A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

“I don’t follow you…”

“You follow me perfectly well. You keep telling me that you’re only here conditionally… that maybe you’ll pay me and maybe you won’t… that each visit here may be your last. You deliberately come late… you even picked an odd hour like this because of its provisional feeling, as though it were a form of weekend entertainment. And you keep insisting that nothing bothers you, that you’re only coming to see how I define what you already know. But we can’t work this way. I’ve let three months of it go by as an opening. It’s even predictable in a case like yours. But we can’t go on going nowhere… your time is too valuable… and so is mine…”

“Hey, you’re attacking me… for the first time… I feel almost stunned…”

“Don’t you think that it’s about time?”

“I didn’t know you had it in you. You’re not as quiet and innocent as I had thought, then… I rather like that. You know, what you just said about my brother… it was an interesting hunch… how old actually are you?”

“Why does it matter to you?”

“Oh no, don’t throw the question back at me. Now it’s you who are evading. Drop your anonymity for once and tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-seven… but why?”

“And you really hope to identify with me?”

“Only in order to understand.”

“What an odd profession you’ve chosen! But all right, I’ll tell you a dream. You asked me a few weeks ago if I ever had any… well, now I’ve dreamt one for you, you can’t say I’m not trying. In fact, that was the real reason for my impatience to see you today… the reason I came on time… because I’ve brought you a fresh dream. I already lost most of it during the day, but something is still left… so let’s see what you can do with its dehydrated remains. As far as I can see it’s completely meaningless, but that’s your problem. You see, I must have known that your attack was coming, because I armed myself with a dream…. You know, I think we’re beginning to form a real tie. Now I’ll put you to work, let’s see you show your stuff…”

“I can only work together with you.”

“Together with me, of course. I’ve already learned the rules of the game…. On the whole, you know, last night was rather strange. My father arrived in the late afternoon and insisted on taking me out to eat even though I had cooked a meal for him. He was obsessed with some little restaurant that served a special borscht he had dreamt of all the time in America…. Okay, so we went there and the place was closed because of the holiday. But he insisted on finding the owners, and they were so overjoyed to see him that they opened the restaurant especially for him… only there wasn’t any borscht left. So they sent out for a whole pitcher of it, and for sour cream too, and he sat there putting away the thick red stuff of his dreams, smacking his lips and grunting with pleasure and joking and chattering away. He didn’t say much about his meeting with mother, except that he hoped it would all be over with on Sunday and that he was ready to give her the whole apartment… after which he began feeling so sick from all the borscht he had eaten that we went home. He washed up, sat down to look at all the letters and journals that had come for him while he’d been away, and then turned on the TV to watch an interview with some new politician he had never heard of before. Halfway through it he began to doze off, so we never did say anything important. I too went to sleep early… and then at two a.m. this old fairy knocked on the door, a big-time banker from an old Jerusalem family… an odd, sentimental character who’s fallen wildly in love with me…”

“Calderon?”

“The very same. Which means that I’ve already mentioned him to you and that you haven’t missed a trick. Exactly. Refa’el Calderon. I showed him who he really was and since then his life has been one big mess. It has no structure anymore and his family is falling apart. He runs after me like a dog, does all kinds of things for me, won’t leave me alone. A case for you. At the stroke of five he’ll be waiting for me below with his chauffered car. A real case for you… now there’s suffering… mark my word, he’ll come to see you yet. In fact, he’s already jealous of you. The man’s in a tailspin…. But to get to the point, he knocked on the door and woke me at two a.m. And I’m such a kind heart that I can’t drive types like him away, so I had to get up and listen to his pre-dawn confession. I too, you see, have my patients… in the long, wee hours of the morning I treat them free of charge… all kinds of oddballs… first they wear me down psychologically, and then they get me into bed and hump away… What?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought you said something.”

“No.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth starting on that dream now… we haven’t much time left… all right, I’d better tell it, just so you don’t say I’m evading again. I went back to sleep and Calderon stayed in the kitchen with my father, who had woken up too. In the end his wife even called… it was either then, or before that, that I had the dream. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but what I remember… what’s left for you… is more or less this. There was a small hotel, a building not far from a lake surrounded by distant mountains… it may even not have been in Israel. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that there were stairs… in fact, two sets of them. The ones I climbed were straight and light-colored, but nearby, as though they had been built by mistake, were the original stairs of the building, which weren’t in use anymore. They were made of rough old stone carpeted with an old, reddish rug that was worn at the edges… very windy stairs that led to some rented rooms, most of them already moved out of. In them I could see unmade beds and personal possessions that had been left behind — shawls, pins, dirty absorbent cotton, colorful robes… On the first floor, which I was trying to climb past, I saw sitting by the window — God knows how he had gotten there — my English teacher from the night school I attended twelve years ago. We called him Mr. Foxy, but that wasn’t his real name — he had some German-sounding last name like Neustadt or Freustadt… a gloomy old bachelor, a gray, impeccable German Jew who had failed in business and taken up teaching English at night. He always wore a winter suit. He was tall and bald, wore glasses, was round-shouldered, had this yellow skin… apart from his fingers, which were green from nicotine… and talked only English with us because that gave him the upper hand…. Now he was sitting in this hotel in an open white shirt, waiting for someone in a room like a dining room that had tables all around. I didn’t know if he remembered me, but I went over to him. He spoke to me in English, but it was an English that I understood, so that I had no trouble following him… the words passed into me as easily as though they were Hebrew. Without turning to look at me he explained that he was waiting for his hunting. I remember him using that word, and I knew at once what it meant, even how to spell it. Hunting. I think he must have been referring to some meat dish, but he called it his hunting in English, as though he were a country squire, or pretending to be one…. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“It seemed absurd that this colorless man should be sitting there and telling me about his hunting that he expected to be brought from the forest, fresh from the kill, because in the room itself there was no sign of anything like a kitchen. But he kept staring out the window. And there, low down, I saw a thicket of bushes with a hose sticking out of it from which some water was running. Something moved there. It took a step in the bright evening light, and then the water dwindled to a trickle and stopped, as though someone had turned off the faucet or bent the hose…”