The Liberated Bride (4 page)

O
N THE TWENTY-THIRD
floor of the university tower, on a desk in the office of the Near Eastern Studies Department, surrounded by student papers and faculty mail, sat a round copper tray filled with baklava. It was a gift from the attentive bride to the teachers who had missed her wedding, so that they wouldn't feel left out.

“It isn't fair,” Rivlin protested. “The slackers shouldn't be rewarded.”

“You can't deny that the effort was worth it,” said the secretaries. They were treating him, the morning after, with an excessive friendliness. “It was a brilliant idea to go see our whining students in their natural habitat. They're so different in their own world. And how we enjoyed your delightful wife!” They already missed Hagit, who had vanished and left them once more with her morose husband.

“Yes. She knows how to have a good time,” the professor admitted with a tight-lipped smile. “That's because I take such good care of her. Why shouldn't she?”

They chuckled at his outrageousness. They had tended to his needs for so many years that they couldn't imagine him doing the same for somebody else. Although it was awkward for him to be striking such an intimate note with these two women, with whom he had always been so formal, he knew that whoever was introduced to his wife did not quickly relinquish her. Perhaps she represented a path to him.

The door of the department head's office was shut. He was wondering whether to enter and tell Akri how pointless his previous
night's harangue had been when the secretaries decided for him. “Professor Akri,” they told him, “would like to see you.”

Rivlin stepped into the large, brightly lit room that had long been his office. Even though he was glad to be relieved of the burden of running the department, he had left some of his books on the shelves and even kept a key as a way of retaining part ownership.

“Professor Tedeschi is in a coma,” Akri greeted him. A normally taciturn man, he kept an orderly workroom. Mounted on his computer were photographs of his two grandsons, one blond and one dark like himself. Perhaps they had helped to inspire his theories about the wrong turn taken by Arab history.

“So I've heard,” Rivlin answered dryly. He felt disappointed that Hannah Tedeschi, not content with his sympathy for her husband, had also turned to a more mediocre scholar than himself. If Tedeschi valued Akri, it was only for the thoroughness with which the new department head helped the old man to index and footnote his articles. “How come,” Rivlin asked, “you're still afraid of his wife's hysteria after having been his teaching assistant in Jerusalem for so many years? Don't you realize that she needs and even enjoys her husband's attacks, which is why she's always so happy to tell us about them?”

Akri's head drooped slightly. Intrepid when battling Arabs, he was cautious about taking on Jews, especially insofar as it might affect his academic career. “This time it sounds serious,” he said in defense of the SOS from Jerusalem. “He's been in a coma for two days.”

“I know. He was in the exact same coma in April 1992. It didn't keep him from coming to his senses a few days later and giving the opening lecture at that big conference about Arabs and Turks at the Dayan Center. He was also in critical condition in February 1994. For four days he was in another world, but in the end he remembered to wake up in time for a sabbatical at Princeton. And I might remind you that here in Haifa, when he was our guest a few years ago at that mini-conference I organized on North Africa, he passed out after lecturing on the Turkish withdrawal from Algeria, spent the night in the emergency room, and caught a flight the next morning to the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo. The irrepressible Carlo Tedeschi is a devoted husband. As such, he knows that only his illnesses can keep his
wife sane in our morbid Israeli reality. That's why he's always in perfect health when he's abroad. Relax, Ephraim. A week ago he returned from a trip to Tierra del Fuego. It would never have occurred to him to have a coma there.”

“Tierra del Fuego?” Although the skullcapped department head found the Tedeschis' far-flung itineraries bizarre, he was not prepared to surrender his concern. “But suppose this time it's real,” he persisted, wary of dubious psychological explanations that subverted the rabbinic commandment to visit the sick, hypochondriacs included. “Even if he's only doing it for his wife, shouldn't we be supportive?” He wished to propose to Rivlin that the two of them, after the afternoon's departmental seminar, drive to Jerusalem to see their old teacher. It would give them an opportunity to talk about business and perhaps discuss his little sermon at Samaher's wedding, which was admittedly not beyond challenge. Even if neither of them succeeded in convincing the other, the department head said with a hint of a smile, they would keep each other awake.

But Rivlin had family commitments. Even without them, he would not have been inclined to spend a second long evening with Akri, much less join him in a sick call as if they were equals, either academically or in their relationship with a revered teacher.

Now, however, standing by the window of his little office at the university, which was to be his sole work space for the next ten days, his back to the reinstalled computer on whose screen was not yet flickering the problematic book he had been struggling with for the past year, his glance drifted longingly from the plaza at the foot of the tower to the grayish folds of the mountains of the Galilee where last night's Arab wedding had died out toward morning, and he wondered whether Ephraim Akri might be right. Perhaps this time Hannah Tedeschi's distress call was genuine, more even than she suspected. If he set out for Jerusalem immediately, he would be able to warn the old professor and his wife that one too many make-believe departures from this world might result in a real one, and still manage to get to the airport on time.

Certainly, he was in no mood to switch on the computer in his little office and view his crabbed work, which lacked a core, a justification,
and any apparent relationship to the panoramic view outside. Telephoning the district court, he left a message for Judge Rivlin, who was in closed chambers, telling her that he was leaving early for Jerusalem before going to the airport and that there would be nowhere to contact him during her noon recess. He knew this would displease her, not so much because she would fear his coming late to the airport or think he was taking Hannah Tedeschi too seriously, as because she liked to be privy to all his whims. If he was going to play hooky from work while she sat in a black robe weighing the fateful dramas of the awe-stricken actors in her courtroom, she at least wanted to know about it.

He stopped by the departmental office on his way to see if there was any mail for him. There was nothing, however, except a polite reminder to pay his share of Samaher's wedding gift. He settled the debt and consumed the last squashed piece of baklava, glancing idly through Akri's now open door to his desk, at which, undistracted by his departmental chores, the department head sat peacefully immersed in his scholarship. Asking a secretary to check the plane's final arrival time, he went to inform Akri that, feeling real alarm for the spuriously ill Tedeschi, he had decided to prod him into consciousness by setting out for Jerusalem at once. “That way, Ephraim,” he remarked, “he'll be ready with a bibliographical favor to ask of you when you turn up there tonight.”

Akri smiled faintly, the deep flush of his dark face disclosing the umbrage he took. Now that he had tenure, he had nothing to fear from a senior colleague. And yet two promotions from assistant to full professor still lay between them, too great a distance for him not to be stung by Rivlin's sarcasm.

“Y
OU'RE RIGHT ABOUT
one thing.” Rivlin paced freely around the new department head's office while trying to decide whom Akri resembled more, his blond or his dark grandson. “That harangue of yours needs to be challenged. I'm sure we'll have a chance to debate it sometime soon. For the moment, I'd just like to inquire whether you don't think it was tactless, perhaps even—you'll forgive my saying so—imprudent,
to lecture Arabs at an Arab wedding on your theory of . . . what is it that you call it? Your Theory of Arab Failure? An Orientalist's Theory of Despair? Yes, your Theory of Despair. I might ask whose despair, though—ours or theirs?”

“Everyone's . . .” Feeling his colleague's hostility, Akri braced for a confrontation.

“Well, you should realize that not everyone understands what it is that you've despaired of.” Rivlin stared at the photographs on Akri's computer, bitterness welling inside him not only at the grandfather, but at the grandsons too. “You don't have to give me your whole speech again. I've already heard it: your despair is pure, intrinsic, theoretical, with no tendentious political content or ideological agenda. But if I, who have some knowledge of your ideas and your articles, have difficulty discerning their purity of intent, what can you expect of others? The students at the wedding weren't all from our department, you know. Those who were are accustomed to your baroque style and have their semiallegorical, semihumorous way of interpreting it. But there were students from elsewhere as well. Why provoke and confuse them at an idyllic village wedding?”

“But that's precisely the place for it!” Akri declared with unexpected tenacity. “On their own turf, where they feel most at home, surrounded by their favorite foods, totally connected to themselves and to their land. It's only there that you stand a chance of getting them to admit the truth. You know me well. You know I don't look down on the Arabs. I only want to call their attention to a fundamental flaw in their conception of freedom that has spelled tragedy and disaster for them. What did I do wrong last night? I livened up a wedding party with an intellectual discussion in a perfectly civilized way. Didn't our rabbis say that a table without words of wisdom is no better than a pagan altar?”

“Words of wisdom?” Rivlin looked at Akri as if he thought the usually quiet department head had gone mad. “Whose wisdom? You demolished their past, you defamed their ancestors, you attacked their honor, you enumerated their every weakness, you told them they have no future. Do you really think they're a merrily self-flagellating band of masochists like us Jews?”

“No one is a masochist.” Akri retained his composure. “I was being objective. I was speaking respectfully and with the best of intentions. Precisely because there were so many young people there, engineers and science majors and future intellectuals, I said to myself, here's a chance to give them a different perspective on their own history—and in their own language, a rich, fluent Arabic such as they love. If we're ever going to learn to get along with them, going to their weddings and making small talk while eating barbecued lamb won't be enough. We have to reach out and touch the truth, even if it hurts. Even if it may be futile.”

“You don't say!” Rivlin glanced at his watch. “Well, in the first place, the truth is not so simple. And second, you don't flaunt it at a wedding, not even in fancy Arabic.”

This time the hurt flashed from the lenses of Akri's metal-framed glasses. Rivlin patted his shoulder.

“Look, now isn't the time for it. I have to get going. We'll postpone the discussion—but not for long. I'll be your next-door neighbor for the next few weeks. My sister-in-law is arriving in Israel today, and my wife has kicked me out of my study. Tomorrow or the day after we'll have a nice, quiet chat. Not about your truth, or about my truth, but about truth in general.”

A
LTHOUGH HIS SISTER-IN-LAW'S
flight was scheduled to land in five hours, there was still, the secretary told him, no arrival time—a first indication of a possible delay. This made it possible for him to drive to Jerusalem with his mind at rest. Indeed, after leaving his car in the hospital parking lot, he detoured to the cafeteria for a bite to eat before taking the large elevator to the third floor. Not that he was hungry. However, he feared that his encounter with his old teacher's illness might spoil his appetite for later.

At first he thought he had been given the wrong room number. The room he entered was small and dark and had only one bed, its bare mattress folded in half as though someone had recently died. His
heart sank. Could Tedeschi have made a terrible mistake and gone too far? A moment later, though, he heard the low drone of a radio and noticed that the room had a niche in which the patient, hooked up to three brightly colored transfusions, was lying with his eyes shut. The tops and bottoms of Tedeschi's pajamas did not match. The pants, on which were stamped the name of the hospital, hung agape around his private parts. The shirt was his own; Rivlin recognized it from previous sick calls. The renowned Arabist seemed to be in a state not so much of unconsciousness as of anticonsciousness. His round face, branded by the Argentine sun, was flame red. Only his thinning but still boyish hair, dancing lightly in the breeze of a small fan aimed directly at him, looked untouched.

The female broadcaster finished the news bulletin and began to interview several politicians, seeking to embroil them in an argument. It seemed doubtful that Tedeschi could hear the altercation, much less follow it, although he was usually addicted to the airwaves, which was why his wife had left the transistor on in her absence. He was breathing with difficulty, choked by a severe asthma that was either holding back or forcing up—Rivlin could not tell which—the phlegm gurgling from his depths, prevented by the blue oxygen mask on his face from clearing his lungs with one of the violent coughing fits, commonly commenced after finishing a lecture and taking his seat in the hall, that had shocked many an audience of Orientalists. Although Rivlin had seen the old mentor from whom he had learned so much (however dated some of it now was) in such twilight zones before, and although he had always been able, by pressing on the lever of Tedeschi's fine sense of irony, to lift him over the awkward hump of his self-pity, now, facing the red flame kindled in the Argentine, he felt less sure of himself.

“Carlo?” he whispered, calling the old man by his first name, as had Tedeschi's teachers, Professors Benet, Maier, and Goitein, who had taught the young Italian in the delicately arched buildings of the Hebrew university campus on Mount scopus in the days of the British Mandate. Although he had been forced to take a Hebrew name upon joining a mortar unit at the outbreak of Israel's War of Independence, during which the old campus was lost, Tedeschi, now
a rotund, energetic young teaching assistant, became Carlo again in the university's temporary postwar accommodations and remained so at the new campus at Giv'at Ram, where he soon received his professorship.

The sick man opened one eye and shut it immediately. Rivlin thought Tedeschi recognized him but lacked the strength, or so it seemed, to emerge from his fog and explain (let alone justify) his condition. Most likely he was waiting for his wife—the loyal impresario of his illnesses—to return and bring Rivlin up to date, with her usual brutally frank histrionics, on her husband's condition and hopeless prognosis. Once she had gone on long enough, she would let Rivlin range far afield to the latest academic gossip. That alone, he knew, was capable of rousing his old mentor, not only from his stupor, but even from the grave.

And yet he restrained himself and said nothing, his eyes taking in, with a mixture of curiosity and slight nausea, the ugly yellow puncture marks from the intravenous needles in the arms of this man who as a youngster, in 1939, after the signing of the Hitler-Mussolini pact, had fled Turin for Palestine and wandered there from one lonely asylum to another before beginning the career that was to win him an international reputation as an expert on the decadent but long-lived Ottoman Empire.

“Just what do you call this, Carlo? What's going on?” Rivlin asked softly again, somewhat frightened by the fiery shade of unfamiliar, astonishingly strong red in Tedeschi's face. It was as if the Israeli Orientalist, having gone to the end of the world, had there been transformed into an Oriental himself.

Again one eye opened. Weary and irritable, it quickly shut once more, to protest the impatience that refused to wait for the woman who, with true dramatic flair, would tell the tale of his latest attack. Meanwhile, he stretched his short legs. From between his feet, still clad in the blue plimsolls given to travelers on El Al's business class, fell an anthology of Jahaliya love poems. Finely penciled in its margins were the notes of Hannah Tedeschi, who just a year ago had published a selection of wonderfully translated verse from this same volume.

Rivlin glanced at his watch. If his sister-in-law's flight was on time, he would have to leave for the airport in half an hour. Who would give him credit for his visit if the sick man went on clinging to his comatose state? Leaving the room, he roamed the corridor until he found Hannah, who was talking animatedly to one of the nurses.

“Yochanan? Here so soon? What was the rush? I told you in my message that Carlo wasn't going anywhere.”

The visitor smiled at this strange woman, Tedeschi's second wife, who had been smitten by him as a student, after his first wife was committed to a mental hospital. As young as she was, she soon adopted her stormy husband's eccentricities. Cultivating his medical problems was her way of avoiding her predecessor's fate.

“This time,” Rivlin said, embracing her loosely, “you've managed to scare me. I thought it best”—a trace of sarcasm crept into his voice—“to get here before Carlo jumped out of bed for some new conference or expedition.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Hannah Tedeschi said indignantly. “What conference? What expedition? Stop being so cynical. Can't you believe what you see with your own eyes?” The cold glitter in her own eyes signaled her satisfaction that Rivlin, Tedeschi's oldest student and close and loving friend, did not take her husband's condition too seriously.

“But I do believe it,” he replied, hugging her more tightly. “I certainly do. He looks terrible. He has the most awful color. What do the doctors say?”

“The doctors,” Hannah snorted, “don't know a thing. That's the whole problem.” Only the constant need to minister to her husband had kept her, the wonderful translator, from an academic career as brilliant as his.

“It's the same story each time,” Rivlin could not resist pointing out. “You go from doctor to doctor, and from one treatment and medicine to another, and nothing ever comes of it. That's because you won't face up to the truth.”

“And just what might that be?” Hannah snapped, aggressively opening the door to the sick man's room.

“That it's purely psychological. It's entirely in your heads, his and yours.” The eternally rebellious pupil regretted his words immediately.