Read Accusation for Free Online

things out, in his insistence on certain kinds of clarity. About his life, his wife. And if he’d left Greta, at least while she was ill, she wouldn’t have wanted him. But she wanted him, his body at least, in her bed, what their bodies did together. One night, she reared up, pulled herself free of the tangled sheets, and said, I can’t do this if it’s going to hurt Greta. For whoever and whatever else Greta was, Greta needed him. From the bed came his voice. Sara. There was nothing peremptory or demanding in his call. I told her there’s a friend I see sometimes. I needed to tell her that much. What Greta said in return, he didn’t mention. Friend, Sara thought, and the word repelled her — pawn in some practical accommodation between them. She did not want to be having an affair and was repelled by herself. He did not talk then, only later, about the neurological symptoms, and how Greta was altered by them. Nor could she believe that she was in bed with a lawyer. Though what she felt by then had moved beyond compassion.
    From the beginning, there was a force of something between them. Of taut connection. The calm field of his body in the bed. The way he called her name in the dark. He had an ability to be present and available to the possibility of a given moment, and this drew her, a form of generosity that she wanted fiercely to be in the presence of. He did not want all of her; nor did she wish to give all of herself to him. He was such a mixture of impulsiveness and restraint. Early on, he told her he would not be able to use the word
l
---. They would not be able to, should not make such declarations to each other. But tenderness, he said, let that be our word. I feel very tender toward you.
    Yes, there were moral contortions in being with him. And I feel very tender toward you, she said.
    Those first months, she was often away travelling, and he was often exhausted by caregiving. There was the night when he wanted only to talk, the night when he said, I cannot do this, the night when she said it, the night when he came and fell asleep while she cooked him dinner, nights when they went out to movies in cinemas where they were less likely to run into people they knew. The week after Greta rang the bell at the end of her chemotherapy treatments, he arrived and lay on her sofa and sobbed and wouldn’t tell her what so disturbed him.
    When she skipped a period right after a trip to Israel and the West Bank, she put it down to stress: the aftermath of the massacre that she was covering, then being nearly attacked by the Zionist settler with a gun and a vicious dog. When, after the second missed period, her doctor told her she was pregnant, she was shocked; they’d been taking precautions, but she hadn’t been using the pill, hadn’t thought she was sleeping with him or anyone enough to warrant it. David, too, was shocked when she told him, but exemplary, said he’d support her whatever she decided to do, would offer all necessary financial support if she decided to go through with the pregnancy. She’d been so certain of what she would do until he opened up this other door of possibility. Having a baby had seemed unimaginable until it didn’t. She’d never thought she wanted children, and though she felt David’s fear and dismay, horror even, here was this other, tender life beginning its vertiginous hold in her. A baby. She told no one else. Eleven weeks. She had an appointment for an ultrasound. Until the morning she woke, body cramping, put out her hand, and felt the sticky, blood-soaked sheets, this discovery even more shocking than the first, the gash of grief so great it pulled her under, wave after wave of grief. She cancelled a trip to South Africa for the elections, the chance to meet Mandela, barely left her bed for a week. She told her parents, and most others, that she’d caught a parasite while travelling. David gave her space to grieve. He did not desert her.
    Two months after that, he showed