The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  After a while, unable to fall asleep with the lamp on, Rivlin switched it off. He was now, together with the desk and the files on the walls, in near total darkness. Only a vague radiance shone through the vents, from which came a light, monotonous buzz. Though at first he found this bothersome, it soon made him shut his eyes and ground down his wakefulness.

  His sleep was a private affair. And yet a foreign presence weighed on it. Whirled in its depths, he fought to separate the distress of the young widow appealing for protection from the fevered appeal of the bold Circe, who could not have been easily categorized even by his wife, the judge.

  The first prime minister’s famous four hours of sleep were granted him, too. At three in the morning he awoke. Opening his eyes, he struggled to reconstruct the spatial dimensions of the room, which had vanished somewhere inside him. A tremor, like that of a slight earthquake, appeared to bend the walls toward him, making it hard to breathe. But it wasn’t lack of air he suffered from. It was surplus of desire. Being slapped by a wife who broke his glasses had made him, so it seemed, fair game for every young woman.

  Rolling out of bed, he turned on the light and groped his blurry way to the photograph of the tall young lady—who, after her father’s death, had built up his thriving business still more by means of small but well-calculated come-ons. Indeed, she might very well have come on to him too, had not Fu’ad appeared in the nick of time with the pillow. Yet what, apart from a low-grade fever, could he have got from it? If she, too, was unable to help him discover the secret by which he was driven, he could only be bound by her even more to this place, which was rapidly becoming dangerous.

  Yes, he had gone too far this time. If Hagit were to need him, his absence-within-an-absence would badly rupture the trust he had always put before everything. And so although it was still long before dawn, he put on his pants, unbolted the door, retraced his way along the corridor past the primeval silhouette of the discarded boiler, and hurried up the concrete stairs, hoping find the door to the kitchen unlocked.

  It was. He strode past rows of pots, griddles, ladles, and frying pans and emerged in the lobby, where he looked for a place to check out, even though he had never checked in.

  At the reception desk was a night clerk reading an Arabic thriller. This being a land in which Arabs were accustomed to confessing to Jews all they knew, he had no difficulty in extracting Fu’ad’s whereabouts. The maître d’ was lying in his underwear on a cot in a small bedroom, half asleep and half awake, his black suit and white shirt on a hanger. Rivlin’s noiseless appearance brought him to his feet at once.

  “Well, Professor,” he said, surveying his visitor blearily, “I see that all of us were wrong—I for suggesting it, Tehila for agreeing, and you for accepting. It’s not so simple to fall asleep surrounded by income-tax files. Once I slept down there myself and dreamed, don’t ask me why, of an earthquake. I just hope you didn’t run away because you thought there was no air. There’s enough air down there for an entire family. The bad smell doesn’t come from the plumbing or the old boiler, but from all those files. First it was Mr. Hendel who wouldn’t throw them out, now it’s Tehila. They want to keep the proof that they never cheated on their country. . . .”

  “Never mind, Fu’ad, I’ve slept enough,” Rivlin said to the maître d’, who had meanwhile risen and donned a pair of gym shorts.

  “If you say so.” Fu’ad sighed. “An hour slept is an hour gained. Now tell me how you want your coffee—arabi willa franji?”*

  “Leysh ma n’ruhesh ma’a l-arabi?”†

  “Heyk lazim y’kun.”‡

  He bent over a little cabinet and took out an electric hot plate, a sooty beaker, and a long spoon. Filling the beaker with water and coffee, he sat waiting patiently for it to boil.

  The profound sadness of a last good-bye had the Orientalist in its grip. He sat on the edge of Fu’ad’s cot, rubbing his eyes hard in the hope of restoring clarity to a world gone hazy. Uncertainly he asked:

  “Shu lakan? Bitfakirni majnun?”§

  Fu’ad was startled. “Kif majnun, ya Brofesor?”∥

  “Because of the way I keep coming back in order to understand what happened to my son’s marriage . . .”

  The old maître d’, his sturdy body looking young in its undershirt and gym shorts, did not answer. He fingered his silver mustache, broodingly watching the coffee slowly boil. As if remembering something, he asked:

  “Inteh b’tush’ur halak ahsan, ya Brofesor?”#

  “Aa. Ahsan. . . .”**

  “God be praised. You Jews worry too much about your health. A person can get sick just from that.”

  Rivlin did not even smile. He watched the Arab search for cups at the bottom of the cabinet.

  “How is it possible that even you don’t know what happened?” he protested.

  “How? That’s simple.”

  “But you can find out whatever you want to about this hotel, Fu’ad.”

  “Perhaps I can, Professor.” The Arab spoke hotly. “But I don’t want to. Someone like myself, who isn’t Jewish and has a master key to every room, has to be careful—very careful—not to step out of bounds. He has to make sure—really sure—that he doesn’t see or hear what he shouldn’t. Why do you think, Professor, that I’m still here, after starting out as a simple worker twenty years ago, when Galya was still a baby? How would I have worked my way to the top—because today I’m part of the management—if I hadn’t stayed out of the family’s problems? I even said as much to the late departed. And that’s why I didn’t argue with Tehila tonight. They respect me for that. ‘Please,’ I’ve said to them, ‘don’t say anything bad about one another in front of me. I don’t want to know about your quarrels. I have to take orders from all of you, and I can’t afford to lose my honor with any of you. U’heyk, ya Brofesor, kult kaman li’ibnak laman balash yibki kuddami. . . . ”*

  “When did Ofer come crying to you?”

  “When he split with Galya. That last autumn.”

  “Last autumn?”

  “Yes. After they separated. He used to come here at night and lurk in the street or in the garden. He was hoping for even just a glimpse of her. I swear to God, it was hard for me too. It was hard for us all. But I didn’t want him hanging around. I didn’t want to have to listen to all his stories and accusations that I had no business knowing about. And that night he stepped out of line with me. I was standing at the bus stop, waiting to go back to my village. All of a sudden he drives up on his motorcycle and shines the light on me and shouts without taking off his helmet, ‘Get on, Fu’ad, I’m taking you to Abu-Ghosh. Don’t tell me you’re afraid to ride.’ You can be sure I wasn’t. I have a brother with a bike twice as big. But I didn’t want to talk to him, and so I said, ‘Yes, I am, Ofer. I’ll take the bus. I’m too old for your motorcycle.’ He took off his helmet, and I could see that his eyes were on fire. And then, Professor, I swear, listen to this and tell me if I wasn’t right, I said to him—I remember every word because I was upset—’You, Ofer,’ I said, ‘as much as I respect you and your parents, please don’t ask me anything. If you’re a man, then be a man with me too, and not just on your motorcycle. You’re not getting anything out of me. Nothing. Because you’ll leave this hotel, and you won’t come back, and God will help you, inshallah, to forget your troubles. But I’m staying right here. And that’s why I don’t want to hear a single bad word about the family. Not about Mr. Hendel, and not about the missus, and not about their children, and not about anyone. Because I want to be honored and treated well, no matter who tells me to do what. That’s why, my friend, I’m asking you to keep your problems to yourself, just as I do mine.’ Il-mazbut* he was very hurt, and embarrassed to be crying in front of an Arab, and he put his helmet back on and drove off without a word. My heart was aching for him, but what could I do? You tell me, Professor. Nothing. That was the last time I saw him. I felt so bad I even wrote a poem when I got home.”

  “A poem?”

  “Y
a’ani, ishi makameh z’ghireh.”†

  “What kind of rhymes?”

  “Makameh, b’ti’raf shu ya’ani makameh. . . .‡ I was always good at rhymes, even as a boy in school. Even now whole lines of them sometimes come to me, one after another. Little poems, when the heart has too much sorrow or happiness. And that night, I thought—I swear—about you, Professor . . . so I sat down and wrote an energy. Is that the right word? Marthiyya.”

  “Elegy.”

  “Elegy? Isn’t that what you say at a funeral?”

  “That’s a eulogy.”

  “I didn’t know there were so many words. Well, I wrote an elegy for your Ofer.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Search me.”

  25.

  THREE LITTLE CUPS of Turkish coffee later, Rivlin felt he had enough adrenaline to walk, not only across the city to the Tedeschis’, but all the way home to his wife in Haifa. Turning down Fu’ad’s offer to order a taxi, he made him promise to look for his five-year-old “Elegy for a Young Man Whose Marriage Fell Apart.”

  “Even if I can’t find it,” the Arab assured him, “I can always write another.”

  The Orientalist’s second, underground absconding having reminded him of the first, he thought, as he stepped out into the streets of Jerusalem in the wee hours of his autonomous night out in the Palestinian Authority. Now, though, he was his own master and had no need of an Arab chauffeur. In the languorous light of the hazed orb of the moon, he strode down Korei ha-Dorot Street and headed for Hebron Road, glancing at the pine trees surrounding the sad, silent house of Agnon. Although, without his glasses, the stars did not seem as bright, making the street signs difficult to read, he navigated adeptly in his native town. His adrenaline, pumped even higher by Fu’ad’s story about Ofer, kept him moving at a rapid clip, as if the faster he put the hotel behind him, the less piercing the thought of his son’s despair would be. What else was there left to ask about? And whom? A stubborn scholar on a solo reconnaissance mission, he would find no one who, even if prepared to humor him, knew more now.

  He was almost running as he swung into the broad, flat avenue of Hebron Road, the silhouette of downtown Jerusalem far ahead of him. Had he bitten off more distance than he could chew? But he had all night to keep on walking before the city awoke to a morning shift of Palestinian workers who, slipping past the checkpoints around Bethlehem, might abscond with him again.

  He crossed from Hebron Road to Bethlehem Road, passed the railroad tracks, entered the dark side streets of the German colony until, unerringly, he came to the one that led to the Rose Garden in posh Talbiya, cut across a flowering traffic circle, made a left on Jabotinsky Street, and then, before coming to the President’s house, turned and went right into Molcho, straight to the darkened building of his hyper-hypochondriac mentor. Despite the many years that had passed since he was a doctoral student awaiting the return of his seminar papers, he still felt nervous each time he climbed the steps of the old staircase.

  It was a quarter to four. He let the automatic staircase light go out and peered at the crack beneath the Tedeschis’ front door. Although not a sign of wakefulness shone through it, he did find there a note explaining where the key was hidden.

  It was only natural, he supposed, that a woman who had spent all day in the headily anxious atmosphere of an emergency room should have forgotten that he had broken his glasses and could not read small print. Moreover, afraid that her note might fall into the hands of a passing burglar, she had composed it in Arabic, no doubt of a highly ornate nature. He had no choice, therefore, but to stick it in his shirt pocket and go back down the stairs. Perhaps a Palestinian worker hoping to get a jump on the new day might be found to read, if not the words of Hannah’s note, at least the letters.

  But Gaza Road was deserted. Nor was there anyone on the street named for the poet Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, at the top of which stood the modest stone house in which the first prime minister had had his office.

  Rivlin soon came to the old school in which he had attended the first twelve grades. He peered through its high fence at its large, dark garden. A little footbridge, remembered from childhood, crossed a channel of water so narrow that it seemed more symbolic than real. What were the chances of finding, in the middle of the night, in this peaceful, middle-class neighborhood, someone to read an Arabic note written by a woman who, like himself, was quite possibly on the verge of going mad? Nevertheless, taking a route he had followed many times in those years, he headed up Keren Kayemet Street and along King George Street, hoping quite absurdly to come across the help he was looking for in the dowdy old downtown of the city, near the gray house he was raised in.

  And find him Rivlin did, sitting on the curb by the Histadrut building, a young, sad, early rising Palestinian worker patiently waiting for a day’s work. A permanent vagabond among Jews, he was no longer surprised by anything about them, not even by an elderly Orientalist now handing him, before the break of dawn, four lines by the renowned translatoress of Ignorance—the first Arabic poem of her life.

  Al-musanan al-manshud mowjud fi juz’ al-nahla,

  Muthahab wa-latif ca’amal al-nowm fi ’l kalbaka.

  Wa-nashadak lahfuka laysa b’al-ruh ash-shaytaniya wa-laysa b’al-hawa al-ilahi,

  Li’annahu fakat bihukmi ’l-Carmel tajiddu rahataka.*

  A short while later, as his fingers were still burrowing in the dry earth of a long-since-wilted dwarf potted palm, the front door opened silently, and Tedeschi, in his eternal corduroys and a blue hospital shirt taken from the emergency room, stood beaming at the old student who had not forgotten to turn up in the end. With a grand gesture he beckoned him into the large library, in which, between two windows opened to the darkness of the night, glowed a cloyingly colored computer.

  “Listen!” The Jerusalem polymath leaned with confidential excitement toward Rivlin, who, drained of the last of his vitality, sank exhaustedly into an armchair. “Don’t think that visit to the emergency room was wasted. I’ve decided to change the subject of tomorrow’s lecture.”

  “Just a minute, Carlo. Let me catch my breath. Did Hagit try getting me on the phone?”

  “No one tried getting you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What’s wrong? Have the two of you quarreled?”

  “A bit.”

  “Never mind. You worship her too much. The first time you brought her here, I could see you were under her thumb. You were so swept off your feet that you had to get married at once and postpone finishing your doctorate by a year, which cost you a position in Jerusalem. . . . But what happened?”

  Rivlin smiled. The wave of warmth he felt for the old man, who read him so well, was also a warning to watch what he said.

  “It’s nothing. We’ll get over it. So you’ve decided, just like that, in the middle of the night, to change your subject?”

  “More the approach to it. Instead of talking about Turkish-Arab relations in a lifeless, abstract way, I’m going to do it so vividly that it may inspire even you. I want to show how the Turks saw the Arabs concretely, in terms of their literature—and especially, in terms of Ottoman popular drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the debacle of the First World War.”

  “There was popular theater way back then?”

  “Where have you been? Have you forgotten that seminar you took with me back in the sixties? Of course there was theater. Everywhere. In Istanbul, in Ankara, in Izmir, even in the south. Little folk theaters that put on original plays, as well as European dramas and drawing-room comedies. They changed the names of the characters and places, replaced Christian allusions with Muslim ones, reworked some themes, and fed the audience a Turkish delight. Sometimes they even adapted the classics, Shakespeare or Molière. As You Like It and Le Malade Imaginaire were performed in Turkish villages. The audiences loved them . . .”

  “Le Malade Imaginaire?” Rivlin grinned, giving Tedeschi a weary but loving glance. His mentor’s face reddened.
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  “Why not? It’s not a wonderful play?”

  26.

  THOUGH THEY WERE talking in whispers, the conversation of the two professors woke Hannah Tedeschi. Barefoot and unkempt, in a wrinkled nightgown, she scolded their cavalier attitude toward the remaining hours of sleep and—it being beyond her powers to drag her husband away from his computer—led Rivlin irmly away to his room. As they stood in its dark doorway, quietly listening to Ephraim Akri’s light, regular breathing, Rivlin felt an old, puzzled sorrow for this once lively and talented student, the faculty’s favorite, who had chosen to devote her life—first as his secretary, then as his teaching assistant, and finally as his living companion—to a professor with a mentally ill and institutionalized wife. Perhaps it was his fear of this ancient dementia still haunting the apartment that had deterred Akri, who had forgotten to bring his own pajamas, from wearing the pair offered him by the doyen of Orientalists, on whose good offices he counted in the future. He had placed it, still folded and ironed, by his black skullcap and steel-rimmed glasses and was lying starkly and swarthily naked beneath a thin blanket. His large, woozy eyes, so different without their glasses, flickered open for a moment to watch his senior colleague, a not unimportant member of the appointments committee of the university senate, open the window and lie down by his side.

  Although it was a big double bed, the thought of contact with the new department head’s naked body gave Rivlin gooseflesh. He put on his pajamas, wrapped himself in his blanket, and embarked on the second, academic half of the convoluted night. The familiar aroma of old journals tickled his nose. A feeling of calm possessed him, as if he were back under the aegis of his strict old doctoral adviser—who, by virtue of this position, shared the blame for his students’ errors and the responsibility of defending them from their critics. A spark of inspiration flashed momentarily in the spacious room, meant for the children Tedeschi never had, neither from the wife who lost her mind nor from the lively student who took her place. I’ve been to this house so many times, Rivlin thought. I’ve learned much here, and argued much, and once even taken an exam. And yet never did I think to see the day when I would sleep here.