Jephte's Daughter (40 page)

She walked over to Elizabeth and laid her head down on her shoulder and felt her friend smooth down her hair. She was crying, too. From the corner of her eye, she saw Graham watching them, motionless, with snakelike threat and the bitterness of a loser. He walked over to them: “Batsheva, shall we go?”

“I’m sorry, Graham. I can’t…”

“Sorry to hear that, my dear.” His voice became very dignified and clipped. “I suppose your parents have been to visit you since you’ve been here. How are they? I thought I might give them a call to let them know how well you’re doing.” He had guessed everything.

“Don’t do it, Graham,” Elizabeth said in a low, threatening tone.

She was afraid, and that pleased him and confirmed his suspicions. “Why, I thought the Hebrews were a very tight group, very clannish. Won’t they be thrilled at the congratulations, at the implied monetary success of their little Jewish princess?”

Ian took a step forward and with a sudden, subtle movement gripped Graham’s arm and hand in what outsiders could have easily mistaken for an enthusiastic handshake. Only Graham could feel the tremendous, unsubtle pressure of the younger man’s concentrated fingers tearing into his shoulder and crushing the bones of his hand. “My dear Graham,” Ian said with a slight smile. “I think it’s time for you to go home and go to bed. And I don’t think it such a wise idea to call anyone at so late an hour. Why, you might get a reputation for doing irrational things, like that recent review you wrote. Some of that material wasn’t exactly original, now was it?”

Graham stopped struggling to get his hand free, and his face flushed darkly. “I…I footnoted it.”

Ian didn’t budge, his smile fixed. “Not exactly, dear fellow, as you well know. It was taken straight out of a student paper. I know because the student is a friend of mine. But no one would believe a lowly student, now would they? But they might believe me.” He let his grip relax.

“It was just an oversight—tell that to your friend, will you? But you’re right. I should be going.” He looked at Batsheva and smiled his wry, bitter smile. “Give my regards to your parents the next time you see them, will you?” He took one step closer to her. “It could have been perfect, my dear. A real pity.” He took her hand and kissed it, then walked out, jaunty and dignified, flashing a rugged, sophisticated smile that dazzled the young hat-check girl until she realized he had left no tip.

“It was a magnificent show. We are so proud of you!” Elizabeth hugged her tightly.

“Thank you. Thank you both.” Batsheva took Elizabeth’s and Ian’s hands and pressed them together in her own. “I’ve been under some kind of evil spell, I guess. Thanks, both of you, for everything.”

“Do you want to come to the house to celebrate?”

“No. I just want to go home and go to sleep. I want to see Akiva, to make sure he’s okay. I’ve been terrible to him lately.” There was also something else she wanted to do that had nothing to do with Akiva or sleep, but she was ashamed to admit it. She kissed them both goodbye and hurried home. When she walked into the dark house, the babysitter thanked her for the generous tip and left. She sat by Akiva’s bedside for a while, listening to his untroubled breathing. She touched his little face. He was fine. Nothing had happened to him. When she got up, she felt that she had regained enough of her strength and equilibrium of soul to face an ordeal she had been avoiding for months.

She walked quickly and deliberately into her bedroom and opened the top drawer of her dresser and reached in underneath the soft, silky underthings and pulled out a packet of unopened letters from Jerusalem. She had not read one.

She got into bed and opened the first one and read in David’s clear, generous script all that had happened to him from the moment he left her. And as she read, her heart began to beat loud enough for her to hear it. At first she read with trepidation and disbelief, and then with incredible, unfathomable joy.

On the long-distance phone line between London and Jerusalem, Batsheva and David spoke in brief, practical sentences: Yes, they agreed, she and Akiva must come to Jerusalem at once. No, they agreed, it wasn’t a good idea for them to be seen together in public until the divorce proceedings were over. Of course that meant David, as much as he would like to, wouldn’t come to the airport. Would she manage by herself? he asked her. With all the suitcases and Akiva? Perhaps she shouldn’t pack too much so they wouldn’t be too heavy to drag off the conveyer herself. And would she manage to find a cab all right? And not to forget to give Akiva Dramamine so he wouldn’t get planesick…He talked and talked with a nervous energy, almost babbling, and then he suddenly fell silent.

“David,” he heard her whisper in a small voice, but so clearly he seemed to feel the small breath of air that escaped her lips caress his ear when she said the
v
.

“My love,” he whispered back, cradling the phone, his throat contracting. “When?”

“Thursday.” They both fell silent, making the quiet calculation of the impossible and wretched minutes, half hours, hours, and whole days that stood between them like an implacable enemy and the dangerous bridges they had still to cross.

The light breaking through the clouds Thursday morning didn’t wake David as much as they gave him license to finally take his tossing, unsleeping body out of bed.

“God!” He looked in the mirror at his unshaven, leathery brown face, his red eyes, with horror and amusement and disbelief: Could she want that? He splashed water on his face, dried it, and because he had no idea what to do next, went to look out of the window.

Black rain clouds presaging the deluge of the
yoreh
, the first rain to break the nearly seven months of seasonal drought, blocked out the light. A pang of irrational disappointment ripped at his chest when he realized it wasn’t going to be a perfect day. He felt a sense of personal failure.

“Might as well get dressed,” he said out loud.

“Might as well take a walk,” he said, before he had even finished buttoning his shirt.

Might as well take a bus, he thought, running with all his might to catch one. He wasn’t thinking as much as he was sleepwalking, acting out some irresistible dream. And even, finally, boarding the bus that would take him to Ben Gurion Airport and thereby throwing all their sensible resolutions and practical strategies out the window, he couldn’t think of anything but that one little letter, that
v
that had touched his ear like a kiss. “David,” she had said with all the old familiar passion he had so feared might have died or faded and been lost to him forever.

He had no idea when the plane would land, or even what airline she was using. And since there is no indoor reception area at Ben Gurion, he wound up waiting outside, along the long metal ramp where arriving passengers emerge. He was afraid to leave his place even to go inside to get a cup of coffee lest she choose just that moment to come through the door. He formed new sensible resolutions: He wouldn’t go near her. He would sit in a corner, far away, and be content with just seeing her. And each time the arrival board lit up with a flight from London, he stood up and watched the steady stream of strangers pouring through the doors, his eyes devouring each one, feeling a fresh stab of despair that each one wasn’t a beautiful, black-haired woman with a curly-headed little boy.

The
yoreh
, which began as a trickle, suddenly burst through all restraints, falling in enormous, stabbing sheets of wild abandon, running off his hatless head, drenching his thin shirt, making his pants drip and cling like a bathing suit. But he hardly noticed, for at that very moment, the doors opened and he caught a small flash of dark, shining hair that joined the stream of bodies like a drop of flotsam on a great river. He strained, craning his neck, taking a small step forward, the rain dripping off his bare head in steady streams, almost blinding him. A slim arm, a small hand clasped securely. A little head of bobbing curls.

He walked past the old Sephardic women, their arms outstretched to welcome dark, prodigal sons; past Arabs in business suits and Greek Orthodox priests; past cabdrivers hawking rides to Haifa and Tiberias in broken English; past hefty security guards who called after him aggressively, each step a little faster until he was running like a madman and had swept her and Akiva completely off the ground, covering their faces and hands with a hundred kisses and hugging them to him for dear life.

“Oh, Lord. What have I done!” he said, putting them down, trying to wipe away the wetness from Batsheva’s face with his wet hands. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of dripping tissues, which he held out to her foolishly, forgetting what he was doing, lost in her eyes, her face, which just kept getting wetter and wetter as tears of happiness so intense, so full of blessing, streamed down her cheeks, almost breaking his heart. She laughed and they looked at each other long and hard. He ran his fingers through his hair with quiet despair and joy, picking Akiva up and blowing on him absurdly to try to dry him off. “I’ve…oh…soaked you both…done it all wrong, I’ve ruined…I wasn’t going to, really…it…it…”

Batsheva reached up, placing her small, soft palm over his mouth. She traced the outline of his lips with the tips of her fingers, the way a blind woman might, her fingers wandering to his ears, losing themselves in his dark hair. For a single moment, everyone and everything blurred around them into a silent whirlpool of indistinct shapes and colors as she put her arms around him and rested her head on his chest feeling, she thought, what Anna might have felt had it been Vronsky, and not the train, that had come rushing toward her out of the fearsome unknown, to enfold her forever in the loving safety of his honest, unwavering passion.

“Ah, no, again,” Mrs Ha-Levi said nervously as the phone rang. The calls were short and mysterious, and always at the same time of day. It had been going on for a week. She bit her fingernails and adjusted her wig, waiting for the servants to answer it. She was afraid to answer it herself, as frightened as a child. “Who was it, who was it?”

“The same, ma’am,” Louise, a large black woman who had been with the family many years, said sympathetically. It was spooky, all right. A stranger, identifying herself only as a friend, asked about the health of Mr and Mrs Ha-Levi and—getting the answers she desired—refused to identify herself, refused to say anything more than she would call back later.

Mrs Ha-Levi bit her knuckle in anguish. “And what was the message this time?”

“A friend of Miss Batsheva will be calling you today at six o’clock
P.M
. with some very good news.”

Mrs Ha-Levi opened her mouth in surprise, as if she wanted to say something, then closed it. It had been almost two years since the accident, which she insisted on calling the event that had taken her only child and grandchild from her. The shock had been so numbing, and she had been so involved with helping her husband, protecting him, that she herself had not been able to face it squarely in all its horror until recently. And then something very strange had happened, a subtle change that she could not have imagined or foreseen.

She had never questioned God, never questioned her husband before. Whatever is, is right. God was good. One must obey one’s husband, as one obeyed one’s father. She had tried to tell Batsheva this…that beautiful, willful child. At first she had been terribly ashamed, almost humiliated. She had brought this child up, and now she had gone and committed the worst sin—the taking of two lives! She had felt everyone looking at her accusingly, the neighbors, her husband. And so she had cowered and bent over in humility, as if waiting to receive further blows that must, by rights, come to her as punishment. The shame, the shame of it, to have raised such a child! To have failed in one’s mission in life so utterly!

But as time wore on, and the days of mourning ended and the house emptied of strangers, she found herself remembering her days as a young mother. She remembered silly things, strange things, so vividly, as if it were a movie reel: There is Batsheva, a tiny child, barely able to talk, toddling over to her with a blow-up rattle.

“Is this the last time? The very last time?” she sees herself asking her. Her face has a little frowning smile as she bends down to the child.

The child nods emphatically. “No more!” she hears the baby affirm in her little lispy, chirping voice, her eyes wide with innocence and sincerity.

She feels herself straining, blowing up the toy. It is difficult. The air keeps escaping through the hole the moment she rests or takes another breath. Her lips hurt. Her chest aches with the effort. She gives the little girl the rattle and sees her eyes widen with delight, taking the toy and pressing it against her small red lips with both hands. She can see the small hands, the red lips and the tiny teeth working to open the plug, to squeeze out the air. And as soon as it is done, the child toddles back to her.

“More!” she demands.

“You mustn’t open it! No more, no more!” She hears herself growing angry, trying to keep her voice calm. She sees the little girl grab her coffee cup. Its contents rise like a typhoon wave over the edge.

“More!” the child demands. “More!” she insists, pushing the flat rubber thing at her.

“Is this really the last time? You promise? You won’t touch it?” she hears herself pleading, demanding.

The little girl nods, and the innocence in her eyes seems to melt. Her lashes sparkle with undropped tears. Again she feels herself inhaling deeply, pinching the opening this time. The flaps slip open and the air keeps escaping. Finally, she finishes. “Here. Now go away and play.” And then, as clear as day, she sees the little girl grab it gleefully with two grasping fists, pressing the plug to her lips,
psssssssssssst
.

It made her want to laugh and cry. Silly story. She didn’t even understand why she remembered it. Perhaps because Batsheva had grown up to be such a good, obedient child. But if they—all those inquiring eyes, the friends, the relatives, the strangers who had come to comfort and stayed to pry—would hear it, they would think it had a different meaning. They would nod knowingly and see the seeds of willfulness, stubbornness. But what did any one of them know? Had they seen her as a little girl sitting patiently on the bed, letting her mother brush her long black hair into soft bottle curls? Had they heard her light, running steps, her call: “Ima, look!” always to share some new miracle she had discovered—the glow of a firefly, the bright, jewel-like glitter of a rock?

A happy child, she told herself. A good and happy child, she repeated, her weak, dependent nature gaining strength and conviction. She could not have done the evil thing they said—her Batsheva, no. It wasn’t possible. To her husband, she said nothing. He mourned silently, tearlessly. He had refused to see or talk to anyone for more than six months. She had had to remind him to eat, remind him to sleep. He spent the whole day locked away in his study, sitting in a leather chair—reading, reading. She had no idea what, or why.

“What are you trying to do, Abraham?” she had pleaded with him. But he had only looked at her and shaken his head. She had waited for it to pass, for him to come to her with words of comfort, and then she would have unburdened her heart to him, reminding him of the child they had loved so much, convincing him that everyone must be wrong about the accident. But as the months passed and he began once again to go out in the limousine to attend to his business, he never once came to her to broach the subject.

For the first time in her life, she began to feel a resentment toward him taking root in her heart. For the first time, she had felt the need to hide her feelings, to dissemble. And like most guileless, uncomplicated people, once she began to lie, she got irretrievably caught up; like a bird in a fine net, the more she struggled to get free, the more she entangled herself. She could not even be sure anymore when she said “Good morning,” to him, if she really meant it.

And so, when the phone calls had begun, she had told him nothing. She looked up at the clock and smoothed back the wrinkles on her aging hands. It was noon.

The ringing of the phone sent waves of cold fear and anticipation up and down her spine. She must answer this herself. She was prepared. It rang two, three times and she couldn’t bring herself to touch it; but then it might stop, she realized, and she grabbed it in a panic. The servants watched her, alarmed and curious, wondering if they could help her. They all felt so sorry for the woman. She had lost so much weight. Her matronly clothes hung from her shoulders, and her once plump face, which had been aging in a healthy, graceful way, looked ravaged and careworn.

“Batsheva,” they saw her whisper softly, and they looked at each other in alarm as she pressed the phone to her ear, cradling it as tenderly as a baby. She closed her eyes and the tears streamed down the premature wrinkles of her face in unheeded rivulets. They saw her write something down, then carefully replace the phone in the cradle. And when she looked up at them, it was with a face that was transformed and made younger, as if the years of misery had been no more than bad makeup now washed away. She didn’t move for a few moments and then they heard a soft, gurgling sound that frightened them until they realized it was a giggle. She jumped up and down, clapping her hands like a child. She went to each of them and hugged them.

“They are alive, alive, both of them,” she babbled like a madwoman, skipping down the immaculate parquet floors of the great hall toward her husband’s study.

He looked up with surprise and annoyance as the door to his sanctuary was flung open. When he saw it was his wife, his feelings changed to alarm and amazement.

“She…ha!” His wife pressed her hands to her lips, bent over with laughter. She grabbed his hands and pulled him out of his chair, dancing before him with the little mincing steps of a bride. “My husband. We have a child, a grandchild!” His white face, stern and impassive, turned away from her in speechless confusion and she remembered who she was, who they were. “My dear husband. I am not
meshuga
. I have just had a phone call. Batsheva is alive and in Jerusalem. She is going to get a divorce. She wants us to join her. The baby is alive! Think of it, Abraham. Both of them alive, alive!” She saw him stagger backward with one uncontrolled, drunken step and reached out in alarm to steady him.

“Come, sit down. Ach. I said it so fast.” She helped him back to his chair and repeated everything. The phone calls. The inquiries. Batsheva’s voice. The need to pack, to get tickets…His eyes, which reflected the violent changes taking place in his soul, misted with profound joy and gratitude and disbelief. And then they began to glitter with a kind of hardness. He was undergoing the metamorphosis that takes place in every parent whose missing child turns up safe and sound. First, the incredible relief and happiness. But then something else takes over, an anger, so hot, so violent, one would be ready to beat the dickens out of the child for all the needless worry and aggravation he has caused. This same series of emotions took place in Abraham Ha-Levi’s heart. But they were magnified many times. Because of the depth of his grief, his joy and gratitude rose to unbelievable heights. And when his emotions turned to anger, it knew no bounds.

His wife saw the struggle taking place inside of him but misunderstood it. She shared the joy, but felt the anger toward the world that had misjudged her darling child. “We must make plans to go, now,” she urged him. “I will call the travel agent.”

“Put down the phone! We will go nowhere!” He got up and paced the room, a lion in a den, the arsenal of his anger, so long directed uselessly at Isaac, so long buried and repressed, opening up with the force of a bomb. “She has been alive all this time,” he muttered to himself, “and yet she has caused me this suffering, caused me to reach the brink of my sanity, to question my belief?” He looked at his wife with eyes that blazed like a fire out of control, eyes that dried all tears with the heat of their anger. “I have sat
shiva
for her. I have buried her in my heart, do you hear me? She is dead to me.”

Fruma Ha-Levi, the timid butcher’s daughter who had never stopped wondering at her good fortune in being a handmaiden to the illustrious Abraham Ha-Levi, pressed her fingertips deep into her face, as if she were wearing a mask she wanted to rip off. She sat down on the sofa and picked up a beautiful Waterford vase from the coffee table, and she held it with the familiar care and awe she felt toward all the things in her husband’s house. She looked at its sparkle, its rainbow brilliance. He had gone to a store and chosen it without discussing it with her. He had brought it home and placed it on this table because it pleased him to do so. She had had nothing at all to do with it, she thought, as her hands tightened around it in a violent spasm of fury and grief. With a sudden, wholly unexpected strength, she smashed it against the wall.

“You stupid man!” she said with a whispered vehemence, a disgust that stunned him. “You have decided, yes, you. The way you decided on a husband for our only daughter!
Our daughter!
Not just yours. And I let you, trusted you! No. Not trust. Fear. I was afraid for myself and so I let you pick my child a husband the way I let you pick out the china and crystal. You only told me about it afterward, when it was all arranged. She was only eighteen! After all those years being away at school, and here you arranged to have her married and living at the other end of the world! So far away from me! And never once did you think of my feelings, of my grief! And then, when she called, our Batsheva, our only daughter, when she called and asked for our help, you…you hid it from me. You decided there was to be no help. You didn’t talk to me, you didn’t say a word to me. You decided. You sent her back to him when she had enough sense to run away! And I was angry at her, at my poor, unhappy little girl, for leaving that monster. I was angry because she dared to upset you, the great and holy Abraham Ha-Levi! I let her go back to him until she was ready to kill herself and her own child, my good child! Yes, rather than to make you sick, to make you angry, she was ready to jump out of the window with her child in her arms.” Her voice rose hysterically.

“Silence now! You don’t understand! You cannot understand that I had to do what I did.”

But she would not be silenced. All the words from all the years that had been kept in check by loyalty, by fear, by religion, by love, rushed like the wind, contemptuous of all obstacles, from her brain and heart to her lips and into the space between them, constructing a barrier, so opaque and cruelly barbed that husband and wife could no longer find each other.

“I am going now. You will never separate us again.”

He heard the door shut with a dull, distant finality. He groped his way back to his chair and sat there, unmoving, watching the thin light coming through the curtains grow grayer and thinner until it disappeared altogether in the darkness that crept over him with the stealthy cunning of fog. He heard the distant sounds of life filtered through the heavy oak door she had closed behind her, and he felt himself cut off from them for good. He sat motionless, deep in a mystery that belonged to the indecipherable night. And then, because he was a man of habit and could not think of anything else to do, he took out the volume that he had worn shiny and wrinkled with countless readings and rereadings and opened it to page one and began again: