The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  IT WAS RAINING SO hard that I couldn’t even see the darkness and had to take off my glasses. As soon as I did, I lost them. That’s too bad, I thought, ’cause now no one in Israel will know me, and I’ll be like Babba, without a right to return. It’s best to cross now in the dark when the soldiers are asleep, ’cause if they see that I don’t know any Hebrew except for “Hello” and “Screw you” they’ll bring me back to my sick father in the basement.

  I was getting hungry. Between Ismail and the old woman, I didn’t eat any supper, so I broke off a leaf and chewed it and thought, maybe it’s poison and I’ll die before Babba. I felt sorry for leaving him all sick and pale in the church. What if the Abuna forgets to take care of him? And I felt bad that I hadn’t opened his present or said thank-you, so I looked in my pocket and there it was, wrapped in some newspaper, and I took it out and it was a little pen, and I wondered what would happen when Babba died, and I missed him and wanted to cry and go back.

  There was a fishy smell. I went to see what it was. A flashlight shone on me. “There he is,” someone whispered. That’s right, I thought, here I am, but why are you talking in Arabic?

  AFTER THE SMALL GAME of Gilboa had eaten all the bait and vanished without a shot being fired, Netur Kontar decided to leave the spring for a new spot on Brave Men’s Hill. They drove over Buttercup Pass and down the Old Patrol Road for five hundred meters. Once again they spread the alfalfa and put out the milk and cheese, into which they now tossed the fish’s tail. This time the Druze remained below and told the two Christians to climb trees.

  The more the night progressed, the more temperamental Netur Kontar became. He began to order the doctor and lawyer around as if they were trackers under his command, barking at them what to do and demanding such silence that not only laughter but smiles were forbidden. “Who does he think he is?” the lawyer whispered indignantly to the dentist. “we didn’t stay out of the Jews’ army in order to serve in a Druze’s. We haven’t caught a damn thing tonight.”

  But as Netur was determined to trap the lambcat, and the keys to the jeep were in his pocket, there was nothing the two Christians could do but climb into their harnesses and up two wet-branched trees. They perched there in their windbreakers, the victims of Netur Kontar’s father’s fantasy. They would, they decided, give it until three in the morning. If the lambcat had not turned up by then, they would look for other game.

  The silence was total. Although the rain picked up again, the dentist and the lawyer soon fell asleep in the branches. They were half-dreaming when the Druze shone his flashlight on the bushes and whispered, “There he is.” By then it was too late to stop him.

  AND I THOUGHT, if they’re talking Arabic, I haven’t reached the border and it must be Ismail coming to spank me. “Don’t,” I wanted to beg him. “Go easy. Don’t spank me too hard, ’cause I’m worried about Babba, who’s sick and all alone, and I’m mad at Mamma for leaving him.” It was wet and cold and dark and I ran and I ran until I couldn’t run any more and I heard my brother growling beneath a tree. He wasn’t shouting or cursing, just making these crazy animal sounds. I was good and scared. So I ran some more and my present fell from my pocket and I bent to pick it up and something whistled and I felt an awful pain as if Babba’s pen were stuck in my back.

  AN EXPERIENCED HUNTER LIKE Netur Kontar knew at once that no animal moved or made sounds like that. Perhaps, he thought, the beast that had fired his father’s imagination was a werelamb. Waking the two Christians in the treetops, he signaled them to slip quietly down and execute a flanking movement and—though he had been warned by his father to catch the lambcat alive—opened the safety catch on his shotgun and took off in hot pursuit.

  It was too dark to see anything. Yet the Druze hunter was used to such nights and tracked the animal by ear. Now and then, glimpsing a silhouette that didn’t match his father’s description, he wondered if it might have changed shape again.

  But it was too quick for him. And so after a while, fearing to disappoint his father, he stopped running, dropped to his knees, and began making friendly animal noises, yowling, bleating, purring, and sighing to convey his good intentions. Yet the beast that had been so playful with his father refused to approach his father’s son, though it did pause for a moment in the bushes to stare curiously at him with its coal black eyes. That was when, desperate, Netur Kontar menacingly shouldered his shotgun. The doctor and lawyer, running up to him at that moment, barely had time to say “Hold it,” as he pressed the trigger in spite of his father’s warning . . .

  IT WASN’T MY BROTHER or the pen. It was some metal in my back that knocked me down and didn’t let me move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. All right, I thought. I’ll forget about Grandmother in the village. Just let me go back to Babba, ’cause he’s sick in the church and I want to be with him. But I couldn’t make a sound, not even a whimper, and my head hurt real bad. Something heavy pressed on me and pinned me down. I wanted to go to sleep and die. Oh, Babba, Babba, oh, Abuna, help me, help me and save me from this earth.

  18.

  MIDWAY THROUGH YOUR CLASS, the door at the top of the lecture hall opened, and a bulky woman with an overnight bag walked in and sat down in the last row.

  Startled, you lost the thread of your lecture for a moment. Since it wasn’t the origins of French colonialism in North Africa that had brought this very pregnant woman to the last class of the winter semester, she had to be a former student coming to display her condition before asking for an extension on a term paper. Yet a second later, your heart did a flip-flop. It was Galya, the lost bride herself. You waved to let her know she should wait for you after class, then resumed your lecture.

  The lecture ended. She struggled toward you with her bag down the tiered rows, carrying her pregnancy as though it were a gift for you. While the students crowded around you to ask about their final exam, she sat again and waited for them to leave. Gone from her glance were last spring’s haughty impatience and anger at her father’s death, their place taken by a wistfulness that verged on defeat. She made a move to get to her feet. You told her not to and hurried to her from the lecture podium. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” you said, bending to embrace her before she could reply. Her body yielded willingly, soft and unresisting like her mother’s. She seemed not to know what to say. It was as if, having come all this way and received a warm welcome from you, she no longer remembered the reason.

  But you weren’t asking for it. You treated her sudden appearance as a perfectly normal family visit, gave her big belly a fatherly appraisal, and asked when she was giving birth. The due date, she answered with some embarrassment, was this week, perhaps even today or tomorrow.

  This was already too much for you. Was she planning to have her child in your lecture room? “What kind of time is this to be running around the country?” you rebuked her mildly, as if the baby in her womb were partly yours too.

  Her overnight bag at her feet, she tried to defend herself. First births were usually late. She was counting on that. She had come to see your son. She needed to speak to him immediately, if possible before she gave birth. Of course, she could have got his telephone number from you. But she wanted your help in persuading him to come to Israel. After all, you were also responsible.

  “I am?”

  Yes, you were. She was firm about that. That’s why you had to help her. She would pay for Ofer’s ticket. She had already reserved a seat for him on tomorrow’s flight from Paris. She had a face-to-face confession to make, and she needed to ask his forgiveness, if only for her baby’s sake. She had sworn to herself that she would do it.

  Her voice echoed emotionally in the empty lecture room. You were beside yourself with joy. At last, though you had no idea what it was, the truth sought by you for nearly a year was about to materialize. You asked, not recognizing your own happiness:

  “Forgiveness for what?”

  19.

  SEATED IN THE EMPTY lecture room like the
last student to finish an exam, Galya realized that this man who had pursued her with his frenzied questions hadn’t a clue. As much as she needed his help, she wasn’t about to give him one now. If Ofer wanted to tell him, that was his business. He had had the past six years to do it in, even though she had asked him not to. She respected him for that. He had acted not from weakness or guilt, but from gallantry toward a woman he loved. She would never compromise him.

  As in their meetings at the hotel, Rivlin felt that his ex-daughter-in-law still harbored a resentment against him. He had to nurture the new trust between them if he didn’t want to lose her again. He reached for her bag, surprised to feel how heavy it was.

  “But why are we standing here?” he asked, adopting a light tone. “Giving birth in this lecture room won’t get your child free tuition in the future. Let’s go to our place. We’ll call Ofer and tell him you’re waiting for him. Believe me, he would have come running even without the ticket you bought him. It’s his attachment to you that’s made me so worried about him. That’s why you mustn’t be angry at me for saying that, quite apart from forgiveness, the truth matters, too.”

  She bowed her head, as if the truth he saddled her with were too heavy for her. Carefully, she eased her way out of her seat. How strange, Rivlin thought, that of all the women, Jewish and Arab, who had asked to be taken under his wing this past year, she had waited to do so until now, in the final days of her pregnancy. Yet in spite of everything, he would grant her wish and be the father she had lost.

  Gripping her arm lightly but firmly, he led her through the gloomy corridors of the building, which had been designed without any provision for letting in the copious sunlight from outside. Passing the large show window of the library, in which were displayed new works by the faculty, he thought sadly of his own book, held up by this, his parallel quest for the truth. The university, he told the perfunctorily nodding Galya, had grown enormously in recent years. Her steps faltered as they entered the dark underground parking lot, along a wall of which some cartons with old files were waiting to be thrown out. But they were already at his car, stowing her bag and his briefcase in the back. He adjusted the front seat for her, as if to let the baby know that the world was making room for it.

  The late winter day was bright and crisp, the rainstorms of the past months now a pleasant memory. It was Galya’s first visit to Haifa since leaving Ofer. “I forgot how beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the sweeping view of the bay and sea. “Well,” he answered, half in jest and half temptingly, pointing at a large hospital on a ridge of the Carmel, “if you feel like it, or don’t manage to get back in time to Jerusalem, you can always give birth up there, with a nice view. Does the baby have a name?”

  The question seemed to upset her. It had had one, she told him, and then fell silent, as if she had begun to say too much and had changed her mind.

  Rivlin lapsed into silence, too. He did not wish to risk losing his mysterious stake in this child with a careless word. In the parking space of his building on the French Carmel, he backed into a spot and exclaimed when Galya went on sitting in her seat belt:

  “But I haven’t told you that we moved!”

  “To here?” She looked disappointedly at the discolored brick paving and the old houses farther down the narrow street. “How could you have given up your beautiful wadi?”

  “If you hadn’t left Ofer,” he said, with dark humor, “you might have talked us into staying. But don’t make snap judgments. Our new apartment is quieter and has more light. And it has another advantage for old people like us or pregnant ones like you . . .”

  He pointed to the elevator, which brought them slowly to the fifth floor. The sight of the spacious apartment, with its familiar couches, armchairs, rugs, and bookcases, was reassuring to her. So was Hagit’s not being there.

  “She’s at the beauty parlor,” Rivlin said familiarly. Taking advantage of this to establish facts on the ground, he took Galya to his study, placed her bag by the couch, and asked discreetly if she wished to wash up first or call Paris at once. She chose the former, and he led her to a large, colorfully tiled bathroom, asking wryly whether she remembered the WC in their old apartment, small and dark despite the glorious view outside. Her smile, which he had forgotten, made his heart twinge. He handed her a towel and a fresh bar of soap, as befitted an honored guest, and went to make her bed in his study, pulling out the convertible couch and spreading sheets and a blanket on it. Although the results were less grand than the royal bed made for Hagit’s sister, he regarded them with satisfaction. Now that the truth had arrived at his doorstep of its own accord, he meant to take good care of it.

  Washed and refreshed, Galya gave the bed an approving glance and sat in the chair Rivlin offered her by the telephone. He wrote Ofer’s number for her on a piece of paper, then wondered out loud whether he shouldn’t speak to him first. After all, he said, he didn’t want his son to think he might be fantasizing again. She reddened at that, but agreed. She would get on the line if Ofer wished.

  “I’ll leave you alone as soon as you do,” he promised her.

  He dialed Paris. His son wasn’t in. There was no longer a Hebrew announcement on his voice mail, just a laconic French one, as if only routine calls were expected. Rivlin, however, chose to leave a complicated message. With one eye on the terrace across the street, on which now appeared his mother’s ghost with her bag of garbage, he told Ofer of Galya’s arrival and imminent delivery, and of the ticket to Israel awaiting him. He was still talking when a beep informed him that he had used up his recording space. “Did I say too much?” he asked his ex-daughter-in-law, who had been listening intently.

  “You were fine,” she said, regarding him as if for the first time. Her old beauty, Rivlin saw, thought by him to have been lost, was still there. He glanced with amusement at the old woman across the street, her ear pressed to empty space to catch the sound of the approaching garbage truck. Did Galya remember his mother? She nodded slowly. “Would you like to see her?” he asked.

  “But . . .” She shivered. “I thought . . .”

  “Yes, she’s dead. But I’ve brought her ghost from Jerusalem. She’s across the street. I put her there to keep an eye on her. . . .”

  Galya did not smile. Apprehensive, she shifted her gaze from the old woman with the garbage bag to the idiotically grinning man at her side.

  “But how are you, Yochanan?” she asked. “Are you better? You had us all worried at the bereavement.”

  “Yes,” he confessed awkwardly. “It was a false alarm. But who is ‘us all’? You’re the only one I told.”

  “You also told Fu’ad.”

  “Did I? That seems unlikely.” Although he found it hard to believe that he could have made such a fool of himself with the maître d’, his memory forced to him to admit otherwise. “You’re right,” he said softly, chagrined. “I must have wanted him to know how desperate I felt. Well, suppose I did? Did he run to tell his boss?”

  “Tehila? She’s not his boss any more.”

  “How is that?”

  “He quit his job a week ago. For good.”

  “Fu’ad quit? But why?” He felt there was more to it than met the eye. “He was so proud of that job. How will Tehila manage without him?”

  “Why can’t she? You know her by now. She’s become so strong-willed since my father’s death that it’s not only the staff she can manage without. It’s . . .” Galya paused, as if surprised by her own words. “It’s her own family too . . .”

  20.

  THE FRONT DOOR OF the duplex opened. Before it could shut again, Hagit’s voice traveled through the house in search of his. He quickly closed the study door and hurried downstairs to tell her about their surprise guest. Seductively painted by the beautician, her eyes regarded him with the infinite patience of someone used to assembling the facts before passing judgment. Not even the news that he had made the bed in his study could shake her repose. Not until he told her about the message he had
left for Ofer did she turn on him.

  “You knew I’d be home soon. Why couldn’t you have waited to ask me what I thought?”

  Refusing to be put on the defensive, he threw his arms around her and passionately pressed his lips to hers. “Be careful,” he pleaded in a whisper. “She can hear us from upstairs. Have pity on her. And on me. What does it matter what message I left him? This isn’t in our hands. And neither of us can stop it. Why shouldn’t Ofer come? The truth will free him.”

  She slipped gently, as though not to hurt him, from his pacifying arms. “The truth doesn’t always free. Sometimes it entangles. I wish you’d think more of Ofer and less of yourself.”

  Stung by her rebuke, he hugged her even harder. A squeeze of her hand told him that Galya was standing at the top of the stairs. There was no telling how much she had heard.

  Hagit hadn’t seen her since the divorce. Now, pale and big with child, she was gripping the railing as if warding off an attack of vertigo. It was no time to be critical. Hagit invited her downstairs, gave her a quick hug and kiss, and suggested she sit with her swollen feet on the low table. Galya asked for some coffee, which Rivlin went to prepare, leaving the judge to cross-examine her about the course and medical history of her pregnancy. She compared it to her own two pregnancies and asked warmly about the Hendels. How was Galya’s mother holding up? She would never forget her great love for Galya’s father. Although her courtroom experience had taught her never to trust appearances, this had seemed real. Of course, the most loving couples could be problems for their children . . . just look at Ofer. Or at Galya’s sister. Was she still unmarried?