A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

— Begging your pardon?

— Yes. I was a bit frightened. I wasn’t sure what you knew and what you didn’t. And suddenly…

— I understand.

— I didn’t know.

— I didn’t know at all.

— I thought as much.

— I understand.

— Now I understand…

— I see. Thank you…

— I didn’t know. I was suddenly afraid… for Tsvi…

— Since adolescence? I understand. I suppose that…

— Your wife too? How interesting!

— The whole family… I understand… I’d so like to hear more about it. It fascinates me. Are the others happily married?

— No. I meant are they normal.

— Yes. He told me about him. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’ve been told that he’s very gifted. He teaches at the university in Jerusalem…

— No.

— Yes.

— No.

— Yes. Naturally I thought that you must know something. I didn’t know how you felt about it, though… so that when suddenly you came down the hallway in the dark… I was frightened…

— I’m glad to hear that.

— That’s a very sensible way of looking at it. Very refined. No, that isn’t the word. What I mean is considerate. So terribly human…

— Yes. I’m glad to hear that. Thank you so much.

— I know. That’s easy to say. But if I were in your place, Mr. Kaminka… I… well, never mind. I myself am a novice at this. Until recently I hardly knew that it existed. I never… it was Tsvi who introduced me to it. It’s all so new to me… and at my age… that’s why I must seem so nervous and distraught to you. This whole last period of my life has been one flood of emotion… it’s all so new to me…

— Just a few months ago… after the autumn holidays… until then I was perfectly normal. I didn’t even know that… how can I put it?…that it was in me all along. That it was even a possibility. It’s only now that it’s surfaced that I can look back and see signs of it since I was a boy. Still, it’s been a great upheaval…

— In the bank. He used to come by my office, because his firm does business with us. He saw through me just from how I talked.

— Just a few days ago…

— No. Only my wife.

— It’s been very difficult. A real tragedy. You understand that. Very difficult. A terrible tragedy. So distressing.

— No. Absolutely not. It would be the end of both her and me. I can’t even imagine it. I could never leave her. Her whole family would murder me.

— Begging your pardon?

— I don’t know. Deep down I keep hoping that I’ll get over it. That I’m just going through a phase.

— I’m going on fifty-six. I was born in 1923. I’m not much younger than you.

— Yes. You can imagine how this has jolted me. Maybe in America such things are taken more for granted… I’m reading an article about it now… even among Jews…

— Exactly. I’ve heard about that synagogue in New York. God is truly all-suffering if He can put up with that too.

— You don’t say! It’s entertaining to read in the evening papers about all the oddballs in this world, but when it suddenly turns up in you… when I think of everything I believed in… you know, I’m from a religious family myself, I still keep up the traditions. Of course, religion with us isn’t as serious a matter as with you…

— Yes, I know. But I was thinking of those of you who are. We don’t get so ideological about things. You won’t ever find us making martyrs of ourselves or of others for some idea. In politics, if you’ve noticed, we’re the first to cross party lines or change sides… but when it comes to family affairs, we’re terribly uptight. And I’m very much a family man. The family is everything to us. That’s the Middle East in us, the family and its honor. We’re very uptight about honor. Power doesn’t interest us, but honor does, because there was never enough of it in this part of the world. For that we’d go out and kill… in theory, I mean… I’m not sure you follow me…

— I feel that I’m going to cry… I beg your pardon, Mr. Kaminka… it keeps happening… perhaps I’m disturbing you…

— I thank you.

— I thank you kindly. Take tonight. I’ve never had such awful insomnia before. You’ll understand me if I tell you that when Tsvi told me about you I said to him, I’m just like your father, only worse. We’re a generation that caught fire late… maybe the emotions that we feel are a substitute for something else… maybe they’re in place of some more basic crisis of values. Because we’ve been a conformist generation. Very conformist, haven’t we? Eh?

— In the sense that we never allowed ourselves any crises the way young people, or even older ones, allow themselves today. And we had no generation before us to hand us our crises ready-made the way they’re handed nowadays to twenty- and thirty- and forty-year-olds, who are so spoiled that they expect to get a new crisis every week. We’re not like that, are we?

— There was no one to do it for us. The old folks kept us on a tight leash.

— Do you mean that seriously? You really find it interesting? It makes me so happy that you understand. I’m not an educated man. Not at all. But I can’t help thinking a bit now and then.

— No. They’re just little thoughts. Just beginnings. What I must try to understand, though, is why all this has flared up so powerfully, so destructively. All the pain that we’re spreading around us… when I think what will happen when my two girls find out…

— But they’re still only twenty-two. What’s twenty-two? My father, rest his soul, still whipped me at that age…

— I swear, he sometimes did. But it’s not just the girls. I’m talking about the whole family. About the old folks too, because we still have them. Yours, you understand, were all killed or left behind in Europe. They don’t keep bugging you. You’ve made your peace with them. You were stronger than they were anyway, and you did what you wanted. Now you have your nostalgic memories, but that’s just for the record… on Saturday nights you dress up like them on TV in black caftans and beards, and it isn’t a bad feeling… but if you were suddenly to find them in your living room along with that whole ghetto of theirs, you’d be in a state of shock. Well, with us they’re in the house all the time…

— A few of them have died, but only recently. Until my father passed away last year I used to go see him practically every day after work. And my wife’s mother still lives with my wife’s brother in Jerusalem… not to mention various aunts here and there who know everything and are told everything and spend the whole day on the telephone, now that they’ve learned to use it, calling up the whole country. I have one aunt whose monthly phone bill is twenty thousand pounds. That’s the equivalent of a small bank branch’s…

— If you’re the type who can travel. But I’m not. Where should I go? Three years ago we went to Europe for a month, and by the end of it I was dying to get back here. Maybe this summer I’ll try Egypt for two weeks. We only eat kosher food, and that makes it difficult too…

— Yes. I understand you. I certainly do. But where to? In Europe we feel like strangers, even though I speak French. But the air there, that grayness all the time… who knows, maybe one day soon the Middle East will open up to us and we’ll be able to vacation among the Arabs…

— Begging your pardon?

— Yes. When the Messiah comes ha ha. But one mustn’t lose faith… if only they were a little more civilized. I can’t tell you how sympatico you are, Mr. Kaminka. I knew I’d like you. We’ve been excited since the moment we heard you were coming. It was I who brought Tsvi to the airport Saturday night, but I didn’t stay, because I didn’t want to intrude. Even tonight I had qualms about dropping in. Your family story attracts me greatly… yesterday when Tsvi took me up there to see your wife… I was very moved… there I was, after feeling that my own family was too much for me, suddenly ready to take on another…