A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“It simply can’t be that you’re unable to throw out a single piece of paper,” he grumbled.

“But it can be,” Hagit said, with a doleful smile. “And don’t forget. You’re here to make order, not to destroy.”

“True order demands the courage to destroy,” he replied, as though it were his credo. If she was going to haggle with him over every absurd item, they might as well forget about it now.

“But you have to promise to show me what you’re throwing out…”

Having no intention of complying with her request, which would take more time than he had the patience to spend, he murmured a vague answer. He was, after all, not only a historian who understood something about documents, but also a loving and sympathetic husband who trusted himself to decide what his wife had accumulated unnecessarily.

He began by carefully collecting all her trial files and arranging them on a separate shelf. Then he pulled out the top drawer, dumped its contents on the cleared desk, gave its empty bottom a hearty thump to rid it of cobwebs and dust, slipped it noisily back into place, pushed the chair back, and invited his wife to have a seat, while planting an encouraging kiss on her neck. Positioning himself between her and the mountain of papers, he seized on an old protocol of an inconsequential meeting and handed it to her for consideration. No sooner had she taken off her distance glasses to read it than he quickly gathered an armful of commercial brochures, invitations to already-held conferences, professional newsletters from the Judges Guild, old updates of income-tax regulations, weekly court bulletins, and pointless communiqués from the police — all of which, crumpled and compacted, were made to vanish into a wastepaper basket hidden beneath the desk.

“What did you just throw out? Show me!”

“Nothing of value. Perfectly useless drivel that you’ve never read and never will.”

“I want to see it.”

He sighed and pulled a brochure from the basket. “You tell me,” he said scornfully. “Do you need this? Are you in the market for a printer?”

She took the brightly colored advertisement, turned it wonderingly around, and let it drop into his clutches without a word.

It did not take long to eliminate, to his considerable joy and satisfaction, most of the papers on her desk. Only a few were returned to the drawer. Hagit, whose helpless aversion to systematic housecleaning forced her to cooperate, found herself the object of a tender love that gradually changed to an ancient desire. Her naked eyes, staring bewilderedly at the documents that he handed her to distract her from the demolition taking place beneath her nose, reminded him of the distant days when he had fallen in love with a young soldier and future law student and introduced her to his mentor in Jerusalem as a useful appendix to his doctorate. And so, before proceeding to the next drawer, he dropped uncontrollably to his knees, showered her with kisses and caresses, and whispered soft endearments while carefully licking her little earlobe. The thought of seducing his wife here in this room, in which so many anxious litigants had awaited her pronouncements, appealed to him greatly.

His kisses grew more expert and precise. Hagit’s eyes shut. She gave her impassioned husband a limp but warm embrace, which encouraged him to press his campaign by opening several buttons on her blouse. All at once, however, he was pushed sharply away with his own words:

“Are you crazy? Now ?”

“Why not?” The idea excited him. “The building is locked, and I have the key. Just think of the good time you’ll have tomorrow, surrounded by all those lawyers, thinking of the good time you had today….”

13.

BUT GOOD TIMES that came from crossing boundaries and mixing worlds were not his wife’s cup of tea, quite apart from the fact that ever since she’d returned from her judicial junket a minority of one, her self-confidence and good nature were gone. He was thus compelled to pull out the next drawer and dump its contents too on the desk, where they were revealed to consist largely of legal circulars and official announcements. It was hopeless to conduct a separate argument about each. The trick was to convince her, in a gentle appeal to reason, that each document had its neatly catalogued double in the court library across the street. And since there was no need of it there either, why not donate the entire collection to the law library of the university for the greater enlightenment of its students?

Hagit thought it over and agreed. She even found a large plastic bag into which to put everything.

They were down to the third drawer. Out of its dense maelstrom innocently fell the invitation to Granot’s exhibition.

“Tell me,” Rivlin sighed, shredding the invitation into little pieces, “what will you do when I die?”

“What?”

“Who will subdue the chaos for you then?”

To his surprise, his death announcements no longer alarmed her.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find ourselves another husband.”

“But suppose he’s not as talented and efficient as this one.”

“We’ll train him. Never fear.”

He smiled, taken aback by her fighting mood yet determined to maintain his posthumous reputation.

“And if your new husband protests, quite rightly, that it isn’t his job, what will you do then? Ask your typist?”

“I told you. It’s not her job either.”

“Then what? You’ll be lost.”

“Why?” She refused to accept the bitter fate foreseen for her. “I can change. What makes you think I can’t arrange my own desk? I only let you do it because I know how much you enjoy ordering me around.”

“ I enjoy ordering you around?” He laughed at the affront. “Really? What, exactly, do you think I get out of it? And who could order you around, even if he wanted to?”

His enthusiasm for the task waning, he hurried to the adjacent courtroom to look for another basket before their half-joking, half — deadly serious exchange could make him despair of the remaining papers on her desk.

He had always liked passing through the narrow archway that led from a corner of her office into the dark, windowless interior of the courtroom — which, though not large, had a solemn and dignified air. Going straight to the bench, which rose massively above the rest of the cool, dimly lit room, he surveyed from the heights of justice the dock, the witness stand, and the counsels’ table while deliberating in the Sabbath silence what verdict to hand down. He groped for the newly installed alarm button at his feet. It was there, shiny and ready for use. He fingered it before picking up the old wastepaper basket that stood beside it.

“How do you like it up there?”

She was standing by the witness stand, her hair mussed, a bit childish-looking from his vantage point on high.

“There’s definitely something appealing about being able to look down on everyone.”

“But only if you’re prepared to give them your undivided attention. That’s something you’re incapable of.”

“It depends on who it is.”

“Anyone. Everyone.”

“I’d give my attention to any person who was getting at the real truth, not just at some dry legal definition of it. I have endless patience for the truth. That’s why I can’t stand being stranded halfway toward it, either in my research or in my life.”

“Stranded how?”

“I’m thinking of Ofer.”

“Why on earth Ofer?”

“I just am. He’s only an example. We’re stuck with no understanding of what happened…”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not we understand. As long as he does.”

“But he doesn’t. That’s what you can’t accept. You’d rather delude yourself. If Ofer understood why his marriage fell apart, he’d be free. It’s that which gives him no peace. I’m worried about him, not myself. But who knows? Maybe now something will change…”