ONLY WHEN THE divorce bill lay in her hand did Hannah Rabinsky remove her wedding picture from the wall next to her bed. Throughout the years that she and her daughter had been in and out of the Rabbinical courts, she and Moshe had been standing arm in arm above the well-polished German chest of drawers. He, erect and festive, eyes looking straight into the camera, and she, huddling into his tall shoulder, her eyes beaming. Now, while polishing the glass prior to putting the photograph in her closet, she suddenly stared at it as if seeing it for the first time. The bridal veil, borrowed from the photographer, may have looked like a veil from the front, with pretty beads on top and a lacy ribbon tying its edges, but from behind, hidden from the camera’s eye, it had two unseemly threads dangling down her nape. The wedding gown she was wearing had been purchased by Moshe from a Polish noblewoman who sold her wardrobe for dollars right after the war. Looking at her straight shoulders, Hannah remembered how proud she had been of her handsome bridegroom and her fine dress. Two years later she had her picture taken in the very same dress by another photographer, this time on Allenby Road in Tel Aviv, with a baby in her arms, her swollen breasts protruding from between the buttons. The shadow in her eyes betrays the fact that nothing is hidden from them anymore.
As she was polishing the glass that covered her face, a sadness suddenly overcame her, for she had been so young then, so full of dreams, so grateful for the new world that suddenly greeted her with such warmth, and so trustful of the handsome man at her side.
“That’s it, then,” she said softly, like a weary traveler yearning to rest after a long journey.
“The hell it is,” Pnina shot at her. Her back facing the backyard, leaning both elbows on the window sill, she glared at her mother. “You should’ve kicked him out of here, not given him a room to stay in, let alone the largest room in the house. This is not a divorce, this is a joke. You think you’re through with him? You’ll hear from him soon enough. I bet you anything he’ll pretend to be sick,” and her foot aimed a kick in the air toward the wall of the adjacent room.
Even without looking at her daughter’s face, Hannah knew what expression it wore: two lines drawn from her nostrils to her chin, and her brow angrily furrowed. She was only eighteen, but her face was the face of a weary, miserable person. Since the day this kicking and screaming baby had emerged from her womb, Hannah tried in vain to appease her implacable spirit. “I can’t throw him out now,” she said softly, her face turned to her face in the photo. She saw him for the first time in the central railway station of Warsaw. He was tall and pellucid, like a stained glass figure in a church. The place teemed with shadows, and trains the color of ashes were spewing refugees onto the platforms. Some slumped by the walls, never to rise again. Others milled around in the crowd looking for lost relatives. Several survivors from the town of Sosnow gathered in an apartment near the station, which formerly served as the office of the Polish Ministry of Transportation. He addressed her by someone else’s name and then led her to the apartment. And she followed him as if she had already foretold her future. In the apartment she made the acquaintance of the others. They spent the following days there like a colony of lepers. They were tongue-tied; sentences tumbled out of their mouths tortuously. From time to time, they would grope toward each other, trying, like children, to learn anew the language of a world that had been recreated for them. They were cautious with words, sensing how their wounds gape at the sound of voices, at the touch of a hand, at the blowing of the wind. And then, as if in reversal, people clung to each other as the blind do. Every night they had a wedding, attended by all their dead. It happened on Avram and Bina’s wedding night. Moshe was sitting on a blanket he had spread on the floor, surrounded by people. Hannah was seated in the back, and she could not take her eyes off him the entire evening. His back was bent, his shoulders protruded as his arms clasped around his knees, and his neck and forearms looked as thin as a boy’s who had undergone a sudden spurt of growth. Tremendous compassion and loving kindness impelled her to touch his back gently, to quell in him the overpowering sense of despair. Then he suddenly turned back and his laughing mouth asked, “Shall we get married?”
“I can’t throw him out,” she told her daughter again. “He’s been living here almost eighteen years. Where can he go now?”
“All those places he used to go until now. Where did he spend the nights when he didn’t sleep at home? Let him go to his women, to his drunken buddies, to his card games.”
Everywhere, from Warsaw to Tel Aviv, women were attracted to him like butterflies, and with them the boozers and the cardsharps. Even when times were hard, his eyes were always smiling, his collar smelled nice, his cuffs were shining white, and his pocket always carried chocolate. When they settled in their two-room apartment in Tel Aviv, he showed no great alacrity in looking for a job. In the morning he would take a long time shaving, then go to the employment office, offer candy to the clerk, and sit there joking with him. But he never found a suitable job. A month after their arrival in Tel Aviv, after she had sold the necklace Moshe had given her as wedding present, Hannah found herself a position in a large shoe shop on King George Street, and from then on supported the family.
Whenever Moshe got lucky in his card games or in the wheeling and dealing whose nature she never discovered, he would show up like a bridegroom, bouquet in hand. On other occasions, he would rummage in her purse and take her cash.
On Saturday afternoons, after having spent the whole morning cleaning the house, Hannah would wash, dab her earlobes with perfume from a tiny vial she had brought from Poland, put on a blue dress with shoulder pads, lace collar, and pearl buttons, and go out for a walk in the streets with her shining husband and their little girl. People would turn their heads to gaze at them. Women would dart sideways glances at him, and his smiling eyes glimmered. But at other times, her mouth would be covered with the palm of her hand, so that the child would not hear her mother crying. On his return in the morning, after the first few nights he was absent from home, he found her pale and bleary-eyed. He always had a well-prepared and detailed story. Later, he dropped the excuses, and she did not want to hear them. He would come back after three nights’ absence, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks unshaven. In his sleep he called out strange women’s names: Sylvana, Adela. The first time she was alarmed. She sat up all night on the edge of the bed deliberating what course to take. In the morning she saw him huddling against her in his sleep, his tattooed arm stretched over her brow, and suddenly she realized that this was her fate. She must spend her life with this man, and she was greatly relieved.
“I want to tell you something about those women, Pninele. What you see is not always the true story. It’s true he likes women, but it’s their fault. They cling to him, and he’s the type who can’t say no. People think he’s so tall and handsome. A strong man. But the truth is, he’s weak. I was the strong one. Always.”
By the window, Pnina tilted her head to her bent shoulder, darted a quizzical look at her mother and said, “Well, if we’re talking like grown-ups, then I think you’re still in love with him. Honestly.”
“And I can never understand why you hate him so much. Ever since you were a baby.”
“I hate him because I know him.”
And Hannah remembered. Right before Pnina’s fifth birthday, at the breakfast table, Moshe asked, “What shall I get my prettiest princess for her birthday?” He said the word princess in Yiddish.
Without raising her eyes to him, Pnina said in a high, firm voice, “A bicycle.”
Hannah was dumbfounded, wondering in her heart where the little girl had learned to express such determination so icily, poker-faced. “This is too much to ask, Pninele . . .” she started.
“No,” Moshe stopped her, one hand stretched forward, the other pointing to the ceiling, as if on a theater stage. “Whatever my princess wants, my princess gets.”
“But you know how much a bicycle costs,” she said to him, then turned to Pnina. “Maybe a doll or a skirt . . .”
“A bicycle,” the girl announced calmly.
“A bicycle is out of the question. It’s too much money . . .”
“Enough, enough.” His face contorted in disgust, as if he were tired of the argument. “A bicycle and that’s it. No doll and no nonsense.”
When he had left, she looked at her daughter sipping her tea, so erect and self-confident, and was terrified by her feeling of alienation from the girl.
“You shouldn’t have asked for a bicycle, Pninele. You’re a big girl now, and you understand that a bicycle is very expensive and we are not rich. You go with me to the grocery store, don’t you? You hear me buy on credit, and Nissim does me a big favor, and I feel ashamed.”
Pnina met her gaze and said, “He won’t get it anyway.”
They waited for him for two days. On the third evening, Hannah baked a cake, then watched the girl blow powerfully on the six flames, her eyes dry. Rosa, the neighbor from whom they had borrowed the candles, stationed herself at the doorway and said, “Bravo, bravo, what a strong girl.”
Now Pnina was staring at her mother and the two furrows leading downward from her nostrils deepened. “Just don’t tell me you regret the whole thing.”
Hannah stroked the wedding picture with her palm and put it in a drawer. “What is there to say? It’s over. I regret or I don’t regret, what difference does it make?”
“You should have done it fifteen years ago. You didn’t need him. You supported him.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Maybe you don’t want to now, either.”
When he faced the Rabbis, Moshe’s visage was like that of a child who doesn’t know what wrong he has done. His eyes, fixed on the beautiful fingers of his hands, were raised from time to time to meet her eyes, as if refusing to believe that the person he had trusted most in the world would thus betray him. “You are all I have,” he repeated in front of the strangers; she could not restrain herself and started to cry.
And here Pnina addresses her in a harsh voice, “Admit that you didn’t want a divorce.”
“I admit it.”
“Then why did you divorce him?”
“Because I had no choice. You’re stronger than I am. Stronger than both of us.”
Pnina, at sixteen, burst into a shoe shop and, in front of the owner’s wife, lashed out at her mother’s flushed face. “You think that you’re kind and forgiving and that people don’t know? Everybody knows! They’re laughing. Laughing to your face and you don’t see it. She’s fourteen, maybe. Following him with that big belly. Her parents kicked her out of the house and he drops her here, drops her there. Soon she’ll run after him with a baby in her arms. But he needn’t worry. He doesn’t give a damn! Whenever he feels like it, he can go home, where a nice woman awaits him, makes him the food he likes, irons his shirts, works like a horse for him. And pretends not to know anything. If she is a little suspicious or has an inkling of an idea, she forgives him right away. You can stay with him. I’ll be leaving soon enough.”
Rosa, the neighbor, pail in hand, passes her on the path to the garbage shed. She calls out her name, but Pnina does not respond.
“This whole arrangement isn’t worth a thing. Now he has even more freedom. He’s divorced and is entitled to come and go whenever he wants. And when he comes back, you’ll rush to cook and wash for him. So why did we even bother?” After a short silence she added, “But if that’s what you want, go ahead. I have done my part. Now I have to go because my ride to the kibbutz leaves in half an hour.”
That’s it, Hannah said to herself, watching Pnina’s back receding down the path, kicking the myrtle bushes with the tips of her shoes along the way. The marriage wasn’t really a marriage and the divorce won’t really be a divorce. You have done your part. You wanted to do it since you were a little girl. You did it out of your strange love for me and your hatred of him. And to alleviate the hurt inside yourself, too. Who knows. Maybe it’s my fault: there were many things I didn’t explain to you. You said that I forgive easily. I forgive you, too.
Suddenly, a coughing sound erupted from the adjacent room, and Hannah tensed up, like someone hearing secret signals unintelligible to anyone else. Years ago, the Greek porter brought him to the door, and Moshe collapsed on the doorstep like a rag doll. All that night his coughing wrenched deeply, bringing forth faint echoes from his frail body. Then came hours of fever and delirium, words were uttered which she could not understand, and names of women from magazines: Clara, Suzanna, and Heidi stalked about the room like evil spirits. Then—as always—came the complete reconciliation and the promises and the good whispers. Now, too, she heard the crackling cough muffled by his fist. In her room, Hannah hurried to collect the divorce papers that Pnina had left on the chest of drawers. Now she’ll go and check if there is anything left of the dark medicine that the German pharmacist on Ben Yehuda Street had concocted for him, which had been so beneficial for him in the past. And she’ll make sure there are the right ingredients in the kitchen to make him chicken soup and homemade noodles. Honey and warm milk are good for his throat, and she’ll also prepare some eggnog. She must rush to buy eggs and honey before Nissim closes the shop and darkness falls.
Translated from the Hebrew by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman