He turned excitedly to old Rabbi Avraham, who, hidden behind his dark sunglasses, had begun to bite his nails worriedly.
But the Russian didn’t turn to look at them. With great dignity he bore down on me in his heavy Red Amy coat whose big copper buttons bore the head of an eagle, his ritual fringes hanging down to his knees underneath it. He couldn’t have been much older than Asi. A smooth, unlined face. A fanatic.
“Is you here… is you asked… but why? What difference it makes if she… nu, you, madame… is in this place anyway… and not young no more too… nu …”
He turned red, flustered, his broken, melodious Hebrew tripping him up. Yehuda had talked just like that when he first came to this country.
“But he’s going to have a baby soon,” I said.
“Baby? Where is baby?”
“In America.”
That lit a fire under him. He turned angrily, sarcastically, to the others.
“ Nu. So now we have little bastard on our hands.” He thumped the file that he held. “Here says nothing of it…”
“Rabbi Subotnik!” Rabbi Mashash was shouting now, pulling at the heavy greatcoat. “Explain yourself!”
But the Russian shook himself free and went on leaning tautly over me, so close I could feel his breath.
“Mrs. Kaminka! Never mind bastard… are many, will be one more… everywhere is same big mess… but marriage is holy…”
He was crimson now.
“Holy for whom?” I asked calmly.
“For whom?” For a moment he was taken aback. “ Nu, for God, of course…” He said the word very gently.
At last. It was time. My anger hummed inside me. I had to force myself not to choke on the torrent of words that poured out of me.
“God what are you talking about who is that?”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to hear another word about it. Not another meaningless word. Please understand that God means less than nothing to me. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Old Rabbi Avraham sat up stiffly and buried his face in his hands. As red as a beet now himself, Rabbi Mashash assailed the Russian, who retreated a step with a smile.
“Rabbi Subotnik! That will be enough. How do you think you’re making us look? There’s a procedure to be followed here. There’s a presiding judge. I ask you to keep your philosophy out of it.”
He stepped hastily over to me and steered me to the door. “Mrs. Kaminka, there’s been a small misunderstanding. We’ll continue soon. Please wait outside for a minute.”
He led me out into the strong sunlight, closing the door after me. Father was sitting on a rock to one side, smoking. “What’s going on?” he asked. If only he would have taken me in his arms now. It was too much to ask. And yet he did that first day, and with such unexpected warmth. “What’s going on?” His anxiety was growing. “What do they want?”
The sound of shouts and of someone thumping on the table reached us from behind the door. Father hurried to it just as it opened again.
“Professor Kaminka, come in for a minute. By yourself, please.” It was Rabbi Mashash, who gave me a dirty look as he pulled father inside.
My headache felt like an omen, like the first sign of an approaching illness. The words I had managed to get out at last clung like foam to my lips. Inside the cottage the voices grew dim. The young rabbi was examining father now, fighting to save our marriage.
“Professor? Of what?…America? Where?”
Yehuda’s deep voice answered softly, in that enchanting way of his, while Rabbi Mashash kept intervening and trying to calm the young Russian down. Smoke rose from the hospital kitchen, drifting up into the brightening glare of the sky, and someone stirred in the clump of trees where Yehezkel and his band were watching us. Someone else was there too, a stranger I couldn’t place, someone made of branches and leaves. Was it her again? I couldn’t believe it. A sudden silence came over the library. Even the whispers had stopped. If only Avigayil were with me. I walked around the cottage, through the high weeds, until I came to the open window and saw father without his jacket, his tie loose, baring his chest while Rabbi Mashash pointed something out to the young Russian and Rabbi Korach rose curiously to look too. I shut my eyes and bit my lips, sinking down on a stoop by the path. After a while the door opened and father was sent back outside. He threw me a tense, angry look, keeping away from me, glancing despairingly at his watch, oblivious of the crisp morning, of the sun and the flowering earth.
“Who asked you about a baby? But you, you had to go tell them…”
A faint smile of contempt flecked his face.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that…”
“Never mind,” he interrupted.
“…they didn’t know.”
He turned toward me angrily. “Didn’t know what? I don’t know what baby you’re talking about. Because there isn’t any… His voice grew shrill, as though he were crying inside. “Can’t you see whom you’re dealing with? Why complicate things even more when I’ve given you everything as it is? Damn it all… it’s all so humiliating…”
His despair was making him cruel. He was afraid that it would all fall through.
“Maybe I should try explaining to them…” I tried to rise but could not. I felt as though a stone weighed me down.
“Don’t. You’ll only make it worse. That Russian rabbi is a nut. He turns every word against you.”
I said nothing. I sat with my white smock covering the stoop, cradling my knees, listening to the birds and to the sounds of the awakening hospital, to the tenor voice of the Russian striving fiercely in its pathetic Hebrew to rise above the wheedling tones of Rabbi Mashash: a strange, antisocial man, fighting to save our marriage for reasons known only to himself. Father fell silent, a handsome but weak, degenerate intellectual, straining to hear while his hands went through the pockets of his jacket and his pants, taking out and putting back his passport, his plane tickets, his documents, his wads of money, distractedly rummaging through the mountains of paper he had with him. For a moment our eyes met. Inside the library the voice of the vainly battling Russian was losing ground, while that of the Yemenite, who had entered the fray now too, rose in a keen yodel. Yehuda took out a cigarette and lit it nervously, blind to the world, to the trees, to the hospital, to the sky, fumbling aimlessly, buttoning his shirt which he had noticed was still open, drifting ever further away from me. And I thought, this will be my last picture of him.
“You know, I’m probably the only one who’s never seen that scar you show to everyone.”
He heard me unwillingly. “What?” he asked, turning hotly toward me.
“You’re leaving soon and I’ll never see you again. And that scar you have from then… from me… I’ve never seen it…”
He was annoyed. “It doesn’t matter. Why should you want to see it? Let me be, Naomi.”
“I’m the only one who hasn’t seen it. Tsvi said you show everyone. So why shouldn’t I see it too?”
“Please, not now.” His voice was entreating. “Some other time. Just let me be.”
“But when? We’ll never meet again.”
“Of course we will. Why shouldn’t we? I’ll be back… there are the children… after all, they belong to us both…”
But I was tired, impatient. “Show it to me!”
He sensed the threat in my voice, my terrible lust to see it, and debated only briefly before almost gladly yielding. Quickly he unbuttoned his shirt again and showed me in the glaring light the chest I knew so well and had forgotten, with its curly gray hairs and its large, pale mole. Across it ran a hooked line like a reddish beak. A near miss, a swooning memory. Not where I’d meant it to be, he had dodged at the last second…. He stood there looking at me quietly, already rebuttoning his shirt. All at once he focused on me sharply, his face lit by that ironic, knowing smile of his.
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