A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Ofer winced. “Is that what he says it was? Just a veneer?”

“I’m sure it was more than that. He just said it because he was desperate and wanted to provoke me. I’ve known him since I was a child. It’s not a veneer, it’s his true self. He’s become cynical now because the promise my father made him is dead and buried. Tili isn’t looking for partners. She’d go to bed with him before she’d go into business with him.”

“But what did that other Arab have to do with it?”

“It started when he and your father talked Fu’ad into going to some poetry and music festival in Ramallah. Those Palestinians would like to be partners, too — in our country. Their own Palestinian Authority isn’t enough for them. They can sing all the love songs they want, but in the end they’d like to pick us apart. Anyway, Fu’ad said it made him realize that working for Jews was getting him nowhere. And so he decided to take his severance pay and go back to his wife’s figs and olives. Why be loyal to a dead man to protect a family from the truth that’s making someone else suffer?”

“Me.” Ofer shivered.

“You, Ofer, you. You see, I’m not the only one who kept thinking about you. So did Fu’ad. That Rashid reminded him of you. Not the way he looked, but the way he was. Fu’ad says he, too, has an old love he won’t let die. He’s a displaced, restless soul. Fu’ad feels sorry for both of you, the way he did when he found you crying by the hotel. Only now he’s wised up. He knows that all the poetry of love doesn’t mean anything. It won’t help Rashid, and it won’t help you. I’m the only partner Fu’ad has left. He thinks we should leave the hotel together. Three days ago he took me to that gazebo in the garden and told me everything. I started to shake. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You have to ask forgiveness to cleanse the baby that should have been his…’”

23.

“MINE?” ENCHANTED, OFER TURNED to his ex-wife, clinging to their lost love. “So?” he asked. “You didn’t bring me here from Paris just to tell me how Fu’ad scared you, did you?”

She raised her soft, weary eyes to him. “Perhaps,” she said discouragingly.

On the lit terrace across the street, an old woman was carefully spreading a cloth on a card table to prepare it for the next day’s game of solitaire. He remembered his grandmother’s insistence that he ask Hendel for forgiveness. And he had done it. Now it was being asked of him.

He hesitated, then switched on the lamp on his father’s desk. Casually, his hand brushed the shoulder of the women carrying the child that should have been his. Her confession done with, her face was tranquil and calm. Did she feel sorry? Had she acted out of love or only from pure calculation?

“Would you like to eat or drink?” he asked.

“Just a glass of water, please.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He left the study and shut the door behind him, as if to keep her for himself a little longer. The outside world, temporarily erased from consciousness, regained its reality. His parents’ duplex was dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought they had gone out. But no, they were in the living room, waiting quietly. Changing course, he went not to the kitchen but to their bedroom, where he found a plastic cup and filled it from the faucet in the sink. He drank, refilled the cup, and returned with it to the study. Galya sipped from it and put it down by the keyboard of the computer.

“You’re not cold?”

“No.” For the first time, she smiled at him. “My baby keeps me warm.”

Why, he wondered, smarting, did she have to say “My”? Unless he breathed some life into the embers of intimacy that had begun to glow again, they would soon go out forever. He wanted to get her back onto the couch, to sit beside her and feel her body. He would have given anything for the kisses and caresses of which the truth had deprived him. But she was too ensconced in his father’s chair to be moved — all but her white-stockinged feet, which dangled in the air.

“Can’t you at least feel some hate for your father now,” he asked, “for wrecking our love and marriage to save himself?”

“He was saving me too. I would never have survived your truth.”

“There you go again! If it was my truth, what are you asking forgiveness for?”

“I can’t judge him.”

“But why can’t you, damn it?”

“Because I pity him. I don’t believe he wanted sex with her. He just couldn’t get out of it.”

“But what do you know about it?” He felt like weeping. “How can you say that? How can you defend a man who was so brutal to me? I never even told you that I met him one last time after our separation. I begged him in your very words. I said, ‘I can’t judge, I won’t breathe a word of this. Just let me stay with Galya and your family.’”

“You did that after our separation?”

“Yes. I begged for my life. And he cynically blamed his betrayal on me.”

“No, Ofer. You’re wrong about that. He simply felt that your promises meant nothing. That you only made them because you confused the hotel with me. He didn’t believe your love would last. And he was right…”

“But how can you say that? How can you even think it when you see me so torn up, stuck for years in my blind loyalty to you? I walk the streets of Paris without even noticing all the beautiful women around me. All I see is the curve of your breast, the sole of one of your feet…”

“That’s just because you’re far away. If we had stayed together, your love would have died. You can’t accept the cruel, sick complexity of this world. You fight it all the time. Your hatred and envy of my father would have driven you crazy and poisoned us both.”

“But your father is gone now. Why not come back to me?”

“Because the memory will haunt us. We’ll never forget that you, too, were implicated. That’s why you went poking in that basement, even though you were warned not to. There’s nothing to regret. Our love was used up. You’re just talking yourself into something.”

“Don’t you dare say that!” He jumped to his feet, pacing the room like a trapped animal unreconciled to its loss of freedom. “ I’m talking myself into something? I, who go on paying the price for my loyalty and hope? What is it that you want? If I got down on my knees, would you believe me? You say you’ve come to ask forgiveness, but what does that mean? I kept my promise. I never said a word. Now give me some hope that you’ll come back to me, if not now, then some day… with your child that should have been mine…”

“I can’t. Watch it…”

“The cup is leaking.”

“No, it isn’t. That’s not where the water is coming from. You’d better call your mother. She’ll know what to do….”

24.

THREE HOURS HAD PASSED and still the Rivlins didn’t know to which hospital Ofer had taken his ex-wife or what was happening there. It was almost midnight. The French Carmel was quiet. The big searchlight in the navy base at Stella Maris shone with bright purpose in the thickening murk. Hagit undressed, got into bed, and switched on the TV. But the curly-headed newscaster whose smiles sweetened the hideous headlines was not on tonight, and she soon switched it off again.

“Come to bed,” she told her husband tenderly. “Walking up and down all night won’t make that baby get born any quicker.”

“But suppose Ofer needs us?”

“At the delivery of another man’s wife? You’re too much! Come on, take off your clothes. You’ve had a hard day. And whatever happens, you’ll have to take him to the airport tomorrow.”

“But shouldn’t we at least find out what hospital they’re in? Suppose her mother or sister want to know. And where in the world did that husband of hers disappear to?”