with a sudden show of firmness. “It won't take me long.” And so we waited in the taxi, bus stops and felafel stands around us, old stones from the citadel piled on the curb. The driver got out to clean the windshield. Gaddi drove his locomotive back and forth in the front seat. Ya'el sat huddled next to me with a guilty look on her face. Does she ever actually think? Think, Ya'el, think, we used to beg her whenever she would suddenly go blank.

“You know ... he's going to have a baby over there ... with that woman...''

“Yes. He told me.”

“Have you told Tsvi?”

“He knows.”

“What did he say?”

“He just laughed.”

“He did? Why didn't he come with us today? I phoned him last night but got no answer.”

“I spoke to him.”

“Why didn't he come with us?”

“I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want them to get divorced. He likes having their apartment...” She didn't finish the thought. But it was Kedmi's anyway, not hers.

“Is that what he said?”

“No. All he said was that he didn't like hospitals.”

“I couldn't sleep last night. I kept tossing in bed. That baby slays me.... Who would have thought it of him?”

She didn't understand, though. Her eyes grew large with wonder.

“What makes you say that?”

I shook with anger again. My lost time. I missed Jerusalem as though it were years since I had last seen it. Father was taking his time. The driver had gone to sit in a nearby café. I glanced at the vaults of the citadel, at a strip of sea on the horizon. I opened the car door.

“Come on, Gaddi. I'll show you something.”

We strode along the seawall until we came to some steps that zigzagged down to a recessed apse at one end of it. A dry, gray day, with a hot desert wind from the east. The U-shaped bay was a blur, the Carmel range a purple mass. I grasped Gaddi's fat hand to keep him from slipping on the guttered stones, the locomotive still under his arm, explaining to him what we saw and showing him the hills across the water where he lived, although he preferred looking at a column of flame rising from the oil refinery on the bay to flicker in the foul wind.

1799. From a hillock nearby Napoleon gazed down on these walls, reached out his hand to them. Had he wished to take them or merely to comprehend, to palpate the pulsebeat of history with his sensitive touch? And then he retreated. This was not the place. Never mind. It was through this trivial defeat that he came to know himself, his true powers, the mission entrusted him. That he found the necessary point of connection. The last years of the eighteenth century were where I must begin.

I wanted to
he
myself again but could not. The boy was in the way. Scrutinizing me. My trampled time, my papers left by my books. In far, clear Jerusalem. Clear thought. Hard light. Dina in its streets, free with our money, free with strange men. And you, stranded high and dry here.

We descended the wall. Ya'el was; still in the taxi, eyes shut, arms folded on her chest. The driver looked at us.

“Father isn't back yet? What's going on in there!”

I climbed the steps of the rabbinate building. A large, long hallway with narrow doors. From somewhere came a sound of muffled sobs. Father's? In a fit I opened one of the doors. A dark young woman sat at a bare desk in a room that made the sobs resound like a weird echo chamber. She rose to speak to me as though I were an office clerk, but I beat a hasty retreat, letting go of the door, which slammed behind me. At the end of the corridor, through another door, I saw father's head beneath a black skullcap. Two young, dark-bearded rabbis sat on either side of him, evidently explaining something to him while he nodded his agreement. I collapsed onto a bench in the hallway, my head in my hands. An endless day. Two black-suited men climbed the stairs with a folded stretcher, threw it on the floor at my feet, and continued up another flight. At last father emerged, seen out by the rabbis, to whom he hadn't stopped nodding. He bowed his head and shook their hands with submissive gratitude. “Everything will be all right, Professor Kaminka,” they assured him. I rose quickly and started down the stairs with him hurrying after me while removing the skullcap and sticking it into his pocket.

“Really, they're being most considerate. They'll bring the rabbinical court to the hospital. They'll arrange it with the management, even though it's Passover eve.”

The exit below was blocked by the yawning doors of a hearse.

With an angry movement I slammed them shut. It was already half past three. We were late. The taxi drove to the hospital and left us at the front gate. Suddenly I had second thoughts: shouldn't Gaddi wait for us outside? But father insisted.

“Why shouldn't he come? She'll be happy to see him. He's a big boy already and can understand.”

Did he want him there to be a buffer? We started down the paved path among the lawns and cottages, the sea glinting beyond them, the strong dry wind at our backs. My last visit here was late last autumn. I had lectured to some history teachers at a local regional high school and stopped off to see her on my way back. It was dusk when I arrived. She was thrilled by my unexpected appearance. She was as lucid as could be, hardly talked about herself, wanted only to hear about me, even asked about the lecture I had given. I felt that she knew what was going on in my mind, in my life. I had already been told of her unforeseen improvement, which hadn't surprised me at all, because I had never really believed in her illness. When it began to get dark she suggested that I stay the night and even went to see if there was a room, but I was in a hurry to get back to Jerusalem. In the end she walked me in the darkness to the gate. Horatio ran wide circles around us, coming back to us each time to sniff our footprints, lick my shoes, tug at their laces with his teeth. And she walked by my side, heavy but erect, stopping now and then to look at me, wanting something from me that I never could give. We didn't argue or quarrel even once. She was unusually tender, thoughtful, uncomplaining, unaccusing. We were standing by the gate when she first told me that she had been getting mail from father. She took out a rustling packet of envelopes from her handbag and showed them to me without letting me hold them. What does he want? I asked anxiously. A divorce, she said. A weak light shone from the gatekeeper's hut. The dog passed under the barrier and stood in the middle of the road with his ears back and his tail wagging softly, drawn bow-like by the sounds of the night, the white fields of cotton, a distant bark. Now and then he glanced our way as though following our conversation from afar.

I began talking in favor of it, enthusiastically even. It's high time. It should have been done long ago, you've just enmeshed each other more and more. She heard me out in silence, her profile turned to me, until she interrupted coldly:

“But he didn't want to.”

“When didn't he?”

“Years ago. Before you were born. I begged him. He didn't want to. There are things you don't know. He wouldn't let me go.”

“But when?”

“There are things you don't know. You wouldn't believe how he clung to me.”

“But you yourself say that now...''

“We shall see. Now be on your way.” She was discounting me, dismissing me. “You'll never get to Jerusalem tonight like this.”

And I left her, walking down the empty road in the dark. Horatio set out at a lope next to me, turned suddenly around to look for mother, and rejoined me once more. Finally he stood halfway between us in the middle of the road, emitting a long angry howl until he was gone in the night.

And now the four of us were going to see her, a family delegation to this hospital that was once a World War II British army base. Gaddi gripped father's hand, Ya'el went ahead, and I brought up the rear with my briefcase. Again the urge to
he
myself and again the need to forgo it. He. What is a he? And what was the collective consciousness of the four of us, did it add up to a single whole? Gaddi's terror combined with his curiosity to see the forbidden he had barely even heard talked of, Ya'el's sadness, father's apprehension, the pain in store for him, his hopes and his fears—and I, feeling only anger at their pointless mulishness and the desire to tell them both off, to expose them, to pillory them, to have done with it, mourning my wasted day. I quickened my pace. Suddenly the paths around us were full of people. Patients and visitors spilled out of the cottages, nurses bearing trays crossed the old lawns still frost-burned from the hard winter, all slightly doubled over in the wind. A shrunken little yellow sun peered through the haze. Will I someday remember this moment, will it have any meaning? Can it be maintained as something tangibly, necessarily alive or must it shrivel too with the dead husk of time?

And then all at once there was a howling shriek as though a tramcar were flying through the branches, something galumphed through the air, someone screamed, the people in front of us scrambled out of the way, someone fell, someone shouted with laughter—and out from the bushes he charged, throwing himself upon us, his torn chain dragging behind him, whining, howling, first jumping on Ya'el and then quitting her, next sinking down at my feet to bite my shoes, then running into Gaddi, bowling him over on the grass, licking him and romping on again, at last spying father and sprawling all over him, pawing his face, clasping him, slobbering on him with choked whimpers, spattering him with mud, rattling the chain still wound around him. Father lost his footing and fell to his knees, white-faced and startled, but only when he screamed did I realize that he didn't know it was Horatio. He had completely forgotten his own dog, who had now streaked so suddenly back into his life and begun to writhe in a demonic dance, circling tightly around him on the pavement where he sat with his arms shielding his face, sprawling on him again like a thing possessed, yipping in a throttled falsetto as though trying to force out a bark that was stuck in the throat.

I rushed over to them. “It's Horatio, father! It's just Horatio. Don't be afraid.”

Ya'el ran to pick up Gaddi, who was too bewildered to cry, and the locomotive that had gone flying on the lawn.

“This
is 'Ratio?” Father was stunned, disheveled, covered with mud. “'Ratio? He's here?”

Father had always called him 'Ratio.

He rose and tried grabbing the uncontrollable dog by its head, as though struggling to make out his once-beloved pet in this mangy old beast.

“Down, Horatio!” I tried calming him. “Down ...”

Just then we glanced up and saw mother watching us in silence a few steps away. Her hair was loose, her face was rouged, and she wore a long brown dress. In one hand she held the other half of the tom chain. The wild look of her shocked me, the glare in her eyes, the splotches of makeup on her tanned cheeks. It was twenty minutes to four. Had she had a relapse? Silently she watched father struggling with the dog.