A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

After that Michaela added another condition to her first: she wanted a small, modest wedding, with only members of the family present. And it was precisely this simple and natural condition, which I agreed with on principle, that gave rise to problems and complications. When I informed my parents of it, their spirits fell, and at first they sank into a grim silence. After a few days they both, each in their own way, began to voice protests about the restrictions imposed by Michaela. As the parents of an only child, they felt not only entitled but also obligated to hold a big wedding reception to which they could invite all their friends and acquaintances and reciprocate for all the similar invitations they themselves had received over the course of their lives. Furthermore, they felt not only a duty but also a desire to take advantage of my wedding to pressure their English relatives to visit Israel at last. I could not help feeling the justice of their arguments, and I asked Michaela to reconsider, but she suddenly revealed an unexpected streak of stubbornness in a nature that up to now had appeared so free and easy in its Buddhist equanimity. A fierce, almost violent stubbornness. She refused to withdraw her opposition to a big wedding. Weddings in big rented halls revolted her, and she stayed away from the weddings of her best friends if they were held in such places. She didn’t really like going to the quiet, pleasant weddings at Ein Zohar either, because there were always too many people, and she had only gone to Eyal and Hadas’s wedding because she wanted to meet me after hearing about the trip to India from Einat. After I realized that I couldn’t budge her, I tried to convince my parents to be content with a large family party, perhaps at the home of one of our wealthier relatives in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. But my parents were offended by this suggestion and showed no readiness to compromise. I began to act as a kind of messenger between them and Michaela, and I would go and eat supper at the café where she worked before my night shifts, simply to try to persuade her to change her mind. Then my parents asked my permission to try to persuade Michaela themselves, and they traveled down to Tel Aviv to meet her without me especially for this purpose. But she refused to be persuaded, as if all her doubts about the marriage were now focused on the question of whether the wedding would be a big affair or a family occasion. At one point in the discussion she even spoke rudely to my parents, and then burst into tears. My parents were alarmed and gave in. My heart ached to see their misery. They were modest people, not at all ostentatious, and if they were fighting for a big wedding it was only in order to both share and reciprocate the many invitations to family affairs they had received. Even though they knew that most of our English relations would not come, they still wanted to let them know that here in Israel they hadn’t been forgotten, and at the same time to announce in public that the lengthy bachelorhood of their only son had come to an end. But Michaela’s tears upset me too, since she was not at all an emotional type, and if she had burst into tears in front of my parents it meant that something else was troubling her. Perhaps she was having second thoughts about the hasty wedding she suddenly found herself in the middle of, which in the depths of her heart she sensed had hidden, ulterior motives that she could not identify. The mysteriousness surrounding my behavior made me more attractive to her, but it had also begun to confuse her. In spite of her inner freedom and fatalistic view of life, her serenity and confidence were showing cracks. I went and bought a book about Indian religion and philosophy and began to read it, hoping to come closer to her way of thinking and compensate her for my lack of love.

In the meantime my parents’ pleas had an effect, and two days after their meeting she called them on her own initiative and said that she would agree to expand the scope of the wedding, which from now on was defined as “medium-sized,” on condition that she herself approved of the reception hall. Since the hall had to be medium-sized, the selection was not particularly wide, and from the uninspiring possibilities available, Michaela, who was becoming more alienated from me with each passing day, chose a smallish place in an old hotel in the middle of downtown Jerusalem. The entrance to the hotel was ugly, but the hall itself was attractive and well cared for, full of lush green plants, and the hotel owners boasted of their excellent catering. After Michaela had given her approval, we rode back to Tel Aviv on the motorcycle, stopping as usual at our favorite diner near the airport. She was tense, a little sad; this time she immediately removed her helmet, without flirting with her reflection in the big mirror. Even though I didn’t know that she had received the results of her pregnancy test two days before, I could feel her new tension, which came not only from the depressing appearance of the hotel but also from her decision to conceal the fact of her pregnancy from me so that we would be free to cancel the wedding at the last minute if for any reason we chose to do so. Maybe this was what she was hoping for in her unconscious mind, whose workings I tried to follow with interest and concern, feeling that I was conducting my own silent, separate dialogue with it.

The invitations were finally printed, with English facing the Hebrew, and my parents hurried to send a batch of them off to England, to give the family there time to prepare for the trip. Then we sat down to draw up a list of the local guests. My parents kept strictly to their promise to Michaela, careful not to exceed the limits of a medium-sized wedding. I noticed that my mother’s attitude to Michaela had changed as a result of her violent outburst and sudden tears in the Tel Aviv café; she was beginning to treat her with a mixture of apprehension and pity. The problem, of course, was who to exclude from the wedding, and who to invite on the assumption that they would not come. My father prepared three lists of possible guests. First, they asked me for the names of people I thought were “essential.” I wrote down Eyal and Hadas, Eyal’s mother, Amnon without his parents, two good friends from my army days, and two more from medical school. I added Dr. Nakash and his wife, whom I had never met, hesitated for a moment over Hishin and decided to leave him out, and confidently added Lazar and his wife, and of course Einat, thanks to whose illness I had met Michaela. My mother smiled sourly. “It’s funny that we’re not allowed to invite good neighbors, people we’ve been living next door to for so many years, while two total strangers like the Lazars will suddenly be our guests.” “Not yours,” I said, reacting sharply, “mine. Why not? I have my own reasons for inviting them. But don’t worry, they won’t come.” “Yes they will,” said my mother, confusing my father, who was poised to put them down on the list of guests who wouldn’t attend. In my heart of hearts I knew that my mother was right. Lazar’s wife wouldn’t forgo the chance of seeing me standing under the chuppah, not only because of the desire she might feel for me but also because she knew that I was marrying for her sake too.

And if she didn’t know, I reflected, I would have to let her know. With this aim in view, I would have to find a way deliver the invitation to her in person. About the wedding itself she must have heard from Einat, with whom Michaela was still in touch and whom she had even invited to a party to mark the end of her single state. I was a little excited at the idea of meeting Einat again, since I had not seen her since our return from India. “At least you had no trouble finding the apartment,” I said when I greeted her at the door and gave her a little hug. She smiled in embarrassment and blushed. Could she have seen me as something more than her physician during the time we spent together in India? She had put on a little weight, and the signs of the hepatitis had vanished, together with all traces of the Indian suntan, which Michaela still had. Now she looked healthy and very cute. She was wearing wide-bottomed black trousers and a white silk blouse with a richly embroidered little red bolero over it. Green earrings, the color of her eyes, dangled from her ears. She was shy, but also a little amused at being in her grandmother’s apartment, now taken over by strangers. When she was a schoolgirl, she said, she had often come here straight from school to have lunch with her grandmother and do her homework, and sometimes she had stayed over, sleeping on the couch in the living room. “Were you comfortable sleeping all night on that narrow couch?” I asked. “Why narrow?” said Einat in surprise. “It only takes a minute to convert it into a big bed.” The fact that the plain old couch could easily be turned into a large bed had escaped my notice, and if not for Einat I might never have noticed it. Despite Michaela’s protests, I moved the chairs and the coffee table aside, and Einat showed me the hidden lever that raised the couch and converted it into a large, comfortable bed, with an old sheet still spread over it and the long-forgotten summer pajamas of the child Einat. “You see, it’s a good thing you came,” I said to her affectionately. “You discovered your pajamas and we discovered an extra bed. When your mother handed over the apartment to me, she forgot to show me the mysteries of the magic sofa.”