Gradually, their aunt emerged from her fortress of self-imposed oblivion with a great desire to know. So reinvigorated was her interest in the numerous details, large and small, of the lives of friends and relatives that Rivlin wondered whether—listening, making connections, cross-referencing, and double-checking—she didn’t know better than he did what went on in his wife’s courtroom or what the young officer was up to in the depths of his mountain. And so, having driven the two sisters to their midday rendezvous and spied from afar their aunt’s white tresses beneath the large carob tree—where, leaning on her cane, she had been standing in anticipation for over an hour beside a table transported for the occasion from the dining room and set for four—he yielded to his wife’s entreaties to donate a few minutes of his time to the soothing effect of allowing her aunt a few jibes at his expense.
And in fact, no sooner had Ofra embraced her aunt and Hagit gaily presented her with a bar of chocolate than the observant old lady began teasing Rivlin for his impatience to be gone.
“You can’t wait to get away from me, can you?”
He joined his palms together, Indian-style, to signify having come in peace.
“I’d be superfluous today. You have a special guest. I wouldn’t want to rob you of your time with her.”
She smiled wanly in agreement. Like a powerful computer scanning his file for recent entries, she asked in her deep, rehumanized voice:
“How was the wedding of your Arab student Semadar?”
“Samaher. . . .”
“Of course. Samaher. Was it as difficult for you as usual?”
He flushed awkwardly and cast a reproachful glance at his wife for having revealed his secret, as a gambit to enhance her aunt’s mood.
“Not quite. . . .”
“He doesn’t envy Arabs as much,” Hagit explained.
“Not yet,” Rivlin added lamely.
16.
IT WASN’T EASY to find the address in Pisgat Ze’ev. The Jerusalem chapter of Rivlin’s life had ended with the 1967 war, before the appetite of the victors had pushed back the bounds of the city in one compulsive new neighborhood after another. Although the buildings of the development in Jerusalem’s far north were new, the streets meandered unclearly, and the house numbers owed more to poetic license than prosaic logic. For a moment, he was tempted to abandon the whole wild-goose chase, telephone a Hebrew University colleague, and settle for a whiff of what was cooking in the academic kitchens of Jerusalem. But since he had time to spare, the two sisters’ aunt having insisted they stay for lunch, he decided to obey his old teacher and take a look at Yosef Suissa’s files. Perhaps something of the man’s brilliance had rubbed off on them.
At least this time he wasn’t paying a condolence call. The first days of the Suissa family’s bereavement were long over with. He had never even met the deceased—who, however, or at least so he hoped, must have known about him. Polite small talk or patient listening to how the dead man had breathed his last would be unnecessary. He would introduce himself and wait by the door for Suissa’s research to be delivered, with a sigh of relief, to his capable hands—which, sorting through it to detect its interrupted purpose, might manage to breathe some life into it.
He stood on the third-floor landing, the same wilderness of Judea that he had gazed at from the hotel in Talpiyot visible through a dusty window in the corridor. This time, however, the Dead Sea did not glint in the distance. Not trusting Tedeschi’s assurance that the widow was no longer a Sabbath observer, he refrained from ringing the bell and rapped lightly on the door, at a point beside the dead man’s name.
The decision proved to be a wise one. The door was opened by the deceased’s father, a short, somber, religious Jew with a hat and a scraggly mourner’s beard that appeared to have grown on top of a previous one. A prayer book lying on the dining-room table testified to his having recently returned from the synagogue, perhaps in the hope of saving the threatened sanctity of the Sabbath, which Rivlin could hear being thrashed in a washing machine. To help get over his discomfort, the Orientalist introduced himself with his academic title, apologized for intruding, and added a few words of commiseration for the death of the lately departed. Nodding morosely, Suissa senior opened the door of a bedroom, from which sprang a small, wildly laughing, bare-bottomed orphan, the imprint of a potty on his behind. Without further ado the child threw himself on the visitor, who was not sure whether he was being physically attacked or appealed to for protection and love. On the orphan’s heels came the young widow. Barefoot, unkempt, and dressed in shorts, a naked infant in her arms, she proclaimed by her appearance that her husband’s tragic death had released her, not only from the bonds of religion, but from those of civilization itself. It was as if, Rivlin thought, the savage soul of the terrorist had taken possession of the wife of his victim.
Little wonder that the bereaved father, his hat still on his head, had made a beeline back from synagogue to ward off the evil spirit let loose in the house.
“I’m Professor Rivlin.” He leaned compassionately forward toward the widow, one hand patting the naked infant clinging to her neck. “I believe Dr. Hannah Tedeschi told you about me.”
“Yes. I’ve prepared a package for you. But come to the bedroom and have a look. Perhaps there’s still more there.”
The visitor’s face burned as hotly as if he were being shanghaied to the Land of Fire. He followed the woman, trailed after by her father-in-law, with the bare-bottomed child running ahead. Tossing the infant onto the blankets of a large bed, in which he began to crawl and entangle himself, she led Rivlin to a modest desk, wedged between the bed and a closet, that was piled high with papers, folders, and books. One had the impression of a work in progress interrupted not months but mere minutes ago. A screen and a keyboard stood alone, without their computer. The latter, the widow told Rivlin, had been taken by an Arab research assistant who hoped to salvage what was on it. Her large, pretty eyes rested anxiously on him, as if inquiring whether she had done the right thing by letting a junior member of the department—and an Arab, yet—make off with the computer.
“They’ll build their careers on his blood,” Suissa senior muttered, with a hatred that made Rivlin shiver, as though he too were a vulture feeding off the dead man’s corpse.
“So what? What do you care? Let them.” The widow’s scolding tone made it clear that her father-in-law was getting on her nerves.
“How old was your son?” Rivlin asked the man sorrowfully.
“Thirty-three. The age at which they crucified the Christian. Except that my son, may he rest in peace, was a good man. . . .”
It was odd to hear a Jew just back from synagogue comparing his son to Jesus.
The visitor wished to avoid misunderstanding.
“I have to tell you that I’m in a different academic field. I deal with Arab history, not literature or poetry. I have no idea whether any of this material, which Professor Tedeschi and his wife wanted me to look at, is related to my work. I’ll take it home for a week or two. If anything interests me, I’ll have it photocopied. You’ll get it all back. . . .”
The thought of the large package of newspapers being returned to her only made the widow more depressed.
“No,” she said. “Please don’t. There’s no need. You can donate it all to the library.”
“His brain went squish!” the bare-bottomed child shouted happily, scrambling underfoot. He stuck out his little hand to touch the package, which was wrapped in brown paper tied with rough twine.
His grandfather grabbed at him to silence him. Leaping onto the bed, the boy vanished with his naked brother among the blankets.
The Orientalist lifted the package, careful not to inquire whether the bloodied pages had been removed or were inside. Before leaving, he yielded to temptation and asked to see a photograph of the deceased. The young widow hurried to bring him several, each of which revealed someone else.
17.
AS THE SCANTILY attired widow was
about to walk her visitor to his car, if only to flee the apartment, her mother-in-law—short and hatted, like her husband, though her hat was a bright bonnet—appeared with a large pot of Sabbath stew to shore up the crumbling dikes of the Day of Rest. Promising to stay in touch, Rivlin thanked them all again and returned to his car. He debated opening the package, decided not to, and thrust it into the baggage compartment, which he had rearranged to make room for Yo’el’s suitcase, even though he knew the latter would be small.
Again he had time on his hands. Better yet, no guilt was attached to it. And so before driving back into town to find a restaurant that was open in the desolation of the Jerusalem Sabbath noon, he made a U-turn onto a winding street from which he could compare the desert view from the city’s north with that from the south. Not only, however, was the blue patch of the Dead Sea missing here too, the noble yellow vista of the Judean wilderness was bleak and dreary, perhaps because of a large Bedouin settlement whose shacks and black tents defended the hillsides against the city’s ravenous encroachment.
Nevertheless, a path descending between two buildings lured him down it with the promise of detecting a sliver of the inland sea that in his Jerusalem childhood had fired his imagination as the city’s answer to the Mediterranean—that far destination of summer vacations. But bleakness still curtained the gray horizon. Looking back up at the third-floor window of the little apartment, he tried to imagine what the dead scholar had seen as he sat at the desk squeezed into his bedroom: not a tiresome old crone like the one Rivlin saw sitting on her terrace in Haifa, but the play of wind and light on the desert, and Arabs, unwilling citizens of the Israeli-ruled city, strolling among the shacks and tents in which burned their hearth and cooking fires. Surely this was a better perspective from which to study the Arab soul and understand, as Ephraim Akri had put it, what mattered to it and what didn’t. Again he felt tempted to inspect the package in the baggage compartment. As it was unlikely that Yo’el would be in any hurry to take his wife to a hotel, many days would go by before he could sit down in his study to determine whether Suissa’s material might indeed provide a spark of inspiration.
He had tried not to grumble about his expulsion from his workroom and to be as patient as possible with their fragile and likable guest. This was not merely to calm his wife’s nagging anxieties about her hospitality. It was also to justify, if only to himself, the new and clandestine freedoms that he was taking.
18.
THIS TIME, THERE being no suitable pretext for another call, it took creativity and courage to avoid the twin embarrassments of being a nuisance to the Hendels and in defiance of his wife. And who could promise him that Galya would even be there? There was no guarantee, on this bleak, sleepy afternoon, of finding his ex-daughter-in-law in the hotel whose threshold he was crossing.
His last visit, with its heated conversation beneath the gazebo by the swimming pool, had made him a familiar figure to the clerk at the reception desk, who regarded him, a guest needing no directions, with approval. But although he knew the way to the Hendels’ quarters, he feared that his unexpected reappearance might be taken as a bizarre or even unbalanced regression, rather than as the sober determination to clear up an ancient mystery. Therefore, he headed for the crowded dining room, in which he lingered despite the unlikelihood of his son’s ex-wife turning up there. Taking a tray, he joined the line by the food counter, whose steamy dishes made him feel slightly queasy. If nothing else, he would enjoy a good meal whose tastes brought back better days. The talk around him informed him that, this time too, he was surrounded by a group of Christian pilgrims.
Well, then, I’ll be a pilgrim myself, Rivlin thought, placing his loaded tray on a table occupied by two outsize Americans, tall, hefty men despite their elderly appearance. They welcomed the Israeli diner and sought to strike up a conversation, which Rivlin joined by proudly informing them, Christian Zionists, that he was not only a Jewish professor but the scion of an ancient Jerusalem family. Inquiring about their itinerary, he pointed out its advantages and shortcomings and responded to their praises of the hotel by mentioning that his son had been wed to the owner’s daughter, albeit not for long. This led the two pilgrims, in the charitable spirit of their journey, to consider his visit and partaking of a meal with them as an act of religious benevolence.
A young Arab waiter came to clear the table. Uncertain of the new pilgrim’s identity, he discreetly sought to establish it and—unauthorized to issue a free meal ticket—went to fetch the maître d’. This turned out to be the old Arab who had recognized Rivlin at the bereavement and encouraged him to write in the condolence book. “What’s the problem?” he scolded. “Professor Rivlin is one of the family. He can eat all he wants on the house.” “You mean I was one of the family,” Rivlin corrected with a laugh while the waiter blushed with embarrassment. But this merely evoked a dismissive wave of the hand. Families were to be entered, not exited.
“You did the right thing by coming here for a rest, Professor,” the maître d’, whose name was Fu’ad, observed. “This is the best season.”
Rivlin had to explain that he had not come to rest or even to eat. He had returned because his wife and sister-in-law were lunching in the city with an aunt. The heart had its reasons. And as though it were an afterthought, he murmured:
“Is Galya by any chance here?”
“You didn’t finish talking to her the last time, did you?”
The man’s powers of observation surprised him.
Fu’ad sighed proudly. “If I didn’t notice such things, who would? She was the one of Mr. and Mrs. Hendel’s children whom I spent the most time with. He and his wife, the poor woman, used to go once a week for a night out in Tel Aviv and leave Galya with me. If she was upset, I’d take her home to Abu-Ghosh to play with my nephews. After a while she’d calm down. Believe me, no one knows her as I do. She’s a smart young lady, but moody and stubborn. Sometimes, I would take her out for an ice cream or a falafel when I had free time at the hotel. She liked that. It always cheered her up. Now she’s taking Mr. Hendel’s death hard, maybe even harder than the missus. Harder than her sister, that’s for sure. She seemed so sad after that conversation with you last week. What made you leave in such a hurry?”
“I had to be at the airport. I have to be there again today.”
“You Jews are always at the airport. Always coming and going. You can’t sit still. It will make you sick in the end.”
“To tell the truth, I already am sick,” the guest said with a smile, looking through the window at a lovely white cloud sailing by. The thought of the illness born here ten days ago made him feel a sweet pang. Stricken, he bowed his head and whispered to the man in the dark suit and black bow tie:
“I’m quite ill.”
The maître d’ looked at the Orientalist suspiciously.
“Ill, Professor? But that can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Is that what you told Galya last week?”
“Among other things.”
“Mish ma’ool, ya eyni.”*
“Leysh la? Ma’ool jiddan.”†
“Ma t’zalnish al-fadi. Kulna minhibak k’tir hon.”‡
“Shu ni’mal, hada min Allah.”§
“Shu Allah? Ma lak uma l’Allah? Ma tistahbilnish.”∥
The two elderly pilgrims, surprised by the change of language in mid-conversation, sat up like two pinkish, blue-eyed elephants given a secret command and took their prudent leave.
“Where is Galya?”
“Perhaps with her mother.”
“And husband?”
“Of course.”
“Could you bring her here? Bas hi. B’sif.”*
“Ala rasi.”†
19.
IT WASN’T JUST from crying, Rivlin decided cheerfully upon seeing his ex-daughter-in-law, still dressed in black, emerge hesitantly from a side door. She really had lost her looks, and the short haircut she had got since their last meeting only emphasized thi
s. He rose to greet her from the dark corner of a little lounge set off from the dining room. It was here that Hendel, seated before a full-length mirror in which he watched the smoke spiral up from the cigars that his wife couldn’t stand, had come when he’d wanted to indulge. Any man, friend, foe, neighbor, or stranger had the right to appear at a bereavement and offer his consolation to the mourners. Yet her ex-father-in-law’s insistence on a second meeting perplexed the young woman who, regarding him with a mixture of pity and fear, now slipped into the chair by his side.
“I’ve received a letter from Ofer,” she said at once, using the son to shield her from the prying father.
He shivered with joy.
“A short one. And a nasty one. He was very hard on me. That’s no way to comfort anyone. But it doesn’t matter. I took it for what it was.”
“You see?”
“See what?”
“Despite all the time that’s gone by, he hasn’t given up.”
“But on what?”
“On wanting to know. To understand. Like me.”
She shook her cropped head angrily. “You’re wrong. His letter had nothing to do with that. I’ve already told you that he understands all he needs to.”
The Liberated Bride Page 13
