A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Strange fantasies?” Rivlin felt a chill. “What were they?”

“How would I know? Maybe my father was thinking of the plans for expansion that Ofer submitted. Or of his political opinions. He had these ideas that you couldn’t get him to stop talking about. He was very attached to my father from the start. He wanted to make an impression on him. And he was very involved in the hotel. Everything about it interested him. He had his ideas about the management, about the menu in the kitchen, about the arrangement of the rooms. Maybe that’s why my father thought he fantasized — was maybe even out of touch with reality. So when Galya said that she wanted to break up with him, my father’s reaction was, in that case, better sooner than later….”

“Out of touch with reality?” Rivlin teetered between shock and pain. “How?”

“Never mind. Those are just words. Why get upset?”

“There’s no such thing as ‘just.’ I want to know what your father meant. If you knew how his mind worked, then now is the time to tell me. It frightens me to hear Ofer accused of such a thing.”

“No one is accusing anyone. Why do you pick on every word as though you were in court? The Mr. Hendel you knew was a polite, good-natured, smiling hotel owner, a very proper man. But the father I knew was someone who took off his jacket and yanked down his tie and could be depressed or nervous or overbearing toward those who were close to him. Even I, who was his right hand, was often hurt…. So what does it matter what he did or didn’t say about Ofer?”

Rivlin was not reassured. Anxiously he studied the bony face — which, in the dim lounge, was increasingly coming to resemble the dead man’s. For some reason he thought of the old revolver in its drawer in the Jewish Agency building in Paris. And even if Ofer had “fantasized” something “out of touch with reality,” couldn’t this have been stopped in time? Mustn’t there have been some clue or lead in the young couple’s silence he could have used to persuade Hendel to join him in trying to delay the divorce?

Now it was too late. Hendel was gone, and Ofer and Galya had gone their separate ways without breaking their silence. Hagit was right. He was and continued to be a coward. Yet it wasn’t people or ideas he was afraid of. It was the woman who kept warning him to stay within bounds. For bounds could be crossed and new territories entered without forsaking one’s love: he had learned this from a tactful but resolute Arab driver with coal black eyes. You could even abscond to a strange bed and rise in the morning wiser and richer.

He glanced at his watch. Either the dim light or the lack of his glasses kept him from making out the hands.

“What time do you have?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“My wife broke my glasses yesterday. I haven’t been able to read or write for a whole day. Just talk.”

“Isn’t that enjoyable?”

“It depends whom I’m talking with.”

“Even with me.”

“With you it’s painful.”

“You brought the pain with you. Don’t blame me for it.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted softly. “But you’ve made it worse.”

She regarded him sympathetically, then asked, with a flush:

“But how did she break them? She doesn’t strike me as the type who goes around breaking things.”

“Not unless she wants to.”

Now it was his turn to blush. He snorted to play down the remark. But the proprietress nodded, grateful for the shared intimacy. Her long, shapely fingers searched for bits of uneaten crab. She did not use the brass implement, but cracked them with her teeth, sucking the hidden meat. Her whiskey-colored eyes clouded.

“You’ll still need a place to sleep tonight. Don’t think that will be easy at this time of year.”

“I have a place. My old professor at the university has a room for me. It’s just that I have to share it with a colleague who came from Haifa for a lecture. I’m not dying to lie next to him and wake up in his dreams.”

From the dining room came the strains of a pilgrim hymn, blessing the Lord for the meal. Rivlin tried making out the words.

“I can save you the trouble.” Tehila smiled. “I know all their hymns by heart. It’s the twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want.’ Very appropriate for wealthy American Christians.”

Fu’ad entered the lounge cautiously. He emptied the last of the wine bottle into the two glasses and cleared the table with a suppressed grin, adding the decimated crab shell from Tehila’s plate to the nearly intact half on Rivlin’s.

“ Haruf, ya Brofesor, kan ahsan lak…. ” *

“ F’il mara ’l-jay. Lazim adir bali aktar….” †

“What did you two say?”

“It’s time, Tehila, that you learned some Arabic,” the maître d’ said.

She waved a dismissive hand, took out a cigarette, and waited for him to light it.

“What for? Russian is more practical.”

“Russian?”

“In a few years, when Russia is back on its feet, we’ll get pilgrims from there too. Why not? I once read that in the days of the czar, Russian pilgrims were so devoted that they crawled all the way to Jerusalem.”

Fu’ad laughed. “They could never have afforded your prices.”

Her eyes glittered.

“You know very well, Fu’ad, that I could make even a crawling pilgrim pay up.”

Fu’ad nodded and reported a problem with some rooms on the second floor. Should he tell the front desk that the proprietress was in the lounge?

“No,” Tehila said. “I’m sick tonight. I only got out of bed so as not to hurt the professor’s feelings.”

“But they’re hurt anyway. We haven’t found him a place to sleep.”

“He knows there’s nothing we can do about it.”

With a snakelike movement, almost losing the dishes on his arm, the maître d’ bent to whisper to the proprietress.

“Down there?” She grinned at the thought. “You can’t be serious.”

“About what?” Rivlin asked.

“Never mind. It was just a thought.”

“I’ve already told you there are no ‘justs.’ That’s what my wife says. Every ‘just’ has something behind it.”

“Fu’ad suggested putting you up in an impossible place.”

“What’s impossible about it?”

“It’s not a real room, just an office. There’s a bed there, which our accountant used to sleep on, but I wouldn’t feel right about putting you in it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s down in the basement. It’s clean and well aired, but it’s still a basement.”

“So it’s a basement.” Rivlin jumped at the idea. “That’s fine. I prefer it to taking a taxi to my old professor’s and sitting up half the night listening to him run down other scholars. What’s wrong with a basement?”

“Nothing… it’s just that…”

The visitor burst into laughter.

“You know, my mother used to call your hotel ‘The Little Paradise.’ If your basement gets its air from Paradise, that’s good enough for me.”

23.

TEHILA, DESPITE HER real or imaginary illness, took him down to the basement herself. A small door at the rear of the kitchen, which was now hectically filling up with cleared dishes, led to a concrete staircase that descended to a narrow corridor. A bucket of congealed plaster, a dusty girl’s bicycle, and an ancient tire leaned against the wall. Tehila, who clearly knew her way, found the light switch in the dark at once. A yellowish glare fell on a row of padlocked closets. He was looking, she told him, at the hotel’s archives. The “accountant’s room,” in which he would sleep if he had not changed his mind, was farther down the corridor.

But why change his mind about a brief absconding that was less in retaliation for injury than in opposition to love’s tyranny — his love for his wife and the love to which his son was chained? Here, at least, he thought, following Tehila’s swift, sure steps, is a woman who needs no protector.