Needless to say, none of this, O wisest mother, has any relevance to the accuracy of my testimony, which is obliged to stick to the facts. Still, I wonder to this day whether the pain and disappointment that my divorce caused this amiable woman led her to guess that she, too, had played a role in it.
She gave me a glass of fresh orange juice and hurriedly dressed before going downstairs to ask Fu’ad for the key—which, Your Honor, I might have eventually managed to find on my own, though not without difficulty.
We found Fu’ad outside in the hot sun, decorating the gazebo with flowers from his village. He was so annoyed that I had enlisted the owner’s wife on my behalf that he barely looked at me. “I swear, Mrs. Hendel,” he said (I’m quoting from memory), “what’s the rush? Mr. Hendel and Tehila will be back soon and will show Ofer everything.”
Naomi, an easygoing woman, was upset by the refusal of an old employee to obey her. She felt she was not being taken seriously. “All I’m asking of you, Fu’ad,” she told him in an injured tone, “is a key.” But the well-bred and soft-spoken maître d’ answered her brusquely. “I’m telling you, Mrs. Hendel,” he said, “there is no key.” But she wouldn’t yield. It flattered her that I had come to ask for her help, and she wanted to prove herself worthy of it. “Fu’ad,” she said, “what are you talking about? You always have the keys with you. Come on, take them out.”
Looking back on it now, Ima, I can see that this tactful, middle-aged man, who never lost his composure, was on the verge of a breakdown. He fumbled in his pocket as though looking for something that wasn’t there, then changed his mind and took out a large ring of keys. Before he could claim that the basement key wasn’t on it, my mother-in-law reached for it in an unusually aggressive manner. Red as a beet, he let her have it, flinging it into her hand. “You Jews,” he blurted (once again, I’m quoting from memory), “want to swallow everything in one gulp, and then you wonder why it sticks in your crow.” (Yes, that I remember: he said “crow,” not “craw.”)
The large, heavy key ring, Your Honor, was then handed to me. I had no idea which key was the right one. Mrs. Hendel, exhausted from the heat, smiled triumphantly and retired to her room. I went to the basement. The door, it turned out, was unlocked.
I descended some stairs and came to a long corridor in which an old bicycle was leaning against a wall. Next to it were a bucket of dry whitewash and a torn tire. Farther on was a closet, padlocked with an old yellow lock inscribed with the number 999. I found a small key on the ring with the same number and opened the lock at once. The closet was full of files, arranged by subject. There were thank-you letters from guests, correspondences with the municipality, and the old building plans of the hotel, which was originally (did you know this, Galya?) designed to be a school building.
And that, Your Honor, would have been the end of it, with nothing gone amiss, had I not said to myself, “As long as I’m here, I may as well have a look at the actual foundations before studying the plans for them.” And so I followed the corridor as far as a metal door. Although I assumed it was locked, I tried the handle. It yielded slightly, as if bolted from within. From the ceiling came the gurgle of running water and a clatter of pots and pans, which told me I was where I wanted to be, right beneath the dining room and kitchen. I found a light switch and continued down the corridor until I came to a dark, cold space on my left, in which stood an old boiler that looked like a predatory fossil. The bones of its victims were scattered around it: an old baby carriage, a green tricycle, and a crib with some dusty toys lying on an oilcloth-covered mattress.
Well, my dear Your Honor, I stood there and thought that I should go get a stronger lightbulb and come back to take measurements. But as I was about to go upstairs, I said to myself: Just a minute. If everything is open apart from that metal door, what was the Arab making such a fuss about? And I took the key ring and went to the door, which was old except for the lock. It was a standard lock, like the ones I had seen in the hotel’s rooms back in the days when I was courting my wife in them. Even though I now had the building plans, I was still annoyed at Fu’ad, who had always been so friendly and courteous. That’s why I took the yellow master key and turned it in the lock. The door opened. I didn’t enter the room, which was lit by a hidden lamp. I stood there flabbergasted for all of five seconds, whispered “Excuse me” to my father-in-law, and left.
The Court may ask how much anyone can see and understand in five seconds. My answer is, worlds, especially if you’re familiar with the cast—the other member of which was a woman unaware of my presence. She lay sleeping, or daydreaming, in a fetal position, her face to the wall and her long, naked buttocks, which I never would have imagined could be so pure and virginal, exposed.
That was all. On the face of it, it wasn’t much. I couldn’t tell from the surprised look of my father-in-law, who was reading a newspaper with a cozy intimacy I didn’t associate with him, whether I had intruded before or after. And perhaps it was neither. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. All I wanted to do, Ima, was to tell my wife, my life’s companion, the soul of my soul, how shocked I was.
PART V
The Judgment Seat
THE EVENINGS SPENT on either side of the border must have left you hungry if, after a sleepless night full of surprises, you head not for bed but for the kitchen, where you remove the cellophane from the containers that have been impatiently waiting for you on the marble counter and permanently renounce, in the crystalline light of a brightening morning, a Ramadan fast half-jestingly and half-wishfully partaken of. Your resentment of the housekeeper, who so flagrantly ignored your instructions just to clean and not to cook, has dissipated your resistance even to the leftovers cramming the refrigerator, though in truth you prefer the fresh dishes that have spent the night anticipating the return of the mysteriously vanished master of the house.
And yet, what effect can the master’s orders have if the mistress of the house is so intimidated by her own housekeeper that she turns to jelly in her presence? And since you forgot to tell her that the judge would be gone for several days, the housekeeper quite naturally decided to spend her leisure time preparing the judge’s favorite dishes. Still, you can’t be averse to them yourself, if you now sit eating them while perusing her note, which says:
Aluminum foil
Oil
Bread crumbs
Detergent
Flour
Garlic.
Beside it lies another note from her, informing you that the new owners of your old apartment have a package for you that was mistakenly delivered to your old address.
As if to spare you the pain of it, an invitation to her son’s wedding has been left in a less conspicuous, though still respectable, place behind the glass door of a bookcase. You slip the gilt-edged card back into its envelope as quickly as you can and let it fall on the shelf beneath the books in the hope that it will be forgotten there, for your envy does not skip even the marriage of the thin, dark boy who, when brought to your house by his mother, sat bashfully in a corner of the living room playing with Ofer’s old toys or appeared timidly at the door of your study to ask for a pencil and paper.
To sleep or not to sleep . . .
At two o’clock there’s a meeting of the appointments committee, at three you have office hours, and at four you give your introductory survey course, for which you still haven’t prepared. Yet having turned day into night in an Arab village, why not do the same in a Jewish duplex, even if later that will mean turning another night into day, without a wife in your bed to solace your sleeplessness?
Turn out the bedroom light, then, brush your teeth, and disconnect the phone. Under a light blanket, to the sounds of the awakening street, you think with bemused longing of a brown-robed, plain-sandaled nun in a village church, unflinching before the stare of a solitary Jew thrust at midnight into the crowd of her admirers. As soft slumber weaves its threads around you, you join a chorus of four droning, white-haired men behind an o
rnamented altar.
Awakening before noon, you listen to the messages left while you slept and hear the voice of an attaché in a distant Asiatic embassy struggling to inform you that the judge’s return has been delayed by a day. This time, too, the new possibilities waiting to take advantage of your solitude send a shiver of excitement down your spine.
2.
EVEN THOUGH THE professor was not sufficiently prepared, the class he taught was absorbing. Perhaps his hyper-wakefulness had made his usually tightly structured lecture, held in a large hall, more spontaneous. More tolerant than usual of the many questions and criticisms of his students, Jews and Arabs alike, he responded with an equanimity that led to a lively discussion. Despite its subject, the treatment of minorities in Egypt during the Second World War, he was forced, contrary to his habit, to run five minutes past the bell.
Outside the large windows of the lecture hall, the light was gray. An overcast sky held the promise of a rare summer rain. His class over, Rivlin felt his high spirits flag before the tedious prospect of a loveless, unsmiling apartment. So when he was approached by two female Arab students, he did not immediately refer them to his office hours, but instead steered them gently back into the empty lecture room and asked solicitously what they wanted. They were both, it turned out, from Mansura and had attended the “seminar” in Samaher’s bedroom, with its story of the Algerians who beat the French at their own game of absurdity. Having concluded that an acquaintance with a senior, if slightly eccentric, professor met on a pleasure jaunt to an Arab village deserved to be cultivated, they took the liberty of informing him that his “research assistant,” far from resting on her laurels after his departure, had translated yet another story that same night.
The Orientalist was greatly amused by these two Near Eastern Studies majors, who were happy to reveal their names and minor fields while coyly inquiring about his final exam. Reassuring them that it would not be difficult, he turned the conversation back to Mansura and its inhabitants. They giggled as they plied him, each interrupting the other, with copious details about Samaher’s and her husband’s families. Samaher’s cousin Rashid, they confessed with a blush, was a fine, devoted young man. But he was wrong about his cousin’s pregnancy, for if it wasn’t real, why was she in bed? “She’ll be giving birth soon, Professor. That’s why you need to give her the final grade she deserves.”
His M.A. student’s devious, hoarsely excited voice buzzed in his brain. Rather than return to an apartment in which only silence awaited him, he headed for the library, free and well rested, to look for Ahmed ed-Danaf, whose errant name had migrated from a medieval story to the modern Algerian tale “The Poisoned Horse.” Easily found in an index to One Thousand and One Nights, ed-Danaf turned out to have been a far more engaging rogue than the morbidly confused horse poisoner of the amateur author Yassin bin Abbas. Although bin Abbas may have borrowed his hero’s name with the intention of giving his readers a lively and picaresque narrative worthy of the great Hārūn ar-Rashīd, the dreary reality of the Sahara had dulled the gay rascality of old Baghdad and muted its human color. The unresolved inner conflict that weighed heavily on the author had burdened his story and his hero as well.
Now, in the university library, the glowworm of his night journey to the Palestinian Authority flickered again. While a gray sky subtly shaded the silhouettes of Haifa Bay, tracing a column of flame that rose from its refinery, the Orientalist whispered to himself:
“No.”
Absolutely not.
Not even the pangs of love could make a man poison a horse, just as no woman would gaily toss a French baby out the window of a speeding train because she believed in miracles, and no judge, not even an Arab one, would trample justice by freeing the moonlight murderer of a French couple. Something else was at work here, deforming and barbarizing the imagination. Could it be, he wondered, a cautious hypothesis forming in his mind, that these folktales, written in the 1930s and 1940s, long before the Algerian War of Independence, were the first foreshadowings of an ongoing dialogue between Algeria and a French conqueror-seducer that was both the country’s oppressor and its object of desire? It was now 170 years old, this jumble of temptation, promise, injustice, and affront that had wreaked havoc on the soul of the country and turned its inhabitants into local strangers.
Was this the spark of inspiration that might cast light on the senseless nighttime raids that ravaged remote villages? Could it be that, forty years after the last French colons had departed and left scorched earth behind them, they still existed as a phantasm in the Algerian brain? Did the Muslim fundamentalists and army death squads imagine as they brutally slaughtered women, children, and old people that these were not their kin or countrymen, flesh of their flesh, but Frenchmen in shadowy disguise, their ancient, intimate enemy the pieds noirs, the black-footed colons of North Africa—who, though long returned to their home across the Mediterranean, their great farms abandoned, still haunted a native self that no longer knew what it was?
The unexpected rain trickling down the windows of the library reminded the worried Orientalist that the window of his study, next to which was his computer, had been left open. Hastily scribbling his reflections on a notepad and sticking it in his pocket before some recalcitrant fact or sober second thought could quench the spark, he left One Thousand and One Nights with its red leather binding and hurried off to his old apartment.
The rain had stopped, refreshing the wadi, which clung at its lower end to a fiery sunset burning out at the point where the horizon met the sea. Rivlin knew every mark and crack on the stairs to his old home, which descended between flowering hedges. Yet not even the memory of his children running happily up and down these stairs could arouse in him the slightest regret at having moved. It was one thing to be a guest, waxing ecstatic in the living room about the sea and the wadi in bloom, and quite another to have to live in the tiny bedrooms whose walls were moldy from the salt air.
The iron gate at the top of the stairs, a gate that had served as a largely symbolic defense of a house that could easily be broken into, was wide open. The couple that had bought the place did not seem concerned that a voyeur, detouring past the front door, might cross the little lawn and peer into the bedrooms or take someone on the terrace by surprise. The doorbell, which still had “Rivlin” written by it, no longer rang. In its place, he had to use the big brass clapper that he and Hagit had bought years ago in a Cairo bazaar and proudly hung by the entrance. Its luster, like hopes for peace with the Arab world, had faded with the years and been covered by the violent vines that scaled the house. Now, however, it was back, salvaged by the new tenants. Its chime, which Ofer had loved listening to, was still delicate despite its coat of verdigris.
The wife of the couple, whom he had met only once, at the closing of the sale at the lawyer’s, recognized him at once. “It’s about time,” she scolded. “We were going to return the package to the post office.” She went to get it without inviting him inside, leaving him standing, surprised and affronted, outside his old home. Cautiously he peered inside, searching for some memory that could be retrieved together with the package. Just then the woman’s husband hurried out of a room, not only more friendly than his good-looking wife, but eager to show the old tenant the changes made in the course of tearing down and rebuilding. Though not in the least interested, Rivlin mumbled a perfunctory expression of interest and let himself be led through the apartment, tagged after by two small children, in order to see how the rooms had been redivided and a little den carved out for a huge television set. The man seemed anxious to convince him that he and his wife had made wise and even witty decisions, as evidenced by a window installed for air in the bedroom closet that offered a surprise view of the terrace—where his wife, having bequeathed the visitor to her husband, had resumed her conversation with a younger and even prettier woman than herself.
Rivlin felt a sudden pang of longing for the deep wadi. Before the new owners could renovate that too, he exerc
ised his right as a former tenant to stride to the terrace, step into the garden, and repossess, standing silently with his back to the women, the view of the ravine and the smooth, pink sea beyond, on which an illuminated ship glided regally.
“At least here it’s still beautiful . . . ,” he murmured.
The wife took offense. “Here? As opposed to where?”
He ignored her and addressed the beautiful woman beside her. “Whenever my mother used to come from Jerusalem,” he reminisced, “she would sit where you are now and say: ‘Well, children, you’ve made yourselves a little Paradise, but what will you do when some wild beast comes charging out of it?’”
“You had a morbid mother,” the wife snickered. She seemed to have taken an inexplicable dislike to him, as if he had left something incriminating behind in her house.
“What’s morbid about it?” Undaunted, he spoke up for his mother. “If only you knew how many scorpions I killed here and how many snakes I chased behind that fence! And when all the dogs in the neighborhood begin to bark hysterically at ten at night in the middle of a heat wave, you can bet that your friendly neighbor, the wild boar at the bottom of the wadi, is out for a stroll. . . .”
The unknown beauty, who had said nothing until now, brushed back a tousle of auburn hair from a swanlike neck and asked, with teasing curiosity,
“Snakes and scorpions aside, doesn’t looking at this panorama make you regret that you sold the place?”
“Regret what?” An intimate question from a gorgeous woman never failed to excite him. “At my age, you want to be closer to heaven than to earth. All the natural beauty in the world, even this wadi’s, can’t make up for lack of comfort. We’ve moved to a new fifth-floor duplex with an elevator and even a bit of a view. My only regret is not having sold this place for more money. . . .”
The Liberated Bride Page 30