And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  Matti looked at the shadowy hallway: the door was still there. It was. His hand reached out and slid over it, stroking, up and down in a caress, smoothing down the sides, then finally gripped the chrome-plated plastic handle. The thick brown color of the door and the deep silence that stood there (Was she asleep? he wondered. Maybe she was asleep) trickled through the pores of his body, seeped inside, and seemed to recharge and colorize his blood cycle, creating a new weather pattern in his entire being. It was not his despair that had changed (he told himself) but the weather of the despair. He put his forehead against the door. Strangely, but not unpleasantly, he felt he had come home. This was home: the locked door, behind which was Margie (Margalit, he remembered. Her name was Margalit). There was a gradual dissipation of the fog inside him, the fog of insult, the violence and astonishment that his mother’s words had aroused. The toxic color in her words and her tone (“Toxic,” he repeated to himself, as though memorizing something, “Toxic, toxic”) had also vanished almost completely, and now a certain transparency arose, a fascinating lucidity of water, at which he dared to look and into which he wanted to gaze so that he could find his own reflection, or Margie’s reflection, or both of their reflections together (he could not decide): Margie didn’t love him. Maybe. Maybe she didn’t love him.

  He collapsed onto the floor and sat there with his back to the door, resting his cheek on his knees, which were folded into his chest, and suddenly he seemed small, very small, like a boy who’d lost his key and was waiting in the stairwell for his mother to come home from work. He went back to his thoughts, making progress (“I’m making progress,” he told himself), appearing in his mind’s eye as that knight who thrashes his sword through the thicket of trees and bushes and cuts away a path for himself. How had he not thought of that? How had he not even considered that possibility, the worst of them all (“And not an unlikely one,” he reproached himself), during the hours in which Margie had locked herself in the room and said she wasn’t getting married? How?! The complaining voice inside him abruptly quieted down and a different one flickered, then broke through: of course the possibility had not occurred to him. Of course it hadn’t. Because she’d said she wasn’t getting married, not that she didn’t love him. Not getting married. And since when was “not getting married” synonymous with “not in love”? Matti made fists with his hands and listened to the grating of a third voice, a stubborn and diligent and extremely monotonous one, which drowned out the previous ones: but she’s the one who wanted to get married in the first place. Not him. She wanted to get married. Margie. Because of Nadia, she wanted to. She did want to. He rubbed his eyes hard, until they stung. Through the stinging, he tried as hard as he could to conjure up Margie’s image before his eyes (he’d suddenly forgotten what she looked like) and project it onto his eyelids: Margie rinsing out her mouth with mouthwash, spitting out the strong green liquid too loudly, proud of herself and full of self-pity (“This stuff is horrific.”); Margie putting together a TV stand from Ikea, losing two screws and finding them under the fridge (how they’d fought at first over deciphering the assembly instructions, and how they’d laughed when they dragged the fridge out and its wheels broke); Margie opening the front door for him, standing there with tears streaming down her face (he never imagined anyone could have so many tears) after she’d finished reading the last page of Chekhov’s biography (“He died, Matti. Chekhov died,” she informed him through her tears); Margie munching crackers in bed, scattering crumbs on the sheet; Margie gravely explaining, as she polished her toenails, that they had to do the wedding pictures (at least part of them, if not all) with “those poor Africans, the foreign workers” (“If we’re going to get married, Matti, we have to share our joy with the most unfortunate ones, you understand? Otherwise it won’t be real joy”); Margie falling silent for long hours, becoming air, turning ashen (everything turning ashen: her olive skin; her greenish-brown eyes that got duller and duller as though someone had covered the pupils with thimbles; her dark hair tied sloppily at the back of her neck, with a few gray flyaways that seemed to reproduce themselves in a geometric sequence under the light of the reading lamp; her gnawed fingernails); Margie sitting cross-legged on the concrete railing in the university courtyard the first time he met her, wearing a blue-and-white checkered dress buttoned up to the neck (“the orphanage dress,” he called it), smoking half a cigarette and tossing it, lighting another, praising him excessively (he thought at the time) and perhaps artificially (he suspected at the time) for his choice of majors (philosophy and political science) and saying, “I’m not talented with ideas, unfortunately. All those ideas fall apart on me when I cook them, like a curdled sauce.” Margie naked.

  Weariness spread through Matti’s body. With his head on his knees, on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness, voices reached his ears from the kitchen and the living room (the apartment was small, yet it seemed as if entire expanses separated him from them), the doorbell played its stupid (he thought) melody a few times, and everybody’s cell phones rang in succession and, at one point, concurrently.

  He was amazed by the tranquility, by this cradled, placid feeling he was immersed in, like a warm bath, surprised (he smiled to himself, a thin smile with his head still buried in his knees) at how sweet this sensation of having defected from the battlefield could be. And he had defected, at this moment, in both body and mind, hardly bothering to look out from a distance at what he had abandoned, entirely devoted to a new and completely different expanse that had opened up inside him, with different enquiries. Did he love Margie? Really love Margie? Really love who she was, she herself, as distinct from him? Did he really love her for herself and not for him? (What is “really”? Is anything “really”? he wondered.) He suddenly knew, in a way that could almost not be articulated or justified, that what Margie had done, what she had declared (“Not getting married”) had stemmed not from a process of consideration (“Consideration,” he dismissed) and reaching conclusions, but rather from within some sort of musical change, a new melodic entry into herself. He perked up his head. Ilan’s rolling laughter reached him from the living room. “What did you say, Gramsy? What’s that word you just said?”

  Without getting up (now leaning slightly to one side), he banged on the bottom of the door with his hand. “Margie!” he called out in a low voice, looking at the corner of the hallway, at the spot where the walls met the molding. “I’m not going to bug you anymore, Margie, you need to know that. I don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and now I think I’m not going to get back at you for it. Not ever. I’m saying this honestly. Now I think I don’t feel like getting even with you, and not because I pity you. Understand this: it’s not from pity. I don’t know if you’re ever coming out of that room or not.” He paused for a moment, considered, then went on. “I don’t know what you’re planning, or if you even know what you’re planning to do. There’s major chaos here, you must understand that. Major.” (He lay flat on the floor and tried to peer through the gap under the door, surprised at how little light came through. “Maybe Ilan was right and she did block the door with the vanity,” he mused). “But now the only thing I . . . ” He sat up again and stopped, squinting, “The only thing I ask is for you to just tell me if all this happened because you understood, or you told yourself, or something, that you just don’t love me. That’s what I want to know, and I think I deserve to know.” He stood up, brushed off his pants and went to the bathroom. He turned the faucet on, washed his face a few times, and looked at his wet and enigmatic face in the mirror above the sink (“I have no opinion about my face, no opinion,” he thought), still holding his hands under the flow of water.

  When he came out, Matti walked down the hallway and gave another glance at the brown door, and his gaze fell on something on the floor: a large piece of paper torn from a notebook. He quickly picked it up and looked at it. Margie. Margie’s handwriting in short lines. Matti’s hands trembled slightly and he shook them, to calm
the tremor, went back into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet bowl with the lid down and read.

  The Prodigal Daughter

  On her journey, the stone said to her:

  How heavy your steps have become.

  Will you—the stone then asked her—

  Reach your forgotten home?

  On her journey, the shrub said to her:

  Your stature is no longer tall.

  How—the shrub then asked her—

  Will you go, if you stumble and fall?

  The milestones could not be sure

  If the stranger was master or damsel,

  And the milestones did rise tall,

  Prickling and piercing like brambles.

  On her journey, the well called out to her:

  How thirsty your lips are, how dry!

  And she knelt down and drank the water And slowly began to cry.

  He folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket and walked through the living room to the kitchen. (Ilan and Gramsy were no longer on the couch, having joined the others, leaving the couch cushions in disarray like two teenagers on summer break.)

  “You’ve finally come!” his mother rejoiced. “Sit down, listen to this.” Matti scanned the room with surprise: something had changed in the past half hour, while he’d been gone, as though stagehands and dressers had visited at intermission in a play and changed the sets and costumes. The air conditioning had stopped working—this was the first hard fact. His father was sprawled on a massage recliner they’d dragged in from the living room because of his backache, and it vibrated beneath him, sending shudders through his upper body, which was clad in nothing but an undershirt. The others were also in various stages of disrobing, and looked not unlike a family gathered for a cookout on a traffic island on Independence Day. In place of a barbeque a floor fan had been positioned in the middle of the dining area (although the nook known as the dining area did not really have a middle, having been sliced out of the kitchen, living room, and hallway together). He looked right and exhaled, looked left and exhaled, and went back to the middle. His mother had taken off her tracksuit top and was wearing a bright fuchsia stretchy tank top that hiked up and exposed her midriff. Nadia had removed the formal dress she’d bought for the wedding (Matti’s heart sunk) and had on a cotton robe with large pockets, in which her hands constantly burrowed. Gramsy had been extricated from the formal white-collared dress and put into a thin hand-knit sweater, while Ilan had taken advantage of the climate (Matti suspected derisively) to change into a tight mini-tank top that provided no coverage for his nipples or navel. Around his head was a turquoise sash that he’d tied on the side (taken from Nadia’s robe).

  Matti sat down at the dining table next to Peninit (he still wore his long-sleeved shirt, and swore he would not unfasten so much as a single button, to distinguish himself from them), who held his hand and explained: “Are you listening? There may be a solution. I talked to Sophie, remember her? From my work?” (Matti took deep breaths, praying the preamble would not become too detailed). “So?” he said. “Well, Sophie told me they have special psychologists” (she accentuated the word special with both her voice and her lips) “for these situations. Special ones, who know how to handle special situations, see?” “So?” he repeated, pulling his hand back, “So what?” “So we looked on the Internet, me and Dad, and we found this office, we found one!” Her voice climbed up and her eyes sparkled (“I never noticed what beautiful eyes she actually has,” Matti realized). “You found it,” Arieh corrected her from his seat. “It’s called ‘Regretful Brides,’” Peninit went on, “and they work 24/7, they come especially for emergencies with brides. I mean . . . You know what I mean.” She stopped suddenly, afraid to get into any more trouble with her son. Matti gave her a bored look. “That’s not by force, having a psychiatrist come talk with Margie and convince her, is it? That’s convincing, not forcing. Isn’t that right, that it’s not called forcing Margie out, Mattileh?” his mother pleaded, eagerly monitoring every stir in his facial muscles.

  “She really doesn’t feel well, the poor girl. Margie doesn’t feel well,” Nadia’s voice piped up, making its contribution. (She’d made a decision, and was doing her best to stick to it, that she would soften and smooth over the emergency relationship with Peninit as much as she could, so that Peninit wouldn’t turn against her and bring up the issue she so feared. This strategy contradicted her nature and was utterly exhausting, and at times she felt as though a huge tray, loaded with glasses, were resting on her head while she tried to balance on a thin rope stretched over an abyss.) “Maybe this doctor can give her a pill to calm her or something. Maybe she’s stressed out, the girl, and she needs a pill,” Nadia added.

  Matti drummed his fingers on the table and said nothing. “So we asked her to come,” Peninit plucked up her courage and confessed. “We asked the psychologist and she’ll be here soon. Dr. Julia, that’s her name.” “Julia is her first name,” Arieh intervened, “not her last name. You should have asked for her last name.” Peninit gave him a withering look: “Stop. At least don’t get in the way.”

  With some effort, Matti asked, “So she’s coming?” (In fact he was drowning in his own contemplations: “The prodigal daughter. The prodigal daughter. Why was she bringing up the prodigal daughter? And besides, wasn’t the original called ‘The Prodigal Son’?” He strained his memory, reading a headline that flickered for an instant on the screen of his consciousness, then turned off, then flickered back on: “Song of the Prodigal Son.” He spluttered on a sudden shortness of breath that rattled him and then passed, leaving him depleted and limp.)

  His mother’s voice roused him: “She’s coming, this psychiatrist. We’ll send Ilan out to wait for her in a minute, so she doesn’t get lost in these buildings. She takes two thousand for a home call.”

  “It’s on me!” came Gramsy’s voice all of a sudden, to everyone’s astonishment. “The doctor’s on me.” She gripped her wallet tightly in her lap.

  “Does she get what’s going on? I thought she wasn’t getting it,” Peninit whispered to Nadia, who blew her nose loudly and shook her head in disbelief. “That’s her whole monthly stipend. Most of it, anyway,” she said.

  Peninit bit her lips, considered for a moment, then went over to Gramsy. “Gramssy,” she called out loud, mispronouncing the s, “Gramssy, you don’t have to pay. There’s no need. We’ll be fine. What’s a doctor’s fee compared to all the expenses we’ve had? You hold on to your money, Gramssy.” She looked around to gauge the impression her gesture had made, then sat back down.

  “Well,” said Matti (so embarrassed by his mother that he’d buried his face in his hands). “Well,” he repeated, slowly taking the folded paper out of his pocket and spreading it out before him, “there’s something from Margie.”

  “What? What?” Everyone grew very excited and huddled around him, apart from Gramsy, who kept sitting on the straight-backed chair, still clutching her wallet and running her long lizard tongue back and forth over her dry lips.

  “Why didn’t you say? What were you waiting for?” Peninit grumbled, glancing at the page. “Did she write that to you?”

  Matti hesitated. “I don’t know. I think Leah Goldberg wrote it,” he said eventually.

  “Who?” asked a puzzled Nadia, snatching the paper out of his hand. “Who’s Leah Goldenberg?”

  “Goldberg, not Goldenberg,” Arieh corrected her and looked at the piece of paper now held by Nadia. “It’s a poem,” he added in a disappointed tone.

  Nadia stared at the page. “How can you say someone called Leah Goldenberger wrote this? It’s Margie’s handwriting. I know it is. This is Margie, not some Leah Goldenberg.”

  “Goldberg, Goldberg,” Peninit corrected her. “She’s a poet. She was on the radio. Didn’t you hear Leah Goldberg on the radio?”

  “Goldenberg, Goldberger, Goldberg, Goldenberger—those names of theirs will be the death of us,” Ilan mumbled desperately, taking hold of his bushy eye
brows between his thumbs and fingers and tugging at them.

  Nadia tried to read what was written on the piece of paper, but her eyes glazed over. “Margie wrote this. Dear soul. She wrote a poem.” She held it out for Matti. “Here. You read it to us.”

  Matti looked at the truncated lines, written in Margie’s incredibly round and fluent handwriting. He choked up a little, cleared his throat, and quickly blurted: “Song of the Prodigal Daughter.”

  “Oh, but she wasn’t prodigal, not Margie,” Arieh interrupted, sounding thoughtful, as he fanned his face with a dustpan. “She worked hard, from age fourteen, and she never wasted a penny. She told me all about it. Not like these spoiled kids today, who get everything handed to them on a silver spoon.” He gave Matti a reproachful look. “Today children are prodigal, throwing money around right and left, but not Margie. I’m really impressed by her.”

  “Dad, I don’t think you know what the word means here. It’s from the New Testament, there’s a story called ‘The Prodigal Son.’ This one is about a daughter who gets lost, but then she comes home. It’s not about being wasteful,” Matti said drily. (From the corner of his eye he glanced at Nadia, at Gramsy, and back at Nadia, at their similarly ossified expressions, which understood nothing yet comprehended everything. He tried to ignore the elevator loaded with dark distress climbing up inside him, from the pit of his stomach to his neck.)

  They lowered their eyes, or at least so it seemed to Matti, even though he didn’t look up from the page, and his father’s voice reached him from a distance, sounding dulled, as if it were coming through a shut window. “Well, the prodigal daughter is something else, like you said. That’s pretty, what she wrote. ‘The Prodigal Daughter’ instead of ‘The Prodigal Son.’ I get it.”