A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

The drive back to Jerusalem was a short one. Hagit laid her head on her husband’s shoulder and was out like a light, sleeping through Hannah Tedeschi’s impassioned recitation of an elegy written by the great Syrian poet Adonis for the same Al-Hallaj whose verses she had translated. Rivlin, a captive audience, listened to her declaim it:

Your poisoned green quill—

The veins of its neck bottled flame

In which a star rises over Baghdad—

Is our bright past, our resurrection on earth,

Our death that returns to itself.

Rivlin, exhausted by the night’s impressions, nodded ironically at this woman who gave birth to translations instead of children. “Well, Hannah,” he demanded, “aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?”

“‘Thank you’?” She looked askance at him. “For what?”

“For making you come tonight.”

“Just wait,” she grumbled, turning color. “We haven’t yet seen what it’s going to cost me.”

They dropped a pensive Suissa and his widowed daughter-in-law in Pisgat Ze’ev. The translatoress, as anxious as a student before an exam, asked Rivlin to come upstairs with her to help bear the brunt of the abandoned Tedeschi’s anger. But the Haifa Orientalist was in no mood to climb three flights of stairs just in order to listen to the old man’s complaints. In the end, they agreed on a compromise proposal of the judge’s that she and her husband wait down below for five minutes to see whether they were needed.

Hannah Tedeschi said her good-byes. All the pent-up emotion of the evening came out as she hugged and kissed Hagit affectionately before turning on the entrance light and starting up the stairs. The Rivlins said good night to Rashid, Samaher, and the two boys, and the Orientalist unlocked their parked car, turned on the heating for Hagit, and went to stand outside the Tedeschis’ building.

The minibus drove a distance down the street and stopped in a little square, waiting for the Jews to be safely on their way. Rashid’s silhouette, seated stiffly by the wheel, was limned by the yellowish glare of a streetlight. Samaher, still in the backseat, looked like a sad mummy. Something that had happened across the border, Rivlin felt, made them afraid to sit close to each other.

The judge, full of the evening’s music and ready for more sleep, leaned her head back in the car. Rivlin stood reading the names on the mailboxes, trying to remember which of them had been in this building thirty years ago. Before he could finish, the stairway light went out. A minute later he was approached by Fu’ad. The maître d’ wished to know whether, on their way back to Haifa, they could drop him off in Abu-Ghosh. Rivlin look at his watch and nodded. He cast a weary glance at the Arab, who took a last, thirsty drag on his cigarette, ground the butt out with his shoe, and whispered underneath his mustache:

“ Bas kan biddi ha’ul, ya Brofesor, * that if you’re wondering whether he cheated on her, you can be sure he didn’t.”

The Orientalist’s battered heart twinged.

“That’s what I thought.” He made two fists. “And that’s why it kills me that…”

The light came back on in the stairwell. They heard hurried steps. Hannah Tedeschi, looking pale, appeared without her coat and signaled Rivlin to follow her.

“But what’s wrong?” he asked. “What does he want? Didn’t fall asleep in the end?”

“In the end…” She repeated the words as though hypnotized. With an abrupt gesture, she signaled the Arab to join them too.

18.

“BUT WHY IS it so dark in here?” Rivlin complained, following Hannah Tedeschi down the hallway with its shelves of novels and thrillers in many languages, bought in airports by the Jerusalem polymath to pass the time on international flights. Hannah didn’t answer. With a stride that seemed to have grown swifter, she led him through the dim guest room to the door of Tedeschi’s study, beneath which crept a beam of light.

Even though Hannah had said nothing, he was prepared for what awaited him and turned around to make sure the maître d’ was behind him. A man who had spent his life going in and out of the rooms of strangers could surely cope with the warmly lit study that the translatoress now ushered them into.

Tedeschi, dressed in his pajamas, had apparently risen from bed and gone to his desk to do something at his computer. His arms embraced its lit screen, and his puckish face nuzzled its ivory keyboard, leaving the wife fifteen years his junior to guess whether he had been slipped an Ottoman sleeping potion, fainted from fright at her absence, or decided to bid a fond adieu to the world of scholarship. From the way she stood, tall and grave, without approaching for a closer look, it was evident which of these possibilities she believed in.

Rivlin felt weak-kneed. His heart went out to this grave woman, his loyal former classmate — who, surprisingly, did not seem to blame herself for her sudden liberation from the teacher who had trapped her. And since the latter was in no condition to tell anyone what to do with him, Rivlin asked the maître d’ to help pry his old mentor loose from the computer, on which he had vomited in a last act of desperation.

Not that Fu’ad owed Tedeschi anything. Still, many years of experience at entering and even breaking into hotel rooms made him a competent assistant. “Let’s lay him on the floor,” he said softly to the Jew, stepping nimbly forward to grab one end of the dead man. It wasn’t easy. The Jerusalem scholar was stronger in death than in life, and it took no little force and ingenuity to wrestle him from the computer screen, on which his favorite comic-book figures were still cavorting, and carefully straighten him out. Undeterred by the pity he felt, Rivlin seized his old doctoral adviser’s skull and pulled it from the keyboard without checking whether the eyes were closed.

Only now, as the maître d’ expertly eased the pudgy body, undeniably a corpse, onto the floor and rather illogically moved the heater closer to it, did it dawn on Rivlin that he would never again sit in this room discussing the Middle East or having new ideas about it run past him. He glanced at Hannah Tedeschi, who was watching sternly and aloofly from the other side of the room, as if the horror of what had happened were a moral boundary she refused to cross. It saddened him that obsessive worry about his son had kept him from promising his old mentor that, come what may, he would write something for the jubilee volume.

“Just a minute, I’ll get a blanket,” Hannah whispered. She actually looked younger, as if the death of her husband had taken years off her age. Since he actually had been parted from his computer and laid down in repose on the Persian rug, no cry of grief escaped her. “Better a sheet, ma’am,” Fu’ad said. “That’s what’s usually used.” The quiet confidence of his movements suggested that he had done this with more than one hotel guest. The translatoress looked searchingly at the Israeli Arab, who was not yet a Jew and no longer a true son of the desert; then she nodded and went to fetch an old, starched cotton sheet. This was taken from her by Rashid, who had turned up as if it were only natural to be offering his services at such a time. Having recently worn sheets in his role as the dybbuk, he expertly unfolded this one and handed one end of it to the maître d’. Working in comradely tandem, the two men whipped it in the air like a great white sail and let it settle over the face of the doyen of Orientalists.

Now that Tedeschi had disappeared from sight for the last time, Rivlin remembered his wife, who was probably still asleep in the running car on the deserted nighttime street. Worriedly, he headed for the front door. The trusty messenger — who, since the wedding in the Galilee, seemed able to read the mind of the teacher who still owed his cousin a grade — stopped him. “You don’t have to run, Professor,” he said. “I hear her coming up the stairs.”