A Late Divorce (36 page)

This is the first time, only lately

Time has not behaved sedately.

Uri Bernstein

 

Saturday? Saturday? Suddenly, halfway through the story, I'm stuck and can't go on. What happened on Saturday three years ago? I hadn't even remembered that there was such a day. It vanished without a trace, without even leaving behind its own phantom pain. Saturday? Somehow I lost it—I, who tended each one of those days like a priestess at the altar; who stubbornly salvaged them, forever frozen in clarity, from the passage of time; who zealously assembled and preserved their story person by person and day by day down to its last detail, color, smell, fragment of conversation, article of clothing, shift of mood and of weather—those last, horrible days of his beamed on a screen in their impossible, in their inevitable unfolding to the distant soundtrack of a faint yet persistent score; who, though none of you ever noticed, have gone on to this day collecting snatches of memories like the last feathers from a tom quilt: from you, Kedmi, from mother, from Tsvi, from Asi, from Dina ... even poking up the last embers in Gaddi and asking whoever was in the hospital that last dreadful night over and over about it (yes, if only I could find him I would ask the dog too, I would beg him to talk, to join me in my exact, relentless search for those days in their impossible, in their inevitable unfolding from that first moment in the
airport when he stepped out to greet us on the rainy, floodlit pavement to the last one on that final night when we arrived too late at the hospital gate to find him already taken away and the whimpering dog pawing madly at the ground ... yes, for me that was the end); who have not forgotten—who will never forget—who will remember for all of you; who was the only one to love him unconditionally; who was neither for him nor against him but simply quietly there with whatever warmth and assistance I could give. You can do what you want, Kedmi; all of you can; I'll always be with you. And instead of thinking ... yes, instead of thinking, Kedmi, I'll remember. I'll leave the thinking to you, to Asi, to all of you, but you leave the remembering to me, because there is no one else to do it. Only what happened to that Saturday? My God, can I have lost a whole day without having been aware of it, can my stubborn, insatiable memory have run right over it on its way to the accident? But how? Like a fool I sat here this morning and told her about each day, all in its slow, orderly sequence, in its impossible, its inevitable unfolding, as though listening to that faint score bring back each minute of it, as if all the stubborn remembering of the past years had been solely for this moment and I had known all along that one day some stranger would walk in out of the blue and demand it all back from me: someone with a hunger for the tiniest facts and the need to know everything, so that, if at first I wasn't sure what to tell her and what not to, not only could I keep back nothing once I began to talk, I was in an absolute frenzy to cough it all up. Things came back to me that I had never dreamed I still remembered. At last there was someone to milk me dry, to turn me over like a bottle and empty me of every word, sound and movement, to plumb our thoughts and motives, to keep track of even the most minor characters in my account, refusing to part from them, clinging to them for dear life. For a while I was actually alarmed by her passion to know. A small woman in a bonnet with a big feather, holding a long pencil and a notebook on her knee, chain-smoking, hanging on every word, jotting down each new expression, nodding incessantly at a fever pitch, in a primitive Hebrew, while I gave it back to her day by day: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ... following him from place to place and from person to person ... from Haifa to Jerusalem and back again, from there to Tel Aviv ... morning, afternoon and night ... everything I knew, whatever I had garnered from him, from you all ... wherever I had been myself and wherever my imagination had gone for me ... and yet as soon as I reached Saturday I drew a blank, I blacked out completely, the music stopped, and I stood there saying idiotically, “Saturday? Saturday? I don't remember there being a Saturday at all.” My mind wouldn't work. “Are you sure that there was one?” I kept asking. “Maybe that was the first day of Passover, it sometimes happens that way. We'll have to look it up in an old calendar.” But she just looked at me with a momentary smile of bewilderment before blushing offendedly, as though I were trying to hide something from her. Where were we on that Saturday? What happened on it? Could I really have forgotten—I, who tended each one of those days like a priestess at the altar, who salvaged them, forever frozen in stubborn clarity, from the passage of time? I almost called you at the office, Kedmi, or else Tsvi. But you, what do you still remember? Why, even what you think you remember is a shadow of the memory itself.

 

I rose and walked about the room. “Saturday?” I murmured to her with a reassuring smile. “Of course. It will come back to me in a minute. On Sunday he was divorced. He went to the hospital that morning by himself. We never understood how he had convinced the rabbis to perform the ceremony on the day of the seder until weeks later there arrived a receipt from some unknown little yeshiva for a contribution he had given it. What didn't he do to see the thing through! But that still leaves Saturday. Saturday ... of course. There had to be one.” I smiled at her. “We'll find it in a minute. But first let's have some more coffee.”

I went to the kitchen, passing through an apartment suspended in time since her coming. Everything was a mess. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, open pots of food stood on the cold stove, the chairs were up on the tables, a rag lay by a bucket on the filthy floor, the beds were unmade, a record went on spinning silently on the turntable. It wasn't nine o'clock yet when she arrived, and since then everything had come to a stop.

I came back with the coffee and, while she went to the bathroom, her comical notebook left open on the table with its short, heavily underlined sentences in a vexed hand, on each page a date as though she were hunting for something, I slipped off to the children's room to have another look at him in Rakefet's crib. I re-covered his little body
with the blanket and touched his face. A mystery, I whispered to myself, feeling ready to cry again, because I had started to when they came and never finished, nor do I think I ever will. Brace yourself, Kedmi: it needn't surprise you that I want to cry each time I see the child. And she was so happy when I did. It made her feel better at once, her face glowed. At first she was in such a panic, poor thing, standing there in the doorway with all her suitcases, blushing and stammering, driven to despair by my determined refusal to realize who she was. Until all of a sudden it dawned on me and I hurried them into the house and bent to take the child, bursting into tears when I lifted him. What else could one have done? Could I have done, I mean, not you, of course, Kedmi. What makes me cry makes you laugh, which is all to the good, because that way we're sure to get along. But I mean laughter, Kedmi, not that insufferably aggressive bile of yours. Irony, yes, laughter, as much as you want—as long as it's like this afternoon when, coming home from work, you ran into all her suitcases by the door and turned your surprise so quickly into an amused smile: you knew at once whose they were—you had figured it out in a flash—no, no one will ever pull a fast one on you. And you were so friendly shaking hands with her—yes, really friendly and warm, you needn't deny it. I swear you were—and you can be cold and nasty enough when you come home and find strangers in the house. You went straight to the kitchen, where the child was sitting with the bib I had tied around his neck, all smeared with cereal, banging on the table with a soup spoon and singing in English, and how sweetly you said with a mischievous twinkle to Gaddi and Rakefet, who were watching him dumbfounded, “Well, kids, how do you like your new uncle from America?” You don't know how relieved I was that you didn't go into one of your sulks, that you were ready to share this incredible experience that's come our way, that you'll have the patience to put up with them. Because I know you will. Please, I beg of you: don't already start planning ways to get rid of them during the few days they'll be here. Give me time to hold the child before he's taken away again. My sweetheart, how I love you, how I thank you, how I love you and thank you for the way that you, who have so little use for strange children, went right over to him and fondled him with such a gentle, marvelous smile. You even kissed him, didn't you? Of course you did. And stroked his hair. Admit it, Kedmi, you needn't be ashamed. There's nothing wrong with it. Even you were touched by the mystery.

 

But I cried and that made her happy. It made her feel so much better, her face glowed. So tense and miserable she was, her first time in Israel and straight from the airport after the long flight from America, having taken a taxi to our house without phoning for fear we would tell her not to come. I ran to answer the doorbell, the whole house in a shambles, still in a fog from the record I'd put on, hypnotized by the soft rain that was falling like gold in the rays of an orange-peel sun, staring at her for what seemed forever, refusing to let it register, sure that there was some mistake and that this bizarre middle-aged woman with a baby in her arms and three rain-spattered valises at her feet—that this flushed, agitated woman who was beseeching me in a rapid-fire English that I didn't even try to understand—that this woman who kept hopelessly repeating a last name that meant nothing to me was someone I didn't know, no, not even when she introduced herself as Connie. And yet gradually I felt myself looking at the child and a shiver ran down my spine. He was a three-year-old Tsvi, perhaps even a three-year-old father ... not that it had sunk in yet, only now something made me want to fling myself on them and drag them into the house. And still she kept up an incomprehensible stream of English, uncertain whether to come in. Perhaps she'd caught a glimpse of the state of the apartment ... but the child was already inside, so curious and earnest. And you should have seen how he looked, all in red from tip to toe, as though out of the pages of a fairy tale. He darted from one thing to another and ran off to listen to the music, talking softly to himself, while I tried to catch him with a hot lump in my throat. Why, he was as light as a baby chick, a mere slip of warm air. Already there were tears on my cheeks. And she was so happy to see them. It made her feel better, her face glowed. “That's him?” I whispered. She nodded. “That's him,” she repeated in Hebrew, shutting her eyes with a sudden, ceremonious toss of her head.

 

A strange, peculiar woman, isn't she? You should have seen how she had dressed the child, all in red.... Come, let me show you his things: red coat, red jacket and pants—a matching suit, in fact—red socks, even red underpants and red undershirt, all in the exact same
shade. And he wore a red velvet skullcap on his head, which she made him put on especially for the trip to Israel, because she thought that everyone here ... that you had to ... really weird! The sheer redness of him was too much. And she herself standing next to him in that white bonnet with its long stiff red feather waving back and forth.... Come, I'll show you that too, she's left it here. What kind of animal or bird does it come from? Or is it synthetic? Yes, I suppose it must be.... She sat across from me for two whole hours with that feather sticking up in the air, an odd, tense, terribly nervous woman. How could we have forgotten about her existence? We must simply have blocked it out. There was a time when I still said to you all that we had to find out what happened to her, that we should write her, but you, Kedmi, were against it, and Tsvi and Asi didn't think much of the idea either. Don't you have enough problems already, you said to me, without asking for more from America? You were afraid of his case being opened again, of raising the issue of the child's paternity and having to re-probate the will. And Tsvi promised us that that little man who followed him around in those days ... that banker ... Calderon ... yes, Refa'el Calderon ... that he would telephone her in America and tell her the whole story. And he did: she told me today of her talks with him back then and said he behaved like a gentleman and kept in touch with her for a long time, even after Tsvi had broken off with him completely. Would you believe that he even sent her a present in our name when the child was born? She was sure that we knew about it—she, who had been so afraid of us and so certain that we blamed her for what happened, for having driven him to divorce mother so that the child could have his name. And afterwards she felt certain that she would hear from us. She couldn't believe that we wouldn't want to see the child, and she was waiting for him to be old enough to be taken here on a visit. How could we not have an interest in him? Half a year ago she even signed up for an intensive Hebrew course—you can see for yourself that she can really talk. She must be quite gifted, I suppose. I tell you, she sat facing me all the time with that pencil and that notebook, writing down every new word. That's how father had begun to teach her, she said: very thoroughly. An awfully odd woman ... and not so young anymore, either. She's at least forty-five and has a married son. In fact, she confided in me that she's about to become a grandmother. She ran a real risk to have a child
at her age, she could have given birth to a monster. And yet she's not a bad-looking woman, is she? A bit tired and lined in the face, and her hair is dyed a bad color ... she told me that being alone with a baby these past three years has been very hard on her ... but her body is still full of life. It's a lovely body, I saw it when I went in to help her with the shower: a young one, with very nice breasts—I can imagine how happy she must have made father.... It's hard to sec all that just from looking at her, though. You're not used to all that makeup and those loud colors. And she does dress a bit ridiculously, with those big hom-rimmed glasses and that feather waving like a red arrow when she walked in. And yet she has a toughness about her too ... a dreamy sort of toughness, inside. To have come straight like that to a strange house, with that little boy all dressed in red ... I'm sure those clothes were supposed to mean something, though I haven't figured out what yet ... why, even his shoes were red ... I don't believe she didn't have something in mind. And the way she sat grilling me about each detail ... and then, without even a by-your-leave, went to change and wash the child, and to take a shower herself, after which she left him with us and disappeared ... suddenly it frightens me, Kedmi. Where has she gone off to? What does she want? The one thing that reassures me is how totally unexpectedly, how almost peculiarly calm you are. Do you hear me, Kedmi? I trust you to have thought it all out, to be in charge here. I'm telling you again that she's a very odd woman: it's no accident that father was attracted to her. And she's come here for some hidden reason, not just to find out what happened. You should have seen how patiently she questioned me, taking her time, getting details out of me that I never even thought were still there. And I told her everything, even though it scared me to: about you, about mother, about father ... there was nothing she didn't want to hear. And she'll go see everyone, she'll go to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem too, she'll follow his tracks everywhere, even to the hospital. How could we have forgotten her, she sobbed; had we forgotten him too? I told her everything, she heard things from me I never thought I still knew, I let her milk me dry. Until suddenly I got stuck on that Saturday. What happened on it? I remember that Sunday was the day of the seder, and that father took a bus by himself to the hospital to get the divorce. He returned that afternoon, and toward evening Tsvi arrived. But there was a Saturday before it that I can't for the life of me recall. What happened then, Kedmi? Were we home? I'm trying to think logically about it. What could I have done that day? I suppose I cooked for the seder ... I must have cooked for it sometime. If only I remembered what I made, I could reconstruct the whole day. What did we eat at the seder, Kedmi? No, don't be annoyed—just tell me if you remember anything. Saturday ... there must have been something! I'm sure it was nothing ... I mean, nothing important, just a kind of interlude ... but still ... I can't stand not remembering a single thing. That's why I said to her in the end, “Excuse me, are you sure that there was one?” Which got her goat. “I suppose there must have been one,” I said, “it will come back to me in a minute.” But she wouldn't drop the subject, she kept pursuing it, giving me the third degree. “Of course there was a Saturday,” she said. “I even called you on it.” “You called us? How did you call us?” “I phoned you,” she said. “Early that Saturday morning. I was trying to get hold of him, don't you remember?” “That's impossible,” I said. “This time you're wrong. You never phoned. If you did, I'd have remembered. I'm sure of it.”