Ilana and Gideon’s Divorce

Ilana and Alexander Gideon’s divorce is the legal end of a marriage that Ilana remembers as having become inseparable from jealousy, coercion, and violence. In her account, the separation followed years of intimacy recast as accusation and punishment; the decree closed their formal claims against each other, while a note sent through Manfred Zakheim and seven years of silence left the emotional bond unresolved.

Causes and Background

Ilana locates the marriage’s collapse in a change that had begun by the time their son, Boaz Brandstetter, was two. She describes their love as already consumed by hatred, with the hatred continuing to masquerade as love. A discovery in the bathroom—a lighter left on a stool—became the occasion for Alexander’s interrogation of her about an affair. Ilana recalls his laughter, blows, and demands for every detail, followed by sexual violence. The episode stands in her account not as an isolated quarrel but as the beginning of a recurring pattern of fury, questioning, disappearance, and return.

Alexander would vanish for days and nights, working on his doctorate in a rented room near the Russian Compound, then arrive without warning. Ilana recalls that he sometimes locked Boaz in his room while he demanded another confession and forced sex. She also connects this period to her attempts to kill herself with pills and gas, and to Alexander’s alliance with Manfred Zakheim and conflict with his father over the house in Yefe Nof. Her account presents the marriage’s breakdown as part of a wider accumulation of domestic and family conflict, not as a decision made in a single moment.

The Divorce and Its Legal End

The marriage ended in a court decree declaring that the two had no further claims on one another. On the day of the decree, Manfred Zakheim delivered to Ilana a note in Alexander’s handwriting. Instead of adding a personal explanation, Alexander copied four lines from a poem by Alterman, imagining himself as a sadness that would persist in the walls and floors of the home. The note thus accompanied the formal separation with an image of continued presence: the marriage was legally over, but its history was represented as something that would remain inside the places they had shared.

Ilana stresses the absence of any other message from Alexander for seven whole years. The court’s declaration ended their claims in law; the years of silence made that ending a lived condition. Yet in her later address to him, the silence does not amount to forgetting. She asks why he has returned like a phantom to the window of her new life, naming the renewed contact as an intrusion into the separation rather than proof that the old relationship has been settled.

Ilana’s Explanation of the Separation

When Ilana answers Alexander’s question about why she divorced him, she turns to the meanings of ritual, fanaticism, and humility, and then to the earth. The earth, in her reflection, can be dug, plowed, and sown by its masters, but eventually swallows them and remains silent. This image shifts the explanation away from a single accusation: the marriage, like the land in her meditation, had been subjected to competing claims, while time and loss outlasted those who tried to possess it.

She also gives the separation a sharply personal explanation. Ilana tells Alexander that she had the womb and therefore held an advantage he could never have; she says that he ran away and that his long reach eventually found her in her refuge. The language makes the divorce part of a contest over power and vulnerability, while also exposing how profoundly their bond remained organized around the past. Even after the decree, she addresses him as someone capable of reaching her from far away.

Aftermath and Continuing Presence

Ilana’s appeal after the divorce is not simply to remember the marriage differently, but to leave her alone. She urges Alexander to go elsewhere, marry, and make a home with another woman. The domestic future she imagines for him is composed of ordinary, concrete intimacies: a garden and roses, a fire in winter, a child whose hair he touches, and a wife who tends to his tiredness. Yet the imagined household cannot exclude Ilana. She pictures herself slipping into it like a rustle and remaining between him and the life he might build.

That contradiction gives the divorce its lasting significance in her account. Ilana insists on separation and rejects Alexander’s return, but the language of haunting, walls, floors, and imagined domestic life shows how the relationship survives the legal ending. The decree could extinguish mutual claims; it could not make their shared history disappear.