And the Bride Closed the Door Page 7

  The lift slowly descended, and just then a siren blared in the distance, getting closer and closer. A police car soon stopped by the crowd of onlookers. Adnan noticed it first, and quickly dug through the glove compartment for his ID. “Who’s in charge here?” asked one of the two policemen who stepped out and calmly surveyed the crowd.

  “Me,” Matti felt compelled to say, making his way forward and standing in front of the officers, straightening his shirt collar.

  “We got a warning on the phone about a truck with explosives. Where’s the truck?”

  “There,” said Matti and Adnan together, pointing at the truck. “It’s the power company, not explosives. There’s no explosives,” Adnan added, holding out his ID.

  Ilan and the doctor stepped off the lift platform and gave the uniformed officers a surprised look. “What did you call the police for? It’s all settled with Margie now,” Ilan said.

  “Settled? What’s settled? What did she say?” Arieh demanded.

  The policemen walked all the way around the truck, peered inside, closed and opened the bolt on the lift’s gate, banged on the sides with their fists a few times, and examined the faded red Arabic letters. “What’s that say on the truck?” one of them asked.

  “Sorry,” said Arieh, who was busy trying to decipher the doctor’s frozen expression. “She wrote ‘Sorry.’”

  The policeman gave him a suspicious look. “What sorry? What are you talking about, sorry?”

  Adnan cleared his throat. “This is the electrical company’s truck, from the PA. I was just doing these people a favor. It was just a favor I was doing because of the wedding.”

  The doctor gave him a stern look (Adnan tilted his head to one side, as though trying to dodge a ball kicked powerfully on a soccer field) and furrowed her brow. “This man was doing us a favor,” she finally confirmed.

  “A favor?! How is this a favor?” Matti snapped. “What did we get out of all this stupid talking with Margie through the window? What do we know now that we didn’t know before?”

  “Hold on,” the officer stopped him, “so now you’re saying the guy from the truck in Arabic wasn’t doing a favor?”

  Matti turned red. “I didn’t say that. That’s actually not what I said. He personally did do us a favor. He did,” he declared, still sounding confused.

  Adnan pushed his way forward and stood between Matti and the officer. “Don’t listen to him, don’t listen, ’cause he’s not in charge, he’s in charge my foot, ’cause his bride left him on their wedding day—is that a man in charge? He’s not in charge, listen to me . . . ” He opened his mouth wide and put his face right in front of the policeman’s.

  The policeman recoiled, squinting. “The two of you are coming to the station with me, right now. With the truck, come with me.”

  Matti stared at him. A bothersome hum was growing louder, turning into an almost deafening beep in his ears (he covered his right ear with his hand). “I can’t start going to stations now,” he said with some effort, in a small voice. “Maybe afterward. But now I have a wedding to cancel.” He shook his head from side to side, walked away, and sank onto the bench next to Gramsy.

  A dusky afternoon light descended abruptly on the parking lot, without anyone noticing, replacing the blazing hot glare from before but leaving the heavy humidity, perhaps even magnifying it (Adnan was led to the truck and one of the policemen sat down next to him in the driver’s seat), since it now seemed the asphalt itself were exhaling on them all, dispensing the enormous, densely packed stores of heat it had absorbed all day, breathing them out, not all at once but at a regular, rhythmic pace, steady breath after steady breath, as though unwilling to reveal its entire secret at once, preferring instead to expose it gradually, piece by piece. (The truck engine rattled, groaned, died out, and was restarted. The truck slowly backed out, turned around in the lot, and crawled away behind the police car.) Matti heard Gramsy smacking her lips and wondered what was in her mouth that she was sucking so eagerly. Her total serenity, embodied in her small freckled hands resting on her thighs together, suddenly horrified him, after having merely surprised him only moments before.

  “How are you, Gramsy? How’s it going?” Matti asked, but she didn’t hear him. She kept looking up at Margie’s window as if she expected something else to appear there, another sign, or a sign of a sign. (From a distance, near the trampled hedge, Peninit and Nadia were talking with the doctor, who did not look at them but instead bent over and examined a long run in her nylons. Then she straightened up, made her way to the edge of the lot with the two women behind her, got into her car, exchanged a few more words with them through the window, and drove away.)

  Matti followed Gramsy’s eyes, carried along with them up to the window, his gaze intertwining with hers, which was, he imagined, both vapid and full of expectation, strangely glowing. An old picture surfaced in his memory, of Margie and Gramsy, Gramsy and Margie, on that day, the first time Margie took him to Gramsy’s jumbled, yellow apartment.

  The old woman was sitting erect in a stiff, straight-backed armchair, wearing a heavy, eggplant-colored knit dress buttoned up to her neck. Her face and eyelids were covered in crude, glowing streaks of makeup (Ilan had done her makeup in honor of the occasion) and her hands clutched each other, and she looked as though she had been marinating herself in this precise position for several hours before their arrival—since morning, in fact. Behind her chair, right above her head, a translucent white curtain billowed, and its hem touched her forehead or hair every so often, but she did not move, did not reach out to brush away the nuisance that apparently did not bother her at all. Margie held his arm, led him to Gramsy’s seat (pinching his upper arm lightly as she did so) and said in Hebrew and Arabic, very deliberately, so that Gramsy could read her lips: “This is the one I told you about. What do you think?” Without waiting for an answer, she jumped into Gramsy’s lap, wrapped her arms around her neck, and put her cheek on Gramsy’s face, near her temple. She shut her eyes. He watched with wonder as Margie sat there in utter delight, with her eyes closed, rocking on Gramsy’s lap and rocking Gramsy with her, as though she were a large baby who had to be soothed and put to sleep.

  He stood there awkwardly, next to a large bureau, and watched them both. Then he looked away from what seemed to him a demonstrative display of powerful emotions and tenderness, sensing his increasing embarrassment, discomfort and even shame, the kind that arises when one watches a bad theater actor gesticulating, trying with all his heart to animate and magnify the audience’s heartfelt emotions. And he was so alarmed. He remembered suddenly how alarmed he felt that day, the internal pallor that colored his awkwardness, that foreign feeling, the alienation from Margie, the evil look she gave him, the look of a hostile witness.

  “Hostile,” he repeated to himself now, but this time without any alarm, only curiosity and huge wonderment at that sensation, that old coat suddenly removed from the depths of his memory and consciousness to be aired out, spreading an indistinct but unpleasant smell, the smell of closed-up spaces with no daylight. He kept his head turned up to Margie’s window but his eyes closed, and pushed away the purring fat cat that nuzzled at his thighs. Actually, there had always been something standing between him and Margie, between him and himself in his relationship with Margie. There had always been something between them, actually. (“Actually, actually,” he rolled the word off his tongue, struck by the realization that the minute that word turned up, the downward slope began. The slope always began with “actually.”) This thought that occurred to him did not surprise him at all, and it even looked familiar and friendly, so much so that he could surround it with equanimity and confidence, like a boy running all the way around a dodgeball court on his own, without anyone racing him. What was the content of the “actually”? What was its logical, concrete embodiment? What exactly was it that stood between him and Margie, still? He found himself face-to-face with the slippery words that for so long had not wanted to be found and now had
been: he always had to bend something inside him with Margie, to constrict, to accept a certain uncomfortable bodily position, and mental position, with regards to her, and to work hard to blur it in his own vision. Always. And it always contained a dirty little secret, a tiny one, a miniscule one, that could not be seen with the naked eye but was there, teeny-tiny, a lie he told himself and her, an “actually” that nestled inside him and bided its time, waiting and waiting. But no longer, he told himself. No longer. For the first time in all those hours that day (“actually, for the first time ever,” he thought), a sense of relief ran through him, an enormous release from a burden he had not even been aware of and which had now been lifted, leaving him practically naked, but at the same time with a wild happiness at the nakedness, an almost total relinquishing of secret assets.

  He opened his eyes, surprised to discover that Gramsy was still sitting next to him, sailing across her world as if on a pool raft. For some reason he found himself pulling out Margie’s note again, spreading it out before him, smoothing out the creases. “Would you like me to read you Margie’s poem, Gramsy?” he asked. (He noticed that he’d called it “Margie’s poem,” but with a wholeheartedness now, which stemmed from the distance, without any pangs of conscience.) She nodded without looking at him.

  “On her journey,” he began, speaking loudly, examining Gramsy’s face. She smiled delightedly and signaled for him to continue.

  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?

  “Why didn’t you say sorry to Margie? You didn’t say sorry,” Gramsy interrupted. She started rocking back and forth on the bench as though something were bothering her, or as though she were praying.

  “What?”

  “Sorry to Margie. Why don’t you tell Margie sorry?” Gramsy repeated.

  “Margie was the one who said sorry,” he tried to explain. “Margie wrote ‘sorry’ on that big paper in the window, remember? She was the one who said it.”

  The old lady pursed her lips, displeased, refusing any words. “Sorry to Margie,” she hissed. Matti opened his mouth wide, about to say something, to flip back what had apparently been flipped over in the old lady’s mind, but he stopped and fell silent in dismay. Perhaps Gramsy had read his thoughts before. Perhaps through her withered, diagonal, tortuous instincts, she had guessed at the path he had taken, which was paved with those words that one must not utter and yet one must utter? He examined her face with great attention, with awe. It showed no sign. It remained impenetrable, like a steaming platter covered with a stainless steel cover. “I’ll tell Margie sorry, like you say. I’ll tell her,” he heard himself saying. “When?” the old lady demanded with the impatience of a debt-collector. “Very soon. Soon I’ll tell Margie sorry,” he promised, amazed at being somehow happy to make her this promise, and even happier to collaborate with her whims.

  His mother and father came over to the bench, with Nadia straggling behind them. “We’re going to the catering hall, to let the guests know. We’ll have to stand up there and tell the guests,” said Arieh, crumpling his Chicago Bulls cap in his hands. “We’re all going,” echoed Nadia behind him. “We’re all going to tell them. We’ll all stand there.”

  Her face was gathered in now, tucked in toward a center, an estimated longitude, which ran from the middle of her forehead to her chin and projected a cool resolution to annihilate any trace of self-pity. Her blond quiff fluttered above all that like a flag erected on a hilltop by the victor.

  Matti scanned the empty lot around him. “Where’s Adnan?” he suddenly thought to ask. “They took him in for questioning at the police,” said Peninit. “They’ll let him go, for sure. They have nothing on him, nothing, why wouldn’t they let him go?”

  Matti looked at his mother and sensed his regular, anticipatory anger giving way to a sort of compassion. His heart suddenly ached for her neck folds, which quivered and dripped with sweat, for her robbed, lost gaze and that unraveling of her expression, which made him think of a house after a burglary. “But he did us a favor,” he said gently. She shrugged her shoulders, holding Arieh’s hand. “Whatever you think. We’re going,” she said, but she did not move, remorseful for a moment. Then she turned to Nadia: “You don’t have to come with us, really. Stay here, get some rest.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ilan quickly concurred. He wiped Nadia’s forehead with the turquoise sash that had been wrapped around his head. “You shouldn’t go there. We’ll tell the people everything.”

  “What everything?” Nadia panicked. “What ‘everything’? Don’t you dare tell them everything.”

  “That’s a good idea, actually, for Ilan to come with us instead of you,” Peninit intervened. “He’ll come with us to the catering hall as the family representative and you take a pill and go get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” Nadia acquiesced, though a look of doubt spread over her face. The words “family representative” kept working inside her, excreting sour juices of displeasure and disagreement. She also suspected that Peninit’s goodwill was meant solely to soften her up before the inevitable blow: her obligation to help cover the deposit paid to the event hall.

  Ilan cut off her labyrinth of contemplations. “I’m putting something on, I’ll be right down,” he declared, and sprinted toward the building.

  Arieh glanced at his watch. “Almost six,” he announced gloomily. Arieh, Peninit, Nadia, and Matti sat down next to one another on the bench next to Gramsy, resembling a row of passengers on the back seat of a bus, waiting for Ilan. Waiting again. Except that now their expectation had a different flavor, chalky and bitter. (Matti stood up and moved to the curb, having almost been pushed off the crowded bench.) The black-and-white stray cat lay on the sidewalk, glaring at them gravely and somewhat curiously.

  Evening had almost fallen when Ilan finally returned, stood opposite the bench and saluted. He was wearing Margie’s old army uniform (he’d had a seamstress take it in awhile ago, to fit his gaunt figure), complete with the red beret on his head and the white socks folded carefully over black ankle boots. The khaki shirt was too tight on his chest, disclosing a hint of a bra line through the open top button, and it was tucked tightly into the narrow skirt that reached his knees, exposing his thin, shaved calves. He was radiant. His face glowed through a layer of makeup and his eyelids shimmered under glittery eye shadow.

  “That’s how you’re going?” Matti broke the silence.

  “Why not? What’s wrong?” Ilan asked boldly and looked straight at Matti with a startled yet impudent stare. “With this kind of thing it’s best to have someone in uniform. It helps people to see someone in uniform with this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?” Matti demanded, tightening his hands into fists inside his pants pockets. “What kind of thing are you babbling about, where you need someone in uniform? Huh?”

  “All right, leave him alone,” Peninit said, getting up and digging around with her bare foot for the shoe she’d removed under the bench. “What difference does it make? He likes the uniform, so there’ll be a uniform. Who knows, maybe he’s right and it’ll calm the atmosphere down a bit.”

  Nadia approached Ilan, felt the collar of his army shirt and sniffed at it. “Did you at least wash it?” she asked. Ilan proudly rolled up his sleeves to show her the shiny, clean cuffs. “I ironed, too! Look how I ironed.”

  They walked to the car. Arieh and Peninit sat in front (Peninit was driving), while Matti and Ilan shared the backseat, each shrinking into his own corner, next to his own window.

  They drove for almost ten minutes in a darkness that grew thicker and thicker until the cars honking at them conveyed to Peninit that she’d forgotten to turn her head
lights on. “What do they want? What . . . ” she mumbled angrily, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I look terrible. When you see a person looking like this, they don’t need to say much.”

  Arieh receded into himself like an unused glove puppet, occupying less and less space in his seat. When he looked at Peninit for a moment, he anxiously noticed that the pierced hole in her earlobe was stretched down, reaching almost to the edge of the lobe, tearing under the weight of her earring. “We left all the bags at Nadia’s,” he said, apparently to himself.

  Peninit passed a garbage truck that was dallying in front of her. “I want you to call your brother now,” she said to Arieh.

  “My brother? Why would I do that? We don’t talk, I haven’t talked to him in months!”

  She looked straight ahead and sped up. “Call him, tell him what happened, and settle with him quickly about your mother’s house. No lawyers. Call him now.”

  “But you were against it, all this time you were against the arrangement. What happened now that you’re not against it? What happened?”