Chapter 21
For a while after Halimi called the police on me, we hardly spoke to each other.
We were obliged to exchange a few words here and there regarding Lily or the household, but no more than that.
He left early in the mornings, taking Lily to daycare on his way to work, and would come home very late, usually after I had gone to sleep.
When the winter rain eventually began, I tried to get used to life as a single mother.
I prepared myself for my upcoming divorce proceedings.
All in all, I told myself, it’s amazing we made it as long as we did.
When Lily asked me where Daddy was, I would tell her, with a lump in my throat, that he was at work.
She didn’t notice a thing—at least, so it seemed.
Not the sadness that enveloped me, or the fact that Halimi was gone from morning to night for days at a time, or that I was cuddling her more than usual.
I gave in to her every request—from walking to the park in the gloomy, drizzling afternoon, when no other living soul could be found among the soaking wet slides and jungle gym, to baking every kind of cake or cookie that she could think of, to repeated viewings of Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, and Winnie the Pooh.
I stopped obsessively stalking Nina. I did not check her socials anymore.
During the daytime hours while Lily was at daycare, I took care of whatever household tasks needed attention and worked on my translation project in a state of numbness.
In bed at night, Halimi and I slept without touching each other.
He usually got into bed smelling of arak, with its licorice scent that I particularly loathed.
If I was awake, I pretended to be asleep.
One night, he simply did not come home. No message, no nothing.
I discovered this in the morning, when Lily crawled into our bed and I saw that the clock was showing eight-thirty.
I got up with a sigh, made her breakfast, and got her ready and out the door to daycare.
The teacher was surprised to see me since I was usually the one who picked her up in the afternoon, and she was unaccustomed to seeing me in the bright, cheery light of morning.
Lily was excited by this departure from routine.
She demanded that we play with her favorite toys, and when I told her that I had to go, her face crumpled.
She clung to me and shook her head “no” every time I moved to try to get up.
I stayed there for almost an hour, until the children went to the playground, and even then I went with them and sat with the teacher, and we discussed the kids and the cost of living and Tel Aviv’s best beaches, until I saw that Lily was entirely preoccupied with commanding a little group in some complex game that involved the slide and the merry-go-round.
I told her that I was going, she gave me a distracted “Bye,” and when I said goodbye to the teacher, she said, “These little ones, they notice every tiny change.” I nodded with a smile of “You’re so right.”
I took a bus to the offices of Free to Be.
I could have taken a taxi, but I was on an austerity kick, coming to terms with my foreseeable future.
Will I go back to living with roommates?
With a child? Do people even do that? But of course Halimi will pay child support, that’s how it works, right?
On the other hand, he’ll probably want shared custody—so what does that mean?
I planned to go online when I got home and clarify some of those details. Do I know any lawyers?
The Free to Be building was an old two-story building not far from the port, with the magazine’s logo on the front. I smoked a cigarette and shivered a little in the cold.
I stubbed out my cigarette and went inside.
The ancient security guard nodded to me, and I took the stairs to the second floor; the building’s elevator opened directly in front of reception, and I did not feel like making a conspicuous entrance.
I walked along the wall and feigned indifference to the deputy editors and their assistants, the producers and graphic designers and secretaries, all women.
Here and there was the occasional, unobtrusive man.
I hated everyone. I didn’t expect anything from them.
I did not think that they cared about me, and I loathed them passionately for being witnesses, even unwilling ones, to the circus of my life.
That these insignificant people, so self-centered and young—as they appeared to me while I walked to Halimi’s office—knew about his affair with Nina before I did.
One of the producers noticed me, waved exaggeratedly, and immediately said something to the woman at her side.
She looked up at me, her eyebrows almost at her hairline.
The two of them laughed to each other in a nauseating way, and I sped up.
I knocked on the door out of habit, and as I was opening it, I heard Halimi bark, “Not now!”
I stood rooted to the spot. Nina jumped off of Halimi’s lap.
“Ohmygod,” she said.
I looked at the two of them without saying a word. Halimi stared at me in shock for a few moments, and Nina sat on the office chair before him and turned to me with an expectant look. All she was missing was popcorn.
“Ditush!” Halimi suddenly grew animated. “What happened?! Is everything okay with Lily? Where is she?”
“She’s at daycare,” I told him impassively. “She’s fine.” I tried very hard not to let any muscles in my face twitch. Lily was all that mattered to him. He probably didn’t even remember that he had not come home last night.
“Idit,” Halimi said nervously. “You look terrible.” (Nina suppressed a snort of laughter.) “Want something to drink?”
“I want a divorce,” I annunciated, looking right at Nina.
Nina whistled. “Hear, hear!” she said.
I looked at her without batting an eye, as if she were some inconsequential stranger at a bus stop that I was simply resting my eyes on.
“Neen, don’t be mean,” Halimi muttered, his eyes cast down.
“Tchhh,” Nina snorted and shot him a look of disbelief.
He looked plagued by guilt and regret, primarily—I could see clearly—because of Nina’s vulgarity.
When she did not receive so much as a look, Nina got up and left.
Neen. He had a pet name for her. A wave of nausea passed through me.
I breathed deeply and ordered the nausea away.
“Ditush,” said Halimi after Nina slammed the door behind her.
“Don’t call me that,” I told him in a flat voice. His face crumpled.
“I’m not coming home today,” I went on. “That is, to your house,” I corrected myself matter-of-factly. “Do whatever you have to do to get Lily from daycare on time. I need to clear my head for a few days, and then I will let you know where I am so we can finalize how to arrange everything.”
Halimi looked at me with eyes puffy from drinking and lack of sleep, overflowing with supplication and desire for atonement, but I was unmoved. I wasn’t even disgusted. I took a step toward the door.
“Idit, wait,” said Halimi.
I stopped.
“You were also at fault, Ditush,” he said quickly, his usually careful diction giving way to a tone of urgency.
“You did whatever you wanted for months, and then you totally brushed it off when I confessed that I was hurt by all your fuck-filled outings and … you left the house and scared me to death and didn’t answer me when I was looking for you and …
you fucked that disgusting guy just to get me back and …
you laughed at me when I called the police, and you didn’t even apologize.
” I guessed that he had gone over this list in his head a few times.
“I didn’t do anything to hurt you on purpose.
Until then,” he added, willing to take some responsibility.
“But you also didn’t do anything to stop hurting me, even though you obviously saw that I was hurting, all that time, with you carrying on your affair with … Neen,” I said scornfully.
Halimi sank into his chair. “You’re just under the illusion that you know how to love, Saul,” I told him mercilessly. “But you really have no idea what love is.”
He looked up at me, tired.
“Maybe you can teach me?’ he said, with a tiny flicker of Halimi-esque mischievousness, still hoping that he could repair the situation. I admit that something in my soul was stirred, but I was not shaken.
“When you love someone, you want them to be happy,” I blurted, the line that had been in my head for the whole past week, the rusty nail in my heart. Halimi’s shoulders slumped.
I opened the door and went out into the central space, where everyone looked down at their work and pretended like everything was normal. Nina was nowhere to be seen.
We stood at the junction where the carriage crossing—which stretched all the way from the fortress and emerged from a rock quarry to the point where we stood—met the ancient sea route of well-worn limestone, extending north to south, from Acre to Ashkelon.
I sat in front of Jean d’Ibelin on his horse, éclair, riding sidesaddle with both legs pointing left, out of modesty, per his instructions.
It was very uncomfortable. When we had ridden like this previously, his body had served as a kind of support to lean on, and his arms as handles.
Now, his body was shifted away from mine, and he instructed me to steady myself on the saddle and sit gracefully while holding onto the saddle’s horn.
My whole body was tense, trying not to slip and fall.
Brunette trotted briskly at our feet, occasionally running ahead to Hugh, seated on a lively looking brown horse.