The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Her two colleagues on the bench had stayed an extra night in Vienna to take in an opera, while the chagrined defense counsel was on business in Germany. That left the prosecutor, now ensconced in the backseat of their car. Satisfied with the results of their journey, which had tipped the case against the defendant, an accused spy he had long been trying to nail, but aware that Judge Rivlin had doubts about the testimony given in the Asiatic republic, he chatted about other things. One of these, which he mentioned in a rather snide tone, was the opening of an exhibition of oils and watercolors by former Supreme Court Justice Granot, a stroke victim who had taken up painting.

  “Granot has another show?” Hagit turned, upset, to her husband. “How come I didn’t know? Why didn’t you show me the invitation? You know I wouldn’t want him to think I’d forgotten him.”

  “But what makes you think I saw an invitation?” Rivlin answered. “It must have been sent to your office and got lost.”

  He refrained from commenting in the presence of a stranger on the chronic disorder of his wife’s desk, a consequence of her inability to throw anything away.

  “If the exhibition is still on, we’ll go to it tomorrow,” Hagit comforted herself before lapsing into a drowsy silence. She looked gray and tired in the yellow light of the road. Rivlin fell silent, too. He felt the eyes of the prosecutor, who was sitting alertly behind him, drilling into his back, as if contemplating indicting him as well.

  Back in their duplex, Hagit kicked off her shoes and stretched out on their bed as if to stamp it with the impressions of her trip while he emptied her suitcase out beside her, shut it again, and slipped it beneath the bed. Before hanging up her clothes, he examined them to see which items had paid their way and which had traveled as hitchhikers. He dumped a bag of his wife’s underwear into the laundry basket and carried her toilet kit to the bathroom.

  “You can arrange your bathroom things by yourself,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “So who goes first, you or me?”

  “I don’t have much to tell. We went to a primitive place at the end of the world to listen to the fantasies of either a psychopath or a highly sophisticated liar. I honestly don’t know whether someone in the district attorney’s office or the Mossad thought they could put one over on us or they’re so naive that they think the man is telling the truth.”

  “What did the other judges think?”

  “They didn’t see it that way. They’ve been sold an opera like the one they’re going to in Vienna. Not that the defendant isn’t a can of worms. But you don’t put someone away for fifteen years without better proof.”

  “Fifteen years?” His curiosity was piqued.

  “It could be. There are charges of treason.”

  “What kind of treason?”

  “Never mind. There’s not much I can tell you. I’d rather not talk about it. I’m fed up with the whole trial. And I feel bad for Granot. He must think I’ve abandoned him.”

  “You exaggerate. In his condition, he has other things to think about.”

  “Precisely in his condition! When you can’t talk and can only think, every little thing becomes crucial. I know how much I mean to him. We have no choice. Tomorrow or the day after, we’ll go to his exhibition and buy a painting.”

  “A painting of Granot’s? What for?”

  “He needs the money. Why do you think he’s exhibiting? His wife never worked, he has no savings, and it’s hard to cover an invalid’s expenses on a pension, even a Supreme Court justice’s.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “There’s nothing to think about. We’ll go to the exhibition and buy a painting. Now tell me about yourself. Did the peace and quiet I gave you help you to make progress?”

  “Conceptually, not on paper. Are you awake enough to listen to a strange story?”

  “Of course.”

  He paced up and down by the bed, his excitement mounting as he described his night journey among the Arabs. Hagit, eyes half-shut, lay listening to every word. She did not appear to be overly perturbed by his story.

  “So! I leave you alone for a couple of days and you run wild.”

  He smiled, relieved by her making a joke of it. “I suppose I did . . .”

  “Did you at least enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy it? Not exactly. But it may have sparked some new thoughts.”

  5.

  REMOVING HIS GLASSES, he lay down beside her in the faint hope of making love. Not that he really wanted to, but they hadn’t done it for a while, and he didn’t want their bodies to grow rusty. Hagit, however, smiled wearily without responding. Although he did not feel greatly deprived, he made a point of wringing from her an acknowledgment of remissness.

  They switched on the TV. Rivlin fell asleep watching a program. Awakening after midnight, he found Hagit’s side of the bed empty and went to look for her. She was sitting in his study, composing the outline of her dissent.

  “You don’t think you can change one of their minds?”

  She shook her head, sadly, not only because she took it hard when her opinion was not accepted, but because her dissent would not even be made public. He stroked her hair while glancing at the little card table on the terrace across the street. Some empty bottles of beer were still on it.

  “She’s started to live it up, my mother’s ghost,” he said, telling Hagit about the man who had come to play cards.

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Jealous?” It never ceased to amaze him how quickly she saw through him. “What an idea! But it does make me realize how hard the last year with her was. There wasn’t a moment of good feeling or enjoyment.”

  She sighed. “And you tried so hard to be a loving son. It’s sad when an old person feels wronged. That’s why I don’t want Granot to think I’ve abandoned him.”

  “But he never would.”

  “You’re wrong. I know him. He’s a noble man. That makes him highly sensitive. How could I not have seen the invitation?”

  “You didn’t see it because your desk is such a mess. You should let your typist arrange it for you.”

  “That’s not her job.”

  “But she loves you. She’ll do anything for you.”

  “Maybe. It’s still not her job. Why don’t we go together one Saturday and you help me?”

  6.

  THEY WERE THE only ones at the exhibition, which was being held in the gym of a community center. The direct light only emphasized how sadly out of place the little watercolors and oils were among the parallel bars and horses. Granot’s first, surprise exhibition had been held two years previously, four years after his stroke. Long the chief justice of the Haifa District Court, he had suffered a stroke a few months after his appointment to the high court in Jerusalem and had had to return to his native city. For two years he was incommunicado, then he began to speak in striking colors and compositions; this led to an exhibition for which his many friends, as well as the entire legal community of Haifa, had turned out. The present show, his second, was more modest. The mute painter seemed to be in decline. His paintings were smaller, the colors more somber, the shapes more abstract. The distorted figures looked as if they were covered by a green mold.

  Hagit strode silently around the room, stopping by each painting as though it had a deep significance. Her husband, having passed through the room quickly, stood asking the guard at the door how many visitors had seen the show. The answer was, Not many. The guard handed Rivlin a sheet of paper with the titles and prices of the works.

  He scanned it quickly. The prices seemed high for an amateur painter, even an ex-Supreme Court justice. He wondered how they had been determined. Yet knowing that his wife had her heart set on buying something—either to make up for the missed opening or to help her first patron and guide—he looked for a reasonably priced item that he could live with and even pretend to like.

  He stood in front of a small watercolor while his wife circulated reverently among the paintings as
though renewing an old dialogue with the man who had been her mentor even after her appointment to the district court. The watercolor was fairly cheap and not too gloomy, with some vague figures, little dogs or jackals, surrounding the thin, black silhouette of a woman. It could be hung one day in the room of an imaginative grandchild, and meanwhile he did not think it would bother him. Calling Hagit over, he informed her that, if they had to buy something, this was what he liked best. Everything else was too ugly and depressing.

  “This?” she marveled. “These poor little children being dragged down to Hell by a black devil?”

  “Children? What children?” He was mystified. “Those are puppies or jackals. And where do you see a devil? Why would Granot paint devils? It’s a woman walking her dogs.”

  The judge took off her glasses and stepped closer to the painting. Her eyes were soft and sorrowful.

  “Well, if that’s what you think and you like it, let’s buy it. I suppose you’ve checked the price.”

  “Six hundred shekels.”

  “Not too bad. Maybe we should buy two.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Please, even one is too much. What are we, a social-work agency?”

  “All right. Don’t be angry. Write down the number and we’ll pick it up when we visit him. Does it have a name?”

  Rivlin consulted the sheet of paper.

  “Yes. The Return of the Little Ones.”

  In their building, by the door to the elevator, stood a tall man with a black ponytail. For a moment, his heart pounding, Rivlin thought it was Galya’s new husband, come to ask them about her first marriage. But it was not the bird-faced man who had told him confidently in the garden of the hotel that he knew “everything.” It was a salesman, sent to demonstrate, “with no obligation,” the remarkable vacuum cleaner, which stood by his side like a faithful dog.

  “But I specifically said you were to call first,” Rivlin protested. “You promised.”

  The man with the ponytail looked crestfallen. He had been misled. He had come all the way from Tel Aviv on the understanding that he would be welcome. He spread imploring arms. He was asking for only half an hour of their time, with “no obligation at all.” They shouldn’t put it off another day, because the price of the vacuum cleaner kept rising.

  “Yes, and I suppose you’re almost out of stock,” Rivlin taunted him. But it was already too late, because his wife had taken pity on the man and invited him up to their apartment.

  Though polite, the salesman projected a quiet authority. Informing them that, despite his hippie-style ponytail, he was a reliable type, an ex-Border Guard officer, he proceeded to tell them about the appliance’s incredible success, not just in Israel, but throughout the Middle East. He had even sold a Kirby to a princess of the Hashemite royal house in Jordan. If they would kindly allow him to rearrange their living-room chairs, they could sit back and watch him demonstrate. The appliance, American-made, was called a vacuum cleaner only for lack of a better word. Its metallic gray showed that it was made from the same materials used in intercontinental missiles. Although this might sound like a stretch, it was true. He had documents to prove it. Take this hose, for example, which emptied the dirt into that container. You could crinkle it—crush it—crunch it with all your might, as he was doing now. Just look how it sprang back to its original shape, as only a noble metal could!

  Rivlin, growing impatient, cast a reproachful look at his wife, who looked utterly tranquil.

  “Just give me half an hour of your time,” the salesman said. “There’s no obligation. Say ‘stop’ and I’ll stop. You see, you have a nice, neat house. As far as you and maybe even your guests are concerned, it’s as clean as it needs to be. But our Kirby here isn’t satisfied with outward appearances. It wants the full, unadulterated truth, as befits folks like you. Excuse me, but may I ask what your work is?”

  “I teach at the university,” Rivlin murmured rancorously. “And my wife is a district judge.”

  The salesman, accustomed to Hashemite princesses, inclined his head respectfully and whipped out of his valise an array of odd attachments that hooked up to one another in complicated but easy-to-grasp ways. These were designed, he said, to penetrate the most inaccessible places, from which they extracted hidden dirt that lesser machines never reached: crumbs of food in the pockets of armchairs and under sofas, dried leaves and dead insects rotting in the grooves of sliding doors and stuck to ceilings and curtain rods, dust between the lines of books or congealed under mattresses in revolting lint balls.

  The judge glanced at her husband.

  The salesman now swung into action. Inserting a thin, round pad into the vacuum cleaner, he ran the machine over the spotless crannies of their living room. He kept this up at length, changing the pads frequently before arranging them in a gray alluvial fan at the hastily withdrawn feet of the duplex’s tenants. Just look at the filth masquerading as cleanliness that the Kirby had unmasked! “You can imagine,” he said, “what your grandchildren must leave behind after they’ve been here for the weekend!”

  Rivlin inched closer to his wife, feeling her warmth. He could feel old age creeping up on them both.

  The ponytailed salesman mixed water and a fragrance in a small container and sprayed the couches with an aerosol attachment. Next he vacuumed the curtains and polished the parquet floor and asked to go upstairs to the bedroom. There, running the talented appliance over the bedspread and skimming the noduled mattress with its gleaming hulk, he removed from it yet another pad caked with a strange, white powder—the remains, he explained, of invidiously invisible mattress worms.

  Rivlin glared at his wife, who seemed overcome by an inexplicable sorrow. Invited by the salesman to try out the machine and to take apart and put together its easy-as-pie components, she smiled demurely and volunteered her husband—who was soon vying to prove that he was as capable as the Hashemite royal house.

  The salesman lauded the Orientalist’s quick grasp.

  “Maybe you should hire him as your assistant,” Hagit suggested.

  An hour later, as the ex-Border Patrol officer was repacking his equipment prior to departing, Rivlin told him morosely:

  “All right. We understand the principle. We’ll think about it. But I want you to know that I’m devastated, because you’ve shown me that my home, which I always took to be clean, is a repository of filth. In the end we’ll have no choice but to spend a fortune on a machine that we’ll never use.”

  “If you buy it,” the salesman reasoned, “why shouldn’t you use it?” Yet judging by his sly smile, such things had been known to happen.

  7.

  ON A QUIET Saturday morning, in a modest apartment, shaded by pine trees, whose living room was lined with books that no one read anymore, a paralyzed man sat silently in a wheelchair. Slender and erect, he wore an old blue suit with a red bow tie that was awry on his neck. Although the whites of his eyes had yellowed and faded, their blue pupils still shone with the bright chivalry of a judge who, years ago, had been compelled by moral scruples to take a purely fatherly and jurisprudential interest in a young intern with whom he had fallen in love. Even after her appointment to district judge, he had played the role of a stern teacher entrusted with her professional supervision. Now, in the methodical spirit of the German Jewry he sprang from, several low coffee tables, placed between a couch and some chairs, were set with refreshments. There were little dishes with squares of chocolate; silver bowls full of peanuts, pretzels, and petit fours; and, on an antique plate in the center of the table, a raisin cake sliced into quarters with a dollop of whipped cream by each piece. What you saw was what you got. Freedom of choice was coffee or tea.

  Hagit, her cheeks hot, felt her heart go out to the old judge. While giving his veiny arm a squeeze, she seemed, in her distress at being a judicial minority of one, more in need of encouragement than he was. The former Supreme Court justice, however, though raising a yearning head toward her, could only move his lips sorrowfully, as if to
say, Now, my dear friend, you’re on your own. All you can do is remember all that I’ve told you, because I will never say anything more.

  This left the conversation to Granot’s wife, a slender, aristocratic woman of Yemenite extraction who had spent the last fifty years so immersed in Germanic kultur that—true freedom lying in obedience to the kategorischer Imperativ—she had practically become a dark-skinned German Jewess herself, though one tinkling with the antique silver Yemenite jewelry adorning her meticulous clothes. Refusing to be disheartened by her husband’s stroke, she had taken it upon herself to represent him and his opinions to the world and had even begun to talk with his old voice, including a trace of a German accent. Now, she was telling her visitors about the painting they had acquired at its full, undiscounted price.

  “You, Professor, see puppies or jackals, and your wife sees little children. You think you are looking at a sad woman in black, and your wife thinks it’s a grotesque devil. . . . You never said it was grotesque? Pardon me. . . . Well, dear friends, the truth lies halfway between you. Granot intended to paint children, not puppies. But what makes you think, Mrs. Rivlin, that they’re being led by a devil? Really, I’m surprised at you. What would a devil be doing here? It’s their natural mother, a quietly tragic woman who has gathered her children from all over the world in order to bring them home. That’s why the painting is called The Return of the Little Ones.”

  The paralyzed judge hung on the words of the woman speaking in his voice.

  “Granot painted this wonderful work a year ago. Do you remember? You got out of bed that morning with the whole thing in your head. By noon the painting was finished. And it came out just as you wanted it to, didn’t it? That’s why it’s so moving and well done. Our friends have fallen in love with it and wish to buy it. Well, what do you say? Shall we let them have it?”