Love Conquers All

by Galia Albin

  Chapter 10

  Despite the relative quiet that now prevailed in the detention center, Talia was unable to sleep; sighs, groans and sobs were heard from time to time, but most of the inmates in the dismal place eventually succumbed to weariness and exhaustion. Only the warden walked to and fro, sewing day and night into one, long continuum; she showed no sign of being tired. Again and again, she passed Talia, shining her red flashlight in her face, rattling her bunch of keys noisily, grinning her toothless grin.

  For the last few hours, Talia’s mind had been hovering outside the reality of her situation. She felt as if she were in a state of grace, sinking into the past, ignoring the grim conditions surrounding her. Rapt in thought, she barely noticed the passage of time; even the stench of the cell no longer bothered her.

  Strange how flexible time can be, how changeable and subjective, Talia reflected in the quiet cell. As her thoughts carried her further and further into the past, she realized how elusive and enigmatic the concept of time really was. She remembered her first marriage, a period of her life which up to now had been relegated to the deepest recesses of her memory.

  Her married life with Amir was placid and uneventful, devoid of sturm und drang. A short time after the wedding, she went with him to Boston, where she majored in literature and special education- earning a B.A. and M.A.—and became active in the Jewish student' organization. She returned to Israel a divorcee. Very little from those years remained in her active memory, not even the divorce, perhaps because both parties had secretly felt, even before Talia expressed it verbally, that the marriage had become empty and meaningless. Or perhaps, as Talia often suspected, it had been emotionally barren to begin with.

  Only her daughter, Na’ama, born in that beautiful university town, remained a living memento to those faded years.

  Both her marriages had lasted about the same time, the same objective measurable span of time, that is, but how immeasurably different they were! It seemed to her that only the years spent with Jonathan had any significance in her life. And they will certainly remain so forever. They were, in the truest sense, the time of her life.

  The thought of their life together in the past tense pierced Talia’s heart with unbearable pain. It is all gone now—they were granted only five years! She envied her married friends, and even those who were not yet married, for the long years with their spouses in store for them, and immediately reproached herself for such pettiness and meanness of spirit. There, on the stinking prison pallet, reeking of all manner of human bodily functions, she meditated on the depth and insights that she and Jonathan had attained in their years together—layer upon layer of mental, emotional and spiritual values, the manifold dimensions of love, couplehood, friendship and parenthood that she had not yet fully fathomed. They lived so intensely, so uniquely, she thought, because deep down in their consciousness something told them that their time was limited. As if they knew in their souls that they must make the most of every moment, because each moment of their shared life was a gift from heaven.

  Jonathan was such a gift to her—and she hoped with all her might and all her anguished heart that she, too, was gift to him, a unique, once-in-a- lifetime gift. Would she have chosen a quiet, dull and long life with a husband, over the intensity, the profundity, the variety of her truncated time with Jonathan? At that moment, with the wound in her heart, she deferred answering the question, refused even to consider the question, itself. But deep down there was only one answer, and she knew what it was.

  Now she understood why she was able to remember every word that Jonathan had ever spoken to her from the moment they’d met, why each event in her life with him was seared in her mind. Their shared life had such resounding significance for her and everything was preserved in her mind as on a unique musical recording; it was the music of memory. She vowed to remember, as long as she lived, the man she had loved, the man who had loved her, the father of their two beloved children.