The nun now began a new exchange, with a tambourine—which, however, rather than following her, took the lead. Its percussive rattle rising above the diminuendo of the musicians, it, too, sought to throw her off balance, forcing her to cling to more and more sobbing grace notes of an increasingly Oriental character. Supposedly above it all in her Lebanese cloister, she now seemed, like the oppressed Palestinians of the Holy Land, to be fighting for an existence that vibrated with them on one wavelength.
Rivlin felt one of Ra’uda’s dark-haired boys slump sleepily against his knee. Laying a hand on the warm little head, he tapped the rhythm of the drum on it. He gave his wife a loving look, glanced fondly at the translatoress immersed in her lyrics, and was surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, Mrs. Suissa junior, who had not said a word to him all evening, crying as he had cried for Jephthah’s daughter.
16.
BUT WHEN WOULD the promised fainting take place? Was it possible in front of such an openly non-Christian audience? And who, apart from Rivlin and Rashid, even hoped for it?
Song followed song, and the little nun showed no signs of tiring. The lute and rebab kept pace with her, their ancient erotic rhythms luring her so far from the sacred that there were times when she could have been performing in a Cairo cabaret.
A thin, reddish gas drifted upward near the musicians. Produced by a secondhand smoke machine bought by Ibn-Zaidoun from an Israeli disco club, it thickened and spread, forming a mist that enveloped the choir and curled around the plain sandals of the nun. From there, like a friendly animal, it crept toward the Palestinians sitting on the floor near the stage. At first they backed away, as if from a tear-gas bomb. Yet seeing that the odorless substance did not burn or make them cry and was no more than a symbol of the world’s insubstantiality, they began to laugh and to try to get a whiff of it or even catch it in their hands.
The Lebanese nun, startled by this special effect, which seemed about to turn her performance into a rock concert, stopped singing. She shut her eyes and hugged her shoulders as if fending off the audience’s clapping to the rhythm of the drum. Now is the time, Rivlin thought. He tugged at his wife and whispered: “Watch her. She’s going to faint. I just hope she doesn’t blow it.”
The judge looked at her husband as if he were deranged. “But what good does it do if she faints?” she asked.
The Orientalist did not expect such a question. Automatically, however, as though from the depths of a trance, the answer came to him. “It’s a warning,” he said. “A warning of the abyss we’re all about to fall into.”
Yet the nun was taking her time. Indeed, if she had been supposed to faint at the point of her hushed climax it was already too late, because the music had resumed and passed the point of no return. Even Ibn-Zaidoun’s smoke machine was now out of control and rapidly fouling the auditorium, in which several veterans of the Intifada had risen to their feet and were shouting the nun down with nationalist songs.
She turned pale and retreated to the rear of the stage. Something unpleasant, a serious and perhaps even violent misunderstanding, was in the air. In another minute, it seemed, she would have to hide behind her choir of hefty drones. And yet oddly, so loyal until now, they were doing nothing to protect her. Droning and clapping, they pushed her almost comically back, as if holding her to the terms of her contract. Rivlin was on his feet, trying to sight the white robe, which was surrounded by a crowd that had burst onto the stage. At its head, talking to the still-singing nun, was Rashid. He made a gesture, and suddenly, with no warning, she collapsed at his feet and disappeared from the sight of the Jew.
17.
IT WAS AFTER midnight when the audience dispersed, in high spirits. The Lebanese nun’s fainting fit had met with sympathy, and numerous well-wishers had come up to her once she regained consciousness. Despite their repeated requests, however, she declined to go on with her performance—which was just as well, since anything more would only have been anticlimactic.
Rivlin and his entourage took their coats and umbrellas from the checkroom and said good-bye to Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun and the blue-blooded judge. The Scotsman, against the advice of his panelists, had awarded first prize in the poetry contest to an elderly village bard who had written his first verse in the days of the British Mandate. The famous Palestinian poet had already departed for Amman, where the air of exile was purer, setting out in a taxi for Jordan as soon as the nun fainted. Ibn-Zaidoun bade everyone farewell for him, especially the Jewish student of the Age of Ignorance, his mystical dialogue with whom he would long remember.
It was bitterly cold when they left the large stone building. The skies were clear, with no sign of more rain. The orange moon that had barely cleared the mountains earlier in the evening was now floating palely and effortlessly among the stars.
They all took their places in the minibus except for Ra’uda, who was given a ride back to Zababdeh by a Christian family. Her two boys remained with Rashid, the older of them sitting by the young widow, whose eyes still shone with emotion. Samaher, bundled up in her shawl, sat self-consciously in the back as if anxious to forget her role as a Jewish rabbi. But Rivlin would not let her. Stooping to enter the vehicle, he said loudly:
“Samaher, you were marvelous! It was a fabulous idea to do a scene from The Dybbuk. I told my wife that the way you got into your part was incredible.”
“Well, Professor,” Rashid said, his dark face smiling at Rivlin in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of his parking place with a honk of the horn, “maybe that’s a reason to give Samaher her final grade tonight.”
“Her final grade?” Rivlin chuckled. “It’s a bit too early for that. But if it’s a question of extra credit for her Arabic translation of The Dybbuk . . . yes, I suppose that’s possible.”
Deep down the Haifa professor had to admit that not giving Samaher a grade was more than just a matter of maintaining academic standards. The fact was that he did not want to part with these two young people, whose love traced an invisible arc in the bulky van.
They joined a convoy of Israeli cars, its peace and poetry lovers escorted by a Palestinian police jeep to the military campfire at the border. This time, the soldiers—unwilling to rely on their instincts to tell an Israeli physiognomy from a Palestinian one in the dead of night—asked for IDs. Through the window of the minibus Rivlin saw Fu’ad led off to the campfire, as if to be examined by its light. Feeling responsible for the maître d’, he climbed out of the minibus and hurried over. The intervention of the aging Jewish professor had its effect, and Fu’ad—perhaps singled out because of his singularly crumpled ID—was allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, however, the car he’d been in had driven off without him, leaving him hurt and bewildered. Still smarting over Rivlin’s remarks, he accepted his offer of a lift to Jerusalem without knowing what to make of his sudden protectiveness.
The drive back to Jerusalem was a short one. Hagit laid her head on her husband’s shoulder and was out like a light, sleeping through Hannah Tedeschi’s impassioned recitation of an elegy written by the great Syrian poet Adonis for the same Al-Hallaj whose verses she had translated. Rivlin, a captive audience, listened to her declaim it:
Your poisoned green quill—
The veins of its neck bottled flame
In which a star rises over Baghdad—
Is our bright past, our resurrection on earth,
Our death that returns to itself.
Rivlin, exhausted by the night’s impressions, nodded ironically at this woman who gave birth to translations instead of children. “Well, Hannah,” he demanded, “aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?”
“‘Thank you’?” She looked askance at him. “For what?”
“For making you come tonight.”
“Just wait,” she grumbled, turning color. “We haven’t yet seen what it’s going to cost me.”
They dropped a pensive Suissa and his widowed daughter-in-law in Pisgat Ze’ev. The translatoress, as anxious as a student before
an exam, asked Rivlin to come upstairs with her to help bear the brunt of the abandoned Tedeschi’s anger. But the Haifa Orientalist was in no mood to climb three flights of stairs just in order to listen to the old man’s complaints. In the end, they agreed on a compromise proposal of the judge’s that she and her husband wait down below for five minutes to see whether they were needed.
Hannah Tedeschi said her good-byes. All the pent-up emotion of the evening came out as she hugged and kissed Hagit affectionately before turning on the entrance light and starting up the stairs. The Rivlins said good night to Rashid, Samaher, and the two boys, and the Orientalist unlocked their parked car, turned on the heating for Hagit, and went to stand outside the Tedeschis’ building.
The minibus drove a distance down the street and stopped in a little square, waiting for the Jews to be safely on their way. Rashid’s silhouette, seated stiffly by the wheel, was limned by the yellowish glare of a streetlight. Samaher, still in the backseat, looked like a sad mummy. Something that had happened across the border, Rivlin felt, made them afraid to sit close to each other.
The judge, full of the evening’s music and ready for more sleep, leaned her head back in the car. Rivlin stood reading the names on the mailboxes, trying to remember which of them had been in this building thirty years ago. Before he could finish, the stairway light went out. A minute later he was approached by Fu’ad. The maître d’ wished to know whether, on their way back to Haifa, they could drop him off in Abu-Ghosh. Rivlin look at his watch and nodded. He cast a weary glance at the Arab, who took a last, thirsty drag on his cigarette, ground the butt out with his shoe, and whispered underneath his mustache:
“Bas kan biddi ha’ul, ya Brofesor,* that if you’re wondering whether he cheated on her, you can be sure he didn’t.”
The Orientalist’s battered heart twinged.
“That’s what I thought.” He made two fists. “And that’s why it kills me that . . .”
The light came back on in the stairwell. They heard hurried steps. Hannah Tedeschi, looking pale, appeared without her coat and signaled Rivlin to follow her.
“But what’s wrong?” he asked. “What does he want? Didn’t fall asleep in the end?”
“In the end . . .” She repeated the words as though hypnotized. With an abrupt gesture, she signaled the Arab to join them too.
18.
“BUT WHY IS it so dark in here?” Rivlin complained, following Hannah Tedeschi down the hallway with its shelves of novels and thrillers in many languages, bought in airports by the Jerusalem polymath to pass the time on international flights. Hannah didn’t answer. With a stride that seemed to have grown swifter, she led him through the dim guest room to the door of Tedeschi’s study, beneath which crept a beam of light.
Even though Hannah had said nothing, he was prepared for what awaited him and turned around to make sure the maître d’ was behind him. A man who had spent his life going in and out of the rooms of strangers could surely cope with the warmly lit study that the translatoress now ushered them into.
Tedeschi, dressed in his pajamas, had apparently risen from bed and gone to his desk to do something at his computer. His arms embraced its lit screen, and his puckish face nuzzled its ivory keyboard, leaving the wife fifteen years his junior to guess whether he had been slipped an Ottoman sleeping potion, fainted from fright at her absence, or decided to bid a fond adieu to the world of scholarship. From the way she stood, tall and grave, without approaching for a closer look, it was evident which of these possibilities she believed in.
Rivlin felt weak-kneed. His heart went out to this grave woman, his loyal former classmate—who, surprisingly, did not seem to blame herself for her sudden liberation from the teacher who had trapped her. And since the latter was in no condition to tell anyone what to do with him, Rivlin asked the maître d’ to help pry his old mentor loose from the computer, on which he had vomited in a last act of desperation.
Not that Fu’ad owed Tedeschi anything. Still, many years of experience at entering and even breaking into hotel rooms made him a competent assistant. “Let’s lay him on the floor,” he said softly to the Jew, stepping nimbly forward to grab one end of the dead man. It wasn’t easy. The Jerusalem scholar was stronger in death than in life, and it took no little force and ingenuity to wrestle him from the computer screen, on which his favorite comic-book figures were still cavorting, and carefully straighten him out. Undeterred by the pity he felt, Rivlin seized his old doctoral adviser’s skull and pulled it from the keyboard without checking whether the eyes were closed.
Only now, as the maître d’ expertly eased the pudgy body, undeniably a corpse, onto the floor and rather illogically moved the heater closer to it, did it dawn on Rivlin that he would never again sit in this room discussing the Middle East or having new ideas about it run past him. He glanced at Hannah Tedeschi, who was watching sternly and aloofly from the other side of the room, as if the horror of what had happened were a moral boundary she refused to cross. It saddened him that obsessive worry about his son had kept him from promising his old mentor that, come what may, he would write something for the jubilee volume.
“Just a minute, I’ll get a blanket,” Hannah whispered. She actually looked younger, as if the death of her husband had taken years off her age. Since he actually had been parted from his computer and laid down in repose on the Persian rug, no cry of grief escaped her. “Better a sheet, ma’am,” Fu’ad said. “That’s what’s usually used.” The quiet confidence of his movements suggested that he had done this with more than one hotel guest. The translatoress looked searchingly at the Israeli Arab, who was not yet a Jew and no longer a true son of the desert; then she nodded and went to fetch an old, starched cotton sheet. This was taken from her by Rashid, who had turned up as if it were only natural to be offering his services at such a time. Having recently worn sheets in his role as the dybbuk, he expertly unfolded this one and handed one end of it to the maître d’. Working in comradely tandem, the two men whipped it in the air like a great white sail and let it settle over the face of the doyen of Orientalists.
Now that Tedeschi had disappeared from sight for the last time, Rivlin remembered his wife, who was probably still asleep in the running car on the deserted nighttime street. Worriedly, he headed for the front door. The trusty messenger—who, since the wedding in the Galilee, seemed able to read the mind of the teacher who still owed his cousin a grade—stopped him. “You don’t have to run, Professor,” he said. “I hear her coming up the stairs.”
She was already in the doorway, his pleasantly plump beloved in her short sheepskin coat. Her untroubled face, the face of a lover of the Just and the Good, showed no suspicion. “Is anything wrong?” she asked softly, with a smile, and advanced innocently toward the study, where she saw the corpse beneath its white sheet. Fearlessly she knelt and pulled back the sheet for a last look at the man who had taken a fancy to her on her first visit to this apartment, thirty years ago, as a young soldier, aspiring law student, and future bride.
She began to cry, her silent tears breaking the heart of a husband who had been sure that here was a death that left him cold and unmoved. Still relentlessly aloof, the translatoress turned in alarm to the two Arabs, as if it were their duty to keep this self-assured woman from introducing grief into the deceased’s study. But they, unaware that the dead man had thought he understood Arabs better than Arabs understood themselves, declined to involve themselves in a Jewish matter, thus forcing the translatoress to drop her mask. At long last she uttered a sound that was somewhere between a groan of pain and a curse of despair, went over to the computer, and tapped a key. The comic-book figures vanished. Tedeschi’s last article appeared on the screen in all its rich complexity. She reached out to touch it, in a final, merciful caress.
PART VII
The Liberation
HAD THERE BEEN advance signs of this death?
Rivlin lay waiting for the dawn under an old woolen blanket in the unborn children’s room. The
Jerusalem polymath, wrapped in a sheet on the Persian rug in his study, awaited the same dawn, which would bring a doctor, a family friend, to confirm his final adieu. Meanwhile, in the living room on the other side of the door, the translatoress sat up talking emotionally to the judge, seeking guidance.
The two Arabs had left, each for his own destination. Or had they gone off together?
They had spread the sheet over the doyen of Orientalists with such perfect coordination that they might have been trained for it.
But what were the signs? For it now appeared that behind the hypochondria and the false alarms a real death had been hiding, waiting to catch the translatoress of Ignorance off guard before striking.
And yet . . .
Rivlin thought about the pajamas Tedeschi was wearing when he died. They indicated that he had gone to bed and tried to sleep. Had some new idea made him jump up and go to his desk? Or was it the terror of dying, against which he had sought comfort in something he had written?
Had he found it?
Or his adamant refusal to spend the evening in the Palestinian Authority, where he would have died among Arabs—was that a sign? Or his battle to keep his wife from going without him, which had ended with a white handkerchief of surrender telling death that the way was now clear?
And how about his lecture that strange morning on the Turkish Othello? And his new interest in imaginative literature as opposed to speeches and protocols?
Two years previously, on a trip to the Dolomites, the Rivlins had found themselves floating skyward, late one summer afternoon, in an orange funicular bound for a restaurant on the heights of Mount Cortina. Although in winter the site must have swarmed with skiers, it now had few visitors. In the restaurant, at a table next to theirs, looking down at the fertile valley below, sat a quiet, polite couple with two small children; on the Rivlins’ other side, facing the bare mountain, was an elderly, stocky man in an old-fashioned summer suit that appeared to have come straight from a 1930s European movie. He was sipping champagne while talking seriously with a man of about thirty who was wearing sporty designer clothes.
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