The Liberated Bride (10 page)
Read The Liberated Bride Online
Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
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?
A
ND 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?
H
E 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?
T
HAT
S
ATURDAY 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 hurriedâoblivious to the glances of other soldiers, some of them under his commandâto 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.
“A
S 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 summitâwhere 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.
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.
Whether despite or because of this, their lovemaking was especially delicious. He rose from it contented, while his wife resumed from beneath the blanket her investigation of his frowned-upon condolence call. In her years as a district attorney, before being appointed to the bench, she had acquired a reputation as a shrewd cross-examiner, and he now answered her questions warily without denying that he might have, between expressions of sympathy for the bereaved, alluded to the painful mystery of Ofer and Galya's separation.
Hagit put on her glasses to study the defendant she had made love to.
“That's all there was?”
“More or less.”
“What else was there?”
“That's all.”
“I hope you realize even that was too much.”
“What was?”
“Mentioning Ofer to her. Wanting to know and understand everything. Come to my courtroom some day and you'll see the terrible things people do because they don't stop to think.”
He made no reply.
“Let it go,” she urged him gently. “Let it go. It only causes you grief. It's time you separated from her, too.”
“Me?” Rivlin laughed and reddened. “I'll never see her again.”
“I mean psychologically. That's why I was against your going to the hotel and wallowing in your old misery and begging for explanations. It's demeaning. For me, too. And most of all, for Ofer. It's over with. Let her be. She has a new husband.”
“Yes,” he murmured, delivering a counterstroke. “I think she's pregnant.”
“Pregnant?”
“Unless she's just put on weight. She's lost her good looks, by the way.”
“But what makes you think she's pregnant?”
“It just struck me . . . when we were saying good-bye. . . .”
“What struck you?”
“Nothing. You know what I mean. Forget it. She's really broken up over her father. I felt it when I said good-bye. . . .”
“Felt what?”
“Just for a second. It was like the old days. I hugged her . . . just to comfort her . . . and I thought I felt . . . this heaviness. . . .”
“A heaviness?”
“Forget it. It's only an image. Don't pounce on every word.”
“But what made you hug her in the first place?”
“I just felt like it. It wasn't really a hug. I was feeling sorry for her. Why are you so hard on her?”
“It's you, not me, who's been angry with her all these years.”
“That's so. I was. I still am. But she suddenly seemed so sad to me. She's too young to lose a father. What did I do wrong?”
She threw off the blanket, rose from bed naked, and put on a bathrobe. Going over to him, she took him in her arms and kissed him so hotly that he trembled.
“I just can't. . . .” He choked. “I can't stop thinking about it. Ofer has been in limbo for five years, without a woman in his life. That's the reality. Why shouldn't I try to understand what happened . . . to make some sense of it. . . .”
She rested her hands on his shoulders and shook him lightly, the bounty of her breasts showing through her robe.
“I know how it hurts you.” Her loving tone had a reprimand in it. “I'm on your side. That's why I'm asking you to put it behind you. All your worry and anxiety just make it worse for Ofer, even if you're far away and think he doesn't know. If you don't free yourself of that woman and stop trying to understand more than she does, he'll never be free, either. Not of her and not of you.”
“But he has to know.”
“Know what?”
“That her father died.”
“Why? Why does it concern him?”
“He can't not write a condolence note.”
“Why not?”
“Because the first thing she asked was whether he knew. She expects to hear from him.”
“Let her expect. Sooner or later he'll hear about it and do what he wants. Whatever that is, it will be right for him. It's his affair, not yours. Do you hear me? It's none of your business!”
“But how can I not tell him I went to the hotel?”
“Just don't. Why should you? To make him want what's lost forever?”
S
OMETHING RUSTLED IN
the bushes. Rivlin reached for a stone in case it was a snake. An animal, mole or rabbit, peeked worriedly from underneath some branches and took a step toward the Orientalist as if meaning to ask something, before changing its mind and darting off.
A soldier emerged from the hidden entrance of the base with a message for Tsakhi. The young officer rose, embraced his aunt, kissed his mother, and glanced at the mountainside in search of his father. Rivlin waved. Although the gesture meant, “Don't worry, son, get back to work and we'll see you soon,” Tsakhi came running toward him.
“You didn't have to run all this way to say good-bye,” Rivlin scolded him warmly. “You'll be home on leave in a few days. War won't break out before then.”
“I suppose not.” The young officer blushed. “Well, I'll be seeing you,” he said, touching his father's arm lightly.
Although the housekeeper had risen from a sickbed to prepare a large lunch for them, Hagit preferred as usual to eat out. Her one concession to the pot roast waiting at home was to choose a dairy restaurant with a fancy menu. Rivlin, undeterred by the elaborate
descriptions, ordered at once and hurried off to the rest room. He knew his sister-in-law needed time to deliberate, turn the pages, and make inquiries of the waitress. Although she and her husband were inveterate travelers and diners out, she still harbored the pristine illusion that every restaurant had its culinary apotheosis if only one knew what to ask for.
Finally the decisions were made. Even the waitress seemed satisfied. A first round of wine was poured, and the judge lit a slim cigarette and persuaded her nonsmoking sister to join her. Far removed from the depressing memory of their mother's cooking, they were happiest together in restaurants. Now, after summarizing the virtues of the gallant young officer, they proceeded to the wedding that was the formal, if not the sufficient, cause of Ofra's coming to Israel. Hagit wished to plan her sister's outfit and appearance.
“But why don't you come with us?” Ofra sought to persuade them. “Yo'el says his family sent you two invitations that weren't confirmed.”
“Yo'el is mistaken,” Rivlin said, regarding the dish put before him with disappointment. It looked small and insipid, and he stole a glance at his wife's plate to gauge her appetite and the prospects of sharing her meal. “We confirmed that we weren't coming.”
“But why not? Wouldn't you like to be with us? Yo'el needs your help to get through the evening with his horrid family.”
“How horrid can anyone be at a wedding?” Rivlin chuckled. He had heard more than one juicy story about the crudity of his brother-in-law's clan.
“Horrid enough. They'll ask nosy questions about why people our age have to go traveling to the ends of the earth, or what happens if Yo'el gets sick somewhere. . . .”
“But they have every right to be worried,” he warmly rebuked the girlish frequent flyer.
Rivlin's sister-in-law, however, refused to equate his and Hagit's genuine concern with the spiteful criticisms of Yo'el's envious family. “We need you there to defend us,” she insisted.
Hagit wavered. “After all, we don't really know them . . . and we didn't invite them to Ofer's wedding. . . .”
“Who remembers Ofer's wedding?” Rivlin's sister-in-law exclaimed aggravatedly, heedless of the feelings of the two people in the world she felt closest to. “All that matters is that they invited you and want you to come. It will be a big, outdoor affair at a new caterer's. We'll spend the evening together. There's so little time on this visit to be with you.”
Rivlin cast a warning glance at Hagit, who was already asking about this new caterer.
“It's called Nature's Corner. It's in a woods on the banks of a stream.”
Hagit was weakening. “For my part . . .”
But Rivlin, having foreseen the danger, had already taken preemptive action. He and Hagit, he announced, had tickets that evening for the theater, for a new play, on a biblical theme, that had opened to rave reviews.
“You can change them to another night,” Ofra pleaded. “We'll come with you. Yo'el loves mythological subjects. We need you at the wedding. You don't have to buy a gift. Ours will be from you too.”
“It's not a matter of a gift. The last thing I need is more weddings.”
“Actually, I wouldn't mind going,” Hagit told her sister. “But weddings make this man of mine so depressed that he's a menace to the bride and groom. The only weddings he can put up with, more or less, are Arab ones. . . .”
“More less than more,” Rivlin said. “I felt depressed even at that Arab wedding in the middle of nowhere two days ago. I can't help it. I was programmed that way by a cruel mother. Never to forget. Never to let go. Never to give in. Always to fight on. And after talking to Galya and meeting her new husband, the need to know what happened to Ofer's marriage is eating away at me like a cancer. . . . Why go to a wedding in Nature's Corner just to be miserable?”
“I hope you're not about to cry,” Hagit said, with a smile.
“Suppose I am?”
“Well, don't. Do it some other time.”
“Not even a little?”
“Not even. I warned you against going to that bereavement.”
“But how could I not have gone?” He appealed hotly to his sister-in-law. “How could I have overlooked his death? It's simple courtesy for an ex-in-law to express his sympathy in such circumstances.”
But the judge was not inclined to be judged.
“A condolence note would have done nicely. You should have seen,” she told her sister, “the touching letter he sent not long ago to the widow of an academic rival who died unexpectedly.”
She cut a large slice from her quiche and placed it, without asking, on her husband's empty plate.
It failed to placate him. His confession of fatal illness in the hotel garden now filled him not with guilt but with compassionâfor himself and for the young woman in black who had sat, shocked, across from him.
“Hagit wants nothing to do with them. She's too . . . I don't know what. Proud, or secretly angry. She doesn't even want to tell Ofer that Hendel died.”
“You don't?” The visitor turned to her sister timidly, reluctant to interfere in a family squabble that had broken out when they were having such a good time.
Hagit didn't answer. Pushing away her plate, she lit a cigarette and signaled the waitress to bring the dessert list.
Rivlin persisted. “You be the judge. Should we tell Ofer or not?”
“But what difference does it make?” Hagit asked, glaring to let him know that no matter how great the intimacy between her and her sister, no one in the world could or should settle their disputes for them. Angrily he snatched the proffered menu while informing his sister-in-law, who was regarding them with mild anxiety:
“Nature's Corner will do without us. Weddings get me down so that I could wreck not only a corner of nature, but the whole works. If it isn't too late, we'll come after the theater to rescue you.”