The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  She said nothing. Unable to make out her expression in the dark, he did not know what she was thinking. One after another, her shoes dropped to the floor. The bed creaked. Only then did she say:

  “You’re a hard man, Yochanan Rivlin. Really hard. Your Ofer was much nicer. What a pity you didn’t make a career in the police or the secret service instead of wasting your time teaching. You would have felt at home there, looking for the truth in all the wrong places. It’s too bad, because I thought you wanted something else from me—something I could have given you.”

  A shiver went through him.

  “Come to think of it, why not ask my sister? You can go on giving her the third degree. If anyone knows what happened to her, she does.”

  “She refused twice,” Rivlin said. “I couldn’t get anything out of her.”

  “And so you’ve decided to pick on me?”

  “You’re a liberal woman. You’re open for a relationship. And you’ve chosen, if I may say so, an uninhibited single life that lets you be frank and do what you want despite your loyalty to your family and the hotel . . . or am I wrong?”

  She sat up on the bed. His eyes, now accustomed to the dim light, discerned the shadow of a smile as she pulled off her sweater, unfastened her apron, and opened the linen drawer beneath the bed. She took out a sheet, spread it on the mattress, and lay down again.

  “Thank you for telling me how liberal and open I am. But it won’t do you any good, because I really know and understand nothing about my sister and Ofer.”

  “But you must!” he burst out, placing professorial hands on his heart.

  She laughed out loud. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said easily. “And maybe you’re right not to. In a family, after all, everything is connected, even what no one understands. But there has to be some closeness before one can talk about such things. And if you’re really such a big-time sleuth, I have a proposal, or rather a condition, to make . . . yes, a condition. That’s the right word for it. Before I can loosen up with you, I need some love. I don’t suppose you would mind a secret little bedtime adventure, would you? We might as well start now. After all, you’re a busy man—and you must realize by now how uninhibited I really am. . . .”

  His arms stayed crossed. Although he wasn’t sure whether he was being challenged to a test of his determination or a battle of wills, he knew deep down that he had expected this—that his unforeseen visit had been made with it in mind.

  “If such is your condition,” he said with mock formality, “I am prepared to surrender my precious faithfulness to my wife. But what is it you look forward to in an old man like me?”

  She smiled. “Leave that to me. You already made me curious at the bereavement, when I saw how lovingly you embraced my mother. That’s why I insisted you wait for Galya. And when I saw you pleading with her in the garden, I said to myself, this is a man who will come back. And you did. . . .”

  “But curious about what?”

  “About what you’re like when you’re turned on.”

  “But what good to you is my pretending to be turned on?”

  “As good as my pretending to know something is to you.”

  “Then you don’t?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care. I’m not like you. I respect other people’s boundaries and wills. I’ve never understood how you dared snoop on your son’s life, poking into his affairs while pretending to save him. If I were your daughter I’d have murdered you long ago.”

  “Murdered me?”

  “With my own hands.”

  “Then how lucky I’m not your father.” But the feeble joke fell flat. Her hard face jutting with disappointment, she turned to the wall, curled up her long body, and withdrew. At that moment he knew that, in a basement full of files, he had lost his last link to a world that would forever keep his son’s secret. Reluctantly he rose, wanting to touch the long body one last time. But he lacked the courage to do so and only said a weak good-bye that was not acknowledged. He walked past the silent stove, running his fingers over the crib, then traversed the corridor and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, in which a solitary chef was concentrating on beheading a large fish.

  The two Arabs were in the smoking lounge, talking quietly like old friends. Fu’ad was smoking a cigarette while Rashid twirled a cigar between his fingers as if uncertain what to do with it. They looked at him accusingly as he entered. For the first time he felt that neither of them liked him. “Shu hada, ya Brofesor?” Rashid asked in a cold voice. “Kul halkad b’sur’ah hillis nomak?”*

  12.

  IT WAS CLEAR AND getting frostier outside. The snow had been cleared from the streets. Here and there, in the afternoon sun, rosy icicles gleamed on the roofs.

  Rashid was in low spirits, disappointed by his failure at the Civil Administration Bureau and embarrassed to have been found naked. He drove silently, with his eyes on the road, passing in front of the walls of the Old City and heading for the underground parking lot on Mount Scopus. Bluish clouds were stamped on the skies above Hebrew University. To the east, over the desert, hung a thick haze.

  The guard at the entrance to the parking lot found an Orientalist in a hunting jeep suspicious and insisted on seeing Rivlin’s invitation to the conference. This, however, was not to be found, having been lost in the hotel or the basement. Not even a faculty ID card from Haifa could persuade the guard to let the car through. Rivlin felt he had had enough of Rashid. Why not, he suggested lamely, start back for the Galilee without him? He would probably find someone to give him a ride back to Haifa.

  Rashid demurred. “I’ll come for you at the end of the session,” he said. “Your wife won’t like it, Professor, if I leave you here in Jerusalem.” Despite the anger in his voice, he still held the judge in high esteem.

  In the reception room of the Truman Institute, a large gathering was crowded around the refreshment-laden tables. The translatoress of Ignorance, circulating excitedly, lit up when she saw Rivlin. “Where did you disappear to?” she scolded. “Everyone has been looking for you. Hagit called, too. She said not to try calling her back—she’ll try again. Look how many people came in the end! Do you think we should move to a bigger auditorium?”

  “There’s no need for it,” he assured the happy widow, explaining that the more crowded the audience, the better the lectures, since packed rows of listeners were an erotic stimulus to an intellectual.

  The rows of the little hall were indeed so full that a janitor had to bring extra chairs. Although many of those present were unfamiliar to Rivlin, he had a good idea of who they were. Apart from university officials and administrators, there were members of the small Italian-Jewish community of Jerusalem, most of them slight, elderly women in high heels and black dresses set off by colorful scarves, who took pride in their scholarly compatriot and hoped to hear stories that would remind them of their childhoods in the beautiful land of fascism they had fled. There were also Arabists from various universities and colleges, and, to his surprise, quite a few young M.A. and Ph.D. students, as well as strange hybrids spawned by pseudoacademic think tanks and research institutes. These, in the spirit of the times, were confusingly interdisciplinary, their Orientalism combined with sociology, law, literature, political science, philosophy, education, Jewish history, computer science, and other things. As he was wondering what they were doing at a memorial for Tedeschi, who had done his best scholarship before most of them were born, he noticed a group of them swarming around Dr. Miller. With a mixture of amazement and consternation, it dawned on him that this pale, quiet man whose promotion he had foiled had disciples. One day, no doubt, they would take their revenge on their guru’s nemesis.

  Yet his envy had no time to linger on Miller, because it had already shifted to the dead man himself and his well-attended memorial. For a moment, Rivlin even begrudged Tedeschi his own eulogy. Who, he lamented, would mourn him? Would he have a successor, in this generation that did not want to succeed anyone because everyone wanted t
o be his original self? Going off to a corner, he reviewed his talk in solitude, ignored by the colleagues invited according to a list drawn up by him.

  The afternoon session was opened by the university rector, a vigorous, middle-aged mathematician who, too old to discover new theorems, had embarked on a second, administrative career. Since he had never known Tedeschi, the doyen of Orientalists having retired before his time, he chose to say a few words about peace with the Arab world and invited Dr. Miller to give the first lecture, the topic of which was “Colonial Desire.”

  The young lecturer strode unhurriedly to the podium. He wore new eyeglasses with clear, light frames so transparent that they seemed not to be there at all. In a soft voice, he read from a prepared text.

  “In his book Colonial Desire, published in 1995, the British cultural historian Robert Young writes about the longing for the cultural Other as an escape from one’s own cultural world. One subject he discusses is the active, sometimes even erotic, desire for the Other that informs all cultural crossovers.

  “Such cross-cultural contacts, as has been observed, leave their perpetrators in what the University of Chicago’s Homi Bhabha has termed ‘an in-between space’—or as Kipling put it, they are ‘East-West mongrels.’

  “The existential plane of this androgynous hybridism is the European colony, whose inner cultural dissonance creates a fractured and divided self . . .”

  Rivlin felt exhausted. In the end, he thought bitterly, his Circe had not let him rest for a moment. At least he would not have to do the driving back to Haifa.

  “Young, like other students of culture, argues that following Sartre in 1960, Mannoni in 1964, Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi in 1967, and Aimé Césaire in 1972—the founding theoretical fathers, as it were, of postcolonialist theory, that theory has emphasized the dichotomy between the binary forces of the colonizer and the colonized.

  “This dichotomy treats the colonized as the Other of the colonizer, knowable only by a false representation that reinstitutes the same static, essentialist categories it wished to do away with. By contrast, the multiculturalist outlook has encouraged many populations to assert their separate individualism. Thus, both Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis maintain that even extremist groups need to be encouraged in their struggle for representability.

  “Historically speaking, we can, therefore, say that only recently, in the final decade of the twentieth century, have critics and scholars grasped the significance of cross-cultural contact as a mapper of the full complex of constructive and destructive social forces. And yet the available models for describing this complex are far from satisfactory.”

  Rivlin noticed that some members of the audience were taking notes. Pleased by this, Miller slowed his pace to enable them to keep up with him.

  “We can say that the main theories of cross-culturalism have been based on the three models of diffusion, assimilation, and isolation. None of these, however, takes into account the effects of interaction, even though historical studies have shown the importance of cross-cultural stimulus and response in such areas as religion, commerce, epidemiology and health care, and so on. The most productive paradigm to date has been the linguistic one.”

  Someone tapped Rivlin on the shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”

  He hurried outside to the telephone at the entrance. “Where are you?” asked Hagit.

  “Right here.”

  “Your sister called two hours ago. She’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing serious. She’ll need tests. There’s a problem with her eye. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I want to know where you ran off to again.”

  “Where do you think? I had lunch off-campus to get away from Hannah and her hysterics. Now I’m back keeping an eye on things and waiting for the memorial session.”

  “Hannah complained there were very few people this morning.”

  “She should stop whining. What does she want? There were as many people as could be expected for a conference in honor of a dead old professor. And it was snowing. But now a whole Italian contingent has arrived, and the place is packed.”

  “Then you’re happy?”

  “Happy? What for? It’s not a memorial for me.”

  “You’re unbelievable. You even envy the dead.”

  “I can envy anyone. But tell me what happened to Raya.”

  “She has a torn retina in three places in her left eye.”

  “For God’s sake! That’s exactly what happened to my father.”

  “Except that the treatment nowadays is much simpler, provided the retina isn’t detached. They use lasers at low temperatures. We’ll know more when the head eye doctor examines her tonight. Meanwhile she has patches on both eyes and is feeling low. She keeps thinking of your father.”

  “Is anyone with her?”

  “Noa was, but she had to leave at seven to relieve the nanny. And Ayal won’t come before nine. That’s why I thought that, if you weren’t too tired, you might drop by the hospital on your way home. Your sister is all alone there. . . . Do you hear me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is Rashid still with you?”

  “Yes. I’m lucky he tags after me everywhere, even though we accomplished nothing at the Civil Administration Bureau.”

  “I’ll take a look at what the law says. But what’s up? Do you feel ready to give the eulogy?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Put some feeling into it. Carlo deserves it.”

  “I’ll do my best. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Just a minute. Why are you so remote?”

  “I’m not. I’m just tired.”

  “Do you still love me a little?”

  His felt his heart turn over.

  “What do you mean? You’re my whole life . . .”

  13.

  THE LAST GLIMMERINGS OF daylight sifted in among the audience, which had not diminished the second session. Although neither the “Sudanese” from Bar-Ilan nor the “Iraqi” from Beersheba had directly challenged Miller’s conclusion that Orientalism was a meaningless concept, each preferring to make a modest point in his own field, the two had demonstrated that Orientalist research was on solid ground. Disappointed by such evasive tactics, a number of Miller’s followers left at the session’s end. Yet the auditorium remained full, since the empty seats were taken by an Italian consular delegation and some Italian priests and nuns, come to pay their last respects to the fellow countryman who had often lectured to them on various subjects.

  The memorial session began at five-thirty. A black lace shawl around her slender shoulders, the widow stepped forward to place two large framed photographs on the podium, one of the young Tedeschi in the Israeli desert and one of an older man getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Turin, the city he had fled on the eve of World War II. The green-ribboned mortarboard above his heavy academic robe gave his nose a pinched and ugly look.

  Two young musicians played a lively Rossini serenade for flute and violin. When the applause died down, the chairman of the Hebrew University’s Near Eastern Studies department delivered a brief review of Tedeschi’s scholarly achievements—which, he declared, were a guiding light to an entire generation. He was followed by the director of the Truman Institute, who regaled the audience with recollections of Tedeschi the public figure. The Jerusalem polymath, he related, had never refused to put aside his scholarly pursuits for a luncheon or dinner in honor of the university’s Middle Eastern guests—Turks, peace-loving Jordanians, Arabs from the Persian Gulf, brave Pakistanis—and to teach them a thing or two about their own history.

  The two musicians returned to play a modern work by an Italian composer, an intricate and unmelodic dialogue that left everyone relieved that it was over. A hush descended on the hall, where the elegiac mood was heightened by the twilight that was its sole illumination. It was time for Rivlin, the deceased’s protégé and real or apparent heir, to rise and go to the lec
tern, where he shut his eyes for a moment with such force that he seemed about to burst into an aria. Outside the large windows, at the foot of Mount Scopus, the Old City, bounded by its ancient Turkish wall, merged in the dusk with the neighborhoods around it. Patches of snow gleamed on its golden domes. Rivlin felt a wave of despondency. The hopeless Rashid and the amorous Circe nagged at his mind. His stubborn, patient pursuit of the mystery of his son’s marriage, begun last spring in the garden of the hotel, had ended in a basement on a snowy day in winter by shelves filled with income-tax files.

  He took his notes from his jacket pocket, placed them on the lectern, and began to read the opening paragraphs, which he had written out in full to get himself off to a good start.

  “Two years ago, my wife and I were on a summer vacation in the Dolomites of northern Italy. One afternoon we took a funicular to a well-known ski site. It let us off on the slope of Mount Cortina, where there was nothing except for a small café. Sitting there was an elderly Italian gentleman, a stocky man with a distinguished if slightly recherché appearance whose face and body language were remarkably like those of Professor Tedeschi. Yes, my friends, he was the very image of our dear Carlo. We were so struck by it that we couldn’t take our eyes off of him. He drank his coffee and ate some cake while conversing thoughtfully with a young companion who—to judge by the deference he showed the older man—might have been his private secretary or student. After a while the gentleman rose, paid the bill, took his burnished, gold-handled cane, and left the café. Yet instead of heading downhill on the funicular to the little valley below, he took the young man’s arm and pointed amiably but firmly with the cane at a bare path that wound toward the summit of the mountain, bald except for a crown of snow. The two of them walked slowly, halting now and then to exchange a few words or look at the scenery, until they disappeared in a sudden haze.

  “The elderly gentleman’s resemblance to Professor Tedeschi affected both me and my wife. We wondered where he and his young companion had been heading. And it was then that a thought occurred to me. ‘Imagine,’ I said to my wife, ‘that there had been no Italian fascism or German Nazism and no Second World War. Carlo Tedeschi, who was born to an assimilated Jewish family and considered himself an Italian in every respect, would have finished his medical studies in Turin. A successful, amiable physician, he would have gone hiking from time to time in the mountains near his native city and might have been the man we just saw. It never would have occurred to him to study Arabs or Turks, whom he would have known only as an occasional item in the newspapers.’