A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

After falling and breaking her pelvis and being confined to a wheelchair, however, his mother had no longer had any choice. Rivlin remembered how stirred he had felt when her ambulance from Jerusalem arrived at the nursing home and he helped an orderly wheel her on a gurney to her new room and put her in her bed. At last I have her where I want her, he had thought, opening her suitcase and hanging up her clothes. No more running to Jerusalem. Now I can take proper care of her.

Yet even from her wheelchair his mother had fought to maintain her autonomy. “You can take care of me all you want,” she adjured him. “Just don’t boss me around. I’ll make my own decisions.” Half-paralyzed, she had launched, as his sister had predicted she would, a desperate and calculated campaign of terror that twice forced him to move her to another home. At first, certain he was squandering her money, she had demanded a receipt for every expenditure. Then she had insisted that he schedule his visits in advance, as she did not want him coming when she was busy. “Busy with what?” Rivlin had asked with an incredulous smirk that she wiped from his face at once. “You know nothing about such things,” she had retorted. “You never have known anything about them. And you don’t have to know anything about them. Just tell me in advance when you’re coming.”

All through her years in Jerusalem, she had complained about how seldom he visited her. Now his visits annoyed her, as if she feared he would take advantage of her condition to gain control of her affairs. Sometimes, on his way home from the university after teaching a last class, he would drive to the nursing home and find her drowsing in her wheelchair under a leafy carob tree in the garden, aloof from the other residents, for whom she had little patience. Treading warily on the rotting carob pods, he approached her slumped form with its thin, reddish braid of hair, while thinking of the Russian student in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shivering with terror and excitement as he stared at the neck of the old moneylender who was fumbling in the Saint Petersburg twilight with his pretended surety, intricately wrapped by him to engage her as he fell on her with an ax. With a shudder, he’d reach out a gentle hand to touch his mother. Never surprised by him, she would turn around and complain, “How many times have I told you to let me know before you come?”

“Believe me, Professor Rivlin,” a veteran social worker had said to him after his mother’s fights with the staff had forced them to ask for her transfer, “she’s an incredible woman. I’ve never seen anyone like her. How did you manage to come out normal?” “Can’t you see that I didn’t?” he answered, staring at the ground.

She didn’t last long in her new place, either. The loss of her Jerusalem observation post gave her no peace, and she gave none to anyone around her, so that, although her condition remained stable during the last months of her life, she had to be shifted from place to place. Finding her bed empty, he would be told by a nurse, in response to his distraught query, that the cleverly programmed computer, having revealed that morning that she had overstayed her quota of days, had spotted an available bed elsewhere and even ordered an ambulance to take her there. It was this computer, which knew more than he did about his mother’s illnesses, rights, and obligations, that whisked her from hospital to hospital with the greatest of ease during the last weeks of her life. Rivlin, who remembered the endless forms he had been made to fill out for each little medical test given his father, now found the health services of the Jewish state remarkably user-friendly.

And yet not even the steady diminution of his mother’s faculties, which grew fewer with each new bed, nor the competent assistance, like an energetic younger brother’s, of the ambulance-chasing, bill-paying computer, could make her company more bearable. Feeling as poorly compensated for her lost observation post by the large windows of the hospitals as by the small ones of the nursing homes, she groused about everything — most of all about her son. Three hours before breathing her last, she was still threatening to dispossess him if he did not take her back to Jerusalem.

He took her back — in a hearse. Hagit wanted to ask Ofer to come from Paris for the funeral: he had often inquired about his grandmother, with whom he seemed to have formed a secret bond in his weeks of living with her after leaving Galya. But Raya, Rivlin’s sister, perhaps fearing that a postponement might give the deceased a chance to come back to life, didn’t want to wait. Rivlin agreed with her. “Why make Ofer do all that traveling in midsemester?” he said. “Now that my mother is gone, we can go abroad with a clear conscience — and for more than a few days at a time. Let’s go to Europe after the unveiling. We’ll visit Ofer in Paris and tell him about everything.”

Indeed, from the minute they landed in Paris, their son wanted to know all about his grandmother. Nervously, he probed them to find out what she had told them about his separation. Rivlin was dumbfounded. “You mean she knew more than we do?” he asked. “You told her things you kept from us?” His dead mother, now entombed with his son’s secret, rose in his estimation.

“You still haven’t told me,” Ofer persisted. “It can’t be that she said nothing.”

“She told us we had to be more patient with you,” Hagit replied. She herself had long ago given up hope of finding out any more from him.

“Patient?” The Parisian, though surprised, seemed satisfied. Gradually, his nervousness wore off. Whereas he had cloaked himself in a heavy mantle of secrecy after his divorce, he was now eager to show his private Paris to his parents during the three days of their visit. He brought them to his cooking academy in Montparnasse, took them for a tour of its classrooms and big kitchens, and introduced them to the Jewish architects for whom he worked as an unpaid apprentice. Rivlin wasn’t sure he wanted to visit his son’s attic room. Who knew what state it might be in? But Ofer insisted, and the room, they were happy to see, was pleasant and not at all untidy.

One evening they went to a concert in a church. Before it, Ofer took them to the Jewish Agency building, where he was being spelled that night by an alternate — a middle-aged former Israeli sculptor who made his wooden statues on the job. While Ofer escorted his mother upstairs to show her the grand old building, Rivlin turned to the burly wood-carver, who was burnishing the large, dark breasts of a female creation. What, he asked, would he do in case, God forbid, of a terrorist attack? The sculptor left the woman’s breasts, leaned down to open a drawer, and pointed at a heavy old revolver. Far from inspiring confidence, this only worried Rivlin more.

4.

ON HIS WAY to the airport the next day, Rivlin thought of Fu’ad’s remark, “You Jews are always coming and going. It will make you sick in the end.” Not that he himself was going anywhere. He was merely dispatching others and picking them up. Although he had wanted to make sure he arrived before Hagit cleared customs and looked for a taxi, he had been detained by a long phone call from Ephraim Akri, who wanted to discuss his plans for the department. At first Rivlin thought his junior colleague was genuinely interested in his advice. However, it didn’t take him long to realize that the shrewd Akri was merely asking him to approve decisions already made. It was his mode of operating. No wonder that, compared to the marathon sessions of the Rivlin era, the departmental meetings had grown short.

“No question about it, Ephraim,” Rivlin declared, needling his junior colleague, “you’re a true political animal. It’s a pity your talent is wasted on a small department like ours.”