sufficiently enamored of his artistic gifts to overlook the absence of most others. Perhaps he would still grow up to be “normal,” whatever that meant.
So, when the transition from the older brother’s bed to the younger’s openly took place, the fault lines between fantasy and reality suddenly split open as well, and, with them, the relative peace and contentment that had, for some months, characterized the Yogev family’s winter and early spring came to an end. Now it was not only Simon’s potentially wrecked future (Daphna Flinker, Sarah Yogev feared, was ripe for motherhood yet once again), but his older brother’s apparently fractured ego that needed tending to, not to mention the Cold War-like mini-détente that now erected a kind of psychological Berlin Wall between the two brothers’ sleeping quarters as well as in their day-to-day relations.
Etan, to put it simply, was heartbroken, his brother guilt-ridden, their briefly shared concubine triumphantly radiant.
Like someone moving backwards through the seven stages of grief, Sarah Yogev slowly moved from her initial state of shock and disbelief, followed reluctantly by acceptance and hope, to profound depression, followed by unmitigated anger at her younger son and his much older girlfriend, and then by a profound sense of guilt toward her fragile and hyper-sensitive older son for having allowed the liaison with a so much older—and still married!—woman to go on to begin with. Now the bargaining stage was about to begin, but it was not yet clear to her where on the table her chips lay, or whether, perhaps, simple denial might be the wiser course.
One thing she decidedly didn’t want, she kept reminding herself as she was once again confronted—at an even higher volume—with Daphna Flinker nightly (and occasionally mid-afternoon) orgasmic elocutions from upstairs, was a grandchild at this point in her life, much less three step-grandchildren to go with it. So she rather unsubtly placed a package of condoms right beside Simon’s bed and another in the bathroom cabinet where he kept his shaving things. There were no lengths, she reminded herself, a desperate woman wouldn’t go to in order to hold onto a man she loved . . . particularly if that man happened to be only a boy.
As for David Yogev, his sincere concern over his older son’s fragile and wounded ego was somewhat mitigated by the bemusement—and, indeed, admiration—with which he observed his friend’s daughter navigate, and escape seemingly unscathed from, the various romantic minefields that lay in her path. He had always been intrigued by rebels and anti-moralists—Raskolnikov had always been his favorite literary character, along with Julien Sorel—having long been one himself. This girl was not merely, he thought (a small but undeniable glimmer of paternal envy running through him) a marvelous conquest . . . she had hutzpah to boot. She knew what she wanted, or at least desired, and was determined to get it. How convincingly could a man like himself argue with that?
Clearly, his younger son, guilt and all, was hardly unhappy with these new amorous developments either. Hardly were his university classes over for the summer, but that he and Daphna set off for two weeks in Rome, the kind of “in your face” romantic interlude Sarah Yogev attempted to mitigate the effects of upon her jilted and fragile older son by taking him, along with her husband and their younger daughter, on a two-week vacation to Provence. A friend of theirs, an Israeli politician of some note, had recently purchased a marvelous mansion there, on a cliff directly overlooking the Mediterranean. At the very least, Sarah thought, she could offer her sensitive older son something “poetic” to offset the more fleshly pleasures his younger brother was so obliviously occupied with in Rome.
As for Daphna Flinker, the weeks in Rome with her young lover—and without the burden of her three children, whom she had left with their grieving father—were a welcome reprieve from the life she had, it seemed, so eagerly abandoned. They, of course, visited the Coliseum and the Pantheon; kissed in front of the Trevi Fountain; strolled among the labyrinthine alleys of Trastevere, and amused themselves at the rows upon rows of washing strung out from the apartments in Mama-Leone tradition. They picnicked in the Roman Forum, and, after making a compulsory donation to the monks who guarded it, discretely made love in the Capuchin cemetery. It hardly bothered them when their landlady, a former Benedictine nun who, they detected from the outset, looked disapprovingly upon what she accurately perceived as their difference in age, finally threw them out, finding the late-night sounds of their lovemaking a bit too much for her and her ailing husband to take.
Luckily for the young couple, there was a vacant—and, given their limited budget, inexpensively priced—room available at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, in the very precious Palazzo Falconieri at via Giulia 1, where a friend of Peter Vajda’s, a Hungarian-Israeli painter by the name of Sinai Sulzberger, had recently become Director. This allowed the young lovers to roam the very same corridors where such eminent Hungarians as the expert of Greek mythology, Károly Kerényi, the philosopher György Lukacs, the writer Antal Szerb, the poet Sándor Weöres, and the composer Zoltán Kodály—some of them even Jews!—had once walked. So that their second week—with those around them seeming to revel in, rather than being disconcerted by, the late-night arias of Daphna Flinker—passed even more happily than had the first.
Simon’s older brother, meanwhile, was enjoying the French coast and its many visual and culinary pleasures, and—surrounded by friends and family—his thoughts returned only infrequently to his former girlfriend. There were, after all, poems to be written, paintings to be made. The pleasures of the flesh had been intense, but brief. Nonetheless, a wound had opened within him—perhaps more a wound of repudiation than of loss, more one of wounded pride than of lost pleasure. For once, he had briefly triumphed over his younger brother—and, what’s more, on the amorous battlefield where his brother had reigned so supreme! But now, that, too, was lost, and he was forced to reassume his previous persona as the bedazzled genius who cared little for earthly pleasures.
The family returned from their Provençal journey, and the young lovers from their romantic two weeks in Rome, at virtually the same time, so that the Yogevs and what had by now become their “extended” family—including not only Daphna, but her three children, somewhat reluctantly repossessed from their increasingly depressed father—once again reconvened at Galilee for what had now unofficially become the “anniversary” of Daphna Flinker’s quasi-conjugal entry into the family circle—or, it might be more accurately stated, the family’s entry into hers.
Unlike the previous year, it had been a torridly hot summer, even for the Middle East, the Galilee being no exception, and some of the obvious tension that had by now more or less solidified between the two brothers was slightly dissipated by periodic sojourns to the lake for refreshment—mostly in groups of two or three, with the two young lovers, of course, usually choosing to bicycle on their own, leaving the children in the care of Sarah Yogev or her young daughter Katya, who, at the age of twelve, had already developed something of a maternal instinct. Few, if any, words were exchanged between the brothers, while their mother did her utmost to constantly extol the enormous pleasures of their trip to France, thereby hoping to assure that the ever-turning wheels of jealousy and envy would be lubricated in the other direction as well.
On the eve of the holiday itself, ever hopeful of some reconciliation between the brothers and of reestablishing an atmosphere of family harmony, Sarah Yogev proposed that they all go to nearby Tiberias for a staged Hebrew-language performance of The Tragedy of Man, the dramatic poem by the famed nineteenth-century Hungarian Imre Madach that had often evoked comparison’s to Milton’s Paradise Lost. With the exception of David Yogev, who opted to stay home and work on his newly commissioned bust of Yitzhak Rabin, and Daphna, who felt uncomfortable about leaving the children in the care of someone who entered all too easily into a state of artistic trance, the others reluctantly agreed. Neither of the boys wanted to further disappoint their mother, who had seemed more than a bit edgy and depressed of late.
Not that the Madach play—Etan, himself hardly in an elevated mood, thought to himself—was a particularly uplifting choice of entertainment. Taking place after Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden, in it Adam
