There was one thing and one thing only that I was on no account ready to accept, and this was Alice’s attempt to make trouble between me and my husband with her scorpion stings. I rebelled against this sabotage of what was most precious to me. And after I had scrupulously examined myself, Oded, and the slanders of the narrator of clichés, after days of examination, I decided that I had to talk to him about it. If only in order to make sure that the virus of punishment had not settled in his bloodstream, and that it was not about to break out and lead him to curse the day he had met me and followed me into the desert and the darkness.
I could not see any signs of the virus, but in the situation in which we found ourselves then, what could be considered normal and what abnormal? So I needed my husband to confirm my diagnosis: to verify it in words.
When I approached him I didn’t mention Alice. Alice only confused the issue. And I have to admit that in spite of her weakness, her reappearance had somewhat undermined me. Apparently I was quite undermined already — yes, I was definitely a little undermined. And therefore I, who never approached Oded in roundabout ways, approached him one evening with a story-telling expression, and taking the coward’s way out told him about these two people who had started to hate one another.
“Let’s suppose,” I asked, because this was the only way I dared to ask, “let’s suppose that somebody wrote our story, and that the writer decided to end it like this. What do you think?”
“You’re not going to write it?” he recoiled.
“I’m just wondering.”
My good husband rubbed the cleft in his chin and said that with all his ignorance of literature, the story I had described sounded to him more like a movie than a novel, and that, as I was well aware, he wasn’t a fan of film noir. In any case, he wasn’t turned on by the particular fantasy I had outlined — except perhaps by the black lace bra, the bra was okay, even though it was a bit pornographic — but altogether it was hard for him to believe that any audience would enjoy this scenario, and he was sure that he wasn’t the only one who would be put off by it.
What do we need art for? said my husband. For wisdom and pleasure. But what kind of pleasure and what kind of wisdom is there in your characters fighting each other? Why should they be punished? For what? In accordance with what logic? And according to what justice and what kind of psychology? These two people loved each other, that was the main thing, and in the circumstances I had described it seemed to him that their love would only grow stronger.
“When you think about it, Elinor,” he toughened his voice, “when you think about it, then as a soldier in Lebanon I probably killed people who did a lot less harm than that scum. I liquidated people I didn’t know and whose lives I knew nothing about, and as you know I sleep very well at night. So tell me why your guy, who only wanted to save his wife, wouldn’t sleep soundly?”
For a moment it seemed to me that I was listening again to the character bragging to me on a movie screen on our way back from the desert. For a moment it seemed to me that the character my husband had put on in order to save me and taken off afterward in order to be with me fully, had stolen into the house again.
He’ll never hate me, I thought, not that, definitely not that. But perhaps the price and the punishment is that this is the only way we’ll be able to talk about ourselves and about what happened: indirectly, putting on fictional characters, in a language that isn’t ours. Hadn’t he just said to me “Why should they be punished, for what?” Because that’s what he thinks, that’s what he really thinks. “Why should they,” he thinks in the third person. . and says. And I too don’t see myself as deserving of punishment. I don’t deserve it, I don’t, and Oded definitely deserves only good. We’d suffered enough evil. And we had done no evil — uprooting evil isn’t a sin. So why was it impossible now to speak directly? It didn’t make sense. Not us. So why?
Oded went on expressing his opinion to me, according to which most of the audience would probably find a proper degree of satisfaction in “the hand of cosmic justice,” and also volunteered to offer me what he called “a theoretical alternative script”:
Your two gave Gotthilf a lift to his hotel, he explained to me, fluent and prepared as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to explain. The two of them took him to his hotel. Before that they had hauled him over the coals, but still, he was an old man, and in the heavy heat they didn’t like to send him to look for a cab. Decent people didn’t do things like that, and we’re talking here about a respectable couple — that goes without saying. You can also add that before that, when they were still in the gallery, the swine told them that he was sick: let’s say he complained of visual disturbances and dizziness. So they gave him a lift, and after that, it’s not clear when, he simply disappeared. Months later, in winter, let’s say, a group of hikers discovered human bones in some wadi near the Dead Sea. And a pathological examination confirmed that they were the remains of the missing man. Who knows what happened to him? Anything’s possible. Perhaps in some attack of senility he decided to go for a hike in the desert in the middle of summer. Perhaps he was the victim of a terror attack, and perhaps he simply got on the nerves of his taxi diver. In any case, cosmic justice did its work, and the sadistic swine got what was coming to him.
“Unconvincing,” I said emphatically. “You can’t rely on cosmic justice. You yourself don’t believe in it.”
“You yourself,” I said. I succeeded in saying “you.”
He looked into my eyes, up to then he hadn’t looked straight at me, and I felt an unexpected warmth flooding my face. My husband was looking at me and I was blushing — the awareness that this was happening only deepened my blush.
For a moment we sat like this, him looking and me blushing and not lowering my eyes. This went on for a moment, until he smiled faintly and shrugged his shoulders, and said that he trusted me. “You. .” he said. “If you ever decide for some reason to write that fantasy, I believe that as an artist you’ll find a solution.” His living voice sounded almost laughing. As if he was laughing with me. There would be no punishment. There should be none and there would be none, because Oded and I wouldn’t allow it. There was nothing to be punished for.
Oded said that he trusted me. My husband smiled at me as if at a young girl. “Their love will only grow stronger,” he said to me. But the rubbing of his chin that followed immediately betrayed anxiety over my thoughts about writing. And thus, in the same breath as he expressed his belief in me, he suggested bringing Alice back to life and renewing my walks in our city with her. “Think about it. Just think about it. In fact it isn’t even a question of bringing her back to life like in all kinds of rubbishy serials, and you don’t have to explain to anyone how come she isn’t dead. Apart from your editor and me nobody knows what happened to her in the last column you wrote, because in the end they never printed it, and you can relate to it as if it never really happened.”
•
My husband was always stubborn, but ever since the incident in the desert he had shown a new kind of self-assertion — anyone who knows him will confirm this — and things reached such pass that last month he went head to head with his father in the office. Oded abandoned the way of quiet diplomacy, and from the secretaries I heard about the shouts coming from behind the door. Menachem, I imagine, did not raise his voice, but afterward, for four days, the two of them didn’t exchange a word, and my husband, who was calm and resolute, made it clear that if his father refused to back down and or stop interfering in his cases this time, he would walk out.