A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“But it did. Really. You could have used an aunt like that, someone to hold up a mirror to you. Yochi’s mother”—Hagit turned around to her sister—“kept him tied to her apron strings, summer vacations included. He wasn’t insurable, and she never gave him a chance to grow up.”

A jumbo jet passed overhead, in one line with the road. For a second they seemed to keep up with it.

“Maybe that’s Yo’el’s plane,” Ofra said.

“Perfect timing!”

But Yo’el’s plane had landed a quarter of an hour early, and since he had only hand luggage, he was out of the terminal and perched on a low wall by a fountain, looking suntanned and refreshed, when they arrived. Reading a Hebrew paper, his toes sticking out of his biblical sandals, he did not look as if he had been away for three years.

21.

HER HUSBAND’S LARGE hands alone, in Ofra’s opinion, could handle her fragile body without breaking it. Although they had been separated for only ten days, she and Yo’el clung to each other tightly, as if also embracing the children never born to them. It was a while before Yo’el turned to Hagit and gathered her, too, in his arms, after which he clapped Rivlin on the back and asked what was new in Algeria.

A spring dusk was descending when they reached Haifa. Gazing from their terrace at some trees bordered by two streets that ran down toward the sea, the distant gleam of which was invisible in the twilight, Yo’el — having been taken on a tour of the duplex by his now knowledgeable guide of a wife — acknowledged that the loss of their old wadi was not so grievous. Then, over bowls of grapes and cherries, the forgotten taste of which quickened the senses of the Israeli émigré, Rivlin decided that the time had come to relate the story of their moving.

“It’s pure theory until you have to do it. You know, we lived in our old place for nearly thirty years. We thought we had some control, or at least some idea, about what went into it. A total illusion! Even the mover, who came to give us an estimate, turned out to be a wild optimist.

“The day before we packed was a Saturday in spring, just like now. We were sitting on our terrace overlooking the wadi, saying good-bye to our view of the sea. The apartment was still in one piece behind us. The pictures were still on the walls, the wineglasses were in the cupboard, the cheeses and the soft drinks and the containers of food were in the refrigerator, the books were on the shelves next to the photo albums — just the way it is now. Except, that is, for the sacks and the folded cartons, which were waiting in a corner for the packers to arrive the next day. Suddenly I had a mild attack of panic. ‘Hagit,’ I said. ‘How can we be sitting here sitting here so calmly? Before the storm strikes, don’t you think we should at least sort through what we’re taking?’ But in the immortal words of Oblomov in the Russian novel, ‘If there’s work to be done, let someone else do it.’ We went on sitting on the terrace.

“Early the next morning, we’re drinking our coffee and reading the newspaper while listening to the birds in the wadi, not at all like two people whose lives are about to be turned upside down, when in walk two packers. They looked like two little ants, a dark woman of about thirty-five, a chain-smoker as thin as a match, and her scrawny twelve-year-old son, a boy with a black skullcap on a black head of hair. ‘How will just the two of you manage?’ I asked. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ the woman says. ‘Just tell us where to start.’

“Well, they attacked the house like two locusts. A pair of zombies couldn’t have gone around with less plan or method, stuffing everything into sacks the way they did. The boy flew everywhere without a sound. He was like some blind, wingless grub, grabbing one thing after another and filling sack after sack. Imagine, I’m shaving in the bathroom when he walks in after me and scoops up whatever he can, the toothbrushes, the shaving cream, my bifocals, everything. I barely managed to retrieve my glasses from his sack. We spent the first two weeks after moving trying to figure out into which of dozens of sacks and crates our lives had been thrown by those maniacs and sprinkled with the mother ant’s cigarette ashes.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. The next morning six Arab moving men show up with a big truck and a little Jewish driver. Our new apartment was so close by that I was sure we’d be done by the afternoon. Well, by the time the first truckload pulled out it already was the afternoon, and the apartment was as full as ever. And when evening came and a second big truckload left, we still hadn’t made a dent in anything, I started to cringe every time I saw a moving man. Something, humanly, had gone wrong. I mean, naked we come into this world and naked we leave — what were we doing with so many things? Were they all to prove our existence or simply to maintain it?

“The movers, every one of whom we now knew by name, address, and individual moving style, were getting restless. Halfway between the two apartments, the Jewish driver, who had been declaring all day that he had never been given such a job in his life — four flights of stairs from the wadi to the street, and four more from the street to the duplex, and with ‘all those goddamn books’—threatened to quit on us. And when the new owner turned up with three workers with hammers, who began knocking down the walls for his renovation while we were still moving out, I began to feel my whole life was a mistake. Luckily, Hagit took command at that point and calmed the mutiny with a smile and a pay raise. The extra money did wonders. By midnight the old apartment was empty, and the last truckload had arrived with that big bookcase over there. The only problem was that it didn’t fit into the stairway and had to be hoisted onto the terrace with ropes and pulleys.

“It was now two A.M. I was standing on the terrace with the head mover, who was having a fine time giving orders how to maneuver a bookcase that no one could see in the darkness. You could only hear it lifting off the ground, gaining altitude, and banging into things as it rose. I was too happy we were finished to give a damn. I felt so grateful to the movers for not abandoning us in the middle that I said to them in Arabic, ‘You’re fantastic! We could conquer the world between us. Let’s draft you all into the Israeli army and march on Iraq.’”

“Iraq?”

“Iraq.”

“Why Iraq?”

“Why not? Search me. I was punch-drunk by then. That must have been when I began losing my faculties. Since then I’ve lost a little more of them every month trying to get this place into shape.”

“What did they say?”

“Who?”

“The Arab movers.”

“What should they have said? They were so glad to be done that they would have taken on Iran too….”

22.

AS DARKNESS DESCENDED, Yo’el fell merrily asleep in the middle of a sentence, and Hagit went hurriedly off to make a second bed in the study — which, Rivlin announced, hoping thus to prevent the long-dreaded judicial inquiry into his free hours in Jerusalem, he was donating to his in-laws for the remainder of their stay. Not that he could work in his office at the university, where the students, secretaries, and teachers gave him no peace. But in any case, he intended to spend the next few days in the library with the journals and newspapers he had brought from Jerusalem, even though they were unlikely to be of great value.

The judge, stretched out fully dressed on their bed after a delightful day, agreed at once to his proposal. However, not only did she appear to take it quite for granted, but it did nothing to prevent her from wanting to know what he had done in Jerusalem. By way of reply, Rivlin invented a long stroll taken by him on the promenade south of the Old City. Since the two of them had once walked there together, he would not be asked for an account of it.