“You don’t say!” Rivlin glanced at his watch. “Well, in the first place, the truth is not so simple. And second, you don’t flaunt it at a wedding, not even in fancy Arabic.”
This time the hurt flashed from the lenses of Akri’s metal-framed glasses. Rivlin patted his shoulder.
“Look, now isn’t the time for it. I have to get going. We’ll postpone the discussion—but not for long. I’ll be your next-door neighbor for the next few weeks. My sister-in-law is arriving in Israel today, and my wife has kicked me out of my study. Tomorrow or the day after we’ll have a nice, quiet chat. Not about your truth, or about my truth, but about truth in general.”
13.
ALTHOUGH HIS SISTER-IN-LAW’S flight was scheduled to land in five hours, there was still, the secretary told him, no arrival time—a first indication of a possible delay. This made it possible for him to drive to Jerusalem with his mind at rest. Indeed, after leaving his car in the hospital parking lot, he detoured to the cafeteria for a bite to eat before taking the large elevator to the third floor. Not that he was hungry. However, he feared that his encounter with his old teacher’s illness might spoil his appetite for later.
At first he thought he had been given the wrong room number. The room he entered was small and dark and had only one bed, its bare mattress folded in half as though someone had recently died. His heart sank. Could Tedeschi have made a terrible mistake and gone too far? A moment later, though, he heard the low drone of a radio and noticed that the room had a niche in which the patient, hooked up to three brightly colored transfusions, was lying with his eyes shut. The tops and bottoms of Tedeschi’s pajamas did not match. The pants, on which were stamped the name of the hospital, hung agape around his private parts. The shirt was his own; Rivlin recognized it from previous sick calls. The renowned Arabist seemed to be in a state not so much of unconsciousness as of anticonsciousness. His round face, branded by the Argentine sun, was flame red. Only his thinning but still boyish hair, dancing lightly in the breeze of a small fan aimed directly at him, looked untouched.
The female broadcaster finished the news bulletin and began to interview several politicians, seeking to embroil them in an argument. It seemed doubtful that Tedeschi could hear the altercation, much less follow it, although he was usually addicted to the airwaves, which was why his wife had left the transistor on in her absence. He was breathing with difficulty, choked by a severe asthma that was either holding back or forcing up—Rivlin could not tell which—the phlegm gurgling from his depths, prevented by the blue oxygen mask on his face from clearing his lungs with one of the violent coughing fits, commonly commenced after finishing a lecture and taking his seat in the hall, that had shocked many an audience of Orientalists. Although Rivlin had seen the old mentor from whom he had learned so much (however dated some of it now was) in such twilight zones before, and although he had always been able, by pressing on the lever of Tedeschi’s fine sense of irony, to lift him over the awkward hump of his self-pity, now, facing the red flame kindled in the Argentine, he felt less sure of himself.
“Carlo?” he whispered, calling the old man by his first name, as had Tedeschi’s teachers, Professors Benet, Maier, and Goitein, who had taught the young Italian in the delicately arched buildings of the Hebrew university campus on Mount scopus in the days of the British Mandate. Although he had been forced to take a Hebrew name upon joining a mortar unit at the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence, during which the old campus was lost, Tedeschi, now a rotund, energetic young teaching assistant, became Carlo again in the university’s temporary postwar accommodations and remained so at the new campus at Giv’at Ram, where he soon received his professorship.
The sick man opened one eye and shut it immediately. Rivlin thought Tedeschi recognized him but lacked the strength, or so it seemed, to emerge from his fog and explain (let alone justify) his condition. Most likely he was waiting for his wife—the loyal impresario of his illnesses—to return and bring Rivlin up to date, with her usual brutally frank histrionics, on her husband’s condition and hopeless prognosis. Once she had gone on long enough, she would let Rivlin range far afield to the latest academic gossip. That alone, he knew, was capable of rousing his old mentor, not only from his stupor, but even from the grave.
And yet he restrained himself and said nothing, his eyes taking in, with a mixture of curiosity and slight nausea, the ugly yellow puncture marks from the intravenous needles in the arms of this man who as a youngster, in 1939, after the signing of the Hitler-Mussolini pact, had fled Turin for Palestine and wandered there from one lonely asylum to another before beginning the career that was to win him an international reputation as an expert on the decadent but long-lived Ottoman Empire.
“Just what do you call this, Carlo? What’s going on?” Rivlin asked softly again, somewhat frightened by the fiery shade of unfamiliar, astonishingly strong red in Tedeschi’s face. It was as if the Israeli Orientalist, having gone to the end of the world, had there been transformed into an Oriental himself.
Again one eye opened. Weary and irritable, it quickly shut once more, to protest the impatience that refused to wait for the woman who, with true dramatic flair, would tell the tale of his latest attack. Meanwhile, he stretched his short legs. From between his feet, still clad in the blue plimsolls given to travelers on El Al’s business class, fell an anthology of Jahaliya love poems. Finely penciled in its margins were the notes of Hannah Tedeschi, who just a year ago had published a selection of wonderfully translated verse from this same volume.
Rivlin glanced at his watch. If his sister-in-law’s flight was on time, he would have to leave for the airport in half an hour. Who would give him credit for his visit if the sick man went on clinging to his comatose state? Leaving the room, he roamed the corridor until he found Hannah, who was talking animatedly to one of the nurses.
“Yochanan? Here so soon? What was the rush? I told you in my message that Carlo wasn’t going anywhere.”
The visitor smiled at this strange woman, Tedeschi’s second wife, who had been smitten by him as a student, after his first wife was committed to a mental hospital. As young as she was, she soon adopted her stormy husband’s eccentricities. Cultivating his medical problems was her way of avoiding her predecessor’s fate.
“This time,” Rivlin said, embracing her loosely, “you’ve managed to scare me. I thought it best”—a trace of sarcasm crept into his voice—“to get here before Carlo jumped out of bed for some new conference or expedition.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Hannah Tedeschi said indignantly. “What conference? What expedition? Stop being so cynical. Can’t you believe what you see with your own eyes?” The cold glitter in her own eyes signaled her satisfaction that Rivlin, Tedeschi’s oldest student and close and loving friend, did not take her husband’s condition too seriously.
“But I do believe it,” he replied, hugging her more tightly. “I certainly do. He looks terrible. He has the most awful color. What do the doctors say?”
“The doctors,” Hannah snorted, “don’t know a thing. That’s the whole problem.” Only the constant need to minister to her husband had kept her, the wonderful translator, from an academic career as brilliant as his.
“It’s the same story each time,” Rivlin could not resist pointing out. “You go from doctor to doctor, and from one treatment and medicine to another, and nothing ever comes of it. That’s because you won’t face up to the truth.”
“And just what might that be?” Hannah snapped, aggressively opening the door to the sick man’s room.
“That it’s purely psychological. It’s entirely in your heads, his and yours.” The eternally rebellious pupil regretted his words immediately.
14.
RIVLIN, WHO SOON had to leave for the airport, was beginning to fear he wouldn’t be able to exchange a word with the defiantly unconscious man, whose wife was now describing, with cruel academic exactness, their tribulations since returning to Israel. In Tier
ra del Fuego, she told Rivlin, Tedeschi’s breathing had been normal, despite the hardships of the trip.
Rivlin, who had no idea why such a trip had been taken, tried to interrupt her torrent of words long enough to understand. “But what were you doing in Tierra del Fuego?” he asked. “what possessed you to go there?”
Tedeschi, it seemed, had been invited to Argentina for a lecture series. And since the government of Italy, many years ago, had volunteered to honor its responsibility toward the young victim of fascism by treating him to an annual week of convalescence from his asthma at any rest home of his choosing—anywhere—the Tedeschis had decided on a Patagonian adventure. After journeying all the way to the bottom of the world, they thought it a shame not to explore what lay beneath it.
Tedeschi’s eyelids flickered with humorous anticipation. Having listened with enjoyment to his wife’s account of his sufferings, he was now ready for the ironies of his loyal student, his first teaching assistant, whom he had sent to establish a new department of Near Eastern studies in Haifa before the two of them could get on each other’s nerves—get in each other’s way—in Jerusalem. With a wave of his hand he signaled his wife to remove his oxygen mask, so that he might converse with this visitor he was fond of—who, however, was more alarmed than ever by the old man’s voice, weak and unrecognizably groping.
“How is Her Honor?” Tedeschi managed to whisper before choking almost at once. It was his way of conveying, Rivlin thought, that he would have liked a visit from Hagit, too. At heart, the old man esteemed her more than he did the husband now bending compassionately over him.
Thirty-three years had gone by since the winter evening on which Rivlin, then writing his master’s dissertation, had brought an aspiring law student doing her army service to his professor’s home. He was already considering marriage and remembered exactly what she wore that night—a black pleated skirt, which made her look fuller than she was, beneath a soft red woolen sweater. Although Hagit hardly spoke and seemed ill at ease in the presence of the great scholar, Rivlin, by now familiar with Tedeschi’s overbearing manner, noticed the sweet but ironic smile with which she regarded him. The great scholar, for his part, struck by some force in the young woman, kept trying to impress her with his wit. When, in a display of interest that was considered good manners in those days, she rose and went to the professor’s large bookcase to inspect its contents, Tedeschi enthusiastically wagged his head behind her back and winked singularly to tell his pupil that he had made a good choice and should not let her get away.
Years later, when relations between the two men were sometimes strained by mutual accusations of academic betrayal, criticism, and neglect, their memories of this evening, on which the older man gave his fateful and sage nod of approval to the younger one, were still able to reconcile them. Besides being Rivlin’s doctoral adviser, Tedeschi had also been partly his matchmaker.
Now, as the conversation continued to proceed along medical lines, including the results of Tedeschi’s latest blood and urine tests, Hannah Tedeschi removed the plimsolls from her husband’s feet to show Rivlin that, far from having just another attack of asthma, the famous Orientalist was suffering from a new and aggressive form of inner rot. Rivlin, unable to bear the sight of the chipped, yellowing nails on the old man’s toes, reached for the volume of Bedouin love poems.
“I see you’re working on a new book of translations,” he said, in an attempt to change the subject to more intellectual matters. Hannah, annoyed to have her case history interrupted, sent him a sharp glance.
“I read the five translations that recently appeared in 2000. They’re not only incredibly faithful, they’re true poems in their own right, works of art. It’s unbelievable how perfectly you captured the two aspects, the comic and the chilling, of Al-Hajaji’s great opening salutation. I’ve recited your rendition to my students several times in order to make them see that, one thousand four hundred years ago, the despotism of an Arab tyrant could also be delicately ironic.”
He positioned himself in the center of the room and recited:
“I, a man of much renown, still aspire upward. When I strip off my turban you shall know who I am. . . .
“O inhabitants of Al-Kufa! I see heads ripe for plucking. I, their master, see the blood between the turban and the beard. . . .”
“As though I see the blood. . . .” The translator corrected him gently.
“Of course. As though. What a marvelous version of the line, Waka’ani anzaru ila al-dimai’ bayna ’l’amami w’al-laha. You’ve done a great thing, Hannah. We’ll never forgive you if you go adventure-hunting again in Tierra del Fuego instead of giving us more ancient Arab poetry in such wonderful translations. Who else could do it so well?”
Standing in the middle of a hospital room with her husband’s plimsoll in her hand, kept from finishing her stirring account of his maladies, the translator, though her work had already been acclaimed in a weekly literary supplement, was unprepared for such kudos from a full professor. Granted, Rivlin’s field was history, not poetry, but he was a connoisseur of the latter, too. The bitter resentment on Hannah’s face yielded to a look of surprise. She seemed not to know what to make of Rivlin’s sudden panegyric. The bright flush in the sick man’s face, however, left no room to doubt that he took pleasure in the compliments lavished on his wife. He broke into a cough that grew steadily more violent.
15.
WHETHER TO CALM her husband or merely keep him from talking, Hannah hurried to replace the oxygen mask.
Tedeschi shut his eyes painfully, his cough burbling out in a fresh supply of oxygen. Unbuttoning his pajama top, he bared a chest that rose and fell like a bellows.
“Where,” sighed the translator, “am I to find the peace and quiet to translate love or battle poems? You know that Carlo’s jubilee volume is supposed to be coming out soon. All the material is ready except for the article you promised.”
Rivlin scratched his head. “Yes. That article. I can’t seem to finish it. . . .”
Tedeschi’s eyelids fluttered again. Choking or not, he wanted to hear his ex-student explain why it was so difficult to finish an article.
“We’ve just moved to a new apartment in a new building. The whole transition, not to mention the actual construction, has been brutal. Hagit can’t take time off from her trials, and the whole burden has fallen on me. I’ve actually become stupider this past year. My brain has shrunk. I’ve lost my concentration. And the Arabs have driven me to despair. How can you write with any sympathy about the Algerian freedom fighters of the nineteen forties and fifties when you see the terrible carnage going on there now? It’s insane, the terror they’ve let loose.”
“But what do you care if they’re murdering each other now?” Hannah Tedeschi rebuked him. “You’re writing about the past. And who says you have to love Arabs to write about them? You promised us an article. Don’t you see the state Carlo’s in? We can’t put out a jubilee volume in his honor without the participation of his best-known student. Think of how it would look. . . .”
Rivlin smiled uncomfortably. “Most successful student” or simply “best student” would have made him happier. He did not always like having his name linked to that of the Jerusalem scholar, whose recent work was rather weak. He glanced at his watch again. It was time to leave for the airport. Relieved that he had eaten before being exposed to Tedeschi’s feet, he laid his arm on the old man’s shoulder in farewell. “It’s all psychological,” he almost reiterated, feeling impelled to repeat his diagnosis. But he caught himself in time.
“You can expect another visit tonight. A ritual one. Ephraim Akri wishes to do his religious duty. And Hagit and I may come together on Saturday.”
Tedeschi looked agitated, as if unwilling to part so soon.
“What is it?” asked his ex-student with genuine concern. The old professor did not reply. His face was angry and tense. Fearful of another spasm, he kept on his oxygen mask and pointed, with an arm connected to an I
V drip, to the empty bed by the door.
What does he want of me now, Rivlin wondered: to become the patient next to him? If the amusing farce of Tedeschi’s illnesses turned into a soap opera, little would remain of the old man’s charm.
But Hannah understood better. “Carlo is right,” she said, happily remembering. “We forgot to tell you who just died. We watched him fading all night from a stroke. What’s the name of your son’s father-in-law?”
“My son’s father-in-law?” Rivlin took a backward step and regarded the folded mattress as if the death might still be hiding in its crevice. “Who are you talking about? My sons aren’t married.”
Tedeschi, who was following the conversation intently, began to strangle beneath his mask.
“But you know who I mean. Your in-law!” Hannah fought to uphold the death that had taken place. “Don’t be stubborn, Yochanan. Listen to me. I’m telling you a fact. They brought him here a few days ago, at night. It only lasted a few hours, but we both recognized him. He was your in-law. Your ex-in-law, anyway. I just can’t remember his name. . . .”
“Hendel?”
“Hendel? Let it be Hendel. We weren’t told his name. It went with him when they wheeled him out of here.”
“But where did you know him from? How did you know who he was?”
“What do you mean, how? We remembered him from the lovely wedding you made for Ofer here in Jerusalem. The tall man who owned a hotel. It was him. You can check for yourself. How could you not have known? Don’t you read the newspapers? You haven’t been in touch with the family?”
16.
“WHY SHOULD I have been?” Rivlin answered angrily, his departure now strained. “What for? There were no grandchildren to share with them. We haven’t heard from them for five years. There was no need to stay in touch. Not that we have anything against them. But there’s nothing going for them either. I must have told you: the marriage ended suddenly, after a year. There were no explanations. Ofer’s wife simply left him. . . .”
The Liberated Bride Page 4