And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  “What happened?” She screeched to a stop at a pedestrian crossing where a biker suddenly popped out onto the street. “A hundred thousand shekels happened. That’s what happened. Our debt to that character from the catering hall, Mano Dvir, that’s what happened. Will you be able to sleep at night if we take money from Nadia? Because I won’t.” She took a deep breath, looking around for something. “Where are the cigarettes?”

  “What cigarettes?” Arieh asked boldly, in a soft voice. “You don’t smoke.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” came Matti’s voice from the backseat. “I’ll pay you back the money.”

  “With what?” Peninit bellowed with false laughter, tilting her head back. “With what exactly will you pay us back? From your job at the phone company?”

  No one said anything. Arieh gave a cautious glance at Peninit’s tensely limp yet dense profile hunched over the wheel, at her fleshy lower lip, drooping and flaccid, which gave her the appearance of a child who’d been irredeemably insulted. His eyes were moist, stinging with tiredness, and an unfamiliar longing for something he could not identify suddenly washed over Arieh, filling him with new tenderness toward himself and this woman. “Maybe I should drive?” he said. “You rest a little, I’ll drive.” But Peninit merely tightened her grip on the wheel.

  Hours later, when Matti woke up on the living room couch in Nadia’s apartment (the cognac-colored, imitation leather perspired beneath him) it was one a.m., and as he looked at his watch twice, to make sure, he had the lazy thought (he was still climbing out of a bad sleep) that this hour was quite suited to itself. That it was entirely, and unusually, located in its appropriate age and date.

  He kept lying on the couch, looking at the big dark window across the room, listening to the silence (Nadia had taken two sleeping pills) that strangely heightened the unique, undefinable, evocatively rich smell of the apartment. It was a blend of aromas that contained allusions and hints, mere hints and allusions at different smells, which slipped away and evaporated the moment they were defined: musk, fried eggplant, pungent cleaning solvents, dampness, lavender-scented air freshener, blossoming jasmine or magnolia (“What is magnolia?” he wondered.), vinegar, muscle rub, boiled milk, nail polish remover, the sour sweat of shoes, turmeric, rose water, and another element that sometimes reminded him of the smell of fresh printing and sometimes of the lucid, frozen no-smell of snow.

  Matti shut his eyes, forced himself to shut them so he could concentrate, so he could finally figure out that smell, dig and dig all the way to its bottom, until he reached it, until his comprehension reached it and clarified it once and for all. He forged ahead, tensely accompanied by a feeling of something hugely fateful, as though cracking the code of this smell was tantamount to the locked door, to the most essential essence of the bedroom door that was still, to this moment, locked. What had Margie eaten all this time? He wondered what food she’d had, if any. He smiled in the darkness and the waffle-weave blanket tickled his nostrils: Margie eating a sandwich.

  He ran the scene before his eyes in slow motion and in black and white, for some reason. Margie eating a sandwich she’d bought at the cafeteria on campus. First, with slender and cautious fingers, she slowly unwraps the thin plastic, then separates the two slices of bread. Then it all starts, the meticulous process of removing, cleaning, and exterminating. She removes the slices of tomato—throws them into the plastic bag next to her. Picks off the strips of lettuce smeared with mayonnaise, one by one—throws them in the bag. Takes out the sliced, pitted olives—tosses them. Removes the slices of cheese to reveal the cucumber underneath, picks them off—tosses them. Finally, with great attention, she uses a paper napkin to wipe off the edges of the sandwich and remove any trace of mayonnaise, examines the remaining object from all angles, slaps the two halves of the sandwich back together and begins to eat, looking up with her lustrous eyes to find his astonished look. And she says: “A person who eats a sandwich like that can do anything. Anything, right?”

  Matti shook the blanket off, sat up, gathered the blanket and pillow in his arms and padded barefoot down the hallway to the locked door. He dropped the blanket and pillow to the floor, stood with his forehead on the door, eyes closed. A slight whiff of furniture polish (he added it to the list of components) and something else, reminiscent of vanilla and not unlike candy (marshmallow?) reached his nostrils. He felt a sharp pang in his chest, but it was on the right side, and it passed after a few seconds, leaving a trail of anxiety and emptiness. “Margie,” he said very quietly, not to be heard but rather to make sure his throat and vocal chords were producing a sound, that they were capable of producing sound, even though the sound was full of strangeness to him now, strangeness upon strangeness, which reached out and joined up with the strangeness of that woman behind the door, who was his beloved—of course she was. Of course. Because it was thanks to her, or thanks to the strangeness actually, that she had become his beloved, and that was exactly what he loved about her, actually: her strangeness. He wriggled the toes of his bare feet, lifted them up, and put them back down. His loneliness was immeasurable. He bent down, arranged the pillow on the floor tiles, adjacent to the locked door, lay down and covered himself with the blanket, curled up on his side. The floor’s hard, cold touch on his ribs was strangely pleasing. It felt right. For a moment it occurred to him that this slumber on the floor was the only one of all the slumbers that he hadn’t stolen, that he didn’t have to steal now, didn’t have to earn dishonestly since it was being given to him justly, with precisely the right measure of generosity and justice, because it contained precise coordination, an appropriate suitability, between what was inside and what was outside.

  Through the crack under the door came the smell of something again, the same something that contained a hint of a suggestion of the aroma of a package of candy, rustling paper streaked with chocolate.

  Matti opened his eyes at once, listening to a memory narrated in Margie’s voice, which reached him from beyond many distances, beyond the years even, many more years than he had known her. It was the voice she had always had, even before him: “Every afternoon, Nadia buys a piece of candy for Natalie. Every day, since she disappeared. Every day a different kind of candy. In the afternoon she buys the candy at the corner store and waits till evening and then till night. Only at night, when Natalie still hasn’t come back, Nadia hides the candy in the linen box under her bed. There are dozens of candies in that box. Sometimes hundreds. Nadia arranges them by type, in neat piles. First the candy bars: Kif Kaf, Pesek Zman, Egozi. Then a pile of Red Cow chocolate bars. A pile of rum-flavored Tortit, and one of Mekupelet chocolates. Pile after pile, one next to the other. Once every month or two she empties out the box, shoves the candy into trash bags and leaves them out on the street, by the trash cans. A few times she didn’t empty the candy out from the linen box for a few months and there was a horrible smell. Cockroaches. Ants. But in the last few years she’s been emptying it. Forcing herself to. And those days in between when she empties the box and when it gets filled up again are the absolute most, you could say. The absolute most. They’re not days at all, actually. They’re not nights, either. I don’t know what to call those days, I just know their color: black. But actually it’s not black, either. Not even black. They have no color. Their color is no-color.”

  Shortly after Matti fell asleep on the floor next to the door (on the verge of falling asleep he found himself running his finger along the gap between the door and the floor, twice, back and forth, saying, “Good night, Margie”), he woke suddenly when he heard the front door being shut very softly. He got up quickly with the blanket and pillow and fled to the bathroom, where he sat down on the little carpet by the sink, hugged the pillow, and waited.

  There were sounds of footsteps and whispers, at times swallowed up in the night’s silence, at other times emerging in a slightly different format, a different syntax. There was a squeak that sounded like furniture being dragged, a muffled giggle, and padding feet ag
ain. Ilan and Gramsy appeared in the hallway. Gramsy was supported by Ilan, who held the stool in his other hand.

  Gramsy was covered from head to toe in a large, white flannel nightgown, which gave her round body the heavy rectangular shape of a fridge, and her head was wrapped in a purple scarf. Ilan had changed only his army boots to plastic flip-flops. His long, black, greasy hair, which was usually tied in a ponytail, was loose now, falling in thick waves on his shoulders, covering the sides of his face and leaving only the middle third bare, with his thin, sensitive, prominent nose jutting out like an antenna. He held Gramsy by the armpits and sat her down heavily on the stool. Then he knelt down at her feet and put his head on her lap, his cheek resting on her broad thighs. (Matti peeked at them and slipped away, dropping the pillow and blanket on the living room couch on his way out of the apartment.)

  Gramsy tipped her head back, cupped one hand to her ear and started singing. At first her voice was very soft, like a hum or a buzz, but it slowly grew louder, repeating the same refrain over and over again like an instrument warming up, seeking the right path. She tried out the opening line of Fairuz’s “Khayef aqul ili fi’albi,” paused, then started again in a different scale: “I’m afraid to say what’s in my heart.” After a few moments, her voice found the right verse in the right key, started again, and this time completed the whole chorus:

  Khayef aqul ili fi’albi

  Titkal w-t’aned w’yaya

  Walav dareit anaq khubi tifd’hkni eini b’hawaya . . .

  Gramsy looked straight ahead at the shut door, her eyes almost popping out of their sockets from aiming at it, and sang. And sang. Her voice grew louder, fuller, ripening from moment to moment in its crystal-clear trill, gathered into itself yet simultaneously so very open, wide open to the world, directed not at one single listener but at many listeners, who all seemed to gather under the broad wingspan of her voice, assembling there as though they’d been waiting for a long time for this voice to bring them together.

  I’m afraid to say what is in my heart

  So that your heart does not harden

  And you become stubborn with me

  Her voice climbed up, filling and melting the space of the narrow hallway. Then it invaded the other areas of the apartment (through her heavy sleep, the voice touched Nadia’s ears and her hand lifted up slightly, as if to brush away a mosquito), filled them and ripened them, and finally spread out into the muggy air of the nighttime neighborhood, through the other apartment windows, the power lines stretched out between the tall hot-water tanks on the rooftops, the old antennas, the two lookout towers atop the shopping center, and the gaps of air between the buildings.

  “Khayef aqul ili fi’albi, titkal w’t’aned w’yaya . . .” Grandma’s voice curled up and insisted for an instant on the w’t’aned, as though seeking to oppose the song’s stubborn man with her own stubbornness, to encircle him with melodic stubbornness, which was in fact nothing but massive and wonderful tenderness, at times pure and innocent, at times sly, circuitous, twirling. Gramsy rocked on the stool as she sang, back and forth, digging her fingers through Ilan’s hair on her lap. She cupped her hand over her ear again to clarify her voice and return it into herself, only to gather up strength and erupt again, “Khayef aqul ili fi’albi”—“I’m afraid to say what is in my heart,” until suddenly, from inside and through Gramsy’s singing, there came a creaking sound from behind the door, then pushing, dragging, pulling, drawers loudly opening, glass bottles clanging.

  The key turned in the lock. Once, then once more. Then it waited.

  RONIT MATALON (1959–2017) was the author of nine novels and a liberal social activist. The daughter of Egyptian immigrants to Israel, she worked as a journalist for the newspaper Haaretz and reported from the West Bank and Gaza. Her last book, And the Bride Closed the Door, was awarded Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize the day before her death at age 58.

  JESSICA COHEN shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon and Nir Baram.

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