A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck! That’s frightening, because five years have gone by with nothing to celebrate. Good and stuck.

So you see, it’s not my fault if I can’t stop the words that are flowing so easily from me now, so pleasurably and without anger, onto the screen of a computer that someone forgot to turn off in the Youth Department of the Jewish Agency. I didn’t even have to open a new file, but just squeezed myself in between two memos on Hebrew-speaking summer camps. There’s still time to decide whether to print this “pointless and oppressive” letter or to hit Delete, just as, after my mother informed me that you really were remarried, I threw “our” yellow notebook into the oven of the Cooking Academy, which cheerfully roasted it to a crisp.

(I like my work as a night guard at the Jewish Agency, which occupies — a bequest from a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor — an apartment building in a fashionable bourgeois district that has a large park nearby. It’s a comfortably posh, three-story nineteenth-century building with attractively oak-paneled lobbies and stairways, and old chairs and tables that were divided up among the different offices on a political basis. You have to spend time in a place like this, Galya, and use your master key to visit all its rooms, in order to appreciate that despite its bureaucratic morass there’s something soothing, even comforting, about its old Jewish National Fund maps of Palestine hanging on the walls. There is a Zionism, old, innocent, and heartwarming, that will last not only another century, but another millennium, even if the State of Israel goes under in the meantime.)

When my grandmother heard (we’re back to that autumn night in her kitchen) that I had gone and asked for forgiveness without waiting for her advice and had been turned down, she was flustered. But since the logic of your four rebuttals failed to move her and she wasn’t a quitter, she simply ignored them and instructed me quite shamelessly to ask forgiveness from Mr. Hendel himself. She was sure, she said, that he could talk you into clasping me to the family bosom again….

She certainly did want to dance in your hotel again!

I didn’t answer her. I went to my bedroom and shut the door. I don’t know whether she changed her mind, but I did manage to scare her, because her demeaning proposal was not repeated the next morning. I was running a fever that day and thought I had the flu, and I stayed in bed until noon. Then I went to the office, phoned your father, and made an appointment with him that same night.

A week later (with his encouragement, if not necessarily on his initiative) you filed for a divorce. Yet I remain confident (for some reason) that he never told you about our meeting until the day he died, which means that you’ll never know about it now, either.

(Because this letter, as I’ve said, will not be sent.)

And yet nevertheless—

My Impossible Meeting with Your Father

Actually, only the dreariness of those days in dowdy downtown Jerusalem could have brainwashed me into putting my grandmother’s grotesque idea into practice. (In one of her nursing homes, an old staff member said to my father: “I’ve never in my life seen anyone like your mother. Tell me, Professor, how did you manage to come out normal?” To which, without cracking a smile, he replied: “I didn’t.”) I can still see her sitting in her kitchen on that revolving high chair of hers, like a pilot or an aeronautical engineer, surrounded by walls and shelves lined with knives, cleavers, ladles, spatulas, graters, mixing bowls, and appliances, all covered with the colorful little jackets she sewed for them. It was only in Paris that I realized that the idea of studying restaurant architecture first came to me, not from your hotel, whose old building plans I went looking for on that infamous morning, but from her cluttered kitchen.

Your father hesitated for a moment and agreed. Our tragic encounter had prepared him for the possibility of a private meeting, even though he had done his best to avoid it. And when it dawned on him, though he still knew nothing specific, that you were about to eliminate the threat to him by ditching me for good, he didn’t have the heart to refuse me.

The truth is that although your father was not the type to cut and run, he had panicked so badly after that fateful Tuesday that he moved up a planned trip to America in the hope that it would give him, and perhaps me too, a breather in which to review the options more calmly (a sensible strategy for the stock market, but not for a Greek tragedy) before formulating his response to this stranger in his family who had never imagined that Paradise had its basements.

In the five years since our separation, Galya, I’ve sometimes thought about the man as much as I’ve thought about you. In the comprehensive dissertation on our divorce that I’ve composed in my head, there’s a chapter devoted to the subtleties of Mr. Hendel, who ran away (yes, ran away!) to America and returned from a successful two-week business trip there with the novel notion of handling me not by pleas, flattery, threats, or sulks, but by good humor. “Why in the world did you run away that day when you saw me?” was his line. “Don’t tell me you thought you had discovered some deep, dark secret! It’s time that you realized a family’s emotional life can be more complicated than you think. ”

I wonder if you remember the family dinner to which we all were invited on the Saturday after your father’s return from America. It was at that nice restaurant belonging to Fu’ad’s uncle in Abu-Ghosh, on a terrace shaded by a grapevine as big as a tree. Surrounded and protected by his loving family, your father thought it was the perfect place to confront the son-in-law who had caught him with his pants down.

Perhaps you even remember how he seated us around the table. He put me as far from himself as possible, but also facing him, so that he could keep me under observation while warning me with a glance not to ruin a happy family. He strained to hear every word that I said, whether it was addressed to him or not. It was at that meal that he began dropping hints that he would make me his head architect in expanding the hotel for a new clientele discovered in America: wealthy fundamentalist Christians looking not just for a place to stay in Jerusalem but also for a home away from home that would offer them, on a clear day, views of the Messiah’s birthplace in Bethlehem, of his baptismal site near the Dead Sea, and of Golgotha, where he was crucified. It was at this meal — remember? — that he announced the coming revolution: no more “parasitical rabbis” checking his kitchen, no more separation of meat and dairy, no more porkless, seafoodless kosher meals. Come hell or high water, or just an ordinary Middle Eastern war, Christian pilgrims were more dependable than Jewish tourists.

And yet, little by little, as that meal went on, without anything careless being said or even hinted at, but simply by watching you and me squirm, he realized, with the intuition of a clever and intelligent father, that the thing he feared most had come to pass. The intimacy between us, so foreign to a secretive man like him, had become a wounded animal threatening to devour him.

I want you to know that to this day, at this precise moment, facing a computer in the dark office building of the Jewish Agency, I can re-create the exact shades of light, tones of voice, and smells of food on that grapevine-shaded terrace, on that day late in the summer of our separation and divorce, with its sweet light falling on the vineyards and orchards, on the restaurants, shops, mosques, and churches — that serene Jewish vision of a bucolic and uncomplaining Arab life, as sweet as baklava.