Free The Liberated Bride by A. B. Yehoshua

condolence registry tended by an elderly Arab waiter in a black suit and bow tie. His presence added a solemn formality to the occasion.
    Rivlin did not wish to be recognized at once. First he wanted to spot the ex-daughter-in-law on whose account he had come and to observe the state she was in. To his disappointment and curious relief, however, a quick glance around the room revealed that she wasn’t there. He had had no idea whether his sorrow for her could get the better of his old anger. On a leather couch, lugged upstairs from the lobby, sat Tehila and Ohad, her older sister and brother, supporting their widowed mother. Dressed in black, Mrs. Hendel was stonily gripping the shoulder of a small boy of about four, apparently a grandson, who had been set on a stool at her feet to help her maintain her equilibrium. For a moment, Rivlin considered beating a retreat. Mrs. Hendel, absorbed in her grief, still hadn’t noticed him. Yet a second later Tehila, a tall, unmarried woman who had managed the hotel with her father, gave him a friendly smile, and with a look of respect in her whiskey-colored eyes rose to greet him.
    Rivlin shook his head in commiseration and hurried to the widow, who glanced up at him with lovely blue eyes reddened and widened by tears, sorrow, and guilt. The sight of her discharged in-law come from afar to share her grief only reminded her of it anew, causing
fresh tears to trickle down her cheeks. More like a lost child than a grown-up woman, she fell into his arms, for the past five years no longer a kinsman’s, asking only that he, too, like the others, embrace her tightly and understand, by the limpness of the flesh and bones in his grasp, that the inner kernel of her being had dissolved with the death of her husband.
    Of course, anyone aware of the devotion that Mr. Hendel had demanded of his wife and bountifully received from her could have predicted the crushing effect of his abrupt disappearance. But what Rivlin saw now was a total collapse—for instead of feverishly reciting for the umpteenth time, as the newly bereaved are wont to do, the many details of her husband’s death and the shock it had given her, she fell back out of his arms and onto the couch in a speechless daze, so utterly absorbed in her sorrow that, as if it concerned someone else entirely, she let her daughter tell Rivlin about it.
    â€œBut where is Galya?” he asked, interrupting Tehila, whose account was as long as her father’s passing had been brief. “Does she still live in Jerusalem?” Apart from the news of her remarriage, which had reached him and Hagit belatedly, he knew nothing about her.
    Galya, it seemed, still lived in Jerusalem. Indeed she lived quite close to the hotel, which was why she had taken a noonday break from the shiva and gone home to rest. Not, Rivlin was told, that he shouldn’t wait for her. On the contrary, Mr. Hendel’s youngest daughter, having been the closest to her father, was most in need of consolation, especially from someone who had traveled from Haifa for her sake.
    Rivlin sat there dejectedly, with a wary brevity giving this family that was no longer his, a résumé of the recent life of its ex-son-and-brother-in-law, before taking advantage of the arrival of a delegation of somberly dressed Mormons, descended from Mount Scopus, to obey his wife’s warning against tarrying too long. Rather than leave all at once, he withdrew to the bow-tied waiter, who recognized him and even addressed him by his name and title while pouring him a glass of water. Perhaps the professor, he said, would like to look at the condolence book and its messages, written in several languages, and add
a few words of his own. Actually, Rivlin thought such a volume seemed grandiose for a man of Hendel’s rank and station. Nevertheless, addressing it not to the survivors but to the dead man himself, he penned a sentence:
    Â 
Despite the separation imposed on us