A Late Divorce (40 page)

We came home. Kedmi's mother was gray from the strain and the tension. Father took out his laundry and began to do a wash. Kedmi paced the room again like a beaten dog until he phoned the police and was told to his great joy that the search had been called off. Then he began tidying up around the house and helped me put the children to bed, after which he talked gently to father and even made him some coffee. He couldn't do enough for us now, he was all sweetness and light.... And then he suddenly disappeared, only to return an hour later in a state of high excitement. He had, it turned out, paid a call on his murderer's parents—who, though insisting they had no knowledge of their son's escape, seemed definitely to Kedmi to be waiting for him. And poor Kedmi, unable to bear the thought of all his efforts going down the drain, cornered me and begged me to accompany him there again and to wait while he tried one more time.

 

That Saturday dragged on and on, it seemed to have no end. Who was it who threw a gray blanket over it afterwards? It was almost midnight when Kedmi finally persuaded father and me to go with him again to that working-class quarter, whose streets were deserted now. He sat us on the same unearthly bench, beneath a yellowish streetlight, and drove off to wait around the corner. Father was amused by it all. He was wide awake and kept joking while he toyed with the murderer's photograph in his hand, relating old memories, telling me of his plans for the future, to which I listened drowsily, silently, passively, half dead from exhaustion, smelling his sweat as I leaned on him, forgetting immediately what he said like a bottle that hasn't room for one more drop, letting my glance wander slowly over the tall chimneys of the cement works that glowed with an unnatural, ochroid smoke, over the small, empty street, over the entrance to one of its houses, where I saw Kedmi's murderer detach himself from a wall as though it were the wall itself that had moved: a short, wiry young man, gliding along the housefronts with slow, catlike strides, keeping away from the light. I rose at once. Head down, hands in his pockets, he didn't even look up at me. I stood peering into his unshaven face, into his beady eyes, while father jumped up to join me. “Just a minute,” I said. “I'm Mr. Kedmi's wife. He's around the corner, and he wants to talk to you. That's all he wants. It's for your own good. There are no policemen with him.”

He froze where he was and studied me and father. He didn't seem frightened. “I have nothing to say to him,” he said drily, in a cold voice. “All he ever wants to do is talk. But he doesn't believe what I say. Let him find a real criminal to play with. I've had it with him.”

He turned to go with hesitant steps, no longer knowing where to. And then, like a teacher lightly grasping a pupil, father laid a hand on his shoulder and began to talk to him, gesturing broadly with his other hand while the listening man kept walking with his eyes on the ground. They disappeared into the next street and I ran to get Kedmi, who had dozed off again at the wheel. “Kedmi,” I said, waking him, “father is talking to him right now.” He jumped groggily out of the car and started to run, shouting in the empty street, but the murderer took off again as soon as he saw him, scaling the fence of the cement works and vanishing among its tall chimneys. Father reached for a cigarette and lit it coolly, wide awake and collected. “He promised to come to you after the seder,” he told Kedmi, who was in total despair. “He swore he'd turn himself in then. He gave me his word and I believe him. So can you.” And Kedmi, perhaps for the first time in all the years I'd known him, stood speechless as a statue, unable to get out a single word.

 

Now he's fallen asleep, a newspaper over his face, the child looking down on him among the pillows and blankets. He has a funny way of standing, the child, almost hunched, toes dug in, his eyes searching for the moon behind the curtain flapping in the breeze. A tall, skinny little boy who still hasn't spoken to me, who regards me with a suspicious look. I try out my broken English on him again while he cocks his head in wonder.

“That's enough of your Shakespearian diction,” grunts Kedmi in his sleep. “Would you kindly put Moses to bed now? He's taking a walk on my head.”

I pick him up, carry him to the freshly made but still wet crib, lay him down in it, and cover him up, his sweetness rubbing off on my fingers. And again I try talking to him. Rakefet rolls over on her back, entering a new, more relaxed stage of sleep. Gaddi stirs in bed too, still not sleeping deeply. The room is dark except for the small night light. I'm already on my way out the door when the child stands up again, gripping the crib bars tightly, eyeing me. What does he want? Such a strange, quiet, inward creature. I try laying him down again but he clings defiantly to the bars, grimacing with determination. Where can she be? Has she really gone and left him with us? Can it be, are such aberrations possible too? A portrait of father as a small child.

All at once something makes me recoil, as if father himself had just entered the room from the hallway and left it again via the window. I'm shaking all over, my heart skips a beat and then pounds even faster. How could we have let him go back there? What possessed him to do it? Why did I forget that Saturday, what was I trying to repress? Perhaps meeting that escaped prisoner had some meaning for me ... only how did we fail to sense it, to know it, to prevent it? What made us leave him like that, looking like he did that Saturday when he stepped out of the taxi, so old, his hair sheared beneath his hat, his valise full of dirty underwear. We had it in for him. Asi despised him. Tsvi wanted vengeance. And I had no opinion. “And you—what do you think?” And I—I didn't answer. “The one person who was genuinely happy to see me was Dina. The rest of you have been hostile, even Gaddi.” And still I passively said nothing—I, who identify vicariously with everyone, I, who always will. Indiscriminately I go from one of them to another: Kedmi, Gaddi, mother, even the dog, even that murderer, even Connie the minute she walked in the door. Yes, I identify with whoever comes close to me, I adopt them without thinking, without judging. And so drive them away from me too. And yet did I really drive him away then with my silence ... with my refusal to say the one thing he wanted to hear ... back into the horror of that final night?

 

Saturday. That was it. Slowly it's slipped back into place among those nine days stubbornly salvaged from the passage of time, frozen in hard clarity, beamed by themselves upon a bright screen. At last I've retrieved the lost day. Kedmi didn't want to help me. It was painful for him to remember, I realize that now. Because that murderer of his was not really a murderer after all. Because after we had finally persuaded him to go back to jail the real murderer was found elsewhere, and he was released without the trial that Kedmi had so enthusiastically prepared for. It was that that made him admit failure, close down his practice, and take a job with the district attorney. At no point had he really believed father that the man would turn himself in. And yet all the way back up the mountain, while we sat tiredly in the car, father had to listen to him telling about his murderer and about all his plans for the trial. After which we walked into a house that was a shambles and I had to take father's underwear and hang it on the terrace in the night that had turned to real spring.

 

When I think of father now I still feel the same pain. The awful sorrow of it stabs me all over again. What did we do wrong? We couldn't get them back together and we couldn't pry them apart. Perhaps all we managed to do was to turn them against one another.... Yes, I must take the child to see mother. I'll dress him in his red clothes and bring him to her, maybe he can put some life into her...

I take one last peek into the children's room. He's still standing there without a sound, looking for someone. For his mother. Wondering where she's been shanghaied. Suddenly I feel more anxious than ever. Where is she? Kedmi must tell me. I go to our bedroom and undress.

“Kedmi? Yisra'el? Yisra'el, are you sleeping?”

“How can I sleep,” he mumbles without opening his eyes, “when I'm already writing my new book,
Staying Awake in Ten Easy Lessons?
Tell me something, must you purposely drive me batty all night long? Why do you keep running circles around me like some big mouse?”

“Are you in a state to hear me, or must you sleep?”

“You've already filled your quota of words for the day. If you're thinking of kisses, though...”

“I remembered. Do you hear me? I found that lost Saturday.”

“I'm overjoyed. Maybe you can also find someone to buy it from you now.”

“Do you know what happened on it? It was the day that poor murderer of yours escaped and we went in the evening to look for him.”

He opens his eyes.

“What murderer?”

“The one who escaped. Who turned out in the end not to ...”

“Stop, stop, don't remind me of him! All the energy I wasted on him ... it was he who made me close my private practice. Stop ... when I think of your father chasing him down the street...”

“Do you remember how he helped you?”

“Of course I do. Well, you can relax now, you've got all your days back again. And if your mind is at rest, you might let mine get some too...”

“Come,” I say to him, lying down naked beside him. Startled he throws off the blanket excitedly and begins to embrace me, to kiss me, to fondle my breasts. I hug him back. He wants to come into me. The child starts to cry. I push him away.

“Forget about him!”

“Where has she gone? Tell me the truth now!”

He catches his breath. “Afterwards. I promise.”

The child's cries gather strength, piercing the night. Kedmi grows more and more passionate, entering me like a young buck. But I am not with him. My mind is still on that Saturday. Everyone was asleep. I stood on the terrace in the winy, fierce spring night, the starry sky above me, hanging father's laundry on the line and thinking of the days ahead with no idea yet of what lay in store for me. And so the day came to an end. Yes, it did exist after all. Of course it did. At last it has joined all the others, stubbornly salvaged from the passage of time, forever frozen in clarity, beamed with them on that one bright screen down to the last detail.

The light dresses you with its flame of death,

O enchantress, O pale sick woman, your face turned

Toward the primeval engines of the evening

That circles about you.

Pablo Neruda

 

Violet light seeps from a mortal wound into the broad sky curved over the bay etched in copper evangelic burning filaments cut into the pinkish flesh of the infinite day driven westward to the heavily the slowly the in-triple-time breathing sea sinking into sleep for the night. The sun-softened water luminescent now warm spray of oily flame turning slowly to gray in the soft lava of darkness spewn up from the earth from the great vats hidden in the watered grass overrun with fierce weeds thorny burnet yellow-blossoming broom creeping up among the treetops fanning out on a breath of wind turning blue day into a black canopy for this sodden world of wet earth greedily sipping clinging with lips that suck that kiss stoutly swinging the tongueless bell of evening snuffing out the small spaces between the lines between the words making the pages of my book a shapeless blob while empty and bloated a giant moon suddenly flips over in the last window quietly slips into the evening on a weak low slant. If the dog were here he would cock his head and howl so did she that first clear winter night we arrived she awoke and sat on the windowsill gripping the bars letting down her hair her clothes barking with joyous abandon with secret delight at each little well-aimed yelp until they came with a straitjacket.

“Come on. Let's go! They're beginning ... the singing has started ... they've begun to sing ...”

Yehezkel's voice begs from the door at the far end of the room but I will not answer him I will not move beneath my light blanket.

“You can't stay here all alone for the seder,” he says again turning out the light stepping into the room gliding among the beds in his large suit in his hat and new tie a cigarette lit in his mouth. He's hoarse he's been chasing me everywhere for a whole week in a dither over my divorce. And now here he is among the beds in the women's ward where he's never dared intrude at night before desperately glancing fearfully about him his own turmoil driving him on. And only now do I notice that we are alone in the ward. Many patients went home this morning with their families and the others are waiting in the dining room now for the seder. Even the night nurse is gone. Even the doctors' room is locked. And here the silence is broken only by his footsteps small and determined he comes toward me his hands shake the spittle flies when he talks. “Come on! You can't do this to me. The singing has started ...” He halts by my bed with a violence I never knew was in him he grabs the book from my hands and slams it shut he lays it on the night table and pokes about among my things there pulling out the white parchment divorce and holding it up to the moonlight suddenly angry with me. “Is this how you leave your things, just lying about? You're no better than a baby! What will become of you?” And without asking permission he gathers it all up and crams it in my drawer rattling my lost dog's chain yanking off my blanket in a fit of annoyance with unaccustomed roughness making me get up glaring at me angrily he must think that I'm now public property. “You're ruining our holiday! We're all waiting for you. You're the reason I stayed behind.” His light warm hand grips my shoulder. “You can't do this to me!” Cast on the bare wall by the door is Musa's huge shadow motionless except for the hungry movements of his mouth that never stop.