The Liberated Bride (14 page)

O
NCE AGAIN, THE
Tedeschis—needing, so it seemed, the constant presence of real death—had a surprise corpse for him. This time it was an unknown young scholar from the Arabic Department in Jerusalem, who, stimulated by a literary, sociological, and ethnographic interest, had undertaken a study of popular literature in North Africa. The translatoress, no mean student of Arabic literature herself, had helped her friend unravel the subtle historical allusions hidden in the intricacies of contemporary Arab writing. And he, an observant Jew intimately familiar with religious sources, had repaid her with many an elegant rabbinic phrase that came in handy in her renditions of Jahaliya poetry. So productive had their collaboration over the past year been that they had even toyed with the idea of putting out a joint anthology of Arabic verse in Hebrew translation, he doing the moderns and she the ancients. And then he was killed.

“How?” Rivlin asked.

“In that bus bombing near Pisgat Ze'ev.”

“That's the first university teacher killed by a terrorist that I've heard of.”

“He wasn't just a teacher,” Tedeschi protested angrily. “He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind. Not that that stopped them from snuffing him out one fine day.”

“Those aren't the same Arabs,” Rivlin protested.

“Yes, they are, yes, they are!” bitterly declared Hannah Tedeschi, who generally avoided political arguments. “Don't be naive, Yochanan.
Anyone who has burrowed through ancient Arabic poetry as much as I have knows it's all one world.”

“How can you let her say such a thing?” Rivlin scolded his old professor.

Tedeschi waved him off. “Let her say what she wants. She loved that young man. And rightly so, because he belonged to that scholarly nobility that, far outside the limelight, does the dirty work that clears the way for the rest of us, correcting old errors and pointing out new directions.”

“It was horrible,” their hostess told the two sisters. “He was carrying a briefcase full of rare Arabic newspapers and magazines, and they were all spattered with blood. I cried when his wife showed them to me—I, who have gone through hell with Carlo and never shed a tear. What a loss to the world of scholarship. And to think of what those sons of bitches in the department made him go through to get a lecturer's rank!”

“What was he doing on a bus? Didn't he own a car?”

“What car? He gave his all to his work and barely made a living. If it hadn't been for Carlo, who managed to arrange a small fellowship for him last year, he would have been on welfare. You should have seen his apartment.”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Yosef Suissa.”

“An Orthodox Jew?”

“One of the decent ones.”

“The field has recently been flooded by such types.”

“Flooded?”

“Enriched.” Rivlin corrected himself while signaling his wife that the visit was over. Hagit, however, paid no attention and even agreed to a second cup of tea, as an antidote to the ghastly cake.

“So what do you say?” their hostess demanded. She looked so weary and distracted at this hour of the morning that Rivlin wondered whether Tedeschi's first wife wasn't making a comeback in her.

“About what?”

“About having a look at Suissa's material. You never know. Perhaps you'll find a spark of inspiration for your book.”

“In old poems and stories? No thanks. They're not my line.”

“No, but they're not far from it,” Tedeschi said. “You can spice your work up with them. Believe me, it's not a bad recipe. . . .” He winked again at the two sisters. “Not bad at all. At Cambridge, when I illustrated the Turks' casual attitude toward state corruption with examples from popular nineteenth-century theater, it went down rather well.”

“But you're asking me to look at things written in a local dialect that I would have a hard time translating.”

“Do as some of your colleagues do and find an Arab student to help you,” their hostess suggested. “Carlo always has a few talented young Arabs doing the drudgery.”

“What makes you think they'll understand Algerian dialect?”

“They will if you give them a reason to—say, a research assistant-ship. They'll use far-flung family connections to find out what they don't know. Take a look at Suissa's material. It's a shame to let it go to waste.”

“But why not find someone in his own department?” Rivlin asked, trying to get out of it. “There must be someone who wants to carry on his work and publish. I'd just be muscling in.”

Hannah Tedeschi was relentless. “No one gives a damn about popular culture. They think it's beneath them. They'd rather write about that blind Egyptian who won the Nobel Prize.”

“I thought he was deaf.”

“Deaf, blind, who cares? They don't have Suissa's feel for everyday life.”

“That's enough talking,” Tedeschi told his wife. “Call Mrs. Suissa and tell her that Yochanan is on his way over now to take everything. She's so swamped by all the papers her husband left behind that she's liable to torch them in desperation.”

“But it's Saturday. . . .”

“Don't worry about it. His wife is no longer a Sabbath observer. The religious one in the family was him. Look here, Yochanan. Listen to your moribund old professor. Do it. You know I'm your loyal friend, whatever our mutual reservations and recriminations. Take my advice. Don't miss the chance to see what Suissa had. It has
nothing to do with my jubilee volume. I couldn't care less about that. It's only making me sicker. Phone her, Hannah. As long as you're already in Jerusalem, you might as well benefit from it. . . .”

Rivlin felt a wave of the same affection that had moved him in the distant days of his doctoral studies, when he had sat for hours in this room under the strict but patient tutelage of the dedicated teacher who had pinned great hopes on him. Back then the smells from the kitchen came from the cooking of Tedeschi's first wife, cooking that alone was sufficient evidence that she was losing her mind. He cast a questioning glance at Hagit and Ofra.

Hagit threw up her hands in cheerful surrender. “What do you have to lose?” she asked. Even his sister-in-law, who always minded her own business, nodded ever so slightly in agreement.

S
INCE MORNING SHE
had been waiting under the carob tree at the geriatric home, a hundred meters from her old apartment in the neighborhood of Bet ha-Kerem. She had left the apartment twenty-five years ago to wander from one mental institution to another, either physically ill or else punishing herself with a Pirandellian, profoundly phantasmagorical madness that, alternately under and out of control, withstood the many assaults of electric shock and drugs. Her older sister, having attended her in her disturbance with anxious devotion, died and left two daughters to carry on. The elder of these took pains to keep in touch with her aunt writing from the remote lands she traveled in, while the younger and jollier one made sure, despite her own numerous obligations, to phone regularly and visit once a month. Deferring with a smile to the old woman's many delusions—old and new alike—she kept reminding her of what no one else dared tell her, namely, that all things are permitted the insane except the abdication of love. And if their sick aunt truly loved her two nieces, she would bestow on them the gift of memory, telling them all they had known and forgotten, or had never known at all, about the dead.

Indeed, in recent years their aunt had begun to mine from her melancholy glittering diamonds forged in the darkness of time. With
a renewed curiosity about the past, she had plunged to astonishing depths to retrieve these bright, hard nuggets. A first harbinger of this change was the sweetly ironic tone in which she took to speaking to Rivlin, the faithful driver who accompanied her niece to their meetings and sat in the shade of the trees by the front gate, reading a newspaper and fending off the mental patients seeking to approach him, until the time came to retrieve his wife, gently but determinedly, from the sick woman's clutches. In the early years of her institutionalization, these appearances of his had so stricken her with fear that he had had to be instantly ejected. Slowly, however, her attitude yielded to a quiet resignation, which was in turn transformed, at first behind his back and eventually to his face, into a coquettish coyness. Hagit, encouraged, kept her aunt informed of all Rivlin's activities, as though by dangling the bait of him before the old woman's reawakening sense of humor she might lure the silken butterfly of sanity from its grim cocoon.

Gradually, their aunt emerged from her fortress of self-imposed oblivion with a great desire to know. So reinvigorated was her interest in the numerous details, large and small, of the lives of friends and relatives that Rivlin wondered whether—listening, making connections, cross-referencing, and double-checking—she didn't know better than he did what went on in his wife's courtroom or what the young officer was up to in the depths of his mountain. And so, having driven the two sisters to their midday rendezvous and spied from afar their aunt's white tresses beneath the large carob tree—where, leaning on her cane, she had been standing in anticipation for over an hour beside a table transported for the occasion from the dining room and set for four—he yielded to his wife's entreaties to donate a few minutes of his time to the soothing effect of allowing her aunt a few jibes at his expense.

And in fact, no sooner had Ofra embraced her aunt and Hagit gaily presented her with a bar of chocolate than the observant old lady began teasing Rivlin for his impatience to be gone.

“You can't wait to get away from me, can you?”

He joined his palms together, Indian-style, to signify having come in peace.

“I'd be superfluous today. You have a special guest. I wouldn't want to rob you of your time with her.”

She smiled wanly in agreement. Like a powerful computer scanning his file for recent entries, she asked in her deep, rehumanized voice:

“How was the wedding of your Arab student Semadar?”

“Samaher. . . .”

“Of course. Samaher. Was it as difficult for you as usual?”

He flushed awkwardly and cast a reproachful glance at his wife for having revealed his secret, as a gambit to enhance her aunt's mood.

“Not quite. . . .”

“He doesn't envy Arabs as much,” Hagit explained.

“Not yet,” Rivlin added lamely.

I
T WASN'T EASY
to find the address in Pisgat Ze'ev. The Jerusalem chapter of Rivlin's life had ended with the 1967 war, before the appetite of the victors had pushed back the bounds of the city in one compulsive new neighborhood after another. Although the buildings of the development in Jerusalem's far north were new, the streets meandered unclearly, and the house numbers owed more to poetic license than prosaic logic. For a moment, he was tempted to abandon the whole wild-goose chase, telephone a Hebrew University colleague, and settle for a whiff of what was cooking in the academic kitchens of Jerusalem. But since he had time to spare, the two sisters' aunt having insisted they stay for lunch, he decided to obey his old teacher and take a look at Yosef Suissa's files. Perhaps something of the man's brilliance had rubbed off on them.

At least this time he wasn't paying a condolence call. The first days of the Suissa family's bereavement were long over with. He had never even met the deceased—who, however, or at least so he hoped, must have known about him. Polite small talk or patient listening to how the dead man had breathed his last would be unnecessary. He would introduce himself and wait by the door for Suissa's research to be delivered, with a sigh of relief, to his capable hands—which, sorting
through it to detect its interrupted purpose, might manage to breathe some life into it.

He stood on the third-floor landing, the same wilderness of Judea that he had gazed at from the hotel in Talpiyot visible through a dusty window in the corridor. This time, however, the Dead Sea did not glint in the distance. Not trusting Tedeschi's assurance that the widow was no longer a Sabbath observer, he refrained from ringing the bell and rapped lightly on the door, at a point beside the dead man's name.

The decision proved to be a wise one. The door was opened by the deceased's father, a short, somber, religious Jew with a hat and a scraggly mourner's beard that appeared to have grown on top of a previous one. A prayer book lying on the dining-room table testified to his having recently returned from the synagogue, perhaps in the hope of saving the threatened sanctity of the Sabbath, which Rivlin could hear being thrashed in a washing machine. To help get over his discomfort, the Orientalist introduced himself with his academic title, apologized for intruding, and added a few words of commiseration for the death of the lately departed. Nodding morosely, Suissa senior opened the door of a bedroom, from which sprang a small, wildly laughing, bare-bottomed orphan, the imprint of a potty on his behind. Without further ado the child threw himself on the visitor, who was not sure whether he was being physically attacked or appealed to for protection and love. On the orphan's heels came the young widow. Barefoot, unkempt, and dressed in shorts, a naked infant in her arms, she proclaimed by her appearance that her husband's tragic death had released her, not only from the bonds of religion, but from those of civilization itself. It was as if, Rivlin thought, the savage soul of the terrorist had taken possession of the wife of his victim.

Little wonder that the bereaved father, his hat still on his head, had made a beeline back from synagogue to ward off the evil spirit let loose in the house.

“I'm Professor Rivlin.” He leaned compassionately forward toward the widow, one hand patting the naked infant clinging to her neck. “I believe Dr. Hannah Tedeschi told you about me.”

“Yes. I've prepared a package for you. But come to the bedroom and have a look. Perhaps there's still more there.”

The visitor's face burned as hotly as if he were being shanghaied to the Land of Fire. He followed the woman, trailed after by her father-in-law, with the bare-bottomed child running ahead. Tossing the infant onto the blankets of a large bed, in which he began to crawl and entangle himself, she led Rivlin to a modest desk, wedged between the bed and a closet, that was piled high with papers, folders, and books. One had the impression of a work in progress interrupted not months but mere minutes ago. A screen and a keyboard stood alone, without their computer. The latter, the widow told Rivlin, had been taken by an Arab research assistant who hoped to salvage what was on it. Her large, pretty eyes rested anxiously on him, as if inquiring whether she had done the right thing by letting a junior member of the department—and an Arab, yet—make off with the computer.

“They'll build their careers on his blood,” Suissa senior muttered, with a hatred that made Rivlin shiver, as though he too were a vulture feeding off the dead man's corpse.

“So what? What do you care? Let them.” The widow's scolding tone made it clear that her father-in-law was getting on her nerves.

“How old was your son?” Rivlin asked the man sorrowfully.

“Thirty-three. The age at which they crucified the Christian. Except that my son, may he rest in peace, was a good man. . . .”

It was odd to hear a Jew just back from synagogue comparing his son to Jesus.

The visitor wished to avoid misunderstanding.

“I have to tell you that I'm in a different academic field. I deal with Arab history, not literature or poetry. I have no idea whether any of this material, which Professor Tedeschi and his wife wanted me to look at, is related to my work. I'll take it home for a week or two. If anything interests me, I'll have it photocopied. You'll get it all back. . . .”

The thought of the large package of newspapers being returned to her only made the widow more depressed.

“No,” she said. “Please don't. There's no need. You can donate it all to the library.”

“His brain went squish!” the bare-bottomed child shouted happily, scrambling underfoot. He stuck out his little hand to touch the package, which was wrapped in brown paper tied with rough twine.

His grandfather grabbed at him to silence him. Leaping onto the bed, the boy vanished with his naked brother among the blankets.

The Orientalist lifted the package, careful not to inquire whether the bloodied pages had been removed or were inside. Before leaving, he yielded to temptation and asked to see a photograph of the deceased. The young widow hurried to bring him several, each of which revealed someone else.