“Your Excellency de Périgord,” said Jean, bowing his head. “In the name of the King of Navarre and in my own name, I thank you for granting us a place on your voyage.”
“There is no need for such formality, dear Arsur,” said de Périgord, who patted Jean’s back with familiarity. “I would not miss an opportunityto snatch a glimpse of the famed Fairy of the Spring for all the fortune in the world!” He cried and laughed a crude laugh. I took a deep breath.
“Soon,” Jean whispered to me, as de Périgord turned to answer one of the men. “In just a few hours, we will be at Le Destroit.”
“Anchors aweigh!” someone shouted, and general pandemonium prevailed. The sails were hoisted, and the ship set off. De Périgord came back to us after consulting with a deckhand and scanned me with a distinctly un-puritanical expression.
“She looks pretty solid for a fairy,” he said critically.
“Allow me to introduce to you Lady Édith of Cilicia, my cousin,” said Jean drily, resuming his uneasy formality.
“Enchanted, my lady,” de Périgord muttered and lost interest. He excused himself, saying that he had several letters to answer. “Duties never end!” he cried as he descended to the cabins below deck.
For weeks, I could not decide about the move to Atlit, and the ball was clearly in my court. At every opportunity, Halimi reiterated that what mattered most to him was that I should be happy. At whatever cost. For a city boy like him, who had breathed the soot of the streets all his life, who needed to be able to buy a pack of Camels at any hour of the night, and who had an ingrained, patronizing compassion for provincial life, this was no small price.
“I know you’ve lost faith in me, Ditush,” he said one evening when we were weighing all the considerations regarding a potential move, again. “And I know that it will take time until that faith is restored. But I swear to you—the only thing that I want is for you to be happy.” He said this so many times that the words were beginning to lose their meaning.
He left the magazine two weeks after he announced his resignation and ran around the house most of the day trying to be useful (he fixed a few things that had been neglected in recent months and made food every day while I worked on translating a science fiction book for youngadults). I expected him to get on my nerves, but it was fun. We had not spent so much time together since Lily was born.
In the mornings, after he took her to daycare, he would prepare an elaborate breakfast and gently wake me up. Toward noon, he would tempt me into watching some episode or two of a funny series, and the times that I really laughed aloud, he glowed. As a special project, he began to prepare cocktails at home (“I am preparing myself for the role of a fifties housewife,” he would say while measuring the exact number of milligrams of the various ingredients, wearing a red apron with white polka dots), to the point where I was tipsy for most of the day.
Slowly and steadily, he got me excited about the idea of starting a new life. There was something stimulating about the buds of thought of a new home somewhere else, somewhere completely different. We went to the house in Atlit twice—once just he and I, and then again with Lily, who was madly enthusiastic—which further tipped the scales.
The house had a bit of a weird feel to it—it had not been lived in for two years, and it was as though the walls themselves missed holding life within them. It was partially furnished, covered with plastic sheets to protect against dust, and when I started to envision where I would put this couch and that table, I was enchanted by the notion of our fresh start.
“We won’t have to pay rent for the house, of course,” Halimi continued with the advantages and disadvantages. “Richard doesn’t make anything off it anyway, and it is his and my mother’s gift to us.” On that occasion, I tried to find out how it happened that Richard owned such a property; what connection did he have with Atlit? After all, he had enough money to buy an apartment in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv if he wanted a home in Israel, but the most I managed to get out of Halimi was that Richard had inherited it from some strange uncle and that none of his family knew the exact story.
When I saw on Facebook that Nina had been appointed to replace Halimi as the editor in chief atFree to Beand read all of the jubilantcomments from the women who had been incensed by Halimi’s appointment way back when, I finally decided that we would make the move. Halimi, who between cocktails and breakfasts and Netflix also continued his never-ending phone conversations, managed to land a gig hosting a weekly cultural program on the radio, a two-hour spot in the coveted rush-hour time slot. Since they knew that he would bring in listeners, he was able negotiate a nice salary.
A day later, I told Halimi, “Okay, let’s do it.” I went and bought a basic cell phone of the ancient kind. I reformatted my smartphone, turned it off, and exiled it to the pile of other devices that might still be of use to someone someday.
To Halimi, I said, “I don’t want that thing to consume any more of my time” (he smiled skeptically), but I knew that the real detox was about the way it consumed my soul.
“What, are you deleting Facebook and Twitter and Instagram too?” he asked, as if my renunciation of the smartphone was an anthropological experiment.
“Not deleting it, but I have to sever this immediate connection between social media and the palm of my hand,” I replied. When I suggested that he detox for a while, too, he said good-naturedly that maybe he would, after we moved and got settled.
More than anything, I just wanted to stop tracking him. I did not want to check, like a spasm every few minutes, when he was online, or stare at our chat box, relaxing if I saw he was typing and getting upset if I saw he had stopped. I truly wanted to stop reaching anxious hands into his secret drawers. I had no illusions that sooner or later I would feel this compulsion again, but for now, I only wanted to just breathe beside him—in body and in spirit.
We moved in early March, and for a month we were busy adapting to the house and adjusting it to our needs. I moved the furniture around again and again, and the lighting, and the pictures on the walls.I worked on the balcony. I made friends with the yard. It gave me unexpected pleasure. I grew grounded in my new life and would gaze for long minutes out at the sea, which continually surprised me from different corners of the house and property. I was looking forward to the start of spring and warmer weather, weekday dips in the wild waters, surrounded by the ruins of the mysterious and inaccessible fortress.
After the suffocating mental stress of Acre, I surrendered completely to the serenity of the wind and the sea—the wet, salty scent in the air, the blue expanses, and the stretch of coast to the east that accompanied us from a distance.
Jean and I stood by the wooden railing, watching the ship parting the water for some time before we began talking. Brunette lay on the deck at our feet, her eyes closed in the pleasant sunshine. Although I was calm, I was still preoccupied with the episode in the solarium at the house of Rohard in Acre. Alice had no doubt that I was her husband’s lover, that was clear, and the way in which he dismissed it as if she were crazy made me a little uncomfortable. I thought of Nina and the day when I had turned up to Halimi’s office and informed him, in her presence, that I wanted a divorce.
I sighed. Jean, who was deep in thoughts of his own, turned to me.
“My lady,” he smiled at me, but sadly.
“My lord,” I replied with a similar expression.
“I never wanted to cause you such distress. All I wanted was to spend a little time together.” He looked back at the water. “I love my wife very much, and I did not want to upset her either. I do not know how the Good Lord created hearts capable of such extreme contradictions. He must have been putting me to the test, and I failed.”
I placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and he looked back at me gratefully. His telling me without apology that he loved his wife comforted me in an unexpected way.
“You did not fail the test, my lord,” I told him gently. “In this complex situation, on account of a lack of forethought, your comportment was knightly and noble. It seems to me that your wife is not really so angry at you.”
He smiled at the sea, turned to me, and seemed to want to say something else but stopped himself.
