And so I began to write the story of our separation, from the first moment: thoughts, conversations, facts, things we did, the weather, the political situation, even a dream or two that I remembered, such as one in which I forced your father to let me shave him with an old electric shaver found in a room of the hotel.
I wrote from the heart. The result was an indictment, a defense plea, perhaps even a proposal for an out-of-court settlement — but only on the left-hand page, because the right-hand page was for your use, so you could add your story to mine. I still hoped against hope that setting down our two versions in the same notebook might help us reach a new understanding.
I filled page after page, quickly, in less than a week. I wanted so badly to prove that you had acted rashly that I remembered all kinds of things I had forgotten. And I had insights I had never had before into the predicament of your making (for example, your insomnia, which started at that time and kept you up all night in my parents’ home in Haifa). It was exciting to put everything down clearly on paper and give my suffering a form. I was so involved in it that I went on writing during my French lessons at the Alliance Française, to the delight of the students from Japan, China, and Indonesia, who were happy to see that the brown and yellow races were not the only ones with languages that looked nothing like French.
I still didn’t know you were about to get married—
And then my father told me over the telephone that my grandmother had died, and I could hear the relief in his voice. She had already lost the last of her independence after falling and breaking her pelvis and being brought from Jerusalem to a nursing home in Haifa — and, as impossible as she had been when she still could stand on her own two feet, she then became such a horror that she kept having to be moved from one institution to another.
But it wasn’t just my father who was relieved. So was I. Not because I ever suffered from her. On the contrary. She always showered my brother and me with love and presents, not only because she really loved us, but also because she hated to waste on us a drop of the special venom that she kept for the issue of her own womb. The relief came from my fear that in the heat of one of her daily spats with my father, she might, in order to show that I trusted her more than him, blurt out the secret I had made her promise to tell no one.
You see, Galya, the time has come for a confession. There was one person in the world (though she is in it no longer) from whom I was unable to conceal the truth. Because back when we agreed to “mutually disengage” in order to gain some perspective, I on my “fantasy” and you on your “fantasy of my fantasy,” and decided to separate and move out of our apartment — you into the hotel and I to my grandmother’s — my parents, although upset by our unexpected breakup, maintained (mostly at my mother’s insistence) a gallant distance while hoping that the crisis (about whose cause they knew nothing) would blow over by itself. On the other hand, my grandmother had no faith in spontaneous reconciliations. Her gloomy, suspicious nature, which always made her expect (sometimes rather eagerly) the worst, led her to demand that I do something practical to restore us to Paradise Lost.
Yes, us. For as upset as she was by our separation, she was also upset by the loss of the hotel, which she had hoped, rather bizarrely, to use as a halfway house in departing this life. Did your parents ever tell you that after our wedding she took to dropping by the hotel in the morning for coffee and cake and, sometimes, for a chat with a lounging customer, knowing that Fu’ad would not take money from a “member of the family”?
My three weeks with her were both sad and strange. In her old apartment in the dowdy old downtown of Jerusalem, nothing had changed: I stayed in my father and aunt’s childhood room, stared at from the shelves by their old dolls and toy animals, painted weird colors by Tsakhi, and regressed, at the hands of this shrewd, bossy woman (I think my father is afraid of her to this day) to the little boy my parents used to leave with her when they came to Jerusalem on their own affairs.
There I was, sitting naked again in the old bathtub I once showed you, the one with those monster legs cast in lead that my father called “Mephistopheles’ feet,” once more throwing my dirty laundry into the big old straw basket, with its cracked, white enamel top that in our boyhoods, both my father and I had made believe was the steering wheel of a bus. Returning to her place late at night — because after work I always went first to our empty apartment on the pretext of having to get something from it — I would find her, in her nightgown, waiting tensely in the kitchen. She would serve me my supper while grilling me like a patient police detective, trying to worm out of me what had really happened between you and me — not for curiosity’s sake, but in order to know how to get the two of us together again so that she could have one more dance, like the dance she danced at our wedding, with “that perfect gentleman, Mr. Hendel.”
One autumn evening, after I had given up all hope of running into you in the apartment or of ambushing you near the hotel, and had begun to accept that we were permanently separated and that I would have to settle for my share of the apartment and find a place of my own, I was overcome by the urge to shock the old woman with the truth and make her realize once and for all what kind of “Paradise” she had lost. First, though, I made her swear on a Bible that if she broke her vow and told anyone what I was going to reveal to her, she would be personally responsible if God punished us by making something bad happen to Tsakhi in the army. (He was a junior in high school and worrying us all with his talk of volunteering for a commando unit. Who could have imagined that he’d end up in the safest place in the country?) And then, right there in her kitchen, late at night, as downtown Jerusalem was emptying out, I told her the whole story. It was the second time (it won’t be the last) that I had told it to someone else, rather than just to myself in my thoughts.
I didn’t spare her any of the details. I knew she would argue with me, as she did with everyone, and I wanted to expose her to the whole tawdry reality. With a twisted pleasure, I shone a light for her on the sick roots of Paradise — roots I was willing to live with, but only on the condition that you acknowledged them.
Well, she listened to my story, right there in her kitchen, with the bored look of a mother blessed with an overimaginative child, sighed when I reached the end of it, like an old woman who has seen everything, and stunned me with her response. You would have loved it. (If, that is, you had known about it, which you never will, because this letter will never reach you.)
It went like this:
“Don’t be ridiculous, Ofer. How can you dare accuse a decent man like Mr. Hendel of such a thing? Galya is right. It’s all in your imagination. Whenever your parents brought you here as a boy, your grandfather would complain that you drove him crazy with your fibs. You would stand outside on the terrace and pretend that scenes from some movie you had seen were taking place in the offices of the National Trade Union Headquarters across the street, all kinds of horrible things that people were doing. It’s your imagination, sweetheart. Ask your wife to forgive you and tell her that even as a child…”