A. Yehoshua - A Late Divorce

Dina and Ya’el were already in the car with the baby, who was still screaming. Dina hadn’t said goodbye to Asi. The motor started up. I got in.

“What is it, Rakefet? What?”

The car backed out through the gate. For a second I caught sight of the three of them standing there, Asi holding on to Calderon, who was struggling to go down on his knees before Tsvi.

“He fell down,” said Gaddi.

What time was it?

Suddenly, just like that, Rakefet grew still. All at once.

“That’s just how it was then!” exclaimed Gaddi, unable to get over it.

Kedmi stopped the car. “ Now she quiets down. She just didn’t want me to have my dessert. It was damned nice there. Maybe we should go back.”

“For God’s sake, Kedmi,” shouted Ya’el, “drive home!”

“You call him Kedmi too?” asked Dina in surprise.

“No one likes to call me by my first name… one Israel is enough. That old fellow is damned nice too… why does he torture him like that?”

“Let’s not talk about it now, Kedmi.”

But that failed to put a damper on his mood. He whistled merrily, the car’s shadow darting from curb to curb as he drove. The streets were deserted. A quiet holiday afternoon. The weather was changing again and looked like rain. Rakefet sat without a peep, staring straight ahead with dry, wide-open eyes.

“What’s wrong with her?” asked Ya’el anxiously.

“Not a thing.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost time for you to fly off into the wild blue yonder, Yehuda. You’re a lucky man. The rest of us will be left behind here with Begin…”

“But didn’t you vote for him?’’ asked Ya’el, puzzled.

“What does that have to do with it?” He burst out laughing, his hands dancing on the steering wheel.

The apartment was growing dim. Rakefet slept with her head thrown back. Ya’el seemed less worried now. “What did she want?” she asked. “What was the matter with her?” She put her to bed. Gaddi entered the children’s room too and lay down on his back, one hand on his chest. All at once the place seemed so untidy. The dirty teacups. Tsvi’s open suitcase. Kedmi went to the refrigerator and took out some chocolate to eat. “Have some,” he said. “Sweets to the sweet.”

“Dina and I will be in my bedroom for a while,” I said to Ya’el. “She wants to show me something.”

Ya’el and Kedmi went off to their room. Dina sat on my bed, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her legs, golden in their silk stockings, beneath her. She sat upright, her slender shadow a blur on the wall. My head was still spinning from the wine. She took a thick packet of closely written pages from her bag and looked at me glowingly.

“You’re the first,” she said softly.

“How come? Hasn’t Asi read it?”

“No.”

“But why not?”

She shrugged. A strange girl. Like a black candle burning with a bluish flame.

“Has something happened between the two of you?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I can feel it. It’s like there’s a tug-of-war between you. You haven’t said a word to each other all day.”

“That’s true. We haven’t been talking much.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just one of those things.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Not in this case.”

“But how long have you… not been talking?”

“Since Wednesday.”

“Of last week?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s the day he went with me to the hospital!”

“Yes.”

“He must have come back in a bad mood. He had a hard time there. It wasn’t his fault.”

“Yes. I know. He told me that he hit himself in front of you.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes. I know all about it. But it isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t tell you now.” She was suddenly impatient. “Are you ready to listen?”

“To listen?”

“Yes. To what I want to read.”

“Ah, you want to read it out loud….All right, that’s not a bad idea. If that’s what you’d prefer, fine. I’ll sit here. What’s the story called?”

“It has no name yet. But that’s not important… you just have to promise to tell me what you really think…”

She took a pair of glasses from her bag and put them on, accenting her beauty even more. Solemnly she began to read in a slow, barely audible, slightly husky voice, her eyes glued to the text, a soft crease appearing in her pale forehead. Her prose was complex, its sentences long and involved. An eclectic style. Sometimes nouns without verbs. A Jerusalem evening seen through the eyes of a woman, a not so young secretary on her way home from the office, walking down a street, going into a bank, thinking of having a baby. Long descriptive passages that occasionally repeated themselves but had a definite sensuous tone of their own and a steady cadence, three or four beats to the phrase. Outside the window the sky was turning grayer. A cozy silence reigned in the apartment. Dina kept her thin, almost matchlike legs tucked beneath her and didn’t take her eyes off her manuscript, from which she read slowly and quietly, enunciating each word clearly, never once looking up, as though afraid to catch my glance.

“Excuse me, Dina. Perhaps we should turn on the light.”

She shook her head and went on reading.

I struggled to concentrate. The thought of the Tel Aviv apartment bothered me. If Asi let him sell it she would be left without a home, and then I’d be sent for again. There wasn’t a sound in the house. Suddenly I heard a hoarse gasp through the wall next to me… was it Kedmi’s? I froze. They were making love, I could hear his voice whispering, “What are you doing to me?” No doubt of it… and the passionate one, so it seemed, was Ya’el… well, at least they had that much between them. I rose uncomfortably from my chair and went to stand by the window. Dina glanced up at me, annoyed at the interruption, her voice quivering in a light rebuke.

“Are you still listening? Should I go on?”

“Of course.”

And she did. The secretary, a nameless woman of about thirty who had once been briefly married, was planning to kidnap a baby and took a bus to some new section of Jerusalem to look for one. A description of it that sounded very much like the neighborhood in which Dina and Asi lived. She attached herself to a woman with a baby carriage and followed her into a supermarket. The descriptions grew more and more detailed.

On the other side of the wall the noises grew louder. Kedmi was snorting now. How like him to come like an animal. Had we not always felt, though, that Ya’el, for all her docility, had in her a tough, dark kernel of passion? She never even got through high school. The snorting sounds reached a comical crescendo. A lunatic scene. Afraid that Dina would hear, I crossed quietly back across the room and leaned my body against the wall to cushion the sound.

But she was too absorbed in her own bizarre story to hear anything. The flow of words didn’t stop. Descriptions of counters, of foods, of shopping lists. There was something undeveloped, held in, still juvenile about the emotions she was expressing but she definitely did have talent. The power to titillate with language, to let a plot slowly unfold. Only what was this fantasy of hers really about? What was she getting at?

Beyond the wall I heard Ya’el’s soft sobs and Kedmi’s devilish laugh. Dina took off her glasses and glanced up with a troubled look. I felt myself go red. She studied me severely, puzzled to find me standing with my back to the wall.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“You’re still with me?”

“Of course I am.”

But my thoughts strayed. Don’t pin your hopes on me I said to her I’m not a stand-in for the man you don’t believe in and never will. And I can’t love the second woman any more than I do the first. A waste of time. And out of guilt you let her have it. Out of fear that you’d make a dreadful mess. Disgrace yourself. The tears formed a lump in my throat.