“I wouldn’t have been one either.” It was extremely painful to him to think of her making love to someone else.
“Perhaps not. I suppose that’s why he had such fond memories of you, even of the way you cried one night in the street. He even wrote a poem about it.”
“A poem? About me?” Ofer got up and went tensely to the window. “What did it say?”
“I don’t know. He never showed it to me. Anyway, it was in Arabic. He wouldn’t let your father see it either.”
And then, one day, Galya’s father died. Although the whole staff feared for its future, Fu’ad’s turmoil was especially great. While he had now taken over the dead man’s responsibilities to the point of all but running the hotel, he was no longer guardian of the secret — and with it he had lost, not only his pay raise, but also all hope of becoming a partner.
“You tell it well,” Ofer said softly.
“And then, in the middle of the bereavement, your father turned up. For five years, we hadn’t seen him. We all felt he had come more to interrogate us than to console us. Even Fu’ad, who treated him like a new father figure and even made him write something in the condolence book, saw through him.”
“Yes. My father told us about that book. Do you remember what he wrote there?”
“More or less. It was addressed to my father. Something like, ‘Despite the separation imposed on us, the memory of you still shines with light and generosity. We feel a keen and vivid sorrow at your death.’”
“He really wrote that? Light and generosity? How strange…”
“Why?” Galya protested. “Despite all that happened, you can’t deny, Ofer, that it was that which attracted you to him, too. But my father wasn’t Fu’ad’s problem any more. Your father was. And at the same time, Fu’ad liked him. You see, your father sensed right away that he was the weak point in the protective wall around me. At first Fu’ad watched from a distance while your father questioned me twice. You tell me: What good would it have done to tell him about your crazy fantasy and what I thought of it? Would he have felt any better? Would it have helped him to make you less stuck? Believe me, I knew about that too and felt bad for you. I still do. But I wouldn’t let him corner me, not even when he absurdly tried playing on my feelings for you. I did agree to answer your letter, so as not to frustrate him completely. I even answered your second one, though both were as nasty as they were anguished.
“Your father wouldn’t give up. He came to the hotel a third time, when I wasn’t there. And now he began a relationship with Tili, who makes friends easily, especially with older men. It was she, by the way, who sent him to sleep in the basement. To this day I have no idea what she knows or suspects about us, because I don’t know whether she noticed you that day. Perhaps my father managed to hide it from her too. I was afraid to ask. It was easier, after talking to Fu’ad, to get up and run away.”
“But what made him confess in the end? Was it my father?”
“No.” Galya felt a new fountain of emotion welling up in her. “It wasn’t your father, although it did have to do with him. Your father could have kept haunting the hotel forever and Fu’ad still wouldn’t have talked. All the Arab-speaking professors and Orientalists in the world couldn’t have wormed that secret out of him, because even though he lost his pay raise when my father died, he hoped his keeping silent would be chalked up to his credit. No, Ofer, what made him tell the truth was another Arab, one he met through your father. That’s when he cracked… I mean, opened up….”
“Another Arab?”
“Rashid or Rasheed. Have you heard of him?”
“No.”
“Neither had I. But he made a big impression on Fu’ad. He’s some kind of driver or guide your father employed. The haunt of the haunt, you might say. It was because of him that Fu’ad decided to discard what he called ‘my veneer of being nice.’”
Ofer winced. “Is that what he says it was? Just a veneer?”
“I’m sure it was more than that. He just said it because he was desperate and wanted to provoke me. I’ve known him since I was a child. It’s not a veneer, it’s his true self. He’s become cynical now because the promise my father made him is dead and buried. Tili isn’t looking for partners. She’d go to bed with him before she’d go into business with him.”
“But what did that other Arab have to do with it?”
“It started when he and your father talked Fu’ad into going to some poetry and music festival in Ramallah. Those Palestinians would like to be partners, too — in our country. Their own Palestinian Authority isn’t enough for them. They can sing all the love songs they want, but in the end they’d like to pick us apart. Anyway, Fu’ad said it made him realize that working for Jews was getting him nowhere. And so he decided to take his severance pay and go back to his wife’s figs and olives. Why be loyal to a dead man to protect a family from the truth that’s making someone else suffer?”
“Me.” Ofer shivered.
“You, Ofer, you. You see, I’m not the only one who kept thinking about you. So did Fu’ad. That Rashid reminded him of you. Not the way he looked, but the way he was. Fu’ad says he, too, has an old love he won’t let die. He’s a displaced, restless soul. Fu’ad feels sorry for both of you, the way he did when he found you crying by the hotel. Only now he’s wised up. He knows that all the poetry of love doesn’t mean anything. It won’t help Rashid, and it won’t help you. I’m the only partner Fu’ad has left. He thinks we should leave the hotel together. Three days ago he took me to that gazebo in the garden and told me everything. I started to shake. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You have to ask forgiveness to cleanse the baby that should have been his…’”
23.
“MINE?” ENCHANTED, OFER TURNED to his ex-wife, clinging to their lost love. “So?” he asked. “You didn’t bring me here from Paris just to tell me how Fu’ad scared you, did you?”
She raised her soft, weary eyes to him. “Perhaps,” she said discouragingly.
On the lit terrace across the street, an old woman was carefully spreading a cloth on a card table to prepare it for the next day’s game of solitaire. He remembered his grandmother’s insistence that he ask Hendel for forgiveness. And he had done it. Now it was being asked of him.
He hesitated, then switched on the lamp on his father’s desk. Casually, his hand brushed the shoulder of the women carrying the child that should have been his. Her confession done with, her face was tranquil and calm. Did she feel sorry? Had she acted out of love or only from pure calculation?
“Would you like to eat or drink?” he asked.
“Just a glass of water, please.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
He left the study and shut the door behind him, as if to keep her for himself a little longer. The outside world, temporarily erased from consciousness, regained its reality. His parents’ duplex was dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought they had gone out. But no, they were in the living room, waiting quietly. Changing course, he went not to the kitchen but to their bedroom, where he found a plastic cup and filled it from the faucet in the sink. He drank, refilled the cup, and returned with it to the study. Galya sipped from it and put it down by the keyboard of the computer.
“You’re not cold?”
“No.” For the first time, she smiled at him. “My baby keeps me warm.”