“We weren’t worried. He was a drag and we were rid of him. What was there to worry about. It’s only out of good manners that you called him the next day.”
We seemed to have agreed not to take this conversation with us into the house. But although I was already ready to get down from the high seat, my husband went polishing his act in the darkness. I was already itching to shed the part of my character in the movie, but he still needed her to stay with him.
“I’m texting Hodaya to ask her to type me some document first thing tomorrow morning,” he said to her. And I was jarred and stumbled on the erratic rhythm of his speech: one minute blustering, with the words gushing out thick and fast, the next slow and arrogant.
“All right.”
“And you should get in touch with someone too, some girlfriend or someone, so it’ll register with someone somewhere that you were going about your usual affairs this evening.”
The past weeks had distanced me from all the people I could have called up spontaneously. I needed a minute or two to think, and then I did as he asked.
“It’s a pleasure doing business with you,” he delivered himself of this cliché when I was done. “Now let’s see: he had the key on him, and if he had it on him, then on principle he could have returned to his room.”
“I know. I already told you, I took it into account.”
“You’re a panther, you are. Next time I think we’ll rob a bank.”
The moment had arrived to go into the house, into the new time opening up: to be with the real Oded who would get off the screen already, with my three-dimensional man, with him — and not with the role.
“Stop it, that’s enough. It’s enough. This is me, and I don’t want you to talk to me like that.” I put my hand on his cheek, and it was dry and cold. “Oded, what’s going on?” He clamped his lips and took a deep breath and breathed out slowly — for a long moment he sat next to me empty of oxygen and emptied of himself — and then, like light floating up from below I saw, I actually saw, his soul returning to him, and his skin sunk under my hand coming back to life. He pressed my hand to his cheek, and then moved it away and looked intently at the palm as if he wanted to read the lines in the dark.
“What’s going on? Tell me what’s happening.”
He raised my hand and slowly kissed the center of my palm, and slowly closed my fingers over it like we used to do with our sons when they were babies, so the kiss wouldn’t escape.
“It’s not that simple. Not quite so simple. I think it will take me a few days to get used to it, but whatever happens — I want you to know that I don’t have any doubts and I won’t regret it,” he said in his normal voice.
And only then we went back into the house.
BOOK FOUR. ONE SWEET SABBATH
— 1 -
When the two of them enter the house they fall on each other voraciously. The man kicks the door closed behind him. The woman presses her loins to the loins of the man leaning against the door. There is the sound of a tear when he pulls of her blouse. Articles of clothing are scattered on the way to the living-room carpet: jeans, a black lace bra, a skirt. The man’s violent grunts of lust mingle with the woman’s screams of ecstasy.
The next day the breach opens. A brief item on the morning news says that a mortally ill man of about seventy was discovered by an IDF patrol in the Judean desert, in the vicinity of the Kidron River. The man whose identity was not known was in a coma, the police were investigating how he got there.
Days of fear. Sleepless nights of terror. The breach widens. Will the patient wake up? The woman’s nerves fail her and she accuses the man of not being man enough: a real man would have finished what he started, she says. And the man curses the day he met the woman.
The phone rings. It’s the police and a polite detective comes to meet the couple. The victim has been identified, and the investigators already know about the meeting in the gallery. The man pours himself a whiskey and his face sweats. He is afraid that his wife is about to betray him and make him take the blame. After the detective leaves, the woman says to the man that they have to go to the hospital and finish him off. She tries to seduce him. She sits on his lap and licks his lips, and he goes on drinking and ignores her. The woman gets up, sweeps glasses off the shelf and smashes them. In general, this character has a habit of breaking things, and when the couple go to visit the man’s parents, and the white-haired mother starts talking about the mystery of the uncle’s disappearance — the heroine drops the dish she was about to put on the table. Red spaghetti sprays and stains the mother’s respectable dress. A meatball rolls and touches the bare foot of the heroine. Her mouth gapes in a silent scream.
When Alice’s ghost appeared and brought me this scene, I was so surprised that it took me some time to recognize her. Alice had undone her pigtails. As befitting a ghost she was dressed in a white kaftan, apparently picked up on her way out of the Old City. And only when she came closer to me in a wild cascade of auburn hair — when she became truly manifest — I finally recognized her, and understood that she had disguised herself as Nemesis.
But not only the appearance of the tourist from Alaska, also the narrative voice which preceded her manifestation took me time to identify: during all those years, on all our expeditions, the teller of my tales had happily blown soap bubbles in the air. Under the protection of a rosy Providence which for some reason favored ignorance and naïveté, the little pigtail-sucker had been oblivious to sex, and any hint of violence had slid away from her like water off the feathers of a goose.
And now all of a sudden my little Pollyanna was strewing items of clothing from the door to the carpet and giving voice to shrieks of ecstasy.
Her rude sexual awakening embarrassed and confused me. If she feared for me and my safety and thought that I needed a cover story to sign off on, why was it necessary for her to strip me of my clothes in this story? What was the point of stripping me naked if the intention was a cover up?
Her crude violence was as new to me as the cunning with which she tried to satisfy it. Presumably these characteristics had been latent in her before, but she had somehow succeeded in concealing them even from me.
Alice’s ghost was lying for me again. The fictions she was trying to weave into my plot were intended to protect me in case I decided one day to tell it. But the content of the fiction also exposed an opposite wish: a clear desire to see me punished.
Despite my embarrassment, this sly wish was actually easy for me to understand: I had done what I had done, and deeds have consequences. Which is as it should be.
Which is presumably as it should be, but at the same time I noticed that my red-haired goddess of vengeance was not demanding blood for blood. Her kaftan looked as if it had been taken from a school fancy-dress box, and the flush of anger did not hide the freckles on her nose.
The more I thought about the ending she proposed, the more convinced I became that she had no desire to smash my skull and shed my blood. My little Nemesis was satisfied with smashing a dish and spraying spaghetti sauce, and these symbolic acts did not disturb me unduly. I didn’t smash a dish, but in the days preceding her appearance I somehow succeeded in dropping and breaking three wine glasses from the set standing on the kitchen shelf, and one precious Wedgwood plate. I was a little sorry about the plate. It was part of a set I had received as a gift from my mother-in-law for my fortieth birthday. I accepted my distraction and temporary unsteadiness, accepted it and understood it. Deeds necessarily have consequences, and until their effects wear off, what you need to do is take a deep, mindful breath: count to eight with the in-breath, count to eight with the slow out-breath — and wait patiently until the panic subsides, in the certain knowledge that the terror has passed and this is nothing but a simple panic-attack: a transient symptom like the chicken pox that are still visible after the patient has already recovered. The main thing is to leave them alone and not to scratch.