Love Life

Shalev Zeruya

Description

An international No. 1 best seller and multi-award winning novel, Love Life, as Fay Weldon said, 'is like nothing else'. In a novel of formidable force and shocking immediacy, a young married woman's turbulent affair with an older man rapidly evolves into a feverish, lyrical exploration of the anatomy of obsession. When Ya'ara meets Aryeh, her father's boyhood friend, she is instantly drawn to his archly assured presence. She quickly forsakes her devoted and well-meaning husband for this powerful and mysterious older man, but as their heated affair intensifies, Ya'ara finds that the things in Aryeh that attract her also repel her with equal intensity. Love Life is an intelligent, seductive and provocative novel about relationships that marks the debut of an important new voice.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 15 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782112976
• Langue: English

Extrait

LOVE LIFE
ZERUYA SHALEV, poet and novelist, was raised on a kibbutz in Israel and now lives in Jerusalem. She has a Master’s degree in biblical studies and is chief literary editor of an Israeli publishing house. Love Life is her first work of fiction to be translated into English; it is also translated into twelve other languages and was nominated for a Dublin Impac Award in 2002. She is also the author of Husband and Wife (Canongate, 2002).
DALYA BILU is a well-known translator of Hebrew literature and has been awarded a number of prizes for her work including The Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Times Literary Supplement and Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew–English Translation.

First published in the UK in English in 2001 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE. Revised edition published in 2002. First published in Israel in 1997 by Keter.
Copyright © 1997 by Zeruya Shalev
Worldwide Translation Copyright © 2000 by the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. English Translation copyright © 2000 by the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.
The right of Zeruya Shalev to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate International series.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84195 298 7 eISBN 978 1 78211 297 6
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2013
www.canongate.tv
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
1
H e’s not my father and not my mother so why does he open the door of their house to me, filling the narrow space with his body, squeezing the door handle, and I begin to retreat, I must have made a mistake, but the decorated plate insists that it is their house, at least it was their house, and in a weak voice I ask, what’s happened to my parents, and he opens his big, grey mouth wide, nothing’s happened to them, Ya’ara, my name flutters in his mouth like a fish in a net, and I burst inside, my arm brushing against his cold, smooth arm, cross the empty living room, and open the closed door of their bedroom.
As if caught red-handed, they jerk their faces towards me, and I see that she’s lying in bed, her head wrapped in a flowered kitchen towel, her hand holding her forehead as if to keep it from falling, and my father is sitting on the edge of the bed, a glass of water swaying in his hand, moving rhythmically from side to side, and on the floor between his feet a nervous little puddle has already formed. What’s wrong, I ask, and she says, I don’t feel well, and my father says, only two minutes ago she was feeling fine, and she complains, you see, he never believes me. What did the doctor say, I ask, and my father says, what doctor, she’s as healthy as an ox, I wish I was as healthy as she is, and I insist, but you called a doctor, didn’t you? He opened the door to me, didn’t he?
That’s no doctor, my father laughs, that’s my friend Aryeh Even, don’t you remember Aryeh? And my mother says, why should she remember him, she wasn’t even born when he left the country, and my father stands up, I’d better go to him, it’s not nice to leave him by himself. He seems to be doing okay, I say, he acts as if the place belongs to him, and my mother begins to cough, her eyes redden, and he thrusts the glass of water, which is already almost empty, at her impatiently and she wheezes, stay with me, Shlomo, I don’t feel well, but he’s already at the door, Ya’ara will stay with you, he says, stepping into the transparent puddle, what are children for?
Angrily she drinks the rest of the water and shakes the wet towel off her head, and her sparse hair sticks up in sad wisps like a hedgehog and when she tries to make it lie flat on her scalp I think of the braid she used to have, the magnificent braid that accompanied her everywhere, as full of life as a kitten, and I say to her, why did you cut it off, it was like amputating a leg, would you have cut off your leg so easily? And she says, it didn’t suit me any more, after everything else had changed, and she sat up in bed, looking nervously at her watch, how long is he going to stay here, I’m tired of lying in bed in the middle of the day.
You’re not really sick at all, I say in surprise, and she giggles, of course not, I just can’t stand that character, and I say immediately, neither can I, because the touch of his arm on mine stings like an insect bite, and I even check to see if the arm has swollen or turned red, and then I ask why.
It’s a long story, she says, your father admires him, they studied together, thirty years ago, he was his best friend, but I always thought that Aryeh was only playing with him, exploiting him even, I don’t think he’s capable of feeling at all. Take now, for instance, for years we haven’t heard from him and suddenly he turns up because he needs your father to fix something up for his wife.
But you said he didn’t live here, I found myself defending him, but she went on angrily, that’s right, they’ve been living in France, they’ve only just come back, but if you want to keep in touch you can, from there too, and her face shrunk to a point of concentrated insult, a triangle covered with wrinkles and age spots, but at the same time childish, with the eyes narrowed in suspicion, dusty as windows that haven’t been cleaned for years, guarding the beautiful straight nose, which I have inherited, and below it pale lips set in bitterness which gradually emptied, as if they were being sucked in from inside.
What was he doing in France, I asked, and she said sourly, the same as he does everywhere else, in other words nothing. Your father’s sure he was there on some sort of security job, something high-up and secret, but in my opinion he was simply living on his rich wife’s money, a guttersnipe who married money and now he’s come back to show off the airs and graces he picked up in Europe, and I saw that her eyes were fixed on the mirror on the opposite wall, watching the words coming out of her mouth, dirty, venomous, and again I thought, who knows what she’s capable of saying about me, and I felt suffocated next to her and said, I have to go, and she exclaimed, not yet, trying to keep me with her like she tried to keep him, stay with me until he goes, and I asked, why, and she shrugged her shoulders in a childish gesture, I don’t know.
A sharp smell of French cigarettes rises from the living room, where my father, who never allows smoking in his presence, sits shrinking on the sofa, shrouded in the heavy smoke, while on his favourite soft armchair the guest sits at his ease, complacent and relaxed, observing my entry into the room. You remember Ya’ara, my father wheedles, almost pleads, and the guest says, I remember her as a baby, I would never have recognized her, and he rises to his feet with surprising agility and holds out his beautiful hand with its long, dark fingers, and asks with a mocking smile, do you always expect the worst? And he explains to my father, when she saw me at the door she looked at me as if I’d murdered the pair of you and she was the next in line, and I say that’s right, and my hand falls from his, heavy and surprised like the hand of someone who has just fainted, because he suddenly dropped it, before I was ready, and he sits down in the armchair again, his sombre grey eyes scanning my face, and I try to hide my face with my hair, sit down opposite him and say to my father, I’m in a hurry, Yonny’s waiting for me at home. How is your mother feeling, the guest asks, and his voice is deep and provocative, and I say, not so good, and a crooked smile escapes me, as always when I’m lying, and my father looks at me with his eyes twinkling, you know that we studied together when we were young, he says, younger than you are now, we even lived together for a while, but the guest’s eyes don’t twinkle back at him, as if he’s much less enthusiastic about those memories, but my father perseveres, wait a minute, he springs up from the sofa, I have to show you a picture of us, the past, as always, affecting him with enormous, almost insulting, excitement.
From the next room come echoes of his search, drawers opening, books thrown to the floor, covering up the silence between us, an oppressive, unpleasant silence, and the guest lights another cigarette, he doesn’t even try to make conversation, he observes me with his arrogant look, provocative and at the same time indifferent, his presence fills the room, and I try to look back at him brightly, but my eyes stay low, not daring to climb up the open buttons of his short shirt, exposing a smooth brown chest, and they stray to his feet, to his highly polished, almost ridiculous, pointed shoes, and the big, black carrier bag between them, with the words ‘The Left Bank, Parisian Clothes’, printed in gold letters, and I swallow a snigger, the dandyism rising from the bag confuses me, how does it fit in with the coarse purposeful face, and the snigger sticks in my throat and I cough in embarrassment, searching for something to say, and in the end I say, he won’t find it, he never finds anything.
He won’t find it because I’ve got it, the guest confirms in a whisper, and at that moment there’s the sound of a thud and a curse, and my father limps into the room, holding the drawer that fell onto his foot, where can it be, where can that picture be, he mutters, and the guest looks at him mockingly, leave it, Shlomo, it’s not important, and I feel angry, why doesn’t he tell him that he’s got it, and why don’t I tell him, and how does he know that I won’t tell? Like a pair of crooks we watch him rummaging desperate