A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

“Hard-pressed? Whatever made you think…?”

“All right, all right, don’t be upset. I really enjoyed my stay with you. I’m sorry it had to be so short…. What are you working on these days, tell me. I apologize for not responding when you sent me your doctorate. I was actually very proud of it. After all, that’s something I dreamed of myself and never managed to achieve…”

“I didn’t expect you to read it. I just wanted you to have a copy. I knew it wouldn’t interest you.”

“No, I should have responded. I should have made the effort to understand at least part of it. Not that I didn’t thumb through it I even read that poem of Pushkin’s that you quote… it’s a good one… but my mind was somewhere else.”

(It always is. That’s why he’s never gotten anywhere.)

“Never mind.”

“But I do mind. When I get back I’ll read it and write you what I think.”

“Don’t bother. Really, father. It will bore you.”

“I’ll do it for my own sake. What are you working on now, those Russian terrorists?”

“No. That was just today’s lesson.”

“What then?”

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“Try me anyway.”

“On the question of historical necessity. On the possibility of shortcutting historical processes. Something having to do with the nineteenth century. A kind of a model.”

“But that’s very interesting. Why wouldn’t it mean anything to me?”

“Because it involves a controversy about theories that you know nothing about.”

“You and your controversies. You waste too much energy arguing with everyone.”

“I had a good teacher to learn from.”

“Maybe I once did let myself be goaded against my better nature… but it happens less often now. I’m more on my guard. Connie… well, never mind. Shortcutting history? Can it be done?”

“It can.”

“For example?”

“Not now, father. Not on this bus.”

“Right you are. But this, Asa, you must send me to read. Do you promise?”

“All right.”

“After all, how can I allow myself not to know what you’re doing, even if I am so far away? I’m sure to understand parts of it…”

“Parts of it, certainly.”

“I myself, you’ll be surprised to hear, am in a very productive period. I’m constantly doing new things. I have my little linguistic projects… it’s very peaceful there… and in the winter you can’t go out anyhow. And recently — I’ll let you in on a secret — I’ve been writing this… these memoirs… maybe one day they’ll turn into a…”

“Novel? I always thought you’d write one someday.”

“Why shouldn’t I try? There’s no need to be so scornful.” “Who’s being scornful?”

“You are. You keep parading this intellectual scorn for me.”

“I was never intellectually scornful of you.”

“But I keep feeling it. Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re like a small boy, angry because I’ve left you…”

“Since when? You’re totally mistaken.”

“But I’ll return. You may not believe me, but I’ll return to live here someday.”

“I never said you wouldn’t.”

“I keep feeling that you’re judging me.”

“I’m not.”

“For all it mattered to you, I could have stayed locked up with her in that house until I died. Just as long as I didn’t bother you.”

“Did I ever tell you to stay there?”

“If I had stayed, could I ever have hoped for such a relationship with a woman… for such an intellectual renaissance? Tell me… when I see your angry looks… why, you would gladly have seen me taken away and locked up there with her!..What’s this, already the new road to Haifa?”

“It’s the old road. The inland route.”

“But it’s so wide. It looks new too.”

“They’ve widened it.”

“How soft and lovely everything seems… these orange groves on either side… it’s a beautiful country, we should be kinder to it… But where was I? Enough, let’s change the subject…”

(Now! I can feel it coming over me. Right smack in his puss.)

“Did you tell Dina that mother tried attacking you?”

“Murdering me, not just attacking. You know perfectly well… please…”

“You know that’s not so.”

“What are you talking about? How can you keep insisting?…Tsvi saw me lying there in my own blood…”

“All right, forget it. Don’t let’s start with that again. So she wanted to murder you. Why did you tell her yesterday…?”

“I just mentioned it in passing. What was wrong with that? So she’d understand why I didn’t come to your wedding. I owed her that much of an explanation.”

“Did you also owe it to her to open your shirt and show her your scar?”

“I don’t remember showing her… did you say that I opened my shirt? How can that be… is that really what she told you? Perhaps I just outlined it with my hand. She really said that? But you know what she’s like. Terribly childish, she lives in fantasies… or call it the literary imagination… and even if I did show her, so what? I suppose she thought it was a big joke.”

“No.”

“Then what did I do wrong? For better or worse she’s one of us now. Let her know. It’s not something that can be kept hidden. Why must you keep feeling ashamed?”

“I’m not ashamed. I just want you to know that if I feel scorn, it’s for that. It’s not intellectual. I never looked down on you intellectually. On the contrary, I learned a great deal from you. You were a teacher too, and I’ve followed in your footsteps, although in a somewhat different field. But this sentimentality of yours… this uncontrollable need to talk… without the slightest sense of discrimination…”

“Where are we turning now?”

“I don’t know. Why are you so worried about the bus?”

“I don’t want to be late. Are you sure he’s going straight to Haifa?”

“Of course.”

“But that’s how I am. That’s my nature. Take me or leave me, as the Americans say. It’s my nature to be frank.”

“Don’t be absurd. Frankness has nothing to do with it. Nobody asked you about it. Don’t you see why I didn’t want you to visit her parents? I was afraid you’d start telling them everything, that you’d stand there and open your shirt…”

“Did you really think I was capable…?”

“Why not? Recently you’ve proven yourself capable of astounding things.”

“That’s Connie. It’s she who gave me new hope. It’s she who saw the potential still in me when I came there a beaten, desperate man… who restored my faith to me. I’d like so much for you to meet her. You’d understand me much better if you did. It would be wonderful if you and Dina could come spend some time with us… if you could see our little Jew-child when it’s born… what a miracle! I still haven’t told you everything… I have grand plans for you… it’s just that… Look, there’s the ocean at last! It will be a chance for you to get out into the world… I’ll arrange something for you at the university… how is your English? You can lecture about your terrorists, or about Judaism and Jewish history — that’s a hot item there now, and they pay well. We’ll live together for a while…. Could you open the window a bit or is it too windy? I’m suddenly gagging… I feel nauseous… you’ve really done a job on me… squelched me completely… you don’t know the meaning of compassion… why can’t you understand what I’ve been going through?”

“That’s enough, father. Never mind. Let’s drop it for now. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. I’ll try to sleep too.”

And the pale young man so rudely plucked from his work — that thinker of never-before-thought thoughts that were to astound the few intellects of his age that could grasp them — that man shut his eyes. He sat with his head thrown back in the speeding bus that drove one dull spring day through hot dusty winds toward the ridges of the Carmel and the bay that looped at their feet, passed on the left by soundless cars whose drivers, sprawled limply at their black wheels, had not the slightest inkling who it was they had passed sitting at the window by his father, that blurred, concupiscent figure of a man now wiping away tears whose traces too would be stalked one hundred years from now by an eager young biographer, who — if he meant to do the job property — would have to travel all the way to Minneapolis and burrow there through old papers to determine what, if any, had been the paternal influence on that world-shaking, seminal mind. He curled up in his seat, savagely kneading his own silence, upgrading raw libido into intellectual power, contemplating space rushing by upon the face of the historical time that meandered within him. Flowing past borders, shooting white water, navigating the hydra-headed river, crossing the alluvial swamp in the midst of dead cosmic time, there he would find the bottom, the true bed in which it all flowed. The time had come to make order, to gather the defiant facts into one grand system, to bare the underlying laws, the sudden cascades, the disappointing channels that blindly petered out only to burst forth unexpectedly again, the missed, the impossible opportunities.