A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Hendel?”

“Hendel? Let it be Hendel. We weren’t told his name. It went with him when they wheeled him out of here.”

“But where did you know him from? How did you know who he was?”

“What do you mean, how? We remembered him from the lovely wedding you made for Ofer here in Jerusalem. The tall man who owned a hotel. It was him. You can check for yourself. How could you not have known? Don’t you read the newspapers? You haven’t been in touch with the family?”

16.

“WHY SHOULD I have been?” Rivlin answered angrily, his departure now strained. “What for? There were no grandchildren to share with them. We haven’t heard from them for five years. There was no need to stay in touch. Not that we have anything against them. But there’s nothing going for them either. I must have told you: the marriage ended suddenly, after a year. There were no explanations. Ofer’s wife simply left him….”

A few minutes later he was in the corridor. Without waiting for the elevator, he dashed excitedly down the stairs as if in hot pursuit of this latest death, one half-suspected by him of being purely imaginary, the joint hallucination of two hypochondriac Orientalists who, not satisfied with the real patients, doctors, and medical instruments all around them, had gone and invented even more.

He hurried to the parking lot, stopping at a public telephone to make sure before driving back down to the coastal plain that his sister-in-law’s flight was on time. Not only was it not on time, however, it was delayed, he now was informed, by a shocking four hours, as if it had run out of gas in midair. His first thought was of how annoyed his wife would be when she found out that he had left early for Jerusalem. Had he remained in Haifa, her usual good luck would have enabled her, with this assist from the airplane’s engines, to join him at the last moment on the ride to the airport that she liked so much.

For a moment he considered not calling her. However, knowing that she would later interpret this as a deliberate evasion, perhaps even an admission of guilt to an indictment he could not foresee, he phoned home, and felt relieved when no one answered. Leaving a short, vague message on her voice mail, to strengthen his alibi he dialed the court. There he was informed that Hagit’s session had ended and she had set out for home. He knew she would take her time making the rounds of the bakeries, delicatessens, and flower shops that would turn their immaculate home into a sumptuously festive one.

Keys in hand, he stood uncertainly by his car. Should he leave Jerusalem, the city of his childhood, and drive to his sister Raya’s home, which was near the airport, where he could rest? Or should he remain here and take advantage of the blank hours at his disposal to renew some old tie that had lapsed or carry out some neglected obligation?

Already, however, his legs were carrying him back to the hospital to confirm the Tedeschis’ cheerfully delivered obituary. Doing so was easy. Considering the obstacles put by large hospitals in the way of those trying to locate the living, the process of uncovering the well-documented fate of the dead posed no problems. Before long he had all the information he wanted. Tedeschi and his wife had not misled him. The folded mattress had indeed belonged to his former in-law, who had hastily departed the world three days earlier. Rushed to the hospital in the evening with an excruciating headache, he had lost consciousness that night and died the next morning.

There was, Rivlin thought, something fitting about the freedom, even the sense of mission, with which the hospital’s officials disclosed the details of Mr. Hendel’s death. With these details in hand he adjourned to the cafeteria, where he sat trying to put in order his welter of emotions. Above all, he felt sad for the deceased, an impressively optimistic man his own age who left behind — Rivlin remembered her well — a delicately attractive, childishly dependent wife. She could easily, he imagined, feel lost and driven to despair. There flickered in him an old regret for the loss of his burgeoning relationship with her gentlemanly husband. Warm, although restricted to practical matters, it had been cut short abruptly five years ago.

And yet as he sipped his Turkish coffee, which he was counting on to keep him awake through the long day still ahead, he was not surprised to detect in his regret, like the grain of cardamon in his drink, the sweet, subtle taste of revenge. He felt it not only toward the daughter of the dead man, now deprived of a father to whom she was greatly attached, but toward the deceased himself, who had refused to join him in preventing the bitter divorce or even understanding the cause of it. Rivlin shuddered, struck by the realization of a new loss. Besides the friendship written off five years ago, he was now deprived of his last link to what had happened. Ofer himself behaved as if the young wife who left him was forgiven, perhaps even forgotten. But a father’s heart knew better. His son was only pretending to have gotten over it.

17.

WHICH WAS WHY he felt an urge to leave the hospital and go to the place itself, the family hotel surrounded by pine trees at the southern end of the city. To cross the thick carpet of sighing pine needles, descend the reddish stone stairs flanked by oleanders and laurels, catch the sudden glimpse of the blue nugget of Dead sea beyond the wilderness of the Judean desert, and knock on doors of the wing of the building where the family now sat in mourning: mother, sister, brother, and others he had got to know in that brief year — an aunt, an uncle, several cousins, and even, if she had not meanwhile died before her son, the dowager grandmother who was the establishment’s first proprietress. On their infrequent visits to Jerusalem in the five years since the divorce, he had felt that his wife, without admitting it or perhaps even being conscious of it, had thwarted all his attempts to approach not only the hotel but even Talpiyot, the neighborhood in which it stood. Once, two years ago, while strolling on the promenade overlooking the old walled city from the south, he had suggested visiting the Talpiyot home, now a museum, of the author’s. Y. Agnon. Hagit had refused. “Why risk running into someone who doesn’t want to see you?” she had said, with characteristic bluntness. “What does that mean?” he shot back angrily. “That we’re barred from Talpiyot forever?” “Not forever,” she’d answered, slipping an arm around him. “Just for now.” But now he was in Jerusalem with time on his hands and no one to judge him or tell him what to do, and with a valid reason to stop by the hotel of his former in-law, whose death had provided him, if not with the duty, at least with the right, to pay a call during the seven days of bereavement.

He debated whether to phone home again in the hope of finding Hagit or simply to tell her about it back in Haifa. By now, though, he was in Talpiyot, scouting the familiar surroundings. The pine wood, in which he had often played as a child, were the same, yet changed, as were the garden and the yard. He hadn’t thought he would be so moved by them. All that had been rendered impossible by the divorce, it appeared, was still preserved in the sweetness of memory, sealed against being opened by a golden film of anticipated pain. How terribly easy it was for him to relive the unforgettable night of the wedding, so private and so public at once, just as was the garden with its catered events and the hidden home in which Galya, Ofer’s bride, had grown up. It was this combination that so appealed to Rivlin — who, together with Hagit, was warmly treated as family whenever he was sighted by the staff on the garden’s paths. Already during their first meeting, when the marriage was a foregone conclusion, Galya’s father had generously offered them the freedom of the grounds. Indeed, he told them, he had decided to expropriate the hotel from its customers not only for the wedding ceremony, but for three whole days of festivities. Moreover, by writing off the costs as a business expense, he would shift the groom’s parents’ share of the costs onto the income-tax authorities.