“You don’t want to be drafted?” he asked again.
“No,” I answered, this time out loud.
“And you want me to marry you?” My face was completely exposed. I knew what he could see in it, I knew what he was asking, I could deceive the whole world, but not him, and I didn’t want to deceive him anyway.
“Yes, I want you to do it.”
“Good, if that’s what you want, then that’s what I’ll do. I gave you a key, have you got the key? I want you to use it always. Will you use it? I’m leaving the country in July, and then too … you can stay here as long as you need to.”
How easily female tears turn into sexual arousal, not only of the male comforter but also of the weeping woman. The woman’s panties were already pulled down, one melting was turning into another, and Ravel’s Bolero was beginning to swell in the background when the man said: “And you’ll manage, and you’ll be all right, because that’s how it is in your story. Everything according to rules of the genre, right?”
ON THE MORNING OF MY WEDDING
On the morning of my wedding I went to the Old City and bought a white dress. I didn’t think that I was buying a wedding dress, but suddenly, as if for no reason, I just coveted a white galabiyeh flapping on a hanger in an alleyway, and it was only afterwards that it occurred to me to wear it to the Rabbinate.
“They expect a white dress,” I said meekly to Alek who examined me in silence before we left the house. “If they don’t like the way we’re dressed they might throw us out, and we’ll have wasted our time for nothing.”
With the dress in my hand I strolled in the direction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, simply because this was one of the places I went with Alek.
I’ve already mentioned that he loved churches, they acted on his soul, and when I stood in the church at his side, I understood that his admiration wasn’t only aesthetic. “That’s a nice picture,” I let slip once in one of the alcoves opposite the sooty face of the Virgin Mary. “I like it.”
“It’s horrible icon,” he replied impatiently from the side, “most of the paintings here are horrible.”
“You think so?”
“It’s not a question of what I think. They’re simply horrible, but it really doesn’t matter. Church isn’t a museum. And from religious point of view maybe bad art is preferable.”
Sometimes he would hurry through the halls — in Gethsemane, in the Dormition, in the Holy Sepulchre, there were two Saturdays when we walked as far as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem — and then, “That’s it, let’s go get some coffee.” Other times he would linger in one of the corners, standing erect and somehow obedient, his hands folded in front of him on the zipper of his jeans, not focused on any of the objects around him, and nevertheless somehow very focused indeed. It seemed as if he were capable of standing there for hours without moving a muscle, as if he had been trained to wait in silence, and the sight made my heart contract. I tried to impose a similar stillness on my own body, I tried not to shift my weight from foot to foot, to relax my shoulders, to relax my hands, as if by succeeding in doing so, I would know what was happening inside him. It seemed to me that if only I emptied my mind and cleaned out my body, Alek’s thoughts would seep by some magical osmosis into the void formed inside me, where they would take shape as the picture, the memory, the ancient experience that he was seeking. Because for some reason it seemed to me that he was searching for something inside him, not actively but the opposite; that he was stilling his thoughts and making room for something to rise up inside him, as if he were trying to call it up and waiting for it to come.
As always, I had to piece bits of information together. “My mother lives in this,” he said to me one night as we descended the Mount of Olives in the direction of the onion-domed church. “Lives in it?” “In Jesus.”
“Is your mother a Christian?”
“She’s a Jew. She’s a Jew in her own eyes, and everyone who sees her sees a Jew.”
“Sometimes when we walk here I try to imagine what it would be like to believe that—”
“You can’t.”
“Just to imagine, what it’s like to really believe that Jesus—”
“Impossible. People like my mother, and all her friends from the sixties, they don’t believe ‘that Jesus,’ they believe in him, which is completely different. They believe in Jesus, and ‘believing that Jesus’ only comes — or doesn’t come — afterwards.”
“But you would like to.”
“What?”
“Know how it feels? To believe?”
“No, certainly not.” He lied, and after a few steps he added, “You and I, we don’t come to these questions from the same place. It’s not a question of what a person wants at all. You don’t choose the direction of the movement of your soul. I don’t choose the direction of mine. There’s nothing you can do about it. So the most a person with intellect can do is to curse all the way, to yell at his souclass="underline" Why did you take me here? And why did you take me there? It’s normal, it just doesn’t really help, all that yelling.”
The moon whitened the stone walls lining the path and cast long shadows behind us. From a distance the city returned to its primeval sounds. A dog barking and a dog replying. The voice of a woman calling over rhythmic metallic blows. Far-near sounds as if we were walking in a country village. I wanted to linger longer, not to go down into the field of vision of the new city. But Alek took hold of my elbow, hastened his steps and said dryly, “Such talk … the direction of the movement of the soul … don’t trust a man who invites you to come up to his apartment to listen to Vivaldi, and don’t believe a man who talks to you about God.”
So on the morning of my wedding I bought a white dress, and with the dress rolled up in my shoulder bag, without really thinking, I arrived at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Straight from the autumn heat into the cool halls below and the dim little room with the single icon hanging in it, the one that Alek loved and belittled.
To this day I have no explanation for what happened there. I was very tired and very alert. I was high on the smell of the incense. Dazed by the transition from glaring light to gloom. I really don’t know, but I remember how the flickering candlelight lent a strange life to the young Madonna’s face, and I remember how quietly and gradually the longer I looked at her the more present she became to me, until she was more real than the tourists moving overhead. She was a timeless Mary, the one who received the annunciation and the one who gave birth, the one at the foot of the cross and the one ascending to heaven to be the bride of God. All the paintings I had seen with Alek combined in her, just as if she was a familiar personality and the object of private memories beyond time. So present to me was she in her infinite serenity, that it came about that I smiled, not to myself, but at her.
What is there to say about this scene? I was eighteen, in other words still an adolescent, and stretched to my limits. And even at those moments I didn’t think of “revelation”—in other words I knew all the time that the flickering figure was only a mirage — but I had a terrible need, and the need radiated out of me, and projected the figure out of the picture, where it twinkled and shone at me until it came about that I addressed it. “Make it be true,” I begged, and by true I meant me and Alek.
All kinds of alien words, alien wishes, whispered in me then. It embarrasses me to remember them now. I wished, with all my heart and soul, I wished for it to be “true” and “pure.” I asked to be “cleansed.” I asked to fall asleep and wake up bathed and washed in light, free of the dross of speech and of buffoonery and of lies. I was ready to endure pain, to be scoured by it, and I begged for grace. The devil knows where I got all this from, but the yearning was so physical and absolute, and the tenderness flowed and ebbed and flowed from her so powerfully that I relaxed my knee and started to kneel. Yes, that’s exactly how it happened, that’s what I did: I relaxed one knee, sent the other one backwards, and I was on the point of kneeling in front of the icon when something grabbed me in the middle of the movement, sent a shiver of disgust through me, and made me stand up straight.