The Liberated Bride

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.

The two Israelis watched the children lick their ice cream, then gradually shifted their attention to the ruddy-faced old man. He looked German or Italian and might have been a banker or an architect, or perhaps a local politician. His young companion, to judge by the deference he showed, was not a relative or friend, but, more likely, a student or assistant.

After a while the man rose with the help of a gold-handled cane, donned a Panama hat, paid the bill, and left with his companion. But instead of heading downhill for the cable car, he took the younger man by the arm and set out for the bald peak. Although the sun was already low in the sky, he strode slowly onward, leaning on his cane while continuing his conversation, as if fulfilling some obligation toward nature or the mountain, the distant summit of which gleamed with a last crown of snow.

The two Israelis regarded the elderly gentleman intently, expecting at any moment to see him tire and turn back. The path he was on zigzagged at a gentle grade up the mountain’s bare, arid flank. He kept walking up it, the younger man at his side or falling slightly behind. Unhurriedly he climbed, in a purpling light that the setting sun would soon take with it.

“Doesn’t he remind you of Tedeschi?” Rivlin had mused aloud.

Hagit’s eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

The elderly gentleman and his young companion vanished in the late-afternoon haze. Were they still heading up the mountain? But where to? The minutes passed and they did not return. The two Israelis looked around them. It was time to take the funicular back down to the darkening valley. “Imagine,” Rivlin said to his wife as they skimmed the treetops between sky and earth, “what would have happened if there had been no Fascism or Nazism and no Second World War. Carlo would have remained in a peaceful Europe and ended up looking like that man — a bit recherché but perfectly respectable, ruddy with health and well-being, strolling in the Dolomites in a summer suit, with a gold-handled cane, until he vanished in the haze. Arabs and Jews would have been the furthest things from his mind.”

Was that a sign, the haze at the bend in the path two years ago?

THE FUNERAL, set for 5 P.M., was postponed until six because of a logjam at the cemetery. The Rivlins spent the day in Jerusalem. The Orientalist helped with the funeral arrangements while the judge stayed on the telephone, calling the Tedeschis’ friends and acquaintances and urging them in a quiet but authoritative manner to come pay their last respects. Later in the day she went to buy flowers and food, and fresh socks and underwear for herself and her husband to wear after showering. Rivlin, however, was repelled by the old, peeling bathroom with its assorted toothbrushes and shaving implements, and untidy laundry basket and medicine chest. Picking up a broken comb to which still clung some old hairs, he dropped it in a fright, quickly changed his underwear, sprinkled himself with aftershave lotion from an old bottle, and said to his wife:

“Don’t expect me to shower. It’s too much for me.”

Soon after arriving in Palestine at the start of World War II, Tedeschi, as a statement that he would never return to Europe, had purchased a burial plot in a small cemetery in Sanhedriya, then an ordinary Jerusalem neighborhood. Subsequently, it had turned into a crowded ultra-Orthodox ghetto, in which the cemetery, grown larger, remained the only open green space. Now, obeying judicial authority, a sizable crowd had gathered and was making its way in falling darkness along the congested aisles between the tombstones, or else cutting through or climbing over them. At its head walked the president of Hebrew University with the rector and the dean, followed by Tedeschi’s fellow faculty members, some senior librarians, and Orientalists from other institutions and organizations — including the Mossad, representatives of which had sometimes consulted the Jerusalem polymath about the lessons to be learned from Arab history. Missing were only the Arabs themselves, not one of whom was in evidence, although Tedeschi had liked to boast of his Arab friends.

Rivlin, standing by the fresh grave, noted that it was the last empty one in its row. Tedeschi, in planning for his own death, had forgotten to think of his wife’s. The liberated translatoress, Rivlin thought sadly, would have to fend for herself. Although she had wanted him to give the eulogy, he had begged off. “Let the president or rector do it,” he told her. “In cemeteries they outrank me. There’ll be other chances to eulogize Carlo. Today I’ll recite the mourner’s prayer. And you should think of some parting words to say yourself.”

Indeed, Rivlin enjoyed the hush that descended on everyone, from the president down, as he read the kaddish in a strong, clear voice from an imitation-parchment scroll handed him by the undertaker, who shone a little flashlight on it. The translatoress, though freed at last from her marital bonds, was too flustered to speak. Taking the flashlight from the undertaker, she pulled from her pocket an ancient elegy from the Age of Ignorance, recently translated by her. “You’ll forgive me,” she apologized to the distinguished gathering. “This is what I know how to do.”

In hard, quick tones she read some lines by the sixth-century Arabic poet Thabata Sharan, put in the mouth of his mother after the death of a son:

You traveled far to run from death, but it caught up with you.

If only I knew how you fell into its hands.

Were you ill, alone without a friend,

Or did your enemies trick you into it?

How harsh the world

In which you may not answer me.

Your silence makes me

My own comforter.

O my heart,

Stand still a while!

I grieve that my soul

Was not taken forever

In place of yours.

1.

EARLY THAT WINTER the Rivlins were informed by Ofra and Yo’el that the two of them were planning to be in Israel on their way to a UN conference in Singapore. It would be a brief stopover, made possible by a ticket from Europe to the Far East.

The stopover was originally planned for five days. While the judge looked for ways to lessen her caseload, Rivlin hurriedly reserved a hotel room on the Carmel and obtained a list of that week’s concerts and performances from a ticket agency. Yet in the end, various constraints and obligations shortened the five days to three.

“Well,” Rivlin said generously, “if it’s only three nights, let’s cancel the hotel reservation and give them my study. We’ll want to spend as much time with them as we can.”

But the three nights did not survive intact, either. The visit was cut again, this time to twenty-four hours.

“If that’s the most your beloved sister can afford to give you,” Rivlin told his disappointed wife, “let’s take a day off from work and spend it and the night by Lake Kinneret.”

Two weeks before his in-laws’ arrival, however, a change in international flights scotched this plan too. The stopover was reduced to a few hours.

“This is already an insult,” Rivlin proclaimed, with an odd gaiety. “Not to Israel — it will manage without them. But what about us? Is that how little we mean to them? I intend to lodge an official complaint at the airport.”

“Just don’t say anything to spoil their visit,” warned his wife, who had no sense of humor when it came to her sister.

Once again they were in the arrivals hall of the airport with its plashing fountains. The two globe-trotters, tired but traveling light with only their hand luggage, were the first of their flight to emerge from customs. “It’s marvelous, even spiritual,” Yo’el said, giving his welcomers a big hug, “to enter Israel with only a light bag.”

“Yes,” Rivlin agreed. “Unfortunately, that’s the bag we’re left holding when you leave.”

“Stow it,” Hagit said, embracing Ofra.

Ofra, thin, pale, and guilt-ridden, threw her arms around her sister and promised that on their way back from Singapore they would come for longer. Meanwhile, they had decided to spend their few hours in Jerusalem, if only for the sake of the venerable aunt, whose survival from one stopover to the next was far from assured.

It was storming. Rivlin, wanting to make sure no one complained about the weather, praised the badly needed rain. They debated stopping for lunch in Abu-Ghosh at Fu’ad’s uncle’s restaurant, which was such a favorite of Yo’el’s that it almost seemed that the entire stopover had been planned with it in mind. Yet since everyone had already eaten, the visitors on the plane and the Rivlins at the airport, it was decided to postpone the restaurant meal until supper and make do with coffee and cake at a roadside diner.

Although the two sisters spoke regularly over the telephone several times a week, not even the longest and most audible of long-distance calls could compete with a face-to-face talk by the roaring fireplace of a diner. The conversation touched on everything, old, new, remembered, and forgotten, and when his in-laws asked about Ofer, Rivlin replied by bewailing his eldest son’s solitude in Paris. Ofer, he said, was still not over his divorce. Before he could proceed any further, however, Hagit changed the subject to the festival in Ramallah, her account of which — especially of the Lebanese nun’s fainting fit and the Arabic production of The Dybbuk—fascinated the visitors. “From now on,” Yo’el said, shaking his head with sorrow at Hagit’s description of Tedeschi’s death, “you’ll have to live your married life without its best man.” They smiled bittersweet smiles, and a tear shone in Ofra’s eye.

She went on dabbing at her tears until, eternally thin and pale, she gave Hagit a last, clinging embrace by the departures gate. So guilty and upset was she over their short visit that Rivlin forbore to comment. Why rub it in?

There had been more tears at their aunt’s, who was bedridden with a bad cold. The old lady, though her usual lucid, ironic self, told her beloved niece not to kiss her and concentrated on Yo’el, whom she had not seen in years, while sparing Rivlin her usual third degree. Perfunctorily expressing her sorrow at the death of his old teacher, she turned to the UN consultant and quizzed him about his conference in Singapore and the names of the participating countries.

Yo’el patiently reviewed the entire list of them. The old lady nodded her white head to confirm the existence of those countries she had heard of and inquired about those she had not. “And you, Yo’el?” she asked with a faint smile. “Will you be representing little Israel?”

“No,” the Third World expert replied. “My clients are ideas. Israel will be represented by its foreign ministry.”

The old lady frowned with disappointment. “What a shame!” she exclaimed. “You still look so Israeli with your khaki pants and your sandals. And that old safari jacket! I remember it from before I was taken ill….”

Yo’el beamed at her. “I’ll still be Israeli even when there’s no more Israel,” he declared. And regretting the remark at once, he bent to kiss her, cold and all.

“All right,” Rivlin said, interrupting the patriotic scene. “Let’s leave the women to their own devices and come back in an hour.”

2.

IT WAS 4 P.M. The rain was still coming down. “What would you like to do?” Rivlin asked his brother-in-law.

“It’s up to you, Yochi,” Yo’el said. “I haven’t been in Jerusalem for so long that anywhere you take me will be new.”

Rivlin thought for a moment. “In that case,” he said, “let’s go to a place I haven’t seen either. Whenever I’ve been there, it’s been closed. Maybe it will be open in your honor. An hour is all we need.”

They drove to Talpiyot, parked near the hotel, and walked to the gray Agnon House with its barred windows. Though it again looked deserted, it was, to Rivlin’s surprise, open to visitors. The person in charge, a small, vivacious woman of about forty, was standing on a stepladder in the kitchen, painting a wall.

“A living soul at last!” the Orientalist declared. “What is this? Just because the city doesn’t charge admission, does this place always have to be closed?”

“For you, we’ll even charge admission.” The woman, who wore her hair in an Orthodox-style puff, grinned at him.

“Admission to an author’s house?” Rivlin was in a fighting mood. “What for, to pay your salary?”

She laughed. “Good Lord! If my salary came from admission fees, I’d have starved to death long ago.”

Rivlin paid thirty shekels for himself and his guest and declined the offer of an information sheet. The two men walked silently around a large, nondescript room, the famous author’s salon that was now used for lectures about him, and climbed a steep staircase to his study. Its walls were lined with books, mostly large rabbinic volumes. Standing on a worn rug was a small, old desk with an antique typewriter, a museum piece in its own right. The room was cold, and an elevated, built-in fireplace, though its blue tiles enlivened the gloom, did not look to Rivlin as though it had been used even in the author’s lifetime.

The room had a single window looking out on the yard. Beneath it, bulky and graceless, was the renowned lectern on which the Nobel Prize winner — in awe, it was said, of the Hebrew language — had written his prodigious output of novels and stories standing up. A sheet of paper covered with his tiny, nebulous script lay on its slanted top. Beside that were his eyeglasses. Rivlin, not daring to try them on, picked them up and immediately put them down again.

The rain outside beat down harder, casting a thick pall. The lamp in the room shone feebly. Yo’el took out his reading glasses and perused the titles on the shelves, now and then taking down a book to look at it. An expert on Third World agriculture and the effects on it of global warming, he had a wide range of interests and encouraged Rivlin to send him Israeli magazines and periodicals, as well as new volumes of Hebrew fiction and poetry, which he avidly read on his long flights. It was his way of keeping in touch with the country, his up-to-date knowledge of which often surprised people.

“How Spartan it is here,” he remarked.

“Yes,” Rivlin said. “Agnon was said to have been a great miser.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Yo’el came passionately to the author’s defense. “It’s not a question of money. It’s an attitude toward life. Look at these books. Some were expensive. There are even rare manuscripts. It’s not miserliness that you’re looking at. It’s a radically modest way of life. I’ve seen the same thing in the houses of other real intellectuals, East and West. I have the greatest respect for it.”

Rivlin took a large, heavy volume from a shelf, glanced at it, and put it back. “Just the title page puts me to sleep,” he said.

“What can you expect? An eternal people like the Jews didn’t go around producing best-sellers. But don’t think that the sacred literature of other peoples is any more lively. And if you look at where all these books come from, you’ll find an amazing variety of periods and countries. Some were printed in places that even the geographers have never heard of. They may seem tedious now, and perhaps they always were, but for better or for worse they’re still the context for many things — including the great works of the man whose house we’re in. That’s why he preferred to spend his money on them and not on rugs or paintings.”

“Far be it from me…” Rivlin left the sentence unfinished. His brother-in-law, whose nationalist ardor was satisfied with seven hours in his native land, sometimes baffled him.

“Especially when I’m in places where no Jews ever lived,” Yo’el continued, “I think of the rabbis, who purged their discourse of all historical concreteness to make a distilled, abstract essence of it even when dealing with the petty details of life. It transcends time and place, which why it fits together so naturally in a library like this, assembled to meet the specifications of its owner.”

“Which were?”

“I don’t know. I only know that the man who worked in this room and consulted these books knew how to get the most out of them and to make the connections between them. He wasn’t interested in history, but in something else… something more important…”

“More important in what way?” Rivlin picked up the gauntlet. “All these books, with their endless hairsplitting commentaries, never helped the Jews to survive, let alone to prepare for the next catastrophe.”

“And those Jews better anchored in history or reality were better prepared?”

“Yes,” the Orientalist said. “I think so. It’s a fact.”

“Would you say that about the Israelis?”

“Why not? As long as we’re able to free ourselves from our own myths…. But we’d better get a move on, Yo’el. Hagit and Ofra’s aunt is sick, and they can’t spend too much time with her.”

And seeing that his brother-in-law was loath to leave the great author’s room, Rivlin added:

“The reason you’ve developed such a nostalgic, sentimental attitude toward Judaism, Yo’el, is that you spend all your time at international conferences. You inhabit a bubble of virtual reality. If you lived in this country and saw all your tax money go to support parasitical yeshiva students, most of whom don’t even study, you’d talk differently.”

“You’re wrong.” Yo’el’s smile was tolerant. “I’m not nostalgic about Judaism, and I’m perfectly realistic. I have no illusions that what’s written in these books has any answer for the suffering and the hardship that I see all the time. I’m talking about something different. Not the content but the template — a style of thought such as you find in a wonderful, if sometimes wearisome, book like Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy, which I read last year in Laos and Cambodia. It gave me more insight into the Third World than no end of documents. That’s what I’m looking for: a template that Israel — and you know how attached I am to it — has lost….”

“But a template for what?” Rivlin asked impatiently.

Yo’el paused by the old lectern and glanced at the page of writing. His glasses, which resembled the author’s, had slipped down his nose, giving his broad, strong face a spiritual mien.

“For giving Israel more of what Judaism once had.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About how Israeli identity might be freed from its provincialism and given wings. How it might adopt a more spiritual attitude toward a world in need of new ideas. It should be possible to combine the Jewish genius for ahistorical abstraction with Israel’s scientific accomplishments — with the curiosity, the collective solidarity, the ability to improvise, that so many Israelis have….”

“Mostly to improvise unnecessary problems,” the Orientalist opined.

“Don’t lose your sense of proportion,” Yo’el corrected him. “Believe me, I know the problems of other peoples. Real ones of hunger and civil war and terrible natural disasters. I’m tired of spoiled Israelis whining all the time, as if the only point of comparison with their situation were the tranquillity of Europe — as if Europe itself hadn’t been within living memory the site of the most horrible of atrocities, not to mention what just happened in Bosnia….”

Rivlin smiled. “Yes, I say the same things in defense of the Middle East when I hear it attacked. But it doesn’t really do any good.”

“What I’m saying,” Yo’el continued, removing the glasses from his nose and laying them absentmindedly on the lectern, “is that it’s time for Israel to look beyond its local squabbles. Globalism, with all that’s frightening and fascinating about it, is our business, too. We have to think of ways to cope with it. We should learn from the way we were in the 1950s, both more modest and more driven by a sense of mission.”

“What mission could we have?”

“But if we believed forty years ago that we had one — that we had something important to contribute to the world even though half of it didn’t recognize us — why not now, when everything is so much more open and interconnected? Just think of what it does for our pride when an Israeli rescue team or field hospital saves lives in an earthquake or a flood somewhere. And that’s just a fraction of what we could do. It would give us a better perspective on ourselves.”

“A better perspective…” Rivlin sighed. He had a great liking for his barrel-chested brother-in-law, whose old safari jacket brushed against the lectern. “Yes, that’s what we need. But we’d better get going. You’ve forgotten you have a flight tonight. Just be careful not to switch glasses with Agnon. It won’t bother him to have yours, but what are you going to do with his in southeast Asia?”

They returned to the little street. Although Rivlin would have liked to take his brother-in-law to the hotel and show him how the garden had changed, he thought better of it. The garden meant nothing to Yo’el. It’s my own open wound, he told himself.

It was getting dark. The rain had eased up. Above the restaurant in Abu-Ghosh the clouds had parted to reveal a dark swath of sky in which, lost and distant, errant stars glittered. Yo’el was in a buoyant mood. Hungry, he went to the kitchen to seek inspiration before ordering.

“They’ll serve you dinner on the plane,” Ofra reminded him.

“I’ll skip it.”

“You know you won’t.”

“So I won’t. So what? Who knows when we’ll be back here?”

An elderly waiter, amused by the broken Arabic of the Israeli who had stopped for dinner on his way to Singapore, soon covered the table with dozens of colorful appetizers in dishes so small that the international consultant had no qualms about finishing all of them. But the gloom of parting hung over the two sisters. Moved by his sister-in-law’s strained face with no makeup, Rivlin turned to his wife and urged her to relate a strange dream she had had that week.

Hagit did not want to. “Then I’ll tell it,” Rivlin said, starting to describe what he remembered. “You can stop right there,” Hagit said, taking him aback with her sternness. “It’s of no interest. And anyway, since when do my dreams belong to you?” Hurt to the quick, he stammered something in his own defense. The judge patted his knee under the table, to let him know that she was annoyed not with him but with her here-today-gone-tomorrow brother-in-law, who was still heartily polishing off dishes that were now so small that their contents looked more like medicine than food.

RETURNING HOME AT MIDNIGHT, Rivlin had an anxious feeling about Ofer and telephoned his attic apartment. As there was no answer, he dialed the emergency number of the Jewish Agency. There he was told, in a French-accented Hebrew, that Ofer had been sick for the past few days and that the speaker was filling in for him. Rivlin dialed the apartment once more. Again no one answered. “He must have felt better and decided to go out,” said the naturally optimistic judge.

But Rivlin slept poorly. When there was still no answer in the morning, he phoned Ofer’s landlady. Ofer, she told him, had come down with such a bad case of the flu that, having no one to take care of him, he had gone to the hospital. Yesterday, he had called to say that his condition had improved. Asked what hospital he was in, however, the landlady said she didn’t know. Perhaps it was just French discretion.

“You see?” Rivlin said to his wife. “He’s been in Paris for five years, and he’s still all alone. And who would want to take care of him when his heart is far away?”

“And suppose it is?” Hagit replied. “Is it up to you to decide where his heart should be?”

3.

WAS IT AN INDICATION of the position he would take that Rivlin convened the secret appointments committee in his own office rather than in the conference room next to the rector’s office, which was on the same floor as Miller’s alcove? He did not wish Miller to see them and guess what it was about.

Yet until the last minute he was undecided and open to persuasion. Despite his hostile feelings for the young lecturer, who had arrogantly torn apart not only his introduction but the entire book that was to follow, he admired Miller’s courage and honesty. Whatever one thought of his beliefs — which, Rivlin hoped, did not have to be taken too seriously — he had risked his promotion by being so outspoken.

The appointments secretary, a middle-aged woman who had been in charge of such meetings for years, was unhappy with Rivlin’s decision. “How am I going to bring all the refreshments down to your office?” she wanted to know.

But Rivlin was adamant. “You’ve dealt with bigger problems,” he told the appointments secretary, who had once worked in the Near Eastern Studies department.

And indeed, coffee, tea, cakes, and sandwiches were on hand when the committee convened to review the secret file. The other two members were the head of the Political Science department, an assistant professor from America, and a fellow Orientalist from Bar-Ilan University. Rivlin felt a comradely kinship with this man, a pleasantly bashful and reliable associate professor his own age whose field, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sudan, was every bit as thorny as Algeria. Occasionally, the two had long telephone conversations in which they compared the form fundamentalism took in each of the two countries and argued which was worse. Rivlin had persuaded the dean to put the “Sudanese” on the appointments committee, both because he enjoyed talking shop with him and because he needed an ally to implement his plan, which was to block Miller’s advancement in Near Eastern Studies by shunting him off to the Political Science department, the American liberalism of which could better cope with the young lecturer’s revisionist theories.

The committee had already discussed, in a previous session, Miller’s curriculum vitae and publications — which, though not numerous, had appeared in a number of prestigious American journals well known to the political scientist. Now they had to review his academic references and to discuss whether the fact that some of them had not been received was due to negligence or disapproval. Rivlin chose to read the recommendations aloud and to parse them sentence by sentence, dwelling especially on any reservations expressed between the lines.

He was cut short by the head of the Political Science department, who did not think this was necessary. He, too, had heard of the tempting offer made to the young lecturer by the University of the Negev, which had a reputation for body snatching, and suspecting Rivlin of setting a trap, he warned against permitting the provincial nitpicking so prevalent on their campus to lead to the loss of a promising talent.

Just then the door opened. An unfamiliar fragrance wafted into the office. Before the door could be shut again, Rivlin spied a woman in a silk shawl.

It was Afifa. “Professor,” she said. “If I could have just a minute with you, please…”

He hurried into the corridor, leaving the door open for the committee members to see him take the hand of the flustered woman and ask, with concern and in Arabic, about his M.A. student.

“She’ll be fine,” Samaher’s mother answered in Hebrew.

But Rivlin insisted on continuing in Arabic, his voice echoing loudly down the corridor.

“Le’inno hunak fi Ramallah kunt kalkan min shanha, bad-ma shuft kif kanet mujtahida kul-halkad fi ’l-masrahiyya ma’a hada ’l-jinni. Le’inno hada kan ra’i’. Samaher mitl hahim yahudi… bitjanin! If-takaret inno fakat b’ilnisbi lahada b’tistahik h’al-alameh.”^*

“That’s just it,” Afifa said excitedly. “I’ve brought another story. It’s time to give Samaher her grade.”

“Shwoy-shwoy. Kul shi biji fi ’l-nahayeh. B’halmuddeh stanini hon. Bad shwoy bantihi ’l-jalseh u’nu’ud b’il nisbi lal-hakayeh.”^†

He returned to his office, sank pleasurably into his armchair, and declared with a deep sigh:

“I’d be the last to deny that Miller is a solid and independent-minded scholar who’s up on the latest approaches, which may yet — who knows? — turn out to have value. That isn’t what bothers me. The problem is something else. I must say that I don’t understand what Miller is doing in our department. When I look at the bibliographies of his publications — and they’re very impressive, very up-to-date — I can’t help asking, where are the Arabic texts? Where are the original sources? I’m concerned about the systematic absence of such references. Does he think that nothing written by Arabs is relevant to what he writes about them? After all, one has to assume the man knows some Arabic. I don’t mean that he knows it like Akri — none of us do, not having had the good fortune to be born in Iraq. But he must know how to read it, and perhaps even to write and speak a bit. Why, then, doesn’t he do something with this knowledge? Does he find Arabic texts so tedious and uninteresting that he prefers to rely on second- and thirdhand Western translations of them? Perhaps he thinks the Middle East is not the subject of a separate discipline but simply grist for his theoretical mill. He’s even implied as much in his conversations with me. For his purposes, any other area — Southeast Asia or South America or Africa — would do just as well.”

“And suppose it would,” the political scientist said crossly. “What of it?”

“Nothing. It’s perfectly legitimate. The only question is why he needs to be in our department. Here, take this article of his. It appeared in a journal that’s apparently reputable, though it’s one I’ve never heard of. It actually contains an Arabic quotation — full of errors. Have a look…”

He handed it to the associate professor from Bar-Ilan.

“That’s not so serious in itself. But it’s typical of a certain kind of scholarship. You might call it the global approach. I don’t say it isn’t important — but it belongs in a different department, in political science, say, or sociology or international relations. It’s more interdisciplinary, and less appropriate for a historically oriented department like our own. Here in Near Eastern Studies we deal with pedestrian topics like ‘The Political Strategy of the Wakf Party in Egypt Between the Two World Wars,’ not with theoretical models.”

“Just what are you suggesting?” the political scientist asked.

“I’m suggesting that, for Miller’s own good, we return his application to the dean with a request to appoint a new committee, or at least a new chairman for this one. Let him be promoted somewhere else, perhaps in political science. After all, he speaks your language.”

“I’d grab him immediately,” the political scientist said eagerly. “I just don’t have an available slot.”

“Then why not work something out with Sociology? I’ve heard they have a part-time slot in their B.A. honors program. You might look into it. And there’s always the possibility of a position in our foreign-students program. You could create a genuinely interdisciplinary track…”

The secretary felt the ground slipping out from under her. “But what will we do?” she asked in alarm. “Start the whole process all over?”

“Why all over? Miller’s file is complete. It has all his recommendations, or at least all those that will arrive. It simply needs to be transferred to another department.”

The political scientist exploded. “Hold on there! We’ll just lose him that way. He’ll leave us for Beersheba.”

Rivlin clapped his hands in pious distress.

“How unfortunate! Still, it’s not a national tragedy, seeing that Beersheba is part of the state of Israel. I understand your concern. But you have to realize that we in Near Eastern Studies don’t have many positions and have to think of the future. I’m not so young anymore. My retirement is approaching, and some little heart attack or stroke — I had an in-law who recently went in a day — could keep me from reaching it…. And then what? Be left without a North African specialist? I have nothing against Miller. Not that I always know what he’s talking about, but that’s no doubt my own problem. But a promotion would give him tenure and leave our department full up. It’s my obligation to think of a successor for myself. Take our greatest Israeli Orientalist, Professor Tedeschi, who died a week ago in Jerusalem. His mind was at rest, because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that I would carry on in his place. But Miller isn’t really interested in the Arabs. He’d never waste his time like the two of us here — two Orientalists of the old school — on such drudgery as examining old religious court records from Algeria or ink-stained stencils of the harangues of Sudanese imams. That’s the truth. Which isn’t to say that my colleague from Bar-Ilan and myself may not be old fogies for believing that dull spadework is crucial for the advancement of science…”

4.

HIS COLLEAGUE FROM BAR-ILAN joined him in recommending that Miller’s file be transferred from the department. The meeting was adjourned, and Rivlin hurried to invite Afifa into his office.

“Have some cookies,” he said. “Perhaps there’s some juice left, too.”

She shook her lovely head, from which the silk shawl slowly dropped. Without warning, as on her previous visit, she let out a hot, overwrought groan.

Rivlin said nothing, curious to see how deeply her distress stirred him. Cautiously, he offered her a box of tissues. She took one, wiped her eyes with it, and left it soggy with tears on his desk.

“Did Rashid bring you?”

“Rashid!” She waved Samaher’s cousin away with both hands. “He’s too involved with the family. They’re all like that, those Arabs who…”—she groped for the right phrase—“… who lost their villages. They don’t know who they are or where they belong, and they don’t let a body be. He’s always fretting about Samaher, as if she didn’t have a husband to do that. And about that sister in Zababdeh he wants to bring back to Israel…. Even Grandmother, though she cares about that sick Christian, too, told him, ‘Enough, give us some peace! Shu hada? Hada zalameh hatyar u’nus, musn, leysh lay’kun l’halo?’”^*

“The man’s a jinni,” Rivlin said, half to himself, as if remembering.

Afifa’s big, bright eyes shut unhappily.

“U’shu ’l-aaher?”^† He switched gently back to Arabic. “Rah el-habl, ow yimkin inno ma balash b’il-marrah?”^‡

“The doctors were wrong.” She resisted the intimacy of switching to her own language. “We thought having a baby would bring her some peace of mind, so we believed it…”

“Never mind. Min nahitkun el-iman k’tir kwoyis.^§ But where is Samaher? At home?”

“Yes. She’s still resting. That’s why I’ve brought you the last story, so that you can give her — but really, Professor — her final grade. It’s terribly important to her husband’s father that she get her degree.”

Her broad, clear face moved him to compassion. Pleased with having blocked Miller’s tenure, he thought languorously of bathing in her tub in the Ramadan twilight. He glanced at his watch. “All right, let’s begin,” he said, trying to sound impatient despite his smile.

This story, too, was a strange one. Outwardly, it was an animal fable, one of a series written during World War II by an Egyptian veterinarian named Shauki ibn Zamrak. Invited to Algiers by the Vichy government after the fall of France to serve as a consultant for a new zoo established for the amusement of French children, Ibn Zamrak, who called himself “the Arab Dr. Doolittle,” also wished to educate young Arabs about the animals brought in cages from the interior of Africa. And so he began publishing stories in the local Arabic press, in which, being a broad-minded man, he did not shrink from describing even the most dislikable beasts. His fable of the snake and hyena who became friends, translated into Hebrew by Samaher and typed up, was now held by Afifa — who, putting on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that gave her a rather intellectual look, insisted, as if the Orientalist were illiterate, on reading it to him.

The Snake and the Hyena

Once upon a time there was an old hyena named Abu-Maher who had trouble finding carcasses to eat. In part this was because of a drought, which made the leopards and wolves less generous with the meat from their kills, and in part because younger and spryer hyenas than Abu-Maher were getting to it before him. One way or another, he grew thinner and thinner and more and more depressed. His laughter at night was bitter and strained, and life was a burden to him. All hyenas hang their heads, since they are ashamed of eating what others have killed, but Abu-Maher’s head hung so low that although he was tall for a hyena, his tongue practically licked the ground.

One night, as Abu-Maher was nosing around some rocks in the desert, he encountered the wary old viper Ibn Sa’id, who was busy digesting inside his long striped stomach a young field mouse eaten two days earlier. Abu-Maher was so hungry that even though fresh meat disgusted him, he thought of eating Ibn-Sa’id. His cast-iron stomach could digest the worst offal; however, his parents of blessed memory had never taught him whether a snake’s poison is found only in its fangs, or in its veins as well. And so before undertaking so risky an enterprise, as he bent over the coiled viper and opened his jaws, which glistened with good, strong teeth, he said, without beating around the bush, “Would you mind telling me where you keep your poison? And also, does it lose its power when you die, or does it remain deadly?”

Ibn-Sa’id had never been asked such a searching question about himself, let alone by an experienced and desperate pair of jaws located so near his head. Though brave and honest to a fault, he was afraid to tell the truth, which was that all his poison was concentrated in a gland behind his fangs. And so he lied and told the old hyena that the poison was everywhere in his body, even in his tail, and that it was best to leave him alone.

The old hyena Abu-Maher, not knowing any better, found the snake’s answer logical, sadly snapped his jaws shut, and went off behind a large rock to lie down and pray for mercy.

The snake felt sorry for the hungry but fair-minded hyena, who could have killed him from sheer disappointment. Having digested the field mouse and passed what was left of it, he crawled quietly over to Abu-Maher, coiled himself gently around his neck, and whispered a surprising proposal:

“You know as well as I do that nobody likes snakes or hyenas. Even though we work hard for our livelihood and are no worse than other animals, we aren’t well thought of. Frankly, I see no hope of changing such superstitions in the near future. Yet if the two of us get together and become friends, perhaps others will think better of us, too.

Abu-Maher listened to the snake’s hisses and replied:

“But there is a great difference between us. Your bad reputation comes from God and is very ancient. Mine comes from holding up a mirror to mankind, because I eat dead meat and laugh, just as men do.”

“Indeed,” the snake admitted, “my reputation is worse and more frightening than yours, since I have been cursed by Allah himself. And as I need your help to improve it, I’ll do more for you than you need do for me. Not only do I require less food than you, I’m a better hunter, especially in times of drought. If you let me ride on your back, we can easily approach animals that have no fear of you, since they know you won’t eat them until they’ve been killed by another animal. I’ll slip off your back, kill them by surprise, and then you can feast on them.”

And so the cunning snake and the hungry old hyena became friends. Hated by everyone else, they learned to like each other and formed a single monster that the beasts of the desert were soon afraid of. This great fear of them led to their being held in awe, and awe is the mother of glory.

5.

RIVLIN LISTENED ATTENTIVELY, his chin in his palm. Despite his efforts to find some social or political moral in the Egyptian veterinarian’s fable, all he could think of was Samaher in her beard, dressed as a young rabbi and pulling out a whip to lash the doll held by her cousin.

He took the translation from her mother and put it in her file. “Very good,” he said. “There’s food for thought here. These old stories collected by Dr. Suissa are treasure troves.” And while Afifa, plump and bejeweled, regarded him with big eyes, waiting to see whether Samaher had completed her seminar requirements, he added, “The translation is excellent. Did you help her?”

He could not tell whether her hot flush meant “yes” or “no.”

“It’s a pity you never finished your studies,” he rebuked her. “You should ask one of the secretaries if your university entrance-exam results are still valid.”

She spread helpless hands. “Valid for what?”

“For continuing your studies.”

“But why should I continue them? It’s Samaher who needs her degree.”

“And she’ll get it. Just keep her cousin away from her. He hangs around her too much.”

“It’s not her fault, Professor. It’s yours.”

“Why mine?”

“He’s always talking about you. He thinks that if he can get you to like him, you’ll help his sister return to Israel.”

“But that’s crazy.”

“He’s even found some official in the General Security Service who’s an old student of yours. Do you have a student in the GSS, Professor? What is he doing there?”

“What kind of question is that?” The Orientalist chuckled. “I have old students in the GSS, in the Mossad, in the foreign office. Why do you think there’s a demand for Near Eastern Studies? To hear about hyenas and snakes?”

Afifa reddened again. “Well, there’s a student of yours there who thinks a lot of you. Rashid says he could take care of everything if you’d talk to him. Believe me, that’s the only reason he hangs around Samaher. It has nothing to do with her.”

“Then why doesn’t he speak to me?”

“He’s afraid to.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of your having thought he was making fun of the Jews in that play in Ramallah.”

“But it’s his right to make fun of us. His Dybbuk was marvelous.”

“Well, I’m telling you, Professor, you’re all he thinks and talks about.”

“Honestly, Afifa, would it make sense to separate Ra’uda from her husband by bringing her back to Israel?”

“But of course it would, Professor. She’s Israeli. And this husband of hers, he’s from the West Bank and a Christian and sick. He could die at any time. Where will that leave her?”

“I suppose so.” Rivlin felt exhausted. He rose, stretched, led Afifa to the departmental office, and asked a secretary to look for her old file and tell her what credits she could get for courses taken twenty years ago.

Afifa, who had no intention of going back to school, stood embarrassed in a corner. Rivlin went to check his mailbox. As he emptied it, he smelled the scent of Miller’s aftershave. The young lecturer was in the middle of sealing an envelope, doing a thorough job of it. Rivlin gave him a friendly smile and invited him to speak at a one-day Orientalists’ conference soon to take place in Jerusalem, on the first month’s anniversary of Tedeschi’s death.

6.

THE WINTER, HAVING BEGUN at Hanukkah with an impressive display of wind and rain, had petered out. Days of unseasonably high temperatures arrived and parched the earth. “If the summer has no bounds,” Rivlin said to Hagit, “I may as well take some vacation.” He intended, he told her, to take all the shopping coupons accumulated over the past year and exchange them for gifts. “They lose their value after December 31,” he explained. “Pick what you want from the catalogs, and I’ll get it.”

Equipped with the coupons and Hagit’s instructions, he set out. His first stop was a shopping mall, where, after climbing up and down many flights of stairs, he came to a small office near the washrooms, signed a form in triplicate, and was given a large, green plastic carrying bag. Next, in a department store, he received a beach towel and an apron. From there he went to a supermarket and after patiently standing in line was rewarded with two small bottles of olive oil and — for only two extra shekels — a bottle of detergent.

A second shopping mall, at the southern edges of the city, was his next-to-last destination. Here they were out of Teflon frying pans and offered him a choice between a saucepan with a transparent cover and six flower-patterned Turkish coffee cups. Lacking clear directives, he phoned the courtroom and found Hagit between trials. A brief discussion ended in a decision to take the saucepan. “When do we ever drink Turkish coffee?” Hagit asked. Finally, he went to a store where, although his coupons for it had become invalid, he obtained a rather odd-looking desk lamp as a premium for buying a cookbook of pasta recipes. Burdened with his acquisitions, he returned home in time for lunch and wrote the following letter to the municipality:

Traffic Department

Municipality of Haifa

Re: U-turns at the intersection of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets.

To Whom It May Concern:

I wish to propose a way of facilitating U-turns at the intersection of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets. Such turns, though legal and unavoidable for drivers heading from Carmel Center for the shops and cafés on the east side of the street, are impeded by the unnecessarily wide sidewalk. As a result, even cars with power steering, like my own, must make a broken U-turn, reversing in the middle of the intersection and in the face of oncoming traffic.

A careful examination has led me to conclude that, were the unnecessary pavement on the left-hand side of the entrance to Ha-Sport Street (which is of little use to anyone, since it slopes and is fenced off from the street) to be reduced, it would be possible to execute a U-turn in a single maneuver, making it easier and safer for drivers in both directions.

I would greatly appreciate your giving this matter your careful consideration. I would also be happy, should it be deemed helpful, to come to the municipality in person to explain my plan.

Sincerely,

Professor Yochanan Rivlin

Department of Near Eastern Studies

University of Haifa

7.

HANNAH TEDESCHI TELEPHONED EVERY day to consult with Rivlin about the memorial conference in Jerusalem. If Hagit picked up the phone first, Hannah took advantage of the opportunity to ask for legal advice regarding Tedeschi’s first wife, never divorced by him despite her many years in an institution.

Ever since Tedeschi’s retirement from teaching eight years previously, his connection with the Near Eastern Studies department at Hebrew university had grown tenuous. Hannah was concerned, therefore, that if the conference were left to the department to plan, it would become a dumping grounds for second-rate papers unpresentable elsewhere. And so, making Rivlin her adviser, she chose the lecturers herself, leaving only the administrative details to the university. She asked Rivlin to give the main lecture, on the subject of literary sources of the Algerian Terror.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” he excused himself. “Carlo knew this was a subject in which I was still groping in the dark. I’m still not prepared to lecture on it. But I will give a eulogy. I’d like to talk about Carlo’s humanity.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“That’s my secret.”

“Be careful, Yochanan. There are sensitive areas…”

After much debate and changing of minds, the program was decided on. The morning would begin with two Ottomanists, one discussing the age-old relationship between Turks and Arabs, and the other, Ataturk in retrospect. They would be followed by a scholar with some new ideas about the period of the great Abbasid caliphate, on which Tedeschi had written his doctorate, after which the translatoress would present several Sufi texts by Al-Hallaj, polished versions of her improvisations in Ramallah.

The afternoon session would begin with Dr. Miller and a provocative lecture in the spirit of Said’s Orientalism (a book Tedeschi had been surprisingly tolerant of) on the profession of Near Eastern Studies. Then would come two traditional scholars, the “Sudanese” from Bar-Ilan and an “Iraqi” from the Dayan Center, who would defend their approach against Miller’s revisionism.

In the evening, as dusk appropriately fell, the Orientalists would be joined for the last, memorial session by a number of prominent Jerusalemites and members of the city’s Italian-Jewish community. There would be a violin and flute duet and three eulogies. The first of these would be given by the head of the Near Eastern Studies department in Jerusalem, who would review Tedeschi’s scholarly work; the second, by a speaker from the Truman Institute, who would talk about the Jerusalem polymath’s public activities; and the concluding one by Rivlin, who, if not as the dead man’s successor then at least as his close friend, would mourn Tedeschi’s passing and reveal a secret.

“But what kind of secret?” Hannah asked again.

“Wait and see.”

“Just be careful you don’t say anything you’ll regret, Yochanan. Don’t be carried away by truths no one needs to hear. I’m still living, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

Meanwhile, the winter that had petered out returned full force. The skies clouded over, and fierce winds blew. Three days before the conference, the forecasters predicted snow in Jerusalem. Hannah Tedeschi now phoned several times a day. What should they do? Should the conference be postponed? Who of Tedeschi’s elderly Jerusalem friends would brave the heights of Mount Scopus in a snowstorm?

Rivlin pooh-poohed the snow warnings. If it snowed in Jerusalem every time somebody said it would, he joked, the city would be known as the Geneva of the Middle East rather than as its disaster zone.

But the warnings came faster and more furiously. Snow had blocked roads in the Galilee and a blizzard had closed the ski slopes on Mount Hermon. Hannah’s telephone calls were more and more hysterical. Perhaps, she said, the event should be moved to a hall in town. “On the contrary,” Rivlin replied. “Snow on Mount Scopus will tell us who Carlo’s true friends were.”

Yet on the day before the conference, as he was putting the finishing touches to his eulogy, the news bulletins announced that the capital had been closed to everything but buses and vehicles with four-wheel drive. The translatoress, afraid of losing him too, phoned at once. Rivlin turned to Hagit and said, “Why spend a day on buses when I have a better idea? I’ll hire Rashid. How much could he ask for?”

8.

HE PHONED RASHID AND got straight to the point:

“Does your van have four-wheel drive?”

“For you, Professor,” Rashid said, “I’ll have four-wheel drive.”

“What do you mean?” Rivlin asked.

In a village near Mansura, the messenger told him, was a hunter who rented out his jeep.

“Then let’s hunt for Jerusalem tomorrow in the snow,” Rivlin asked. “Just tell me what the pleasure will cost me.”

There was silence. Then Rashid almost whispered:

“What have I done to you, professor, to make you insult me?”

“Either I pay you, Rashid,” Rivlin said, “or we don’t go.”

Hotly, however, the Arab explained that he had been intending to visit Jerusalem anyway. He wanted to apply again at the Civil Administration Bureau for an Israeli identity card for his sister, and there was no better day than a snowy one, when the lines would be short. Rivlin relented. “But only on the condition that I come with you and try to use my influence,” he said. “I heard from Samaher’s mother that there’s a GSS official in the Bureau who’s a former student of mine.”

“Not one student, Professor,” Rashid said. “Three. A person might think no one joined the GSS without first taking a course with you…”

And so on a gray, cold, misty morning, a big old jeep pulled up in front of the Rivlins’ building on the French Carmel. It was still full of hunting gear, including a harness seat, a large flashlight, some nets, and a partridge snare with a long, shiny knife in it. Although it had a sturdy top, Rashid covered the Orientalist with a woolen army blanket. “The canvas,” he observed, “isn’t windproof.”

The weather forecast had been taken seriously, for the road leading up to Jerusalem was almost empty. The snowflakes drifting down on the large cemetery at the city’s entrance were no sign that the storm was letting up. Unplowed snow caked the city’s streets, and Rashid shifted into four-wheel drive at Rivlin’s request, though even without it the jeep’s big wheels crunched easily over the white powder.

They talked little on the way. The blanket made Rivlin pleasantly drowsy, and Rashid, concentrating on driving an unfamiliar car in bad weather, was uncommunicative. He inquired briefly about Hannah Tedeschi, wanted to know how important the husband had been whose face he had covered with a sheet, and then lapsed into silence. He did not even respond when, as they started the ascent to the capital, Rivlin awoke and praised his double-brided production of The Dybbuk. Nor did he mention Samaher. The Rabbi of Miropol’s exorcism, the Orientalist thought with a grin, had worked. The jinni had been banished — and not only onstage…

Yet once he had killed the motor upon reaching the Civil Administration building in north Jerusalem, the Arab abandoned his reserve. Sitting with Rivlin in the jeep, in teeth-chattering cold amid European-sized snowbanks, he explained the bureaucratic obstacles that kept his sister from returning to her native village with her children. The officials, he said, acted as if they were dealing with an intercontinental border. And why? Solely to protect the rights of the sick father, who might miss his sons and complain to the Red Cross that he wasn’t allowed to visit them. “How odd,” Rivlin said. “I never would have imagined they’d worry about such a thing.”

“They don’t. It’s just an excuse to turn my sister down. You know Ra’uda’s husband, professor. He’s a sick old Christian who eats from a soldier’s mess kit. Does he look the type to complain?”

“But what should I say to them?”

“That you’ll be responsible.”

“For what?”

“For no one complaining.”

“How can I be responsible for anyone’s complaints?” Rivlin smiled and pulled the blanket back up over him. “I can’t always keep myself from complaining.”

But Rashid hadn’t come this far in order to back down.

“You could at least promise — to the GSS man, say, who was your student — to handle the human-rights organizations.”

“Human-rights organizations?” Astonished by the sophistry that went on inside the white building visible through the fogged windshield, he regarded the agitated messenger. “Don’t tell me the GSS is afraid of the Israel Civil Liberties Union!”

“They’re afraid of whoever they want to be afraid of.”

Yet on this snowy morning at the Civil Administration Bureau, not only was no one waiting in line, no one was waiting to receive anyone either. Even his old student had chosen to stay in bed. Rivlin, worn-out from the drive, followed Rashid down a long corridor in which the Arab knew every door. He tried opening them one by one while asking where everyone had disappeared to — which might have gone on forever had not a woman cried out a surprised hello. “What did I tell you, professor?” Rashid crowed. “They all know you here. I’ll bet that lady was a student of yours, too.”

The woman, who was roly-poly and henna-haired, came hurrying toward them up the dark corridor. Although Rivlin had forgotten her name, he was quite sure she had once taught introductory Arabic in Haifa. “What brings you here in a snowstorm?” she inquired. Pointing at Rashid by way of explanation, he was invited to warm up in her room. This did not look like a government office. With a sofa upholstered in flowery fabric and a large flowerpot with a dwarf tree that would, the woman said, bear fruit in the spring, it looked more like a comfortable residence.

Rivlin let his weary body drop onto the sofa with an odd relish, toasting his feet by the mock flames of an electric fireplace while signaling Rashid — who, standing in the doorway, seemed to be debating whether the woman could be of use — to join him. He now recalled, watching her put up a kettle to boil in a kitchenette, that she was an Egyptian Jew who had learned her Arabic in the streets of Cairo. He grimaced with the almost physically painful effort to remember her name, but in the end had to ask her for it apologetically. “Georgette,” she replied, wagging a finger. “How could you forget such a nice name?” Rivlin clutched his head.” “Of course,” he said. “My mind just doesn’t work well when it’s snowing so early in the day.”

The snow was piling up in thick, heavy flakes on the windowsill. Georgette, it turned out, had heard of Tedeschi’s death and of the conference that brought Rivlin to Jerusalem. While she had never studied with the Jerusalem polymath, she had had the greatest respect for him and was thinking of attending the closing session to hear the eulogies and meet old friends, some of whom she began discussing with Rivlin.

The Orientalist, however, mindful of his mission, was more interested in what Georgette did. The answer was that, having changed not her profession but only her students, she still taught Arabic. Yet her salary was better, for she was now paid both to improve the Arabic of the young GSS investigators and to teach them her linguistic methods for detecting lies in that language. A divorcée with children living abroad, she was so devoted to her work that she sometimes slept in her office. Hence, its resemblance to a private apartment.

Rashid just stared at her.

They chatted for a while before Rivlin disclosed why he had come and asked Rashid to produce his documents so as to be advised by Georgette as to who in the GSS might be suitably softhearted. Flattered and amused to be asked, she leafed through a packet of Palestinian birth certificates and tattered old Israeli passbooks in which Rashid and Ra’uda were listed as brother and sister. When she was done she said that although she was no expert on such things, she imagined that to turn little Palestinians into Israelis more was needed than a mother’s longing for her native village.

“Such as?”

An intelligent woman, she stopped to think. Did any of his sister’s children, she asked Rashid, have a chronic disease or rare health problem that called for treatment in Israel? A medical reason, she explained to the Orientalist, who nodded while stretching his hands out to the electric flames, was better than an emotional one, perhaps because the Jews thought their curative powers made the Arabs more trusting and less dangerous….

An enigmatic smile played over Rashid’s lips.

Rivlin turned to him. “Well?”

He shrugged. As far as he knew, both of his nephews in Zababdeh were healthy. If there were no other choice, however, he would try to find something wrong with them.

“The problems people have,” Rivlin sighed as the messenger gently shut the door and headed for the ground floor to obtain application forms for medical treatment in Israel. He took another sip of his tea.

Georgette shot him a distrustful look. “What do you want us to do, open the gates to all of them? Don’t we have enough of them already?”

“Excuse me,” he said, turning crimson as if accused of high treason. “Those children are half-Israeli.”

“So is the West Bank, which is why it should be good enough for them. I see no reason to separate them from their father. Tell me, Rivlin: how did you get involved with this Arab in the first place?”

“He’s sometimes my driver. And also…”

“Also what?”

“Jinni ’l-aziz alay…. ”^*

9.

FOR A SECOND, the falling snowflakes wavered between turning to sleet and keeping their pristine whiteness. Yet those falling quickly behind them stiffened their frozen resolve, and the white carpet outside the window grew thicker. Under a large umbrella they stepped back onto it, the careful Jew and the glum Arab, whose pockets were stuffed with useless medical forms. It took a moment to spot the jeep, now a white mass like the cars around it. Perhaps, Rivlin thought amusedly as he directed his driver toward a majestically white Mount Scopus, the snow was Europe’s farewell salute to the young man it had tried to murder sixty years ago. The idea so appealed to him that he decided to include it in his eulogy.

In the university parking lot, he sought to part with Rashid. “Why waste the day waiting for me?” he said. “Start back now. I’ll make it to Haifa on my own. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for your sister’s children. We have to sit down and work out a plan.”

“No plan will work if no one has a heart,” Rashid said. “But thanks for trying.”

He put a gentle hand on the Arab’s shoulder. “Don’t give up. It’s not like you.”

“It may not be like me, but it’s how I feel.”

“It’s not like you at all,” the Jew repeated reprovingly.

Rashid turned a dark, stubbled face full of anguish toward the road. His profile against the snow made Rivlin think of the dybbuk’s white shrouds. “If this snow keeps up, Professor,” he said, “you’ll need a jeep to get out of Jerusalem.”

“Don’t worry,” Rivlin said. “I’m tenth generation in this city. I know these Jerusalem snows. By this afternoon the sun will be out and it will all melt.”

But even if Samaher’s teacher was holding up his cousin’s grade, the messenger insisted on sticking by him. He had no other work lined up for the day, which he would spend in Jerusalem, returning for the Orientalist’s eulogy at the end of it. An Israeli Arab in a jeep could go where he wanted in this two-part city. Perhaps he would visit Fu’ad at his hotel. The two of them had got along well on the night of Tedeschi’s death. He had even stopped in Abu-Ghosh on his way back to Mansura because Samaher hadn’t been feeling well.

Rivlin felt a sweet frisson.

“Don’t worry about me, Professor,” Rashid said. “The ride to Jerusalem was my treat, and the ride home will be too. Your wife will feel better if she knows you’re with me.”

Rivlin smiled at Rashid’s intuition. “Listen,” he said, reminded by the gurgle of melting snow in a nearby drainpipe of the basement of the hotel, the symbol of his lost and longed-for happiness. “Come back at lunchtime and we’ll go together. Fu’ad will feed us.”

He took an invitation to the conference from his pocket and handed it to Rashid, showing him the building and the number of the room in which he would be.

The auditorium was empty. Hannah Tedeschi was pacing irritably up and down, her eye on the white maelstrom outside the window. The dark, masculine suit she had on looked as though it might have been Tedeschi’s. Though they had spoken often by telephone since the day of the funeral, he was surprised to see how she had changed. Thinner, and with a new, short haircut, she suggested, despite her makeup and high heels, a melancholy youth. “I warned you!” she scolded Rivlin despairingly as soon as she saw him. “We should have postponed it or moved it to town, where at least the streets are plowed. You forgot, Yochanan, that Jerusalem can cope with war, siege, and terrorism but not with snow — and especially not on Mount Scopus.”

Rivlin defended himself calmly and logically. In the first place, there was no guarantee that a more suitable place in town would have been available at the last moment. Secondly, even if one had been, there hadn’t been time to inform the public. And thirdly, what would Carlo have said had he known that a little snow would make them forsake a campus that meant so much to him? After all, not only had his entire career taken place on it, he was almost killed trying to break through to it in a relief convoy during the 1948 war.

“A little snow? Yochanan, don’t you see what’s going on out there?”

Once again Rivlin trotted out his Jerusalem pedigree to make light of the snow. By noon, he promised, the skies would clear and there would be nothing left but a white frosting. The timid souls who missed the morning session would surely have enough northern blood in them to turn out in the afternoon.

“You wait and see,” she accused him. “This snow will be an excuse to trample on his memory. We’re in for another disaster like the Othello lecture. He never said a word about it, but I know how hurt he was.”

“But what made you take him to the emergency room?”

“He was afraid.”

“Of those political scientists? You’re kidding.”

“But he was. All those theoreticians frightened him. He didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“Neither do I. So what?”

She looked startled. “You don’t?”

“Not always. But to hell with them. You have new glasses.”

“Just the frames. Was it wrong to change them?”

“Of course not.” He moved closer to her, feeling pity. “On the contrary. Since his death, Hannah, you’re even more lovely.”

She flushed, hotly. “Don’t be silly. The things you say! I feel so lost…”

Her eyes filled with tears.

Yet not even her tears were an incentive to come to the morning session. Although one of the two Ottomanists managed to make it through the snow, he had to speak to empty seats. If not for Suissa senior, who — his fedora covered in plastic against the rain — turned up at the last minute as a gesture to his son’s admirers, there wouldn’t have been a dozen people in the hall. The dean of the liberal-arts school, an art historian who couldn’t have cared less about the Turks, delivered a few welcoming words, shut his eyes, and fell asleep, chin in hand, on the podium. Fortunately, the secretary of the Near Eastern Studies department, who had always been fond of Tedeschi and his witticisms, handed the dean a note summoning him to an imaginary meeting, thus sparing him further embarrassment.

Rivlin sat through the lecture with a sense of tedium. It didn’t help that the lecturer let himself be sidetracked from the complex subject of Turkish-Arab relations to a discussion of Kurdish nationalism and its “historic,” as opposed to merely “emotional,” roots.

“Be careful, children,” his mother would tell Rivlin and his sister on snowy days in Jerusalem, on which she had made them stay home. “Snow lulls the brain to sleep.” So that they might enjoy the snow anyway, she would send their father out to fetch a bowl of it, which they were allowed to play with, under her supervision, in the bathroom. Now, feeling his eyelids droop, he wondered whether she hadn’t been right. Others around him were yielding to the same effect. Although the lecturer, a delicate homosexual once labeled by Tedeschi “the True Turk,” was struggling valiantly, in the extra time provided by the absence of the second speaker, to return to his original theme, the Kurds, whose muddled identity was typical of the minorities of the Ottoman Empire, kept distracting him. Now and then, in a concession to the occasion, he mentioned some old idea or forgotten publication of Tedeschi’s. But the audience was too sleepy and too small for it to matter.

Rivlin, despite his sympathy for the Kurds, could barely keep awake. He went on repeating his mother’s words like a mantra. And indeed the snow soon stopped falling, and a first patch of blue gleamed through the windows. Slowly the sky grew calm and clear, just as he had predicted in the name of his ancestors. He nodded encouragingly at Hannah, as if to say, “See, things are looking up.” By evening, he was sure, there would be a full house.

The rear door of the auditorium opened. Rivlin turned around to see who was there. It was his trusty driver, the dybbuk.

10.

ALTHOUGH THE CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS had given the lecturers meal tickets for the cafeteria, Rivlin excused himself.

“I’ve been up since early morning, and all this snow has made me sleepy,” he told the disappointed translatoress. “I need some fresh air, not more academic chitchat. You’ll manage without me. I’ll give my ticket to Mr. Suissa.”

And going over to the bereaved father, he clasped his hand with his own two and said, “It’s wonderful to see you following in your son’s footsteps.” Suissa accepted the voucher gladly. “How is your daughter-in-law?” Rivlin asked. “She’s left Jerusalem and gone to look for work in Tel Aviv,” the father of the murdered scholar replied. “And the children?” “For the time being, they’re with us.” “I thought she and you were getting along better.” “I thought so, too,” Suissa said sadly. “But there’s nothing to be done about it. She’s a young woman in a hurry to live.” “How old is she?” Rivlin asked, blushing as if he had committed an indiscretion. “Twenty-five next spring.” “That’s all?” He had thought she was older. “With all she’s been through,” he said, “you wouldn’t think she would be hurrying anywhere.”

In the garden of the Hendels’ hotel, the snow lay fresh and virginal on the paths and formed frisky little snow cubs of the bushes. Rivlin walked ahead, with Rashid following carefully behind him. Stopping to inspect a fringe of ice gaily trimming the old gazebo, he yielded to temptation and mentioned the wedding. Only six years ago, he told his driver, they had all been standing here. And as if to make up for the disappointment of the Civil Administration Bureau, he related the story of the unexpected and difficult divorce.

“They were only married a year?” Rashid asked, a sardonic glint in his coal black eyes.

“To this day, I don’t understand what happened.”

“It must be painful for you to come back here.”

“It is. But real knowledge, Rashid, is born of pain.”

“And what do you know?”

“That’s just it. I can’t get an explanation from anyone. Not even from Fu’ad, who knew exactly what went on here.”

“Fu’ad?” Rashid read his mind. “Hada ma bihki k’tir. Hada arabi kadim, b’tist’hi k’tir.’”^*

The Orientalist smiled. “B’tist’hi min sham eysh?”^†

“B’tist’hi yehin el-yahud.”^‡

“But why should anyone be offended?”

“There’s no reason. Bas ahyanan, b’kulu andna, el-yahud biz’alu min el-hakikah ili bifatshu aleiha b’nafsehum.”^§

A few minutes later, the old-fashioned maître d’ was surprised to find the two uninvited Israelis in his dining room, standing in line among the Christian pilgrims at the buffet with large, empty plates in their hands.

“What are you doing here in all this snow?” he asked, startled to see them. “U’sayara ma t’zahlakatesh”?^*

“Ahadna jeeb bit’harak min el-amam,” the Arab explained to the Arab, “u’safarna mitl ala zibdeh.”^†

But though the Jerusalem snow was child’s play for the pious Christians from the American Midwest, it had blocked roads and canceled tours all over Israel, so that, as on Rivlin’s previous visit, the dining room was full up. Rather than wait for Fu’ad to apologize, he filled his plate and headed for the smoking lounge favored by Mr. Hendel, whose death now seemed to belong to the distant past.

“You see,” he said as Rashid sat down next him, “I’m still family despite my son’s divorce.”

The unexpected crush kept Fu’ad running back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. Still, he found a few minutes to drop by the lounge and even to smoke a cigar, reminisce about the eventful trip to Ramallah, and ask about the scholar who had died.

“As a matter of fact,” Rivlin said, “I’m in Jerusalem on a snowy day like this is for a memorial conference in his honor.”

“Don’t tell me it’s already been a month!” the maître d’ marveled. It seemed to him just a few days. Sometimes, falling asleep at night, he still thought of the face he had covered with a sheet. “And how is the widow?” he asked. “What a poet!”

Rivlin clucked with sympathy. “She’s coming around slowly,” he said.

The maître d’ asked to be remembered to her. He could still hear her declaiming Al-Hallaj’s lines—My soul is his, his is mine. Who has heard of the body In which two souls combine? — as if they had been written in Hebrew. He was so moved by the great Sufi poet that he had even tried writing a few mystical poems of his own. But who had patience for such things? “Ya’ani, el-hawa ma bikdar yimsikha.”^‡

“Kif el-hawa?” Rashid asked.^*

“El-jow.^† Mysticism needs peace of mind. In this country everyone just wants to hear the next news bulletin.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, cleared the dishes from the table, and suggested dessert. He would bring them ice cream and coffee.

“We’ll have neither,” Rivlin declared, getting to his feet. “We just came to see if you were still alive. It’s time we got back to the memorial.”

“But what do you mean, Professor?” Fu’ad said, taken by surprise. “Aren’t you going to say hello to the management?”

Rivlin felt a ripple of unease.

“We can’t today. Another time.”

“But how another time? I’ve told Tehila you’re here. And she said I should keep you here until she’s free, because she’s busy with all the guests whose tours were canceled. Bihyat Allah, ya Brofesor, hatta la y’hib amalha minnak.”^‡

Something gnawed at him.

“Tell her another time. I’ll be back.”

Yet even as he said it, he knew he would never be back. The chapter of the hotel had ended.

“I can’t do that,” Fu’ad said.

“Of course you can,” Rivlin told him. “We came for you this time, didn’t we, Rashid? And for you only.”

“I’m honored, Professor.” Fu’ad put down the dirty dishes on the table and pressed his hands to a grateful heart. “I appreciate it. But that isn’t something I can tell Tehila.”

“And Galya?” The image of the lost bride flashed before him as though in an old dream. “Why isn’t she here?”

“In a snowstorm in the ninth month of pregnancy? She’s enormous. You could visit her, but I wouldn’t recommend it. She rests in the afternoon. This is her first child, and she’s nervous. You’ll see her at the circumcision.”

“All right,” Rivlin said impatiently. “Rashid and I have to go.”

But Rashid didn’t move. The always polite and reserved maître d’ was physically blocking his path. As though pleading for dear life, Fu’ad said:

“I can’t let you go, Professor, without your at least saying hello to someone in the family. Go see Mrs. Hendel. I’m sure she’s up by now. You haven’t spoken to her since the week of the bereavement.”

“Next time,” Rivlin replied, laying a friendly hand on Fu’ad’s shoulder. But the maître d’ stubbornly stood his ground. “I mean it,” Rivlin said more softly. “How is Mrs. Hendel doing?”

“Still falling apart,” was the cruelly candid answer. “There’s nothing left for her here. Her son is in America with his family, and if we didn’t find someone to play cards with her now and then, she’d have only her own depression to keep her company. Maybe the new grandson will cheer her up. But that will be no substitute for a man who treated her like a princess. And she’s not going to find another one in this hotel, because there’s no one here but Christians looking for God.”

Rashid grinned.

“Come,” Fu’ad said, grabbing the Orientalist by the hand. “Do me a favor and say hello to Mrs. Hendel. She’ll be grateful that you haven’t forgotten her like so many of her old friends. I’ll send up coffee and cookies. Tehila will come if she has time.”

“All right.” Rivlin blinked anxiously. “But only for a minute. And leave Tehila out of this. Another time…”

And again he knew there would never be another time.

From the stuffy, overheated room on the third floor, the snowy garden looked like a fairy tale. Gently he gathered the widow, delicate from falling apart, in his arms. Her new, unresisting gauntness made her large eyes that demanded his sympathy shine more brightly than ever. Although it was afternoon, her bed was unmade. Her hardly touched breakfast was still on the table. A black silk nightgown sticking out from beneath the quilt made the Orientalist feel a slight sexual qualm. His amiable smile gone from his face, Fu’ad quickly restored order, carrying the dirty dishes to the hallway, deftly making the bed, and folding the nightgown and putting it in a drawer.

“It’s the professor, Mrs. Hendel,” he said as he exited. “He’s come to say hello and have coffee with you.”

She offered him a small chair by her side. “I suppose I should be insulted that you forgot all about me while coming to visit my daughters,” she said.

“All in all,” he answered, turning his chair to face the garden, “I’ve been here twice since the bereavement. The second time, you weren’t here.”

“I wasn’t?” She seemed astonished to hear it.

“You were in Europe with Galya.”

“Oh, yes,” she remembered. “That was when you tried to sleep here.”

He smiled. “You see?” he said. “You know everything.”

“Everything?” She bowed her pretty head sadly. “Far from it. I only know what I’m told.”

“Well,” the Orientalist said, “I had no place to sleep in Jerusalem, and I remembered Yehuda telling me that I could always have an available room. It was foolish of me.”

“Not at all!” Moved by his mention of her husband, she regarded him with bright, solicitous eyes. “He meant it. And while he lived, he was as good as his word. The promises he made, he kept. He didn’t want this hotel turning into the railway station it’s become. Of course, he wanted to succeed and make money. But he also wanted this place to be about more than just work. That’s why he always left an extra room for family or friends. Now that Tili is in charge, all that has changed. You’ve seen how full the place is. She overbooks so much that she has to put up guests in her own wing.”

“Yes.” Rivlin grinned. “I got the basement.”

“I heard about it. And about how you ran away in the middle of the night. It made me mad. I said to her, ‘Tell me, Madame Manager, have you no sense of shame? If you can’t treat an important guest well, it’s better to turn him away.’ But nothing fazes her. She’s as tough as nails. And her father’s death only made her tougher. He would never have dreamed of risking the hotel’s reputation. Tehila couldn’t care less. I sometimes wonder how I ever gave birth to someone so brash. She’ll ride roughshod over anyone.”

“Yes.” Rivlin nodded. “My wife is sometimes like that, too.”

“Your wife?” The revelation startled her. “Perhaps….” She thought it over. “I suppose I did feel that kind of backbone in her, even though you never gave us the chance to get to know her. But she’s more gracious about it, a true lady. She’s cultured and has boundaries. Tili is a wild woman. You wouldn’t believe how afraid I’ve always been of her, even when she was a child…”

“I assure you, I would.” Rivlin laughed candidly. “I’m afraid of my wife sometimes, too. Not that it stops me from loving her.”

Mrs. Hendel’s face darkened with sorrow. The thought of her former in-laws’ love for each other, so palpable the first time she met them, made her feel the loss of her husband even more keenly. Only lovers, she told Rivlin, know love when they see it. “That was something I used to say to my husband. ‘I trust Galya’s choice of Ofer,’ I told him, ‘because his parents are like us. They’re loving and close. Ofer and Galya won’t have to improvise, because they have models.’ Only…”

“Only what?”

“Only then…”

“Then what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t!” he said heatedly. “And none of you will tell me. And that’s why I can’t help Ofer to get unstuck…”

“But I don’t know anything, either. I asked Galya a thousand times and never got an answer. Even on our trip to Europe, when we shared a double bed at night. I said to her, ‘Gali, maybe you were embarrassed to tell your father, but now that he’s gone, learn from your sister, who’s embarrassed by nothing. Tell me what happened…’”

“And?”

“Nothing. She clammed up. But what does it matter? They’re not the first couple to have fallen out of love. At least it happened before it was too late. She knew how much I liked Ofer. But it wasn’t me who had to live with his fantasies.”

“Fantasies?” There was that word again.

“That’s what she called them.”

“But fantasies of what?”

“She wouldn’t say.”

“You never asked?”

“No.”

“But it isn’t possible!” He flung the words at her angrily. “I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe me?” The delicate woman was hurt.

“Don’t take him seriously, Mother.” Tehila had entered quietly through the door left open by Fu’ad. “He keeps thinking we’re hiding something from him. But at least that gives us a chance to see him.”

He sat up in his chair, the afternoon sun in his eyes. The proprietress, in whose cropped hair he noticed the first streaks of gray, was not content with a handshake. Tall and stooped, a chambermaid’s apron tied by its strings around her waist, she bent to plant a ministering kiss on his forehead, as if he were a small boy with a fever.

“Your coffee, Professor,” she said, with a hint of mockery, “is waiting downstairs.”

“But Fu’ad said he would have it sent up,” Mrs. Hendel complained.

“So he did. But I told him not to, because I didn’t want you to miss your lunch. We’re closing the kitchen soon.”

“You can send my lunch up too.”

“No, Mother. I have no one to wait on you today.”

“Then I’ll skip lunch.”

“No, you won’t. You think you will, but at three o’clock you’ll decide you’re hungry, and I’ll have to wake up the chef and make him light the oven. You need to show some consideration, because it’s been a crazy day even without the snow. And don’t worry about our guest. He’ll be back — won’t you, Professor? Just because we tell you we know nothing is no reason to believe us, is it?”

11.

TEHILA DESCENDED THE BROAD, old-fashioned staircase ahead of him to the ground floor. Her long stride made her look like an ungainly bird that had forgotten how to fly. If Ofer knew to what depths I’ve descended to look for the fantasy he’s marooned by, Rivlin thought, he’d wipe me from his mind instead of just cold-shouldering me. In the large lobby he halted, stuck out a hand, and said:

“Thank you. I’m afraid I’m running late. I’ll have my coffee on Mount Scopus.”

“But why?” She gave him a whiskey-colored glance. “The coffee is ready. What can you be late for? You have plenty of time until your talk.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw an ad for the conference in the newspaper. The afternoon session starts at four, and your eulogy comes at the end of it. You’re in no hurry. And where are you going on a day like this? Don’t let the sunny skies fool you. The temperature is dropping.”

“I see you’ve decided to manage me too.”

“Let’s say I’m giving you a bit of friendly advice. Not that you couldn’t use some managing — especially when you’re away from your wife, with no one to keep an eye on you.”

He recoiled. “My wife,” he said softly, “keeps an eye on me everywhere — from within me…”

There was an awkward silence. Her birdlike face, sharp, hard, and offended, lost its teasing look. He felt suddenly sorry for this ugly Circe of the hotel, her bright apron perched absurdly on her hips like a chambermaid’s in an Alpine inn.

“All right,” he relented. “Let’s have some coffee. I wouldn’t want to hurt Fu’ad.”

The little table in the smoking lounge was set with elegant cups and saucers and a plate of cookies. Rivlin looked for Rashid. “I gave him a bed to rest in,” Fu’ad said, pouring their coffee. “He’s feeling low because of all those forms for his sister’s children. Why does an Arab have to be sick to be allowed back into his own country?”

“What’s wrong with having to live in a village near Jenin?” Tehila asked, warming her ivory hands on her coffee cup. “Isn’t that Palestine too?”

“But Ra’uda grew up in the Galilee.”

“So what? Why must every one of you live where he or she was born? What babies you are, missing Daddy and Mommy’s home when you’re parents and grandparents yourselves! I swear, you deserve a spanking, not a state.”

Fu’ad glanced at Tehila and then down at the floor, unsure what to make of her barb. His arm in the sleeve of its black maître d’s jacket trembled as it lifted the cover of the canister to see how much coffee was left. “Afay’o, ya Brofesor?”^* he glumly asked of Rashid.

“Give him a few more minutes,” Rivlin replied. “He needs to rest. Sar majnun u’murtabir min kul el-ashyaa illi hawil yi’milha.”^†

“Mitl el-masrahiyya,”^‡ Fu’ad said. “Hada el-dibbuk illi mat.”^§

“A jinni,” Rivlin said. He looked wearily at the proprietress, who was nursing her coffee in slow sips. Sallow and sickly-looking, she sat plotting her next move while trying to follow the Arabic conversation — until, with a gesture of impatience, she signaled the maître d’ to be gone.

“As long as your driver is resting, you may as well, too,” she said to Rivlin when they were alone. “Is your eulogy ready?”

“More or less.”

“Will you read it?”

“I’ll speak from notes.”

“Good,” she said approvingly. “That way you can cut it short if you’re losing your audience.”

He regarded her sardonically. “Don’t worry. That’s never happened to me.”

“I should hope not. But tell me, what made this Tedeschi such a big shot that he’s getting a whole day in his honor?”

“You don’t have to be such a big shot to get a day for dying. But he was an important scholar. And a dedicated and much-loved teacher.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, with a sly gleam. “Yours is a generation that still loves its teachers. Nowadays, I’m told, university faculties are full of dumb women.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He felt a chill of fatigue. “You’ve never even been to a university.”

“What if I haven’t?” She took another calm sip of coffee. “It’s not because I couldn’t have, as you seem to think. It’s because I went to work for my father, helping him to put the hotel on its feet. Believe me, I’ve learned more from life here than I could have at a university. But you’re cold!”

“Something is wrong with the heating.”

“Nothing is wrong with it. Fu’ad likes to save electricity, especially when he’s mad at me. As soon as the dining room empties out, he turns the heat off. This part of the building cools quickly. Down in the basement, where you were the last time, you wouldn’t know the difference, not even when it was freezing out. There’s natural heat down there.”

“Natural heat?” He scoffed at the idea. “It must come from those old tax files.”

“Perhaps,” she said with a hearty laugh, throwing back her head as though remembering something. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.”

“So you want to stick me in that hole again?” He met her small, eagle eyes, their gaze fearful with anticipation.

“You can rest there undisturbed, polishing your eulogy beneath a warm blanket in perfect equilibrium.”

He smiled uncertainly and glanced at the thick curtain on the window. A ray of blue light slipped through the space between the hooks and the curtain rod. Why was it, he wondered, that during the year of his marriage Ofer had hardly ever mentioned Tehila? He had only enthused about Galya’s father and the hotel. Had he paid no attention to his wife’s shrewd sister, or was she, too, part of his “fantasy”?

“Yallah, ila l-amam.”^* He rose and touched her bony shoulder. “Ta’ali nitdafa shwoy bil-kabu.”^†

For the third time, he found himself walking through the hotel kitchen. In the between-meals silence, the carving knives and cleavers gleamed above the big, clean vats and the empty tables and cutting boards. They passed the large freezer and came to the little door whose concrete steps led to the underground corridor with its broken bicycle, torn tire, and bucket of hardened whitewash. A new broom was the one addition to this display. In the space at the corridor’s end the baby crib stood beside the old boiler, whose chimney was rammed into the ceiling like the tooth of an ancient, petrified mammoth that still gave off its secret heat.

Rivlin watched the tall woman search in vain for the key to the accountant’s room beneath the oilcloth mattress of the crib. The door to the dark room was open. Sound asleep on its bed was the protean driver-messenger-brother-cousin-uncle — displaced citizen — and-dybbuk for a day. Undressed, he lay dead to the world with his face to the wall, the splendid rear of his dark, smooth, naked body pointed at the door.

The proprietress was startled by the liberty taken by the maître d’. Yet touched by the sight of the naked Arab, who had instinctively availed himself of the freedom offered by this subterranean grotto, she asked Rivlin for his name, knelt by his side, and gently poked him as if he were a soldier being awakened for guard duty. “All right, Rashid,” she said. “You’ve slept enough. Give someone else a chance.”

His name spoken by an unfamiliar woman, followed by her gentle touch, caused the sleeper to bolt to an upright position and wrap himself in his sheet, the hot coals of hastily extinguished sleep still glowing in his eyes. As if he were in the midst of a dream whose interpretation they were, he groped with a beseeching hand toward the two Jews. Before he could utter an apology, if not for his sleep itself, for which he had permission, then at least for his nakedness, he was fully clothed and holding a folded sheet beneath his arm, with which he departed, to return it to Fu’ad.

“Wait. Don’t turn on the light,” Rivlin told the proprietress, who had shown no sign of doing any such thing. In the gloom pierced by a few murky rays coming from the direction of the staircase, he moved the accountant’s chair to the desk and sat down with his arms on his chest. He did not look at his Circe — who, instead of remaking the evacuated bed for him, sank onto it like a white ghost. It’s hopeless, he told himself, and there’s no time for it anyway, but if I don’t ask her now I never will. And although she had still made no move to do so, he said again, “Don’t turn on the light. Maybe it will be easier in the dark to tell me what you know about your sister. You can see how I’m suffering. Be kind just once.”

She said nothing. Unable to make out her expression in the dark, he did not know what she was thinking. One after another, her shoes dropped to the floor. The bed creaked. Only then did she say:

“You’re a hard man, Yochanan Rivlin. Really hard. Your Ofer was much nicer. What a pity you didn’t make a career in the police or the secret service instead of wasting your time teaching. You would have felt at home there, looking for the truth in all the wrong places. It’s too bad, because I thought you wanted something else from me — something I could have given you.”

A shiver went through him.

“Come to think of it, why not ask my sister? You can go on giving her the third degree. If anyone knows what happened to her, she does.”

“She refused twice,” Rivlin said. “I couldn’t get anything out of her.”

“And so you’ve decided to pick on me?”

“You’re a liberal woman. You’re open for a relationship. And you’ve chosen, if I may say so, an uninhibited single life that lets you be frank and do what you want despite your loyalty to your family and the hotel… or am I wrong?”

She sat up on the bed. His eyes, now accustomed to the dim light, discerned the shadow of a smile as she pulled off her sweater, unfastened her apron, and opened the linen drawer beneath the bed. She took out a sheet, spread it on the mattress, and lay down again.

“Thank you for telling me how liberal and open I am. But it won’t do you any good, because I really know and understand nothing about my sister and Ofer.”

“But you must!” he burst out, placing professorial hands on his heart.

She laughed out loud. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said easily. “And maybe you’re right not to. In a family, after all, everything is connected, even what no one understands. But there has to be some closeness before one can talk about such things. And if you’re really such a big-time sleuth, I have a proposal, or rather a condition, to make… yes, a condition. That’s the right word for it. Before I can loosen up with you, I need some love. I don’t suppose you would mind a secret little bedtime adventure, would you? We might as well start now. After all, you’re a busy man — and you must realize by now how uninhibited I really am….”

His arms stayed crossed. Although he wasn’t sure whether he was being challenged to a test of his determination or a battle of wills, he knew deep down that he had expected this — that his unforeseen visit had been made with it in mind.

“If such is your condition,” he said with mock formality, “I am prepared to surrender my precious faithfulness to my wife. But what is it you look forward to in an old man like me?”

She smiled. “Leave that to me. You already made me curious at the bereavement, when I saw how lovingly you embraced my mother. That’s why I insisted you wait for Galya. And when I saw you pleading with her in the garden, I said to myself, this is a man who will come back. And you did….”

“But curious about what?”

“About what you’re like when you’re turned on.”

“But what good to you is my pretending to be turned on?”

“As good as my pretending to know something is to you.”

“Then you don’t?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. I’m not like you. I respect other people’s boundaries and wills. I’ve never understood how you dared snoop on your son’s life, poking into his affairs while pretending to save him. If I were your daughter I’d have murdered you long ago.”

“Murdered me?”

“With my own hands.”

“Then how lucky I’m not your father.” But the feeble joke fell flat. Her hard face jutting with disappointment, she turned to the wall, curled up her long body, and withdrew. At that moment he knew that, in a basement full of files, he had lost his last link to a world that would forever keep his son’s secret. Reluctantly he rose, wanting to touch the long body one last time. But he lacked the courage to do so and only said a weak good-bye that was not acknowledged. He walked past the silent stove, running his fingers over the crib, then traversed the corridor and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, in which a solitary chef was concentrating on beheading a large fish.

The two Arabs were in the smoking lounge, talking quietly like old friends. Fu’ad was smoking a cigarette while Rashid twirled a cigar between his fingers as if uncertain what to do with it. They looked at him accusingly as he entered. For the first time he felt that neither of them liked him. “Shu hada, ya Brofesor?” Rashid asked in a cold voice. “Kul halkad b’sur’ah hillis nomak?”^*

12.

IT WAS CLEAR AND getting frostier outside. The snow had been cleared from the streets. Here and there, in the afternoon sun, rosy icicles gleamed on the roofs.

Rashid was in low spirits, disappointed by his failure at the Civil Administration Bureau and embarrassed to have been found naked. He drove silently, with his eyes on the road, passing in front of the walls of the Old City and heading for the underground parking lot on Mount Scopus. Bluish clouds were stamped on the skies above Hebrew University. To the east, over the desert, hung a thick haze.

The guard at the entrance to the parking lot found an Orientalist in a hunting jeep suspicious and insisted on seeing Rivlin’s invitation to the conference. This, however, was not to be found, having been lost in the hotel or the basement. Not even a faculty ID card from Haifa could persuade the guard to let the car through. Rivlin felt he had had enough of Rashid. Why not, he suggested lamely, start back for the Galilee without him? He would probably find someone to give him a ride back to Haifa.

Rashid demurred. “I’ll come for you at the end of the session,” he said. “Your wife won’t like it, Professor, if I leave you here in Jerusalem.” Despite the anger in his voice, he still held the judge in high esteem.

In the reception room of the Truman Institute, a large gathering was crowded around the refreshment-laden tables. The translatoress of Ignorance, circulating excitedly, lit up when she saw Rivlin. “Where did you disappear to?” she scolded. “Everyone has been looking for you. Hagit called, too. She said not to try calling her back — she’ll try again. Look how many people came in the end! Do you think we should move to a bigger auditorium?”

“There’s no need for it,” he assured the happy widow, explaining that the more crowded the audience, the better the lectures, since packed rows of listeners were an erotic stimulus to an intellectual.

The rows of the little hall were indeed so full that a janitor had to bring extra chairs. Although many of those present were unfamiliar to Rivlin, he had a good idea of who they were. Apart from university officials and administrators, there were members of the small Italian-Jewish community of Jerusalem, most of them slight, elderly women in high heels and black dresses set off by colorful scarves, who took pride in their scholarly compatriot and hoped to hear stories that would remind them of their childhoods in the beautiful land of fascism they had fled. There were also Arabists from various universities and colleges, and, to his surprise, quite a few young M.A. and Ph.D. students, as well as strange hybrids spawned by pseudoacademic think tanks and research institutes. These, in the spirit of the times, were confusingly interdisciplinary, their Orientalism combined with sociology, law, literature, political science, philosophy, education, Jewish history, computer science, and other things. As he was wondering what they were doing at a memorial for Tedeschi, who had done his best scholarship before most of them were born, he noticed a group of them swarming around Dr. Miller. With a mixture of amazement and consternation, it dawned on him that this pale, quiet man whose promotion he had foiled had disciples. One day, no doubt, they would take their revenge on their guru’s nemesis.

Yet his envy had no time to linger on Miller, because it had already shifted to the dead man himself and his well-attended memorial. For a moment, Rivlin even begrudged Tedeschi his own eulogy. Who, he lamented, would mourn him? Would he have a successor, in this generation that did not want to succeed anyone because everyone wanted to be his original self? Going off to a corner, he reviewed his talk in solitude, ignored by the colleagues invited according to a list drawn up by him.

The afternoon session was opened by the university rector, a vigorous, middle-aged mathematician who, too old to discover new theorems, had embarked on a second, administrative career. Since he had never known Tedeschi, the doyen of Orientalists having retired before his time, he chose to say a few words about peace with the Arab world and invited Dr. Miller to give the first lecture, the topic of which was “Colonial Desire.”

The young lecturer strode unhurriedly to the podium. He wore new eyeglasses with clear, light frames so transparent that they seemed not to be there at all. In a soft voice, he read from a prepared text.

“In his book Colonial Desire, published in 1995, the British cultural historian Robert Young writes about the longing for the cultural Other as an escape from one’s own cultural world. One subject he discusses is the active, sometimes even erotic, desire for the Other that informs all cultural crossovers.

“Such cross-cultural contacts, as has been observed, leave their perpetrators in what the University of Chicago’s Homi Bhabha has termed ‘an in-between space’—or as Kipling put it, they are ‘East-West mongrels.’

“The existential plane of this androgynous hybridism is the European colony, whose inner cultural dissonance creates a fractured and divided self…”

Rivlin felt exhausted. In the end, he thought bitterly, his Circe had not let him rest for a moment. At least he would not have to do the driving back to Haifa.

“Young, like other students of culture, argues that following Sartre in 1960, Mannoni in 1964, Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi in 1967, and Aimé Césaire in 1972—the founding theoretical fathers, as it were, of postcolonialist theory, that theory has emphasized the dichotomy between the binary forces of the colonizer and the colonized.

“This dichotomy treats the colonized as the Other of the colonizer, knowable only by a false representation that reinstitutes the same static, essentialist categories it wished to do away with. By contrast, the multiculturalist outlook has encouraged many populations to assert their separate individualism. Thus, both Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis maintain that even extremist groups need to be encouraged in their struggle for representability.

“Historically speaking, we can, therefore, say that only recently, in the final decade of the twentieth century, have critics and scholars grasped the significance of cross-cultural contact as a mapper of the full complex of constructive and destructive social forces. And yet the available models for describing this complex are far from satisfactory.”

Rivlin noticed that some members of the audience were taking notes. Pleased by this, Miller slowed his pace to enable them to keep up with him.

“We can say that the main theories of cross-culturalism have been based on the three models of diffusion, assimilation, and isolation. None of these, however, takes into account the effects of interaction, even though historical studies have shown the importance of cross-cultural stimulus and response in such areas as religion, commerce, epidemiology and health care, and so on. The most productive paradigm to date has been the linguistic one.”

Someone tapped Rivlin on the shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”

He hurried outside to the telephone at the entrance. “Where are you?” asked Hagit.

“Right here.”

“Your sister called two hours ago. She’s in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing serious. She’ll need tests. There’s a problem with her eye. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I want to know where you ran off to again.”

“Where do you think? I had lunch off-campus to get away from Hannah and her hysterics. Now I’m back keeping an eye on things and waiting for the memorial session.”

“Hannah complained there were very few people this morning.”

“She should stop whining. What does she want? There were as many people as could be expected for a conference in honor of a dead old professor. And it was snowing. But now a whole Italian contingent has arrived, and the place is packed.”

“Then you’re happy?”

“Happy? What for? It’s not a memorial for me.”

“You’re unbelievable. You even envy the dead.”

“I can envy anyone. But tell me what happened to Raya.”

“She has a torn retina in three places in her left eye.”

“For God’s sake! That’s exactly what happened to my father.”

“Except that the treatment nowadays is much simpler, provided the retina isn’t detached. They use lasers at low temperatures. We’ll know more when the head eye doctor examines her tonight. Meanwhile she has patches on both eyes and is feeling low. She keeps thinking of your father.”

“Is anyone with her?”

“Noa was, but she had to leave at seven to relieve the nanny. And Ayal won’t come before nine. That’s why I thought that, if you weren’t too tired, you might drop by the hospital on your way home. Your sister is all alone there…. Do you hear me?”

“Of course.”

“Is Rashid still with you?”

“Yes. I’m lucky he tags after me everywhere, even though we accomplished nothing at the Civil Administration Bureau.”

“I’ll take a look at what the law says. But what’s up? Do you feel ready to give the eulogy?”

“Pretty much.”

“Put some feeling into it. Carlo deserves it.”

“I’ll do my best. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Just a minute. Why are you so remote?”

“I’m not. I’m just tired.”

“Do you still love me a little?”

His felt his heart turn over.

“What do you mean? You’re my whole life…”

13.

THE LAST GLIMMERINGS OF daylight sifted in among the audience, which had not diminished the second session. Although neither the “Sudanese” from Bar-Ilan nor the “Iraqi” from Beersheba had directly challenged Miller’s conclusion that Orientalism was a meaningless concept, each preferring to make a modest point in his own field, the two had demonstrated that Orientalist research was on solid ground. Disappointed by such evasive tactics, a number of Miller’s followers left at the session’s end. Yet the auditorium remained full, since the empty seats were taken by an Italian consular delegation and some Italian priests and nuns, come to pay their last respects to the fellow countryman who had often lectured to them on various subjects.

The memorial session began at five-thirty. A black lace shawl around her slender shoulders, the widow stepped forward to place two large framed photographs on the podium, one of the young Tedeschi in the Israeli desert and one of an older man getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Turin, the city he had fled on the eve of World War II. The green-ribboned mortarboard above his heavy academic robe gave his nose a pinched and ugly look.

Two young musicians played a lively Rossini serenade for flute and violin. When the applause died down, the chairman of the Hebrew University’s Near Eastern Studies department delivered a brief review of Tedeschi’s scholarly achievements — which, he declared, were a guiding light to an entire generation. He was followed by the director of the Truman Institute, who regaled the audience with recollections of Tedeschi the public figure. The Jerusalem polymath, he related, had never refused to put aside his scholarly pursuits for a luncheon or dinner in honor of the university’s Middle Eastern guests — Turks, peace-loving Jordanians, Arabs from the Persian Gulf, brave Pakistanis — and to teach them a thing or two about their own history.

The two musicians returned to play a modern work by an Italian composer, an intricate and unmelodic dialogue that left everyone relieved that it was over. A hush descended on the hall, where the elegiac mood was heightened by the twilight that was its sole illumination. It was time for Rivlin, the deceased’s protégé and real or apparent heir, to rise and go to the lectern, where he shut his eyes for a moment with such force that he seemed about to burst into an aria. Outside the large windows, at the foot of Mount Scopus, the Old City, bounded by its ancient Turkish wall, merged in the dusk with the neighborhoods around it. Patches of snow gleamed on its golden domes. Rivlin felt a wave of despondency. The hopeless Rashid and the amorous Circe nagged at his mind. His stubborn, patient pursuit of the mystery of his son’s marriage, begun last spring in the garden of the hotel, had ended in a basement on a snowy day in winter by shelves filled with income-tax files.

He took his notes from his jacket pocket, placed them on the lectern, and began to read the opening paragraphs, which he had written out in full to get himself off to a good start.

“Two years ago, my wife and I were on a summer vacation in the Dolomites of northern Italy. One afternoon we took a funicular to a well-known ski site. It let us off on the slope of Mount Cortina, where there was nothing except for a small café. Sitting there was an elderly Italian gentleman, a stocky man with a distinguished if slightly recherché appearance whose face and body language were remarkably like those of Professor Tedeschi. Yes, my friends, he was the very image of our dear Carlo. We were so struck by it that we couldn’t take our eyes off of him. He drank his coffee and ate some cake while conversing thoughtfully with a young companion who — to judge by the deference he showed the older man — might have been his private secretary or student. After a while the gentleman rose, paid the bill, took his burnished, gold-handled cane, and left the café. Yet instead of heading downhill on the funicular to the little valley below, he took the young man’s arm and pointed amiably but firmly with the cane at a bare path that wound toward the summit of the mountain, bald except for a crown of snow. The two of them walked slowly, halting now and then to exchange a few words or look at the scenery, until they disappeared in a sudden haze.

“The elderly gentleman’s resemblance to Professor Tedeschi affected both me and my wife. We wondered where he and his young companion had been heading. And it was then that a thought occurred to me. ‘Imagine,’ I said to my wife, ‘that there had been no Italian fascism or German Nazism and no Second World War. Carlo Tedeschi, who was born to an assimilated Jewish family and considered himself an Italian in every respect, would have finished his medical studies in Turin. A successful, amiable physician, he would have gone hiking from time to time in the mountains near his native city and might have been the man we just saw. It never would have occurred to him to study Arabs or Turks, whom he would have known only as an occasional item in the newspapers.’

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Tedeschi’s Orientalism was a by-product of the tragedy of World War II. Even after the war, he could easily have returned to Italy and resumed his medical studies. But the fate of Europe’s Jews caused him to burn all his physical and spiritual bridges to his native land. He sold his parents’ home in Turin for less than market value, renounced his Italian citizenship, and began a new career on Mount Scopus as a student of Near Eastern history. His mentors, great Orientalists from Germany and Central Europe, had turned to the field for similar reasons. But Tedeschi was not satisfied with their classroom learning and decided to polish his spoken Arabic with a strict old Arab instructor known for his rigor in inculcating a proper accent. The young Italian threw himself into his new field with total dedication. It was more than a career for him. It was a calling, his contribution to integrating the Jewish people into the region they had chosen to live in — a crucial task if they were to survive there.”

There was wonder on the face of the translatoress, who had never heard Rivlin’s vividly told story of her husband’s doppelgänger climbing Mount Cortina in the sunset. He smiled at her tenderly. Getting no response, he turned to the consular officials, who were listening to his Hebrew with attentive incomprehension.

“In recent years,” he continued, “the field of Orientalism has been under unremitting attack. Edward Said’s renowned book, published twenty years ago, is but one illustration of this. Even though the radical accusations of this literary and intellectual critic living in New York were rejected out of hand by most scholars, among them such serious Arab academicians as Jalal el-Azem, Nadim el-Bitar, and Fu’ad Zakariyya, they have served to legitimize the ongoing criticism leveled at their own profession by many young Orientalists. So dubious are they of the scholarly integrity of their field that they would deny it its very name. Suddenly, a time-honored belief in the capacity of rational Western thinkers to understand the history and reality of the Arab world has been called into question. At the end of the twentieth century, we have been asked to adopt a postmodernist sensibility — a rather nebulous concept, I must say — characterized by a more flexible, relativistic, multicultural approach. This alone, we are told, can get us to the heart of an elusive essence that — so forthright Arab writers like Fu’ad Ajami lament — even the Arabs have despaired of understanding.

“The problem is especially severe for Israeli Orientalists, who are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they are suspected by both the world and themselves of being unduly pessimistic about the Arab world because of Israel’s conflict with it. And on the other hand, they are accused of unrealistic optimism because of their deep craving for peace. For the Israeli scholar, whether he likes or admits it or not, Orientalism is not just a field of research. It is a vocation involving life-and-death questions affecting our own and our children’s future. This is why we have a greater responsibility to be accurate in our work. Just as we must refrain from all condescension toward the Arabs, so must we avoid all romanticization of them. We are not German philologists, retired British intelligence officers, or literary French tourists, who can afford to be deluded about who the Arabs are or should be. We are the Arabs’ neighbors and even their hostages — participants in their destiny who are unavoidably part of what we study. We are the old and yet new stranger in their midst, the constant shadow of the Other that, by their own testimony, has become their twentieth-century obsession. The problematic indeterminacy of Jewish identity undermines the old stability of the Arab world that slumbered peacefully for centuries in the desert.”

From the throes of Israeli Orientalism’s double bind, the eulogist gave his worried audience a sorrowful, we-must-carry-on-nonetheless smile. Even the Italians who did not understand him nodded trustingly at his impeccable logic.

“And here,” Rivlin continued, pointing to the photograph of the Jerusalem polymath in the desert, “lies another of Tedeschi’s unique contributions. Growing aware many years ago of the dangers posed to Israeli Orientalism by this symbiotic relationship with the Arabs, he decided to draw a clear boundary. ‘Let us,’ he declared, drawing on his fund of knowledge, ‘learn from the Turks how to belong and not belong to this region at one and the same time.’ And so turning away from Iraq, putting Sudan aside, and even abandoning great Egypt, he traveled northward to Turkey, in whose relations with the Arab world he saw a paradigm for our own.”

The eulogist regarded his audience. It suddenly struck him that the elegant young woman seated several rows behind the eternal fedora of Mr. Suissa, her eyes riveted on him in the dim auditorium, was not an Italian consular worker but Mrs. Suissa junior, who had come to express her sympathy for a colleague of her murdered husband and for a newer widow than herself. The sight of this restless soul, looking calm and pretty with her hair pinned up, a new life ahead of her now that she had freed herself from the clutches of her in-laws, should have gladdened him. Instead, however, he was flooded with such sorrow for his own son that an involuntary groan escaped him. Seeking to obey his wife’s bidding, he fought to concentrate on his feelings for Tedeschi. The dead man deserved no less.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “though the Turks, ancient and modern, became Professor Tedeschi’s main concern, he did not neglect the Arabs completely. Indeed, having reached a stage in his career in which he could afford to take a panoramic view, he grew increasingly worried by our inability to understand the Arab mind. While he did his best to conceal it, he was fearful that we Jews, having failed catastrophically in Europe, were about to fail again in the Middle East — that the new homeland meant to be our final destination could become another bloody trap. Despite the natural optimism of a man who had taken his fate in his hands and saved his own life by coming to this country, he felt torn, as Israel’s leading Orientalist, between his responsibility to warn his colleagues of the pitfalls of wishful thinking and his reluctance to sow despair by declaring — he, who had educated generations of Arabists! — ’It is hopeless to try to understand the Arabs rationally. Back to their poetry, then, for that is all we have to go on!’

“Ladies and gentlemen, from this inner rupture came Tedeschi’s many imaginary illnesses, whether they were an escape from the harsh truth of reality or a cry for help to his friends, asked to come still his fears.”

The profound silence told him that he had said something unexpected and true. Reaching for the glass of water on the lectern, he took a slow sip while summoning his strength for the love and compassion he had promised his wife. It surprised him that no one had turned on the lights to dispel the darkness that had become almost palpable. Perhaps this was because Rashid, an anguished look on his face as he strained to hear the eulogist’s painful words from the back of the hall, was standing in the way of the light switch.

14.

DESPITE THE PATCHES ON her eyes, she knew it was her younger brother even before he opened his mouth. The intimacy of a childhood shared in one room in their parents’ small Jerusalem apartment had taught her to sense him from afar.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I told Hagit it was too much for you.”

“It’s all right. It was on my way.”

“Did that Arab at least drive you?”

“Yes. I’m lucky he sticks by me.”

“But why does he? I’ve heard you don’t even pay him.”

“Don’t ask me. It’s he who doesn’t want to take anything.”

She lay, small and thin, on a couch in the head eye doctor’s office, a black patch on each eye, waiting for the doctor to finish an operation and determine whether the low-temperature laser suture performed that afternoon had repaired her retina and made surgery unnecessary.

“In which eye did it happen to our father?” he asked.

“The same one. The left one.”

“Couldn’t you think of a better way to take after him?” He couldn’t resist teasing his sister, even while she lay dismally in the dark, with her good eye covered too — a precaution taken, she told him, not on orders from the doctor, but on the suggestion of a nurse. Although her son’s kindhearted wife had spent the afternoon with her, she had only made Raya’s fears worse by overidentifying with her condition. Now Rivlin’s sister lay waiting for her son to appear with his calming presence. Her brother, glum and tired, was not having a reassuring effect. On the contrary, he soon lapsed into a listless silence, from which she tried to arouse him by changing the subject to the snow in Jerusalem.

“That old bitch!” she declared of their mother, as angry at the age of sixty as if she were still a teenager. “All the kids were outside having fun while we were protected from pneumonia by having to ski a doll in a bowl of snow in the bathtub.”

“What doll are you talking about?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember!” Just because she couldn’t see she was not about to give up on her never ending struggle to keep her childhood memories alive in him. “That little black doll you went with everywhere…”

His silence only deepened as he tried remembering the black doll. He had no wish to rage with his sister against their mother. He hadn’t seen her ghost for ages. Would he end up having to eulogize her too?

Two hours ago he had been speaking in honor of Tedeschi. The lights in the auditorium had come on, the light switch behind Rashid having been discovered, just as he was describing in a tremulous voice how the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance, that pre-Islamic period so crucial for understanding the Arabs, had combined scholarship with her love of poetry and devotion to her husband’s health. But had it been fair to say what he had about Tedeschi’s illnesses, or had this been cheap psychologizing on his part? Before he could answer that, his son’s dreary solitude again pierced the twilight of his mind. For the first time, he felt no sympathy for Ofer, only anger. That’s it, my boy, he addressed him in his thoughts. I’ve failed just as you hoped I would. There’s no more hotel and no more Arabs to help me.

As in a dream, this, too, quickly faded. Now he saw his pale, lanky Circe, curled on the basement bed like a long fetus, osmosing into her own freedom.

“Listen,” he said to his sister. “I’m getting hungry. Shall I bring you something to eat too?”

“I’m too worried to eat. But I can feel how edgy you are. Why don’t you go home? It’s late.”

“It’s all right. Hagit made me promise to stay until Ayal comes.”

His sister smiled, reaching out a blind hand toward him.

The corridor outside was empty. The visitors had gone home. The nurse on duty sat reading a book. There was no telling whether the patients, lying in their rooms with bandaged eyes, were awake or asleep. A large figure was blocking his path.

“What’s up, Professor?”

To his amazement, he found himself looking at his sister’s former husband, a tall, thin, balding ex-playboy. Hearing from his son that Raya was in the hospital, he had come to have a look. Although he was a strange, difficult man who had given his wife a hard time, Rivlin felt a nostalgic affection for him.

“Look who’s here!” he said, giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t believe it! Come, say hello to Raya. She’ll flip when she sees you.”

“Shhh,” his ex-brother-in-law said. “If she does see me, she’s liable to detach her other retina.”

“But isn’t that what you’re here for?” For some reason, his encounter with this man, whom he had not run into for years, had improved his mood.

“To see Raya? What a thought! The head eye doctor is my tennis partner. Ayal asked me to speak to him.”

“But as long as you’re here,” Rivlin persisted. “why not look in on her? Don’t be childish. What are you afraid of? She won’t even know it’s you. Her eyes are covered.”

“They are?” The temptation to be invisible in his wife’s presence was too great to overcome. Silently, he followed Rivlin to Raya’s room.

She was still lying on the couch, small and thin. A lamp, buzzing softly on the table, lit her face. The black patches over her eyes gave her the look of an airplane passenger trying to get some sleep. For a moment, Rivlin thought she was drowsing. But sensing her ex-husband, who was standing in the doorway with a crooked smile, she raised her head and asked anxiously:

“Yochi, is that you?”

“What’s up?” Rivlin asked quietly.

“Did you eat so fast?”

“It seems I did…”

“But there’s someone else with you,” she said worriedly. “Who is it?”

He dodged the question. “Who could it be?”

“But there is!” She sounded fearful. “Someone is with you! Is it your driver?”

“My driver?”

The unseen husband smiled ironically. His blue, froggy eyes darted with amusement, as if reconfirming the oddness of the woman he had married and suffered with. Putting a finger to his lips, he turned and left.

Ayal arrived at last, tired but in full possession of himself. When told of his father’s visit, he said angrily to Rivlin, “You shouldn’t have let him come near her,” as if he were talking about two disturbed children.

It was ten o’clock when, back in a wet, glittering Tel Aviv street full of strollers taking the air after the storm, he climbed into the jeep and woke Rashid — who, having filled the vehicle with smoke from one of Fu’ad’s cigars, now lay fast asleep beneath a blanket.

“Look here, Rashid,” he said. “It’s turned into such a long day that I’m not driving back with you unless you let me pay you.”

“Pay me?” The messenger’s coal black eyes regarded him blearily. “You couldn’t afford what a day like this costs.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” the Orientalist said, offended. “I’m not a charity case. I can afford whatever you would normally take. Just tell me honestly what that is.”

“Normally?” Rashid smiled to himself, as if at a new thought. “For a long, hard day like this with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I’d take… at least… at least fifteen hundred shekels.”

“Fifteen hundred?” Though unable to conceal his shock, he quickly recovered and laughed derisively. “If that’s the going price, fine. Why not?” Grandly he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check, while promising Rashid that his wife would read up on the immigration laws dealing with the reunion of families.

The Arab jammed the check in his pocket and replied in a half hopeless, half newly dismissive tone:

“You can tell the judge not to try too hard, Professor. Laws have got nothing to do with it.”

15.

I have a strange pet, half kitten, half lamb. It’s a hand-me-down from my father, but only now has it begun to grow.

— Franz Kafka

THE HEAVY RAINS, WHICH went on falling in the north for another week, turned the dirt roads of the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon into treacherous bogs. After a Bedouin tracker was killed by a mine concealed in the mud, Central Command suspended all foot patrols and kept the roads open with armored vehicles. The Commanding Officer of the trackers’ platoon, a lieutenant whose name was Netur Kontar, hurriedly applied for leave and was granted it.

The CO was a Druze of about forty, a heavy man with a big mustache. Before leaving his base, he informed his family on the Carmel that he was going first to the village of B’keya in the Galilee, where he had promised to let his Christian dentist friend Marwan pull an infected wisdom tooth. If the weather improved, he might also join him and his friends for a night of hunting.

Kontar had been an avid hunter since he was a small boy. His father, discovering early that he had a natural instinct for finding his way at night without getting lost, took him along on his hunting trips, during which young Netur sometimes spent entire nights perched silently in the treetops. It was so hard to wake him the next morning that he was almost expelled from school. If it hadn’t been for his older sister, who did all his homework, he would never have graduated.

It was in the army, however, that his abilities became fully appreciated. As a recruit in boot camp, he so impressed his officers with his navigational skills that they vied to take him on their nighttime maneuvers. When his three years of conscripted service were over, the Northern Corps, loath to lose an ace tracker, made him the unusual offer of a commission, without requiring him to take an officers’ training course, and immediate command of a platoon in southern Lebanon.

The young Druze accepted, not only because the conditions were good and the job was a feather in his cap, but also because the army was a first-rate base from which to pursue his life’s passion. Throughout his long years of daily exposure to mines, bayonet charges, and booby traps, he took comfort in the regimental armory, out of which he enhanced his collection of weapons with an array of silencers, telescopic lenses, starlight sensors, and other devices, to say nothing of camouflage nets, which made excellent snares, and stale bread from the kitchens, which was good bait for wild boars. After losing his right thumb to a mine blast, he was afraid he had impaired his trigger finger, and for a while he suffered from depression. But the impediment was overcome, and the old army jeep that he was given in compensation, which he quickly filled with the equipment that now went with him everywhere, made him a legendary figure among the hunters of northern Israel and even of southern Lebanon.

Today, however, as he knocked on the door of the dental clinic in B’keya, Netur Kontar was in a troubled mood, both because of his painful wisdom tooth and of a strange story told him by his father. At first he didn’t mention it. Leaning back in the dentist’s chair, he opened an uncomplaining mouth and let his head be jerked this way and that while his friend gaily pulled his tooth and told funny stories to distract him. Yet once Netur Kontar had spat out the last of the blood, rinsed his mouth thoroughly, admired its new hole in a hand mirror, and taken off his bib, he asked the assistant to leave him alone with the dentist so that he could speak his mind.

Netur Kontar’s father, the renowned hunter of his childhood, was now an octogenarian. Yet several nights ago, Netur told the Christian dentist, the old man had gone hunting in the hills near Megiddo — where, in the moonlight, he spied a creature like none he had ever seen before. It had the height and shape of a large lamb and the head and claws of a cat, and it moved by alternating wriggles and skips. Its round, green eyes, wild and roving, were catlike and lamblike at once. Instead of cat’s whiskers it had heavy muttonchops that gleamed pink in the light of the moon.

Surprisingly, the old hunter told his son, this strange mongrel made no attempt to flee. Curious and frisky, it let out a sound that was neither a meow, nor a purr, nor a bleat, but rather a hoarse groan, and approached the old Druze in a friendly manner, nuzzling him and sniffing at his clothes as if they were on the best of terms. Yet as the old Druze was wondering how best to trap the animal and bring it back to his village, it seemed to guess his intentions and sprang from his arms, scratching his forehead and disappearing on the bushy hillside.

The old man was determined to pursue the matter. Although being clawed by an unidentified beast required medical treatment, he spent the next day secretly making a large rope net, with which he returned to the scene of the encounter the following night. He set out a bowl of milk and a chopped fish, sprinkled them with fresh alfalfa, and hid in the branches of a tree to see what would happen.

It was only toward dawn, as he crouched in the tree half-asleep and half-shaking from cold, that the mongrel appeared again. This time it resembled neither a cat nor a lamb, but a cross between a goat and a German shepherd. It sniffed at the food, consumed it all, and glanced fearlessly at the old hunter as he slipped slowly down from his tree. This time, too, it let itself be petted and even turned over on its back, enabling him to see that it was sexless — neither male, female, nor in between. “Well, then,” Netur Kontar’s father thought, his desire to show the strange animal off to his friends and family growing stronger by the minute, “this is a pure miracle, a one-time creation of God’s that will never reproduce itself.” Yet as soon as he spread the large net he had brought, the animal gave a great leap and — before bounding off toward the valley of Jezreel — nearly tore out the eye of the old Druze who had planned to catch it.

Even now, however, the old hunter refused to give up. Despite his eighty years, he set out in pursuit of the fleeing beast, at first on foot, and then, seeing that it was following the road to Afula, in his old pickup truck. Near Mount Gilboa, not far from the Jordan, the mongrel vanished from sight.

“And then?” the dentist asked. He had listened with no sign of emotion while disinfecting and arranging his tools.

And then a week went by. The old hunter’s wounds were treated by a doctor, who gave him anti-tetanus shots. Fearing to be made fun of by his family, he said nothing about the beast that had clawed him and waited for his son to come home from the army. He was prepared to tell his story to him alone.

The dentist felt concern for the Druze officer still sitting in the revolving chair, his eyes red from lack of sleep. Not only had he just had a tooth pulled, he had lost a tracker earlier in the week. “With all due respect to your father’s wounds,” said the Christian dentist, who had heard his share of Druze tall tales in his life, “don’t you think he might have imagined it?”

Netur Kontar frowned. He knew his father well. He had learned to hunt from him. They had spent long nights together in the mountains. Although he questioned the mysterious lambcat’s sexlessness, he didn’t doubt that the beast existed. His father, though possibly confused, was not making it up. He had been hunting since the days of the British Mandate and had seen every animal there was, and if he said at his age that he had found a brand-new one, he was to be taken at his word. Indeed, it was the duty of every hunter to bring the lamb-cat alive to the Nature Authority, or else to the University of Haifa or even the government in Jerusalem, since it was sure to be named for its discoverer, thus bringing scientific glory to the Kontars and the entire Druze community.

“But where do you suggest looking for it?” the dentist asked gently. He was beginning to wonder whether his old friend was in his right mind.

“On Mount Gilboa. That’s where it was last seen.”

“But where on Gilboa? It’s a big mountain.”

“It’s not as big as all that.”

“It’s also a nature reserve on which hunting is forbidden.”

At this the Druze officer turned livid. Forbidden? To whom? To an officer like himself who risked his life day after day for the State of Israel? You might think he was proposing to kill the animal and eat it in revenge for its having clawed his father. All he wanted was to further scientific knowledge of the country’s wildlife.

The dentist feared his friend might burst out crying. He would think about it, he said. Meanwhile, he urged Netur Kontar to wash up, change his clothes, and lie down in a little side room of the clinic.

The Druze officer took the dentist’s advice and was soon fast asleep. Going to the telephone, Marwan called his fellow hunter Anton, the lawyer in Nazareth, to ask for his opinion of the story. The lawyer tended to agree that it was all the old man’s fantasy, taken seriously by his son out of filial loyalty and mental exhaustion from his long service in Lebanon. Still, he, Anton, would be happy to hunt the lambcat together with them tomorrow night. “Don’t worry, Marwan,” he laughed loudly. “Even if we’re arrested for poaching, I’ll file such an appeal with the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, arguing that we can’t be convicted of hunting a nonexistent animal, that the judges will pee in their pants. So why not spend a night on Gilboa protected by an army officer? While we’re looking for Netur’s animal, we may bag a boar or a nice juicy gazelle. In Nazareth we say, ‘The Arab harvests the Druze’s dreams.’”

16.

AND THEN YOU KNEW it. Calamity burst from you like a dream become a reality, and though you leaped barefoot in the dark to head it off, it was too late. Its swift shadow passed through the room you had prepared and merged outside the window with the certainty awaiting it, gathering speed along roads of awakening light, rolling as all calamities do to a place you had never imagined. The lamb fled to the hunter who dreamed a dream.

Now they all say, “Enough, stop blaming yourself! It was Fate. Only God knows the reason, and God will make good on it.” Idiots! Go explain to them that Right is stronger than Fate and mightier than God because it alone promises sweet Justice.

It found you outside the Civil Administration building, hopelessly stuffing your jacket pocket with forms as though it were a garbage pail for hope. “Take me with you!” it cried. “Take me from this Jerusalem slush. Even the Jew, though you led him here through a blizzard, can only go tsk and mumble vague promises. Take me with you, Rashid! If not now, when? I’m light and I’m clear and I won’t weigh you down. Enough of the hypocrisy of colored forms — forms for the government, and forms for the army, and forms for tired bureaucrats and officers with their games. ‘Yes, by all means, bring your sister and her children, just make sure they’re dying of some illness’—as if any illness could be fatal enough. Take me with you, O Arab of Israel, O displaced citizen who has his rightful place!”

And so you threw away the forms, and Right jumped into your arms like a lion cub, emboldening you so that you asked for your full pay, and the shocked Professor laughed but forked up. And that night, when you reached the village, even the horse sensed that Right was with you and backed away from the gate. Samaher and Afifa turned over in their sleep, hearing Right pass down the hallway, and Grandmother lay with open eyes by Grandfather and smelled it as if sniffing fresh vegetables. “Careful, Rashid, my love,” she thought. “Don’t do anything crazy with this Right you’ve brought home.” Yes, Grandmother. The Law blows up in the lawmaker’s brain, and Right stabs the hearts of the righteous. But what else can I do when it and I have embraced and there is no turning back?

That night you began clearing out your room for Ra’uda and her children. You felt sad giving up the place that had been yours since childhood, the solitary room of your hopes and dreams, of your books and self-abuse and love for the young cousin you protected. It was hard to empty out the drawers, collect the books, and fumigate the same mattress the Jew slept on. But when you took down the colored memos and the pictures, baring ugly patches on the faded walls, you realized that childhood had gone on long enough and love had grown too entangled. It was time, O wise one, to choose exile.

You spent the day painting and plastering. And in the evening, when all came to see, the village informer came too, for who knew what juicy bit of information the police might pay for? But Right was stronger than all payment, and even the old informer could only say “Well done” and depart. Your old enemy alone, Samaher’s husband, was gloomy and nervous and refused to believe that anything had changed. “O husband of my beloved cousin,” you should have said to him, “are you not glad the jinni is leaving?” But he knew that the return of Ra’uda and her children would only strengthen your foothold in this house, even though you had moved to the far end of the village.

Was it he, in desperation, who informed on you that night?

Yes, Calamity burst from you like a dream become a reality, and though you leaped barefoot in the dark to head it off, it was too late. Its swift shadow passed through the room you had prepared and merged outside the window with the certainty awaiting it. Over the hills, in the awakening light, it rolled as all calamities do to a place you had never imagined. O rash Rashid, how could you deliver the boy into the hands of poachers?”

It was afternoon when you arrived in Zababdeh. The winter sun was mild. As on the night of Paradise, you crossed the fields and — noticed only by Calamity, which followed you — kicked down a section of fence. You suspected nothing, happy to see the children in the churchyard looking so nice in their clean clothes, dream-Israelis about to become real ones. Ra’uda was wearing the Jewish judge’s hand-me-downs in honor of her return. You gave her sick old Christian husband a package of your old clothes, too, and some books to pass the time with when his children were gone, and you went to say good-bye to the Abuna, who showered you with twice as many blessings as usual because he sensed that Calamity was on its way. After that you went for a last meal in the basement. The Christian sat silently at the head of the table, eating his soup from his army mess tin in a mood of great fear, as if Calamity were directly overhead. You alone were not frightened or confused. You were as pleased with yourself as if Right and you were now bedfellows.

At three that afternoon you folded the backseats of the minibus, loaded the bundles and kitchenware, and hid the children among them. Ra’uda sat up front with the baby. Ismail and Rasheed put on their big glasses, so that whoever had seen them in the Jewish state would recognize them. Their father gave them some farewell gifts, and they parted with a few words. It had clouded over and begun to drizzle, and you were in a hurry to get back to Israel before dark. The Palestinian police in Kabatiyeh and Jenin knew you were on your way. “Good luck,” they said to your sister. “We too will return some day.” But cutting across the field, you saw a new checkpoint that hadn’t been there before and two soldiers waiting for something, perhaps for you — and you panicked. In fact, you did the worst possible thing. You stopped the car and turned around. And Calamity thought: if one checkpoint with two soldiers can make this Israeli Arab turn and run, how much Right can he have?

The report of the vehicle that had turned back spread like an ink stain. More and more checkpoints went up. You headed east toward Mount Gilboa and reached it at twilight, hoping to find an unguarded path, only to run into a roadblock there too. And yet Calamity was still preventable. The three soldiers, all middle-aged reservists, had no idea what to look for. They checked the bundles and suitcases, searched for explosives and drugs, and lined the children up in a row and demanded to know the history of each. You kept calm. The children, you explained quietly, were all little Israelis who had been visiting their cousins in the Palestinian Authority with their mother. Now they missed their village in the Galilee, which was why it was wrong to detain them, because they were hungry and wanted their Israeli supper.

The dark Arab’s light manner did not entirely assuage the Jews, who failed to grasp what so many ID-less little children were doing at the foot of Mount Gilboa at dusk on a winter day. And yet their commander, a sergeant in his forties whose hair was streaked with gray, was not looking for problems. He had a family of his own, which was sitting down to its supper now, too, and he felt sorry for the children, especially for the black baby sleeping in the arms of its curiously well-dressed mother. He was ready to turn a blind eye — but only one. He would let them all through except for the two older boys, the ones with the funny glasses, who would have to wait for their ID’s.

And then, Rashid, you made your second mistake. You should have noticed the fear in little Rasheed’s coal black eyes and insisted, “Hold on there, my fellow citizens. I have too much Right on my side to compromise. I’m not going anywhere without the two boys. Their grandmother is waiting for them too.”

But you didn’t. You were rattled and started to squirm, afraid the sergeant would open his blind eye too, and you turned tail and headed for the village of Arabuna to find a place for the two boys for the night. Bolts of lightning sliced the air, and you heard a boom of thunder and thought, “I have to hurry,” and you knocked on the door of the first house. The old woman who opened it looked as ancient and used as a ghost from Turkish times. And then you made your third mistake. Instead of saying, “Sorry, I’ve come to the wrong house,” you appointed her temporary grandmother in charge of the two returnees. You even gave her twenty shekels for milk and eggs and told the Dybbuk’s two candle bearers to wait for you, making the younger one promise to obey the older and the older one swear to look after the younger, so that Grandmother Ghost, who had by now awakened Grandfather Ghost to help her, would not be annoyed with them.

And now, sitting day and night by the boy’s bed, you wonder how Calamity took over that night and Right stabbed you in the back. Because Rasheed freaked when you didn’t come back. He didn’t even take off his funny glasses, because he was sure you would return in a minute to bring him to Israel. He must have thought you loved him best of all because his name was just like yours. And you did, because he was the most darling. But when the two old folks gave him his supper, he began to cry and scream at the old lady that he didn’t want to be left behind in Palestine. And even then she might have calmed him if only Ismail, a moody child in the best of times, hadn’t slapped him and made him cry even harder for his mother. And at night, when they were all asleep with the windows shut and the door locked, he wriggled through a transom in the bathroom. Although at first he meant to wait for his uncle, he was lured on by the lights of Israel in the distance. He was sure that once he reached them, no one would ask him for any ID. He didn’t know that Fate prowled on the mountain, disguised as the hunter whose gun would fill out the forms you had thrown away.

17.

’CAUSE WHY NOT TRY? The lights are bright and near and I can reach them. Why be afraid of the soldiers if my mother was born there and can speak their language? The village is called Mansura. We were there twice. Grandmother gave us candies and told us to come back. What made Mamma leave? She shouldn’t have done it for Babba. He’s sick. Let him die in Jenin, where he was born.

But why does this path keep going up? I thought it was just a little mountain. Now I see it’s a big one. And there’s nothing on it. I should have slept in that old witch’s house. But I made a mistake and I can’t go back.

THE DRUZE OFFICER SLEPT all day and all night in his friend’s dental clinic, woozy from the painkillers he took for his pulled tooth. At dawn he arose, amazed and contentedly refreshed by his long slumber. He phoned headquarters to make sure his leave had not been canceled, went to his jeep, which was stocked with six battle rations, two canteens of fresh milk mixed with grated cheese, and a carton of stale bread, and took out a military map of Mount Gilboa. Spreading it on the floor of the clinic, he studied it carefully. Then he picked out a route and some good spots for hunters’ blinds, committed them to his photographic memory, and folded and put away the map. The dentist, none of his patients protesting, called off his appointments for the next day; the lawyer postponed all his meetings, giving each client a different excuse; and the two Christian hunters sat down to clean and oil their guns in preparation for the Druze extravaganza.

A light rain was falling in the glare of their headlights as they set out. They stopped in a field, to pick some alfalfa for the lamb half of the lambcat, and arrived at evening, fully armed and bundled in their windbreakers, at Netur Kontar’s father’s house. There, over a cozy supper, the old hunter described what he had seen. The main thing, he warned, was to catch the animal alive. This was important not only for science, but also for tourism, especially if — though the task seemed impossible — the sexless lambcat could be made to propagate.

It was nine o’clock when the three hunters returned to their jeep and set out for Mount Gilboa. Parking by a spring chosen by the Druze officer, they spread the alfalfa on a rock, poured the milk and cheese into a bowl, and added a fish head given them by Netur’s mother, who knew nothing of the strange beast that had frolicked with her husband. The Druze positioned his two friends and climbed a tree that looked down on the bait. In the next few hours the bait drew partridges, conies, and even a wary young fox, who left nothing for the lambcat. The rain beat down harder.

IT WAS RAINING SO hard that I couldn’t even see the darkness and had to take off my glasses. As soon as I did, I lost them. That’s too bad, I thought, ’cause now no one in Israel will know me, and I’ll be like Babba, without a right to return. It’s best to cross now in the dark when the soldiers are asleep, ’cause if they see that I don’t know any Hebrew except for “Hello” and “Screw you” they’ll bring me back to my sick father in the basement.

I was getting hungry. Between Ismail and the old woman, I didn’t eat any supper, so I broke off a leaf and chewed it and thought, maybe it’s poison and I’ll die before Babba. I felt sorry for leaving him all sick and pale in the church. What if the Abuna forgets to take care of him? And I felt bad that I hadn’t opened his present or said thank-you, so I looked in my pocket and there it was, wrapped in some newspaper, and I took it out and it was a little pen, and I wondered what would happen when Babba died, and I missed him and wanted to cry and go back.

There was a fishy smell. I went to see what it was. A flashlight shone on me. “There he is,” someone whispered. That’s right, I thought, here I am, but why are you talking in Arabic?

AFTER THE SMALL GAME of Gilboa had eaten all the bait and vanished without a shot being fired, Netur Kontar decided to leave the spring for a new spot on Brave Men’s Hill. They drove over Buttercup Pass and down the Old Patrol Road for five hundred meters. Once again they spread the alfalfa and put out the milk and cheese, into which they now tossed the fish’s tail. This time the Druze remained below and told the two Christians to climb trees.

The more the night progressed, the more temperamental Netur Kontar became. He began to order the doctor and lawyer around as if they were trackers under his command, barking at them what to do and demanding such silence that not only laughter but smiles were forbidden. “Who does he think he is?” the lawyer whispered indignantly to the dentist. “we didn’t stay out of the Jews’ army in order to serve in a Druze’s. We haven’t caught a damn thing tonight.”

But as Netur was determined to trap the lambcat, and the keys to the jeep were in his pocket, there was nothing the two Christians could do but climb into their harnesses and up two wet-branched trees. They perched there in their windbreakers, the victims of Netur Kontar’s father’s fantasy. They would, they decided, give it until three in the morning. If the lambcat had not turned up by then, they would look for other game.

The silence was total. Although the rain picked up again, the dentist and the lawyer soon fell asleep in the branches. They were half-dreaming when the Druze shone his flashlight on the bushes and whispered, “There he is.” By then it was too late to stop him.

AND I THOUGHT, if they’re talking Arabic, I haven’t reached the border and it must be Ismail coming to spank me. “Don’t,” I wanted to beg him. “Go easy. Don’t spank me too hard, ’cause I’m worried about Babba, who’s sick and all alone, and I’m mad at Mamma for leaving him.” It was wet and cold and dark and I ran and I ran until I couldn’t run any more and I heard my brother growling beneath a tree. He wasn’t shouting or cursing, just making these crazy animal sounds. I was good and scared. So I ran some more and my present fell from my pocket and I bent to pick it up and something whistled and I felt an awful pain as if Babba’s pen were stuck in my back.

AN EXPERIENCED HUNTER LIKE Netur Kontar knew at once that no animal moved or made sounds like that. Perhaps, he thought, the beast that had fired his father’s imagination was a werelamb. Waking the two Christians in the treetops, he signaled them to slip quietly down and execute a flanking movement and — though he had been warned by his father to catch the lambcat alive — opened the safety catch on his shotgun and took off in hot pursuit.

It was too dark to see anything. Yet the Druze hunter was used to such nights and tracked the animal by ear. Now and then, glimpsing a silhouette that didn’t match his father’s description, he wondered if it might have changed shape again.

But it was too quick for him. And so after a while, fearing to disappoint his father, he stopped running, dropped to his knees, and began making friendly animal noises, yowling, bleating, purring, and sighing to convey his good intentions. Yet the beast that had been so playful with his father refused to approach his father’s son, though it did pause for a moment in the bushes to stare curiously at him with its coal black eyes. That was when, desperate, Netur Kontar menacingly shouldered his shotgun. The doctor and lawyer, running up to him at that moment, barely had time to say “Hold it,” as he pressed the trigger in spite of his father’s warning…

IT WASN’T MY BROTHER or the pen. It was some metal in my back that knocked me down and didn’t let me move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. All right, I thought. I’ll forget about Grandmother in the village. Just let me go back to Babba, ’cause he’s sick in the church and I want to be with him. But I couldn’t make a sound, not even a whimper, and my head hurt real bad. Something heavy pressed on me and pinned me down. I wanted to go to sleep and die. Oh, Babba, Babba, oh, Abuna, help me, help me and save me from this earth.

18.

MIDWAY THROUGH YOUR CLASS, the door at the top of the lecture hall opened, and a bulky woman with an overnight bag walked in and sat down in the last row.

Startled, you lost the thread of your lecture for a moment. Since it wasn’t the origins of French colonialism in North Africa that had brought this very pregnant woman to the last class of the winter semester, she had to be a former student coming to display her condition before asking for an extension on a term paper. Yet a second later, your heart did a flip-flop. It was Galya, the lost bride herself. You waved to let her know she should wait for you after class, then resumed your lecture.

The lecture ended. She struggled toward you with her bag down the tiered rows, carrying her pregnancy as though it were a gift for you. While the students crowded around you to ask about their final exam, she sat again and waited for them to leave. Gone from her glance were last spring’s haughty impatience and anger at her father’s death, their place taken by a wistfulness that verged on defeat. She made a move to get to her feet. You told her not to and hurried to her from the lecture podium. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” you said, bending to embrace her before she could reply. Her body yielded willingly, soft and unresisting like her mother’s. She seemed not to know what to say. It was as if, having come all this way and received a warm welcome from you, she no longer remembered the reason.

But you weren’t asking for it. You treated her sudden appearance as a perfectly normal family visit, gave her big belly a fatherly appraisal, and asked when she was giving birth. The due date, she answered with some embarrassment, was this week, perhaps even today or tomorrow.

This was already too much for you. Was she planning to have her child in your lecture room? “What kind of time is this to be running around the country?” you rebuked her mildly, as if the baby in her womb were partly yours too.

Her overnight bag at her feet, she tried to defend herself. First births were usually late. She was counting on that. She had come to see your son. She needed to speak to him immediately, if possible before she gave birth. Of course, she could have got his telephone number from you. But she wanted your help in persuading him to come to Israel. After all, you were also responsible.

“I am?”

Yes, you were. She was firm about that. That’s why you had to help her. She would pay for Ofer’s ticket. She had already reserved a seat for him on tomorrow’s flight from Paris. She had a face-to-face confession to make, and she needed to ask his forgiveness, if only for her baby’s sake. She had sworn to herself that she would do it.

Her voice echoed emotionally in the empty lecture room. You were beside yourself with joy. At last, though you had no idea what it was, the truth sought by you for nearly a year was about to materialize. You asked, not recognizing your own happiness:

“Forgiveness for what?”

19.

SEATED IN THE EMPTY lecture room like the last student to finish an exam, Galya realized that this man who had pursued her with his frenzied questions hadn’t a clue. As much as she needed his help, she wasn’t about to give him one now. If Ofer wanted to tell him, that was his business. He had had the past six years to do it in, even though she had asked him not to. She respected him for that. He had acted not from weakness or guilt, but from gallantry toward a woman he loved. She would never compromise him.

As in their meetings at the hotel, Rivlin felt that his ex-daughter-in-law still harbored a resentment against him. He had to nurture the new trust between them if he didn’t want to lose her again. He reached for her bag, surprised to feel how heavy it was.

“But why are we standing here?” he asked, adopting a light tone. “Giving birth in this lecture room won’t get your child free tuition in the future. Let’s go to our place. We’ll call Ofer and tell him you’re waiting for him. Believe me, he would have come running even without the ticket you bought him. It’s his attachment to you that’s made me so worried about him. That’s why you mustn’t be angry at me for saying that, quite apart from forgiveness, the truth matters, too.”

She bowed her head, as if the truth he saddled her with were too heavy for her. Carefully, she eased her way out of her seat. How strange, Rivlin thought, that of all the women, Jewish and Arab, who had asked to be taken under his wing this past year, she had waited to do so until now, in the final days of her pregnancy. Yet in spite of everything, he would grant her wish and be the father she had lost.

Gripping her arm lightly but firmly, he led her through the gloomy corridors of the building, which had been designed without any provision for letting in the copious sunlight from outside. Passing the large show window of the library, in which were displayed new works by the faculty, he thought sadly of his own book, held up by this, his parallel quest for the truth. The university, he told the perfunctorily nodding Galya, had grown enormously in recent years. Her steps faltered as they entered the dark underground parking lot, along a wall of which some cartons with old files were waiting to be thrown out. But they were already at his car, stowing her bag and his briefcase in the back. He adjusted the front seat for her, as if to let the baby know that the world was making room for it.

The late winter day was bright and crisp, the rainstorms of the past months now a pleasant memory. It was Galya’s first visit to Haifa since leaving Ofer. “I forgot how beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the sweeping view of the bay and sea. “Well,” he answered, half in jest and half temptingly, pointing at a large hospital on a ridge of the Carmel, “if you feel like it, or don’t manage to get back in time to Jerusalem, you can always give birth up there, with a nice view. Does the baby have a name?”

The question seemed to upset her. It had had one, she told him, and then fell silent, as if she had begun to say too much and had changed her mind.

Rivlin lapsed into silence, too. He did not wish to risk losing his mysterious stake in this child with a careless word. In the parking space of his building on the French Carmel, he backed into a spot and exclaimed when Galya went on sitting in her seat belt:

“But I haven’t told you that we moved!”

“To here?” She looked disappointedly at the discolored brick paving and the old houses farther down the narrow street. “How could you have given up your beautiful wadi?”

“If you hadn’t left Ofer,” he said, with dark humor, “you might have talked us into staying. But don’t make snap judgments. Our new apartment is quieter and has more light. And it has another advantage for old people like us or pregnant ones like you…”

He pointed to the elevator, which brought them slowly to the fifth floor. The sight of the spacious apartment, with its familiar couches, armchairs, rugs, and bookcases, was reassuring to her. So was Hagit’s not being there.

“She’s at the beauty parlor,” Rivlin said familiarly. Taking advantage of this to establish facts on the ground, he took Galya to his study, placed her bag by the couch, and asked discreetly if she wished to wash up first or call Paris at once. She chose the former, and he led her to a large, colorfully tiled bathroom, asking wryly whether she remembered the WC in their old apartment, small and dark despite the glorious view outside. Her smile, which he had forgotten, made his heart twinge. He handed her a towel and a fresh bar of soap, as befitted an honored guest, and went to make her bed in his study, pulling out the convertible couch and spreading sheets and a blanket on it. Although the results were less grand than the royal bed made for Hagit’s sister, he regarded them with satisfaction. Now that the truth had arrived at his doorstep of its own accord, he meant to take good care of it.

Washed and refreshed, Galya gave the bed an approving glance and sat in the chair Rivlin offered her by the telephone. He wrote Ofer’s number for her on a piece of paper, then wondered out loud whether he shouldn’t speak to him first. After all, he said, he didn’t want his son to think he might be fantasizing again. She reddened at that, but agreed. She would get on the line if Ofer wished.

“I’ll leave you alone as soon as you do,” he promised her.

He dialed Paris. His son wasn’t in. There was no longer a Hebrew announcement on his voice mail, just a laconic French one, as if only routine calls were expected. Rivlin, however, chose to leave a complicated message. With one eye on the terrace across the street, on which now appeared his mother’s ghost with her bag of garbage, he told Ofer of Galya’s arrival and imminent delivery, and of the ticket to Israel awaiting him. He was still talking when a beep informed him that he had used up his recording space. “Did I say too much?” he asked his ex-daughter-in-law, who had been listening intently.

“You were fine,” she said, regarding him as if for the first time. Her old beauty, Rivlin saw, thought by him to have been lost, was still there. He glanced with amusement at the old woman across the street, her ear pressed to empty space to catch the sound of the approaching garbage truck. Did Galya remember his mother? She nodded slowly. “Would you like to see her?” he asked.

“But…” She shivered. “I thought…”

“Yes, she’s dead. But I’ve brought her ghost from Jerusalem. She’s across the street. I put her there to keep an eye on her….”

Galya did not smile. Apprehensive, she shifted her gaze from the old woman with the garbage bag to the idiotically grinning man at her side.

“But how are you, Yochanan?” she asked. “Are you better? You had us all worried at the bereavement.”

“Yes,” he confessed awkwardly. “It was a false alarm. But who is ‘us all’? You’re the only one I told.”

“You also told Fu’ad.”

“Did I? That seems unlikely.” Although he found it hard to believe that he could have made such a fool of himself with the maître d’, his memory forced to him to admit otherwise. “You’re right,” he said softly, chagrined. “I must have wanted him to know how desperate I felt. Well, suppose I did? Did he run to tell his boss?”

“Tehila? She’s not his boss any more.”

“How is that?”

“He quit his job a week ago. For good.”

“Fu’ad quit? But why?” He felt there was more to it than met the eye. “He was so proud of that job. How will Tehila manage without him?”

“Why can’t she? You know her by now. She’s become so strong-willed since my father’s death that it’s not only the staff she can manage without. It’s…” Galya paused, as if surprised by her own words. “It’s her own family too…”

20.

THE FRONT DOOR OF the duplex opened. Before it could shut again, Hagit’s voice traveled through the house in search of his. He quickly closed the study door and hurried downstairs to tell her about their surprise guest. Seductively painted by the beautician, her eyes regarded him with the infinite patience of someone used to assembling the facts before passing judgment. Not even the news that he had made the bed in his study could shake her repose. Not until he told her about the message he had left for Ofer did she turn on him.

“You knew I’d be home soon. Why couldn’t you have waited to ask me what I thought?”

Refusing to be put on the defensive, he threw his arms around her and passionately pressed his lips to hers. “Be careful,” he pleaded in a whisper. “She can hear us from upstairs. Have pity on her. And on me. What does it matter what message I left him? This isn’t in our hands. And neither of us can stop it. Why shouldn’t Ofer come? The truth will free him.”

She slipped gently, as though not to hurt him, from his pacifying arms. “The truth doesn’t always free. Sometimes it entangles. I wish you’d think more of Ofer and less of yourself.”

Stung by her rebuke, he hugged her even harder. A squeeze of her hand told him that Galya was standing at the top of the stairs. There was no telling how much she had heard.

Hagit hadn’t seen her since the divorce. Now, pale and big with child, she was gripping the railing as if warding off an attack of vertigo. It was no time to be critical. Hagit invited her downstairs, gave her a quick hug and kiss, and suggested she sit with her swollen feet on the low table. Galya asked for some coffee, which Rivlin went to prepare, leaving the judge to cross-examine her about the course and medical history of her pregnancy. She compared it to her own two pregnancies and asked warmly about the Hendels. How was Galya’s mother holding up? She would never forget her great love for Galya’s father. Although her courtroom experience had taught her never to trust appearances, this had seemed real. Of course, the most loving couples could be problems for their children… just look at Ofer. Or at Galya’s sister. Was she still unmarried?

Rivlin, having discovered that the milk was sour, came back from the kitchen to propose tea.

“But why tea?” Hagit protested. “We need fresh milk, for tomorrow too. You should run down and get some. And while you’re at it, pick up a cake, because something tells me we’ll have more guests from Jerusalem….”

Galya, the judge had discovered with her usual knack for ferreting out the truth, had not informed her family or even her husband of her trip. She had set out for Haifa without telling them.

For a moment, no one spoke. Hagit gave Rivlin, standing by the door with a shopping basket, a reproachful look. Uncharacteristically fumbling for words, she probed for the hidden logic of her ex-daughter-in-law’s actions.

“But how could you, Galya? Not that it’s any of our business… but still… and now of all times… are you aware of what you’ve done? How could you just go and disappear in your condition? Suppose you should… of course, you’re not alone… we’re here with you… but you’re not registered at any hospital… and your husband must be frantic with worry…”

“Don’t worry about Bo’az,” Galya reassured them. “He’s not the frantic type. He’s calm and collected and takes things as they come, sometimes a bit too much. He’s not like Ofer, who’ll run to the end of the world to find something to worry about. I suppose I’ve gone to the opposite extreme…” She laughed strangely. “Maybe I’ll need a third husband to find the golden mean.”

But Hagit had no patience for jokes. “Please,” she told her stunned husband, “the grocery is closing soon. And don’t forget we have a concert tonight.”

“Why not skip it?” Rivlin suggested.

“What for? If you don’t feel like going for milk, I’ll do it.”

He went for milk, making an agitated reckoning of how many of the bounds breached since Hendel’s death he was responsible for. Afraid Hagit might talk Galya into returning to Jerusalem, he hurried back with his purchases and was relieved to find his ex-daughter-in-law where he had left her, her feet on the coffee table.

“Ofer phoned,” Hagit informed him, her annoyance replaced by a new tone of complicity. “Your message confused him, but I set him straight. He’s coming tomorrow. Galya talked to him, too. He didn’t stay on the phone for long, as if he were afraid to spoil things.”

“What did I tell you!” Rivlin crowed to the bulky young woman, who seemed to have taken refuge behind the baby in her stomach.

“You and I will pick him up at the airport tomorrow afternoon,” Hagit said. “Unless you have more important things to do.”

“What could be more important?” he protested.

Yet as afternoon turned into evening, a brooding silence settled over the duplex. Only when Galya agreed to notify the hotel of her whereabouts did Hagit relax and go to dress for the concert. Rivlin, resigned to going, paced moodily while she changed before the mirror. What else, he asked, had she discovered while he was buying milk?

“Nothing. I didn’t ask, and I don’t want to know.”

“Not even now? I still can’t get you to budge, can I?”

“Why should I budge when I’m where I should be?”

21.

THE PHILHARMONIC CONCERT WAS an all-Haydn one. Although he didn’t question the greatness of the classical composer, Rivlin feared a whole evening with him might be dull. But after leafing through the program notes, from which he learned that the four works to be performed took no more than an hour and a half, he felt reassured. Even if she went into labor, Galya could hold out until they returned. And the opening piece, the B Major cello concerto, gave him unexpected pleasure. Its soloist, a guest performer from abroad with an enormous mane of hair, played without glancing at his instrument, as if it were part of his body. His hands flowed in and out of the strings of their own accord, his mane tossing as he kept practiced eyes on the audience as if to forge a connection or even a friendship with it.

During the intermission, perhaps to avoid an argument, Hagit and Rivlin did not discuss their guest. Instead, they reminisced about the birth of Ofer, lovingly recalling every detail of the thirty-three-year-old memory.

The concert ended with the Clock Symphony. Haydn, Rivlin had to admit, had not subjected him to a dull moment. Yet finding the duplex in darkness upon their return, he felt a current of anxiety. Had someone spirited their miraculous visitor back to Jerusalem?

He opened the door to his study carefully. The orange reminder to be of good cheer twirled over the screen saver of his computer and lit the face of the sleeper on the couch with a tender light. She lay as peacefully beneath the mound of her pregnancy as if she were where she had always wanted to be.

He and Hagit exchanged smiles, like the parents of a naughty child, and shut the door softly. They undressed in silence, getting into bed and turning out the light without the TV news. Although for a moment he thought his wife wanted to make love, he didn’t dare put it to the test. He gave her a last hug, stroked the face he had kissed, and turned to the wall.

In the middle of the night, the telephone rang and stopped before he could answer it. Curling up again beneath the quilt, he realized that his sleep had fled and would have to be hunted down in the apartment. He went first to the bathroom and then, cautiously, to his study. Although the lights were still off, a voice was speaking as though to itself. Going downstairs to the guest room, he gently picked up the receiver of the telephone. Now there were two voices, Galya’s plaintive, her husband’s quiet and restrained. He hung up and sank into a chair, his wakefulness growing. Let it. Keeping watch over his ex-daughter-in-law’s last hours of pregnancy seemed the right thing to do.

After a while he went to the kitchen, poured himself some wine, and sipped it with slow ceremony. When he picked up the receiver again, the conversation was over. Content with the world, he went to the terrace for a look at it. From the bottom floor of the duplex, he had no height advantage over the ghost. Her apartment was dark. She slept better than he did.

The narrow, quiet street below was filled as usual with the cars that occupied every inch of parking space at night. Even ordinarily, this made it hard to get in and out of their building. Now, though, a large car blocked the entrance completely. If Galya went into labor, he thought worriedly, he wouldn’t be able to drive her to the hospital. Yet a second look revealed someone sitting beside the empty driver’s seat. They had come to get her, without even waiting for the new day.

He heard footsteps. They must be Bo’az’s, he thought, coming up the street from the pay phone around the corner. In the glow of a streetlight he made out the ponytail of the man who took things as they came, perhaps because he thought he knew all about them. And yet, in the middle of the night, in the silent street of a strange city, the knowledgeable husband seemed at a loss. Bending over, he spoke to the occupant of the car. Rivlin, looking down from above, had no doubt that this was the proprietress, come to restore her sister to her senses. Soon her lanky frame appeared in the street. Heart pounding, he shrank back as her birdlike head swiveled upward to look for his floor.

What now? The taker-of-things-as-they-came and the thumber-of noses-at-them had joined forces to rob him of the confession he had yet to hear. He had to stop them, to turn them back at the entrance to the building. Stepping into full view on the terrace, still in his pajamas, he signaled that he was coming down.

They met in the parking lot. Tehila planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek, and Bo’az gave him an affable nod. How close he had come, Rivlin mused, to disgracing himself in his passion for the truth — and now here it was, upstairs in his home, waiting to be deciphered. Shivering from the cold of the winter night, he brought the Jerusalemites up-to-date on the day’s events, starting with Galya’s intention to confess.

“To confess what?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask her.”

“She’s out of her mind,” Tehila snapped, narrowing her whiskey-colored eyes.

He stuck up for the shelterer in his study, who was definitely in her right mind. Although feeling sad, even miserable, she had a plan that she meant to carry out. It would be best to let her do it.

He took a long look at his watch to remind them of the hour. He was sorry, he said with a remote smile, that he had no basement to put them in. On the next ridge of the Carmel, he told them, pointing at a building rising starkly in the moonlight, was a hotel he could recommend, even though he had never stayed in it.

But the proprietress had her own hotel, where at this time of the night when the roads were empty she could be again in two hours. And so, with a friendly handshake, she promised to phone in the morning and was off with her brother-in-law while Rivlin, returning to bed, found his escaped sleep waiting for him there.

The new day dawned filled with the anticipation of discoveries. Hagit left early for the courthouse, and Rivlin stayed behind to wait for Galya to awake. She rose late and took a while to arrange her new room, in which she had made herself at home. She was already in the kitchen, glancing pregnantly at the morning paper, when the housekeeper arrived and was struck dumb. But Galya preserved a demure silence, while Rivlin, who felt so much and understood so little, made no attempt to explain what looked like the backward flow of time.

His study commandeered once again, he drove to the university and circulated aimlessly. From there, unable to contain his excitement, he continued to the courthouse. Entering his wife’s courtroom, he sat in the last row, behind the defendant, several attorneys, and the usual spectators with nothing better to do. The black-robed wife-judge conducted the proceedings with dispatch. When they were over, he waited until she was alone in her chambers and embraced her with inexplicable love.

They returned to the duplex at noon. Their guest, having installed herself as thoroughly as if she had rejoined their family, had made a list of their telephone calls. She said nothing about her husband and sister. “They can wait in Jerusalem,” was her sole reference to them, as if it were no longer her city. Meanwhile, she would appreciate being stayed with until Ofer arrived — preferably by Hagit, who could help interpret the stirrings she felt.

FOR THE FIFTH TIME in a year, Rivlin found himself standing by the fountains in the arrivals hall of the airport. Yet this time, he thought as he watched Ofer stride out of customs with only a small bag on his shoulder, was the most remarkable.

They stood warily in the place where they had parted so painfully last summer. Avoiding his son’s eyes, Rivlin put his arm lightly around him. Ofer’s suffering face, on which a narrow French beard now grew, had a new, almost exalted look.

“You’re becoming like your aunt and uncle, who visit Israel for a few hours at a time,” Rivlin joked when informed by his son that he was returning to Paris the next day for an exam at his cooking school. Ofer took the jibe in stride. He saw nothing wrong in using Israel as a stopover.

Rivlin told him about Galya, choosing his words carefully. She had confided very little in them, he said. The news that she did not want to see her family or husband brought a tight, malicious smile to Ofer’s face. In no mood to talk on the drive back to Haifa, he let his father describe his book on Algeria and the memorial conference for Tedeschi.

“Did you really love him that much?” he asked, hearing for the first time of the Jerusalem polymath’s death.

“I’m not sure what you mean by love,” Rivlin answered. “But missing him so much makes me realize how attached to him I was…”

Yet when it came to attachments, this admission could not hold a candle to the deathly pallor that suffused Ofer’s face as he entered the house in which his ex-wife, encountered only in his imagination for the past six years, was waiting for him. Even now that she had taken refuge with his parents, he could hardly bring himself to look at her or at her swollen stomach. With a few curt words, he invited her upstairs to his father’s study.

“Are you sure you won’t eat or drink something?” asked his mother, who barely had time to give him a hug. He shook his head. Like a sleepwalker, he followed the pregnant woman up the stairs.

22.

“I COULDN’T DECIDE WHAT to do. I didn’t know if I had the right to ask you to come. If I hadn’t been about to give birth, I would have gone to Paris. Because suddenly, three days ago, it struck me that before I brought a child into this world, I had to cleanse myself of what I did to you. And to myself. I wrecked a love that made me happy, forever and for no good reason.”

Why forever? he wanted to ask. But the words stuck in his throat.

“And even if you came, I knew it would be wrong to meet you in Jerusalem. Certainly not in the hotel. I only now realize how the place weighs me down. And so I decided to come to your parents — that is, to your father, because he’s the only one who kept fighting to know the truth. I thought you’d agree to meet me here, not just for the sake of the love we once had, but because it would be a revenge for you. But I never dreamed, Ofer, that you’d come so quickly, with no questions asked. Maybe you were waiting for this all along. Were you? Did your father tell you something? But unless I’m wrong, he doesn’t know the truth to this day.”

“You’re not wrong. He doesn’t.”

“And it’s up to you whether it stays that way. I mean, whether you go on keeping the promise you made me…”

“If it’s up to me,” he said eagerly, his answer cutting through the dense air, “the promise will be kept. I swear to you, Galya, he’ll never hear from me what he wants to know. But how about you? Can I count on you to keep, if not the condition, then at least the hope behind that promise… I mean… that you’ll come back to me one day?”

Her face shone. A married woman about to give birth, she made no attempt to disabuse him. It was as if every sign of living love that he gave her was part of the cleansing she had come for.

Ofer sat in his father’s revolving armchair, into which he had thrown himself with stiff distraction, his back to the computer and his hungry eyes feasting on his pregnant ex-wife. Galya, for lack of a chair, sat on the convertible couch, her hands supporting the burden of her large belly.

It was nearly evening. A thin, melancholy dusk descended on the voices of the children playing in the street. No lights had been switched on in the Orientalist’s study, in which a folded blanket and sheets were set by the books on the shelves. The pale twilight suited their encounter.

“I know,” Galya continued, “that you’re angry at your father, just as I am. He’s gone beyond all bounds since my father’s death. Still, now that I accept your ‘fantasy’ as fact, shouldn’t the two of us forgive him?”

He looked with amazement at the woman he still loved like an old dog faithful to its master. Though he might try remembering her as she was now, swollen and ugly with another man’s child, to tide himself over the sad, lonely days ahead, he knew she only had to touch him with a finger for all his feelings to flame up again.

“So my ‘fantasy’ is now a fact?” He regarded her with sarcastic wonder. “Are you sure of that, Gali?”

She quailed. Was it possible that, after what she had done, risking anger and uproar by running off to Haifa to see him, he was brutally about to turn the tables by admitting he had imagined it all? But this was the way he had always argued, deliberately playing the devil’s advocate. Reassured by this knowledge, she rebuked him with a smile, kicked off her shoes, loosened her sweater, put a pillow behind her back for support, tucked her legs beneath her, wrapped her arms around herself, and sat on the couch like a great ball.

“Yes, Ofer,” she said, her voice soft but firm, “I’m sure.” Her belly swayed in a supplicating movement, as if comforting the infant about to emerge into a world of human sorrow. “Absolutely sure…”

She was sure enough to tell him what she knew. It went back to the beginnings of the hotel. That whole first year, in the chaos of getting started, when her parents were occupied with the staff and the guests every moment and her older sister, too, was totally involved in the work, a young Arab from Abu-Ghosh — whether to please his employers or because he felt sorry for a little girl who wandered all day around the many floors and rooms of her new home — took her quietly under his wing. In his spare time he went with her for walks in the neighborhood and bought her the falafel that she loved, and he sometimes asked permission to take her home to play with his nephews. She still remembered her games with them, though not what they themselves looked like.

As she grew older and went to school and made friends, who were thrilled to know someone with her own hotel — to which they invited themselves to play hide-and-seek in the garden and tag in the hallways or to ride up and down in the new elevator and bang on the big pots in the kitchen — she remained buoyed by the knowledge that there was someone who, in his quiet and chivalrous way, always knew where to draw the line with them. And thus the years passed, and even as she learned to accept that the hotel could never be a real home, he remained a dual figure of intimacy and strangeness, a family member whose degree of kinship no one knew. Although she was never sure what he was thinking, she felt certain that he would always be there for her, if only fleetingly and from afar.

The more the hotel grew, the higher the Arab climbed the ladder of advancement and the more indispensable he became. He was a gardener, waiter, bellboy, and custodian all in one, a maintenance man who doubled as a tourist guide. Sometimes, coming home late at night, she found him in a tuxedo and bow tie at the reception desk; other times, in the middle of the day, she spied him through her window in nothing but his gym shorts, unloading fresh produce — fruit, vegetables, eggs, and poultry — from a truck. Once he brought her a week-old lamb, which was her pet until it went to the slaughterer.

No one ever met his wife or knew her name. She was said to be childless, a sickly older woman with whom he remained because she stood to inherit a large orchard of olives and figs. His real home was the hotel. He served it loyally and in a spirit of harmony and was often consulted by Galya’s father, who treated him more like a partner than an employee.

And then one day, while Galya was doing her military service, Fu’ad suddenly resigned. There had been no argument with Mr. Hendel, no demands, no reason given at all. He had simply announced one afternoon that he was leaving, and the next day he had a new job at a rival establishment nearby. Although everyone, especially Mrs. Hendel, was greatly upset by this and called for an explanation from Galya’s father, he himself, though failing to provide one, did not seem overly perturbed. And yet slowly it dawned on him that the Arab who had mysteriously abandoned the kingdom he had penetrated so deeply was dangerous.

At that period of her life, Galya had been living away from the hotel and had taken little interest in the incident. Only now, after leaving again and for good, had Fu’ad revealed to her what had happened the first time. Hendel, he told her, had lured him back with an offer that hinted at taking him into the business.

Even now, knowing what she did about her father, Galya told Ofer she could not but feel deeply for him. She still loved and even identified with the tall, lanky man who arrived one winter evening in Abu-Ghosh dressed not with his usual elegance, but disguised in jeans and an old jacket and hat. There, in a little coffeehouse in the square in front of the village church of St. Joseph, he coaxed Fu’ad into coming back. Convinced that the Arab had quit after uncovering his secret, he chose to confess all to him, the intimate stranger to whom alone the truth could be told.

Hendel, according to Fu’ad, displayed no feeling of guilt about what he revealed. He seemed less contrite than annoyed at the weakness, having nothing to do with sex, that had got him into his predicament. He had simply, he said, wanted to be nice to the daughter who had helped put the hotel on its feet. Though young, she considered herself his second-in-command and refused to share her ambition with anyone else. She did not want other men or love affairs in her life, which was dedicated to her work. This was why it was his duty, she told him, to make her less lonely, with an adult form of the love he had shown her as a child.

And so, Hendel told Fu’ad, he gave in, thinking it was just for one time, and became Tehila’s prisoner.

Fu’ad sat in the square of St. Joseph’s, listening silently to this confused and unbelievable account by a man he had once greatly respected. At first, determined to put more distance between them, he refused to reconsider his decision. Yet his former employer now made him a proposal so bold that it took his breath away; namely, to return to work, for double his old pay, as maître d’, future partner, and guardian of the secret which he was entrusted to make unknowable by both protecting and keeping in check what he alone knew.

For the first time in his life, Fu’ad could do something for a Jew other than serve him. At last, he thought, I can help the Jews without having to defeat them.

“Without having to defeat them?” Ofer asked in astonishment. “What does that mean?”

Galya spread her arms helplessly to acknowledge that she didn’t know. She shut her eyes with a grimace, as if the child inside her, too, were demanding to be told. In a frail voice, she asked her ex-husband to change places with her. She had felt what might be a first labor pain and needed better support than a pillow.

“God knows,” she said, easing her way into the Orientalist’s revolving chair. The computer at her back, switched off by Ofer, no longer radiated good cheer. “I didn’t ask him because I was afraid if I did he would never get to the point — which was, you’ll be surprised to hear…”—she paused to look at Ofer, hunched on the couch like a big rabbit preparing to jump—“… you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Ofer, you. You’re the hero of his story, just as he is of mine.”

A week after that winter night in Abu-Ghosh, Fu’ad returned to work at the hotel — as maître d’ with a huge pay raise, though not yet as a partner. If Hendel’s main worry was to keep the secret from his wife, Fu’ad’s was now to keep it from Galya, the effect on whom, he feared, would be disastrous. And so when he was introduced one day to her fiancé, he was greatly relieved. Now, at least, there was someone to take her away from the danger zone.

He met the groom’s parents too, the professor and the judge. As did everyone at the hotel, he considered this new family connection a source of pride and threw himself into the preparations for the wedding. And yet it quickly became apparent that, far from intending to carry the bride off to his own world, the new husband was being drawn into hers. He was already dreaming of a role in the hotel, where he sought to involve himself in the management.

The Arab’s worries, far from decreasing, were now made worse. On top of everything, he had to keep Ofer’s curiosity and enthusiasm within bounds. And so that morning, when Ofer insisted on descending to the forbidden basement, he did everything to stop him. Yet unable to defy Mrs. Hendel, he had no choice but to toss her the ring of keys, while thinking resentfully, “Before I’ve even been made a partner, I already have a partner of my own.” Could he at least count on him to be discreet?

But Ofer’s indiscretion was soon apparent. Before long he had risked his marriage by choosing honesty over love.

“It was the honesty of love that made me do it,” Ofer murmured passionately. He suddenly regretted burning the letter he had written to Galya in Paris.

Fu’ad now faced a dilemma. Should he protect Galya’s marriage by telling her the truth, or protect her family and his hoped-for partnership? He chose the latter, not realizing that this was the greatest fantasy of all. Hendel, saying nothing, quietly hiked his pay again without telling Tehila.

“And so they gave you the boot,” Galya concluded, with an odd flourish. “You were driven from the hotel, from the family, from my life, and from my love. And two years later I found another husband, a very different one from you, who takes things as they come…”

“But how do you take things as they come?” Ofer pleaded in the darkness. “Explain that to me…”

“You just do. What shocked and outraged you wouldn’t have mattered to Bo’az, because he accepts all that’s twisted and perverse in life. He respects the privacy of others to a fault, even if they’re close to him — even if it’s his own wife. He’s never intrusive or clumsy. Even when we make love, he’s a world apart. If he had found out or guessed what you did — and perhaps he did — he would have kept it to himself. That’s why Fu’ad, although he’s not keen on him, is happy not to have to keep an eye on him or treat him as an obstacle.”

“I wouldn’t have been one either.” It was extremely painful to him to think of her making love to someone else.

“Perhaps not. I suppose that’s why he had such fond memories of you, even of the way you cried one night in the street. He even wrote a poem about it.”

“A poem? About me?” Ofer got up and went tensely to the window. “What did it say?”

“I don’t know. He never showed it to me. Anyway, it was in Arabic. He wouldn’t let your father see it either.”

And then, one day, Galya’s father died. Although the whole staff feared for its future, Fu’ad’s turmoil was especially great. While he had now taken over the dead man’s responsibilities to the point of all but running the hotel, he was no longer guardian of the secret — and with it he had lost, not only his pay raise, but also all hope of becoming a partner.

“You tell it well,” Ofer said softly.

“And then, in the middle of the bereavement, your father turned up. For five years, we hadn’t seen him. We all felt he had come more to interrogate us than to console us. Even Fu’ad, who treated him like a new father figure and even made him write something in the condolence book, saw through him.”

“Yes. My father told us about that book. Do you remember what he wrote there?”

“More or less. It was addressed to my father. Something like, ‘Despite the separation imposed on us, the memory of you still shines with light and generosity. We feel a keen and vivid sorrow at your death.’”

“He really wrote that? Light and generosity? How strange…”

“Why?” Galya protested. “Despite all that happened, you can’t deny, Ofer, that it was that which attracted you to him, too. But my father wasn’t Fu’ad’s problem any more. Your father was. And at the same time, Fu’ad liked him. You see, your father sensed right away that he was the weak point in the protective wall around me. At first Fu’ad watched from a distance while your father questioned me twice. You tell me: What good would it have done to tell him about your crazy fantasy and what I thought of it? Would he have felt any better? Would it have helped him to make you less stuck? Believe me, I knew about that too and felt bad for you. I still do. But I wouldn’t let him corner me, not even when he absurdly tried playing on my feelings for you. I did agree to answer your letter, so as not to frustrate him completely. I even answered your second one, though both were as nasty as they were anguished.

“Your father wouldn’t give up. He came to the hotel a third time, when I wasn’t there. And now he began a relationship with Tili, who makes friends easily, especially with older men. It was she, by the way, who sent him to sleep in the basement. To this day I have no idea what she knows or suspects about us, because I don’t know whether she noticed you that day. Perhaps my father managed to hide it from her too. I was afraid to ask. It was easier, after talking to Fu’ad, to get up and run away.”

“But what made him confess in the end? Was it my father?”

“No.” Galya felt a new fountain of emotion welling up in her. “It wasn’t your father, although it did have to do with him. Your father could have kept haunting the hotel forever and Fu’ad still wouldn’t have talked. All the Arab-speaking professors and Orientalists in the world couldn’t have wormed that secret out of him, because even though he lost his pay raise when my father died, he hoped his keeping silent would be chalked up to his credit. No, Ofer, what made him tell the truth was another Arab, one he met through your father. That’s when he cracked… I mean, opened up….”

“Another Arab?”

“Rashid or Rasheed. Have you heard of him?”

“No.”

“Neither had I. But he made a big impression on Fu’ad. He’s some kind of driver or guide your father employed. The haunt of the haunt, you might say. It was because of him that Fu’ad decided to discard what he called ‘my veneer of being nice.’”

Ofer winced. “Is that what he says it was? Just a veneer?”

“I’m sure it was more than that. He just said it because he was desperate and wanted to provoke me. I’ve known him since I was a child. It’s not a veneer, it’s his true self. He’s become cynical now because the promise my father made him is dead and buried. Tili isn’t looking for partners. She’d go to bed with him before she’d go into business with him.”

“But what did that other Arab have to do with it?”

“It started when he and your father talked Fu’ad into going to some poetry and music festival in Ramallah. Those Palestinians would like to be partners, too — in our country. Their own Palestinian Authority isn’t enough for them. They can sing all the love songs they want, but in the end they’d like to pick us apart. Anyway, Fu’ad said it made him realize that working for Jews was getting him nowhere. And so he decided to take his severance pay and go back to his wife’s figs and olives. Why be loyal to a dead man to protect a family from the truth that’s making someone else suffer?”

“Me.” Ofer shivered.

“You, Ofer, you. You see, I’m not the only one who kept thinking about you. So did Fu’ad. That Rashid reminded him of you. Not the way he looked, but the way he was. Fu’ad says he, too, has an old love he won’t let die. He’s a displaced, restless soul. Fu’ad feels sorry for both of you, the way he did when he found you crying by the hotel. Only now he’s wised up. He knows that all the poetry of love doesn’t mean anything. It won’t help Rashid, and it won’t help you. I’m the only partner Fu’ad has left. He thinks we should leave the hotel together. Three days ago he took me to that gazebo in the garden and told me everything. I started to shake. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You have to ask forgiveness to cleanse the baby that should have been his…’”

23.

“MINE?” ENCHANTED, OFER TURNED to his ex-wife, clinging to their lost love. “So?” he asked. “You didn’t bring me here from Paris just to tell me how Fu’ad scared you, did you?”

She raised her soft, weary eyes to him. “Perhaps,” she said discouragingly.

On the lit terrace across the street, an old woman was carefully spreading a cloth on a card table to prepare it for the next day’s game of solitaire. He remembered his grandmother’s insistence that he ask Hendel for forgiveness. And he had done it. Now it was being asked of him.

He hesitated, then switched on the lamp on his father’s desk. Casually, his hand brushed the shoulder of the women carrying the child that should have been his. Her confession done with, her face was tranquil and calm. Did she feel sorry? Had she acted out of love or only from pure calculation?

“Would you like to eat or drink?” he asked.

“Just a glass of water, please.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He left the study and shut the door behind him, as if to keep her for himself a little longer. The outside world, temporarily erased from consciousness, regained its reality. His parents’ duplex was dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought they had gone out. But no, they were in the living room, waiting quietly. Changing course, he went not to the kitchen but to their bedroom, where he found a plastic cup and filled it from the faucet in the sink. He drank, refilled the cup, and returned with it to the study. Galya sipped from it and put it down by the keyboard of the computer.

“You’re not cold?”

“No.” For the first time, she smiled at him. “My baby keeps me warm.”

Why, he wondered, smarting, did she have to say “My”? Unless he breathed some life into the embers of intimacy that had begun to glow again, they would soon go out forever. He wanted to get her back onto the couch, to sit beside her and feel her body. He would have given anything for the kisses and caresses of which the truth had deprived him. But she was too ensconced in his father’s chair to be moved — all but her white-stockinged feet, which dangled in the air.

“Can’t you at least feel some hate for your father now,” he asked, “for wrecking our love and marriage to save himself?”

“He was saving me too. I would never have survived your truth.”

“There you go again! If it was my truth, what are you asking forgiveness for?”

“I can’t judge him.”

“But why can’t you, damn it?”

“Because I pity him. I don’t believe he wanted sex with her. He just couldn’t get out of it.”

“But what do you know about it?” He felt like weeping. “How can you say that? How can you defend a man who was so brutal to me? I never even told you that I met him one last time after our separation. I begged him in your very words. I said, ‘I can’t judge, I won’t breathe a word of this. Just let me stay with Galya and your family.’”

“You did that after our separation?”

“Yes. I begged for my life. And he cynically blamed his betrayal on me.”

“No, Ofer. You’re wrong about that. He simply felt that your promises meant nothing. That you only made them because you confused the hotel with me. He didn’t believe your love would last. And he was right…”

“But how can you say that? How can you even think it when you see me so torn up, stuck for years in my blind loyalty to you? I walk the streets of Paris without even noticing all the beautiful women around me. All I see is the curve of your breast, the sole of one of your feet…”

“That’s just because you’re far away. If we had stayed together, your love would have died. You can’t accept the cruel, sick complexity of this world. You fight it all the time. Your hatred and envy of my father would have driven you crazy and poisoned us both.”

“But your father is gone now. Why not come back to me?”

“Because the memory will haunt us. We’ll never forget that you, too, were implicated. That’s why you went poking in that basement, even though you were warned not to. There’s nothing to regret. Our love was used up. You’re just talking yourself into something.”

“Don’t you dare say that!” He jumped to his feet, pacing the room like a trapped animal unreconciled to its loss of freedom. “I’m talking myself into something? I, who go on paying the price for my loyalty and hope? What is it that you want? If I got down on my knees, would you believe me? You say you’ve come to ask forgiveness, but what does that mean? I kept my promise. I never said a word. Now give me some hope that you’ll come back to me, if not now, then some day… with your child that should have been mine…”

“I can’t. Watch it…”

“The cup is leaking.”

“No, it isn’t. That’s not where the water is coming from. You’d better call your mother. She’ll know what to do….”

24.

THREE HOURS HAD PASSED and still the Rivlins didn’t know to which hospital Ofer had taken his ex-wife or what was happening there. It was almost midnight. The French Carmel was quiet. The big searchlight in the navy base at Stella Maris shone with bright purpose in the thickening murk. Hagit undressed, got into bed, and switched on the TV. But the curly-headed newscaster whose smiles sweetened the hideous headlines was not on tonight, and she soon switched it off again.

“Come to bed,” she told her husband tenderly. “Walking up and down all night won’t make that baby get born any quicker.”

“But suppose Ofer needs us?”

“At the delivery of another man’s wife? You’re too much! Come on, take off your clothes. You’ve had a hard day. And whatever happens, you’ll have to take him to the airport tomorrow.”

“But shouldn’t we at least find out what hospital they’re in? Suppose her mother or sister want to know. And where in the world did that husband of hers disappear to?”

“If he’s not worried about her, you can relax too. You’re not part of this birth.”

“Why not?”

She raised her head from the pillow to regard him with amazement. Her hair disarrayed, her face wild with anger, she had lost her last shred of patience.

“Because you aren’t! You’ll wait for Ofer to get in touch — if he does. And you’ll let him live out this day, and his meeting with Galya, and whatever is happening right now as he pleases.”

“Of course. Naturally.”

“Promise me you’ll stay out of it from now on.”

“I promise.”

“Swear you won’t phone or go looking for anyone while I’m asleep.”

“All right. All right….”

“No, it’s not all right. Swear!”

“I swear.”

She smiled. “And now get into bed. You’ll sleep better for having sworn.”

He undressed and got into bed, turning out the light and snuggling up to her. But the more regular her breathing grew as it carried her surely off to sleep, the more awake he became. His excitement getting the better of him, he disengaged himself and rose. Sleeping pills were out of the question on a night like this.

He entered his study apprehensively, as if the amniotic sac that had burst a few hours before might still be dripping. Hagit, with unusual alacrity, had mopped it up before he could get a look at it. Now, though, in the light of the desk lamp, he saw that his chair was still damp. Overcoming his qualms, he bent to sniff it. The stains had a slight, soapy scent. With a shiver of revulsion, he noticed what looked like bits of white, nearly colorless matter.

Galya had left her overnight bag on the couch. It was open. In it, beside her toilet articles and a book, were rolled her wet dress and underpants. He closed the bag and put it on the floor. Then, covering the chair with a sheet she had slept on as one covers the mirrors in a dead man’s house, he sat down, switched on his computer, loaded a chapter of his book onto the screen, and set to work on it. He was getting closer, he thought, to the crux of things that he had been groping for since the spring. Though still not out of the woods, he felt confident that he was onto something real. Yet he wondered if he would ever find out what it was, or if he would remain like a faithful courier with no idea of the message he carried.

True to his pledge to Hagit, he waited to hear from Ofer. One might have thought his son could pick up a telephone and tell his parents, “Galya had the baby.” Or, “We’re still waiting.” Or how the delivery was proceeding, or whether Jerusalem had been informed, or if Tehila and Bo’az were on their way. Or, at the very least, “I’ll be home soon,” or “I’m staying at the hospital,” or “Go to sleep, Abba,” or “Wait up for me.” Hagit was asleep. He could easily phone every hospital in town and find out. But he had sworn not to.

The editing went well. He worked on the chapter and made such progress that he was almost up to the next one. It was nearly two o’clock. For a moment he imagined that Ofer and Galya would soon come home from a disco, as in those distant days before the wedding.

It took him a while to realize that the tapping on the front door was not imaginary. He hurried downstairs. Through the frosted glass he made out a blurry figure. It was Tehila, standing in the darkness. As though continuing a conversation, she remarked, without saying hello:

“Tell me, am I wrong or did you once live somewhere else, in a fantastic wadi all your own?”

“We moved,” Rivlin said. She had hennaed her cropped hair, increasing her pallor.

“I’m told Galya made quite a scene.” She gave him a mischievous look as he stood there, blocking her way. “Listen, I’m sorry it’s so late, but she asked me to get her bag.”

“But what’s happening? Has she given birth?”

“There’s still time, I suppose,” Tehila said, with the nonchalance of an old maid who knows nothing about such matters. “The nurse in the delivery room says she’s still not dilated. Bo’az wants to take her back to Jerusalem. We came in the hotel’s tourist van, and there’s plenty of room for her to lie down. It will be better for everyone.”

“But where is she now?”

“Not far from here, at Carmel Hospital. It’s nice and clean and she can give birth with a view of the sea. But we have a room reserved for her at Hadassah on Mount Scopus. She’ll have to make do with a desert view there, but at least it’s the one she grew up with.”

“Who told you she was at Carmel?”

“Ofer. It was his decision to call us, because I think Galya would have been perfectly happy giving birth first and telling us later. But he didn’t want the responsibility, so he left us a message, and we came running. Just imagine, we even brought my mother!”

“How is Ofer?”

“He’s his usual excited, discombobulated self. And very sad-looking. Just see what you’ve done, Professor. Instead of liberating him as you planned, you and your Arabs have only complicated things. Now he has not only her but her baby to be attached to. Believe me, I still don’t get why she had to make him come all the way from Paris. A nice letter would have been simpler and cheaper. But never mind. It’s her right. It’s even her right to buy him an expensive ticket and charge it to the hotel. As long as you’re happy…”

“Me?” Rivlin mumbled. “Happy? I haven’t the vaguest idea what it’s all about.”

She smiled brightly, satisfied with herself as always. “By the way,” she added familiarly, “if your wife is awake, I’d love to say hello to her.”

“She isn’t,” he said, horrified by the thought. He had to get rid of Tehila. “Wait here and I’ll bring you the bag,” he told her.

Yet no sooner had he left his post at the door than she was in the house. Nor did she wait for him in the living room, but instead followed him upstairs, as if he were showing her to a room in a hotel. He had to wheel and turn back when, respecting no bounds, she stopped by the open door of his bedroom to look at his wife — who, curled fetally in a tangle of sheets and blankets, was sleeping peacefully. Shutting the door angrily, he pulled her after him to his study, where she inspected the bookshelves, desk, and couch before reaching down wearily to take her sister’s bag and return with it to the bottom floor.

He didn’t invite her to sit. She asked for a glass of water, drank half of it, and left, clearly loath to depart.

What was he to make of it all? Although he felt calmer knowing that Galya’s family was with her, he was still in the dark.

There was nothing to do but wait for Ofer. No longer in the mood to work at his computer, he sank onto the couch facing the TV and watched, with drowsy disinterest and the sound turned off, an old black-and-white thriller.

At four-thirty there was still no sign of Ofer. Had Galya stayed in Haifa to give birth? Or had they all gone back to Jerusalem together? It was a bad business either way. He went to the bedroom, determined to ask Hagit to absolve him of his pledge not to make phone calls. Although sound asleep, she so logically confuted the case he tried to make that he crawled into bed and dozed off beside her.

HE HAD HARDLY — or so it seemed to him — plunged to the depths of sleep when he was dredged up from them again. His wife and son, both fully dressed, were standing by the bed.

“Go back to sleep,” Hagit said. “Everything is fine. Ofer just wanted to say good-bye. He’s promised to return this summer, perhaps for good. I’ll take him to the airport. Don’t worry.”

Rivlin roused himself. This was no way to say good-bye.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did she give birth?”

“No,” Hagit answered. “She still has time. They took her back to Jerusalem. Now say good-bye to your son and go to sleep. We don’t want to be late.”

But he wasn’t about to miss the ride to the airport. “You can’t leave me here by myself,” he implored them. “Take me with you. I promise not to be a backseat driver.”

They couldn’t say no. Unwashed and unshaven, in a polo shirt and old jacket, he heaved himself like an empty sack into the rear seat. Ofer, his eyes shut and his head thrown back at an odd angle, sat next to Hagit, who gripped the wheel tensely. The traffic, although heavy despite the early hour, moved at a good clip. Rivlin, dead to the world, did not wake up until they arrived at the airport.

After Ofer had checked in, they went for coffee at a small, noisy corner counter.

Father and son, both groggy from their brief but deep sleep, regarded each other with wonder and suspicion, like two lawyers faced with summing up a case that had been thought to be interminable. Rivlin gulped some coffee, not knowing whether his son was as sad as he looked or merely tired and pensive.

“And so in the end,” he said, a note of resignation in his voice, “you’re leaving us without a clue to what happened or why anyone had to be forgiven.”

“That’s right,” Ofer replied. He gave his father a faint smile, the first in recent memory. “Although you did your best to wreak havoc, you’ll have to go on guessing, because you’ll never know or understand more than you do now.”

Hagit shifted her glance from one to the other, afraid of a last-minute row.

“But why?” Rivlin asked with bitter fatigue, refusing to accept defeat. “Why can’t we know? Is it only because you still believe she’ll come back to you?”

Ofer said nothing, avoiding his mother’s pitying eyes.

Rivlin threw caution to the winds. “You’ll be worse off than ever,” he declared.

The judge squeezed her husband’s thigh like an iron vise.

“No, I won’t,” Ofer answered serenely. He looked, Rivlin thought, less sad than lonely.

“Why not?”

“Because even if I’m still tied to her in my thoughts, and maybe in my feelings, I’m morally a free man. And that, Abba, is all you should care about.”

He swallowed the rest of his coffee, got to his feet, hugged and kissed his father, and disappeared through the departures gate.

25.

IT WAS SPRING. The winter having been a real one, with rain, snow, storms, and floods, all Israel felt that it had earned the vernal scents and colors and was entitled to enjoy them before dun summer took over.

The spring semester had started. On his way to the university for the first meeting of his seminar on the Algerian revolution, Rivlin noticed a new traffic sign. The municipality, although not answering his letter regarding the corner of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets, had acknowledged it nonetheless — not by accepting his suggestion to narrow the sidewalk, but by banning U-turns completely. And so, the professor thought self-mockingly, I only made things worse here, too. So much for citizens’ initiatives! Yet on second thought, he had to admit that the new arrangement made better sense. Any U-turn at a busy traffic light like this was dangerous and pointless.

Before his seminar, he went to the departmental office for a list of its students. Knowing their names in advance helped him encourage them to be active. In the office, a new young secretary informed him that a middle-aged woman had been waiting for him all morning. They’d told her that he had no office hours today, but she had insisted on remaining.

He walked to the end of the corridor with a sense of foreboding. There, as he had guessed, was Afifa. Stripped of her jewelry, she wore a simple shawl draped over her head and shoulders that accented her femininity even more.

“Is it me you’re waiting for?” he asked gently.

“Who else?” Her voice was anxious yet intimate, as though he were her family doctor.

“But…” He glanced at his watch. “I have a seminar.”

“I know. I checked the catalogue. I’ve only come to give you Samaher’s term paper and get her grade.”

She wasn’t requesting or beseeching it. She was asking for it as you might ask a bank teller for your money.

He made no reply. Leading her to his office, he sat her down unsmilingly, with none of his usual small talk in Arabic, and took the bright green folder. The translated stories and poems were neatly typed, with titles, notes, and two pages of bibliography. He leafed through them and looked up at Afifa, whose black shawl — more a moral than a religious statement, he assumed — deepened the glow in her eyes.

“It looks good,” he said. “I’ll go through it and give Samaher a grade.”

“But what is there to go through, Professor? You already know everything that’s in there, even if it was only read aloud to you. Take my word for it, it’s everything you asked for. Now give her what she has coming to her.”

“Shu b’ilnisbilha?”^* He couldn’t resist a few Arabic words.

Declining to collaborate in a fruitless ritual, she answered in Hebrew:

“Samaher will be fine. She’s a strong girl. Her mind is all right again, like before her illness. And she’s in a new house her husband built for her at the end of the village. There’s no more grandfather and grandmother and everyone else looking over her shoulder. But the whole family and the whole village, Professor, want her to have her grade. I’m here to get it.”

He smiled and leafed through the neatly typed work again, studying its matching pages of Arabic and Hebrew texts, the fantastical names of which reminded him of hours spent in Samaher’s bedroom and in his own dimly lit office. He felt an old yearning for strange roads and a trusty driver.

“U’feyn Rashid hala?”^† he asked. “Lissato bubrum laf u’dawaran hawlkun?”^‡

But Afifa would not play the game. She gathered her shawl around her. “He’s a poor devil, Rashid. He spends all his time in the hospital with that boy… the vegetable…”

“Vegetable? What vegetable?”

“Ra’uda’s boy, Rasheed. He ran away to the hills one night, and some hunter with crazy ideas put a bullet in him. Only Allah knows how it will ever end.”

“I didn’t know!” Rivlin cried, rent by pain. “I remember Rasheed. I’m so sorry… Believe me, I loved that little boy.”

“So did everyone,” Afifa said angrily. “A lot of good it did him! A lot of good it did my mother, the boy’s grandmother, who only wanted all her children home again! What has it brought us? A vegetable….”

Rivlin glanced at his watch. “And you?” he asked Afifa, who now had not only his sympathy but his esteem. “Don’t you want to finish your B.A.?”

To his surprise, she didn’t reject the idea.

“Allah is great…,” she replied, leaving the matter open while continuing to regard him with suspicion, as if he were looking for another excuse to postpone Samaher’s grade.

“Leave Allah out of this,” he said bitterly, as if suddenly identifying the real problem. “Great or not, he has nothing to do with this. Go to the secretary and register. What’s it to you? There’s no obligation. Go on, don’t be afraid. Now that Samaher has left home, you’ll have time. Sign up for a course, mine or anyone’s. Meanwhile, I’ll grade this paper.”

Although he hadn’t meant to link the two things, this was how she understood it: Samaher’s seminar grade swapped for her registration. A smile lit her face. She rose, tightened her shawl around her, held out her white, pudgy hand, and took her leave. Rivlin stayed in his chair, leafing through the paper a third time. Turning to the last page, he wrote an 80. Then, thinking better of it, he crossed this out, and wrote 90. Should he add some comment? He reflected briefly and wrote a sentence that he hoped was meaningful though addressed to no one in particular:

“I have read, listened, accompanied, and lived with this paper and am pleased with it.”

Although this struck him as rather bland, it was too late to change it. Nor could he think of anything else to add. And so he simply signed his name.

26.

IN EARLY SUMMER, three months after Ofer’s return from Paris, Tsakhi finished his military service. Remembering his fears when his youngest son went into the army with the thought of volunteering for a commando unit, Rivlin thanked his lucky stars for having enabled him to sleep well at night. The army, deciding it needed Tsakhi’s brains more than his fighting prowess, had sent him from the induction center to an intelligence course that landed him in a secret base well-protected from the perils of the Jewish state. His officer’s pay had even allowed him to squirrel away a tidy sum in the bank, there having been nothing to spend it on in the secret bowels of his mountain that he was forbidden to discuss even with his inquisitive father.

And yet since this high-interest savings account was a long-term one that could not be dipped into, the provident ex-soldier had no money to pay for the traditional post-army trip taken abroad by young Israelis — a problem aggravated by his intention of traveling, not on the cheap in the Far East or South America, but with his brother in France and Europe. And so, the day after his discharge, he wasted no time in finding a job. In fact he created one, going into business with the blond, baby-faced sergeant who had been his aide. Receiving permission to use Rivlin’s computer, the two found room on it, between the professor’s reflections on the disintegration of Algerian identity, to design an attractively colored ad for two experienced, responsible, and reasonably priced housepainters and plasterers.

“But what do you know about painting and plastering?” the amazed Orientalist asked. “Who would hire two nerds like you? And how do you know the walls you paint won’t start peeling the day after?”

“Don’t worry, Abba,” Tsakhi assured him. “Nothing will peel.” Without his uniform, he looked like the high-school boy he had been before being drafted.

Rivlin had grown accustomed, in the morning hours before Hagit came home from court, to a quiet house in which he was alone. Now he had a young partner — a most pleasant and much loved one, to be sure, but also a noisy and messy one who never switched off a light and who played strange, pounding music.

The blond sergeant arrived that same evening. He and Tsakhi ran off dozens of ads on the printer, waited until late at night for the municipal inspectors to be gone from the streets, and went to stick their notices on every electric pole, tree, traffic sign, storefront, bus station, and café they could find. Their coverage was so extensive that when a week later Rivlin glanced at a university bulletin board on which his colleagues had posted grades, he discovered a piece of paper with his own telephone number on it.

Another week went by, and one morning Tsakhi asked if the old jalopy could be spared so he and his sidekick could transport materials from a large hardware store, whose owners had promised to give them some professional tips. A few hours later, while Rivlin was hard at work trying to abstract a valid generality or two from Samaher’s texts, the telephone rang. It was his son, asking whether he needed anything.

“Like what?”

The two youngsters were at the hardware store and wanted to know if he needed any tools, a new hammer or screwdriver, say, or perhaps some spare lightbulbs. They could get everything at a discount.

“No, Tsakhi,” Rivlin said, delighted to have been thought of. “I don’t need a thing, honestly.”

“How about the car?”

“You can have it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

The main thing the ex-officer wanted to know was whether his father could direct him to the income-tax bureau.

“What do you need that for?” Rivlin asked.

He and his friend, Tsakhi explained, wanted to give their customers receipts. That meant registering with the tax authorities.

“You want to register before you’ve earned your first cent? Forget about it.”

His son heard him out imperturbably and asked again:

“But do you know where they are?”

“Of course I do. But there’s no point going there. You’ve just been discharged. You don’t owe any taxes. Why register now?”

“Never mind,” the young officer said soothingly. “Just tell me where they are.”

“On Ha-Namal Street, near the outdoor market. Ask when you get there.”

“Thanks,” Tsakhi said, offering to buy fruit and vegetables for the house.

Rivlin was touched. “You needn’t bother,” he said. “You have enough on your mind. Do your thing.”

“You’re positive?”

“Well, if you insist, I suppose you could bring home some artichokes.”

“How many?”

“You’re asking me? Five or six.”

“Fine. Anything else?”

“No. Just artichokes.” He was impatient to get back to work.

Since their storeroom in the basement of their building was too small for all the ladders, paint cans, rollers, and brushes, some of this equipment was moved into Tsakhi’s bedroom, along with a folding cot for the blond sergeant. The two got along well, at least to judge by the quiet, mutually respectful way they sat planning their business. Although the tax authorities were happy to open a file, and receipt books were printed, prospective customers were hard to find. The few who phoned often did so when Tsakhi was out, and Rivlin, who took to identifying himself as “the housepainter’s father,” had to take their calls.

The problem was the baby-faced sergeant, whose blond hair and blue eyes failed to win the confidence of potential clients, especially given the high prices the two asked for. This led to a revised marketing strategy, whereby Tsakhi’s partner stayed below while his former CO, unshaven and wearing paint-spattered overalls, visited the apartment to be painted and gave a low estimate. Then, the deal concluded, he called in his expert assistant to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb and suggest a few extras for a slight increase.

This worked better. The two young housepainters soon acquired a reputation on the Carmel. Returning in the evening proud and pleased after a hard day’s work, they lingered in their overalls, wearing them like a badge of distinction while cooking their supper and planning the next day. So great was their comradeship that Rivlin was tempted to come downstairs from his computer to join them. It was a chance to hear about small, old apartments with their rickety terraces and strange storerooms and funny owners, elderly pensioners or widows who, infected by the two young workers’ enthusiasm, decided to do another wall or door… and then another and another…

“What a waste,” Rivlin teased. “Here the army invests a fortune in teaching you high technology, and you end up painting walls.”

But they didn’t see it that way. Heatedly they defended the house-painter’s profession, which needed skill and judgment and rewarded them with the bright colors and good smells that they had been deprived of all the years that they had lived, while staring at flickering screens, like moles in the belly of their mountain.

27.

THE DAYS WERE GETTING warmer. Rivlin, opening his study window as far as it would go, tried longingly to remember the aroma of spring flowers that had bathed their old apartment in the wadi. His eyes, tired from hours at the computer, instinctively sought out the old woman across the street. She, too, had raised all the blinds on her terrace. A large ladder was standing there. On it, Rivlin was astonished to see the blond sergeant. He was talking to the young officer, who was seated at the card table, while slapping plaster on the wall.

Without thinking twice, or even saving the text on his computer, Rivlin left the duplex and hurried excitedly to the building across the street, in which he had never been before.

He didn’t know the ghost’s name. But he did know her floor, and he knocked on her door without looking at what was written there. The old woman, wearing a large apron and a hairnet, opened it. The smell of some cheese dish came from the kitchen. A radio on the terrace was playing the rock music his son liked. The ghost’s face was soft and smiling, unlike the time he had met her in the pharmacy. Perhaps this was because she was in her own territory, protected from all harm by two sturdy young workmen newly discharged from the army.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Rivlin introduced himself. “I’m the boss of the two painters working for you. I came to see how they’re doing and to ask if you’re satisfied.”

The ghost’s weather-beaten face gaped at him. She looked back into the apartment, as if racking her brain for something to complain about.

Meanwhile Tsakhi, hearing his father’s voice, appeared in the hallway, a lively mixture of amusement and astonishment in his big, brown eyes.

Rivlin warned his son with a look not to give him away. “I want you to be entirely satisfied with my staff and their work, ma’am,” he continued. “You should feel you’re getting the best possible service. That’s why I need to know if you have any complaints. Think carefully. Perhaps they’ve been noisy, or impolite, or not neat enough. Just tell me. I’ll give them a piece of my mind and change them immediately. Why, if you’d like I’ll take their place myself. Just say the word and I’ll put on my work clothes….”

This was already too much for the ghost. The smile of pleasure fracturing her face was positively alarming. So much consideration could be fatal for a hard-bitten woman like her.

“There’s no need,” she murmured, thrilled and grateful to be getting such attention. “Everything is fine. Don’t put yourself out. Your workers can stay. Just tell them to hurry up and finish…”

“You’re sure? Perhaps you’d like to think about it.”

“Oh, no.” She was suddenly worried she might lose them. “They’re just fine. They’re nice boys…”

Brimming with pride that his younger son had vanquished so fearful an apparition, he strode quickly out to the open terrace, which was bright with morning sunlight. Curiously, he glanced at the window of his study across the street. Through it he could spot his computer. He went over to the red card table. Despite all the flying plaster, a deck had been dealt for a game of solitaire. He carefully picked up a card. The old woman, though concerned that the strange contractor might ruin her game, said nothing. It was too beautiful a morning to be angry at the world. She stared at the middle-aged man with the gray curls, who did not seem to fit his own job description.

“Tell me,” she said, “don’t I…” Her clear khaki eyes squinted at him. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“No,” he said, giving her a firm, friendly smile of encouragement. “You don’t know me from anywhere. But now, ma’am, if you don’t mind my saying so, you do know me a little bit….”

Haifa, 1998–2001