The Liberated Bride (3 page)

H
IS DESIRE, HE CONCLUDED
, even though the next day's chores were tediously waiting for him in a long line, would pass muster. He reached out, took the remote control from his wife's hands, and muted the TV. The pictures remained on the screen.

“Not now,” Hagit said. “You won't enjoy it either. Don't force yourself. Let's wait until morning. You know what happens when I'm not in the mood.”

“You will be,” he promised, as if there were a switch he could press for that, too. Squirming free of him, however, she demurred. He couldn't tell if her resistance came solely from fatigue or also from something more ancient.

“In the end you'll leave me all alone.”

“No, I won't.” The stirring in his loins firmed his resolution. “Don't worry. I won't come without you.” He switched off the overhead light, leaving only the reading lamp.

“Then talk to me!” she protested, with an inner anger that made her tense when he embraced her. “Say something! We're not animals.
You know how hard your silences are for me. You never have time for a loving or caring word.”

And again there was no telling whether she was pleading with him to overcome her resistance or—already cradled by an exhaustion stronger than his arms—looking to fend him off. But he would not take no for an answer. Perhaps it was the sobbing grace notes of the music. Or else the lamb had been in heat, or he was haunted by the image of his attractive former student Afifa, now puffing on a narghile with Samaher's healthy old grandmother. He was not about to back down. As excessive as declarations of love seemed when he, too, wanted only to sink calmly into sleep, he managed to dredge a few sincere ones from his depths.

Hagit listened with eyes shut, a smile playing over her lips. She took words seriously. They counted with her even more in the bedroom than in the courtroom. Spreading heavy arms, she invited him to rise from his crouch by the bed and join her face to face. She kissed his forehead and eyes. Yet her kisses were lukewarm. Though there was a will, the way to her heart was blocked.

“What's wrong?” he asked, irritated.

“Nothing. I told you. I'm dead tired. Why insist on it? Did someone turn you on at the wedding?”

“How could you say such a thing?”

“I don't know. Forget it. You smell funny.”

“I do? What are you talking about?”

“Don't take it personally. Something must have rubbed off on you in the village. Some strange perfume. Did you touch anything? Maybe it was the soap you used. It's nothing. Just wash your face. It's not a good smell. Perhaps we should both shower. We'll feel better if we do. You go first. We're both sweaty. It's been a long, sweaty day. We'll wake up fresh in the morning and have time for everything.”

F
INIS
. E
VEN INTELLECTUALLY
, the life had gone out of his lust. He stepped into the shower, thoroughly soaping his face and private parts. Unsure the smell was gone, he embraced his wife when their
naked bodies collided outside the bathroom, menacingly offering her his forehead to smell. She burst into laughter and hugged him back, her marvelous breasts pressed against him. They would make love in the morning, she promised, kissing the proffered brow. It was a promise, he knew, backed by nothing. Who knew what the morning would bring? Things could go wrong even in their dreams.

And in fact the approach of her beloved sister, though still oceans away, roused Hagit from bed at dawn to vacuum the house, scrub and scour the windows and mirrors, refill the dishwasher repeatedly with dishes that had already been washed, and stoke the washing machine with clean towels and sheets. As a crowning touch, she made a bed fit for a princess, with starched, scented sheets, light, fluffy blankets, and brand-new eiderdown pillows—all in unspoken competition with the crisp and fragrant luxuriance that, carefully arranged by her sister, always awaited her on her visits to America.

Rivlin, whose wife was usually happy to let him and the cleaning woman manage the house, while she relaxed amid her dresses and fruit pits after a hard day in court, listened to her instructions without protest. He knew how much her sister's rare visits meant to Hagit. Like an old drill sergeant ordered about by a new officer, he helped hang another round of laundry while moving his belongings from his study. Although his sister-in-law would only be staying with them for ten days, this meant emptying all three drawers of his desk, clearing his books from a shelf, and transferring his computer to his small office at the university. He was actually fond of Hagit's sister and wouldn't have wanted her to be blamed for impeding his work, which had gone slowly since the move to the duplex.

The morning passed quickly. Soon the judge would don her black robe and join her colleagues waiting in the wings of the courtroom for the crier to announce them. Yet by working efficiently, he and Hagit had managed to accomplish more in two hours than the cleaning woman did in a day. The floors were spotless. The windows and mirrors gleamed. The guest room, its couch opened into a sumptuous bed, looked airy and inviting. Flowers, cakes, and other good things would arrive with the judge, bought on her way home from court. She would not accompany her husband to the airport. The trial was a
long and secretive one, held behind closed doors, and there was no chance of an early recess.

T
HE UPSHOT WAS
that he had to start the second car for her—the little old model she wasn't used to driving—and once again explain the dashboard, the meaning of whose clocks and gauges she kept forgetting. Fortunately, Hagit was a relaxed but careful driver, which was the only reason she ever arrived anywhere in one piece. Nor was she in any hurry to depart now, even though she was late. First she had two requests of him. One was direct: as soon as her sister passed through customs, she wanted to be informed. The other was more complicated. Could he please, before leaving for the university, launder the curtain in his study? Only now had she noticed how filthy it was.

“What do you mean, filthy?”

“Filthy,” she said gently, “really filthy. You, my dear, never notice such things.”

“Suppose I don't. This is where I draw the line. I'm not laundering any curtains. The room is for your sister, not for some dowager queen.”

“Dowager queen?” The expression struck her as oddly belligerent. What did queens have to do with her sister? It was his study. When he moved back into it in ten days' time, he'd appreciate a clean curtain too.

He didn't answer. This was always the best tactic to keep her from trying to change his mind. He wished she'd leave already. If you had made love to me yesterday, he whispered to himself, I might have laundered that curtain for you now. His silence was met with a hostile look. Parting from him, even for short periods, was always unwelcome to Hagit. Now, this morning of all times, a long court session was preventing her from going with him to the airport, which was one of her favorite places.

“What are you waiting for? You have to be in court.”

“The court won't convict you for my lateness,” she said with a smile, sure of her ability to disarm him with a deft remark. He said
nothing. Changing the subject, she asked what he had thought of the Arab wedding.

“It was all right.”

“It was more than all right.” His brusqueness annoyed her. “It was marvelous. I had a wonderful time. You didn't seem to be suffering either. You must really think very little of the Arabs if their weddings don't make you envious.”

He flared at that. “What are you talking about? What does envy have to do with it? Do you think I'm against people getting married?” It was a matter of memory, not envy. It pained him to be reminded. Of all that ruin and loss. Of what had been done to his son without justification. Why couldn't she understand that?

She let him talk. Late for a trial that couldn't start without her, she switched off the motor and said, not for the first time, “It's time you put all that behind you. It's been five years. How long can you go on feeling loss? Ofer was no innocent himself.” Why brood when there was nothing to be done about it? She sometimes thought he was projecting onto their son feelings that had to do with other things.

“What things?”

“Your own self.”

His own self? What did she mean by that?

“Not now,” she said, restarting the motor. “We'll talk about it some other time. Just be nice to my sister. You know how sensitive she is.”

“I'm always nice to her.”

“Then be nicer than always.”

The little car drove off. He knew it would brake immediately, however, for her to beckon to him and ask anxiously, as if she had never done it before, “Do you love me?”

A wave of love passed over him in spite of himself. Loath to send her off to the waiting courtroom with a clean conscience, he stared at the ground, weighing the question carefully before answering with a barely perceptible nod.

“How much?” she demanded, as though buying a kilo of fruit.

“A lot,” he admitted honestly. Softly he added:

“More than you deserve.”

The cross-examination wasn't over. “Why?”

He didn't know whether she was being coy or asking the most important question of her life.

“Tell me! Why do you love me so much?”

This was already too much. He laughed, thumped the roof of the little car, and exclaimed:

“Move! Enough already!”

T
HE DAY PROMISED
to be a long one. There were still eight hours left before his sister-in-law's plane landed. He returned to his study to get rid of more papers and decided to clear another shelf. Then he scrutinized the white net curtain on the window. Although it did not look dirty, he was prepared to wash it for his wife, who had a long, hard session on the bench ahead of her. He unhooked it, carried it carefully to the bathroom, like a bride across the threshold, and soaked it in lukewarm, soapy water. It took many rinsings for the water to run clear. Because it occurred to him that, in her eagerness to make her sister feel at home, Hagit might launder the clean curtain again while he drove to the airport, he left a note that he had cleaned it and would expect a commensurate reward. Then he erased the last sentence. His son might come home from the army unexpectedly and read it.

It was time to unplug the computer. He coiled its wires and packed it in two black traveling bags padded with small towels. Then, grinning foolishly, he stopped by the window of his study for a last look at his dead mother, who liked to putter around on the second-floor terrace of the building across the street. And indeed there she was, in a red, sleeveless summer dress. She had opened the venetian blind and was leaning on the railing while following a big garbage truck, which was proceeding slowly down the narrow street, with a glance cross, curious, and indifferent.

This ghost of his mother had begun appearing to him not long after they had moved into their new duplex. At first he had placed his desk against a wall so as to be able to concentrate better. It was his
wife who had persuaded him to move it to a window. “If you run out of ideas,” she said, “the wall won't give you any new ones. And if you don't, the view won't harm them.”

He took her advice. A week passed before he tired of the panorama of the western Carmel, with its rich patches of green and red-tiled roofs immersed in pine trees. Shifting his gaze to the houses across the street, he scanned their windows and terraces. Suddenly, he spied the apparition playing solitaire on a terrace. Her straw-colored hair and her heavyset frame, hunched forward to preempt a hostile world, was the spit and image of the mother who had died three years ago. Dumbfounded and bemused, too distant to make out her features clearly, he imagined for a moment that she was the same lonely figure he remembered, withdrawn and sunk in a cosmic and trivial boredom.

The terrace across the street had four blinds. Only one of them was ever opened, and that, too, never more than halfway and for only a few hours a day. The woman was the only person he ever saw there. The rest of her apartment, which could not have been small, remained beyond his ken. She emerged from its gloom and vanished into it. Unlike his mother, who had liked to read old foreign-language magazines, this woman spent her time playing cards. Sometimes she appeared with a knife and a piece of fruit. Leaning on the railing, she sliced and ate the fruit quickly, spitting the pits into the garden below.

His youngest son and his wife, whom he, with mixed humor and anxiety, had apprised of the resemblance, were slow to acknowledge it. Hagit was actually indignant. “You're heartless!” she cried. “Your mother was never that ugly or awful-looking.” Rivlin's sister, on the other hand, who had hated their mother, thought the double was better-looking. She understood her brother's fascination and stood for a long time by the window herself, smiling with grim satisfaction at the ghost as though viewing her in a peep show with no risk of a reprimand. Rivlin was so intrigued by the discovery that during their first month in the apartment he asked Tsakhi to bring him a pair of binoculars from his army base. Magnified, their neighbor resembled his mother—a strident peacock of a woman who had painted herself with flamboyant colors until her dying day—less closely. She used no makeup and had a yellowed, time-weathered face like that of an excavated
sphinx. At first he took care to observe her from a place of concealment, afraid that he and his binoculars might drive her away or cause her to complain. Eventually, however, he realized that the danger was nil, since her gaze was always directed downward, as if the world lay only in that direction.

Now he would be parting from her for two weeks. He couldn't say he'd miss her. Yet sometimes, observing her in an idle moment, he had found a strange consolation in her manner, so familiar to him from his childhood. The difference was that this time, he felt no guilt or sense of obligation.