The Liberated Bride (29 page)
Read The Liberated Bride Online
Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
T
HE GUESTS PARTED
with the Abuna, who, still in his colorful night-clothes, was jollier than ever after a few hours of sleep. Ra'uda, still
brooding over the ignominy of her fate, seized Rivlin's hand and made him swear in the name of Allah to do all he could to regain her ID. IDs, her brother assured her, pressing her warmly to his heart, would not be needed when peace came at last. “Let's go, Professor Rivlin,” he said. “We have to get a move on.”
They boarded the minibus, in the back of which, beside the blanket and the pillow, now clucked three hens; strapped on their safety belts; and carefully placed the photocopied material from Jerusalem, which had spent the night in the vehicle, on the seat between them.
A morning mist was lifting over the Vale of Issachar. The road grew more distinct, twisting between olive groves and fragrant fields. Rashid, taking advantage of his Israeli license plate, skirted Kabatiyeh on Jewish bypass roads, along which the checkpoints were few. A few kilometers before Jenin they were surrounded by Palestinian policemen, who prodded seven workers, hiding from the morning chill in a ditch by the road, to climb aboard.
“
Weyn Issam?
”
*
Rashid asked, demanding to know why one seat was empty.
Worker number eight, it appeared, having been up all night partying, had failed to wake in time.
Loath to lose the income from the empty place, Rashid offered it to the commander of the police force, a middle-aged sergeant. The sergeant accepted with alacrity. He slipped the magazine from his Kalachnikov, took off his belt with its military pouches, and handed them to his second-in-command. Then he removed his army shirt, put it on again inside out, stuck his green policeman's beret in his back pocket, wrapped his head in a kaffiyeh someone handed him, and thus completed his transformation into a Palestinian laborer looking for a day's work in Israel.
They continued northward on a new, wide, empty road toward a group of Israeli settlements. Their handsome villas, topped by cockscombs of red tiles, had names the Haifaite had never heard of. All around them the world was sweetly quiet, as if no one had ever fought a war in it. The reservists from Jerusalem manning the checkpoint on
the Green Line were too busy having breakfast to bother stopping an Israeli car heading home, even if it was full of Arabs.
It was six o'clock. Good old Mount Gilboa was in its usual place, and the faithful sprinklers of the Valley of Jezreel hummed in their yellow fields, filling Rivlin's heart with an old love for his native land. All the tension seeped out of him. At Megido Junction his head fell back, and he did not jerk it back up until the French Carmel. As no driver could leave a dazed passenger standing in front of his house, Rashid came with him in the slow-moving elevator, carrying the photocopied texts.
The little space capsule carried them upward. In its mirror Rivlin noted a growth of beard that had not been there the day before. He felt compelled to return to an old question. Was Samaher really pregnant?
Unexpectedly, her cousin did not reply with his usual shrug. “Maybe not,” he whispered, looking down at the floor of the elevator.
“But why does her mother keep her in bed?”
“Because she sometimes imagines or does foolish things.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . like thinking she's a horse.”
He flushed hotly, the coal black eyes sad with regret. The elevator door opened. Rivlin's key was in the lock when Rashid said:
“Really, Professor Rivlin, you mustn't be angry. She really does love you. From her first class with you. Only you.”
He handed the binders to Rivlin and turned despairingly to go.
This time the Orientalist did not scold him or make light of his ailing student's love. Rather, he asked Rashid to come to the bedroom and handed him two bags of his wife's old clothes for the Abuna. Hagit's red shoes he stuck into a drawer. Who in Zababdeh would wear them?
Rashid did not look surprised. There seemed to be no way of surprising him. Perhaps, Rivlin thought, he could read minds. In any case, they would see each other again soon, because there were more poems and stories to be brought from Samaher.
Picking up the phone to check the voice mail, Rivlin noticed through the open door of the kitchen that the bored housekeeper, defying
his instructions not to cook, had left several containers covered with cellophane on the marble counter.
There were no messages. In the wondrous day that had passed, he had been needed by no one.
Dear Galya,
I'd like an answer to a simple question. Has your father's death, in your opinion, freed me from my vow (or promise) to tell no one what I saw (or, if you insist, fantasized)?
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 yearsâthat this alone, if anything, could make you come back to me.
That's all. A simple question calling for a simple answerâyes 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
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 fatherâwho, 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 mayâor may notâthink), 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 generationâyes, there already is oneâthat'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 sorryâno, gladâto 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 causeâthat 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 partedâ
word for wordâ
“
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 anywayâif not to look for the plans, then, say, to check the foundationsâand seen or fantasized the same thing.