David Bezmozgis - The Betrayers

Ah! It was wholly unpredictable where life’s emotional jolts would come from, thought Kotler. He would never have supposed that the sight of Miriam’s name, typed in Hebrew — a thing he had seen a thousand times on the ephemera of household bills — could so stir him.

He clicked on her message.

My Dear Baruch,

I don’t know where my letter will find you, but I believe it will find you. This is the opposite of how it was all those years ago when I knew where you were but couldn’t trust that my letters would be delivered. Much has changed since then, most of it, praise G-d, for the better. I have been reminding myself of this during these last two trying days.

Baruch, I never thought the time would come when I would be writing you such a letter. I never thought there would come a time when I would not know where to find you in this world. That has been the greatest shock of all. That, if you can believe it, is what seems most painful to me. That you have vanished on us. On me and on the children. That you have treated those dearest to you like informers, like strangers. Somehow I feel that if I knew where you were, I could better withstand my pain.

Baruch, I am not naïve. I understand that the promises people make to each other when they are young cannot be enforced when they grow old. I understand about men and the temptations of the flesh. I understand it from life and from our Torah, which does not shy away from this subject. I am a sixty-year-old woman and I know that, as pertains to the sexual appetite, this is not the same as being a sixty-year-old man. I do not desire and do not need to be desired the way I did when I was a younger woman. G-d, in His wisdom, made men and women differently, and made men to harbor these desires until their dying days. When King David was old, it was a young girl, Abishag the Shunammite, who was sent to warm his bed and not Bathsheba, his wife, whose beauty had once caused him to commit a terrible sin. The Torah never says how Bathsheba felt about this girl in her husband’s bed. Did she not wish to care for him herself? Or did she accept that she could not provide for him the way a young girl could? Of course, those were different times and a king had many wives and none could make an exclusive claim on him. Still, I have been thinking about Bathsheba and Abishag these past days. There is only one passage in the Bible where Bathsheba and Abishag appear together. It is when Bathsheba goes to King David to ask him to honor his promise to her and to appoint Solomon the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. “And Bathsheba went in unto the king in the chamber. — Now the king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the king. — And Bathsheba bowed, and prostrated herself unto the king.” Why does the Bible mention again that Abishag was with the king? It must be only to further humble Bathsheba at this moment. Not only must she beg her husband to keep his promise, she must do it before the young woman who now warms his bed. But in the end, she is rewarded. Her husband keeps his promise and her son ascends to the throne and builds the first temple, praise G-d.

I have been thinking about this and about what lesson I am to draw from it. Is it to accept that there is something in the natures of men and women that must be accommodated? I know that our intimate life is no longer what it was. I am not Abishag. I am Bathsheba. I am your wife, a woman of sixty, the mother of your children. But after all these years of marriage, what can Bathsheba ask of her husband? Can she ask only on behalf of the children, or also on her own behalf? If I no longer possess all the same desires, it does not mean I am without desires. I still desire those other things that we have always had together — comfort, familiarity, respect, affection, and love. For all the years we have spent together and the hardships we have endured, what is the value of the bond between us? What is owed to Bathsheba?

I am not writing to plead with you or make demands. I also will not pretend that you have not hurt me or that I am not angry with you. But I see that our life together has reached a crossroads and I ask myself which path I would prefer we take. It is true, we have both reached a very mature age and our children are nearly grown. We are no longer in that stage of life where we must worry about remaining together for the sake of the children. And I am past the stage of my life where I would be lost without a man. My mother was widowed when she was not much older than I am now and she lived until the end by herself. She claimed she was content. She would have preferred to have my father beside her, but without him she had the company of her friends and she also had me. Not only me, but all of us, as you well remember. We all cared for her, you no less than me. You were as much a son to her as if you were hers by blood. I too have friends and I have our children. And in time — soon, if G-d grants — there will be grandchildren. I imagine myself living the life my mother lived in her final years and I cannot say it terrifies me. But just as my mother would have wished to have my father by her side, I would still, even after all this, prefer to have you by my side. We have built this family together. It was the dream we shared almost from the first moment we met in Moscow. It seemed such a distant dream, and for so long it seemed nearly unattainable. But we have done it. We have made our lives in the land of Israel, the land of our forefathers, and we have raised two beautiful children here, proud Jews and Israelis who now dream their dreams in Hebrew.

Baruch, I don’t know what your intentions are. I don’t know what is in your mind or in your heart. I don’t know what promises you have made to Leora, the Abishag in our story. Of course, I always recognized her as Abishag. A younger woman in your house is always Abishag. No matter how doting or polite she may be, you know she poses a threat. It is not even her fault. It is in nature. Our part is to struggle against nature. Our part is to resist our bad inclinations with our good. I do not know how much Leora resisted her bad inclinations and I don’t know how much you resisted yours. But Dafna said you were blackmailed and that, if you had compromised, those dreadful photographs would have been suppressed. (On this, I took your side. One cannot make such compromises and I know you never would.) But if you were blackmailed it means that you did not intend for those photographs to be seen and you didn’t want to make public this affair. And perhaps this affair had already run its course or you were planning on ending it. Perhaps it was never your intention to leave our marriage. Perhaps you had simply strayed, submitted to an isolated temptation, and were now prepared to continue with our life as we have always lived it. That is for you to say. But if you wish to return to our marriage, I am willing to forgive. Our friends, our community, the people who have rallied around me as they rallied around me in the years of our earlier struggle, feel as I do. Everyone is willing to forgive. No one of us is perfect. Just this morning, Gedalia brought me this verse from Ecclesiastes: “For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.” Our greatest sages and prophets were also not without sin. So what right do I have to expect of you, even you, to be more righteous than our sages?

Baruch, whatever you decide, I ask only that you don’t delay. Even if you decide not to return to me, return speedily to the country and to your children. They are in desperate need of your presence and your guidance.

Your wife,

Miriam

How thoroughly he had fouled the best of what they had once been, Kotler thought. And of the many offenses he had committed, the worst seemed to be against the girl he had met in Moscow forty years earlier to whom he had pledged his love. The quiet, contemplative beauty, like a young Ingrid Bergman, who appeared one evening at the Hebrew class that the Sobels ran secretly out of their apartment. Rak Ivrit —“only Hebrew”—was the rule. In the course of a conversational exercise, he had said to her: Would you like to see a movie and go drink coffee and get married and move to Israel and raise a large family? To which she had replied with the single Hebrew word: Zehu? “That’s it?”