A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“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?”