The Liberated Bride

PART V. The Judgment Seat

THE EVENINGS SPENT on either side of the border must have left you hungry if, after a sleepless night full of surprises, you head not for bed but for the kitchen, where you remove the cellophane from the containers that have been impatiently waiting for you on the marble counter and permanently renounce, in the crystalline light of a brightening morning, a Ramadan fast half-jestingly and half-wishfully partaken of. Your resentment of the housekeeper, who so flagrantly ignored your instructions just to clean and not to cook, has dissipated your resistance even to the leftovers cramming the refrigerator, though in truth you prefer the fresh dishes that have spent the night anticipating the return of the mysteriously vanished master of the house.

And yet, what effect can the master’s orders have if the mistress of the house is so intimidated by her own housekeeper that she turns to jelly in her presence? And since you forgot to tell her that the judge would be gone for several days, the housekeeper quite naturally decided to spend her leisure time preparing the judge’s favorite dishes. Still, you can’t be averse to them yourself, if you now sit eating them while perusing her note, which says:

Aluminum foil

Oil

Bread crumbs

Detergent

Flour

Garlic.

Beside it lies another note from her, informing you that the new owners of your old apartment have a package for you that was mistakenly delivered to your old address.

As if to spare you the pain of it, an invitation to her son’s wedding has been left in a less conspicuous, though still respectable, place behind the glass door of a bookcase. You slip the gilt-edged card back into its envelope as quickly as you can and let it fall on the shelf beneath the books in the hope that it will be forgotten there, for your envy does not skip even the marriage of the thin, dark boy who, when brought to your house by his mother, sat bashfully in a corner of the living room playing with Ofer’s old toys or appeared timidly at the door of your study to ask for a pencil and paper.

To sleep or not to sleep…

At two o’clock there’s a meeting of the appointments committee, at three you have office hours, and at four you give your introductory survey course, for which you still haven’t prepared. Yet having turned day into night in an Arab village, why not do the same in a Jewish duplex, even if later that will mean turning another night into day, without a wife in your bed to solace your sleeplessness?

Turn out the bedroom light, then, brush your teeth, and disconnect the phone. Under a light blanket, to the sounds of the awakening street, you think with bemused longing of a brown-robed, plain-sandaled nun in a village church, unflinching before the stare of a solitary Jew thrust at midnight into the crowd of her admirers. As soft slumber weaves its threads around you, you join a chorus of four droning, white-haired men behind an ornamented altar.

Awakening before noon, you listen to the messages left while you slept and hear the voice of an attaché in a distant Asiatic embassy struggling to inform you that the judge’s return has been delayed by a day. This time, too, the new possibilities waiting to take advantage of your solitude send a shiver of excitement down your spine.

2.

EVEN THOUGH THE professor was not sufficiently prepared, the class he taught was absorbing. Perhaps his hyper-wakefulness had made his usually tightly structured lecture, held in a large hall, more spontaneous. More tolerant than usual of the many questions and criticisms of his students, Jews and Arabs alike, he responded with an equanimity that led to a lively discussion. Despite its subject, the treatment of minorities in Egypt during the Second World War, he was forced, contrary to his habit, to run five minutes past the bell.

Outside the large windows of the lecture hall, the light was gray. An overcast sky held the promise of a rare summer rain. His class over, Rivlin felt his high spirits flag before the tedious prospect of a loveless, unsmiling apartment. So when he was approached by two female Arab students, he did not immediately refer them to his office hours, but instead steered them gently back into the empty lecture room and asked solicitously what they wanted. They were both, it turned out, from Mansura and had attended the “seminar” in Samaher’s bedroom, with its story of the Algerians who beat the French at their own game of absurdity. Having concluded that an acquaintance with a senior, if slightly eccentric, professor met on a pleasure jaunt to an Arab village deserved to be cultivated, they took the liberty of informing him that his “research assistant,” far from resting on her laurels after his departure, had translated yet another story that same night.

The Orientalist was greatly amused by these two Near Eastern Studies majors, who were happy to reveal their names and minor fields while coyly inquiring about his final exam. Reassuring them that it would not be difficult, he turned the conversation back to Mansura and its inhabitants. They giggled as they plied him, each interrupting the other, with copious details about Samaher’s and her husband’s families. Samaher’s cousin Rashid, they confessed with a blush, was a fine, devoted young man. But he was wrong about his cousin’s pregnancy, for if it wasn’t real, why was she in bed? “She’ll be giving birth soon, Professor. That’s why you need to give her the final grade she deserves.”

His M.A. student’s devious, hoarsely excited voice buzzed in his brain. Rather than return to an apartment in which only silence awaited him, he headed for the library, free and well rested, to look for Ahmed ed-Danaf, whose errant name had migrated from a medieval story to the modern Algerian tale “The Poisoned Horse.” Easily found in an index to One Thousand and One Nights, ed-Danaf turned out to have been a far more engaging rogue than the morbidly confused horse poisoner of the amateur author Yassin bin Abbas. Although bin Abbas may have borrowed his hero’s name with the intention of giving his readers a lively and picaresque narrative worthy of the great Hārūn ar-Rashīd, the dreary reality of the Sahara had dulled the gay rascality of old Baghdad and muted its human color. The unresolved inner conflict that weighed heavily on the author had burdened his story and his hero as well.

Now, in the university library, the glowworm of his night journey to the Palestinian Authority flickered again. While a gray sky subtly shaded the silhouettes of Haifa Bay, tracing a column of flame that rose from its refinery, the Orientalist whispered to himself:

“No.”

Absolutely not.

Not even the pangs of love could make a man poison a horse, just as no woman would gaily toss a French baby out the window of a speeding train because she believed in miracles, and no judge, not even an Arab one, would trample justice by freeing the moonlight murderer of a French couple. Something else was at work here, deforming and barbarizing the imagination. Could it be, he wondered, a cautious hypothesis forming in his mind, that these folktales, written in the 1930s and 1940s, long before the Algerian War of Independence, were the first foreshadowings of an ongoing dialogue between Algeria and a French conqueror-seducer that was both the country’s oppressor and its object of desire? It was now 170 years old, this jumble of temptation, promise, injustice, and affront that had wreaked havoc on the soul of the country and turned its inhabitants into local strangers.

Was this the spark of inspiration that might cast light on the senseless nighttime raids that ravaged remote villages? Could it be that, forty years after the last French colons had departed and left scorched earth behind them, they still existed as a phantasm in the Algerian brain? Did the Muslim fundamentalists and army death squads imagine as they brutally slaughtered women, children, and old people that these were not their kin or countrymen, flesh of their flesh, but Frenchmen in shadowy disguise, their ancient, intimate enemy the pieds noirs, the black-footed colons of North Africa — who, though long returned to their home across the Mediterranean, their great farms abandoned, still haunted a native self that no longer knew what it was?

The unexpected rain trickling down the windows of the library reminded the worried Orientalist that the window of his study, next to which was his computer, had been left open. Hastily scribbling his reflections on a notepad and sticking it in his pocket before some recalcitrant fact or sober second thought could quench the spark, he left One Thousand and One Nights with its red leather binding and hurried off to his old apartment.

The rain had stopped, refreshing the wadi, which clung at its lower end to a fiery sunset burning out at the point where the horizon met the sea. Rivlin knew every mark and crack on the stairs to his old home, which descended between flowering hedges. Yet not even the memory of his children running happily up and down these stairs could arouse in him the slightest regret at having moved. It was one thing to be a guest, waxing ecstatic in the living room about the sea and the wadi in bloom, and quite another to have to live in the tiny bedrooms whose walls were moldy from the salt air.

The iron gate at the top of the stairs, a gate that had served as a largely symbolic defense of a house that could easily be broken into, was wide open. The couple that had bought the place did not seem concerned that a voyeur, detouring past the front door, might cross the little lawn and peer into the bedrooms or take someone on the terrace by surprise. The doorbell, which still had “Rivlin” written by it, no longer rang. In its place, he had to use the big brass clapper that he and Hagit had bought years ago in a Cairo bazaar and proudly hung by the entrance. Its luster, like hopes for peace with the Arab world, had faded with the years and been covered by the violent vines that scaled the house. Now, however, it was back, salvaged by the new tenants. Its chime, which Ofer had loved listening to, was still delicate despite its coat of verdigris.

The wife of the couple, whom he had met only once, at the closing of the sale at the lawyer’s, recognized him at once. “It’s about time,” she scolded. “We were going to return the package to the post office.” She went to get it without inviting him inside, leaving him standing, surprised and affronted, outside his old home. Cautiously he peered inside, searching for some memory that could be retrieved together with the package. Just then the woman’s husband hurried out of a room, not only more friendly than his good-looking wife, but eager to show the old tenant the changes made in the course of tearing down and rebuilding. Though not in the least interested, Rivlin mumbled a perfunctory expression of interest and let himself be led through the apartment, tagged after by two small children, in order to see how the rooms had been redivided and a little den carved out for a huge television set. The man seemed anxious to convince him that he and his wife had made wise and even witty decisions, as evidenced by a window installed for air in the bedroom closet that offered a surprise view of the terrace — where his wife, having bequeathed the visitor to her husband, had resumed her conversation with a younger and even prettier woman than herself.

Rivlin felt a sudden pang of longing for the deep wadi. Before the new owners could renovate that too, he exercised his right as a former tenant to stride to the terrace, step into the garden, and repossess, standing silently with his back to the women, the view of the ravine and the smooth, pink sea beyond, on which an illuminated ship glided regally.

“At least here it’s still beautiful…,” he murmured.

The wife took offense. “Here? As opposed to where?”

He ignored her and addressed the beautiful woman beside her. “Whenever my mother used to come from Jerusalem,” he reminisced, “she would sit where you are now and say: ‘Well, children, you’ve made yourselves a little Paradise, but what will you do when some wild beast comes charging out of it?’”

“You had a morbid mother,” the wife snickered. She seemed to have taken an inexplicable dislike to him, as if he had left something incriminating behind in her house.

“What’s morbid about it?” Undaunted, he spoke up for his mother. “If only you knew how many scorpions I killed here and how many snakes I chased behind that fence! And when all the dogs in the neighborhood begin to bark hysterically at ten at night in the middle of a heat wave, you can bet that your friendly neighbor, the wild boar at the bottom of the wadi, is out for a stroll….”

The unknown beauty, who had said nothing until now, brushed back a tousle of auburn hair from a swanlike neck and asked, with teasing curiosity,

“Snakes and scorpions aside, doesn’t looking at this panorama make you regret that you sold the place?”

“Regret what?” An intimate question from a gorgeous woman never failed to excite him. “At my age, you want to be closer to heaven than to earth. All the natural beauty in the world, even this wadi’s, can’t make up for lack of comfort. We’ve moved to a new fifth-floor duplex with an elevator and even a bit of a view. My only regret is not having sold this place for more money….”

“I should think that, at your age, your future lies more in the earth,” the wife said, pointing to a plot of ground behind the kitchen. Her hostility was so blatant that her embarrassed husband had to excuse it with some remark about gardening being good for the elderly.

“You call that a garden?” the former owner asked, gesturing indignantly at a lemon tree and two bushes he had planted beyond a small fence. “No, thank you. Just thinking of how I had to run around shutting five doors and ten windows each time we left the house for a few hours is enough to get over the garden, the sea, and all the rest of it.”

“What were you so afraid of?” the wife asked sarcastically. “Your mother’s imagination?”

He turned to look at her for the first time. “Imagination? After thirty years of living here, I can tell you how easy it is to break in at any hour of the day or night. Some burglar could be entering right now, even as we stand here peacefully talking….”

He irritably snatched the little package, whose return address told him it was destined for the garbage pail, and turned to go without another word. This made the husband feel so bad that he dragged the Orientalist to the bathroom and showed him that here, at least, everything had been left lovingly untouched. The floor, the sink, the faucets, the toilet seat, the biliously green-spotted tiles — nothing had changed.

3.

THE NEW DUPLEX, whose distance from the ground had not brought it appreciably closer to the sky, was burning every possible light. The young intelligence officer, who had arrived from deep in the mountains on a short leave, took after his mother: lights, in his opinion, were meant to be turned on and left on. Already in civilian clothes, he was showered, shaved, and combed, and off to a horror movie in Carmel Center. Distracted by something he knew he had forgotten, however, he went from room to room, trying to remember what it was, while politely asking his father to check whether he had run the washing machine correctly. Only after he was already out the door did it come to him. Someone had called from some embassy to say that the judge was returning from Vienna tomorrow night after all. She wanted to be picked up at the airport.

“Ima is coming tomorrow? Are you sure? Think!”

Tsakhi lapsed into meditative thought. “Yes,” he said after a while. “Tomorrow. I’m sure of it, Abba.”

And he was off.

Though glad to be getting back his warm-bodied and gentle-souled wife, Rivlin felt a twinge of disappointment at having his solitude cut short. As of tomorrow evening, he would again be living with his other half, who would hold him responsible for every word uttered, every sentence left unfinished, and not only every passing or hidden emotion not shared, but also every one not stated with precision. Sooner or later he would be obliged to confess his night out in the Palestinian Authority and to explain why an experienced, sober scholar like himself had to consign himself to the hands of his subject matter. And yet, if the returning traveler were not too weary, he might also test out his new theories on her nonacademic but perspicacious mind.

First, though, he would have to let Hagit tell him all she could about her trip. Besides listening to her complaints about the trying and tiresome time she had had, he would solicit from her the enjoyable moments, the little pleasures and unanticipated freedoms, experienced in the line of duty.

He was already counting the hours. The kiss that her smiling eyes would throw him as she came through Customs would more than compensate for the advantages of being alone. Tidying up the house for her, he picked up the young officer’s underpants from the bathroom floor, piled the dirty dishes, and systematically turned out lights, prodigally switched on even in his study. From the study window he was astonished to see leaning on the railing of the terrace across the street, not the ghost of his mother, but a heavyset man dressed in black, who watched with a satisfied look as a noisy garbage truck came up the street.

Was he a relation? A visitor? Rivlin had never seen another person on the terrace. Could the old woman have died during his day off among the Arabs, or moved to an old-age home, making the man the new owner or tenant? Since this man’s gaze, unlike her downward-directed one, also wandered up, Rivlin turned off the remaining lights and stood regarding him from the darkness. Yet now, slow and bulky, the ghost herself emerged from the apartment. She had put on makeup for the visitor and was now anxiously trying to catch the eye of a thin garbage collector running before his truck. He knew perfectly well, the garbage man did, that a gleefully tossed bag of refuse would sail down at him as soon as he raised his irritable eyes to the nagging old woman on the third floor.

The man by her side, though amused by her antics, rebuked her for them. But the ghost, loyal to the memory of Rivlin’s mother, whose earthly plenipotentiary she was, did not care what anyone thought of her. Switching on a fluorescent light on the terrace, she spread the little table there with a cloth, a malevolent smile on her apparitional face.

Rivlin wondered who her visitor could be. A son? A nephew? Or just some passerby? At this time of the evening her shutters were usually closed, with not a ray of light shining through them. Now, on the brightly lit terrace, the two of them sat down to play a game of cards. The Orientalist, who had never in his life played anything with his mother, watched with an astonished envy.

After the death of his father, Rivlin had tried to get his mother to move to Haifa. He did not want to travel back and forth to Jerusalem anymore, as he had done during his father’s long illness. But his mother refused to budge. She would not leave her apartment in the once fashionable triangle between King George, Ben-Yehuda, and Hillel Streets in order to move from the busy capital to the distant provinces in which her son and his family lived — not when she had seen from her kitchen window, scant days before the establishment of the State of Israel, two British soldiers killed and left to wallow in their blood. And after the UN partition Resolution, three bombs had gone off on her street, damaging the walls of her apartment — to say nothing of what had happened during Israel’s War of Independence, when an artillery shell had landed on the stairs while the besieged tenants huddled in the shelter. How could she be asked to forsake so strategically located a place, especially when it also looked out on the offices of the Histadrut, the national trade union, in which — or so she imagined — momentous decisions were made on a daily basis? Nothing could make her give up such an observation post for the dubious satisfaction of staring at a mountain or the sea.

After falling and breaking her pelvis and being confined to a wheelchair, however, his mother had no longer had any choice. Rivlin remembered how stirred he had felt when her ambulance from Jerusalem arrived at the nursing home and he helped an orderly wheel her on a gurney to her new room and put her in her bed. At last I have her where I want her, he had thought, opening her suitcase and hanging up her clothes. No more running to Jerusalem. Now I can take proper care of her.

Yet even from her wheelchair his mother had fought to maintain her autonomy. “You can take care of me all you want,” she adjured him. “Just don’t boss me around. I’ll make my own decisions.” Half-paralyzed, she had launched, as his sister had predicted she would, a desperate and calculated campaign of terror that twice forced him to move her to another home. At first, certain he was squandering her money, she had demanded a receipt for every expenditure. Then she had insisted that he schedule his visits in advance, as she did not want him coming when she was busy. “Busy with what?” Rivlin had asked with an incredulous smirk that she wiped from his face at once. “You know nothing about such things,” she had retorted. “You never have known anything about them. And you don’t have to know anything about them. Just tell me in advance when you’re coming.”

All through her years in Jerusalem, she had complained about how seldom he visited her. Now his visits annoyed her, as if she feared he would take advantage of her condition to gain control of her affairs. Sometimes, on his way home from the university after teaching a last class, he would drive to the nursing home and find her drowsing in her wheelchair under a leafy carob tree in the garden, aloof from the other residents, for whom she had little patience. Treading warily on the rotting carob pods, he approached her slumped form with its thin, reddish braid of hair, while thinking of the Russian student in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shivering with terror and excitement as he stared at the neck of the old moneylender who was fumbling in the Saint Petersburg twilight with his pretended surety, intricately wrapped by him to engage her as he fell on her with an ax. With a shudder, he’d reach out a gentle hand to touch his mother. Never surprised by him, she would turn around and complain, “How many times have I told you to let me know before you come?”

“Believe me, Professor Rivlin,” a veteran social worker had said to him after his mother’s fights with the staff had forced them to ask for her transfer, “she’s an incredible woman. I’ve never seen anyone like her. How did you manage to come out normal?” “Can’t you see that I didn’t?” he answered, staring at the ground.

She didn’t last long in her new place, either. The loss of her Jerusalem observation post gave her no peace, and she gave none to anyone around her, so that, although her condition remained stable during the last months of her life, she had to be shifted from place to place. Finding her bed empty, he would be told by a nurse, in response to his distraught query, that the cleverly programmed computer, having revealed that morning that she had overstayed her quota of days, had spotted an available bed elsewhere and even ordered an ambulance to take her there. It was this computer, which knew more than he did about his mother’s illnesses, rights, and obligations, that whisked her from hospital to hospital with the greatest of ease during the last weeks of her life. Rivlin, who remembered the endless forms he had been made to fill out for each little medical test given his father, now found the health services of the Jewish state remarkably user-friendly.

And yet not even the steady diminution of his mother’s faculties, which grew fewer with each new bed, nor the competent assistance, like an energetic younger brother’s, of the ambulance-chasing, bill-paying computer, could make her company more bearable. Feeling as poorly compensated for her lost observation post by the large windows of the hospitals as by the small ones of the nursing homes, she groused about everything — most of all about her son. Three hours before breathing her last, she was still threatening to dispossess him if he did not take her back to Jerusalem.

He took her back — in a hearse. Hagit wanted to ask Ofer to come from Paris for the funeral: he had often inquired about his grandmother, with whom he seemed to have formed a secret bond in his weeks of living with her after leaving Galya. But Raya, Rivlin’s sister, perhaps fearing that a postponement might give the deceased a chance to come back to life, didn’t want to wait. Rivlin agreed with her. “Why make Ofer do all that traveling in midsemester?” he said. “Now that my mother is gone, we can go abroad with a clear conscience — and for more than a few days at a time. Let’s go to Europe after the unveiling. We’ll visit Ofer in Paris and tell him about everything.”

Indeed, from the minute they landed in Paris, their son wanted to know all about his grandmother. Nervously, he probed them to find out what she had told them about his separation. Rivlin was dumbfounded. “You mean she knew more than we do?” he asked. “You told her things you kept from us?” His dead mother, now entombed with his son’s secret, rose in his estimation.

“You still haven’t told me,” Ofer persisted. “It can’t be that she said nothing.”

“She told us we had to be more patient with you,” Hagit replied. She herself had long ago given up hope of finding out any more from him.

“Patient?” The Parisian, though surprised, seemed satisfied. Gradually, his nervousness wore off. Whereas he had cloaked himself in a heavy mantle of secrecy after his divorce, he was now eager to show his private Paris to his parents during the three days of their visit. He brought them to his cooking academy in Montparnasse, took them for a tour of its classrooms and big kitchens, and introduced them to the Jewish architects for whom he worked as an unpaid apprentice. Rivlin wasn’t sure he wanted to visit his son’s attic room. Who knew what state it might be in? But Ofer insisted, and the room, they were happy to see, was pleasant and not at all untidy.

One evening they went to a concert in a church. Before it, Ofer took them to the Jewish Agency building, where he was being spelled that night by an alternate — a middle-aged former Israeli sculptor who made his wooden statues on the job. While Ofer escorted his mother upstairs to show her the grand old building, Rivlin turned to the burly wood-carver, who was burnishing the large, dark breasts of a female creation. What, he asked, would he do in case, God forbid, of a terrorist attack? The sculptor left the woman’s breasts, leaned down to open a drawer, and pointed at a heavy old revolver. Far from inspiring confidence, this only worried Rivlin more.

4.

ON HIS WAY to the airport the next day, Rivlin thought of Fu’ad’s remark, “You Jews are always coming and going. It will make you sick in the end.” Not that he himself was going anywhere. He was merely dispatching others and picking them up. Although he had wanted to make sure he arrived before Hagit cleared customs and looked for a taxi, he had been detained by a long phone call from Ephraim Akri, who wanted to discuss his plans for the department. At first Rivlin thought his junior colleague was genuinely interested in his advice. However, it didn’t take him long to realize that the shrewd Akri was merely asking him to approve decisions already made. It was his mode of operating. No wonder that, compared to the marathon sessions of the Rivlin era, the departmental meetings had grown short.

“No question about it, Ephraim,” Rivlin declared, needling his junior colleague, “you’re a true political animal. It’s a pity your talent is wasted on a small department like ours.”

“It’s the only one I belong to,” Akri replied, in what was either an apology or a complaint, and promised to send Rivlin a summary of their talk. Exasperated by the pedantic nature of the man he had appointed to succeed him, Rivlin decided to goad him with the story of his visit to Mansura. The Near Eastern department head was not only goaded, he was perturbed. “You let them leave you alone in a bedroom with a sick Arab woman, just like that?” he scolded his colleague, warning him to be more careful in the future. Although it was important, even imperative, to be forthcoming with Arabs, intimacy was to be avoided. It could only lead to misunderstanding.

Rivlin was in a hurry to get to the airport and in no mood to argue. Yet no sooner had he changed to a fresh shirt than the phone rang again. This time it was an insistent saleswoman who had to talk “to your wife and only your wife.” When the Orientalist asked what about, he was told that it concerned a new vacuum cleaner of such remarkable capabilities that it was being marketed only to a select clientele. Though he had no time, he felt obliged to chastise the caller for her lack of feminist consciousness, there being many men in today’s world — himself, for example — who used vacuum cleaners more often than their wives. The saleswoman was delighted to hear this. In that case, she said, she would gladly discuss the new appliance with him. It was a Kirby and could vacuum anything imaginable. Rivlin thanked her for the information, adding that he was in a hurry and that the vacuum cleaner they had worked perfectly well. “One more minute,” the voice at the other end of the phone pleaded, hanging on to him for dear life. “I’m only asking you to listen. There’s no obligation. This is a new concept in housecleaning, a revolution your wife will want to hear about. It’s called a vacuum cleaner only because our language lacks a better word.” “But my wife isn’t here!” Rivlin exclaimed triumphantly. “I’ve been trying to tell you that I’m on my way to the airport to pick her up.” “Wish her a happy homecoming for me,” the dogged saleswoman congratulated him. “I hope she lands safely and gets some rest. We’ll be at your house for a free demonstration the day after tomorrow. How about 8 P.M.?”

“Just make sure you phone first,” Rivlin warned her. And before hanging up, he repeated: “Make sure you phone.”

In the new airport terminal, amid the chirping of cell phones that welcomed the arriving passengers before they had time to arrive, the pervasive smell of burned coffee, and the plashing of fountains that serenaded the crowd waiting for the returnees (who, in the seconds between clearing customs and coming into sight, had their happy-to-be-home-again faces televised on a closed-circuit screen for the benefit of their welcomers) — here, and here alone, the professor from Haifa reflected, was the erotic epicenter of the Jewish state. The Jewish heart might throb in Jerusalem, and the Jewish brain might grow sharp or soft in Tel Aviv, but the passionate focus of Israeli life was here, in the going and the coming. It took an Arab of the old school, like Fu’ad, to realize that what might seem to be Jewish solidarity, as displayed by the tall man coming over to tell him that his wife was on her way, was only Jewish hyperactivity.

Rivlin wasn’t sure whether this person, who had gently put down his suitcase, was the prosecutor or the defense counsel in the mysterious trial. He himself was already looking at his wife on the closed-circuit screen. Her few seconds there were enough to tell him that something was on her mind. He hurried to take her suitcase, hoping to learn, before they joined the patiently waiting man, what it was. “Not now,” she whispered, giving him a grateful hug for his powers of observation. “There’s a split decision to convict, and I’m the dissenting opinion. We’ll talk about it later. Did you miss me? I missed you terribly. That man is the assistant district attorney of the Northern Circuit. We’re giving him a ride to Haifa. I couldn’t refuse. Don’t ask him too many questions. Just be nice.”

Her two colleagues on the bench had stayed an extra night in Vienna to take in an opera, while the chagrined defense counsel was on business in Germany. That left the prosecutor, now ensconced in the backseat of their car. Satisfied with the results of their journey, which had tipped the case against the defendant, an accused spy he had long been trying to nail, but aware that Judge Rivlin had doubts about the testimony given in the Asiatic republic, he chatted about other things. One of these, which he mentioned in a rather snide tone, was the opening of an exhibition of oils and watercolors by former Supreme Court Justice Granot, a stroke victim who had taken up painting.

“Granot has another show?” Hagit turned, upset, to her husband. “How come I didn’t know? Why didn’t you show me the invitation? You know I wouldn’t want him to think I’d forgotten him.”

“But what makes you think I saw an invitation?” Rivlin answered. “It must have been sent to your office and got lost.”

He refrained from commenting in the presence of a stranger on the chronic disorder of his wife’s desk, a consequence of her inability to throw anything away.

“If the exhibition is still on, we’ll go to it tomorrow,” Hagit comforted herself before lapsing into a drowsy silence. She looked gray and tired in the yellow light of the road. Rivlin fell silent, too. He felt the eyes of the prosecutor, who was sitting alertly behind him, drilling into his back, as if contemplating indicting him as well.

Back in their duplex, Hagit kicked off her shoes and stretched out on their bed as if to stamp it with the impressions of her trip while he emptied her suitcase out beside her, shut it again, and slipped it beneath the bed. Before hanging up her clothes, he examined them to see which items had paid their way and which had traveled as hitchhikers. He dumped a bag of his wife’s underwear into the laundry basket and carried her toilet kit to the bathroom.

“You can arrange your bathroom things by yourself,” he said.

“Of course.”

“So who goes first, you or me?”

“I don’t have much to tell. We went to a primitive place at the end of the world to listen to the fantasies of either a psychopath or a highly sophisticated liar. I honestly don’t know whether someone in the district attorney’s office or the Mossad thought they could put one over on us or they’re so naive that they think the man is telling the truth.”

“What did the other judges think?”

“They didn’t see it that way. They’ve been sold an opera like the one they’re going to in Vienna. Not that the defendant isn’t a can of worms. But you don’t put someone away for fifteen years without better proof.”

“Fifteen years?” His curiosity was piqued.

“It could be. There are charges of treason.”

“What kind of treason?”

“Never mind. There’s not much I can tell you. I’d rather not talk about it. I’m fed up with the whole trial. And I feel bad for Granot. He must think I’ve abandoned him.”

“You exaggerate. In his condition, he has other things to think about.”

“Precisely in his condition! When you can’t talk and can only think, every little thing becomes crucial. I know how much I mean to him. We have no choice. Tomorrow or the day after, we’ll go to his exhibition and buy a painting.”

“A painting of Granot’s? What for?”

“He needs the money. Why do you think he’s exhibiting? His wife never worked, he has no savings, and it’s hard to cover an invalid’s expenses on a pension, even a Supreme Court justice’s.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about. We’ll go to the exhibition and buy a painting. Now tell me about yourself. Did the peace and quiet I gave you help you to make progress?”

“Conceptually, not on paper. Are you awake enough to listen to a strange story?”

“Of course.”

He paced up and down by the bed, his excitement mounting as he described his night journey among the Arabs. Hagit, eyes half-shut, lay listening to every word. She did not appear to be overly perturbed by his story.

“So! I leave you alone for a couple of days and you run wild.”

He smiled, relieved by her making a joke of it. “I suppose I did…”

“Did you at least enjoy it?”

“Enjoy it? Not exactly. But it may have sparked some new thoughts.”

5.

REMOVING HIS GLASSES, he lay down beside her in the faint hope of making love. Not that he really wanted to, but they hadn’t done it for a while, and he didn’t want their bodies to grow rusty. Hagit, however, smiled wearily without responding. Although he did not feel greatly deprived, he made a point of wringing from her an acknowledgment of remissness.

They switched on the TV. Rivlin fell asleep watching a program. Awakening after midnight, he found Hagit’s side of the bed empty and went to look for her. She was sitting in his study, composing the outline of her dissent.

“You don’t think you can change one of their minds?”

She shook her head, sadly, not only because she took it hard when her opinion was not accepted, but because her dissent would not even be made public. He stroked her hair while glancing at the little card table on the terrace across the street. Some empty bottles of beer were still on it.

“She’s started to live it up, my mother’s ghost,” he said, telling Hagit about the man who had come to play cards.

“Are you jealous?”

“Jealous?” It never ceased to amaze him how quickly she saw through him. “What an idea! But it does make me realize how hard the last year with her was. There wasn’t a moment of good feeling or enjoyment.”

She sighed. “And you tried so hard to be a loving son. It’s sad when an old person feels wronged. That’s why I don’t want Granot to think I’ve abandoned him.”

“But he never would.”

“You’re wrong. I know him. He’s a noble man. That makes him highly sensitive. How could I not have seen the invitation?”

“You didn’t see it because your desk is such a mess. You should let your typist arrange it for you.”

“That’s not her job.”

“But she loves you. She’ll do anything for you.”

“Maybe. It’s still not her job. Why don’t we go together one Saturday and you help me?”

6.

THEY WERE THE only ones at the exhibition, which was being held in the gym of a community center. The direct light only emphasized how sadly out of place the little watercolors and oils were among the parallel bars and horses. Granot’s first, surprise exhibition had been held two years previously, four years after his stroke. Long the chief justice of the Haifa District Court, he had suffered a stroke a few months after his appointment to the high court in Jerusalem and had had to return to his native city. For two years he was incommunicado, then he began to speak in striking colors and compositions; this led to an exhibition for which his many friends, as well as the entire legal community of Haifa, had turned out. The present show, his second, was more modest. The mute painter seemed to be in decline. His paintings were smaller, the colors more somber, the shapes more abstract. The distorted figures looked as if they were covered by a green mold.

Hagit strode silently around the room, stopping by each painting as though it had a deep significance. Her husband, having passed through the room quickly, stood asking the guard at the door how many visitors had seen the show. The answer was, Not many. The guard handed Rivlin a sheet of paper with the titles and prices of the works.

He scanned it quickly. The prices seemed high for an amateur painter, even an ex-Supreme Court justice. He wondered how they had been determined. Yet knowing that his wife had her heart set on buying something — either to make up for the missed opening or to help her first patron and guide — he looked for a reasonably priced item that he could live with and even pretend to like.

He stood in front of a small watercolor while his wife circulated reverently among the paintings as though renewing an old dialogue with the man who had been her mentor even after her appointment to the district court. The watercolor was fairly cheap and not too gloomy, with some vague figures, little dogs or jackals, surrounding the thin, black silhouette of a woman. It could be hung one day in the room of an imaginative grandchild, and meanwhile he did not think it would bother him. Calling Hagit over, he informed her that, if they had to buy something, this was what he liked best. Everything else was too ugly and depressing.

“This?” she marveled. “These poor little children being dragged down to Hell by a black devil?”

“Children? What children?” He was mystified. “Those are puppies or jackals. And where do you see a devil? Why would Granot paint devils? It’s a woman walking her dogs.”

The judge took off her glasses and stepped closer to the painting. Her eyes were soft and sorrowful.

“Well, if that’s what you think and you like it, let’s buy it. I suppose you’ve checked the price.”

“Six hundred shekels.”

“Not too bad. Maybe we should buy two.”

“Are you out of your mind? Please, even one is too much. What are we, a social-work agency?”

“All right. Don’t be angry. Write down the number and we’ll pick it up when we visit him. Does it have a name?”

Rivlin consulted the sheet of paper.

“Yes. The Return of the Little Ones.”

In their building, by the door to the elevator, stood a tall man with a black ponytail. For a moment, his heart pounding, Rivlin thought it was Galya’s new husband, come to ask them about her first marriage. But it was not the bird-faced man who had told him confidently in the garden of the hotel that he knew “everything.” It was a salesman, sent to demonstrate, “with no obligation,” the remarkable vacuum cleaner, which stood by his side like a faithful dog.

“But I specifically said you were to call first,” Rivlin protested. “You promised.”

The man with the ponytail looked crestfallen. He had been misled. He had come all the way from Tel Aviv on the understanding that he would be welcome. He spread imploring arms. He was asking for only half an hour of their time, with “no obligation at all.” They shouldn’t put it off another day, because the price of the vacuum cleaner kept rising.

“Yes, and I suppose you’re almost out of stock,” Rivlin taunted him. But it was already too late, because his wife had taken pity on the man and invited him up to their apartment.

Though polite, the salesman projected a quiet authority. Informing them that, despite his hippie-style ponytail, he was a reliable type, an ex-Border Guard officer, he proceeded to tell them about the appliance’s incredible success, not just in Israel, but throughout the Middle East. He had even sold a Kirby to a princess of the Hashemite royal house in Jordan. If they would kindly allow him to rearrange their living-room chairs, they could sit back and watch him demonstrate. The appliance, American-made, was called a vacuum cleaner only for lack of a better word. Its metallic gray showed that it was made from the same materials used in intercontinental missiles. Although this might sound like a stretch, it was true. He had documents to prove it. Take this hose, for example, which emptied the dirt into that container. You could crinkle it — crush it — crunch it with all your might, as he was doing now. Just look how it sprang back to its original shape, as only a noble metal could!

Rivlin, growing impatient, cast a reproachful look at his wife, who looked utterly tranquil.

“Just give me half an hour of your time,” the salesman said. “There’s no obligation. Say ‘stop’ and I’ll stop. You see, you have a nice, neat house. As far as you and maybe even your guests are concerned, it’s as clean as it needs to be. But our Kirby here isn’t satisfied with outward appearances. It wants the full, unadulterated truth, as befits folks like you. Excuse me, but may I ask what your work is?”

“I teach at the university,” Rivlin murmured rancorously. “And my wife is a district judge.”

The salesman, accustomed to Hashemite princesses, inclined his head respectfully and whipped out of his valise an array of odd attachments that hooked up to one another in complicated but easy-to-grasp ways. These were designed, he said, to penetrate the most inaccessible places, from which they extracted hidden dirt that lesser machines never reached: crumbs of food in the pockets of armchairs and under sofas, dried leaves and dead insects rotting in the grooves of sliding doors and stuck to ceilings and curtain rods, dust between the lines of books or congealed under mattresses in revolting lint balls.

The judge glanced at her husband.

The salesman now swung into action. Inserting a thin, round pad into the vacuum cleaner, he ran the machine over the spotless crannies of their living room. He kept this up at length, changing the pads frequently before arranging them in a gray alluvial fan at the hastily withdrawn feet of the duplex’s tenants. Just look at the filth masquerading as cleanliness that the Kirby had unmasked! “You can imagine,” he said, “what your grandchildren must leave behind after they’ve been here for the weekend!”

Rivlin inched closer to his wife, feeling her warmth. He could feel old age creeping up on them both.

The ponytailed salesman mixed water and a fragrance in a small container and sprayed the couches with an aerosol attachment. Next he vacuumed the curtains and polished the parquet floor and asked to go upstairs to the bedroom. There, running the talented appliance over the bedspread and skimming the noduled mattress with its gleaming hulk, he removed from it yet another pad caked with a strange, white powder — the remains, he explained, of invidiously invisible mattress worms.

Rivlin glared at his wife, who seemed overcome by an inexplicable sorrow. Invited by the salesman to try out the machine and to take apart and put together its easy-as-pie components, she smiled demurely and volunteered her husband — who was soon vying to prove that he was as capable as the Hashemite royal house.

The salesman lauded the Orientalist’s quick grasp.

“Maybe you should hire him as your assistant,” Hagit suggested.

An hour later, as the ex-Border Patrol officer was repacking his equipment prior to departing, Rivlin told him morosely:

“All right. We understand the principle. We’ll think about it. But I want you to know that I’m devastated, because you’ve shown me that my home, which I always took to be clean, is a repository of filth. In the end we’ll have no choice but to spend a fortune on a machine that we’ll never use.”

“If you buy it,” the salesman reasoned, “why shouldn’t you use it?” Yet judging by his sly smile, such things had been known to happen.

7.

ON A QUIET Saturday morning, in a modest apartment, shaded by pine trees, whose living room was lined with books that no one read anymore, a paralyzed man sat silently in a wheelchair. Slender and erect, he wore an old blue suit with a red bow tie that was awry on his neck. Although the whites of his eyes had yellowed and faded, their blue pupils still shone with the bright chivalry of a judge who, years ago, had been compelled by moral scruples to take a purely fatherly and jurisprudential interest in a young intern with whom he had fallen in love. Even after her appointment to district judge, he had played the role of a stern teacher entrusted with her professional supervision. Now, in the methodical spirit of the German Jewry he sprang from, several low coffee tables, placed between a couch and some chairs, were set with refreshments. There were little dishes with squares of chocolate; silver bowls full of peanuts, pretzels, and petit fours; and, on an antique plate in the center of the table, a raisin cake sliced into quarters with a dollop of whipped cream by each piece. What you saw was what you got. Freedom of choice was coffee or tea.

Hagit, her cheeks hot, felt her heart go out to the old judge. While giving his veiny arm a squeeze, she seemed, in her distress at being a judicial minority of one, more in need of encouragement than he was. The former Supreme Court justice, however, though raising a yearning head toward her, could only move his lips sorrowfully, as if to say, Now, my dear friend, you’re on your own. All you can do is remember all that I’ve told you, because I will never say anything more.

This left the conversation to Granot’s wife, a slender, aristocratic woman of Yemenite extraction who had spent the last fifty years so immersed in Germanic kultur that — true freedom lying in obedience to the kategorischer Imperativ—she had practically become a dark-skinned German Jewess herself, though one tinkling with the antique silver Yemenite jewelry adorning her meticulous clothes. Refusing to be disheartened by her husband’s stroke, she had taken it upon herself to represent him and his opinions to the world and had even begun to talk with his old voice, including a trace of a German accent. Now, she was telling her visitors about the painting they had acquired at its full, undiscounted price.

“You, Professor, see puppies or jackals, and your wife sees little children. You think you are looking at a sad woman in black, and your wife thinks it’s a grotesque devil…. You never said it was grotesque? Pardon me…. Well, dear friends, the truth lies halfway between you. Granot intended to paint children, not puppies. But what makes you think, Mrs. Rivlin, that they’re being led by a devil? Really, I’m surprised at you. What would a devil be doing here? It’s their natural mother, a quietly tragic woman who has gathered her children from all over the world in order to bring them home. That’s why the painting is called The Return of the Little Ones.”

The paralyzed judge hung on the words of the woman speaking in his voice.

“Granot painted this wonderful work a year ago. Do you remember? You got out of bed that morning with the whole thing in your head. By noon the painting was finished. And it came out just as you wanted it to, didn’t it? That’s why it’s so moving and well done. Our friends have fallen in love with it and wish to buy it. Well, what do you say? Shall we let them have it?”

The Supreme Court justice tried spreading his hands in a vague gesture.

“You see?” the Yemenite told him. “What a pity you’ve stopped painting this past year.”

“He’s stopped painting?” Hagit exclaimed sadly. Her gaze clung steadfastly to the old judge’s wide-open blue eyes, which seemed unable to fathom why his old intern looked so troubled.

“Yes, yes,” the woman chided, her German accent growing stronger. “Granot has stopped painting. He just sits all day and does nothing. He makes no use of his time. Isn’t that so, Granot? You’ve become a frightful idler. That’s very bad. All day he sits looking at me instead of at his easel.”

A heartbreakingly guilty smile creased the silent judge’s face. Honest to a fault, he nodded to confirm his wife’s verdict while his eyes filled with large tears.

But the woman just went on chastising him. “Paint, don’t cry! Don’t you see how everyone loves your paintings?”

Back in their car, Hagit laid the unframed painting in the back. “This is a good time to put me to work,” Rivlin told her. “I’m in the mood to go to the courthouse and clean out your drawers. We can’t afford any more missed invitations.”

Yet no prospect seemed more dreadful to Hagit than having to go through her drawers, and her husband’s eagerness only heightened her reluctance.

“Next weekend,” she said, with a smile, as if she were doing him a favor. “Won’t you be in the mood next weekend?”

8.

THAT TUESDAY, midway through his introductory survey course in the large hall whose very air seemed jaundiced by long hours of lectures, the classroom front door opened slowly, and in came Samaher, wearing a black dress embroidered with little flowers and a white scarf wrapped around her head and shoulders.

Well, well, Rivlin thought with a streak of meanness: the pregnancy that never was is over. He watched his “research assistant” take a seat, her sudden appearance causing a stir among the Arab students, not a few of whom were her friends or relations. Had she recovered from her illness or simply run away from her mother?

She waited patiently, after the lecture, for him to finish talking to the last student, then stepped up to inform him, rather ceremoniously, that she had more material for him. Even though the room was empty, she spoke in secretive tones, as if the subject were not amateur North African writing but a dangerous narcotic.

Rivlin regarded the slender figure. Gently but unsparingly, he asked:

“Well, Samaher. Is this the end of your pregnancy?”

She shrugged. “So it seems….” She declined to be more explicit, though her hand trembled as it gripped the edge of the lecture podium.

He felt a wave of pity for this Arab girl who was struggling to get her degree. “The main thing,” he said, patting her shoulder, “is that you’re back on your feet.”

He pictured them, delicate, wriggling beneath her blanket as excitedly as a floating French baby.

“For the time being, Professor.” She sighed glumly, unwilling to rule out future indispositions.

“Why just for the time being?” he asked sharply, reaching to take what she had brought him. “You’ve been sick long enough.”

This time too, however, there was nothing very material about his Arab student’s material. The new story, it turned out, existed only as a fever in her brain. She had read it with such excitement that she hadn’t bothered to summarize it in her notebook, because she had said to herself, Hey, Samaher, this is an important story, really special, just the thing for your professor’s research. Even Dr. Suissa had underlined it heavily, though his pencil marks had grown blurry from so much photocopying.

Of the stalwart bride who wrestled horses only the burning eyes, their sadness deepened by her mysterious illness, now remained.

“Then you understand what I’m looking for?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me.”

She gave a start, as if he were going to examine and grade her right now in the empty lecture hall:

“Maybe… I thought you wanted to find out, Professor… I mean… how it happened that the Algerian people, who suffered so much from the French, began to torture themselves… that is, to kill each other… just like that, for no reason…”

Although he had already realized it back when she was a first-year student, Rivlin had forgotten that she was really quite bright. The lecture hall was empty. It was 6:40 p.m. Soon it would be dark, and the campus would be swallowed by the shadows creeping out of the forests of the Carmel.

“But what’s so special about this particular story?” he demanded, debating whether to listen to it now.

“What’s special is that it’s disguised. I mean, it’s a story written by a woman, maybe even a young one, but signed by a man, the author. You can tell it by the style, the imagination, the feeling. That poor lecturer from Jerusalem knew it, too.”

“Dr. Suissa.”

“Yes, Suissa. I’m telling you, Professor Rivlin, it’s a shame about him, because he was a special person, maybe really a genius — a Jew who grasped us Arabs from the inside, the way we are, without fancy explanations. That’s rare. At first I didn’t understand why he wrote in the margin that the author was a woman in disguise. But when I finished reading the story, I said, Of course! Only a woman could write and feel such things. I can’t stand thinking of the way he died, that Suissa. Believe me, if he were alive I’d go to Jerusalem just to thank him. I’d say, ‘Thank you, Doctor, for understanding the Arab soul so well.’”

The Orientalist felt a twinge of envy. “Well, Samaher,” he snapped, “now you know whom your Palestinians killed.”

She winced at his unexpected outburst. “But what can I do about it, Professor?” she answered stubbornly. “Every man has his fate….”

9.

SAMAHER WANTED TO tell him the story right away, while it was still fresh in her mind. Although he was impatient to get home to Hagit, who was waiting to eat supper with him, Rivlin, standing in the large lecture hall, agreed to listen to a digest of it. Just then, however, two Druze cleaning women entered the room with mops and sloshing buckets of water. He had no choice but to take his excited student and her story to his office.

They were the only ones in the elevator. Early shadows flitted along the corridor that connected the locked offices. Without bothering to ask about her family or the village, or even about Rashid, Rivlin led Samaher silently down the hallway, politely holding doors for her and ushering her into his little room on the twenty-third floor. Seating her across from him, by the window looking out on the Galilee, he thought of her perfume on the night of her wedding and of Ephraim Akri’s warning. At least, he thought, smiling to himself, we’re not in her bedroom this time. As he debated switching on the ceiling light or making do with the last sweet glow of the day that still clung to the sky, his student pulled off her white scarf and with quick, pale fingers gathered the hair that spilled out of it into a long ponytail.

“Are you all right?” he asked with a start.

She nodded. “Then wait for me here,” he said, stepping out into the dark corridor. Leaving the lights off, he used an old key to enter his former room, now the new department head’s. With a glance at Akri’s grandsons, he dialed Hagit.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll be a bit late. That Samaher has just turned up with something new. She wants to tell me about it now, orally, the way she did in the village. I’ve become like Harun ar-Rashid in One Thousand and One Nights: all I do is listen to stories. Do you think I should tell her to come another time? Why don’t you begin eating and I’ll be there in half an hour, three-quarters at the most. She’s come all the way from her village, and she’s not in such good shape…. What do you think?”

“I hate to eat without you.”

“You could have your hair done while you’re waiting.”

“My hair? What does my hair have to do with it?”

“Don’t you have an appointment at the hairdresser’s tomorrow morning? I thought you might be less pressured if you went now. Weren’t you thinking of trimming it in the back?”

“What on earth for?”

“Then you could work on your dissent.”

This was already too much for her.

“Listen, Yochi. Stop finding things for me to do. Just tell me how much time you intend to spend with her.”

“None at all. Half an hour. Three-quarters at most. She’s slightly mad, just as I thought. That whole pregnancy was her mother’s fantasy or manipulation. Honestly, I feel sorry for her.”

“If you’re feeling sorry for anyone besides yourself,” his wife said, “it’s not an experience to miss. But keep it short. I’m hungry and I’m tired and I’m feeling low. Get it over with and come cheer me up. And don’t forget to give her my regards.”

“Your regards?”

“Why not? I was at her wedding.”

“If I start giving her your regards, we’ll never be rid of her. But fine. On the contrary. She’ll be happy. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

From the corridor came a muffled but familiar-sounding whisper. Could it be the department head, coming to commune with his grandchildren? Rivlin hurried out, switching on the light in time to catch a glimpse of a small silhouette, child or puppy, that passed by in the darkness. But it was already gone.

Samaher had opened the window and was standing beside it. She was staring, not at the landscape of the Galilee, in which the lights of her village glittered too, but at the paved plaza at the tower’s base. Her ponytail, dark and quiet, fell down her back.

“My wife sends you her regards. Do you remember her?”

His student’s suffering face lit up with gratitude.

“Who could forget your wife, Professor? Whoever likes you has to like her twice as much.”

He turned red and waved a hand. “All right, let’s begin. And next time, please make an appointment. You may not realize it, but I’m a busy man. What’s the new story called?”

“Er-rakid u’immo et-tarsha.”

“The Dancer and His Deaf Mother?”

“That’s correct.”

The shadows were thickening in the room. The idea, given him by Tedeschi and the translatoress, of seeking inspiration in the posthumous papers of the Jerusalem genius now seemed preposterous. But I’ll see it through to the end, he thought resolutely. He flicked on the ceiling light, although the last beams of the sunset were still honey clear. It would be inadvisable for a Druze cleaning woman to enter the room and imagine things.

The Dancer and His Deaf Mother

“I already told you, Professor, that this is a story written by a woman pretending to be a man. It’s about this Frenchwoman named Colette. I think the author had to hide who she was because the story appeared in a semireligious magazine called Al-Masjid al-Zhagir,^* which also published, if you can believe it, sermons from mosques. So how does a story like this get into such a magazine? That beats me. Even the date of publication is given according to the Muslim religious calendar. But there’s a teacher in our village who can turn Muslim dates into Christian ones, and he told me it’s May 1948. Isn’t that the period in which you’re looking for — how did you put it? — the black hole of identity that spawned the Terror of the nineties? If I follow you, you want to prove that it didn’t come from the Algerians themselves, but from the French….”

“From the relationship between them.”

“Right. From the relationship. It’s as if, if I follow you, the French left this poison behind when they pulled out.”

“Something like that.” Recalling that Hagit was in a bad mood, which rarely happened with her, he wished his student would hurry up. “Get to the point, Samaher.”

“I thought this story could help you with your research because it’s more realistic than the others. There are no miracles or poisoned horses in it. It’s understated. I had tears in my eyes when I read it. And my mother and grandmother cried, too, when I read it aloud to them.”

“Come on, Samaher, give us the gist of it. We don’t have all night.”

“All right. The woman telling the story is French. She’s fifty-five years old, born in Algeria at the end of the last century on a big colonial farm. She writes about this Muslim woman, a Berber, who was born deaf and dumb in a nearby village. The deaf and dumb girl’s parents are poor, simple shepherds and don’t know what to do with their daughter. And the farmer, Colette’s father, is a really good-looking man who was an officer in the French army. One day he sees this deaf and dumb shepherdess with her goats and sheep and feels sorry for her, because she’s beautiful and has a good heart, even though she keeps losing her flock. That’s because she can’t hear its bells or make anything but funny gurgling sounds. And so he goes to her parents and says, ‘Let me have your deaf and dumb girl. She’ll help my wife around the farm, and we’ll teach her sign language.’ You see, Professor, they’d just invented sign language in Europe.

“The parents, who have nine other children, like the idea. They say, ‘Why not? Take her and do what you want with her. When it’s time for her to marry, we’ll lend a hand.’”

“Lend a hand?”

“That’s what they say. Don’t look at me, Professor, it’s in the story. So the Frenchman takes her to his farm to help his wife. You see, she’s a weak, tired woman, all worn out by the desert and the heat, and she’s always thinking of her parents in France and going to visit them. Well, you can see what’s coming, Professor, can’t you? It’s obvious. The deaf and dumb Berber girl learns sign language, and the Frenchman falls for her quiet beauty. But even though he’s very smart and educated, he’s not careful, and he gets her pregnant. And she — not only is she unable to tell her parents, she doesn’t want to, because she’s happy with the Frenchman.

“Colette describes how she has grown up with this Berber woman on the farm. The woman is half a sister and half a mother, and Colette has become attached to her. But in the meantime, there’s this matter of the pregnancy. The Frenchman goes to the Berber parents and tells them that it’s time to keep their promise and help their daughter get married. It can be with anyone, he says. She’ll give birth in her husband’s Berber village and then come back with her child to the farm. And that’s what she does. They marry her off to this deaf and dumb shepherd from a far-off village, a good, simple man who doesn’t know sign language and can’t talk to a wife with a French education, and she goes back to the farm when her baby is born.”

“Is there much more to this?”

“It doesn’t look so long in writing,” Samaher apologized. “But it’s very condensed. It gets longer when I tell it. Maybe that’s because I add explanations. What should I do, Professor? Should I go on?”

“As long as we’re here, you might as well. You say the story was published in a religious magazine in the 1940s?”

“Semireligious.” His “research assistant” wanted to be precise. “But it’s always like that. If a story has the right ending, it can be about anything.”

Rivlin smiled with pleasure at her insight. Samaher, encouraged, whisked her ponytail around from her neck to her throat.

“So now she’s his mistress.” She took out an index card and glanced at it. “It’s called a maîtresse. That’s the French word. It’s the one used in the story, maybe to avoid offending readers. Colette doesn’t like the idea that her father has two wives, a French one who talks normally and a Muslim one who talks sign language. But at least she has the Berber woman’s child, who’s like a little brother to her. She takes him with her everywhere, even to visit friends on the nearby French farms. And it’s the beginning of the century, and the latest dance craze is the cancan, and they bring this teacher from Paris to give them lessons.”

10.

THERE WAS A scratch on the door. Timidly, it was opened. A dark-skinned boy of about ten with large, horn-rimmed glasses entered, head down, and threw himself into the M.A. student’s lap.

“Who is this?” the astonished Orientalist asked.

“Don’t you remember him?”

It was Rasheed, Ra’uda’s son from Zababdeh, whose West Bank father had deprived him of an Israeli identity. Now, while the authorities considered his mother’s request for repatriation, his uncle Rashid was accustoming him to Israel by taking him around in his minibus.

“Rashid is here too?”

“Of course. How else would I get back to the village?”

“Then why doesn’t he say hello?” Rivlin, livening up, ran into the corridor to look for his driver-guide and found him in the gloom at the end of the corridor.

“Is that you, Rashid?”

“How are you, sir?” came the quiet answer.

“But who are you hiding from?”

“I’m not hiding, Professor. I just didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Let’s have a look at you.”

Rashid took a few slow steps. He was wearing horn-rims like his nephew’s.

Rivlin had to laugh. “What are you doing with those glasses?”

Rashid laughed, too. “It’s for the checkpoints. It makes them think we’re father and son.”

He stopped his clowning and put the glasses in his pocket. “How are you, Professor? I owe you an apology for that night in the Palestinian Authority.”

“What for?”

“For the hundred shekels those punks took from you. They had no business doing it. Here, let me return it….”

“Bikafi, ya Rashid, shu is-siri? ’lrsh birja. Es-safar wara ’l-hudud kan fazi’, ma bintasa. Lissa bitghani fii ir-rahbi.^* By the way, how is she?”

“In the end she performed in Nablus and fainted.”

“She did?” Rivlin felt cheated.

“I told you she was embarrassed in front of you. But she’ll be back in the autumn. There’s going to be a music and poetry festival in Ramallah. Nothing political or patriotic, just love songs. There’ll be Jewish poets, too. Maybe she’ll agree to faint for them….”

“Wonderful. Now come and join us. Samaher hasn’t finished her story, and I’m in a hurry.”

The End of the Story of the Dancer and His Deaf Mother

“The French dance teacher,” Samaher continued, picking up where she had left off while her cousin’s nephew snuggled in her lap and Rashid stood behind her, lapping up every word, although he had already heard it, “realizes right away that the little boy, who looks Berber but acts French, has a great talent for dancing. As small as he is, he dances with the French girls and is the star. And then World War I breaks out. Even in Algeria, across the sea, everyone is worried because the French are getting killed like flies. The dance teacher, an ‘easy come, easy go’ type who only likes men, is so upset that he decides to return to Paris. First, though, he asks the French farmer and the deaf and dumb mother’s permission to take the little Berber boy with him. It seems he’s in love with him and wants to make him famous. And so the two of them go to France, and it’s wartime and hard to stay in touch. Colette describes how sad the Berber woman is, even though her little boy is now a dancer in a Paris night club called Er-Ra’iya il-Majnuna.^† She’s not even comforted when they send her a photograph of him. His real father, the French farmer, keeps promising to bring him home as soon as the war is over. But after the war there’s a drought, and he can’t leave his farm with all its problems. And so the years go by, and one year the farmer dies, and his wife sells the farm and returns to France with Colette, and the poor deaf and dumb Berber woman has to go back to her deaf and dumb husband.”

Rivlin tried catching Rashid’s eye. But Rashid, like an attentive bodyguard, kept his eyes on Samaher. A worried expression Rivlin had never seen before crossed his dark, friendly face.

“Meanwhile,” Samaher continued, “Colette lives in France but keeps thinking of her Berber half brother. She even starts going to dance clubs to look for him. She wants so badly to find him that she doesn’t have time for a boyfriend. But as the years pass she begins to realize that they may not recognize each other even if they meet. And so — we’re almost up to World War II — she goes back to Algeria to look for the deaf and dumb mother, because she’s sure she’ll recognize her son. It’s not easy to find her village, and Colette discovers when she gets there that the woman died from heartbreak a few years before. That leaves the old deaf and dumb husband, a simple, good-natured man who’s forgotten whatever sign language his wife managed to teach him. But he’s better than nothing, and Colette takes him to France. Maybe, she thinks, he’ll recognize his son, the lost dancer.

“And so Colette returns to France with this gray, gloomy old Algerian in a big burnoose who can’t talk. She doesn’t even know whether he knows what she wants from him. But he does his best, and Colette puts him up in her house and makes the rounds with him of the dance clubs and fancy cabarets. Everyone stares at this elegant woman, who’s no longer young, dragging along an old, deaf and dumb Muslim in a white robe who can’t hear the music and just looks at the dancers. And now it’s wartime again, and soon the Germans are in Paris, and no one goes to nightclubs any more. Colette is about to give up. But one day they’re in this café and a dark, fat, unshaven Frenchman of about forty sits down next to them and keeps looking at them. The deaf and dumb villager, who has never spoken a word, begins shaking all over. He puts out his hand and touches the Frenchman and says the first word of his life:

“Ibni.”

“Ibni?”

“Yes. ‘My son.’ And that’s the end of the story.”

“That’s the end?” the Orientalist asked, disappointed.

“Yes. There isn’t any more,” Samaher said firmly. “The moral is obvious. You can dance all you want — you’ll still never lose your true identity.”

The worried Rashid smiled with relief. Once again, as in Samaher’s bedroom, their forbidden love sent a chill down Rivlin’s spine. He thought of Paris, and of the loneliness of his son, who would soon be starting his night shift.

“So if you think about it, Professor,” his “research assistant” said, “you’ll see why I was in a hurry to tell you about it. It’s an important story about identity.”

Rivlin had run out of patience. He glanced at his watch, rose, patted the boy on the head, and declared:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to go home.”

Rashid took charge of the timid boy, while whispering something to Samaher. Reminded, she took a paper from her purse and laid it on Rivlin’s desk.

“This is for you, too, Professor. It’s a poem, translated.”

“Another one?”

She nodded almost dreamily.

He folded the page in four and stuck it in his shirt pocket as if it were a note from someone. Then, before Rashid could say anything more, he proceeded to the door to let the two young Arabs know the meeting was over.

At a traffic light on his way home (feeling guilty and concerned for his wife), he took out the poem and looked at it. It was in Rashid’s clear, curly hand. Once more it gave proof that the poetry of the Arabs was much more sophisticated than their prose.

I Am a Prize Given in Your Name

I will never call you by a musical name.

I will volunteer no surprises.

Your nakedness is my desire,

Because in it my reveries attain their glory.

I am a prize given in your name.

Your navel makes the world vanish

Like a whirlpool on water.

Your face is armed indolence,

And I am a one-celled animal amid your breasts.

I will call you by a name I will never forget.

There are books that smell like rooms,

And I say to them: “Books,

You smell like rooms!”

There are poems like broken glass,

And I say: “Broken glass,

I have not found you a listener.”

My dream flees to your bedroom,

But your room is nothing but a trick.

Listen, I may have to call you by a different name.

Damn it! What name can I call you by?

I’ll make you a new prison,

But who will help me to escape?

11.

A Draft for an Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that I began work on this study of tendencies and conflicts in the national identity of Algeria between 1930 and 1960. It forms a natural sequel to my previous book, The Reconstruction of the New Algerian Identity through Municipalism, which dealt with the early formation of an Algerian sense of self via the institutions of local government. After I had begun the present study, a bloody civil war broke out in Algeria in the wake of the cancellation of the 1991 election results; it is still going on as I write these lines.

A historian of the recent past must choose between two approaches. The first is to write as if the present did not exist — or, rather, under the assumption that any serious and responsible examination of the present will have to wait for historians of the future, who will analyze it with the help of reliable documents and appropriate scholarly tools. In other words, any attempt to explain the flux of a hotly contested present with a methodologically responsible study of the past is doomed to hasty conclusions that will distort our understanding not only of the present but of the past as well.

Hence the warning of Professor Uriel Hed, a great Orientalist of the last generation:

“Especially in our field, in which we deal largely with recent events, we must resist all temptation to blur the boundary between scholarship and political journalism. The historian must do everything to resist the siren song of ‘contemporary relevance.’”

And yet there is also, it must be said, a second approach, one that the intellectually honest and morally sensitive historian cannot simply overlook. How, after all, can the serious student of the past, taken by surprise by extreme and unexpected developments (and the writer of these lines must admit that although he has been studying the history of North Africa for nearly three decades) — how can he simply shut his eyes and engage in his research as though nothing had happened? Inasmuch as all who believe in the continuity of historic process know that every turning point has had turning points before it, does he not have a scholarly obligation to search for the connection between the examined past and the experienced present?

But perhaps there is yet a third approach (a modest footpath, it may be, yet a real one) that can be taken by the scholar wishing to trace an arc from past to present — one that will, rainbowlike, connect these two poles of his interest.

I choose the image of the rainbow advisedly, for, as both a promise and a stimulus, evanescent yet spanning our field of vision, it represents the joining of the past to the dramatic events of the present.

What has happened to the identity of the Arabs, in which the Algerians share? This question, repeated interminably in cultural and political forums, has recently become a concern of academic research as well. What has kept the Arabs from a new ascendancy in which they might reclaim their proud place in history, a place held by them for hundreds of years? Why have they responded in such self-crippling ways to the challenges of technology and liberal democracy?

What is it that brought the well-known Syrian poet Nizar Kabani to publish his notorious 1995 poem, “When Will the Death of the Arabs Be Announced?” Despite the literary and political scandal caused by this work, and the subsequent attempts to ban the Syrian poet from Egypt, there were courageous Egyptian intellectuals who rallied to Kabani’s defense.

These fundamental questions, which the body of my book refrains from discussing, stand to be illuminated in this introduction by the many-hued and perhaps chimerical rainbow that I propose to sketch from the past, the proper subject of my research, to the contemporary events that hover on its horizon.

Is the covert source of Arab society’s inability to internalize the concept of personal freedom to be found in its attitude toward women? Does the early childhood identification of the Arab son with his docile, marginalized, and sometimes humiliated mother seriously damage his capacity to develop a sense of inner freedom as he matures? I believe that the identification with the passive female lies in the hidden depths of his construction of his masculinity, thus producing a binary passive-aggressive loop.

And why does the memory of colonialism continue to sear the Arab mind more than that of other Asian and African peoples with similar experiences? Is it the Arab world’s relative proximity to the West, or the memory of its former dominance in part of Europe, i.e., in the “lost Paradise” of Andalusia, that makes the pain and frustration of a remembered colonialism so great?

An ethereal, chromodynamic, vanishing and reappearing rainbow may suggest a number of hypotheses….

12.

ON SATURDAY MORNING, the Russian immigrant guard was waiting as agreed for Judge Rivlin and her husband to appear by the iron gate of a small wing of the District Court. Instead of giving them the key, he told them that he intended to keep it and lock the gate behind them until summoned to let them out. Rivlin did not like this arrangement at all. “Suppose you fall asleep?” he asked. “What if one of our telephones isn’t working or you have to go somewhere? Do you want us to spend the day locked up in the courthouse?” In the end, in violation of standard procedure, the guard reluctantly left the key with them, on the condition that they return it to him personally.

And even then, as they were climbing the worn white steps of the old building, once the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Division of the British Mandate in Palestine, the judge, perturbed by her husband’s eagerness to reorganize her drawers, had second thoughts. Perhaps, she suggested, they should put it off for another week.

Rivlin did not even break stride. “Are you crazy?” he said. “Now you think of that?”

He hadn’t been in the courthouse in two years. Not much had changed in the halls of justice. Yet he was curious to have a look at the new electronic system, with its security buzzers and hidden alarm buttons, which had recently been installed outside the judges’ offices and beneath their desks. He took pleasure in using the code his wife had given him to unlock the door to her office. In fact, he announced with a flourish, the protection offered by such a system, if installed in his study, might give his hobbling book a push.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Hagit said.

Her dark, cold chambers had a new feature: the desk and chair, formerly on floor level, were now set up on a low podium. Despite her husband’s populist protest, the judge seemed pleased by her new elevation. Raising the heavy blinds to let in some light, she pointed to some paintings on the walls, salvaged from their old apartment, whose absence Rivlin had not even noticed. At once he proposed hanging Granot’s watercolor alongside them. It might encourage her colleagues on the bench to invest in the paralyzed ex-Supreme Court justice’s work. But Hagit, her loyalty to her old patron notwithstanding, thought that neither the colors nor the subject of The Return of the Little Ones was appropriate for her office. Since it was her husband who liked it so much, she observed, he should hang it in his study, instead of letting it gather dust in their apartment.

She went to water the little flowerpots on the windowsill. Rivlin, eager to form a first impression of the chaos of paper awaiting his sound judgment and firm hand, mounted the podium and sat at her desk. As he had surmised, its drawers were bursting with documents and notices that should never have survived the day of their arrival.

“It simply can’t be that you’re unable to throw out a single piece of paper,” he grumbled.

“But it can be,” Hagit said, with a doleful smile. “And don’t forget. You’re here to make order, not to destroy.”

“True order demands the courage to destroy,” he replied, as though it were his credo. If she was going to haggle with him over every absurd item, they might as well forget about it now.

“But you have to promise to show me what you’re throwing out…”

Having no intention of complying with her request, which would take more time than he had the patience to spend, he murmured a vague answer. He was, after all, not only a historian who understood something about documents, but also a loving and sympathetic husband who trusted himself to decide what his wife had accumulated unnecessarily.

He began by carefully collecting all her trial files and arranging them on a separate shelf. Then he pulled out the top drawer, dumped its contents on the cleared desk, gave its empty bottom a hearty thump to rid it of cobwebs and dust, slipped it noisily back into place, pushed the chair back, and invited his wife to have a seat, while planting an encouraging kiss on her neck. Positioning himself between her and the mountain of papers, he seized on an old protocol of an inconsequential meeting and handed it to her for consideration. No sooner had she taken off her distance glasses to read it than he quickly gathered an armful of commercial brochures, invitations to already-held conferences, professional newsletters from the Judges Guild, old updates of income-tax regulations, weekly court bulletins, and pointless communiqués from the police — all of which, crumpled and compacted, were made to vanish into a wastepaper basket hidden beneath the desk.

“What did you just throw out? Show me!”

“Nothing of value. Perfectly useless drivel that you’ve never read and never will.”

“I want to see it.”

He sighed and pulled a brochure from the basket. “You tell me,” he said scornfully. “Do you need this? Are you in the market for a printer?”

She took the brightly colored advertisement, turned it wonderingly around, and let it drop into his clutches without a word.

It did not take long to eliminate, to his considerable joy and satisfaction, most of the papers on her desk. Only a few were returned to the drawer. Hagit, whose helpless aversion to systematic housecleaning forced her to cooperate, found herself the object of a tender love that gradually changed to an ancient desire. Her naked eyes, staring bewilderedly at the documents that he handed her to distract her from the demolition taking place beneath her nose, reminded him of the distant days when he had fallen in love with a young soldier and future law student and introduced her to his mentor in Jerusalem as a useful appendix to his doctorate. And so, before proceeding to the next drawer, he dropped uncontrollably to his knees, showered her with kisses and caresses, and whispered soft endearments while carefully licking her little earlobe. The thought of seducing his wife here in this room, in which so many anxious litigants had awaited her pronouncements, appealed to him greatly.

His kisses grew more expert and precise. Hagit’s eyes shut. She gave her impassioned husband a limp but warm embrace, which encouraged him to press his campaign by opening several buttons on her blouse. All at once, however, he was pushed sharply away with his own words:

“Are you crazy? Now?”

“Why not?” The idea excited him. “The building is locked, and I have the key. Just think of the good time you’ll have tomorrow, surrounded by all those lawyers, thinking of the good time you had today….”

13.

BUT GOOD TIMES that came from crossing boundaries and mixing worlds were not his wife’s cup of tea, quite apart from the fact that ever since she’d returned from her judicial junket a minority of one, her self-confidence and good nature were gone. He was thus compelled to pull out the next drawer and dump its contents too on the desk, where they were revealed to consist largely of legal circulars and official announcements. It was hopeless to conduct a separate argument about each. The trick was to convince her, in a gentle appeal to reason, that each document had its neatly catalogued double in the court library across the street. And since there was no need of it there either, why not donate the entire collection to the law library of the university for the greater enlightenment of its students?

Hagit thought it over and agreed. She even found a large plastic bag into which to put everything.

They were down to the third drawer. Out of its dense maelstrom innocently fell the invitation to Granot’s exhibition.

“Tell me,” Rivlin sighed, shredding the invitation into little pieces, “what will you do when I die?”

“What?”

“Who will subdue the chaos for you then?”

To his surprise, his death announcements no longer alarmed her.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find ourselves another husband.”

“But suppose he’s not as talented and efficient as this one.”

“We’ll train him. Never fear.”

He smiled, taken aback by her fighting mood yet determined to maintain his posthumous reputation.

“And if your new husband protests, quite rightly, that it isn’t his job, what will you do then? Ask your typist?”

“I told you. It’s not her job either.”

“Then what? You’ll be lost.”

“Why?” She refused to accept the bitter fate foreseen for her. “I can change. What makes you think I can’t arrange my own desk? I only let you do it because I know how much you enjoy ordering me around.”

“I enjoy ordering you around?” He laughed at the affront. “Really? What, exactly, do you think I get out of it? And who could order you around, even if he wanted to?”

His enthusiasm for the task waning, he hurried to the adjacent courtroom to look for another basket before their half-joking, half — deadly serious exchange could make him despair of the remaining papers on her desk.

He had always liked passing through the narrow archway that led from a corner of her office into the dark, windowless interior of the courtroom — which, though not large, had a solemn and dignified air. Going straight to the bench, which rose massively above the rest of the cool, dimly lit room, he surveyed from the heights of justice the dock, the witness stand, and the counsels’ table while deliberating in the Sabbath silence what verdict to hand down. He groped for the newly installed alarm button at his feet. It was there, shiny and ready for use. He fingered it before picking up the old wastepaper basket that stood beside it.

“How do you like it up there?”

She was standing by the witness stand, her hair mussed, a bit childish-looking from his vantage point on high.

“There’s definitely something appealing about being able to look down on everyone.”

“But only if you’re prepared to give them your undivided attention. That’s something you’re incapable of.”

“It depends on who it is.”

“Anyone. Everyone.”

“I’d give my attention to any person who was getting at the real truth, not just at some dry legal definition of it. I have endless patience for the truth. That’s why I can’t stand being stranded halfway toward it, either in my research or in my life.”

“Stranded how?”

“I’m thinking of Ofer.”

“Why on earth Ofer?”

“I just am. He’s only an example. We’re stuck with no understanding of what happened…”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not we understand. As long as he does.”

“But he doesn’t. That’s what you can’t accept. You’d rather delude yourself. If Ofer understood why his marriage fell apart, he’d be free. It’s that which gives him no peace. I’m worried about him, not myself. But who knows? Maybe now something will change…”

He caught himself, conscious of having said too much.

“Why now?” The alerted judge regarded her husband from the witness stand.

“It was just a thought.”

“No one ‘just’ thinks anything. What made you say ‘now’?”

“I just did. It doesn’t matter.”

“Everything matters. What were you thinking of? Her father’s death?”

“I suppose. That too.”

“But how is Ofer supposed to know about it?”

“How? That’s obvious. Everything gets known in the end.”

“Tell the truth. Did you tell him?”

“I don’t think so… I mean, I may have mentioned something without meaning to.”

“No one mentions anything without meaning to. Stop being afraid and tell me honestly. It’s not so terrible. Did you tell Ofer that Galya’s father died? Yes or no?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Even though we decided you wouldn’t.”

“You decided. I never agreed with you. Ask my sister. I have a right to my own opinion.”

“Of course you have a right. But you also have an obligation to tell me what you do. I’m your partner. We have to trust each other.”

“So I happened to forget.”

“You didn’t forget. And it didn’t just happen. You hid it from me. Maybe you asked Ofer to hide it, too.”

“I would never do that.”

“Why not? If you were afraid I might know, you could have done anything. Watch it, Yochi. Tell the truth. I can easily call Ofer and ask him. Don’t stoop to making me do that.”

“Who’s stooping?”

“Then tell me what you told him.”

“I suppose I was afraid. I didn’t want to upset you. Maybe it’s time, once and for all, to understand why I have to fear you.”

“You have to fear me? Who needs your fear? You should love me, not fear me. What good is being afraid? If you are, it’s because you’re a coward. And a liar to boot.”

“Don’t talk to me that way. I’m warning you. Watch what you say.”

“But I can’t help it. I’m so mad at you.”

His eyes now accustomed to the dim light, he stared at the wife who was upping the stakes.

“You’ve lost all sense of proportion. What are you making such a big deal of this for?”

“I’ll tell you for what. For the truth. And I want to know it. Stop trying to wriggle out of it and tell me exactly what you meant when you said just now that, after Hendel’s death, something might change with Ofer. What does Ofer have to do with Hendel?”

“Nothing. I just thought that, since he sent her a condolence note, they might be in touch again.”

“Who told you he sent her a condolence note?”

“Nobody told me. Stop cross-examining me. I assume that he sent her a note. It would have been appropriate.”

“You told him to do it!”

“I didn’t tell him anything. And suppose I did? He’d have done what he wanted to, anyway. If he sent her a note, that’s what he felt like doing. It’s his right. He’s not heartless like you.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’ll call you what I want. You started this. What have I done to you?”

“Tell the truth. That’s all I’m asking. The whole truth. It’s not as hard as all that.”

“I’m not a defendant in your court.”

“It has nothing to do with my court. I’m your wife. I’m open with you about everything. And you keep things from me like a coward.”

“I don’t understand you. What right do you have to be angry with Ofer for sending Galya a condolence note when you know he’s still neurotically attached to her?”

“Don’t change the subject. It’s not Ofer, it’s you. I’m asking you plainly. What did you say to him, and what do you know, and what are you up to?”

“Who says I have to be up to anything to encourage him to send his ex-wife a condolence note? But I suppose that’s the kind of reasoning I should expect from someone who can’t even fry an egg without burning it.”

“Stick to the point. You went to the hotel, against my advice, to pry, under the pretext of a condolence call.”

“No, I didn’t. I went there with no such thing in mind. If I mentioned the divorce to Galya, that’s only natural. You, if anyone, should know how torn up I was by it. So I happened to mention it, so what? It’s my right.”

“Everything just happens with you. You happened to do this, you happened to do that. But you didn’t happen to do anything. You’re a lot more calculating than you let on. You’re not really naive at all.”

“Why should I be naive?”

“You shouldn’t be. You should be honest. Above all with me. Now tell me what you know. He sent her a letter. Did she answer it?”

“I don’t know. Ask Ofer.”

“I will. But now I’m asking you. Did Galya answer his condolence letter? What do you know?”

“She probably did.”

“What is ‘probably’? What kind of answer is that? Speak the truth, man! Let’s have it. I’m your wife. What are you afraid of? Even if you were foolish enough to try putting them in touch again, which could only cause more pain, that’s not a crime. The crime is not sharing it with the one person who shares everything with you. Please, don’t force me to squeeze the truth out of you bit by bit. You know I can do it. Be honest and open. Tell me what happened. What have you done? What have you said?”

“All right. All right. Just stop threatening me as though I were a traitor or a murderer.”

“You are. You’ve betrayed me. You’ve murdered the trust between us.”

“Don’t exaggerate. The truth is more mundane than you imagine.”

“Then come down from there and talk to me. What are you doing up there anyway? Since when does the defendant sit on the bench?”

14.

HE CAME DOWN from the bench, hurt and sulking. But he was not going back to her office. He refused to have this out on her turf. They would talk right here, in the courtroom. He stopped by the counsels’ table, keeping his distance from her, looking away. Although the dim light seemed well suited to a confession, he wasn’t sure how to work his way into it. Somehow, though, he did, tersely and concisely, even telling her about his second visit to the hotel, although carefully skipping over his imaginary illness.

She listened sternly, pale with anger.

“So you lied to me when you said you went to see the Agnon House.”

“I didn’t lie. I had always wanted to visit it with you. You refused because you were boycotting the neighborhood. So what are you saying — that I have to live with your sick, childish pride forever? And the Agnon House really is closed on Saturdays, which is why I decided to go to the hotel.”

“Don’t which-is-why me. Stop playing games. Nothing which-is-whyed you to go to the hotel. You did it on purpose, behind my back — and, worst of all, behind Ofer’s. I would have thought you had enough self-respect not to beg that girl to tell you what nobody wants you to know, what you have no right to know. It’s unbelievable what a pathetically stubborn man you are.”

“Fine, so I’m stubborn about getting at the truth. I’m willing to make a fool of myself to do it, personally and intellectually. So what? What have I done wrong? Maybe that’s the reason I’ve got as far as I have in life.”

“But we’re not putty in your hands to be twisted and molded for your pathetic investigations. We’re talking about Ofer. He’s your son. You owe him some respect. The minute you want something, you lose all inhibition.”

“Listen. If this is the style you’re going to continue in, we can stop now and go home.”

“First you’ll hear me out.”

“You can talk to the wall, not to me. Leave me out of this. You’ve gone totally berserk. They should never have raised your desk and chair and given you all those buzzers. You’re getting awfully high-and-mighty. Well, not with me! You can be like that with your murderers and rapists. I’ve had it. Just shut up! This is the last time I help you to do anything. I have to be crazy to be wasting my time on you. I want silence from now on! Do you hear me? Silence! Not one word.”

She stepped up to him and grabbed his hand, her eyes boring into him, and slapped him hard in an outburst of fury.

Dumbfounded, he seized the hand that hit him and twisted it without letting go.

“Now calm down. What are you…”

“Let go of me! Do you hear me?”

“I’m not letting go until you calm down and say you’re sorry.”

“Never!”

She tried to straighten up. His iron grip kept her doubled over.

“Watch out, Yochi. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into by assaulting a judge in a courtroom. I can press an alarm and have the police here in no time. You’ll be locked up in solitary before you know it. It will be a week before you can open your lying mouth to anyone….”

“You’ll have me locked up?” He laughed wildly. “It’s you they’ll lock up. Who hit who?”

“It doesn’t matter. No one will believe a word you say.”

“Then I might as well give them a reason to lock me up. Here’s for the slap you gave me.”

He yanked her up to give her a symbolic slap of his own. But he was too careful not to hurt her. It gave her a chance, with a savage litheness he had never seen in her, to snatch his bifocals and make off with them.

“Be careful!” he cried. “You know they’re my only pair.”

“Then stand still and don’t move until the police come.”

“You bully! Who do you think you are? This is your last warning before I ruin you. Give me back my glasses. They’re my only pair.”

“I’ll give them back if you promise to stand still.”

“What for? You swung at me.”

“You deserved it. You’re a liar and a coward. There’s nothing I hate more.”

“Be careful with my glasses. You’re bending them. I don’t have another pair. If anything happens to them, you’re ruined for good. I’ll smash your computer, and you’ll be fired from your job.”

“You can smash what you like. You’re going to jail anyway.”

“Hagit, I want my glasses!”

“Stand still and calm down.”

“Bully! Give me my glasses!”

He lunged at her. She backed away, light on her feet and wild, gripping the bifocals with both hands.

Once (he had been told by her sister), after a fight with the father she loved, she had broken all his work tools.

“If you don’t give me back my glasses this minute, I’m going to go to your office and destroy your files.”

“You can destroy all you want. There are copies of everything.”

“Aren’t you ashamed to be dragging us down to this level?”

“I’m so mad at your lies that I don’t care if I never see you again.”

He lunged again, his vision blurred, and grabbed her hair. She screamed, struggling to free herself, bent his glasses into a shapeless mass, and smashed them against the witness stand. He bent to retrieve them while she fled to her chambers through the little door and locked it.

15.

WITH THE REMAINS of his bifocals jammed hopelessly into his pocket, he hurried out of the courthouse and locked the gate behind him. Although he was angry enough to keep her locked up for a while, he was afraid she might hit the alarm button and make a scene. And so, returning the key to the guard, he asked him to open the gate for the judge, who still had work to do, in half an hour. The Russian took the key with a sigh of relief. He would be sure, he said, to get to the gate on time. “But you’ve got blood on your face, Mister,” he said. He brought Rivlin a small mirror in which the Orientalist saw a long, thin scratch on his forehead. As in his childhood fights with his sister, his first instinct was to run back and retaliate. Yet he no longer had the key, and the Russian was too curious about his cut. Forswearing immediate revenge, he walked to his car and drove carefully, through the quiet and blurry Sabbath streets, to his office at the university, the best place he could think of to abscond to. Barred even from reading his mail without his glasses, he took his old key, opened the new department head’s office, and sank irately into the large, comfortable armchair purchased during his tenure.

Yet after a while, his worry for the trapped judge got the better of him. Phoning her chambers and getting no answer, he tried her at home. Her “hello,” quiet and friendly as if nothing had happened, told him that — as usual — she had recovered surprisingly quickly. He hung up at once, knowing that a prolonged silence was his best weapon against someone for whom conversation was life itself.

She knew it was him, of course. Soon the stubborn ring of the telephone inside his closed office reached him from the other end of the corridor. Confident, however, that it would never occur to her that he had taken refuge in his old room, he relaxed and settled back in the armchair. The photographs of Akri’s adorable grandchildren bothered him less without his glasses.

He sat silently for a few minutes. His naked eyes felt huge. It was the first time he could remember being unable to read or write. The freedom this gave him was both liberating and humiliating. Going over to the large window, he studied the reflection of his cut. Although superficial, it was a good one that would take time to heal. A powerful sense of lust, aroused by the unexpected wildness of the woman who had attacked him, vied with his ignominy and thirst for revenge. Oh yes, he thought. The punishment of silence will work best if I abscond for a while.

Before deciding which of his friends was most suitable for a Saturday morning visit, he phoned his old mentor to get some feedback on his latest scholarly thoughts. The sound of his voice was a cause for joy in Jerusalem. “Where have you been?” Hannah complained. “You only come to see us when Carlo is sick. As soon as he’s well, we don’t exist for you.”

“Carlo is well?” Rivlin teased. “I don’t believe it. There must be some mistake.”

“Shhh!” Tedeschi chortled, joining in. “I’m not exactly well, but who has time to be sick when the Orientalists have latched onto my old Turks again? Ever since Stephen Jones and his gang at Oxford started spreading their new theory that all the faults of the Arabs can be blamed on Ottoman rule, the whole world has been beating a path to my door. I’m the latest academic sensation. My old book, the one you were examined on, has been rediscovered, and since nobody has the patience to read it, everybody wants me to tell them what’s in it. Believe me, Yochi, it’s your luck up there in Haifa that you haven’t been taken over yet by the new historians who are out to prove that every venal idiot and corrupt ruler in the Arab world was a victim of imperialism. I swear, they should be called the ancient historians, not the new ones. Why stop with the Ottomans? Why not blame it on the Byzantines or the Romans? Listening to them makes me sorrier than ever that you’ve let the Terror in Algeria hold up that book of yours. Stop being so obsessed by it. If you could come to Jerusalem tomorrow, I’d take you — for your sake, not mine — to hear a paper I’m giving at a political-science conference. You’d see I’ve become a new historian myself. In fact, you’d understand that your Algerians aren’t killing each other off, God forbid, because they’re nasty-tempered, but because the Turks oppressed them three hundred years ago. So why get worked up over it, my friend?… Ha! They’re good for a laugh, these brand-new Orientalists. How I adore Stephen Jones, that imbecile of an Englishman at St. Antony’s with his high table. High twaddle! O men of lovely Oxford! Stick your pipes up your arses and tell us more….”

Rivlin burst into merry laughter. The old man hadn’t sounded so youthfully wicked in ages.

“What time are you giving your paper?”

“At eight in the evening. Why? Is there any chance of your coming?”

“I would come just to hear you. I really do miss the two of you. But eight o’clock is too late for me. I’ve broken my glasses and can’t drive at night.”

“But why go back to Haifa at night?” Hannah Tedeschi asked, thrilled by his unexpected declaration of longing. “You can sleep at our place. It will give us a chance to chat. If you’d like, I’ll even let you look at a few new translations. And don’t worry, Carlo’s nightly coughing fits have stopped….”

16.

HE ABSCONDED UNTIL three o’clock. Then, returning in a sullen mood to the duplex, he found the kitchen clean, the dishes washed, and the pots of food cold on the stove. He couldn’t tell if Hagit had eaten lunch or was waiting for him. Making it clear that he wasn’t ready to end the hostilities, he stepped briskly into the bedroom, grabbed a blanket and a pillow without stopping to see whether she was sleeping or merely resting in their bed, and went to lock himself up in his study. Placing the remains of his broken glasses by the computer, where they resembled a surrealistic totem meant to ward off a premature reconciliation, he pulled out the convertible couch, took off his pants and shoes, and glanced instinctively across the street looking for the old woman, who had recently lost weight.

The expected knock was not long in coming. It was followed by an invitation, in a clear but severe voice, to come out and “talk it all over.” He didn’t answer. Hands behind his head, he lay staring at the ceiling.

“Please. Don’t sulk like a child.” The door handle rattled. “Open the door and let’s talk like two grown-ups. Believe me, I’m just as mad as you are. But I promise to control myself and explain calmly why you deserved what happened this morning. Come on out and listen. Don’t be such a coward…”

He turned to the wall and pulled the pillow over his ears, feeling how, despite his determination to keep silent, one more well-aimed sentence might draw his answering fire. Yet her voice reached him anyway.

“I’m sorry about the glasses, but not about hitting you. Not at all. Come on out and I’ll explain.”

He shut his eyes tight.

“Don’t play the martyr just because your glasses are bent a little. You’ll have them straightened tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can find an old pair. Open the door and I’ll help you to look for them….”

He grinned, carefully gauging the scratch on his forehead. For sure! She, who always had to ask him where everything was, was going to find his old glasses. He burrowed deeper into his silence, surprised to feel it growing stronger.

“I really am sorry about the glasses, even though it’s no tragedy, neither for you nor for the Middle East, if you don’t write anything for a day. But believe me, you had that slap coming. It was a moral act. And if you open the door now, you’ll get another one…”

As though bitten by a snake, he leaped to his feet with fists clenched, only to restrain himself at the last moment. He was pleased to note how, in spite of everything, his love and desire for this woman were unabated.

Still, if he was to avoid the new quarrel that a response would provoke, which could only lead to their making up before he wanted to, he had to fortify his defenses. And so, switching on his computer, he made it play music so loud that it not only drowned out the woman behind the door but brought the ghost across the street scurrying to her terrace, from which, gray and unkempt, she turned uncertain eyes for the first time in his direction.

He drew the white lace curtain to shut her out. It was the same curtain that, laundered for his sister-in-law’s visit, had made him think of a bridal gown. He turned down the music and stretched out on the bed again, shutting the eyes that were excused from intellectual effort. A thought was running through his head.

It’s true, went the thought, that my love for this woman has only grown greater with the years. Each day it’s more unconditional than the day before. But if I don’t sometimes put my foot down, how is our melancholy son, our flesh-and-blood image who has followed in our footsteps and learned from our love and gone beyond it, ever going to hate the woman who wrecked his marriage, or at least get over her instead of just missing her more and more?…

He switched off the music, covered himself with the blanket, and made himself rest for a while before emerging, careful to avoid any trap. None had been set. Hagit had stepped out, leaving him a note that she had gone to the hairdresser’s and that he absolutely must wait for her to return, since there was an important new development they had to talk about.

Her lacerated husband, however, who was finding the world not only blurry but increasingly remote, did not want to listen to one more reprimand or scolding, no matter how subtle or sweetened by a request for forgiveness. Putting on his sneakers, he scrawled in large, baleful letters:

“I’ve gone out for a couple of hours. Our plans for the movies tonight are off. I don’t want to talk to you when I come back. Saying you’re sorry won’t help. I’ve just begun to fight.”

He was soon strolling along the beach in a southerly direction. A golden halo enveloped the ancient crusaders’ castle at Atlit on its spit of land sticking into the sea. Peace talks were out of the question after a single skirmish. A resolute campaign of silence was called for. Having been punished for his lies and concealments with a slap and the breaking of his glasses, he was now entitled — no, obliged — to stalk the truth that haunted him and stood in the way of his son. Just let anyone try to stop him. They might as well try to stop a ghost. This much freedom his fight with his wife had gained for him.

He came to a halt, his helpless eyes scanning the fuzzy sea. It was not only a father’s right to investigate his offspring’s suffering, it was his duty, he thought, turning back northward toward the lights on the Carmel. Youngsters, wet from the sea, walked on the sand. You’ll see, Rivlin whispered to his beloved. I have the strength and the patience to search on in the dark. There will be no surrender.

He came home in high spirits to find her barefoot on the couch, conversing with her sister beyond the sea. Smiling at him brightly, she signaled him to wait so that they might discuss the new development. But however clear it was that in the long run his love for her would compel him to submit to her judicial logic, this was all the more reason to abscond a while longer while their war of silence went on.

He went to his study and locked the door. From behind it came first anger, then supplication. He knew he was scandalously jeopardizing something old and precious — and since his heart would never stop loving or desiring her, he chose to imagine that the revolving chair by his desk was a wheelchair and that, right arm rigid, leg limp, paralyzed torso twisted to one side, he was, like the former Supreme Court justice who loved her, too, the victim of a stroke.

Yet at midnight, on his way to the bathroom, discovering her wide-awake in her alcove by the library, in which she was working on her dissent without looking up at him, he realized that she, too, was now at war. He shivered. Yet it was too late to retreat. Without a word he returned to his study and crawled into bed, this time without locking the door.

17.

IN THE MORNING, he carefully laid the broken pieces of his bifocals on the optician’s counter while inventing a story about their flying off his face and being run over by a car as he sprinted to cross a street against the light.

“By a minimum of two cars, I would say,” the old optician remarked skeptically. Without asking permission, he swept the remnants of the tall tale into the trash. Testing Rivlin’s eyes before ordering new lenses, he discovered that the Orientalist’s vision, both near and far, had deteriorated.

Although the new bifocals would not be ready for several days, Rivlin turned down, in the spirit of the warpath, the offer of a temporary pair. This did not prevent him, however, from going to his office at the university to hunt for an old pair there. Yet the drawers of his desk were bare, and in his old office he was told by Ephraim Akri that there were no extra glasses there either. The new department head did, however, have a reserve pair of his own, which he offered to lend Rivlin in the event that the two Orientalists were similarly myopic. But the assistant professor’s steel-rimmed spectacles only made the world even fuzzier. Content to renew his exemption from reading and writing, which left him only the option of conversation, he thanked his junior colleague, sank into his old armchair, and related the latest exploits of the Jerusalem polymath. If Tedeschi was joining the Turkish wing of the new historians, who blamed the present on the heroes of the past, he must indeed be physically and intellectually resurrected. Actually, Rivlin said, he was giving a paper tonight in Jerusalem. Should the assistant professor wish to drive this evening to the capital, he would find in the full professor, who was setting out by bus that afternoon, a willing passenger and debating partner for the trip home.

Although Akri was not inclined to absolve anyone in the Middle East of blame for anything, the temptation of having Rivlin to argue with all the way from Jerusalem to Haifa, perhaps even to win over to his side, was great. He therefore promised to do his best to attend the lecture, even though he rejected its conclusions a priori.

A lecture by Tedeschi was hardly a reason to travel to Jerusalem, let alone to sleep away from home. But before his inevitable reconciliation with his wife, Rivlin wished to intensify his silence and abscond more seriously — something best done in a far but familiar place where he could let others do the talking. What did he have to lose? He returned home, emptied his briefcase of its books and notes, replaced them with his toilet articles, some underwear, and a pair of pajamas, and left a new, dryly factual note on the table.

He had not taken a long bus ride in ages. Unable to read or even sleep, he let old and new thoughts run through his mind and arrived worn-out and glum, early that afternoon, at the political-science conference on Mount Scopus. He was greeted with warmth and raised eyebrows. Tedeschi, he was told, had been taken that morning to the emergency room. It was not at all clear whether he would be reading his paper.

“Back to the emergency room?” Rivlin exclaimed, with genuine sorrow. “And I came to Jerusalem especially to hear him! What’s got into him? I can’t believe the old fox is scared of political scientists.”

The political scientists smiled at the barb. “You see,” one of them said, “as bland and superficial as we’re thought to be, we, too, can be scary. But I know we don’t frighten you, Professor Rivlin. And if the old man isn’t released in time, you surely won’t let his audience down — not when you, his heir apparent, are with us and can take his place…”

Surprised and even stirred to be so matter-of-factly referred to in such terms, Rivlin nevertheless turned down the offer.

“Take his place? How? With what? Besides, my glasses are broken.”

“Who needs glasses to speak? Do your usual thing. Tell us what you know and what you feel.”

Now he was offended. “What do my feelings have to do with it? Is that what you take me for — an understudy with a gift of the gab?”

“Perish the thought! But anyone familiar with your publications knows that you keep busy in the kitchen even when you’re not serving a meal. The smells of cooking tantalize us all….”

“Tantalizing smells aren’t scholarship. Precision and documentation are.”

“But who cares about documents any more?” the political scientists protested. “Don’t be an old fogy. People want provocative challenges, paradoxes. We’ve made a special effort to include your Middle East in the program tonight so as not to be accused of dealing in magnificent theories while leaving the mess on the ground to you. Honestly, Rivlin, if Tedeschi stays in the hospital, we’ll be left with a bad hole in our after-dinner program.”

“I’ll think about it,” he murmured. “But that’s not a promise, so don’t count on me.”

He entered the auditorium, in which a rising young star from the University of the Negev was juggling some highly abstract and cerebral notions in order to arrive at some quite simple and self-evident conclusions. In the row ahead of him he noticed a small, middle-aged man in an old gray fedora busily taking notes. Stepping up to him after the lecture, Rivlin tapped him cautiously on the shoulder.

“Mr. Suissa?”

“Oh, Professor Rivlin. You’re here too.”

“But what are you doing here?”

“What am I doing? As always, listening and learning. What did you think of the lecture? Pretty deep, eh?”

“I hope you received the material I returned to you.”

“Everything arrived in good shape. It’s back on my son’s desk.”

“But why keep it on his desk? Give it to the National Library. There are things there that are too valuable to be lost.”

“Why should anything be lost?” Suissa said. “Every word collected by my son of blessed memory is sacred to me. I’m taking good care of it. God willing, I hope to carry on with his work.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve been studying the material he left behind, trying to understand what such a brilliant man — may God avenge his blood — was looking for. Have you noticed, Professor, that, besides all the journalism, those old Arabic newspapers of his have stories and poems, too?”

Rivlin smiled. “I didn’t know you knew Arabic.”

“I don’t know it well, but I get the gist of it. I can make myself understood, too. I go slowly when I read and use good dictionaries. Just sitting at his desk makes me feel his inspiration and guidance. I use his computer too. Sometimes I even write on it….”

“What sort of things?” Rivlin asked, with an anxious smile, as if the man in the gray fedora were about to steal his thunder.

“I type his old notes and manuscripts. I try to imagine where his thoughts were taking him.”

“Interesting. Very interesting. Could you send some of it to me?”

“Right now it’s all in the computer, Professor.”

“Don’t you have a printer?”

“It’s old and doesn’t work very well. Eventually, God willing…”

“Listen. Why don’t I come to your place and read it on-screen?”

“It would be an honor and a pleasure, Professor. Anytime.”

“How about now?” The idea of plugging into another ghost took the Orientalist’s fancy. “Your place isn’t far from here.”

“But what about the next lecture? Don’t you want to hear it?”

“Your interpretation of your son’s ideas, Mr. Suissa, means more to me than any lecture.”

Startled by the compliment, the man took off his hat, wiped his bald head, and declared:

“All right, Professor. Let’s go. I’m with you.”

The little apartment on the edge of the desert had been further colonized by the dead scholar’s parents. The behavior of the widow and her two orphans, worrisomely anarchistic on his previous visit, now seemed deadly serious. The same little boy who had run affectionately to greet him stood somberly to the side, a dark skullcap on his head. Seeing Rivlin bend down to his baby brother crawling on the floor, he leaped to the infant’s defense and sank his teeth into the visitor.

“It’s nothing,” Rivlin laughed, rubbing the bite. “Please, Mr. Suissa. Let the boy be.”

But it was too late. The little grandfather was already chasing his grandson furiously around the room. Catching up with him by the bathroom door, he hit him hard. The boy threw down his skullcap and spit on it before vanishing into the bathroom without a word.

They went to the bedroom. With an almost religious reverence, the bereaved father conjured up the dead scholar’s thoughts on the green screen of the old computer. Unfortunately, Rivlin apologized, he did not have his glasses. But if Mr. Suissa would remove his hat, which was hiding the screen, the Orientalist would try to follow while listening to a summary such as he was used to hearing from Samaher.

There was a touching innocence in the attempt of the North African — born Suissa senior, an uneducated and academically inexperienced official in the municipal waterworks department, to read the forever silenced mind of his dead son, which he believed he could fathom by virtue of his own paternity. He had ignored, Rivlin gathered, everything in the dead scholar’s texts having to do with tribal and class conflict, French colonialism, and debates about Algerian identity, in order to concentrate — culling his evidence from the stories and poems alone — on popular attitudes toward Allah, the God of the desert who had come to curb the savagery and ignorance of its inhabitants.

The Orientalist, his senses piqued by the widow’s clothes, which were scattered on the double bed beside the computer, was amazed to see how intense were the religious preoccupations of the stories that Samaher had read for their social content alone. He felt a sudden affection for this man, a religious Jew himself, who, no doubt unconsciously, was seeking to overcome his craving for vengeance by exploring the divinity in the Arab soul.

“Actually, Mr. Suissa,” the Orientalist said, “I think you may be onto something. The strong religious underpinnings everywhere, even at the time of the secular Algerian revolution… it fits in well with my own line of thought.”

He felt a touch as light as a caress.

The young widow, wearing a flowery dress, had come home. Overjoyed to find the professor there, she invited him to dine with them. Rivlin, however, begged off. He had come to Jerusalem not to work on her husband’s material but to hear a lecture by an old and beloved mentor who had paid a visit to the emergency room that morning with no knowledge of when he would leave. As fascinating as he found her father-in-law’s research, he had to be off. But he would surely come again soon.

Mr. Suissa, greatly cheered by Rivlin’s interest, switched off the computer, put on his fedora, and offered to drive Rivlin to the hospital. Yet the young widow, chagrined by her visitor’s hasty departure, insisted on driving him herself. Rudely pushing away the son who clung to her, pleading to come with them, she escorted Rivlin out of the apartment in the manner of someone who had long wanted to be alone with him.

18.

AND IN FACT Mrs. Suissa stopped the car after a few blocks, switched off the motor, and began lamenting, as though to an old friend, about how hard and complicated her life was. Ever since her husband’s tragic death, his parents had refused to leave her alone. Not that he had been an easy man himself. Yet his great love for her had atoned for his stubborn principles. He adored her so much that he had been almost afraid to touch her.

Rivlin stared down. The young woman, a bleached blond with deeply tanned legs whose polished toenails fidgeted on the stilled pedals of the car, had a sharp, strange fragrance. The street, seen through the windshield, was dusty and gray. Had he absconded or merely been newly impounded? Was this trip to Jerusalem a liberation or just an aggravation? On that wonderful night with the Arab messenger, he had been made to vanish as though by a magic trick. But here, in Jerusalem, without his glasses or his car, who would be his magician?

Perhaps, the young Mrs. Suissa was saying unhappily, the professor knew of some job for her. It could even be in Haifa. Anything to get her away from the siege she was under. Could he, as a gesture to her husband, find her part-time work as a typist or a secretary in his department, something temporary? She wasn’t asking for much. As a terror victim, she received a stipend from the Ministry of Defense. She could come to Haifa without the children and rent a room there. Once she was settled, she would bring them. But first she had to have a foothold, a position at the university. She wanted Professor Rivlin, as an admirer or at least an appreciator of her husband, to take her under his wing.

The tears welled in her eyes at the thought of the man who had adored her to the point of trepidation. Carried away by her emotion, she laid a soft hand on the aging Orientalist’s knee, asking not only for advice and direction, but also for comfort and warmth. She was certain that here in Jerusalem, fenced in by her husband’s parents, she would never find another man.

Rivlin glanced at his watch, unable to make out the time. He nodded and asked the young widow about her own parents.

Her father had died long ago. She and her mother did not get along. Her husband’s parents, on the other hand, had been nice, considerate people until his terrible death had turned them into evil little hedgehogs.

“Hedgehogs?”

Yes. Little, black, prickly things who had moved in with her to keep her children from being exposed to bad influences. Especially hers. They were worried she might give up religion. That was why they sniffed after her everywhere, the two hedgehogs. She flashed Rivlin a charmingly mischievous smile at the image that had occurred to her before her eyes filled with little tears again.

He didn’t need his glasses to see what an ingenue she was. Laying his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the steering wheel, he wondered what kind of wing she was looking for. Was it for a medium through which to contact the ghost of her husband — the young prodigy who, according to the Tedeschis, had sought in an original way to revive the old Orientalism that studied not documents, speeches, protocols, and pronouncements but the literature whose intricate language revealed the secretive Arab soul?

And yet if, by her own admission, this same prodigy had been reduced to adoring her from a safe distance, what, besides frustration, confusion, and neglect, could be expected from her? The tremor of desire he had felt was already gone. He would, he promised, see what he could do to help her, not just for her husband’s sake, but for her own. But on one condition. He looked her in the eye. She must take the children with her. Children must never be abandoned.

Calmed by this, she gave him a long look and started the car. But to his annoyance, instead of dropping him off by the entrance to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, she parked and got out with him, determined to join him on his visit to the emergency room. She wanted, she said, to say hello to Hannah Tedeschi and see how her husband was.

It took Rivlin a while, without his glasses in the bustle of the emergency room, to spot the illustrious polymath sitting on a little terrace in a thin smock, quietly staring at the Judean desert while awaiting the results of his tests.

“I come to Jerusalem especially to hear you lecture, Carlo, and look what you do to me!”

“But there’s nothing wrong with me,” Tedeschi said. “This morning, on our way to the conference, Hannah decided that as long as we were on Mount Scopus, she might as well bring me in for a checkup. Since then we’ve been stuck here. But never mind, I’ll soon be released. You haven’t missed a thing. Your bed is already made. You’ll sleep over, and tomorrow I’ll give the lecture they canceled tonight. You should have brought Hagit.”

“Would you believe that I was asked to fill in for you tonight?”

Tedeschi was alarmed. “To talk about what?”

“About anything. I refused. You know me. I don’t open my mouth without documentation.”

“And quite rightly.” Tedeschi regarded his old student fondly. “Never let these giddy conference organizers talk you into anything. So what if they have a hole in their program? It’s not the end of the world. They can add another course to their dinner. But where are your glasses? Don’t tell me you’re wearing contacts.”

“That will be the day!”

“And who is the young lady you’ve brought with you? Do I know her?”

“You should.” Rivlin introduced Mrs. Suissa, who had been standing quietly by.

The old scholar jumped to his bare feet and embraced the young widow warmly, his white chest showing through the hospital smock. “So it’s you!” he said delightedly. “Just yesterday I read another article of your husband’s. For the first time I fully appreciated the depths he was exploring. I stand behind every word my wife has said about him. His loss was not just yours, but Orientalism’s. Wait and see. The Arabs will yet mourn for him, too.”

19.

THE YOUNG WOMAN perked up. She looked radiantly at Rivlin, as though asking him whether she should add the Jerusalem polymath’s wing to his own.

Just then the white curtain on the window was moved cautiously aside. It was swarthy-headed Ephraim Akri, peering in to ascertain whether he had found the right patient. “What an idiot I am!” Rivlin apologized. “I talked you into coming to Jerusalem and forgot to tell you that Carlo has canceled his appearance in favor of a one-night stand in the emergency room.”

“I haven’t canceled a thing,” the old scholar protested, thrilled to have yet another Orientalist come from afar to pay his respects. “Don’t be nasty, Yochanan. You have no right to judge me until you know what it’s like to be throttled to death at night by your own breathing.”

“Enough of that! Leave the man alone.” The rebuke was Hannah Tedeschi’s. She had just arrived, waving the results of her husband’s tests and his release form.

Although many years had passed since Ephraim Akri’s days as a teaching assistant in Jerusalem, he remained nervous and obsequious in the presence of his old teacher — who, for his part, had nothing but admiration for the religious department head’s elegantly polished Arabic. Now, sure that the keys to his promotion lay more in Jerusalem than in Haifa, Akri asked to see the test results. Using the doctor’s royal “we,” he pronounced with relief:

“Thank God! We’re on the borderline of danger, but not over it.”

An ironic smile crossed the round, childlike face of the released patient as he rose to dress. When he spoke to Akri, who was now searching for his old teacher’s pants and shoes, it was tenderly. “It would be a pity, Ephraim, seeing you’ve come all the way from Haifa, if you missed the lecture tomorrow. Even if you don’t agree with my conclusions, you’ll enjoy hearing how I reach them. And don’t worry about a place to sleep, because we’ll put you next to Rivlin. You can hold a midnight departmental meeting.”

Rivlin took Hannah aside.

“That’s fine with me. By all means take Akri home with you. He’ll drive you in his car. I’m going into town to do some walking and thinking. You needn’t worry about me. If I’m not back by ten, lock the door and go to sleep. I’ll either have thrown in the towel and gone back to my courthouse in Haifa or found somewhere else to sleep in Jerusalem. If I stay and Carlo doesn’t do an encore in the emergency room tomorrow, I’ll be at the lecture, listening to every word.”

And before she could argue or protest, he took his stiff old classmate, the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance, in his arms, gave her a hug and a kiss on each cheek, and bade her a conspiratorial adieu.

He made his way quickly past nurses and medical instruments, certain he could tell the healthy from the sick and locate the exit even without his bifocals. In his haste, he failed to notice the young widow, loath to be abandoned by her protector, running after him.

“Let me drive you,” she implored.

“I’ll take the bus. Your children are waiting for you.” It came out sounding like a reprimand. “Just tell me what bus to take.”

“Screw the goddamn bus!” she swore. “Who needs it?”

He felt her anger melting his resistance. “But I’m going to the other end of town,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll drive you.”

Strapped into his seatbelt beside her, he let her talk while they crossed the city from north to south. Anxious to leave her before reaching the hotel, he pointed to the corner of a small street halfway up the rise to Talpiyot and said, “This is where I get off. Thanks a million.”

Yet she wouldn’t part with him. “Why on the corner? Tell me the house number. I’ll bring you to the door.”

“It’s a short street,” he demurred. “The number doesn’t matter. I’m going to the old Agnon house. They’ve made it into a museum.”

“A museum?” She grabbed at the opportunity. “Why don’t I have a look at it?”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned into the street, parked by the gray old building with its small, barred windows, and got out to investigate. The museum, it appeared, was closed for the day. “Where to now?” she asked, as if she had become, like Rashid, his personal chauffeur. He gave her a hard look.

“Nowhere. I have a meeting right here. Now go home and stop worrying about me.”

Overcoming her curiosity to know whom he was meeting in such an unlikely place, she nevertheless insisted on a peek at the Nobel Prize winner’s backyard. The gate was open. Quickly she disappeared down a narrow path that led past garbage cans and tanks of cooking gas to a hedge of dusty bushes. A restless woman, Rivlin thought. How had her husband ever managed to concentrate? After a few minutes passed and she did not return, he went worriedly to look for her.

The small yard was empty. A large, rough concrete wall, covered with water pipes, blocked one end of it. Apart from a few patches of old, melancholy grass, the ground was paved with plain, cracked floor tiles. Suissa’s widow was seated on a low fence, smoking a cigarette that wreathed her in sad blue smoke. He gave her a friendly nod but kept his distance. Without his glasses, she looked none too distinct. He inquired if she knew who Agnon was.

“Of course. Who doesn’t?”

Cautiously he asked, “Have you ever read anything of his?”

She exhaled a large, perfect smoke ring that floated slowly in his direction. Yes. She had read something or other. Everyone had to in school.

“What story?” he persisted, as though quizzing a student. “What was it called?”

“You’re asking me to remember now?” she replied, bemused. Since her husband’s death, she had forgotten more important things than Agnon’s stories. Her husband had liked Agnon. He had read him a lot. He had once even told her he saw a connection between some of his stories and Arab folklore.

“Agnon and the Arabs?” Rivlin chuckled, struck by the dead scholar’s boldness. “But how can that be?”

She was sure her husband had talked about it. Agnon and the Arabs. The Arabs were always on his mind.

A mixed-up woman, too, Rivlin thought, still careful not to come too close to her. Her husband must also have been a little around the bend. But now, as if his homeless status were written all over him, she turned the tables and questioned him. Suppose the person he was supposed to meet didn’t show up? Where would he go? Where would he eat and sleep? Dr. Hannah Tedeschi had enough on her hands without him.

Rivlin sought to reassure her. “Don’t worry. No man is ever at his wit’s end in the city he grew up in.”

She took a last, deep drag of smoke and ground out her cigarette with the heel of a flimsy shoe. Her earrings tinkled as she stepped toward him, her glance challenging.

“Just tell me one more thing before I go, Professor. But honestly. Do you agree with Professor Tedeschi and his wife that my husband was a genius? Was his death really anyone’s loss but mine?”

The shadow of a distant cloud, floating eastward toward the desert, darkened the Orientalist’s face as he explained that although his own field was Near Eastern history rather than literature or philology, he thought Suissa had been a serious and original scholar.

“Maybe too original for his own good,” she remarked bitterly, surprising Rivlin with the insight.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “But why ask me? Trust Hannah Tedeschi. She’s a very well-read and critical person. It’s hard to get her to say a good word about anyone. If she calls your husband a genius, believe her.”

Despairingly, without removing his hand from her shoulder, she opened the top button of her dress. Above the ivory crevice of her breasts was the tattoo of a face, no larger than a large coin.

She followed his glance, her mouth childishly open in a half-contrite, half-provocative smile.

“I’m confused by everything I hear about him. I’m so upset that I wasn’t nicer to him that I took a picture of him and had it tattooed over my heart. You’d think his parents would have been happy that I wanted to remember him on my own body. But no, they hit the ceiling. And my little boy is mad at me, too.”

The Orientalist bent to examine the tattoo, which touched the swelling outline of a hidden breast. It was strange and frightening. When he was done, Mrs. Suissa calmly rebuttoned her dress and restated her original appeal:

“That’s why I’m asking you and others to think of me. Use your influence. Because even if you didn’t know him, you’re benefiting from his material. Please, get me out of this goddamned city. If you’re afraid that I’ll be a nuisance in Haifa, find work for me at some college up north. I don’t care if it’s in the boondocks. First I’ll go by myself. Then I’ll bring the kids. Don’t worry about it. I’ll never find a man with those hedgehogs hanging around.”

Was this, Rivlin wondered, the place he had wanted to abscond to? The ugly backyard of an author for whom the world’s beauty existed only in language and human relationships? Confident that he was old and reputable enough to behave like his old mentor, who had embraced with the naturalness of a father this confused woman blown out of orbit by the bomb that killed her husband, he felt her slender body relax as he promised to do his best. Even had she meant to invite him to a different adventure, she kept within bounds and did nothing more to tempt him.

20.

ALTHOUGH YOU WILL never surrender your love, this is not the time to surrender to it. You know how hurtful your absconding is and how much resentment is building up against you. But if that’s what is needed to free the stubborn heart that is chained to the place you are in now, you’re prepared to add still more to the injury.

The daylight slowly abandons the desert, casting copper sparkles on its way to the Dead Sea. You stroll through the hilly neighborhood, in no particular hurry, even though the hotel summons you with its unanswered questions. You bide your time and wait for the twilight to turn to darkness. Only then will you make your third visit, which must remain forever sealed in your heart.

Is there any reason to hope that the truth that has eluded you in daylight will reveal itself by night? Is the old promise of a room still good even though the promiser is gone?

You approach in a roundabout way from the rear and enter the big garden, in which, you are surprised to see, there’s no one. You pass by the tables scattered around the gazebo in the yellow light of the glittering pool, your heart twinging with the memory of a wedding held in vain. It’s not just the garden that is empty. The hotel, too, is dark and deserted.

But at least, you think, grandly handing the clerk at the reception desk your ID, there will be a room. At first you don’t understand why he smiles without looking at it. Then he explains that, even if no guests are in evidence at this early hour of the evening, the entire staff — clerks, waiters, cooks, and chambermaids — is on standby for a full house. The name of each guest is on a place card on a table in the dining room, next to the key to his room.

21.

“AH, PROFESSOR!” The maître d’ hurried over. “This time you’re out of luck. The heart that brought you back to see Galya did not know that she and her mother have gone abroad on vacation.”

Rivlin shook the sturdy Arab’s hand. Although he had been looking forward to another tête-à-tête with his ex-daughter-in-law, he was nevertheless not put out by the news. “Ma’alesh,”^* he said. “This time I didn’t come just for her. I’m stuck tonight in Jerusalem. Fi odeh r’hiseh minshani?”^†

“Odeh? Il-leileh? Hon?^‡ Oh, my!” exclaimed the gray-haired Fu’ad, who was resplendent in a black suit and bow tie. “You’ve forgotten it’s high season. As honored as we would be to have you, you’d have to be a Christian, an American, and a member of an organized group to stand a chance of finding a room here in midsummer.”

“Odeh janbi, zghiri, behimmish.”^§

“There’s nothing, Professor. I swear to God. Everything is filled up. You could be the size of a mouse and I still couldn’t find a spare hole for you. Imagine, bas ma tihkish la’hadda,^* we’re even putting up guests in Mrs. Hendel’s apartment. And Tehila, though she isn’t feeling well, will have to give up a room, too. You’ll see the stampede begin in a few minutes. Ten busloads are on their way from the airport.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s called success. There’s nothing I can do about it. We’re very successful, Professor. Success will kill us all in the end. As good at the pilgrim trade as the late Mr. Hendel was, Tehila has doubled our occupancy in a few months. And she hasn’t even made any big changes. It’s all in the details. For example, there’s now free seafood at the buffet, and we pick up the tab for the cable car at Masada. We have two new Christian channels on cable TV, too. The Christians are crazy about this place. And we’ve done it without increasing the staff. Tehila gave everyone a raise, and u’sirna abidha.^† What more can I tell you? She has her father’s talent and brains without his heart.”

“Where’s her brother?”

“Tehila has — what’s the expression? — kicked him upstairs. She sent him and his family to America to be agents for the hotel. It isn’t nice to say, but it was her way of getting rid of him. That’s life. She and her father, may he rest in peace, were thick as thieves. She never left his side. Irfet kul ishi,^‡ she stuck her nose everywhere. That’s why, when he died, she grabbed the reins right away, u’udrub, hiyeh sarat al fars.§^§ Who can stand up to her? Her poor mother, you may remember, was always a weak, spoiled woman who kept to herself and was treated like a princess by her husband. Now that he’s gone, she only wants to collapse, even though I do my best to keep her going. And Galya — I don’t have to tell you about Galya. Who doesn’t love Galya? Mara n’zifeh u’mumtazeh.^∥ God be praised, she’s pregnant now.”

“She is?” He gave a start. “In what month?”

“What month?” The maître d’ smiled and spread his arms. “You’ll have to ask her on your next condolence call. Or else figure it out yourself, because she’s due in the middle of January, if I’m not mistaken. She must have got pregnant in the spring, right after her father died. It’s eerie. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say it was Mr. Hendel’s spirit coming back. But you, Professor — you’ll say that’s all a lot of nonsense.”

Rivlin glanced at the big garden and at the gazebo surrounded by lanterns, nostalgic for his first condolence call, which seemed to have taken place years ago.

“Why nonsense, Fu’ad? Today everything goes. Reincarnation is big with the young folks. As long as no one gets hurt by it.”

“You’re so right, Professor. Inteh bit’ul hada kul hal’ad hilu.^* What I was thinking was, it’s only natural for a father’s death to — what’s the word? — b’ghazel…. Right. To stimulate the daughter to be a mother. And you know, Galya isn’t that young. She never gave your poor Ofer a chance. Believe me, my friend, I may be a stranger to you, and an Arab in addition, but it grieves me that you and I won’t have a grandson together. I always said to myself, The Professor, he’s a good man, he’s never jealous. Galya is a sensitive girl. She deserves to be happy. She’s the opposite of her sister, who doesn’t give a damn about anyone.”

A bow-tied young waitress whispered something in Fu’ad’s ear.

“That’s it. The buses are here. Now the fun starts. I’m sorry to have to go without helping. Listen, Professor. The next time you want to sleep here, give us a call first. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you again.”

But Rivlin was not going to let the night’s visit end like this. Gripping the shoulder of the Arab, who appeared to know more than he let on, he said:

“Al hal, ya Fu’ad, a’tini ishi aakul…. ^†

The maître d’ squirmed and swore that there wasn’t room for another pin in the dining room. Every table and chair was taken. The guests would proceed straight to their meal from the buses. “But I’ll tell you what, Professor. I can put you in the smoking lounge next to the bar, where you sat with Galya. Mr. Hendel sometimes used to order a snack there with his cigar. Have a seat and we’ll bring you something. The soup is on its way.”

The large windows of the lobby shook as the buses flooded the parking lot with their headlights, setting the bushes of the garden aflame before lining up in a long, silent row. The elderly Christians poured into the lobby in a swift but orderly wave. Pennants were raised and hymns struck up as they marched into the dining room as smartly as conscripts in boot camp.

The Jew nearly followed them in. At the last minute, he turned and headed for the lounge, sniffing its air as though to scent the deceased’s last springtime cigar. He passed through the dark, windowless bar, its counter glowing with bottles that seemed to have their own source of light, and sat in the easy chair from which his ex-daughter-in-law had dueled with him. Could he manage, without risking too much on the home front, to abscond to the very place his son had been banished from?

A heavily made-up waitress in a pantsuit brought him a large cup of hot soup and some crackers. Would he, she asked, prefer crab or a vegetarian platter for his main course?

“Crab?” He had never eaten crab in his life. “Why not?”

“Do you have enough light, sir?”

For the moment, he had all the light he wanted.

From the dining room came the voice of a woman welcoming the guests in the name of the hotel and the nearby holy sites. It took him a while to realize it was Tehila. Though down with a cold, she had made sure to be present. He wondered if Fu’ad had told her he was there.

He shut his solitary eyes and strove to return to that summer night like this one — that night that was still, despite all that had happened since then, the happiest of his life. Although he could deal with the anger of his wife, who knew he loved her come what may, he was worried that she might try phoning the home of his old mentor — where, having finished their supper, the Tedeschis were now seated with Akri in the large library, showing him Hannah’s latest translations of pre-Islamic war and love poetry.

A brief, matter-of-fact grace was said in the dining room, followed by the soft chime of plates and glasses as the waiters hurried to feed the hungry pilgrims. Meanwhile, Rivlin waited for his food. But even if that Arab has forgotten me completely, he thought, I’m not going anywhere.

22.

FU’AD, HOWEVER, had forgotten neither him nor his solitude, which was now broken by the waitress, who returned to expertly spread a white cloth on the table and set it with silverware and wineglasses for two. Soon the curtain of the lounge parted, and in came his dinner partner, the new proprietress of the hotel. Tall and slightly stooped in her light housedress, her hair cropped short above her sallow, bony face, she planted, despite her cold, a warm but casual kiss on his cheek, as if he were still a member of the family. She wanted to thank him, she said, for taking seriously her admonition not to wait for another death before coming again. True, he had dropped in without warning on the craziest day of the year, but what of it? What mattered was that he hadn’t forgotten them. She knew, of course, that it wasn’t her or her mother he had come to see, but his lost daughter-in-law. Still, he was a dear and honored guest. Nor should he feel insulted at being made to dine in the lounge. Even she, the proprietress, hadn’t found a seat in the dining room. She hoped he didn’t object, then, to her joining him as his fellow pariah in the lounge.

The sly gleam in her little whiskey-colored eyes matched the reddish glow of the bottles on the counter.

Object? How could he, he replied, when she was the owner and he was her guest?

She sighed. She felt more like a slave than like an owner. Far from losing business after her father’s death, the hotel was doing better and better, and she was coming down with more and more colds. But why complain about success when so many people could only complain about failure? How was his wife? And what had made him come again without her — and at night, of all times? She hoped the judge wasn’t angry at them.

Rivlin felt a shiver. His wife, angry? Why should she be angry? She had taken Ofer’s divorce more easily than he had. It was only lack of time that kept her from joining him on his visits, which had all been last-minute decisions. Take tonight, for example. He was stuck in Jerusalem without a place to sleep. Perhaps only a naive historian could have hoped that her father’s promise of a room, although made long ago, still held.

The tall, pale woman, who seemed to have taken a liking to him, laid a hand on her heart and swore solemnly in the name of the new management to honor the commitments of the old one.

“Then how about a room?” His heart pounded strongly.

But there was none available. Nor, Tehila added with a naughty laugh, was there likely to be one, since she had taken to overbooking — an offense she was paying for tonight by having to forfeit a room of her little wing to an extra pilgrim, even though she was running a fever.

The waitress gracefully put on the table a gleaming brass implement that resembled a dentist’s tooth extractor. From a large serving dish she transferred to their plates a boiled king crab that had been divided, eyes, whiskers, and all, into two symmetrical halves. Only the claws, reaching out toward each other over plates they were too long for, seemed unreconciled to their separation.

“Would you like more light, Miss Hendel?” the waitress asked.

“No,” Rivlin answered for the second time, though the question had not been put to him. “It’s frightening enough to eat this thing in the dark.” Laughing gaily but apprehensively, he lifted his wineglass to toast the bony woman. She had already seized the brass implement and was cracking the legs of his crab for him, extracting white fibers of meat—“The best part, make sure you eat it!”—with long fingers.

“I’ll catch your cold,” he joked, taking his time about putting the crabmeat in his mouth. He could only marvel at how fast and how far his absconding was going.

“I already gave it to you,” she said, her naughty eyes the same color as her deceased father’s, “when I kissed you. Assuming, that is, that I ever give anything to anyone. But don’t be a scaredy-cat. Eat! The marvelous meat in the legs of this crab comes courtesy of an airplane from Crete. Our hotel owes no small share of its astonishing success in recent years to the reputation of its cuisine. Our meals are as much part of the pilgrim experience as a visit to the Holy Sepulchre or a baptism in the Jordan. It all started with my father’s revolution five years ago, when he threw out those parasitical inspectors from the Rabbinate and did away with the kosher kitchen. He knew he was risking his Jewish clientele, but he didn’t think he could count on it anyway. He preferred to gamble on quiet, conservative Baptists from Georgia and Mormons from utah who would visit the Holy Land come hell or high water. Ofer was still married to Galya then. It’s a pity he didn’t stay with us. He could have been a partner in all this….”

Rivlin flared. “What do you mean, it’s a pity? It was you who drove him out.”

“We?” The whiskey smiled in her eyes. “What are you talking about? Who knew anything about it?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Nothing.”

“A tight, loving family like yours?”

“We were. But not here. Believe me, to this day I don’t know what made Galya break up her marriage. She may have been in the eye of the storm, but to us she was a closed book. Whenever my mother or I tried talking about it or suggested a reconciliation, she just grew hostile. She acted like a stranger. And when, as her big sister, I made a last attempt to ask her to reconsider leaving a man she had loved so much, she lost her temper and said she wasn’t made for love that wanted to creep under your skin. That’s all I know. There was no stopping her. Maybe she thought finding a better man than Ofer would be no problem with her good looks.”

“Did she?”

“Find a better man? I don’t know. It’s hard to compare two such different types. Bo’az is Ofer’s opposite. It’s as though Galya wanted, not only a new husband, but one who would cancel out the old one.”

“Cancel Ofer out? How?” His voice trembled with his eagerness to know. “I only met him for a few minutes.”

“Bo’az is a closed, almost secretive person. He’s nice, and he’s thoughtful, but he’s not made for intimate relationships. It isn’t easy to get close to him. I’m not the right person to ask about him, because I preferred Ofer’s openness and emotion. You remind me of Ofer. I liked being with him, even if he sometimes ran off at the mouth about whatever happened to be on his mind. I don’t know what he’s doing today. I do know, looking back, that his idea of expanding by building up rather than out into the garden was a good one. After he left, there was no one to fight for it.”

“But why do you keep saying he left?” Rivlin protested. “You know he didn’t. He was made to leave.”

“Fine. After he was made to leave. Look, I don’t really know what happened.”

“Did your father?”

“No. I’m sure of that. At the bereavement, during one of those long, sleepless nights when we sat talking about him, Galya cried and said he had been very noble. My mother, you know, was against the divorce. She thought it was wrong to hurry. She wanted them to separate and give it time. But my father backed Galya all the way. He trusted her, as he always did. And he respected her too much to ask questions. He gave her complete freedom and was as generous as possible about paying the costs of the divorce.”

“Generous?”

“You know perfectly well — our accountant was upset about it — that Ofer received much more from my father than he, or you and your wife, put into their apartment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. It was my father’s right to do what he wanted with his money. You must have noticed that he loved and always listened to Galya more than he did to me or my brother. That’s the truth. Believe me, though, I never resented it. It was enough for me to be by my father’s side. No one knew better than I did every mood of his, every weakness and depression and foolish anxiety. When you work that closely with someone, it’s only natural to fight at times. I wasn’t like Galya, who worshiped him from a distance. So don’t lump us all together. We weren’t partners in the divorce. Far from it. Perhaps if you or your wife had shared what you knew with us, my mother and I — or at least I — might have encouraged Ofer to handle Galya differently….”

Rivlin emptied his wineglass with a gulp and pushed the crab revoltedly away.

“But what could we have shared? We were as much in the dark as you were. We still are.”

“You, too?”

“Absolutely. And if Ofer won’t talk about it to this day and neither will Galya, it must have been something bad. I can’t stop thinking about it. What terrible thing could he have done? If he’s punishing himself by keeping silent, that only prevents him from getting over it. Or was he himself the victim of an injustice he still hasn’t recovered from?”

“But what is it you want now?”

“Only to know. I have to know. That’s how I am. I need to know the truth even if it’s useless. It’s my nature. It’s what motivates any historian — otherwise he’s in the wrong profession. This has been haunting me for the past five years. And the strange thing is that your father’s death, rather than putting an end to it, has made it worse than ever. Just look at how I keep coming back.”

“In that case,” she laughed, “I feel better. At least you weren’t looking for a room.”

“That was only a pretext. I could have found a room somewhere else.”

“And yet it was all so long ago. You’re a stubborn man.”

“Your sister has remarried. She’s going to have a baby. But Ofer is still stuck. Even then, five years ago, something told me the separation would go badly for him. She meant too much to him. I knew he wouldn’t give her up so easily. I just never imagined it would take so long. That’s why I…”

“You what?”

“I tried talking it over with your father on the phone, without telling even my wife. I hoped that the two of us could have a restraining influence. And although you say — and I’d like to believe you — that he knew nothing, which is what he told me too, I must say I was offended by his tone. There was something cold about it. All his friendliness and good nature were gone. He sounded hard, as if he wanted to get rid of me. That’s why I never came to see you afterward.”

“But what did you want him to do?”

“At least to feel sorry. To be as anguished as I was that a marriage that seemed so happy was over in a year. That’s all I asked of him: not to accept it so easily.”

“He accepted it because he trusted Galya. That’s why he was generous with Ofer.”

“Yes, he was. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t like his generosity either. What made him so ready to give Ofer more than he deserved? Could it have been that Ofer knew something and was being paid off?”

“What a strange thought! My father wasn’t generous because he was afraid of Ofer. He wanted Galya to be able do what she thought best for herself. He didn’t want to give Ofer any excuse to withhold his consent. Trust me. I knew my father well. Better even than my mother did. I knew how his mind worked. We were together on a daily basis. It was an intensive relationship. Had he known anything, sooner or later he would have dropped some hint. Listen. Look at me. I’m a confirmed single woman. I have no family apart from the one I was born in. I don’t even have many friends. I was with my father all the time. I swear to you, whenever Ofer’s name came up, he had only good things to say about him. ‘Ofer was a nice, talented boy,’ he’d say. ‘The only problem with him was those strange fantasies…. ’”

“Strange fantasies?” Rivlin felt a chill. “What were they?”

“How would I know? Maybe my father was thinking of the plans for expansion that Ofer submitted. Or of his political opinions. He had these ideas that you couldn’t get him to stop talking about. He was very attached to my father from the start. He wanted to make an impression on him. And he was very involved in the hotel. Everything about it interested him. He had his ideas about the management, about the menu in the kitchen, about the arrangement of the rooms. Maybe that’s why my father thought he fantasized — was maybe even out of touch with reality. So when Galya said that she wanted to break up with him, my father’s reaction was, in that case, better sooner than later….”

“Out of touch with reality?” Rivlin teetered between shock and pain. “How?”

“Never mind. Those are just words. Why get upset?”

“There’s no such thing as ‘just.’ I want to know what your father meant. If you knew how his mind worked, then now is the time to tell me. It frightens me to hear Ofer accused of such a thing.”

“No one is accusing anyone. Why do you pick on every word as though you were in court? The Mr. Hendel you knew was a polite, good-natured, smiling hotel owner, a very proper man. But the father I knew was someone who took off his jacket and yanked down his tie and could be depressed or nervous or overbearing toward those who were close to him. Even I, who was his right hand, was often hurt…. So what does it matter what he did or didn’t say about Ofer?”

Rivlin was not reassured. Anxiously he studied the bony face — which, in the dim lounge, was increasingly coming to resemble the dead man’s. For some reason he thought of the old revolver in its drawer in the Jewish Agency building in Paris. And even if Ofer had “fantasized” something “out of touch with reality,” couldn’t this have been stopped in time? Mustn’t there have been some clue or lead in the young couple’s silence he could have used to persuade Hendel to join him in trying to delay the divorce?

Now it was too late. Hendel was gone, and Ofer and Galya had gone their separate ways without breaking their silence. Hagit was right. He was and continued to be a coward. Yet it wasn’t people or ideas he was afraid of. It was the woman who kept warning him to stay within bounds. For bounds could be crossed and new territories entered without forsaking one’s love: he had learned this from a tactful but resolute Arab driver with coal black eyes. You could even abscond to a strange bed and rise in the morning wiser and richer.

He glanced at his watch. Either the dim light or the lack of his glasses kept him from making out the hands.

“What time do you have?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“My wife broke my glasses yesterday. I haven’t been able to read or write for a whole day. Just talk.”

“Isn’t that enjoyable?”

“It depends whom I’m talking with.”

“Even with me.”

“With you it’s painful.”

“You brought the pain with you. Don’t blame me for it.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted softly. “But you’ve made it worse.”

She regarded him sympathetically, then asked, with a flush:

“But how did she break them? She doesn’t strike me as the type who goes around breaking things.”

“Not unless she wants to.”

Now it was his turn to blush. He snorted to play down the remark. But the proprietress nodded, grateful for the shared intimacy. Her long, shapely fingers searched for bits of uneaten crab. She did not use the brass implement, but cracked them with her teeth, sucking the hidden meat. Her whiskey-colored eyes clouded.

“You’ll still need a place to sleep tonight. Don’t think that will be easy at this time of year.”

“I have a place. My old professor at the university has a room for me. It’s just that I have to share it with a colleague who came from Haifa for a lecture. I’m not dying to lie next to him and wake up in his dreams.”

From the dining room came the strains of a pilgrim hymn, blessing the Lord for the meal. Rivlin tried making out the words.

“I can save you the trouble.” Tehila smiled. “I know all their hymns by heart. It’s the twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want.’ Very appropriate for wealthy American Christians.”

Fu’ad entered the lounge cautiously. He emptied the last of the wine bottle into the two glasses and cleared the table with a suppressed grin, adding the decimated crab shell from Tehila’s plate to the nearly intact half on Rivlin’s.

“Haruf, ya Brofesor, kan ahsan lak…. ”^*

“F’il mara ’l-jay. Lazim adir bali aktar….”^†

“What did you two say?”

“It’s time, Tehila, that you learned some Arabic,” the maître d’ said.

She waved a dismissive hand, took out a cigarette, and waited for him to light it.

“What for? Russian is more practical.”

“Russian?”

“In a few years, when Russia is back on its feet, we’ll get pilgrims from there too. Why not? I once read that in the days of the czar, Russian pilgrims were so devoted that they crawled all the way to Jerusalem.”

Fu’ad laughed. “They could never have afforded your prices.”

Her eyes glittered.

“You know very well, Fu’ad, that I could make even a crawling pilgrim pay up.”

Fu’ad nodded and reported a problem with some rooms on the second floor. Should he tell the front desk that the proprietress was in the lounge?

“No,” Tehila said. “I’m sick tonight. I only got out of bed so as not to hurt the professor’s feelings.”

“But they’re hurt anyway. We haven’t found him a place to sleep.”

“He knows there’s nothing we can do about it.”

With a snakelike movement, almost losing the dishes on his arm, the maître d’ bent to whisper to the proprietress.

“Down there?” She grinned at the thought. “You can’t be serious.”

“About what?” Rivlin asked.

“Never mind. It was just a thought.”

“I’ve already told you there are no ‘justs.’ That’s what my wife says. Every ‘just’ has something behind it.”

“Fu’ad suggested putting you up in an impossible place.”

“What’s impossible about it?”

“It’s not a real room, just an office. There’s a bed there, which our accountant used to sleep on, but I wouldn’t feel right about putting you in it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s down in the basement. It’s clean and well aired, but it’s still a basement.”

“So it’s a basement.” Rivlin jumped at the idea. “That’s fine. I prefer it to taking a taxi to my old professor’s and sitting up half the night listening to him run down other scholars. What’s wrong with a basement?”

“Nothing… it’s just that…”

The visitor burst into laughter.

“You know, my mother used to call your hotel ‘The Little Paradise.’ If your basement gets its air from Paradise, that’s good enough for me.”

23.

TEHILA, DESPITE HER real or imaginary illness, took him down to the basement herself. A small door at the rear of the kitchen, which was now hectically filling up with cleared dishes, led to a concrete staircase that descended to a narrow corridor. A bucket of congealed plaster, a dusty girl’s bicycle, and an ancient tire leaned against the wall. Tehila, who clearly knew her way, found the light switch in the dark at once. A yellowish glare fell on a row of padlocked closets. He was looking, she told him, at the hotel’s archives. The “accountant’s room,” in which he would sleep if he had not changed his mind, was farther down the corridor.

But why change his mind about a brief absconding that was less in retaliation for injury than in opposition to love’s tyranny — his love for his wife and the love to which his son was chained? Here, at least, he thought, following Tehila’s swift, sure steps, is a woman who needs no protector.

She passed a large iron door, checked that its handle was locked, and continued down the corridor until they came to a space in which pipes running down from the kitchen gurgled with water. An old black boiler in the middle of it brought to mind a petrified primeval beast. Strewn around it, like the bones of its prey, were a twisted baby carriage, a green tricycle, and a crib with some little toy animals on its dusty, oilcloth-covered mattress.

Overcome with sudden grief for the grandchild that had never been born, Rivlin felt as though he were mourning his own death.

“When is your sister giving birth?”

The question took Tehila by surprise.

“In early winter, I think.”

“Do they know the sex of the child?”

She wrinkled her brow, her little eyes naughty.

“That’s a good question. I think it’s either a boy or a girl. The truth is that I don’t remember what Galya told me. But why should you care?”

The old despair clutched at his heart again. His vision blurred without his glasses, he watched the bony woman, whose sallow skin looked almost sickly, choose the right key for a windowless room jammed between the foundations of the building. In it was a large desk, two metal bookcases filled with file holders, and a narrow, unmade bed. Tehila halted in the doorway. She wasn’t sure, she said, that the room, in which she hadn’t set foot since her father’s death, was suitable even for a night. It hadn’t been used since their accountant, a cousin from Tel Aviv who had come every month to do their books, died seven years ago.

“Where does this place get its air from?”

She pointed to the ceiling. His naked eye made out two small, dark vents covered with rusty netting.

“You’re sure it’s real air?”

She laughed.

“Do you think we would have asphyxiated a wonderful accountant who saved us so much money? Relax. It is a bit strange down here, but it’s clean and it’s safe and I always liked it, even as a child. In summertime I came down here to get away from the heat and the sun; it was always cool at night here. And in winter it was so warm that I could take off my clothes and be totally cut off from the world, with no one to bother me or even to think of me. I tell you, if it weren’t for all the germs in my bed, I’d send you upstairs to sleep in that and happily spend the night here myself.”

She bent down and pulled a wooden linen chest from under the bed. Carefully choosing some white sheets, she sniffed their scent of laundry soap; then, whipping them in the dark air like the wings of two snow-white swans, she let them fall on the bed with a sharp crack, one after another, and made the bed as deftly as an experienced chambermaid. No, Rivlin thought again. This is not a woman who needs protection. This is a woman who gives it.

“Look here,” she said. “This place may not be up to your usual standards, and my father would be upset to know I’d put you here, but you’ll enjoy the bed. You’re getting two honest-to-God starched and ironed cotton sheets such as we don’t use anymore, because it costs too much money. Nothing feels better than a smooth, cool cotton sheet. Come and see for yourself.”

Rivlin could not move. His absconding was getting out of hand. Despite her illness, he feared, the Circe of this cave was up to no good.

“It’s strange how two sisters can be so different,” he said in a subdued voice. “My wife and her sister are like that, too.”

She threw him a suspicious look.

“I remember your wife very well. She has a style of her own. Your sister-in-law I saw only once, at the wedding. But you’re right. Galya and I are complete opposites. My father quite thoughtlessly gave me not only his height, which is more than any woman needs, but his eyes and a metabolism that doesn’t leave an ounce of fat on me. Galya’s eyes are my mother’s, and so is her tendency to put on weight. Do you want the blue blanket or the green one?”

“It makes no difference.”

“Come over here and make up your mind.”

His face felt on fire. He didn’t move.

There was a knock so soft that the door opened before anyone could hear it or say “Come in.” The maître d’, minus his bow tie, stood in the doorway holding a big pillow in a flowery pillowcase. He did not look at the proprietress, who seem displeased by his sudden appearance.

“T’zakart, ya Brofesor, inno el-m’hadeh hon sarlha yabseh,^* so I brought another.”

Rivlin let out a relieved laugh and laid a hand on the Arab’s shoulder.

“Thanks. It was kind of you to think of me.”

“Leysh la, iza ana kunt ili akna’tak t’nam hon e-leileh? Min hazna likbir inno hawajja Hendel ma irfish inno na’umnak hon, li’inno kan y’kul daiman inno mamnu’ nist’hir hatta iza fi deif binam bi’balash.”^*

Tehila burst into their exchange. “What’s that about Mr. Hendel? What did you say, Fu’ad? Why are you sticking Arabic into every sentence tonight?”

The Arab took the rebuke in stride.

“Why shouldn’t I? When you were little I taught you many Arabic words, and you were very sweet when you used them. Why not learn them again and be sweet once more?”

“Give me a break, Fu’ad,” Tehila said impatiently. “Just tell me what you were saying about my father.”

“I said it’s a lucky thing that the late departed doesn’t know where we’re putting our honored guest.”

“But whose idea was it?”

“And who agreed to it?”

“Just give me a break. What’s with all this Arabic? You forget I’m walking around with a fever.”

“How can I have forgotten your fever when I’ve come to escort you to bed because of it? Just do me a favor and stop off at the reception desk on your way. There’s a problem with some rooms on the second floor. Your evangelicals have run out of religion and sung their last hymn, and now they’re quarreling over the rooms like little children. It takes your brains to solve this one. And you needn’t worry about our extra pilgrim, because we’ve already put him in your wing and locked him up so that he won’t bother you. He’s a very old man, but a lively one and a great believer in the Resurrection.”

Rivlin could feel the tall woman’s agitation. Angrily she yanked the pillow from Fu’ad and stood hugging it instead of placing it on the bed. Her yellow, predatory bird’s eyes strayed back and forth between the two gray-haired men, as if trying to decide whose good graces she sought. Equally aroused and alarmed by her unwillingness to leave him, Rivlin turned for help to the maître d’, who stood there, resplendent, in his black suit. A thin smile tickled his silver mustache. With the fatherly air of a family servant taking his old master’s orphaned daughter in hand, he gripped her arm, put his hand on her waist, and said, “I think, Tehila, that if you’re running a fever, you should let our guest go to sleep. There’s no need to leave him the key, because the door has a bolt.”

He slipped the key ring from the door, opened the side pocket of his employer’s dress, and slipped the keys into it as if he were in charge of a little girl. Appeased, she brushed Rivlin’s cheek with her warm lips, the naughty gleam back in her little amber eyes.

“If you haven’t caught anything from me yet, you won’t now, and if you have, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can pass it on to your clever wife. What should I tell Galya? That you were here looking for her again? Or nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all,” was his unhesitating answer.

24.

ABSCONDING TO THE hotel’s basement was his deepest and most dangerous absence yet. Though committed in his native city and among Jews, it was entirely self-willed, an absence within an absence, for he had already absconded to Jerusalem itself, to ease the fear of his love.

He slid the bolt into place. Leaving on the light, he took off his shirt and shoes and lay down on the cool cotton sheets spread in his honor. Unable to read the yellowed newspaper that lay on the table, he stared patiently at the overhead vents as if hoping to ascertain whether the air he was breathing was real or imaginary. The deep silence around him was broken only by the gurgle of the hotel’s water system.

Despite his concern that his abandoned and anxious wife might swallow her pride and find a pretext to phone his old mentor, with whom he was supposed to be staying, he had refused to send her a reassuring signal. And in any case, an expert on the criminal mind like her could easily have guessed that his erratic behavior since Hendel’s death was likely to lead him for a third obsessive time to where stubborn love had chained their son.

He pulled off his pants and slipped on the pajamas he had brought, leaving them unbuttoned. All I need is a few hours of sleep to get my strength back, he thought, and I’ll be off. Convinced he could fall asleep with the light on, he lay with his back to the door and his face to the wall, on which hung two old still lifes of sunflowers and a faded photograph of a young man — no, a woman — standing in shorts by the gazebo. Even his unaided eyes could see that the pointy features, cropped head, long, bony legs, and slight stoop belonged to a much younger Tehila. Beside her stood an elderly man in a dark suit and tie. The avuncular arm he had put around her conveyed that he was a friend or relation — perhaps even the accountant, who had hung the photo to look at himself while he tinkered with the books.

After a while, unable to fall asleep with the lamp on, Rivlin switched it off. He was now, together with the desk and the files on the walls, in near total darkness. Only a vague radiance shone through the vents, from which came a light, monotonous buzz. Though at first he found this bothersome, it soon made him shut his eyes and ground down his wakefulness.

His sleep was a private affair. And yet a foreign presence weighed on it. Whirled in its depths, he fought to separate the distress of the young widow appealing for protection from the fevered appeal of the bold Circe, who could not have been easily categorized even by his wife, the judge.

The first prime minister’s famous four hours of sleep were granted him, too. At three in the morning he awoke. Opening his eyes, he struggled to reconstruct the spatial dimensions of the room, which had vanished somewhere inside him. A tremor, like that of a slight earthquake, appeared to bend the walls toward him, making it hard to breathe. But it wasn’t lack of air he suffered from. It was surplus of desire. Being slapped by a wife who broke his glasses had made him, so it seemed, fair game for every young woman.

Rolling out of bed, he turned on the light and groped his blurry way to the photograph of the tall young lady — who, after her father’s death, had built up his thriving business still more by means of small but well-calculated come-ons. Indeed, she might very well have come on to him too, had not Fu’ad appeared in the nick of time with the pillow. Yet what, apart from a low-grade fever, could he have got from it? If she, too, was unable to help him discover the secret by which he was driven, he could only be bound by her even more to this place, which was rapidly becoming dangerous.

Yes, he had gone too far this time. If Hagit were to need him, his absence-within-an-absence would badly rupture the trust he had always put before everything. And so although it was still long before dawn, he put on his pants, unbolted the door, retraced his way along the corridor past the primeval silhouette of the discarded boiler, and hurried up the concrete stairs, hoping find the door to the kitchen unlocked.

It was. He strode past rows of pots, griddles, ladles, and frying pans and emerged in the lobby, where he looked for a place to check out, even though he had never checked in.

At the reception desk was a night clerk reading an Arabic thriller. This being a land in which Arabs were accustomed to confessing to Jews all they knew, he had no difficulty in extracting Fu’ad’s whereabouts. The maître d’ was lying in his underwear on a cot in a small bedroom, half asleep and half awake, his black suit and white shirt on a hanger. Rivlin’s noiseless appearance brought him to his feet at once.

“Well, Professor,” he said, surveying his visitor blearily, “I see that all of us were wrong — I for suggesting it, Tehila for agreeing, and you for accepting. It’s not so simple to fall asleep surrounded by income-tax files. Once I slept down there myself and dreamed, don’t ask me why, of an earthquake. I just hope you didn’t run away because you thought there was no air. There’s enough air down there for an entire family. The bad smell doesn’t come from the plumbing or the old boiler, but from all those files. First it was Mr. Hendel who wouldn’t throw them out, now it’s Tehila. They want to keep the proof that they never cheated on their country….”

“Never mind, Fu’ad, I’ve slept enough,” Rivlin said to the maître d’, who had meanwhile risen and donned a pair of gym shorts.

“If you say so.” Fu’ad sighed. “An hour slept is an hour gained. Now tell me how you want your coffee—arabi willa franji?”^*

“Leysh ma n’ruhesh ma’a l-arabi?”^†

“Heyk lazim y’kun.”^‡

He bent over a little cabinet and took out an electric hot plate, a sooty beaker, and a long spoon. Filling the beaker with water and coffee, he sat waiting patiently for it to boil.

The profound sadness of a last good-bye had the Orientalist in its grip. He sat on the edge of Fu’ad’s cot, rubbing his eyes hard in the hope of restoring clarity to a world gone hazy. Uncertainly he asked:

“Shu lakan? Bitfakirni majnun?”^§

Fu’ad was startled. “Kif majnun, ya Brofesor?”^∥

“Because of the way I keep coming back in order to understand what happened to my son’s marriage…”

The old maître d’, his sturdy body looking young in its undershirt and gym shorts, did not answer. He fingered his silver mustache, broodingly watching the coffee slowly boil. As if remembering something, he asked:

“Inteh b’tush’ur halak ahsan, ya Brofesor?”^#

“Aa. Ahsan….”^**

“God be praised. You Jews worry too much about your health. A person can get sick just from that.”

Rivlin did not even smile. He watched the Arab search for cups at the bottom of the cabinet.

“How is it possible that even you don’t know what happened?” he protested.

“How? That’s simple.”

“But you can find out whatever you want to about this hotel, Fu’ad.”

“Perhaps I can, Professor.” The Arab spoke hotly. “But I don’t want to. Someone like myself, who isn’t Jewish and has a master key to every room, has to be careful — very careful — not to step out of bounds. He has to make sure — really sure — that he doesn’t see or hear what he shouldn’t. Why do you think, Professor, that I’m still here, after starting out as a simple worker twenty years ago, when Galya was still a baby? How would I have worked my way to the top — because today I’m part of the management — if I hadn’t stayed out of the family’s problems? I even said as much to the late departed. And that’s why I didn’t argue with Tehila tonight. They respect me for that. ‘Please,’ I’ve said to them, ‘don’t say anything bad about one another in front of me. I don’t want to know about your quarrels. I have to take orders from all of you, and I can’t afford to lose my honor with any of you. U’heyk, ya Brofesor, kult kaman li’ibnak laman balash yibki kuddami…. ”^*

“When did Ofer come crying to you?”

“When he split with Galya. That last autumn.”

“Last autumn?”

“Yes. After they separated. He used to come here at night and lurk in the street or in the garden. He was hoping for even just a glimpse of her. I swear to God, it was hard for me too. It was hard for us all. But I didn’t want him hanging around. I didn’t want to have to listen to all his stories and accusations that I had no business knowing about. And that night he stepped out of line with me. I was standing at the bus stop, waiting to go back to my village. All of a sudden he drives up on his motorcycle and shines the light on me and shouts without taking off his helmet, ‘Get on, Fu’ad, I’m taking you to Abu-Ghosh. Don’t tell me you’re afraid to ride.’ You can be sure I wasn’t. I have a brother with a bike twice as big. But I didn’t want to talk to him, and so I said, ‘Yes, I am, Ofer. I’ll take the bus. I’m too old for your motorcycle.’ He took off his helmet, and I could see that his eyes were on fire. And then, Professor, I swear, listen to this and tell me if I wasn’t right, I said to him — I remember every word because I was upset—’You, Ofer,’ I said, ‘as much as I respect you and your parents, please don’t ask me anything. If you’re a man, then be a man with me too, and not just on your motorcycle. You’re not getting anything out of me. Nothing. Because you’ll leave this hotel, and you won’t come back, and God will help you, inshallah, to forget your troubles. But I’m staying right here. And that’s why I don’t want to hear a single bad word about the family. Not about Mr. Hendel, and not about the missus, and not about their children, and not about anyone. Because I want to be honored and treated well, no matter who tells me to do what. That’s why, my friend, I’m asking you to keep your problems to yourself, just as I do mine.’ Il-mazbut^* he was very hurt, and embarrassed to be crying in front of an Arab, and he put his helmet back on and drove off without a word. My heart was aching for him, but what could I do? You tell me, Professor. Nothing. That was the last time I saw him. I felt so bad I even wrote a poem when I got home.”

“A poem?”

“Ya’ani, ishi makameh z’ghireh.”^†

“What kind of rhymes?”

“Makameh, b’ti’raf shu ya’ani makameh….^‡ I was always good at rhymes, even as a boy in school. Even now whole lines of them sometimes come to me, one after another. Little poems, when the heart has too much sorrow or happiness. And that night, I thought — I swear — about you, Professor… so I sat down and wrote an energy. Is that the right word? Marthiyya.”

“Elegy.”

“Elegy? Isn’t that what you say at a funeral?”

“That’s a eulogy.”

“I didn’t know there were so many words. Well, I wrote an elegy for your Ofer.”

“What happened to it?”

“Search me.”

25.

THREE LITTLE CUPS of Turkish coffee later, Rivlin felt he had enough adrenaline to walk, not only across the city to the Tedeschis’, but all the way home to his wife in Haifa. Turning down Fu’ad’s offer to order a taxi, he made him promise to look for his five-year-old “Elegy for a Young Man Whose Marriage Fell Apart.”

“Even if I can’t find it,” the Arab assured him, “I can always write another.”

The Orientalist’s second, underground absconding having reminded him of the first, he thought, as he stepped out into the streets of Jerusalem in the wee hours of his autonomous night out in the Palestinian Authority. Now, though, he was his own master and had no need of an Arab chauffeur. In the languorous light of the hazed orb of the moon, he strode down Korei ha-Dorot Street and headed for Hebron Road, glancing at the pine trees surrounding the sad, silent house of Agnon. Although, without his glasses, the stars did not seem as bright, making the street signs difficult to read, he navigated adeptly in his native town. His adrenaline, pumped even higher by Fu’ad’s story about Ofer, kept him moving at a rapid clip, as if the faster he put the hotel behind him, the less piercing the thought of his son’s despair would be. What else was there left to ask about? And whom? A stubborn scholar on a solo reconnaissance mission, he would find no one who, even if prepared to humor him, knew more now.

He was almost running as he swung into the broad, flat avenue of Hebron Road, the silhouette of downtown Jerusalem far ahead of him. Had he bitten off more distance than he could chew? But he had all night to keep on walking before the city awoke to a morning shift of Palestinian workers who, slipping past the checkpoints around Bethlehem, might abscond with him again.

He crossed from Hebron Road to Bethlehem Road, passed the railroad tracks, entered the dark side streets of the German colony until, unerringly, he came to the one that led to the Rose Garden in posh Talbiya, cut across a flowering traffic circle, made a left on Jabotinsky Street, and then, before coming to the President’s house, turned and went right into Molcho, straight to the darkened building of his hyper-hypochondriac mentor. Despite the many years that had passed since he was a doctoral student awaiting the return of his seminar papers, he still felt nervous each time he climbed the steps of the old staircase.

It was a quarter to four. He let the automatic staircase light go out and peered at the crack beneath the Tedeschis’ front door. Although not a sign of wakefulness shone through it, he did find there a note explaining where the key was hidden.

It was only natural, he supposed, that a woman who had spent all day in the headily anxious atmosphere of an emergency room should have forgotten that he had broken his glasses and could not read small print. Moreover, afraid that her note might fall into the hands of a passing burglar, she had composed it in Arabic, no doubt of a highly ornate nature. He had no choice, therefore, but to stick it in his shirt pocket and go back down the stairs. Perhaps a Palestinian worker hoping to get a jump on the new day might be found to read, if not the words of Hannah’s note, at least the letters.

But Gaza Road was deserted. Nor was there anyone on the street named for the poet Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, at the top of which stood the modest stone house in which the first prime minister had had his office.

Rivlin soon came to the old school in which he had attended the first twelve grades. He peered through its high fence at its large, dark garden. A little footbridge, remembered from childhood, crossed a channel of water so narrow that it seemed more symbolic than real. What were the chances of finding, in the middle of the night, in this peaceful, middle-class neighborhood, someone to read an Arabic note written by a woman who, like himself, was quite possibly on the verge of going mad? Nevertheless, taking a route he had followed many times in those years, he headed up Keren Kayemet Street and along King George Street, hoping quite absurdly to come across the help he was looking for in the dowdy old downtown of the city, near the gray house he was raised in.

And find him Rivlin did, sitting on the curb by the Histadrut building, a young, sad, early rising Palestinian worker patiently waiting for a day’s work. A permanent vagabond among Jews, he was no longer surprised by anything about them, not even by an elderly Orientalist now handing him, before the break of dawn, four lines by the renowned translatoress of Ignorance — the first Arabic poem of her life.

Al-musanan al-manshud mowjud fi juz’ al-nahla,

Muthahab wa-latif ca’amal al-nowm fi ’l kalbaka.

Wa-nashadak lahfuka laysa b’al-ruh ash-shaytaniya wa-laysa b’al-hawa al-ilahi,

Li’annahu fakat bihukmi ’l-Carmel tajiddu rahataka.^*

A short while later, as his fingers were still burrowing in the dry earth of a long-since-wilted dwarf potted palm, the front door opened silently, and Tedeschi, in his eternal corduroys and a blue hospital shirt taken from the emergency room, stood beaming at the old student who had not forgotten to turn up in the end. With a grand gesture he beckoned him into the large library, in which, between two windows opened to the darkness of the night, glowed a cloyingly colored computer.

“Listen!” The Jerusalem polymath leaned with confidential excitement toward Rivlin, who, drained of the last of his vitality, sank exhaustedly into an armchair. “Don’t think that visit to the emergency room was wasted. I’ve decided to change the subject of tomorrow’s lecture.”

“Just a minute, Carlo. Let me catch my breath. Did Hagit try getting me on the phone?”

“No one tried getting you.”

“You’re sure?”

“What’s wrong? Have the two of you quarreled?”

“A bit.”

“Never mind. You worship her too much. The first time you brought her here, I could see you were under her thumb. You were so swept off your feet that you had to get married at once and postpone finishing your doctorate by a year, which cost you a position in Jerusalem…. But what happened?”

Rivlin smiled. The wave of warmth he felt for the old man, who read him so well, was also a warning to watch what he said.

“It’s nothing. We’ll get over it. So you’ve decided, just like that, in the middle of the night, to change your subject?”

“More the approach to it. Instead of talking about Turkish-Arab relations in a lifeless, abstract way, I’m going to do it so vividly that it may inspire even you. I want to show how the Turks saw the Arabs concretely, in terms of their literature — and especially, in terms of Ottoman popular drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the debacle of the First World War.”

“There was popular theater way back then?”

“Where have you been? Have you forgotten that seminar you took with me back in the sixties? Of course there was theater. Everywhere. In Istanbul, in Ankara, in Izmir, even in the south. Little folk theaters that put on original plays, as well as European dramas and drawing-room comedies. They changed the names of the characters and places, replaced Christian allusions with Muslim ones, reworked some themes, and fed the audience a Turkish delight. Sometimes they even adapted the classics, Shakespeare or Molière. As You Like It and Le Malade Imaginaire were performed in Turkish villages. The audiences loved them…”

“Le Malade Imaginaire?” Rivlin grinned, giving Tedeschi a weary but loving glance. His mentor’s face reddened.

“Why not? It’s not a wonderful play?”

26.

THOUGH THEY WERE talking in whispers, the conversation of the two professors woke Hannah Tedeschi. Barefoot and unkempt, in a wrinkled nightgown, she scolded their cavalier attitude toward the remaining hours of sleep and — it being beyond her powers to drag her husband away from his computer — led Rivlin irmly away to his room. As they stood in its dark doorway, quietly listening to Ephraim Akri’s light, regular breathing, Rivlin felt an old, puzzled sorrow for this once lively and talented student, the faculty’s favorite, who had chosen to devote her life — first as his secretary, then as his teaching assistant, and finally as his living companion — to a professor with a mentally ill and institutionalized wife. Perhaps it was his fear of this ancient dementia still haunting the apartment that had deterred Akri, who had forgotten to bring his own pajamas, from wearing the pair offered him by the doyen of Orientalists, on whose good offices he counted in the future. He had placed it, still folded and ironed, by his black skullcap and steel-rimmed glasses and was lying starkly and swarthily naked beneath a thin blanket. His large, woozy eyes, so different without their glasses, flickered open for a moment to watch his senior colleague, a not unimportant member of the appointments committee of the university senate, open the window and lie down by his side.

Although it was a big double bed, the thought of contact with the new department head’s naked body gave Rivlin gooseflesh. He put on his pajamas, wrapped himself in his blanket, and embarked on the second, academic half of the convoluted night. The familiar aroma of old journals tickled his nose. A feeling of calm possessed him, as if he were back under the aegis of his strict old doctoral adviser — who, by virtue of this position, shared the blame for his students’ errors and the responsibility of defending them from their critics. A spark of inspiration flashed momentarily in the spacious room, meant for the children Tedeschi never had, neither from the wife who lost her mind nor from the lively student who took her place. I’ve been to this house so many times, Rivlin thought. I’ve learned much here, and argued much, and once even taken an exam. And yet never did I think to see the day when I would sleep here.

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

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

“But don’t worry…”

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

27.

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

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

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

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

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

O despicable thief!

Where hast thou hidden my daughter?

Thou hast enchanted her, damn thy soul!

What sane man would not understand, as I do,

That, if not for thy enchantments,

No lovely maiden would have spurned such fine suitors

And fled her father for a black body,

Terrifying, not pleasuresome, like thine?

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

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

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

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

28.

RIVLIN CAME FORWARD at the lecture’s end to congratulate Tedeschi for his original methodology and to say good-bye, nodding wordlessly to Suissa senior and his anxious daughter-in-law, who stood retiringly by her father-in-law’s side.

As he was in no mood to argue with Ephraim Akri about the latter’s harangue at Samaher’s wedding, or even about Tedeschi’s lecture, Rivlin let the department head do the talking while piloting them expertly northward. Loosely strapped into his seat, he listened with patient passivity to Akri’s opinionated views, which grew most vocal at stoplights. The deeper his silence grew, the more cheerfully pessimistic about the Arabs his junior colleague became. Had the hard night rendered Rivlin apathetic toward opinions that usually exasperated him? Perhaps his strength had been sapped by Fu’ad’s tale of Ofer’s nocturnal prowling.

Although Akri was hurrying to a meeting at the university, he detoured to drop Rivlin off at his home to reward him for being so agreeable. He hoped, he said in parting, that his senior colleague’s docility was not a sign that he was coming down with something. “I just may be,” Rivlin replied with a smile. “What else could make me put up with your racism?” Yet he immediately clapped his driver warmly on the shoulder to mitigate the remark, while affirming that he had not yet said his final word.

The thought that he might actually have caught something from the proprietress was not totally unpleasant. Nevertheless, as he emptied the mailbox of mail that he couldn’t read, his mood changed, and his lapsed anger at the woman who had recklessly broken his glasses flared up again.

The afternoon light was honey clear, the living room clean and tidy, and the food left in its pots on the counter by the housekeeper still warm. Although he had absconded for barely a day, his isolation from his wife, with whom he had not spoken since their quarrel, made the time seem much longer. Still unwilling to make up, however, he decided, even though he wasn’t hungry, to eat lunch without waiting for her, which was something she hated. After eating, he went to his study. Unable to make out the letters on his keyboard, he took some paper and scrawled a few thoughts about the four languages that contributed to the conflict of national identity in Algeria. Now and then he paused to glance at the ghost of his mother sitting unconcernedly on her terrace in a summery green dress, her heavy arms bare and her stout, pale legs propped on a chair.

Yet reading and writing were impractical. Better, he thought, to lie down and ascertain whether he had really brought back a fever from Jerusalem. To his surprise, he found the bedroom neatly arranged, as if his wife had wished to prove she could make order without him. He pulled off his shoes and stretched out with a bittersweet feeling, then rose to lower the blinds and draw the curtain to make the room dark. He took off his trousers, unbuttoned his shirt, and tried to picture — a difficult task in such bourgeois surroundings — the dark depths of the hotel’s basement.

It was not the basement, however, that he saw in the half-light. It was the tall, bony woman who had talked without inhibition while making the swan-sheeted bed with quick, snapping movements. She must have a crush on me, Rivlin thought with a start. Perhaps, despite her resentment of her dead father, she misses having an older man in her life.

Though his wife would soon be home from court, it seemed absurd to return to his study and to the old ghost on the terrace. And so, hearing the front door open, he pulled the blanket over him and turned to the wall. Hagit entered the bedroom without switching on the light. She lowered herself comfortably onto the bed and softly laid her hand on him as if nothing had happened and there were no need to ask.

“You’re not going to fall asleep now anyway,” she said. “Come, let’s go to the kitchen. I shouldn’t have to eat alone after a hard day’s work.”

The scent of her soft, full body bending toward him triggered his old love for her. He fought against it while trying to think of something sarcastic to say about lunatics who went around breaking glasses. Yet knowing well that any reply would lead to a conversation that — as sooner or later happens between rational people — would bring about the reconciliation his wife craved, he stubbornly clung to his silence.

Rebuffed anew, she gave him a hurt look and went to the kitchen to eat by herself. When she returned, she switched on the light, took off her dress, and put on a light robe. “I have news,” she said directly. “Do you want to hear it? Or would you rather go on mourning your glasses?”

But his silence was out of control. It was stuck in his throat like a bone. Rising from the bed with a hangdog look, he buttoned his shirt and pulled on his pants with the intention of returning to his study. Hagit sat up and grabbed him. “I want you to listen,” she said with a reassuring smile. “It’s good news. Ofer is coming for six days. The Jewish Agency has given him a ticket to escort some youth group, but he only has to be with them on the flight itself.”

Yet even this could not break his silence. As much as the news filled him with joy, it also made him realize that he feared his son’s coming. With pretended nonchalance he bent to put on his shoes, conscious of how he was trying not only his wife’s patience but his own.

“Will you stop it!” she cried with a desperation that wasn’t like her, clutching at his shirt. “What is wrong with you?”

He shut his eyes and didn’t move, to keep the shirt from tearing.

“Stay. Take off your clothes. Take them off! Lie down and rest. Don’t start in again. Aren’t you happy Ofer is coming?”

He didn’t open his eyes or speak. He simply froze, feeling her fingers undoing, perhaps for the first time in her life, the buttons of his shirt. They touched his skin. They stroked it, clawed at it. Shameless and demanding, they grabbed at the zipper of his pants. It had never happened before. She wanted him, now, as her friend — her lover — her man. Shocked and thrilled by the frank desire of a woman who had always had to be courted patiently, with no end of cajoling words, he waived all rights to an apology or explanation and made his peace with a hasty, wordless reconciliation in which, slowly, the sweetness of absconding, now over with forever, faded and went out.

29.

When an entire people is linguistically confused, what hope is there for dialogue or communication?

Four languages mingle in Algerian life, leading to a chaotic identity:

First, there is Berber, the indigenous language of the Maghreb, spoken by close to a third of the population.

Second, there is North African Arabic, known to every Algerian.

These two languages are oral media not used for writing, even though Berber once had a written form.

The two written languages of Algeria are French and classical literary Arabic. Neither, however, is a mother tongue. Both are in effect foreign languages. Classical Arabic comes with Islamization and French with Western colonialism. The first arrived as a sacred tongue, the second as a secular one.

It is obvious that, historically considered, reading and writing are forms of submission and penetration that create an intricate dialectic between the individual and the written language. To write in French is to betray. To write in Arabic is to profane.

Each of the four languages used in Algeria is thus subject to the dichotomies of the powerful/legitimate or sacred/secular. All four conflict at various levels of writing and speech. Each forms a discrete system having little significant contact with the others.

The complexity of this situation is problematic for every Algerian. Fully living an Algerian identity means knowing four languages, being at home in four cultures, and adapting to four different psychological standpoints.

Practically speaking, only 10 percent of the population of Algeria is proficient in all four languages. Such a small group is unable to bring about an integration of four different worlds. And even if such an integration were possible, it would be inaccessible to the majority of Algerians.

Rivlin scratched his head and paused before writing a last sentence.

This unique and problematic linguistic configuration has contributed to Algeria’s rapid descent into violence.

30.

COULD HE REALLY still be wearing the same old army jacket? And had he put on weight, or was he just slower and more cumbersome, an old soldier fighting a rear-guard battle with himself? Rivlin, though happy to see his son, was worried by the figure that appeared on the closed-circuit screen above the exit from Customs. Yet Hagit, standing excitedly in the crowd of welcomers, their numbers undiminished despite its being the middle of the night, was unperturbed. She spread her arms wide to Ofer, overjoyed to see him.

“Where is the group you were supposed to escort?” Rivlin asked, after giving his son’s forehead a kiss. “Aren’t you still responsible for them?”

Ofer’s responsibility, it turned out, had been virtual. The Jewish youngsters he was supposed to accompany for his free ticket had returned to France a week ago.

“Well, then,” Rivlin laughed, “your only duty is to be with your parents.”

But Ofer hadn’t come to Israel to be dutiful to his parents. He had already, he informed them, phoned Tsakhi from Paris and suggested a diving expedition to the Sinai. The young officer, enthusiastic about the idea, was now working on getting leave.

“You see!” Rivlin exclaimed, crowing at his two sons’ initiative. “In order to be with you, he’ll pull a few days’ leave out of a hat. But when we visited his base with your aunt and uncle, he didn’t even have time say hello.”

“Why must you always blame him for what isn’t his fault?” Hagit protested, coming to Tsakhi’s defense. “It will be wonderful,” she told Ofer, “if you two can spend some quiet time together after having been apart for so long. I’d give a lot just to be able to see you.”

“Why not dive with them?” Rivlin teased.

“Come to think of it, why not?” she said, reddening.

He awoke in the morning with the first light. Descending to the bottom floor of the duplex, he carefully opened the door of his younger son’s room, in which Ofer was sleeping, his crew-cut head on the pillow. Brimming with compassion, Rivlin stood looking at him as though searching for some sign of his hopeless struggle with lost love.

Two years had gone by since they had last seen him, in Paris. The dear face so often pictured by them, now covered by two days’ growth of beard, was broader and fleshier, perhaps a result of his classes at the Academy of Cooking in Montparnasse. For a moment, Ofer’s eyes seemed to open. Then he turned his face to the wall. Had the father scrutinizing him been the subject of last night’s conversation with his mother, with whom Ofer had sat up after Rivlin, unable to stay awake, had gone to bed? Or had he kept his grievances to himself?

Rivlin shut the door quietly and went to fetch the morning paper, of which he could read only the headlines. Then he went to the bedroom to see if Hagit was awake. Having been up half the night with Ofer, she would no doubt want to sleep. Yet, attuned to the woundup man who tiptoed past her bed, she opened smiling eyes and promised to join him at the breakfast table.

By the time she did, he had eaten and was sitting by the unopened newspaper, which lay on the table as a mute testimony to his wife’s crime. “I really am sorry,” she said, picking up the paper and glancing at it. “If I had known how much you depended on those glasses, I would have been more careful. But you need to realize how impossible you sometimes are. It isn’t what you do, it’s what you hide.”

“Please. Ofer is here. We agreed to a truce, so let’s keep it. Don’t be like the Arabs.”

“The Arabs? Where do they come in?”

“They’ve always been here. After so many years of living with me, it’s time you knew they’re part of my mental world.”

He went to switch on the electric kettle and take the toast from the toaster while she leafed rapidly through the paper as if looking for something. She found it, read it without comment, and put the paper aside.

“What were you looking at?”

“A notice that the verdict is today.”

“The verdict? Today?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m glad the damned thing is over.”

“What’s so damned about it?”

“It just is.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe all those mysterious closed-door sessions got on my nerves.”

“Why should they have mattered to you?”

“They just did.”

“I wish you’d cut out all those ‘justs.’ Try to explain yourself. Why did this particular trial, which you knew nothing about, get on your nerves? Don’t you have enough there already?”

“I do. But it did anyway. And I don’t like your being a minority who can’t convince the other judges.”

“It’s strange that you should need to feel I’m always in the right. Anyhow, the Supreme Court may rule that I was right on an appeal.”

“You’re that sure he didn’t do anything?”

“I don’t know what he did or didn’t do. And I’m sure that he’s a very shady type. But there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict him.”

“Forensic evidence.”

“Yes, forensic. Don’t make light of it.”

“But when did you manage to write your dissent?”

“The night you ran away to the Tedeschis. Didn’t you wonder why I never tried to get in touch with you?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“It was so quiet without you that I had all the time in the world to concentrate and finish it in one sitting.”

“How did it come out?”

“It certainly convinced me.” Hagit bobbed her head charmingly and took another sip of coffee.

“Will your opinion be in tomorrow’s paper?”

“Only a few snippets. That’s all the censor will allow.”

“I’d like to read the full text.”

“You’d be bored by it. There are parts you wouldn’t follow. And I’d be in trouble if you blabbed about it afterward.”

“Why should I blab?” he replied angrily. “To whom? Forget it. What I want to know is, what happened with Ofer after I went to sleep?”

“He talked about Paris. He loves it more every day.”

“Did he say anything about a girlfriend?”

“No. I don’t think he has one.”

“So what will be?”

“There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Nothing? I don’t know about that. I suppose he criticized me.”

“A bit. It’s hard for him that you identify with him so much. He finds it a burden.”

“I identify with him? He said that?” For some reason, this gladdened him. “But why should that bother him? I wish someone would identify with me….”

“Don’t be so sure. It puts more spine in one to be opposed. And you think your identifying with him gives you the right to know things that he can’t or doesn’t want to talk about.”

“Why can’t he?”

“He just can’t. You have to respect that. He was as upset as I was that you took advantage of your condolence call to quiz Galya. I don’t want to say I told you so. But I did try to talk you out of going to that bereavement. All you did was complicate things.”

“I didn’t complicate anything. I wanted to understand.”

“But you didn’t.”

“At least I tried.”

“Look at the price, though.”

“What price? Didn’t you just say he said nice things about me?”

“Because he loves you.”

“He does?” Rivlin marveled, as though at something impossible. “Did he really say that?”

“He didn’t have to. I know it.”

31.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His son’s large eyes regarded him attentively.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

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

“What kind of mistake?”

“Even a fantasy.”

“A fantasy?” The young officer seemed alarmed.

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

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

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

“Of course.”

“And you promise to try?”

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

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

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

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

32.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rivlin felt his cheeks burn.

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

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

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

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

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

“Elegy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is your cold?”

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

“That’s your own fault.”

“Naturally.”

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

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

“Cartons?”

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

“I’ll tell him.”

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

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

“Aiwa, ya habibi.”^*

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

“Min shanak hatta taht al-ard.”^‡

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you find this?”

“What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And Samaher? Where has she disappeared to?”

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

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

“I’ll tell her,” Rashid said.

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

33.

TANNED AND EXUBERANT, Tsakhi and Ofer returned from their diving adventure on Saturday. They showered, changed into fresh clothes, and hurried off to the Arab market to buy lamb, vegetables, and spices for a French gastronomic experience. Rivlin had no chance to be alone with his younger son or to ask him whether, between dives, he had managed to learn anything from his brother. Tsakhi, though friendly, did not seem interested in talking to his father even when he took time out from his job as assistant chef. And when dinnertime arrived, it turned out that there were guests. Ofer had invited four old friends. The older generation, it had been decided, would eat first and then go to the movies, leaving the younger one to dine by itself.

And so Rivlin sat facing Hagit over a handsomely set table, expertly waited on by their two sons. Ofer, wielding a long knife, carved the fragrant French roast into long, thin slices swimming in sauce.

“You remind me of that elegant Arab waiter in the hotel in Jerusalem,” Rivlin said innocently. “What was his name? Fu’ad?”

The carving knife trembled momentarily in their divorced son’s hand, which quickly regained its grip.

“What about him?”

“I was just reminded of him. I think of him as the perfect waiter. I was surprised to see at the bereavement how well he still bears himself.”

“Where did you see him?”

“In that big room on the first floor.”

“The library.”

“I suppose so. He was made to stand, all in black, behind a table with a condolence book.”

“A condolence book?” Ofer’s voice filled with bitter mockery. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I also thought it was a bit much. But I imagine they did it for all the Christians who came to pay their respects.”

“I hope you weren’t foolish enough to write anything.”

“What’s foolish? I had no choice.”

“Why not?”

“I just didn’t. I suppose that Arab waiter made me feel it was expected of me.”

“What did you write?”

“I don’t remember. I just did.”

“There you go with your ‘justs’ again!” Hagit’s eyes were not sympathetic. “You always remember every word you write.”

“Every word? Really! That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But what does it matter what I wrote? It was just something off the top of my head. A few words about his generosity. You can’t deny him that. His light…”

Ofer bristled. “What light?”

“It was just something I wrote. For God’s sake, let me be! What does it matter?”

He carefully cut a slice of the meat on his plate, dipped it in the sauce, and put it in his mouth. It had the perfumed tang of an exotic game animal.

“The roast is wonderful,” Hagit said. “So delicate.”

“Yes,” Rivlin agreed. “It doesn’t taste exactly like lamb, but it’s delicious. Something special.”

But Ofer wasn’t looking for compliments. “How did Fu’ad recognize you?” he asked.

“Why shouldn’t he? It’s only been five years.” Rivlin continued to chew while he talked. “You needn’t be so hostile to them. They speak of you affectionately. By the way, Tehila called to say that Galya has left two cartons of your old things in the hotel basement. She’s cleaning out her apartment before giving birth.”

“Giving birth?” Ofer turned white. He laid a hand on his cheek, as if hiding something.

“She’s going to have a baby.”

No one spoke.

“Who told you?”

“It was my impression from Tehila.” Rivlin spread blameless hands. “I could be wrong.”

Hagit’s furious expression, and his younger son’s pained, sad look, told him he had made a mistake.

“What did you tell her?” Ofer asked, in a rough, interrogating voice.

“What could I tell her? I said I’d come to Jerusalem and take the cartons. That was before I knew you were coming.”

“Don’t take anything! Stay away from there. Do me a favor, Abba. Leave the hotel and the family alone.”

“I’ll be glad to. But don’t you want to know what’s in those cartons?”

“It can’t be anything important.”

“Because I thought that if your flight is Monday morning and I’m still on vacation, we could drive to Jerusalem to have a look. Maybe you’ll find something…”

“That’s silly,” Hagit said. “It’s a waste of time. There’s nothing there.”

But Ofer, staring angrily as his father carved another, thicker slice of lamb, muttered something no one could make out.

And so it was that, a few hours before his flight, under a torrid morning sky, they drove past the airport on their way to Jerusalem. Rivlin, at a fever pitch, almost regretted the whole thing. He leaned forward in his loosely fastened seatbelt, intently following the curves of the road as if he and not his son were driving. Ofer, on his way to a place in which, even if it was not Paradise, he had been happier than he was now, said nothing behind the steering wheel.

It was only in Talpiyot, in the clear desert light, silently crossing the large garden with its shrubs and flowers that were swooning in the heat, that Rivlin felt, like a lightning bolt, the full force of the spurned husband’s excitement. A strange smile played over Ofer’s tense, wide-eyed face. Certain he could find the cartons by himself, he had told no one he was coming, preferring to avoid an encounter with the woman whose love entrapped him. That could only send him back to Paris branded by more of the old pain.

He appeared to know what he was doing. The morning bustle at the hotel was over. The keys hanging behind the reception desk indicated that the guests had already set out on their pilgrim mission of frequenting the lanes of Jerusalem’s Old City or the ruins of Masada. A single receptionist, a sleepy young Arab, made no comment as the nervous father and son walked past him. Rivlin prayed that they would not run into the proprietress. If she ever opens her mouth and tells Ofer how I played detective here, he thought, all the love in the world will never save me.

The kitchen was deserted. The guests’ tours fed them lunch, and supper was still a long way off. Rivlin watched with amazement as Ofer led him unerringly past the big stoves and sleek worktables. It was as if he had been here yesterday. By the little door to the basement stairs he paused and asked doubtfully:

“Are you sure you want to come down with me? Wouldn’t you rather wait in the lobby?”

“I’d better not,” said Rivlin, his heart in his mouth. “If anyone sees me, it will mean a whole long conversation, and we want to be on time for your flight.”

Ofer looked at his father as if seeing him for the first time and headed down the dark stairs, flicking on the lights one after another as though his fingers remembered where each switch was. They walked along the corridor, passed the closets and the bicycle, sidestepped the bucket of plaster and the old tire, and came to the space with the baby carriage, crib, and old monster of a boiler. As though he knew where to look for them, Ofer went straight to two small cartons in a corner. Disgustedly, hoping for nothing, he began going through them, pulling out a bare canteen, a crumpled army fatigue shirt with sergeant’s stripes, a blackened copper bowl, and some old notebooks, and stopping only when he reached an old pajama top at the bottom.

“She’s crazy,” he muttered, offended. “What did she save all these rags for?”

“She didn’t think she was saving them,” Rivlin said. “She simply went through life like your mother, without noticing how many unnecessary things she was surrounded by.”

Ofer stuffed everything irritably back into the carton, except for a single book, which he laid by the baby carriage. He was bent over the second carton, which looked no more promising than the first, when Fu’ad’s bass voice boomed through the basement:

“Heyk, ya jama’a, bidun ma t’salem? Zay el-haramiyya?”^*

“Shu ni’mal?”^† Rivlin put his hands behind his ears in the gesture of Muslim prayer. “We have no time to be polite. Ofer’s flight takes off in three hours.”

“Still landing and taking off, eh?” Fu’ad laughed. “How will it all end? You Jews can’t sit still. It will drive you crazy.”

He gave Ofer a warm hug.

“The years have gone by, and you’ve grown into your own man. But it wasn’t nice of you to forget all your friends here. If it weren’t for your father’s coming now and then to remind us of you, we would have forgotten you completely.”

Before Rivlin could change the subject, Ofer turned to him with open anger, a new, menacing note in his voice:

“So you were here more than once?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” He tried getting out of it with a sheepish smile.

“No. When? Why?”

“Because your father was stuck in Jerusalem with no place to sleep,” the maitre d’ explained, telling the story. “He thought he would find a room here. How was he to know we’re more full up than ever since Mr. Hendel’s death? Just imagine: your own father, whom we respect and honor, had to sleep down here in the basement! Or at least he slept here half the night, because in the middle of it the poor man woke up and ran away in a fright. Isn’t that so, Professor? Kif fakart fujatan ’an haza ardiyya…. ^‡

He clapped the Orientalist on the back and gave Ofer, who stared at his father incredulously, a conspiratorial laugh.

“You agreed to sleep here?”

“What could I do? I thought…”

“You thought what?” His elder son’s voice was now a stifled cry. “What were you trying to do?”

Rivlin affected an astonished smile. “What do you mean, trying to do?”

But Ofer had already turned more gently to Fu’ad. “Is this room still in use?” he asked wonderingly.

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“And you still don’t have the key?”

Hiding a smile, the Arab went to the baby carriage, moved the dusty toy animals, lifted the mattress, took a key, and opened the door to the accountant’s room, whose shelves creaked beneath the weight of their old files.

Ofer froze in the doorway as though caught in a dream or a fantasy. His eyes were riveted to a new, large quilt that lay on the bed like a layer of frozen white foam.

Rivlin’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the quilt, foamy bright in the dark room. He wondered what made Fu’ad sound so exultant when he said:

“One way or another, it’s still there, Ofer, eh?”

And with that he locked the door. “You mustn’t miss your flight,” he murmured.

Ofer took the book he had put by the baby carriage and started up the stairs. “You can throw out those two cartons,” he called scornfully over his shoulder to Fu’ad. “Or give them to someone in your village. Come on,” he said to his father. “We’ll be late.”

But in the empty parking lot, by their car baking in the sun, he halted and said to Rivlin:

“I have nothing more to say to you. Just shut up and don’t answer me. Not one word. I don’t want any explanations or rationalizations. I’ve had enough. Let’s go to the goddamn airport and say good-bye.”

“But what have I done to you, Ofer? What’s wrong?”

“You haven’t done anything. You’re simply an impossible man. A sneaking, bossy traitor who wants to spy on my soul. Well, you can’t. You’re not spying on anything.”

“But what have I done?”

“You know perfectly well what you’ve done and what you’re doing. Ever since her fucking father’s bereavement, you’ve kept coming back here to paw at my past. It’s sickening, and it’s pointless. God! Am I glad I’m leaving and won’t have to see you anymore!”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“I can say what I like!” The stifled cry burst from him, echoing through the garden. “What gives you the right to trespass on anyone’s life?”

Rivlin felt on fire. The sunlight wounded his eyes. His son’s sudden anger frightened him.

“But I only wanted to help you to move on. To share your pain and find a way for you to…”

“You’re not finding a way for me to do anything. You can’t.”

“But why can’t I? Only because I know nothing. If you’d tell me why they drove you from here…”

“But I won’t! Do you hear me?” He was shouting now. “I won’t tell you anything. You’d better accept that. Either you stop your vile habit of poking around basements or you’re not my father anymore. I swear to God, I’ll have nothing more to do with you!”

“But why?” Rivlin implored, desperately trying to keep calm. “Who are you protecting? Yourself — or her too? Why keep secrets after so many years? There’s a statute of limitations on secrets too. Ask your mother. She’ll tell you.”

Ofer’s face was contorted. “I’m not asking anyone. I’ll decide when enough time has passed. Not you! Do you hear me? Not you! I don’t want to talk about it any more. Period. And you’ll either accept that or lose one son.”

Yet just when it seemed that his anguish would end in tears or violence, he looked away and out over the large garden with its gravel paths and gazebo, silent in the noonday heat. When he turned back and spoke to his father, who was watching him motionlessly, it was in a different, quiet tone. “Because if I tell you what happened,” he said, “I’ll lose my only chance of coming back here.”

“Coming back here?” Rivlin clutched at the car door for support. “Are you telling me that you’re still hoping… to get together again… now, when she’s about to have a child?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Ofer, my darling, I’ll swear to you never to come back here. I’ll swear never to say a word to anyone. I won’t even think about it anymore. This is the last time. I beg you, don’t leave me more tormented than I’ve been. Just say one sentence, because I have to be sure I understand. Do you really believe she’ll take you back?” Ofer said nothing.

“I beg you. Just say yes or no. Answer your father. Because maybe I misunderstood you.”

“You understood me very well,” his son murmured with a sudden tenderness, as though lapsing into an inner reverie. “Amazingly enough, I do believe it.”

“If that’s so,” Rivlin said in horror, “it’s because you’ve decided to chain yourself forever. You’re destroying yourself and your future…”

“That’s my right.” He made a fist as though to strike his father. “It’s my right just as it’s anyone’s right to live by real or imagined love. But listen here, I’m warning you. If there’s one more word out of you — one word! about anything! — I’m not getting into this car. I’ll get to the airport by myself, and that’s the last you’ll see of me.”