The Liberated Bride

PART I. A Village Wedding

HAD HE KNOWN that on this evening, on the hill where the village held its celebrations, an evening suffused by the scent of a fig tree bent over the table like another, venerable guest, he would again be struck — but powerfully — by a sense of failure and missed opportunity, he might have more decisively made his excuses to Samaher, his annoyingly ambitious M.A. student, who, not content with sending him an invitation by mail and then repeating it to his face, had gone and chartered a minibus, after first urging the new department head to make sure the faculty attended her wedding. It wasn’t just for her sake, she said. It would be a gesture to all the university’s Arab students, without whom — the cheek of it! — the department would count for nothing.

His wife, Hagit, who knew all too well how weddings had depressed him in recent years, had warned against it. “Why do you need the aggravation?” she had asked. “But they’re Arabs,” he’d answered mildly, with the innocence of a man pursuing an academic interest. “As opposed to what?” she had wanted to know. “Human beings?” “On the contrary… on the contrary…” he had tried defending himself, at a loss to explain how Arabs, although not among the many objects of his envy, could be more human than anyone else.

Yet the snake of envy, his companion of many years, had slithered after him here too, to the little village of Mansura high up in the Galilee, near the Lebanese border. It had lain coiled in the incense of the glowing grilled lamb and writhed to the Oriental music that, despite its sobbing grace notes, secretly aspired to the savage disco beat of a Jewish wedding party — and now, as the student bride presented him not with the seminar paper she was a year late in finishing, but with her groom, it injected its venom.

Many hands had done their best to beautify Samaher, causing him to wonder for a moment whether he was looking at the same woman who had taken nearly all of his courses for the past five years. High heels and a swept-up hairdo had made her taller, and her usually restless eyes, chronically resentful when not anxiously scheming — the eyes of an active member of the Arab Student Committee — were smiling and relaxed. She was also without her glasses, and her eyes were heavily made up with a kohl so unusually tinted that he suspected it of having been smuggled across the border from Lebanon. A bright rouge masked the pimples that wandered as a rule from her cheeks to her throat and back again, and her long wedding gown bestowed a harmony, if only for a single night, on a figure not known for its sartorial coordination. Brimming with pride at having enticed him, the most senior and eminent of her teachers, to honor her and all Araby with his presence, she extended a hand quivering with excitement to his wife.

“So this is the teacher who’s so annoyed at you,” laughed the groom, pumping his hand in what could have been either an acknowledgment of Samaher’s flightiness or a warning that she now had a protector. It was the same young man — taken by Rivlin for a maintenance worker rather than a future husband — who had stood every day last winter in the corridor outside the classroom waiting for their seminar to end. As if to atone for an error of which he alone was aware, he rose from his seat and congratulated the new husband cordially. Yet even as he did so, the cruel fate of his son, the young husband rebuffed, stung him sharply. So strong was the surge of resentment and jealousy that he at once sought out his wife — who, however, was laughing gaily at some remark. Such sentiments, although by rights she should have shared them, were unknown to her. Her glance, when he finally caught it, conveyed not so much sympathy as vague reassurance, plus a warning that he had better not get into one of his bad moods among all these people trying so hard to be hospitable.

It was being slowly spun out, Samaher’s wedding, on the twilight of a bashful summer night, to the friendly warmth of young Arabs, many of them students from his and other departments at the university, who had gathered in their little autonomous kingdom, the borders of which were being drawn, stealthily but steadily, amid the pinkening hills of the Galilee. Now, telling a bearded young qadi in a gray cloak that she didn’t want her Jewish guests to feel deprived, the bride asked him to repeat a shortened version of the wedding ceremony — which, they were surprised to hear, had already taken place in the bosom of her family a few days previously. It was an opportunity to still the wailing music, leaving the hill so shrouded in silence that the distant boom of an artillery shell fired across the border in Lebanon sounded like part of the reenacted rite.

2.

AS THE EVENING deepened and the music resumed its beat, and little lanterns were hung from grapevines trellised above tables spread with colorful piles of appetizers that were followed by copper trays of juicy, red-hot lamb, he was overcome by regret, not so much for having accepted Samaher’s invitation as for having willingly surrendered his freedom of movement for the convenience of a prearranged ride. Two hours had passed, and none of the faculty showed the slightest sign of wanting to depart — least of all their organizer, Ephraim Akri. He was the new department head, a swarthy Orientalist who, though forced by the religious scruples proclaimed by the skullcap he wore to forage carefully through the little plates in search of kosher morsels, was so full of high spirits that he demanded — whether as a gesture to his hosts or as a boast of his own fluency — that even his Jewish colleagues speak to him only in Arabic. In fact, they were as taken with the bucolic atmosphere as he was. Hagit, always quick to adjust, was genially absorbed in the conversation around her, following it with interest and laughter and occasionally making a remark, or even uttering a single word, that was sure to leave an indelible impression.

Fated to spend more time at the wedding than he had intended, he decided to go for a walk — the sooner the better, before any more of the tender meat with which his plate kept being piled metamorphosed into his own flesh. He ambled over to the sweetly smoking spit to inspect the remains of the incandescent lamb, then joined a line of guests waiting by the rickety door of a makeshift outhouse. A nattily dressed young man, introducing himself as a construction worker who had labored on the professor’s new duplex apartment in Haifa, tried escorting him to the head of the line. Before they could reach it, however, Samaher, who had been keeping him under surveillance, came to rescue him from the indignity of queuing up for an outdoor toilet by leading him to more dignified facilities.

“We live right near here, Professor Rivlin,” she cajoled him, as if his presence at her wedding would be incomplete without a home visit. Before he knew it he was being led by the bride, hobbling on her unaccustomed high heels, past houses and courtyards and down a dark, narrow dirt lane. Her wedding gown showed signs of disarray, and its lace ruff, which had slipped from her slender shoulders, smelled faintly of fresh perspiration. In the pale moonlight, the polished nails of her hands and feet looked like large drops of blood. Barely two years ago, he recalled with amusement, this same vivacious young lady had had an attack of religion and sat sternly through his seminars in a long-sleeved black dress and large kerchief. It had been only a passing phase, however.

A horse whinnied. Once again he felt the ache of that other, wasted wedding that had come to naught. It made him want to rebuke his student guide.

“It embarrasses me, Samaher, to hear you tell people that I’m angry at you without your also explaining why.”

She stopped in her tracks, blushing with pleasure. “But how can you say that, Professor? You’re wrong. I not only explain why you’re angry, I tell them you’re right.”

She studied his face and added with a smile:

“But so am I.”

“You are?” he marveled bitterly. “How can you be right, too?”

“I can be right because how could I finish a seminar paper with a sick grandmother to take care of? And then, on top of it all, this wedding.”

“That’s enough excuses, Samaher,” he said, loath to give this devious Arabic-studies major standing beside him in a wedding gown the chance to extort a new postponement.

Her smile brightened even more, as if she not only had been granted a postponement but had also been offered course credits for her wedding. Taking hold of his arm, she steered him with dexterous confidence toward an iron gate blocked by a large black horse.

Samaher scolded the horse in Arabic. When this made no impression on it, she seized it by its bridle and in her wedding gown, high heels and all, wrestled it out of the way. The battle was quickly over and left Rivlin struck by her determination. Raising her head proudly, she pulled the horse after them into the yard, shut the gate, put on her glasses after extracting them from a previously hidden case, and led him up the heavy, dark stone steps of her home.

He now found himself at another celebration, this one for women only. Squeezed together, in bright dresses, they sat on pillowed divans in a large guest room whose walls were covered with photographs of ancient elders wearing fezzes. A few old crones in a corner were puffing on glass narghiles. A younger, heavily adorned woman hurried over to him with a smile. “Professor Rivlin!” she exclaimed. This was Afifa, Samaher’s mother, who long ago — back in the nineteen-seventies — had been a first-year undergraduate in the Near Eastern Studies Department. She had taken an introductory survey course of his and might have gone on to get a B.A. as her daughter would, had she not broken off her studies to have her.

“You know,” Rivlin told the handsome woman, “it’s not too late for you to go back to school. We’ll readmit you. You can continue from where you left off.”

She replied with an embarrassed laugh, as if he had made her an intimate proposition. Dismissing with a charmingly sinuous gesture the possibility of recovering lost time, she took possession of him from her daughter and led him to a large, spotless bathroom where he was given, as if he had come not just to relieve himself but also to take a leisurely bath, two fresh towels and a new bar of soap.

There was no lock or latch on the door. Quite apart from not wishing to worry his wife by his disappearance, this was sufficient reason for leaving the bathroom’s contents uninspected, despite the opportunity afforded him to learn more about the private side of Arab life. He urinated in silence, washed his hands and face, took a large green comb from a shelf, rinsed it carefully, and ran it through his silver curls. Then, picking up a small bottle, he studied its Arabic label until satisfied that he understood it, and daubed a few drops from it on his forehead to sweeten the relentless bitterness assailing him.

The bride had returned to the wedding party on the hill without waiting for him, leaving her friendly mother to guard the bathroom door. It was an appropriate moment, he thought, to pay a sick call on Samaher’s grandmother.

“Sick?” Afifa was startled. “Who told you she’s sick?”

“But of course she is. The poor woman is bedridden.” He deliberately mimicked Samaher’s manner of speech.

“But who told you? She’s not sick at all!” Triumphantly, Afifa pointed to a gaily dressed old woman puffing heartily on a narghile with her friends. Samaher’s grandmother smiled back with a mouth full of smoke.

And yet, he decided, as Afifa — fearful he wouldn’t find his way back by himself — went off to look for an escort, you didn’t upbraid a lying bride on her wedding night. Samaher’s mother returned with the bride’s grandfather, a sturdy, taciturn old man in a gray satin robe and white kaffiyeh who stood waiting by the gate with his head bowed respectfully. Noticing the horse in the yard, he commanded it to join them. The three of them walked back up the lane, the solemn grandfather in the middle as he gallantly struggled to understand the Arabic of the Jewish professor.

The lit-up dance floor was now crowded with youngsters gyrating to the music. The Oriental wail had been replaced by Western tomtoms. From afar, Rivlin cast a yearning glance at his wife. She was where he had left her, seated beneath the fig tree, with her slender legs stretched in front of her, intent on the conversation. As always, especially in moments of distress, he was aware of how perfectly true and unquestioning was his old, faithful love for this woman, who was now engaged in tempting with a pack of cigarettes two departmental secretaries who had attached themselves to her. He knew that from now on, whenever they saw him, they would remember to send their special regards, coupled with words of admiration, to this woman whom they had just met, who sometimes said to him only half-jokingly:

“You’re a lucky man! Luckier than you deserve to be.”

3.

“YOU’RE FEELING BETTER.”

It was a statement of fact, not a question, uttered with the precision with which she always diagnosed his moods. “You needn’t be ashamed to admit that you’re having a good time like the rest of us.”

Admitting enjoyment, however, did not come easily to him — certainly not at a wedding, even an Arab one. Instead, omitting his visit to Samaher’s bathroom — an episode that might strike his colleagues as unintelligibly bizarre — he began to relate with an odd relish his encounter with their old student Afifa. His proposal to reinstate her in the department met with cautionary remarks from the two secretaries. He should not, they warned him, arouse false Arab hopes. The Law of Return did not apply to abandoned studies. Afifa would have to start again from scratch.

“Sit down,” his wife said good-naturedly. “Standing will get you nowhere.”

She was right. It was pointless to hope that remaining forlornly on his feet might persuade anyone to set out for home. The refusal of their Arab hosts to be insulted by a premature departure was only part of the reason. The Jews, too, had lost all sense of time and of the long ride back to Haifa still ahead of them. Basking in the oriental languor of the spring night, they were awaiting a final course of homemade ice cream. It did not escape him that his wife — for whom dessert, especially if it promised to be exceptional, was the raison d’être of every meal — had become the secret ringleader of a sweet-toothed conspiracy.

“I wish you’d sit down,” she chided him again. “Stop making us nervous. You’re not the driver. No one is leaving this wonderful wedding without dessert.”

He sat, forced to yield to the popular demand for ice cream while attempting to follow, above the pounding of the rock music, an argument between the department head and some of the Arab students. Tensely but politely, the latter were listening to Akri’s heated exposition of a theme that pained them despite its delivery in flawless Arabic — namely, that ever since the Arab world had been conquered by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, Arab intellectuals had failed to confront the inner dysfunction of their society. Rivlin knew well that Akri, a Jew of Middle Eastern origin, was gracious to his Arab students, whose weddings he attended and whose language he went out of his way to speak, although less from admiration for their culture than from despair of it. Not that he had an aversion to Arabs. He felt no contempt or disdain for them. He simply had arrived at what he believed to be a scholarly conclusion: that they could never understand — let alone respect, desire, or implement — the idea of freedom. This was a theory, which Akri supported with an odd and astonishing assortment of facts morbidly assembled from the gamut of Arab history, that Rivlin firmly rejected. It smacked to him of racism, and he scoffed vehemently at it whenever it was mentioned by his colleagues. And yet tonight, whether because it fed or was fed by his own gloomy associations, he, too, felt Akri’s despair, felt it to the point of paralysis. He sat there silently, one hand on the shoulder of his wife as she awaited her dessert.

The Arab students from the department, however, having listened respectfully to a man who was both their guest and their academic senior executive, were running out of patience, especially since they had been joined by other students who neither knew Akri nor needed to defer to him. Akri, continuing to deride the Arabs’ history in an impeccable display of their language, was now surrounded by a shocked circle of listeners. The prospect of a row hung in the soft, mild air and threatened to spoil the gesture of their coming. Just as Rivlin, a full professor, was about to pull rank on Akri and nip the quarrel in the bud, there was a flurry of excitement. A chilled, glittering serving bowl was placed on the table while crystal dishes and golden spoons were handed out. How, Rivlin wondered as he tasted his first spoonful of the ice cream, could this remote little village, a bastion of chickens and donkeys, have produced such a magnificent last course, so lavishly creative in its flavors and deliciously chewy in its texture that he had to keep an eye on his ravenous wife, who had put on not a little weight in recent years? Not that this bothered him. He liked her company in any shape or form.

4.

DESPITE THE HOUR, it seemed entirely natural to Hagit, halfway home between Amihud and Shfar’am, to ask the Arab driver to stop by an illuminated greengrocer’s stand, where she talked the two secretaries, as well as two young teaching assistants who had taken a fancy to her, into some late-night shopping, as if, Rivlin reflected, saddened to bid her Arab hosts good-bye, she were determined to bring home as a memento their freshly picked cucumbers, eggplants, squashes, and strawberries. His protests unavailing, he remained seated on the bus, boycotting the proceedings while regarding with amazement the sleeping Ephraim Akri, after his diatribe slumbering so sweetly that not even the sudden stilling of the motor could awaken him. Irritable and weary, he watched his wife circulate eagerly in the bluish light of a kerosene lamp. Several large dolls dangling from a thatched roof suggested idols in an ancient Canaanite temple. There she goes again, he thought angrily. Once more she was witlessly letting some shrewd merchant sell her a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that would end up rotting in the refrigerator unless he ate them all himself.

A car drove up. Two young women climbed out and joined the midnight shopping spree. Despite his desire to intervene and put an end to it, the sight of the yellowish fog from a nearby gas station, into and out of which cars were pulling busily, had an immobilizing effect on him. Who would be left to rise early in the Jewish state, he wondered, if the Arabs, too, had begun to burn the midnight oil? His wife, meanwhile, having struck up a conversation with the two newcomers, added her spruce legs to theirs in another tour of the pagan greengrocery. The memory of the hale old grandmother sucking on the snake head of her narghile heightened his bile. How had he ever agreed to such a wasted evening? And especially when weddings, even of close family and friends, were becoming increasingly painful to him. Had he and Hagit stayed home tonight, they surely would have made the love that had disappointingly eluded them all week. And tomorrow he was expected to vacate his study for ten days in order to make room for Ofra, his sister-in-law from abroad, who would be staying with them until her husband joined her and they moved to a hotel. His prospects for the next week and a half were slim. The evenings without Hagit would be long, and the mornings with her short, not because she was attached to her only, elder sister by twin strands of love and guilt, but also because there would be no chance for him to make love to her while they were all together under one roof. A single item of Ofra’s clothing in the next room, even a pair of her shoes, was enough to banish all thought of sex from Hagit’s mind.

5.

RIVLIN’S BOYCOTT was dealt with by the simple expediency of having the greengrocer bring Hagit’s bulging bags to the minibus and arrange them there carefully. “Here you are, Your Honor,” he declared, having discovered who she was from the two lady passengers — recent law-school graduates entranced by their unexpected encounter with a district judge. Perhaps aware that, like all Arabs, he would sooner or later end up in court himself, whether in the dock or on the witness stand, the man seemed in awe of the genial magistrate who had chosen this time of night to patronize his stand.

“You should know better than to make friends with lawyers,” Rivlin scolded her. “Don’t you realize they’re out to make a dishonest man of every judge?”

“Man, my dear,” Hagit repeated with a grin. “You said so yourself. Not woman.” Producing a small comb from her handbag, she invited him, as if the night’s entertainment were just beginning, to run it through his hair. “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I know where the bounds are. And I make sure others do, too.” She could only have been referring to judicial bounds, because the minibus hadn’t gone far before she was opening the paper bags at her feet to probe their contents. She popped into her mouth several cherries whose pink globes must have reminded her of the munificent nipples she had sucked when she was a child, and deposited the pits carefully in the palm of her hand.

It was past midnight. The first guests to have been picked up by their driver, they were the last to be dropped off. First they had to awaken Akri. Although Akri’s antics had nearly ruined the evening, Rivlin watched him fondly as he walked with a springy gait to his apartment building. He was pleased that he had used his influence with the Appointments Committee to get Akri his promotion and tenure — thus relieving himself of the long-standing burden of running the department.

On the East Carmel his wife parted with affection from one of the secretaries, and, two blocks farther, just as lovingly from the other. The minibus snaked through a new housing development, looking for the street of a young instructor with a bright academic future. Only now did Rivlin notice that the instructor’s bashful wife was in the early months of pregnancy.

The two merry young teaching assistants got off downtown. A Jew and a Druze, they shared an apartment. At Carmel Center, Rivlin descended from the vehicle to lead an old professor emeritus, who never missed a departmental event, to the front door of his old-age home. They parted with unaccustomed warmth, as if an evening spent among Arabs had reawakened their sense of Jewish solidarity. In years to come, he knew, his wife’s keen memory would preserve, if not the name, then at least some identifying mark, of every person at the wedding.

Home at last in their new duplex on the French Carmel, to which they had moved half a year previously, they were happy to see that, as always, they felt no regret for the lush wadi that had abutted the terrace of their old apartment, where they had lived for thirty years before exchanging the wadi for the slow but sure elevator that now brought them and their shopping bags to the fifth floor. The Arab driver, a young man with almost sable skin and handsome, fiery eyes, was distrustful of elevators but insisted on accompanying them to their door and carrying their purchases inside. He was indignant when Hagit sought to tip him. How could she think of such a thing? He, Rashid, was one of the family. He was Samaher’s cousin and would do anything for her or her guests. Everyone in the village loved her and was proud of her. She had character and education and was one of Mansura’s most prominent young people. Samaher would go far, despite having been ill all winter.

“Samaher, ill? Rivlin objected. “You must be mistaken.”

Rashid stuck to his guns. Samaher had been ill.

“With what?”

He didn’t know the name of the illness. He only knew it was a bad one. This was the reason Samaher had agreed to be married as soon as she had recovered: to make up for lost time.

6.

THEY MADE DO with giving the driver a cold drink, pleased with his oohs and ahs over the duplex. Informed that he intended to rejoin the festivities, which would go on all night, Hagit asked Rashid what the name Samaher meant in Arabic. Rivlin, indignant she hadn’t turned to him, blurted:

“It means a javelin.”

The young Arab begged to differ. Samaher meant a lance, not a javelin. His coal-black eyes glowed as he pointed out the difference. Samaher, he repeated solemnly, was a lance. A samaheri was a lancer. And with that he took his leave.

At last they were alone. The first thing they did was check the voice mail for a message from Ofer, their older son, who had spent the last four years in Paris. None of the three messages were from him. One, quick and bashful with an Arab accent, came from the cleaning woman’s son, whose regular job it was to tell them she wasn’t well, especially when her illness was imaginary. The second voice — clear, good-natured, and always a pleasure to hear — belonged to their younger son, Tsakhi; an officer in the army; he was calling to apologize for unexpectedly having to be on duty over the weekend, which meant that anyone wanting to see him would have to visit his base in the Galilee. The last message was from Hannah Tedeschi. In crisp, firm tones she announced that although she and her husband had returned to Israel a week ago from a long trip to South America, they were not yet installed in their Jerusalem home because before they could unpack, Professor Tedeschi’s notorious asthma, having waited patiently for their vacation to end, had struck more cruelly than ever. If Rivlin wanted to see his old academic patron and doctoral adviser, he had better come to Bikkur Holim Hospital, where the barely conscious professor could be found on the third floor, in Room 8 of Internal Medicine. He needn’t rush, though. This time, he was informed triumphantly by Hannah (an Orientalist herself and a first-rate translator of the poetry of the Jahaliya, the pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance”), Tedeschi was in for a long hospitalization.

“It’s unbelievable how she loves him to be sick,” Rivlin said.

“Needs, not loves,” his wife corrected him. Often a single word was enough to remind him of how admirably clever she was. “Come, let’s go to bed,” she urged when he wanted to listen to Hannah’s message again, hoping to discern the difference between love and need with his own ears. “The house is a mess. And there’s no cleaning woman tomorrow. You’ll have to pitch in. I’ll need your help to tidy up a bit….”

“A bit?” he repeated resentfully. He knew full well that in the end most of the work would fall on him. Unlike his wife, who had a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and a defendant all waiting for her to appear in court in her best judicial form, he had only the incomplete draft of a book that would be happy to be left for another day.

Hagit knew that her husband liked nothing better than to complain while taking refuge from his recalcitrant research in the chores of a malingering cleaning woman or an inadequate housewife. Careful to show no disrespect for the sacrifice demanded of him by her sister’s visit, she let him go to the kitchen and — grumbling loudly about the food she had bought — switch on the dishwasher despite the late hour. When he finally climbed the stairs to their bedroom, she was sprawled on the bedspread fully clothed, watching the TV news with a bowl of cherries in her lap. Her “presomnial relaxation,” as she called it, took precedence, like her postsomnial relaxation, over putting away the disorder of dresses, skirts, blouses, and shoes that testified to the difficulties of deciding what to wear to an Arab wedding.

“How can you possibly still be hungry?” Rivlin asked, scooping up a few cherries, more to help rid the bowl of them than because he was hungry himself.

“Why not?” She smiled serenely. “All I had to eat all night was ice cream. I never touched the lamb. That’s more than I can say for some people, who ate half of it single-handedly.”

“You’re sure it was only half?” His own smile was glum. He was already feeling nostalgic for the juicy meat heaped unceasingly on his plate by the villagers. It was gone now, devoured without a trace, leaving only the faint strains of Oriental music pulsing inside him. He turned to regard his wife, whose face was pallid with fatigue. As of tomorrow he would have his childless sister-in-law on his hands, ten days’ worth of advanced middle age. Though tired and dejected, he was determined as a matter of principle to assert his conjugal rights. Sitting at the foot of the bed, he lightly stroked the soles of Hagit’s feet, so as to gauge his own desire before making any claims on hers.

7.

HIS DESIRE, HE CONCLUDED, even though the next day’s chores were tediously waiting for him in a long line, would pass muster. He reached out, took the remote control from his wife’s hands, and muted the TV. The pictures remained on the screen.

“Not now,” Hagit said. “You won’t enjoy it either. Don’t force yourself. Let’s wait until morning. You know what happens when I’m not in the mood.”

“You will be,” he promised, as if there were a switch he could press for that, too. Squirming free of him, however, she demurred. He couldn’t tell if her resistance came solely from fatigue or also from something more ancient.

“In the end you’ll leave me all alone.”

“No, I won’t.” The stirring in his loins firmed his resolution. “Don’t worry. I won’t come without you.” He switched off the overhead light, leaving only the reading lamp.

“Then talk to me!” she protested, with an inner anger that made her tense when he embraced her. “Say something! We’re not animals. You know how hard your silences are for me. You never have time for a loving or caring word.”

And again there was no telling whether she was pleading with him to overcome her resistance or — already cradled by an exhaustion stronger than his arms — looking to fend him off. But he would not take no for an answer. Perhaps it was the sobbing grace notes of the music. Or else the lamb had been in heat, or he was haunted by the image of his attractive former student Afifa, now puffing on a narghile with Samaher’s healthy old grandmother. He was not about to back down. As excessive as declarations of love seemed when he, too, wanted only to sink calmly into sleep, he managed to dredge a few sincere ones from his depths.

Hagit listened with eyes shut, a smile playing over her lips. She took words seriously. They counted with her even more in the bedroom than in the courtroom. Spreading heavy arms, she invited him to rise from his crouch by the bed and join her face to face. She kissed his forehead and eyes. Yet her kisses were lukewarm. Though there was a will, the way to her heart was blocked.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, irritated.

“Nothing. I told you. I’m dead tired. Why insist on it? Did someone turn you on at the wedding?”

“How could you say such a thing?”

“I don’t know. Forget it. You smell funny.”

“I do? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t take it personally. Something must have rubbed off on you in the village. Some strange perfume. Did you touch anything? Maybe it was the soap you used. It’s nothing. Just wash your face. It’s not a good smell. Perhaps we should both shower. We’ll feel better if we do. You go first. We’re both sweaty. It’s been a long, sweaty day. We’ll wake up fresh in the morning and have time for everything.”

8.

FINIS. EVEN INTELLECTUALLY, the life had gone out of his lust. He stepped into the shower, thoroughly soaping his face and private parts. Unsure the smell was gone, he embraced his wife when their naked bodies collided outside the bathroom, menacingly offering her his forehead to smell. She burst into laughter and hugged him back, her marvelous breasts pressed against him. They would make love in the morning, she promised, kissing the proffered brow. It was a promise, he knew, backed by nothing. Who knew what the morning would bring? Things could go wrong even in their dreams.

And in fact the approach of her beloved sister, though still oceans away, roused Hagit from bed at dawn to vacuum the house, scrub and scour the windows and mirrors, refill the dishwasher repeatedly with dishes that had already been washed, and stoke the washing machine with clean towels and sheets. As a crowning touch, she made a bed fit for a princess, with starched, scented sheets, light, fluffy blankets, and brand-new eiderdown pillows — all in unspoken competition with the crisp and fragrant luxuriance that, carefully arranged by her sister, always awaited her on her visits to America.

Rivlin, whose wife was usually happy to let him and the cleaning woman manage the house, while she relaxed amid her dresses and fruit pits after a hard day in court, listened to her instructions without protest. He knew how much her sister’s rare visits meant to Hagit. Like an old drill sergeant ordered about by a new officer, he helped hang another round of laundry while moving his belongings from his study. Although his sister-in-law would only be staying with them for ten days, this meant emptying all three drawers of his desk, clearing his books from a shelf, and transferring his computer to his small office at the university. He was actually fond of Hagit’s sister and wouldn’t have wanted her to be blamed for impeding his work, which had gone slowly since the move to the duplex.

The morning passed quickly. Soon the judge would don her black robe and join her colleagues waiting in the wings of the courtroom for the crier to announce them. Yet by working efficiently, he and Hagit had managed to accomplish more in two hours than the cleaning woman did in a day. The floors were spotless. The windows and mirrors gleamed. The guest room, its couch opened into a sumptuous bed, looked airy and inviting. Flowers, cakes, and other good things would arrive with the judge, bought on her way home from court. She would not accompany her husband to the airport. The trial was a long and secretive one, held behind closed doors, and there was no chance of an early recess.

9.

THE UPSHOT WAS that he had to start the second car for her — the little old model she wasn’t used to driving — and once again explain the dashboard, the meaning of whose clocks and gauges she kept forgetting. Fortunately, Hagit was a relaxed but careful driver, which was the only reason she ever arrived anywhere in one piece. Nor was she in any hurry to depart now, even though she was late. First she had two requests of him. One was direct: as soon as her sister passed through customs, she wanted to be informed. The other was more complicated. Could he please, before leaving for the university, launder the curtain in his study? Only now had she noticed how filthy it was.

“What do you mean, filthy?”

“Filthy,” she said gently, “really filthy. You, my dear, never notice such things.”

“Suppose I don’t. This is where I draw the line. I’m not laundering any curtains. The room is for your sister, not for some dowager queen.”

“Dowager queen?” The expression struck her as oddly belligerent. What did queens have to do with her sister? It was his study. When he moved back into it in ten days’ time, he’d appreciate a clean curtain too.

He didn’t answer. This was always the best tactic to keep her from trying to change his mind. He wished she’d leave already. If you had made love to me yesterday, he whispered to himself, I might have laundered that curtain for you now. His silence was met with a hostile look. Parting from him, even for short periods, was always unwelcome to Hagit. Now, this morning of all times, a long court session was preventing her from going with him to the airport, which was one of her favorite places.

“What are you waiting for? You have to be in court.”

“The court won’t convict you for my lateness,” she said with a smile, sure of her ability to disarm him with a deft remark. He said nothing. Changing the subject, she asked what he had thought of the Arab wedding.

“It was all right.”

“It was more than all right.” His brusqueness annoyed her. “It was marvelous. I had a wonderful time. You didn’t seem to be suffering either. You must really think very little of the Arabs if their weddings don’t make you envious.”

He flared at that. “What are you talking about? What does envy have to do with it? Do you think I’m against people getting married?” It was a matter of memory, not envy. It pained him to be reminded. Of all that ruin and loss. Of what had been done to his son without justification. Why couldn’t she understand that?

She let him talk. Late for a trial that couldn’t start without her, she switched off the motor and said, not for the first time, “It’s time you put all that behind you. It’s been five years. How long can you go on feeling loss? Ofer was no innocent himself.” Why brood when there was nothing to be done about it? She sometimes thought he was projecting onto their son feelings that had to do with other things.

“What things?”

“Your own self.”

His own self? What did she mean by that?

“Not now,” she said, restarting the motor. “We’ll talk about it some other time. Just be nice to my sister. You know how sensitive she is.”

“I’m always nice to her.”

“Then be nicer than always.”

The little car drove off. He knew it would brake immediately, however, for her to beckon to him and ask anxiously, as if she had never done it before, “Do you love me?”

A wave of love passed over him in spite of himself. Loath to send her off to the waiting courtroom with a clean conscience, he stared at the ground, weighing the question carefully before answering with a barely perceptible nod.

“How much?” she demanded, as though buying a kilo of fruit.

“A lot,” he admitted honestly. Softly he added:

“More than you deserve.”

The cross-examination wasn’t over. “Why?”

He didn’t know whether she was being coy or asking the most important question of her life.

“Tell me! Why do you love me so much?”

This was already too much. He laughed, thumped the roof of the little car, and exclaimed:

“Move! Enough already!”

10.

THE DAY PROMISED to be a long one. There were still eight hours left before his sister-in-law’s plane landed. He returned to his study to get rid of more papers and decided to clear another shelf. Then he scrutinized the white net curtain on the window. Although it did not look dirty, he was prepared to wash it for his wife, who had a long, hard session on the bench ahead of her. He unhooked it, carried it carefully to the bathroom, like a bride across the threshold, and soaked it in lukewarm, soapy water. It took many rinsings for the water to run clear. Because it occurred to him that, in her eagerness to make her sister feel at home, Hagit might launder the clean curtain again while he drove to the airport, he left a note that he had cleaned it and would expect a commensurate reward. Then he erased the last sentence. His son might come home from the army unexpectedly and read it.

It was time to unplug the computer. He coiled its wires and packed it in two black traveling bags padded with small towels. Then, grinning foolishly, he stopped by the window of his study for a last look at his dead mother, who liked to putter around on the second-floor terrace of the building across the street. And indeed there she was, in a red, sleeveless summer dress. She had opened the venetian blind and was leaning on the railing while following a big garbage truck, which was proceeding slowly down the narrow street, with a glance cross, curious, and indifferent.

This ghost of his mother had begun appearing to him not long after they had moved into their new duplex. At first he had placed his desk against a wall so as to be able to concentrate better. It was his wife who had persuaded him to move it to a window. “If you run out of ideas,” she said, “the wall won’t give you any new ones. And if you don’t, the view won’t harm them.”

He took her advice. A week passed before he tired of the panorama of the western Carmel, with its rich patches of green and red-tiled roofs immersed in pine trees. Shifting his gaze to the houses across the street, he scanned their windows and terraces. Suddenly, he spied the apparition playing solitaire on a terrace. Her straw-colored hair and her heavyset frame, hunched forward to preempt a hostile world, was the spit and image of the mother who had died three years ago. Dumbfounded and bemused, too distant to make out her features clearly, he imagined for a moment that she was the same lonely figure he remembered, withdrawn and sunk in a cosmic and trivial boredom.

The terrace across the street had four blinds. Only one of them was ever opened, and that, too, never more than halfway and for only a few hours a day. The woman was the only person he ever saw there. The rest of her apartment, which could not have been small, remained beyond his ken. She emerged from its gloom and vanished into it. Unlike his mother, who had liked to read old foreign-language magazines, this woman spent her time playing cards. Sometimes she appeared with a knife and a piece of fruit. Leaning on the railing, she sliced and ate the fruit quickly, spitting the pits into the garden below.

His youngest son and his wife, whom he, with mixed humor and anxiety, had apprised of the resemblance, were slow to acknowledge it. Hagit was actually indignant. “You’re heartless!” she cried. “Your mother was never that ugly or awful-looking.” Rivlin’s sister, on the other hand, who had hated their mother, thought the double was better-looking. She understood her brother’s fascination and stood for a long time by the window herself, smiling with grim satisfaction at the ghost as though viewing her in a peep show with no risk of a reprimand. Rivlin was so intrigued by the discovery that during their first month in the apartment he asked Tsakhi to bring him a pair of binoculars from his army base. Magnified, their neighbor resembled his mother — a strident peacock of a woman who had painted herself with flamboyant colors until her dying day — less closely. She used no makeup and had a yellowed, time-weathered face like that of an excavated sphinx. At first he took care to observe her from a place of concealment, afraid that he and his binoculars might drive her away or cause her to complain. Eventually, however, he realized that the danger was nil, since her gaze was always directed downward, as if the world lay only in that direction.

Now he would be parting from her for two weeks. He couldn’t say he’d miss her. Yet sometimes, observing her in an idle moment, he had found a strange consolation in her manner, so familiar to him from his childhood. The difference was that this time, he felt no guilt or sense of obligation.

11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14.

RIVLIN, WHO SOON had to leave for the airport, was beginning to fear he wouldn’t be able to exchange a word with the defiantly unconscious man, whose wife was now describing, with cruel academic exactness, their tribulations since returning to Israel. In Tierra del Fuego, she told Rivlin, Tedeschi’s breathing had been normal, despite the hardships of the trip.

Rivlin, who had no idea why such a trip had been taken, tried to interrupt her torrent of words long enough to understand. “But what were you doing in Tierra del Fuego?” he asked. “what possessed you to go there?”

Tedeschi, it seemed, had been invited to Argentina for a lecture series. And since the government of Italy, many years ago, had volunteered to honor its responsibility toward the young victim of fascism by treating him to an annual week of convalescence from his asthma at any rest home of his choosing — anywhere — the Tedeschis had decided on a Patagonian adventure. After journeying all the way to the bottom of the world, they thought it a shame not to explore what lay beneath it.

Tedeschi’s eyelids flickered with humorous anticipation. Having listened with enjoyment to his wife’s account of his sufferings, he was now ready for the ironies of his loyal student, his first teaching assistant, whom he had sent to establish a new department of Near Eastern studies in Haifa before the two of them could get on each other’s nerves — get in each other’s way — in Jerusalem. With a wave of his hand he signaled his wife to remove his oxygen mask, so that he might converse with this visitor he was fond of — who, however, was more alarmed than ever by the old man’s voice, weak and unrecognizably groping.

“How is Her Honor?” Tedeschi managed to whisper before choking almost at once. It was his way of conveying, Rivlin thought, that he would have liked a visit from Hagit, too. At heart, the old man esteemed her more than he did the husband now bending compassionately over him.

Thirty-three years had gone by since the winter evening on which Rivlin, then writing his master’s dissertation, had brought an aspiring law student doing her army service to his professor’s home. He was already considering marriage and remembered exactly what she wore that night — a black pleated skirt, which made her look fuller than she was, beneath a soft red woolen sweater. Although Hagit hardly spoke and seemed ill at ease in the presence of the great scholar, Rivlin, by now familiar with Tedeschi’s overbearing manner, noticed the sweet but ironic smile with which she regarded him. The great scholar, for his part, struck by some force in the young woman, kept trying to impress her with his wit. When, in a display of interest that was considered good manners in those days, she rose and went to the professor’s large bookcase to inspect its contents, Tedeschi enthusiastically wagged his head behind her back and winked singularly to tell his pupil that he had made a good choice and should not let her get away.

Years later, when relations between the two men were sometimes strained by mutual accusations of academic betrayal, criticism, and neglect, their memories of this evening, on which the older man gave his fateful and sage nod of approval to the younger one, were still able to reconcile them. Besides being Rivlin’s doctoral adviser, Tedeschi had also been partly his matchmaker.

Now, as the conversation continued to proceed along medical lines, including the results of Tedeschi’s latest blood and urine tests, Hannah Tedeschi removed the plimsolls from her husband’s feet to show Rivlin that, far from having just another attack of asthma, the famous Orientalist was suffering from a new and aggressive form of inner rot. Rivlin, unable to bear the sight of the chipped, yellowing nails on the old man’s toes, reached for the volume of Bedouin love poems.

“I see you’re working on a new book of translations,” he said, in an attempt to change the subject to more intellectual matters. Hannah, annoyed to have her case history interrupted, sent him a sharp glance.

“I read the five translations that recently appeared in 2000. They’re not only incredibly faithful, they’re true poems in their own right, works of art. It’s unbelievable how perfectly you captured the two aspects, the comic and the chilling, of Al-Hajaji’s great opening salutation. I’ve recited your rendition to my students several times in order to make them see that, one thousand four hundred years ago, the despotism of an Arab tyrant could also be delicately ironic.”

He positioned himself in the center of the room and recited:

“I, a man of much renown, still aspire upward. When I strip off my turban you shall know who I am….

“O inhabitants of Al-Kufa! I see heads ripe for plucking. I, their master, see the blood between the turban and the beard….”

“As though I see the blood….” The translator corrected him gently.

“Of course. As though. What a marvelous version of the line, Waka’ani anzaru ila al-dimai’ bayna ’l’amami w’al-laha. You’ve done a great thing, Hannah. We’ll never forgive you if you go adventure-hunting again in Tierra del Fuego instead of giving us more ancient Arab poetry in such wonderful translations. Who else could do it so well?”

Standing in the middle of a hospital room with her husband’s plimsoll in her hand, kept from finishing her stirring account of his maladies, the translator, though her work had already been acclaimed in a weekly literary supplement, was unprepared for such kudos from a full professor. Granted, Rivlin’s field was history, not poetry, but he was a connoisseur of the latter, too. The bitter resentment on Hannah’s face yielded to a look of surprise. She seemed not to know what to make of Rivlin’s sudden panegyric. The bright flush in the sick man’s face, however, left no room to doubt that he took pleasure in the compliments lavished on his wife. He broke into a cough that grew steadily more violent.

15.

WHETHER TO CALM her husband or merely keep him from talking, Hannah hurried to replace the oxygen mask.

Tedeschi shut his eyes painfully, his cough burbling out in a fresh supply of oxygen. Unbuttoning his pajama top, he bared a chest that rose and fell like a bellows.

“Where,” sighed the translator, “am I to find the peace and quiet to translate love or battle poems? You know that Carlo’s jubilee volume is supposed to be coming out soon. All the material is ready except for the article you promised.”

Rivlin scratched his head. “Yes. That article. I can’t seem to finish it….”

Tedeschi’s eyelids fluttered again. Choking or not, he wanted to hear his ex-student explain why it was so difficult to finish an article.

“We’ve just moved to a new apartment in a new building. The whole transition, not to mention the actual construction, has been brutal. Hagit can’t take time off from her trials, and the whole burden has fallen on me. I’ve actually become stupider this past year. My brain has shrunk. I’ve lost my concentration. And the Arabs have driven me to despair. How can you write with any sympathy about the Algerian freedom fighters of the nineteen forties and fifties when you see the terrible carnage going on there now? It’s insane, the terror they’ve let loose.”

“But what do you care if they’re murdering each other now?” Hannah Tedeschi rebuked him. “You’re writing about the past. And who says you have to love Arabs to write about them? You promised us an article. Don’t you see the state Carlo’s in? We can’t put out a jubilee volume in his honor without the participation of his best-known student. Think of how it would look….”

Rivlin smiled uncomfortably. “Most successful student” or simply “best student” would have made him happier. He did not always like having his name linked to that of the Jerusalem scholar, whose recent work was rather weak. He glanced at his watch again. It was time to leave for the airport. Relieved that he had eaten before being exposed to Tedeschi’s feet, he laid his arm on the old man’s shoulder in farewell. “It’s all psychological,” he almost reiterated, feeling impelled to repeat his diagnosis. But he caught himself in time.

“You can expect another visit tonight. A ritual one. Ephraim Akri wishes to do his religious duty. And Hagit and I may come together on Saturday.”

Tedeschi looked agitated, as if unwilling to part so soon.

“What is it?” asked his ex-student with genuine concern. The old professor did not reply. His face was angry and tense. Fearful of another spasm, he kept on his oxygen mask and pointed, with an arm connected to an IV drip, to the empty bed by the door.

What does he want of me now, Rivlin wondered: to become the patient next to him? If the amusing farce of Tedeschi’s illnesses turned into a soap opera, little would remain of the old man’s charm.

But Hannah understood better. “Carlo is right,” she said, happily remembering. “We forgot to tell you who just died. We watched him fading all night from a stroke. What’s the name of your son’s father-in-law?”

“My son’s father-in-law?” Rivlin took a backward step and regarded the folded mattress as if the death might still be hiding in its crevice. “Who are you talking about? My sons aren’t married.”

Tedeschi, who was following the conversation intently, began to strangle beneath his mask.

“But you know who I mean. Your in-law!” Hannah fought to uphold the death that had taken place. “Don’t be stubborn, Yochanan. Listen to me. I’m telling you a fact. They brought him here a few days ago, at night. It only lasted a few hours, but we both recognized him. He was your in-law. Your ex-in-law, anyway. I just can’t remember his name….”

“Hendel?”

“Hendel? Let it be Hendel. We weren’t told his name. It went with him when they wheeled him out of here.”

“But where did you know him from? How did you know who he was?”

“What do you mean, how? We remembered him from the lovely wedding you made for Ofer here in Jerusalem. The tall man who owned a hotel. It was him. You can check for yourself. How could you not have known? Don’t you read the newspapers? You haven’t been in touch with the family?”

16.

“WHY SHOULD I have been?” Rivlin answered angrily, his departure now strained. “What for? There were no grandchildren to share with them. We haven’t heard from them for five years. There was no need to stay in touch. Not that we have anything against them. But there’s nothing going for them either. I must have told you: the marriage ended suddenly, after a year. There were no explanations. Ofer’s wife simply left him….”

A few minutes later he was in the corridor. Without waiting for the elevator, he dashed excitedly down the stairs as if in hot pursuit of this latest death, one half-suspected by him of being purely imaginary, the joint hallucination of two hypochondriac Orientalists who, not satisfied with the real patients, doctors, and medical instruments all around them, had gone and invented even more.

He hurried to the parking lot, stopping at a public telephone to make sure before driving back down to the coastal plain that his sister-in-law’s flight was on time. Not only was it not on time, however, it was delayed, he now was informed, by a shocking four hours, as if it had run out of gas in midair. His first thought was of how annoyed his wife would be when she found out that he had left early for Jerusalem. Had he remained in Haifa, her usual good luck would have enabled her, with this assist from the airplane’s engines, to join him at the last moment on the ride to the airport that she liked so much.

For a moment he considered not calling her. However, knowing that she would later interpret this as a deliberate evasion, perhaps even an admission of guilt to an indictment he could not foresee, he phoned home, and felt relieved when no one answered. Leaving a short, vague message on her voice mail, to strengthen his alibi he dialed the court. There he was informed that Hagit’s session had ended and she had set out for home. He knew she would take her time making the rounds of the bakeries, delicatessens, and flower shops that would turn their immaculate home into a sumptuously festive one.

Keys in hand, he stood uncertainly by his car. Should he leave Jerusalem, the city of his childhood, and drive to his sister Raya’s home, which was near the airport, where he could rest? Or should he remain here and take advantage of the blank hours at his disposal to renew some old tie that had lapsed or carry out some neglected obligation?

Already, however, his legs were carrying him back to the hospital to confirm the Tedeschis’ cheerfully delivered obituary. Doing so was easy. Considering the obstacles put by large hospitals in the way of those trying to locate the living, the process of uncovering the well-documented fate of the dead posed no problems. Before long he had all the information he wanted. Tedeschi and his wife had not misled him. The folded mattress had indeed belonged to his former in-law, who had hastily departed the world three days earlier. Rushed to the hospital in the evening with an excruciating headache, he had lost consciousness that night and died the next morning.

There was, Rivlin thought, something fitting about the freedom, even the sense of mission, with which the hospital’s officials disclosed the details of Mr. Hendel’s death. With these details in hand he adjourned to the cafeteria, where he sat trying to put in order his welter of emotions. Above all, he felt sad for the deceased, an impressively optimistic man his own age who left behind — Rivlin remembered her well — a delicately attractive, childishly dependent wife. She could easily, he imagined, feel lost and driven to despair. There flickered in him an old regret for the loss of his burgeoning relationship with her gentlemanly husband. Warm, although restricted to practical matters, it had been cut short abruptly five years ago.

And yet as he sipped his Turkish coffee, which he was counting on to keep him awake through the long day still ahead, he was not surprised to detect in his regret, like the grain of cardamon in his drink, the sweet, subtle taste of revenge. He felt it not only toward the daughter of the dead man, now deprived of a father to whom she was greatly attached, but toward the deceased himself, who had refused to join him in preventing the bitter divorce or even understanding the cause of it. Rivlin shuddered, struck by the realization of a new loss. Besides the friendship written off five years ago, he was now deprived of his last link to what had happened. Ofer himself behaved as if the young wife who left him was forgiven, perhaps even forgotten. But a father’s heart knew better. His son was only pretending to have gotten over it.

17.

WHICH WAS WHY he felt an urge to leave the hospital and go to the place itself, the family hotel surrounded by pine trees at the southern end of the city. To cross the thick carpet of sighing pine needles, descend the reddish stone stairs flanked by oleanders and laurels, catch the sudden glimpse of the blue nugget of Dead sea beyond the wilderness of the Judean desert, and knock on doors of the wing of the building where the family now sat in mourning: mother, sister, brother, and others he had got to know in that brief year — an aunt, an uncle, several cousins, and even, if she had not meanwhile died before her son, the dowager grandmother who was the establishment’s first proprietress. On their infrequent visits to Jerusalem in the five years since the divorce, he had felt that his wife, without admitting it or perhaps even being conscious of it, had thwarted all his attempts to approach not only the hotel but even Talpiyot, the neighborhood in which it stood. Once, two years ago, while strolling on the promenade overlooking the old walled city from the south, he had suggested visiting the Talpiyot home, now a museum, of the author’s. Y. Agnon. Hagit had refused. “Why risk running into someone who doesn’t want to see you?” she had said, with characteristic bluntness. “What does that mean?” he shot back angrily. “That we’re barred from Talpiyot forever?” “Not forever,” she’d answered, slipping an arm around him. “Just for now.” But now he was in Jerusalem with time on his hands and no one to judge him or tell him what to do, and with a valid reason to stop by the hotel of his former in-law, whose death had provided him, if not with the duty, at least with the right, to pay a call during the seven days of bereavement.

He debated whether to phone home again in the hope of finding Hagit or simply to tell her about it back in Haifa. By now, though, he was in Talpiyot, scouting the familiar surroundings. The pine wood, in which he had often played as a child, were the same, yet changed, as were the garden and the yard. He hadn’t thought he would be so moved by them. All that had been rendered impossible by the divorce, it appeared, was still preserved in the sweetness of memory, sealed against being opened by a golden film of anticipated pain. How terribly easy it was for him to relive the unforgettable night of the wedding, so private and so public at once, just as was the garden with its catered events and the hidden home in which Galya, Ofer’s bride, had grown up. It was this combination that so appealed to Rivlin — who, together with Hagit, was warmly treated as family whenever he was sighted by the staff on the garden’s paths. Already during their first meeting, when the marriage was a foregone conclusion, Galya’s father had generously offered them the freedom of the grounds. Indeed, he told them, he had decided to expropriate the hotel from its customers not only for the wedding ceremony, but for three whole days of festivities. Moreover, by writing off the costs as a business expense, he would shift the groom’s parents’ share of the costs onto the income-tax authorities.

At first Rivlin tried turning down this unexpected perk. Mr. Hendel, however, stood firm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find other things for you to pay for. I promise I won’t lose on the transaction.” Rivlin and Hagit, he said, had an open invitation to stay at the hotel at his expense whenever there was a room available. A phone call to the desk clerk was all that was necessary, and there would be no social obligations attached.

Hagit was for resisting temptation. “We can afford to pay for our own hotel room,” she told him. Yet in the end she, too, gave in to their future in-laws’ entreaties, and on their next visit to Jerusalem, which was to see the young couple’s new apartment, a month before the wedding, they had spent the night at the hotel in a modest but tasteful room whose window looked out majestically on the desert and on the great salt sea in its folds. Needless to say, they stayed at the hotel again during the three hectic days of the celebration, when they were given a suite facing the Old City.

And yet in the course of the brief year between the wedding and the divorce, Hagit had managed, however politely and apologetically, to keep Galya’s parents and their enticements at arm’s length. In the end Rivlin feared being taken by them for a snobbish intellectual. And so, arranging to appear at a meeting of the Jerusalem Orientalists’ society, he used the opportunity, much to Hagit’s chagrin, to spend the night in his in-laws’ hotel. There he had been showered with attention sufficient for both himself and his missing wife.

18.

THE MANY DEATH notices by the entrance and at the reception desk with its old lithographs of Palestinian landscapes, and arrows pointing the way to the mourners’ quarters, spelled out the demise of the family’s privacy. Rivlin was reminded of the first question he had asked Galya’s father on being introduced to him. How, he had wanted to know, could a family live a normal life in the middle of a hotel? In reply he received an exact description of Mr. Hendel’s formula for separating the two spheres. As it was unnecessarily wasteful, in the proprietor’s opinion, to keep them totally apart, and since he had at his disposal attractive rooms, a kitchen that had to stay operational, and a staff of chefs, waiters, and chambermaids without always enough to do, he had decided long ago to lodge his family in the hotel. However, he had made it clear from the start to his three children — especially to the youngest, the spoiled little girl who was to be Ofer’s future bride — that their right to a life of luxury, with serviced rooms and daily meals chosen from a first-class menu, depended on their self-restraint, it being incumbent upon them to conceal the existence of their private lives from the guests, who needed to maintain the illusion that is cherished by each guest, even if paying for a single night alone: that the establishment is as exclusively devoted to his comfort as if he were its sole owner.

It was, thus, astonishing to see this inviolable rule rudely shattered by the death of the man who had decreed but could no longer defend it. Plastered over the entrance, the lobby, and the door to the dining room were sorrowfully worded death notices in English and in Hebrew, as if all at once the family had decided to tear down the curtain hiding it and permit — no, compel — the guests to share its unexpected grief.

It was 3:20 P.M. His sister-in-law’s flight would not land before seven. Rivlin had time to spare. Resisting the printed invitations to the bereavement, he decided to wait until four and let the mourners enjoy their afternoon nap.

He wouldn’t have minded a nap himself. The day was turning out to be longer and more tiring than he had anticipated. He went over to an armchair in the lobby and swiveled it around to face the garden — the same garden full of flowers, lit by a pure Jerusalem noonday sky, that he remembered from his anxious childhood. Had it been this rich with color the last time he saw it, or had it been enlarged and transformed over the past five years with new flowerbeds and shrubs? His eyes followed a path that led to the lawn. On that lawn, close to midnight, the bride, her veil and bridal train discarded, had enticed him to dance with her. Thrilled, he had moved cautiously but freely to the music. He had not danced since his student days, he explained to Galya’s family, because his wife, afraid, perhaps, that she might blur her judicial boundaries, would not go along with it. This made Galya turn to Hagit and demand that she join them. Most of the wedding guests had gone home. Only close family and friends remained, and Hagit yielded and danced, first with him and the bride and then with their two sons. Though shy and hesitant, she was graceful. He had felt a deep surge of happiness. It was as if his son’s marriage, more than any book or article he had written or could write, were his life’s great achievement.

Now, although he had made up his mind to pay his respects, he lingered in the armchair, to give Hagit time to return home, unpack the treats she had bought, and set the table. It wasn’t that he needed to ask permission for something he knew would seem pointless to her, but simply that he wished to be aboveboard. The last twenty-four hours had been full of good deeds: first his attendance at the Arab wedding, then his visit to his old professor, and now this condolence call on a family to which he no longer belonged.

He sat regarding the flowers and the light on the lawn, his fond memories of the wedding mixed with thoughts of the failure that had followed and the death that had just taken place. Actually, a great deal had changed in the last five years. Evidently, the hotel had done well. The little knoll that had been part of the desert beyond the hotel grounds was now annexed to the garden, and the old dance floor, with its grapevine-trellised gazebo that had served as the wedding canopy, had been replaced by a new swimming pool and a small amphitheater. Even five years ago the term “family hotel” had struck him as overly modest. Now it seemed more like a boast: that amid so much luxury an intimate touch could still be preserved.

Rivlin let himself be drawn into the garden, as if he were in search of the vanished gazebo. In fact, it had not vanished at all. Rather, it had been thoughtfully moved to higher ground, its ancient foliage of grape leaves replaced by bright bougainvillea. Beneath it they had stood that night, all six of them: the groom, the bride, and two sets of parents. He walked warily toward it. New spotlights were hidden in the bushes. He shut his eyes and remembered the long-ago twilight in which he, the father of the groom, had felt like a newlywed himself. And why not? There, by his son’s side, he had pledged anew his troth to his wife and forged a new blood-tie to a young bride he hardly knew. Now he strode to the spot on which Ofer had stood and where he had reached out instinctively, midway through the ceremony, for his mother’s hand. Humiliation and anger mingled with the sweetness of the memory.

19.

HE LOVED HIS wife’s way of answering the telephone. Her soft, cultivated “Hello” was alive and attentive. There was nothing remote or fuzzy about it. And now it also tingled with the expectation of hearing a sister’s voice. Hence her angry gasp of disappointment when she heard that the flight was late.

“Why didn’t you call me before?”

“You weren’t home. I tried you at court, but you were gone.”

“Where are you now?”

“In Jerusalem.”

“Still in Jerusalem? What are you doing there? Are you with Tedeschi in the hospital?”

“No. I left.”

“How is he?”

“It’s a more serious attack than usual. You should see him. He’s red as a beet.”

“Is he really unconscious?”

“I’d say half-conscious.”

“Which half?”

“He has difficulty talking. But he listens. He can follow.”

“But what was so urgent about seeing him? You’re always complaining that you have no time for work. Why look for still more things to do?”

“As long as I was going to the airport, I thought I’d make the gesture. I had a hunch the flight would be late.”

“What kind of hunch?”

“At eleven o’clock there was still no arrival time on the recorded announcement at the airport.”

“But if you thought the flight would be late, you should have waited for me. I would have gone with you. You know how upsetting it is for me not to be there.”

“I never imagined the delay would be for four whole hours. I thought it would be a small one.”

“You could have waited to find out. What made you rush off to Jerusalem? Since when is Tedeschi so urgent? You keep saying his problems are psychological, and suddenly you’re in a panic over him.”

“In the first place, psychological problems deserve attention too. And second, Hannah’s telephone call yesterday worried me. Sometimes people just go and die on you.”

“Not Tedeschi. You can count on him. And even if you had nothing better to do, you could have waited for me. Or at least let me know. I would have come with you. I care about Tedeschi too. I’m shut up in a dark courtroom with all kinds of shady characters and you’re gallivanting around the world.”

“What kind of gallivanting? I went to the hospital.”

“Hospitals can be fun, too. You might have waited. It was another of your premature ejaculations….”

“Are you out of your mind? What kind of way is that to talk? Me…?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I was talking about life. About living. You know how I love going places and seeing things.”

“Nothing will be gone tomorrow. What have I done? It’s not my fault the flight was delayed. It inconvenienced me too.”

“But what are you doing now? You still have three hours left. Go to Raya’s. You can rest there until the plane lands. Does your back still hurt?”

“My back?”

“This morning you said you had a backache.”

“It’s gone.”

“You should rest at Raya’s anyway. You can lie down there. I just spoke to her fifteen minutes ago. Start out now. We rose early today. You’re not a young boy anymore. You can’t just keep going. Take a nap. By the way, it was nice of you to wash the curtain.”

“Especially since it wasn’t dirty.”

“Nothing is ever dirty, in your opinion. But what counts is that you washed it. Start out now. Raya is expecting you. I’ll phone in an hour.”

“Wait. Listen. Something’s come up. Listen to this. Her father died.”

“Whose father?”

“Yehuda.”

“Yehuda who?”

“Hendel.”

“Yehuda Hendel died? When?”

“A few days ago.”

“Who told you?”

“Carlo. Hendel was in the bed next to him. He had a stroke one night. He was gone in a matter of hours….”

“But why should Carlo have mentioned him?”

“He remembered him from Ofer’s wedding.”

“From six years ago? He sounds pretty conscious to me. How old was Hendel?”

“He must have been about my age. Maybe half a year older.”

“How terrible. When did you say it happened?”

“Three days ago. Believe me, at our age you have to read the obituaries every day. If I hadn’t gone to see Tedeschi, I’d never have heard about it.”

“In the end we hear about everything.”

“The question is what you do with what you hear. By my reckoning, they’re still sitting shiva at the hotel. As long as I’m in Jerusalem, I might as well pay them a little condolence call.”

“Forget it. Why get involved? Send them a letter. You write such lovely condolence notes. That way they’ll have a permanent record.”

“A letter isn’t enough. This calls for something more personal. They must be devastated. Just think of Galya’s mother, of how dependent she was on him.”

“That’s why it’s better to write and not barge in on them. They won’t understand what you’re doing there after five years of being out of touch. And it will look strange for you to turn up by yourself, without me….”

“What’s there to understand? It’s a condolence call. I can tell them the truth. I happened to be in Jerusalem, and you were in court.”

“Listen. Do me a favor. Don’t go. You’re overdoing it. They’re not friends of ours, and they’re no longer relatives either. You’re getting involved for no good reason. What’s got into you? I thought you were angry at them.”

“I was angry at her, not at him. He never wronged me.”

“But he’s dead. If you go there now, it’s to see her.”

“Hagit, sometimes we have to extend ourselves. She was our daughter-in-law. You can’t erase the past.”

“No one is erasing anything. Write them a nice letter. You’re the last person she needs to see now. What can you do for her?”

“I don’t have to do anything. I only have to say how I feel. If I died, wouldn’t you appreciate her coming from Jerusalem to see you?”

“You know I can’t stand your fantasies about dying. That was your family’s favorite occupation, imagining how you’d all die and mourn for each other. In my family, death wasn’t talked about.”

“Like sex.”

“Maybe. Not that it ever kept anyone from having children or dying. Listen to me. Forget about it. Go to your sister’s, and we’ll write them a letter together. Suppose you hadn’t gone to Jerusalem and happened to hear that he was dead?”

“But I’m in Jerusalem. I’m even in Talpiyot. Right next door to their hotel.”

“You are? What are you doing there?”

“I must have secret longings for the place.”

“Longings for what? I thought you wanted to relax. Wasn’t that Arab wedding enough for you?”

“Definitely. It was tediously long. That lamb is still sitting in my stomach. It was probably that wedding that made me long for Ofer’s. Listen, Hagit. There’s no point in arguing. I’m here, and it’s my to duty drop in on them.”

The judge paused to assess her husband’s intentions and reevaluate the battlefield before answering.

“All right. But remember. Condolence calls are short and sweet. You don’t want to hold up the line behind you. Don’t overstay your visit.”

“Why should I overstay it? I’ll say a few words and leave.”

“And remember to give them my condolences too. And to explain that you did all you could to keep me from coming with you.”

20.

HE HEADED FOR the third floor, where the family residence was tucked away in a wing of the hotel, but the arrows directed him to a reading room on the second floor, which had been converted into a receiving room. He was surprised to see how many callers there were, among them even some hotel guests. In a corner stood a huge table with some bottles of water and a large condolence registry tended by an elderly Arab waiter in a black suit and bow tie. His presence added a solemn formality to the occasion.

Rivlin did not wish to be recognized at once. First he wanted to spot the ex-daughter-in-law on whose account he had come and to observe the state she was in. To his disappointment and curious relief, however, a quick glance around the room revealed that she wasn’t there. He had had no idea whether his sorrow for her could get the better of his old anger. On a leather couch, lugged upstairs from the lobby, sat Tehila and Ohad, her older sister and brother, supporting their widowed mother. Dressed in black, Mrs. Hendel was stonily gripping the shoulder of a small boy of about four, apparently a grandson, who had been set on a stool at her feet to help her maintain her equilibrium. For a moment, Rivlin considered beating a retreat. Mrs. Hendel, absorbed in her grief, still hadn’t noticed him. Yet a second later Tehila, a tall, unmarried woman who had managed the hotel with her father, gave him a friendly smile, and with a look of respect in her whiskey-colored eyes rose to greet him.

Rivlin shook his head in commiseration and hurried to the widow, who glanced up at him with lovely blue eyes reddened and widened by tears, sorrow, and guilt. The sight of her discharged in-law come from afar to share her grief only reminded her of it anew, causing fresh tears to trickle down her cheeks. More like a lost child than a grown-up woman, she fell into his arms, for the past five years no longer a kinsman’s, asking only that he, too, like the others, embrace her tightly and understand, by the limpness of the flesh and bones in his grasp, that the inner kernel of her being had dissolved with the death of her husband.

Of course, anyone aware of the devotion that Mr. Hendel had demanded of his wife and bountifully received from her could have predicted the crushing effect of his abrupt disappearance. But what Rivlin saw now was a total collapse — for instead of feverishly reciting for the umpteenth time, as the newly bereaved are wont to do, the many details of her husband’s death and the shock it had given her, she fell back out of his arms and onto the couch in a speechless daze, so utterly absorbed in her sorrow that, as if it concerned someone else entirely, she let her daughter tell Rivlin about it.

“But where is Galya?” he asked, interrupting Tehila, whose account was as long as her father’s passing had been brief. “Does she still live in Jerusalem?” Apart from the news of her remarriage, which had reached him and Hagit belatedly, he knew nothing about her.

Galya, it seemed, still lived in Jerusalem. Indeed she lived quite close to the hotel, which was why she had taken a noonday break from the shiva and gone home to rest. Not, Rivlin was told, that he shouldn’t wait for her. On the contrary, Mr. Hendel’s youngest daughter, having been the closest to her father, was most in need of consolation, especially from someone who had traveled from Haifa for her sake.

Rivlin sat there dejectedly, with a wary brevity giving this family that was no longer his, a résumé of the recent life of its ex-son-and-brother-in-law, before taking advantage of the arrival of a delegation of somberly dressed Mormons, descended from Mount Scopus, to obey his wife’s warning against tarrying too long. Rather than leave all at once, he withdrew to the bow-tied waiter, who recognized him and even addressed him by his name and title while pouring him a glass of water. Perhaps the professor, he said, would like to look at the condolence book and its messages, written in several languages, and add a few words of his own. Actually, Rivlin thought such a volume seemed grandiose for a man of Hendel’s rank and station. Nevertheless, addressing it not to the survivors but to the dead man himself, he penned a sentence:

Despite the separation imposed on us by your younger daughter, the memory of you over the years still shines with your light and generosity. We feel a keen and vivid sorrow at your death.

The Rivlin Family, Haifa.

21.

HE REGRETTED THE words as soon as he had written them. Yet so great was the appreciation with which the old Arab waiter read them that he was embarrassed to cross them out, and merely turned a few pages of the book to keep them from being the first thing to strike the next person’s eye. New callers kept arriving, increasing the noise in the room. The conversation, veering from the subject of Mr. Hendel’s death, now touched on the family’s plans for the future. His wife, Rivlin thought, had been right. As always. What had made him insist on coming? A brief letter would have been enough. In half an hour the telephone would ring at his sister’s and his wife would be on the line, wanting to know why he still hadn’t arrived from a visit that he never should have made. He went back to the widow, who sat up like a wind-up doll at his approach. More than words she appeared to need physical contact that could be placed as a warm compress over her dislocated self. Next he said good-bye to Tehila, who seemed upset, even aggrieved, by his departure.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “It’s by pure chance that I came to Jerusalem, and I have a sister-in-law to pick up at the airport. I’ll wait outside a little longer. If Galya doesn’t come, please be sure to tell her I was here.”

“But of course she’ll come.”

He went back down to the lobby. A gray light from the desert deepened the somberness of the late Jerusalem day. Springtime clouds, not yet fled before the rainless summer, made intricately changing patterns in the sky. The air was astir with something. Scanning the guests in the lobby for a familiar face and noticing that each was seated before an identical piece of cake, he realized that they were a group of Christian pilgrims from America, Mormons or Evangelicals, of the kind Mr. Hendel had specialized in. Feeling excluded, he retreated farther — not, however, out to the street, but rather back to the garden, with its red gravel path leading to the flowering gazebo. He stood gazing at the entrance to the hotel. Should his ex-daughter-in-law arrive, he would have a chance to scrutinize her from afar before deciding whether to approach her or — relinquishing her forever — slip quietly away.

It was four-thirty. Although there was still plenty of time before the plane landed, he was beginning to feel guilty toward his wife. She had been more farsighted than he had been. What was he to the Hendels, or the Hendels to him, anymore? Nothing tangible in memory could compensate for the ignominy of what had happened or assuage the longing that had reopened like an old wound. It was time to depart the magic of Jerusalem and set out. The dead man wasn’t worth the gesture he had made. Rivlin remembered the bitter taste left by their last conversation, five years ago, when — telephoning without Hagit or Ofer’s knowledge — he had made a fool of himself trying to find out why the marriage had so shockingly broken up. “Even if I accept it,” he had said to Hendel imploringly, “I’ll have no peace until I understand the real reason. And I don’t think Ofer understands it either. You’re the person Galya trusts most. I think you should find out the truth from her and share it with me.”

Mr. Hendel had flatly refused. He and his family, he said, were just as pained by the sudden rift, which no one could possibly feel happy about. But if it had to happen, it was better happening sooner than later. Better, too, quickly, rather than nerve-rackingly bit by bit. He had faith in his children and would never want to know more than they wished him to. Besides, anything his daughter might tell him would be treated with strictest confidence. And sensing that Rivlin, who wanted only to cut short the conversation, felt hurt, he had ended on an optimistic note.

“You needn’t torment yourself. In a year or two it will all be forgotten. Why worry about it? They’re young. Their life is still ahead of them. Each of them will find someone else.”

22.

AND IN FACT, he had no cause for complaint. The optimist willing to wait for the truth to emerge in time could not possibly understand the sufferer driven in the depths of him to breathe it into life all at once. It gave him a feeling of pleasure, therefore, when Tehila, who took after her father physically as well as in a business sense, now hurried after him along the garden path to beg him to wait for Galya. She was sure to arrive any minute. He couldn’t allow himself to miss her after coming so far to see her.

“But I’m the last person she would want to be consoled by.”

“How can you say that? Even after the separation, she always spoke of you in the friendliest tones when you were mentioned. She was in awe of your wife. I think she must have been afraid of her.”

“Afraid of Hagit?” The thought amused him. “Why not of me?”

Tehila leaned smilingly toward him. “How could anyone be afraid of you? She had warm feelings for you. More than warm. If you ask me, she loved you.”

“She did?” Rivlin felt a tremor. “Come on! The way she broke off all ties with us was heartless. It was totally out of the blue. She never bothered to explain anything.”

“I’m sure she meant well. She just didn’t want to cause you more pain. I want you to know that if, God forbid — God forbid! — it were your wife to whom something had happened…” Tehila crimsoned. “If it had been the opposite, God forbid… your wife or someone close to you… she would have gone straight to see you, just as you have come to see her.”

He weighed her words and nodded in gratitude, as if the return call paid by his son’s ex-wife on the Carmel had already taken place. Affectionately, he reached out to touch her shoulder. She had inherited not only her father’s hard, bony face but also his lanky, aristocratic frame.

“Well then, I give in. But only for a few minutes.”

“Why don’t you rest while you’re waiting? You can even stretch out in this gazebo. How do you like the changes we’ve made? The place is a lot pleasanter now. I’ll bring Galya as soon as she arrives. In the meantime, Fu’ad will be at your service.”

23.

EVEN THOUGH HE had no wish to cause his wife, who would soon be speaking to his sister, the slightest concern, he decided not to phone her. The longer he could put off the accounting she was sure to demand of him, the better. Meanwhile, over an emptied coffee cup and the last crumbs of his cake, he pondered the encounter awaiting him. The bougainvillea flowering on the old gazebo, which had changed its location but not its charm, and the Jerusalem air freshening toward evening gave him new hope that it still might be possible to redress, if only in small measure, the consequences of the parting five years ago. There were still two hours before his sister-in-law landed, and in any case, she was a woman who took her time and divided her luggage into many small pieces that never arrived on the conveyor belt all at once. Keeping on the safe side, he had at least an hour to get to the airport.

It was twenty after five when Tehila returned with Galya. With them was Galya’s new husband, a tall fellow with a short ponytail. One glance at Galya was enough to make Rivlin understand why Tehila had insisted that he wait, for he could see at once that her mourning was of a different and more passionate nature.

She was dressed in black, like her mother, and still wearing her ritually torn funeral blouse. He couldn’t tell whether it was the thinning of her hair or her lack of sleep, or something else that had happened over the years, but she struck him as less pretty and more awkward than the image preserved in the wedding album in his Haifa home. The satisfaction this gave him softened his sense of grievance. Hurriedly, before he could say a word, her outstretched little hand still in his, she apologized for her lateness, as though they had had an appointment she had not come on time for.

How different was the stormy bereavement of Hendel’s youngest daughter from the quiet composure of her unmarried sister, who stood smiling beside her! Even the new husband, judged by Rivlin to be older than his son, appeared startled by his wife’s agitation, at which he slowly wagged his ponytail back and forth.

“There are people,” Galya said to Rivlin, “who, because they can imagine their own death, can also imagine the deaths of those they love. It helps prepare them for it when it strikes. But not me, Yochanan. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I keep feeling it as if my father were dying in front of me over and over. There’s no net to hold me. Our family — we were more like Hagit’s than like yours — we never talked or even thought about death. It was as if life would go on forever. Maybe our brains were addled by all those Christian tourists talking about eternal bliss.”

The perfect naturalness with which she mentioned his and Hagit’s families gave him a sensation of fresh, intimate directness, as if the separation of five years ago had never taken place. Heartening too, for some reason, was her failure to introduce her husband.

“Has Ofer heard?”

“How could he have?” Rivlin simpered at the childish question. “I myself only found out today — and by pure chance. I was visiting an old teacher who was hospitalized in the bed next to your father’s. He remembered him from the wedding. That’s the only reason I’m here. Honestly.”

The contingency of it, he could see, displeased her. Full of her father’s death, she wanted the world to have room for nothing else.

Tehila interrupted them. “I’ll leave you two here and go back to my mother,” she told Rivlin. She had her father’s small, shrewd eyes. “The next time you’re in Jerusalem, Yochanan, don’t overlook us again. You needn’t wait for someone else to die.”

She turned to Galya’s husband, whose birdlike face wore a worried frown. “You,” she said to him, stating a fact, “will come with me.”

24.

EMBARRASSED BY THEIR failure to introduce him to the new husband, who appeared to have been entirely forgotten by his wife, Rivlin said hesitantly: “You must be…”

“Bo’az.” Tehila, answering for him, prodded the young man to come with her.

“… her new husband.” With a sheepish smile Rivlin pointed to his ex-daughter-in-law, who nodded in confirmation.

“I’m pleased to meet you. You may know… that I’m…” He choked on his words.

“Of course I know,” the new husband said tactfully, smiling back with a pleasant, rarefied mien. “I know everything.”

“Everything? But how?”

“I mean, everything I’ve been told.”

Bo’az and Tehila returned to the hotel. Galya went to fetch a metal chair from beside the pool. The old waiter, who had followed Rivlin to the garden, hastened to help her.

It was five-thirty. He would leave at six, come what may. Meanwhile, every second that passed only made him angrier at the silence in which they were sitting. And yet how could he have refused such a rare opportunity, even if opposed by his wife? Galya, too, seemed to have grown suddenly aware of the situation. With a movement he found touching, she fingered the rip in her blouse as if to protect herself against this comforter who had come not only to comfort.

He studied her pale, slightly swollen face, on which, the day Ofer announced their engagement, he had allowed himself, following his wife’s lead, to plant a kiss — the first of many whenever they met.

“The fact is,” he began, “that you don’t deserve this visit from me.” His openly aggressive tone surprised and pleased him. “You caused us a great deal of sorrow and disappointment. Not so much by the separation you imposed on Ofer — you had every right to do as you saw fit — as by running away without saying good-bye, let alone explaining why you broke up a marriage we mistakenly thought was a happy one.”

Galya was caught off guard. The hand fingering the blouse fell to her side.

“Even if that’s so,” she admitted in a low tone, “and I did run away, it was because of the friendship and trust we had between us. There was nothing I could tell you. Not because there was nothing to say, but because there was no way of saying it….”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ofer must have told you something.”

“No. Nothing concrete. Nothing that made any sense….”

A wave of relief appeared to pass over her. She blushed with emotion. “Then he must have had his reasons.”

“Not at all,” Rivlin protested vigorously. “He wasn’t evading us or hiding anything, I’m sure of that. He simply had no idea what made you walk out on him with no warning.”

“No warning?” She smiled mockingly. “As if that were possible.”

“There were signs in advance?”

“Of course there were. There had to be.”

“Well, they must have been too subtle for us. In any case, I’m telling you — listen carefully — that Ofer couldn’t explain it. That was the reason he didn’t want to talk to us.”

“Then why keep trying to make him?” She was upset now.

“We stopped doing that long ago. It’s a subject we avoid. But even then, he feels our sadness and keeps away from it….” He paused to phrase it more exactly. “I suppose I should say my sadness. I’m less able than Hagit to live with it, perhaps because Ofer is closer to me and more like me. I identify with him more. Listen. I’ll say it again. A long time has gone by. We’ve come to accept your divorce. But I still refuse to accept its mysteriousness. It keeps Ofer from freeing himself like you and meeting someone else.”

“You’re overstating it,” she accused him boldly, almost contemptuously. “There was nothing mysterious about it.”

“If there wasn’t, so much the better. Then you can explain to me right now what happened, and I’ll free myself, too.”

And he added softly after a brief silence:

“From you.”

“But why from me?” She seemed exasperated. “Why can’t you let things be? Maybe we discovered that we simply weren’t compatible. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“But you were compatible!” exclaimed the ex-father-in-law. “You still are….”

“That’s not up to you to decide.” She narrowed her large, pretty eyes despairingly. “What do you want from me? If he didn’t tell you why we separated, he had his reasons.”

“Then you tell me!” He was growing more heated. “If it’s too intimate, or even… forgive me… too deep or complicated… perhaps sexual… something you don’t want me to know about… then tell Hagit. You know what a good listener she is. She’s wise and she’s honest and she’s loyal. Believe me, she keeps the darkest secrets from me as if she had been told them behind closed doors in a courtroom. She’ll keep yours, too.”

He felt relieved. Not simply because he had got it off his chest at last, but because his unstinting praise of his wife, who was no doubt furious at his disappearance, made up in part for this strange conversation that would only have aggravated her even more.

Galya tossed her head, eyeing him with distrust.

“What happened? Tell me!” He was losing his temper. “Why can’t you give me a straight answer? Or is it that you, too, don’t understand what you did?”

His open refusal to believe her set her on edge. She had lost a dearly loved father three days ago and now, still overwhelmed by it, needed all the tenderness she could get, not this cruel rebuff.

“But who says I owe you anything?” Her eyes blazed. “It’s over with. It’s all over with. I’ve remarried. If it were not for my father’s death, I could consider myself a happy woman. It’s your son’s own problem if he can’t free himself of me. It’s not mine. How old is he now, thirty-two? Thirty-three? If he still doesn’t know why I had to leave him, even though… even though I loved him a lot… then he has a problem. Maybe you do too. Maybe — who knows? — you’re even the cause of it….”

25.

A QUARTER OF an hour had gone by. He had to stick to his schedule, especially because he might yet be caught in the rush-hour traffic leaving Jerusalem. But if this singular encounter ended now, with no resolution, he simply would have added to his old torment a new sense of missed opportunity.

His glance wandered to two pink-skinned Holy Land pilgrims who, undaunted by the chill evening air, were diving into the swimming pool that had replaced the old dance floor. On that floor, six years ago, a happy and ravishing young bride had determinedly approached a cerebral, middle-aged couple who hadn’t danced for so many years that they were as intimidated by the old dances as they were by the new ones. Hesitantly, Rivlin had let himself be coaxed, encouraged by the young people around him. He needn’t fear looking foolish, they assured him, because nowadays there were no rules. Next came the turn of his wife, dragged laughing onto the floor by her sons, so that midnight found the two of them pawing the air with their hands and feet like two endearingly wary bears. Mr. and Mrs. Hendel, whose long years in the hotel business had made them excellent dancers, cheered them on. After a while the same bride who now sat sullenly hunched before him had made them all join hands and dance in a circle around her.

“Suppose you’re right,” he said, trying to outflank the swift passage of time with a hurried admission. “Suppose, indirectly, we too had to do with the failure of your marriage. Isn’t that a reason why we deserve to understand what happened? It’s painful to think we’ve been kept in the dark when even your new husband knows all about it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been inconsiderate or simply scared. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all the same.”

She said nothing, her resentful glance protesting — justifiably, he knew — the pitiless way he had turned a condolence call into a bill of indictment. His wife had been right again. The visit was ending with a pointless exacerbation of past wounds. In his despair he thrust a lance he hadn’t known he possessed.

“Listen, Galya. I’m in a hurry to get to the airport. And you have to rejoin your family. I just want to say that, though we haven’t spoken for five years, your father’s death is truly hard for me…. We’re no longer one family, and I wasn’t obliged to come today. Still, you see that I did anyway. This death is a double blow for me, because for five years — secretly, without telling Hagit, because she’s too proud to acknowledge her feelings — I’ve kept hoping that one day it would be possible to ask your father to help me to understand. I’ve always thought that he of all people, who loved you so much and was so attached to you, was the one to do it….”

His reference to her dead father, he saw at once, only heightened her distress. She rose, the setting sun red on her eyes.

“My father knew nothing. And even if he had suspected something, he would never have revealed to anyone, not even my mother, a secret having to do with me. He respected me totally.”

“I know he did. Yet I’m convinced he would have agreed had he known…. What I’m trying to say is… had he known the truth about me….”

“What truth?”

He made a supreme effort to pretend that his next words were no more his than the gray birds flying heedlessly above the pine trees he had played among as a child.

“The truth about my situation. I’m talking about my illness… because I don’t have much time left to live. I’m sure he would have taken that into account….”

“You’re ill?”

“Yes,” he said. Unforeseen and absurd, the declaration was made calmly. “I haven’t much time left.”

In the time that remained his imagination wove a narrative of intricate arabesques out of the secret illness of Samaher, the pretended illness of her narghile-puffing grandmother, the actual and deadly illness of Mr. Hendel, who was presently hovering above the two believers in his resurrection who were splashing in the swimming pool, and the illness that he now invented, with its real pain and imaginary symptoms, for an internationally renowned Orientalist improvising a lecture on it from his fantasies.

“Yes,” he said again, lowering his gaze to avoid the eyes of the young woman he had forced to factor his death into her father’s. “It’s a fatal disease that my wife alone knows about — and believe me, she too doesn’t know everything. We haven’t told Ofer or his brother yet. For the time being, I’d rather spare them. I’m telling you this, while swearing you to secrecy, only to prick your conscience, if you have one, into helping me get at the truth, or at least your version of it. It’s not only for my son’s sake. It’s for my own inner peace as well.”

26.

STRANGELY, HOWEVER, HE did not insist on an immediate answer. As if they both needed time to recover from the shock of his revelation, he held out his hand in farewell while expressing the hope that his dramatic confession would not keep them from meeting again. The final moments were devoted by him to a few appreciative words about the deceased. Then, adding the wish that the family’s sorrow and bereavement might become a source of creation and strength, he gave Galya a light hug, as casually as in the old days, and planted a fatherly kiss on her cheek in testimony to the memories and reckonings that time could not erase. Her body clung to his warmly, as if his approaching death were now one with the death that had just taken place. Pressed against her, he realized with a start that she must be pregnant. He said nothing and hurried to his car. Although it was already five after six, he was sure he would make it to the airport on time.

The traffic out of Jerusalem wasn’t bad. At the Kiryat-Ye’arim gas station he stopped to phone the airport. The final time, it turned out, had retreated from its finality by forty more minutes, thus enabling him, if the traffic continued to flow, to drop by Raya’s. Apprehensive about contacting his wife, who might cross-examine him about the whys and wherefores of having stayed too long in a place he should never have been in, he preferred to call his sister. To his amazement, she told him that Hagit hadn’t tried to get in touch with him. Raya was in the middle of making cheese fritters, a favorite dish from their childhood, and impatient to know when he would arrive. “Are you sure you have enough time?” she inquired. That, he told her, depended on road conditions. “Even if I come,” he warned her, “it will only be to wash my hands and face and pop a fritter into my mouth. Then I’ll be off.”

27.

THE TABLE AT his sister’s was already set. Rinsing away the sick and the dead at the sink, he called Hagit before sitting down to eat — and found, not an anxious, irritated wife, but a soft and sleepy one, freshly awakened from a delicious afternoon nap, lengthened past the usual span of her naps by her fatigue and the absence of her husband’s habitually restless body from her side. “What’s happening? What time is it?” she asked, with the innocence of a pampered child granted a special indulgence. “How are you?” Her voice was full of concern for him. “Did you sleep or at least rest at Raya’s?” He maneuvered carefully between maintaining a fog of uncertainty around his movements and complaining about the world’s many demands on him. “How is your back?” Hagit wanted to know. “Is it better?” “A little,” he answered grudgingly, loath to forfeit her sympathy for a condition that had vanished and been forgotten long ago. There was no knowing when it might come in handy again.

“I want you to promise me one more time, darling. Be patient and nice with my sister.”

“Don’t worry. She’s one person I’m always nice to.”

“Be nicer than nice.”

“Trust me.”

“How was the shiva?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Just a hint.”

“It’s hard for them. Hendel’s wife is still in shock, just as I thought she’d be. She’s a wreck.”

“Did you talk to Galya?”

“Yes.”

“What about?”

“What does one talk about at such times? About her father. About death.”

“That’s all?”

“More or less.”

He shut his eyes, recalling his outrageous lie.

“I hope you didn’t raise the subject of Ofer.”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly what?” The judge was waking up.

“We’ll talk about it later, Hagit. Not now. You don’t want me to miss your sister’s flight.”

28.

HE WAS STILL prying open with a finger the shiny eyes of his sister’s granddaughter’s doll when a plate of golden fritters, their crisp warmth enclosing little slabs of fried cheese, was set before him. It never ceased to amaze him how, despite his sister’s indefatigable and never ending hatred of their mother, she continued to make all her dishes, as if determined to demonstrate how simple and even improvable they were. It wasn’t easy for him to resist an improved taste of his childhood. In the end he had to plead with her — just as he had pleaded with his mother in her day — to stop plying him with more fritters and to wrap them in aluminum foil for his sister-in-law, who was by now probably circling overhead.

As he had feared, however, it was half past eight before, weary and exhausted, he was able to hold yet another woman in his arms — the fifth of the day by his count, although without a doubt the prime mover of the five. He embraced her gingerly, knowing that her youthful-looking body, which, after a single miscarriage, had borne no children, was thin and fragile at the age of sixty. Five years his wife’s senior and a year older than himself, she stiffened self-protectively in the innocent embrace of a devoted brother-in-law who had spent the day on his way to the airport to welcome her.

Ofra herself had been en route from British Columbia for thirty hours. Yet her small, delicate face, rather than showing signs of tiredness, was lit by a spiritual elation only further refined by the six-hour delay for repairs in Dublin. She and her husband, Yo’el, who worked for the United Nations as a consultant on the agricultural economies of developing countries, were not only frequent flyers who had accumulated zillions of points with four different airlines, but also conscientious travelers who loved wandering through the duty-free shops of the world, the details of which they studied as intensely as if they were back in the Zionist youth movement, in which they had met in Tel Aviv, memorizing the clues of a treasure hunt.

What was the point of commiserating with an abused traveler who had enjoyed every minute of the flight and even managed to catch two or three catnaps that, however brief, more than rid her of her jet lag? And so without further ado they set out on the road to Haifa, over which the spring night had scattered its scents and lights, while he told her the latest news of his family, but especially of the young Army Intelligence officer, her favorite (if only because he was named for her father).

“Yo’el and I worry about him each time there’s an incident in Lebanon,” she said.

“It’s not him you need worry about,” Rivlin rebuked her, as if annoyed that the two Israeli émigrés didn’t convey their concern over the situation in Lebanon to a more appropriate address. “I’ve explained to you several times that he’s at a well-guarded base in the Galilee. If this entire country were to go up in smoke, he’d be the last to be affected. He wouldn’t even hear the screams.”

Ofra didn’t crack a smile. Like her sister, she disapproved of fantasies of violence, even ones designed solely to illustrate how safe her nephew was. She and her husband, though gone from Israel for over thirty years, still considered themselves temporary absentees entitled to demand of those who had remained behind that they take good care of the country.

“I still don’t understand what he does there.”

“You can’t get anything out of him. If you ask me, he’s listening to the radio communications of Syrian pilots. Maybe they’ll tell us what’s going to happen in the Middle East.”

“All in Arabic?”

“Unfortunately, that’s the language the Syrians use.”

“He knows it that well?”

“Well enough to know he’s hearing it. And also, I hope, to understand it.”

“You wait and see, Yochi. He’ll end up an Arabist like his father.”

“What for? So that he can be driven to despair? Who needs it?”

She dropped her eyes without answering. “Despair,” as his brother-in-law Yo’el told them candidly, was a taboo word at the conferences on developing economies, which were held in the most hopeless of deteriorating countries, that he regularly attended in the loyal company of his wife.

Rivlin switched on the radio. Perhaps a brief exposure to the hourly news bulletin would help acclimatize his passenger to the homeland she hadn’t been in for three years. In fact, he doubted whether she would have come now, had it not been for a wedding in Yo’el’s family. The two of them were inseparable. If he, for his part, took her along with him into his conference rooms as if she were an agricultural expert herself, she returned the compliment by letting him attend her sessions at the beauty parlor, where he sat reading a newspaper on a revolving chair by her side while giving advice to the hairdresser. Their mutual dependence was so great that he had taken to putting his driver’s license and credit cards in her purse, leaving only a few coins in his pocket like a small boy’s allowance. He had agreed with reluctance to Ofra’s coming to Israel two weeks before him, during which time he would have to go around with his own wallet.

“It’s a lucky thing,” Rivlin teased his sister-in-law good-naturedly, “that you people have an occasional wedding in this country. Otherwise we’d never see you at all….”

Ofra acknowledged the justice of his reproach. And since he knew she was too tactful to mention Ofer’s wedding festivities of six years ago, to which she and Yo’el had dedicated a month of their lives, he took the liberty of telling her about his former in-law’s sudden death. Unlike Hagit, she took in stride his desire to revisit the original site of Ofer’s botched marriage. She remembered it vividly and listened attentively to his descriptions of the new swimming pool, the refurbished garden, the bereaved ex-daughter-in-law, and her tall second husband with the ponytail.

He was tempted to relate his conversation with Galya. It might serve, he mused, as a trial balloon to gauge Hagit’s probable reaction. But Ofra had already shut her eyes and was enjoying, between Zichron Ya’akov and Atlit, one final nap, as though on the last leg of her flight. He glanced at her slender sixty-year-old form. The years were embalming her as an eternal adolescent. He really should get up the courage someday, Rivlin thought as the lights of Haifa came into view, to ask Yo’el about their married life. Perhaps there were a few useful lessons in it for him.

29.

THE APARTMENT HAD even more sparkle now than in the morning. Brightly lit and adorned with flowers, it awaited the arrival of the guest who, having followed via floor plans and telephoned reports the tortuous drama of its construction, was now seeing it for the first time.

The two sisters threw their arms around each other. Happy tears mingled with sad ones. Rivlin deposited the cheese fritters on the food-laden table and went to bring Ofra’s suitcases to his top-floor study, which had been further transformed in his absence. The big desk had been pushed to one side, the table lamp was replaced by a reading light, and a third pillow now graced the royal bed. Beside it lay folded a new woolen blanket from which the price tag had yet to be removed.

He proceeded to the bedroom, turning off two or three unnecessary lights on the way while grumbling about the lengths to which his wife was prepared to go in order to appease the critical eyes of visitors, even her own sister’s. Without taking off his shoes he lay down on the bed, careful not to rumple the covers before his sister-in-law’s tour of inspection was over.

He thought with a smile of Akri. At this very moment his skull-capped colleague was bending cautiously over Tedeschi’s rotting feet to confirm the dark prognosis of the translator of Jahaliya poetry. He let his thoughts wander. Across them fell the shadow of the bereaved hotel.

What bizarre inner devil had driven him, in his quest for sympathy, to invent a fatal disease? Would this succeed in extracting his ex-daughter-in-law’s secret? Yet perhaps she herself had no comprehension of what she had done.

One way or another, he would have to warn her to say nothing.

Gently and reasonably.

Had she believed him? Or had she thought he was hallucinating?

But hallucinations are an illness too.

Take the asthmatic Tedeschi in his oxygen mask. Or Samaher and her grandmother with the narghile.

Hagit would hit the ceiling.

How could he have sunk so low?

A trap. That was what it was. And his wife wanted them to wait patiently until their son-in-exile found someone else, even though the five years that had gone by had led to nothing. Ofer was at the end of his rope. He was nearly thirty-three. What good was patience? It wasn’t time that freed you from traps. It was truth. And he would fight for it. Cunningly and untiringly.

He mustn’t give up. Never mind the eternal judge below, whose ringing laughter was now calling him to come down and join them for supper.

“Don’t you first want to show your sister the bedroom and the Jacuzzi?” he called down from above.

“Soon. There’s no hurry. Let’s have a bite first.”

She was in a good mood, wide awake from her long nap and her sister’s arrival. Rivlin turned on his side to reflect on an ancient and unrealized ambition that thirty-five years of marriage had not quelled. He still hoped one day to persuade his wife to share a bubble bath with him.

It was midnight when they remembered him and went to look for him.

“So you conked out, eh?” laughed Hagit. “My poor darling… and with your shoes on, yet. You didn’t even shower.”

He opened his eyes, feeling their radiant sisterly warmth.

“How do you like the apartment?” he asked his sister-in-law of the brightly jet-lagged cheeks.

“It’s much nicer than I imagined from the floor plans.”

“Well, I paid for it with my mental faculties,” he said, not for the first time. “I’ve lost my power of concentration. While Hagit was having a fine time with her criminals in court, I was jousting over every brick, faucet, and electric socket with a crooked Jewish contractor and his wily Arab workmen.”

“At least it ended well,” Ofra said comfortingly.

“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Hagit added. “Go to sleep. You ran yourself ragged today with all your needless expeditions. And last night,” she told her sister with satisfaction, “we went to an Arab wedding in the Galilee and came home late.”

“An Arab wedding?” marveled Ofra. “How come?”

He tried picturing Samaher’s wedding. It seemed to have taken place, not a day, but a year ago.