PART VI
The Dybbuk
ALTHOUGH HE KNEW there was no getting out of it, since not even a generous present, given in advance, would have soothed the sting of their absence, he went on hoping on that autumn evening, right up to the last minute, for something unexpected to save him from the wedding. Yet he kept his grumbling to himself. For all his criticism in recent years of their housekeeper’s careless cleaning and dull cooking, he would always be grateful for her unstinting loyalty, for her love for his two boys, even for some of her meals. And so while Hagit debated what to wear, he sat in his black suit by the front door and studied the map on the invitation.
There was no Arab driver this time; there were no young parking attendants waving lanterns to show them the road, just the two of them, trying to find their way in the industrial zone of Haifa Bay. They passed garages, textile plants, furniture outlets, and appliance stores and finally reached a large wedding hall that glittered with neon magic. And even then they had to look for their wedding, since the disco music pounding inside came from several celebrations at once.
Was this the right one? Despondent and already exhausted, they stood on a palatial marble staircase that led to a reception room decorated with artificial flowers, wondering whether to slip the check they had brought into the gold-leafed box in front of them or to hand it directly to the housekeeper.
“Well,” Rivlin said, deciding to deposit the check in the box, “we can go now.” The sight of so many overweight cousins and aunts, escorted by little husbands in loud jackets, filled him with odium. However, as they knew none of these people and so would have no one to testify to their attendance, they had no choice but to take their seats at a numbered table with a basket of stale-looking rolls, a bottle of white wine, and a tray of wizened garnishes, there to wait, beneath the savage onslaught of the music, to see who would be their dinner mates.
Nothing had changed since the Arab wedding in the Galilee that spring. Surrounded by strangers, ordinary people with every right to celebrate and enjoy themselves, he felt only his own failure. The bile of envy rose in his gorge, as if all the weddings taking place in this building had conspired to reopen his old wound.
“Why don’t we just get up and walk out?” he shouted to his wife over the violent music, which had driven a wedge between them. “Don’t tell me you came here for the food.”
This proposal was so undeserving of a response that the judge did not bother to make one. Only when Rivlin repeated it did she reply severely:
“Believe me, I’d rather be in bed now, too. But we have to wait for the ceremony so that we can congratulate her. Why can’t you understand how much we, and especially I, mean to her?”
The ceremony did not appear to be imminent. Some members of the younger set were already gyrating wildly to the music, and new guests continued to arrive. No one joined them at their table. Time passed. “The families must be haggling over the wedding contract,” Hagit remarked, lighting another cigarette while staring at the red velvet curtain from which the bride and groom were to emerge. Rivlin, though he had only a vague notion of the family feuds that the housekeeper kept the judge informed about, gave up all hope for a quick getaway and reached for the tray of garnishes, from which he began to collect the olives. His ennui was only heightened when a small, elderly man in an old brown three-piece suit sat down warily at their table. The man, who had a slight palsy, recognized the Rivlins, at whose company he seemed pleased. Contentedly reaching for a roll, he crumbled it between his fingers and held out his wineglass for Rivlin to fill.
“I’m glad to see you two,” he said with a sagacious smile, brushing the crumbs from his suit. “I wasn’t sure you were coming. The mother of the bride has been working for us even longer than for you, ever since she was a girl. She stayed on after my wife died, until I moved to a senior citizens’ home seven years later. But we’re still on good terms. When you think of the difficult background she comes from, she’s an amazingly pleasant and well-adjusted person. Of course her cooking isn’t exactly—what’s the word the young folk like to use?—awesome. Let’s hope tonight’s meal was cooked by someone else, ha, ha, ha . . .”
Rivlin permitted himself a covert smile, which did not escape the old widower’s sharp eye.
“Yes, I know all about you,” he said, picking at the roll with palsied fingers. “She brings me up-to-date when she visits me—all about your new apartment, and your sons and what they’re doing. She’s very attached to you, Your Honor, and always says how patient you are with her. Which reminds me . . . if it isn’t intruding . . . I mean, as long as we’re at the same table . . . you see, I couldn’t tell from yesterday’s paper . . . what exactly were your reasons for acquitting that damned spy? Why, he’s not even an Arab.”
“Not an Arab?” Rivlin asked in puzzlement.
“You see, Professor,” the widower said, taking him into his confidence, “we all know our judges go easy on Arabs. They do it even with ordinary murderers and rapists, not to mention terrorists. They’re afraid—oh, yes, they are!—to be accused of something as unfashionable as patriotism. But in your wife’s case, the defendant was Jewish and a big fish at that. That’s why I wondered why she let him off the hook as if he were an Arab.”
Pleased with his irony, the old widower took a sip of wine, broke into a cough, turned red, and nearly choked.
Hagit, perking up to the sound of a European wedding march played in a Middle Eastern style, did not even glance in the choking patriot’s direction. Her eyes bright with emotion, she leaned forward to take her husband’s hand and led him to the wedding canopy behind the procession that the large curtain had parted to admit. Ahead of them, accompanied by their families and a video crew, the bride and groom walked slowly and majestically.
Rivlin remembered the groom as a quiet, easily frightened boy. Now, dark-complexioned and thin, in a wide-lapelled suit and a black hat, he looked like a pensive secret-service agent. He was holding the hand of his father, a greengrocer, whose own suit was a summery white. Its color matched the muslin veil of the bride, who was now floating down the aisle between two women, one big and fat and one slim and attractive. For a moment, Rivlin failed to recognize the slim woman as their housekeeper. She bore herself gracefully in a bare-shouldered yellow silk dress, her head topped by an auburn hairpiece glittering with sequins, her heavily made-up eyes regarding the world as if it were no longer quite worthy of her. Meeting the surprised glance of her employer as she passed him twice, once in front of him and once on a large screen above his head, she flashed, so he thought, a triumphant smile.
2.
STANDING IN LINE at the pharmacy of his health clinic for his blood-pressure medicine, Rivlin took a step back from the old woman in front of him, whose blue-tinged hair he found distasteful. She sensed his presence and turned to look at him. It was the ghost in person, her baggy old jacket grazing his clothes. He smiled at her desiccated face, which was heavier and infinitely harder than his mother’s. Failing to place the bespectacled, scholarly voyeur, the ghost stared blankly at him and turned around again, shifting a long list of prescriptions from hand to hand. As soon as a new window opened, she darted for it more quickly than he would have thought possible at her age and was the first to reach it. The Orientalist, amused, did not bother changing lines.
When Rivlin was a small boy, his father kept a journal of his son’s exploits that he read aloud to whoever would listen. Sometimes, wishing to relive his childhood, Rivlin browsed in it. The boy rather sentimentally described in its pages was capable of great and even extreme obstinacy and was not always very clever. Sometimes, Rivlin succeeded in dredging from the depths of memory the incidents his father related—the time he pretended to conduct an orchestra of children in nursery school; the time he chased a runaway chicken. Yet the most famous of these stories, the one in which he proposed marriage to his mother, was one he had no recollection of. Perhaps this was why, although its psychological significance seemed obvious,
he smiled mysteriously whenever he read it.
The Six-Year-Old Rivlin Proposes Marriage to His Mother
When Rivlin attended first grade, his father walked him to school on his way to work every day, crossing the streets of the old downtown with him. The little boy liked to take his time, especially when he spied a pile of builder’s sand or gravel, which he felt duty-bound to climb. One day his father lost his temper at his dallying. When this didn’t help, he pointed to a neatly dressed and combed blond boy walking with his schoolbag on his back, and said:
“That does it! I’m trading you in for that nice blond boy. From now on he’ll be my son.”
Rivlin, who was standing on a big pile of gravel while regarding the old Knesset building, was thunderstruck. Turning red with indignation, he began to call the little stranger names, even declaring that he was Hitler’s son, a cruel boy who had to be watched out for. Reaching the school with his father, who now regretted the whole thing, he refused to kiss him good-bye.
The first-grade student—so his father’s journal continued—sat in the classroom in an agitated state. As soon as the recess bell rang, he raced into the schoolyard to vent his feelings to his big sister. By the time he found her standing with some friends, however, the bell had rung again, and there was no time to say a word. Instead of returning to class he burst into tears and ran home, dashing blindly across streets whose dangers he had been warned of without stopping to climb a single pile of sand. His mother was in the kitchen. Without mincing words, he said:
“You should never have married that man. I’d make a better husband. Why don’t you leave him and marry me?”
His mother, pleased by the unexpected proposal, did not reject it out of hand. She made Rivlin repeat it and finally coaxed the whole story from him, after which he calmed down and regained his old brashness—so much so that, when his exhausted father came home at the end of a day’s work, he opened the door and said:
“Hurry up and go to Ima! She wants to spank you!”
His father ended this episode by remarking:
“Who would have thought, my little boy, that a passing remark of mine would stir up such a dreadfully strong spirit of jealousy and contention? From now on I shall never cease to worry, for if every little thing excites you so badly, what will happen when you grow older?”
3.
DEAR, SWEET AUTUMN, don’t let us down, Rivlin exhorted the skies every morning, as he opened the shutter to study the color and shape of the clouds drifting over the Carmel. “Another rainless, stormless winter like the last two and I’ll go out of my mind,” he told his wife. Hagit lay self-indulgently beneath the big white quilt that he had made her take from the closet in the hope of coercing the cold weather to come.
The fall semester was about to begin, students were flocking to ask for advice, and the department head was still in America. His lecture at the conference on “Twenty Years of Edward Said’s Orientalism” had gone so well that even exiles from Iraq and Sudan had asked him for a copy of the text, which he had delivered in Arabic as a symbolic provocation. If Akri was to be trusted, the New York—based Palestinian professor, or one of his disciples, would now have to rewrite the book, in order to defend it against the Haifaite’s challenges, hot off the Middle Eastern griddle. Of course, some of the conference’s participants had sought to dismiss the Israeli Arabist as simply another Western Orientalist like those accused by Said of marginalizing the Arab world—a pseudoscholar treating the Middle East as an absence to be filled by his presence, or as a shadow play waiting to be brought to life by its colonialist puppeteers. And yet how could the Middle East be absent, or a shadow, in a courageously original Middle Easterner like Ephraim Akri, a stalwart, God-fearing Levantine, albeit a Jewish one, whose brown skin and sad Bedouin eyes were those of a true son of the desert and whose command of the subtleties of Arabic put to shame the politically correct professors from New England and northern California who couldn’t pronounce correctly a single Arabic curse? His bold new ideas had made such an impression that he had been invited to speak to numerous Jewish and Christian groups, who were eager to hear an Old Historian’s reasons for believing that the situation in the Middle East was more hopeless than anyone thought.
And so, while Akri was enlightening his audiences in Florida and even inviting one of his grandsons to join him for a tour of Disneyland, his temporary replacement moved back into his old room, the spacious and well-lit office of a department head. Putting up with the gaze of both grandsons, one blond and one dark, he resumed his job of advising students—new and old, Arab and Jewish—on how best and least onerously to fulfill their obligations and keep the department from losing them.
He avoided serious phone talks with Ofer, the depth of whose hostility he did not dare to gauge for fear of a brutal rebuff. (On their trip to the airport, his son had kept his vow of silence, uttering a total of three inconsequential sentences.) Letting Hagit conduct their weekly conversation with Paris, he listened over the second receiver like a circumspect aide-de-camp, asking an occasional pointless question. Ofer’s acquiescence in this arrangement, however artificial, allowed him to hope that his son, who had lost all self-control that day at the hotel, was taking himself in hand.
Even after getting his new glasses, he did not hurry to type his handwritten reflections on Algeria into his computer. Perhaps he feared that weaknesses and inconsistencies not apparent in the heat of composition might show up on the bright screen. Meanwhile, to the delight of the two secretaries, he spent much of his time in his old office, comfortably ensconced in the big armchair that had been his own acquisition. No one, he knew, could run the department as well as he could. Though he was only doing so on a stopgap basis, he did his best to solve the problems brought to him.
One morning he heard Rashid talking to the secretaries. Straining to listen, he learned that Samaher’s cousin was on a secret, Rivlin-bypassing mission to obtain certification, at least of a provisional nature, of his M.A. student’s completion of all her course requirements for the previous year. The secretaries, remembering him as their driver to the wedding in Mansura, asked about the vanished bride.
“She hasn’t been feeling well,” Rashid said. “That’s why she asked me to take care of this.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She isn’t well,” he repeated. “She can’t concentrate. It’s the situation.”
“What situation?”
“Ours. The country’s.”
They checked Samaher’s file, saw that she had an incomplete from Professor Rivlin, and dispensing with further formalities, waved Rashid in to the department head. Much to his surprise, the trusty messenger, who had had no intention of doing so, found himself facing Samaher’s teacher.
“Are you running the department again?” he asked.
“Just for a while,” Rivlin apologized. “Shut the door. What’s new? What does Samaher want now?”
“Temporary certification that she’s completed her requirements.”
“Temporary certification? There’s no such thing as temporarily completing something. You shouldn’t let her use you like this, Rashid.”
The coal black eyes, taken aback, stared at him, then looked thoughtfully down at the floor.
Rivlin felt a pang. “You didn’t bring me anything from her? Not even one story? Not a single poem?”
“She can’t . . . ,” Rashid murmured, in genuine anguish. “She really can’t . . .” He regarded the Orientalist as if deciding whether to trust him, then whispered in Arabic:
“Al-hayal sar kabt, u’l’kabt b’dur ala ’l-jnun.”*
“You’ll drive me crazy, too,” the Orientalist said absently, with a bitter smile.
Rashid seemed to have thought of that possibility, for he did not look surprised. He merely laid a defensive hand on his heart and asked:
“Why me?”
“Listen here, Rashid. I want the truth.”
The truth, it seemed, was a long story.
It had to do with Samaher’s father-in-law, the contractor, a difficult man who had insisted on hospitalizing his confused daughter-in-law in Safed, so that she could be cured of . . .
“. . . of . . . the horse.”
“The horse?”
Rashid sighed. “Yes. She keeps imagining it.”
“And she’s still there?”
“Who?”
“Samaher. In the hospital.”
“Just a little while longer. We have to be patient. Soon she’ll get out. That’s what the doctor says. She wants to very badly. . . .”
The sky outside the window had clouded over. A bolt of lightning pawed at the bay. But Rashid, though he had never been in this room, had no interest in its views, neither of the bay nor of the mountains. Running his glance over the books on the shelves, he let it linger on the photographs of Akri’s grandsons, as if committing them to memory. His silence filled Rivlin with a warm memory of their night journey. He would have liked, in obedience to an old longing, to take to the road once again with the messenger, who now reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled white skullcap that he smoothed with his hand.
“Is that for The Dybbuk, Rashid?”
An Arab librarian, Rashid explained, had helped him find the play and had convinced the student at the checkout counter to let him borrow it under Samaher’s name. They were already rehearsing it.
“Then the festival is really taking place?”
“Of course it is.” Rashid was insulted. “When did I ever lie to you?”
The Liberated Bride Page 44