A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Rivlin felt a sudden pang of longing for the deep wadi. Before the new owners could renovate that too, he exercised his right as a former tenant to stride to the terrace, step into the garden, and repossess, standing silently with his back to the women, the view of the ravine and the smooth, pink sea beyond, on which an illuminated ship glided regally.

“At least here it’s still beautiful…,” he murmured.

The wife took offense. “Here? As opposed to where?”

He ignored her and addressed the beautiful woman beside her. “Whenever my mother used to come from Jerusalem,” he reminisced, “she would sit where you are now and say: ‘Well, children, you’ve made yourselves a little Paradise, but what will you do when some wild beast comes charging out of it?’”

“You had a morbid mother,” the wife snickered. She seemed to have taken an inexplicable dislike to him, as if he had left something incriminating behind in her house.

“What’s morbid about it?” Undaunted, he spoke up for his mother. “If only you knew how many scorpions I killed here and how many snakes I chased behind that fence! And when all the dogs in the neighborhood begin to bark hysterically at ten at night in the middle of a heat wave, you can bet that your friendly neighbor, the wild boar at the bottom of the wadi, is out for a stroll….”

The unknown beauty, who had said nothing until now, brushed back a tousle of auburn hair from a swanlike neck and asked, with teasing curiosity,

“Snakes and scorpions aside, doesn’t looking at this panorama make you regret that you sold the place?”

“Regret what?” An intimate question from a gorgeous woman never failed to excite him. “At my age, you want to be closer to heaven than to earth. All the natural beauty in the world, even this wadi’s, can’t make up for lack of comfort. We’ve moved to a new fifth-floor duplex with an elevator and even a bit of a view. My only regret is not having sold this place for more money….”

“I should think that, at your age, your future lies more in the earth,” the wife said, pointing to a plot of ground behind the kitchen. Her hostility was so blatant that her embarrassed husband had to excuse it with some remark about gardening being good for the elderly.

“You call that a garden?” the former owner asked, gesturing indignantly at a lemon tree and two bushes he had planted beyond a small fence. “No, thank you. Just thinking of how I had to run around shutting five doors and ten windows each time we left the house for a few hours is enough to get over the garden, the sea, and all the rest of it.”

“What were you so afraid of?” the wife asked sarcastically. “Your mother’s imagination?”

He turned to look at her for the first time. “Imagination? After thirty years of living here, I can tell you how easy it is to break in at any hour of the day or night. Some burglar could be entering right now, even as we stand here peacefully talking….”

He irritably snatched the little package, whose return address told him it was destined for the garbage pail, and turned to go without another word. This made the husband feel so bad that he dragged the Orientalist to the bathroom and showed him that here, at least, everything had been left lovingly untouched. The floor, the sink, the faucets, the toilet seat, the biliously green-spotted tiles — nothing had changed.

3.

THE NEW DUPLEX, whose distance from the ground had not brought it appreciably closer to the sky, was burning every possible light. The young intelligence officer, who had arrived from deep in the mountains on a short leave, took after his mother: lights, in his opinion, were meant to be turned on and left on. Already in civilian clothes, he was showered, shaved, and combed, and off to a horror movie in Carmel Center. Distracted by something he knew he had forgotten, however, he went from room to room, trying to remember what it was, while politely asking his father to check whether he had run the washing machine correctly. Only after he was already out the door did it come to him. Someone had called from some embassy to say that the judge was returning from Vienna tomorrow night after all. She wanted to be picked up at the airport.

“Ima is coming tomorrow? Are you sure? Think!”

Tsakhi lapsed into meditative thought. “Yes,” he said after a while. “Tomorrow. I’m sure of it, Abba.”

And he was off.

Though glad to be getting back his warm-bodied and gentle-souled wife, Rivlin felt a twinge of disappointment at having his solitude cut short. As of tomorrow evening, he would again be living with his other half, who would hold him responsible for every word uttered, every sentence left unfinished, and not only every passing or hidden emotion not shared, but also every one not stated with precision. Sooner or later he would be obliged to confess his night out in the Palestinian Authority and to explain why an experienced, sober scholar like himself had to consign himself to the hands of his subject matter. And yet, if the returning traveler were not too weary, he might also test out his new theories on her nonacademic but perspicacious mind.

First, though, he would have to let Hagit tell him all she could about her trip. Besides listening to her complaints about the trying and tiresome time she had had, he would solicit from her the enjoyable moments, the little pleasures and unanticipated freedoms, experienced in the line of duty.

He was already counting the hours. The kiss that her smiling eyes would throw him as she came through Customs would more than compensate for the advantages of being alone. Tidying up the house for her, he picked up the young officer’s underpants from the bathroom floor, piled the dirty dishes, and systematically turned out lights, prodigally switched on even in his study. From the study window he was astonished to see leaning on the railing of the terrace across the street, not the ghost of his mother, but a heavyset man dressed in black, who watched with a satisfied look as a noisy garbage truck came up the street.

Was he a relation? A visitor? Rivlin had never seen another person on the terrace. Could the old woman have died during his day off among the Arabs, or moved to an old-age home, making the man the new owner or tenant? Since this man’s gaze, unlike her downward-directed one, also wandered up, Rivlin turned off the remaining lights and stood regarding him from the darkness. Yet now, slow and bulky, the ghost herself emerged from the apartment. She had put on makeup for the visitor and was now anxiously trying to catch the eye of a thin garbage collector running before his truck. He knew perfectly well, the garbage man did, that a gleefully tossed bag of refuse would sail down at him as soon as he raised his irritable eyes to the nagging old woman on the third floor.

The man by her side, though amused by her antics, rebuked her for them. But the ghost, loyal to the memory of Rivlin’s mother, whose earthly plenipotentiary she was, did not care what anyone thought of her. Switching on a fluorescent light on the terrace, she spread the little table there with a cloth, a malevolent smile on her apparitional face.

Rivlin wondered who her visitor could be. A son? A nephew? Or just some passerby? At this time of the evening her shutters were usually closed, with not a ray of light shining through them. Now, on the brightly lit terrace, the two of them sat down to play a game of cards. The Orientalist, who had never in his life played anything with his mother, watched with an astonished envy.

After the death of his father, Rivlin had tried to get his mother to move to Haifa. He did not want to travel back and forth to Jerusalem anymore, as he had done during his father’s long illness. But his mother refused to budge. She would not leave her apartment in the once fashionable triangle between King George, Ben-Yehuda, and Hillel Streets in order to move from the busy capital to the distant provinces in which her son and his family lived — not when she had seen from her kitchen window, scant days before the establishment of the State of Israel, two British soldiers killed and left to wallow in their blood. And after the UN partition Resolution, three bombs had gone off on her street, damaging the walls of her apartment — to say nothing of what had happened during Israel’s War of Independence, when an artillery shell had landed on the stairs while the besieged tenants huddled in the shelter. How could she be asked to forsake so strategically located a place, especially when it also looked out on the offices of the Histadrut, the national trade union, in which — or so she imagined — momentous decisions were made on a daily basis? Nothing could make her give up such an observation post for the dubious satisfaction of staring at a mountain or the sea.