A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

“All right.” I winced. “All right.”

“It’s my fault… all mine…” Mother almost managed a smile, glowing with a sadly poignant beauty. “Just don’t hit yourself anymore. I thought you had stopped that long ago…”

“All right, all right.” I bent to kiss her and walked by myself toward the gate. Ya’el and mother followed me arm in arm, while father tagged along at their side, still very pale, absorbed in thought. Further back the crowd of patients trailed slowly after us. We crossed the lawns, Horatio lumbering between us, our sole connecting link. Kedmi’s car was waiting at the gate, already faced toward the main road, its radio blasting away. The engine started up and raced nervously.

“Tomorrow…” said mother in parting. “Tomorrow…”

Ya’el slipped into the front seat. Father was talking Russian again, hurriedly, urgently, intent on finishing his thought. But his words were drowned out by the motor. I got into the back seat with him after me. Horatio tried squeezing in too but the door banged shut on him. He began to howl, clawing at it frantically.

“Ya’el,” yelled Kedmi, “if he scratches up that door I’ll murder him…”

He stepped on the gas.

Horatio chased us. We watched him through the back window as he ran down the middle of the narrow side road, a diminishing point. Smiling to himself, Kedmi glanced in the rearview mirror. He slowed down and the dog began to catch up.

“Drive faster, Kedmi,” said Ya’el.

Kedmi sped up a bit and then slowed down again, stopping for a long while when he reached the main road. Horatio loped on down the middle of the side road, behind him the sea and a last gasp of sun setting in a wrinkled orange sky. Eyes narrowed to a slit, red tongue dripping sunlight, he almost touched the car with his wolfish cranium when Kedmi started up again and turned into the main road. Horatio chased us into it, still running down the center line, cars honking and screeching all around him.

“Stop, Kedmi!” cried father. “He’ll be run over.”

“Don’t,” said Ya’el. “Drive faster.”

But Kedmi neither speeded up nor stopped. All concentration, he led the dog away from the hospital, determined to kill him.

“Kedmi, what are you doing?” pleaded Ya’el. “Drive faster!”

He was deliberately staying behind a slow truck.

“All criticisms of my driving should be typed in triplicate, please…”

I said nothing. As soon as we entered Acre we lost sight of the dog among the cars behind us. We were in heavy city traffic now, stopping for lights, passing pedestrians with their packages of matzos and youngsters hanging out on corners between appliance stores and fastfood stands. In Crusader times St.-Jean-d’Acre had been a metropolis the size of London or Paris.

Kedmi stopped to fill the car at a gas station, moving lazily, looking around him. At the last light on the way out of town we caught sight of Horatio in the crosswalk in front of us, his eyes bulging, his tongue grazing the asphalt, a hairy old thing lost in a shuffle of human feet, sniffing the tires of cars. The light turned green, leaving him by himself in the middle of the crosswalk, still searching for our scent. Behind us cars beeped their horns wildly. Kedmi was set to steamroller him when I opened the door and jumped out, grabbing him by the collar and hauling him onto the sidewalk. The traffic flowed past. At first Horatio fought me, but when he saw who I was he licked my hand, more dead than alive, yelping with dumb, hoarse joy. I peered in his eyes. He was exhausted, half crazed from fatigue and the maze of city streets. “Go home, Horatio,” I said, pointing north. He looked at me, his skull bones strong but fragile in my palms. “Go home, boy. Go home to mother.” He wagged his tail, his eyes a dull wolfish blue. I picked up a small stick, a broken sliver of board, ran it over his dry snout, and threw it as far as I could into a rubbish-strewn abandoned lot. “Go get it, Horatio! Don’t you remember how?” He looked at me without budging, drawn to a different scent, wagging his tail some moire. “Get it, Horatio!” I shouted. I took another stick and threw it too. “Go fetch, boy, I need it!” He cocked his head wonderingly, then suddenly shook himself as though harking to an ancient call and ran into the lot, vanishing among some two-by-fours. I dashed back to the car, jumped in, and slammed the door.

“Go, Kedmi! For God’s sake, step on it. The poor dog.”

“Since when have you begun believing in God?”

“Go, Kedmi!” shouted all three of us. “Go!”

“All right, you don’t have to shout.”

And while the old dog was still hunting for the stick we were already driving south on the highway toward Haifa. Father sat huddled in one corner with his head thrown back, his face swept by headlights, his lips tightly clenched. Suddenly he felt me looking at him and looked back, noticing for the first time the scratch on my forehead, terribly upset, in total despair over me.

“So you’re still hitting yourself,’’ he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “But you promised! There’ll never be any peace for me now. I shouldn’t have brought you today. It’s my fault.”

I could see Kedmi’s beady eyes in the mirror, studying us curiously.

He was struck down by lightning toward evening. His charred body was lifted from the street and laid on a bench at a bus slop, a torn blanket over it. Eventually it was brought to the morgue and left in a corner on the floor. A quiet night passed. In the morning the waiting students filled the lecture hall. A few of them went out to look for him in the corridors. Suddenly, bloodshot, Professor Berger hurried to the dais. He’s dead, struck down by lightning, our great genius. What a frightful loss. The most brilliant of all my pupils. Our bright young hope. And just when he was on the verge of the great historical breakthrough. You have no idea what he had in mind, the sheer daring of it Now only his notes remain. What a painful loss. If only he had had the time. If only he had been given more time. But his parents killed him. A bolt of lightning struck him down…. Dina faints at the graveside. Now I know, she says, that I too am to blame. She returns to her parents’ home, where she lapses into religious mysticism. In the end she is married off to a dirty old rabbi.

I got out at the Haifa bus station. Father stayed in the car. He’d sleep at Ya’el’s tonight and return to the hospital the first thing in the morning. This time by himself. They would call Tsvi immediately; should they phone Dina too and tell her I was on my way? No, I said. You needn’t bother. Maybe I’ll stay on for a while in Tel Aviv. To punish her. To make her miss me.

Father laid a protective hand on me. My hitting myself had left him one up, he could pity me now. “Well, now you understand me better, don’t you? Don’t worry, though, I’ll let her have her way in the end. Do you want me to give you any money?…When will we meet again?…You’ll have to come on the holiday to say goodbye…. We’ll be in touch…”

Suddenly I was putty in his hands. A burst string. And yet deep down a feeling of tranquillity.

The large concrete station was already dark and silent. In the cafeteria where we had eaten lunch the lights were out and the chairs were stacked on the tables. I boarded the Tel Aviv bus, and it backed slowly out of its stall. A lit-up train traveled parallel to it until it vanished into thin air. The driver turned on the news. The bus was full of sleeping soldiers. A narrow, shrunken patch of sea flickered in the wind. To take some distant period and discuss it in trivial terms — to find a neglected document or manuscript that has yet to be written about and blow up its significance — to burrow through old newspapers in search of unknown facts about some second-rate statesman who lived in a forgotten age — let that be for the rest of them. But I would find the cryptograph, the secret code. The old age has died, the new one has yet to be born, and meanwhile there are morbid pustules everywhere, a bad case of adolescent acne. An age of nostalgia, confusion, anticipation and fear, a twilight zone, an eve of great upheavals, a jumbled time of contradictory processes. Who will find the right cipher, who will see thirty years into the future, not by means of his fallible intuition but clearly and with scientific certainty…?