After a little while I went back to work, but my head and heart were not with me. I went up to the doctors’ lounge and looked for a friend to take my place. I told him that I had been summoned to court to give testimony about a certain criminal, and that it was impossible to postpone the case. A nurse came and asked whether she should order a cab. “Certainly, nurse, certainly,” I answered. While she went to the switchboard to telephone, I ran out of the hospital like someone who had gone berserk.
I passed by a bar and considered going in to drown my sorrows in drink, as embittered men are accustomed to say. I grew a bit calmer and told myself, Troubles come and go, your troubles will also pass. But I had only grown calm temporarily, and only to lose control again. I began walking. After an hour or so, I stopped and saw that I had gone all around myself and completed a circle around the same spot.
10
I came home and told my wife. She listened and said nothing. I was infuriated that she should sit there in silence, as if she had heard nothing of significance. I bowed my head over my chest the way he did when he stood before me to thank me, and, imitating his voice, I said, “I wish to thank you, doctor, for saving me from death and restoring me to life.” And I told my wife, “That’s the way his voice sounds and that’s the way he stands,” in order to show her how low he was, what a pitiful creature was the man whom she had preferred to me and to whom she had given her love before she knew me. My wife looked up at me as though the whole thing were not worth her while to care about. Rising, I scrutinized her face in the hope of finding some indication of joy over that good-for-nothing’s recovery, but just as I had seen no signs of sorrow when I told her he was sick, I saw now not the slightest sign of joy over his recovery.
After two or three days, the experience lost its sting and no longer disturbed me. I treated patients, talked much with the nurses, and immediately after work went home to my wife. Sometimes I would ask her to read to me from one of her books, and she would agree. She read while I sat looking at her, thinking, This is the face that had the power to drive away the frowns and dissipate the anger of whoever saw it. And I would run my hand over my face in gratification as I continued to look at her. Sometimes we had a friend over for coffee or for supper. And once again we talked about everything people talk about, and once again I realized that there were things in the world other than woman trouble. Often now I climbed into bed at night with a feeling of contentment and gratification.
One night this fellow came to me in a dream: his face was sickly and yet just a little — just a little — likable. I was ashamed of myself for thinking evil of him, and I resolved to put an end to my anger against him. He bent down and said, “What do you want from me? Is the fact that she raped me any reason for you to have it in for me?”
* * *
The next night we had as dinner guests two of our friends, a married couple, whom we both particularly liked — him because of his admirable qualities, her because of her blue eyes filled with radiance, and because of her high forehead which deceived the eye into thinking that she was unusually intelligent, and because of the golden curls trembling on her head, and also because of her voice, the voice of a woman who suppresses her longings within her. We sat together some three hours without being aware of the time. He discussed the questions of the day, and she helped him with the radiance from her eyes.
After they left, I said to my wife, “Let me tell you a dream.”
“A dream?” cried my wife in surprise, and fixed her eyes on me sorrowfully and repeated in a whisper, “A dream.” For it was not my way to tell dreams, and it seems to me that all those years I had not dreamed at all.
“I had a dream,” I told her. And as I said it, my heart suddenly quaked.
My wife sat down and looked into my face intently. I proceeded to tell her my dream. Her shoulders shook and her body began to tremble. She stretched out her arms all of a sudden and, placing them around my neck, she embraced me. I returned her embrace and we stood clinging together in love and affection and pity, while all that time this fellow never left my sight, and I could hear him saying, “Is the fact that she raped me any reason for you to have it in for me?”
I pushed my wife’s arms away from my neck, and a terrible sadness welled up within me. I got into bed and thought over the whole affair quietly and calmly until I fell asleep.
The next day we got up and ate breakfast together. I looked over at my wife and saw that her face was the same as always. I thanked her in my heart for bearing no grudge against me over the night before. At that moment, I recalled all the trouble and suffering I had caused her since the day she married me, how time after time I drained her lifeblood and insulted her in every possible way, while she took everything in silence. My heart swelled with love and tenderness for this miserable soul whom I had tortured so much, and I resolved to be good to her. And so I was for one day, for two days, for three days.
11
And I was quite prepared to conclude that everything was being set right. In point of fact, nothing had been set right. From the very day I made peace with myself, that peace was robbed from me through another means. My wife treated me as though I had become a stranger to her. Yet all the efforts I was making with her were for her sake. How this woman failed to take notice! But she did notice.
One day she said to me, “What a good thing it would be if I were dead!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why, you ask?” And in the wrinkles around her lips there was visible a sort of smile which made my heart jump.
“Don’t be a fool,” I scolded her.
She sighed. “Ah, my dear, I am not a fool.”
“Then I am a fool.”
“No, you’re not a fool either.”
I raised my voice and challenged her. “Then what do you want from me?”
“What do I want?” she answered. “I want the same thing you want.”
I brushed one palm off with the other and said, “There’s nothing at all I want.”
She looked into my face intently. “There’s nothing at all you want. Then everything must be all right.”
“All right?” I laughed scornfully.
“You see, my dear,” she said, “that laugh does not sit well with me.”
“What am I supposed to do, then?”
“Do what you’ve been wanting to do.”
“Namely?”
“Namely, why should I repeat something you yourself know?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what that something is. But since you know, you can tell me.”
She pronounced in a whisper, “Divorce.”
I raised my voice as I answered. “You want to force me into giving you a divorce.”
She nodded. “If you think it’s proper for you to put it that way and say that I want to force you, then I agree.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Why do we have to repeat things when there’s no call for it? Let us do what is written for us above.”
In anger, I mocked her. “Even heaven is an open book for you, as you know what’s written there. I am a doctor and I can only go by what my eyes see, while you, madam, you know what is written on high. Where did you pick up such knowledge, maybe from that louse?”
“Be still!” Dinah cried. “Please, be still!”