The Bridesman by Savyon Liebrecht

Author:Savyon Liebrecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Once again I’m in Business Class, this time flying westward, and once again I am thinking about the mystery of Adella’s invitation as I ponder my sudden departure and realize that, although she didn’t tell me in so many words, I was not summoned to document the years Adella spent at the boarding school nor the years that preceded them. I am the witness to her transformation. When I left at age fifteen she had reached the nadir of her life, and it was clearly important to her that I know that she had risen from rock bottom entirely on her own and become a respected and affluent woman. Maybe she had invited me so that through me she could denounce my aunts and uncles, some of whom were dead, for the injustice they had done her in her youth, and certainly to display her fabulous success. Yes, I am sure. Her story is no less worthy of a book than are those of the famous people to whom I provide the service of a ghostwriter.

And still reflecting on Adella’s story, perhaps under the influence of the free drinks being served, I fall asleep in my comfortable seat, and in my dream a fire ignites in my body, which wakes me, and I remember where I am and sit up with a jolt. I recall feeling the same internal burning during that final exam, and the memory evokes a chain of sensations which followed the distant conflagration—the smell of the interior of the gym teacher’s car; the feeling of falling backward into space; the comfort of the firm mattress; the scent of the skin of a woman who sits beside me and wipes my brow sometimes with a damp cloth and sometimes with the palm of her hand.

Suddenly I see the face of Adella from years ago coming close to mine, and I feel my young body raging with fever and her soft fingers travelling along the nape of my neck, trailing pinpricks of heat, and the sensation of another body pressing into the length of my body, a trembling so intense that my teeth chatter, the electric shock of hot lips meeting mine. I jerk forward in my seat, and the air hostess rushes to my side. “Is everything all right, sir?”

My face is red-hot, and for a crazy moment I feel as though the heat in my body is melting my eyes in their sockets. The stewardess brings me a cup of water, and I drink it down in one gulp, to extinguish the fire.

What is this forgotten memory bursting forth? I try to marshal my thoughts, realizing that it is my mother’s description of the events rather than my own memories that I have relied on for all these years to describe what actually happened from the minute the gym teacher brought me like a mother carrying her child from the car to the bed at Adella’s house until I saw my father and my brother and my sister Yarden waving and smiling, waiting for us, excited, at the airport in Los Angeles.

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