The Liberated Bride (34 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

Absolutely not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he was off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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