9.
IN THE COLD, dark minibus, Rivlin made out at once the coal black eyes of a small boy, who was sitting beside a woman in an old fur-collared winter coat. It was the same coat that had hung for years in their own closet because Hagit had not wanted to part with it. Amused and alarmed, he glanced at his wife to see if she recognized it on the shoulders of Rashid’s sister. But the judge was busy talking to the translatoress—who, distraught over her sudden separation from her husband, had barely managed to clamber into the vehicle, where she now sat squeezed in the middle row, next to Rivlin.
He waited for the minibus to start moving before introducing Ra’uda to the two women. Though she was married to a West Bank Palestinian, he explained, she was still an Israeli of sorts and could even quote the poetry of Bialik. Rashid’s sister responded with a despairing laugh while Rivlin turned around to pat her son’s head. The boy did not flinch and even took off his cap and offered his head, like a pet dog.
Only then did Rivlin notice, huddled in the back on a jump seat that had been folded on the trip to Jenin, a pale young woman in a thick woolen shawl. Next to her, larger and darker than his brother, sat Rasheed. He was holding the horn-rimmed glasses meant to convince the Israeli border guards that he was his uncle’s natural son.
“Why, it’s Samaher!” Rivlin cried excitedly. “Samaher, this is my wife. You must remember her from your wedding.”
His still-ungraded M.A. student gave him a frail and poignant smile. “Who could forget your wife, Professor?” she whispered hoarsely, nodding to Hagit. “Never . . .”
The minibus turned right on Gaza Road, passed Terra Sancta, and headed for East Jerusalem, skirting the walls of the Old City—which on this wintry Saturday night were illuminated only symbolically, as if in discharge of a formal obligation. The rain came down harder as Rashid drove through the Arab half of town. “Don’t forget to stop in Pisgat Ze’ev,” Rivlin reminded him. “I’ll direct you.” But Rashid, having rehearsed the route earlier that day, needed no directions, leaving Rivlin free to turn around and chat with his “research assistant.” Her answers to his questions, though laconic, were to the point.
They reached Pisgat Ze’ev in northern Jerusalem. There, in the yellowish glare of the headlights, flagging them down at the bus stop where they had agreed to meet him—the same stop from which the murdered scholar had gone to his death—was Mr. Suissa in his gray fedora. With him was the murdered scholar’s wife.
“I hope it’s all right,” Suissa said to Rivlin, who reddened at the sight of the young widow. “She didn’t want me to go by myself. Do you have room for her?”
“Of course we do,” Rashid said, jumping happily out of the car. No one even had to move. He went to the back, opened the rear door, and squeezed the widow in beside Samaher.
They drove on to the Palestinian Authority. Although a black, overcast sky hid the first three stars that ended the Sabbath, these were surely glittering somewhere above the clouds—in token of which, despite the heavy rain, the streets filled with cars as the Jews of Jerusalem, exhausted by their day of rest, emerged to see what had changed in the world while they slept. At Atarot Junction the traffic lights were rattling in the wind, which soon turned to a howling gale. In the foggy darkness, with nothing around them but dim buildings and empty lots, it wasn’t clear whether they were heading in the right direction. But gradually the billboards changed from Hebrew to Arabic, and they saw that the border was close. In the end, they flew across it. The soldiers on the Israeli side, warming themselves around a campfire, showed no interest in the passengers bound for food and entertainment, while two gun-toting policemen on the Palestinian side were so eager to help that, although unaware of any festival, they piled with their weapons into the minibus, now equally full of Arabs and Jews, and guided it to the Ramallah police station.
In the stone building of the police station, the festival was better known. There were even name tags for the guests from Israel. Rivlin was told to climb some stairs to the second floor. There, in a large room whose long, curtained windows made it look like a cross between an office and a salon, sat a corpulent police officer decorated like a Russian general and surrounded by men, civilians or plainclothesmen, who made the Orientalist feel rather nervous. Taking some plastic tags from a drawer, the officer inscribed them with the names of the Israeli entourage and stamped each with a bloodred stamp.
There was a timid knock on the door. In walked a bewildered-looking Hannah Tedeschi, her thick glasses halfway down her nose. Drawn magnetically by her anxiety to the telephone on the officer’s desk, she inquired in quaint seventh-century Arabic whether she could call her husband in Jerusalem. Rivlin, putting a hand on her shoulder to calm her, hurried to translate her speech into something more modern, while introducing her, complete with all her academic titles, to the astonished gathering.
“Be my guest, Madame Doctor. It’s an honor.” The fat officer sat up, reached for the phone, and poised a long-nailed finger on the dial.
It took many rings to get the doyen of Orientalists to answer his wife’s call. While the officer and the plainclothesmen listened at one end to the shaky voice of the translatoress, the old professor at the other end was deliberately cool. He answered Hannah’s questions brusquely, was vague and uninformative, and soon hung up. As though reluctant to part with it, she slowly handed the receiver back to the fat officer and took out her purse to pay for the call.
“La, walla la, ya madam, la!”* the Palestinians cried at once, commiserating with the strange Jewess. “Don’t insult us. What’s a telephone call to Jerusalem? Nothing. You can call all you like . . . even to America . . . to Japan . . . a kul hal, b’nidfa’sh el-hasab l’isra’il.”†
There was a sense of merriment in the room. When they left it, properly name-tagged (Rashid must have told someone he had important passengers), a jeep with a machine gunner was waiting to escort them. The rain had tapered off to a thin drizzle. They traveled in a little convoy through the streets of the brightly lit Palestinian city. At the new Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center, teenagers holding torches directed them to a nearly full parking lot. If last summer he had crossed the border as a one-man show, Rivlin thought, he was now heading a multinational, multisexual, and multigenerational delegation. He took care to keep his five women together as they climbed out of the minibus, while saying some encouraging words to Mr. Suissa, who had sat in the car looking tense. Meanwhile, Rashid handed each of his nephews a small carton and disappeared with them around the back of the building.
They climbed some stairs to the aristocratically arched stone entrance of the Cultural Center, which looked like a wealthy private mansion. There to greet them was the festival’s director, Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun, an energetic, gap-toothed, baby-faced man who in his old leather coat, Rivlin thought, resembled a trade union official. Ibn-Zaidoun shook hands briskly with the Israelis, introduced them to the British judge of the poetry contest, who towered over him like a thoroughbred horse, and urged them to help themselves to refreshments on the second floor. Tonight’s festival, he assured them, was meant for body and mind alike.
10.
A LOCAL BEAUTY welcomed them to the high-ceilinged second floor and politely but firmly made them take off their coats, for which there would be no room in the auditorium, and hang them in the checkroom. With the thrill of old intimacy Rivlin spied, beneath Hagit’s fur-collared coat, her beloved blouse and velvet pants on Ra’uda’s tall, dark figure. He tried to catch her eye, wishing to share his amusement at her simulacrum from the other side of the border. But Hagit, still involved with the translatoress, who was greatly distressed by her husband’s coolness, had no time for her old clothes, which now vanished with their wearer in the wake of Samaher.
Rivlin let himself be carried along by the festive hubbub of the guests, most of them young people of unclear identity. It was hard to tell the Arabs from the Jews, or either of the two from anyone else. Taking Ibn-Zaidoun’s advice, he headed for the buffet
, followed by Suissa’s widow with Suissa senior on her heels. The murdered scholar’s father, awed by the occasion despite his vengeful feelings toward its Palestinian organizers, had taken off his fedora and put on a big, colorful skullcap that might have been knit back in his North African childhood. At the buffet, by plates of stuffed grape leaves and cigar-shaped meat pastries, the conversation flowed in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with an occasional German exclamation mark. Holding a glass and surrounded by Israeli peace activists, the most famous of Palestinian poets stood by the auditorium door. An aging, though still boyish, bachelor and full-time exile who circulated among the world’s capitals reading his poetry, he was trying to follow, a bored glitter in his eyes, the singsong English of an Israeli poet of his own generation, a tall, balding, protuberant man with thick glasses, who was known for his marvelously erotic sonnets—which, though politically naive, were said to embody his lust for peace. At his side, seeking to elbow his way into the conversation, was another poet from Tel Aviv—a literary critic as well, whose brilliant but nasty essays took advantage of the Middle East conflict to settle scores with his numerous rivals.
There was a tap on Rivlin’s shoulder. It was Rashid, visibly excited. “Is everything all right, Professor?” he asked softly and disappeared before the Orientalist could answer, leaving Rivlin to smile sympathetically at the sad widow—who, a glass of water in her hand, regarded him with silent resentment, as if still waiting, even though he now was entrusted with five women, for the protection she demanded.
“It seems,” he said in a friendly whisper, trying to keep from being overheard by Suissa senior, who was cruising the counter in search of a kosher Middle Eastern hors d’oeuvre, “that you’re getting used to your hedgehog.”
The young widow, giving him the cold shoulder, merely shook her head and set her glass down on the counter.
Hagit and Hannah stepped out of the ladies’ room, smiling and relaxed. Still more people were filing into the lobby, among them some country musicians in traditional costume who hurried to the auditorium with their instruments. Rivlin, his inhibitions dispelled by the noisy crowd, put two fingers to his mouth and startled those around him by shrilling his and Hagit’s old whistle of recognition. At once came the judge’s soft answering call. Spotting him, she linked arms with Hannah and headed in his direction. It pleased yet saddened him to see that although the two were the same age his wife looked much younger than her companion, who had been kept childless by a husband fearing rivals for her love.
“What happened to your driver?” Hannah chided him. “Don’t forget that you’ve left your old teacher all alone. I only came because you promised I could be brought back any time I wanted.”
“Any time after Rashid’s performance.”
“What performance is that?”
Rivlin smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see. He’s a demon in disguise, not just a driver.”
Ibn-Zaidoun, accompanied by two policemen serving as ushers, now opened the doors of the auditorium and began shooing the audience inside. From within came the sounds of a shepherd’s pipe and a three-stringed rebab. At the doorway they were blocked by a conversation, started by the remark of an Israeli that according to the latest studies Jews and Palestinians had the same DNA. Although this had occasioned much laughter, it was hard to tell whether the laughter was approving or embarrassed.
“We all come from the same monkey’s ass,” the erotic poet guffawed. “And should go back there.”
The Palestinian poet grinned provocatively. “I trust that’s one place where the Law of Return applies equally.”
“Please, no politics tonight! Just love,” Ibn-Zaidoun warned through the gap between his front teeth. Rivlin was startled to see a shiny pistol protruding from his old leather coat.
“They say there is love in this world,” quoted the Palestinian poet—who, like Ra’uda, knew his Bialik. “But I ask: What is love?”
He entered the auditorium.
On the spur of the moment, Rivlin decided to introduce himself and his companions to the poet, which he did while praising his verse, read by him in the original. The world-famous exile, his slim figure neat in a custom-made suit and a last cigarette butt between his yellowed fingers, listened to the Jewish Orientalist politely. He beamed when told of the accomplishments of the translatoress of Ignorance. “Na’am, ya sitti,” he said with an intense handshake, “el-jahaliya mish bas asas esh-shi’ir el-arabi, hiyya kaman asas el-kiyan.”*
11.
THE AUDITORIUM OF THE Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center was designed in the best modern taste, with unadorned white walls and columns bearing a vaulted ceiling of white arches graceful as the wings of a dove. Although it was so crowded that the Haifa professor and his entourage at first had nowhere to sit, Ibn-Zaidoun soon appeared, made some young Palestinians move to the floor, and gave the Jewish VIPs their seats. These looked down on a stage covered with a checked carpet, on which stood a long wooden table and three chairs. The musicians, seated in the back, were tuning their instruments while sipping little cups of coffee.
More and more young people kept pushing into the auditorium and finding places on the floor. The warmth of so many bodies made the heated hall stuffy, and a gray-haired Arab in jeans went to a window, drew its white lace curtain, and let in some cool night air. It took Rivlin a startled moment to realize it was Fu’ad. The maître d’ had taken off his black uniform and come to search for poetic inspiration among his compatriots across the border.
The first strains of hesitant melody, still lacking the firm beat of a drum, were forming from the random notes of zither, shepherd’s pipe, lute, and rebab. Ibn-Zaidoun, standing by the table, signaled the ushers to dim the lights. The melody stopped, and the audience was asked to rise for a moment of silence in memory of the great Palestinian educator after whom the new Cultural Center had been named. Then all sat down again, and Ibn-Zaidoun pulled from a pocket of his leather coat a Hebrew translation of a passage from es-Sakakini’s journals, published under the title This Is Me, Gentlemen. The educator’s first love letter to his future wife was read aloud:
My Sultana,
And so, like clouds scattered before the wind, my days in Jerusalem are over. Allow me to write you a last letter and to bid you farewell from a heart that has almost ceased to beat from so much love and that has melted away from so much suffering. I utter these words as though from the grave. Soon I will leave this city, with its people, houses, streets, and soil that I belong to, and in which I breathed love for the first time, for a place that will never be mine. How could it be when my heart is staying behind?
Yesterday I spent the day parting with people whose goodness and sterling qualities I will never forget for as long as I live. I thought this would be easy for me, because I had prepared myself for it ever since conceiving of my journey. But when the time came, I felt how bitter it was. All day my heart was in a turmoil. And even if I can part with friends and family, how can I part with you, Sultana? Every other parting is easy in comparison.
I will think of you, Sultana, each time the sun rises or sets; I will think of you when I come and go, rise and lie down, arrive and depart; I will think of you when I go to work; I will think of you when I am calm and free of worry, and when I am weary and exhausted.
To part with you is to part with comradeship, purity, light, and joy; it is to encounter loneliness and sorrow. The first man leaving Paradise was not more anguished than I am. You are my Paradise. You are my happiness. You are my pleasure in life, my soul’s joy, my life itself. What must a man feel when he leaves his own life?
Think of me, Sultana, each time you enter the church to pray, or open your Bible; think of me when you are teaching your students, or taking them for a nature walk to our beloved rock; think of me when you are at home. Stand at your window, which faces mine, and say: “Fare thee well, Khalil.” Ah, I would fain look at that window, for perhaps I would see you there!
And when springtime comes with its fa
ir flowers and you feel a breeze, that is my greeting to you—or glimpse a flower, that is my smile—or hear the song of birds, that is my voice speaking. Should you glance up at the sky and see the sparkling stars, you have seen my eyes looking at you. If the moon peeps over the mountains and sends its silvery beams through the clouds—regard them, for perhaps I am seeing them too and our two gazes will meet.
Today I sat with my cousin Ya’akub, to whom I confessed: “I love Sultana, I adore her.” I did not tell him that I have revealed to you the secret of my love. He thinks I should do so before I depart. When will I receive a clear answer from you? Ah, Sultana, have pity and do not let me go with an anxious heart and a worried mind. The anguish of parting is enough.
Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun was now joined by the Palestinian beauty from the checkroom. Playing the role of Khalil es-Sakakini’s beloved, she stood with a white rose in her long hair and declaimed the letter written by the thirty-year-old Palestinian in its original Arabic.
Rivlin cast a warm glance at his wife, who was listening with empathy to the words even though they were only sounds for her. The eyes of the translatoress were damp with tears behind their glasses.
“What did you think of the translation?” he whispered.
She shrugged disdainfully. “Who can’t translate such simple Arabic?”
“Simple but beautiful,” he said.
She looked at him suspiciously, then nodded slowly and, annoyed, took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.
She was not the only one moved. Opening the festival, the simple but genuine love letter of the Palestinian educator—a revolutionary in his thoughts and a romantic in his feelings—sent a shiver through the audience and made it want more. As Es-Sakakini’s last words faded and Ibn-Zaidoun signaled the musicians to strike up a sweetly plaintive tune, the first poets edged toward the stage for the contest.
The Liberated Bride Page 47