The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Rivlin, having discovered that the milk was sour, came back from the kitchen to propose tea.

  “But why tea?” Hagit protested. “We need fresh milk, for tomorrow too. You should run down and get some. And while you’re at it, pick up a cake, because something tells me we’ll have more guests from Jerusalem. . . .”

  Galya, the judge had discovered with her usual knack for ferreting out the truth, had not informed her family or even her husband of her trip. She had set out for Haifa without telling them.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Hagit gave Rivlin, standing by the door with a shopping basket, a reproachful look. Uncharacteristically fumbling for words, she probed for the hidden logic of her ex-daughter-in-law’s actions.

  “But how could you, Galya? Not that it’s any of our business . . . but still . . . and now of all times . . . are you aware of what you’ve done? How could you just go and disappear in your condition? Suppose you should . . . of course, you’re not alone . . . we’re here with you . . . but you’re not registered at any hospital . . . and your husband must be frantic with worry . . .”

  “Don’t worry about Bo’az,” Galya reassured them. “He’s not the frantic type. He’s calm and collected and takes things as they come, sometimes a bit too much. He’s not like Ofer, who’ll run to the end of the world to find something to worry about. I suppose I’ve gone to the opposite extreme . . .” She laughed strangely. “Maybe I’ll need a third husband to find the golden mean.”

  But Hagit had no patience for jokes. “Please,” she told her stunned husband, “the grocery is closing soon. And don’t forget we have a concert tonight.”

  “Why not skip it?” Rivlin suggested.

  “What for? If you don’t feel like going for milk, I’ll do it.”

  He went for milk, making an agitated reckoning of how many of the bounds breached since Hendel’s death he was responsible for. Afraid Hagit might talk Galya into returning to Jerusalem, he hurried back with his purchases and was relieved to find his ex-daughter-in-law where he had left her, her feet on the coffee table.

  “Ofer phoned,” Hagit informed him, her annoyance replaced by a new tone of complicity. “Your message confused him, but I set him straight. He’s coming tomorrow. Galya talked to him, too. He didn’t stay on the phone for long, as if he were afraid to spoil things.”

  “What did I tell you!” Rivlin crowed to the bulky young woman, who seemed to have taken refuge behind the baby in her stomach.

  “You and I will pick him up at the airport tomorrow afternoon,” Hagit said. “Unless you have more important things to do.”

  “What could be more important?” he protested.

  Yet as afternoon turned into evening, a brooding silence settled over the duplex. Only when Galya agreed to notify the hotel of her whereabouts did Hagit relax and go to dress for the concert. Rivlin, resigned to going, paced moodily while she changed before the mirror. What else, he asked, had she discovered while he was buying milk?

  “Nothing. I didn’t ask, and I don’t want to know.”

  “Not even now? I still can’t get you to budge, can I?”

  “Why should I budge when I’m where I should be?”

  21.

  THE PHILHARMONIC CONCERT WAS an all-Haydn one. Although he didn’t question the greatness of the classical composer, Rivlin feared a whole evening with him might be dull. But after leafing through the program notes, from which he learned that the four works to be performed took no more than an hour and a half, he felt reassured. Even if she went into labor, Galya could hold out until they returned. And the opening piece, the B Major cello concerto, gave him unexpected pleasure. Its soloist, a guest performer from abroad with an enormous mane of hair, played without glancing at his instrument, as if it were part of his body. His hands flowed in and out of the strings of their own accord, his mane tossing as he kept practiced eyes on the audience as if to forge a connection or even a friendship with it.

  During the intermission, perhaps to avoid an argument, Hagit and Rivlin did not discuss their guest. Instead, they reminisced about the birth of Ofer, lovingly recalling every detail of the thirty-three-year-old memory.

  The concert ended with the Clock Symphony. Haydn, Rivlin had to admit, had not subjected him to a dull moment. Yet finding the duplex in darkness upon their return, he felt a current of anxiety. Had someone spirited their miraculous visitor back to Jerusalem?

  He opened the door to his study carefully. The orange reminder to be of good cheer twirled over the screen saver of his computer and lit the face of the sleeper on the couch with a tender light. She lay as peacefully beneath the mound of her pregnancy as if she were where she had always wanted to be.

  He and Hagit exchanged smiles, like the parents of a naughty child, and shut the door softly. They undressed in silence, getting into bed and turning out the light without the TV news. Although for a moment he thought his wife wanted to make love, he didn’t dare put it to the test. He gave her a last hug, stroked the face he had kissed, and turned to the wall.

  In the middle of the night, the telephone rang and stopped before he could answer it. Curling up again beneath the quilt, he realized that his sleep had fled and would have to be hunted down in the apartment. He went first to the bathroom and then, cautiously, to his study. Although the lights were still off, a voice was speaking as though to itself. Going downstairs to the guest room, he gently picked up the receiver of the telephone. Now there were two voices, Galya’s plaintive, her husband’s quiet and restrained. He hung up and sank into a chair, his wakefulness growing. Let it. Keeping watch over his ex-daughter-in-law’s last hours of pregnancy seemed the right thing to do.

  After a while he went to the kitchen, poured himself some wine, and sipped it with slow ceremony. When he picked up the receiver again, the conversation was over. Content with the world, he went to the terrace for a look at it. From the bottom floor of the duplex, he had no height advantage over the ghost. Her apartment was dark. She slept better than he did.

  The narrow, quiet street below was filled as usual with the cars that occupied every inch of parking space at night. Even ordinarily, this made it hard to get in and out of their building. Now, though, a large car blocked the entrance completely. If Galya went into labor, he thought worriedly, he wouldn’t be able to drive her to the hospital. Yet a second look revealed someone sitting beside the empty driver’s seat. They had come to get her, without even waiting for the new day.

  He heard footsteps. They must be Bo’az’s, he thought, coming up the street from the pay phone around the corner. In the glow of a streetlight he made out the ponytail of the man who took things as they came, perhaps because he thought he knew all about them. And yet, in the middle of the night, in the silent street of a strange city, the knowledgeable husband seemed at a loss. Bending over, he spoke to the occupant of the car. Rivlin, looking down from above, had no doubt that this was the proprietress, come to restore her sister to her senses. Soon her lanky frame appeared in the street. Heart pounding, he shrank back as her birdlike head swiveled upward to look for his floor.

  What now? The taker-of-things-as-they-came and the thumber-of noses-at-them had joined forces to rob him of the confession he had yet to hear. He had to stop them, to turn them back at the entrance to the building. Stepping into full view on the terrace, still in his pajamas, he signaled that he was coming down.

  They met in the parking lot. Tehila planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek, and Bo’az gave him an affable nod. How close he had come, Rivlin mused, to disgracing himself in his passion for the truth—and now here it was, upstairs in his home, waiting to be deciphered. Shivering from the cold of the winter night, he brought the Jerusalemites up-to-date on the day’s events, starting with Galya’s intention to confess.

  “To confess what?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask her.”

  “She’s out of her mind,” Tehila snapped, narrowing her whiskey-colored eyes.

  He stuck up for the shelterer in his
study, who was definitely in her right mind. Although feeling sad, even miserable, she had a plan that she meant to carry out. It would be best to let her do it.

  He took a long look at his watch to remind them of the hour. He was sorry, he said with a remote smile, that he had no basement to put them in. On the next ridge of the Carmel, he told them, pointing at a building rising starkly in the moonlight, was a hotel he could recommend, even though he had never stayed in it.

  But the proprietress had her own hotel, where at this time of the night when the roads were empty she could be again in two hours. And so, with a friendly handshake, she promised to phone in the morning and was off with her brother-in-law while Rivlin, returning to bed, found his escaped sleep waiting for him there.

  The new day dawned filled with the anticipation of discoveries. Hagit left early for the courthouse, and Rivlin stayed behind to wait for Galya to awake. She rose late and took a while to arrange her new room, in which she had made herself at home. She was already in the kitchen, glancing pregnantly at the morning paper, when the housekeeper arrived and was struck dumb. But Galya preserved a demure silence, while Rivlin, who felt so much and understood so little, made no attempt to explain what looked like the backward flow of time.

  His study commandeered once again, he drove to the university and circulated aimlessly. From there, unable to contain his excitement, he continued to the courthouse. Entering his wife’s courtroom, he sat in the last row, behind the defendant, several attorneys, and the usual spectators with nothing better to do. The black-robed wife-judge conducted the proceedings with dispatch. When they were over, he waited until she was alone in her chambers and embraced her with inexplicable love.

  They returned to the duplex at noon. Their guest, having installed herself as thoroughly as if she had rejoined their family, had made a list of their telephone calls. She said nothing about her husband and sister. “They can wait in Jerusalem,” was her sole reference to them, as if it were no longer her city. Meanwhile, she would appreciate being stayed with until Ofer arrived—preferably by Hagit, who could help interpret the stirrings she felt.

  FOR THE FIFTH TIME in a year, Rivlin found himself standing by the fountains in the arrivals hall of the airport. Yet this time, he thought as he watched Ofer stride out of customs with only a small bag on his shoulder, was the most remarkable.

  They stood warily in the place where they had parted so painfully last summer. Avoiding his son’s eyes, Rivlin put his arm lightly around him. Ofer’s suffering face, on which a narrow French beard now grew, had a new, almost exalted look.

  “You’re becoming like your aunt and uncle, who visit Israel for a few hours at a time,” Rivlin joked when informed by his son that he was returning to Paris the next day for an exam at his cooking school. Ofer took the jibe in stride. He saw nothing wrong in using Israel as a stopover.

  Rivlin told him about Galya, choosing his words carefully. She had confided very little in them, he said. The news that she did not want to see her family or husband brought a tight, malicious smile to Ofer’s face. In no mood to talk on the drive back to Haifa, he let his father describe his book on Algeria and the memorial conference for Tedeschi.

  “Did you really love him that much?” he asked, hearing for the first time of the Jerusalem polymath’s death.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by love,” Rivlin answered. “But missing him so much makes me realize how attached to him I was . . .”

  Yet when it came to attachments, this admission could not hold a candle to the deathly pallor that suffused Ofer’s face as he entered the house in which his ex-wife, encountered only in his imagination for the past six years, was waiting for him. Even now that she had taken refuge with his parents, he could hardly bring himself to look at her or at her swollen stomach. With a few curt words, he invited her upstairs to his father’s study.

  “Are you sure you won’t eat or drink something?” asked his mother, who barely had time to give him a hug. He shook his head. Like a sleepwalker, he followed the pregnant woman up the stairs.

  22.

  “I COULDN’T DECIDE WHAT to do. I didn’t know if I had the right to ask you to come. If I hadn’t been about to give birth, I would have gone to Paris. Because suddenly, three days ago, it struck me that before I brought a child into this world, I had to cleanse myself of what I did to you. And to myself. I wrecked a love that made me happy, forever and for no good reason.”

  Why forever? he wanted to ask. But the words stuck in his throat.

  “And even if you came, I knew it would be wrong to meet you in Jerusalem. Certainly not in the hotel. I only now realize how the place weighs me down. And so I decided to come to your parents—that is, to your father, because he’s the only one who kept fighting to know the truth. I thought you’d agree to meet me here, not just for the sake of the love we once had, but because it would be a revenge for you. But I never dreamed, Ofer, that you’d come so quickly, with no questions asked. Maybe you were waiting for this all along. Were you? Did your father tell you something? But unless I’m wrong, he doesn’t know the truth to this day.”

  “You’re not wrong. He doesn’t.”

  “And it’s up to you whether it stays that way. I mean, whether you go on keeping the promise you made me . . .”

  “If it’s up to me,” he said eagerly, his answer cutting through the dense air, “the promise will be kept. I swear to you, Galya, he’ll never hear from me what he wants to know. But how about you? Can I count on you to keep, if not the condition, then at least the hope behind that promise . . . I mean . . . that you’ll come back to me one day?”

  Her face shone. A married woman about to give birth, she made no attempt to disabuse him. It was as if every sign of living love that he gave her was part of the cleansing she had come for.

  Ofer sat in his father’s revolving armchair, into which he had thrown himself with stiff distraction, his back to the computer and his hungry eyes feasting on his pregnant ex-wife. Galya, for lack of a chair, sat on the convertible couch, her hands supporting the burden of her large belly.

  It was nearly evening. A thin, melancholy dusk descended on the voices of the children playing in the street. No lights had been switched on in the Orientalist’s study, in which a folded blanket and sheets were set by the books on the shelves. The pale twilight suited their encounter.

  “I know,” Galya continued, “that you’re angry at your father, just as I am. He’s gone beyond all bounds since my father’s death. Still, now that I accept your ‘fantasy’ as fact, shouldn’t the two of us forgive him?”

  He looked with amazement at the woman he still loved like an old dog faithful to its master. Though he might try remembering her as she was now, swollen and ugly with another man’s child, to tide himself over the sad, lonely days ahead, he knew she only had to touch him with a finger for all his feelings to flame up again.

  “So my ‘fantasy’ is now a fact?” He regarded her with sarcastic wonder. “Are you sure of that, Gali?”

  She quailed. Was it possible that, after what she had done, risking anger and uproar by running off to Haifa to see him, he was brutally about to turn the tables by admitting he had imagined it all? But this was the way he had always argued, deliberately playing the devil’s advocate. Reassured by this knowledge, she rebuked him with a smile, kicked off her shoes, loosened her sweater, put a pillow behind her back for support, tucked her legs beneath her, wrapped her arms around herself, and sat on the couch like a great ball.

  “Yes, Ofer,” she said, her voice soft but firm, “I’m sure.” Her belly swayed in a supplicating movement, as if comforting the infant about to emerge into a world of human sorrow. “Absolutely sure . . .”

  She was sure enough to tell him what she knew. It went back to the beginnings of the hotel. That whole first year, in the chaos of getting started, when her parents were occupied with the staff and the guests every moment and her older sister, too, was totally involved in the work, a young Arab from Abu
-Ghosh—whether to please his employers or because he felt sorry for a little girl who wandered all day around the many floors and rooms of her new home—took her quietly under his wing. In his spare time he went with her for walks in the neighborhood and bought her the falafel that she loved, and he sometimes asked permission to take her home to play with his nephews. She still remembered her games with them, though not what they themselves looked like.

  As she grew older and went to school and made friends, who were thrilled to know someone with her own hotel—to which they invited themselves to play hide-and-seek in the garden and tag in the hallways or to ride up and down in the new elevator and bang on the big pots in the kitchen—she remained buoyed by the knowledge that there was someone who, in his quiet and chivalrous way, always knew where to draw the line with them. And thus the years passed, and even as she learned to accept that the hotel could never be a real home, he remained a dual figure of intimacy and strangeness, a family member whose degree of kinship no one knew. Although she was never sure what he was thinking, she felt certain that he would always be there for her, if only fleetingly and from afar.

  The more the hotel grew, the higher the Arab climbed the ladder of advancement and the more indispensable he became. He was a gardener, waiter, bellboy, and custodian all in one, a maintenance man who doubled as a tourist guide. Sometimes, coming home late at night, she found him in a tuxedo and bow tie at the reception desk; other times, in the middle of the day, she spied him through her window in nothing but his gym shorts, unloading fresh produce—fruit, vegetables, eggs, and poultry—from a truck. Once he brought her a week-old lamb, which was her pet until it went to the slaughterer.

  No one ever met his wife or knew her name. She was said to be childless, a sickly older woman with whom he remained because she stood to inherit a large orchard of olives and figs. His real home was the hotel. He served it loyally and in a spirit of harmony and was often consulted by Galya’s father, who treated him more like a partner than an employee.