And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  Praise for

  AND THE BRIDE CLOSED THE DOOR

  “Ronit Matalon was a giant of Israeli literature: not of the bombast of grand political statements, but rather a master of the private, the intimate, the ambivalent, the human. And the Bride Closed the Door invites us into a single revealing moment in a family’s life, and we are right there in the room with them—or rather, right outside the door. It’s funny, moving and deeply real.”

  —DARA HORN,

  author of Eternal Life and Guide for the Perplexed

  “Refreshingly audacious and stirringly sophisticated, And the Bride Closed the Door presents the reader with a sharp-edged piece of social and feminist critique, hidden by a veil of wit and humor. Jessica Cohen’s masterful translation further enhances the rare and intricate voice of Ronit Matalon, one of Israel’s leading female authors, whose sudden passing shocked and saddened lovers of Hebrew literature worldwide.”

  —RUBY NAMDAR,

  author of The Ruined House

  “With seductive wit and light pathos, this brilliant novel makes the reader privy to the inner thoughts of a comically messy family. From there, bigger truths about personal life and the wider culture are exposed and explored.”

  —BETHANY BALL,

  author of What to Do About the Solomons

  “A fable of the Israeli condition . . . Matalon is one of today’s best Israeli authors, one of the original, intriguing and unique voices now active here. Her writing—the themes, the characters, the way they are shaped—is distinct and unique.”

  —HAARETZ

  “A remarkable book. The deep inner structures of Israeli society, the existential tensions of being Israeli, and questions pertaining to the definition of individual identity are dealt with brilliantly and light-handedly.”

  —THE BRENNER PRIZE COMMITTEE, 2017

  “It remains unclear whether this novel is an allegory of hopelessness or a feminist manifesto. The narrative allows for many interpretations and perhaps most importantly it’s a comedy.”

  —FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG

  “Ronit Matalon, a major figure in Israeli literature who died in 2017, exposes the contradictions of her country.”

  —L’EXPRESS

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Hebrew in 2016 as Ve-Ha-Kala Sagra Et Ha-Delet

  Copyright 2019 © by The Estate of Ronit Matalon

  Published by arrangement with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  Supported by “Am Ha-Sefer”—The Israeli Fund for Translation of Hebrew Books, The Cultural Administration, Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport

  Translation copyright © 2019 Jessica Cohen

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Matalon, Ronit

  [Ve-Ha-Kala Sagra Et Ha-Delet, English]

  And the Bride Closed the Door/ Ronit Matalon; translation by Jessica Cohen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-78-8

  Library of Congress Control Number 2019934494

  I. Israel—Fiction

  For my son, Daniel

  Contents

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  The young bride, who had been locked in her room in utter silence for more than five hours, finally made her announcement, then repeated the astonishing declaration three times from behind the closed door, through which four pairs of ears listened anxiously and with the utmost devotion. “Not getting married. Not getting married. Not getting married,” she recited in a flat, almost bored voice that sounded extremely distant and nebulous, like the final vapors of a scented cleaning spray.

  Three of them were crowded into the sad hallway (the grandmother had been placed upon a wicker stool opposite the door when her feet had grown weary from the long wait) and avoided looking at one another for a long time, as though any eye contact might turn the declaration they had just heard into a solid fact, confirming not only its content, but worse—its significance. And so they simply continued to stare at the shut door with its old-fashioned dark wood veneer, seemingly anticipating a thawing, a softening, a miraculous melting—if not of the bride then at least of the door—and hoping for something further: a continuation of the sentence, an idea or a word that might emerge through the door like the wet head of a newborn closely followed by the body itself sliding out.

  “I’m cold,” said the bride’s mother, Nadia. She tried to encircle her fleshy shoulders with her own arms, which were encased in the tight-fitting, prickly lace sleeves of the light gray evening gown she had been trying on, at the hairstylist’s request, though her feet were absentmindedly clad in plaid winter slippers with zippers down the front. Her dyed blond quiff perked up in surprise over her forehead, and similar wonderment veiled her gaze when it unintentionally fell on the grandmother, her own elderly mother, by whose presence she seemed as perplexed as she might be by an unfamiliar piece of furniture that she had not ordered yet was suddenly delivered to her home.

  “What did Margie say?” the grandmother asked cheerfully. She was hard of hearing and generally “not with us,” as Nadia put it, and throughout all these hours of waiting she had sustained a dazzling smile, full of the pearly white teeth inlayed by the dentist only a week earlier, in honor of the wedding. “What did she say?” she repeated, hanging her round gaze on the chrome door handle, which was positioned precisely at her eye level. She sat on the stool with her legs obediently straight and close together, like a kindergartener at circle time, and patted the remaining two apple quarters (two she had already eaten) on a dish towel on her lap.

  Nadia leaned over and gripped her elbow: “Go on, go rest in the living room for now. We’ll let you know when there’s any news.”

  The grandmother munched on some apple, and a thin dribble of pale yellow juice ran from the corner of her mouth down to her chin. “Booze? What booze? They’ll have plenty of drinks at the catering hall, don’t worry,” she assured them, wiping her fingertips on the dish towel.

  The phone rang in Matti’s pocket. He quickly silenced it, but a few seconds later it rang again and he turned it off yet again. “It’s not her?” asked Nadia. “It’s not her,” the groom replied, “I have her phone, did you forget?” Nadia closed her heavily made-up eyes. “I didn’t forget. I didn’t know you had it. How could I forget something I didn’t know?” She paused. “What are we going to do?” Then she repeated her question more quietly, as if trying not to wake someone: “What are we going to do?”

  Matti looked at her intently, somewhat wistful yet completely alert, and seemed to be considering her question, although he wasn’t really. She could feel his gaze jabbing her in the spot right between her painted eyebrows with an injection of despair, tense expectation,
and something else she couldn’t quite name. Startled, she turned sharply to Ilan, her nephew, who was leaning over on her right and whispering in her ear. “What? What did you say?” Nadia was confused.

  “I corrected you. I said: ‘God, what are we going to do?’ That’s what I said you should have said. ‘God, what are we going to do?’” Ilan displayed his ugliest sneer, intentionally exaggerated, then went back to covetously playing with Nadia’s six gold bracelets. He rolled them up and down her arm, counted them over and over again, pulled them almost up to her elbow then dropped them back down, one by one, to her wrist.

  “What does God have to do with it?” Nadia pulled her arm away impatiently. “Why would you bring God into this?”

  “It’s true. God forgets no one. Allah ma biyinsash khad, like they say,” the grandmother announced with contemplative satisfaction, rocking slightly from side to side on the stool to stretch her buttocks. Nadia put her hands over her eyes. “I can’t take her. I can’t. Explain to her what’s happening,” she murmured at Ilan without looking at him, and leaned her back against the wall.

  Ilan wiped his dry hands on his pants, moved closer to the grandmother’s stool, knelt down before her with his eyes straight across from hers, cupped her milky cheeks in his hands and held her head right in front of his own, so that she could watch his lips move. “Gramsy!” he said quietly, in a soft but persuasive voice. “Lena!” The grandmother’s face lit up and her wide nostrils trembled slightly with joy, as though her name pronounced by Ilan were a surprising discovery. “Can you hear me, sweetie?” he asked with a grave look. She nodded vigorously. “It’s Margie. Mar-gie. She’s not getting married in the end,” he explained. “Why not?” the grandmother asked, as a look of confusion and dread spread over her face. “Why isn’t she getting married?” Ilan replied slowly, accentuating every syllable: “She doesn’t want to. She said she doesn’t want to get married.” “Ever?” the grandmother inquired. “She doesn’t ever want to get married?” Ilan reached out, stroked her hair, and tucked a long strand behind her ear. “I don’t know if not ever, sweetie. We don’t know. For now—she doesn’t want to get married.”

  Nadia cried out. For the first time in the past half hour, the news sank in and hit her all at once, suddenly embodied in Ilan’s words, which ruptured her with their tenderness far more than a whip or a violent shaking could have. Her neck was bent forward and the skin was flushed, her hands covered her ears, and she gaped, extricating from inside her body a peculiar, truncated, almost inhuman wail, which she herself had never heard before. As she yelled (and now she also began striking her thigh rhythmically with her right hand) she marveled at this voice, so horrifyingly foreign, which was apparently coming from inside her, just as if her body and mind had split into two—two women: one screaming until her facial muscles ached and her eyes burned, and the other casually filing her nails and throwing the occasional curious glance at the screaming one.

  The screamer was the one who turned to the door and began to pound on it (the enormous amethyst ring on her finger pivoted into her palm and injured her): “Open up, Margie! Open up! Do you hear me? Open the door now or this is the end of you! The end, do you hear me? What’s the matter with you? What? What are we supposed to tell people? Five hundred people in that wedding hall four hours from now with the food and the band and everything! What are we going to tell them? What will they think of us?” Then she turned to Matti, one hand still banging on the door with feeble acquiescence, and added, “I had a feeling all morning. All morning. When she got up this morning and said she wasn’t going to the bridal salon. That we should cancel with the salon. With that face she had as soon as she got up, I knew, but I didn’t want to know, you see? I was afraid to know what that face meant.” She touched her red, painful hands, then wrenched the amethyst ring off and flung it furiously at the bathroom.

  Ilan leapt up, crawled over to the little bathroom, and felt around the floor for a long time until he found the ring behind the toilet. He spat on it, wiped it off thoroughly, and held it out to Nadia: “Here. Isn’t it a shame to throw away such a beauty because that basket case locked herself in her room? Isn’t it a shame?” Nadia wept softly and shook her head over and over again, mechanically. Her face was twisted under a caked mask of makeup, and the blond quiff clung to her damp, painted eyelashes, its tips smudged black from the mascara. She shrugged her shoulders, wiped her eyes on the hem of her dress, and pushed Ilan away. “Don’t bother me with that ring now. Nothing but rotten luck it’s brought us. Only rotten luck.” Ilan stared, transfixed, at the pale purple stone, then hesitated, held the ring to his lips, and put it on his finger. “I’ll take care of this stunner for you. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of it like I care for my own eyes,” he promised.

  Ilan, who was twenty-one, regarded his dazzling greengray eyes as his greatest, most secure asset. Almost no one—including himself—could resist their allure, and for years (since the age of ten or so) he had compulsively followed a ritual of examining his face in the mirror at length, then emitting a resigned sigh, as if to reluctantly acknowledge: Can’t do anything about it—these eyes are so gorgeous they could drive a person crazy.

  Outside the realm of his eyes, Ilan found things less satisfactory, and this caused him constant but silent suffering. His long, thin body seemed as though it were being stretched on either side by unequally matched powers, each struggling to pull the hardest. His vexing proportions were clearly the result of this struggle: from the waist up, his physique brought to mind a long noodle of dough that had been rolled, stretched, and thinned until his rear end had the same degree of flatness as his back, while his head and squashed face, particularly when viewed frontally, looked like the direct continuation of his neck in one straight line. His legs, on the other hand, were as short as a child’s, and the feet protruding from them were abnormally narrow, extremely long (he wore a size 12), and embarrassingly pale, or so he felt, which was why he never dared wear sandals.

  After his parents divorced, Ilan had moved in with Gramsy (a nickname he had invented when he was three), who lived in a one-bedroom apartment next door to Nadia. He slept on a narrow twin bed in a closed-in balcony off the kitchen, surrounded by piles of empty boxes, broken lamp shades, and various tatters left behind by the previous tenant. (Gramsy was terrified she might return at any moment to demand her pathetic but legal belongings). There were muslin blouses from the 1940s with missing buttons and frayed seams under the arms, which had once been white but were now yellow; moth-eaten ball gowns in lavender and baby-blue chiffon with high, narrow waistlines; a faux fur stole covered with a thin layer of glue and dead bugs; pink corsets with dozens of hooks; and one black silk nightgown that had survived virtually intact apart from its completely disintegrated train, which Ilan cherished above all the other items in this legacy that he viewed as his own. He tried on the nightgown every evening, marveling at its décolletage (a word he had learned from Gramsy), which was adorned with two rows of colorful crystal stones that he affectionately called “my candy.”

  Ilan was exempt from military service due to “incompatibility,” though he insisted with fearsome resoluteness—or with smug indifference, depending on his mood—that it was not he who was incompatible with the army, but rather the army that was incompatible with him. (He had once heard that line from someone, and pretended—then later forgot that he was pretending—that he had come up with it.) The issue of military service seemed to come between him and Matti, whom Ilan perceived as the embodiment of “the establishment.” Whenever their paths crossed, above every word Matti said, every “pass the Coke please, Ilan,” there hovered, in Ilan’s mind’s eye, a giant, colorful neon sign flashing the word A-R-M-Y while an imaginary siren blared. This vision aroused contractions of terror, distress, and latent anger, which gripped Ilan in the diaphragm and dysregulated his breath.

  This was what he experienced as he stood in the hallway wearing Nadia’s amethyst ring on his finger and his eyes met
Matti’s and encountered one of those looks—the supposedly hesitant looks that embodied a dark core of hostility, which passed through Ilan’s face, penetrated his mind, and exited out the other side of his head, transmitting a momentary tremor through his thin, weak hands. He fled to Gramsy, dabbed the saliva and apple juice off her chin with the dish towel, and kept his back to Matti (“that guy,” as he privately called him), which meant that he hardly heard Matti speaking, imbuing his voice with a firm courtesy that sounded very foreign.

  “I want you all to leave, please. Leave us alone.” Matti’s words finally broke through. He took off his jacket and slung it over his arm as though preparing for a long walk.

  “Which us? Us who?” asked Nadia.

  “Us. Me and Margie,” Matti replied. Then he glared at the door and waited, his back turned to them. His body looked rigid and poised, as if it had been wrapped in cling film. He stood there until the final sounds and rustles attested to their departure.

  Matti put his ear against the door and listened for a long time. The ticking of the large wall clock (an employee gift from Koor Industries years ago) came from inside the room, very faint in the silence. He bent down, peeked through the keyhole, and his eye came up against a dark spot that must have been the key stuck in the lock from the other side of the door. “Margie!” he called, shuddering slightly from the unfamiliar sound of his own voice. Then quietly, “Margie? Are you there?” He waited, gazing down at the pointed toes of the new black patent leather shoes Margie had talked him into buying.

  As he stood there, captivated by the glimmer of his shoes, that incident in the shoe store with Margie a week ago suddenly forced itself on him, compelling him to recall and recount its every detail, now of all times: how he and Margie had taken a taxi to the store at the north end of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv (his car was in the shop), how Margie’s feet hurt from the new shoes she’d just bought and insisted on wearing immediately, how they’d looked for a pharmacy to buy Band-Aids, paid and left the box on the counter, gone back to the pharmacy again (and the argument that had ensued at a street bench on which Margie collapsed, over whether to go back to the pharmacy where they’d left the Band-Aids or buy new ones at a closer pharmacy; and the beads of sweat on Margie’s chin when she barked, “It’s pennies, Matti! Those Band-Aids cost pennies, for God’s sake!”) and then the taxi. No, actually before the taxi and before the pharmacy, they’d stopped for ice cream. She didn’t like hers (pistachio), had been tempted by the pale green color but after a few licks she wanted to throw it away. And then the taxi. Margie’s long, brown thigh slung distractedly over his, and what she said while she gazed out the window, not at him. “I love taking cabs so much. Being driven. I wish this would never end,” she’d said, and all at once Matti felt so abandoned, but he didn’t respond, simply tried to quell the buds of displeasure and disappointment inside himself, even though he did not fully understand what she meant, and privately wondered whether to be hurt by her absentmindedness, which projected such anonymity, or to just let it be, to just leave it.