“I’m not far from here,” he explains graciously, “on Ovadiah Street in Kerem Avraham, but during the week I teach up north near Safed, which is why we haven’t run into each other.”
“A shame, because your Yuda-Zvi would drop in here freely via the gutters and down the drainpipe, and bring along a mixed-up little tzaddik. By the way, where is he?”
Shaya smiles. “The tzaddik, as you call him, Shraga, he should live and be well, was sent away to Safed, to a family with the patience and heart for children like him. But here is Yuda-Zvi, coming to you to ask forgiveness, because we know what he has done. Right, Yuda-Zvi?”
“Right,” the boy confesses in a whisper.
“And the fruit is for your mother, lovely fruit from the Galilee, the vineyards and orchards of Mount Canaan. Your mother phoned my father yesterday to tell him she was returning to the neighborhood, and we wished to congratulate her on her decision and give her our blessing.”
“Of all of us, it was your father she told first,” she murmurs, astonished.
“Maybe it was easier for her that way.”
Insulted, she does not take the fruit from him, motioning for his son to come to her. The boy hesitates, looks pleadingly at his father, who nudges him forward. She clasps the child to her bosom, stares him in the eye and says, “Now do you understand that because of stupid television, you and your little tzaddik could have crashed to the ground?” Yuda-Zvi nods, and she strokes his sidelocks, straightens his hat, lightly kisses his forehead and eyes and returns him to his father, who watches with a smile and sways back and forth with immense devotion.
Only then does she take the fruit bowl from Shaya, placing it on top of the TV and indicating Uriah, who still stands with briefcase in hand. “Maybe you recognize him,” she says. “This is Uriah, my former husband, who is on his way to work.” Uriah, red with embarrassment, extends his hand, but when she extends hers too, Shaya quickly drops his hand and moves it to the doorframe, covering the mezuzah as if to keep it warm, until he and the boy depart.
Thirty-Nine
“YOUR CHILDHOOD LOVE was unwilling to shake your hand.”
“Because I was wearing a nightgown.”
“Even if you were wearing a fur coat there would have been no handshake from him.”
“What does he matter? You’re still here.”
“You just announced I’m on my way to work.”
“No, today the work will be done here. We’ll seat your love, that stubborn entity, between us, and together we’ll set you free.”
She goes into her room, puts on one of her mother’s bathrobes over her nightgown, and on her way back to the kitchen she picks up the glass bowl, rimmed with a gold decoration, apparently part of a set. The fruit is unblemished and ripe — plums and apples, grapes and cherries, pears and peaches. She places the bowl between her and her former husband, and the indignity resurfaces.
“It’s pretty annoying and insulting that a neighbor, a haredi yet, is the first to know about my mother’s decision to come back to Jerusalem, and also suspicious that this man is so quick to send her a bowl of fruit.”
“Maybe it’s his wife.”
“No, it’s him, because his wife — I learned this from the grandson — is so ill she doesn’t know who she is. It’s him. But why? Why does he care whether Ima comes back here or not?”
“Why shouldn’t he care?” says Uriah. “When I was surprised that your parents had stayed in the neighborhood, you used to claim, perhaps half seriously, that there are religious people who enhance and sweeten their neighbors’ secular way of life. Maybe also the opposite is true — your mother’s secular life sweetens his religiosity. When you played your harp on Shabbat, he would get all excited and prophesy that you would play in the Holy Temple.”
“Fine, there’s something to that. Now there’s an old lawyer lurking in the neighborhood just waiting to sell the apartment to an extremist haredi family, and those people are specialists in making life miserable for the Orthodox who are less ultra than they are.”
She sets down two small plates and on each puts cherries and grapes, a pear and a peach, along with two small knives, and says, “This, Uriah, is so we’ll have the strength to work.”
He looks around with mild disbelief, takes a knife and peels the pear, hesitates a moment, then reaches over without asking permission and peels her pear as well, but when he tries to peel the peach, the juice sprays all over.
“Careful, you’ll stain your nice jacket. Take it off, and your tie too. You were always good at staining yourself. Anyway, what’s with the tie?”
He finds this amusing, as if his ex-wife were an actress playing the wife he once had. And like a soldier who has been given a sensible order, he takes off his jacket and tie, undoes the top button of his shirt, sits down and goes back to peeling the peach.
“Strange,” he says, “how the ultra-Orthodox from poor neighborhoods in Jerusalem end up in the Galilee.”
“Why not? After the government built them yeshivas all over the country, they turned themselves into teachers and were in great demand.”
He nods his agreement with the woman who has long since left her homeland, then eats a few grapes and a few cherries, not putting the pits on the plate but getting up and tossing them in the trash under the sink, then rinsing his hands.
“Strange”—he has grown attached to the word—“how nothing here has changed. Even the same trash can from when we were married.”
“Exactly the same. But if you hadn’t left me, you’d have managed to persuade my parents to buy a different trash can, one more in line with your ideology.”
“No doubt. I had a very good relationship with them both.”
“More than good. They really loved you. Honi especially.”
“And I loved this old apartment, not just because it was your childhood home, but for itself. This is where we slept together the first time.”
“And do you remember what you said afterward?”
“What?”
“‘I hope we won’t have a baby from this.’”
“That’s what I said?”
“Yes, and that makes sense. We were so young, why be parents so soon?”
“True.”
“You don’t remember how I responded?”
“How did you respond?”
“‘Don’t worry, Uriah, we won’t have a child just like that.’”
“Even then?”
“Even then I could feel the controlling nature of your love. Only you didn’t want to hear the warning, and your love wasted time on me, which is why your kids are now in elementary school and not high school.”
“I don’t remember what you said.”
“Maybe you thought it was just talk. But I don’t just talk.”
“Not you.”
“And if you’re hoping that our work today also includes making love, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t let you or me hurt your wife, even though I don’t know her and you insist she doesn’t resemble me in any way.”
“In any way.”
“But she is important to me, because I made a sacrifice for her. After you forced yourself to leave me, I knew that the heart that was still bound to me would not be able to connect with another woman. And so, although I could have waited and hoped for a position as a harpist in some Israeli orchestra, I hurried to accept the Dutch offer and disappear from your horizon, so you’d be free to heal with a new relationship. So don’t think that we can repeat the past, even if I have the urge and capacity to do so.”