There was a surprise finale. Never since he and Hagit had taken out their Philharmonic subscription could Rivlin remember such a thing. At the special request of the conductor, a musician rose and asked the audience to remain seated. As much as he loved the local musical scene, the Indian maestro had not forgotten his native land—which, poor, vast, and suffering, had young talents, too, who deserved a hearing. With a sharp wave of the baton, an Indian lad was thrust upon the stage. A fat, bespectacled ten-year-old in a baggy black suit, he stepped forward with a little violin that reminded Rivlin of the instrument once bought for him by his mother, who had dreamed of raising another Yehudi Menuhin.
The solemn boy, looking more like a despondent dwarf than a child prodigy, paid no attention to the applauding audience. Like a well-trained baby elephant, he took his place beside the smiling maestro, who patted him lovingly, as if reminded of his own self fifty years earlier. Leaving the orchestra to its own devices, the big Indian put the little one through his paces, leading him gently and attentively down the enchanted paths of Mendelssohn’s First Violin Concerto—paths that would take him assuredly Westward if only he remained a true son of the East.
13.
YO’EL, UNLIKE HIS WIFE, chose to arrive on a Saturday, thus giving the judge the pleasure of an airport reunion. Invoking recent precedent, the Rivlins decided to detour first to Jerusalem, where Hagit and Ofra’s old aunt was impatiently awaiting a visit from her nieces—especially from the fragile émigré, whose Third World peregrinations she had faithfully followed from the inner sanctum of her little room in a geriatric institution. And as long as they would be in the capital anyway, Hagit said, why not recoup the chance, lost the week before, to succor that dubious invalid Professor Tedeschi, now home from the hospital? The judge was never averse to the lavish praise that the illustrious polymath was sure to bestow on her.
Since family meetings in Jerusalem had a way of unfolding with an inner rhythm of their own that made their outcome difficult to foresee—especially when they involved two sisters eager to reminisce about their dead parents with an old aunt who was hard to stop once she got started—it was decided to put the sick call first, which would make it possible to cut short the visit to the aunt with the imperative of setting out for the airport. And so, on a crisp, sky blue Saturday morning, the three travelers were admitted to the Tedeschis’ apartment by the translator of Jahaliya poetry, who shook a stern head at them as if to say: “Although you may find us at home and not in the hospital, don’t delude yourselves for a moment that our afflictions have passed, much less that they are—the thought of it!—imaginary. On the contrary, the doctors’ refusal to face the facts only makes matters worse.” Introduced to Ofra, she gave her a bitter smile, satisfied with this new addition to the anxious circle of her husband’s well-wishers, before leading them into the old living room into which, thirty-two years previously, a young instructor had brought his girlfriend, then in the army, for the approval of his academic mentor, the sound of whose slippers was now heard as he came padding from an inner room.
The flame red color of Tierra del Fuego that Rivlin had noted in Tedeschi’s cheeks had faded to the ruddy suntan of an Alpine skier, and the hospital pajamas had been replaced by a pair of old corduroy pants. Only the pajama top, flecked with medicinal stains, was unchanged. Tedeschi’s skinny arms, proudly bearing the yellow marks of the infusion needles, protruded from the sleeves. He entered the room slowly, ignoring his old student and making straight for Hagit, who kissed him warmly on both cheeks and handed him a bouquet of flowers. Bowing slightly to Ofra, he asked Hagit, with ironic pathos:
“To what do I owe the privilege of Your Honor’s coming all this way just to see me?”
“Not just,” Rivlin corrected him. “Also.”
“Come, come, Carlo,” Hagit said, with a smile. “Don’t you think you’re worth a trip to Jerusalem?”
The old polymath shrugged genuinely skeptical shoulders and sank into a large armchair that had slightly deformed itself to accommodate his shape. The translatoress, on guard lest her husband stray from the subject of his medical condition, thus collaborating with the enemy, who made light of it, kept an irritable eye on him.
“He looks much better than he did last week,” Rivlin told her. Sarcastically he added, “He must be in training for the conference at the Dayan Center later this month.”
The Jerusalem scholar, while regarding Rivlin’s two women with approval, dismissed the conference with a disdainful wave and began to cough with gusto, the phlegm rattling so loudly in his chest that Ofra winced in her corner. He winked, still without looking at Rivlin, and declared:
“Who cares about that conference in Tel Aviv? Unless, that is, you’ll be presenting something new there that I owe it to myself to listen to. . . .”
“I’m afraid,” the visitor from Haifa replied glumly, “that I have nothing new to present.”
“Those Tel Avivans just want to make a splash. I’ve informed them that I’ll have to feel better than I do now before I give them the benefit of my latest insights.”
The old professor modestly shut his eyes.
“Then you’re considering giving a paper?” Rivlin, out of sorts, glared at Hagit, who had insisted on this visit. You see? his expression seemed to say. Why bother when it’s all just a big act?
“What paper?” Hannah Tedeschi protested, rallying to the side of the man’s illness. “Carlo is fooling himself if he thinks he’ll be back on his feet in two weeks. The only conference he’ll attend will be about the results of his tests.”
“Rubbish,” Tedeschi murmured, glancing from the wife fifteen years his junior to his ex-student, the pitiable professor from Haifa. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t tell me your book is still bogged down. Can’t you throw the conference some juicy little bone, something heartwarming about the Algerian psychosis?”
“I have no bones to spare,” Rivlin replied, with a hostile air. “You know me. I don’t need to go to conferences just to remind the world of my existence. If I have nothing to say, I say nothing.”
Tedeschi shut his eyes again and nodded in vague confirmation.
“But you’ve been working on that material for years!” exclaimed their hostess, distressed not for the conference in Tel Aviv, but for her husband’s jubilee volume. “Don’t tell me you can’t get a single article out of it!”
“One can always toss something off, Hannah. But you, of all people, who work so hard and have only three or four poems to show for it at the end of the year, should understand the difficulty of producing something solid that will withstand the test of time. I can’t write about the fifties and sixties in Algeria, which were a period of vision and hope, without taking into account the insane terror going on now. A scholar with some integrity doesn’t just closet himself with old documents and materials. He reads the newspapers and connects the past to the present. It’s his job to show that today’s developments have their roots in yesterday’s.”
“It’s hopeless,” Hagit said with a smile, recrossing her legs for the benefit of the old polymath, who, though wheezing a bit, was listening raptly. “I’m married to a man who is convinced that everything has a logical reason. He can’t fall asleep at night until he finds it.”
“Tea or coffee?” asked a chagrined Hannah Tedeschi.
The two sisters chose tea. The unkempt house and the state of its upholstery suggested that the milk in the fridge might not be fresh. The professor from Haifa, knowing the Tedeschis better than the women did, asked for brandy, hoping it might disinfect any dirty glass given him.
Tedeschi wagged a half-threatening, half-approving finger. “He’s right,” he said of Rivlin, as though to justify having considered him his successor. “We must never write about the past as if the present didn’t exist. On the contrary, we have to look for the hidden symptoms of impending disorder even before it breaks out. Historical research is like prostate cancer: we need a blood test to detect the antibodies that si
gnal the malignancy still contained in one little gland, before it invades the entire body. We must measure both kinds of cholesterol, the good and the bad, to determine the secret relationship that blocks the blood vessels and leads to a sudden heart attack. There are subtle signs that show up in newly coined speech, in imaginative combinations that occur only to poets and novelists. And at the same time, we must not be taken in by mere decadence, by the whiners and complainers who speak only for themselves.”
Rivlin’s head began to droop. He was familiar with the latest theories about the tendency of art and literature to signal social transformations. Yet all the studies concocted from such ideas, unless made solid by government protocols, political declarations, and legal and institutional decisions, were too frothy to merit a response.
“Yochi has no time for novels,” Hagit announced. “He says life is too turbulent.”
She was enjoying her visit with the hypochondriac so much that, forgetting to refuse the grayish slab of cake placed before her, she bit politely into it and even praised it. But yet the translatoress, well aware of her shortcomings in the kitchen, shrugged off the hypocritical compliment, while turning impatiently to the recalcitrant Rivlin.
“Surely you could write something about a poem or two.”
“Only if translated by you,” Rivlin warmly answered the tense, severe woman, whose blue eyes, magnified by thick spectacles, were the same as those of the mischievous student he had attended classes with back in the sixties. Knowing it would give her pleasure, he again recited Al-Hajaj’s grand soliloquy, this time in Arabic.
“But what,” he lamented, “would the know-it-alls say if I used a wonderful poem written fifteen hundred years ago to explain the murders of terrorists today?”
“Then choose a modern poem. Something hot off the press.” Tedeschi sounded as if he were running a fast-food stand. “Listen, Rivlin. We have something authentically new for you. Hannah, tell him about that friend of yours . . . the poor fellow who was killed. . . .”
14.
ONCE AGAIN, THE Tedeschis—needing, so it seemed, the constant presence of real death—had a surprise corpse for him. This time it was an unknown young scholar from the Arabic Department in Jerusalem, who, stimulated by a literary, sociological, and ethnographic interest, had undertaken a study of popular literature in North Africa. The translatoress, no mean student of Arabic literature herself, had helped her friend unravel the subtle historical allusions hidden in the intricacies of contemporary Arab writing. And he, an observant Jew intimately familiar with religious sources, had repaid her with many an elegant rabbinic phrase that came in handy in her renditions of Jahaliya poetry. So productive had their collaboration over the past year been that they had even toyed with the idea of putting out a joint anthology of Arabic verse in Hebrew translation, he doing the moderns and she the ancients. And then he was killed.
“How?” Rivlin asked.
“In that bus bombing near Pisgat Ze’ev.”
“That’s the first university teacher killed by a terrorist that I’ve heard of.”
“He wasn’t just a teacher,” Tedeschi protested angrily. “He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind. Not that that stopped them from snuffing him out one fine day.”
“Those aren’t the same Arabs,” Rivlin protested.
“Yes, they are, yes, they are!” bitterly declared Hannah Tedeschi, who generally avoided political arguments. “Don’t be naive, Yochanan. Anyone who has burrowed through ancient Arabic poetry as much as I have knows it’s all one world.”
“How can you let her say such a thing?” Rivlin scolded his old professor.
Tedeschi waved him off. “Let her say what she wants. She loved that young man. And rightly so, because he belonged to that scholarly nobility that, far outside the limelight, does the dirty work that clears the way for the rest of us, correcting old errors and pointing out new directions.”
“It was horrible,” their hostess told the two sisters. “He was carrying a briefcase full of rare Arabic newspapers and magazines, and they were all spattered with blood. I cried when his wife showed them to me—I, who have gone through hell with Carlo and never shed a tear. What a loss to the world of scholarship. And to think of what those sons of bitches in the department made him go through to get a lecturer’s rank!”
“What was he doing on a bus? Didn’t he own a car?”
“What car? He gave his all to his work and barely made a living. If it hadn’t been for Carlo, who managed to arrange a small fellowship for him last year, he would have been on welfare. You should have seen his apartment.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“Yosef Suissa.”
“An Orthodox Jew?”
“One of the decent ones.”
“The field has recently been flooded by such types.”
“Flooded?”
“Enriched.” Rivlin corrected himself while signaling his wife that the visit was over. Hagit, however, paid no attention and even agreed to a second cup of tea, as an antidote to the ghastly cake.
“So what do you say?” their hostess demanded. She looked so weary and distracted at this hour of the morning that Rivlin wondered whether Tedeschi’s first wife wasn’t making a comeback in her.
“About what?”
“About having a look at Suissa’s material. You never know. Perhaps you’ll find a spark of inspiration for your book.”
“In old poems and stories? No thanks. They’re not my line.”
“No, but they’re not far from it,” Tedeschi said. “You can spice your work up with them. Believe me, it’s not a bad recipe. . . .” He winked again at the two sisters. “Not bad at all. At Cambridge, when I illustrated the Turks’ casual attitude toward state corruption with examples from popular nineteenth-century theater, it went down rather well.”
“But you’re asking me to look at things written in a local dialect that I would have a hard time translating.”
“Do as some of your colleagues do and find an Arab student to help you,” their hostess suggested. “Carlo always has a few talented young Arabs doing the drudgery.”
“What makes you think they’ll understand Algerian dialect?”
“They will if you give them a reason to—say, a research assistant-ship. They’ll use far-flung family connections to find out what they don’t know. Take a look at Suissa’s material. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.”
“But why not find someone in his own department?” Rivlin asked, trying to get out of it. “There must be someone who wants to carry on his work and publish. I’d just be muscling in.”
Hannah Tedeschi was relentless. “No one gives a damn about popular culture. They think it’s beneath them. They’d rather write about that blind Egyptian who won the Nobel Prize.”
“I thought he was deaf.”
“Deaf, blind, who cares? They don’t have Suissa’s feel for everyday life.”
“That’s enough talking,” Tedeschi told his wife. “Call Mrs. Suissa and tell her that Yochanan is on his way over now to take everything. She’s so swamped by all the papers her husband left behind that she’s liable to torch them in desperation.”
“But it’s Saturday. . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. His wife is no longer a Sabbath observer. The religious one in the family was him. Look here, Yochanan. Listen to your moribund old professor. Do it. You know I’m your loyal friend, whatever our mutual reservations and recriminations. Take my advice. Don’t miss the chance to see what Suissa had. It has nothing to do with my jubilee volume. I couldn’t care less about that. It’s only making me sicker. Phone her, Hannah. As long as you’re already in Jerusalem, you might as well benefit from it. . . .”
Rivlin felt a wave of the same affection that had moved him in the distant days of his doctoral studies, when he had sat for hours in this room under the strict but patient tutelage of the dedicated teacher who had pinned great hopes on him. Back th
en the smells from the kitchen came from the cooking of Tedeschi’s first wife, cooking that alone was sufficient evidence that she was losing her mind. He cast a questioning glance at Hagit and Ofra.
Hagit threw up her hands in cheerful surrender. “What do you have to lose?” she asked. Even his sister-in-law, who always minded her own business, nodded ever so slightly in agreement.
15.
SINCE MORNING SHE had been waiting under the carob tree at the geriatric home, a hundred meters from her old apartment in the neighborhood of Bet ha-Kerem. She had left the apartment twenty-five years ago to wander from one mental institution to another, either physically ill or else punishing herself with a Pirandellian, profoundly phantasmagorical madness that, alternately under and out of control, withstood the many assaults of electric shock and drugs. Her older sister, having attended her in her disturbance with anxious devotion, died and left two daughters to carry on. The elder of these took pains to keep in touch with her aunt writing from the remote lands she traveled in, while the younger and jollier one made sure, despite her own numerous obligations, to phone regularly and visit once a month. Deferring with a smile to the old woman’s many delusions—old and new alike—she kept reminding her of what no one else dared tell her, namely, that all things are permitted the insane except the abdication of love. And if their sick aunt truly loved her two nieces, she would bestow on them the gift of memory, telling them all they had known and forgotten, or had never known at all, about the dead.
Indeed, in recent years their aunt had begun to mine from her melancholy glittering diamonds forged in the darkness of time. With a renewed curiosity about the past, she had plunged to astonishing depths to retrieve these bright, hard nuggets. A first harbinger of this change was the sweetly ironic tone in which she took to speaking to Rivlin, the faithful driver who accompanied her niece to their meetings and sat in the shade of the trees by the front gate, reading a newspaper and fending off the mental patients seeking to approach him, until the time came to retrieve his wife, gently but determinedly, from the sick woman’s clutches. In the early years of her institutionalization, these appearances of his had so stricken her with fear that he had had to be instantly ejected. Slowly, however, her attitude yielded to a quiet resignation, which was in turn transformed, at first behind his back and eventually to his face, into a coquettish coyness. Hagit, encouraged, kept her aunt informed of all Rivlin’s activities, as though by dangling the bait of him before the old woman’s reawakening sense of humor she might lure the silken butterfly of sanity from its grim cocoon.
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