The Liberated Bride (44 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not dive with them?” Rivlin teased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Arabs? Where do they come in?”

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

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

“What were you looking at?”

“A notice that the verdict is today.”

“The verdict? Today?”

“Yes.”

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

“What's so damned about it?”

“It just is.”

“But why?”

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

“Why should they have mattered to you?”

“They just did.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Forensic evidence.”

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

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

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

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

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

“How did it come out?”

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

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

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

“I'd like to read the full text.”

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

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

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

“Did he say anything about a girlfriend?”

“No. I don't think he has one.”

“So what will be?”

“There's nothing we can do about it.”

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

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

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

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

“Why can't he?”

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

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

“But you didn't.”

“At least I tried.”

“Look at the price, though.”

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

“Because he loves you.”

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

“He didn't have to. I know it.”