“Then how do they know these aren’t?”
“They’re too good. And their bibliographies list Arabic books that aren’t available in Israel. There are hard-up instructors and even professors in Arab countries willing to sell term papers on Hamlet, Othello, or Romeo and Juliet to the highest bidder.”
“Not to mention The Merchant of Venice,” Akri put in. “Dr. Dagut once told me that he was given a term paper on Shylock by an Arab student that was full of anti-Semitic remarks.”
“I hope he didn’t flunk him because of it.”
“God forbid. The liberals in the English department love anti-Semitic remarks. These just seemed suspicious because they were so extreme. . . .”
Rivlin sank slowly into the armchair in which, as department chairman, he had frequently napped. The battle of the boutique had been tiring, though by no means unpleasant. He leafed through the two term papers, trying to guess their author by their style and subject. He thought of Samaher.
“Well, what do you think?” Akri asked.
“I’d turn it over to the disciplinary committee. They’ll find out who sold what to whom.”
“That could get nasty. It will make the student newspaper, and the Arab students will raise a rumpus.”
“Let them.”
“I wouldn’t want to impugn their honor.”
“You?”
“Me above all. There’s a difference between historical generalizations and personal accusations. The rules call for expulsion in a case like this. It will end badly.”
Akri glanced at the two secretaries. His sudden solicitude for the misconceivers of freedom did not seem to please them. “Whatever we do, we mustn’t be hasty,” he declared heatedly. “Before we make our staff happy by besmirching our own department, let’s try to work this thing out. Why step on toes if you don’t have to?”
“By doing what?”
“Something stupid.”
“You sound like a politician.”
“There’s nothing wrong with politics if it can prevent conflict.”
The new department head adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses and politely signaled the two secretaries to leave him alone with his colleague.
10.
“CAN YOU GUESS who wrote these two papers?”
“You say they were written by the same person?”
“Yes. They’re in the same style.”
Rivlin leafed through them. How, he wondered aloud, could he possibly know? He had graded so many papers in his life.
“But these were written recently,” Akri said.
“How can you tell?”
“Your handwriting dates from the last two years.”
“What do you mean?”
“I compared it with your writing from previous years in some old files. It’s changed. Your letters used to be larger, more upright and decisive. Lately they’ve become . . . well, a bit scrawled- and scrunched-looking. The lines are crooked, as though something were pressing on them.”
“If ever they make you a cabinet minister, Ephraim, I’d suggest the ministry of police.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Since when have you become graphologist?”
“We all agreed that the marginal comments were yours. I wanted to know when they were from.”
“But why all this sleuthing around? It’s a waste of time. Get the two students to talk.”
But the Oriental Akri was so sensitive to the feelings of his Arab students that he was concerned even for the cheats among them. He didn’t want to make use of informers. This was a Jewish method, far worse than discrimination or neglect, that had left a festering sore in Arab society. He preferred to solve the case by himself.
Out of the corner of his eye Rivlin noticed, beside the two photographs on top of the computer, a new picture of an infant in a crib. Did Akri have another grandson? Until officially informed of this, he decided bitterly, he would ignore the newcomer and assume him to be an earlier version of Grandson One or Two.
He rose awkwardly from his chair. “I have a class,” he said. But the department head continued to detain him.
“We have to determine whether, when she gave those papers to someone else, she knew what would be done with them.”
“How do you know it was a she?”
“Because she uses the feminine case for herself.”
Rivlin pictured a young woman in a wedding gown, pulling a black horse away from a gate. “Sometimes I don’t know what to make of you, Ephraim,” he said, with a patronizing smile. “On the one hand, you speak about Arabs with the most awful despair. And on the other, you coddle them like a social worker.”
“It’s all connected,” the department head replied, flattered to be considered a paradox. “It’s our human and scholarly responsibility. The better we understand the Arabs, the better we can defend ourselves against them. We have to distinguish the crucial from the trivial, what’s important to them from what isn’t. That’s the only way we’ll ever know what to expect from them. We have to honor their feelings and realize what hurts them in order to guard against betrayal and lies. It’s a question of patting their backs with one hand while squeezing their balls with the other. Without romantic or egotistical illusions. Because it’s the purest egotism on the part of their so-called friends—I’m talking about our own bleeding-heart colleagues—to treat the Arabs as our clones who share our values and hopes. It exasperates me how the same types who are always accusing our Jewish society of decadence and fanaticism expect the Arabs to think just like them. If you don’t like your own self, at least don’t impose its norms on others.”
“Do you know who wrote those papers?” Rivlin asked, interrupting. “It was our bride, Samaher. The one whose wedding you made us go to.”
“I thought as much.” Akri was not surprised. “I was waiting to hear it from you. Something about them reminded me of a paper she wrote for me as an undergraduate.”
“That was the only time she wrote anything. She hasn’t done a thing since entering the M.A. program. I’ve given her three extensions, and the only requirement she’s met is getting married.”
“That’s not an unimportant one,” Akri said seriously. “Nothing terrible has happened. Now that we’ve caught her red-handed, we’ll make her fulfill her other requirements.”
“Well, then, I wash my hands of her. She’s all yours.”
“They’re all mine,” the new department head replied, confirming his position of authority. “But let’s be discreet about it. And first of all, that means getting our secretaries to keep their mouths shut. . . .”
11.
ON TUESDAY EVENING, at seven-thirty, half an hour before he and Hagit were due to leave for a concert at the Israel Philharmonic, Rivlin’s sister phoned and asked to speak to Hagit about a strange dream she had had that day. Ever since attending a course in forensic psychology a few years previously, Hagit had liked interpreting dreams.
“Not now, Raya,” Rivlin told her. “We have a concert, and Hagit isn’t dressed yet. And Ofra hasn’t decided what to wear, either. . . .”
“All I need with her is five minutes. Otherwise, I’ll forget the dream.”
“It can’t be that important if it’s so forgettable.”
“Two minutes . . .”
“Sorry. I know how long your two-minute conversations can last. I’m tired of arriving at concerts after all the parking spaces have been taken.”
“Two minutes, I promise,” his sister pleaded. “She doesn’t have to interpret it. Let me just tell it to her so that she can think about it during the concert.”
“Hagit dreams her own dreams during concerts. I’d be a rich man if I received a refund for every concert she’s fallen asleep at.”
“Just a few words.”
“You can tell your dream to me. I’ll pass it on to her.”
“My dreams crumble when I tell them to you.”
“Just the gist of it. I’m already dressed. For a small fee, I’ll e
ven be your analyst. Who can understand your childhood neuroses better than I?”
But his sister did not want to tell him her dream or have him for her analyst. As children they had fought frequently, just like their parents. Only after his marriage was their relationship put on a more even keel. And since Hagit’s feelings of guilt toward her childlessly globe-trotting sister had room in them for Rivlin’s sister too, she had let herself become Raya’s confidante, the sole person capable of shaking golden coins from the pockets of her dreams. Now, overhearing the conversation, she picked up the receiver.
“I’m warning you,” Rivlin whispered, removing the covers from their king-size bed and folding back the blanket for a quick plunge after the concert.
“Don’t be so mean. Give me a minute with her. We’ve never come late for a concert yet. . . .”
And so Rivlin’s sister, a divorcée of many years who never talked about her ex-husband, told Hagit of a short, powerful dream about him. In it she was holding a baby, a little toddler, while imploring her former partner in English, “Please, don’t hurt the child.” He merely laughed, climbed into his big car, and drove off while leaving her standing in the street. Still clutching the little boy, she hurried off to the house of her ex-husband’s old friends to look for some baby food. Yet all they gave her was half a glass of milk, and she ran desperately back out to the street, boarded an empty bus, and sat the hungry baby beside her.
That was the whole dream. As he had feared, Raya now wanted it interpreted on the spot.
“Your brother is having a fit,” the half-naked judge told her. “Offhand, though, I’d say that the baby is you.”
“Me?”
“Well, parts of you.”
“Parts . . . ?” The idea both delighted and alarmed her. “What parts?”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
12.
THE CONCERT WAS sold out. The only seats available were onstage. Rivlin, feeling sorry for his pale-faced sister-in-law, who was still agonizing over her dress for the wedding, gallantly surrendered his place beside Hagit and went to sit behind the orchestra.
The program was structured around several unknown young soloists making their debuts and consisted of a number of shorter works and several excerpts from longer ones—an approach that Rivlin found annoying. Apart from being opposed on principal to violating the aesthetic integrity of a musical composition, he feared that the Philharmonic’s renowned Indian conductor might try to fit so many young talents into the evening that it would become unduly long. These fears were dispelled by a quick glance at the program notes, which listed the length of each piece; after totaling them up and adding time for applause and intermissions, he concluded that the concert would end on schedule. Leaning back in his seat, he cast a benevolent glance at the overflow audience on the stage, which was young and unpretentiously dressed. Several rows ahead of him sat a man with a ponytail. For a moment he thought it might be his ex-daughter-in-law’s husband. Come to think of it, though, the ponytail was as gray as the coat of a mouse.
He gazed down at the auditorium, looking for the wife who must already be missing him. Would she notice him and wave back? Or feel comfortable enough beside her sister to doze off? Lately she was suffering from fatigue, no doubt from the stress of a long closed-door trial that she was barred from talking about. At concerts, plays, and even movies she was soon so entangled in the cobwebs of sleep that were it not for her husband, who made sure to wake her at critical junctures, and especially before the end, she would not have known what she had sat through.
The opening soloist was a Russian immigrant, a tall, blond adolescent with a self-effacing manner, who played the first movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Rivlin, though fancying himself a lover of music, did not pretend to judge the caliber of the performance. Still, he had a melancholy tendency to doubt the staying power of young prodigies. “Time alone will show what will become of them,” he liked to grumble as they took their bows. “Maybe someone knows what happened to last year’s prodigies. Where are they now?”
Deep down he knew that his cynicism was caused by his worry for his stranded son. The night before, they had talked briefly with Ofer on the phone, after which Rivlin had insisted on going over every word of the conversation with Hagit. Resigned to Ofer’s telling his mother that he knew of Hendel’s death, he was surprised when it went unmentioned. Now, as a long orchestral prelude coaxed the violin from its silence, he wondered whether this was a sign of indifference to his ex-wife or of a secret pact with the father fighting to rescue him, even at the price of more pain, from the tyranny of an old wound.
The sentimental music of the Russian composer—who, the program notes said, was almost driven to suicide each time the critics panned his work—made its sure, swift way toward the final cadenza. From his vantage point behind the orchestra, Rivlin could see the back and shoulders of the young violinist, quivering with feeling. As his anxiety for his son, an exile mourning his marriage in a distant place, mounted in tandem with the trumpets, flutes, horns, and strings, he sought out the reassuring presence of his wife. Yet the passionate movements of the dark-skinned conductor, his baton pointed from time to time straight at Rivlin, as if he too were expected to contribute a few bars, hid Hagit from sight.
The orchestra fell silent. Having run out of both patience and emotion, the Russian violinist attacked the cadenza with a coldly calculated technique, as if wishing to have done with it as quickly as possible. Now that the musicians seated next to him were idle, Rivlin studied them for a clue to what they thought of the young soloist. Yet he could not tell whether they were even listening. The members of the wind section, busy cleaning their instruments, were whispering and smiling to each other with an old rapport. No doubt they had heard and would hear this concerto dozens of times, and this performance did not appear to have been one of the more impressive. From time to time they glanced at the conductor, whose limp, motionless stance, head down and hands at his sides, cleared the way for the yearning husband to search once more for his wife—only to look away in confusion upon discovering that he was staring at the wrong woman.
“You have to respect his bounds. You have no right to trespass, not even in your thoughts.”
“Not even in my thoughts? What’s wrong with you? How can anyone control such painful thoughts?”
“You can if you want to. And if you can’t, at least keep them to yourself. Be careful. Ofer isn’t you. You don’t own him. You have no right to interfere in what happened between them. It can’t do any good.”
“But time is passing. . . . ”
“Don’t exaggerate. It’s only four years.”
“Five! Five! What makes you say four?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll find someone. A woman who suits him better. Stop conjuring up old ghosts. Let him breathe.”
Several months after Ofer’s sudden divorce, their son had stored his possessions in their apartment and gone to Paris to study hotel and restaurant design, a field he had become interested in after his marriage. That was more than four years ago. He had worked as an apprentice, without pay, for various architects, most of them Jews, while auditing classes at a cooking academy in order to “get the feel,” as he put it, of the relationship between a kitchen and its diners. Meanwhile, he supported himself by working as a night security guard at the Jewish Agency in the 17th arrondissement—a situation shortened by his parents, in response to casual inquiries, to “Ofer works for the Jewish Agency in Paris.”
The conductor lifted his baton and spurred the orchestra, as if it were a pack of hunting dogs, to race to the end of the movement. Rivlin did not join in the applause. Aloof, he watched the flustered soloist take his curtain call and vanish into the wings. Near the exit, by the kettledrum, were some empty seats. Rivlin decided to move to one of these, so as to improve his view of both the soloists and his wife.
The two sisters were chatting happily. Hagit, noticing his new location, seemed pleas
ed that he would be visible for the rest of the concert. She waved, then signaled him with a smile to comb his hair.
The Tchaikovsky interpreter was followed by a parade of young female performers, most of them daughters of Philharmonic musicians. The first was a pianist with eyeglasses. Her long silver dress trailed past him across the floor while he read about her, her studies, and her accomplishments in the program, which announced that she was to play Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. Alas, now all he could see, from his vantage point by the bald kettledrummer, were two bare shoulders and a white back with silver ribbons. What, he wondered, was the musical significance of such décolletage? Was there a connection between the low-necked dress and the rhapsody? Were this pianist and the tender young soloists who followed her—bare of shoulder, flowing of hair, alluring of bosom, slyly slit at the leg—offering their carnal bodies in compensation for possible lapses in their renditions, for notes misplayed or omitted, or was this their consolation prize to a sense of sight forced to play second fiddle to the sense of hearing? And what, then, of the performers with pimples and bad complexions? Of what use were they to an audience promised visual as well as audial pleasures?
As the father of two sons, he had been deprived, once the wife of the elder one left him, of paternal access to young maidenhood. Now, as a steady procession of it passed before him, nubile, fluid, and flushed with excitement, a violin, clarinet, oboe, cello, or flute in its bravely vestal hands, he could not listen to the second concerto of Karl Maria Von Weber or to Ravel’s Les Tsiganes or Chausson’s Poeme, without an old sorrow welling up in him. Borne on the alternating waves of the music, his fictional confession in the hotel garden throbbed in him like a real disease.
This time the applause found him ready to join in, and he exchanged smiles with the bald kettledrummer, who had crossed his sticks in the symphonic gesture of approval for a job well done. Yet as he sought to leave the hall at the concert’s end, the Orientalist’s way was blocked by the ushers, who had shut the doors to prevent the early-to-bed-and-to-rise Haifaites from rushing for the exits.
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