A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

And even after (my Parisian continued) the outward signs have yielded their inner promise in all its glory or poverty, its undreamed-of heights or insufferable depths, the glow of the first falling-in-love continues everywhere and all the time. Yes, even when the beloved is in a wheelchair in an old-age home, diapered and connected to tubes, even then the flash of a smile in moldering eyes, the ancient movement of a veiny hand, the heard-again lilt of a dear voice, even a single sentence containing the right words, can resurrect the first falling-in-love in a twinkling — that love that unconditionally and in advance forgives every weakness and failing, if only for the reason that in advance it knew nothing about them.

Indeed (in my Parisian’s opinion), nothing is more democratic than this total embrace of the beloved; for just as the state, or the republic, can never revoke the citizenship of a citizen, be he a spy, traitor, rapist, or murderer, so first love forbears in all things because the first, unconditional falling-in-love persists.

Such (thinks my wise Parisian) was my love for you. This is why I am still stranded in it, waiting for another falling-in-love to set me free….

(And it will—)

And yet, says my Parisian, who is four years older than I am even though she’s a class lower — because she has a rich father who periodically treats her to a new career—“your story makes clear that your ex-wife’s conception of love is of the other variety.” And this is why, she explains, what happened to us was inevitable.

And that’s precisely what I need: to understand calmly the necessity of our separation, so that I can say good-bye for good, graciously and with a light heart.

It seems, Galya, that your kind of love has to do with choice. That’s the great difference. Perhaps yours is the more developed variety, skipping love’s primitive and dangerous “fall” for what is deliberately and courageously chosen — not because it is the best choice, since there is always a better one, but because it has potential. (I once watched a nature program on television about a certain species of duck or swan that takes four years of painstaking investigation to choose a mate — the longest aptitude test on record.) Rather than marriage as a first flowering of feeling that lasts only until the next falling-in-love, the love of choice offers something less passionate but more stable: responsibility. In a moment of crisis the first kind of lover declares emotionally, “What’s done is done — I fell in love with you, and so I forgive you,” but whereas the second kind says coolly, “Yes, what’s done is done — I chose you, and I am responsible for my choice.” But — and here’s the rub — while love of the first kind can by its nature overlook what it doesn’t like, love of the second kind is incapable of such evasions. And so when something bad shakes the foundations, “responsible love” is too weak to support it — and at that point the whole structure collapses, and all that’s left to say is, “You’d better pack your things, Ofer, and go to your grandmother’s. ”

Once, some two years ago, a month or two after I arrived in France, in a moment of deep sadness but also of intermittent hope (I didn’t know you were about to remarry), I decided to write an itemized account of the horribly quick parting that you subjected me to after forty-two days of struggle. I bought a big yellow notebook, which went well with the yellow light of gray Paris in August ’93, where I found myself after my expulsion from the Paradise in which you lived with your father, mother, and sister (who to this day can inspire in me, along with horror and revulsion, a good, stiff erection).

Anyway, you and your family, even your hotel, were cloaked by my imagination in the late-summer light that I remembered from the brambly little hill near the gazebo under which we were married. That’s how I had imagined Paradise back in Bible class in grade school, perhaps so as to give it a Middle Eastern touch: a lush green oasis fed by springs and surrounded by soft, friendly desert.

And so I began to write the story of our separation, from the first moment: thoughts, conversations, facts, things we did, the weather, the political situation, even a dream or two that I remembered, such as one in which I forced your father to let me shave him with an old electric shaver found in a room of the hotel.

I wrote from the heart. The result was an indictment, a defense plea, perhaps even a proposal for an out-of-court settlement — but only on the left-hand page, because the right-hand page was for your use, so you could add your story to mine. I still hoped against hope that setting down our two versions in the same notebook might help us reach a new understanding.

I filled page after page, quickly, in less than a week. I wanted so badly to prove that you had acted rashly that I remembered all kinds of things I had forgotten. And I had insights I had never had before into the predicament of your making (for example, your insomnia, which started at that time and kept you up all night in my parents’ home in Haifa). It was exciting to put everything down clearly on paper and give my suffering a form. I was so involved in it that I went on writing during my French lessons at the Alliance Française, to the delight of the students from Japan, China, and Indonesia, who were happy to see that the brown and yellow races were not the only ones with languages that looked nothing like French.

I still didn’t know you were about to get married—

And then my father told me over the telephone that my grandmother had died, and I could hear the relief in his voice. She had already lost the last of her independence after falling and breaking her pelvis and being brought from Jerusalem to a nursing home in Haifa — and, as impossible as she had been when she still could stand on her own two feet, she then became such a horror that she kept having to be moved from one institution to another.

But it wasn’t just my father who was relieved. So was I. Not because I ever suffered from her. On the contrary. She always showered my brother and me with love and presents, not only because she really loved us, but also because she hated to waste on us a drop of the special venom that she kept for the issue of her own womb. The relief came from my fear that in the heat of one of her daily spats with my father, she might, in order to show that I trusted her more than him, blurt out the secret I had made her promise to tell no one.

You see, Galya, the time has come for a confession. There was one person in the world (though she is in it no longer) from whom I was unable to conceal the truth. Because back when we agreed to “mutually disengage” in order to gain some perspective, I on my “fantasy” and you on your “fantasy of my fantasy,” and decided to separate and move out of our apartment — you into the hotel and I to my grandmother’s — my parents, although upset by our unexpected breakup, maintained (mostly at my mother’s insistence) a gallant distance while hoping that the crisis (about whose cause they knew nothing) would blow over by itself. On the other hand, my grandmother had no faith in spontaneous reconciliations. Her gloomy, suspicious nature, which always made her expect (sometimes rather eagerly) the worst, led her to demand that I do something practical to restore us to Paradise Lost.

Yes, us. For as upset as she was by our separation, she was also upset by the loss of the hotel, which she had hoped, rather bizarrely, to use as a halfway house in departing this life. Did your parents ever tell you that after our wedding she took to dropping by the hotel in the morning for coffee and cake and, sometimes, for a chat with a lounging customer, knowing that Fu’ad would not take money from a “member of the family”?