The Liberated Bride (43 page)

T
HREE 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.

“Why not? It's not a wonderful play?”

T
HOUGH 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.

Ephraim Akri groaned in his sleep. To Rivlin it sounded like a general protest at the sorry state of the Middle East. Taking advantage of the break in Akri's slumber, he asked the new department head if anyone had tried getting in touch with him.

“No one,” Akri avowed, his eyes shut. Discreetly turning his naked back, which was as smooth as a bar of chocolate, he added hoarsely:

“But don't worry . . .”

In that case, Rivlin thought with fresh anxiety, she's picked up the gauntlet I threw down. She, too, wants to loosen the reins of our love.
Not, as I do, for Ofer's sake, but for her own, to keep aloof from the mistakes that I've made and will make. And if that's what she's up to, why did I bother making two nights out of one by hurrying here to see if she had called? I could have stayed in the basement. The last thing he saw, as his mind went blank and he fell into a short but powerful and delicious sleep, was the angular face of the tall proprietress.

I
T WAS APPARENT
as soon as Rivlin entered the lecture hall that the postponement had been for the worse. The political-science faculty that had come to hear Tedeschi the night before, only to be told he was in the hospital, had no way of knowing, as did his colleagues in Near Eastern studies, of his propensity for miraculous recoveries. When he mounted the dais, therefore, spreading out his notes with their new approach, barely a dozen people were in the audience, and these included his wife, the two colleagues who had slept in his home, and three young political scientists, the organizers of the event, who had hurriedly mustered several secretaries and typists so that the renowned polymath wouldn't be demoralized. Tedeschi, however, was unflustered. Seeing Suissa senior enter the lecture hall in his gray fedora, along with Suissa junior's widow, he gave them a friendly wave and invited them to sit in the front row. Then he glanced at the sunlight pouring through the window, stripped off his jacket like a prizefighter—unselfconsciously baring two puny white arms riddled with yellow intravenous marks—and began in a stentorian voice to relate the story of a play produced in 1867 in a little theater in the town of Antakiyya, not far from the Syrian border.

Though punch-drunk from a night divided between two such different and distant beds, Rivlin was all concentration, as if he had instantly reverted to the loyal and eager student of thirty years ago. And indeed Tedeschi started off in fine form, using his narrative skills to introduce his subject with a concise but vivid survey of the Turkish hill town's geography, history, archaeology, and sociology, which broke down into Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, each group with its distinctive occupations and religious and cultural institutions.

His tone growing dramatic, the Jerusalem professor invited his little audience to join him in entering a small structure that housed the town theater. The details grew thicker, as if he were now sketching not a distant century but a recent experience. Before raising the curtain on the stage, he described the layout of the little auditorium, the seats, the audience, and even the smell of grilled meats and the steam rising from the glasses of tea.

Rivlin, feeling a keen intellectual delight such as he had not experienced in ages, sensed in his old mentor's glance, which came to rest on him increasingly, that the sleepless night's revisions had been for his sake. Tedeschi had wanted to show him, the heir apparent, how a research project bogged down in dry, recalcitrant facts could be revived by a single, bold artistic stroke—at least enough to yield an article for a jubilee volume.

The curtain went up. He had never realized what a born actor his old teacher was. After reading the list of the cast, a medley of comically mangled Turkish, Arabic, and Greek names, the Jerusalem professor declaimed the opening lines with a comic leer, reciting them first in Turkish and then in a free Hebrew translation:

O despicable thief!
Where hast thou hidden my daughter?
Thou hast enchanted her, damn thy soul!
What sane man would not understand, as I do,
That, if not for thy enchantments,
No lovely maiden would have spurned such fine suitors
And fled her father for a black body,
Terrifying, not pleasuresome, like thine?

“
Othello!
” Hannah Tedeschi—who had not known of her husband's change of plans—cried with childish glee.

“Right you are, madam, as always,” the lecturer confirmed, with a bow to his wife's sagacity. “Perhaps our adaptation of this famous play can help us to understand, better than historical abstractions, the shift that occurred in the Turks' perceptions of the Arabs as early as the mid-nineteenth century—a shift from an attitude of contempt, disdain, and disregard to one of suspicion, hostility, and even fear,
especially among the upper classes. This is why, in the popular theater of Antakiyya, a town close to Syria, the Turkish translator and adapter of
Othello
chose to make of Shakespeare's tragically powerful black man, a figure who appears like a hurricane from beyond the bounds of civilization with no tangible national or religious identity—yes, to make of this wonderful and terrible man, whose danger-fraught life has caused a nobleman's daughter to fall in love with him—an addled, pompous, absurd general from the desert, a black Arab of unbounded ambition who joins the Venetians as a mercenary against the Turks and barbarously thinks that an accidental victory in a trivial battle entitles him to possess a paragon of Christian womanhood, even though she is culturally and psychologically worlds above him.”

The doyen of Orientalists paused, his heart going out to his old student, who, though now a full professor himself, albeit at a somewhat provincial university, was sitting open-mouthed in the middle of the morning, gaping like a freshman. To help him relax after a hard night of bed-hopping, he now faced him and explained, in precise, analytic language, how the Turkish adapter had killed two Arab birds with one stone—for not only had he made an Arab of Othello, he had done the same with his treacherous adjutant Iago, now known as Yassin. The latter, however, was an Arab of a different stripe: not a black savage from the desert, but a shrewd, educated, cunning Lebanese urbanite who knew the hidden codes of his Bedouin compatriot and used them to plant in him the maddening fantasy of being cuckolded by the unworldly Christian with whom he was mismatched.

And thus, moving from play to play and theater to theater, the Jerusalem professor demonstrated how already in the middle of the nineteenth century, even though nothing had changed in official Turkish policy, the sinking empire was permeated by feelings of enmity toward and estrangement from its Arab subjects, now seen as potential traitors. Little wonder, then, that these fears turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy at the end of World War I in the form of the Great Arab Revolt—which, aided by the British, brought four hundred years of Ottoman rule crashing down. Indeed, Tedeschi concluded, with a roguish wink, the bad feeling between the two peoples
has persisted to this day, giving the Jews some hope that they, too, might find a corner of their own in the Levant.