S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

11

And I was quite prepared to conclude that everything was being set right. In point of fact, nothing had been set right. From the very day I made peace with myself, that peace was robbed from me through another means. My wife treated me as though I had become a stranger to her. Yet all the efforts I was making with her were for her sake. How this woman failed to take notice! But she did notice.

One day she said to me, “What a good thing it would be if I were dead!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why, you ask?” And in the wrinkles around her lips there was visible a sort of smile which made my heart jump.

“Don’t be a fool,” I scolded her.

She sighed. “Ah, my dear, I am not a fool.”

“Then I am a fool.”

“No, you’re not a fool either.”

I raised my voice and challenged her. “Then what do you want from me?”

“What do I want?” she answered. “I want the same thing you want.”

I brushed one palm off with the other and said, “There’s nothing at all I want.”

She looked into my face intently. “There’s nothing at all you want. Then everything must be all right.”

“All right?” I laughed scornfully.

“You see, my dear,” she said, “that laugh does not sit well with me.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?”

“Do what you’ve been wanting to do.”

“Namely?”

“Namely, why should I repeat something you yourself know?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what that something is. But since you know, you can tell me.”

She pronounced in a whisper, “Divorce.”

I raised my voice as I answered. “You want to force me into giving you a divorce.”

She nodded. “If you think it’s proper for you to put it that way and say that I want to force you, then I agree.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Why do we have to repeat things when there’s no call for it? Let us do what is written for us above.”

In anger, I mocked her. “Even heaven is an open book for you, as you know what’s written there. I am a doctor and I can only go by what my eyes see, while you, madam, you know what is written on high. Where did you pick up such knowledge, maybe from that louse?”

“Be still!” Dinah cried. “Please, be still!”

“You don’t have to get so angry,” I told her. “After all, what did I say?”

She rose, went to her room, and locked the door behind her.

I came to the door and asked her to open it for me, but she refused. “Look, I’m leaving,” I said to her. “The whole house is yours, and you don’t have to lock the door.” When she still did not answer, I began to be afraid that she had taken sleeping pills and, God forbid, committed suicide. I began to beg and plead for her to open the door, but still she did not open. I peeked through the keyhole, my heart pounding me blow after blow, as though I were a murderer. Thus I stood before the locked door until evening came on and the walls darkened.

With darkness, she came out of her room, pale as a corpse. When I took her hands in mine, a deathly chill flowed out of them that made my own hands cold. She made no effort to pull her hands away from me, as though she had no feeling left in them.

I laid her down on her bed and calmed her with sedatives, nor did I move from her until she had dozed off. I looked at her face, a face innocent of any flaw, without the slightest blemish, and I said to myself, What a lovely world in which such a woman exists, and what difficult lives we have to live! I bent down in order to kiss her. She turned her head in sign of refusal. “Did you say something?” I asked. “No,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was conscious of me or simply was talking in her sleep. Thoroughly disconcerted, I kept my distance from her. But I sat there all night long.

The next day I went to work and came back at noon. Whether out of prudence or for some other reason, I made no mention to her of what had happened the day before. She on her part did not speak of it either. So it was on the second day, so again on the third day. I was ready to conclude that matters were returning to their previous state. Yet I knew that though I might try to forget, she would not forget.

During that period her appearance became more vigorous and she changed some of her habits. Where she was accustomed to greet me as I came in the door, she no longer greeted me. Sometimes she would leave me and go off somewhere, and there were times when I came home and did not find her.

The anniversary of our engagement fell at that time. I said to her, “Let’s celebrate and take a trip to the place we went to when we were first married.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to go somewhere else.”

“Pardon me, but where is it you are going?”

“There’s a patient I’m taking care of.”

“Why this all of a sudden?”

“Not everything a person does is all of a sudden. For a long time now I’ve felt that I ought to work and do something.”

“And isn’t it enough for you that I am working and doing something?”

“Once that was enough for me. Now it’s not enough.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? If you yourself don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.”

“Is it such a complicated issue that it’s difficult to explain?”

“It’s not hard to explain, but I doubt if you would want to understand.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“Because I want to earn my own living.”

“Do you think you’re not supported adequately in your own home, that you have to go look for a living elsewhere.”

“Right now I’m being supported. Who knows what will be tomorrow?”

“Why all of a sudden such ideas?”

“I already told you that nothing happens all of a sudden.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You understand, all right, but you prefer to say, ‘I don’t understand.’”

I nodded my head in despair and said, “That’s how it is, then.”

“Really, that’s how it is.”

“This whole dialectic is beyond me.”

“It’s beyond you, and it’s not particularly close to me. So it would be better if we kept still. You do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to.”

“What I do, I know. But I have no idea what it is you want to do.”

“If you don’t know now, you’ll soon find out.”

But her efforts did not succeed. And however they may have succeeded, she failed to make a penny out of them. She was caring for a paralyzed girl, the daughter of a poor widow, and she received no payment for her work. On the contrary, she helped the widow financially, and she even brought her flowers. At that time Dinah’s strength drained from her as though she were sick, and she herself needed someone to take care of her instead of her caring for others. Once I asked her, “How long are you going to continue working with that sick girl?” She fixed her eyes on me and said, “Are you asking me as a doctor?”

“What difference does it make whether I ask as a doctor or as your husband?”

“If you ask as a doctor, I don’t know what to tell you, and if you ask for other reasons, I see no need to answer.”

I tried to act as if she were joking with me, so I laughed. She averted her face from me, and, leaving me where I was, went off. The laughter immediately died on my lips, nor has it yet returned.

It’s just a mood, I told myself, and I can put up with it. Yet I knew that all my optimism was completely baseless. I recalled the first time she spoke to me about a divorce, and I remembered what she said: “Whether I want it or not, I am prepared to do whatever you ask, if only it will relieve your suffering — even a divorce.” Now I thought, However you look at it, there’s no way out for us except a divorce. As soon as this idea occurred to me, I dismissed it, as a man will dismiss something painful from his thoughts. But Dinah was right when she said we had to do what was written for us above. Before long I saw with my own eyes and I grasped with my own understanding what at first I had not seen and I had not grasped. At once I decided that I would grant Dinah the divorce. We had no children, for I had been apprehensive about begetting children for fear they would look like him. I arranged our affairs and gave her the divorce.