His voice was matter-of-fact, even cold. In the darkness of the bedroom, I heard the ticking of the clock on the wall and Halimi’s breaths.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Limi,” I said after a while. “You know I fell in love with you completely, even though I didn’t mean to. I never believed we’d stay together for more than a month. And I don’t know if it can work, considering the kinds of things you do.”
“Considering,” Halimi said quietly and clung to me again. “I’m willing to undergo chemical castration if you’ll stay with me,” he added, wrapping his long arms tighter around me. “But only after you give me a baby. Even if you leave me after.” I laughed, and the fact that he could still make me laugh, even now, suddenly made it all look idiotic and insignificant. While I thought about it some more, I realized he’d fallen asleep.
I woke him up in the middle of the night and said, “What about an open relationship?”
“Give me a break,” Halimi mumbled, his arms still around me.
“So, he doesn’t want to know?” my sister said, thoughtfully chewing on a carrot stick she’d cut for Max. Max and his sister, Eva, came in and out of the frame behind Dina as we chatted on Zoom.
“It’s not a good sign … If he doesn’t want to know, it means he doesn’t really want to deal with it.”
Throughout her adolescence, Dina shocked our parents with outrageous behavior. She became a heroin addict and went to rehab on a farm in Spain. After that, she floated through different countries. Twice she joined mystical-spiritual cults and stormed out of both. In recent years, she’d settled down in Berlin with Georg, an installation artist who initially came off as a psychopath but was actually a very gentle soul.
We maintained a strong bond throughout the years. I was quite close to my parents, too, but it wasn’t the same. Natasha and Sergei Rozhevsky were frozen in the time before they moved from Russia to Israel. Old black-and-white photos revealed a wild youth, all-night parties, fancy costumes, guitars. Stories of underground manuscripts and clandestine recordings of Western music circulated among the few friends who also immigrated to Israel. But in Israel, they became moralistic and neurotic, and when they finally settled in, my sister and I had already left home. It was only on weekend visits later, when I was a student, that I began talking to my mom about her youth and her life.
They would come once a month for lunch at a Tel Aviv restaurant, and sometimes Halimi and I would sleep over at their small apartment in Jerusalem. Halimi loved Jerusalem and its wind-blown hills, the stones that turned pink at sunset, the introspective denizens. He particularly loved Natasha and Sergei’s warm little den, its walls lined floor to ceiling with books, my dad’s old record collection, and the tea and candies served every couple of hours. My parents adored Halimi—he flirted shamelessly with my mom and made her laugh like a teenager. Heargued with my dad over politics. They agreed on nothing, but both of them enjoyed the clashes.
I spoke to Dina almost every day—by phone or Messenger, and sometimes we spoke on Zoom. I visited her frequently in Berlin, and whenever it seemed like things were getting out of hand in Israel, I toyed with the idea of moving there. By the time Halimi and I started living together, Dina was already a mom. Dina and Georg—who met at a crazy party one night at Berghain—decided on an open relationship with clear boundaries from the start: one-night stands only, no affairs, complete transparency with each other, and the right to veto. It worked—they stuck to the rules, their love for each other blossomed, and Dina gathered material for a book on how to sustain consensual non-monogamy.
“That’s what I understand from him,” I answered. “He doesn’t want to know, and he doesn’t want me to know either.” I tried to get Max’s attention by making a funny face. Both Halimi and I were in a kind of anxious euphoria at our joint decision to experiment. Negotiations on exactly how we might do it were dragging on.
“I just don’t get why this is what you want to formalize …” Halimi would say when I broached the subject of “the rules,” holding my hand and stroking the engagement ring he gave me with great ceremony one Saturday morning. I smiled but wouldn’t drop the subject. In fact, after agonizing over it for a number of weeks, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to marry him just because I was in love with him and pregnant with his child. Eventually I decided that yes, it was enough—but I was determined to straighten out the subject of adultery.
“I just want to deal with it,” I’d say to him. He would stare at me with characteristic feline pleasure, totally ignoring my words and ensconced in a halo of blind adoration, as if resisting the urge to jump me.
“I mean, it’s clear we both have healthy libidos and a tendency to get turned on by others,” I would say, trying to catch his wanderingattention. “And instead of causing each other pain, I just want to neutralize it, you know? So we can trust each other.”
“You’re so sweet,” Halimi would say, and once, when he was in a cooperative mood, he continued, “but it’s human nature to sin, my love. It’s got nothing to do with sex or not, with men or women, right? That’s the secret, the excitement, the danger. The fact you’re doing something forbidden and it’s so fun. That’s the sin.”
“So, you do believe that you and I are going to sin, right?” I said impatiently.
Halimi fell silent and looked at me.
“Yes, Diti, yes,” he answered unwillingly.
“So, you’re just going to accept the pain we’ll cause each other?”
“Look,” he said, trying not to smile, “we need to be super discreet.” When he saw my face fall, he quickly added, “Without overdoing it, of course.”
“I want to know the truth,” I said in a voice brimming with seriousness. “And I expect you to give it to me,” I added.
“Come on, Diti, honestly …” Halimi pleaded. “You want me to report to you every time there’s a chance I might fool around with someone whose name I won’t even remember an hour later? Why would you want to know?”
I didn’t know what to say in response. A cold fury swept over me, but I didn’t let it go. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t willing to accommodate me.
“And maybe it isn’t human nature at all, the tendency to ‘sin,’ the secrecy and the lying, maybe that’s unique to you, Saul,” I said brusquely.
“Could be,” he said icily, and from that moment until we retired for the night, he treated me with cold politeness. He was horribly distant and reacted with one-syllable responses. This was the first time he’d ever treated me like that—and suddenly it hit me that he was capable of totally alienating himself from me.
I cried that night and felt short of breath. I moaned and groaned, and my pregnant belly moaned and groaned along with me. Halimi tried to feign calm, but he was worried. I stopped him when he began dialing the emergency number. I told him between clenched teeth that I was okay and forced myself to relax both my muscles and my nerves. I breathed deeply, in and out; I swallowed again and again; I inhaled and exhaled. He brought me more water than I could drink, placed a damp towel on my forehead, and then simply sat beside me and stroked my hair, and occasionally my arms. It did the trick, and I fell asleep.
In the morning, it was like it never happened. I worked on my laptop in the living room; he returned from his walk through the neighborhood—maybe he’d bought cigarettes. When he came into the living room, he was humming happily to himself and looked around his former bachelor pad, transformed into a warm nest for the coming baby chick. Drapes and lampshades and pictures and framed memories—tickets from a particularly good music festival where I most likely was impregnated, a poem by a Polish writer we both liked, a photo of us in Cambodia, the red-and-gold bedspread I flung across his old couch—everything that rounded and softened the sharp corners and empty surfaces. I saw the pleasure on his face when he entered the apartment, knowing that all this was his now. He leaped on me with declarations of adoration and gestures of love, and I yielded with bursts of laughter. Anything to do with “the rules” made him revert to his impressive passivity, and me to my ideological determination.
“Why can’t we live in solidarity with this thing as well? So that it’ll be something we are equal partners in?” I attacked him from another angle, focusing on his weakness for social issues.
Halimi sighed. “Because I’m telling you again,” he would begin, and I never knew if the look on his face was sad or if he was simply losing patience. “This. Isn’t. About. Sex. If you want it that bad, then okay—I’lltry letting you know when I’m attracted to someone, and if you give me the green light, I’ll go for it and let you know what happens afterward. Yup. So that’s an option. I hope. And you, too, okay? If you’re attracted, and so on and so forth, I’ll give you the green or the red light, and if you really want to, you can tell me all about it, but please spare me the details.” He stared at me for a moment after stuttering this out, and we both burst out laughing.
