And then one day, while Galya was doing her military service, Fu’ad suddenly resigned. There had been no argument with Mr. Hendel, no demands, no reason given at all. He had simply announced one afternoon that he was leaving, and the next day he had a new job at a rival establishment nearby. Although everyone, especially Mrs. Hendel, was greatly upset by this and called for an explanation from Galya’s father, he himself, though failing to provide one, did not seem overly perturbed. And yet slowly it dawned on him that the Arab who had mysteriously abandoned the kingdom he had penetrated so deeply was dangerous.
At that period of her life, Galya had been living away from the hotel and had taken little interest in the incident. Only now, after leaving again and for good, had Fu’ad revealed to her what had happened the first time. Hendel, he told her, had lured him back with an offer that hinted at taking him into the business.
Even now, knowing what she did about her father, Galya told Ofer she could not but feel deeply for him. She still loved and even identified with the tall, lanky man who arrived one winter evening in Abu-Ghosh dressed not with his usual elegance, but disguised in jeans and an old jacket and hat. There, in a little coffeehouse in the square in front of the village church of St. Joseph, he coaxed Fu’ad into coming back. Convinced that the Arab had quit after uncovering his secret, he chose to confess all to him, the intimate stranger to whom alone the truth could be told.
Hendel, according to Fu’ad, displayed no feeling of guilt about what he revealed. He seemed less contrite than annoyed at the weakness, having nothing to do with sex, that had got him into his predicament. He had simply, he said, wanted to be nice to the daughter who had helped put the hotel on its feet. Though young, she considered herself his second-in-command and refused to share her ambition with anyone else. She did not want other men or love affairs in her life, which was dedicated to her work. This was why it was his duty, she told him, to make her less lonely, with an adult form of the love he had shown her as a child.
And so, Hendel told Fu’ad, he gave in, thinking it was just for one time, and became Tehila’s prisoner.
Fu’ad sat in the square of St. Joseph’s, listening silently to this confused and unbelievable account by a man he had once greatly respected. At first, determined to put more distance between them, he refused to reconsider his decision. Yet his former employer now made him a proposal so bold that it took his breath away; namely, to return to work, for double his old pay, as maître d’, future partner, and guardian of the secret which he was entrusted to make unknowable by both protecting and keeping in check what he alone knew.
For the first time in his life, Fu’ad could do something for a Jew other than serve him. At last, he thought, I can help the Jews without having to defeat them.
“Without having to defeat them?” Ofer asked in astonishment. “What does that mean?”
Galya spread her arms helplessly to acknowledge that she didn’t know. She shut her eyes with a grimace, as if the child inside her, too, were demanding to be told. In a frail voice, she asked her ex-husband to change places with her. She had felt what might be a first labor pain and needed better support than a pillow.
“God knows,” she said, easing her way into the Orientalist’s revolving chair. The computer at her back, switched off by Ofer, no longer radiated good cheer. “I didn’t ask him because I was afraid if I did he would never get to the point—which was, you’ll be surprised to hear . . .”—she paused to look at Ofer, hunched on the couch like a big rabbit preparing to jump—“ . . . you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Ofer, you. You’re the hero of his story, just as he is of mine.”
A week after that winter night in Abu-Ghosh, Fu’ad returned to work at the hotel—as maître d’ with a huge pay raise, though not yet as a partner. If Hendel’s main worry was to keep the secret from his wife, Fu’ad’s was now to keep it from Galya, the effect on whom, he feared, would be disastrous. And so when he was introduced one day to her fiancé, he was greatly relieved. Now, at least, there was someone to take her away from the danger zone.
He met the groom’s parents too, the professor and the judge. As did everyone at the hotel, he considered this new family connection a source of pride and threw himself into the preparations for the wedding. And yet it quickly became apparent that, far from intending to carry the bride off to his own world, the new husband was being drawn into hers. He was already dreaming of a role in the hotel, where he sought to involve himself in the management.
The Arab’s worries, far from decreasing, were now made worse. On top of everything, he had to keep Ofer’s curiosity and enthusiasm within bounds. And so that morning, when Ofer insisted on descending to the forbidden basement, he did everything to stop him. Yet unable to defy Mrs. Hendel, he had no choice but to toss her the ring of keys, while thinking resentfully, “Before I’ve even been made a partner, I already have a partner of my own.” Could he at least count on him to be discreet?
But Ofer’s indiscretion was soon apparent. Before long he had risked his marriage by choosing honesty over love.
“It was the honesty of love that made me do it,” Ofer murmured passionately. He suddenly regretted burning the letter he had written to Galya in Paris.
Fu’ad now faced a dilemma. Should he protect Galya’s marriage by telling her the truth, or protect her family and his hoped-for partnership? He chose the latter, not realizing that this was the greatest fantasy of all. Hendel, saying nothing, quietly hiked his pay again without telling Tehila.
“And so they gave you the boot,” Galya concluded, with an odd flourish. “You were driven from the hotel, from the family, from my life, and from my love. And two years later I found another husband, a very different one from you, who takes things as they come . . .”
“But how do you take things as they come?” Ofer pleaded in the darkness. “Explain that to me . . .”
“You just do. What shocked and outraged you wouldn’t have mattered to Bo’az, because he accepts all that’s twisted and perverse in life. He respects the privacy of others to a fault, even if they’re close to him—even if it’s his own wife. He’s never intrusive or clumsy. Even when we make love, he’s a world apart. If he had found out or guessed what you did—and perhaps he did—he would have kept it to himself. That’s why Fu’ad, although he’s not keen on him, is happy not to have to keep an eye on him or treat him as an obstacle.”
“I wouldn’t have been one either.” It was extremely painful to him to think of her making love to someone else.
“Perhaps not. I suppose that’s why he had such fond memories of you, even of the way you cried one night in the street. He even wrote a poem about it.”
“A poem? About me?” Ofer got up and went tensely to the window. “What did it say?”
“I don’t know. He never showed it to me. Anyway, it was in Arabic. He wouldn’t let your father see it either.”
And then, one day, Galya’s father died. Although the whole staff feared for its future, Fu’ad’s turmoil was especially great. While he had now taken over the dead man’s responsibilities to the point of all but running the hotel, he was no longer guardian of the secret—and with it he had lost, not only his pay raise, but also all hope of becoming a partner.
“You tell it well,” Ofer said softly.
“And then, in the middle of the bereavement, your father turned up. For five years, we hadn’t seen him. We all felt he had come more to interrogate us than to console us. Even Fu’ad, who treated him like a new father figure and even made him write something in the condolence book, saw through him.”
“Yes. My father told us about that book. Do you remember what he wrote there?”
“More or less. It was addressed to my father. Something like, ‘Despite the separation imposed on us, the memory of you still shines with light and generosity. We feel a keen and vivid sorrow at your death.’”
“He really wrote that? Light and generosity? How strange . . .”
“W
hy?” Galya protested. “Despite all that happened, you can’t deny, Ofer, that it was that which attracted you to him, too. But my father wasn’t Fu’ad’s problem any more. Your father was. And at the same time, Fu’ad liked him. You see, your father sensed right away that he was the weak point in the protective wall around me. At first Fu’ad watched from a distance while your father questioned me twice. You tell me: What good would it have done to tell him about your crazy fantasy and what I thought of it? Would he have felt any better? Would it have helped him to make you less stuck? Believe me, I knew about that too and felt bad for you. I still do. But I wouldn’t let him corner me, not even when he absurdly tried playing on my feelings for you. I did agree to answer your letter, so as not to frustrate him completely. I even answered your second one, though both were as nasty as they were anguished.
“Your father wouldn’t give up. He came to the hotel a third time, when I wasn’t there. And now he began a relationship with Tili, who makes friends easily, especially with older men. It was she, by the way, who sent him to sleep in the basement. To this day I have no idea what she knows or suspects about us, because I don’t know whether she noticed you that day. Perhaps my father managed to hide it from her too. I was afraid to ask. It was easier, after talking to Fu’ad, to get up and run away.”
“But what made him confess in the end? Was it my father?”
“No.” Galya felt a new fountain of emotion welling up in her. “It wasn’t your father, although it did have to do with him. Your father could have kept haunting the hotel forever and Fu’ad still wouldn’t have talked. All the Arab-speaking professors and Orientalists in the world couldn’t have wormed that secret out of him, because even though he lost his pay raise when my father died, he hoped his keeping silent would be chalked up to his credit. No, Ofer, what made him tell the truth was another Arab, one he met through your father. That’s when he cracked . . . I mean, opened up. . . .”
“Another Arab?”
“Rashid or Rasheed. Have you heard of him?”
“No.”
“Neither had I. But he made a big impression on Fu’ad. He’s some kind of driver or guide your father employed. The haunt of the haunt, you might say. It was because of him that Fu’ad decided to discard what he called ‘my veneer of being nice.’”
Ofer winced. “Is that what he says it was? Just a veneer?”
“I’m sure it was more than that. He just said it because he was desperate and wanted to provoke me. I’ve known him since I was a child. It’s not a veneer, it’s his true self. He’s become cynical now because the promise my father made him is dead and buried. Tili isn’t looking for partners. She’d go to bed with him before she’d go into business with him.”
“But what did that other Arab have to do with it?”
“It started when he and your father talked Fu’ad into going to some poetry and music festival in Ramallah. Those Palestinians would like to be partners, too—in our country. Their own Palestinian Authority isn’t enough for them. They can sing all the love songs they want, but in the end they’d like to pick us apart. Anyway, Fu’ad said it made him realize that working for Jews was getting him nowhere. And so he decided to take his severance pay and go back to his wife’s figs and olives. Why be loyal to a dead man to protect a family from the truth that’s making someone else suffer?”
“Me.” Ofer shivered.
“You, Ofer, you. You see, I’m not the only one who kept thinking about you. So did Fu’ad. That Rashid reminded him of you. Not the way he looked, but the way he was. Fu’ad says he, too, has an old love he won’t let die. He’s a displaced, restless soul. Fu’ad feels sorry for both of you, the way he did when he found you crying by the hotel. Only now he’s wised up. He knows that all the poetry of love doesn’t mean anything. It won’t help Rashid, and it won’t help you. I’m the only partner Fu’ad has left. He thinks we should leave the hotel together. Three days ago he took me to that gazebo in the garden and told me everything. I started to shake. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You have to ask forgiveness to cleanse the baby that should have been his . . .’”
23.
“MINE?” ENCHANTED, OFER TURNED to his ex-wife, clinging to their lost love. “So?” he asked. “You didn’t bring me here from Paris just to tell me how Fu’ad scared you, did you?”
She raised her soft, weary eyes to him. “Perhaps,” she said discouragingly.
On the lit terrace across the street, an old woman was carefully spreading a cloth on a card table to prepare it for the next day’s game of solitaire. He remembered his grandmother’s insistence that he ask Hendel for forgiveness. And he had done it. Now it was being asked of him.
He hesitated, then switched on the lamp on his father’s desk. Casually, his hand brushed the shoulder of the women carrying the child that should have been his. Her confession done with, her face was tranquil and calm. Did she feel sorry? Had she acted out of love or only from pure calculation?
“Would you like to eat or drink?” he asked.
“Just a glass of water, please.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
He left the study and shut the door behind him, as if to keep her for himself a little longer. The outside world, temporarily erased from consciousness, regained its reality. His parents’ duplex was dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought they had gone out. But no, they were in the living room, waiting quietly. Changing course, he went not to the kitchen but to their bedroom, where he found a plastic cup and filled it from the faucet in the sink. He drank, refilled the cup, and returned with it to the study. Galya sipped from it and put it down by the keyboard of the computer.
“You’re not cold?”
“No.” For the first time, she smiled at him. “My baby keeps me warm.”
Why, he wondered, smarting, did she have to say “My”? Unless he breathed some life into the embers of intimacy that had begun to glow again, they would soon go out forever. He wanted to get her back onto the couch, to sit beside her and feel her body. He would have given anything for the kisses and caresses of which the truth had deprived him. But she was too ensconced in his father’s chair to be moved—all but her white-stockinged feet, which dangled in the air.
“Can’t you at least feel some hate for your father now,” he asked, “for wrecking our love and marriage to save himself?”
“He was saving me too. I would never have survived your truth.”
“There you go again! If it was my truth, what are you asking forgiveness for?”
“I can’t judge him.”
“But why can’t you, damn it?”
“Because I pity him. I don’t believe he wanted sex with her. He just couldn’t get out of it.”
“But what do you know about it?” He felt like weeping. “How can you say that? How can you defend a man who was so brutal to me? I never even told you that I met him one last time after our separation. I begged him in your very words. I said, ‘I can’t judge, I won’t breathe a word of this. Just let me stay with Galya and your family.’”
“You did that after our separation?”
“Yes. I begged for my life. And he cynically blamed his betrayal on me.”
“No, Ofer. You’re wrong about that. He simply felt that your promises meant nothing. That you only made them because you confused the hotel with me. He didn’t believe your love would last. And he was right . . .”
“But how can you say that? How can you even think it when you see me so torn up, stuck for years in my blind loyalty to you? I walk the streets of Paris without even noticing all the beautiful women around me. All I see is the curve of your breast, the sole of one of your feet . . .”
“That’s just because you’re far away. If we had stayed together, your love would have died. You can’t accept the cruel, sick complexity of this world. You fight it all the time. Your hatred and envy of my father would have driven you crazy and poisoned us both.”
“But your father is gone now. Why not come
back to me?”
“Because the memory will haunt us. We’ll never forget that you, too, were implicated. That’s why you went poking in that basement, even though you were warned not to. There’s nothing to regret. Our love was used up. You’re just talking yourself into something.”
“Don’t you dare say that!” He jumped to his feet, pacing the room like a trapped animal unreconciled to its loss of freedom. “I’m talking myself into something? I, who go on paying the price for my loyalty and hope? What is it that you want? If I got down on my knees, would you believe me? You say you’ve come to ask forgiveness, but what does that mean? I kept my promise. I never said a word. Now give me some hope that you’ll come back to me, if not now, then some day . . . with your child that should have been mine . . .”
“I can’t. Watch it . . .”
“The cup is leaking.”
“No, it isn’t. That’s not where the water is coming from. You’d better call your mother. She’ll know what to do. . . .”
24.
THREE HOURS HAD PASSED and still the Rivlins didn’t know to which hospital Ofer had taken his ex-wife or what was happening there. It was almost midnight. The French Carmel was quiet. The big searchlight in the navy base at Stella Maris shone with bright purpose in the thickening murk. Hagit undressed, got into bed, and switched on the TV. But the curly-headed newscaster whose smiles sweetened the hideous headlines was not on tonight, and she soon switched it off again.
“Come to bed,” she told her husband tenderly. “Walking up and down all night won’t make that baby get born any quicker.”
“But suppose Ofer needs us?”
“At the delivery of another man’s wife? You’re too much! Come on, take off your clothes. You’ve had a hard day. And whatever happens, you’ll have to take him to the airport tomorrow.”
The Liberated Bride Page 61