You get the idea.
So you see, Galya, I found for you an unexpected ally. If only she hadn’t been buried next to my grandfather for the past two years….
“Say you’re sorry, boy!”
And then I remembered, with a slight feeling of panic, how as a boy, especially on my visits to Jerusalem, I really did make up strange stories to entertain my grandfather, who lived in dread of his horrible wife. At which point I surprised her by revealing that I had already asked you to forgive me and had been, quite rightly, turned down.
I repeat: quite rightly.
(I hope you’ve noticed, Galya, how objective I’m trying to be.)
It wasn’t so easy to explain that to her after our last meeting in that little café—when, in a desperate attempt to save our marriage, I took back everything I had said and apologized in the most groveling manner. You had four perfectly logical rebuttals, all mutually reinforcing, like four cogwheels in a machine to crush all hope. And if your answer, which deserves to appear as a special section in The Guide to Marital Warfare, was not entirely clear to my grandmother, this was only because it was raining out and she had stuffed her infection-prone ears with absorbent cotton upon hearing the first spatter of drops on the window.
Rebuttal 1: “If you were telling an out-and-out lie, Ofer, you don’t deserve to be forgiven, ever. In that case, what you did was such a low blow that I can never trust you anymore. Even if I forgave you, it wouldn’t last.”
Rebuttal 2: “On the other hand, if you were the victim of a fantasy, then the mind that fantasized is still there. How can you ask to be forgiven for something that’s still in you and that you’re still trying to prove?”
Rebuttal 3 (bravely honest to a fault): “And suppose it turns out that you’ve told the truth? Then it’s not you who have to ask for forgiveness, but I, for involving you with such a pathological family. And why, really, should I be forgiven for that?”
I shuddered. You must remember how I answered, in a choked voice, “That’s true. But I do forgive you, because I want to. And from now I’ll love not only you, but whatever is yours, even your father and sister, more than ever…. ”
Coldly and calculatedly (after a year of marriage you knew me well enough to be prepared for such a lunatic promise), you delivered the coup de grâce,
Rebuttal 4: “I know you mean every word of it, Ofer. And believe me, it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve heard from you yet.”
I didn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral. My mother left the decision up to me, and my father advised against it — and not just because of the plane fare. To tell you the truth, apart from my mild and rather foolish relief that our story belonged just to the two of us again, which left me a ghost of a chance of getting you back, I felt real sorrow for the death of a woman I had spent so much time with as a child and had returned to after my separation from you for a sad yet warm and intense reunion. And because I could think of no other way to mourn in Paris, I bought a black ribbon and tied it to my arm in the Catholic fashion that you see in old French movies. I even went around with it longer than I had planned to, in part because I noticed that it made people more patient with my bad French.
About half a year later, over the phone, my mother told me in passing that she had heard you were getting married and thought I should know about it, even if it was painful, since it might make it easier for me to free myself from you. I was too stunned to say anything, and so she said, “Don’t take it so hard. You deserve a better and more dependable wife than Galya, and you’ll find her.” That helped me to get a grip on myself. “Thank you, Ima,” I said. “I’m glad you told me. Even if it’s only a rumor, I’ve been waiting for the chance to finally mourn for Galya.” And I put the black ribbon back on and started wearing it again. After a week, though, when I realized I still wasn’t over you, I took it off.
Stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck! That’s frightening, because five years have gone by with nothing to celebrate. Good and stuck.
So you see, it’s not my fault if I can’t stop the words that are flowing so easily from me now, so pleasurably and without anger, onto the screen of a computer that someone forgot to turn off in the Youth Department of the Jewish Agency. I didn’t even have to open a new file, but just squeezed myself in between two memos on Hebrew-speaking summer camps. There’s still time to decide whether to print this “pointless and oppressive” letter or to hit Delete, just as, after my mother informed me that you really were remarried, I threw “our” yellow notebook into the oven of the Cooking Academy, which cheerfully roasted it to a crisp.
(I like my work as a night guard at the Jewish Agency, which occupies — a bequest from a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor — an apartment building in a fashionable bourgeois district that has a large park nearby. It’s a comfortably posh, three-story nineteenth-century building with attractively oak-paneled lobbies and stairways, and old chairs and tables that were divided up among the different offices on a political basis. You have to spend time in a place like this, Galya, and use your master key to visit all its rooms, in order to appreciate that despite its bureaucratic morass there’s something soothing, even comforting, about its old Jewish National Fund maps of Palestine hanging on the walls. There is a Zionism, old, innocent, and heartwarming, that will last not only another century, but another millennium, even if the State of Israel goes under in the meantime.)
When my grandmother heard (we’re back to that autumn night in her kitchen) that I had gone and asked for forgiveness without waiting for her advice and had been turned down, she was flustered. But since the logic of your four rebuttals failed to move her and she wasn’t a quitter, she simply ignored them and instructed me quite shamelessly to ask forgiveness from Mr. Hendel himself. She was sure, she said, that he could talk you into clasping me to the family bosom again….
She certainly did want to dance in your hotel again!
I didn’t answer her. I went to my bedroom and shut the door. I don’t know whether she changed her mind, but I did manage to scare her, because her demeaning proposal was not repeated the next morning. I was running a fever that day and thought I had the flu, and I stayed in bed until noon. Then I went to the office, phoned your father, and made an appointment with him that same night.
A week later (with his encouragement, if not necessarily on his initiative) you filed for a divorce. Yet I remain confident (for some reason) that he never told you about our meeting until the day he died, which means that you’ll never know about it now, either.
(Because this letter, as I’ve said, will not be sent.)
And yet nevertheless—
My Impossible Meeting with Your Father
Actually, only the dreariness of those days in dowdy downtown Jerusalem could have brainwashed me into putting my grandmother’s grotesque idea into practice. (In one of her nursing homes, an old staff member said to my father: “I’ve never in my life seen anyone like your mother. Tell me, Professor, how did you manage to come out normal?” To which, without cracking a smile, he replied: “I didn’t.”) I can still see her sitting in her kitchen on that revolving high chair of hers, like a pilot or an aeronautical engineer, surrounded by walls and shelves lined with knives, cleavers, ladles, spatulas, graters, mixing bowls, and appliances, all covered with the colorful little jackets she sewed for them. It was only in Paris that I realized that the idea of studying restaurant architecture first came to me, not from your hotel, whose old building plans I went looking for on that infamous morning, but from her cluttered kitchen.