“A fictive construct in what way?” Stiffening, Rivlin did his best to overlook the connotations of the word “collaborate.”
The young postmodernist was happy to explain. In articulate, if rather mechanical and (Rivlin thought) smugly jesuitical language, he demystified the devious concept of national identity, which served to ghettoize the lower classes and deprive them of their rights within the rigid framework of the national state, whether—for there was no difference—this was of an openly totalitarian or an ostensibly democratic nature.
“Come, come,” Rivlin drawled, in what he intended to be a patronizing manner. “No difference between totalitarianism and democracy? Isn’t that going a bit far?”
But the sandy-haired jesuit, now sitting in the shadow of a passing cloud, stuck to his guns. National identity was an illegitimate concept even in a country like Israel that still pretended, albeit with increasing difficulty, to be democratic. Rather than let people decide for themselves who they were and how they wished to be defined, it trapped them in a rigid category that had no room for change, development, personal experience, or multiple identities. With the full complicity of the academic community, the ruling classes sought to impose an inflexible model of reality, privileging some and marginalizing others, for the purpose of exerting total control.
Rivlin sighed. “I’d say you were the proof that they haven’t succeeded,” he said, wishing he could dampen the young postmodernist’s ardor.
“They can never succeed,” Miller agreed triumphantly. “In the end the whole system will implode.” Ordinary thinking people would rebel against being labeled by the antiquated notions that the professor (sitting now in evening shadow, his head jerked back in dismay) wished to construct his book with. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy would understand that national identity enslaved rather than enhanced them, by curbing their freedom and mobility and preventing a rich interchange of perspectives across permeable frontiers. And the moral absurdity of it was that the enslavers, the engineers of identity who locked the doors and sealed the borders, kept open these possibilities for themselves. They alone retained access to the rich interfaces of language and culture, traveling widely and associating with different peer groups while the masses, locked within the gates of the state, were chauvinistically regimented. And to what end? But that was obvious . . .
“Not to me,” Rivlin said honestly.
“To make cannon fodder for the next unnecessary war.”
“Whoa there!” he protested. “Begging your pardon! How can a political progressive like you call an anticolonialist struggle against a century of oppression in Algeria unnecessary?”
But the theoretical jesuit was unimpressed by anticolonialist platitudes. Colonialism, he maintained, was not so much a historical or political phenomenon as a ubiquitous condition that co-opted all elements of society. It was present even in countries that had never had colonies, such as Austria or Sweden, to say nothing of Israel, a colonialist entity from the start. You didn’t even have to look at the Occupied Territories to see that. “Take, for instance,” Miller said, with a thin smile, “the hierarchical organization of the university tower we’re in, surrounded by a national park that has wiped out every remnant of the Arab villages that once were in it. Think of the internal division of the floors, with the administration at the top and the slowest elevators serving the lower and middle echelons, where the liberal-arts faculties are, while the high-speed elevators zoom up to the appointments committees and the personnel department and financial offices. That’s where the real power of this university is. And what sits, disgracefully, on top of everything? A military installation, an army radar station! Of course, we pretend it’s not there. Its operators are made to look like students. But let’s not kid ourselves. It combs the area and sends its information to an intelligence base in the Galilee in which everything is secretly processed. That’s where the legitimacy of the whole oppressive power structure comes from . . .”
The daylight was vanishing. So, Rivlin thought, that’s what our blond wunderkind has to say.
The young postmodernist now came back to Rivlin’s introduction, picking it apart like a stale roll. “National identity” was bad enough, a thoroughly dated notion. But worse yet was this business of a rainbow. Was national identity some kind of weather condition? What was the point of the whole, perfectly absurd theoretical exercise? It was only there to justify the professor’s obsession with artificially linking the past to the present. But what entitled him to assume that the poor devils who murdered villagers at night and slit the throats of babies snatched from their mothers’ wombs had any memory of wanting to be French? Had the more original thought never occurred to him that they might be pursuing their own authenticity, acted out by their darkly passionate souls? Surely Professor Rivlin was aware that beneath the tinsel of national identity, with which the military dictatorship in Algeria sought to distract the country, there was something more genuine and primitive. The Arabs were too fluid and unbounded to be subsumed under a single national grid.
“Excuse me,” Rivlin said softly, “but I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any light here?”
The little cubbyhole had no ceiling light. There was only the lamp on Miller’s desk. But its bulb was burned out, and the administration had not yet bothered to replace it.
Although the Orientalist was free to beat a retreat, he remained sprawled limply in his chair, unable to tear himself away from the young lecturer, whose sandy hair glowed golden in the gloom. Dr. Miller, having finished taking Rivlin apart, now turned to the outdated profession of Orientalism itself, which had proved incapable of absorbing the new theories of multiple narratives. It was time the professor realized that the news coming from Algeria was simply one narrative among many, propagated by the corporate press to uphold the dictatorial regime. . . .
It was getting dark. Perhaps, Miller suggested, they should continue the discussion in the professor’s office.
“We can stay here,” Rivlin said. “If you don’t mind talking to someone you can’t see, neither do I.”
And as a wistful night descended on the world, lighting up the Druze houses on the Carmel one by one, he continued to offer his head to the guillotine, summoning the last of his patience to listen to the new theories whose very language he had despaired of understanding long ago.
7.
WINTER CAME EARLY, prolifically. After two years of little rain there were no complaints about the torrential storms and gale-force winds, only about the unpreparedness for them—especially in Tel Aviv, where streets were so flooded that they looked, at least on television, like the canals of Venice, without their gondolas and lovers. Meanwhile, the official opening of the Khalil es-Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah was postponed by a month and rescheduled for Christmas, which coincided with Hanukkah that year. The abbess of the Greek Orthodox convent in Baalbek had not considered a poetry contest, or even a fifty-year-old United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between two headstrong peoples, sufficient reason to send his singing nun to Ramallah and had preferred to wait for the holiday season to cast its religious aura over the event.
That Saturday morning it rained so hard that Rivlin, anticipating crawling back underneath the big quilt for an afternoon nap, did not bother to make the bed. Now, to the cozy patter of the rain and the shriek of the wind, he lay wondering whether the Palestinians of Ramallah deserved to be visited in such weather.
“I’ve seen enough real Arabs in the last few months,” he grumbled to his wife. “From now on I’d rather meet them on my computer screen.”
The judge, who had been looking forward to the event with keen curiosity, refused to hear of this.
“You’ve lost all joie de vivre,” she accused the big gray head sticking out from the quilt. “Life with you is becoming unbearable. You’re so busy controlling everyone that you can’t enjoy yourself anymore. You can’t even sit through a movie. At night you can’t wait to go to bed, and in
the morning you can’t wait to get up and start eating your heart out again. I’m not calling off a trip we’ve been planning for so long. And you promised Carlo and Hannah that we’d take them with us.”
“They’ll just change their minds in the end anyway. They’ll be afraid to go to Ramallah at night.”
“But what is there to be afraid of if that Arab of yours . . .”
“Rashid.”
“If Rashid takes us and brings us back, the way he took you to Jenin. What’s the problem? Why are you backing out?”
“That festival can go on all night.”
“Let it. I’m off from work tomorrow. We can return to Haifa in the morning. I need to get out into the world and see some new faces.”
“In Ramallah?”
“What’s wrong with that? Do you have a better suggestion? There’s sure to be good food, just as there was at that village wedding that I enjoyed so much. And this isn’t a wedding, so you don’t have to envy anyone. Besides, I want to see that nun you were so wild about . . .”
“Don’t exaggerate. I wasn’t so wild about her.”
“What does it matter? Live! Experience! Lately you’ve been pure gloom. Every day you’re nursing some new injury.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About that young lecturer who attacked your theories a bit. You were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Every fly on the wall puts you in a panic.”
“In the first place, he didn’t attack them a bit. He attacked them a lot. And secondly, he’s no fly on the wall . . .”
“So he’s not a fly. He’s a screwed-up young man who wants to be original at any cost. I knew what he was up to when I saw him at that wedding in the Galilee. It was enough to see how he put down his wife.”
Rivlin smiled with satisfaction, rubbing his feet under the blanket. His mood brightened. In the west, a patch of blue sky was showing through the rain. His love for his wife, who now lay down beside him, welled within him. “All right,” he said. “But on two conditions. You know the first. And the second is that we leave early and get to Jerusalem in daylight.”
You couldn’t exactly call it daylight. The wet city, when they arrived, was struggling with a premature darkness brought on by the storm, contravening the laws of nature by being darker in the west than in the east. As it was too early to rouse the Tedeschis from their Sabbath nap, Hagit suggested driving to the Agnon House to see whether it was really closed on Saturdays.
It was indeed, and looked gray and unwelcoming with its little window bars. Rivlin had no intention of following the trail of the tattooed widow into the dismal yard. The hometown of any famous French or German author, he thought, would do better by its native son.
He put his arm around Hagit and steered her down the little street for a view of the tail end of sunlight that was wriggling between the desert’s pinkish curves. He didn’t know whether he felt more glad or alarmed when she said unexpectedly, with one of her wise looks:
“All right. As long as we’ve come this far, I’m ready to take a look at the happiest memory of your life.”
“Now? Are you sure?”
“We won’t enter the hotel. We’ll just have a look at the garden.”
“Then let’s walk.”
“It’s not too far?”
Even though the rain was more illusory than real, they shared a black umbrella. Arm in arm, they headed up the wet street toward the hotel, which had not yet switched on its lights, cut through the parking lot, and quietly entered the murky garden from the rear. Rivlin took a wary route through the bushes, apprehensive of encountering the tall proprietress. He had to hand it to Hagit: although she had not been in this place for years, she spotted the gazebo at once and went right to it. True, she did not notice that it had been moved from its old location by the swimming pool. But even if it was not her happiest memory, there was no denying that the night of her son’s wedding had been a joyous one. Little wonder that she gripped her husband’s arm tightly as he led her on a tour of the wet, fragrant garden.
The large glass door of the hotel swung open. Rivlin’s heart beat faster as he saw a tall, thin figure appear in the rectangle of light, from which it looked out at the dark garden before vanishing. All at once, the little lanterns along the garden paths lit up. A young maintenance worker came out to remove the table umbrellas before it could storm some more. Although he did not wish to call attention to himself, Rivlin could not resist asking if Fu’ad was around. No, the maintenance worker said. He had taken a few days off for some festival.
“A festival?” Rivlin asked. “In Abu-Ghosh?”
No, not in Abu-Ghosh. If it were in Abu-Ghosh, the maintenance worker would be going to it too.
8.
AT THE TEDESCHIS’, whose little street ran down from the president’s house in a small but perfect question mark, he soon confirmed how well he knew his old mentor. The doyen of Orientalists had indeed decided to dispense with the trip to Ramallah on so stormy a winter night.
“At least you didn’t run to the emergency room,” Rivlin joked, slapping his old doctoral adviser warmly on the back. In response, Tedeschi demonstrated his resolve by putting on his bathrobe and exchanging his shoes for a pair of slippers. “Eyri fik,”* he said, laughing gaily at the juicy Arabic curse. His old red sweater, showing through his open bathrobe, gave him a puckish look. “Eymta bakun hatyar hasab fikrak hatta t’sadkini fi amradi?”† he complained.
Hagit, who could sometimes guess what simple Arabic sentences meant, was up in arms. “What is this? We were so looking forward to spending the evening with you. What’s Ramallah after Tierra del Fuego? It’s just a suburb of Jerusalem.”
“And crossing the border, Your Honor, once in each direction, is nothing to you?”
“Don’t worry,” Rivlin said. “We have an Arab-Israeli driver who cuts through borders like a knife through butter.”
“That makes it sound even more frightening.”
“But why?” Hagit asked petulantly. “What kind of Orientalist are you, Carlo? Don’t you ever feel a professional need to meet real, live Arabs?”
“Reality is what I write on,” Tedeschi said affably, pointing to his computer, on whose screen saver little comic-book figures were cavorting. “Real-life Arabs, let alone real-life Jews, make me too dizzy to think straight.”
“Leave him alone,” the translatoress of Ignorance said morosely. “He’s embarrassed to tell you that he’s been up these past few nights with chest pains.”
“That’s because he gets no fresh air,” Hagit said doggedly. “I’m telling you, Carlo, I won’t take no for an answer. Come on! Don’t be afraid. Do you remember that trip we took together to Turkey twenty years ago, and what a good time we had? Come! It’s not like you to be such a party pooper. Let’s have a good time with the Arabs like the one we had with the Turks. When will we get another chance? It’s a poetry and music festival. No politics and no speeches. There’s sure to be good food. And there’ll be a Lebanese singer, some sort of nun, who got Yochi so excited last summer that he had all kinds of new ideas . . .”
“New ideas?” The Jerusalem polymath perked up. “What ideas?”
Hagit, however, stuck to the subject.
“Never mind, Carlo. Not now. Don’t be such a professor. Come with us. We’ll have a good time. I promise to look after you. I’ll stay by your side, fair enough?”
Her eyes shone. Her cheeks were ruddy from the heated apartment. Rivlin, smitten anew by her, marveled at the youthfulness of this woman of over fifty, whose short sheepskin coat left her shapely legs uncovered. Tedeschi, flustered, rose and hugged her.
“But really, my dear, what do you need me for? I’ll just begin to cough and spoil the evening. Where will you find me an emergency room in Ramallah?”
“Then at least let your wife go.” The judge gave up on the stubborn old man. “Let her come with us.”
“Hannah?” Tedeschi chuckled at the thought and winked at his wife, who was sitti
ng quietly by the lamp. “I don’t believe she’s at all eager to go to Ramallah tonight. She’s a bit under the weather herself . . .”
Once again the Haifa Orientalist felt his heart go out to the lovely student of former days, made old and worn before her time by an eccentric husband, so that she now stood in an old bathrobe, her hair that needed dyeing straggling onto her shoulders, ready for bed before the night had begun. He felt driven to join his wife’s attack on his old mentor, who was already by his computer, running his fingers absent-mindedly over the keyboard.
“Listen, Carlo. She’s coming with us. Why shouldn’t she? If you don’t want to live yourself, then don’t—but at least let live. Stop being such a killjoy. You can’t keep her chained to your depressions.”
“My depressions?” Tedeschi was startled by the unexpected salvo. “When do you remember me being depressed?”
“So it’s not your depressions. It’s your hypochondria. Or just your gloom.” He could hear himself speaking with Hagit’s voice. “Let there be some enjoyment in life. Give Hannah her freedom. Don’t you think she deserves a rest from you?”
The Jerusalem polymath did not reply. Half fearfully and half ironically, he pulled out a crumpled white handkerchief from his bathrobe pocket, waved it like a flag of surrender with an absurdly dramatic gesture, and made a bow.
The translatoress struggled to make up her mind. She was still torn between wanting, even longing, to get out of the house, and worry for her husband—who, having dismissed the comic-book figures with a tap of his finger, was already seated at his computer—when there was a quiet knock on the door. It was the sable-skinned messenger of many devices, come with a stocking cap on his head to transport his Jews to the festival.
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