The Liberated Bride

PART III. Samaher’s Term Paper

YET THERE HAD to have been signs, early warnings, by which a serious scholar looking unflinchingly at the present could unlock the past. How could the simple desire to avenge the 1991 elections, whose canceled results robbed the Islamic Salvation Front of victory at the polls, have so inflamed Algeria’s religious fundamentalists and army that they fought a ten-year civil war in which armed bands repeatedly attacked their own people and massacred simple villagers like themselves, women, children, and old people?

Writers in academic journals, scholars from the Universities of Montpelier and Aix-en-Provence, in which were deposited the archives of the colonial rule that turned Algeria into a French province in the early nineteenth century while disenfranchising the country’s population, had racked their brains over questions like: “Where did we go wrong? What was it that made Algeria incapable of institutional stability? What have we not accounted for in the ledger of the past? What still veils the violence of the Terror of the 1990s?”

Reading these SOSs sent by his colleagues across the sea, he had felt obliged to help. His scholarly conscience rose to the challenge posed by the slashed throats of infants.

Prudently, he had opened a new computer file and begun a long essay entitled “Early Warnings of the Horror of the Disintegration of National Identity.” Then, as a responsible historian who thought in sober categories, not a hack journalist, he erased “Horror” and substituted “Shock to” for “Disintegration of.”

FOR EXAMPLE: was it possible to see in the riots that broke out in October 1934, at the tomb of the Muslim saint Ibn Sa’id, between Berber pilgrims and the reformists of the Salafia movement in the Constantine district, a first warning of the indiscriminate Terror of the 1990s? A report recently discovered in a military archive in Toulon, filed by the French officer who had rushed to the scene, suggested a surprising perspective, worthy of careful consideration.

Certainly an Israeli Orientalist, no matter how secular, might be expected to sympathize with the reformist vision of the Salafia, which sought to return Islam to its pristine origins by purging the dross from its monotheistic core. Nor could an enlightened or rational person fail to be repelled by the pilgrims’ superstitious revels and commerce in amulets and holy water. Even though, as the latest studies showed, the reformists too had their fanatical side, their leaders’ high intellectual level, rhetorical gifts, and staunch defense of Algerian nativism against French military brutality and colonial rapacity had to appeal to a liberal observer like the Orientalist.

In the course of the Constantine riots, two men were killed, and many more wounded. Based on the assumption that the reformists were waging a moral and spiritual war against the pilgrims’ paganlike practices, which distracted the faithful from the struggle for individual and communal self-betterment, it seemed natural to blame the violence on primitive Berbers clinging to otherworldly beliefs. And yet, surprisingly, this was not the picture painted by the French officer summoned to restore order between the warring parties. It was the Berbers, he reported, who were attacked first, the opening shots having been fired from the ranks of the reformists, who were led by prominent clerics and intellectuals. The shots were aimed at a slender, white-cloaked Sufi monk capering by a sacred tomb.

Was this an early warning, subtle but unmistakable, of the ruthless Terror that would come sixty years later? Could the reformists’ descendants, the supporters of the Islamic Front, be venting their wrath not only on their traditional enemies — heretics, Westernizers, corrupt army officers, writers and journalists — but also on innocent villagers who, rather than joining the political struggle, remained benightedly mired in pilgrimages, amulet peddling, and necromancy? Did the fundamentalists, in the chaos following the cancellation of the elections, turn on their own illiterate brethren as if to say: “So it’s graves, saints, and holy men that you want? Be our guests! We’ll fill your villages with the graves of so many old men, women, and children that you’ll never have to flock to a saint’s tomb again, since you’ll have plenty of your own.”

Or take this forgotten item, found in a transcript of court proceedings from the Eyn-Sifra district bordering on the Sahara: perhaps it, too, was an early warning of the senseless brutality now taking place. In 1953, inspired by a recently published story by Albert Camus, three French students from the University of Marseilles, two young men and a woman, set out with an experienced local guide named Hamid el-Kadr to get a sunset view of the Sahara. Camus’s story concerned a depressed Frenchwoman named Jeannine who accompanies her husband, a traveling salesman, on his rounds in the Algerian countryside. One day the childless couple find themselves in a small town at the desert’s edge, where they climb to a hilltop fort with a view. So shattered are the remote, frozen depths of Jeannine’s being by the vast empty spaces she sees that she undergoes an inner revolution. In the middle of the night she awakes with an unsettled feeling, leaves her hotel room, and climbs back to the fort, from which she stares longingly at the Bedouin tents in the distance, her unfulfilled femininity thirsting for the infinite freedom of the Sahara.

It was under the influence of this story that the three French students decided to spend their Christmas vacation on a quest for Camus’s heroine, hoping to relive her experience. Their guide even managed to find a hilltop fort and brought them to its panoramic vista. There they saw, like the childless Jeannine, the black tents of nomads and the silent camels nibbling at the edge of infinity. Unwilling to make do with mere longing, they asked their guide to take them to the encampment. Having reached the edge of the desert, why not push a bit farther into the cold night for a meatier taste of its eternal essence?

Hamid el-Kadr was agreeable and took them to the encampment, where their unexpected appearance met with a warm welcome. They were fed and given a place to sleep under the desert sky, huddled beneath layers of blankets. Yet in the morning, when they awoke, the Bedouin had vanished, tents, camels, flocks, and all. Going to wake their guide, asleep in his blanket roll, they discovered to their consternation that the Bedouin had made off with his head.

The three terrified tourists ran for their lives, uncertain whether to report the brutal murder to the local Berber gendarme or to go straight to the French garrison in the district capital. In the end, duty prevailed over fear, and they went to the gendarme, who did not seem overly surprised. To ensure their personal safety, he locked them in his house until a French officer arrived.

It took three months to find the murderer, who was caught when he returned with his family and livestock to the foot of the fort, confident that all was forgotten and perhaps even hoping to attract new tourists. When asked by the French judge what his motives had been, he answered that the guide’s French was too good for a believing Muslim and Algerian patriot like himself, and that not knowing to what lengths such a treacherous tongue might go, he had cut it off with the rest of the head. And in reply to the judge’s astonished query as to how someone ignorant of French could assess its fluency, the Bedouin pointed to the freedom of the young Frenchwoman’s laugh when Hamid el-Kadr spoke to her.

AND PERHAPS HE, Professor Rivlin, had found another harbinger of the Terror now rampant in Algeria. To be sure, one had to be careful about going all the way back to the 1850s, when the French, having commenced their colonial administration, disbanded the guilds known as the jama’at. Yet having recently supervised a doctoral dissertation on the subject that suggested some curious conclusions, he decided to return to it.

During the long period of Turkish rule in North Africa, many Algerian villagers, especially in times of drought or economic hardship, migrated to the cities for their livelihood. They did not settle in them permanently, however, or mingle with the urban population. Rather, organizing themselves by place of origin and occupation — that is, flour miller, butcher, perfume merchant, bathhouse keeper, and so on — they formed cooperative guilds, each led by an elected official, recognized by the Turkish authorities, called the amin. Each amin was empowered to judge and discipline the members of his jama’a, bachelors unwilling to marry out of their tribe or village who accepted his decisions without challenge. This arrangement officially ended in 1868, when the French government, after considerable debate, revoked the autonomy of the jama’at and the authority of the amins.

At first the jama’at refused to accept the French decree. Particularly angered were the now unemployed amins, who had derived many benefits from their position. For years the guilds struggled to maintain themselves on an unofficial basis, the members continuing to obey the amins despite their unrecognized status. Not until the early twentieth century did these voluntary cooperatives lapse completely, leaving the French exclusively in control.

And yet the ancient memory of these independent guilds stayed with the villagers from the desert, who were now an urban proletariat dependent on French colonial rule. The longing for the little jama’a with its strongman was passed down. From time to time, it even induced certain simple villagers to imagine that they were the new amins and to blame the failure of their dreams not on the authorities but on their illiterate neighbors, whom they accused of refusing to submit to them. This situation culminated in 1927, in a bizarre incident that took place in the village of Mezabis, on the fringe of the desert, 560 kilometers from the capital. There, a local resident, in a throwback to Turkish times, gathered a small jama’a that appointed him its amin and launched a punitive campaign that only came to an end when the French caught him and put him to death.

Had the elections of 1991, held during a conflict between a brutal, disorganized army and furious fundamentalists, led to a new outbreak of atavism? Were its new, self-fantasized amins taking back the power they had lost one hundred years before? Were the vicious bands formed by them none other than the old jama’at, sallying forth once more to judge and punish at night?

1.

ONCE THE MERRY émigrés, having filled their suitcases with the Israeli pharmaceuticals they always took back with them, were gone, Rivlin wondered whether his fears of their visit had not been exaggerated. It had passed slowly, yet in a tender Chekhovian ambience, full of mellow conversations over glasses of tea on the large terrace, and in leisurely walks on the beach. Although being exiled from his study to the university had not unstuck his blocked book, perhaps some wisdom had rubbed off on it from all the computers humming on the top floors of the tower overlooking the Galilee — from which his own computer, having sat quietly for two weeks, had been carried home again wrapped in soft towels. As he watched it light up against the background of his mother’s ghost playing solitaire on her terrace, the breeze teasing the Carmel seemed to whisper, “Be of good cheer! Steady at the keyboard!” To bolster his and the computer’s spirits, he made the words “Be of Good Cheer!” float across his display screen.

Meanwhile, a letter had arrived from Samaher. Written for some reason in Arabic, it informed him in a patronizing tone — as if she were doing her favorite professor a favor by accepting his offer to help her salvage the semester — that she had begun the new project assigned her. Indeed, she appeared to be enjoying it, for the stories and poems brought to her by her cousin, she wrote, were so interesting that she was actually “wild” about them. (Samaher wrote “wild” in Hebrew, as if Arabic lacked a word to express the cuddly Israeli concept of wildness.) For the first time, she was discovering the grandeur of the Arab nation that stretched from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and the pride she felt in it. She had already translated two love poems and would soon finish summarizing two stories. One of these was realistic, the other, a naively sentimental (although, in her opinion, highly political) bit of folklore. If allowed by the doctor — for she was happy to inform Rivlin that she was pregnant and temporarily restricted to her bed — she would bring everything to the university when it was ready.

“Damn!” Rivlin swore under his breath. “What made me get involved with her? All I’ve done is given her a new batch of excuses.” Worse yet, he no longer possessed Yosef Suissa’s original collection, which had been returned to Jerusalem at the urgent request of the murdered scholar’s father, who wished to see for himself what in the Arab soul had so intrigued his beloved son. Not that Rivlin had any illusions that Suissa’s texts might rescue his own book. Still, now that they had been brought to his attention, he felt obliged to deal with them. It was even with a feeling of relief that he turned to them, as they gave his marooned project an immediate direction that it lacked.

He telephoned Samaher to reprimand her, only to be told by Afifa, who sounded alarmed by his angry demand to be sent at once whatever was finished, that her daughter was bedridden. Two days later, Rashid brought him two short love poems translated into a fluent Hebrew. The first went:

Who has seen her in the morning, When her brow opens like a flower, / Restful with dew and lilies, / Roses, violets, / Flowers, and the nests of ruins? / Who has seen the dawn of her glory? / Who has seen her nightclothes, / Woven among mulberries, / On which hang two berries, / And half a berry again, / Two kingdoms of silk / And half a kingdom? / Matchless among unmatched women, / Who can see her hips / And stay sober? / O follow the curve/ And the slide of them / To a different star! / They are a way-point of the future, / A journey from death / To life. There they stand and lament / The ruins of the Arabs, / The desert of the Arabs.

The hypnotic, coal black eyes of the messenger stared intently at the baffled professor, who failed to fathom the swift transition from the curves of an unmarried woman awakening in the morning to the ruins of lamenting Arabs.

“Where is the Arabic original?” he asked.

The messenger had brought the translation alone.

The second poem was written by the same poet, Farouk el-Janabi, and was about the same mystery figure:

How stunning is night’s color in her eyes! / In them she hides a note from her lover, / And a cool ring with which to cheat Time. / How stunning is night’s color in her eyes! / She paints a tattered flag, / A black cloak, / For those turned back / By the gates of her glory. / She paints the night / So that none are seen by none. / O unmatched woman…. / How beauteous is her misfortune!

“What about the stories?” Rivlin asked disappointedly.

“Samaher is still working on them,” her cousin said. “She spends all her time in bed. It’s easier for her to do short poems. But don’t you worry, Professor. She’ll have it all in good time.”

“Can she really be pregnant so soon?” he asked incredulously.

“That’s what her mother says,” was the noncommittal answer.

2.

MEANWHILE, THERE WAS a new development in the closed-door trial. A key witness for the prosecution, who, fearing for his life, had fled to an Asian republic of the former Soviet Union, had now agreed after concerted pressure to testify, but only on condition that the court, in whose closed doors he had no faith, hear him in a place of his own choosing outside of Israel. At first, a single judge had seemed sufficient. But the defense, worried that the testimony might be highly damaging, had insisted that all three judges attend. This meant Hagit too.

“The court agreed without knowing where it’s going?”

“That was the condition. But there’s no need to worry. We’ll be told the exact location as soon as we get to Vienna. And the Israeli embassy will know where we are.”

“But suppose I were to abscond like that?”

“I’d be annoyed,” Hagit admitted with an unflappable smile. “But that’s only because you could always take me with you. I can’t take you. But why should you care? Won’t it be nice to be rid of me for a while?”

“Not like this.”

“Then like what?”

“I’d need a more thorough break from you.”

Taken aback, she laughed and went to kiss him.

“Don’t imagine it’s going to be all fun and games. This is a working trip.”

Yet she did not seem put out by the prospect of it. Her mood was one of excitement. Besides the adventure itself, there was the prospect of new evidence deciding a case that had dragged on inconclusively for months. And surrounded by male colleagues, she would surely be getting at least as much attention as could be provided by a single husband.

Rivlin felt an anxious sadness, coupled with an unfamiliar aggressiveness. Their impending separation, though short, was a rare event, and his wife’s forensic talents, marshaled to convince him that it was a blessing in disguise that might revive his powers of concentration, did not reassure him. He grumbled not only about the fancy restaurants and good meals she would enjoy without him and the new places he would not get to see with her, but about the chronic disorder she always left behind. This was why he insisted, on the eve of her departure, on her keeping an old promise, made earlier in the year and repeated before her sister’s visit, to go through the clothing in her closet and throw out what wasn’t needed. It was time they gave their stuffy life an airing.

3.

EVEN THOUGH HAGIT was leaving the next day and hadn’t yet decided what to pack, so that she swore she would do “anything” for her husband if only he put off closet-cleaning until her return, he was determined to have his way. And so at 10 P.M., two chairs were set up in their bedroom, one for the clothes whose fate had been sealed and one for those granted a temporary reprieve. Hagit hated parting with her old things, which were an inseparable part of the self she felt comfortable with. Not surprisingly, the Rivlins were at loggerheads at once.

“First of all, what about this?” He grabbed a faded gray coat by its fur collar as though it were a beggar caught panhandling in the closet. “The last time I wanted to throw this out you promised to wear it, but I’m still waiting for that to happen. All it did was spend two more years growing moldy in the closet and infecting everything else.”

“You can’t blame me if we haven’t had any real winters.”

“You wouldn’t have worn it if we had. A heavy coat with a fur collar is an absurdity in this country.”

“But I love it.”

“Strictly platonically. The time has come to part.”

“We’ll regret it the first cold winter that we have.”

“Bye-bye, sweetheart,” Rivlin said, depositing the folded coat on the first chair. “And now, before we do anything else, the moment has come, ten years after her death, to pay our last respects to your mother’s woolen skirt.”

“Don’t you dare touch it!”

“But why not? You’ve never worn it, and you never will. Give it to some new immigrant from Russia.”

“Don’t Russia me. It stays right here.”

“Why?”

“I’ve already told you. It has sentimental value.”

“I’ll be damned if I understand what sentiments an old black skirt of your mother’s can arouse.”

“You would understand better if you had ever felt any sentiments for your own mother.”

“I certainly never felt any for her old skirts. How long does this skirt have to hang over us like a black fate?”

“What’s fateful about it? It’s a memento.”

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get far tonight.”

“I told you we wouldn’t. I’m tired. Why do we have to do this now? I have to be up at three in the morning. I promise to go through everything when I get back.”

“I’ve heard such promises before. You’ll come back exhausted, and that will be the end of it. Here, let’s give it one more try. Fifteen more minutes. I deserve a less cluttered house. Look at this embroidered blue blouse. It’s lovely, but it’s reached the end of the road. It’s much too tight on you.”

“Do you remember when we bought it?”

“In Zurich.”

“No. In Geneva. In a little store near the lake. It cost a fortune, and you were against spending the money.”

“I wasn’t. I just had my doubts.”

“That was so long ago. And look how alive this purple embroidery still is! Do you have any idea how often I’ve worn this? How much use I’ve got out of it?”

“Of course I do. It’s one of your uniforms.”

“Then let’s spare it. For a blouse like this, I’m ready to lose weight.”

“Hagit, you know you’ll never lose weight. Bye-bye, blouse. It’s been good to know you. Now lie down and let yourself be folded like a good girl.”

“I can’t stand giving it away.”

“And now, Hagiti, look this brown suit in the eye and admit that it’s been five years since you last touched it.”

“No, it hasn’t. I wore it to the party you were given by the oriental Society.”

“So you did. But my partying days are over.”

“It’s not my fault if it’s out of fashion.”

“That’s what you said the day you bought it.”

“It could come back in.”

“Not a chance.”

“You’re a hard man. What’s it to you if I own another suit?”

“I told you. It clutters up your closet and hides the clothes that are wearable.”

“Then let’s put it in your closet.”

“Are you out of your mind? Come on, bite the bullet! This suit will make a perfect gift to some poor, penniless woman who can’t afford to be in fashion. And she can also have these old velvet pants of yours….”

“Never!”

“But there’s a hole in them.”

“I can wear them around the house.”

“With a hole? I don’t deserve the honor.”

4.

YET THOUGH YOU knew you would have trouble sleeping the night before she left, you never thought such desolate sorrow would chip away at you, slowly and dully, minute by minute. Already at ten-thirty, feeling the impending signs, you hurriedly put on your pajamas, threw another pillow on the bed, turned off the lights, and lowered the blinds to shut out the moon, as if in it lay the threat to your sleep. And even then, still not reassured, you preemptively swallowed a blue sleeping pill to stun the day’s anxieties and the morrow’s premonitions. Not that you were reckless. Afraid of sleeping through the alarm, you divided the pill in two, taking half for yourself and giving the other half to the guileless traveler, a stranger to worry and insomnia. Excited by her adventure and protesting the loss of the newspaper that you snatched from her hands while switching off the reading light, she kissed you gently and curled herself, to the serenade of her musical snores, into her usual, peaceful ball of sleep.

How could you have been so slow then to recognize the poison dripping into you as you tossed for a whole hour in bed, dozing fitfully, rumpling sheets and kicking off blankets, until you went to lie down on the convertible couch in your study, the royal bed from which you vainly tried to shake the leftovers of your fragile sister-in-law’s sleep, until at midnight, with a desperate hope, you swallowed another sleeping pill, this time a whole one ingested with a glass of brandy that, though it hit you like an uppercut, merely poured more fuel on the stubborn flame inside you?

Can it be that your beloved’s folded clothes, now lying resigned to their fate in a higher pile than you had counted on, reminded you of happier times? Because Hagit, after fighting tooth and nail for each item, suddenly reversed course and joined your clearance campaign with such ardor that you had to stop her in a panic, uncertain whether this was a shrewd ploy to make you back down or a genuine decision to prune her wardrobe, which would inevitably be followed by a demand for its massive renewal.

And so, fatigued and confused by new and old desires, you return after midnight to reconsider the old dresses, skirts, and blouses. By the glow of the reddish night-light between the two floors of the duplex, you run your hand over worn velvet, finger beloved embroidery, caress light wool, and sniff at a never-worn pair of red high-heeled shoes that you called “whorish” because you thought their provocative nature would bring a blush to the cheeks of defendants and plaintiffs alike. Their straps shamelessly seductive, they have fled from drawer to drawer, closet to closet, and apartment to apartment before being apprehended at last and added to the pile of castaways waiting to be sent to some charity.

You know what is the one thing capable of chaining to your bed the recalcitrant sleep now wandering about the apartment. But you know, too, that your mate of many years will never allow you to mix love with slumber, lest she lose control over an act that is in her opinion more spiritual than physical. And so, reduced to raising the blinds again in the hope that the rebuffed moonlight may dispel the darkness of the room, you whimper (though not to tomorrow’s traveler, whose sleep is precious, but to the sky, the stars, the sleeping ghost across the street, the blue pill that has been swallowed by your anxiety rather than vice versa):

“I haven’t slept a wink. Not for one minute.”

And you lapse into silence, not knowing whether your voice has made a dent in the woman beside you. After a while comes her faint but clear answer. It is on automatic pilot, that unconscious critique born of pure judgment that enables her, in all times and places, no matter how deep the night or her sleep, to utter words of reassurance or reproach that not only are unremembered by her in the morning, but amuse her greatly when she is told of them.

“Never mind, my love. There’s nothing sacred about sleep.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Ben-Gurion slept four hours a night and was the best prime minister the country ever had.”

“Give me four hours and I’ll be a happy man.”

“You can sleep all you want when I’m gone.”

“How? When? What are you talking about? The housekeeper is coming tomorrow. How can I sleep with her around? And that goddamn Samaher is sending me her cousin with her material. What made me get involved with her? God Almighty, how did I let it happen?”

“Never mind. You’ll sleep afterward.”

“I’m a wreck.”

“What’s the matter with you tonight? Don’t tell me you envy me too.”

“Of course not. There’s nothing enviable about you. It’s just the injustice of it. You can abscond all the way to Europe, while I can’t even do it for a few hours to Jerusalem without feeling guilty.”

“When did you abscond to Jerusalem?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then what do you feel guilty about?”

“You. Wherever I go makes you jealous and angry.”

“Because I don’t like being without you. Tomorrow will be hard for me too. But what was I supposed to do? You mustn’t mind my going. I had no choice. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to it.”

Astonished, you stare at this woman making perfect sense in her sleep, from the depths of which she talks like an obedient fetus.

“All right, all right. It doesn’t matter. Go on sleeping. You only have an hour and a half left.”

“Would you like me to put you to sleep too?”

But already her breathing grows regular, and she sinks back under, beneath the straight blanket, upon the crisp sheet, her fist against her mouth like the last trace of an old habit of thumb-sucking. You snuggle up to her from behind, one hand on her stomach, trying but failing to access her warmth, to cling to her, fetus-to-fetus, your breath in one rhythm with hers, sucking in the generous bounty of her calm, untroubled sleep — only to give up and, with a sudden movement, despairing and reconciled at once, free her of the burden of you. Oddly, your mood improves at once. Slipping out of bed, you put on your bifocals, shut the bedroom door behind you, turn the light on in the kitchen, put up some water up to boil, and go to switch on your computer, across whose screen float the words “Be of Good Cheer.”

5.

ONLY WITH THE first glimmerings of dawn was Rivlin permitted to shut the suitcase and stand it by the front door. Hagit, wearing makeup and her regulation black suit that no number of clearance campaigns would eliminate, joined him for coffee. Beaming and expectant, she agreed to help finish an old piece of cake left over from her sister’s visit. The two of them sat looking at each other with a deep and weary affection, surprised to discover that their rare, if brief, separation was really about to take place.

“What would you like the housekeeper to cook for you today?”

“Nothing. The fridge is full of leftovers.”

“Will you come downstairs with me?”

“Of course.”

“It’s not necessary. The suitcase isn’t heavy.”

“What’s necessary is to get a coherent explanation from you of how we’re going to be in touch and how I’ll know when you’ll be back. This whole trip is a little too mysterious for me.”

“Mysterious? It’s only for three or four days. And I won’t be alone.”

“But who will be responsible for all of you?”

“Why does anyone have to be responsible? The embassy in Vienna will know where to contact us. Just don’t expect a phone call today. Maybe tomorrow. Are you going to change that shirt?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s creased. You can’t come down with me in that. And please shave, too.”

“I never shave this early.”

“Shave anyway. You can’t expect everyone to be familiar with your habits.”

He shaved, put on a fresh shirt, and took down her suitcase while she lingered to check her makeup, in an assertion of her feminine prerogative to be late. A sleek Corrections Authority van was waiting in the narrow street. The driver, dressed in a prison warder’s uniform, had switched on the revolving blue police light to proclaim the importance accorded by the state to its judicial institutions. The district court secretary, a tall, lanky man, greeted Rivlin and moved quickly to take the suitcase. Recognizing the Orientalist at once, Hagit’s two colleagues on the bench shook his hand. Soon she appeared, her eyes aglow with adventure, wearing an old cardigan salvaged at the last moment from the pile of cast-off clothes. Two young men, the prosecutor and the defense counsel, scrambled from the van to salute her and make the professor’s acquaintance.

His wife was now surrounded by a full-court press of five attentive men. Overhead, a first cloud was turning pink in the dawn light above the Carmel. Drunk from his sleepless, lovelorn night, Rivlin took his wife in his arms and kissed her before everyone. Then, suddenly relaxed and smiling, he turned to the travelers and declared, as if it were he who was dispatching them:

“It’s time you ended this damn trial.”

A head movement of the judge’s told him he had gone too far. Trying to make up for it, he said gallantly:

“And try to enjoy yourselves if you can….”

Only upon returning to the apartment, where he noticed that Hagit had taken the unusual step of washing the breakfast dishes, did he realize how guilty she had felt, not for leaving him, but for the moment of parting. At once he picked up the phone and dialed Ofer, the night guard sitting behind a heavy green security door in Paris. Although the switchboard of the Jewish Agency was shut down after work to prevent the off-hours from being whiled away on the phone, Ofer had an emergency line that could be used in a pinch. If he ever fell asleep while on duty, Rivlin told himself, it was better for him to be awakened by his father than by his boss.

He began the call by relating Hagit’s dawn departure, the feverish preparations for which had turned him into a night watchman like his son, although one who watched only himself. With a touch of irony he described the Corrections Authority van, into which an entire courtroom had fitted. Next he asked Ofer about the weather in Europe, his latest exam, and the date of the next one — and since the emergency line could not be used for long, he inquired casually before hanging up whether a reply had arrived from Jerusalem to his son’s condolence letter.

The voice at the other end was startled. “How did you know I sent Galya a letter?”

“I suppose you told me.”

“I couldn’t have, Abba. I never said a word to you.”

“Well, then I suppose I assumed that’s what you would do,” Rivlin said, trying to keep his presence of mind. “Don’t forget that she was once your wife.”

There was a heavy silence behind the green door, on the other side of which an early-morning Parisian breeze was perhaps already blowing. Then came the unexpected query:

“Have you told Ima?”

“Told her what?”

“What you’ve been hiding from her. That you told me about Hendel even though she asked you not to….”

“Not yet.”

“But why not, Abba?” Ofer’s laugh was cynically provocative. “It’s not like you to act behind her back. In the end you’ll have to pay for that.”

“Don’t worry about what I’ll have to pay for. And don’t romanticize your parents. We’re good friends, not Siamese twins. Your mother is a judge. It’s her job to put a line through the past by passing sentence. I’m a historian. For me the past is a gold mine of surprises and possibilities.”

“A gold mine?” Rivlin heard a note of scorn. “A dunghill is more like it.”

“Dunghills have their surprises too.” He spoke softly, the telephone pressed to his ear like a rifle tracking a bird. “So? Did you get an answer from Galya?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“It doesn’t. But I had the feeling she wanted you to know about her father’s death. The first thing she asked when I came to the hotel was, ‘Does Ofer know?’”

Silence. Then:

“She did? How strange.”

“Yes. In the garden. Don’t get me wrong, Ofer. I’m angry at her, too. But it pained me to see her in such grief. She was devastated, desperate for comfort. Even from you.”

“Devastated. The poor thing….” There was vindictiveness rather than compassion in those words. “Yes, that’s what she said in her letter.”

“So she answered you.” He had bagged the bird with a single, well-aimed shot.

“Yes. With a very sad note. And a nasty one.”

“Nasty?” He gave a start, excited to hear the same word that had been used by Galya to describe his son’s condolence note. Perhaps so much nastiness between a couple that hadn’t spoken for five years held out hope for new understanding. In a soft but authoritative voice, like that with which he had soothed his son when, cranky and troubled, he had been wakened as a child by bad dreams, Rivlin asked:

“Nasty? Why? What did she say?”

“Never mind.”

“But what? Explain yourself. You can’t just leave it like that. Why don’t you ask her what she wants?”

That did it. Ofer suddenly let loose with a bitter grievance that became a harsh tirade.

“That’s enough, Abba! There’s a limit. What do you want from me? What are you trying to do? You should listen to Ima. She knows better than you what is and isn’t possible. You think you can call up ghosts and control them. When will you realize there are things that you don’t have to understand? There are things I don’t understand myself. Have some faith in me…. No, no,” he continued when his father sought to apologize. “Please, don’t. I know what you’re going to say. Listen to me for once. Ima is right. It’s annoying how uptight you are. You’re always poking at things. Well, poke at your Arabs, not at me. And don’t be angry. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But you should talk to Ima. You’re wrong about her. She doesn’t want to put a line through anything. She wants boundaries. And that’s something you’re a world champion at crossing and getting others to cross. I’m not blaming you. But it’s amazing how naive you can be despite all your education and knowledge. And when you start being stubborn about your naïveté, you become impossible….

“No, don’t,” he went on, not letting his father reply. “Please. Don’t tell me you’re worried. Worry can be real and smothering anyway. I’ve told you a thousand times, but you won’t listen…. Yes, I have! More than a thousand! Get it into your head that I know exactly how and why my marriage broke up. I may not have been happy about it, I may not have come to terms with it, but I know why it happened. I do! Do you hear me? I do! And if I decided to spare you what I know and keep silent for five years, don’t think I’m going to start talking now….

“No, no…. You mustn’t be upset. You know that I love you, even if I’m angry. But it gets harder all the time, believe me. Maybe that’s because I’m like you…. No, listen. Don’t start in on that again. I have to hang up. It’s nearly morning, and there are things to be done before opening the office. We’re on an emergency phone. Take my word for it, none of this has been an emergency for quite some time….”

6.

GHOSTS? HE LET the word run through his racing mind. Perhaps. But this ghost was pregnant. The fact that he had got Galya to answer, however “nastily,” an equally “nasty” letter from his son took the sting out of Ofer’s rebuke. He leafed through the morning paper, took off his clothes, and strode around the apartment while waiting for the Jacuzzi, installed as a prize for the ordeal of moving, to fill with foam that would consign the night to oblivion by caressing private parts never touched by others underwater. Once in the bath he shut his eyes and let its currents churn past him while imagining himself on the airplane with his wife. Soon he was swooning in the arms of the accursed slumber that had eluded his advances all night long. Here, of all places, water jetting all around him, his soul was at last trapped in its embrace…

It was thus that the coal-eyed messenger, arriving at the appointed hour, was required to demonstrate his faith by persisting in short, polite rings of the doorbell, reinforced at intervals by a thoughtfully civilized drumming of his knuckles in various rhythmic measures, to which the duplex responded with a stubborn silence. Indeed, had Rivlin surmised that the empty-handed Arab had come not to deliver but to fetch — and first and foremost, to fetch the Orientalist himself — he would never have risen in the end to throw out the love baby of sleep with the golden bathwater rippling in the early-morning light by running to the front door, dripping wet and blind, and petitioning abjectly from his side of it:

“Is that you, Rashid? You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a bit woozy because my wife had to catch a plane this morning and I didn’t sleep all night. Just leave Samaher’s material behind the big flowerpot and tell her I’ll get in touch.”

The Arab, however, had precious little material to leave. On the contrary, since it was too immaterial to be left behind a flowerpot, he was prepared to wait for the professor to make up for lost sleep and to return that afternoon or evening. “It makes no difference,” he declared from his side of the door. “The day is shot anyway.”

Rivlin felt a new burst of anger at Samaher, who was now enlisting her entire family to make a fool of him. Yet before he could tell the messenger to go shoot himself along with the day, it occurred to him that Suissa’s texts were still in Mansura. Slowly, the leaden crust on his eyes was dissolving. Rashid, he decreed, should return in an hour.

“Only an hour? Are you sure, Professor? You don’t want to sleep more than that?”

“An hour will be fine. Don’t make it any longer.”

An hour later, fully dressed and ready to cope, the slippers on his feet the only sign of his untimely abduction from the bosom of sleep, he sat in the living room looking irritably at the sable-skinned young man, who had refused all refreshment except for a glass of water, which had not touched his lips. On the table lay a Hebrew translation of a poem by a Berber from Oran, Hatib Abu el-Slah. Written in the early 1940s, it had been excellently translated by Samaher:

The world, sharp as a razor, / Slashes my cheeks. / Pursued by the law as though by a whale, / I amuse myself by making a paper star. / Fire worshipers gather around its light. / An Ethiope attendant fans me. / I rise on straws toward the windows, / Snuff out the honeymoon lamp, / And climb on the radiant beams of teeth / While incense ascends from me. / I sculpt an angel that is eaten like a raisin along the way, / Sit chewing on ice like a ball rolled off the playing field, / Travel on a reed, / And transport painted eggs, chicks, and kerosene. / In pants as short as an entry in a diary, / I jump to the stars through the glass panes of the observatory. / I unbutton my shirt, breathe the pure air, / And create a lion of stone / Infested by fleas and the secrets of the microcosm.

“Where is the Arabic?” he asked, surprised by the poem’s playful tone.

This time too, however, there was only a translation.

“Tell me, Rashid, what’s going on here? Is Samaher subjecting me to Chinese water torture by dripping one poem at a time on me? And where are the stories?”

The young man’s sense of truth and justice was unshaken by Rivlin’s sarcasm. With a candid look that demanded credence, he swore that his cousin had read everything marked by the murdered scholar and even filled a copybook with her notes and summations. It was just that, being bedridden, she found it difficult to write. Her handwriting was so bad and full of spelling mistakes, in Arabic as well as in Hebrew, that she was embarrassed to let her professor see it.

“But this poem is perfectly legible.”

“That’s because I wrote it. The poems are easy. She learns the Arabic by heart, goes over it with her mother, puts it into Hebrew, learns that by heart too, and dictates it to me on Saturday when I have the day off.”

“But how long is this going to go on?” the sleepy Orientalist wanted to know. “Is she really pregnant?”

“So her mother keeps saying,” Rashid said again without indicating whether he believed it.

The messenger sat straight in his chair, the glass of water still untouched. He was, Rivlin thought, a devoted, sensitive young man. The coal black eyes were neither cunning, sardonic, nor obsequious.

“Well, what now?”

“Both Samaher and her mother think an oral exam would be best.”

“An oral exam?”

“Yes. She’ll tell you what’s in the stories, and you’ll write it down for your research. Dictating them to me in Hebrew would take too long.”

“I’ve had quite enough of this,” the professor snapped, though not in genuine anger. “Samaher and her lovely mother have gone bonkers. They think they can make a soft touch like me rewrite the rules of the university.”

Rashid, solemn, said nothing. Like a sorrowful but obedient disciple, he crossed his arms and waited for the professor to think better of it.

“So when will she come to take these orals of hers?”

“But how can she come?” Rashid spread his arms in amazement. “The doctor won’t even let her go to the bathroom. That’s why her mother wants you to come to us… to the village….”

“I should drive to the village?”

“Of course not. I’ll drive you. I’ll bring you back, too. Whenever you like. It could even be now. That’s what Samaher’s mother says.”

Why did Rashid keep bringing her into this? Did he suspect him of having a crush on the attractive woman who had cried in his office?

Rivlin glanced at the translated poem. Could so sophisticated a piece of free verse have been written in the Algeria of the 1940s, or was this a hoax concocted for his benefit in Samaher’s Galilee village? In either case, he had to retrieve the photocopies of Suissa’s texts before they disintegrated between the sheets of her bed… unless, that is, the promised spark of inspiration depended on direct contact with the rare originals returned to Jerusalem.

And yet the dawn parting from his wife, without even a definite reunion to look forward to, coming on top of a sleepless night that weighed on him like a sick, heavy cat on his shoulders, had turned him into such a passive, malleable, and perhaps even seducible creature that, instead of terminating his special arrangement with Samaher and demanding the material back, he sat drowsily contemplating her jet-colored intercessor, whose noble and refined manner reminded him of his younger son’s. Although sensing the professor’s bewilderment, Rashid did not avert his glance. Willing to put up with a reprimand but not a refusal, he cocked a guileless head. One might have thought, from the way he kept his gentle eyes on the Orientalist while awaiting a reply, that he had all of Araby behind him. He did not even turn to look when a key scraped in the door and the housekeeper, in tight jeans and high heels, made her bored appearance.

7.

WAS AGREEING TO his Arab driver’s suggestion to take along a blanket and two small pillows an early warning of the depth of the seduction? For although Rivlin protested that he never slept in cars, Rashid insisted on making a bed of the backseat for the comfort of the Jewish professor, who would travel “just like in an ambulance.”

Before turning onto the Northern Highway, the minibus entered a gas station on a side road. The station’s name appeared only in Arabic, the pennants decorating it were colored an Islamic green, and each driver was given a copper tray with Turkish coffee and a piece of baklava instead of the usual mudslinging Hebrew newspaper. Rashid handed these to his passenger. It was the holiday of Ramadan, and besides, he never felt hungry before evening.

“You’re right, it’s Ramadan,” Rivlin said, remembering that it was the month in which Muslims fasted by day and ate at night. “I would never have come today if I had realized that.”

“But why not, Professor? Why should Ramadan bother you? It’s a time when guests are especially welcome.”

The sleepless night, coupled with the infusion of morning slumber, had left him fuzzy-headed. He emptied the coffee cup, catching sight, as he threw back his head to drain the last drops, of the university tower in Haifa, a thin needle on the horizon.

“Still, Rashid,” he said, “tell me the truth. I need to know it before we reach the village. What’s wrong with Samaher? Is she depressed?”

Samaher’s cousin put his head in his hands, as if to think the matter through.

“Sometimes. But sometimes she’s happy and even sings songs.”

He took out a pocketknife and strode to a field behind the gas station. Finding a bush with blue flowers among the dry brambles, he deftly cut a few fresh branches and made a bouquet of them.

“You can give this to Samaher’s grandmother,” he said, with a twinkle. “We Arabs never give flowers. That’s why we’re always so glad to get them.”

The village lay silent, struck by a withering noon light. The minibus climbed a small hill and parked between the wrecks of two fifties pickup trucks, near which red Arab chickens of an obsolete stock were pecking at the ground. Rivlin, his head aching, stopped by a large, dusty fig tree, trying to remember something.

“Yes, the wedding was here,” Rashid said with a hint of melancholy. There was no telling whether his doleful tone had to do with the event itself or with its being over so soon. “We put all the Jewish guests by this tree. Your wife sat over there. She laughed all evening. We even talked about it afterward, how a woman could be a judge and laugh so much.”

“But these old trucks weren’t here then, were they?”

“They were, but we covered them with a tarpaulin. We spread olive branches on it and put the D.J. and his equipment on top of them.”

Here was the narrow lane down which Samaher’s wedding dress had rustled as she resolutely transferred her illness to her grandmother. In broad daylight it was a short, simple path. The black horse rubbing its head against the bars of the front gate was familiar, too.

Rashid stroked the animal’s unbridled neck. Gently gripping its intelligent head, he gave it an odd, quick kiss. Samaher’s mother opened the door of the large stone house. Either because of the holiday, or to distance herself from the Jewish professor who had acceded rather too quickly to her request, she was wearing a traditional peasant dress. Soon the sturdy, silent grandfather, his bald head no longer hidden by a kaffiyeh, was summoned to the scene too. Giving the Orientalist what looked like a Turkish salute, he unscoldingly led the friendly horse to its stable, as though it were a slow-witted but likable child.

By now, several women had congregated by the front door along with Afifa and the grandmother. Some young and some old, they greeted the visitor respectfully.

“Allah yehursak.”^*

“Barak li’lah fik, ya mu’alim.”^†

“Kadis!”^‡

“Low kunt ba’aref ino ’l-yom Ramadan,” Rivlin replied, “ma kuntish bawafe’ bilmarra aaji el-yom la’indikon.”^§

“But why not, Professor? Why let Ramadan stop you?” Afifa scolded him in a friendly Hebrew. “You’re not a Muslim, and Muhammad didn’t make the fast for you. And even if you were, it’s a free country….”

Samaher’s grandmother sniffed the flowers Rashid gave her. Kissing her eldest grandson’s hands, she blessed him for bringing “Samaher’s important teacher.” No one, it seemed, had really expected him to come.

8.

HE WAS LED to a spacious bedroom, in which stood a black lacquered chest, a closet, a large table, several smaller ones, and some chairs. Half-lying and half-leaning on pillows in a big bed, his student of many years looked pale and thin. Her hair was gathered in a net and traces of red polish from the wedding were still on her fingernails and toenails, which stuck out from beneath the blanket. He gave her a suspicious, pitying look. Expecting a child, he told himself, as though he had lately become an expert on false pregnancies, she was not. It looked more like a case of depression.

“You really came.” She blushed and smiled wanly. “Thank you. Thank you, Professor, for coming to our village.”

“Sad’uni,”^* he said, addressing not only Afifa and the grandmother, who had followed him into the room, but the women outside in the hallway, “I’ve been teaching at the university for thirty years, and this is my first house call. Bil sitta ow marid.”^†

“Tiwafakt bil’aml es-saleh.”^‡

“Allah yibarek fik.”^§

Meanwhile, the sable-skinned impresario was arranging the stage by plumping up the squashed pillow behind his cousin, bending down to retrieve a pair of slippers from beneath the bed, throwing some wrinkled napkins into a wastepaper basket, and handing the grandmother two dirty glasses. Turning to Samaher’s medicines, with which he seemed familiar, he restored some order to them before pulling out two notebooks and pens from the lacquered chest. All this was done deftly and knowledgeably, in a code composed of short, swift sentences, as if he alone knew the desires of the recent bride.

“How’s the new husband?” Rivlin asked cautiously, putting the question to no one in particular.

“Working hard for his father.”

“What at?”

“He’s a building contractor.”

Rashid now placed Suissa’s texts in their colored binders on the large table. At least, Rivlin thought with relief, he could take them back to Haifa with him.

The messenger was not yet done. Moving a large armchair close to the bed, he placed a small table next to it and spread this with an embroidered cloth just as a girl entered the room with a knife and fork.

“Min fadleku, la.”^* The guest returned the silverware to the hands of the frightened girl. “Don’t serve me any meals now. We have plenty of time. And what’s this about food, anyway? N’situ Ramadan?”^†

“Shu Ramadan? Kif faj’a nat lak Ramadan?”^‡ The women laughed, amused by how easy the Jew thought it was to become a Muslim. “You have your Yom Kippur, Professor. What’s Ramadan to you? Er-ruz matbuh, u’lahm el-haruf ala ’lnar.”^§

The Orientalist stuck to his guns. He was not eating now. He had already told Rashid. His wife had flown abroad early in the morning, as a result of which he hadn’t slept all night. If he ate now, he would need to sleep, which was not the purpose of his visit.

But why shouldn’t he sleep? The women took to the notion enthusiastically. “In fact, why don’t you do it the other way around, Professor, and sleep first? If your wife is out of the country, you’re in no hurry to get home. Have a light snack, and we’ll give you a nice, quiet room to lie down in. That way you’ll be fresh for the exam.”

“The exam? What exam?”

“The oral exam for Samaher’s final grade….”

But the Orientalist, well aware how Arab guile was concealed behind the innocence of the desert, was quick to squelch, even at the risk of his newly won popularity, the illusion of a final grade.

“I’m not giving Samaher any exam. She knows as well as I do that she’s still a long way from a final grade. I came here today to hear the oral summaries that she can’t write. And to take back the material.”

The messenger gasped. “You’re taking back the material?” So that was why the professor had agreed so easily to come to the village.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

It was an awkward situation. Rivlin turned to his student, who, though she hadn’t missed a course of his in five years, lay staring at him as though she had never seen him before.

“You can still finish your assignment,” he said to her. “Rashid can photocopy a new set for you. The poems you’ve translated aren’t bad at all. In fact, you’ve done a good job. In a minute we’ll see what you’ve done with the stories.”

There was a ripple of relief that the professor was not proposing to reject Samaher’s term paper. Fearfully, the young girl returned again to place a jug of cold water and an infusion of herbs in front of Rivlin. “Even the greatest saints,” Afifa assured him, “have been known to drink during the fast.” A small boy, dressed in a fez and a festive holiday robe, entered proudly bearing a narghile, which Samaher’s grandmother had ordered as an antidote for the Jew’s hunger. The growing acceptance of his determination to observe the fast caused Rivlin to fear that he might have to leave the village in the end on an empty stomach.

Meanwhile, Samaher, greatly cheered by his compliment, dismissed not only the women, but her cousin as well. Before shutting the door behind him, Rashid pulled down the colored blind on the window, leaving the teacher and his student pleasantly bathed in a golden Galilean gloom.

9.

“DO YOU HAVE enough light, Professor?”

“That remains to be seen.”

He leaned back in his armchair and smiled at his student, who removed her hairnet and shook her hair out with a brisk, free movement. Above her bed was a picture of an ancient dignitary, a patriarch belted with a dagger. How, he wondered, had she managed to lure him, first to her wedding, and now into her bedroom?

“Well?” He could not resist taking a dig at all the lies. “This pregnancy of yours — is it definite?”

“Almost…” The answer was diplomatic.

“How are you feeling?” he asked in a fatherly tone.

“Better.” A tear shone in her eye.

“Then let’s begin.” He took some of the herbs, crushed them between his fingers, and inhaled their scent. “First, where are the originals of the poems you’ve translated? I don’t doubt you’ve done a faithful job, but I have to check whether the Arabic is quite so modern.”

“But why shouldn’t it be, Professor? Do you think we’re always going to remain… primitive?”

“What a word to use, Samaher!” Her forwardness startled him. “Who said anything about primitive? I merely wanted to see the originals.”

“They’re in the binders on the table. I’ll call Rashid and tell him to find them.”

“That can wait. By the way, I like your cousin. He’s a fine fellow and very devoted to you. How come someone like him isn’t married?”

Samaher shrugged. “He hasn’t found a wife.” In an irritable whisper she added, “He doesn’t want one. What can I do about it? Nothing.”

“You’re quite right,” the Jewish professor admitted. “There’s nothing you can do. Let’s move on. You say that you’ve read two stories…”

“Two? A lot more than that.”

“You mentioned two in your note to me: a realistic one about a feud between village clans, and one that’s more like a folktale.”

“A parable.”

“Of a political nature.”

“In my opinion.”

“Let’s start with that. Do you remember where you summarized it in your notebook, or do we have to call Rashid?”

She was insulted. “Why Rashid? Of course I remember.”

She leafed through some pages and found it.

The story had appeared in a mimeographed periodical, a quarterly or biannual named Katarna,^* put out with French backing in the 1940s by the Railway and Post Office Workers Union of Algeria. Besides information on the postal and railway services and their development, the volume included articles, stories, and poems written by union members. In January 1942, one Ibrahim Ibn Bakhir, a ticket clerk at the Sidi Bal-Abbas station, published a tale titled “El-Tifl el-Faransi el-Murafrif.”

“‘The Floating French Baby’?” Rivlin translated doubtfully.

“That’s correct. It’s one of the stories you marked, Professor.”

Forbearing to point out that most of the markings were Suissa’s, he sat back in his chair.

The Tale of the Floating French Baby

In a small village near Sidi Bal-Abbas lived a hardworking farmer named Yusuf with his wife, Ayisha. Although the two were good, fine-looking people who loved each other greatly, they had no children. “I’m afraid,” Yusuf said to Ayisha, “that I’ll have to take another wife to bear me children.” “That,” Ayisha replied, “is only natural. But to prevent my life from being consumed by jealousy, let me first travel through the countryside. Perhaps I can find an abandoned orphan to be mine.” “You’re right, my beloved wife,” the farmer said. “Go look for an abandoned child. Just make sure you return to me. Although by then I will have taken a second wife, my love for you is assured until your dying day.”

The farmer’s wife decided that the best place to look for an abandoned child was a railway station. People in stations are always in a hurry and often forget suitcases, bags, and even babies. So as to remove all suspicion from herself, and escape being molested because of her beauty, Ayisha cut her hair short, dyed it white, and stuck a beard on her face. Then she sewed herself a short cloak, found a big walking stick, and began wandering from station to station, disguised as a Sufi holy man, in search of an abandoned child.

At first all went well. The old Sufi was treated with respect, and no one suspected a thing. After a while, however, attracted by the Sufi’s bare legs, which were unusually smooth and shapely, people began to follow him and seek his blessing. Afraid of being given away by her soft voice, Ayisha stopped talking and only smiled. But this only increased the number of her devotees, who accompanied her from station to station.

Meanwhile the train management, seeing that the silent Sufi had increased the number of passengers, gave him a free lifetime ticket.

“How very strange,” Rivlin chuckled. “You can see the author was a ticket clerk.”

Yet how was Ayisha, now surrounded day and night by loyal disciples who expected her to work wonders, supposed to find an abandoned baby to comfort her for the many children that her husband’s second wife would bear? And so one night, hatching a plan, she talked. In a thick, slow voice like an old man’s, she told her disciples that she was planning to work a wonder such as no one had ever seen. She would make a little baby too small to stand on its feet float outside the window of a train. Yet who would agree to volunteer their offspring for such a risky miracle? She had to find an orphaned or abandoned child with no mother. If her disciples would bring her such an infant, she would do the rest.

Several days went by, and then Ayisha’s disciples kidnapped a baby. It wasn’t an orphan, however. It was French, because only the French leave their babies lying in baby carriages. It was far easier to steal an infant from a Christian pram than from the shoulder sling of a Muslim mother.

This frightened Ayisha greatly. She had intended to get hold of an abandoned child, a poor, dirty little waif whom she could save from hunger, and now she had been brought a big, fat, blond, well-dressed, conspicuous baby. And the police were already searching for its kidnapper!

Nor was that all. Ayisha had planned to wait for her disciples to fall asleep at night and then rip off her beard, change her hermit’s cloak for a dress, veil her face, and slip away to her husband’s village. How, surrounded by boisterous disciples, with the French police and army on her heels, was she going to do that with a fat, blond French baby?

And what would she tell her angry followers when they discovered that they had kidnapped a baby for a wonder she couldn’t work? And so, sitting down beneath a distant tree, she prayed to Allah to have pity on the French child, whose miracle was planned for the next day.

Samaher was leaning cross-legged against the plumped pillows, her long hair grazing the embroidered flowers on her nightgown. There was new color in her cheeks, and her voice had grown stronger, as if this bizarre and tedious tale were now carrying her along with Ayisha’s disciples and the trains.

The next day, Ayisha boarded a train with several of her disciples. As soon as it picked up speed, she took the French baby and tossed it out the window. Yet Allah had heard her prayer and had pity. He did not let the child fly away but kept it floating outside the window, laughing and playing with the wind until Ayisha took it back into the train. At the next station it was given to a ticket clerk and brought to the police, who had posted a large reward.

“There’s that ticket clerk again,” laughed the visitor.

Ayisha, now a famous — though still childless — wonder-worker, was very sad. Everyone who heard about the floating French baby became more devoted to her than ever. A house was built for her on a mountaintop, and pilgrims came to kiss the hem of her cloak and the dainty soles of her feet. Even her husband’s second wife, who also was childless, came to kneel before her without knowing who she was.

“That’s the end. Nice, isn’t it?”

“Let’s not exaggerate,” he said, his headache back again. It was a story for One Thousand and One Nights. “What strikes you as political about it?”

“Well, you see, Professor, I thought that if it was written in 1942, during the Second World War, when the French were as helpless as babies, it was a story about how sorry the Arabs felt for them.”

“Sorry? Didn’t they throw the French baby out the window?”

“Yes, but only because Allah would save it. The God of the Muslims,” Samaher said gently, “who has mercy on the whole world. I think that’s the point of the parable, don’t you?”

He recalled how, in her first years as an undergraduate, she had kept getting into political arguments until, tired of them, she had stopped.

There was a profound silence.

“Tell me, Samaher,” he asked. “Do you believe in God?”

She blushed, her eyes flashing. “Why ask me? Ask the man who wrote this story, Ibrahim Ibn-Bakhir. Ask his readers. They were believers.”

“That may be. But are you one, Samaher?”

“In God?” She smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “Not exactly….” Realizing where she was, she checked herself. “But during Ramadan, when we’re fasting, I do try to believe… And when I’m not feeling well, too….”

10.

RIVLIN ROSE FROM his chair and began to pace up and down as though he were in a seminar room at the university. His sleepless night pounded in his temples. What had made him come to this place?

He stumbled across the narghile on the floor. Lifting it, he gave it a sniff, put it carefully down in a corner, went to the tray of medicines by Samaher’s bed, picked up a small bottle that rattled with blue pills, and stood there assessing their purpose. “Are these for your depression?” he bluntly asked his student, who was following his every movement with concern.

“I’m not depressed… just moody….” She smiled anxiously at the Jew standing so close to her bed. “My mother and grandmother take them sometimes, too. They’re good for when you feel blue.”

Did he feel blue? He took a pill from the bottle, licked it with the tip of his tongue, and popped it into his mouth without asking permission. It had a bitter and sour but clean taste.

The pleasant gloom was pierced by the coal black eyes of the trusty messenger, sent to inform Rivlin that his bed was ready. An afternoon nap was a welcome prospect. Before retiring for it, however, the Orientalist wished to hear the second, realistic story, the one about the feuding clans. Perhaps realism was better suited to uncovering the spark that had kindled the Algerian conflagration.

“Your cousin,” he told Rashid, possibly hoping that his praise would spur the young Arab to continue his efforts on Samaher’s behalf, “has quite an original interpretation of the story of the French baby.”

Not that Rashid’s loyalty or admiration needed spurring. “Leave it to Samaher,” he said. “She has a B.A. in Arabic language and literature.”

“Then this will be an interdisciplinary project,” Rivlin said. And to prevent them from thinking that he was being ironic at their expense, he suggested that he stay until the end of the day’s fast. “After all,” he added, “if you’ve lured me all the way to your village, I may as well enjoy some good food.”

“A baby lamb, slaughtered just for you!”

Rashid was ecstatic. Going to the table, he carefully collected the large binders to bring to Ma’alot, the nearest town with a photocopier. He did not want a single day to be lost in the career of his cousin, by whose bed he hovered like a dark bird, gently helping her to ease the pressure of the pillow crumpled behind her back. The visitor watched the coals of his eyes burn hypnotically into themselves as he bent over her, as though examining the pimples on her throat. Recklessly turning her on her side, he scooped her up in one arm before she could stop him, while airing and straightening the sheets with his other hand. Rivlin, enthralled and aghast at the passion between the two young Arabs, could not bring himself to turn away.

But it was time for the second, realistic story, which he hoped would be more plausible than the first. If it lacked the rumble of trains and the din of stations, which the author of the first tale knew well, at least it would have no miraculous babies or beautiful women disguised as saints. Set in a remote village in the mountains, it had been written by an author named Yassin bin Abbas and published in the spring 1948 issue of a short-lived Oran literary magazine called Al-Huriya al-Thalitha, or “The Third Freedom.” (What the first and second freedom were remained unclear.) Its language, according to Samaher, was highly colloquial, with so many odd local expressions that Rashid had gone with it to a relative in the Gaza Strip who had spent years working for the PLO in North Africa.

The Story of the Poisoned Horse

There was once, Samaher began enthusiastically, a small village on a mountain called Jebl Musa. She had abandoned her prone position and was now sitting up in bed with her notebook on her knees and her bare feet dangling. Its poor, simple farming families barely eked out a living from the arid soil. Yet one of them, the Sidik family, had sheep, goats, and two horses. The other farmers hated the Sidiks, whose flocks and horses, they were convinced, ate the villagers’ crops at night. No matter how often the Sidiks promised to keep their animals out of the neighbors’ fields and graze them only in natural pasture, the farmers did not believe them. It got so bad that hardly anyone even spoke to them.

The Sidiks had a daughter, a lovely girl who had been named Leona after a French prime minister called León who was a great friend of the Muslims in Algeria. Yet so great was the village’s hatred and suspicion of her father and brothers that none of its young men could think of marrying her, despite her good looks and good nature. “Never mind,” her father said to her. “If we can’t find you a husband in the village, we’ll find one somewhere else.” And so he sent one of her brothers to an old uncle in a far-off place, hoping that someone there, perhaps a cousin, might agree to marry her.

Samaher looked up from her notebook to see whether her teacher was listening. He had removed his eyeglasses and was wearily sprawled in his chair, fascinated as always by the Hebrew spoken by her generation, which alternated between a clumsy translation of her native Arabic and a true command of Israeli idiom.

Meanwhile, this plan became known to a fine young man named Ahmed ed-Danaf, the son of farmers in Leona’s village. Ahmed ed-Danaf was secretly in love with Leona and was tormented by the thought that she would marry someone else far away. Leona, too, had set her eye on this young man, even though she never spoke to him. How, thought Ahmed ed-Danaf, could he keep his beloved from marrying? Not that he believed that his father would let him marry her himself. But at least, so he hoped, she would not be taken someplace else, where he could never see her again. And so he did something desperate.

Not far from the village was a large French estate whose owners raised wheat and fodder and scattered rat poison in their fields to protect their crops. Although the Frenchmen had tried convincing the Muslims to do the same, the farmers were afraid that their little children, who roamed the fields freely, might eat the poison and die. Now Ahmed ed-Danaf went to the Frenchmen and told them that he wished to do as they did. They were happy to see such a modern Arab and gave him a sack full of poison pellets. But he did not scatter these pellets in his fields. He hid them.

Meanwhile, a husband was found for Leona. He was indeed a cousin, a middle-aged widower who lived in France and had come to Algeria on a brief visit. He was ready, he said, to take an Algerian woman back to France with him, and the rumors made the rounds that the Sidiks would soon be holding a betrothal ceremony. And so Ahmed ed-Danaf made up his mind to put poison in the Sidiks’ stable. It didn’t kill their horses, but it made them very sick.

Of course, the Sidik family also had donkeys, which could have been harnessed to the betrothal wagon, too. But a donkey was not as dignified as a horse — and the horses were sick. This grieved the Sidiks greatly, especially since something told them that their horses were not the victims of Allah but of a curse someone had put on them. The question was who.

Meanwhile, Ahmed ed-Danaf, seeing the great sorrow of Leona’s family, let alone the suffering of the horses, who lay miserably in their stable, all grassy-eyed and foaming at the mouth, began to feel sorry for his evil deed.

The phrase “grassy-eyed,” uttered in the heat of the narration, brought a faint smile to Rivlin’s lips, even though his head was now lolling to one side and his breathing had grown heavy. It was one of those comic slips that sound natural.

“Hold it, Samaher,” he said. “Isn’t Ahmed ed-Danaf also the name of a character in One Thousand and One Nights, the one in Scheherazade’s story about the old woman?… You know who I mean… Delilah!”

But the name meant nothing to Samaher. Nor did she remember any such story in the great prose classic of the Arabs.

And so Ahmed ed-Danaf decided to make amends. He found his courage and lay in wait for Leona and said to her, “I’ve heard that someone has cursed your horses and made them sick. If your family is afraid to leave them alone in order to go to your betrothal, I’m willing to look after them, because I love horses and it hurts me to see them. You can’t blame the horses for our village feud, because they aren’t part of it.”

The Sidiks did not know what to do about Ahmed ed-Danaf’s offer. But Leona, who felt he had made it because he was in love with her, persuaded her father to take it in good faith.

And so it was. The Sidiks harnessed plain donkeys to their wagon and set out for the betrothal. Yet on the night after their departure, one of the horses died. When Ahmed ed-Danaf arrived at the stable in the morning and saw this, he was frightened and even cried. Then he called for his two brothers, and they dragged the carcass away to keep it from saddening the other horse, which was fighting for its life. From that day on, Ahmed ed-Danaf was determined to stay by its side day and night, thinking only of it and of his beloved, who was being betrothed far away.

“Actually, Professor Rivlin,” Samaher said, “I haven’t got to the main part yet. I’ve only summarized the beginning. The rest is awfully long and gruesome. It tells how Ahmed ed-Danaf fights with all his strength to save the life of the horse he poisoned, because it belongs to the family of his beloved, who will go to France and never see him again…. Are you still listening, Professor? Perhaps it’s too much for you.”

This remark was well timed, because the last sentences, entwined in the sweet faintness mounting within him like a rampant ivy, had been dissipated in a desperate struggle with a fatigue of such uncommon violence that he slumped sideways in his chair and nearly stretched out on the Persian rug on the floor by the bed of his M.A. student, who had infected him, it seemed, not only with her depression, but with the fatigue of her false pregnancy.

11.

SINCE RASHID, NOT trusting Rivlin’s patience to hold out until the end of the day’s fast, had hurried off to Ma’alot to photocopy the Jerusalem scholar’s material, the bedridden M.A. student had to summon her mother, who whisked the Orientalist off to sheets as white and soft as any his wife had ever made his sister-in-law’s bed with. Assisted by Samaher’s grandfather, who bent to remove his shoes, Rivlin felt the flame of his tiredness welding him to his lost sleep of the night before, which had doggedly followed him all the way to the village.

Later that evening, seeking to apologize for his attack of somnolence, he blamed it on the pill for “feeling blue,” which he confessed to having sampled from Samaher’s tray of medicines. Afifa, however, ruled this out.

“No pill could knock you out like that, Professor. Your tiredness came with you from Haifa. You were a sight when you arrived. If you had listened to us and gone right to sleep after El-Tifl el-Faransi il-Murafrif, we wouldn’t have had to drag you off to bed more dead than alive. Believe me, Professor, il-habbeh illi a’tatak iyaha Samaher hiya friendly l’il-nas.^* It’s just a pill to cheer you up a bit. I sometimes even let my little girls have one. It gets them through their homework.”

And indeed, curious to find out whether Ahmed ed-Danaf had saved the life of the horse he had poisoned, he returned with the last, fading light to his armchair by Samaher’s bed not only showered and refreshed, but greatly cheered. He felt as if the entire narcoleptic afternoon had been cranked out musically inside him in something called the Symphony of the Great Sleep. The first movement had been a brutally violent fortissimo: In it, a man, stripped of identity and consciousness, had lain fully dressed without knowing whence he had come, to what or whom he belonged, or whether he would ever wake again. An occasional errant dream notwithstanding, he had been as impermeable as a block of black stone. Yet after a while, his titanic stupor pierced by the scent of a strange soap that energized him sufficiently to pull off his shirt and pants in the hope of a more intimate contact with the wonderfully friendly sheets, the Jewish Orientalist had detected the theme of a second movement, which took command of a slumber made doubly delicious by the absence of his beloved wife. Whisked away that morning by a party of competent and responsible men, she had taken with her all worry for her welfare and even all worry for her worry for him. Guaranteed a minimum twenty-four-hour exemption from his daily accounting to her, he reached down and pulled off his socks.

Nor could the sounds of children returning from school or the glow of two o’clock on the alarm clock convince him that the time had come to wake up. After all, if the first prime minister of Israel, with all his many obligations, had nevertheless asked — or so said the Orientalist’s wife — for four hours of sleep, why should he, whose obligations were few, make do with less than three? And so even upon rising from his cozy bed he left the lights off and refrained from any noise that might encourage members of the household to look in on him. With every intention of falling asleep again, he turned his temporary attention to the room he was in, hoping to make out, by the shimmering slivers of light that fell through the slats of the shutter, where and in whose realm he was.

Much to his pleasure, he saw that Samaher’s wise mother had put him in the bed of the trusty cousin and not in that of some elderly aunt or uncle forced to forfeit an afternoon’s nap for his sake. He was in a small wing of the house that included a shower and a bathroom, the abode of an independent, stouthearted, and — so it seemed — passionate young man. Perhaps this was why the door was equipped with a large bolt, which the Orientalist immediately slid into place while debating whether or not to return to full consciousness.

He chose not to. His rightful quota of sleep was not yet exhausted, and besides, he was feeling hungry and did not wish to show weakness by reneging, scant hours before sunset, on his apparently poignant but absurdly inappropriate pledge to fast on Ramadan. Groping his way in the dark to the toilet, he sat down on it slowly and encouragingly whispered to himself:

“As a human gesture, it’s the least you can do.”

12.

THE THIRD MOVEMENT began at 3 P.M. Rondo? Andante? Allegro? Although the visitor was still celebrating his exemption from reporting in, not only to his widely scattered family, which was not about to go looking for him, but even to the patient Arabs who had hushed for his sake the children playing in the yard, the second movement’s keen, anarchic sense of freedom had faded. Thoughts he had driven away came creeping back from beneath the pillow.

And yet he was determined to hold the line and not wake up. As though rising to the challenge, he now stripped off his underpants and surrendered the last fraction of himself to the accommodating bed. Lying naked between the sheets and under a light blanket, he recalled the case of a Haifa accountant, a recent widower sent to audit the suspicious books of a Galilean township not far from Mansura. Entering the house of the town council’s treasurer, the accountant had soon found himself immersed, not in the books, but in the bed of the man’s youngest daughter, in which he fell fast asleep.

And yet this accountant was a public servant who had nodded off on the job among Jews, whereas Rivlin, though no widower, was his own master and among Arabs. Why not, then, doze a little longer in the bed of this young man the age of his eldest son while delving in its sheets for his old dream of tasting the essence of Araby? Curling up like a fetus beneath the blanket, therefore, he took firm possession of the pillow, but his thoughts, slipping from his grasp, dragged him back to Ofer’s dawn rebuke. Surprisingly, he felt no pain or resentment. If anything, his position had been strengthened. If both son and ex-daughter-in-law had been truthful enough with each other to be nasty, the venom of the past retained its potency, and there were boundaries to be crossed.

Thus it was that, in this Galilean village, in this cool stone house, the thick walls of which muffled all superfluous sound, Rivlin, while continuing patiently to pursue the fluttering nymph of sleep, reassured himself that he had been right to overrule his wife, and even to risk her ire, by forcing a confrontation between two young people who had agreed too lightly, as if they were all alone in the world and responsible to no one, to separate, five years ago.

He knew how infinitesimal was his influence over his ex-daughter-in-law, now remarried and about to give birth, and even over his distant son, who, though suffering, refused to concede injury or accept help. Still, he was not prepared to forego the understanding that every parent has a right to demand. How strange that here, in this far corner of the country, secluded in willful sleep in a remote Arab village, his desire to know remained as great as ever, so that he seemed to hear his hosts encouraging him as they moved silently from room to room. “Keep it up, Professor,” their inaudible voices said. “Don’t give in. Here, among us Arabs, you can bathe in the true river of time.”

And so, confident that time would continue to flow from the underground springs of Mansura, Rivlin curled up once more to catch the nymph of sleep in his bosom. And since Samaher’s cousin had left no dream for him, he created a nude apparition of his own and made love to himself.

13.

YET ANOTHER HOUR passed in symphonic slumber. Young and old, the members of the household kept as silent as if the visitor were not Samaher’s professor from Haifa but the Caliph of Baghdad in person. Awakening for some reason at the end of the third movement more exhausted than at the end of the second, Rivlin realized that it was only polite to get over his ill-mannered sleeping sickness, for which his insomnia of the night before was but a pretext, one that had unleashed an ancient weariness that must have been handed down from his earliest progenitors.

He rose, switched on the bed light, and studied the space around him. A photograph of Rashid stared down at him from the wall opposite the bed. The messenger looked younger and sat on a horse while gazing into the distance. Prior to dressing, Rivlin folded the sheets and tucked them into the pillowcase. Next, he folded the bare mattress and laid the blanket on top of it, as he had been taught to do in basic training before a furlough. Then he washed, soaping himself and rinsing his mouth with toothpaste to freshen up before rejoining the Arabs.

It was a pity, he thought, that he had not managed to dream a single dream of his own in the intimate atmosphere so generously provided him, now lambent with the soft, coppery light of a village afternoon astir with the shouts of children. Limply, he sat down at a small, old-fashioned secretary covered by a plastic map from Beirut showing the countries of the Middle East in bright colors. The State of Israel, though included, had been shrunk to the borders of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution, marked by a dotted line, like an illusion waiting to be dispelled. Above the little cubbyholes of the desk, each with its handsome brass handle, an empty artillery shell served as a vase for some artificial flowers, their dusty plastic blossoms inclined toward a gold-rimmed glass containing sharpened pencils in different colors. Behind the secretary, a bulletin board had bright notes from a memo pad pinned to it — reminders, scrawled in a clear, curling hand, of jobs for the minibus. The messenger, a tidy tenant, clearly liked his surroundings to be cheerful, as evidenced also by the lively book jackets with which he had covered not only the old Arabic novels, published in Beirut and Damascus, that stood in orderly rows on the shelves, but also two stray volumes of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and a book called The Israelis. A heavy black photograph album, on which some faded blue receipt books had been neatly stacked, contributed a more somber note.

Rivlin reached for the album, whose black binding reminded him of the condolence book in which several weeks ago he had written a sentence, no longer regretted by him, to a dead man. He was curious to see how Samaher’s family had looked when younger.

To his disappointment, however, the photographs were of no one he could recognize. No youthful Afifa or middle-aged grandmother stared out at him, not even Samaher as a child. There was only page after relentless gray page of an unfamiliar, dark-skinned woman with eyes that resembled Rashid’s. Her stony face was unsmiling and grave, both as a stiff young girl and as a married woman surrounded by sad, frightened-looking children — at first two or three of them, then four or five. In the background was a village, less picturesque than Mansura, sometimes seen from the courtyard of a run-down house and sometimes through two olive trees or from the window of a large kitchen full of big black pots. There were shots without it, too — one was of the woman standing by the bed of a sick-looking man in pajamas. Rivlin had the sense that this mysterious woman, with her solemn, frozen air, had been photographed not for her own sake but for some ulterior motive.

He sat leafing through the dreary album in the cheerful room of the bachelor tenant, amazed at the patience of the Arabs who, having laid an exhausted Jew to bed three hours before, hadn’t checked to see if he had risen from the dead. The Ramadan sun streaked the wall with a first, golden hope of day’s end as the fourth and final movement of the symphony began. Strong yet soft as fur, the tail end of his slumber now stroked the roots of his consciousness, from which ancient brainchildren, the fossil relics of his doctoral days, shuddered to life and carried him off to an Asiatic country of fertile steppes. A huge, open shed stretched to hills on the horizon. It was a giant barn, full of large, quiet cows with golden spots, the markings of a breed long thought to be extinct, which here, thousands of miles from the sea, were gathered in noble silence in a global, cosmic farm bristling with snow white udders whose bountiful milk fed the calves and lambs that descended, naked and shorn, from the hills. One of these, spotted from afar by Rivlin’s sharp eye, raised a cropped head: its expression, sad, suspicious, and lost, was his eldest son’s. Spying its dreaming father across the wide expanse, it wagged a stubby tail in recognition. Not only did it look like his son, it was his son, who had undergone, unknown to his parents, a horrid transformation that had compelled him to wander with a Turkish flock from Europe to Asia.

The dreamer’s heart went out to the lamb. He would have liked to approach it and ascertain whether, as seemed to be the case from afar, it was unhappy in its metamorphosis. Yet fearful that it might flee in shame or misunderstanding, he knelt instead and threw it a stick to retrieve while clucking his tongue as though it were a dog or stray cat. This proved a miscalculation. The stick only frightened it, turning innocent anxiety to alarm. Rearing on its hind legs, the lamb broke away from its huddled companions and retreated to the hills, its little tail forlornly still.

14.

ALTHOUGH SO HARSH a dream could not but put an end to the final movement, it did not detract from the splendor of the lengthy nap wrested from the no-man’s-time of afternoon. Even if it had only lasted four hours, like the legendary sleep of the first prime minister, its exotic intimacy made it seem twice as long.

He urinated and washed up, and unbolted the door in the hope of finding at least one Arab waiting worriedly for him in the hallway. There was no one. His long nap seemed to have made him one of the family. The old grandmother, whose open door he now passed, was seated beside the grandfather, she listening to Arabic music on the radio while he dozed on a divan beneath a wall clock. She nodded to Rivlin as though he were an old friend and nothing could be more natural than a reputable Jewish professor wandering around her house at twilight. Pointing to the clock, she said:

“Iza inta ju’an, ya eini, il-akl hadr. Ka’yahudi, inta sumt an kul hatayak uhatay eiltak. Lakin iza inta m’samim innak t’kamel, lazim ti’raf inno bad akal min sei’ah b’tiji il-kunbila taba Sadal.”^*

The air flowing through the open window had a clear, dry Palestinian tang such as he remembered from his childhood. Grinning with curiosity, he let himself be lured into the old couple’s room as if he were their middle-aged son.

“Il-kunbilah taba Sadal? Shu hada?”^†

“In British times there was an old cannon in the next village that fired each day at the end of the fast. Now Israel lets the soldiers of the southern Lebanese Army across the border shoot a mortar shell. We eat on Lebanese time.”

The old lady chortled toothlessly.

“My mother won’t eat on Ramadan unless something goes boom first,” laughed Afifa, entering the room in a large apron that smelled tantalizingly of cooking. “How are you, Professor? Are you sure you’ve slept enough? A person might have thought you had missed three nights’ sleep, not just one. Is that how worried you were about your wife’s trip?”

He nodded amiably, feeling a profound serenity, in a world that was not of this world. Even his hunger, no longer nagging, was pleasantly vague. Could the pill against “feeling blue” have given him a high?

“Where is Rashid?” he asked. “Has he finished photocopying?”

“Long ago. Don’t worry, the material is ready. We’ll call him the minute you want to leave. Bas leysh bidak t’safir? Ma n’halik.^* Absolutely not. We’re sitting down to our holiday dinner in an hour, and you’re one of the family. And the bathtub is free if you want to use it. Samaher just bathed and is waiting to finish the story of Ahmed ed-Danaf and the sick horse. She has other stories for you, too. One is about an absurd man who killed two Frenchmen, ‘El-Gharib El-Mahali.’ How would you translate that?”

“The Local Stranger.”

“Exactly.”

Was he, then, personally and professionally, on the verge of a long-craved intimacy with the Arabs, one much greater than the merely literary one proposed by his old mentor in Jerusalem, an intimacy that would prolong the day into a stirring, eventful night? And was the freedom of knowing that his movements could not be tracked by his wife so seductive that he was prepared to abandon himself to it? Not that these Arabs were the same as the Algerians whose crisis of identity had hobbled his computer for over a year. Yet surely the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance was right about their belonging to “one world,” a world sometimes cruel and sometimes indulgently hospitable.

And indeed, in that case why not bathe in the tub remembered fondly from the night of Samaher’s wedding and now put at his disposal by a ruddy and buxom Arab woman redolent of holiday aromas, who had taken a course of his twenty years ago? Let the distinguished Jewish Orientalist be pampered by the same Arabs who brimmed with grievances against the crimes of Western colonialism and frustrated him by their refusal to accept any responsibility for their condition.

“Inti bidal’ini aktar min zojti,”^* Rivlin said to Afifa, the white lie making him blush.

“Kif ti’dar el-maskini t’dal’ak, iza-ma kan andeha wa’t?”^†

Touched to hear this unexpected defense plea for the judge uttered in a remote Arab village, he happily went off to bathe, accompanied by two towels, a bottle of fragrant liquid soap, and a young girl, who had been appointed to guard his privacy outside a bathroom door that would never, so it seemed, be locked or bolted.

15.

HE SOAKED IN the foamy water, examining the ceramic tiles on the walls with the expertise of a man who had recently been through the construction of a new apartment. The truth was trite but sad: the Arab workers did a better job of tiling in their own homes than they did in the homes of their Jewish customers. And why, really, should this be surprising?

He dried himself with both towels and dressed. As the sun went down to the smells of dinner from the kitchen, he stepped into Samaher’s room, reinvigorated and shiny-faced, to continue her “term paper,” which now seemed to him a marvelous invention.

Her own bath, to judge by an empty washtub in a corner and a puddle of water on the floor, had taken place in her room. Though she had changed to a brighter robe, she looked pale, worn, and anything but refreshed. Propped exhaustedly on a large pillow, she suggested — perhaps because her hair was now done up in two braids — a suffering child more than an M.A. student. Her sorrowful eyes reproached him for abandoning her for his monumental sleep in the middle of her story.

“Where’s Rashid?” he asked of his now indispensable sidekick.

“Why do you need him?” she answered sullenly, as if to erase the smarting passion of being swept up in her cousin’s arms.

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“I can tell him to come right away.”

“There’s no hurry.”

Through the large window, a last, vivid drop of sun sizzled in the cleft between two distant hills.

“Don’t worry, Professor. He’ll take you home whenever you want.” There was a new, hurt note of disappointment in her voice.

“But there’s no hurry, Samaher,” he repeated serenely, seated in the armchair by the open window, through which he caught a first whiff of the dialogue of hot coals and meat. “I’m not worried in the least. I’ve already caught a bad case of nirvana from all of you.”

She reddened at what seemed another of his anti-Arab digs. Looking tense and miserable, she wriggled anxious legs beneath the blanket.

“Well, what happened in the end with Ahmed ed-Danaf?” he asked, like a teacher encouraging a stuck pupil. “Did he save the horse he poisoned?”

“Do you really want to know?” Her eyes flashed with resentment. “I thought you found it so silly that it put you to sleep.”

“Silly?” He was amused. “Not at all. It was no sillier than the other story.”

“The other one?” she repeated dreamily.

“The literary value of these stories doesn’t matter. I’m looking for something else — the spirit of the times, some sign of the future.”

“The future?”

“The insane Terror, for example.”

“What Terror?”

“The one in Algeria. They’ve been butchering one another there.”

She gave him a guarded look, as if searching for a mysterious new drift that five years of his courses had not revealed to her.

“I’ve never heard of it. Is there a book about it?”

The Orientalist stared hard at the young Arab.

“It’s been going on for eight years.”

“Masakin…”^* Dismissing the butcher and the butchered alike, she reached out with a thin hand for her bed lamp. The bulb beneath the red lampshade lit up like a little sun in place of the real one that had vanished. Opening her notebook, she softly continued the tale of the young villager who fought to save the life of the horse he had poisoned.

Ahmed ed-Danaf’s unhappy love for Leona, the daughter of a family of hated shepherds betrothed to a relative from France, was now joined by the suffering of the poisoned horse sprawled on its straw in the stable. Samaher’s summary was so full of detail that Rivlin couldn’t tell what was in the story and what had been invented by her. Descriptions of lights and shadows, smells and sounds accompanied the drama of the horse, which failed to grasp why the strange young man who had poisoned it two days ago was now sitting up with it all night, hand-feeding it mashed oats and kissing and petting it with loving words. After a few days Ahmed ed-Danaf tied a thin rope around its neck and led it daintily around the stable. In the end it recovered and even carried its rescuer to a hilltop above the village, from which he was the first to greet his beloved upon her return from the betrothal that would take her to France. And that was the end.

“The end?”

“Of the story.”

“Very good,” the professor said, with an approving glance at his student. She was definitely not pregnant. No doubt her mother had confined her to bed to keep her from doing something rash.

Samaher, calmed by her teacher’s patient attention, stopped wriggling her legs. Her long lashes drooped. Evening shadows clung to the walls of the room.

“Can you use such a story, Professor?” she asked with a ghostly smile.

As he was reassuring her that there was value even in a folktale, written at the height of Algeria’s struggle for independence, about unhappy love and a sick horse, the sound of a shell rang out. Soon afterward, Samaher’s husband, still in his plaster-spattered work clothes, warily entered the room. Acknowledging Rivlin with a nod, he turned anxiously to see how his new wife’s depression was doing.

16.

THE HOLIDAY DINNER, announced by the setting of the sun, was held in the courtyard. Joining them was Samaher’s father-in-law and his two sons, as well as several neighbors and village notables who had come to break the fast with the Jew illi bisum zay il-mu’amin, lakin al-fadi.^* Now that his marathon slumber in Rashid’s bed, already famous throughout the village, had been interpreted not only as a sign of great weariness brought from afar, but also as a vote of confidence in the Arabs, he was greeted with warmth as well as respect, like a potential kinsman who might become a real one if plied with enough food.

Yet oddly, though he hadn’t touched a thing since his cup of coffee and piece of baklava in the gas station that morning, Rivlin was not very hungry. So lackluster and almost abstract was his appetite that it was satisfied with a bit of pita bread dipped in warm hummus, thus compelling Afifa to provide him with a special carver, a mysterious old man named Ali who was either somebody’s uncle or Samaher’s second grandfather. A punctilious, square-shouldered man, he came and went grandly from the kitchen bearing a copper tray of choice morsels plucked from the head, ribs, rump, and inmost organs of the lamb and arranged by him on Rivlin’s plate, from which he sternly force-fed them to the Jewish professor.

It was hard for the Orientalist to say no, especially since the guests, although deriving no benefit from Ali’s labors, urged him to obey the old man, brought from another village to coax him out of a fast unrequired by Allah. Moreover, the morsels put on his plate being few and select, Rivlin had to assume them to be a mere prelude, a symbolic tasting meant to lure him back, stomach and all, from the ominous steppes of his dream.

The village was coming to life. Passersby stopped to peer through the iron gate at the Jewish professor. A few entered to introduce themselves — elderly teachers, brawny high-school graduates, even some old students who had had children and grandchildren since taking his courses at the university. All seemed pleased by his long sleep and gratuitous fast. Someone wanted to know about Samaher. Was it true, as her mother claimed, that he had made her his research assistant? And what, precisely, was the research?

It was a calm Galilean evening. Rivlin, clear of mind and unlimited of patience, gladly answered the villagers’ questions. Who could say whether they, too, might not provide a spark of inspiration? His research met with general approval. Algeria was a country dear to the Arabs. Its inhabitants had suffered almost as much as the Palestinians. You couldn’t blame them if bad things had rubbed off on them from the French. “But when will you write something about us, Professor Rivlin?” they all asked.

Good-humoredly he explained that even when writing about Arabs in far-off times and places he looked for the connecting link with what was nearby. “After all,” he told them, “you all have the same roots and come from the same desert.” While this was still being digested, there was a whinny from the black horse. Sticking a bridleless head between the bars of the gate, it had come to remind Samaher’s grandfather to take it back to the stable.

“What’s the bottom line, Professor? Will Samaher get her final grade?”

The impatient question came from the contractor, Samaher’s father-in-law, who had been eating silently beside him.

The man’s two sons tried silencing him. Rivlin, however, gave him a friendly pat on the back.

“Of course she’ll get it,” he said. “In time to be given her M.A.”

“But what can anyone do with an M.A.?” the contractor wondered out loud. “What good is it?”

“Every case is different,” Rivlin reassured him. “Samaher could continue for her next degree.”

“Her next degree?” The man turned despairingly to his son. “Fi kaman thaleth?”^*

“It’s called a doctorate,” Samaher’s sad husband whispered back.

17.

WHERE IS RASHID?

Yet not even the thought of your missing driver can prevent you from calmly dismissing all worries. Whether it’s your magical sleep that has scrambled your biological clock and muddled the hours, or the absence of your wife, even the greenish stars in the village sky now patiently await your confirmation that night has arrived.

Rashid, it seems, is lying low because of Samaher’s husband. Hence the repeated reassurances that he’ll drive you where and when you want. “Rashid is all yours, Professor. Relax,” Afifa half-scolds, half-soothes you, as if you’d been given a black slave, rather than a citizen, albeit a displaced one, of the state of Israel — one who, on the way out of Ma’alot this morning, pointed to a Jewish community center and some tennis courts on a hillside and said, “That’s our village, Dir-el-Kasi.” “Was your village,” you corrected him. “Right,” he conceded after a moment’s thought. “Was.”

In a corner of the courtyard Afifa now kindles a savage fire and throws blackening eggplants in it. Enveloped in bitter smoke, you find yourself defending the political acrobatics of a right-wing prime minister you didn’t vote for. “It will take a shrewd operator to get the right to cross the Rubicon,” you say, and a college graduate who remembers Caesar explains the image with an Arabic proverb that has to be explained once more in Hebrew for your benefit.

Afifa has an idea. “Since your wife, Professor, is out of the country, why not sleep here tonight in the bed you’ve gotten used to? Rashid won’t need it because he works nights during Ramadan, and you’ll have all evening and tomorrow morning to make more progress with Samaher.”

“Sleep here?” You run a hand through your gray curls. “It’s very tempting, but inni el-yom azuz, marbut fi ’l-leil fi frasho.”^*

The glitter of a smile in her eyes tells you that once again you’ve made a comic blunder in your Arabic, which you learned from texts and documents at the university and not, like the new department head, whose supple, serpentine speech transfixes his listeners before biting them, in the streets of Mesopotamia. Still, you insist on dropping an Arabic sentence or expression here and there, not just to keep your listeners on their toes, but to let them know that their world is your second home.

And all this while fierce old Ali won’t let you alone, coming and going with his little tray and refusing to take no for an answer, as if the barbecued lamb would be mortally injured unless you consumed its innards. Having eaten, as your wife put it, “half a lamb” at Samaher’s wedding, you’ll soon have eaten the other half unless you stop now. And so, though you wouldn’t mind another helping, you deem it best to rise and call for your displaced citizen, although only after first asking Samaher, promoted by her mother to the position of your research assistant, for one last story, that of the moonstruck murderer.

18.

SAMAHER’S ROOM was unexpectedly crowded. The full moon, the only light apart from her little reading lamp, sketched on the walls the shadows of the young women, some wearing Islamic kerchiefs, who had come to see how their friend had survived the fast in her confinement. Samaher had changed clothes again and was wearing a loose, colorful peasant dress like her mother’s. A tray of food, most of it left uneaten, lay on the lacquered chest beside the new photocopies of Dr. Suissa’s material.

Samaher gave him a timid smile. Her pale face, sallow by day, was now as heavily made up as on the night of her wedding. The Lebanese kohl around her eyes hid any sign of tears.

“I see you have visitors,” Rivlin said.

“They’re here for you, not me, Professor,” she answered with her old impishness. “They want to get a look at you and hear you speak Arabic.”

The young women giggled shyly. The more religious tightened the kerchiefs on their heads.

“There are even two students here from your survey course. Don’t you recognize them?”

“That’s not so easily done,” he murmured, afraid of being approached with yet another request for a change of topic or extension. “Well, do we have time for another story? Perhaps we should make it ‘The Local Stranger,’ as your mother suggested.”

“Yes. It’s special and not very long. If you don’t mind, my visitors would like to hear it, too. I think it’s the perfect story for your research, Professor. I came across it in the photocopies this afternoon, while you were sleeping. That poor man who was killed in Jerusalem didn’t notice it. To tell you the truth, it was Rashid who did. ‘ The Local Stranger’—that’s an eye-catching title, isn’t it? It was written by a journalist named Jamal bin el-Maluh as an attack on an important French author. He’s mentioned in the introduction — Albert Camus. Have you ever heard of him, Professor? But what a question! Of course you have. Who hasn’t? Rashid even found books of his in Arabic right here in the village, and his novel The Stranger was published in Syria. Just imagine: even the Syrians know him and honor him! I took a look at it just now, while you were eating. Jamal bin el-Maluh’s story starts out exactly like it, but it’s also a criticism of it….”

She spoke animatedly, smiling at her guests. Rivlin recalled how years ago, in the same survey course, she had been one of the first students whose name he had mastered. Thin, alert, and adversarial, from her regular seat at the front of the large lecture hall, she had frequently raised her hand to argue with him, making up for her lack of knowledge with a keen, if sometimes perverse, intelligence. Although he had tried being patient with her, he had secretly hoped that the more practical-minded Jewish students in the course would silence her — as, eventually, they did.

It was eight o’clock. From the village mosque, the prayer call of the muezzin came pleading over the rooftops. Was he still in a Jewish state? Or had he been, like his wife, transported to a far land? He wondered whether the new department head would be more pleased or appalled to know how he had spent the day. Once more turning Samaher’s quarters into a seminar room, he explained to her and her guests why the Syrians were right to not to fear the French writer’s philosophy of the absurd. Meanwhile, they were joined, his clothes clean and his hair wet from the shower, by Samaher’s husband, who waited for her to make room for him on the edge of her bed. He, too, wanted to hear the story of the Local Stranger. So did Afifa and Samaher’s grandmother. Even the large contractor peered in bewilderedly from the hallway. Everyone was there but the black horse.

The Story of the Local Stranger

Jamal bin el-Maluh, a Tunisian journalist and author, had written a rather sardonic preface for this story, which was published in 1949 in a small magazine called El-Majaleh. “Not long ago,” he wrote, “on a visit to France, I noticed that all Europe was praising a short, absurdist novel by a French colon named Albert Camus. It told the story of how, one hot day on the beach, for no reason at all, a young Frenchman named Marseault murdered an Algerian he had nothing against. ‘ The sun was too much for me,’ he casually told the court. And yet if that young Frenchman had no reason to murder anyone, and reality is absurd, as our philosophical author claims, why would it have been any less absurd of him to kill a Frenchman like himself? Why must he absurdly kill an Arab?”

And so Jamal bin el-Maluh decided to invent an absurd Arab to balance the absurd Frenchman. If everything was absurd, let the absurdity be equal. His story, a parody of Camus’s novel, began in almost the exact same words: “Today my father died. Or maybe it was yesterday. I can’t remember.”

“In The Stranger, it’s his mother,” Rivlin mused.

“Yes, I noticed that, Professor. But here it’s the father, because it would be hard to imagine a young Arab who didn’t mourn the death of his mother. A father is something else. The character’s name, Musa, even sounds like Marseault. He lives in Algiers, and he puts his dead father in a car and takes him to his village to bury him without feeling any grief. That same night he returns to the city for a date at the movies with his girlfriend. And the next day he takes off from work and goes swimming, just like the character in Camus. But he doesn’t go for an afternoon walk on the beach, because who can take the midday sun in Algiers? He waits for it to be evening — say, like now — and then strolls on the sand looking at the waves. After a while he approaches a nice French couple, a boy and a girl sitting on a bench, and asks how they are and what time it is. They tell him the time but not how they are and go on talking to each other. He’s standing near them, staring at the moon rising over the bay. It’s like a big egg yolk, and it scares him, and he can’t take his eyes off it. And so he decides to wait for the two French to start kissing in the moonlight. That’s what the French like to do, and he thinks it will calm him. But they just go on talking, and he gets more and more scared, because now the moon is overhead and could fall on him at any minute. So he goes over to the couple and asks in French, ‘What do you think of that moon?’ ‘It’s a very nice moon,’ they say. ‘You don’t think it will fall on me?’ he asks. That makes them laugh. Let them laugh, Musa thinks, at least they’ll die happy. And he takes out a big knife, slits their throats because it’s absurd, and goes home for a nap.”

“For a nap?” Rivlin asked. He couldn’t tell whether that, too, was part of the story or one of Samaher’s embellishments.

There was a stir in the room. From a corner of it, the coal black eyes of the messenger signaled his readiness to set out and at the same time stole a glance at Samaher’s husband — who, seated on the edge of the bed, was as curious as anyone to know whether the Arab murderer would stick to his absurdity in court or come up with explanation for his deed.

The shrewdly ironic Jamal bin el-Maluh kept his hero faithful to the absurd. Like Camus’s stranger, the Arab refused to say he was sorry or ask the court for mercy, and blamed it all on the moon. The one difference was that in the Arabic version, the judge, too, was so affected by the spirit of absurdity that he acquitted the defendant. And so, Samaher concluded triumphantly, Jamal bin el-Maluh proved that the Arabs could be even more absurd than the French.

The room laughed at the French defeat.

“But how could he have acquitted him?” Rivlin chided her, as if Samaher had made the whole thing up. “Are you sure that’s the end?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said, with a complacent smile. “I can’t help it, Professor.”

The Jewish Orientalist felt a tremor of delight. Though weakly and dully perhaps, the spark of inspiration promised by his Jerusalem mentor was beginning to glow like a dusty coal. He rose, took a cup of Turkish coffee from a tray brought by Samaher’s sister, downed it in a gulp like a shot of brandy, and asked the jet-colored messenger if he could locate Jamal bin el-Maluh’s wonderful and important story in the photocopied material waiting in the minibus.

“Of course he can,” Samaher answered for him. “I told you, it was he who found it.”

The young ladies bowed their heads, fearful of being blinded by the dazzling light of illicit love that flashed past the tired husband.

19.

“DID YOU MANAGE to eat?” Rivlin asked his driver, who stepped on the gas as they left the village.

“There’s plenty of time for that, Professor. Don’t worry about me. During Ramadan I eat all night. After I return you to Haifa, I have to pick up some workers in Jenin and bring them to their jobs in the morning. Have you ever been to Jenin, Professor?”

“Maybe once, thirty years ago. After the 1967 war.”

“I have a sister not far from there, in a village called Zababdeh. I’ll drop in on her tonight too. That’s the custom. On the nights of Ramadan, a brother visits his married sisters and brings them gifts. Money, food, whatever he can…”

“That’s something I never knew.”

“For sure. It’s to keep her from feeling low that she has to be with her husband’s family and not with her own kin on the holiday. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a pig for her tonight….”

“A pig?”

“A wild boar. There’s a forest after Elkosh where I want to stop, if you have no objection, and look for some hunters.”

“Pork on Ramadan? What are you talking about?”

“Relax, Professor. My sister is a Muslim, but she lives with a Christian. Most of Zababdeh is Christian. They’ll eat anything you bring them: chickens, pigs, sharks, frogs, you name it. The pig isn’t for her. It’s for the school run by the Abuna, the Christian priest. She works as a cook there. He’s a good man, the Abuna, always ready to lend her a hand, because her man is sick and not so young anymore. She had to raise the children by herself, away from her family. She doesn’t eat pork, but she’ll cook it for the Abuna.”

“But where is she from originally?”

“Where should she be from, Professor? She’s Israeli, born in Mansura. Her bad luck was to marry someone from the West Bank twenty years ago and lose her Israeli ID. Now Israel won’t let her back in. We’ve filled out forms and begged Knesset members to intervene — nothing helps. They won’t even allow her to return with just the children, without her sick husband. They say she has to leave them behind, too. You’d think they were lepers or something. How can she leave them? You tell me, Professor. But that’s the West Bank for you. It’s a trap. The poor woman walked into it and can’t get out…. After Elkosh, if you don’t mind, we’ll take a dirt road, half a kilometer at most. It goes to an old grave that’s being renovated because it’s some rabbi’s from the Torah. We’ll see if there’s a pig or not. It won’t take more than half an hour. But only if it’s all right with you. If you’re in a hurry or feeling tired, just say so. I heard in the village that you slept for a while….”

“For a while?” He grinned at Rashid’s tact. The driver must have heard of his marathon. “It was more than a little. It was four whole hours — and in your bed…”

“It’s an honor, Professor.” The Arab lowered his head almost to the steering wheel and murmured, “My bed is your bed.”

Rivlin’s head throbbed, as if the gentle but powerful erotic force that had lifted Samaher from her bed, grazing the pimples on her face, might make demands on him too.

The windows were open. The dry fragrance of the summer night filled the minibus, which took the curves swiftly but surely, braking before the turn-off to the dirt road. Newly blasted, to judge by the red soil still seeping from the rock on either side of it, it wound to a small structure awaiting the pouring of a concrete dome, its venerable sanctity’s seal of approval. In the meantime, while the ancient rabbi’s new home was under construction, a large jeep was parked beside it.

“There they are!” the Arab cried happily. “You can either wait for me here, Professor, or climb that hill up ahead with me. Take it from me, it’s not far, one hundred and twenty or thirty meters at the most.”

The Jew, needless to say, was not about to wait in the darkness by an empty grave. Knowing Rashid’s estimates of time and distance to be accurate, he joined him in scrambling up the steep, rocky hill. “I hope no one thinks we’re pigs,” he joked as he followed his agile guide, who looked back from time to time to see if the middle-aged Orientalist needed help.

“What a thought, Professor!” Rashid said. “They’re licensed hunters. They know enough to get a degree in it. One is a lawyer, and the other is a dentist. They only shoot what they’re allowed to. Besides, I’ll give them a warning whistle when we get close….”

All the same, though the moon was bright enough to highlight the yellow flowers of the prickly pears, the Orientalist, afraid of being taken for a prowling animal, stayed close to Rashid, who sounded some shrill whistles in the direction of a clump of trees on the hilltop.

“If they’re tracking something, they won’t answer,” he whispered. “Let’s wait and see.”

A call came from the branches of the trees:

“Rashid?”

“Yes, Anton. It’s me.”

“Walow,^* ‘Yes, Anton, it’s me.’” The hunters guffawed at the Hebrew answer. “Weyn inta, ya az’ar kushi?”^†

“Cut it out, Marwan. You too, Anton,” Rashid said good-naturedly. “I’m not alone. I have a distinguished Jewish guest. And he speaks Arabic, so watch yourselves.”

“Min hada?”^‡

“First come on down from those trees.”

“Lakin min jibtilna?”^§

“Come on down.”

The hunters were perched in harness seats up near the tops of the trees, double-barreled shotguns in their hands.

“Tell us who you’ve brought.”

Rashid introduced the Jewish professor. The strong beam of a flashlight was aimed at them from a tree.

“Jesus Christ!” the lawyer said. “Are you Judge Rivlin’s husband? Believe it or not, I once tried a case before her….”

“Will you two come down!” Rashid scolded. “We can’t have a conversation with you sitting in a tree.”

“Marwan is ashamed to be seen.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t ask! I hate to admit it, but an hour ago he shot and killed a piglet. A little baby.”

“It was an accident,” Marwan apologized. “I didn’t mean to. I can’t even look at it.”

“He thought it was a jackal. But how could it have been a jackal, when the jackals were killed off long ago?”

“I never said it was a jackal, you dope! I thought it was a partridge. Watch out behind that tree, Rashid. Dir balak! La tit’harak ula t’sib ishi…. “^∥

The two hunters clambered slowly down, their shotguns snagging on the branches. Despite the hot night, they were wearing military flak jackets; their pockets bulged with shells. The gray-haired man was the dentist. The lawyer was younger and taller. Both had pistols strapped to their waists, as if they were manhunters too.

“Welcome to Hunter’s Hill, Professor,” said the lawyer, who spoke a racy Hebrew. He gave Rivlin a cheerful handshake. “No kidding, I once appeared before your wife in a libel suit. She made mincemeat of me.”

“Deservedly?”

“Who knows what’s deserved and what isn’t, Professor?” The lawyer sighed and shouldered his gun. “Ask your wife. She always thinks she’s right. A tough woman, I’m telling you!”

Rashid came to the judge’s defense. “She’s not always so tough. You should have seen her laughing at Samaher’s wedding. The village will never forget her.”

“Maybe she laughs at weddings. But in court she has a tongue like a knife. A first-rate judge. Even the losers respect her.”

Rivlin, stung by longing, nodded modestly. Where are you now, my love? Are you in your hotel? Can you — uncomplaining, uncomforted, unable to switch rooms — cope with the tacky accommodations? Who will open your suitcase for you, hang up your clothes, make bearable your world while you sit huddled on the bed, staring glumly at the ugly, dirty walls?

“What brings you here?” the hunters asked.

Rashid told them about his cousin’s promotion to research assistant on an important scholarly project.

“Is Samaher still ill?” The question, asked by the lawyer, was addressed to Rivlin, as if it took a Jew to verify such things.

“Not unless pregnancy is an illness,” Rashid interposed angrily. Afraid the Orientalist might talk too much, he changed the subject to the Jew’s Ramadan solidarity fast.

The two hunters threw Rivlin wondering looks.

“But what will you do for us Christians, Professor?”

“I’ll fast during Lent.”

They laughed and led him and Rashid to a large rock. Behind it, underneath a black tarpaulin that they removed, a piglet lay in the moonlight.

“I don’t know how it happened,” the dentist lamented. “I’m always so careful.”

Rivlin had never seen a wild boar up close. The little creature lay peacefully on its bristles, its snout agape as though letting out a last sigh.

Rashid knelt and looked for the entry wound. He turned the piglet over, exposing a smooth, pink belly. It was three or four months old, he reckoned. He held it up by its hind legs to gauge its weight.

“How in hell could I have thought that was a partridge?” the dentist asked.

“The mother pig took off with the first shot,” Anton told them. “She’s still hanging around. We saw her from the trees, fifty or sixty meters off. Maybe she’s waiting for her baby to come back.”

“Are you going to shoot her too?” Rashid asked.

“If she insists.”

“On what?”

They laughed. “Dying.”

“What do you say?” Rashid asked. “Should we give the piglet to the Abuna?”

“Just take it as it is, unskinned and uncleaned. It’s our gift. Il-banduk hatamli kalbi.^* It will bring us bad luck.”

Rashid turned to Rivlin. For the first time in their travels, he laid a light hand on the Jew’s shoulder.

“You won’t mind, Professor, if we put the piglet in the back of the minibus? Don’t worry. It’s fresh and won’t smell. But if it will bother you, forget it. You’re the passenger. It’s up to you.”

Rivlin looked at the piglet, deep within which, like a powerful sleeping pill, was a bullet. It seemed to be poignantly hugging itself, its forefeet crossed, when dangled by Rashid. The Orientalist gingerly stuck out a foot to touch the curious tail, stiffly erect in the moonlight. Dreamily he rocked the carcass with a toe, suddenly struck by the realization that he was in for another sleepless night. “All right,” he said glumly to Rashid, who was awaiting his decision. “Wrap it up, and we’ll take it to the Abuna.”

Odd, his using the Christian title of respect for a priest he had never met.

20.

AND HOW, REALLY, did you manage to stay up that whole night? What kept you going? Wanting to meet the Abuna? Or was it the Song of Paradise that enticed you from your bed to a foreign adventure needing no passport?

You may as well admit it: the displaced and irreplaceable Arab with the coal black eyes, who is the age of your eldest son, though more like your youngest in his sure and easygoing sense of himself, has an influence over you. And not at all a bad one, though it has made his concerns and adventures yours too. A transporter of men who are at home in the give-and-take of human commerce, he finds it entirely natural to transport you, an introverted old professor, across a dotted green line on the map that, imaginary demarcation, will be haggled over until the end of time.

One way or another, now that the minibus is again speeding along the main road with a prematurely and sorrowfully shot piglet in its backseat, you can check your clarity of mind and powers of endurance — both, despite (or is it because of?) the bizarre day, amazingly keen and looking forward to the night plans of your driver, which include, so it seems, not only a charitable Abuna and a needy sister awaiting her holiday gift, but a Song of Paradise sung by an angel in a church.

“An angel?”

“A Greek Orthodox nun brought from Lebanon to sing in the Abuna’s church so that the Christians won’t feel left out during Ramadan.”

“Your Abuna sounds like a wise man.”

“He can’t be mine if I’m a Muslim,” Rashid tactfully corrects you. “But he is a wise and good man. He helps everyone. And I tell you, Professor, the Song of Paradise is heavenly. You can ask the Muslims from Nablus and Kalkilya who came to hear it last year.”

“What do they know about Paradise?” you ask, to take the young man down a peg.

“They haven’t been to it yet,” Rashid admits. “But if the angels there sing like she does, they’ll have no complaints when they get there.”

“What does she sing?”

“Byn… Bynza… how do you say it?”

“Byzantine.”

“Right. Byzantine chants. They say she makes the heart tremble. Sometimes she faints at the end. That makes it even better.”

“Faints?”

“Yes. She has these dizzy spells. That’s why they send her here and to Jordan, because they don’t like her to faint in Lebanon. They think she does it for effect. But what effect can fainting have in Palestine? None at all.”

You laugh. You’re beginning to like this young Arab more and more. He must be aware of it, too, if he wants to take you to church with him tonight.

It’s nine o’clock. No one is waiting for you at home. You haven’t been this free in ages. If you were in Jerusalem, you could return to the Hendels’ hotel.

But you’re in the western Galilee, with a driver who will take you anywhere. It’s a time to sit back and to think, not about your wife and sons, or even about your stuck book, but only about yourself. A full moon, the moon of Arab absurdity, casts its royal glow on Haifa Bay and the Carmel. Not only will it not fall on you, it will light your way wherever you go.

“But tell me, Rashid. Can we cross the Green Line and drive into Jenin in the middle of the night just like that?”

The Arab is surprised by your question.

“We’re Israelis, Professor, have you forgotten? Why would anyone stop us at a checkpoint?”

21.

AS ON THE night of Samaher’s wedding, this time too the minibus pulled into the all-night vegetable stand with its colorful dolls that made him think of Canaanite household gods. Its Arab owner, now revealed to be a Christian, recognized Rivlin at once. But it was Rivlin’s wife whom he missed and to whom — after helping to load a sack of beans, a gift to the Abuna and his flock, onto the minibus — he sent a small bag of cherries as both an offering and a warning that, if she did not return as a customer, he might turn up as a plaintiff in her court.

At Yagur Junction, before turning left for Arab Nazareth rather than continuing on to Jewish Haifa, Rashid glanced at his passenger to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind. In Nazareth’s crowded downtown, they stopped to pick up some cartons of eggs and a crate of canned goods, a present from the Church of the Annunciation to the Church of the Temptation in Zebabdeh. Then, the engine purring softly, they glided down into the Valley of Jezreel with its good old Jewish farming villages laid out in neat arrangements of lights. They sped through Adashim Junction; passed Mizra and Balfouria; drove through the broad, deserted streets of sleeping Afula, which made no attempt to detain them; and headed south on an empty road to the whir of the sprinklers of Kibbutz Yizra’el. The lights of the Israeli settlements grew fewer, and the plastic frames of greenhouses alone gleamed white in the faithful moonlight that was prepared to cross the border, if such it was, together with them.

For now the Arab was saying:

“The army checkpoint is right ahead of us, Professor. Getting through it is no problem. It’s just that if they see a darky like me with a high-class type like you, they may think you’re being kidnapped. It’s better to take a detour. It will add ten more minutes, but we have time.”

“What if I really am being kidnapped, Rashid?”

“Then it’s only to Paradise,” the Arab laughed. “That’s for your own good, Professor.”

The minibus turned right toward Mukibla and then left onto a harvested field, jolting lightly. Rashid maneuvered it slowly over a narrow ditch, reached a fence, switched off the engine, and got out. Several kicks and a section of fence was down. Shadowy in the moonlight, he wiped his hands and climbed back into the driver’s seat. It was the moment chosen by Rivlin to touch the shoulder of the messenger and ask, in the silence of the night, whether Samaher was really pregnant. The unexpected question, as though given urgency by the border they were crossing, made Rashid start. “That’s what her mother says,” he answered, as evasively as before. This time, though, he added hesitantly: “Who knows for sure, Professor? Only God and the ultrasound.” He looked dolefully down at the floor of the car, as if having said too much.

“Then what keeps her in bed?”

“She’s confused. It started before the wedding. Maybe her soul is looking for another body. But don’t be angry at Samaher, Professor. She’s always liked you, from the first day of her first class with you. I swear, she’s in love with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous….”

The Arab gave him a searching look, puzzled why this should make him angry. Starting the engine, he crossed the fallen border with his parking lights on. “We’re in Zone C,” he explained, gesturing at the vagaries of the Oslo Agreement in the darkness around them. “Two kilometers from here we’ll enter Zone B, and in Jenin we’ll be in the middle of A. Then, on the way to Kabatiyeh, we’ll cross back into B and come to Zababdeh, which is one half B, one quarter C, and one quarter none of the above, because a small Jewish settlement has squeezed itself in there.”

Jenin was full of life, a wild festivity of Ramadan lights. Its shops and markets were open despite the late hour, and a steady stream of cars and horse- and donkey-drawn wagons clogged the streets. Slow-moving men stood in groups; women, cloaked and uncloaked, hurried laughing through the smoke of charcoal grills. And children, no end of children, clung to the minibus, which Rashid steered with great patience, yielding right-of-way to all comers. The city seemed engaged in a great orgy of eating that took place in the dark passageway between one day’s fast and the next. Two armed Palestinian policemen peremptorily flagged down their vehicle, but only to banter with the Israeli Arab, who was known and liked on this side of the border, too. The Jew was looked through as if he weren’t there.

If here, too, Rivlin thought, not for the first time, the Arabs stay up all night partying, who, really, will look after us Jews by day? Not sure how Rashid would respond to such a reflection, however, he watched in silence as the latter excused himself politely and drove as far as the city’s last street lamp, whose light fell on a macadam road that had once been part of a British Mandate highway running the length of Palestine. The bright Israeli man in the moon had now been transformed into a cloud-veiled Palestinian woman — who a few kilometers further on bared her face to shine on two more armed Palestinians wearing camouflage suits and carrying black Kalachnikov assault rifles. This time Rashid was grilled about his passenger before being allowed to head southeast for Kabatiyeh, a town notorious during the Intifada for the long and cruel curfews imposed on it. Perhaps this was why its inhabitants, refusing to go to sleep, were still up and about with pots, trays of food, and holiday gifts, vanishing and reappearing in the lit doorways of shops and houses and sometimes thumping the Israeli vehicle with a jovial or hostile fist. The minibus made its way through twisting side streets, emerged in a cool, dim valley, and climbed a hilltop to a village whose houses were half hidden by trees behind empty streets. At the top of the hill, in front of a drowsing iron gate that opened on the courtyard of a church, Rashid stopped and pulled a rope that rang an old gong.

The gate creaked. Slowly, laboriously, it was opened by a boy of about ten, who must have been waiting for them all evening. He threw his arms around Rashid and clung to him tightly while a second child leapfrogged over him to embrace his beloved uncle and a third, materializing from nowhere, shouted something and pushed his brothers aside before a quickly crawling black baby could reach them across the white flagstones of the courtyard. There being nothing left of her uncle to grab hold of, the baby clutched at Rivlin, who was peering through the open door of the church, past rows of empty pews, at a crucified Jesus made of light-colored wood — a rugged, thoughtful, rather likable young man hanging from a cross behind a handsome altar decorated with fresh branches and lit by a reddish light. Now a plump priest wearing a cassock and eyeglasses appeared. This was the Abuna, who came hurrying out of the church in the moonlight that shone through a gap between two Samarian hills. Using one hand to free the Jew of the infant clinging to his feet, he offered him a hearty handshake with the other, while babbling in English as if he had just met an old friend.

“We’ve been in touch with Mansura and know everything about you, Professor. How wonderful that a Jew should come to our church at the end of a fast day during Ramadan! I assure you, you haven’t come in vain. Our prayers have been answered, and Sister Suheyr feels well enough to sing a mass for us tonight. You’ll see for yourself, sir: it’s not to a church in Zababdeh that you’ve come, but to Paradise. And not just to Paradise, but to Paradise on a night when an angel is giving a concert.”

22.

PRIOR TO ENTERING Paradise, however, it was necessary to pass through the purgatory of a basement apartment at the rear of the church, which consisted of two rooms and a kitchen. In the innermost room, beside a crib, lay the sick Christian husband. The outer room had a low table, set for a meal and surrounded by cushions on the floor. While the two older boys continued to grip their Israeli uncle to keep him from escaping, the younger one, having no Arab to take hold of, lifted the baby onto his shoulders and bashfully reached for the hand of the Jew so as to lead him to his dark-skinned mother — who, on this night of dreams within dreams, proved to be none other than the woman Rivlin had seen in the album.

She looked taller and more robust than in her photographs. Overcome by emotion, she buried her face in her hands, hiding her tears from the younger brother freshly arrived from the place of her nativity. Rashid gave his sister a staunch, comforting hug and deftly slipped, like a reverse pickpocket, several bills of money into the unprotesting pocket of her gown.

“Bikafi, Ra’uda. Mish ajeina lahon minshan d’mu’eik. Kaman jibtilak deif m’him k’thir. Bikafi tibki, ahsan yuhrub min hon. Ana jit aakol andik. U’ana ju’an k’thir, u’izza b’tittahri, b’yohod il-deif abuna. Leish il-buka, ya uhti? Hada ’id, hata il-yahudi hada sam min shana l-yom.”^*

She looked at the guest with wonder. Getting hold of herself, she wiped the tears from her hypnotic, coal black eyes and apologized in Hebrew:

“Forgive me — and welcome. How can I not feel sad when I know you’re coming from Mansura? How can I not cry? My whole family is there, my grandfather and my grandmother and everyone. And Israel, it won’t even let me visit her, because it’s afraid my children will come too…. Maybe you know someone….”

“Bikafi, bikafi!” her brother interrupted. “Mish bidna nirja lal’awal.”^†

“But how come your sister knows Hebrew?” Rivlin asked.

“Why shouldn’t she? She lived in Israel until she was married at the age of fifteen. She even went to high school there. Tell the professor, Ra’uda, what you learned in Hebrew class.”

“The poems of Bialik.”

“You see? She studied Hebrew poetry. And she practices speaking so that she can convince the authorities she’s Israeli and should be allowed to return. When there were Israeli soldiers in the village, she used to talk to them all the time. She would translate their orders for the Abuna.”

“They should have stayed,” Rashid’s sister said despairingly.

“Don’t even say it! They might hear you and come back,” Rashid joked, urging his sister to serve the soup before the Abuna came and snatched them away as guests for his dinner.

“But I’m not hungry,” Rivlin protested.

“You have to eat something,” Rashid said softly. “It’s for her honor. You’ll shame her by not tasting anything.”

“Don’t be bashful,” the woman told Rivlin, returning from the kitchen with some serving dishes. The three boys were already tucked in at the table with big spoons in their hands. Even the black baby, wearing a little apron, was standing at one end of the low table, watching her mother ladle out red lentil soup from a large pot. Speedy Rashid, having already washed up and changed his shirt, attacked the soup as voraciously as if he had come all the way from Mansura for it.

The sick Christian husband now appeared from the back room, too. A pale, gangling man with long hair, an unshaven face, watery blue eyes, and hands marked by sores, he shook a weary head as he took his seat and produced from his pajama top a shiny mess kit, left behind by the Israeli army, that he handed to his wife to be filled. Tasting a spoonful of the soup, he made a nauseated face and inquired of his jet-colored brother-in-law if their visitor was the dreamed-of Jew who would return Ra’uda to her family in Israel.

23.

AND NOW THE Abuna descended to the basement to thank Rashid for the gifts sent by the Christians of Israel. He was especially touched by the Galilean piglet, which, shorn of its bristles and tail, was about to be put in the oven. Yet he was unhappy, the Abuna was, to find the Orientalist in the basement, staring at a bowl of soup, when up above in the teachers’ room all was ready for a feast that was to be attended by Socrates and Plato, two seminarians thus nicknamed because they had studied in Athens.

“Who could object to being called Socrates even in jest?” the Abuna asked, spreading his arms with a cross-eyed twinkle. Taking the baby’s spoon, he tasted the soup and praised it highly, a necessary preliminary to receiving permission from the lady of the house to spirit away her Jewish visitor.

The Abuna left with Rivlin in tow. On their way, to demonstrate that the midnight oil was burned on Ramadan in Zababdeh too, they made a moonlit side trip to a classroom. There, seated at small desks, was a group of female students, who immediately straightened up and veiled themselves. The Abuna patted their heads and showed their notebooks to Rivlin, who was asked to approve the penmanship of these poor Muslim girls from a village near Nablus. They had been sent to the Christian school after Abuna promised to display no crosses or icons — he had these replaced with colorful posters extolling the universal virtues in English and in Arabic.

Next, the Abuna lit a pocket flashlight and led Rivlin down a corridor filled with scaffolding, to show him his dream: a new wing of the school, unfortunately still unfinished because “We Greek Orthodox are stingy, like you Jews, but also poor.” From there he took him to the roof and proudly pointed out a valley below, spectral in the light of the moon. “It’s the Vale of Issachar,” he said. “Zababdeh is the Issachar of your Torah.”

Rivlin nodded in agreement while stealing a glance at his watch. It was eleven-thirty.

Where are you now, my beloved wife? Did your cotravelers take good care of you today? Have you made your peace with your hotel room, or are you still huddled beside an unopened suitcase, yearning for your bed and the man you think is in it? And yet, light of my life, I am not. I, too, have been condemned to spend this night in a strange land, though nearer to home than you. Our unslept-in apartment must be wondering what to say, should anyone come looking for the addled Orientalist now dutifully following the flashlight of a stout and jolly Christian priest.

The Abuna led him to a large kindergarten full of colored blocks and old pillows, creatively refashioned into human and animal dolls. On the walls still hung pennants of the Israeli Border Patrol unit that, sent to pacify the village, had commandeered the room during the Intifada.

“And was the village made peaceful?” Rivlin asked curiously, fingering a doll to see what its shiny eyes were made of.

The Abuna’s eyes twinkled merrily. “Only toward the end, when the soldiers were too exhausted to pacify anyone….”

It was the hour for the late news on Israeli TV, regularly watched every night by Hagit. She liked the way its cultured, curly-headed newscaster did his smiling best to make the world’s sorrows more palatable before sleep. Here in the newborn Palestinian autonomy, however, sleep was out of the question, perhaps because the modest freedom won by its inhabitants was most apparent in the wee hours of the curfewless nights. And the Jewish visitor felt free, too — free enough to tease his hosts, assembled in warm welcome at the table:

“Izan ya muhtaramin, il-muslamin b’yoklo fi ’l-leil, il-yahud fi ’n-nahar, u’intu in-nasara, kaman fi ’n-nahar u’kaman fi ’l-leil.”^*

The Christians laughed, pleased to belong to a religion so cunning as to dispense with the restrictions of both Judaism and Islam. Shy but beaming, they introduced themselves. Some wore clerical collars. There were women, too, laughing and vivacious in the middle of the night.

“But how did you know I was coming?” the Orientalist asked in bewilderment. “I myself had no idea that I was crossing the Green Line with Rashid until the last minute!”

Yet Rashid, it turned out, had telephoned the Abuna from Samaher’s home in Mansura to inform him that his gifts would include a Jew, a professor from Haifa who was a specialist on Algeria. Had the sable-skinned Arab so easily manipulated him? Rivlin wondered with a slight feeling of alarm, taking his place between Socrates and Plato — who, happy to be called by their sobriquets, asked what he was looking for in the North African folktales he had found in old publications.

“For warning signs of the insane brutality that later broke out in Algeria,” he answered with a smile, breaking off and putting in his mouth such a small crust of warm pita bread that one might have thought he was commencing another fast. The Abuna, not yet settled into his seat, put this answer into lengthy Arabic while offering Rivlin an unfamiliar purple sauce full of little leaves in which to dip the next piece of his bread.

“But what good will finding such signs do, Professor?” The Hebrew question, asked with a sigh, came from a teacher wearing a large golden cross over the cleft above her heart.

“None at all, Madam,” the Orientalist answered, his smile sadder this time. “U’lakin min wazifti inno ma asa’id, bas a’raf.”^†

“Know thyself…” Socrates confirmed in English.

“Lakin leysh?”^* The Abuna put a positive face on it. “Yimkin nit’alem ’an il-zawahir hadi, ya’ani min halno’a, hon fi Filastin…. unu’iti tahdir lalra’is.”^†

“Le’min?” There was laughter. “‘Njanet? Ahsan shi ma-nihkish ishi, la tahdir u’la il-Jaza’ir, hata ma-yurkubhinish afkar min il-Shaitan, la-samahallah.”^‡

But the academic brain, its gray curls now tilted at a downward angle, had no interest in the future, only in the past.

24.

THE LEBANESE NUN now made her entrance. She was dressed, not in angelic white, but in a plain brown habit, in whose deep pockets she kept her hands. Young and slim, she wore simple sandals and a small silver cross that hung down on a long chain to her bosom, which looked ample beneath the heavy cloth that covered it. Her face was framed by a white clerical collar and a wimple, from which a few strands of hair had escaped. Pale and delicate, she peered tensely at the company that rose in her honor. It was not a face that asked to be patronized. The Orientalist, intrigued by the hush that greeted her, which brought the Abuna hurrying excitedly to her side, put down his fork and got to his feet, too.

The nun hesitated at the sight of him. A slight bob of her head disclosed her concern that contact with a Jew, especially before a performance, might compromise the mission she had been sent on by her convent in Baalbek — namely, to spend the month of Ramadan in Jordan and the suffering Holy Land firming up the spirits of the diminishing faithful by means of the old Byzantine liturgy.

Muslims, too, had come to hear the voice of Paradise dwelling within the nun’s habit. Not that a Muslim had any reason to be dissatisfied with life on earth, where Islam was doing well. Yet there were believers in Allah, worried that the Palestinian autonomy might end up as a stale fantasy rather than as a viable state, who preferred keeping one eye on the higher spheres. And since the Abuna did not wish to arouse unwanted religious tensions in broad daylight, he had invited the Muslim audience for a midnight concert because that could not be confused with an actual mass and — even more important — because the Lebanese’s fainting fits were best kept in the dark.

As for the Jews, they had grabbed more than their share of the terrestrial Eden from the Arabs, the celestial one was not for them, and they were represented tonight by a surprise Orientalist. Naturally enough, therefore, the singing nun, now carefully sipping a beverage spiked with honey, averted her pretty eyes from a man who might cast an evil spell on her vocal cords.

Might he? Yet even if it was the witching hour, Rivlin was feeling quite rational. Indeed, after an adventurous day spent chasing the chimerical spark of inspiration in the Land of Israel and Palestine without a loving but critical wife to set him bounds, he was considering demanding a retroactive research grant. And in any case, the real wizard, who was now entering the teacher’s room and asking Rivlin with fatherly solicitude how he was, was his sable-skinned driver, whose protean identities also numbered enamored cousin, faithful brother, many-armed messenger, swift kicker of fences, and multidirectional crosser of borders.

Everyone knew Rashid and was in thrall to his enchantments. He, for his part, having eaten his fill of the childhood dishes cooked for him by his sister, was now ready for seconds from the Christians. “Il-kenisi ’am-tint’li, ya uhti,” he gently told the nun. “Aju min Kabatiyeh u’min Tubas, hatta fi sharkas min Dir el-Balad, tarkin en-nom min shanik, kulhom bistanu il-leili l’al-mt’a ’l-k’biri.”^*

The nun smiled wearily at the Arab from Israel who had room in his heart for everyone. She shut her eyes and shook her head back and forth like a baby lulling itself to sleep.

“Inshallah…”^* Her voice, heard by the Orientalist for the first time, had a striking spiritual presence. “Inshallah…”

The diners began hurriedly rising from the table to find a place in the church. Taking his passenger aside, Rashid whispered:

“Relax, Professor. You have a reserved seat. You’ll sit with the Abuna and the notables. The one thing you need to know,” he warned, “is that the church has no bathroom and this nun can sing nonstop for an hour or more. You don’t want to miss any of it, because she’s top-notch, and the aisles will be so packed that you’ll never get back in if you’ve gone out. So if you think you might have to… I suggest you take my advice… there’s a very clean bathroom right here…”

Rivlin thought of being led by Samaher up the narrow lane to her house on the night of her wedding. For a moment, his spirits flagged. He would have liked to go home, climb into bed, and pull a familiar blanket over him. But how was it possible, not only to miss the Song of Paradise, but to ask Rashid to drive him back to Haifa now? And on the other hand, was not this the test of Afifa’s promise that his driver would take him anywhere, anytime?

The driver himself was engaged in gently pushing Rivlin into a bathroom that locked with a key. Unable to find the light switch, he made do with the unveiled moon, which illuminated a large bathtub whose claw-footed legs, like the Devil’s cast in lead, reminded him of his parents’ old-fashioned tub in Jerusalem.

He felt dizzy. As though in a dream, he urinated silently and briefly, wet his face and hair with cold water from the tap, and leaned halfway through the open window, outside of which was hanging some freshly laundered underwear, to take a deep breath of the Palestinian countryside. The door handle rattled. Opening it to make way for the next in line, he saw the Lebanese singer standing in the dark corridor. He bowed his head in homage, feeling himself redden as he said:

“Shaifi sayid’ti, hatta il-yahudi biddo yi’raf shu b’ghanu il-leili b’il-janeh.”^*

Laughing in her strong, sure voice, she dismissed, with a charming gesture, the Jew and Paradise equally.

“Il-janeh… il-janeh… kulhon honi bi’Filastin b’balghu, majanin shwoy. Min hakalhon inno b’il-janeh ’am b’ghanu?”^†

The professor laughed, too. Emboldened by her friendly tone, he begged to differ. Why should there not be song in Paradise, he said, and inquired in what language she would be singing that night and whether it would be possible to obtain the words.

The nun answered that she planned to sing the Easter Mass in Greek and Arabic.

“Hasan jiddan,” he responded enthusiastically. “Ana ’l-an bash’ur b’il-mut’a abl-ma tiji alay.”^‡

Her pale face seemed to twitch in the moonlight, her remote glance turning to an ironic compassion. Extending a finger toward the Jew’s heart, she said in French, as though embarking with him for new territory:

“Mais vous n’êtes pas trop fatigué, Monsieur?”^§

25.

EVEN THOUGH, GIVEN the history of the previous twenty-four hours, he should have been not only tired but thoroughly wiped out, he did not doze off, even once, the way he did during Philharmonic concerts. Deeply moved, he sat beside the Abuna, listening intently while holding some creased pages that contained the Arabic program notes and the text of the Mass. His front-row seat, which offered no visual distractions, forced him to keep his eyes on the singer, who stood erect in her habit and sandals on a step near the altar, accompanied by four white-haired men. It wasn’t clear whether she had brought them from Beirut or assembled them locally.

Her rich coloratura voice showed the influence of the Arab scale, its vibrato tendencies kept in check by a religious austerity. Though distilled in her to an abstract emotion, the soulfulness of Arab vocalism retained its erotic sweetness. Despite the monotony of the Byzantine chants, she gave their transitions a dramatic power, her strong, sure voice rising to stirring heights. The accompanists, standing behind her by a flickering candle, backed her with a steady, unobtrusive drone that reminded Rivlin of the hum of a generator or the rush of water past a boat. At times, as though yielding to the current, she let her voice drop and joined them, or at other times fell mute during the choir’s recitative. Then would come a moment of silence, while she considered what had been said before framing her reply.

Rivlin made no attempt to comprehend the Greek. But the nun’s soft Arabic sent a shiver through him, as though an ancient matriarch were speaking to him. Under his breath, he translated the words to the chant for Holy Thursday.

“Include me, O Son of God, in this mystic dinner with its holy bread. For I will not reveal your secret to the enemy, nor give you the kiss of Judas. Like the thief on the cross, O Lord, I beseech you to remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

The spiritual uplift often noticeable in performing musicians shone redoubled in her face. Yet her singing was no more a religious rite than it was a concert to be greeted by applause. Halfway between prayer and art, it belonged to the domain of memory or of hope for an uncertain redemption.

“Many of the Muslims have come to see her faint,” the Abuna whispered to Rivlin in English, perhaps to prevent those near them from understanding. “But she won’t tonight. She’s already told me.”

Proud that so many believers in Allah had come to his church to pass the time between the post- and the prefast meals, he was also a bit apprehensive of them.

The Jew turned cautiously around in his seat. How could he tell the Muslims from the Christians? Perhaps Rashid, standing in the aisle behind his somber sister, could enlighten him. But his driver merely flashed him a V sign, as if to say, Admit that I’ve kept my word.

“But why won’t she?” Rivlin whispered, disappointed.

“You embarrass her.”

“Me?”

“That’s a fact, Professor. She’s a real Lebanese, not a Palestinian refugee. She comes from way up in the mountains and isn’t used to crying or fainting in front of Jews.”

The Abuna laid a hand on the Orientalist’s knee to comfort him, or perhaps to end their conversation, since the singer, who was looking straight at them, had a note of annoyance in her voice.

Rivlin’s cheeks burned. It piqued him to think of the nun being embarrassed to faint in front of him. She was now singing about the sacrament of the washing of feet. Would she let him wash hers — which, glimpsed through the straps of her sandals, were carnally petite? Or would he first have to become a Christian?

26.

THE EXCITEMENT IN the church was building. The candle in its tall candelabrum had begun to sputter. As the ancient Byzantine chants quavered more and more with Arab grace notes, the mostly male audience swayed and joined the droning chorus. The little sailboat had entered stormy waters.

The Abuna, his moon-shaped face bright with satisfaction, was unfazed. Removing his eyeglasses and rubbing his eyes, he let half a cross-eyed squint roam the throng of rhapsodic Muslims while the other half winked at the Christians. Although the upsurge of emotion threatened to swamp the church’s sanctity, frowning upon it too openly might strike the Muslim notables in the front row as Christian impudence. One of them, a bearded young imam, was staring at the Lebanese with burning eyes, as if plotting to steal her voice at the concert’s end.

“T’safrani, ya ruhi, t’safrani, ya idisi ayuha il-batul…. ”^*

The murmur was Plato’s. Alarmed by the sharp tilt of the sacred toward the profane, he prayed for a dignified fainting fit that might calm the clamorous crowd and bring the evening to a peaceful end.

The nun, however, showed no sign of swooning. Determined to stay conscious for the Jew, she confidently let her unclouded coloratura plunge to more masculine depths. A note of grief crept into the chant for Palm Sunday:

“I inspect the bridal chamber, O Lord. But although it is adorned in glory, I have no garment with which to enter it. I beg you, lave the garment of my soul, enlighten me, save me.”

Once more he felt a lump in his throat, as on the night of the biblical drama in Tel Aviv. Was he about to succumb, in this godforsaken church near Jenin, to the same strange need to cry that had overcome him while watching the thrice-repeated dance of Jephthah’s daughter? And there was no one here, not even Rashid, who could calm him with the wisdom of his wife.

He lifted the program to his eyes to hide them. What was it that moved him almost to tears? There were no human conflicts or relationships here, only the bliss of an ancient Jew’s moonstruck disciples discovering he was gone from the grave. Yet the magical voice of the Lebanese nun soared with such power that he turned in wonder to the Abuna, who nodded with approval at the Jew’s damp eyes. It’s perfectly natural, Professor, he might have said had he been inclined to say anything at all. Cry, weep all you want. Such is the Song of Paradise. Sometimes it’s in Arabic, sometimes in Greek. Inshallah, the day will come when you Jews, too, if only you show some magnanimity, will sing it in Hebrew.

But Rivlin did not want to look foolish in front of these nocturnal Arabs. This was not the opera house in Tel Aviv, after all, in whose great auditorium a tear could be concealed, but a simple village church, brightly lit to keep the Muslims from complaining that the Christians were stealing their souls in the darkness. Resolved to keep his tears to himself, he turned his glistening eyes to the nun, whose robe was girded by a rope belt. With a long, piercing cry she strove to subdue an audience that was increasingly confusing the Passion of God with the passion of Um Kulthoum. Rivlin feared that his night out in the Palestinian Authority was ending in another of his infatuations. He leafed through the program notes with their thumbnail biography.

“Sister Suheir Sharuan was born in Dir el-Amhar, Lebanon. She has degrees in religion and musicology, with a specialization in Oriental and Occidental song, from St. Joseph’s University in Beirut and the Université de Saint-Esprit in France. For the past ten years she has studied Byzantine and Gregorian chant in Lebanon and Athens and has performed with choral accompaniment in the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris. A member of the Basilite Order, she spends summers on evangelical missions to the Christian communities of Jordan and Palestine.”

27.

GET A GRIP on yourself. You’re not the only one awake on this long night. So is your eldest son, studying for another pointless exam behind his heavy green door. So, perhaps, is your youngest son, patrolling his mountain fastness to make sure that the signs of war and peace are read correctly. Even your wife — who knows? — may be tossing and turning. You have nothing to complain about. The spark of inspiration, though still not trapped, is flickering closer, and you have heard the Arabs’ Song of Paradise and even passed the test of their acceptance — no small achievement for a pedantic Jewish Orientalist.

And now, in the courtyard of the little church, you are surrounded not only by the Abuna and his flock, but by young Muslims who, having heard the music of the Christians, wish to know what the Jews have to say. Why draw boundaries in the first place, they want to know, if the peace they bring is an illusion?

As you try to reassure them, you are approached by Rashid’s sister. Before you know it she is on her knees, begging you in Bialik’s Hebrew to use your Jewish influence to help her retrieve her ID card so that she can return to her native village.

“Bas ma’a l-ulad, mish bidunhum,”^* her brother warns her, struggling to pull her to her feet.

But the dark woman strikes her head despairingly and insists:

“Even without them!”

“Abadan la!” Her brother loses his patience. “Kif b’tihki, ya majnuna. Bifsadu aleiki!”^*

He yanks her up violently, then regrets losing his temper, embraces her, and compassionately leads her back to her basement at the rear of the church.

The soft, autonomous Palestinian moon vanishes in nebulous folds. A fresh night breeze cools the blood warmed by Paradise. The door is locked on the darkened church. In the parking lot reclaimed by the murky night, Christians and Muslims crowd around the nun, whose bell-like voice has not a trace of faintness. You, too, would like to thank her for a moving experience, but you don’t wish to be pushy, a Jewish stranger deep in a long-destroyed kingdom of vanished Israelite tribes. And so while you wait for Rashid to return, you wander off to a fence with a view of the Vale of Issachar. A lone car heads down a dirt road toward a Bedouin encampment, beside which two tall horses graze in profound tranquillity.

The old anxiety has you in its clutches.

Stop! Give it up, you stubborn fool.

Whether he knows or not, understands or not, is stuck or not, protests or not — let him be. Leave him alone. It isn’t you who will release him from the net of lost love he is thrashing in.

Yes, Hagit. You knew better than I did.

Set him free even in your thoughts.

See how far I’ve come tonight to free you, Ofer.

Will you laugh at this story of your father’s?

Are we, too, knowingly or not, to blame for the breakup of your marriage?

Five years. What are you protecting yourself from, my son? The disgrace? The humiliation? The error? The betrayal? Look around you. It’s a vulgar, shameless striptease of a world that can’t wait to confess what never happened even in fantasy.

And you won’t give an inch.

Stop! Let him be….

For the thousandth time….

How often did you have to be told? He’s his own person. Let him live his own life. Set him free.

Give it up.

You too, Galya. You too, O bride of pain. Set him free, lost bride….

There. It’s done. I swear by the stars above. No more imaginary illnesses. No more visits to the hotel. No more inquiries, questions, lies. But you, too, my son, for the love of God, stop being so sad and depressed. I don’t want you, wild and wretched, in my dreams anymore.

28.

RETURNING TO THE basement, Rivlin was surprised to find the metal door locked. Rashid had vanished into thin air.

He hurried back to the courtyard of the church. It was empty. The Abuna and the nun were gone. Two sole figures, young men with long hair, remained by the gate. They supposed the Israeli Arab must have gone to see the skit about the Jewish kibblelist.

“About who?”

“The kibblelist. Rabbi Whatsis, that holy man of yours who wears a fez. The one without teeth who’s always laughing. Here in the village, we like to laugh with him.”

One of the young men had a pistol strapped to his waist. A bit worriedly, the Orientalist asked the two if they were Christians or Muslims.

“That depends what holiday it is.”

“How about Ramadan?”

“Then we’re Muslims. But only at night when we can eat….”

They both laughed.

“Where do you know Hebrew from?”

“Nablus prison.”

Yet they seemed to have taken a fancy to him, for they now insisted that he come see the skit with them. “It will be cool, man. And you don’t have to worry about us. Don’t worry about your driver, either. Your Arabs in Israel won’t ever leave you.” They chuckled slyly. “Come on, it’s not far, man. Nothing will happen to you. After that little tearjerker from Lebanon, don’t we deserve a few laughs? The Arabs get theirs, too. Those two Christians, Socrates and Plato, don’t give a shit for anyone. They do all the big shots in the PA, even Arafat with his shaking hands and his lips that go gul-gul-gul-gul-gul-gul. Just like the comics on your TV. You don’t happen to have a hundred shekels on you, do you?”

“For what?”

“Expenses. Costumes and all that jazz. It’s a contribution for the actors. No shit.”

And so, parting with a hundred shekels for “expenses,” he let himself be taken captive by two Palestinian hipsters. They walked down the hill from the church, turned into some narrow, deserted streets, and came to a structure that had served, so he was nostalgically informed, as a hideout during the Intifada. Now, it was a warehouse for plastic utensils. A small audience sat squeezed amid various sizes and colors of plastic plates, bowls, and basins, filling the dim room with purplish smoke. Rivlin recognized some of the faces from the church. Most belonged to unemployed youngsters, out of work and out of luck — who, having slept away their despair by day, had turned out for a night’s entertainment in front of a small stage concealed by a red curtain.

The Arabs quickly made room for the Jew in the front row. They were so pleased to see him, though they would gladly have cut his throat in this same place several years ago, that they even turned down the Egyptian pop music blasting from an old transistor in order to enjoy his university Arabic. Waving to him from a dark corner in which, no longer droning, they sat smoking and drinking, were Suheir’s four accompanists. Perhaps the Abuna was hiding somewhere, too. Yet before Rivlin could look for him, the lights went out, and the curtain was pulled to one side. Holding a candle on a small improvised stage was the kabbalist, Rabbi Kaddouri, the venerable icon of the Sephardic Shas Party. Gigantic in a loud robe and a red Turkish fez, he greeted the audience with a toothless and shyly endearing giggle.

It was Plato on Socrates’ shoulders. Together the two pranksters formed a single nonagenarian dotard, who began to harangue, in the down-to-earth dialect of his native Iraq, imaginary Middle Eastern Jews on either side of him. Reproaching those on the left for forgetting they were Sephardim, he attacked those on the right for not remembering they were human, while simultaneously blessing members of the audience who jumped onstage to kiss his hand. But while the old kabbalist’s head was Plato’s, his arms and legs belonged to Socrates, and an amusing conflict ensued between the mouth that showered his petitioners with good wishes and the limbs that drove them off with kicks and blows.

The Iraqi dialect grew increasingly Palestinian, peppered with private jokes and innuendos served up with Hebrew gibberish and absurd Israeli military commands. Just as the huge but sprightly kabbalist was blessing an aspiring prime minister while handing him a nasty pinch, his robe opened, and out popped two more hands. Breaking into a dance to a raucous Egyptian pop tune, he whirled before the astonished audience with four-handed tai chi exercises. The cheering spectators rose to their feet, copying the Chinese movements.

Nor was this the end. As a stack of plastic basins collapsed in a corner of the stage, an actor jumped out of the disorder in an embroidered robe, a fake beard plastered to his face. Whipping out a pair of dark sunglasses from his pocket, he put them on, intoned the priestly benediction from the Torah, struck the giant kabbalist contemptuously, and cried in Hebrew: “He’s innocent! He’s innocent!” This was Shas leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whose favorite disciple, the politician Aryeh Deri, had been convicted on corruption charges. Losing his temper, the ancient fez wearer grabbed the rabbi, stripped off his sunglasses, and swallowed him in his robe with one gulp. But this did not go down well with the kabbalist’s digestion, for he immediately split into two halves — Plato, the lower half, in the form of a wheelchair, and Socrates as its occupant. He, too, now had a beard, long and unruly behind a colorful silk veil. The kabbalist and rabbi had vanished, their place taken by the crippled Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin of Gaza, who rolled his eyes heavenward and sang a dirty ditty in a squeaky voice.

And so it went. Talented mimics, the two seminarians used a small but well-chosen assortment of props to skip merrily from target to target, now a Palestinian one and now an Israeli one, each turning into and emerging from the others until all finally joined in one monstrous, pitiably conflicted figure — which, mumbling and grumbling in Hebrew and Arabic, sobbed and simpered as it struck and stroked itself and the audience called for more.

29.

IN THE DARK, hilarious room, in which plastic plates flew in all directions, Rivlin made out the gleam of his driver’s smile. “You’re back, Rashid? But where on earth did you disappear to? Come on, let’s go home!” “Home? Now?” “When, then? How long do you intend to stay here?” “But it’s too early, Professor.” “What do you mean, too early?” “Too early, sir. The workers aren’t up yet.” “What workers? What are you talking about?” “Did you forget, Professor, that I have to pick up workers and bring them to Israel?” “Oh, no, Rashid, my friend! I’m not waiting for any workers. You promised to take me home when I wanted. Well, this is it. I want to go home. You can pick up anyone you want to later.” “But it’s too late, Professor.” “What do you mean, too late? You just said it was too early.” “It’s too late to bring you back to Haifa and return to Jenin in time for the workers. I promised them.” “But why did you disappear?” “I disappeared, Professor? Excuse me, but it was you who disappeared. It took a long while to find you here.” “Rashid, I’m disappointed in you. You’ve been bugging me all day.” “But how have I bugged you, Professor?” “Don’t ask me how. You just did. You and Samaher and her mother, all of you.” “But what did we do to you, Professor?” “I don’t know what. I only know I’m no longer in my right mind.” “Your mind is fine, Professor. Didn’t you enjoy the Lebanese?” “Yes, and now I want to go home.” “Wouldn’t you like to see those two clowns do Aryeh Deri?” “For God’s sake, Rashid, don’t give me Aryeh Deri. Don’t give me anyone. I’m tired. I’m old. Do you think we Jews are made of steel?” “Of course not, Professor. But you’re not old at all. And you’re a good man even if you’re not made of steel. Everyone is happy to see you here. What can I do? That’s the way it turned out. The night had a will of its own. Why fight it? You need a little patience, not even very much. Soon the sun will be up, and the partying will stop. If you feel you’re wasting your time, I can show you some old Jewish graves that were discovered near here. They’re from the time of your Temple, and now there’s a little settlement watching over them. It’s a good, clear night for seeing them…. No? Well, then, it’s best to go back to the Abuna. He’ll find a place for you to sleep. We’ll start out at sunrise.”

Having left the minibus at the church, they had to walk back up the hill. The Abuna, too worried about his Jewish visitor to go to bed, was wide awake. In brightly striped pajamas and a funny green turbanlike nightcap, he looked as if he were dressed for a children’s play. “Sweet Jesus!” he exclaimed in English. He was sweating, and his eyes would not stay still in their sockets. “What happened to you? I went to show Sister Suheir to her room, and you were gone when I came back. We were beginning to think the Islamic Jihad had taken you hostage. You need to be careful, Professor. Peace hasn’t broken out here yet.”

He led the Orientalist through the dark teachers’ room, placing a finger on his mouth to warn him that the nun, a light sleeper, was lying behind a partition, and brought him to a little alcove that was the headmaster’s room. There he swept some papers off a desktop and deftly converted a director’s chair into a cot.

“Are you planning to fast tomorrow, too?” he asked gently.

The Abuna seemed relieved to hear that there would be no more Jewish concessions to Islam. His night-turban nodding vigorously, he hurried to take out a thick, hairy blanket and a small pillow in a green pillowcase.

You haven’t been away from home for twenty-four hours, Rivlin mused, and once again your Israeli fatigue has met with the offer of an Arab bed. By day with Muslims in the Galilee, by night with Christians in Samaria. Off with thy shoes and onto thy cot, O weary Orientalist!

O distant woman, visibly invisible: are not the strange adventures of this day sufficient proof for you? Do you understand now, my sweet judge, that it is not disdain or condescension that you hear in my voice when I speak of Arabs, but freedom — a freedom burdened neither by feelings of superiority nor by those of hypocritical guilt? Call it a scholar’s simple, bluff intimacy with his subject, for the sake of which he is willing to lie down even on a narrow cot beneath a hairy and none-too-clean blanket.

And yet how will you fall asleep when your mind is full of songs and stories — French babies afloat on poisoned horses, Arab moons plunging into seas, enormous dancing tai chi kabbalists with the squeaky voices of fanatical sheikhs? There’s nothing for it but to reconvert the cot to a chair, move it to the headmaster’s desk, switch on the lamp, take some paper from a drawer, and doodle a big spark of inspiration with an original idea at the center of it and a few supporting facts in its cusp.

It was the naive yet genuine and blameless belief of Algerian soldiers that shedding their blood for France in two world wars would make them French, which belief, ultimately frustrated, gave birth, fifty years later, to an orgy of violence against their descendants.

The veteran scholar quickly jotted down a few chapter headings, added references to historical events, documents, and specific Algerian officers and battalions in the French army, and followed this with a short bibliography. It would all have to be documented later.

His reinvigorated mind at rest, he folded the paper, deposited it in his pocket, switched off the lamp, and turned the chair back into a cot in the moonlight. His only regret was not having thanked the Lebanese nun for her wonderful performance. His infatuation with a woman he would never meet again kept him from falling into a deep sleep despite his tiredness. He drowsed fitfully, the vast night around him penetrating his slumber with the noise of an automobile, the sounds of shots, laughter, someone cursing. And then quiet, and the distant whinny of a horse…

The dawn was debating whether to awake the Holy Land when he was roused by a low murmur from the teachers’ room. It was a woman’s voice, telling a story that would never end. Time to get up, fold the hairy blanket, primp the pillow, smooth and button his clothes, and — still shivering from the morning cold — knock softly on the door to bid the nun an appreciative farewell.

But lying in wait for him in the teachers’ room was Ra’uda, who had eluded her brother. To his relief, she did not throw herself at his feet or bang her head on the floor. She simply went on setting the table for his breakfast — which would, she hoped, fortify his resolve to bring her back, with or without her children, to her village in the Galilee. Listening to her troubles was the nun, woken by her in her anguish. The wondrous Lebanese, putting religious duty before an artist’s right to a morning’s sleep, had hurried from behind the partition wrapped in a blanket and now sat at the table, a small, solitary figure with big, bright eyes, listening to the homesick Muslim — who, removing a towel from a saucepan it had been keeping warm, ladled out a dish of piglet-scented rice and beans. Wordlessly, without resorting to the Hebrew of Bialik, her soft eyes coaxed him to taste her food. Rivlin thanked her and sat down, spoon in hand, across from the nun. In a French perfected from Algerian colonial documents, he carefully said:

“Mademoiselle, I hereby confirm the opportunity to express my gratitude for your marvelous voice. Never before have I looked forward to Paradise, having always feared that, without my body, my soul would be thoroughly bored. Yet if there is singing like yours there, I am willing to reconsider. I only hope it is not too late.”

Her smile slight but sincere, she said in her strong, sure voice:

“Cher monsieur, il n’est jamais trop tard pour embrasser la vrai religion.’”^*

He laughed awkwardly and asked where her next concert would be held. Nowhere, she said. She was leaving for Jordan that evening and would return to her convent the following day. Yet next autumn, inshallah, she hoped to be in Ramallah for a Palestinian music-and-poetry festival. And she turned to say good morning to the Israeli Arab driver, who had come to announce the start of a new day.

30.

THE GUESTS PARTED with the Abuna, who, still in his colorful night-clothes, was jollier than ever after a few hours of sleep. Ra’uda, still brooding over the ignominy of her fate, seized Rivlin’s hand and made him swear in the name of Allah to do all he could to regain her ID. IDs, her brother assured her, pressing her warmly to his heart, would not be needed when peace came at last. “Let’s go, Professor Rivlin,” he said. “We have to get a move on.”

They boarded the minibus, in the back of which, beside the blanket and the pillow, now clucked three hens; strapped on their safety belts; and carefully placed the photocopied material from Jerusalem, which had spent the night in the vehicle, on the seat between them.

A morning mist was lifting over the Vale of Issachar. The road grew more distinct, twisting between olive groves and fragrant fields. Rashid, taking advantage of his Israeli license plate, skirted Kabatiyeh on Jewish bypass roads, along which the checkpoints were few. A few kilometers before Jenin they were surrounded by Palestinian policemen, who prodded seven workers, hiding from the morning chill in a ditch by the road, to climb aboard.

“Weyn Issam?”^* Rashid asked, demanding to know why one seat was empty.

Worker number eight, it appeared, having been up all night partying, had failed to wake in time.

Loath to lose the income from the empty place, Rashid offered it to the commander of the police force, a middle-aged sergeant. The sergeant accepted with alacrity. He slipped the magazine from his Kalachnikov, took off his belt with its military pouches, and handed them to his second-in-command. Then he removed his army shirt, put it on again inside out, stuck his green policeman’s beret in his back pocket, wrapped his head in a kaffiyeh someone handed him, and thus completed his transformation into a Palestinian laborer looking for a day’s work in Israel.

They continued northward on a new, wide, empty road toward a group of Israeli settlements. Their handsome villas, topped by cockscombs of red tiles, had names the Haifaite had never heard of. All around them the world was sweetly quiet, as if no one had ever fought a war in it. The reservists from Jerusalem manning the checkpoint on the Green Line were too busy having breakfast to bother stopping an Israeli car heading home, even if it was full of Arabs.

It was six o’clock. Good old Mount Gilboa was in its usual place, and the faithful sprinklers of the Valley of Jezreel hummed in their yellow fields, filling Rivlin’s heart with an old love for his native land. All the tension seeped out of him. At Megido Junction his head fell back, and he did not jerk it back up until the French Carmel. As no driver could leave a dazed passenger standing in front of his house, Rashid came with him in the slow-moving elevator, carrying the photocopied texts.

The little space capsule carried them upward. In its mirror Rivlin noted a growth of beard that had not been there the day before. He felt compelled to return to an old question. Was Samaher really pregnant?

Unexpectedly, her cousin did not reply with his usual shrug. “Maybe not,” he whispered, looking down at the floor of the elevator.

“But why does her mother keep her in bed?”

“Because she sometimes imagines or does foolish things.”

“Like what?”

“Like… like thinking she’s a horse.”

He flushed hotly, the coal black eyes sad with regret. The elevator door opened. Rivlin’s key was in the lock when Rashid said:

“Really, Professor Rivlin, you mustn’t be angry. She really does love you. From her first class with you. Only you.”

He handed the binders to Rivlin and turned despairingly to go.

This time the Orientalist did not scold him or make light of his ailing student’s love. Rather, he asked Rashid to come to the bedroom and handed him two bags of his wife’s old clothes for the Abuna. Hagit’s red shoes he stuck into a drawer. Who in Zababdeh would wear them?

Rashid did not look surprised. There seemed to be no way of surprising him. Perhaps, Rivlin thought, he could read minds. In any case, they would see each other again soon, because there were more poems and stories to be brought from Samaher.

Picking up the phone to check the voice mail, Rivlin noticed through the open door of the kitchen that the bored housekeeper, defying his instructions not to cook, had left several containers covered with cellophane on the marble counter.

There were no messages. In the wondrous day that had passed, he had been needed by no one.

31.

Dear Galya,

I’d like an answer to a simple question. Has your father’s death, in your opinion, freed me from my vow (or promise) to tell no one what I saw (or, if you insist, fantasized)?

Even though I don’t depend on your answer, the decision being entirely my own, I’m curious to know why you think I shouldn’t be released from the silence I agreed to in the mad, vain hope that I’ve walked around with for the last five years — that this alone, if anything, could make you come back to me.

That’s all. A simple question calling for a simple answer — yes or no.

I don’t suppose my reply to your last letter made you happy. You should realize, however, that it’s you who first played with fire by asking my father, quite astonishingly and unnecessarily, whether I knew that your father had died and how I had reacted.

What exactly were you hoping to find out? What difference did it make to you what I thought about your father’s death?

Which is why you owe me a straight answer to a straight question. Am I or am I not absolved of my silence? Because my anger and my longing for you, which have awakened all over again, make me a dangerous man. So much so that, for my own good, I have had to put my pistol in a drawer and make sure the drawer is locked….

Ofer