The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “But shouldn’t we at least find out what hospital they’re in? Suppose her mother or sister want to know. And where in the world did that husband of hers disappear to?”

  “If he’s not worried about her, you can relax too. You’re not part of this birth.”

  “Why not?”

  She raised her head from the pillow to regard him with amazement. Her hair disarrayed, her face wild with anger, she had lost her last shred of patience.

  “Because you aren’t! You’ll wait for Ofer to get in touch—if he does. And you’ll let him live out this day, and his meeting with Galya, and whatever is happening right now as he pleases.”

  “Of course. Naturally.”

  “Promise me you’ll stay out of it from now on.”

  “I promise.”

  “Swear you won’t phone or go looking for anyone while I’m asleep.”

  “All right. All right. . . .”

  “No, it’s not all right. Swear!”

  “I swear.”

  She smiled. “And now get into bed. You’ll sleep better for having sworn.”

  He undressed and got into bed, turning out the light and snuggling up to her. But the more regular her breathing grew as it carried her surely off to sleep, the more awake he became. His excitement getting the better of him, he disengaged himself and rose. Sleeping pills were out of the question on a night like this.

  He entered his study apprehensively, as if the amniotic sac that had burst a few hours before might still be dripping. Hagit, with unusual alacrity, had mopped it up before he could get a look at it. Now, though, in the light of the desk lamp, he saw that his chair was still damp. Overcoming his qualms, he bent to sniff it. The stains had a slight, soapy scent. With a shiver of revulsion, he noticed what looked like bits of white, nearly colorless matter.

  Galya had left her overnight bag on the couch. It was open. In it, beside her toilet articles and a book, were rolled her wet dress and underpants. He closed the bag and put it on the floor. Then, covering the chair with a sheet she had slept on as one covers the mirrors in a dead man’s house, he sat down, switched on his computer, loaded a chapter of his book onto the screen, and set to work on it. He was getting closer, he thought, to the crux of things that he had been groping for since the spring. Though still not out of the woods, he felt confident that he was onto something real. Yet he wondered if he would ever find out what it was, or if he would remain like a faithful courier with no idea of the message he carried.

  True to his pledge to Hagit, he waited to hear from Ofer. One might have thought his son could pick up a telephone and tell his parents, “Galya had the baby.” Or, “We’re still waiting.” Or how the delivery was proceeding, or whether Jerusalem had been informed, or if Tehila and Bo’az were on their way. Or, at the very least, “I’ll be home soon,” or “I’m staying at the hospital,” or “Go to sleep, Abba,” or “Wait up for me.” Hagit was asleep. He could easily phone every hospital in town and find out. But he had sworn not to.

  The editing went well. He worked on the chapter and made such progress that he was almost up to the next one. It was nearly two o’clock. For a moment he imagined that Ofer and Galya would soon come home from a disco, as in those distant days before the wedding.

  It took him a while to realize that the tapping on the front door was not imaginary. He hurried downstairs. Through the frosted glass he made out a blurry figure. It was Tehila, standing in the darkness. As though continuing a conversation, she remarked, without saying hello:

  “Tell me, am I wrong or did you once live somewhere else, in a fantastic wadi all your own?”

  “We moved,” Rivlin said. She had hennaed her cropped hair, increasing her pallor.

  “I’m told Galya made quite a scene.” She gave him a mischievous look as he stood there, blocking her way. “Listen, I’m sorry it’s so late, but she asked me to get her bag.”

  “But what’s happening? Has she given birth?”

  “There’s still time, I suppose,” Tehila said, with the nonchalance of an old maid who knows nothing about such matters. “The nurse in the delivery room says she’s still not dilated. Bo’az wants to take her back to Jerusalem. We came in the hotel’s tourist van, and there’s plenty of room for her to lie down. It will be better for everyone.”

  “But where is she now?”

  “Not far from here, at Carmel Hospital. It’s nice and clean and she can give birth with a view of the sea. But we have a room reserved for her at Hadassah on Mount Scopus. She’ll have to make do with a desert view there, but at least it’s the one she grew up with.”

  “Who told you she was at Carmel?”

  “Ofer. It was his decision to call us, because I think Galya would have been perfectly happy giving birth first and telling us later. But he didn’t want the responsibility, so he left us a message, and we came running. Just imagine, we even brought my mother!”

  “How is Ofer?”

  “He’s his usual excited, discombobulated self. And very sad-looking. Just see what you’ve done, Professor. Instead of liberating him as you planned, you and your Arabs have only complicated things. Now he has not only her but her baby to be attached to. Believe me, I still don’t get why she had to make him come all the way from Paris. A nice letter would have been simpler and cheaper. But never mind. It’s her right. It’s even her right to buy him an expensive ticket and charge it to the hotel. As long as you’re happy . . .”

  “Me?” Rivlin mumbled. “Happy? I haven’t the vaguest idea what it’s all about.”

  She smiled brightly, satisfied with herself as always. “By the way,” she added familiarly, “if your wife is awake, I’d love to say hello to her.”

  “She isn’t,” he said, horrified by the thought. He had to get rid of Tehila. “Wait here and I’ll bring you the bag,” he told her.

  Yet no sooner had he left his post at the door than she was in the house. Nor did she wait for him in the living room, but instead followed him upstairs, as if he were showing her to a room in a hotel. He had to wheel and turn back when, respecting no bounds, she stopped by the open door of his bedroom to look at his wife—who, curled fetally in a tangle of sheets and blankets, was sleeping peacefully. Shutting the door angrily, he pulled her after him to his study, where she inspected the bookshelves, desk, and couch before reaching down wearily to take her sister’s bag and return with it to the bottom floor.

  He didn’t invite her to sit. She asked for a glass of water, drank half of it, and left, clearly loath to depart.

  What was he to make of it all? Although he felt calmer knowing that Galya’s family was with her, he was still in the dark.

  There was nothing to do but wait for Ofer. No longer in the mood to work at his computer, he sank onto the couch facing the TV and watched, with drowsy disinterest and the sound turned off, an old black-and-white thriller.

  At four-thirty there was still no sign of Ofer. Had Galya stayed in Haifa to give birth? Or had they all gone back to Jerusalem together? It was a bad business either way. He went to the bedroom, determined to ask Hagit to absolve him of his pledge not to make phone calls. Although sound asleep, she so logically confuted the case he tried to make that he crawled into bed and dozed off beside her.

  HE HAD HARDLY—or so it seemed to him—plunged to the depths of sleep when he was dredged up from them again. His wife and son, both fully dressed, were standing by the bed.

  “Go back to sleep,” Hagit said. “Everything is fine. Ofer just wanted to say good-bye. He’s promised to return this summer, perhaps for good. I’ll take him to the airport. Don’t worry.”

  Rivlin roused himself. This was no way to say good-bye.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did she give birth?”

  “No,” Hagit answered. “She still has time. They took her back to Jerusalem. Now say good-bye to your son and go to sleep. We don’t want to be late.”

  But he wasn’t about to miss the ride to the airport. “You can’t leave me here by myse
lf,” he implored them. “Take me with you. I promise not to be a backseat driver.”

  They couldn’t say no. Unwashed and unshaven, in a polo shirt and old jacket, he heaved himself like an empty sack into the rear seat. Ofer, his eyes shut and his head thrown back at an odd angle, sat next to Hagit, who gripped the wheel tensely. The traffic, although heavy despite the early hour, moved at a good clip. Rivlin, dead to the world, did not wake up until they arrived at the airport.

  After Ofer had checked in, they went for coffee at a small, noisy corner counter.

  Father and son, both groggy from their brief but deep sleep, regarded each other with wonder and suspicion, like two lawyers faced with summing up a case that had been thought to be interminable. Rivlin gulped some coffee, not knowing whether his son was as sad as he looked or merely tired and pensive.

  “And so in the end,” he said, a note of resignation in his voice, “you’re leaving us without a clue to what happened or why anyone had to be forgiven.”

  “That’s right,” Ofer replied. He gave his father a faint smile, the first in recent memory. “Although you did your best to wreak havoc, you’ll have to go on guessing, because you’ll never know or understand more than you do now.”

  Hagit shifted her glance from one to the other, afraid of a last-minute row.

  “But why?” Rivlin asked with bitter fatigue, refusing to accept defeat. “Why can’t we know? Is it only because you still believe she’ll come back to you?”

  Ofer said nothing, avoiding his mother’s pitying eyes.

  Rivlin threw caution to the winds. “You’ll be worse off than ever,” he declared.

  The judge squeezed her husband’s thigh like an iron vise.

  “No, I won’t,” Ofer answered serenely. He looked, Rivlin thought, less sad than lonely.

  “Why not?”

  “Because even if I’m still tied to her in my thoughts, and maybe in my feelings, I’m morally a free man. And that, Abba, is all you should care about.”

  He swallowed the rest of his coffee, got to his feet, hugged and kissed his father, and disappeared through the departures gate.

  25.

  IT WAS SPRING. The winter having been a real one, with rain, snow, storms, and floods, all Israel felt that it had earned the vernal scents and colors and was entitled to enjoy them before dun summer took over.

  The spring semester had started. On his way to the university for the first meeting of his seminar on the Algerian revolution, Rivlin noticed a new traffic sign. The municipality, although not answering his letter regarding the corner of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets, had acknowledged it nonetheless—not by accepting his suggestion to narrow the sidewalk, but by banning U-turns completely. And so, the professor thought self-mockingly, I only made things worse here, too. So much for citizens’ initiatives! Yet on second thought, he had to admit that the new arrangement made better sense. Any U-turn at a busy traffic light like this was dangerous and pointless.

  Before his seminar, he went to the departmental office for a list of its students. Knowing their names in advance helped him encourage them to be active. In the office, a new young secretary informed him that a middle-aged woman had been waiting for him all morning. They’d told her that he had no office hours today, but she had insisted on remaining.

  He walked to the end of the corridor with a sense of foreboding. There, as he had guessed, was Afifa. Stripped of her jewelry, she wore a simple shawl draped over her head and shoulders that accented her femininity even more.

  “Is it me you’re waiting for?” he asked gently.

  “Who else?” Her voice was anxious yet intimate, as though he were her family doctor.

  “But . . .” He glanced at his watch. “I have a seminar.”

  “I know. I checked the catalogue. I’ve only come to give you Samaher’s term paper and get her grade.”

  She wasn’t requesting or beseeching it. She was asking for it as you might ask a bank teller for your money.

  He made no reply. Leading her to his office, he sat her down unsmilingly, with none of his usual small talk in Arabic, and took the bright green folder. The translated stories and poems were neatly typed, with titles, notes, and two pages of bibliography. He leafed through them and looked up at Afifa, whose black shawl—more a moral than a religious statement, he assumed—deepened the glow in her eyes.

  “It looks good,” he said. “I’ll go through it and give Samaher a grade.”

  “But what is there to go through, Professor? You already know everything that’s in there, even if it was only read aloud to you. Take my word for it, it’s everything you asked for. Now give her what she has coming to her.”

  “Shu b’ilnisbilha?”* He couldn’t resist a few Arabic words.

  Declining to collaborate in a fruitless ritual, she answered in Hebrew:

  “Samaher will be fine. She’s a strong girl. Her mind is all right again, like before her illness. And she’s in a new house her husband built for her at the end of the village. There’s no more grandfather and grandmother and everyone else looking over her shoulder. But the whole family and the whole village, Professor, want her to have her grade. I’m here to get it.”

  He smiled and leafed through the neatly typed work again, studying its matching pages of Arabic and Hebrew texts, the fantastical names of which reminded him of hours spent in Samaher’s bedroom and in his own dimly lit office. He felt an old yearning for strange roads and a trusty driver.

  “U’feyn Rashid hala?”† he asked. “Lissato bubrum laf u’dawaran hawlkun?”‡

  But Afifa would not play the game. She gathered her shawl around her. “He’s a poor devil, Rashid. He spends all his time in the hospital with that boy . . . the vegetable . . .”

  “Vegetable? What vegetable?”

  “Ra’uda’s boy, Rasheed. He ran away to the hills one night, and some hunter with crazy ideas put a bullet in him. Only Allah knows how it will ever end.”

  “I didn’t know!” Rivlin cried, rent by pain. “I remember Rasheed. I’m so sorry . . . Believe me, I loved that little boy.”

  “So did everyone,” Afifa said angrily. “A lot of good it did him! A lot of good it did my mother, the boy’s grandmother, who only wanted all her children home again! What has it brought us? A vegetable. . . .”

  Rivlin glanced at his watch. “And you?” he asked Afifa, who now had not only his sympathy but his esteem. “Don’t you want to finish your B.A.?”

  To his surprise, she didn’t reject the idea.

  “Allah is great . . . ,” she replied, leaving the matter open while continuing to regard him with suspicion, as if he were looking for another excuse to postpone Samaher’s grade.

  “Leave Allah out of this,” he said bitterly, as if suddenly identifying the real problem. “Great or not, he has nothing to do with this. Go to the secretary and register. What’s it to you? There’s no obligation. Go on, don’t be afraid. Now that Samaher has left home, you’ll have time. Sign up for a course, mine or anyone’s. Meanwhile, I’ll grade this paper.”

  Although he hadn’t meant to link the two things, this was how she understood it: Samaher’s seminar grade swapped for her registration. A smile lit her face. She rose, tightened her shawl around her, held out her white, pudgy hand, and took her leave. Rivlin stayed in his chair, leafing through the paper a third time. Turning to the last page, he wrote an 80. Then, thinking better of it, he crossed this out, and wrote 90. Should he add some comment? He reflected briefly and wrote a sentence that he hoped was meaningful though addressed to no one in particular:

  “I have read, listened, accompanied, and lived with this paper and am pleased with it.”

  Although this struck him as rather bland, it was too late to change it. Nor could he think of anything else to add. And so he simply signed his name.

  26.

  IN EARLY SUMMER, three months after Ofer’s return from Paris, Tsakhi finished his military service. Remembering his fears when his youngest son went into the army
with the thought of volunteering for a commando unit, Rivlin thanked his lucky stars for having enabled him to sleep well at night. The army, deciding it needed Tsakhi’s brains more than his fighting prowess, had sent him from the induction center to an intelligence course that landed him in a secret base well-protected from the perils of the Jewish state. His officer’s pay had even allowed him to squirrel away a tidy sum in the bank, there having been nothing to spend it on in the secret bowels of his mountain that he was forbidden to discuss even with his inquisitive father.

  And yet since this high-interest savings account was a long-term one that could not be dipped into, the provident ex-soldier had no money to pay for the traditional post-army trip taken abroad by young Israelis—a problem aggravated by his intention of traveling, not on the cheap in the Far East or South America, but with his brother in France and Europe. And so, the day after his discharge, he wasted no time in finding a job. In fact he created one, going into business with the blond, baby-faced sergeant who had been his aide. Receiving permission to use Rivlin’s computer, the two found room on it, between the professor’s reflections on the disintegration of Algerian identity, to design an attractively colored ad for two experienced, responsible, and reasonably priced housepainters and plasterers.

  “But what do you know about painting and plastering?” the amazed Orientalist asked. “Who would hire two nerds like you? And how do you know the walls you paint won’t start peeling the day after?”

  “Don’t worry, Abba,” Tsakhi assured him. “Nothing will peel.” Without his uniform, he looked like the high-school boy he had been before being drafted.

  Rivlin had grown accustomed, in the morning hours before Hagit came home from court, to a quiet house in which he was alone. Now he had a young partner—a most pleasant and much loved one, to be sure, but also a noisy and messy one who never switched off a light and who played strange, pounding music.

  The blond sergeant arrived that same evening. He and Tsakhi ran off dozens of ads on the printer, waited until late at night for the municipal inspectors to be gone from the streets, and went to stick their notices on every electric pole, tree, traffic sign, storefront, bus station, and café they could find. Their coverage was so extensive that when a week later Rivlin glanced at a university bulletin board on which his colleagues had posted grades, he discovered a piece of paper with his own telephone number on it.