Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  Nicholas begins to recite in ancient Greek. You recall? he asks wistfully. He wonders if it was my hour to die. He continues to quote lines from Hippolytus’ speech in Euripides’ Phaedra. For my benefit? He knows Ezra doesn’t understand. They are the passages he read to me the first time we were alone together. —⁠Missed her true moment. Her kairos. He concludes solemnly.

  Ezra puffs rhythmically on his pipe, thinking aloud to himself. —Wouldn’t stand in my way if I really wanted to sunder what...If I could conceive of...

  He was supposed to come to Paris in a week to sign the divorce papers. How convenient for him.

  —An act of God, Ezra says. In the eyes of God, eternally married. Could be no other woman for me.

  —She loved you, Nicholas muses.

  —She loved you, Ezra echoes significantly.

  Five years ago, the winter I was in New York and he wrote to me from Palermo, I thought I was in love with him.

  —She is dead, Ezra says with gusto, now we can talk truth. You knew her, Nicholas. I want to know what you think—your image of the woman I married. You knew her, biblically I mean. I know all about it.

  —She told you?

  —Her postcard from Delphi. “Spent Sunday with Nicholas at Delphi. The gods descended.” I know what that means when my wife says, “The gods descended.”

  Meant the gods. Incorrigibly carnal Israelites. Will never understand.

  —And what did you do? Nicholas asks sternly, his lips compressed. What did you do?

  Afraid Ezra beat me? Was terribly upset when I spanked Joshua. Little boys so delicate. Remember poor Kafka, he said.

  —Sent her the postcard from the Cathedral of Chartres of “The Woman Taken in Adultery.”

  Sent it from Heidelberg. Bought a supply of that picture when we passed through on our honeymoon trip.

  —I forgive you, he says magnanimously to Nicholas.

  Nicholas frowns, stamps out his cigaret with suppressed fury.

  Should have beat me but didn’t. Him he loves. Was only go-between in romance between master and disciple. Exalted for their purpose. A beautiful feeling to be their symbolic object. The bastards. Would like these mortal remains to decay all over them. Smother them in my carcass.

  —How do you find life in Heidelberg? Nicholas asks. They’ve just created a new department for comparative mysticism in Lima. Old Beelzebub has gone to Tokyo, has he heard? Tokyo may be the place. Only for two years. Returning to Jerusalem. They talk through the night. Heard all this before. X’s review of Y’s critique of Z’s book on the ——. It’s turning into an endless Passover service.

  A dog’s life alone, Ezra complains. There is Irmele in Heidelberg and Bettina in Paris, an extraordinary woman but getting old, has asthma too. Then Frau X in Frankfurt takes care of his laundry, excellent woman, Ph.D. in Roman history. A delightful girl in London, only eighteen, a Renoir, speaks Latin fluently. But in the end one is alone.

  He dozes off on Nicholas’ shoulder. He is awakened by an attack of diarrhea. Nicholas holds the pot. She is dead, he howls. Who will take care of me?

  —Did you observe, Nicholas asks, the number of corpses that have been brought in between midnight and dawn?

  Another batch is being brought in. Nicholas wants to know if this is usual. —⁠Ah oui, Monsieur, the night watchman whispers excitedly, flushed with pride. C’est la fête.

  It’s almost noon when the inspector arrives. Ezra is frantic. Burial arrangements must be made at the latest by Thursday, according to Jewish Law. Even with extenuating circumstances. There are complications. City regulations require burial in the eighth arrondissement; he shows cemetery on the map. Or Ezra can file an application for a permit to release the body at the Préfecture, open between eight and six o’clock. It will take another day to get customs clearance. Transport by plane expensive. He tries to persuade secretary to postdate death certificate. Rages against French bureaucracy, medieval laws. Required to bury his wife within forty-eight hours according to Jewish Law. Why this comedy? Wants body—body of his wife, mother of his children; recites my genealogy to the seventh generation, raves about resurrection and Judgment.

  Wonder myself why the comedy. Always this embarrassing business of the body. Should be possible to disappear clean and simple. Whisk one’s self out of the world whole—dress, shoes, gloves, purse and all. So heavy-handed, the way God—

  Nicholas has returned from coffin maker. Delivery promised by six. Fear journey ahead. French Railways on slowdown strike. Nicholas suggests cremation. Tries to persuade Ezra that fire is my element. —⁠All signs indicate, he pursues with smile and clownish shrug, that the gods are opposed to her being committed to dust. Earth is not her element. It will cost two thousand francs to ship the coffin by air freight. Old or new francs? Ezra is considering. A friend of Nicholas’ is driving to Naples tomorrow. Could share expenses...Easy to smuggle coffin across Italian border. Scatter her ashes over Aegean Sea. Ezra rushes out to make long-distance calls before the post office closes. Nicholas is studying timetables of ships going out of Naples. The Grimani, with stops at Palermo, Piraeus, Cyprus—departure Saturday, too late. Ferry boats out of Naples three times a week to Capri, to Stromboli Thursday morning.

  Always wanted to see the volcano.

  THE RABBI has agreed. It seems I shall have a Jewish funeral after all. Ezra’s family is holding a reception at his sister’s house in Vienna.

  All the silver—trays, bowls, goblets, platters, candlesticks—shines festively like at Passover in Renata’s apartment; only now the big table is pushed up against the wall to make room for the coffin, the chairs have been taken out and the mirrors are covered. There is a happy bustle near the hall leading to the nursery—the little round woman with the long red hair surrounded by children. I’m sure it’s Ezra’s mother giving chocolates to the children—but I thought the poor soul died; remember going to the unveiling of the stone on our way to Paris; on a beautiful summer day in the cemetery: didn’t believe it. Her smug, slit-eyed cat face beams, of course it’s she, chocolates in her palm; clucking as if she were feeding chicks. Dear old Sosie—one hand passing sweets, the other fumbling in the back, resticking the pins in her hair that won’t stay up, or groping for a buttonhole, grabbing the arm of someone who’s trying to pass to convey a compliment. Ezra’s father, with dandy rabbi beard and proudly displaying his belly, is trying discreetly to brush white specks from her Sabbath dress—flour or powder, lint, bed feathers. She forgot the zipper in the back as usual, but the best story is the time she got dressed for Passover in such a rush (late as always, the guests already beginning to arrive) and appeared festive in diamond earrings and a red dress, only she forgot to take off her nightgown. I am glad for her it happened this way. Couldn’t really leave Ezra. Had to stay with him for the sake of his mother. Entrusted her son to me. Remember in the delivery room when the doctor said, Bear up, Sophie and you’ll have a fine boy—it will take a while, he’s coming buttocks first, it may last another three hours—but we know it’s a boy. When I finally heard—I was screaming so loud, he kept repeating, boy—when I heard boy, I thought it would make Ezra’s mother so happy; if it was true, because I couldn’t believe it. Then when I came to, Ezra told me, ceremonious, impressed, surprised, struggling with himself, awe finally triumphing over cynicism; and I knew it was true...My first thought was, Won’t Ezra’s mother be happy. Ezra, myself, unimportant; my father with his “a boy is a big problem”—one all-knowing Freudian eyebrow drooping, the other raised, smiling ambiguously. Not important, Ezra, Father, me, nurse showing Eskimo-faced newborn. Heard him scream, as they tried to pull legs straight to measure length for hospital records. Thinking only of Sosie’s happiness when she got the telegram. Perhaps my one moment of real unselfishness. Will I go to heaven? Never understood that scheme of heaven-hell—except to enrich the language. Sosie’s bringing in huge steaming platter—can’t be jelli
ed fish. Wonder if she knows I’m dead. Doesn’t take cognizance of coffin, perhaps she misheard, as Ezra told me before we got engaged: A truly good soul, hears only the good, tell her the women at the party thought her dress a disgrace, and she’ll smile and say, I’m glad they liked my hat; let her husband complain the meat’s like leather, and she’ll say, I knew you’d love my spinach...

  She is blessing the pictures. Photographs of me that Ezra sent when we got engaged, mounted in silver frames. The wedding is in New York, she explains to everyone, just about now, because of the time difference. Mad little Polish woman. Whatever is good in Ezra came from her. Boasts like peasant, showing pictures around: her daughter-in-law, pretty like a movie star, the father a professor—a psychoanalyst, she adds impressively after a glance at her husband who looks away, pained, his mouth puckered, afraid she’s spilled the beans; poor Sosie never got further than that: embarrassing Herr Rabbiner with the wrong word, lint on her dress, serving meat carelessly in a milchig dish. Bride’s father is son of lamented chief rabbi of...Her husband elaborates pompously while she polishes glass on picture with her sleeve.

  Nicholas has just come in, his chest in a cast, apologizes for being late; broke a rib skiing in St. Moritz.

  “Goyim naches,” he laughs.

  Getting more Jewish every day. Fooled even Ezra as a freshman in his Hegel seminar. Had a wedding cooked up with a girl from a wealthy Sephardic family. Surprised to discover his star pupil was a pure Polish Catholic (son of a small-town New England pharmacist—corrupted by Marxist piano teacher, Nicholas explained with cynical Semitic shrug). Ezra decided his mistake was not a mistake. Claimed he could smell a Jew, developed trans-racial theory. Nevertheless, the wedding didn’t materialize.

  “At last!” Ezra embraces him. “I was waiting for you.”

  “Were you worried about the papers?”

  “It’s all settled,” Ezra assures him. “Yes, you may smoke.”

  Nicholas leans over the coffin, he stares like a man looking down a well for something lost. What is it? Afraid his eyes will fall out. His mouth moving without a sound. Kiss me? Well do it. Kiss me on the forehead like the years you slept on the living-room couch, calling me sister. Remember you in long shirttails falling over hairy thighs. A brother to count among my blessings. The third time you came to visit at night, Ezra was out. “Have you come to see the master or the master’s wife?” I asked and caught your hands as you came toward me. It was in New Haven in 1954 but it could have happened in a Polish ghetto in the seventeenth century—the strange slow-motion dance, only our fingers clasping—it happened in a book: you were holding my hands up high like in a minuet; you kissed me on the forehead and smiled. “Good night, sister,” you said and let go. I went to my room.

  You were kind. Read to me aloud from Hölderlin and the Greeks. When you kissed me in the grass years later it was another book: My eyes were closed. Your hand slid under my coat, up my bare side, you took my breast; you said “Wurm.” Why? It was startling. Woman’s flesh brought to mind the wages of sin? Or did you mean something good? Because we were lying on the damp, loose ground in April, the earth wet and cold, the last year’s dead grass and new grass just beginning. I remember coals strewn gray and black on the path leading to the bank of the river, and our slow-motion descent to the ground. You stared at me (like you do now) as I lay there; my face felt painted on, the damp coming from the earth up my back. The sky baby-blue with white clouds over the campus, looking up through the willows—the whole thing fell straight out of Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen. “Wurm,” you said. “Why?” I asked but you only repeated “Wurm.” Didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended. Did you mean death? Is that why you are staring? I wish you’d say something. My name. Anything. A quote. Once when we sat on another patch of grass and I asked you what you were thinking you said, “I’m thinking that I am unnecessarily fortunate to have two worlds when I am perfectly content with one.” Perhaps you haven’t another good line like that.

  “The folly of it,” he exclaims angrily, turning away from the coffin.

  The guests file by the wall, circling slowly toward the coffin. They pause to admire expensively framed wedding pictures on display. The gifts have been put on the table again: sets of silver salt pits, sugar bowls and ashtrays. Pairs of candlesticks in assorted sizes. Crystal vases and dessert plates. A pile of tablecloths, satin and damask, still as good as new. Boxes still in their wrapping and ribbons are stacked under the table.

  Jonathan stands in the doorway. The children were told to stay in the nursery but he sees Toby and Joshua playing hide-and-seek between the forest of legs. He wanders into the room asking, “Have they opened the coffin?” Grandmother catches his arm and holds him pressed against her jutting belly.

  One by one people move up to the coffin. “...done by big-name experts. Latest American techniques,” Renata boasts as the guests murmur admiringly, “The sunglasses are haute mode.”

  Grandmother, her palm clamped on the child’s forehead, makes a little push forward. He takes a step, but she pulls him back. “It’s not her,” he says, “that’s not her face.”

  The child is hushed. They had the best mortician in town restore my face. Sixty fingers working all morning produced half a dozen different faces—impossible to please every member of the family. It was Ezra’s choice in the end. She looks exactly like in the wedding pictures, the guests remark.

  The bereaved husband receives condolences with a festive air; positively aglow, he waltzes through the crowd on waves of sympathy. He holds a large handkerchief over his mouth to cover a leer. From every part of the room he casts triumphant and amorous glances into the coffin, and blows his nose vigorously. Such a loss and a cold on top of it! A thick layer of talcum white to cover up the mourner’s stubble makes his lips appear unusually thick and pink. He loves public occasions—a wedding, a funeral, circumcision, inaugural address or political rally—who cares, as long as it is an occasion. There never were enough occasions for poor Ezra. As he confessed to me sadly, but for the fact that he was born a Jew he would have become Pope. He is relieved that fate spared him the dubious status of the divorce. It feels great to be a widower. He has forgiven me, forgiven himself. God has forgiven us all. Once more I am the woman of his dreams, the bride of his youth.

  “She was a great woman,” he says solemnly.

  I am dead. They can all relax and celebrate.

  Renata, too, is relieved. It was hard to love me. The strain of having to love me gave the poor soul migraine. She envied me the children. Now she has them.

  More guests keep arriving. There is excitement at the door. A raspy voice rising above the general hubbub sounds like my father, speaking louder and with a heavier Hungarian accent than normally. He keeps asking how much all this cost—the shipping, the rabbi, the mortician, the total sum; he will write a check—so loudly it’s embarrassing. While Ezra placates him, he mutters on about religious atavism, back to the primal horde. There is Uncle Joske, the soccer player from Budapest. Have they all come? The aunts and cousins from Australia, Canada and Paraguay? I see my mother enter, wrapped in a crystal cocoon. No, it was only a reflection. A little draft lifted the edge of the drape over the mirror. Renata has fixed it already.

  “I looked,” the child says. “Will I die?”

  He didn’t see anything, his grandmother tells him.

  It is raining. The guests are becoming increasingly restless. What are we waiting for? someone asks.

  I hear my father groan in Hebrew.

  Ezra, trying to cheer him up, makes a joke.

  “At her funeral at least she is decent. Bekovet.” They have stepped away from the coffin. Ezra, his arm around my father’s shoulder, continues talking heatedly through the noise and confusion. Death the final test “...In the end gathered unto her fathers. The great granddaughter of Reb Smuel Nyitra, after all...Shame how you lived. The parents, she. Freu
d. Homer. Joyce. Kultur. Cyclon B. Auschwitz. Holy Land.” His hand rises, a finger wags menacingly. “God will judge us!” The finger grows gigantic. The whole room turns a gangrenous black.

  Judgment? Not yet.

  No, it was only a warning. A window was thrown open. Everything is all right. Ezra emphatically denies rumors that I was to be tried as a witch by a council of orthodox rabbis. Grandmother screamed but Renata is quieting her. The sudden gust raised the drape from the mirror and she saw her daughter and granddaughters thrown into the flames, she wails. Always these little excitements. Renata fastens the windows. Only a vase turned over. The coffin bearers have arrived. Renata tries to pick up the broken pieces. Can’t under the herd of shuffling feet as the guests are leaving. The children are told to wait in the next room.

  A man whose face is very familiar leans down over the coffin. One of the coffin bearers? His final look as he lifts his head is blank. They are putting on the lid.

  The child, his face pressed against the streaming window pane, straining to see the coffin bearers as they come out on the street, is disappointed that there is no funeral hearse with plumed horses. They watch the men maneuver the crated corpse into the big black limousine. The car slides out of view.

  At last we’re outside. Small group stands under umbrellas listening to the rabbi’s voice drone on while the rain whips the earth around fresh-dug grave into a yellow froth.

  At some moment, just before lowering the coffin, the rabbi will have to turn around and, facing the congregation, ask if anyone present wishes to object.

  The coffin hangs suspended.

  THE SKY is an intense blemishless blue. Cables stretched taut on derrick booms zone the sky; distant vessels present odd foreshortened silhouettes. Napoleon’s tricorne. A cow hangs in the sky. It was on our honeymoon trip, waiting to board the Greek ship. I watched them load all afternoon while Ezra was writing postcards. They were hoisting cattle onto the freighter. I saw a cow strapped in a halter, its feet rising from the ground. The crane swung out over the water and the cow remained there, suspended midair, motionless and inert as if the soul had simply deserted.