“I should think that, at your age, your future lies more in the earth,” the wife said, pointing to a plot of ground behind the kitchen. Her hostility was so blatant that her embarrassed husband had to excuse it with some remark about gardening being good for the elderly.
“You call that a garden?” the former owner asked, gesturing indignantly at a lemon tree and two bushes he had planted beyond a small fence. “No, thank you. Just thinking of how I had to run around shutting five doors and ten windows each time we left the house for a few hours is enough to get over the garden, the sea, and all the rest of it.”
“What were you so afraid of?” the wife asked sarcastically. “Your mother’s imagination?”
He turned to look at her for the first time. “Imagination? After thirty years of living here, I can tell you how easy it is to break in at any hour of the day or night. Some burglar could be entering right now, even as we stand here peacefully talking. . . .”
He irritably snatched the little package, whose return address told him it was destined for the garbage pail, and turned to go without another word. This made the husband feel so bad that he dragged the Orientalist to the bathroom and showed him that here, at least, everything had been left lovingly untouched. The floor, the sink, the faucets, the toilet seat, the biliously green-spotted tiles—nothing had changed.
3.
THE NEW DUPLEX, whose distance from the ground had not brought it appreciably closer to the sky, was burning every possible light. The young intelligence officer, who had arrived from deep in the mountains on a short leave, took after his mother: lights, in his opinion, were meant to be turned on and left on. Already in civilian clothes, he was showered, shaved, and combed, and off to a horror movie in Carmel Center. Distracted by something he knew he had forgotten, however, he went from room to room, trying to remember what it was, while politely asking his father to check whether he had run the washing machine correctly. Only after he was already out the door did it come to him. Someone had called from some embassy to say that the judge was returning from Vienna tomorrow night after all. She wanted to be picked up at the airport.
“Ima is coming tomorrow? Are you sure? Think!”
Tsakhi lapsed into meditative thought. “Yes,” he said after a while. “Tomorrow. I’m sure of it, Abba.”
And he was off.
Though glad to be getting back his warm-bodied and gentle-souled wife, Rivlin felt a twinge of disappointment at having his solitude cut short. As of tomorrow evening, he would again be living with his other half, who would hold him responsible for every word uttered, every sentence left unfinished, and not only every passing or hidden emotion not shared, but also every one not stated with precision. Sooner or later he would be obliged to confess his night out in the Palestinian Authority and to explain why an experienced, sober scholar like himself had to consign himself to the hands of his subject matter. And yet, if the returning traveler were not too weary, he might also test out his new theories on her nonacademic but perspicacious mind.
First, though, he would have to let Hagit tell him all she could about her trip. Besides listening to her complaints about the trying and tiresome time she had had, he would solicit from her the enjoyable moments, the little pleasures and unanticipated freedoms, experienced in the line of duty.
He was already counting the hours. The kiss that her smiling eyes would throw him as she came through Customs would more than compensate for the advantages of being alone. Tidying up the house for her, he picked up the young officer’s underpants from the bathroom floor, piled the dirty dishes, and systematically turned out lights, prodigally switched on even in his study. From the study window he was astonished to see leaning on the railing of the terrace across the street, not the ghost of his mother, but a heavyset man dressed in black, who watched with a satisfied look as a noisy garbage truck came up the street.
Was he a relation? A visitor? Rivlin had never seen another person on the terrace. Could the old woman have died during his day off among the Arabs, or moved to an old-age home, making the man the new owner or tenant? Since this man’s gaze, unlike her downward-directed one, also wandered up, Rivlin turned off the remaining lights and stood regarding him from the darkness. Yet now, slow and bulky, the ghost herself emerged from the apartment. She had put on makeup for the visitor and was now anxiously trying to catch the eye of a thin garbage collector running before his truck. He knew perfectly well, the garbage man did, that a gleefully tossed bag of refuse would sail down at him as soon as he raised his irritable eyes to the nagging old woman on the third floor.
The man by her side, though amused by her antics, rebuked her for them. But the ghost, loyal to the memory of Rivlin’s mother, whose earthly plenipotentiary she was, did not care what anyone thought of her. Switching on a fluorescent light on the terrace, she spread the little table there with a cloth, a malevolent smile on her apparitional face.
Rivlin wondered who her visitor could be. A son? A nephew? Or just some passerby? At this time of the evening her shutters were usually closed, with not a ray of light shining through them. Now, on the brightly lit terrace, the two of them sat down to play a game of cards. The Orientalist, who had never in his life played anything with his mother, watched with an astonished envy.
After the death of his father, Rivlin had tried to get his mother to move to Haifa. He did not want to travel back and forth to Jerusalem anymore, as he had done during his father’s long illness. But his mother refused to budge. She would not leave her apartment in the once fashionable triangle between King George, Ben-Yehuda, and Hillel Streets in order to move from the busy capital to the distant provinces in which her son and his family lived—not when she had seen from her kitchen window, scant days before the establishment of the State of Israel, two British soldiers killed and left to wallow in their blood. And after the UN partition Resolution, three bombs had gone off on her street, damaging the walls of her apartment—to say nothing of what had happened during Israel’s War of Independence, when an artillery shell had landed on the stairs while the besieged tenants huddled in the shelter. How could she be asked to forsake so strategically located a place, especially when it also looked out on the offices of the Histadrut, the national trade union, in which—or so she imagined—momentous decisions were made on a daily basis? Nothing could make her give up such an observation post for the dubious satisfaction of staring at a mountain or the sea.
After falling and breaking her pelvis and being confined to a wheelchair, however, his mother had no longer had any choice. Rivlin remembered how stirred he had felt when her ambulance from Jerusalem arrived at the nursing home and he helped an orderly wheel her on a gurney to her new room and put her in her bed. At last I have her where I want her, he had thought, opening her suitcase and hanging up her clothes. No more running to Jerusalem. Now I can take proper care of her.
Yet even from her wheelchair his mother had fought to maintain her autonomy. “You can take care of me all you want,” she adjured him. “Just don’t boss me around. I’ll make my own decisions.” Half-paralyzed, she had launched, as his sister had predicted she would, a desperate and calculated campaign of terror that twice forced him to move her to another home. At first, certain he was squandering her money, she had demanded a receipt for every expenditure. Then she had insisted that he schedule his visits in advance, as she did not want him coming when she was busy. “Busy with what?” Rivlin had asked with an incredulous smirk that she wiped from his face at once. “You know nothing about such things,” she had retorted. “You never have known anything about them. And you don’t have to know anything about them. Just tell me in advance when you’re coming.”
All through her years in Jerusalem, she had complained about how seldom he visited her. Now his visits annoyed her, as if she feared he would take advantage of her condition to gain control of her affairs. Sometimes, on his way home from the university after teaching a last class, he would drive to the nursing home and find her drowsing in
her wheelchair under a leafy carob tree in the garden, aloof from the other residents, for whom she had little patience. Treading warily on the rotting carob pods, he approached her slumped form with its thin, reddish braid of hair, while thinking of the Russian student in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shivering with terror and excitement as he stared at the neck of the old moneylender who was fumbling in the Saint Petersburg twilight with his pretended surety, intricately wrapped by him to engage her as he fell on her with an ax. With a shudder, he’d reach out a gentle hand to touch his mother. Never surprised by him, she would turn around and complain, “How many times have I told you to let me know before you come?”
“Believe me, Professor Rivlin,” a veteran social worker had said to him after his mother’s fights with the staff had forced them to ask for her transfer, “she’s an incredible woman. I’ve never seen anyone like her. How did you manage to come out normal?” “Can’t you see that I didn’t?” he answered, staring at the ground.
She didn’t last long in her new place, either. The loss of her Jerusalem observation post gave her no peace, and she gave none to anyone around her, so that, although her condition remained stable during the last months of her life, she had to be shifted from place to place. Finding her bed empty, he would be told by a nurse, in response to his distraught query, that the cleverly programmed computer, having revealed that morning that she had overstayed her quota of days, had spotted an available bed elsewhere and even ordered an ambulance to take her there. It was this computer, which knew more than he did about his mother’s illnesses, rights, and obligations, that whisked her from hospital to hospital with the greatest of ease during the last weeks of her life. Rivlin, who remembered the endless forms he had been made to fill out for each little medical test given his father, now found the health services of the Jewish state remarkably user-friendly.
And yet not even the steady diminution of his mother’s faculties, which grew fewer with each new bed, nor the competent assistance, like an energetic younger brother’s, of the ambulance-chasing, bill-paying computer, could make her company more bearable. Feeling as poorly compensated for her lost observation post by the large windows of the hospitals as by the small ones of the nursing homes, she groused about everything—most of all about her son. Three hours before breathing her last, she was still threatening to dispossess him if he did not take her back to Jerusalem.
He took her back—in a hearse. Hagit wanted to ask Ofer to come from Paris for the funeral: he had often inquired about his grandmother, with whom he seemed to have formed a secret bond in his weeks of living with her after leaving Galya. But Raya, Rivlin’s sister, perhaps fearing that a postponement might give the deceased a chance to come back to life, didn’t want to wait. Rivlin agreed with her. “Why make Ofer do all that traveling in midsemester?” he said. “Now that my mother is gone, we can go abroad with a clear conscience—and for more than a few days at a time. Let’s go to Europe after the unveiling. We’ll visit Ofer in Paris and tell him about everything.”
Indeed, from the minute they landed in Paris, their son wanted to know all about his grandmother. Nervously, he probed them to find out what she had told them about his separation. Rivlin was dumbfounded. “You mean she knew more than we do?” he asked. “You told her things you kept from us?” His dead mother, now entombed with his son’s secret, rose in his estimation.
“You still haven’t told me,” Ofer persisted. “It can’t be that she said nothing.”
“She told us we had to be more patient with you,” Hagit replied. She herself had long ago given up hope of finding out any more from him.
“Patient?” The Parisian, though surprised, seemed satisfied. Gradually, his nervousness wore off. Whereas he had cloaked himself in a heavy mantle of secrecy after his divorce, he was now eager to show his private Paris to his parents during the three days of their visit. He brought them to his cooking academy in Montparnasse, took them for a tour of its classrooms and big kitchens, and introduced them to the Jewish architects for whom he worked as an unpaid apprentice. Rivlin wasn’t sure he wanted to visit his son’s attic room. Who knew what state it might be in? But Ofer insisted, and the room, they were happy to see, was pleasant and not at all untidy.
One evening they went to a concert in a church. Before it, Ofer took them to the Jewish Agency building, where he was being spelled that night by an alternate—a middle-aged former Israeli sculptor who made his wooden statues on the job. While Ofer escorted his mother upstairs to show her the grand old building, Rivlin turned to the burly wood-carver, who was burnishing the large, dark breasts of a female creation. What, he asked, would he do in case, God forbid, of a terrorist attack? The sculptor left the woman’s breasts, leaned down to open a drawer, and pointed at a heavy old revolver. Far from inspiring confidence, this only worried Rivlin more.
4.
ON HIS WAY to the airport the next day, Rivlin thought of Fu’ad’s remark, “You Jews are always coming and going. It will make you sick in the end.” Not that he himself was going anywhere. He was merely dispatching others and picking them up. Although he had wanted to make sure he arrived before Hagit cleared customs and looked for a taxi, he had been detained by a long phone call from Ephraim Akri, who wanted to discuss his plans for the department. At first Rivlin thought his junior colleague was genuinely interested in his advice. However, it didn’t take him long to realize that the shrewd Akri was merely asking him to approve decisions already made. It was his mode of operating. No wonder that, compared to the marathon sessions of the Rivlin era, the departmental meetings had grown short.
“No question about it, Ephraim,” Rivlin declared, needling his junior colleague, “you’re a true political animal. It’s a pity your talent is wasted on a small department like ours.”
“It’s the only one I belong to,” Akri replied, in what was either an apology or a complaint, and promised to send Rivlin a summary of their talk. Exasperated by the pedantic nature of the man he had appointed to succeed him, Rivlin decided to goad him with the story of his visit to Mansura. The Near Eastern department head was not only goaded, he was perturbed. “You let them leave you alone in a bedroom with a sick Arab woman, just like that?” he scolded his colleague, warning him to be more careful in the future. Although it was important, even imperative, to be forthcoming with Arabs, intimacy was to be avoided. It could only lead to misunderstanding.
Rivlin was in a hurry to get to the airport and in no mood to argue. Yet no sooner had he changed to a fresh shirt than the phone rang again. This time it was an insistent saleswoman who had to talk “to your wife and only your wife.” When the Orientalist asked what about, he was told that it concerned a new vacuum cleaner of such remarkable capabilities that it was being marketed only to a select clientele. Though he had no time, he felt obliged to chastise the caller for her lack of feminist consciousness, there being many men in today’s world—himself, for example—who used vacuum cleaners more often than their wives. The saleswoman was delighted to hear this. In that case, she said, she would gladly discuss the new appliance with him. It was a Kirby and could vacuum anything imaginable. Rivlin thanked her for the information, adding that he was in a hurry and that the vacuum cleaner they had worked perfectly well. “One more minute,” the voice at the other end of the phone pleaded, hanging on to him for dear life. “I’m only asking you to listen. There’s no obligation. This is a new concept in housecleaning, a revolution your wife will want to hear about. It’s called a vacuum cleaner only because our language lacks a better word.” “But my wife isn’t here!” Rivlin exclaimed triumphantly. “I’ve been trying to tell you that I’m on my way to the airport to pick her up.” “Wish her a happy homecoming for me,” the dogged saleswoman congratulated him. “I hope she lands safely and gets some rest. We’ll be at your house for a free demonstration the day after tomorrow. How about 8 P.M.?”
“Just make sure you phone first,” Rivlin warned her. And before hanging up, he repeated: “Make su
re you phone.”
In the new airport terminal, amid the chirping of cell phones that welcomed the arriving passengers before they had time to arrive, the pervasive smell of burned coffee, and the plashing of fountains that serenaded the crowd waiting for the returnees (who, in the seconds between clearing customs and coming into sight, had their happy-to-be-home-again faces televised on a closed-circuit screen for the benefit of their welcomers)—here, and here alone, the professor from Haifa reflected, was the erotic epicenter of the Jewish state. The Jewish heart might throb in Jerusalem, and the Jewish brain might grow sharp or soft in Tel Aviv, but the passionate focus of Israeli life was here, in the going and the coming. It took an Arab of the old school, like Fu’ad, to realize that what might seem to be Jewish solidarity, as displayed by the tall man coming over to tell him that his wife was on her way, was only Jewish hyperactivity.
Rivlin wasn’t sure whether this person, who had gently put down his suitcase, was the prosecutor or the defense counsel in the mysterious trial. He himself was already looking at his wife on the closed-circuit screen. Her few seconds there were enough to tell him that something was on her mind. He hurried to take her suitcase, hoping to learn, before they joined the patiently waiting man, what it was. “Not now,” she whispered, giving him a grateful hug for his powers of observation. “There’s a split decision to convict, and I’m the dissenting opinion. We’ll talk about it later. Did you miss me? I missed you terribly. That man is the assistant district attorney of the Northern Circuit. We’re giving him a ride to Haifa. I couldn’t refuse. Don’t ask him too many questions. Just be nice.”
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