The truth is that although your father was not the type to cut and run, he had panicked so badly after that fateful Tuesday that he moved up a planned trip to America in the hope that it would give him, and perhaps me too, a breather in which to review the options more calmly (a sensible strategy for the stock market, but not for a Greek tragedy) before formulating his response to this stranger in his family who had never imagined that Paradise had its basements.
In the five years since our separation, Galya, I’ve sometimes thought about the man as much as I’ve thought about you. In the comprehensive dissertation on our divorce that I’ve composed in my head, there’s a chapter devoted to the subtleties of Mr. Hendel, who ran away (yes, ran away!) to America and returned from a successful two-week business trip there with the novel notion of handling me not by pleas, flattery, threats, or sulks, but by good humor. “Why in the world did you run away that day when you saw me?” was his line. “Don’t tell me you thought you had discovered some deep, dark secret! It’s time that you realized a family’s emotional life can be more complicated than you think.”
I wonder if you remember the family dinner to which we all were invited on the Saturday after your father’s return from America. It was at that nice restaurant belonging to Fu’ad’s uncle in Abu-Ghosh, on a terrace shaded by a grapevine as big as a tree. Surrounded and protected by his loving family, your father thought it was the perfect place to confront the son-in-law who had caught him with his pants down.
Perhaps you even remember how he seated us around the table. He put me as far from himself as possible, but also facing him, so that he could keep me under observation while warning me with a glance not to ruin a happy family. He strained to hear every word that I said, whether it was addressed to him or not. It was at that meal that he began dropping hints that he would make me his head architect in expanding the hotel for a new clientele discovered in America: wealthy fundamentalist Christians looking not just for a place to stay in Jerusalem but also for a home away from home that would offer them, on a clear day, views of the Messiah’s birthplace in Bethlehem, of his baptismal site near the Dead Sea, and of Golgotha, where he was crucified. It was at this meal—remember?—that he announced the coming revolution: no more “parasitical rabbis” checking his kitchen, no more separation of meat and dairy, no more porkless, seafoodless kosher meals. Come hell or high water, or just an ordinary Middle Eastern war, Christian pilgrims were more dependable than Jewish tourists.
And yet, little by little, as that meal went on, without anything careless being said or even hinted at, but simply by watching you and me squirm, he realized, with the intuition of a clever and intelligent father, that the thing he feared most had come to pass. The intimacy between us, so foreign to a secretive man like him, had become a wounded animal threatening to devour him.
I want you to know that to this day, at this precise moment, facing a computer in the dark office building of the Jewish Agency, I can re-create the exact shades of light, tones of voice, and smells of food on that grapevine-shaded terrace, on that day late in the summer of our separation and divorce, with its sweet light falling on the vineyards and orchards, on the restaurants, shops, mosques, and churches—that serene Jewish vision of a bucolic and uncomplaining Arab life, as sweet as baklava.
And then—do you remember?—your father grew suddenly alarmed at the prospect of my “betrayal.” He looked so bewildered and hostile, and his gloom was so great, that your mother asked if he was feeling all right and Tehila, who (unbelievable!) knew nothing (and may know nothing to this day) about the drama that had taken place behind her back, said crossly, “What’s the matter, Abba? Cheer up!” Even the old restaurant owner, Fu’ad’s uncle, who knew your father well, sensed the shift in mood and sent us a copper beaker of Turkish coffee and a plate of yellow semolina cakes on the house. I noticed that your father, whose relationship with you had always been warm and full of love, was afraid even to look at you.
Then and there, the masks were stripped from us all. Had you wanted it (but you didn’t, you didn’t!), you had all the proof you needed that my version of events was as real as the Arab village we were looking at. But you, although you felt your father’s distress and could easily have grasped its significance, decided to overlook it in his favor, his and not mine, because you had only one father, whereas a husband could always be housebroken or exchanged. And you knew that only by turning truth into fantasy could you defend the honor of your family and the sweet memories of your childhood. Right in front of me, demonstratively, you went over to your father and gave him a hug to bolster him and—isolate me.
My Meeting with Your Father in the King David Cafeteria
He chose the place. You know how he liked to drop in on hotels and check their service and prices so as to know what to charge for his own rooms.
It was seven in the evening. The cafeteria was half-deserted. Twilight was falling on a hot, dry autumn day. He was studying the menu while waiting for me in a corner.
He wasn’t unfriendly, although neither did he display the ingratiating anxiety he had shown me in Abu-Ghosh. He was serious and reserved throughout our meeting. It couldn’t have been easy for him. He was wearing his safari jacket despite the heat (the beige one, not the white), and as always I had the sense (for the first time, accompanied by a twinge of envy) of a strong, impressively virile man.
He ordered an herbal tea for himself—did his stroke really come from his notorious high blood pressure?—and I, in a moment of weakness, asked the waitress to bring me, along with my coffee, a piece of cream cake; its tastelessness only weakened me more in what was the shortest, but most dramatic, confrontation of my life.
It started off in a low key. We talked about his plans for expanding the restaurant, which required a building permit. I suggested, based on my experience working for Harari, that he refrain from making public his idea of bringing Christian pilgrims from the United States, and especially—at least until the plans were approved—from telling anyone that he intended to make the place nonkosher. Every official in the Jerusalem municipality, I told him, no matter how nonobservant, lived in fear of the religious parties, and there was no point in taking chances. Your father listened carefully, gripping his tea with both hands as though to warm them. He glanced at the walls of the Old City, as if checking whether the floodlights had been turned on, and then casually uttered five words that spelled an end to all my hopes:
“I’ll really miss you, Ofer.”
(Which is more than I ever heard from you, Galya.)
Just then the lights came on in the Tower of David. I went white, or perhaps red, and instead of doing the honorable thing, getting up and walking out on that pointless meeting, I bowed my head as though failing to grasp his meaning and asked ironically if he understood whose fault it was that he would have to miss me. And without waiting for answer, I said: “Yours, Yehuda, yours and only yours!”
He was momentarily taken aback. The surprise that made him flush seemed genuine. But after a minute, he asked in that unflappable, gentlemanly way of his:
“My fault in what way?”
And that was when I forgot all my grandmother’s instructions. I only knew that this man, sitting across from me wearing a silk foulard, had already turned me out of his family. The injustice of it infuriated me. I told him he had to defend me against you.
In those very words. “You have to defend me against Galya.”
This time he was ready.
“What are you talking about, Ofer?” he asked innocently. “We’ve been terribly upset by what’s happened between you, but we’re helpless. Galya is treating it like a top secret. She told Tehila to mind her own business and not ask any questions. It’s a fact that we’re fond of you. And we’re sorry, too, about your parents, with whom we were proud to be connected. But how can we talk her out of it after such a betrayal?”
The malicious glint in his eyes said everything. The man was demonic and in full control, and although
I didn’t think you had dared tell him about my “fantasy,” he knew that you wouldn’t hesitate to break up our marriage, not only to save his honor, but also (from now on I’m going to be pitiless, Galya) because you were already thinking ahead.
My despair and bitterness turned to anger and hatred. In the middle of that quiet cafeteria I said furiously:
“What betrayal are you talking about? Yours?”
“Mine?” He smiled calmly. “Whom have I betrayed?”
I stared down at the table. I still couldn’t bring myself to speak the truth. I toyed with my fork at the soft, wounded corpse of the insipid cheesecake, and I said, “All of us, the whole family. Down there in your hideaway . . .”
He was ready for that, too. Yes, your father had prepared himself well.
“Hideaway?” The word amused him. “You call that a hideaway? It’s an old office in which a cousin of ours used to work, an accountant who’s been dead for years. He came from Tel Aviv to do our income taxes. I didn’t understand what you were looking for down there. All you had to do was ask and I would have told you that the old plans were in the closet by the front entrance. But you disappeared without a word. What made you run away? There was no one there but me. . . . ”
At that moment I realized that before I had even thought of a showdown with him, he had figured out how to win one. If I were going to save our marriage at the last minute, it wouldn’t be by cross-examining him. My only hope was a desperation measure: to offer not an apology, but my collaboration, and that would have horrified even my grandmother. “Stop right there, Ofer,” she would have said. “Tell him to go to hell with his Paradise and find yourself another wife.”
Find myself another wife. . . .
But I didn’t want another wife. It was you I fell in love with and you I wanted from the day I was born. And so before my final banishment, I tried one last move that only a sick spirit could have thought of:
“I’m not your judge, Mr. Hendel,” I said. (Yes, “Mr. Hendel,” not “Yehuda.” Maybe I felt that my madness called for some formality.) “That’s something I don’t want to be and can’t be. It’s a big, strange world, full of things that seem terrible now but may be taken for granted someday. Perhaps I shouldn’t have panicked. I should have assumed you knew what you were doing. I’m almost thirty years old, and I had to come a long, hard way before I learned to love as I do now. My marriage to Galya is the high point of my life, and its only hope. To lose her is to risk losing everything. That’s why, although I can’t pretend that I was fantasizing, I’ll cooperate with you in any way I can. My love for Galya is so great that I’d look the other way even if she wanted to behave like her sister.”
All at once, as if the chair beneath him were on fire, he jumped to his feet and asked the waitress for the check. He had to get away as quickly as possible, not from my being more explicit, which he was prepared for, but from the new temptation I had dangled in front of him. He would have liked to vanish on the spot, even though he was too well mannered to run out on me or the waitress. And so he stood waiting for the check with his back to me, because he couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “I’ll pay the goddamned bill,” I felt like saying. “Just don’t leave me all alone with all the terrible things that have been said here.” But I knew that one more word would drive him away and that there was still something, a last sentence, that he wanted to say. And in fact, when the waitress came back and he handed her a bill, he didn’t tell her to keep the change. He waited for that too, with that virile stance of his that made two young women at the next table turn to look at him. The waitress brought some change in a dish. We were about to part forever. He turned to me and said (I would still like to believe, Galya, that these last words were uttered not just in anger, but also with concern and even compassion):
“Be careful, Ofer. Such boundless love will destroy you. . . . ”
And now he’s dead. And though he wrecked my marriage, I feel (you’ll be surprised to hear) that I owe him a small debt of gratitude for that warning.
The divorce papers arrived a few days later. Although I was expecting them, I was so sad and depressed that for weeks I couldn’t even sit down to a proper meal. I simply grabbed a bite now and then on the fly, especially at night, like a Muslim on Ramadan.
What have I left out? Nothing. And soon there’ll be nothing. I’ll shade the text, hit Delete, and poof.
Thank you. Thank you for forbidding me to send you “pointless and oppressive” letters. The thought of printing all these pages, putting them in an envelope, and mailing them to you just to torment myself by waiting for an answer that will never come. . . . Thank you for wanting nothing more from me. For walking off without leaving a trail. I should have realized it was merely my father’s projection to think innocently you wanted a condolence letter from me. All he managed to do was entangle me with you again. But don’t worry. It won’t be for long.
Maybe it’s because he never had a daughter that he always took such a paternal interest in you. But if he thinks your father’s death is an opportunity to get at the truth I’ve been hiding, I’ll repeat my first promise:
The truth will not out. Mum’s the word.
“If my requests still matter to you,” you write. Well, my misfortune is that everything about you still matters. That’s why I’ll keep silent.
And even though over the past five years I’ve once or twice allowed myself to wonder, “Maybe, Ofer, it was just a fantasy after all,” I’ve repressed that doubt each time, always returning to the belief that the rift between us was tragic rather than dramatic—an inevitable fate. That’s why, over the years, I’ve rephrased the confused emotion of it into precisely stated testimony like that I saw given in court, when as a child, I would visit my mother at work.
Your Honor
Dear Ima,
The day was Tuesday, 15 July, 1993. It was 10 A.M. I was at work in the office of Harari, Architects & Urban Planners, 26 Hillel Street, Jerusalem (hereafter “the office”). Quite casually, I happened to mention a plan proposed by Yehuda Hendel (hereafter “my father-in-law”), the owner of a hotel at 34 Hagiv’ah Street, Talpiyot (hereafter “the hotel”), to expand its kitchen and dining room and—this was the exciting part—to have me, a beginning architect, draw up the plans. A colleague in the office advised me not to start working on the project before looking at the old building plans, which needed to be taken into account. At once, Your Honor, I telephoned my father-in-law to ask for them. But he was not (at 10:15) in the hotel, and my sister-in-law (hereafter “Tehila”), his right-hand woman, had gone somewhere, too, without saying when she would be back. I could, of course, have waited for one of them to return, there being nothing urgent about it. But in my childish enthusiasm, and my fear that my father-in-law might withdraw his generous proposal and—quite sensibly—turn to someone more experienced, I hurried to phone the Arab maître d’ (hereafter “Fu’ad”), to ask him for the key to the basement so that I might look for the plans. However, Your Honor (and this is my first circumstantial evidence), Fu’ad tried to put me off, even though our relationship—in part because Professor Rivlin (hereafter “my father”) liked to chat with him in Arabic—was a good one. He said he didn’t have the key and didn’t know where it was. Since by now my desire to surprise my father-in-law with a plan—and my fear of being preempted—had made me impatient to proceed, I phoned my mother-in-law (hereafter “Naomi”) and asked for her assistance. I knew, of course, Your Honor, that this woman (a good-natured but passive and somewhat empty-headed type) was far removed from the practical affairs of the hotel, even though she had lived in it for twenty years. Still, the affection she had shown me as a member of her family encouraged me to think she would talk to Fu’ad. And in fact, she turned out to be familiar with the basement—in which, before air conditioners were installed in all the rooms, the hotel’s central heating system had been located. Although she hadn’t been down there for years, she knew there was a storage room and an “archive�
�� that Tehila sometimes used. And so, Your Honor, childishly eager and well intentioned, I left the office and hurried to see Naomi.
Does the Court wish to know what the weather was like on that fateful day? What can that have to do with my testimony? And yet, since I wish to establish my credibility with the Court, I will withhold no information. In short, it was an extremely hot, dry day, thirty-eight degrees Celsius in the shade. In the neighborhood of Talpiyot, which borders on the desert, the glare of the Jerusalem sun was blinding. Even on my motor scooter, speeding to the hotel, I felt not a breath of fresh air. Fu’ad, who must have seen me coming, slipped away before I arrived. At first I thought of going straight to the archives (the existence of which, incidentally, I had never heard of until that day). But even though, Your Honor, a year of marriage to my wife had made me one of the family, I didn’t wish to step out-of-bounds. And so I hurried to the third floor, where I found Naomi, lounging in a light bathrobe over her second or third breakfast delivered from the hotel kitchen.
Is it possible—the Court may wish to leave the question open—that this passive, dreamy woman had a vague suspicion that the archives in the basement involved more than just the past? Was this why she encouraged her curious son-in-law to investigate them?
The Liberated Bride Page 29