A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

“Then I want you to know that means you can’t.’’

He’s furious now. “Don’t start that again. You know what the real truth is… all right then, come on! I’ll prove it to you.”

All of a sudden he throws himself on me savagely spread-eagling me mounting me right away I contract as hard as I can locking the little door he’s a frail snake gliding groping slithering drily away.

“You crazy woman, now do you see?”

All at once my anger melts I have to force myself not to cry. I get out of bed and put on a nightgown.

“All right then, tomorrow. But call off the punishment.”

“Do me a favor, stop talking idiotically.”

“Tell me it’s called off.”

“There’s nothing to call off.”

“There is. You know how you’ve behaved toward me these last two weeks. You’ve picked on me, you haven’t touched me…”

“All right, all right…”

I kiss his face I get into bed I turn my back to him and snuggle up like a fetus asking him to put his hand on my belly. The warmth of it in that deep pit of tiredness. The mind’s last gasps. My heroine Sarah she’s stuck in her room without moving. Where will she sleep? She won’t talk she won’t think. A flop of a character. The whole story’s a washout. Where can it go from here? A dead end. And now I don’t know what to do with her. Tomorrow I’ll try to breathe some life into her I’ll give her of my own flesh and blood. The light goes out in the living room. Fatigue courses through her like a river wave after wave of it rocking over soft bottomless depths a towering dull blue wall of water beneath her the quiet hum of the traffic in the wind. But someone keeps bothering her there’s no quiet a murmured sob blankets are tugged back and forth he moves her about lifts a hand or a leg the light keeps going on and off. Asi are you up? What time is it? It’s already three o’clock what’s the matter with you? I can’t sleep he sobs. Put your arms around me That won’t help I’m boiling mad inside. What’s wrong? Everything everything. Is it me? It’s you and it’s him. He has to go have another child hasn’t he done enough harm already? Goddamn him… where does he get the strength… the man has no sense of shame… he’ll make a laughingstock of us all. I’m finally beginning to understand. Ya’el suspected all along. But sleep is getting the better of her. What will she do? An old a prolonged cough pierces the silence from the other room. She’s so sleepy she’s sleeping but he keeps bothering her. Stop thinking you think too much if you don’t think you can’t go mad she says it without knowing if she really has said it or if she only has slept it…

“… so that as consistently as these youngsters rejected the idea of the state, and of all public bodies and institutions, they also rejected, at least initially, the idea of organized terror. Their terror was individual, and so they wished it to remain. A private rather than a collective act. Authority could reside only in the individual acting by himself and flowed from his great sense of inner freedom that sought to bestow itself upon the nation as a whole. The decision to commit a terrorist act could not be made by any organized forum proceeding by majority vote or some other resolution-passing process. Thus, despite their enormous feeling of camaraderie for each other, their marvelous sense of shared humanity that made up in part for their lack of contact with a sympathetic public, the terrorists remained radically isolated. In the first place, you must remember that they were very young — much younger than you yourselves. Pisarev, the leading theoretician of Russian nihilism, once remarked that children and teen-agers made the greatest fanatics. Russia was at this time a youthful nation that had been essentially reconstituted barely one hundred years before, and its terrorists were youthful too. ‘A proletariat of high-school graduates,’ they were called. And yet it was they who held high the torch of freedom and took a stand against a brutal dictatorial regime in order to liberate a people that was far from eager to collaborate with them. Nearly every one of these youngsters paid the price of suicide, public execution, imprisonment or insanity. A handful of intellectuals struggled alone while an entire nation kept silent. On the twenty-seventh of January 1878, what is called the First Wave of Russian Terror began. A young woman named Vera Zasulich shot General Tarpov, the vicious head of the St. Petersburg police. She had received orders from no one and was acting completely on her own, impelled by her own moral conscience. Ideologically, however, she was well prepared for what she did. She had read many underground writings, among them an essay called Murder by the German Karl Heinsen that was published as early as 1849 and was well known in her circles. She was also familiar with Mikhail Bakunin’s famous treatise Revolution, Terrorism and Gangsterism, which appeared in Geneva in 1856. These were the two selections that I asked you to read for today in Walter Laqueur’s anthology…”

But as usual they haven’t. The pens stop moving. Outside the wind howls in the sudden silence. Their eyes avoid mine breaking off contact. What do they care about treatises? I should be grateful that they’re willing to listen to me at all. You tell us about it. Whatever you say. But unless I get a discussion going now I’ll have to eat into my next lesson. There are still fifteen minutes to go. If only that old fusspot had come today: he doesn’t bother with the reading list either but he always has something to say and knows the oddest details and old books. He’s the only one here with some vague idea of what I’m getting at even if he is always protesting in the name of his absurd sense of values. I can always kill some time with him. Shadowbox with him in a corner. But he didn’t come to class this morning and he wasn’t here last week either. Sick? Dead? Dropped the course? Neither did those old women auditors show up today because of the holiday. I have a small audience and that always annoys me, I’ve gotten used to standing room only.

“Can somebody please tell me then what Heinsen’s basic thesis is? Who’ll sum it up for us?”

A scraping of chairs.

“Who read it?”

They avoid my glance leafing through their notebooks looking out the windows deep in thought.

“Perhaps I’d better ask who hasn’t read it.”

A limp hand goes up. Several others hesitantly follow it. They grin at each other.

“The book wasn’t in the library because you have it,” calls a voice from the corner.

Relieved laughter.

“But there are two other copies. I put them on the reserved shelf myself at the beginning of the year.”

They frown bewilderedly.

“I really did look for it but it wasn’t there.”

In her dreams.

Yes, a student announces, they were once on reserve but they’re gone. The librarian can’t understand it herself.

“Gone where?”

“Who knows? They’re gone.”

The relief is general now. As long as the books aren’t there.

“But why didn’t you let me know? I asked you to read those selections a month ago. Why didn’t you say something then? This is a discussion class, not a lecture…”

The door opens silently and Dina’s curly head peeks in. “May we?” she whispers amiably and without waiting for an answer turns and says in a clear voice that echoes down the corridor, “It’s here!” She glides to the last row and slips silently into a seat while father tiptoes in behind her head down as though entering a low tunnel careful not to meet my eyes his little valise clutched to his chest and picks his way through the jumble of empty chairs to the last one in the corner. Everyone turns to look at them. Several students recognize her and start whispering to each other while giving me doting looks. The blood goes to my head. Goddamn her. Why did she have to come in now? The room buzzes irritatingly.