And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  Without paying any attention to him, Arieh pressed on, growing more and more fond of the idea (and not only because of the benefit it might bring). “I can talk to Avner from the electric company. He has connections with the garage where they keep the trucks with the ladders. I’ll find his number in a second.” He put his glasses on and leafed through a little notebook.

  “Electric company ladders?” Nadia asked with a weak, involuntary smile. (She had retreated, taking no position in the debate over necessary modes of action, and was preventing herself from taking any interest, retiring to a place that was not even her home but a sort of hideout, a secret room that branched off her actual apartment, which in her mind’s eye had been impounded by Peninit and Arieh and the polite doctor and even by Matti, and it was all lawful, she thought, it was a lawful impounding, because she sensed what was going to happen on account of the huge debt she owed them for the wedding expenses, and so she quickly retreated, relinquishing what was far more costly than the apartment itself, which was her sense of ownership of the apartment.)

  Arieh left the room with his phone, having tried to hush the voices around him with his hand, and came back a few minutes later. “I talked to Avner, I told him the whole story,” he announced excitedly. “So here’s the deal,” he began, and took a deep breath to prepare for his speech.

  “Stop it. I don’t even want to hear it, I don’t want to,” Matti said, stomping his foot.

  That foot-stomping infuriated Peninit (she once again noticed Matti’s black patent leather shoes, which she despised) and at that moment she made up her mind to side with Arieh and Ilan. “Run along,” she told Matti impatiently. She picked up her purse, pulled out a coin and put it in his hand: “Here’s ten shekels. Go buy yourself a popsicle at the corner store. Calm down. Run along.”

  Arieh continued: “Avner wants to help, he’s a good guy, I know him. But here’s the problem: to get an electric company vehicle out here now, he can’t do that. He could easily lose his job for that. But he had an idea. He has a good friend, Adnan, from the Palestinian Authority’s electrical company, and this Adnan brought one of their vehicles in for repairs at the shop. So Avner says maybe Adnan can come out here with his truck, and it won’t be any trouble. No trouble at all. Adnan owes him a favor—lots of favors—and he’ll do it,” he summed up ceremoniously.

  “So this Adnan has to get in trouble instead of Avner? That’s the solution?” Matti asked caustically.

  “Who said he’ll get in trouble?” Arieh asked defensively. “Why must you always see the glass half empty? He won’t get in trouble. He’s used to it, with all their chaos over there, I guarantee you. We don’t know what he owes Avner over there.”

  “Tell him to come quickly,” Peninit decreed in a foreboding voice.

  One of the doctor’s two phones rang (they were on the living room table, in front of her). “Regretful Brides, how can I help you?” she said. She spoke softly for a moment, then hung up. “I don’t have a lot of time,” she announced. “There’s an urgent case with a bride who got out of the car on the way to her wedding. I’ll need to get over there.”

  “She got out of the car just like that?” Arieh asked in amazement, his attention completely distracted from the previous matter. “You mean she jumped out of a moving car on the way to the event hall?”

  The doctor shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not sure exactly. But I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Ilan was getting ready to walk out to the parking lot to wait for Adnan’s van or pickup truck. (“Is it a van or a pickup?” he asked). He put on Margie’s slippers, the woolly ones with squished bunny faces in the front.

  “It’s a truck, but a small one,” Arieh said. “You’ll recognize it. And call us right out.”

  “Does it have any kind of flag on it?” Ilan insisted. “Does it have that flag of theirs, red and . . . blue and yellow, or whatever their colors are?”

  “Are you mad?” Arieh sounded horrified. “There will be no flag of theirs here. Over my dead body!”

  Peninit went back to the window, leaned over the railing again and looked out, lost in thought. Gramsy and Nadia ate eggplant dip out of the same dish, without a fork, scooping it up with pieces of bread. Peninit watched them sympathetically. “Why don’t you both go and lie down? Have a little rest, we’ll call you when he gets here,” she suggested.

  “She’ll come out in the end, don’t worry. They all come out in the end,” the doctor added, as she texted feverishly on her phone.

  Peninit looked at her. “What are we going to tell the five hundred guests? Friends from work, neighbors, family—what will we tell them?” The doctor did not answer. It was quiet. They could hear Gramsy chewing and smacking her lips, enjoying the eggplant. Matti lay back in the recliner with his eyes closed (Arieh had gone out with Ilan to wait for the truck), surrendering in exhaustion to a dreamy or nightmarish picture of a different universe, which danced in front of his eyes, rustling and colorful like a bundle of cellophane sheets, a sort of semimute universe. In that space between sleep and wakefulness there were regretful brides who scurried around, tripping over their long veils, skipping past trucks belonging to the Palestinian Authority’s power company, and his father walked among them, pleading and urging, with the blood pressure cuff on his arm, which for some reason was covered with shiny, bright green cats’ eyes. He woke up with a start, bathed in sweat, and suddenly remembered something. He touched the paper in his shirt pocket, took it out, and unfolded it.

  “Again with her poem?” Peninit asked dryly. (Then she thought: “I must update the doctor.”) “She sent a poem. Did we tell you Margie sent out a poem she wrote?”

  “She didn’t write it, Leah Goldberg wrote it and Margie copied it,” Matti explained, privately wondering whether “copied” was the correct verb in this case.

  “Margie never copied anything. Why are you saying she copied it from Leah again? She was the top of her class,” Nadia insisted, suddenly come back to life. She went over to Matti, took the paper out of his hand and brought it to her lips, then held it out to look at the short lines. “Where did Margie get them? All these words?” she wondered.

  Matti took the page back and handed it to the doctor. “Read it.”

  The doctor read silently, furrowing her brow, her lower lip curled into an expression of either bewilderment, misunderstanding, or repulsion. “There’s no doubt about it, she’s a very special young woman,” she said when she was finished.

  “Very, very special. Too special, if you ask me. From morning to night all she does is work on being special, that girl,” Peninit commented resentfully. (The fatigue and tension had unbridled her inhibition and sharpened her tongue.)

  Paying no attention to her, Nadia went over to the doctor and stood facing her. “What did she say, my daughter?” she asked. “What does her poem mean? Tell me.” Just then Ilan flung the front door open and announced: “The ladder’s here!” Then he hurried over to Gramsy, took her by the arm, and walked beside her at her measured pace to the front door. “You’re taking her? Her, too?” Matti exclaimed. Ilan looked surprised: “Why not? She’s always with us at family events. You want me to leave her here like a dog?”

  They went downstairs, Ilan and Gramsy in the lead, the others behind them.

  Matti sat alone in the living room awhile longer. He lay down on the couch, still wearing his shoes, looked at the poem again, folded up the paper and put it in his pocket, and stared at the narrow strip of sky visible through the large window, above the treetops and buildings of the Tel Aviv suburb. He was suddenly filled with awe at this vision of the revelatory sky, and he said to himself: “The skies of Kir’on.” A bothersome thought began to adhere, centered around that foolish, unrelenting phrase, “the skies of Kir’on,” which, much as he tried to rid himself of and move on to the next thing, nonetheless assailed him again and again, emerging from fragments of other sentences, thoughts and feelings, disrupting them, hindering their proper motion, if they ev
en had any motion, any direction.

  With great effort, through this disruption, this “skies of Kir’on” disturbance, he found himself clinging to his earlier question (“What was she trying to say with this poem? What is she saying?”), which now merely aroused boredom and disinterest, as though it were the homework assignment of a lazy student. Still, he tried to animate it and bring it to life, simply because it reminded him of what he knew and recognized as himself, the same self that now seemed extremely ancient, almost prehistoric, impervious to his current being, the one that existed after Margie and Margie’s door. He felt as if he’d grown up at once, or grown small at once, in a matter of hours, since the whole business of Margie and her door had begun. He moved the toes of his shoes in front of his eyes while he thought about this, trying to restore his sense of body, to regain a proportionate view of things, and of himself inside the things, which had seemed to have slipped through his fingers, and from that slippage, from the leakage of himself out of himself, from his fear of losing contact with the floor beneath his feet, he could feel the jealousy arising. He was not jealous of Margie, at the thought that she might prefer someone else to him, but he was terribly envious of her. Like her, he longed to lock himself behind a door, to put everything on hold, to rebuff the world and its words, to reduce his entire existence into that space between his breaths and the pillow his head lay on. For a moment he had the urge to go back to the hallway and beg her to open up again, but this time not to make her come out but to make her let him join her, so they could lock the door behind them both.

  The phone rang. Arieh told him to come down quickly. On his way out, Matti stopped in the bathroom and then lingered in the dark hallway outside the door. He looked at it quietly, his arms hanging limply at his sides, listening to the silence inside himself, the new silence that hummed its soft melody inside him, as if through a thick blanket, monotonous and circular, reaching the end of the tune and starting over again: “It doesn’t matter if she comes out or not, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter now if she comes out, doesn’t matter.”

  When Matti got to the parking lot he found a sizeable gathering of neighbors and passersby next to a decrepit looking midsized truck with Arabic lettering on its side. The area nearest the building wall and the upstairs bedroom window was occupied by three parked cars, and everyone was discussing how to locate the owners—residents of the building—and persuade them to move their cars.

  Adnan, a short, thin young man wearing a red T-shirt that said “Petach Tivka Summer Camps” on the front, had walked away, sat down on the curb, and was smoking a cigarette while he waited. “This is when they come to fix the power?” grumbled a young woman with a stroller. “They’ll end up causing a power outage all night with their repairs.” Arieh, who stood next to her wearing his baseball cap, aflutter with excitement, did not correct her mistake. (“Don’t go opening your mouth and telling everyone about Margie, don’t open your mouth,” Peninit had warned him earlier.) He scowled at Ilan, who had moved away from the truck and was conversing with someone (Arieh had just instructed him to stand by the truck and hide the Arabic words as best he could). The doctor sat on a nearby wooden bench, next to Gramsy, whose eyes were shaded behind Ilan’s gold-framed sunglasses. Gramsy looked around, and every so often she stuck out her long, supple tongue, moistened her lips, and stretched it down to her chin. Matti sat down next to them, assuming the status of a bystander, but a few moments later he changed his mind, walked over to Adnan, and looked down at the young man who still sat on the curb with his feet crossed. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Adnan looked at Matti’s black patent shoes. “Are you something or other from the municipality?”

  “I’m the groom,” Matti replied and sat down next to him.

  Adnan offered a cigarette. “Total mess, huh?” he said, lighting the cigarette Matti refused and smoking it himself.

  Matti looked at the truck. “That elevating ladder—is it going to reach up there?” he wondered.

  “It’ll reach,” Adnan confirmed. “Why wouldn’t it? We get it to reach all the way up to the wires. Nothing happens to them, they’re all good.”

  Matti had trouble following. “Who’s all good?”

  Adnan did not answer. Lost in thought, he tapped the cigarette with his finger, flicking ash on the sidewalk. “Why don’t you lock her up?” he finally asked. “Lock her up for two or three weeks, maybe four, let her sit it out.”

  “Lock who up?”

  “Your fiancée. Lock her up,” Adnan advised.

  “But she’s already locked up. How much more locked can I get her?”

  “No, no, no,” Adnan corrected him, straightening up. “You lock her before she locks herself. Before. After, it’s no use anymore.” He looked to one side, as did Matti, at a small cluster of neighbors standing around Nadia next to the truck.

  “Ten years after the girl left, another one goes,” Nadia was saying in a subdued voice, wrapping her fingers around a piece of fabric, a scarf or handkerchief, staring far away above their heads. “I don’t have the heart to feel what I’m going through anymore. Where will I get the heart?” she lamented, walking in a circle from one neighbor to the next, touching each one and standing close to them, as if she were circulating among wedding guests.

  “And she won’t come out? She won’t come out of the room?” asked one of the neighbors worriedly. His neck was stabilized in a high orthopedic neck brace. He gave a quick glance at Arieh and then at Matti.

  “Won’t come out,” Nadia confirmed. She looked out beyond them again, at the reddish roof of the shopping center across the street, seemingly broadcasting her voice to something, not someone.

  The neighbor in the neck brace held Nadia’s clammy hand and stared at the truck. “But why did you bring Arabs to rescue her? Why Arabs? Don’t we have our own rescue forces?” he asked. The young woman with the stroller scolded him, distractedly rocking the empty stroller as she held the baby in her arms: “Stop with that. What’s it got to do with rescue forces? The bride doesn’t want to come out, you heard what she said, she won’t come out. What does that have to do with rescue forces?”

  Peninit stood there listening bitterly, overcome with an urge to pull Nadia and her words out of there and give them a good shake. (“Be diplomatic,” she commanded herself, “diplomatic.”) Instead she went over to the circle, made her way to Nadia (“Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry”) put her arms around her shoulders, gripping tightly, brushed away the hair stuck to her forehead, and led her slowly out of the circle (“She doesn’t feel well, she mustn’t talk so much,” she explained pleasantly) to the bench where Gramsy and the doctor were sitting.

  When the parking area near the apartment window was finally cleared, Adnan started the truck up and drove at a crawl to the side of the building (trampling the sparse hedges). Two long, parallel metal tracks, with a small lift attached to them, emerged from the body of the truck and began to extend upward. Adnan got out and opened the side of the lift for the doctor. “Please, Madam,” he said with a slight nod.

  She hesitantly put one foot, clad in a blue, high-heeled pump, on the metal platform. “Is this thing safe?”

  “Of course, don’t worry,” Adnan promised.

  The doctor looked down, pulled her foot back, stood with her legs straight and close together, and bowed her head. “I can’t get on it. I have a fear of heights,” she whispered to Ilan, who was standing very close on her right side.

  “I’ll come with you, don’t worry. I’ll go up with you,” he reassured her.

  “No, no, that’s impossible,” she said, shaking her head. “No one can be with me while I’m talking to her. No one. That’s not allowed in a therapeutic situation.”

  “But I’m no one. I swear, I’m no one. Nobody is more no one than me, and I won’t hear a word of what you say, and what I do hear I won’t understand anyway, I’m telling you,” Ilan insisted eagerly.

  She looked wanly at his f
ace, at the turquoise sash tied around his head with a butterfly knot on the side. “All right,” she agreed.

  They stepped onto the platform. The small lift shuddered, barely rose up from its base, then began climbing slowly to the third-floor window, went straight past it—to everyone’s astonishment—and kept going to the fourth floor, where it stopped. Ilan and the doctor were swallowed up behind large, damp sheets that had just been hung out to dry.

  “That’s not the right window, it’s not the right one!” Arieh growled at Adnan. “Where are you taking them—to God Almighty?” Adnan hushed him with a wave of his hand, pressed the left button, and the elevator began to descend again, stopping outside Margie’s window.

  From afar and below, from the edge of the parking lot where everyone rushed to get a better look (Gramsy was left alone on the bench. A fat, black-and-white stray cat sprawled out next to her, squinting with the heavy weariness of one who’s seen it all), the doctor could be seen stretching her arm toward the windowpane, trying to knock on it, unable to reach. She consulted with Ilan and then removed one of her blue pumps, held it out, and used the heel to bang on the window. There was a moment’s silence. The high-pitched, slightly squeaky voice of a girl suddenly came from the crowd: “Which of my clothes are new and what’s already been washed?”

  The doctor rapped on the window with her shoe again. “Let’s hope she doesn’t break the glass and make people get hurt. That’ll be the end of this,” Arieh fretted, and was immediately silenced by an elbow from Peninit, who was staring up expectantly. The glass pane slowly rolled along its tracks and the window opened. The bride, with her head behind a transparent veil that plunged to her shoulders and hovered like thick steam around her dark hair, stood at the window wearing dark sunglasses (a glaring sun still blazed from the east). Nadia’s hand reached up to her gaping mouth, which sought to unleash an involuntary yelp of joy (she could not remember if she’d ever broken out in a yelp of joy, or whether she even knew how to produce such a sound, which always aroused in her a tinge of discomfort and embarrassment), but she tamped it down with her hand. Margie spoke. With their hands shielding their foreheads against the sun, everyone saw her arms moving while she talked to the doctor for several minutes. She vanished from the window for a moment and then reappeared, holding out a large piece of thick, unrolled paper that filled the rectangular window frame. In the same curly lettering from the poem, the word “Sorry” was written on the paper. The crowd looked up. “What does it say?” Nadia asked, unable to see clearly. “Sorry,” said Peninit in a miserable, defeated voice. “She says sorry.”