A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Even though I don’t depend on your answer, the decision being entirely my own, I’m curious to know why you think I shouldn’t be released from the silence I agreed to in the mad, vain hope that I’ve walked around with for the last five years — that this alone, if anything, could make you come back to me.

That’s all. A simple question calling for a simple answer — yes or no.

I don’t suppose my reply to your last letter made you happy. You should realize, however, that it’s you who first played with fire by asking my father, quite astonishingly and unnecessarily, whether I knew that your father had died and how I had reacted.

What exactly were you hoping to find out? What difference did it make to you what I thought about your father’s death?

Which is why you owe me a straight answer to a straight question. Am I or am I not absolved of my silence? Because my anger and my longing for you, which have awakened all over again, make me a dangerous man. So much so that, for my own good, I have had to put my pistol in a drawer and make sure the drawer is locked….

Ofer

14.6.98

Ofer,

You asked for a short answer to a short question. Well, here it is. No.

My father’s death cannot absolve you of a promise made not only to me, but to yourself. A dead man’s honor is no less precious than a living one’s, and there is no reason to trash him now, when he can no longer defend himself against your fantasies, old or new.

That’s my answer to your question. It’s also, if I may say so, my request (if my requests still matter to you).

But if you nevertheless believe that you’re free to break your promise and make your fantasies known, at least do me the favor of sparing me your decision, as well as your oppressive and above all pointless letters.

Galya

20.6.98

Dear Galya,

1. Your answer was appreciated.

2. Your reply and its reasoning (and most of all, its request) are clear.

3. Even though your father’s death absolves me of my commitments (which were, by the way, only to you. How could they have been to myself?), I will continue to keep silent for the time being (the last words need to be stressed) even with my parents, and especially with my father — who, I hope, will get over the frenzy that his meeting with you put him into.

4. I think that’s all.

5. And again, I appreciate the fact that you overcame your negative (and to an extent, justifiable) reaction to my letter enough to answer it. Perhaps you recognized some of the old pain in my anger. I won’t bother you anymore.

Ofer

P.S. For the past five years I’ve fought (with a resolve I didn’t always understand myself) to keep my promise to you. I’ve told no one what went wrong with our marriage, not even those women who have mattered to me (and these were not as rare as you may — or may not — think), even though I know this may have harmed my chances for a new and honest relationship. Because while it may seem (but only seem) that a marriage lasting no more than a year can be explained by a simple sentence like “It didn’t take us long to realize we weren’t meant for each other,” or “I thought I loved her but I didn’t,” or, on the contrary, “It turned out that she didn’t love me back and so we decided to split before we ruined the life of some unnecessary child,” this doesn’t work with a woman interested in a relationship with a divorced no-account like myself. On the contrary, any serious, deeply feeling person has to be more worried by someone who divorces quickly than by someone whose marriage falls apart bit by bit, because being mistaken in the first place is more damning than experiencing the gradual attrition of love. Whoever dramatically misjudges his first partner may do so again. That’s why I think highly of any woman who wants to know why my marriage didn’t work.

The fact is that I’ve encouraged them to ask. Those who didn’t, even if we got along well, didn’t last long. (Most of them, by the way, were young, a new generation — yes, there already is one — that’s quick to start up and quick to break off and doesn’t care who’s married and who’s divorced. It surprised them, even upset them, when I insisted on telling them about my divorce on our first or second date, because they couldn’t understand why this mattered.)

So I’m sorry — no, glad — to inform you that I’ve had not a few women in my life, especially in the first years after our breakup. It was as if, in leaving me, you also left me with a master key like the one I give every evening to the African woman who cleans the offices, or the one Fu’ad opens every door in the hotel with. My wanting revenge on you only increased my masculine charms, which were assumed to come with a high degree of technical proficiency because I had been married for a year. Which is how I, who, before you and I met, would get involved in torturous love affairs with the most impossible types, now became a butterfly flitting from flower to flower for the nectar.

But I soon tired of all this, Galya. I wanted a real connection in place of the one we had had, and I believed it would come because I had proved that I was capable of it and that what went wrong was not my fault. I started looking for a lifetime relationship (with a lot of short-lived women), and the first test I gave everyone was to see who wanted to know about my marriage. After all, unless you know something about the past (ask my father: he makes his living from it), it’s hardly possible, and certainly not easy, to make any headway in the present. That’s what I told every woman whom I wanted and tried to fall in love with.

And so over and over I found myself harping on our divorce without being able to touch on its real cause — that is, what I saw that day with my own eyes. And although there was perhaps something noble in the discretion of a divorced man who refused to say a bad word about his ex, there was also something strange and suspicious about it, and, in the end, aggravating. After all, you can’t come asking for comfort, and keep saying that you need to understand what happened before you can start a new life, while deliberately avoiding the heart of the matter. All you’re doing is putting obstacles in your own way and letting the other person know that you still have hopes for the woman who said to you when you parted—

word for word—

“ Perhaps in the end I’ll miss you so much that I’ll beg you to take me back. But if I ever find out that you told anyone, one single person, about your insane fantasy, there’s no chance of that ever happening.”

Word for word, right?

Not that it’s so difficult to figure out what I’ve been hiding. Women smart enough to realize that I need to be released from some horrible scandal should be able to use their imaginations. And in fact, among the many possibilities that have occurred to them (it’s amazing how fertile the imagination is when it comes to the sordid things people do), one or two of them, like little birds pecking at garbage, have come close to the truth. But even then I didn’t let on that they did. “The details don’t matter,” I told them. “I made a promise I’m not ready to break. Just convince me that I couldn’t have prevented my divorce and I can start thinking about marriage again. ”

Not many women are prepared to deal with such a devious neurotic.

But there was one who rose to the challenge. Not as a prospective wife, but as a friend. She was a true Parisian, a class behind me in school, who tried to free me by means of that logical French mind that hones itself on the subtleties of sex. Without knowing the details of our case, which I never revealed to her, she constructed a psychological model proving almost mathematically that despite our great love (and that, at least, you never denied), our separation was inevitable. Her analysis concluded that whether I had actually seen something or just fantasized it, our marriage never stood a chance. Even had I not (she argued), by sheer coincidence, on a Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock, left my office to look for some old building plans in the basement of your father’s hotel, I was by then so involved in his project to expand the kitchen and dining room that sooner or later I would have gone down there anyway — if not to look for the plans, then, say, to check the foundations — and seen or fantasized the same thing.