A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Yet when he arrived, Galya was in the bedroom, asleep or pretending to be. A glum-looking Ofer gave him an absent-minded hug. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes, the living room was untidy, and there was no sign on the table of even the lightest supper. “I’m really not hungry,” he reassured his son, who seemed upset by something. “I just wanted to say hello. A glass of tea will be fine. Although maybe,” he added quietly, “we should wait for Galya to wake up. After all, she knew I was coming.”

But Galya did not wake up. They sat in the living room over tea and cake, listening to the sounds that came intermittently from the bedroom. Ofer made no attempt to investigate them and responded curtly to his father’s attempts at conversation, as if keeping him at arm’s length. “It’s certainly an odd time of day to sleep,” Rivlin remarked after a while, with a smile, albeit in an injured tone. “Isn’t she afraid of being kept up at night?” “Would you like me to wake her for you?” Ofer asked. “For me?” Rivlin said. “What for? I’ll be heading home in a minute.”

Was this a sign?

He arrived back in Haifa and was told by Hagit that right after he’d left Jerusalem Galya had telephoned to apologize for her ill-mannered slumber. Ofer got on the phone, too.

“How did they sound to you?” he asked anxiously.

“The usual. Nice and friendly.”

“Are you sure?” he persisted. “Are you sure?”

OR PERHAPS THIS was a sign.

At the opera in Tel Aviv, during the intermission, they suddenly noticed, a few rows ahead of them, their daughter-in-law sitting with her father. Her long hair, usually done up in a bun, fell glamorously over her shoulders. He and Hagit had hurried over, uncertain whether to be delighted or worried by this unexpected encounter. Where, they asked, was Ofer? Hagit gave Galya a kiss. Rivlin, self-conscious in her father’s presence, made do with a comment about her hair. Galya blushed awkwardly. Her father came to her defense. It was his idea to let it down, he said.

They returned to their seats. As the lights slowly dimmed, Rivlin saw his daughter-in-law throw him a fearful glance, as if feeling guilty for the husband left at home. Her hands quickly gathered her hair into a bun.

Was this what she meant by a sign?

OF ONE SIGN, at any rate, he had no doubt.

Some three weeks before the separation, Galya spent a weekend with her parents in the Galilee. There was a small hotel there that her father was thinking of acquiring. Having been to see their in-laws in Haifa only once since the wedding, the Hendels suggested dropping by on their way back to Jerusalem. That morning, however, a few hours before they were due, Galya telephoned to say they would not be coming. She offered no explanation and no apology.

Which was why, on the terrible Saturday when Ofer broke the news of the divorce, Rivlin had remarked cuttingly, “Maybe you just found out, but her parents knew long ago.” Ofer denied it. “They didn’t know a thing,” he insisted. “They were in shock just like you. Her mother burst into tears right in front of me.”

A sign? Or a coincidence?

AND PERHAPS SHE meant subtler signs, like the Friday night a month before the separation.

The young couple had slept over at their home. In the middle of the night, on his way to the bathroom, Rivlin spied the glimmer of a white nightgown in the living room. Although the intimate circumstances made him shy of approaching her, he felt Galya’s eyes on him. “How long have you been awake?” he asked. “I never fell asleep,” she answered brusquely. He took a step toward her. “Is anything wrong?” As though he were to blame for her insomnia, she shrugged like a stubborn child and looked at him accusingly. “Why don’t you wake Ofer?” he asked. She shrugged again. “Would you like me to sit up with you?” he inquired gently. “You needn’t bother,” she said. “It’s no bother,” Rivlin replied. He sat down across the room from her, at first silent and then feebly trying to make conversation. Her head drooped. Her eyes shut, and her breathing grew deeper. Slowly she drifted back to her lost sleep. Yet when he suggested she go back to bed, she refused. All she wanted was a blanket, she said.

Was that a sign of things to come? But how?

HE REMEMBERED, TOO, a strange dream of Ofer’s. It was Galya who told it to them, as if to warn them of something.

In his dream Ofer was in an inner room of the hotel, sitting by the bed of Galya’s father, who lay pale and indisposed. No one else in the family was there. Not knowing how to call for help, he roamed the hotel. There were no guests. The staff had vanished, too. The rooms were empty. Some were missing their tables and beds. Fixtures were ripped from the bathrooms.

He returned to the inner room, in which the sick man had risen from his bed and was sitting in an armchair. Deciding to bring him a glass of water, he went to the bathroom to see if the sink had a faucet. It did, but only one. As he wasn’t sure whether it was for hot water or cold, he abandoned the idea and picked up an old electric shaver from the marble counter. He blew away the hairs that adhered to it, went to the sick man, and started shaving him.

It must have been a dream with signs, Rivlin thought. Why else would he remember it so many years later?

1.

THAT SATURDAY MORNING they were back in the Galilee. Hagit’s sister, who had yet to see her favorite nephew in uniform, let alone with his officer’s bars, had gently but firmly turned down several weekend invitations in order to visit Tsakhi at his army base. Not that the Rivlins needed a special reason to make the trip. Even their car, to judge by the alacrity with which it took the twisting road to the large intelligence base on Mount Canaan, was eager to see their youngest son.

They were not the first parents to park outside the base, whose green gate had a double entrance in keeping with its top-secret nature. A few early birds had arrived before them and were already feeding their fledglings snacks, soft drinks, and even hamburgers.

“The army has gone soft,” Rivlin observed disdainfully. “If anyone like us had turned up at the gate of an army base in my soldiering days, they would have been mowed down at once.”

Half-hidden behind the gate, surrounded by ferns in a thick stand of oak trees, was a small shack whose pastoral innocence camouflaged the real entrance to the underground base. Carved into a mountain, the installation was covered by tall antennas and giant satellite dishes that ran in a silver forest to a nearby second hilltop. Rivlin, amused by the thought of an elevator inside a mountain, had once asked his son whether there was one. But Tsakhi had only smiled, refusing to disclose even so innocent a fact. Nor had he reacted when Rivlin accused the army of being “hysterically hush-hush.” Without bothering to defend either it or himself, he had merely dipped his head in sorrow at being unable to satisfy his father’s curiosity.

“Sometimes,” the judge liked to remark, in a doting tone very different from her clipped severity on the bench, “I think I gave birth to a saint.”

“What’s so saintly about him?” Rivlin would protest, while hoping that his son’s beatification might reflect creditably on him, too. “What good does it do to be a saint nowadays? Let’s just hope that nothing spoils him.”

Despite having been on duty all night, the young officer who emerged from the mountain in crisp, spotless fatigues did not look spoiled at all. Beaming in the dewy morning light, he hurried — oblivious to the glances of other soldiers, some of them under his command — to give his notoriously fragile aunt a gentle hug.

“So he’s not a saint,” the judge had conceded. “But he does have a sense of boundaries. He knows right from wrong, and he doesn’t care what others think of him, unlike you and Ofer. You needn’t worry about him. Compliments don’t go to his head. Nothing will spoil him or throw him off stride.”