A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

She was already in the doorway, his pleasantly plump beloved in her short sheepskin coat. Her untroubled face, the face of a lover of the Just and the Good, showed no suspicion. “Is anything wrong?” she asked softly, with a smile, and advanced innocently toward the study, where she saw the corpse beneath its white sheet. Fearlessly she knelt and pulled back the sheet for a last look at the man who had taken a fancy to her on her first visit to this apartment, thirty years ago, as a young soldier, aspiring law student, and future bride.

She began to cry, her silent tears breaking the heart of a husband who had been sure that here was a death that left him cold and unmoved. Still relentlessly aloof, the translatoress turned in alarm to the two Arabs, as if it were their duty to keep this self-assured woman from introducing grief into the deceased’s study. But they, unaware that the dead man had thought he understood Arabs better than Arabs understood themselves, declined to involve themselves in a Jewish matter, thus forcing the translatoress to drop her mask. At long last she uttered a sound that was somewhere between a groan of pain and a curse of despair, went over to the computer, and tapped a key. The comic-book figures vanished. Tedeschi’s last article appeared on the screen in all its rich complexity. She reached out to touch it, in a final, merciful caress.

HAD 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 Arabs — was 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 man — a 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?

THE 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 organizations — including 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.