The Liberated Bride (54 page)
Read The Liberated Bride Online
Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
PART VII
H
AD THERE BEEN
advance signs of this death?
Rivlin lay waiting for the dawn under an old woolen blanket in the unborn children's room. The Jerusalem polymath, wrapped in a sheet on the Persian rug in his study, awaited the same dawn, which would bring a doctor, a family friend, to confirm his final adieu. Meanwhile, in the living room on the other side of the door, the translatoress sat up talking emotionally to the judge, seeking guidance.
The two Arabs had left, each for his own destination. Or had they gone off together?
They had spread the sheet over the doyen of Orientalists with such perfect coordination that they might have been trained for it.
But what were the signs? For it now appeared that behind the hypochondria and the false alarms a real death had been hiding, waiting to catch the translatoress of Ignorance off guard before striking.
And yet . . .
Rivlin thought about the pajamas Tedeschi was wearing when he died. They indicated that he had gone to bed and tried to sleep. Had some new idea made him jump up and go to his desk? Or was it the terror of dying, against which he had sought comfort in something he had written?
Had he found it?
Or his adamant refusal to spend the evening in the Palestinian Authority, where he would have died among Arabsâwas that a sign? Or his battle to keep his wife from going without him, which had ended
with a white handkerchief of surrender telling death that the way was now clear?
And how about his lecture that strange morning on the Turkish
Othello
? And his new interest in imaginative literature as opposed to speeches and protocols?
Two years previously, on a trip to the Dolomites, the Rivlins had found themselves floating skyward, late one summer afternoon, in an orange funicular bound for a restaurant on the heights of Mount Cortina. Although in winter the site must have swarmed with skiers, it now had few visitors. In the restaurant, at a table next to theirs, looking down at the fertile valley below, sat a quiet, polite couple with two small children; on the Rivlins' other side, facing the bare mountain, was an elderly, stocky man in an old-fashioned summer suit that appeared to have come straight from a 1930s European movie. He was sipping champagne while talking seriously with a man of about thirty who was wearing sporty designer clothes.
The two Israelis watched the children lick their ice cream, then gradually shifted their attention to the ruddy-faced old man. He looked German or Italian and might have been a banker or an architect, or perhaps a local politician. His young companion, to judge by the deference he showed, was not a relative or friend, but, more likely, a student or assistant.
After a while the man rose with the help of a gold-handled cane, donned a Panama hat, paid the bill, and left with his companion. But instead of heading downhill for the cable car, he took the younger man by the arm and set out for the bald peak. Although the sun was already low in the sky, he strode slowly onward, leaning on his cane while continuing his conversation, as if fulfilling some obligation toward nature or the mountain, the distant summit of which gleamed with a last crown of snow.
The two Israelis regarded the elderly gentleman intently, expecting at any moment to see him tire and turn back. The path he was on zigzagged at a gentle grade up the mountain's bare, arid flank. He kept walking up it, the younger man at his side or falling slightly behind. Unhurriedly he climbed, in a purpling light that the setting sun would soon take with it.
“Doesn't he remind you of Tedeschi?” Rivlin had mused aloud.
Hagit's eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
The elderly gentleman and his young companion vanished in the late-afternoon haze. Were they still heading up the mountain? But where to? The minutes passed and they did not return. The two Israelis looked around them. It was time to take the funicular back down to the darkening valley. “Imagine,” Rivlin said to his wife as they skimmed the treetops between sky and earth, “what would have happened if there had been no Fascism or Nazism and no Second World War. Carlo would have remained in a peaceful Europe and ended up looking like that manâa bit recherché but perfectly respectable, ruddy with health and well-being, strolling in the Dolomites in a summer suit, with a gold-handled cane, until he vanished in the haze. Arabs and Jews would have been the furthest things from his mind.”
Was that a sign, the haze at the bend in the path two years ago?
T
HE FUNERAL,
set for 5
P.M.
, was postponed until six because of a logjam at the cemetery. The Rivlins spent the day in Jerusalem. The Orientalist helped with the funeral arrangements while the judge stayed on the telephone, calling the Tedeschis' friends and acquaintances and urging them in a quiet but authoritative manner to come pay their last respects. Later in the day she went to buy flowers and food, and fresh socks and underwear for herself and her husband to wear after showering. Rivlin, however, was repelled by the old, peeling bathroom with its assorted toothbrushes and shaving implements, and untidy laundry basket and medicine chest. Picking up a broken comb to which still clung some old hairs, he dropped it in a fright, quickly changed his underwear, sprinkled himself with aftershave lotion from an old bottle, and said to his wife:
“Don't expect me to shower. It's too much for me.”
Soon after arriving in Palestine at the start of World War II, Tedeschi, as a statement that he would never return to Europe, had purchased a burial plot in a small cemetery in Sanhedriya, then an ordinary Jerusalem neighborhood. Subsequently, it had turned into a crowded ultra-Orthodox ghetto, in which the cemetery, grown larger,
remained the only open green space. Now, obeying judicial authority, a sizable crowd had gathered and was making its way in falling darkness along the congested aisles between the tombstones, or else cutting through or climbing over them. At its head walked the president of Hebrew University with the rector and the dean, followed by Tedeschi's fellow faculty members, some senior librarians, and Orientalists from other institutions and organizationsâincluding the Mossad, representatives of which had sometimes consulted the Jerusalem polymath about the lessons to be learned from Arab history. Missing were only the Arabs themselves, not one of whom was in evidence, although Tedeschi had liked to boast of his Arab friends.
Rivlin, standing by the fresh grave, noted that it was the last empty one in its row. Tedeschi, in planning for his own death, had forgotten to think of his wife's. The liberated translatoress, Rivlin thought sadly, would have to fend for herself. Although she had wanted him to give the eulogy, he had begged off. “Let the president or rector do it,” he told her. “In cemeteries they outrank me. There'll be other chances to eulogize Carlo. Today I'll recite the mourner's prayer. And you should think of some parting words to say yourself.”
Indeed, Rivlin enjoyed the hush that descended on everyone, from the president down, as he read the kaddish in a strong, clear voice from an imitation-parchment scroll handed him by the undertaker, who shone a little flashlight on it. The translatoress, though freed at last from her marital bonds, was too flustered to speak. Taking the flashlight from the undertaker, she pulled from her pocket an ancient elegy from the Age of Ignorance, recently translated by her. “You'll forgive me,” she apologized to the distinguished gathering. “This is what I know how to do.”
In hard, quick tones she read some lines by the sixth-century Arabic poet Thabata Sharan, put in the mouth of his mother after the death of a son:
You traveled far to run from death, but it caught up with you.
If only I knew how you fell into its hands.
Were you ill, alone without a friend,
Or did your enemies trick you into it?
How harsh the world
In which you may not answer me.
Your silence makes me
My own comforter.
O my heart,
Stand still a while!
I grieve that my soul
Was not taken forever
In place of yours.
E
ARLY THAT WINTER
the Rivlins were informed by Ofra and Yo'el that the two of them were planning to be in Israel on their way to a UN conference in Singapore. It would be a brief stopover, made possible by a ticket from Europe to the Far East.
The stopover was originally planned for five days. While the judge looked for ways to lessen her caseload, Rivlin hurriedly reserved a hotel room on the Carmel and obtained a list of that week's concerts and performances from a ticket agency. Yet in the end, various constraints and obligations shortened the five days to three.
“Well,” Rivlin said generously, “if it's only three nights, let's cancel the hotel reservation and give them my study. We'll want to spend as much time with them as we can.”
But the three nights did not survive intact, either. The visit was cut again, this time to twenty-four hours.
“If that's the most your beloved sister can afford to give you,” Rivlin told his disappointed wife, “let's take a day off from work and spend it and the night by Lake Kinneret.”
Two weeks before his in-laws' arrival, however, a change in international flights scotched this plan too. The stopover was reduced to a few hours.
“This is already an insult,” Rivlin proclaimed, with an odd gaiety. “Not to Israelâit will manage without them. But what about us? Is that how little we mean to them? I intend to lodge an official complaint at the airport.”
“Just don't say anything to spoil their visit,” warned his wife, who had no sense of humor when it came to her sister.
Once again they were in the arrivals hall of the airport with its plashing fountains. The two globe-trotters, tired but traveling light with only their hand luggage, were the first of their flight to emerge from customs. “It's marvelous, even spiritual,” Yo'el said, giving his welcomers a big hug, “to enter Israel with only a light bag.”
“Yes,” Rivlin agreed. “Unfortunately, that's the bag we're left holding when you leave.”
“Stow it,” Hagit said, embracing Ofra.
Ofra, thin, pale, and guilt-ridden, threw her arms around her sister and promised that on their way back from Singapore they would come for longer. Meanwhile, they had decided to spend their few hours in Jerusalem, if only for the sake of the venerable aunt, whose survival from one stopover to the next was far from assured.
It was storming. Rivlin, wanting to make sure no one complained about the weather, praised the badly needed rain. They debated stopping for lunch in Abu-Ghosh at Fu'ad's uncle's restaurant, which was such a favorite of Yo'el's that it almost seemed that the entire stopover had been planned with it in mind. Yet since everyone had already eaten, the visitors on the plane and the Rivlins at the airport, it was decided to postpone the restaurant meal until supper and make do with coffee and cake at a roadside diner.
Although the two sisters spoke regularly over the telephone several times a week, not even the longest and most audible of long-distance calls could compete with a face-to-face talk by the roaring fireplace of a diner. The conversation touched on everything, old, new, remembered, and forgotten, and when his in-laws asked about Ofer, Rivlin replied by bewailing his eldest son's solitude in Paris. Ofer, he said, was still not over his divorce. Before he could proceed any further, however, Hagit changed the subject to the festival in Ramallah, her account of whichâespecially of the Lebanese nun's fainting fit and the Arabic production of
The Dybbuk
âfascinated the visitors. “From now on,” Yo'el said, shaking his head with sorrow at Hagit's description of Tedeschi's death, “you'll have to live your married life without
its best man.” They smiled bittersweet smiles, and a tear shone in Ofra's eye.
She went on dabbing at her tears until, eternally thin and pale, she gave Hagit a last, clinging embrace by the departures gate. So guilty and upset was she over their short visit that Rivlin forbore to comment. Why rub it in?
There had been more tears at their aunt's, who was bedridden with a bad cold. The old lady, though her usual lucid, ironic self, told her beloved niece not to kiss her and concentrated on Yo'el, whom she had not seen in years, while sparing Rivlin her usual third degree. Perfunctorily expressing her sorrow at the death of his old teacher, she turned to the UN consultant and quizzed him about his conference in Singapore and the names of the participating countries.
Yo'el patiently reviewed the entire list of them. The old lady nodded her white head to confirm the existence of those countries she had heard of and inquired about those she had not. “And you, Yo'el?” she asked with a faint smile. “Will you be representing little Israel?”
“No,” the Third World expert replied. “My clients are ideas. Israel will be represented by its foreign ministry.”
The old lady frowned with disappointment. “What a shame!” she exclaimed. “You still look so Israeli with your khaki pants and your sandals. And that old safari jacket! I remember it from before I was taken ill. . . .”
Yo'el beamed at her. “I'll still be Israeli even when there's no more Israel,” he declared. And regretting the remark at once, he bent to kiss her, cold and all.
“All right,” Rivlin said, interrupting the patriotic scene. “Let's leave the women to their own devices and come back in an hour.”
I
T WAS 4 P.M.
The rain was still coming down. “What would you like to do?” Rivlin asked his brother-in-law.
“It's up to you, Yochi,” Yo'el said. “I haven't been in Jerusalem for so long that anywhere you take me will be new.”
Rivlin thought for a moment. “In that case,” he said, “let's go to a place I haven't seen either. Whenever I've been there, it's been closed. Maybe it will be open in your honor. An hour is all we need.”
They drove to Talpiyot, parked near the hotel, and walked to the gray Agnon House with its barred windows. Though it again looked deserted, it was, to Rivlin's surprise, open to visitors. The person in charge, a small, vivacious woman of about forty, was standing on a stepladder in the kitchen, painting a wall.
“A living soul at last!” the Orientalist declared. “What is this? Just because the city doesn't charge admission, does this place always have to be closed?”
“For you, we'll even charge admission.” The woman, who wore her hair in an Orthodox-style puff, grinned at him.
“Admission to an author's house?” Rivlin was in a fighting mood. “What for, to pay your salary?”
She laughed. “Good Lord! If my salary came from admission fees, I'd have starved to death long ago.”
Rivlin paid thirty shekels for himself and his guest and declined the offer of an information sheet. The two men walked silently around a large, nondescript room, the famous author's salon that was now used for lectures about him, and climbed a steep staircase to his study. Its walls were lined with books, mostly large rabbinic volumes. Standing on a worn rug was a small, old desk with an antique typewriter, a museum piece in its own right. The room was cold, and an elevated, built-in fireplace, though its blue tiles enlivened the gloom, did not look to Rivlin as though it had been used even in the author's lifetime.
The room had a single window looking out on the yard. Beneath it, bulky and graceless, was the renowned lectern on which the Nobel Prize winnerâin awe, it was said, of the Hebrew languageâhad written his prodigious output of novels and stories standing up. A sheet of paper covered with his tiny, nebulous script lay on its slanted top. Beside that were his eyeglasses. Rivlin, not daring to try them on, picked them up and immediately put them down again.
The rain outside beat down harder, casting a thick pall. The lamp in the room shone feebly. Yo'el took out his reading glasses and perused the titles on the shelves, now and then taking down a book to look
at it. An expert on Third World agriculture and the effects on it of global warming, he had a wide range of interests and encouraged Rivlin to send him Israeli magazines and periodicals, as well as new volumes of Hebrew fiction and poetry, which he avidly read on his long flights. It was his way of keeping in touch with the country, his up-to-date knowledge of which often surprised people.
“How Spartan it is here,” he remarked.
“Yes,” Rivlin said. “Agnon was said to have been a great miser.”
“That's not what I meant.” Yo'el came passionately to the author's defense. “It's not a question of money. It's an attitude toward life. Look at these books. Some were expensive. There are even rare manuscripts. It's not miserliness that you're looking at. It's a radically modest way of life. I've seen the same thing in the houses of other real intellectuals, East and West. I have the greatest respect for it.”
Rivlin took a large, heavy volume from a shelf, glanced at it, and put it back. “Just the title page puts me to sleep,” he said.
“What can you expect? An eternal people like the Jews didn't go around producing best-sellers. But don't think that the sacred literature of other peoples is any more lively. And if you look at where all these books come from, you'll find an amazing variety of periods and countries. Some were printed in places that even the geographers have never heard of. They may seem tedious now, and perhaps they always were, but for better or for worse they're still the context for many thingsâincluding the great works of the man whose house we're in. That's why he preferred to spend his money on them and not on rugs or paintings.”
“Far be it from me . . .” Rivlin left the sentence unfinished. His brother-in-law, whose nationalist ardor was satisfied with seven hours in his native land, sometimes baffled him.
“Especially when I'm in places where no Jews ever lived,” Yo'el continued, “I think of the rabbis, who purged their discourse of all historical concreteness to make a distilled, abstract essence of it even when dealing with the petty details of life. It transcends time and place, which why it fits together so naturally in a library like this, assembled to meet the specifications of its owner.”
“Which were?”
“I don't know. I only know that the man who worked in this room and consulted these books knew how to get the most out of them and to make the connections between them. He wasn't interested in history, but in something else . . . something more important . . .”
“More important in what way?” Rivlin picked up the gauntlet. “All these books, with their endless hairsplitting commentaries, never helped the Jews to survive, let alone to prepare for the next catastrophe.”
“And those Jews better anchored in history or reality were better prepared?”
“Yes,” the Orientalist said. “I think so. It's a fact.”
“Would you say that about the Israelis?”
“Why not? As long as we're able to free ourselves from our own myths. . . . But we'd better get a move on, Yo'el. Hagit and Ofra's aunt is sick, and they can't spend too much time with her.”
And seeing that his brother-in-law was loath to leave the great author's room, Rivlin added:
“The reason you've developed such a nostalgic, sentimental attitude toward Judaism, Yo'el, is that you spend all your time at international conferences. You inhabit a bubble of virtual reality. If you lived in this country and saw all your tax money go to support parasitical yeshiva students, most of whom don't even study, you'd talk differently.”
“You're wrong.” Yo'el's smile was tolerant. “I'm not nostalgic about Judaism, and I'm perfectly realistic. I have no illusions that what's written in these books has any answer for the suffering and the hardship that I see all the time. I'm talking about something different. Not the content but the templateâa style of thought such as you find in a wonderful, if sometimes wearisome, book like Agnon's
The Bridal Canopy,
which I read last year in Laos and Cambodia. It gave me more insight into the Third World than no end of documents. That's what I'm looking for: a template that Israelâand you know how attached I am to itâhas lost. . . .”
“But a template for what?” Rivlin asked impatiently.
Yo'el paused by the old lectern and glanced at the page of writing. His glasses, which resembled the author's, had slipped down his nose, giving his broad, strong face a spiritual mien.
“For giving Israel more of what Judaism once had.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About how Israeli identity might be freed from its provincialism and given wings. How it might adopt a more spiritual attitude toward a world in need of new ideas. It should be possible to combine the Jewish genius for ahistorical abstraction with Israel's scientific accomplishmentsâwith the curiosity, the collective solidarity, the ability to improvise, that so many Israelis have. . . .”
“Mostly to improvise unnecessary problems,” the Orientalist opined.
“Don't lose your sense of proportion,” Yo'el corrected him. “Believe me, I know the problems of other peoples. Real ones of hunger and civil war and terrible natural disasters. I'm tired of spoiled Israelis whining all the time, as if the only point of comparison with their situation were the tranquillity of Europeâas if Europe itself hadn't been within living memory the site of the most horrible of atrocities, not to mention what just happened in Bosnia. . . .”
Rivlin smiled. “Yes, I say the same things in defense of the Middle East when I hear it attacked. But it doesn't really do any good.”
“What I'm saying,” Yo'el continued, removing the glasses from his nose and laying them absentmindedly on the lectern, “is that it's time for Israel to look beyond its local squabbles. Globalism, with all that's frightening and fascinating about it, is our business, too. We have to think of ways to cope with it. We should learn from the way we were in the 1950s, both more modest and more driven by a sense of mission.”
“What mission could we have?”
“But if we believed forty years ago that we had oneâthat we had something important to contribute to the world even though half of it didn't recognize usâwhy not now, when everything is so much more open and interconnected? Just think of what it does for our pride when an Israeli rescue team or field hospital saves lives in an earthquake or a flood somewhere. And that's just a fraction of what we could do. It would give us a better perspective on ourselves.”
“A better perspective . . .” Rivlin sighed. He had a great liking for his barrel-chested brother-in-law, whose old safari jacket brushed
against the lectern. “Yes, that's what we need. But we'd better get going. You've forgotten you have a flight tonight. Just be careful not to switch glasses with Agnon. It won't bother him to have yours, but what are you going to do with his in southeast Asia?”
They returned to the little street. Although Rivlin would have liked to take his brother-in-law to the hotel and show him how the garden had changed, he thought better of it. The garden meant nothing to Yo'el. It's my own open wound, he told himself.
It was getting dark. The rain had eased up. Above the restaurant in Abu-Ghosh the clouds had parted to reveal a dark swath of sky in which, lost and distant, errant stars glittered. Yo'el was in a buoyant mood. Hungry, he went to the kitchen to seek inspiration before ordering.
“They'll serve you dinner on the plane,” Ofra reminded him.
“I'll skip it.”
“You know you won't.”
“So I won't. So what? Who knows when we'll be back here?”
An elderly waiter, amused by the broken Arabic of the Israeli who had stopped for dinner on his way to Singapore, soon covered the table with dozens of colorful appetizers in dishes so small that the international consultant had no qualms about finishing all of them. But the gloom of parting hung over the two sisters. Moved by his sister-in-law's strained face with no makeup, Rivlin turned to his wife and urged her to relate a strange dream she had had that week.
Hagit did not want to. “Then I'll tell it,” Rivlin said, starting to describe what he remembered. “You can stop right there,” Hagit said, taking him aback with her sternness. “It's of no interest. And anyway, since when do my dreams belong to you?” Hurt to the quick, he stammered something in his own defense. The judge patted his knee under the table, to let him know that she was annoyed not with him but with her here-today-gone-tomorrow brother-in-law, who was still heartily polishing off dishes that were now so small that their contents looked more like medicine than food.
R
ETURNING HOME AT MIDNIGHT,
Rivlin had an anxious feeling about Ofer and telephoned his attic apartment. As there was no answer, he
dialed the emergency number of the Jewish Agency. There he was told, in a French-accented Hebrew, that Ofer had been sick for the past few days and that the speaker was filling in for him. Rivlin dialed the apartment once more. Again no one answered. “He must have felt better and decided to go out,” said the naturally optimistic judge.
But Rivlin slept poorly. When there was still no answer in the morning, he phoned Ofer's landlady. Ofer, she told him, had come down with such a bad case of the flu that, having no one to take care of him, he had gone to the hospital. Yesterday, he had called to say that his condition had improved. Asked what hospital he was in, however, the landlady said she didn't know. Perhaps it was just French discretion.
“You see?” Rivlin said to his wife. “He's been in Paris for five years, and he's still all alone. And who would want to take care of him when his heart is far away?”
“And suppose it is?” Hagit replied. “Is it up to you to decide where his heart should be?”