A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

“Would you like to be the last case?”

“Love to. I’m dying to be the last. I’ve thought several times of hiding behind the stairway to see if anyone came after me, but I didn’t want to involve you in a scandal with the neighbors. Yes, I’d be thrilled to know I was the last… to be able to think that as soon as I walked out of here the door opened and in came your wife sighing, ‘The weekend at last! Is that curly, handsome queer of yours gone? Come, there’s cauliflower for supper!’ ’’

“Cauliflower?”

“I smelled it coming up the stairs. Perhaps she hasn’t told you yet. You’re in for a surprise.”

“Do you like cauliflower?”

“I hate it.”

“And is that really how you think of yourself — a handsome, curly queer?”

“Curly and handsome, in that order. I’m simply stating a fact.”

“Yes. I understand that. I simply wanted to know if that’s how you thought of yourself… if it was your self-image.”

“That’s how others think of me too.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. Do you doubt it?”

“I was only asking.”

“But what was I saying… you had interrupted me…”

“You were saying that because of the suitable hour, the easy chair, the room…”

“…I kept being drawn back here despite my decision to stop.”

“And these externals are all that… keeps making you come back?”

“The whole atmosphere.”

“Yes. The whole atmosphere. Only that?”

“Of course not only that. You too have been clever enough to leave some loose thread at the end of every session… some nagging question to bait me with. You’ll cut me short in the middle of an idea or even a sentence in order to get me to return… you always make sure to leave some buoy afloat for me above the confusion of the week… which is why I’ve kept forgetting to tender you my resignation…”

“Forgetting?”

“Yes, yes… though I know that there’s no such thing as forgetting in this room… that everything is significant. My tense young brother, you know, claims that all of human history, the whole hideous compendium of human misery, can be reduced to a few simple laws that he intends to discover. And he will discover them, I have no doubt of it… he’ll come up with something. All these significance freaks amuse me no end…. But what did I want to say?”

“You were saying that this time…”

“What about it?”

“…you felt impatient to see me.”

“Righto. Listen, you really do hear and remember everything. You don’t lose track of the thread in my wildest associations. I suppose you’re glad to be told that I’ve become less indifferent toward you, maybe even more dependent.”

“Do you think that I want you to be dependent on me?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s natural. I like to attach people to me also — provided, of course, that the attachment can always be broken. There are lots of people who would like to tie me to their apron string too.”

“Such as?”

“There’s a long list of them.”

“Your father, for one…”

“My father? No, he turned me loose long ago. When the string got too tangled for him. Mow he’s trying to steal a page from my book and be a free soul like me. You should have seen him getting off the plane…”

“He’s really here, then?”

“Of course. Why shouldn’t he be? A reconditioned father with a brand-new style. Youthful movements, a floppy, offbeat hat, even a snappy-looking valise. What else? Oh, yes, a long mane of hair in the back and color-coordinated clothing that some young lady must have picked out for him. My sister and brother-in-law were waiting for him in the terminal, but I had gone up to the observation deck to get a bird’s-eye view… to see this sixty-four-year-old psychosexual renovation job step out on Israeli soil and take his first gulp of its humid, gray evening air… and above all, to watch him put on his self-pitying mask before passport control… our poor murder victim…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“It was nothing.”

“Didn’t you add something under your breath at the end? I didn’t hear it.”

“No, nothing… I was just…’’

“But you did say something?”

“It’s not important.”

“Does he make you angry?”

“Not in the least. You’re barking up the wrong tree, come down from it….Do I sound angry to you? You’re missing the whole point about my relationship with him. He simply doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“I had thought that was the reason for your impatience today… that you wanted to talk about him…”

“But why? You’ve got your preconceived theories and you have to fit me into them. Father-son relations, oedipal conflicts, primal entanglements… I’m sorry to have to spoil it all for you…”

“Last session you didn’t stop talking about him. You were very tense about his coming.”

“Maybe I was. I wouldn’t deny it. But it turns out to have been wasted emotion. As far as I’m concerned, his visit hasn’t even begun yet…”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that almost a week has gone by without our seeing each other. There was a typical, sentimental Kaminkean moment when he came through customs into the night. We hugged each other hard… somewhat harder than I had counted on… we even had tears in our eyes, although the real crying was courtesy of my sister. She’s been the family’s fount of tears ever since childhood. Her lawyerman stood smiling off to one side — I don’t believe he even has tear glands…. But all this happened very quickly. It had begun to drizzle too. At which point, in the middle of all the suitcases and the packages and the small talk about the flight and the meals and the not having slept, a new leitmotiv emerged: his resemblance to me and mine to him. The three years that had gone by had apparently closed the physical gap between us. I had matured a bit… perhaps grown slightly stooped… my head had a more profound tilt to it… while he’d lost weight, let his curls grow out, and adopted this youthful style. Maybe I had even served as his model from afar. In short, there were his and my genes showing through at last with a smile of mutual recognition. The lawyerman couldn’t get over it. All he kept saying was ‘Wow! I never knew the two of you looked so alike!’ ”

“Did that upset you?”

“Not exactly. But it was a good reason to be glad that we soon split up. They took him up north with them right away. After all, there’s a reason for this rushed trip of his: the long-promised divorce… the legal termination of their hundred-year war…”

“And has it gone through already?”

“Next Sunday, God willing… or more precisely, God able. But I’m not at all sure that He will be able, because so far there’s been nothing but disasters. They’ve been going about it in the most ass-backwards, roundabout way, making every possible mistake. To begin with, instead of going straight to her by himself, even on that first night, throwing himself at her feet and declaring, ‘Here I am, you summoned me… forgive me… I’m unworthy of you… it’s I who have been the true madman… he went and fell into a gargantuan slumber in my sister’s house. For a whole day. After which he sent that comical lawyerman to get her to sign the agreement. I warned them on the phone not to let that joker go alone because he would screw up everything, but he insisted on it, and came back that evening totally befuddled. She had made a complete fool of him…. Then on Tuesday, still instead of seeing her by himself and confessing, ‘Here I am… I’ve come… you’re too good for me… you can have the apartment… I’m in a terrible mess over there… have mercy on me…,’ he made a pilgrimage to the Holy City in order to solicit moral support from my younger brother and his new wife — a romantic type with literary delusions whom father had never met, since he never bothered to come to their wedding. What better time to make amends for having missed it? So he slept over with them and finally, on Wednesday, organized a whole delegation to visit my mother — my brother and my sister and my brother-in-law… they even dragged along their small son. All to soften the blow of having to face her…”