A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

She dropped her eyes without answering. “Despair,” as his brother-in-law Yo’el told them candidly, was a taboo word at the conferences on developing economies, which were held in the most hopeless of deteriorating countries, that he regularly attended in the loyal company of his wife.

Rivlin switched on the radio. Perhaps a brief exposure to the hourly news bulletin would help acclimatize his passenger to the homeland she hadn’t been in for three years. In fact, he doubted whether she would have come now, had it not been for a wedding in Yo’el’s family. The two of them were inseparable. If he, for his part, took her along with him into his conference rooms as if she were an agricultural expert herself, she returned the compliment by letting him attend her sessions at the beauty parlor, where he sat reading a newspaper on a revolving chair by her side while giving advice to the hairdresser. Their mutual dependence was so great that he had taken to putting his driver’s license and credit cards in her purse, leaving only a few coins in his pocket like a small boy’s allowance. He had agreed with reluctance to Ofra’s coming to Israel two weeks before him, during which time he would have to go around with his own wallet.

“It’s a lucky thing,” Rivlin teased his sister-in-law good-naturedly, “that you people have an occasional wedding in this country. Otherwise we’d never see you at all….”

Ofra acknowledged the justice of his reproach. And since he knew she was too tactful to mention Ofer’s wedding festivities of six years ago, to which she and Yo’el had dedicated a month of their lives, he took the liberty of telling her about his former in-law’s sudden death. Unlike Hagit, she took in stride his desire to revisit the original site of Ofer’s botched marriage. She remembered it vividly and listened attentively to his descriptions of the new swimming pool, the refurbished garden, the bereaved ex-daughter-in-law, and her tall second husband with the ponytail.

He was tempted to relate his conversation with Galya. It might serve, he mused, as a trial balloon to gauge Hagit’s probable reaction. But Ofra had already shut her eyes and was enjoying, between Zichron Ya’akov and Atlit, one final nap, as though on the last leg of her flight. He glanced at her slender sixty-year-old form. The years were embalming her as an eternal adolescent. He really should get up the courage someday, Rivlin thought as the lights of Haifa came into view, to ask Yo’el about their married life. Perhaps there were a few useful lessons in it for him.

29.

THE APARTMENT HAD even more sparkle now than in the morning. Brightly lit and adorned with flowers, it awaited the arrival of the guest who, having followed via floor plans and telephoned reports the tortuous drama of its construction, was now seeing it for the first time.

The two sisters threw their arms around each other. Happy tears mingled with sad ones. Rivlin deposited the cheese fritters on the food-laden table and went to bring Ofra’s suitcases to his top-floor study, which had been further transformed in his absence. The big desk had been pushed to one side, the table lamp was replaced by a reading light, and a third pillow now graced the royal bed. Beside it lay folded a new woolen blanket from which the price tag had yet to be removed.

He proceeded to the bedroom, turning off two or three unnecessary lights on the way while grumbling about the lengths to which his wife was prepared to go in order to appease the critical eyes of visitors, even her own sister’s. Without taking off his shoes he lay down on the bed, careful not to rumple the covers before his sister-in-law’s tour of inspection was over.

He thought with a smile of Akri. At this very moment his skull-capped colleague was bending cautiously over Tedeschi’s rotting feet to confirm the dark prognosis of the translator of Jahaliya poetry. He let his thoughts wander. Across them fell the shadow of the bereaved hotel.

What bizarre inner devil had driven him, in his quest for sympathy, to invent a fatal disease? Would this succeed in extracting his ex-daughter-in-law’s secret? Yet perhaps she herself had no comprehension of what she had done.

One way or another, he would have to warn her to say nothing.

Gently and reasonably.

Had she believed him? Or had she thought he was hallucinating?

But hallucinations are an illness too.

Take the asthmatic Tedeschi in his oxygen mask. Or Samaher and her grandmother with the narghile.

Hagit would hit the ceiling.

How could he have sunk so low?

A trap. That was what it was. And his wife wanted them to wait patiently until their son-in-exile found someone else, even though the five years that had gone by had led to nothing. Ofer was at the end of his rope. He was nearly thirty-three. What good was patience? It wasn’t time that freed you from traps. It was truth. And he would fight for it. Cunningly and untiringly.

He mustn’t give up. Never mind the eternal judge below, whose ringing laughter was now calling him to come down and join them for supper.

“Don’t you first want to show your sister the bedroom and the Jacuzzi?” he called down from above.

“Soon. There’s no hurry. Let’s have a bite first.”

She was in a good mood, wide awake from her long nap and her sister’s arrival. Rivlin turned on his side to reflect on an ancient and unrealized ambition that thirty-five years of marriage had not quelled. He still hoped one day to persuade his wife to share a bubble bath with him.

It was midnight when they remembered him and went to look for him.

“So you conked out, eh?” laughed Hagit. “My poor darling… and with your shoes on, yet. You didn’t even shower.”

He opened his eyes, feeling their radiant sisterly warmth.

“How do you like the apartment?” he asked his sister-in-law of the brightly jet-lagged cheeks.

“It’s much nicer than I imagined from the floor plans.”

“Well, I paid for it with my mental faculties,” he said, not for the first time. “I’ve lost my power of concentration. While Hagit was having a fine time with her criminals in court, I was jousting over every brick, faucet, and electric socket with a crooked Jewish contractor and his wily Arab workmen.”

“At least it ended well,” Ofra said comfortingly.

“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Hagit added. “Go to sleep. You ran yourself ragged today with all your needless expeditions. And last night,” she told her sister with satisfaction, “we went to an Arab wedding in the Galilee and came home late.”

“An Arab wedding?” marveled Ofra. “How come?”

He tried picturing Samaher’s wedding. It seemed to have taken place, not a day, but a year ago.

AND YET IF there had been advance signs, as Galya claimed, how had he and Hagit failed to notice them? Had they been so subtly concealed? Or had Ofer and Galya, too, not wanted to see them?

And what made a sign a sign? His meeting with Galya in the hotel garden had been so hurried and emotional that he had had no chance to ask. The time she had refused to wake up, for example: was that a sign? Now, thinking about it, he was inclined to believe it was.

A few weeks before the separation, Rivlin took part in a day’s conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Bored by the lectures, all rehashes of familiar material, he’d decided to skip the concluding session and visit his son and daughter-in-law. Galya answered the telephone. “We’d love to see you,” she told him. “Let’s have an early supper.” “Make it a light one,” he cautioned, not because he wasn’t hungry but because he didn’t wish to inconvenience her.