A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Tehila leaned smilingly toward him. “How could anyone be afraid of you? She had warm feelings for you. More than warm. If you ask me, she loved you.”

“She did?” Rivlin felt a tremor. “Come on! The way she broke off all ties with us was heartless. It was totally out of the blue. She never bothered to explain anything.”

“I’m sure she meant well. She just didn’t want to cause you more pain. I want you to know that if, God forbid — God forbid! — it were your wife to whom something had happened…” Tehila crimsoned. “If it had been the opposite, God forbid… your wife or someone close to you… she would have gone straight to see you, just as you have come to see her.”

He weighed her words and nodded in gratitude, as if the return call paid by his son’s ex-wife on the Carmel had already taken place. Affectionately, he reached out to touch her shoulder. She had inherited not only her father’s hard, bony face but also his lanky, aristocratic frame.

“Well then, I give in. But only for a few minutes.”

“Why don’t you rest while you’re waiting? You can even stretch out in this gazebo. How do you like the changes we’ve made? The place is a lot pleasanter now. I’ll bring Galya as soon as she arrives. In the meantime, Fu’ad will be at your service.”

23.

EVEN THOUGH HE had no wish to cause his wife, who would soon be speaking to his sister, the slightest concern, he decided not to phone her. The longer he could put off the accounting she was sure to demand of him, the better. Meanwhile, over an emptied coffee cup and the last crumbs of his cake, he pondered the encounter awaiting him. The bougainvillea flowering on the old gazebo, which had changed its location but not its charm, and the Jerusalem air freshening toward evening gave him new hope that it still might be possible to redress, if only in small measure, the consequences of the parting five years ago. There were still two hours before his sister-in-law landed, and in any case, she was a woman who took her time and divided her luggage into many small pieces that never arrived on the conveyor belt all at once. Keeping on the safe side, he had at least an hour to get to the airport.

It was twenty after five when Tehila returned with Galya. With them was Galya’s new husband, a tall fellow with a short ponytail. One glance at Galya was enough to make Rivlin understand why Tehila had insisted that he wait, for he could see at once that her mourning was of a different and more passionate nature.

She was dressed in black, like her mother, and still wearing her ritually torn funeral blouse. He couldn’t tell whether it was the thinning of her hair or her lack of sleep, or something else that had happened over the years, but she struck him as less pretty and more awkward than the image preserved in the wedding album in his Haifa home. The satisfaction this gave him softened his sense of grievance. Hurriedly, before he could say a word, her outstretched little hand still in his, she apologized for her lateness, as though they had had an appointment she had not come on time for.

How different was the stormy bereavement of Hendel’s youngest daughter from the quiet composure of her unmarried sister, who stood smiling beside her! Even the new husband, judged by Rivlin to be older than his son, appeared startled by his wife’s agitation, at which he slowly wagged his ponytail back and forth.

“There are people,” Galya said to Rivlin, “who, because they can imagine their own death, can also imagine the deaths of those they love. It helps prepare them for it when it strikes. But not me, Yochanan. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I keep feeling it as if my father were dying in front of me over and over. There’s no net to hold me. Our family — we were more like Hagit’s than like yours — we never talked or even thought about death. It was as if life would go on forever. Maybe our brains were addled by all those Christian tourists talking about eternal bliss.”

The perfect naturalness with which she mentioned his and Hagit’s families gave him a sensation of fresh, intimate directness, as if the separation of five years ago had never taken place. Heartening too, for some reason, was her failure to introduce her husband.

“Has Ofer heard?”

“How could he have?” Rivlin simpered at the childish question. “I myself only found out today — and by pure chance. I was visiting an old teacher who was hospitalized in the bed next to your father’s. He remembered him from the wedding. That’s the only reason I’m here. Honestly.”

The contingency of it, he could see, displeased her. Full of her father’s death, she wanted the world to have room for nothing else.

Tehila interrupted them. “I’ll leave you two here and go back to my mother,” she told Rivlin. She had her father’s small, shrewd eyes. “The next time you’re in Jerusalem, Yochanan, don’t overlook us again. You needn’t wait for someone else to die.”

She turned to Galya’s husband, whose birdlike face wore a worried frown. “You,” she said to him, stating a fact, “will come with me.”

24.

EMBARRASSED BY THEIR failure to introduce him to the new husband, who appeared to have been entirely forgotten by his wife, Rivlin said hesitantly: “You must be…”

“Bo’az.” Tehila, answering for him, prodded the young man to come with her.

“… her new husband.” With a sheepish smile Rivlin pointed to his ex-daughter-in-law, who nodded in confirmation.

“I’m pleased to meet you. You may know… that I’m…” He choked on his words.

“Of course I know,” the new husband said tactfully, smiling back with a pleasant, rarefied mien. “I know everything.”

“Everything? But how?”

“I mean, everything I’ve been told.”

Bo’az and Tehila returned to the hotel. Galya went to fetch a metal chair from beside the pool. The old waiter, who had followed Rivlin to the garden, hastened to help her.

It was five-thirty. He would leave at six, come what may. Meanwhile, every second that passed only made him angrier at the silence in which they were sitting. And yet how could he have refused such a rare opportunity, even if opposed by his wife? Galya, too, seemed to have grown suddenly aware of the situation. With a movement he found touching, she fingered the rip in her blouse as if to protect herself against this comforter who had come not only to comfort.

He studied her pale, slightly swollen face, on which, the day Ofer announced their engagement, he had allowed himself, following his wife’s lead, to plant a kiss — the first of many whenever they met.

“The fact is,” he began, “that you don’t deserve this visit from me.” His openly aggressive tone surprised and pleased him. “You caused us a great deal of sorrow and disappointment. Not so much by the separation you imposed on Ofer — you had every right to do as you saw fit — as by running away without saying good-bye, let alone explaining why you broke up a marriage we mistakenly thought was a happy one.”

Galya was caught off guard. The hand fingering the blouse fell to her side.

“Even if that’s so,” she admitted in a low tone, “and I did run away, it was because of the friendship and trust we had between us. There was nothing I could tell you. Not because there was nothing to say, but because there was no way of saying it….”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ofer must have told you something.”

“No. Nothing concrete. Nothing that made any sense….”

A wave of relief appeared to pass over her. She blushed with emotion. “Then he must have had his reasons.”

“Not at all,” Rivlin protested vigorously. “He wasn’t evading us or hiding anything, I’m sure of that. He simply had no idea what made you walk out on him with no warning.”