He didn’t answer. This was always the best tactic to keep her from trying to change his mind. He wished she’d leave already. If you had made love to me yesterday, he whispered to himself, I might have laundered that curtain for you now. His silence was met with a hostile look. Parting from him, even for short periods, was always unwelcome to Hagit. Now, this morning of all times, a long court session was preventing her from going with him to the airport, which was one of her favorite places.
“What are you waiting for? You have to be in court.”
“The court won’t convict you for my lateness,” she said with a smile, sure of her ability to disarm him with a deft remark. He said nothing. Changing the subject, she asked what he had thought of the Arab wedding.
“It was all right.”
“It was more than all right.” His brusqueness annoyed her. “It was marvelous. I had a wonderful time. You didn’t seem to be suffering either. You must really think very little of the Arabs if their weddings don’t make you envious.”
He flared at that. “What are you talking about? What does envy have to do with it? Do you think I’m against people getting married?” It was a matter of memory, not envy. It pained him to be reminded. Of all that ruin and loss. Of what had been done to his son without justification. Why couldn’t she understand that?
She let him talk. Late for a trial that couldn’t start without her, she switched off the motor and said, not for the first time, “It’s time you put all that behind you. It’s been five years. How long can you go on feeling loss? Ofer was no innocent himself.” Why brood when there was nothing to be done about it? She sometimes thought he was projecting onto their son feelings that had to do with other things.
“What things?”
“Your own self.”
His own self? What did she mean by that?
“Not now,” she said, restarting the motor. “We’ll talk about it some other time. Just be nice to my sister. You know how sensitive she is.”
“I’m always nice to her.”
“Then be nicer than always.”
The little car drove off. He knew it would brake immediately, however, for her to beckon to him and ask anxiously, as if she had never done it before, “Do you love me?”
A wave of love passed over him in spite of himself. Loath to send her off to the waiting courtroom with a clean conscience, he stared at the ground, weighing the question carefully before answering with a barely perceptible nod.
“How much?” she demanded, as though buying a kilo of fruit.
“A lot,” he admitted honestly. Softly he added:
“More than you deserve.”
The cross-examination wasn’t over. “Why?”
He didn’t know whether she was being coy or asking the most important question of her life.
“Tell me! Why do you love me so much?”
This was already too much. He laughed, thumped the roof of the little car, and exclaimed:
“Move! Enough already!”
10.
THE DAY PROMISED to be a long one. There were still eight hours left before his sister-in-law’s plane landed. He returned to his study to get rid of more papers and decided to clear another shelf. Then he scrutinized the white net curtain on the window. Although it did not look dirty, he was prepared to wash it for his wife, who had a long, hard session on the bench ahead of her. He unhooked it, carried it carefully to the bathroom, like a bride across the threshold, and soaked it in lukewarm, soapy water. It took many rinsings for the water to run clear. Because it occurred to him that, in her eagerness to make her sister feel at home, Hagit might launder the clean curtain again while he drove to the airport, he left a note that he had cleaned it and would expect a commensurate reward. Then he erased the last sentence. His son might come home from the army unexpectedly and read it.
It was time to unplug the computer. He coiled its wires and packed it in two black traveling bags padded with small towels. Then, grinning foolishly, he stopped by the window of his study for a last look at his dead mother, who liked to putter around on the second-floor terrace of the building across the street. And indeed there she was, in a red, sleeveless summer dress. She had opened the venetian blind and was leaning on the railing while following a big garbage truck, which was proceeding slowly down the narrow street, with a glance cross, curious, and indifferent.
This ghost of his mother had begun appearing to him not long after they had moved into their new duplex. At first he had placed his desk against a wall so as to be able to concentrate better. It was his wife who had persuaded him to move it to a window. “If you run out of ideas,” she said, “the wall won’t give you any new ones. And if you don’t, the view won’t harm them.”
He took her advice. A week passed before he tired of the panorama of the western Carmel, with its rich patches of green and red-tiled roofs immersed in pine trees. Shifting his gaze to the houses across the street, he scanned their windows and terraces. Suddenly, he spied the apparition playing solitaire on a terrace. Her straw-colored hair and her heavyset frame, hunched forward to preempt a hostile world, was the spit and image of the mother who had died three years ago. Dumbfounded and bemused, too distant to make out her features clearly, he imagined for a moment that she was the same lonely figure he remembered, withdrawn and sunk in a cosmic and trivial boredom.
The terrace across the street had four blinds. Only one of them was ever opened, and that, too, never more than halfway and for only a few hours a day. The woman was the only person he ever saw there. The rest of her apartment, which could not have been small, remained beyond his ken. She emerged from its gloom and vanished into it. Unlike his mother, who had liked to read old foreign-language magazines, this woman spent her time playing cards. Sometimes she appeared with a knife and a piece of fruit. Leaning on the railing, she sliced and ate the fruit quickly, spitting the pits into the garden below.
His youngest son and his wife, whom he, with mixed humor and anxiety, had apprised of the resemblance, were slow to acknowledge it. Hagit was actually indignant. “You’re heartless!” she cried. “Your mother was never that ugly or awful-looking.” Rivlin’s sister, on the other hand, who had hated their mother, thought the double was better-looking. She understood her brother’s fascination and stood for a long time by the window herself, smiling with grim satisfaction at the ghost as though viewing her in a peep show with no risk of a reprimand. Rivlin was so intrigued by the discovery that during their first month in the apartment he asked Tsakhi to bring him a pair of binoculars from his army base. Magnified, their neighbor resembled his mother—a strident peacock of a woman who had painted herself with flamboyant colors until her dying day—less closely. She used no makeup and had a yellowed, time-weathered face like that of an excavated sphinx. At first he took care to observe her from a place of concealment, afraid that he and his binoculars might drive her away or cause her to complain. Eventually, however, he realized that the danger was nil, since her gaze was always directed downward, as if the world lay only in that direction.
Now he would be parting from her for two weeks. He couldn’t say he’d miss her. Yet sometimes, observing her in an idle moment, he had found a strange consolation in her manner, so familiar to him from his childhood. The difference was that this time, he felt no guilt or sense of obligation.
11.
ON THE TWENTY-THIRD floor of the university tower, on a desk in the office of the Near Eastern Studies Department, surrounded by student papers and faculty mail, sat a round copper tray filled with baklava. It was a gift from the attentive bride to the teachers who had missed her wedding, so that they wouldn’t feel left out.
“It isn’t fair,” Rivlin protested. “The slackers shouldn’t be rewarded.”
“You can’t deny that the effort was worth it,” said the secretaries. They were treating him, the morning after, with an excessive friendliness. “It was a brilliant idea to go see our whining students in their natural habitat. They’re so different in
their own world. And how we enjoyed your delightful wife!” They already missed Hagit, who had vanished and left them once more with her morose husband.
“Yes. She knows how to have a good time,” the professor admitted with a tight-lipped smile. “That’s because I take such good care of her. Why shouldn’t she?”
They chuckled at his outrageousness. They had tended to his needs for so many years that they couldn’t imagine him doing the same for somebody else. Although it was awkward for him to be striking such an intimate note with these two women, with whom he had always been so formal, he knew that whoever was introduced to his wife did not quickly relinquish her. Perhaps she represented a path to him.
The door of the department head’s office was shut. He was wondering whether to enter and tell Akri how pointless his previous night’s harangue had been when the secretaries decided for him. “Professor Akri,” they told him, “would like to see you.”
Rivlin stepped into the large, brightly lit room that had long been his office. Even though he was glad to be relieved of the burden of running the department, he had left some of his books on the shelves and even kept a key as a way of retaining part ownership.
“Professor Tedeschi is in a coma,” Akri greeted him. A normally taciturn man, he kept an orderly workroom. Mounted on his computer were photographs of his two grandsons, one blond and one dark like himself. Perhaps they had helped to inspire his theories about the wrong turn taken by Arab history.
“So I’ve heard,” Rivlin answered dryly. He felt disappointed that Hannah Tedeschi, not content with his sympathy for her husband, had also turned to a more mediocre scholar than himself. If Tedeschi valued Akri, it was only for the thoroughness with which the new department head helped the old man to index and footnote his articles. “How come,” Rivlin asked, “you’re still afraid of his wife’s hysteria after having been his teaching assistant in Jerusalem for so many years? Don’t you realize that she needs and even enjoys her husband’s attacks, which is why she’s always so happy to tell us about them?”
Akri’s head drooped slightly. Intrepid when battling Arabs, he was cautious about taking on Jews, especially insofar as it might affect his academic career. “This time it sounds serious,” he said in defense of the SOS from Jerusalem. “He’s been in a coma for two days.”
“I know. He was in the exact same coma in April 1992. It didn’t keep him from coming to his senses a few days later and giving the opening lecture at that big conference about Arabs and Turks at the Dayan Center. He was also in critical condition in February 1994. For four days he was in another world, but in the end he remembered to wake up in time for a sabbatical at Princeton. And I might remind you that here in Haifa, when he was our guest a few years ago at that mini-conference I organized on North Africa, he passed out after lecturing on the Turkish withdrawal from Algeria, spent the night in the emergency room, and caught a flight the next morning to the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo. The irrepressible Carlo Tedeschi is a devoted husband. As such, he knows that only his illnesses can keep his wife sane in our morbid Israeli reality. That’s why he’s always in perfect health when he’s abroad. Relax, Ephraim. A week ago he returned from a trip to Tierra del Fuego. It would never have occurred to him to have a coma there.”
“Tierra del Fuego?” Although the skullcapped department head found the Tedeschis’ far-flung itineraries bizarre, he was not prepared to surrender his concern. “But suppose this time it’s real,” he persisted, wary of dubious psychological explanations that subverted the rabbinic commandment to visit the sick, hypochondriacs included. “Even if he’s only doing it for his wife, shouldn’t we be supportive?” He wished to propose to Rivlin that the two of them, after the afternoon’s departmental seminar, drive to Jerusalem to see their old teacher. It would give them an opportunity to talk about business and perhaps discuss his little sermon at Samaher’s wedding, which was admittedly not beyond challenge. Even if neither of them succeeded in convincing the other, the department head said with a hint of a smile, they would keep each other awake.
But Rivlin had family commitments. Even without them, he would not have been inclined to spend a second long evening with Akri, much less join him in a sick call as if they were equals, either academically or in their relationship with a revered teacher.
Now, however, standing by the window of his little office at the university, which was to be his sole work space for the next ten days, his back to the reinstalled computer on whose screen was not yet flickering the problematic book he had been struggling with for the past year, his glance drifted longingly from the plaza at the foot of the tower to the grayish folds of the mountains of the Galilee where last night’s Arab wedding had died out toward morning, and he wondered whether Ephraim Akri might be right. Perhaps this time Hannah Tedeschi’s distress call was genuine, more even than she suspected. If he set out for Jerusalem immediately, he would be able to warn the old professor and his wife that one too many make-believe departures from this world might result in a real one, and still manage to get to the airport on time.
Certainly, he was in no mood to switch on the computer in his little office and view his crabbed work, which lacked a core, a justification, and any apparent relationship to the panoramic view outside. Telephoning the district court, he left a message for Judge Rivlin, who was in closed chambers, telling her that he was leaving early for Jerusalem before going to the airport and that there would be nowhere to contact him during her noon recess. He knew this would displease her, not so much because she would fear his coming late to the airport or think he was taking Hannah Tedeschi too seriously, as because she liked to be privy to all his whims. If he was going to play hooky from work while she sat in a black robe weighing the fateful dramas of the awe-stricken actors in her courtroom, she at least wanted to know about it.
He stopped by the departmental office on his way to see if there was any mail for him. There was nothing, however, except a polite reminder to pay his share of Samaher’s wedding gift. He settled the debt and consumed the last squashed piece of baklava, glancing idly through Akri’s now open door to his desk, at which, undistracted by his departmental chores, the department head sat peacefully immersed in his scholarship. Asking a secretary to check the plane’s final arrival time, he went to inform Akri that, feeling real alarm for the spuriously ill Tedeschi, he had decided to prod him into consciousness by setting out for Jerusalem at once. “That way, Ephraim,” he remarked, “he’ll be ready with a bibliographical favor to ask of you when you turn up there tonight.”
Akri smiled faintly, the deep flush of his dark face disclosing the umbrage he took. Now that he had tenure, he had nothing to fear from a senior colleague. And yet two promotions from assistant to full professor still lay between them, too great a distance for him not to be stung by Rivlin’s sarcasm.
12.
“YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT one thing.” Rivlin paced freely around the new department head’s office while trying to decide whom Akri resembled more, his blond or his dark grandson. “That harangue of yours needs to be challenged. I’m sure we’ll have a chance to debate it sometime soon. For the moment, I’d just like to inquire whether you don’t think it was tactless, perhaps even—you’ll forgive my saying so—imprudent, to lecture Arabs at an Arab wedding on your theory of . . . what is it that you call it? Your Theory of Arab Failure? An Orientalist’s Theory of Despair? Yes, your Theory of Despair. I might ask whose despair, though—ours or theirs?”
“Everyone’s . . .” Feeling his colleague’s hostility, Akri braced for a confrontation.
“Well, you should realize that not everyone understands what it is that you’ve despaired of.” Rivlin stared at the photographs on Akri’s computer, bitterness welling inside him not only at the grandfather, but at the grandsons too. “You don’t have to give me your whole speech again. I’ve already heard it: your despair is pure, intrinsic, theoretical, with no tendentious political content or ideological agenda. But if I, who have some kno
wledge of your ideas and your articles, have difficulty discerning their purity of intent, what can you expect of others? The students at the wedding weren’t all from our department, you know. Those who were are accustomed to your baroque style and have their semiallegorical, semihumorous way of interpreting it. But there were students from elsewhere as well. Why provoke and confuse them at an idyllic village wedding?”
“But that’s precisely the place for it!” Akri declared with unexpected tenacity. “On their own turf, where they feel most at home, surrounded by their favorite foods, totally connected to themselves and to their land. It’s only there that you stand a chance of getting them to admit the truth. You know me well. You know I don’t look down on the Arabs. I only want to call their attention to a fundamental flaw in their conception of freedom that has spelled tragedy and disaster for them. What did I do wrong last night? I livened up a wedding party with an intellectual discussion in a perfectly civilized way. Didn’t our rabbis say that a table without words of wisdom is no better than a pagan altar?”
“Words of wisdom?” Rivlin looked at Akri as if he thought the usually quiet department head had gone mad. “Whose wisdom? You demolished their past, you defamed their ancestors, you attacked their honor, you enumerated their every weakness, you told them they have no future. Do you really think they’re a merrily self-flagellating band of masochists like us Jews?”
“No one is a masochist.” Akri retained his composure. “I was being objective. I was speaking respectfully and with the best of intentions. Precisely because there were so many young people there, engineers and science majors and future intellectuals, I said to myself, here’s a chance to give them a different perspective on their own history—and in their own language, a rich, fluent Arabic such as they love. If we’re ever going to learn to get along with them, going to their weddings and making small talk while eating barbecued lamb won’t be enough. We have to reach out and touch the truth, even if it hurts. Even if it may be futile.”
The Liberated Bride Page 3