Free The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev Page B

dashed.
    Unrestrained the words cascaded from her mouth, she told him everything, she turned informer, and thereafter she didn’t go back there, despite offers and appeals, and even these faded away as the days passed, and although the two of them left at the end of the academic year – Orly vanished as if the earth had swallowed her, and there were rumours that she had gone to study abroad on a bursary arranged for her by Emmanuel, and he himself left for a university in the south, apparently leaving the field open for her, if you’re really so well suited come and prove it – she refused to return to the history team, even when someone else, a woman younger than both of them and far less talented, took advantage of the confusion prevailing in the faculty. In her forbidden moments, when she allows herself to play this game, the three of them are still there and their futures still ahead of them, when the rain stops, and when spring bursts into flower, and when summer is shining, year after year, as it could have been if she hadn’t ruined everything, even burying her own aspirations under heaps of rubble.
    And Gideon was definitely on her side then, until his patience snapped. What are you demanding of yourself? he asked her, bemused. They are the ones who did you an injustice, you had an obligation to expose it! How could he promote Orly when he was having an affair with her, and leave you behind even though you were much better qualified? He just wanted to keep her close to him so she wouldn’t betray him, don’t you see that? That’s enough, Dini, stop punishing yourself and go back to the university, you’re wasting your talents. But she was no longer sure of this. How do you measure talent anyway, maybe Orly really was better qualified after all, and when she stood before a class the following year, in the training college where there was a warm welcome for the distinguished refugee from the history faculty, and lectured on the causes behind the expulsions from Spain her voice was softer and less vigorous, and the words which in the past had flowed from her throat packed tightly together in impressive sequences began to sound haphazard and deflated.
    A dry breeze of defeatism hovered there, which she was incapable of negating, even though in the first years she hoped that the transition would enable her to devote herself to bringing up her daughter, to enjoying her more, without the pressures of academic competition. But with the passage of the years Nitzan needed her devotion less and less, and the competition that she so much hoped to get away from was rampant, so it turned out, even among the defeated, and was more virulent than ever, especially with all the new regulations; as a result of these, if she doesn’t complete her doctoral thesis some time soon, the thesis that she began back then, eighteen years ago, under the supervision of Professor David Emmanuel, there won’t even be a place for her there.
    For some reason she always goes back to that evening when the course of her life was changed, and it’s only from there that her consciousness moves to other focuses of pain, older and deeper, but again and again it seems to her that everything is determined from there, even events that happened years before then, as if there’s no early and late, only late, like that day when it became clear that her embryo wasn’t going to survive any longer. Gideon was still in Africa then and Orly accompanied her to the clinic for the tests, her face flushed as she regaled her with personal anecdotes, how Emmanuel invited her to his house for a Sabbath meal with his wife and children, who were already treating her as a big sister, and when he took her down to drive her home, believe it or not, right there in the parking space, in front of his house, he pounced on her, and at that moment his wife came out with the rubbish, what luck, she didn’t notice them, imagine it, Dina, and Dina imagined it, her hands on her