The Liberated Bride (45 page)

Y
ET NOT EVEN LOVE
, real or potential, could wake the Parisian from his Israeli sleep. He's so used to sleeping by himself that he doesn't even dream anyone might be waiting for him to wake up, Rivlin thought
sorrowfully, and proceeded to cancel all his morning appointments. He was hoping for a relaxed conversation with his son, not only to put the tensions between them to rest, but also, with the help of his night at the hotel, to uncover some new lead. Meanwhile, sans glasses, computer, notes, or reference books, he sat in his study ruminating in a giant scrawl about the Algerian language problem.

. . . And so we have a situation in which different sectors of social activity, having no common language, remain totally distinct. Classical Arabic is the language of religion. French is used for economic, administrative, and scientific purposes. North African Arabic and Berber are spoken in the street and in the family. This is the great curse of Algerian identity. It's not that such an identity does not exist, but that it is linguistically fragmented beyond any possibility of a synthesis. Thus French-speaking Algerians will say, “Ah, I completely fail to understand those Arab fundamentalists,” while Arabic-speaking Algerians think the French-speakers are neocolonialists in the service of France. No Arabic-speaker believes anyone can love Algeria in French, no Berber-speaker believes anyone can love it in Arabic, and no French-speaker believes any intellectual life at all is possible in Arabic. Each side sees the others as an alien, hostile force. Such an Algeria is an Algeria at war.

The current civil war in Algeria is more a war of languages fighting for cultural space than it is a war between religious and secular society. The fundamentalist Arab must oppose the written civilization of the West with the Koran because that is the only sacred text he knows. The real choice facing Algeria, therefore, is: French or the Koran.

The writing flowed easily, carrying him along almost blindly, so that he forgot to keep his letters large and was soon unable to read what he had written. Although this had the advantage of making corrections or revisions impossible, such writing could not prevent him from thinking of his sleeping son. He rose from his desk, descended a few steps of the duplex, and stood midway between its floors, listening for a sign of life. But it was not until noon that the sound of water in the bathroom told him that the visitor from Paris was up.

They sat facing each other in the kitchen over a breakfast that turned gradually into lunch. Rivlin felt his way cautiously, seeking to cross no forbidden lines. Both he and Ofer avoided mentioning their harsh phone conversation, and Rivlin, afraid Hagit might have carelessly told Ofer about his second visit to the hotel, said nothing about the first—that springtime condolence call that now, at the end of a tedious summer, seemed so distant. And while he would have liked dearly to tell the spurned husband how much the new proprietress missed him and how she had lauded his architectural judgment, he knew very well that an allusion to his third, underground visit would never be forgiven.

And so, turning to the future, he tried finding out from his son when he planned to return to Israel. The night security guard of the Jewish Agency, however, was too much in thrall to the past to have any patience for the future. Dressed in old gym shorts and a T-shirt, his face unshaven and his eyes swimming from unsatisfying slumber, he replied that he had no plans. To listen to him, Rivlin remarked, one might think he was an adolescent still needing to experience life, rather than a grown man of over thirty. Not at all, Ofer replied. There were many new developments in the field of kitchen and restaurant design, both practical and theoretical, with which he ought to acquaint himself before leaving Paris. Meanwhile, gastronome that he now was, he criticized the housekeeper's pot roast, which he had eaten with relish in his benighted pre-Paris days.

“Why not make us a meal to demonstrate what you've learned over there?” Rivlin suggested.

Ofer was not keen on the idea. He and Tsakhi were returning from Sinai on Saturday, and on Monday he was flying back to Paris. That left barely a day.

“A day,” his father said, “should be enough.”

“We'll see,” was the only commitment received.

Ofer went to phone his brother and came back with the news that Tsakhi's request for leave had been approved and that a soldier under his command, who lived across the bay in Acre, had enough diving equipment for the two of them. He would have to drive there now to pick it up.

Rivlin, thinking sadly that his son should be looking at baby carriages rather than at diving equipment, gave him the keys to the old jalopy. Soon Hagit came home from court. Setting the table for a second lunch, he allowed her to tell him about the two-to-one verdict, dismiss his criticisms of Ofer, and go to the bedroom to nap while he returned to his study in the hope of recapturing the morning's inspiration. But the writing that had gone so easily then had dried up and now felt pointless.

The front door opened and shut with a bang. It was Tsakhi. Rivlin went down to set the table for a third time. Although the young officer had already eaten at his base, he agreed to eat again for his father's sake. And in the end, still in his uniform with its officer's bars, he did so heartily.

“Listen, Tsakhi,” Rivlin said. “You and Ofer will be spending a few days in another world. We're happy that he wants to spend most of his vacation with you. Ever since he went to France and you've been in the army, you haven't had a chance to be together. Now you'll have a few unpressured days on the beach. It will be an opportunity to find out what happened to him. What's bothering him. Why he can't find another woman.”

His son's large eyes regarded him attentively.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

“All right. So you'll try tactfully to find out what happened. How and why his marriage fell apart. Maybe there was some mistake . . .”

“What kind of mistake?”

“Even a fantasy.”

“A fantasy?” The young officer seemed alarmed.

“I said maybe. What do we know about it? Nothing. But in the peace and quiet of a beach in Sinai, you can find out more. Okay?”

Tsakhi gave no sign whether it was okay or not. He just went on listening with the same concentration, although by now looking distinctly uneasy.

“You'll have lots of time to find out—just do it unobtrusively—why he's so secretive. You should know that he loves you and trusts you without limit. You can let us know afterward, in a general way,
what he told you, so that we can think of how to help him. You know I'm worried sick about him. Do you follow me?”

“Of course.”

“And you promise to try?”

The young officer put down his knife and fork and said nothing. His fretful glance made Rivlin think of the rabbit he had seen hop out of the bushes on his walk near his son's base.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

“Then you'll do it for me? You promise?”

And still the young officer said nothing. Not wanting to hurt or embarrass his father, he kept his large eyes on him, their pain and anxiety growing. Only now did it dawn on Rivlin what his silence meant.

O
N HIS WAY
to the university the next day, he stopped by the optician's to demand the speedy delivery of his new glasses. Five days had gone by since his old pair was broken. “You mean demolished,” the optician smirked, promising that during his lunch break he would fetch them himself from the lab in Haifa Bay.

It was the summer-vacation doldrums, and the campus was quiet. Ephraim Akri was in Florida, at a conference sponsored by the University of Miami to mark the twentieth anniversary of Edward Said's
Orientalism.
One of the conference's organizers, having read some of Akri's articles in various semischolarly magazines, had been impressed by their metahistorical sweep and intellectual boldness. Hearing that the man was a Middle Easterner not only by birth but by looks and had a remarkable command of Arabic despite being Jewish, he had immediately invited him as a counterweight to the Palestinian professor's disciples, who were terrorizing the academic community.

Consequently, although the fall semester was still far away, Rivlin had been asked to be the temporary department head, if only to prevent the university's dean and rector from taking advantage of Akri's absence to pirate a disputed half-time teaching slot. Reluctant to use
Akri's room, Rivlin functioned from the main office, where he'd had to ask the two secretaries to read the mail to him. He was in the middle of tearing up and throwing out some routine circulars and giving instructions to the pair, who seemed glad to have him back, when in walked Dr. Miller and asked to have a private talk. He had just received, he told Rivlin, a tempting offer from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba and had come to inquire about his long-deferred promotion. Did he have a future in Haifa, or should he accept the invitation from down south?

Rivlin refrained from revealing that he was chairman of the secret committee considering Miller's case. Promising rather vaguely that the promotion was on its way, he pointed to the window and said, with a smile:

“If I were you I'd be patient before moving to the desert—if not for the university's sake, then at least for this view's.”

The promising young scholar, however, was not appeased by the bluish hills of the Galilee. Not even the gleaming expanse of the Mediterranean could make up for the delay in his promotion. And since his keen analytical mind told him that the guileful professor was on the secret committee, he had come to present him with an ultimatum. Rivlin nodded, remembering Miller's bleached-out wife, who had been pregnant at Samaher's wedding. When, he inquired discreetly, was she giving birth?

“Giving birth?” The young scholar glanced askance at him.

Rivlin felt his cheeks burn.

“Excuse me. It's just that . . . at Samaher's wedding . . . I thought that . . . or at least I guessed . . .”

He had guessed correctly, Miller told him. Unfortunately, the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.

“I'm terribly sorry,” the Orientalist said, without feeling sorry in the least. He promised to speak to the dean without waiting for Akri to come back from Miami and asked in return, with a twinge of anxiety, whether his analytically minded colleague would care to look at a recently written first draft of an article on Algeria. Not that Algeria was Miller's field, but there were some theoretical points that might interest him.

His head felt heavy. Late last night he and his wife had driven their two sons to the bus for Eilat, after which he had been unable to fall asleep. Not wishing to usurp the department head's armchair, he took the cup of coffee given him by the secretaries and went to his room at the end of the corridor. There he shut the door and dialed Fu'ad.

“
Wallah,
Professor!” boomed the deep voice of the maître d' from Jerusalem. “I looked everywhere and couldn't find it. But if you'd like, I can write a new . . . what's the word?”

“Elegy.”

“Elegy? Sorry. The same as at a funeral. That must be why I can't remember it.”

Over the phone came the sound of a woman's laughter.

“Who was that?” Rivlin asked. “Let me talk to her.”

“So,” the voice chortled, “you ran away in the middle of the night! What happened to you? Don't tell me you were afraid of the tax authorities.”

He joined her laughter. “For a second I thought there was an earthquake.”

“You're not the only one who's imagined that. But believe me, all that ever quakes down there is one's heart.”

“How is your cold?”

“Thank you for remembering it. It has no time to get better. Every little problem at this hotel ends up in my lap.”

“That's your own fault.”

“Naturally.”

“You know,” he surprised himself by saying, “Ofer is here from Paris for a week.”

“Then tell him to come. Galya left two cartons of his things in the basement.”

“Cartons?”

“Yes. She came back from abroad bursting with energy and started housecleaning. Either he takes them or I throw them out. I'm not turning this hotel into a warehouse.”

“I'll tell him.”

“Why don't you come, too? That will be twice as nice.”

“I'll see,” he said, his heart skipping a beat. “Let me have Fu'ad for a minute.”

“
Aiwa, ya habibi.
”
^*

“
Ala kul hal, dawwar ala l'marthiyi l'adimi.
”
^†

“
Min shanak hatta taht al-ard
.”
^‡

He hung up and sat thinking of the unreal night in Jerusalem. His coffee had no taste, and he went to the cafeteria to look for a stronger brew. Although it was vacation time, the cafeteria was packed with older people who were taking summer extension courses.

He sat and sipped his coffee slowly, gazing idly at a dark-skinned boy of about ten who was circulating among the tables. Noticing a half-eaten pita, the boy stopped, looked around, snatched it from its plate, and swallowed it quickly before putting on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and heading for the nearby library.

Rashid is here, Rivlin thought. He jumped up and followed the boy, who was stopped by a guard at the entrance to the library. “It's all right, he's with me,” Rivlin said. He put a hand on Rasheed's neck and pushed him through the library door.

He was not mistaken. The boy recognized the Jewish professor who had eaten his mother's bean soup and like a hunting dog led him up and down the floors of the library and in and out of the narrow stacks. In the end they found Rashid, squatting on his haunches while looking on the bottom shelf for a book listed on a scrap of paper.

“
Lakeyt kaman el-yahudi hada,”
^§
the boy called to his uncle, as though he had indeed been sent to fetch Rivlin.

Rashid did not seem at all surprised by Rivlin's appearance. Perhaps he had known that sooner or later the Jewish passenger would again need his Arab driver. Still squatting, he handed the Orientalist the catalog number.

“Can you find this?”

“What is it?”

“A play,
The Dybbuk.
Have you heard of it?”

“The
Dybbuk?
” Rivlin burst into laughter. “Samaher sent you to bring her
The Dybbuk?
”

This time, however, Rashid hadn't come to the university for his cousin, but only on her advice. He was in the library in connection with the coming song and poetry festival in Ramallah. It was going to be a happening, with no politics or debates. A big new cultural center, named for the prominent Palestinian educator Khalil es-Sakakini, had recently opened in the West Bank city north of Jerusalem. Well-known poets like Mahmoud Darwish, who came from Amman to give readings, had already appeared there. There would be singers from Gaza and Hebron, and Jewish vocalists too. Perhaps even the Lebanese nun, for the Abuna had gone to her Lebanese convent to ask her to cheer the Christians of Palestine again. She would sing, not prayers, but folk songs, and perhaps even have one of her fainting fits.

“If she promises to faint,” Rivlin said enthusiastically, “I'll come.”

“Of course you will. You'll bring your wife. Why shouldn't she hear all the wonderful music? You can bring your friends too, the more the merrier. Everyone is welcome. It's for all believers in coexistence. No politics. No debates. No history. No who's right and who's wrong. Just songs and poems in Arabic and Hebrew. They even asked us to put something on the program that would be traditionally Jewish. Samaher thought we should surprise everyone with
The Dybbuk,
because—so she says—it's the
Hamlet
of the Jews.”

The Orientalist guffawed, making the somber Arab boy stare at him.

“And Samaher? Where has she disappeared to?”

“She hasn't disappeared anywhere. She's sad. In the village they think it's because of the grade she never got.”

“She never got it because she never finished her work. She keeps dragging it out, as usual. Let her do it once and for all. It isn't that difficult. But it can't just be oral summaries, because then I have no way of knowing what's in the texts. I need to see at least one entire story, translated from beginning to end. I promise to give her a grade then.”

“I'll tell her,” Rashid said.

He reached out to pat the boy, who seemed to be trying to follow the Hebrew. It would be his second language—if he were ever allowed back into Israel.