A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

After a while he went to the kitchen, poured himself some wine, and sipped it with slow ceremony. When he picked up the receiver again, the conversation was over. Content with the world, he went to the terrace for a look at it. From the bottom floor of the duplex, he had no height advantage over the ghost. Her apartment was dark. She slept better than he did.

The narrow, quiet street below was filled as usual with the cars that occupied every inch of parking space at night. Even ordinarily, this made it hard to get in and out of their building. Now, though, a large car blocked the entrance completely. If Galya went into labor, he thought worriedly, he wouldn’t be able to drive her to the hospital. Yet a second look revealed someone sitting beside the empty driver’s seat. They had come to get her, without even waiting for the new day.

He heard footsteps. They must be Bo’az’s, he thought, coming up the street from the pay phone around the corner. In the glow of a streetlight he made out the ponytail of the man who took things as they came, perhaps because he thought he knew all about them. And yet, in the middle of the night, in the silent street of a strange city, the knowledgeable husband seemed at a loss. Bending over, he spoke to the occupant of the car. Rivlin, looking down from above, had no doubt that this was the proprietress, come to restore her sister to her senses. Soon her lanky frame appeared in the street. Heart pounding, he shrank back as her birdlike head swiveled upward to look for his floor.

What now? The taker-of-things-as-they-came and the thumber-of noses-at-them had joined forces to rob him of the confession he had yet to hear. He had to stop them, to turn them back at the entrance to the building. Stepping into full view on the terrace, still in his pajamas, he signaled that he was coming down.

They met in the parking lot. Tehila planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek, and Bo’az gave him an affable nod. How close he had come, Rivlin mused, to disgracing himself in his passion for the truth — and now here it was, upstairs in his home, waiting to be deciphered. Shivering from the cold of the winter night, he brought the Jerusalemites up-to-date on the day’s events, starting with Galya’s intention to confess.

“To confess what?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask her.”

“She’s out of her mind,” Tehila snapped, narrowing her whiskey-colored eyes.

He stuck up for the shelterer in his study, who was definitely in her right mind. Although feeling sad, even miserable, she had a plan that she meant to carry out. It would be best to let her do it.

He took a long look at his watch to remind them of the hour. He was sorry, he said with a remote smile, that he had no basement to put them in. On the next ridge of the Carmel, he told them, pointing at a building rising starkly in the moonlight, was a hotel he could recommend, even though he had never stayed in it.

But the proprietress had her own hotel, where at this time of the night when the roads were empty she could be again in two hours. And so, with a friendly handshake, she promised to phone in the morning and was off with her brother-in-law while Rivlin, returning to bed, found his escaped sleep waiting for him there.

The new day dawned filled with the anticipation of discoveries. Hagit left early for the courthouse, and Rivlin stayed behind to wait for Galya to awake. She rose late and took a while to arrange her new room, in which she had made herself at home. She was already in the kitchen, glancing pregnantly at the morning paper, when the housekeeper arrived and was struck dumb. But Galya preserved a demure silence, while Rivlin, who felt so much and understood so little, made no attempt to explain what looked like the backward flow of time.

His study commandeered once again, he drove to the university and circulated aimlessly. From there, unable to contain his excitement, he continued to the courthouse. Entering his wife’s courtroom, he sat in the last row, behind the defendant, several attorneys, and the usual spectators with nothing better to do. The black-robed wife-judge conducted the proceedings with dispatch. When they were over, he waited until she was alone in her chambers and embraced her with inexplicable love.

They returned to the duplex at noon. Their guest, having installed herself as thoroughly as if she had rejoined their family, had made a list of their telephone calls. She said nothing about her husband and sister. “They can wait in Jerusalem,” was her sole reference to them, as if it were no longer her city. Meanwhile, she would appreciate being stayed with until Ofer arrived — preferably by Hagit, who could help interpret the stirrings she felt.

FOR THE FIFTH TIME in a year, Rivlin found himself standing by the fountains in the arrivals hall of the airport. Yet this time, he thought as he watched Ofer stride out of customs with only a small bag on his shoulder, was the most remarkable.

They stood warily in the place where they had parted so painfully last summer. Avoiding his son’s eyes, Rivlin put his arm lightly around him. Ofer’s suffering face, on which a narrow French beard now grew, had a new, almost exalted look.

“You’re becoming like your aunt and uncle, who visit Israel for a few hours at a time,” Rivlin joked when informed by his son that he was returning to Paris the next day for an exam at his cooking school. Ofer took the jibe in stride. He saw nothing wrong in using Israel as a stopover.

Rivlin told him about Galya, choosing his words carefully. She had confided very little in them, he said. The news that she did not want to see her family or husband brought a tight, malicious smile to Ofer’s face. In no mood to talk on the drive back to Haifa, he let his father describe his book on Algeria and the memorial conference for Tedeschi.

“Did you really love him that much?” he asked, hearing for the first time of the Jerusalem polymath’s death.

“I’m not sure what you mean by love,” Rivlin answered. “But missing him so much makes me realize how attached to him I was…”

Yet when it came to attachments, this admission could not hold a candle to the deathly pallor that suffused Ofer’s face as he entered the house in which his ex-wife, encountered only in his imagination for the past six years, was waiting for him. Even now that she had taken refuge with his parents, he could hardly bring himself to look at her or at her swollen stomach. With a few curt words, he invited her upstairs to his father’s study.

“Are you sure you won’t eat or drink something?” asked his mother, who barely had time to give him a hug. He shook his head. Like a sleepwalker, he followed the pregnant woman up the stairs.

22.

“I COULDN’T DECIDE WHAT to do. I didn’t know if I had the right to ask you to come. If I hadn’t been about to give birth, I would have gone to Paris. Because suddenly, three days ago, it struck me that before I brought a child into this world, I had to cleanse myself of what I did to you. And to myself. I wrecked a love that made me happy, forever and for no good reason.”

Why forever? he wanted to ask. But the words stuck in his throat.

“And even if you came, I knew it would be wrong to meet you in Jerusalem. Certainly not in the hotel. I only now realize how the place weighs me down. And so I decided to come to your parents — that is, to your father, because he’s the only one who kept fighting to know the truth. I thought you’d agree to meet me here, not just for the sake of the love we once had, but because it would be a revenge for you. But I never dreamed, Ofer, that you’d come so quickly, with no questions asked. Maybe you were waiting for this all along. Were you? Did your father tell you something? But unless I’m wrong, he doesn’t know the truth to this day.”