A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

A soldier emerged from the hidden entrance of the base with a message for Tsakhi. The young officer rose, embraced his aunt, kissed his mother, and glanced at the mountainside in search of his father. Rivlin waved. Although the gesture meant, “Don’t worry, son, get back to work and we’ll see you soon,” Tsakhi came running toward him.

“You didn’t have to run all this way to say good-bye,” Rivlin scolded him warmly. “You’ll be home on leave in a few days. War won’t break out before then.”

“I suppose not.” The young officer blushed. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” he said, touching his father’s arm lightly.

Although the housekeeper had risen from a sickbed to prepare a large lunch for them, Hagit preferred as usual to eat out. Her one concession to the pot roast waiting at home was to choose a dairy restaurant with a fancy menu. Rivlin, undeterred by the elaborate descriptions, ordered at once and hurried off to the rest room. He knew his sister-in-law needed time to deliberate, turn the pages, and make inquiries of the waitress. Although she and her husband were inveterate travelers and diners out, she still harbored the pristine illusion that every restaurant had its culinary apotheosis if only one knew what to ask for.

Finally the decisions were made. Even the waitress seemed satisfied. A first round of wine was poured, and the judge lit a slim cigarette and persuaded her nonsmoking sister to join her. Far removed from the depressing memory of their mother’s cooking, they were happiest together in restaurants. Now, after summarizing the virtues of the gallant young officer, they proceeded to the wedding that was the formal, if not the sufficient, cause of Ofra’s coming to Israel. Hagit wished to plan her sister’s outfit and appearance.

“But why don’t you come with us?” Ofra sought to persuade them. “Yo’el says his family sent you two invitations that weren’t confirmed.”

“Yo’el is mistaken,” Rivlin said, regarding the dish put before him with disappointment. It looked small and insipid, and he stole a glance at his wife’s plate to gauge her appetite and the prospects of sharing her meal. “We confirmed that we weren’t coming.”

“But why not? Wouldn’t you like to be with us? Yo’el needs your help to get through the evening with his horrid family.”

“How horrid can anyone be at a wedding?” Rivlin chuckled. He had heard more than one juicy story about the crudity of his brother-in-law’s clan.

“Horrid enough. They’ll ask nosy questions about why people our age have to go traveling to the ends of the earth, or what happens if Yo’el gets sick somewhere….”

“But they have every right to be worried,” he warmly rebuked the girlish frequent flyer.

Rivlin’s sister-in-law, however, refused to equate his and Hagit’s genuine concern with the spiteful criticisms of Yo’el’s envious family. “We need you there to defend us,” she insisted.

Hagit wavered. “After all, we don’t really know them… and we didn’t invite them to Ofer’s wedding….”

“Who remembers Ofer’s wedding?” Rivlin’s sister-in-law exclaimed aggravatedly, heedless of the feelings of the two people in the world she felt closest to. “All that matters is that they invited you and want you to come. It will be a big, outdoor affair at a new caterer’s. We’ll spend the evening together. There’s so little time on this visit to be with you.”

Rivlin cast a warning glance at Hagit, who was already asking about this new caterer.

“It’s called Nature’s Corner. It’s in a woods on the banks of a stream.”

Hagit was weakening. “For my part…”

But Rivlin, having foreseen the danger, had already taken preemptive action. He and Hagit, he announced, had tickets that evening for the theater, for a new play, on a biblical theme, that had opened to rave reviews.

“You can change them to another night,” Ofra pleaded. “We’ll come with you. Yo’el loves mythological subjects. We need you at the wedding. You don’t have to buy a gift. Ours will be from you too.”

“It’s not a matter of a gift. The last thing I need is more weddings.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind going,” Hagit told her sister. “But weddings make this man of mine so depressed that he’s a menace to the bride and groom. The only weddings he can put up with, more or less, are Arab ones….”

“More less than more,” Rivlin said. “I felt depressed even at that Arab wedding in the middle of nowhere two days ago. I can’t help it. I was programmed that way by a cruel mother. Never to forget. Never to let go. Never to give in. Always to fight on. And after talking to Galya and meeting her new husband, the need to know what happened to Ofer’s marriage is eating away at me like a cancer…. Why go to a wedding in Nature’s Corner just to be miserable?”

“I hope you’re not about to cry,” Hagit said, with a smile.

“Suppose I am?”

“Well, don’t. Do it some other time.”

“Not even a little?”

“Not even. I warned you against going to that bereavement.”

“But how could I not have gone?” He appealed hotly to his sister-in-law. “How could I have overlooked his death? It’s simple courtesy for an ex-in-law to express his sympathy in such circumstances.”

But the judge was not inclined to be judged.

“A condolence note would have done nicely. You should have seen,” she told her sister, “the touching letter he sent not long ago to the widow of an academic rival who died unexpectedly.”

She cut a large slice from her quiche and placed it, without asking, on her husband’s empty plate.

It failed to placate him. His confession of fatal illness in the hotel garden now filled him not with guilt but with compassion — for himself and for the young woman in black who had sat, shocked, across from him.

“Hagit wants nothing to do with them. She’s too… I don’t know what. Proud, or secretly angry. She doesn’t even want to tell Ofer that Hendel died.”

“You don’t?” The visitor turned to her sister timidly, reluctant to interfere in a family squabble that had broken out when they were having such a good time.

Hagit didn’t answer. Pushing away her plate, she lit a cigarette and signaled the waitress to bring the dessert list.

Rivlin persisted. “You be the judge. Should we tell Ofer or not?”

“But what difference does it make?” Hagit asked, glaring to let him know that no matter how great the intimacy between her and her sister, no one in the world could or should settle their disputes for them. Angrily he snatched the proffered menu while informing his sister-in-law, who was regarding them with mild anxiety:

“Nature’s Corner will do without us. Weddings get me down so that I could wreck not only a corner of nature, but the whole works. If it isn’t too late, we’ll come after the theater to rescue you.”

4.

A COUPLE THEIR own age, an overdressed woman and a man with a goatee, entered the restaurant and recognized Ofra with cries of joy. “Look who’s here! Are you back in Israel?”

Ofra squirmed, as if reluctant to admit that she knew them. However, once they had demonstrated a knowledge of her name and Yo’el’s, and given proof that all four of them had recently been together at an Aztec ruin in Mexico, she abandoned the pretense.

“Just for a wedding. Yo’el is coming in a few days.”

Eager to reestablish a tie forged by a chance meeting far away, the couple asked to be introduced to the Rivlins.

“We were on this wonderful Geographic Society tour,” they explained, “when who did we run into on a godforsaken hacienda in Mexico but Ofra and Yo’el?”

They held out their hands in a show of friendship, hungry, so it seemed, for new relationships at home as well as abroad. Or so Rivlin construed their insistence on giving their names and occupations and asking for his and Hagit’s.