The Liberated Bride

PART VI. The Dybbuk

ALTHOUGH HE KNEW there was no getting out of it, since not even a generous present, given in advance, would have soothed the sting of their absence, he went on hoping on that autumn evening, right up to the last minute, for something unexpected to save him from the wedding. Yet he kept his grumbling to himself. For all his criticism in recent years of their housekeeper’s careless cleaning and dull cooking, he would always be grateful for her unstinting loyalty, for her love for his two boys, even for some of her meals. And so while Hagit debated what to wear, he sat in his black suit by the front door and studied the map on the invitation.

There was no Arab driver this time; there were no young parking attendants waving lanterns to show them the road, just the two of them, trying to find their way in the industrial zone of Haifa Bay. They passed garages, textile plants, furniture outlets, and appliance stores and finally reached a large wedding hall that glittered with neon magic. And even then they had to look for their wedding, since the disco music pounding inside came from several celebrations at once.

Was this the right one? Despondent and already exhausted, they stood on a palatial marble staircase that led to a reception room decorated with artificial flowers, wondering whether to slip the check they had brought into the gold-leafed box in front of them or to hand it directly to the housekeeper.

“Well,” Rivlin said, deciding to deposit the check in the box, “we can go now.” The sight of so many overweight cousins and aunts, escorted by little husbands in loud jackets, filled him with odium. However, as they knew none of these people and so would have no one to testify to their attendance, they had no choice but to take their seats at a numbered table with a basket of stale-looking rolls, a bottle of white wine, and a tray of wizened garnishes, there to wait, beneath the savage onslaught of the music, to see who would be their dinner mates.

Nothing had changed since the Arab wedding in the Galilee that spring. Surrounded by strangers, ordinary people with every right to celebrate and enjoy themselves, he felt only his own failure. The bile of envy rose in his gorge, as if all the weddings taking place in this building had conspired to reopen his old wound.

“Why don’t we just get up and walk out?” he shouted to his wife over the violent music, which had driven a wedge between them. “Don’t tell me you came here for the food.”

This proposal was so undeserving of a response that the judge did not bother to make one. Only when Rivlin repeated it did she reply severely:

“Believe me, I’d rather be in bed now, too. But we have to wait for the ceremony so that we can congratulate her. Why can’t you understand how much we, and especially I, mean to her?”

The ceremony did not appear to be imminent. Some members of the younger set were already gyrating wildly to the music, and new guests continued to arrive. No one joined them at their table. Time passed. “The families must be haggling over the wedding contract,” Hagit remarked, lighting another cigarette while staring at the red velvet curtain from which the bride and groom were to emerge. Rivlin, though he had only a vague notion of the family feuds that the housekeeper kept the judge informed about, gave up all hope for a quick getaway and reached for the tray of garnishes, from which he began to collect the olives. His ennui was only heightened when a small, elderly man in an old brown three-piece suit sat down warily at their table. The man, who had a slight palsy, recognized the Rivlins, at whose company he seemed pleased. Contentedly reaching for a roll, he crumbled it between his fingers and held out his wineglass for Rivlin to fill.

“I’m glad to see you two,” he said with a sagacious smile, brushing the crumbs from his suit. “I wasn’t sure you were coming. The mother of the bride has been working for us even longer than for you, ever since she was a girl. She stayed on after my wife died, until I moved to a senior citizens’ home seven years later. But we’re still on good terms. When you think of the difficult background she comes from, she’s an amazingly pleasant and well-adjusted person. Of course her cooking isn’t exactly — what’s the word the young folk like to use? — awesome. Let’s hope tonight’s meal was cooked by someone else, ha, ha, ha…”

Rivlin permitted himself a covert smile, which did not escape the old widower’s sharp eye.

“Yes, I know all about you,” he said, picking at the roll with palsied fingers. “She brings me up-to-date when she visits me — all about your new apartment, and your sons and what they’re doing. She’s very attached to you, Your Honor, and always says how patient you are with her. Which reminds me… if it isn’t intruding… I mean, as long as we’re at the same table… you see, I couldn’t tell from yesterday’s paper… what exactly were your reasons for acquitting that damned spy? Why, he’s not even an Arab.”

“Not an Arab?” Rivlin asked in puzzlement.

“You see, Professor,” the widower said, taking him into his confidence, “we all know our judges go easy on Arabs. They do it even with ordinary murderers and rapists, not to mention terrorists. They’re afraid — oh, yes, they are! — to be accused of something as unfashionable as patriotism. But in your wife’s case, the defendant was Jewish and a big fish at that. That’s why I wondered why she let him off the hook as if he were an Arab.”

Pleased with his irony, the old widower took a sip of wine, broke into a cough, turned red, and nearly choked.

Hagit, perking up to the sound of a European wedding march played in a Middle Eastern style, did not even glance in the choking patriot’s direction. Her eyes bright with emotion, she leaned forward to take her husband’s hand and led him to the wedding canopy behind the procession that the large curtain had parted to admit. Ahead of them, accompanied by their families and a video crew, the bride and groom walked slowly and majestically.

Rivlin remembered the groom as a quiet, easily frightened boy. Now, dark-complexioned and thin, in a wide-lapelled suit and a black hat, he looked like a pensive secret-service agent. He was holding the hand of his father, a greengrocer, whose own suit was a summery white. Its color matched the muslin veil of the bride, who was now floating down the aisle between two women, one big and fat and one slim and attractive. For a moment, Rivlin failed to recognize the slim woman as their housekeeper. She bore herself gracefully in a bare-shouldered yellow silk dress, her head topped by an auburn hairpiece glittering with sequins, her heavily made-up eyes regarding the world as if it were no longer quite worthy of her. Meeting the surprised glance of her employer as she passed him twice, once in front of him and once on a large screen above his head, she flashed, so he thought, a triumphant smile.

2.

STANDING IN LINE at the pharmacy of his health clinic for his blood-pressure medicine, Rivlin took a step back from the old woman in front of him, whose blue-tinged hair he found distasteful. She sensed his presence and turned to look at him. It was the ghost in person, her baggy old jacket grazing his clothes. He smiled at her desiccated face, which was heavier and infinitely harder than his mother’s. Failing to place the bespectacled, scholarly voyeur, the ghost stared blankly at him and turned around again, shifting a long list of prescriptions from hand to hand. As soon as a new window opened, she darted for it more quickly than he would have thought possible at her age and was the first to reach it. The Orientalist, amused, did not bother changing lines.

When Rivlin was a small boy, his father kept a journal of his son’s exploits that he read aloud to whoever would listen. Sometimes, wishing to relive his childhood, Rivlin browsed in it. The boy rather sentimentally described in its pages was capable of great and even extreme obstinacy and was not always very clever. Sometimes, Rivlin succeeded in dredging from the depths of memory the incidents his father related — the time he pretended to conduct an orchestra of children in nursery school; the time he chased a runaway chicken. Yet the most famous of these stories, the one in which he proposed marriage to his mother, was one he had no recollection of. Perhaps this was why, although its psychological significance seemed obvious, he smiled mysteriously whenever he read it.

The Six-Year-Old Rivlin Proposes Marriage to His Mother

When Rivlin attended first grade, his father walked him to school on his way to work every day, crossing the streets of the old downtown with him. The little boy liked to take his time, especially when he spied a pile of builder’s sand or gravel, which he felt duty-bound to climb. One day his father lost his temper at his dallying. When this didn’t help, he pointed to a neatly dressed and combed blond boy walking with his schoolbag on his back, and said:

“That does it! I’m trading you in for that nice blond boy. From now on he’ll be my son.”

Rivlin, who was standing on a big pile of gravel while regarding the old Knesset building, was thunderstruck. Turning red with indignation, he began to call the little stranger names, even declaring that he was Hitler’s son, a cruel boy who had to be watched out for. Reaching the school with his father, who now regretted the whole thing, he refused to kiss him good-bye.

The first-grade student — so his father’s journal continued — sat in the classroom in an agitated state. As soon as the recess bell rang, he raced into the schoolyard to vent his feelings to his big sister. By the time he found her standing with some friends, however, the bell had rung again, and there was no time to say a word. Instead of returning to class he burst into tears and ran home, dashing blindly across streets whose dangers he had been warned of without stopping to climb a single pile of sand. His mother was in the kitchen. Without mincing words, he said:

“You should never have married that man. I’d make a better husband. Why don’t you leave him and marry me?”

His mother, pleased by the unexpected proposal, did not reject it out of hand. She made Rivlin repeat it and finally coaxed the whole story from him, after which he calmed down and regained his old brashness — so much so that, when his exhausted father came home at the end of a day’s work, he opened the door and said:

“Hurry up and go to Ima! She wants to spank you!”

His father ended this episode by remarking:

“Who would have thought, my little boy, that a passing remark of mine would stir up such a dreadfully strong spirit of jealousy and contention? From now on I shall never cease to worry, for if every little thing excites you so badly, what will happen when you grow older?”

3.

DEAR, SWEET AUTUMN, don’t let us down, Rivlin exhorted the skies every morning, as he opened the shutter to study the color and shape of the clouds drifting over the Carmel. “Another rainless, stormless winter like the last two and I’ll go out of my mind,” he told his wife. Hagit lay self-indulgently beneath the big white quilt that he had made her take from the closet in the hope of coercing the cold weather to come.

The fall semester was about to begin, students were flocking to ask for advice, and the department head was still in America. His lecture at the conference on “Twenty Years of Edward Said’s Orientalism” had gone so well that even exiles from Iraq and Sudan had asked him for a copy of the text, which he had delivered in Arabic as a symbolic provocation. If Akri was to be trusted, the New York — based Palestinian professor, or one of his disciples, would now have to rewrite the book, in order to defend it against the Haifaite’s challenges, hot off the Middle Eastern griddle. Of course, some of the conference’s participants had sought to dismiss the Israeli Arabist as simply another Western Orientalist like those accused by Said of marginalizing the Arab world — a pseudoscholar treating the Middle East as an absence to be filled by his presence, or as a shadow play waiting to be brought to life by its colonialist puppeteers. And yet how could the Middle East be absent, or a shadow, in a courageously original Middle Easterner like Ephraim Akri, a stalwart, God-fearing Levantine, albeit a Jewish one, whose brown skin and sad Bedouin eyes were those of a true son of the desert and whose command of the subtleties of Arabic put to shame the politically correct professors from New England and northern California who couldn’t pronounce correctly a single Arabic curse? His bold new ideas had made such an impression that he had been invited to speak to numerous Jewish and Christian groups, who were eager to hear an Old Historian’s reasons for believing that the situation in the Middle East was more hopeless than anyone thought.

And so, while Akri was enlightening his audiences in Florida and even inviting one of his grandsons to join him for a tour of Disneyland, his temporary replacement moved back into his old room, the spacious and well-lit office of a department head. Putting up with the gaze of both grandsons, one blond and one dark, he resumed his job of advising students — new and old, Arab and Jewish — on how best and least onerously to fulfill their obligations and keep the department from losing them.

He avoided serious phone talks with Ofer, the depth of whose hostility he did not dare to gauge for fear of a brutal rebuff. (On their trip to the airport, his son had kept his vow of silence, uttering a total of three inconsequential sentences.) Letting Hagit conduct their weekly conversation with Paris, he listened over the second receiver like a circumspect aide-de-camp, asking an occasional pointless question. Ofer’s acquiescence in this arrangement, however artificial, allowed him to hope that his son, who had lost all self-control that day at the hotel, was taking himself in hand.

Even after getting his new glasses, he did not hurry to type his handwritten reflections on Algeria into his computer. Perhaps he feared that weaknesses and inconsistencies not apparent in the heat of composition might show up on the bright screen. Meanwhile, to the delight of the two secretaries, he spent much of his time in his old office, comfortably ensconced in the big armchair that had been his own acquisition. No one, he knew, could run the department as well as he could. Though he was only doing so on a stopgap basis, he did his best to solve the problems brought to him.

One morning he heard Rashid talking to the secretaries. Straining to listen, he learned that Samaher’s cousin was on a secret, Rivlin-bypassing mission to obtain certification, at least of a provisional nature, of his M.A. student’s completion of all her course requirements for the previous year. The secretaries, remembering him as their driver to the wedding in Mansura, asked about the vanished bride.

“She hasn’t been feeling well,” Rashid said. “That’s why she asked me to take care of this.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She isn’t well,” he repeated. “She can’t concentrate. It’s the situation.”

“What situation?”

“Ours. The country’s.”

They checked Samaher’s file, saw that she had an incomplete from Professor Rivlin, and dispensing with further formalities, waved Rashid in to the department head. Much to his surprise, the trusty messenger, who had had no intention of doing so, found himself facing Samaher’s teacher.

“Are you running the department again?” he asked.

“Just for a while,” Rivlin apologized. “Shut the door. What’s new? What does Samaher want now?”

“Temporary certification that she’s completed her requirements.”

“Temporary certification? There’s no such thing as temporarily completing something. You shouldn’t let her use you like this, Rashid.”

The coal black eyes, taken aback, stared at him, then looked thoughtfully down at the floor.

Rivlin felt a pang. “You didn’t bring me anything from her? Not even one story? Not a single poem?”

“She can’t…,” Rashid murmured, in genuine anguish. “She really can’t…” He regarded the Orientalist as if deciding whether to trust him, then whispered in Arabic:

“Al-hayal sar kabt, u’l’kabt b’dur ala ’l-jnun.”^*

“You’ll drive me crazy, too,” the Orientalist said absently, with a bitter smile.

Rashid seemed to have thought of that possibility, for he did not look surprised. He merely laid a defensive hand on his heart and asked:

“Why me?”

“Listen here, Rashid. I want the truth.”

The truth, it seemed, was a long story. It had to do with Samaher’s father-in-law, the contractor, a difficult man who had insisted on hospitalizing his confused daughter-in-law in Safed, so that she could be cured of…

“… of… the horse.”

“The horse?”

Rashid sighed. “Yes. She keeps imagining it.”

“And she’s still there?”

“Who?”

“Samaher. In the hospital.”

“Just a little while longer. We have to be patient. Soon she’ll get out. That’s what the doctor says. She wants to very badly….”

The sky outside the window had clouded over. A bolt of lightning pawed at the bay. But Rashid, though he had never been in this room, had no interest in its views, neither of the bay nor of the mountains. Running his glance over the books on the shelves, he let it linger on the photographs of Akri’s grandsons, as if committing them to memory. His silence filled Rivlin with a warm memory of their night journey. He would have liked, in obedience to an old longing, to take to the road once again with the messenger, who now reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled white skullcap that he smoothed with his hand.

“Is that for The Dybbuk, Rashid?”

An Arab librarian, Rashid explained, had helped him find the play and had convinced the student at the checkout counter to let him borrow it under Samaher’s name. They were already rehearsing it.

“Then the festival is really taking place?”

“Of course it is.” Rashid was insulted. “When did I ever lie to you?”

Everyone in Ramallah, he told Rivlin, even the police, was organizing for the event. The date was set for a Saturday night in late November, which worked out well for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In fact, it turned out to be on the anniversary of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution for Palestine. He, Rashid, would bring the professor from Jerusalem if he didn’t want to drive through Palestinian territory himself. There would be plenty of room in the minibus. Professor Rivlin had seen how no checkpoint could stop him. And there would be no political skits like those in Zababdeh, just poems of love and friendship, some new and some old. The professor wouldn’t be the only Jew there. There would be Israeli poets and peace activists, progressive people, all guests of the Palestinian Authority. There would even be a poetry contest, with prizes. The judge had already been chosen: a British professor who taught at Bir-Zeit University. It would all be in a spirit of fun. Everyone was tired of politics. Ramallah wasn’t Gaza, where people loved to hate each other. The Ramallans knew how to live. And the professor should bring his wife this time. The judge would enjoy it. She mustn’t miss the Lebanese nun, that divine little scamp who had promised to come on another tour of Palestine. She had even asked the Abuna — or so he said — whether the Jew would be there.

4.

AUTUMN ARRIVED AT full blast, bringing wind and rain and the promise of a real winter. Yet there were also days of warm sun and sweet light, with fleecy white clouds hanging quietly in the sky. Although her blinds were opened less often now, the ghost, dressed in two heavy sweaters that Rivlin recognized from the previous winter, continued to sit on her terrace. She no longer played solitaire. Seated at the little red table with a pad of stationery, she seemed to be — as far as he could make out from across the street — filling page after page with writing.

The semester began. The Oriental department head returned from the Occident, buoyed by his audiences of decent Christians and wealthy Jews politely worried about the future. He thanked Rivlin for filling in for him, and especially for preventing the rector and the dean from making off with the half-time teaching slot.

Relieved of the duty of substituting for his successor, Rivlin no longer had an excuse to put off typing his wildly scrawled and illegible notes, the product of his days without glasses, into his computer, to prepare them for submission to the critical eye of the brilliant young Dr. Miller, the keys to whose academic career he held. He knew that Miller was attuned to the latest winds blowing from German and American universities and that his approach to scholarship, and to Orientalism in particular, was revisionist. (Indeed, the young doctor had even announced at a departmental meeting that he refused to be called any longer by the intellectually pretentious and discredited title of “Orientalist”; he preferred the more modest description of “Middle Eastern social ethnographer.”) For this reason, Rivlin, wishing to present his draft in a softer, more ambivalent light, took care to insert in more places than necessary a number of self-critical qualifications and to replace exclamation points with question marks. He then ran his remarks off on the printer, put them in Miller’s mailbox with a jocular note, and postponed the next meeting of the secret appointments committee until the following week.

He thought sorrowfully of his eldest son and of their harsh exchange in the parking lot of the hotel. I won’t defend myself against his accusations, he told himself. On the contrary, I’ll admit openly that I should never have slept in the basement with all those superannuated tax files. Still, he doesn’t have to be angry with me just because I did something foolish. If he’d told me the reason for his separation, I’d never have had to sink to such depths.

Self-pity vied with self-blame. He envied the old ghost on the terrace her outburst of writing.

His thoughts weren’t only of Ofer, his face twisted with rage. He also thought of his Circe, deftly making a bed for him with snow white sheets. Had it been the brackish light of the basement or her low-grade fever that had made her skin look so translucent and virginal? It was curious. You could count on someone like her not to take a night’s fling seriously or to expect anything from you afterward, her only loyalty being to the hotel. And yet what pleasure could there be in making love to such a bony, unattractive woman, who, for all her haughtiness, wanted protection, too? And how did you make love at all to a woman so much taller than yourself? Did you expand or did she contract?

And then there was Fu’ad. What had he been up to, turning up like that with a pillow? Had he come to warn him against an involvement that an ex-in-law should have known better than to risk, or was he protecting the proprietress? And in either case, why hadn’t the discreet maître d’ stuck to his philosophy of playing it safe and putting his own interests first?

And on the other hand, if this were really Fu’ad’s credo, why write an elegy for Ofer? Why mention it? Simply to demonstrate his friendship for an Orientalist who had told him in polished Arabic that he was dying? Or was it a signal not to give up in his pursuit of a secret that he, Fu’ad, was unable to discuss?

On a whim, Rivlin called the hotel. Without identifying himself, he asked to speak to Fu’ad, who had to be summoned from the garden.

“Anna ba’awek aleyk?”^*

“La, abadan, ya ahi.”^†

“What’s new? How’s Galya?”

“God be praised. She’s giving birth soon.”

“And the elegy? Al-marthiyya? Did you find it?”

“I’ve stopped looking for it, Professor. So should you. What’s gone is gone. Why lose sleep over it? If you want a new elegy, it’s no problem. I can even write you a love poem. Lately, the rhymes just keep coming. I even wrote a little poem in Hebrew.”

“Good for you.”

“I don’t know what it is, but since Mr. Hendel passed on I’ve been full of feeling. I can be in the middle of work, running the dining room or the cleaning staff, and suddenly I want to write. It’s a pity it’s all lost in the end, like that elegy. No one in our village appreciates a good poem. I wish I knew someone who could give me some constructive criticism. Back in the fifties we had a poet of our own, a fellow named Ibn Smih. Then he got into trouble with the law, and they took him away….”

5.

THAT WEEK, a movie called Passage of Memory was playing at the Japanese Museum. Two young lawyers, stopping their debate in Hagit’s chambers long enough to discuss it, had recommended it. Whereas famous stars and good reviews could not persuade Rivlin to go to a European or American movie unless he first got a detailed synopsis from his wife, he was more tolerant of films from more exotic places. Lately, he had particularly enjoyed several Iranian ones made under the regime of the ayatollahs. “Even if the plot doesn’t hold up,” he explained to Hagit, “there are still new faces, landscapes, and foods… who knows, perhaps even new and better ways of making love.”

Love was something he had slacked off at. Ten days had passed since he and Hagit had last made it, which meant it was time for action. Since in recent months the judge had been an elusive partner, prematurely tired at night and prematurely quick to rise in the morning, he had decided to consider other times of the day — such as before the Japanese movie, which was still three hours off. Hagit, however, was far from eager to undress or to miss the five o’clock news. It took many tender endearments, plus switching on the heater in the bedroom, to get her to take off her pants and blouse. Aroused by her half-naked body, Rivlin proceeded slowly, wary of making a false step or overshooting the intricate target zone of her desire.

And yet it went badly. Their kisses and caresses, even in places that had never failed them before, were stale and counterfeit. The room was too hot, and the tingle of passion soon turned to a thin, unpleasant trickle of sweat. Hagit, impatiently fretting and complaining, asked to be excused and even urged him to finish without her, which was something she generally hated. Though unhappy about it, he went ahead and made love to her motionless body for the sake of his peace of mind during the movie. Yet something about the way she shut her eyes, as though to protect herself, upset him at the wrong moment, and he came with a paltry dribble.

“It’s all right,” she said comfortingly, after he had rolled off her. “Don’t worry about it. Next time…”

He didn’t answer.

The Japanese Museum would have had a comfortable theater had the rows not lacked a middle aisle, thus forcing too many people to stand up for those taking or leaving their seats. The movie, though of recent vintage, was in black and white, presumably to convey its somber mood, while the English subtitles were difficult to read quickly — a serious problem in a film that had more talking than action. The film (so a flyer handed out to the audience explained) was about the passage from life to death and took place in a Japanese purgatory, where the newly deceased were interviewed. To gain admission to the next world, they had to forget everything about their lives except for one happy memory, which they were allowed to keep for all eternity.

It was storming outside. The drumming of rain on the roof gave Rivlin a cozy feeling as he watched the arrival of the interviewers. A likable group of young men and women who resembled social workers or vocational testers, they had their quarters in a small, drab office that reminded him of the former quarters of the income-tax bureau in an old building near Haifa port. Unlike other Japanese movies he had seen, in which the actors expressed simple, everyday emotions with a frequently jarring agitation, in this one they talked calmly and quietly. They, too, it appeared, were dead, stranded between worlds because they had been unable to choose their happiest memory. Their punishment was to have to help others choose.

After a long opening scene in which the interviewers chatted over coffee and cake, the first newly dead person arrived. Rivlin found the interview difficult to follow. His eyelids drooped, and his head fell to one side. After a while he roused himself and glanced at his wife. Hagit took her eyes off the screen, at which she had been staring with stupefaction, and smiled. “What do you think?” he whispered. “It’s one of these intellectual art movies,” she said reassuringly. “Let’s give it a chance.” He heard a thin whistling coming from his left. He turned to look at the attractive woman sitting next to him, whose large, bald husband was the source of the sound. She hurried to wake him, and he sat up, rubbed his eyes, gave Rivlin an apologetic look, and resumed staring grimly at the screen.

Outside, the rain beat down harder. Although the movie had been showing for barely ten minutes, to Rivlin it felt like a year. How much more of this could he take? The Japanese purgatory, though profoundly symbolic, did not speak to him. He scanned the audience of middle-class intellectuals and culture lovers, many of them known to him from concerts at the Philharmonic. Most seemed determined to rise to the movie’s challenge, while only a few showed signs of dropping out. He glanced back at Hagit. Although she was still managing to sit straight, her eyes were closed. Now and then, as if fighting off the sleep engulfing her, her head bobbed in agreement with the sound track, in little Japanese bows. He nudged her. She didn’t wake. He had to whisper her name to make her open her eyes and flash him another warm smile.

“Already asleep?” he scolded.

“No. Just for a second. What’s happening? Are you following it?”

“God knows. It’s awfully complicated. But you can relax. No one is going to get killed because they’re all dead already.”

She laid an affectionate hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s see what happens,” she encouraged him. “Lean back. My lawyers said it was a good movie.”

A crew-cut, ornery-looking old man now appeared on the screen and told an interviewer about his native village. He remembered the wind and the grass. Rivlin felt cheered. The first happy memory was on its way.

But it wasn’t so simple. The ornery man couldn’t decide which memory was his happiest. And the next time Rivlin awoke, it was only a quarter of an hour later. The attractive woman was asleep now, too, leaning on him lightly. He tried moving away from her. But this only made her lean more, and in the end he had to push her gently back toward her husband. She awoke annoyed, and he turned back to his own wife, who was now sleeping so soundly that her bowing had stopped.

The rain had died down. A deadly quiet prevailed in the little theater. The camera panned on the industrial area of a large city, where a dead Japanese woman was stonily describing the accident that had killed her.

This continued for an hour and a half before the lights came on for intermission. Rivlin, his head full of Japanese memories, awoke with a start. Hagit greeted him brightly, while his attractive neighbor gave him a dirty look, as if he had done something indecent to her during their joint sleep. Her husband rose and stretched himself groggily.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rivlin said.

“Maybe the second half will be better.”

“It won’t be.”

“I hate leaving in the middle. There’s nothing terrible about falling asleep from time to time. The movie is made of separate episodes.”

But he found falling asleep at movies and concerts embarrassing, and exhausting to fight against. He rose and made their whole row rise with them. People stood by the buffet, sipping coffee and cold drinks while discussing whether to remain for the film’s second half. Those who had stayed awake explained what it was about to those who hadn’t and coached them for the remainder. Rivlin, tired of happy Japanese memories, took Hagit by the arm and steered her toward the exit.

A storm-buffeted moon staggered through the sky between tattered clouds. He brushed wet leaves from the windshield of their car and said, pierced by sorrow,

“I would have been through with that interview in a minute. I could have said right away what my happiest memory was and gladly forgotten everything else.”

She bowed her head. “Yes. I know.”

“You know what?”

“The memory you would have taken with you.”

“Which?”

“Ofer’s wedding. The garden of the hotel.”

“You’re right,” he said, a bit annoyed to have his thoughts read so easily. “Ofer’s wedding. Despite, or maybe — who knows? — because of all that’s happened since then.”

He started the car as his wife climbed into it, then backed carefully out of the narrow parking space.

“And I,” Hagit mused, “would have ended up stranded between worlds. I have too many happy memories to choose just one. Especially of things that happened before I met you.”

6.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER giving his preface to Dr. Miller, Rivlin found it returned to his mailbox, without an accompanying note. What did Miller think he was doing? Was he being provocative or just stupid? Rivlin couldn’t believe that the young lecturer was so unafraid of him.

At first he was inclined to say nothing until they saw each other at the next departmental meeting. That night, however, he slept poorly. In the morning, unable to restrain himself, he called to straighten the matter out.

“I was wondering if you’d read it…”

But reading Rivlin’s introduction had been a piece of cake for the theoretical mind of the young lecturer. He just hadn’t been sure whether the professor, with whom he had such ideological and methodological differences, really wanted to know his opinion.

“But that’s just it,” the Orientalist said, feeling better. “It’s precisely those differences that make me want to know what you think.”

Nevertheless, he was careful to set their meeting in Miller’s room, a few floors above his own. That way he could get out of it any time he wanted.

Although Miller’s standing at the university did not entitle him to his own office, the young lecturer, who was two or three years older than Ofer, had found a little cubbyhole between two rooms near the rector’s office — a space originally intended for a coffee machine or a file cabinet — and talked his way into getting it. His sense of his own uniqueness, it seemed, made him prefer a cramped room of his own to a larger one shared with someone else.

It was late on a gray winter day. Miller’s narrow window looked out on neither mountains nor sea, but on some houses of a Druze village that appeared engraved in the dust on its glass pane. Rivlin, a tense smile on his face, surveyed the tiny room’s overloaded bookshelves with what was meant to be a benevolent glance. Most of the books were recently published American and German studies of political and sociological theory. Not a single Arabic volume was in evidence. Did this man demanding tenure in the Near Eastern Studies department know Arabic at all, or did he rely entirely on translations for his postmodernist opinions? Moving the empty chair away from Miller’s desk so as not to have to face him like a student, Rivlin positioned himself diagonally and stretched his legs out in front of him. “To judge by your tone,” he began magnanimously, “I take it that you have some objections. Well, I’d like to hear them. I’m open to criticism.”

Miller ran a hand through his sandy hair and took off his glasses. To Rivlin’s surprise, his light blue eyes were childishly innocent. Although the young lecturer could easily guess that the full professor was on the secret appointments committee, he did not beat around the bush. In no uncertain terms, he rejected the Orientalist’s thesis that an academic study dealing with the origins of Algerian national identity could have any relevance to the current bloodshed in Algeria. His tone quiet and considered, he stressed the need to demolish not only the theoretical foundations of his senior colleague’s introduction — which, Rivlin now saw, he had not only read but could remember every word of — but the premises of the still unwritten book to follow. Its reification of the concept of national identity, he contended, doomed it to failure on moral and intellectual grounds.

“Reification?” Rivlin forced a smile while concealing his anxiety over a word whose exact meaning he was unsure of.

Yes, Miller said. National identity was not a natural or empirical given, there being no such thing. It was a fictive construct used by the power structure to enslave the population it purportedly described. He found it deplorable that a senior faculty member, writing at the end of the twentieth century, should collaborate in such an anachronistic, long repudiated, and even dangerous point of view, much less base a book on it.

“A fictive construct in what way?” Stiffening, Rivlin did his best to overlook the connotations of the word “collaborate.”

The young postmodernist was happy to explain. In articulate, if rather mechanical and (Rivlin thought) smugly jesuitical language, he demystified the devious concept of national identity, which served to ghettoize the lower classes and deprive them of their rights within the rigid framework of the national state, whether — for there was no difference — this was of an openly totalitarian or an ostensibly democratic nature.

“Come, come,” Rivlin drawled, in what he intended to be a patronizing manner. “No difference between totalitarianism and democracy? Isn’t that going a bit far?”

But the sandy-haired jesuit, now sitting in the shadow of a passing cloud, stuck to his guns. National identity was an illegitimate concept even in a country like Israel that still pretended, albeit with increasing difficulty, to be democratic. Rather than let people decide for themselves who they were and how they wished to be defined, it trapped them in a rigid category that had no room for change, development, personal experience, or multiple identities. With the full complicity of the academic community, the ruling classes sought to impose an inflexible model of reality, privileging some and marginalizing others, for the purpose of exerting total control.

Rivlin sighed. “I’d say you were the proof that they haven’t succeeded,” he said, wishing he could dampen the young postmodernist’s ardor.

“They can never succeed,” Miller agreed triumphantly. “In the end the whole system will implode.” Ordinary thinking people would rebel against being labeled by the antiquated notions that the professor (sitting now in evening shadow, his head jerked back in dismay) wished to construct his book with. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy would understand that national identity enslaved rather than enhanced them, by curbing their freedom and mobility and preventing a rich interchange of perspectives across permeable frontiers. And the moral absurdity of it was that the enslavers, the engineers of identity who locked the doors and sealed the borders, kept open these possibilities for themselves. They alone retained access to the rich interfaces of language and culture, traveling widely and associating with different peer groups while the masses, locked within the gates of the state, were chauvinistically regimented. And to what end? But that was obvious…

“Not to me,” Rivlin said honestly.

“To make cannon fodder for the next unnecessary war.”

“Whoa there!” he protested. “Begging your pardon! How can a political progressive like you call an anticolonialist struggle against a century of oppression in Algeria unnecessary?”

But the theoretical jesuit was unimpressed by anticolonialist platitudes. Colonialism, he maintained, was not so much a historical or political phenomenon as a ubiquitous condition that co-opted all elements of society. It was present even in countries that had never had colonies, such as Austria or Sweden, to say nothing of Israel, a colonialist entity from the start. You didn’t even have to look at the Occupied Territories to see that. “Take, for instance,” Miller said, with a thin smile, “the hierarchical organization of the university tower we’re in, surrounded by a national park that has wiped out every remnant of the Arab villages that once were in it. Think of the internal division of the floors, with the administration at the top and the slowest elevators serving the lower and middle echelons, where the liberal-arts faculties are, while the high-speed elevators zoom up to the appointments committees and the personnel department and financial offices. That’s where the real power of this university is. And what sits, disgracefully, on top of everything? A military installation, an army radar station! Of course, we pretend it’s not there. Its operators are made to look like students. But let’s not kid ourselves. It combs the area and sends its information to an intelligence base in the Galilee in which everything is secretly processed. That’s where the legitimacy of the whole oppressive power structure comes from…”

The daylight was vanishing. So, Rivlin thought, that’s what our blond wunderkind has to say.

The young postmodernist now came back to Rivlin’s introduction, picking it apart like a stale roll. “National identity” was bad enough, a thoroughly dated notion. But worse yet was this business of a rainbow. Was national identity some kind of weather condition? What was the point of the whole, perfectly absurd theoretical exercise? It was only there to justify the professor’s obsession with artificially linking the past to the present. But what entitled him to assume that the poor devils who murdered villagers at night and slit the throats of babies snatched from their mothers’ wombs had any memory of wanting to be French? Had the more original thought never occurred to him that they might be pursuing their own authenticity, acted out by their darkly passionate souls? Surely Professor Rivlin was aware that beneath the tinsel of national identity, with which the military dictatorship in Algeria sought to distract the country, there was something more genuine and primitive. The Arabs were too fluid and unbounded to be subsumed under a single national grid.

“Excuse me,” Rivlin said softly, “but I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any light here?”

The little cubbyhole had no ceiling light. There was only the lamp on Miller’s desk. But its bulb was burned out, and the administration had not yet bothered to replace it.

Although the Orientalist was free to beat a retreat, he remained sprawled limply in his chair, unable to tear himself away from the young lecturer, whose sandy hair glowed golden in the gloom. Dr. Miller, having finished taking Rivlin apart, now turned to the outdated profession of Orientalism itself, which had proved incapable of absorbing the new theories of multiple narratives. It was time the professor realized that the news coming from Algeria was simply one narrative among many, propagated by the corporate press to uphold the dictatorial regime….

It was getting dark. Perhaps, Miller suggested, they should continue the discussion in the professor’s office.

“We can stay here,” Rivlin said. “If you don’t mind talking to someone you can’t see, neither do I.”

And as a wistful night descended on the world, lighting up the Druze houses on the Carmel one by one, he continued to offer his head to the guillotine, summoning the last of his patience to listen to the new theories whose very language he had despaired of understanding long ago.

7.

WINTER CAME EARLY, prolifically. After two years of little rain there were no complaints about the torrential storms and gale-force winds, only about the unpreparedness for them — especially in Tel Aviv, where streets were so flooded that they looked, at least on television, like the canals of Venice, without their gondolas and lovers. Meanwhile, the official opening of the Khalil es-Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah was postponed by a month and rescheduled for Christmas, which coincided with Hanukkah that year. The abbess of the Greek Orthodox convent in Baalbek had not considered a poetry contest, or even a fifty-year-old United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between two headstrong peoples, sufficient reason to send his singing nun to Ramallah and had preferred to wait for the holiday season to cast its religious aura over the event.

That Saturday morning it rained so hard that Rivlin, anticipating crawling back underneath the big quilt for an afternoon nap, did not bother to make the bed. Now, to the cozy patter of the rain and the shriek of the wind, he lay wondering whether the Palestinians of Ramallah deserved to be visited in such weather.

“I’ve seen enough real Arabs in the last few months,” he grumbled to his wife. “From now on I’d rather meet them on my computer screen.”

The judge, who had been looking forward to the event with keen curiosity, refused to hear of this.

“You’ve lost all joie de vivre,” she accused the big gray head sticking out from the quilt. “Life with you is becoming unbearable. You’re so busy controlling everyone that you can’t enjoy yourself anymore. You can’t even sit through a movie. At night you can’t wait to go to bed, and in the morning you can’t wait to get up and start eating your heart out again. I’m not calling off a trip we’ve been planning for so long. And you promised Carlo and Hannah that we’d take them with us.”

“They’ll just change their minds in the end anyway. They’ll be afraid to go to Ramallah at night.”

“But what is there to be afraid of if that Arab of yours…”

“Rashid.”

“If Rashid takes us and brings us back, the way he took you to Jenin. What’s the problem? Why are you backing out?”

“That festival can go on all night.”

“Let it. I’m off from work tomorrow. We can return to Haifa in the morning. I need to get out into the world and see some new faces.”

“In Ramallah?”

“What’s wrong with that? Do you have a better suggestion? There’s sure to be good food, just as there was at that village wedding that I enjoyed so much. And this isn’t a wedding, so you don’t have to envy anyone. Besides, I want to see that nun you were so wild about…”

“Don’t exaggerate. I wasn’t so wild about her.”

“What does it matter? Live! Experience! Lately you’ve been pure gloom. Every day you’re nursing some new injury.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About that young lecturer who attacked your theories a bit. You were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Every fly on the wall puts you in a panic.”

“In the first place, he didn’t attack them a bit. He attacked them a lot. And secondly, he’s no fly on the wall…”

“So he’s not a fly. He’s a screwed-up young man who wants to be original at any cost. I knew what he was up to when I saw him at that wedding in the Galilee. It was enough to see how he put down his wife.”

Rivlin smiled with satisfaction, rubbing his feet under the blanket. His mood brightened. In the west, a patch of blue sky was showing through the rain. His love for his wife, who now lay down beside him, welled within him. “All right,” he said. “But on two conditions. You know the first. And the second is that we leave early and get to Jerusalem in daylight.”

You couldn’t exactly call it daylight. The wet city, when they arrived, was struggling with a premature darkness brought on by the storm, contravening the laws of nature by being darker in the west than in the east. As it was too early to rouse the Tedeschis from their Sabbath nap, Hagit suggested driving to the Agnon House to see whether it was really closed on Saturdays.

It was indeed, and looked gray and unwelcoming with its little window bars. Rivlin had no intention of following the trail of the tattooed widow into the dismal yard. The hometown of any famous French or German author, he thought, would do better by its native son.

He put his arm around Hagit and steered her down the little street for a view of the tail end of sunlight that was wriggling between the desert’s pinkish curves. He didn’t know whether he felt more glad or alarmed when she said unexpectedly, with one of her wise looks:

“All right. As long as we’ve come this far, I’m ready to take a look at the happiest memory of your life.”

“Now? Are you sure?”

“We won’t enter the hotel. We’ll just have a look at the garden.”

“Then let’s walk.”

“It’s not too far?”

Even though the rain was more illusory than real, they shared a black umbrella. Arm in arm, they headed up the wet street toward the hotel, which had not yet switched on its lights, cut through the parking lot, and quietly entered the murky garden from the rear. Rivlin took a wary route through the bushes, apprehensive of encountering the tall proprietress. He had to hand it to Hagit: although she had not been in this place for years, she spotted the gazebo at once and went right to it. True, she did not notice that it had been moved from its old location by the swimming pool. But even if it was not her happiest memory, there was no denying that the night of her son’s wedding had been a joyous one. Little wonder that she gripped her husband’s arm tightly as he led her on a tour of the wet, fragrant garden.

The large glass door of the hotel swung open. Rivlin’s heart beat faster as he saw a tall, thin figure appear in the rectangle of light, from which it looked out at the dark garden before vanishing. All at once, the little lanterns along the garden paths lit up. A young maintenance worker came out to remove the table umbrellas before it could storm some more. Although he did not wish to call attention to himself, Rivlin could not resist asking if Fu’ad was around. No, the maintenance worker said. He had taken a few days off for some festival.

“A festival?” Rivlin asked. “In Abu-Ghosh?”

No, not in Abu-Ghosh. If it were in Abu-Ghosh, the maintenance worker would be going to it too.

8.

AT THE TEDESCHIS’, whose little street ran down from the president’s house in a small but perfect question mark, he soon confirmed how well he knew his old mentor. The doyen of Orientalists had indeed decided to dispense with the trip to Ramallah on so stormy a winter night.

“At least you didn’t run to the emergency room,” Rivlin joked, slapping his old doctoral adviser warmly on the back. In response, Tedeschi demonstrated his resolve by putting on his bathrobe and exchanging his shoes for a pair of slippers. “Eyri fik,”^* he said, laughing gaily at the juicy Arabic curse. His old red sweater, showing through his open bathrobe, gave him a puckish look. “Eymta bakun hatyar hasab fikrak hatta t’sadkini fi amradi?”^† he complained.

Hagit, who could sometimes guess what simple Arabic sentences meant, was up in arms. “What is this? We were so looking forward to spending the evening with you. What’s Ramallah after Tierra del Fuego? It’s just a suburb of Jerusalem.”

“And crossing the border, Your Honor, once in each direction, is nothing to you?”

“Don’t worry,” Rivlin said. “We have an Arab-Israeli driver who cuts through borders like a knife through butter.”

“That makes it sound even more frightening.”

“But why?” Hagit asked petulantly. “What kind of Orientalist are you, Carlo? Don’t you ever feel a professional need to meet real, live Arabs?”

“Reality is what I write on,” Tedeschi said affably, pointing to his computer, on whose screen saver little comic-book figures were cavorting. “Real-life Arabs, let alone real-life Jews, make me too dizzy to think straight.”

“Leave him alone,” the translatoress of Ignorance said morosely. “He’s embarrassed to tell you that he’s been up these past few nights with chest pains.”

“That’s because he gets no fresh air,” Hagit said doggedly. “I’m telling you, Carlo, I won’t take no for an answer. Come on! Don’t be afraid. Do you remember that trip we took together to Turkey twenty years ago, and what a good time we had? Come! It’s not like you to be such a party pooper. Let’s have a good time with the Arabs like the one we had with the Turks. When will we get another chance? It’s a poetry and music festival. No politics and no speeches. There’s sure to be good food. And there’ll be a Lebanese singer, some sort of nun, who got Yochi so excited last summer that he had all kinds of new ideas…”

“New ideas?” The Jerusalem polymath perked up. “What ideas?”

Hagit, however, stuck to the subject.

“Never mind, Carlo. Not now. Don’t be such a professor. Come with us. We’ll have a good time. I promise to look after you. I’ll stay by your side, fair enough?”

Her eyes shone. Her cheeks were ruddy from the heated apartment. Rivlin, smitten anew by her, marveled at the youthfulness of this woman of over fifty, whose short sheepskin coat left her shapely legs uncovered. Tedeschi, flustered, rose and hugged her.

“But really, my dear, what do you need me for? I’ll just begin to cough and spoil the evening. Where will you find me an emergency room in Ramallah?”

“Then at least let your wife go.” The judge gave up on the stubborn old man. “Let her come with us.”

“Hannah?” Tedeschi chuckled at the thought and winked at his wife, who was sitting quietly by the lamp. “I don’t believe she’s at all eager to go to Ramallah tonight. She’s a bit under the weather herself…”

Once again the Haifa Orientalist felt his heart go out to the lovely student of former days, made old and worn before her time by an eccentric husband, so that she now stood in an old bathrobe, her hair that needed dyeing straggling onto her shoulders, ready for bed before the night had begun. He felt driven to join his wife’s attack on his old mentor, who was already by his computer, running his fingers absent-mindedly over the keyboard.

“Listen, Carlo. She’s coming with us. Why shouldn’t she? If you don’t want to live yourself, then don’t — but at least let live. Stop being such a killjoy. You can’t keep her chained to your depressions.”

“My depressions?” Tedeschi was startled by the unexpected salvo. “When do you remember me being depressed?”

“So it’s not your depressions. It’s your hypochondria. Or just your gloom.” He could hear himself speaking with Hagit’s voice. “Let there be some enjoyment in life. Give Hannah her freedom. Don’t you think she deserves a rest from you?”

The Jerusalem polymath did not reply. Half fearfully and half ironically, he pulled out a crumpled white handkerchief from his bathrobe pocket, waved it like a flag of surrender with an absurdly dramatic gesture, and made a bow.

The translatoress struggled to make up her mind. She was still torn between wanting, even longing, to get out of the house, and worry for her husband — who, having dismissed the comic-book figures with a tap of his finger, was already seated at his computer — when there was a quiet knock on the door. It was the sable-skinned messenger of many devices, come with a stocking cap on his head to transport his Jews to the festival.

9.

IN THE COLD, dark minibus, Rivlin made out at once the coal black eyes of a small boy, who was sitting beside a woman in an old fur-collared winter coat. It was the same coat that had hung for years in their own closet because Hagit had not wanted to part with it. Amused and alarmed, he glanced at his wife to see if she recognized it on the shoulders of Rashid’s sister. But the judge was busy talking to the translatoress — who, distraught over her sudden separation from her husband, had barely managed to clamber into the vehicle, where she now sat squeezed in the middle row, next to Rivlin.

He waited for the minibus to start moving before introducing Ra’uda to the two women. Though she was married to a West Bank Palestinian, he explained, she was still an Israeli of sorts and could even quote the poetry of Bialik. Rashid’s sister responded with a despairing laugh while Rivlin turned around to pat her son’s head. The boy did not flinch and even took off his cap and offered his head, like a pet dog.

Only then did Rivlin notice, huddled in the back on a jump seat that had been folded on the trip to Jenin, a pale young woman in a thick woolen shawl. Next to her, larger and darker than his brother, sat Rasheed. He was holding the horn-rimmed glasses meant to convince the Israeli border guards that he was his uncle’s natural son.

“Why, it’s Samaher!” Rivlin cried excitedly. “Samaher, this is my wife. You must remember her from your wedding.”

His still-ungraded M.A. student gave him a frail and poignant smile. “Who could forget your wife, Professor?” she whispered hoarsely, nodding to Hagit. “Never…”

The minibus turned right on Gaza Road, passed Terra Sancta, and headed for East Jerusalem, skirting the walls of the Old City — which on this wintry Saturday night were illuminated only symbolically, as if in discharge of a formal obligation. The rain came down harder as Rashid drove through the Arab half of town. “Don’t forget to stop in Pisgat Ze’ev,” Rivlin reminded him. “I’ll direct you.” But Rashid, having rehearsed the route earlier that day, needed no directions, leaving Rivlin free to turn around and chat with his “research assistant.” Her answers to his questions, though laconic, were to the point.

They reached Pisgat Ze’ev in northern Jerusalem. There, in the yellowish glare of the headlights, flagging them down at the bus stop where they had agreed to meet him — the same stop from which the murdered scholar had gone to his death — was Mr. Suissa in his gray fedora. With him was the murdered scholar’s wife.

“I hope it’s all right,” Suissa said to Rivlin, who reddened at the sight of the young widow. “She didn’t want me to go by myself. Do you have room for her?”

“Of course we do,” Rashid said, jumping happily out of the car. No one even had to move. He went to the back, opened the rear door, and squeezed the widow in beside Samaher.

They drove on to the Palestinian Authority. Although a black, overcast sky hid the first three stars that ended the Sabbath, these were surely glittering somewhere above the clouds — in token of which, despite the heavy rain, the streets filled with cars as the Jews of Jerusalem, exhausted by their day of rest, emerged to see what had changed in the world while they slept. At Atarot Junction the traffic lights were rattling in the wind, which soon turned to a howling gale. In the foggy darkness, with nothing around them but dim buildings and empty lots, it wasn’t clear whether they were heading in the right direction. But gradually the billboards changed from Hebrew to Arabic, and they saw that the border was close. In the end, they flew across it. The soldiers on the Israeli side, warming themselves around a campfire, showed no interest in the passengers bound for food and entertainment, while two gun-toting policemen on the Palestinian side were so eager to help that, although unaware of any festival, they piled with their weapons into the minibus, now equally full of Arabs and Jews, and guided it to the Ramallah police station.

In the stone building of the police station, the festival was better known. There were even name tags for the guests from Israel. Rivlin was told to climb some stairs to the second floor. There, in a large room whose long, curtained windows made it look like a cross between an office and a salon, sat a corpulent police officer decorated like a Russian general and surrounded by men, civilians or plainclothesmen, who made the Orientalist feel rather nervous. Taking some plastic tags from a drawer, the officer inscribed them with the names of the Israeli entourage and stamped each with a bloodred stamp.

There was a timid knock on the door. In walked a bewildered-looking Hannah Tedeschi, her thick glasses halfway down her nose. Drawn magnetically by her anxiety to the telephone on the officer’s desk, she inquired in quaint seventh-century Arabic whether she could call her husband in Jerusalem. Rivlin, putting a hand on her shoulder to calm her, hurried to translate her speech into something more modern, while introducing her, complete with all her academic titles, to the astonished gathering.

“Be my guest, Madame Doctor. It’s an honor.” The fat officer sat up, reached for the phone, and poised a long-nailed finger on the dial.

It took many rings to get the doyen of Orientalists to answer his wife’s call. While the officer and the plainclothesmen listened at one end to the shaky voice of the translatoress, the old professor at the other end was deliberately cool. He answered Hannah’s questions brusquely, was vague and uninformative, and soon hung up. As though reluctant to part with it, she slowly handed the receiver back to the fat officer and took out her purse to pay for the call.

“La, walla la, ya madam, la!”^* the Palestinians cried at once, commiserating with the strange Jewess. “Don’t insult us. What’s a telephone call to Jerusalem? Nothing. You can call all you like… even to America… to Japan… a kul hal, b’nidfa’sh el-hasab l’isra’il.”^†

There was a sense of merriment in the room. When they left it, properly name-tagged (Rashid must have told someone he had important passengers), a jeep with a machine gunner was waiting to escort them. The rain had tapered off to a thin drizzle. They traveled in a little convoy through the streets of the brightly lit Palestinian city. At the new Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center, teenagers holding torches directed them to a nearly full parking lot. If last summer he had crossed the border as a one-man show, Rivlin thought, he was now heading a multinational, multisexual, and multigenerational delegation. He took care to keep his five women together as they climbed out of the minibus, while saying some encouraging words to Mr. Suissa, who had sat in the car looking tense. Meanwhile, Rashid handed each of his nephews a small carton and disappeared with them around the back of the building.

They climbed some stairs to the aristocratically arched stone entrance of the Cultural Center, which looked like a wealthy private mansion. There to greet them was the festival’s director, Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun, an energetic, gap-toothed, baby-faced man who in his old leather coat, Rivlin thought, resembled a trade union official. Ibn-Zaidoun shook hands briskly with the Israelis, introduced them to the British judge of the poetry contest, who towered over him like a thoroughbred horse, and urged them to help themselves to refreshments on the second floor. Tonight’s festival, he assured them, was meant for body and mind alike.

10.

A LOCAL BEAUTY welcomed them to the high-ceilinged second floor and politely but firmly made them take off their coats, for which there would be no room in the auditorium, and hang them in the checkroom. With the thrill of old intimacy Rivlin spied, beneath Hagit’s fur-collared coat, her beloved blouse and velvet pants on Ra’uda’s tall, dark figure. He tried to catch her eye, wishing to share his amusement at her simulacrum from the other side of the border. But Hagit, still involved with the translatoress, who was greatly distressed by her husband’s coolness, had no time for her old clothes, which now vanished with their wearer in the wake of Samaher.

Rivlin let himself be carried along by the festive hubbub of the guests, most of them young people of unclear identity. It was hard to tell the Arabs from the Jews, or either of the two from anyone else. Taking Ibn-Zaidoun’s advice, he headed for the buffet, followed by Suissa’s widow with Suissa senior on her heels. The murdered scholar’s father, awed by the occasion despite his vengeful feelings toward its Palestinian organizers, had taken off his fedora and put on a big, colorful skullcap that might have been knit back in his North African childhood. At the buffet, by plates of stuffed grape leaves and cigar-shaped meat pastries, the conversation flowed in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with an occasional German exclamation mark. Holding a glass and surrounded by Israeli peace activists, the most famous of Palestinian poets stood by the auditorium door. An aging, though still boyish, bachelor and full-time exile who circulated among the world’s capitals reading his poetry, he was trying to follow, a bored glitter in his eyes, the singsong English of an Israeli poet of his own generation, a tall, balding, protuberant man with thick glasses, who was known for his marvelously erotic sonnets — which, though politically naive, were said to embody his lust for peace. At his side, seeking to elbow his way into the conversation, was another poet from Tel Aviv — a literary critic as well, whose brilliant but nasty essays took advantage of the Middle East conflict to settle scores with his numerous rivals.

There was a tap on Rivlin’s shoulder. It was Rashid, visibly excited. “Is everything all right, Professor?” he asked softly and disappeared before the Orientalist could answer, leaving Rivlin to smile sympathetically at the sad widow — who, a glass of water in her hand, regarded him with silent resentment, as if still waiting, even though he now was entrusted with five women, for the protection she demanded.

“It seems,” he said in a friendly whisper, trying to keep from being overheard by Suissa senior, who was cruising the counter in search of a kosher Middle Eastern hors d’oeuvre, “that you’re getting used to your hedgehog.”

The young widow, giving him the cold shoulder, merely shook her head and set her glass down on the counter.

Hagit and Hannah stepped out of the ladies’ room, smiling and relaxed. Still more people were filing into the lobby, among them some country musicians in traditional costume who hurried to the auditorium with their instruments. Rivlin, his inhibitions dispelled by the noisy crowd, put two fingers to his mouth and startled those around him by shrilling his and Hagit’s old whistle of recognition. At once came the judge’s soft answering call. Spotting him, she linked arms with Hannah and headed in his direction. It pleased yet saddened him to see that although the two were the same age his wife looked much younger than her companion, who had been kept childless by a husband fearing rivals for her love.

“What happened to your driver?” Hannah chided him. “Don’t forget that you’ve left your old teacher all alone. I only came because you promised I could be brought back any time I wanted.”

“Any time after Rashid’s performance.”

“What performance is that?”

Rivlin smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see. He’s a demon in disguise, not just a driver.”

Ibn-Zaidoun, accompanied by two policemen serving as ushers, now opened the doors of the auditorium and began shooing the audience inside. From within came the sounds of a shepherd’s pipe and a three-stringed rebab. At the doorway they were blocked by a conversation, started by the remark of an Israeli that according to the latest studies Jews and Palestinians had the same DNA. Although this had occasioned much laughter, it was hard to tell whether the laughter was approving or embarrassed.

“We all come from the same monkey’s ass,” the erotic poet guffawed. “And should go back there.”

The Palestinian poet grinned provocatively. “I trust that’s one place where the Law of Return applies equally.”

“Please, no politics tonight! Just love,” Ibn-Zaidoun warned through the gap between his front teeth. Rivlin was startled to see a shiny pistol protruding from his old leather coat.

“They say there is love in this world,” quoted the Palestinian poet — who, like Ra’uda, knew his Bialik. “But I ask: What is love?”

He entered the auditorium.

On the spur of the moment, Rivlin decided to introduce himself and his companions to the poet, which he did while praising his verse, read by him in the original. The world-famous exile, his slim figure neat in a custom-made suit and a last cigarette butt between his yellowed fingers, listened to the Jewish Orientalist politely. He beamed when told of the accomplishments of the translatoress of Ignorance. “Na’am, ya sitti,” he said with an intense handshake, “el-jahaliya mish bas asas esh-shi’ir el-arabi, hiyya kaman asas el-kiyan.”^*

11.

THE AUDITORIUM OF THE Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center was designed in the best modern taste, with unadorned white walls and columns bearing a vaulted ceiling of white arches graceful as the wings of a dove. Although it was so crowded that the Haifa professor and his entourage at first had nowhere to sit, Ibn-Zaidoun soon appeared, made some young Palestinians move to the floor, and gave the Jewish VIPs their seats. These looked down on a stage covered with a checked carpet, on which stood a long wooden table and three chairs. The musicians, seated in the back, were tuning their instruments while sipping little cups of coffee.

More and more young people kept pushing into the auditorium and finding places on the floor. The warmth of so many bodies made the heated hall stuffy, and a gray-haired Arab in jeans went to a window, drew its white lace curtain, and let in some cool night air. It took Rivlin a startled moment to realize it was Fu’ad. The maître d’ had taken off his black uniform and come to search for poetic inspiration among his compatriots across the border.

The first strains of hesitant melody, still lacking the firm beat of a drum, were forming from the random notes of zither, shepherd’s pipe, lute, and rebab. Ibn-Zaidoun, standing by the table, signaled the ushers to dim the lights. The melody stopped, and the audience was asked to rise for a moment of silence in memory of the great Palestinian educator after whom the new Cultural Center had been named. Then all sat down again, and Ibn-Zaidoun pulled from a pocket of his leather coat a Hebrew translation of a passage from es-Sakakini’s journals, published under the title This Is Me, Gentlemen. The educator’s first love letter to his future wife was read aloud:

My Sultana,

And so, like clouds scattered before the wind, my days in Jerusalem are over. Allow me to write you a last letter and to bid you farewell from a heart that has almost ceased to beat from so much love and that has melted away from so much suffering. I utter these words as though from the grave. Soon I will leave this city, with its people, houses, streets, and soil that I belong to, and in which I breathed love for the first time, for a place that will never be mine. How could it be when my heart is staying behind?

Yesterday I spent the day parting with people whose goodness and sterling qualities I will never forget for as long as I live. I thought this would be easy for me, because I had prepared myself for it ever since conceiving of my journey. But when the time came, I felt how bitter it was. All day my heart was in a turmoil. And even if I can part with friends and family, how can I part with you, Sultana? Every other parting is easy in comparison.

I will think of you, Sultana, each time the sun rises or sets; I will think of you when I come and go, rise and lie down, arrive and depart; I will think of you when I go to work; I will think of you when I am calm and free of worry, and when I am weary and exhausted.

To part with you is to part with comradeship, purity, light, and joy; it is to encounter loneliness and sorrow. The first man leaving Paradise was not more anguished than I am. You are my Paradise. You are my happiness. You are my pleasure in life, my soul’s joy, my life itself. What must a man feel when he leaves his own life?

Think of me, Sultana, each time you enter the church to pray, or open your Bible; think of me when you are teaching your students, or taking them for a nature walk to our beloved rock; think of me when you are at home. Stand at your window, which faces mine, and say: “Fare thee well, Khalil.” Ah, I would fain look at that window, for perhaps I would see you there!

And when springtime comes with its fair flowers and you feel a breeze, that is my greeting to you — or glimpse a flower, that is my smile — or hear the song of birds, that is my voice speaking. Should you glance up at the sky and see the sparkling stars, you have seen my eyes looking at you. If the moon peeps over the mountains and sends its silvery beams through the clouds — regard them, for perhaps I am seeing them too and our two gazes will meet.

Today I sat with my cousin Ya’akub, to whom I confessed: “I love Sultana, I adore her.” I did not tell him that I have revealed to you the secret of my love. He thinks I should do so before I depart. When will I receive a clear answer from you? Ah, Sultana, have pity and do not let me go with an anxious heart and a worried mind. The anguish of parting is enough.

Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun was now joined by the Palestinian beauty from the checkroom. Playing the role of Khalil es-Sakakini’s beloved, she stood with a white rose in her long hair and declaimed the letter written by the thirty-year-old Palestinian in its original Arabic.

Rivlin cast a warm glance at his wife, who was listening with empathy to the words even though they were only sounds for her. The eyes of the translatoress were damp with tears behind their glasses.

“What did you think of the translation?” he whispered.

She shrugged disdainfully. “Who can’t translate such simple Arabic?”

“Simple but beautiful,” he said.

She looked at him suspiciously, then nodded slowly and, annoyed, took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

She was not the only one moved. Opening the festival, the simple but genuine love letter of the Palestinian educator — a revolutionary in his thoughts and a romantic in his feelings — sent a shiver through the audience and made it want more. As Es-Sakakini’s last words faded and Ibn-Zaidoun signaled the musicians to strike up a sweetly plaintive tune, the first poets edged toward the stage for the contest.

The cleverly creative festival director, however, was not in any hurry. First he wished to build up the suspense, setting the bar for the young poets with classical, but still bold and lively, verse. He would begin with some eighth-century poems by “the curly-headed one,” as he was known, the great Abu-Nawwas, followed by excerpts from the ninth-century poet Al-Hallaj. Both men were rebels and possibly not even true Arabs, for they were born in Persia and lived and wrote in Baghdad, where Abu-Nawwas ended his life in a dungeon and Al-Hallaj by losing his head. Their poems, Ibn-Zaidoun announced, ratcheting up the audience’s expectations, would be read by the great Palestinian poet, who need not fear their competition in tonight’s contest.

The poet recited the classic verse in a voice rusty from tobacco smoke. Hebrew translations, prepared in advance, were then read aloud by Ibn-Zaidoun, who appeared to consider himself knowledgeable on the sacred language of the Jews.

Uktubi In Katabti, Ya Maniyya

When you write, my precious one, I pray you,

Do so with an open heart and a frank spirit and your spit.

Make many mistakes and erase them all

With it. No fingers, please.

Wet the page with the sweetness

Of your lovely teeth.

Each time I read a line you have corrected,

I’ll lick it with my tongue,

A kiss from afar,

Leaving me giddy and dazed!

Ya Sakiyyati

O you who made me drink the bitter cup

That made a pleasant life unbearable!

Before I bore love’s yoke I was well thought of,

And she, the one I love, dwelt in king’s chambers.

Then some evil-wisher waylaid me with love,

And heaped upon me shame and degradation.

Her scent is of the musk of sea-dwellers.

Her smile outshines the buds of chamomile.

She laughs when friends bring gifts of fragrances.

“Does perfume need perfume?” she asks.

They say, “Why do you not adorn yourself?”

She answers, “Any jewelry

Would dull my luster.

Did I not throw away my silver bangles

To keep myself from blinding them?”

Next, to assure the Israelis — who by now had blended invisibly into the packed audience — that they, too, had a role in the golden age of the Arabs, two poems were read about Jews, who in days of old had pandered to Muslims with forbidden pleasures.

Ind al-Yahudiyya

I went to Kutkebul laden with gold crowns,

Eighty dinars saved by my hard work.

In no time I had blown them like flies,

And pledged a good silk shirt,

A fancy robe, and my best suit

To the Jewess who runs the tavern.

No woman more modest, more gracious, more lovely!

“My beauty,” I said to her, “come, be a sport,

Give us a kiss and be done with it!”

“But why,” she replied, “do you want a woman’s love

When a boy,

All dreamy-eyed and smooth as a gold coin,

Is so much better?”

She went and fetched a lissome lad,

Bright as the moon, fresh-bottomed—

But I, I left that place dead broke

And down on my luck.

And though, my shirt lost to her wine,

She said in parting,

“Now be well,”

I tell you that I felt like hell.

The Palestinians roared good-humoredly. The Israelis, prepared in the cause of peace to share the blame for a cunning Jewess who had lived twelve hundred years ago, tittered politely.

Ibn-Zaidoun now put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and read, to the delight of the audience, another poem about a Jew.

Jitu Ma’a As’habi

I came with my friends, both fine young men,

To the tavern keeper at the hour of ten.

You could tell by his dress he was no Muslim.

Our intentions were good — I can’t say that of him.

“Your religion,” we asked, “it’s Christianity?”

He let loose a flood of profanity.

Well, that’s a Jew: It’s love to your face

And a knife in the back, anytime, anyplace.

“And what,” we asked, “shall we call you, sir?”

“Samuel,” he said. “Or else Abu-Amar.

Not that I like having an Arab name.

It certainly isn’t a claim to fame.

Yet I prefer it all the same

To longer ones that aren’t as plain.”

“Well said, Abu Amar!” we chimed.

“And now be a friend and break out the wine.”

He looked us up and he looked us down,

And he said, “I swear, if word gets out in this town,

Because of you, that I sell booze,

I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

And with that he brought us a golden mead

That knocked the three of us off our feet,

So that what was meant to be a weekender

Has lasted a month and we’re still on a bender!

12.

THE MOOD WAS growing mellow. Who could fail to be charmed by such comic proof of the pragmatic, hard-nosed collaboration of Jewish avarice and Muslim vice in the greatest Arab metropolis of the first millennium? And now, striding gracefully to the center of the stage, the Palestinian poet invited with a flourish the illustrious translatoress of Jahaliya poetry, Hannah Tedeschi, to demonstrate her talents in the name of the everlasting fraternity of two ancient languages. His request was simple. Dr. Tedeschi, he proposed, would stand by his side and render into simultaneous Hebrew some excerpts from the mystical tenth-century verse of Al-Hallaj, “the carder”—whose thirst for Allah was so great that it drove him out of his mind and made him decide that he himself was God, leaving the authorities no choice but to behead him publicly, burn his body, and scatter the ashes to dispel his delusion.

The translatoress was caught off guard. She crimsoned, simpered with fright, and tried making herself small, while glaring at the Orientalist who had got her into this. But before Rivlin could come to the defense of his ex — fellow student, presented with an impossible task by the Palestinian poet, his wife surprised him by taking the opposite tack and urging the translatoress to agree.

“But how,” Hannah protested, “can I just stand up and translate the fabulously subtle poetry of Hussein Ibn Mansur al-Hallaj? Any version I came up with could only be pitifully superficial.”

Yet her even knowing the middle name of so ancient a Sufi poet only strengthened the judge’s opinion. “Give it a try,” she said. “What do you have to lose? No one will dare criticize you. Those in the audience who, like me, don’t know Arabic deserve to know what a poet lost his head for.”

The flustered translatoress threw a desperate look at the sad-eyed Mr. Suissa, as if pleading with him to enlist the ghostly authority of his son on her behalf. But Rivlin, always swayed by any show of firmness on his wife’s part, now switched sides and took Hannah’s hand. “What do you care?” he said. “Don’t worry about subtlety. It might even end up in the jubilee volume.”

It was a well-aimed shot. To a murmur of approval from the audience, which had been watching her trying to make up her mind, Hannah rose, wound her old woolen scarf around her neck, and gave her hand to the renowned exile, who gallantly led her to the center of the stage.

The lights were dimmed still more, in honor of the martyred mystic. As the Palestinian poet read the first lines, the Jewish translatoress of Ignorance, her hair in need of dyeing and her shoes of new heels, shut her eyes and let Al-Hallaj’s cryptic but refined verse percolate through her.

Sukutun thumma samtun thumma harsu

Wa’ilmun thumma thumma wajdun thumma ramsu

Wa’tinnun thumma narun thumma nurun

Wa’bardum thumma zillun thumma shamsu

Wa’haznun thumma shalun thumma fakrun

Wa’nahrun thumma bahrun thumma yabsu

Wa’sukrun thumma sahwun thumma shawkun

Wa’kurbun thumma waslun thumma unsu

Wa’kabdun thumma bastun thumma mahwun

Wa’frakun thumma jam’un thumma tamsu.

Hannah Tedeschi opened her eyes and loosened her scarf. Taking the book of poetry from the Palestinian, who stood, smiling, with a fresh cigarette in his hand, she rested it on her open palms, looked up at him and back at it, and softly but surely improvised a Hebrew translation of the beheaded poet’s ode.

Quiet and then silence and then stillness,

And knowledge and then ecstasy and then the grave.

And clay and then fire and then light,

And cold and then shade and then the sun.

And rocks and then plains and then wilderness,

And a river and then a sea and then the land.

And drunkenness and then sobriety and then desire,

And closeness and then touching and then rejoicing.

And contraction and then expansion and then erasure,

And parting and then union and then life.

The translatoress glowed with a new radiance. To the applause of the audience, which did not need to understand the Hebrew to appreciate its music, she returned the book to the poet. He bowed ironically, exhaled a last puff of smoke, and chose another, shorter lyric:

Wa’inna lissan al-ghaybi jalla an al-nutki

Zahrta li’halki w’altabasta la’fityatin

Patahu wa’dalu w’ahtajabat an el-halki

Fa’tazaharu l’il-albab fi ’l-ghaybi taratan

Wa’tawrann an al-absar taghurbi fi ’l-sharki.

And again the book was handed with a smile to the translatoress, who threw back her head with such concentration that it almost flew off her shoulders like Al-Hallaj’s. She tossed off the five lines without batting an eyelash:

The language of mystery far exceeds speech,

Revealed to some, from others concealed.

They wonder and wander and meanwhile you are gone,

Sometimes sighted by hearts in the west,

While lost to the sight of eyes in the east.

Rivlin could not contain his admiration. Turning to his wife with a triumphant grin, he congratulated her for making Hannah accept the challenge.

The Palestinian poet bowed a second time, took the book gently, leafed rapidly through it, and found another short and enigmatic poem:

Fa’izza absartani absartahu

Fa’izza absartahu absartana

Ayaha al-sa’ilu an kissitna

Law tarana lam tufarik baynena

Ruhuhu ruhi wa’ruhi ruhuhu

Min ra’a ruheyn halat badana?

This time the translatoress was so sure of herself that she didn’t even look at the text. Leaving it with the poet, she answered him:

When you see me, you see him,

When you see him, you see us.

You who would know of our love

Could not tell us apart.

My soul is his, his is mine.

Who has heard of the body

In which two souls combine?

The poet’s esteem for the woman mounted. With an approving glance at her, he recited from memory:

Muzijat ruhuka fi ruhi kama,

Tumzaju al-hamratu b’al-ma’ al-zulal.

Fa’izza masaka shai’un masani,

Fa’izza anta ana fi kuk hal.

Back with a smile came the Hebrew:

Your soul stirred into mine:

Into clear water — wine.

Who touches you, touches me.

I am you in one we.

The poet bowed his head. The Hebrew he had learned in Israel as a boy, before he chose exile, was enough to tell him how perfect the translation was. Yet unable to resist putting the now eager translatoress to one last test, he declaimed:

Jubilat ruhaka fi ruhi kama

Yujbalu al-inbaru b’il-miski ’l-fatik.

Fa’izza masaka shai’un masani

Fa’izza anta anna la naftarik.

Hannah Tedeschi replied at once:

Thy soul merges with mine

As with fragrant musk, amber.

Touch mine and it’s thine.

Thou art me forever.

Rivlin, one of the few in the auditorium to appreciate what the translatoress had accomplished, lifted his curly head to regard with satisfaction the Arabs around him — among whom he was astonished to see, in the dark corner occupied by the musicians, a pale-faced, black-hatted yeshiva student, with earlocks and a beard, whose burning eyes were none other than Samaher’s.

13.

ONLY NOW WAS it apparent what an effort had been made by the festival’s organizers to reach out to their Jewish guests. They wanted the Israelis, whether peaceniks or poetry lovers, to feel at home in their hilly city — which, freed of the cruel yoke of occupation, extended to them a strictly cultural welcome on this chilly but brightly lit winter night.

And so when Samaher had suggested producing for the half-liberated Palestinians a scene from The Dybbuk, “the Jewish Hamlet,” as she called it (although she might just as well have said “the Jewish Faust” or “the Jewish Tartuffe”), the idea met with the approval of Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun, the baby-faced director with eyes of steel. These now glittered as he directed the ushers to remove the table from the stage, hang a white lace curtain in its place, and dim the lights completely.

First upon the dark stage, lit only by a few beams of wet moonlight shining through the window opened by Fu’ad, were two timid, dark-haired boys carrying candles that made their shadows flicker on the curtain. Rivlin could have sworn they were Ra’uda’s sons. Soon they were joined by a serious-looking young man. This was the brilliant Rabbi Azriel, who stood between the candles staring silently at the audience with Samaher’s bright eyes. Rivlin held his breath as the rabbi summoned the possessed bride:

“Leah, the daughter of Sender, you may enter the room.”

But the bride refused to enter. The voice of the dybbuk possessing her, Rashid’s, called from the wings:

“I won’t! I don’t want to!”

And a woman echoed the words in Arabic:

“La urid ad’hul, la urid!”

Rabbi Azriel, played by Rivlin’s M.A. student with surprising aplomb, was unfazed. Turning to the wings, he said with quiet firmness:

“Maiden! I command you to enter this room!”

The figure of the bride grew slowly visible in the darkness. It was Ra’uda, still wearing the judge’s old clothes, over which a long bridal veil hung past her shoulders. She stood behind the white curtain, waiting for the haunt to speak from her throat. Rashid appeared, white-bearded and wrapped in shrouds, for he was a ghost. He walked with a cane, its handle the doll-like head of a woman, illustrating his obsession for the Palestinian audience. Rivlin was startled to see that this doll had the features of his cousin Samaher.

“Sit, maiden!” Samaher commanded sternly.

The doll did not want to. The dybbuk said:

“Leave me alone. I won’t.”

And Ra’uda, behind the white curtain, echoed in Arabic:

“Utrekuni. La urid.”

Samaher: Dybbuk! I command you to tell me who you are.

Rashid: Rabbi of Miropol, you know who I am. But no one else may know my name.

(Repeated by Ra’uda in Arabic.)

Samaher: I command you again. Tell me who you are.

The little doll squirmed in Rashid’s hand.

Rashid: I am a seeker of new paths.

“Alathina yufatshuna an subul jedida,” said the echo.

Samaher was displeased by this answer. She stroked her little beard and rebuked the dybbuk severely:

“Only those who stray seek new paths. The just walk the path of righteousness.”

Rashid: It is too narrow.

Samaher: Why have you possessed the body of this maiden?

Rashid: I am her mate.

Ra’uda: Ana zowjuha.

Samaher: Our Torah forbids the dead to haunt the living.

Rashid: I am not dead.

Ra’uda: Ana lastu maitan.

Samaher would have none of it. “You have departed to another world — and there you must remain till the great ram’s horn is sounded. I command you to leave the body of this maiden and return to your resting place!”

Rashid: [Softly] O Tzaddik of Miropol! I know how great you and your power are. I know that angels and seraphs do your bidding. But I will not. [Bitterly] I have nowhere to go, nowhere to rest in this world, apart from where I am now. Everywhere the jaws of Hell await me, and legions of devils and demons would devour me. I will not leave this woman! I cannot!

And Ra’uda repeated, trembling bitterly in her bridal veil:

“La astati’u ’l-huruj.”

Samaher turned to face the audience, sprightly in her black jacket and pants with her glued-on beard and earlocks. “O holy congregation!” she addressed it. “Do you grant me the authority to drive out the dybbuk in your name?”

“Drive out the dybbuk in our name!” the two candle-holding brothers cried, the bigger one in Hebrew and the little one in Arabic:

“Utrud al-jinni!”

Solemnly, Samaher stepped up to the doll held by Rashid and admonished it:

“In the name of this congregation and all the saints, I, Azriel the son of Hadassah, command you, O dybbuk, to leave at once the body of the maiden Leah, the daughter of Hannah, and to injure neither her nor anyone in departing. If you do not obey me, I will war against you with bans and excommunications. But if you do, I will find you a penance and drive away the devils surrounding you.”

Rashid: I do not fear your curses, nor do I believe your promises. No power on earth can give me peace. I have no place in this world. The paths are all blocked, the gates are all locked. There is heaven and there is earth and there are worlds upon worlds, but nowhere have I found as pure and holy a refuge as I have found in the body of this maiden. Here I am at peace like an infant in its mother’s lap and fear nothing. No! Do not make me leave! No oath will compel me!

Ra’uda’s echo: La, la tutruduni! La tahlefuni!

Samaher: Leave the body of the maiden Leah the daughter of Hannah at once!

Rashid: [Defiantly] I will not!

Ra’uda: La atruk!

Samaher: [Taking a small whip from her belt and lashing the doll while the audience gasps] In the name of the Lord of the universe, I adjure you for the last time. Depart from the maiden Leah, the daughter of Hannah! If you do not listen to me now, I will excommunicate you and deliver you to the angels of destruction.

(A terrifying pause)

Rashid: In the name of the Lord of the universe, I am joined and conjoined with my mate and will not leave her.

Ra’uda: Malsuk wa’mulassak ana bi’zowjati wala atrukha ila ’l-abd.

Despairing of getting the stubborn dybbuk to depart peacefully, the Arab rabbi strode with small steps to the leather-coated Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun — who, enchanted by the performance, was standing off to one side excitedly fingering his little pistol.

“O Archangel Michael!” the rabbi commanded him. “Have seven Torah scrolls taken out and prepare seven ram’s horns and seven black candles.”

But either this was as far as the rehearsals had gone or Ibn-Zaidoun had forgotten his lines, because, shaking with laughter, he saluted, bowed, and went to turn on the lights. Then, to the beating of the drum, which spurred the lute, the rebab, and the shepherd’s pipe to make music, he broke into loud applause. The audience followed suit. The lace curtain fell, and the older of the two boys snuffed out the candles. Samaher had tears in her eyes. Visibly moved, she pulled off her beard and earlocks and turned shyly to Rashid, who gallantly dipped the head of his doll to her. Yet when he gestured to his sister to join him for a curtain call, she fled the auditorium with her two sons, overcome by stage fright. The two cousins dropped everything and ran after her.

Rivlin, touched to the quick, turned to his wife.

“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “Simply unbelievable….”

14.

THE TABLE, RETURNED to its place, was now a judgment seat. The judge was an elderly Scotsman. As a young man he had served with British intelligence in the Holy Land, where he had learned Hebrew and Arabic in order to investigate the “terrorists” of those days. Now a pensioner, he sometimes came to the Middle East to lecture at Bir Zeit University on “The Bounds of British Democracy.” It was this that qualified him to be the arbiter of the poetry contest.

He sat behind the table, a lanky thoroughbred whose eyes, too, were blue from sheer blue-bloodedness. Two panelists joined him, for balance: a pudgy Egyptian diplomat, in the area on state business, and the Tel Aviv critic-poet — who, however, could hardly be accused of bias in favor of his own people. At the last moment, the learned translatoress, having impressed one and all with her renditions of the mystical verse of Al-Hallaj, was added too. Her confidence had grown by such leaps and bounds that Rivlin easily persuaded her to accept the nomination “for the honor of Israeli Orientalism,” as he put it. Hannah nodded and ran a small comb through her stringy hair before letting herself be led to the table.

One by one, the contestants were called upon to read their verse. First, however, the rule was restated that the contest was for love poems only. No entries on political themes would be accepted, even if cast in such lyric form as a Palestinian lament for a field expropriated by Jews, a Palestinian dirge for an olive tree uprooted by Jews, a Palestinian elegy for the childhood memory of a fragrant orange grove built on by Jews, or a Palestinian threnody for the tears of an abandoned horse in a village destroyed by Jews. Likewise, there were to be no refugees, no occupations, no anti-Semitism, no Holocaust, no death, and no bereavement. Only love.

The contest had attracted a large number of competitors, old poetic hands and newcomers alike. Most were residents of Ramallah or nearby villages, though some came from as far afield as Jordan, and others were Arabs from Israel, several of them equipped with Hebrew translations of their verse. The Israeli contingent was small, even after being reinforced by an overweight and bashful German woman and a slightly tipsy American, both reading their verse in their own languages.

And yet, starting with the very first poem, it was evident that the elegy and the threnody, the uprooted olive tree and the tearful horse, were not so easily forgotten in love’s name. Not a few contestants sought to outwit the organizers by disguising their national grief as erotic outpourings for a stolen beloved, her splendid belly compared to a lost wheat field, the chime of her bracelets to the enemy’s machine guns. One old villager wrote a poem to his wife in which a younger rival for her affections was likened to a Jewish settler.

In his seat in the murmuring, smoke-filled auditorium, the Orientalist was growing weary of the same repetitive images in the same unchanging rhymes and meters, the gist of which had to be translated for his wife. The one poem he was looking forward to was Fu’ad’s — but the maître d’, intimidated by so many Palestinians from across the border, passed up his turn with a wave of his hand.

Intermission came at last. The audience flowed back to the buffet, leaving the Scottish judge and his panelists to tally their scores. Arabs and Jews stepped up to congratulate Hannah Tedeschi on her translations. Flustered by so much praise, she shrugged it off by explaining in tedious detail each mistake she had made while promising to correct them all in good time. “It was a brilliant idea of yours to get her away from that tyrannical hypochondriac,” Rivlin said to Hagit as he fondly watched his old classmate struggling to keep the attention from going to her head. The judge, well aware of her judiciousness, merely smiled at her husband — who, thinking he had caught a glimpse of the fluttering robe of the Lebanese nun, decided to go to the men’s room before the intermission ended.

The nun, however, failed to materialize, Rashid and his possessed women had disappeared, and even the men’s room proved elusive and was to be found only with the help of the poetry-reading coat-check attendant, who had resumed her position by the checkroom. Following her directions, the Orientalist climbed a staircase to the third floor. This was a loft whose wide-open windows failed to dispel the heated atmosphere of the loud young men and women gathered there, evidently more in search of love than of poetry. Several of the women had chosen to cool off by removing their shawls and letting down their hair.

There was a long line for the men’s room. In it was Fu’ad, looking as athletic in his tightly cut jeans as the young men around him. Noticing the Jewish Orientalist, he turned around and said loudly in Arabic for all to hear, “Please move up, Professor. I’ve saved a place for you.” When Rivlin, embarrassed, shook his head, Fu’ad moved back to join him.

“You look so youthful that I didn’t recognize you,” Rivlin said, almost grudgingly.

“Youthful?” The maître d’ laughed. “How can I be youthful, Professor? Look around you and you’ll see youth. I’m just without my dark suit and Miss Hendel bossing me. Come back to the hotel and you’ll see the tired old Fu’ad you know.”

The Jew looked at the Arab reproachfully. “How come you got cold feet?”

“How do you mean?”

“You didn’t read your poem.”

“You call that flimflam a poem, Professor? The poems tonight made me realize that all the juice has gone out of my Arabic. With the pepper and the hot sauce. I’ve hung around you Jews for so long that my Arabic is like a rusty faucet. Do you want them to think in Ramallah that that’s the best Abu-Ghosh can do? Better to listen and to learn…”

The line advanced slowly. From somewhere Rivlin made out the rich voice of the Lebanese nun. His heart beating faster, he turned and spotted her on a balcony at the far end of the loft. Petite and smiling, she stood in the cigarette smoke of her choir of drones, looking bridal herself with a nun’s dickey over her white robe. With her was Ibn-Zaidoun, who appeared to be telling her a funny story, at which she burst out laughing in the same throaty tones in which Rivlin had heard her lament the death of God.

“Hadi hiyya ’l-mutribba ’l-lubnaniyya,”^* he said excitedly to Fu’ad, who made sure to remain a half-step behind him as they neared the bathroom. “You’ll love her singing.”

The bathroom had two urinals and a stall. Although the Orientalist would have preferred the stall for privacy’s sake, a red arc above its door handle showed it was occupied. He took his place at the urinal, fumbling with his zipper. As he carefully pulled out his penis, the man next to him zipped his pants and walked away and Fu’ad slipped into his place. The Jew could not help stealing a glance at the Arab’s member. It was passing water with surprising speed.

Rivlin felt anger. He couldn’t relax enough to pee.

“It’s not the Jews who have ruined your Arabic, Fu’ad,” he said despairingly to the flower-patterned tiles in front of him. “It’s surrendering your freedom to the hotel.”

The plash of water stopped beside him. He continued, still looking straight ahead:

“When I beg you to tell me what happened with Ofer and Galya, and who was to blame, you just clam up. But I know you know, l’inno inta, ya Fu’ad, mowjud fi kul mahal.^* You don’t give a damn how I’m suffering because you only think of yourself and of getting ahead. But where to? If you’re not free inside you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll end up writing elegies for yourself.”

The water flushed in the stall. Yet the door remained closed, and the next man in line lost patience and moved up behind them, waiting for someone to finish. Fu’ad, pale, looked stunned by the Orientalist’s words. He went to the sink, washed his hands quickly, and left.

Rivlin shut his eyes fervently and waited for the painfully slow trickle of his urine to increase. He had finished and was washing his hands, slowly squeezing detergent from a plastic bottle, when the door of the stall opened and out stepped Mr. Suissa. Had he overheard the conversation with Fu’ad? But what if he had?

“Well, what do you think of the festivities?” Rivlin asked. “Wasn’t I right, Mr. Suissa, that it was worth coming tonight?”

“Yes,” Suissa replied, “there’s always something to be learned. Those Sufi lyrics were golden.”

“And Hannah Tedeschi’s Hebrew translations? Marvelous.”

“They were. My son always said to me: ‘Doctor Tedeschi outranks her husband.’”

“And this Center — would you have believed it of the Palestinian Authority? Such a pleasant, elegant place!”

“I suppose so — if visiting a vipers’ nest can be pleasant.”

“A vipers’ nest?”

“Make no mistake about it, Professor Rivlin. They can stand and recite love poems all night, but they’re still vipers. Even that Arab you were just talking to.”

Rivlin, nettled, came to the maître d’s defense. “What do you know about him, Mr. Suissa?”

“Nothing, Professor,” Suissa replied, his face betraying no emotion. “Since my son was killed, I don’t know a thing. I’m listening and learning, just like your friend.”

Yet encountering Fu’ad waiting for them outside, Suissa dropped his eyes deferentially and headed for the stairs leading back to the second floor.

The top floor was emptying out. Even the young people who had ignored the poetry contest wanted to hear the Lebanese singer, whose white robe was still visible on the balcony. Her male chorus was gone, and she was alone with the festival’s director, who regarded her admiringly while smoking a little pipe.

Rivlin, convinced that the nun not only would but should remember him, set out in her direction. He was intercepted by Fu’ad, anxious to smooth things over.

“Don’t be angry, Professor. It’s been so many years…. Why should I be a tattletale? I wouldn’t even know what tale to tell.”

Rivlin just kept walking. “The truth is,” he said venomously, “bas al-mazbut — inta hiwif.”^*

And he hurried to the nun without paying attention to the gray-haired Arab’s distress.

She remembered him. Who could forget a lone Jew in a village church in the middle of the night?

“Inti shaifi, ya Madame, ana anid k’tir,” he said to her with emotion. “Jit kaman marra ta’asma’ eish bighanu fi ’l-janneh. Bas hal marra jibt el-mara kaman…. ”^†

She smiled gently. “Ahlan u-sahlan.”^‡

He glanced at her bare feet in the plain sandals worn by her even on this cold, rainy night. Speaking in French to avoid embarrassing her in front of Ibn-Zaidoun, he said:

“I told my wife how you wouldn’t faint for me last summer. She joins me in hoping that this winter you’ll be more forthcoming….”

If shocked by the Israeli’s forwardness, the nun was too well bred to show it. She merely gave him a lucid Christian look and said, with a hint of irony:

“Inshallah.”^*

15.

THE AUDITORIUM WAS twice as full as before. It took considerable effort for Rivlin, one of the last to reenter it, to make his way to his wife over the Palestinians on the floor.

“I thought you’d been kidnapped,” Hagit said, more curious than concerned by his absence.

“Where to?” Rivlin said, stroking her hair. “Anyway, we’re kidnapped already.” In a whisper he told her of his encounter with the nun, who now entered to stormy applause. On the floor at his feet, he noticed Ra’uda in his wife’s old clothes with her two boys.

“Feyn Rashid?” he asked. “Feyn Samaher?”^†

“’Round,” she said, using what Hebrew she remembered. She seemed worried by their disappearance.

The second half of the program was entitled “Christian Arab Song.” More folkloristic than the performance in Zababdeh, it was all in Arabic, with no Greek Passions or Resurrections. He glanced at the words of the lyrics, obtained by the translatoress. Although they abounded in religious references — how else would the convent in Baalbek have agreed to send the nun to the Holy Land? — the emphasis was, in the spirit of the festival, on God’s love. The musicians, too, were more richly polyphonic than the monotonous droners of Zababdeh, whose four male singers, now taking their place by the band, were augmented by three more hefty, gray-haired men in dark suits indistinguishable from themselves. Rivlin hoped that this ensemble, backed by a small but vigorous drum, would force the Lebanese singer out of her angelic bubble and into a confrontation with the world.

And it did. At first every line warbled by the little nun was resoundingly seconded with all its grace notes by the lute, rebab, and drum. Then, however, these were joined by the shepherd’s pipe, whose plaintive tones turned their agreement into a protest or question to which the Lebanese was forced to reply — which in turn forced the male choir to stop its droning and rebel, pained and incredulous, against the white-robed singer’s unshakable harmonies. It was hard to tell what was rehearsed and what was improvised. At times, despite her great vocal resourcefulness, the nun was surprised and thrown off her stride. Yet she not only recovered quickly, she rose to the challenge and added still more quavers to her answer until these lengthened into a single long appoggiatura that brooked no response.

Was this her way, assisted by the musicians, of preparing for the swoon that Rivlin was looking forward to? Were they wearing down her resistance with their repeated phrases until its precise point of collapse was reached, not by calculation, but by a true intoxication of the spirit? Or did they, on the contrary, fearing that too quick a loss of consciousness might end the concert prematurely, engage her in this complex dialogue to keep her from passing out from sheer boredom?

The Orientalist felt a tug on his pants. It was Ra’uda, drawing his attention to the rear of the auditorium. There, in its crowded last row, was Samaher in a scarf, and behind her, her handsome cousin. His gaze zeroing in on the Orientalist, Rashid flashed him a V sign like the one Rivlin remembered from Zababdeh. Yet this time, he felt, there was something proud and debauched about it. Ra’uda, he saw by her frightened face, had the same reaction.

The nun’s singing had now infected the Ramallah audience, which swayed in its seats as if straining to join in. The musicians, prepared for such an uprising, changed tempo to nip it in the bud. Rivlin turned to his wife, wishing to share the experience. Her ironic smile left him uncertain that she was enjoying it. “Well, what do you say?” he asked excitedly, as if he were the nun’s impresario. “Doesn’t she have a wonderful voice?” Hagit gave her husband a pitying look. “I wouldn’t exactly call it wonderful,” she answered judiciously, while smiling at the Arabs bouncing up and down to the insurrectionary beat of the drum. “But it is special.”

Disappointed in her, Rivlin surveyed the rest of his entourage, hoping for greater enthusiasm. Hannah Tedeschi, bent over the lyrics that she was no doubt translating in her head, did not appear to be listening to the music. Mr. Suissa, on the other hand, had a look of wary satisfaction on his face, as if he had discovered here in Ramallah the Arab music he had been deprived of in his North African Jewish childhood.

O my Lord, who spreads the heavens,

We are purged of our carnality,

And the earth quivers with love.

Your long arm

Summons us to the Redemption.

The nun now began a new exchange, with a tambourine — which, however, rather than following her, took the lead. Its percussive rattle rising above the diminuendo of the musicians, it, too, sought to throw her off balance, forcing her to cling to more and more sobbing grace notes of an increasingly Oriental character. Supposedly above it all in her Lebanese cloister, she now seemed, like the oppressed Palestinians of the Holy Land, to be fighting for an existence that vibrated with them on one wavelength.

Rivlin felt one of Ra’uda’s dark-haired boys slump sleepily against his knee. Laying a hand on the warm little head, he tapped the rhythm of the drum on it. He gave his wife a loving look, glanced fondly at the translatoress immersed in her lyrics, and was surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, Mrs. Suissa junior, who had not said a word to him all evening, crying as he had cried for Jephthah’s daughter.

16.

BUT WHEN WOULD the promised fainting take place? Was it possible in front of such an openly non-Christian audience? And who, apart from Rivlin and Rashid, even hoped for it?

Song followed song, and the little nun showed no signs of tiring. The lute and rebab kept pace with her, their ancient erotic rhythms luring her so far from the sacred that there were times when she could have been performing in a Cairo cabaret.

A thin, reddish gas drifted upward near the musicians. Produced by a secondhand smoke machine bought by Ibn-Zaidoun from an Israeli disco club, it thickened and spread, forming a mist that enveloped the choir and curled around the plain sandals of the nun. From there, like a friendly animal, it crept toward the Palestinians sitting on the floor near the stage. At first they backed away, as if from a tear-gas bomb. Yet seeing that the odorless substance did not burn or make them cry and was no more than a symbol of the world’s insubstantiality, they began to laugh and to try to get a whiff of it or even catch it in their hands.

The Lebanese nun, startled by this special effect, which seemed about to turn her performance into a rock concert, stopped singing. She shut her eyes and hugged her shoulders as if fending off the audience’s clapping to the rhythm of the drum. Now is the time, Rivlin thought. He tugged at his wife and whispered: “Watch her. She’s going to faint. I just hope she doesn’t blow it.”

The judge looked at her husband as if he were deranged. “But what good does it do if she faints?” she asked.

The Orientalist did not expect such a question. Automatically, however, as though from the depths of a trance, the answer came to him. “It’s a warning,” he said. “A warning of the abyss we’re all about to fall into.”

Yet the nun was taking her time. Indeed, if she had been supposed to faint at the point of her hushed climax it was already too late, because the music had resumed and passed the point of no return. Even Ibn-Zaidoun’s smoke machine was now out of control and rapidly fouling the auditorium, in which several veterans of the Intifada had risen to their feet and were shouting the nun down with nationalist songs.

She turned pale and retreated to the rear of the stage. Something unpleasant, a serious and perhaps even violent misunderstanding, was in the air. In another minute, it seemed, she would have to hide behind her choir of hefty drones. And yet oddly, so loyal until now, they were doing nothing to protect her. Droning and clapping, they pushed her almost comically back, as if holding her to the terms of her contract. Rivlin was on his feet, trying to sight the white robe, which was surrounded by a crowd that had burst onto the stage. At its head, talking to the still-singing nun, was Rashid. He made a gesture, and suddenly, with no warning, she collapsed at his feet and disappeared from the sight of the Jew.

17.

IT WAS AFTER midnight when the audience dispersed, in high spirits. The Lebanese nun’s fainting fit had met with sympathy, and numerous well-wishers had come up to her once she regained consciousness. Despite their repeated requests, however, she declined to go on with her performance — which was just as well, since anything more would only have been anticlimactic.

Rivlin and his entourage took their coats and umbrellas from the checkroom and said good-bye to Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun and the blue-blooded judge. The Scotsman, against the advice of his panelists, had awarded first prize in the poetry contest to an elderly village bard who had written his first verse in the days of the British Mandate. The famous Palestinian poet had already departed for Amman, where the air of exile was purer, setting out in a taxi for Jordan as soon as the nun fainted. Ibn-Zaidoun bade everyone farewell for him, especially the Jewish student of the Age of Ignorance, his mystical dialogue with whom he would long remember.

It was bitterly cold when they left the large stone building. The skies were clear, with no sign of more rain. The orange moon that had barely cleared the mountains earlier in the evening was now floating palely and effortlessly among the stars.

They all took their places in the minibus except for Ra’uda, who was given a ride back to Zababdeh by a Christian family. Her two boys remained with Rashid, the older of them sitting by the young widow, whose eyes still shone with emotion. Samaher, bundled up in her shawl, sat self-consciously in the back as if anxious to forget her role as a Jewish rabbi. But Rivlin would not let her. Stooping to enter the vehicle, he said loudly:

“Samaher, you were marvelous! It was a fabulous idea to do a scene from The Dybbuk. I told my wife that the way you got into your part was incredible.”

“Well, Professor,” Rashid said, his dark face smiling at Rivlin in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of his parking place with a honk of the horn, “maybe that’s a reason to give Samaher her final grade tonight.”

“Her final grade?” Rivlin chuckled. “It’s a bit too early for that. But if it’s a question of extra credit for her Arabic translation of The Dybbuk… yes, I suppose that’s possible.”

Deep down the Haifa professor had to admit that not giving Samaher a grade was more than just a matter of maintaining academic standards. The fact was that he did not want to part with these two young people, whose love traced an invisible arc in the bulky van.

They joined a convoy of Israeli cars, its peace and poetry lovers escorted by a Palestinian police jeep to the military campfire at the border. This time, the soldiers — unwilling to rely on their instincts to tell an Israeli physiognomy from a Palestinian one in the dead of night — asked for IDs. Through the window of the minibus Rivlin saw Fu’ad led off to the campfire, as if to be examined by its light. Feeling responsible for the maître d’, he climbed out of the minibus and hurried over. The intervention of the aging Jewish professor had its effect, and Fu’ad — perhaps singled out because of his singularly crumpled ID — was allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, however, the car he’d been in had driven off without him, leaving him hurt and bewildered. Still smarting over Rivlin’s remarks, he accepted his offer of a lift to Jerusalem without knowing what to make of his sudden protectiveness.

The drive back to Jerusalem was a short one. Hagit laid her head on her husband’s shoulder and was out like a light, sleeping through Hannah Tedeschi’s impassioned recitation of an elegy written by the great Syrian poet Adonis for the same Al-Hallaj whose verses she had translated. Rivlin, a captive audience, listened to her declaim it:

Your poisoned green quill—

The veins of its neck bottled flame

In which a star rises over Baghdad—

Is our bright past, our resurrection on earth,

Our death that returns to itself.

Rivlin, exhausted by the night’s impressions, nodded ironically at this woman who gave birth to translations instead of children. “Well, Hannah,” he demanded, “aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?”

“‘Thank you’?” She looked askance at him. “For what?”

“For making you come tonight.”

“Just wait,” she grumbled, turning color. “We haven’t yet seen what it’s going to cost me.”

They dropped a pensive Suissa and his widowed daughter-in-law in Pisgat Ze’ev. The translatoress, as anxious as a student before an exam, asked Rivlin to come upstairs with her to help bear the brunt of the abandoned Tedeschi’s anger. But the Haifa Orientalist was in no mood to climb three flights of stairs just in order to listen to the old man’s complaints. In the end, they agreed on a compromise proposal of the judge’s that she and her husband wait down below for five minutes to see whether they were needed.

Hannah Tedeschi said her good-byes. All the pent-up emotion of the evening came out as she hugged and kissed Hagit affectionately before turning on the entrance light and starting up the stairs. The Rivlins said good night to Rashid, Samaher, and the two boys, and the Orientalist unlocked their parked car, turned on the heating for Hagit, and went to stand outside the Tedeschis’ building.

The minibus drove a distance down the street and stopped in a little square, waiting for the Jews to be safely on their way. Rashid’s silhouette, seated stiffly by the wheel, was limned by the yellowish glare of a streetlight. Samaher, still in the backseat, looked like a sad mummy. Something that had happened across the border, Rivlin felt, made them afraid to sit close to each other.

The judge, full of the evening’s music and ready for more sleep, leaned her head back in the car. Rivlin stood reading the names on the mailboxes, trying to remember which of them had been in this building thirty years ago. Before he could finish, the stairway light went out. A minute later he was approached by Fu’ad. The maître d’ wished to know whether, on their way back to Haifa, they could drop him off in Abu-Ghosh. Rivlin look at his watch and nodded. He cast a weary glance at the Arab, who took a last, thirsty drag on his cigarette, ground the butt out with his shoe, and whispered underneath his mustache:

“Bas kan biddi ha’ul, ya Brofesor,^* that if you’re wondering whether he cheated on her, you can be sure he didn’t.”

The Orientalist’s battered heart twinged.

“That’s what I thought.” He made two fists. “And that’s why it kills me that…”

The light came back on in the stairwell. They heard hurried steps. Hannah Tedeschi, looking pale, appeared without her coat and signaled Rivlin to follow her.

“But what’s wrong?” he asked. “What does he want? Didn’t fall asleep in the end?”

“In the end…” She repeated the words as though hypnotized. With an abrupt gesture, she signaled the Arab to join them too.

18.

“BUT WHY IS it so dark in here?” Rivlin complained, following Hannah Tedeschi down the hallway with its shelves of novels and thrillers in many languages, bought in airports by the Jerusalem polymath to pass the time on international flights. Hannah didn’t answer. With a stride that seemed to have grown swifter, she led him through the dim guest room to the door of Tedeschi’s study, beneath which crept a beam of light.

Even though Hannah had said nothing, he was prepared for what awaited him and turned around to make sure the maître d’ was behind him. A man who had spent his life going in and out of the rooms of strangers could surely cope with the warmly lit study that the translatoress now ushered them into.

Tedeschi, dressed in his pajamas, had apparently risen from bed and gone to his desk to do something at his computer. His arms embraced its lit screen, and his puckish face nuzzled its ivory keyboard, leaving the wife fifteen years his junior to guess whether he had been slipped an Ottoman sleeping potion, fainted from fright at her absence, or decided to bid a fond adieu to the world of scholarship. From the way she stood, tall and grave, without approaching for a closer look, it was evident which of these possibilities she believed in.

Rivlin felt weak-kneed. His heart went out to this grave woman, his loyal former classmate — who, surprisingly, did not seem to blame herself for her sudden liberation from the teacher who had trapped her. And since the latter was in no condition to tell anyone what to do with him, Rivlin asked the maître d’ to help pry his old mentor loose from the computer, on which he had vomited in a last act of desperation.

Not that Fu’ad owed Tedeschi anything. Still, many years of experience at entering and even breaking into hotel rooms made him a competent assistant. “Let’s lay him on the floor,” he said softly to the Jew, stepping nimbly forward to grab one end of the dead man. It wasn’t easy. The Jerusalem scholar was stronger in death than in life, and it took no little force and ingenuity to wrestle him from the computer screen, on which his favorite comic-book figures were still cavorting, and carefully straighten him out. Undeterred by the pity he felt, Rivlin seized his old doctoral adviser’s skull and pulled it from the keyboard without checking whether the eyes were closed.

Only now, as the maître d’ expertly eased the pudgy body, undeniably a corpse, onto the floor and rather illogically moved the heater closer to it, did it dawn on Rivlin that he would never again sit in this room discussing the Middle East or having new ideas about it run past him. He glanced at Hannah Tedeschi, who was watching sternly and aloofly from the other side of the room, as if the horror of what had happened were a moral boundary she refused to cross. It saddened him that obsessive worry about his son had kept him from promising his old mentor that, come what may, he would write something for the jubilee volume.

“Just a minute, I’ll get a blanket,” Hannah whispered. She actually looked younger, as if the death of her husband had taken years off her age. Since he actually had been parted from his computer and laid down in repose on the Persian rug, no cry of grief escaped her. “Better a sheet, ma’am,” Fu’ad said. “That’s what’s usually used.” The quiet confidence of his movements suggested that he had done this with more than one hotel guest. The translatoress looked searchingly at the Israeli Arab, who was not yet a Jew and no longer a true son of the desert; then she nodded and went to fetch an old, starched cotton sheet. This was taken from her by Rashid, who had turned up as if it were only natural to be offering his services at such a time. Having recently worn sheets in his role as the dybbuk, he expertly unfolded this one and handed one end of it to the maître d’. Working in comradely tandem, the two men whipped it in the air like a great white sail and let it settle over the face of the doyen of Orientalists.

Now that Tedeschi had disappeared from sight for the last time, Rivlin remembered his wife, who was probably still asleep in the running car on the deserted nighttime street. Worriedly, he headed for the front door. The trusty messenger — who, since the wedding in the Galilee, seemed able to read the mind of the teacher who still owed his cousin a grade — stopped him. “You don’t have to run, Professor,” he said. “I hear her coming up the stairs.”

She was already in the doorway, his pleasantly plump beloved in her short sheepskin coat. Her untroubled face, the face of a lover of the Just and the Good, showed no suspicion. “Is anything wrong?” she asked softly, with a smile, and advanced innocently toward the study, where she saw the corpse beneath its white sheet. Fearlessly she knelt and pulled back the sheet for a last look at the man who had taken a fancy to her on her first visit to this apartment, thirty years ago, as a young soldier, aspiring law student, and future bride.

She began to cry, her silent tears breaking the heart of a husband who had been sure that here was a death that left him cold and unmoved. Still relentlessly aloof, the translatoress turned in alarm to the two Arabs, as if it were their duty to keep this self-assured woman from introducing grief into the deceased’s study. But they, unaware that the dead man had thought he understood Arabs better than Arabs understood themselves, declined to involve themselves in a Jewish matter, thus forcing the translatoress to drop her mask. At long last she uttered a sound that was somewhere between a groan of pain and a curse of despair, went over to the computer, and tapped a key. The comic-book figures vanished. Tedeschi’s last article appeared on the screen in all its rich complexity. She reached out to touch it, in a final, merciful caress.