The Liberated Bride (41 page)

A
LTHOUGH YOU WILL
never surrender your love, this is not the time to surrender to it. You know how hurtful your absconding is and how much resentment is building up against you. But if that's what is needed to free the stubborn heart that is chained to the place you are in now, you're prepared to add still more to the injury.

The daylight slowly abandons the desert, casting copper sparkles on its way to the Dead Sea. You stroll through the hilly neighborhood, in no particular hurry, even though the hotel summons you with its unanswered questions. You bide your time and wait for the twilight to turn to darkness. Only then will you make your third visit, which must remain forever sealed in your heart.

Is there any reason to hope that the truth that has eluded you in daylight will reveal itself by night? Is the old promise of a room still good even though the promiser is gone?

You approach in a roundabout way from the rear and enter the big
garden, in which, you are surprised to see, there's no one. You pass by the tables scattered around the gazebo in the yellow light of the glittering pool, your heart twinging with the memory of a wedding held in vain. It's not just the garden that is empty. The hotel, too, is dark and deserted.

But at least, you think, grandly handing the clerk at the reception desk your ID, there will be a room. At first you don't understand why he smiles without looking at it. Then he explains that, even if no guests are in evidence at this early hour of the evening, the entire staff—clerks, waiters, cooks, and chambermaids—is on standby for a full house. The name of each guest is on a place card on a table in the dining room, next to the key to his room.

“A
H
, P
ROFESSOR
!” The maître d' hurried over. “This time you're out of luck. The heart that brought you back to see Galya did not know that she and her mother have gone abroad on vacation.”

Rivlin shook the sturdy Arab's hand. Although he had been looking forward to another tête-à-tête with his ex-daughter-in-law, he was nevertheless not put out by the news. “
Ma'alesh,
”
^*
he said. “This time I didn't come just for her. I'm stuck tonight in Jerusalem.
Fi odeh r'hiseh minshani?
”
^†

“
Odeh? Il-leileh? Hon?
^‡
Oh, my!” exclaimed the gray-haired Fu'ad, who was resplendent in a black suit and bow tie. “You've forgotten it's high season. As honored as we would be to have you, you'd have to be a Christian, an American, and a member of an organized group to stand a chance of finding a room here in midsummer.”

“
Odeh janbi, zghiri, behimmish.
”
^§

“There's nothing, Professor. I swear to God. Everything is filled up. You could be the size of a mouse and I still couldn't find a spare hole
for you. Imagine,
bas ma tihkish la'hadda
,
^*
we're even putting up guests in Mrs. Hendel's apartment. And Tehila, though she isn't feeling well, will have to give up a room, too. You'll see the stampede begin in a few minutes. Ten busloads are on their way from the airport.”

“I can't believe it.”

“It's called success. There's nothing I can do about it. We're very successful, Professor. Success will kill us all in the end. As good at the pilgrim trade as the late Mr. Hendel was, Tehila has doubled our occupancy in a few months. And she hasn't even made any big changes. It's all in the details. For example, there's now free seafood at the buffet, and we pick up the tab for the cable car at Masada. We have two new Christian channels on cable TV, too. The Christians are crazy about this place. And we've done it without increasing the staff. Tehila gave everyone a raise, and
u'sirna abidha
.
^†
What more can I tell you? She has her father's talent and brains without his heart.”

“Where's her brother?”

“Tehila has—what's the expression?—kicked him upstairs. She sent him and his family to America to be agents for the hotel. It isn't nice to say, but it was her way of getting rid of him. That's life. She and her father, may he rest in peace, were thick as thieves. She never left his side.
Irfet kul ishi,
^‡
she stuck her nose everywhere. That's why, when he died, she grabbed the reins right away,
u'udrub, hiyeh sarat al fars.
§
^§
Who can stand up to her? Her poor mother, you may remember, was always a weak, spoiled woman who kept to herself and was treated like a princess by her husband. Now that he's gone, she only wants to collapse, even though I do my best to keep her going. And Galya—I don't have to tell you about Galya. Who doesn't love Galya?
Mara n'zifeh u'mumtazeh.
^∥
God be praised, she's pregnant now.”

“She is?” He gave a start. “In what month?”

“What month?” The maître d' smiled and spread his arms. “You'll
have to ask her on your next condolence call. Or else figure it out yourself, because she's due in the middle of January, if I'm not mistaken. She must have got pregnant in the spring, right after her father died. It's eerie. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd say it was Mr. Hendel's spirit coming back. But you, Professor—you'll say that's all a lot of nonsense.”

Rivlin glanced at the big garden and at the gazebo surrounded by lanterns, nostalgic for his first condolence call, which seemed to have taken place years ago.

“Why nonsense, Fu'ad? Today everything goes. Reincarnation is big with the young folks. As long as no one gets hurt by it.”

“You're so right, Professor.
Inteh bit'ul hada kul hal'ad hilu.
^*
What I was thinking was, it's only natural for a father's death to—what's the word?—
b'ghazel
. . . . Right. To stimulate the daughter to be a mother. And you know, Galya isn't that young. She never gave your poor Ofer a chance. Believe me, my friend, I may be a stranger to you, and an Arab in addition, but it grieves me that you and I won't have a grandson together. I always said to myself, The Professor, he's a good man, he's never jealous. Galya is a sensitive girl. She deserves to be happy. She's the opposite of her sister, who doesn't give a damn about anyone.”

A bow-tied young waitress whispered something in Fu'ad's ear.

“That's it. The buses are here. Now the fun starts. I'm sorry to have to go without helping. Listen, Professor. The next time you want to sleep here, give us a call first. I wouldn't want to disappoint you again.”

But Rivlin was not going to let the night's visit end like this. Gripping the shoulder of the Arab, who appeared to know more than he let on, he said:

“
Al hal, ya Fu'ad, a'tini ishi aakul. . . .
^†

The maître d' squirmed and swore that there wasn't room for another pin in the dining room. Every table and chair was taken. The guests would proceed straight to their meal from the buses. “But I'll tell you what, Professor. I can put you in the smoking lounge next to
the bar, where you sat with Galya. Mr. Hendel sometimes used to order a snack there with his cigar. Have a seat and we'll bring you something. The soup is on its way.”

The large windows of the lobby shook as the buses flooded the parking lot with their headlights, setting the bushes of the garden aflame before lining up in a long, silent row. The elderly Christians poured into the lobby in a swift but orderly wave. Pennants were raised and hymns struck up as they marched into the dining room as smartly as conscripts in boot camp.

The Jew nearly followed them in. At the last minute, he turned and headed for the lounge, sniffing its air as though to scent the deceased's last springtime cigar. He passed through the dark, windowless bar, its counter glowing with bottles that seemed to have their own source of light, and sat in the easy chair from which his ex-daughter-in-law had dueled with him. Could he manage, without risking too much on the home front, to abscond to the very place his son had been banished from?

A heavily made-up waitress in a pantsuit brought him a large cup of hot soup and some crackers. Would he, she asked, prefer crab or a vegetarian platter for his main course?

“Crab?” He had never eaten crab in his life. “Why not?”

“Do you have enough light, sir?”

For the moment, he had all the light he wanted.

From the dining room came the voice of a woman welcoming the guests in the name of the hotel and the nearby holy sites. It took him a while to realize it was Tehila. Though down with a cold, she had made sure to be present. He wondered if Fu'ad had told her he was there.

He shut his solitary eyes and strove to return to that summer night like this one—that night that was still, despite all that had happened since then, the happiest of his life. Although he could deal with the anger of his wife, who knew he loved her come what may, he was worried that she might try phoning the home of his old mentor—where, having finished their supper, the Tedeschis were now seated with Akri in the large library, showing him Hannah's latest translations of pre-Islamic war and love poetry.

A brief, matter-of-fact grace was said in the dining room, followed by the soft chime of plates and glasses as the waiters hurried to feed the hungry pilgrims. Meanwhile, Rivlin waited for his food. But even if that Arab has forgotten me completely, he thought, I'm not going anywhere.

F
U'AD, HOWEVER
, had forgotten neither him nor his solitude, which was now broken by the waitress, who returned to expertly spread a white cloth on the table and set it with silverware and wineglasses for two. Soon the curtain of the lounge parted, and in came his dinner partner, the new proprietress of the hotel. Tall and slightly stooped in her light housedress, her hair cropped short above her sallow, bony face, she planted, despite her cold, a warm but casual kiss on his cheek, as if he were still a member of the family. She wanted to thank him, she said, for taking seriously her admonition not to wait for another death before coming again. True, he had dropped in without warning on the craziest day of the year, but what of it? What mattered was that he hadn't forgotten them. She knew, of course, that it wasn't her or her mother he had come to see, but his lost daughter-in-law. Still, he was a dear and honored guest. Nor should he feel insulted at being made to dine in the lounge. Even she, the proprietress, hadn't found a seat in the dining room. She hoped he didn't object, then, to her joining him as his fellow pariah in the lounge.

The sly gleam in her little whiskey-colored eyes matched the reddish glow of the bottles on the counter.

Object? How could he, he replied, when she was the owner and he was her guest?

She sighed. She felt more like a slave than like an owner. Far from losing business after her father's death, the hotel was doing better and better, and she was coming down with more and more colds. But why complain about success when so many people could only complain about failure? How was his wife? And what had made him come again without her—and at night, of all times? She hoped the judge wasn't angry at them.

Rivlin felt a shiver. His wife, angry? Why should she be angry? She had taken Ofer's divorce more easily than he had. It was only lack of time that kept her from joining him on his visits, which had all been last-minute decisions. Take tonight, for example. He was stuck in Jerusalem without a place to sleep. Perhaps only a naive historian could have hoped that her father's promise of a room, although made long ago, still held.

The tall, pale woman, who seemed to have taken a liking to him, laid a hand on her heart and swore solemnly in the name of the new management to honor the commitments of the old one.

“Then how about a room?” His heart pounded strongly.

But there was none available. Nor, Tehila added with a naughty laugh, was there likely to be one, since she had taken to overbooking—an offense she was paying for tonight by having to forfeit a room of her little wing to an extra pilgrim, even though she was running a fever.

The waitress gracefully put on the table a gleaming brass implement that resembled a dentist's tooth extractor. From a large serving dish she transferred to their plates a boiled king crab that had been divided, eyes, whiskers, and all, into two symmetrical halves. Only the claws, reaching out toward each other over plates they were too long for, seemed unreconciled to their separation.

“Would you like more light, Miss Hendel?” the waitress asked.

“No,” Rivlin answered for the second time, though the question had not been put to him. “It's frightening enough to eat this thing in the dark.” Laughing gaily but apprehensively, he lifted his wineglass to toast the bony woman. She had already seized the brass implement and was cracking the legs of his crab for him, extracting white fibers of meat—“The best part, make sure you eat it!”—with long fingers.

“I'll catch your cold,” he joked, taking his time about putting the crabmeat in his mouth. He could only marvel at how fast and how far his absconding was going.

“I already gave it to you,” she said, her naughty eyes the same color as her deceased father's, “when I kissed you. Assuming, that is, that I ever give anything to anyone. But don't be a scaredy-cat. Eat! The marvelous meat in the legs of this crab comes courtesy of an airplane from Crete. Our hotel owes no small share of its astonishing
success in recent years to the reputation of its cuisine. Our meals are as much part of the pilgrim experience as a visit to the Holy Sepulchre or a baptism in the Jordan. It all started with my father's revolution five years ago, when he threw out those parasitical inspectors from the Rabbinate and did away with the kosher kitchen. He knew he was risking his Jewish clientele, but he didn't think he could count on it anyway. He preferred to gamble on quiet, conservative Baptists from Georgia and Mormons from utah who would visit the Holy Land come hell or high water. Ofer was still married to Galya then. It's a pity he didn't stay with us. He could have been a partner in all this. . . .”

Rivlin flared. “What do you mean, it's a pity? It was you who drove him out.”

“We?” The whiskey smiled in her eyes. “What are you talking about? Who knew anything about it?”

“You didn't know?”

“Nothing.”

“A tight, loving family like yours?”

“We were. But not here. Believe me, to this day I don't know what made Galya break up her marriage. She may have been in the eye of the storm, but to us she was a closed book. Whenever my mother or I tried talking about it or suggested a reconciliation, she just grew hostile. She acted like a stranger. And when, as her big sister, I made a last attempt to ask her to reconsider leaving a man she had loved so much, she lost her temper and said she wasn't made for love that wanted to creep under your skin. That's all I know. There was no stopping her. Maybe she thought finding a better man than Ofer would be no problem with her good looks.”

“Did she?”

“Find a better man? I don't know. It's hard to compare two such different types. Bo'az is Ofer's opposite. It's as though Galya wanted, not only a new husband, but one who would cancel out the old one.”

“Cancel Ofer out? How?” His voice trembled with his eagerness to know. “I only met him for a few minutes.”

“Bo'az is a closed, almost secretive person. He's nice, and he's thoughtful, but he's not made for intimate relationships. It isn't easy
to get close to him. I'm not the right person to ask about him, because I preferred Ofer's openness and emotion. You remind me of Ofer. I liked being with him, even if he sometimes ran off at the mouth about whatever happened to be on his mind. I don't know what he's doing today. I do know, looking back, that his idea of expanding by building up rather than out into the garden was a good one. After he left, there was no one to fight for it.”

“But why do you keep saying he left?” Rivlin protested. “You know he didn't. He was made to leave.”

“Fine. After he was made to leave. Look, I don't really know what happened.”

“Did your father?”

“No. I'm sure of that. At the bereavement, during one of those long, sleepless nights when we sat talking about him, Galya cried and said he had been very noble. My mother, you know, was against the divorce. She thought it was wrong to hurry. She wanted them to separate and give it time. But my father backed Galya all the way. He trusted her, as he always did. And he respected her too much to ask questions. He gave her complete freedom and was as generous as possible about paying the costs of the divorce.”

“Generous?”

“You know perfectly well—our accountant was upset about it—that Ofer received much more from my father than he, or you and your wife, put into their apartment. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. It was my father's right to do what he wanted with his money. You must have noticed that he loved and always listened to Galya more than he did to me or my brother. That's the truth. Believe me, though, I never resented it. It was enough for me to be by my father's side. No one knew better than I did every mood of his, every weakness and depression and foolish anxiety. When you work that closely with someone, it's only natural to fight at times. I wasn't like Galya, who worshiped him from a distance. So don't lump us all together. We weren't partners in the divorce. Far from it. Perhaps if you or your wife had shared what you knew with us, my mother and I—or at least I—might have encouraged Ofer to handle Galya differently. . . .”

Rivlin emptied his wineglass with a gulp and pushed the crab revoltedly away.

“But what could we have shared? We were as much in the dark as you were. We still are.”

“You, too?”

“Absolutely. And if Ofer won't talk about it to this day and neither will Galya, it must have been something bad. I can't stop thinking about it. What terrible thing could he have done? If he's punishing himself by keeping silent, that only prevents him from getting over it. Or was he himself the victim of an injustice he still hasn't recovered from?”

“But what is it you want now?”

“Only to know. I have to know. That's how I am. I need to know the truth even if it's useless. It's my nature. It's what motivates any historian—otherwise he's in the wrong profession. This has been haunting me for the past five years. And the strange thing is that your father's death, rather than putting an end to it, has made it worse than ever. Just look at how I keep coming back.”

“In that case,” she laughed, “I feel better. At least you weren't looking for a room.”

“That was only a pretext. I could have found a room somewhere else.”

“And yet it was all so long ago. You're a stubborn man.”

“Your sister has remarried. She's going to have a baby. But Ofer is still stuck. Even then, five years ago, something told me the separation would go badly for him. She meant too much to him. I knew he wouldn't give her up so easily. I just never imagined it would take so long. That's why I . . .”

“You what?”

“I tried talking it over with your father on the phone, without telling even my wife. I hoped that the two of us could have a restraining influence. And although you say—and I'd like to believe you—that he knew nothing, which is what he told me too, I must say I was offended by his tone. There was something cold about it. All his friendliness and good nature were gone. He sounded hard, as
if he wanted to get rid of me. That's why I never came to see you afterward.”

“But what did you want him to do?”

“At least to feel sorry. To be as anguished as I was that a marriage that seemed so happy was over in a year. That's all I asked of him: not to accept it so easily.”

“He accepted it because he trusted Galya. That's why he was generous with Ofer.”

“Yes, he was. But to tell you the truth, I didn't like his generosity either. What made him so ready to give Ofer more than he deserved? Could it have been that Ofer knew something and was being paid off?”

“What a strange thought! My father wasn't generous because he was afraid of Ofer. He wanted Galya to be able do what she thought best for herself. He didn't want to give Ofer any excuse to withhold his consent. Trust me. I knew my father well. Better even than my mother did. I knew how his mind worked. We were together on a daily basis. It was an intensive relationship. Had he known anything, sooner or later he would have dropped some hint. Listen. Look at me. I'm a confirmed single woman. I have no family apart from the one I was born in. I don't even have many friends. I was with my father all the time. I swear to you, whenever Ofer's name came up, he had only good things to say about him. ‘Ofer was a nice, talented boy,' he'd say. ‘The only problem with him was those strange fantasies. . . . '”

“Strange fantasies?” Rivlin felt a chill. “What were they?”

“How would I know? Maybe my father was thinking of the plans for expansion that Ofer submitted. Or of his political opinions. He had these ideas that you couldn't get him to stop talking about. He was very attached to my father from the start. He wanted to make an impression on him. And he was very involved in the hotel. Everything about it interested him. He had his ideas about the management, about the menu in the kitchen, about the arrangement of the rooms. Maybe that's why my father thought he fantasized—was maybe even out of touch with reality. So when Galya said that she wanted to break up with him, my father's reaction was, in that case, better sooner than later. . . .”

“Out of touch with reality?” Rivlin teetered between shock and pain. “How?”

“Never mind. Those are just words. Why get upset?”

“There's no such thing as ‘just.' I want to know what your father meant. If you knew how his mind worked, then now is the time to tell me. It frightens me to hear Ofer accused of such a thing.”

“No one is accusing anyone. Why do you pick on every word as though you were in court? The Mr. Hendel you knew was a polite, good-natured, smiling hotel owner, a very proper man. But the father I knew was someone who took off his jacket and yanked down his tie and could be depressed or nervous or overbearing toward those who were close to him. Even I, who was his right hand, was often hurt. . . . So what does it matter what he did or didn't say about Ofer?”

Rivlin was not reassured. Anxiously he studied the bony face—which, in the dim lounge, was increasingly coming to resemble the dead man's. For some reason he thought of the old revolver in its drawer in the Jewish Agency building in Paris. And even if Ofer had “fantasized” something “out of touch with reality,” couldn't this have been stopped in time? Mustn't there have been some clue or lead in the young couple's silence he could have used to persuade Hendel to join him in trying to delay the divorce?

Now it was too late. Hendel was gone, and Ofer and Galya had gone their separate ways without breaking their silence. Hagit was right. He was and continued to be a coward. Yet it wasn't people or ideas he was afraid of. It was the woman who kept warning him to stay within bounds. For bounds could be crossed and new territories entered without forsaking one's love: he had learned this from a tactful but resolute Arab driver with coal black eyes. You could even abscond to a strange bed and rise in the morning wiser and richer.