The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev

Author:Zeruya Shalev
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781608199549
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

When he arrives there deliberately late, to allow no room for banal conversations, enquiries, what are you really doing here, what’s your connection with the deceased, the event has already started, from the stage far away a monotonous female voice is heard and he sits down in one of the back rows in the hall, which is filled to capacity, thoroughly scrutinising the audience. Shoulder to shoulder they sit in silence to pay their respects to Professor Rafael Allon, a mixture of lecturers and students, blond heads and dark, hairy and bald. He spots from a distance the golden head of the neighbour and bobbing beside her the golden head of the widow; apparently they went to the same salon and there was only one shade of dye available, an unnatural and provocative pumpkin colour, but the smooth black hair that he remembers so well he doesn’t see anywhere, although his gaze wanders from woman to woman, and of course he knows that a woman’s hair is a volatile creature, unreliable evidence, and colour and style are liable to change at a moment’s notice, and for that reason he’s also looking out for any pale profiles that may present themselves, registering some candidates and waiting for them to turn their faces in his direction, but one after another they are eliminated: it isn’t her, not her either, and that one’s a man . . . He bows his head and closes his tired eyes, the voice of the lecturer coming through to him, sounding muffled: when you look at the sky you always see what used to be, the stars of the past, she declares sadly, light years separate us.

She isn’t here, he sighs, she didn’t dare show her face here and he’s never going to find her, this was his last hope, cherished these past weeks, after he gave up the idea of trying to meet her by the freshly dug grave, again and again he sneaked into the cemetery and lay in wait for her from a distance, standing like a mourner beside the grave of a young woman, with a pink headstone designed to resemble a party dress, and the inscription on it, rest in peace, beautiful bride.

Rest in peace, beautiful bride, he used to stand there repeating, but she never appeared, wiping her eyes with the paper tissue he offered her, and she isn’t here either; it’s clear to him now that it’s all been in vain, all the cunning and resourcefulness and pretence and crossing boundaries. And he opens his eyes to the toecaps of his shoes, his hands massaging his nape, what is this grief that’s rising in you for a man who’s a total stranger to you, what’s this compulsion to locate a woman who’s a stranger too, what do you want to hear from her, what do you want to say, he’s been so preoccupied with the project he hasn’t given enough thought to what it’s really about.

Does the universe remember its

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