But Hagit had no patience for jokes. “Please,” she told her stunned husband, “the grocery is closing soon. And don’t forget we have a concert tonight.”
“Why not skip it?” Rivlin suggested.
“What for? If you don’t feel like going for milk, I’ll do it.”
He went for milk, making an agitated reckoning of how many of the bounds breached since Hendel’s death he was responsible for. Afraid Hagit might talk Galya into returning to Jerusalem, he hurried back with his purchases and was relieved to find his ex-daughter-in-law where he had left her, her feet on the coffee table.
“Ofer phoned,” Hagit informed him, her annoyance replaced by a new tone of complicity. “Your message confused him, but I set him straight. He’s coming tomorrow. Galya talked to him, too. He didn’t stay on the phone for long, as if he were afraid to spoil things.”
“What did I tell you!” Rivlin crowed to the bulky young woman, who seemed to have taken refuge behind the baby in her stomach.
“You and I will pick him up at the airport tomorrow afternoon,” Hagit said. “Unless you have more important things to do.”
“What could be more important?” he protested.
Yet as afternoon turned into evening, a brooding silence settled over the duplex. Only when Galya agreed to notify the hotel of her whereabouts did Hagit relax and go to dress for the concert. Rivlin, resigned to going, paced moodily while she changed before the mirror. What else, he asked, had she discovered while he was buying milk?
“Nothing. I didn’t ask, and I don’t want to know.”
“Not even now? I still can’t get you to budge, can I?”
“Why should I budge when I’m where I should be?”
21.
THE PHILHARMONIC CONCERT WAS an all-Haydn one. Although he didn’t question the greatness of the classical composer, Rivlin feared a whole evening with him might be dull. But after leafing through the program notes, from which he learned that the four works to be performed took no more than an hour and a half, he felt reassured. Even if she went into labor, Galya could hold out until they returned. And the opening piece, the B Major cello concerto, gave him unexpected pleasure. Its soloist, a guest performer from abroad with an enormous mane of hair, played without glancing at his instrument, as if it were part of his body. His hands flowed in and out of the strings of their own accord, his mane tossing as he kept practiced eyes on the audience as if to forge a connection or even a friendship with it.
During the intermission, perhaps to avoid an argument, Hagit and Rivlin did not discuss their guest. Instead, they reminisced about the birth of Ofer, lovingly recalling every detail of the thirty-three-year-old memory.
The concert ended with the Clock Symphony. Haydn, Rivlin had to admit, had not subjected him to a dull moment. Yet finding the duplex in darkness upon their return, he felt a current of anxiety. Had someone spirited their miraculous visitor back to Jerusalem?
He opened the door to his study carefully. The orange reminder to be of good cheer twirled over the screen saver of his computer and lit the face of the sleeper on the couch with a tender light. She lay as peacefully beneath the mound of her pregnancy as if she were where she had always wanted to be.
He and Hagit exchanged smiles, like the parents of a naughty child, and shut the door softly. They undressed in silence, getting into bed and turning out the light without the TV news. Although for a moment he thought his wife wanted to make love, he didn’t dare put it to the test. He gave her a last hug, stroked the face he had kissed, and turned to the wall.
In the middle of the night, the telephone rang and stopped before he could answer it. Curling up again beneath the quilt, he realized that his sleep had fled and would have to be hunted down in the apartment. He went first to the bathroom and then, cautiously, to his study. Although the lights were still off, a voice was speaking as though to itself. Going downstairs to the guest room, he gently picked up the receiver of the telephone. Now there were two voices, Galya’s plaintive, her husband’s quiet and restrained. He hung up and sank into a chair, his wakefulness growing. Let it. Keeping watch over his ex-daughter-in-law’s last hours of pregnancy seemed the right thing to do.
After a while he went to the kitchen, poured himself some wine, and sipped it with slow ceremony. When he picked up the receiver again, the conversation was over. Content with the world, he went to the terrace for a look at it. From the bottom floor of the duplex, he had no height advantage over the ghost. Her apartment was dark. She slept better than he did.
The narrow, quiet street below was filled as usual with the cars that occupied every inch of parking space at night. Even ordinarily, this made it hard to get in and out of their building. Now, though, a large car blocked the entrance completely. If Galya went into labor, he thought worriedly, he wouldn’t be able to drive her to the hospital. Yet a second look revealed someone sitting beside the empty driver’s seat. They had come to get her, without even waiting for the new day.
He heard footsteps. They must be Bo’az’s, he thought, coming up the street from the pay phone around the corner. In the glow of a streetlight he made out the ponytail of the man who took things as they came, perhaps because he thought he knew all about them. And yet, in the middle of the night, in the silent street of a strange city, the knowledgeable husband seemed at a loss. Bending over, he spoke to the occupant of the car. Rivlin, looking down from above, had no doubt that this was the proprietress, come to restore her sister to her senses. Soon her lanky frame appeared in the street. Heart pounding, he shrank back as her birdlike head swiveled upward to look for his floor.
What now? The taker-of-things-as-they-came and the thumber-of noses-at-them had joined forces to rob him of the confession he had yet to hear. He had to stop them, to turn them back at the entrance to the building. Stepping into full view on the terrace, still in his pajamas, he signaled that he was coming down.
They met in the parking lot. Tehila planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek, and Bo’az gave him an affable nod. How close he had come, Rivlin mused, to disgracing himself in his passion for the truth — and now here it was, upstairs in his home, waiting to be deciphered. Shivering from the cold of the winter night, he brought the Jerusalemites up-to-date on the day’s events, starting with Galya’s intention to confess.
“To confess what?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask her.”
“She’s out of her mind,” Tehila snapped, narrowing her whiskey-colored eyes.
He stuck up for the shelterer in his study, who was definitely in her right mind. Although feeling sad, even miserable, she had a plan that she meant to carry out. It would be best to let her do it.
He took a long look at his watch to remind them of the hour. He was sorry, he said with a remote smile, that he had no basement to put them in. On the next ridge of the Carmel, he told them, pointing at a building rising starkly in the moonlight, was a hotel he could recommend, even though he had never stayed in it.
But the proprietress had her own hotel, where at this time of the night when the roads were empty she could be again in two hours. And so, with a friendly handshake, she promised to phone in the morning and was off with her brother-in-law while Rivlin, returning to bed, found his escaped sleep waiting for him there.
The new day dawned filled with the anticipation of discoveries. Hagit left early for the courthouse, and Rivlin stayed behind to wait for Galya to awake. She rose late and took a while to arrange her new room, in which she had made herself at home. She was already in the kitchen, glancing pregnantly at the morning paper, when the housekeeper arrived and was struck dumb. But Galya preserved a demure silence, while Rivlin, who felt so much and understood so little, made no attempt to explain what looked like the backward flow of time.