A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“I’ll catch your cold,” he joked, taking his time about putting the crabmeat in his mouth. He could only marvel at how fast and how far his absconding was going.

“I already gave it to you,” she said, her naughty eyes the same color as her deceased father’s, “when I kissed you. Assuming, that is, that I ever give anything to anyone. But don’t be a scaredy-cat. Eat! The marvelous meat in the legs of this crab comes courtesy of an airplane from Crete. Our hotel owes no small share of its astonishing success in recent years to the reputation of its cuisine. Our meals are as much part of the pilgrim experience as a visit to the Holy Sepulchre or a baptism in the Jordan. It all started with my father’s revolution five years ago, when he threw out those parasitical inspectors from the Rabbinate and did away with the kosher kitchen. He knew he was risking his Jewish clientele, but he didn’t think he could count on it anyway. He preferred to gamble on quiet, conservative Baptists from Georgia and Mormons from utah who would visit the Holy Land come hell or high water. Ofer was still married to Galya then. It’s a pity he didn’t stay with us. He could have been a partner in all this….”

Rivlin flared. “What do you mean, it’s a pity? It was you who drove him out.”

“We?” The whiskey smiled in her eyes. “What are you talking about? Who knew anything about it?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Nothing.”

“A tight, loving family like yours?”

“We were. But not here. Believe me, to this day I don’t know what made Galya break up her marriage. She may have been in the eye of the storm, but to us she was a closed book. Whenever my mother or I tried talking about it or suggested a reconciliation, she just grew hostile. She acted like a stranger. And when, as her big sister, I made a last attempt to ask her to reconsider leaving a man she had loved so much, she lost her temper and said she wasn’t made for love that wanted to creep under your skin. That’s all I know. There was no stopping her. Maybe she thought finding a better man than Ofer would be no problem with her good looks.”

“Did she?”

“Find a better man? I don’t know. It’s hard to compare two such different types. Bo’az is Ofer’s opposite. It’s as though Galya wanted, not only a new husband, but one who would cancel out the old one.”

“Cancel Ofer out? How?” His voice trembled with his eagerness to know. “I only met him for a few minutes.”

“Bo’az is a closed, almost secretive person. He’s nice, and he’s thoughtful, but he’s not made for intimate relationships. It isn’t easy to get close to him. I’m not the right person to ask about him, because I preferred Ofer’s openness and emotion. You remind me of Ofer. I liked being with him, even if he sometimes ran off at the mouth about whatever happened to be on his mind. I don’t know what he’s doing today. I do know, looking back, that his idea of expanding by building up rather than out into the garden was a good one. After he left, there was no one to fight for it.”

“But why do you keep saying he left?” Rivlin protested. “You know he didn’t. He was made to leave.”

“Fine. After he was made to leave. Look, I don’t really know what happened.”

“Did your father?”

“No. I’m sure of that. At the bereavement, during one of those long, sleepless nights when we sat talking about him, Galya cried and said he had been very noble. My mother, you know, was against the divorce. She thought it was wrong to hurry. She wanted them to separate and give it time. But my father backed Galya all the way. He trusted her, as he always did. And he respected her too much to ask questions. He gave her complete freedom and was as generous as possible about paying the costs of the divorce.”

“Generous?”

“You know perfectly well — our accountant was upset about it — that Ofer received much more from my father than he, or you and your wife, put into their apartment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. It was my father’s right to do what he wanted with his money. You must have noticed that he loved and always listened to Galya more than he did to me or my brother. That’s the truth. Believe me, though, I never resented it. It was enough for me to be by my father’s side. No one knew better than I did every mood of his, every weakness and depression and foolish anxiety. When you work that closely with someone, it’s only natural to fight at times. I wasn’t like Galya, who worshiped him from a distance. So don’t lump us all together. We weren’t partners in the divorce. Far from it. Perhaps if you or your wife had shared what you knew with us, my mother and I — or at least I — might have encouraged Ofer to handle Galya differently….”

Rivlin emptied his wineglass with a gulp and pushed the crab revoltedly away.

“But what could we have shared? We were as much in the dark as you were. We still are.”

“You, too?”

“Absolutely. And if Ofer won’t talk about it to this day and neither will Galya, it must have been something bad. I can’t stop thinking about it. What terrible thing could he have done? If he’s punishing himself by keeping silent, that only prevents him from getting over it. Or was he himself the victim of an injustice he still hasn’t recovered from?”

“But what is it you want now?”

“Only to know. I have to know. That’s how I am. I need to know the truth even if it’s useless. It’s my nature. It’s what motivates any historian — otherwise he’s in the wrong profession. This has been haunting me for the past five years. And the strange thing is that your father’s death, rather than putting an end to it, has made it worse than ever. Just look at how I keep coming back.”

“In that case,” she laughed, “I feel better. At least you weren’t looking for a room.”

“That was only a pretext. I could have found a room somewhere else.”

“And yet it was all so long ago. You’re a stubborn man.”

“Your sister has remarried. She’s going to have a baby. But Ofer is still stuck. Even then, five years ago, something told me the separation would go badly for him. She meant too much to him. I knew he wouldn’t give her up so easily. I just never imagined it would take so long. That’s why I…”

“You what?”

“I tried talking it over with your father on the phone, without telling even my wife. I hoped that the two of us could have a restraining influence. And although you say — and I’d like to believe you — that he knew nothing, which is what he told me too, I must say I was offended by his tone. There was something cold about it. All his friendliness and good nature were gone. He sounded hard, as if he wanted to get rid of me. That’s why I never came to see you afterward.”

“But what did you want him to do?”

“At least to feel sorry. To be as anguished as I was that a marriage that seemed so happy was over in a year. That’s all I asked of him: not to accept it so easily.”

“He accepted it because he trusted Galya. That’s why he was generous with Ofer.”

“Yes, he was. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t like his generosity either. What made him so ready to give Ofer more than he deserved? Could it have been that Ofer knew something and was being paid off?”

“What a strange thought! My father wasn’t generous because he was afraid of Ofer. He wanted Galya to be able do what she thought best for herself. He didn’t want to give Ofer any excuse to withhold his consent. Trust me. I knew my father well. Better even than my mother did. I knew how his mind worked. We were together on a daily basis. It was an intensive relationship. Had he known anything, sooner or later he would have dropped some hint. Listen. Look at me. I’m a confirmed single woman. I have no family apart from the one I was born in. I don’t even have many friends. I was with my father all the time. I swear to you, whenever Ofer’s name came up, he had only good things to say about him. ‘Ofer was a nice, talented boy,’ he’d say. ‘The only problem with him was those strange fantasies…. ’”