A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Naomi, an easygoing woman, was upset by the refusal of an old employee to obey her. She felt she was not being taken seriously. “All I’m asking of you, Fu’ad,” she told him in an injured tone, “is a key.” But the well-bred and soft-spoken maître d’ answered her brusquely. “I’m telling you, Mrs. Hendel,” he said, “there is no key.” But she wouldn’t yield. It flattered her that I had come to ask for her help, and she wanted to prove herself worthy of it. “Fu’ad,” she said, “what are you talking about? You always have the keys with you. Come on, take them out. ”

Looking back on it now, Ima, I can see that this tactful, middle-aged man, who never lost his composure, was on the verge of a breakdown. He fumbled in his pocket as though looking for something that wasn’t there, then changed his mind and took out a large ring of keys. Before he could claim that the basement key wasn’t on it, my mother-in-law reached for it in an unusually aggressive manner. Red as a beet, he let her have it, flinging it into her hand. “You Jews,” he blurted (once again, I’m quoting from memory), “want to swallow everything in one gulp, and then you wonder why it sticks in your crow.” (Yes, that I remember: he said “crow,” not “craw.”)

The large, heavy key ring, Your Honor, was then handed to me. I had no idea which key was the right one. Mrs. Hendel, exhausted from the heat, smiled triumphantly and retired to her room. I went to the basement. The door, it turned out, was unlocked.

I descended some stairs and came to a long corridor in which an old bicycle was leaning against a wall. Next to it were a bucket of dry whitewash and a torn tire. Farther on was a closet, padlocked with an old yellow lock inscribed with the number 999. I found a small key on the ring with the same number and opened the lock at once. The closet was full of files, arranged by subject. There were thank-you letters from guests, correspondences with the municipality, and the old building plans of the hotel, which was originally (did you know this, Galya?) designed to be a school building.

And that, Your Honor, would have been the end of it, with nothing gone amiss, had I not said to myself, “As long as I’m here, I may as well have a look at the actual foundations before studying the plans for them.” And so I followed the corridor as far as a metal door. Although I assumed it was locked, I tried the handle. It yielded slightly, as if bolted from within. From the ceiling came the gurgle of running water and a clatter of pots and pans, which told me I was where I wanted to be, right beneath the dining room and kitchen. I found a light switch and continued down the corridor until I came to a dark, cold space on my left, in which stood an old boiler that looked like a predatory fossil. The bones of its victims were scattered around it: an old baby carriage, a green tricycle, and a crib with some dusty toys lying on an oilcloth-covered mattress.

Well, my dear Your Honor, I stood there and thought that I should go get a stronger lightbulb and come back to take measurements. But as I was about to go upstairs, I said to myself: Just a minute. If everything is open apart from that metal door, what was the Arab making such a fuss about? And I took the key ring and went to the door, which was old except for the lock. It was a standard lock, like the ones I had seen in the hotel’s rooms back in the days when I was courting my wife in them. Even though I now had the building plans, I was still annoyed at Fu’ad, who had always been so friendly and courteous. That’s why I took the yellow master key and turned it in the lock. The door opened. I didn’t enter the room, which was lit by a hidden lamp. I stood there flabbergasted for all of five seconds, whispered “Excuse me” to my father-in-law, and left.

The Court may ask how much anyone can see and understand in five seconds. My answer is, worlds, especially if you’re familiar with the cast — the other member of which was a woman unaware of my presence. She lay sleeping, or daydreaming, in a fetal position, her face to the wall and her long, naked buttocks, which I never would have imagined could be so pure and virginal, exposed.

That was all. On the face of it, it wasn’t much. I couldn’t tell from the surprised look of my father-in-law, who was reading a newspaper with a cozy intimacy I didn’t associate with him, whether I had intruded before or after. And perhaps it was neither. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. All I wanted to do, Ima, was to tell my wife, my life’s companion, the soul of my soul, how shocked I was.

THE EVENINGS SPENT on either side of the border must have left you hungry if, after a sleepless night full of surprises, you head not for bed but for the kitchen, where you remove the cellophane from the containers that have been impatiently waiting for you on the marble counter and permanently renounce, in the crystalline light of a brightening morning, a Ramadan fast half-jestingly and half-wishfully partaken of. Your resentment of the housekeeper, who so flagrantly ignored your instructions just to clean and not to cook, has dissipated your resistance even to the leftovers cramming the refrigerator, though in truth you prefer the fresh dishes that have spent the night anticipating the return of the mysteriously vanished master of the house.

And yet, what effect can the master’s orders have if the mistress of the house is so intimidated by her own housekeeper that she turns to jelly in her presence? And since you forgot to tell her that the judge would be gone for several days, the housekeeper quite naturally decided to spend her leisure time preparing the judge’s favorite dishes. Still, you can’t be averse to them yourself, if you now sit eating them while perusing her note, which says:

Aluminum foil

Oil

Bread crumbs

Detergent

Flour

Garlic.

Beside it lies another note from her, informing you that the new owners of your old apartment have a package for you that was mistakenly delivered to your old address.

As if to spare you the pain of it, an invitation to her son’s wedding has been left in a less conspicuous, though still respectable, place behind the glass door of a bookcase. You slip the gilt-edged card back into its envelope as quickly as you can and let it fall on the shelf beneath the books in the hope that it will be forgotten there, for your envy does not skip even the marriage of the thin, dark boy who, when brought to your house by his mother, sat bashfully in a corner of the living room playing with Ofer’s old toys or appeared timidly at the door of your study to ask for a pencil and paper.

To sleep or not to sleep…

At two o’clock there’s a meeting of the appointments committee, at three you have office hours, and at four you give your introductory survey course, for which you still haven’t prepared. Yet having turned day into night in an Arab village, why not do the same in a Jewish duplex, even if later that will mean turning another night into day, without a wife in your bed to solace your sleeplessness?

Turn out the bedroom light, then, brush your teeth, and disconnect the phone. Under a light blanket, to the sounds of the awakening street, you think with bemused longing of a brown-robed, plain-sandaled nun in a village church, unflinching before the stare of a solitary Jew thrust at midnight into the crowd of her admirers. As soft slumber weaves its threads around you, you join a chorus of four droning, white-haired men behind an ornamented altar.

Awakening before noon, you listen to the messages left while you slept and hear the voice of an attaché in a distant Asiatic embassy struggling to inform you that the judge’s return has been delayed by a day. This time, too, the new possibilities waiting to take advantage of your solitude send a shiver of excitement down your spine.