“I’ll really miss you, Ofer.”
(Which is more than I ever heard from you, Galya.)
Just then the lights came on in the Tower of David. I went white, or perhaps red, and instead of doing the honorable thing, getting up and walking out on that pointless meeting, I bowed my head as though failing to grasp his meaning and asked ironically if he understood whose fault it was that he would have to miss me. And without waiting for answer, I said: “Yours, Yehuda, yours and only yours!”
He was momentarily taken aback. The surprise that made him flush seemed genuine. But after a minute, he asked in that unflappable, gentlemanly way of his:
“My fault in what way?”
And that was when I forgot all my grandmother’s instructions. I only knew that this man, sitting across from me wearing a silk foulard, had already turned me out of his family. The injustice of it infuriated me. I told him he had to defend me against you.
In those very words. “You have to defend me against Galya.”
This time he was ready.
“What are you talking about, Ofer?” he asked innocently. “We’ve been terribly upset by what’s happened between you, but we’re helpless. Galya is treating it like a top secret. She told Tehila to mind her own business and not ask any questions. It’s a fact that we’re fond of you. And we’re sorry, too, about your parents, with whom we were proud to be connected. But how can we talk her out of it after such a betrayal?”
The malicious glint in his eyes said everything. The man was demonic and in full control, and although I didn’t think you had dared tell him about my “fantasy,” he knew that you wouldn’t hesitate to break up our marriage, not only to save his honor, but also (from now on I’m going to be pitiless, Galya) because you were already thinking ahead.
My despair and bitterness turned to anger and hatred. In the middle of that quiet cafeteria I said furiously:
“What betrayal are you talking about? Yours?”
“Mine?” He smiled calmly. “Whom have I betrayed?”
I stared down at the table. I still couldn’t bring myself to speak the truth. I toyed with my fork at the soft, wounded corpse of the insipid cheesecake, and I said, “All of us, the whole family. Down there in your hideaway…”
He was ready for that, too. Yes, your father had prepared himself well.
“Hideaway?” The word amused him. “You call that a hideaway? It’s an old office in which a cousin of ours used to work, an accountant who’s been dead for years. He came from Tel Aviv to do our income taxes. I didn’t understand what you were looking for down there. All you had to do was ask and I would have told you that the old plans were in the closet by the front entrance. But you disappeared without a word. What made you run away? There was no one there but me…. ”
At that moment I realized that before I had even thought of a showdown with him, he had figured out how to win one. If I were going to save our marriage at the last minute, it wouldn’t be by cross-examining him. My only hope was a desperation measure: to offer not an apology, but my collaboration, and that would have horrified even my grandmother. “Stop right there, Ofer,” she would have said. “Tell him to go to hell with his Paradise and find yourself another wife.”
Find myself another wife….
But I didn’t want another wife. It was you I fell in love with and you I wanted from the day I was born. And so before my final banishment, I tried one last move that only a sick spirit could have thought of:
“I’m not your judge, Mr. Hendel,” I said. (Yes, “Mr. Hendel,” not “Yehuda.” Maybe I felt that my madness called for some formality.) “That’s something I don’t want to be and can’t be. It’s a big, strange world, full of things that seem terrible now but may be taken for granted someday. Perhaps I shouldn’t have panicked. I should have assumed you knew what you were doing. I’m almost thirty years old, and I had to come a long, hard way before I learned to love as I do now. My marriage to Galya is the high point of my life, and its only hope. To lose her is to risk losing everything. That’s why, although I can’t pretend that I was fantasizing, I’ll cooperate with you in any way I can. My love for Galya is so great that I’d look the other way even if she wanted to behave like her sister.”
All at once, as if the chair beneath him were on fire, he jumped to his feet and asked the waitress for the check. He had to get away as quickly as possible, not from my being more explicit, which he was prepared for, but from the new temptation I had dangled in front of him. He would have liked to vanish on the spot, even though he was too well mannered to run out on me or the waitress. And so he stood waiting for the check with his back to me, because he couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “I’ll pay the goddamned bill,” I felt like saying. “Just don’t leave me all alone with all the terrible things that have been said here.” But I knew that one more word would drive him away and that there was still something, a last sentence, that he wanted to say. And in fact, when the waitress came back and he handed her a bill, he didn’t tell her to keep the change. He waited for that too, with that virile stance of his that made two young women at the next table turn to look at him. The waitress brought some change in a dish. We were about to part forever. He turned to me and said (I would still like to believe, Galya, that these last words were uttered not just in anger, but also with concern and even compassion):
“Be careful, Ofer. Such boundless love will destroy you…. ”
And now he’s dead. And though he wrecked my marriage, I feel (you’ll be surprised to hear) that I owe him a small debt of gratitude for that warning.
The divorce papers arrived a few days later. Although I was expecting them, I was so sad and depressed that for weeks I couldn’t even sit down to a proper meal. I simply grabbed a bite now and then on the fly, especially at night, like a Muslim on Ramadan.
What have I left out? Nothing. And soon there’ll be nothing. I’ll shade the text, hit Delete, and poof.
Thank you. Thank you for forbidding me to send you “pointless and oppressive” letters. The thought of printing all these pages, putting them in an envelope, and mailing them to you just to torment myself by waiting for an answer that will never come…. Thank you for wanting nothing more from me. For walking off without leaving a trail. I should have realized it was merely my father’s projection to think innocently you wanted a condolence letter from me. All he managed to do was entangle me with you again. But don’t worry. It won’t be for long.