A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“What mission could we have?”

“But if we believed forty years ago that we had one — that we had something important to contribute to the world even though half of it didn’t recognize us — why 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.

RETURNING 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?”

3.

WAS IT AN INDICATION of the position he would take that Rivlin convened the secret appointments committee in his own office rather than in the conference room next to the rector’s office, which was on the same floor as Miller’s alcove? He did not wish Miller to see them and guess what it was about.

Yet until the last minute he was undecided and open to persuasion. Despite his hostile feelings for the young lecturer, who had arrogantly torn apart not only his introduction but the entire book that was to follow, he admired Miller’s courage and honesty. Whatever one thought of his beliefs — which, Rivlin hoped, did not have to be taken too seriously — he had risked his promotion by being so outspoken.

The appointments secretary, a middle-aged woman who had been in charge of such meetings for years, was unhappy with Rivlin’s decision. “How am I going to bring all the refreshments down to your office?” she wanted to know.

But Rivlin was adamant. “You’ve dealt with bigger problems,” he told the appointments secretary, who had once worked in the Near Eastern Studies department.

And indeed, coffee, tea, cakes, and sandwiches were on hand when the committee convened to review the secret file. The other two members were the head of the Political Science department, an assistant professor from America, and a fellow Orientalist from Bar-Ilan University. Rivlin felt a comradely kinship with this man, a pleasantly bashful and reliable associate professor his own age whose field, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sudan, was every bit as thorny as Algeria. Occasionally, the two had long telephone conversations in which they compared the form fundamentalism took in each of the two countries and argued which was worse. Rivlin had persuaded the dean to put the “Sudanese” on the appointments committee, both because he enjoyed talking shop with him and because he needed an ally to implement his plan, which was to block Miller’s advancement in Near Eastern Studies by shunting him off to the Political Science department, the American liberalism of which could better cope with the young lecturer’s revisionist theories.

The committee had already discussed, in a previous session, Miller’s curriculum vitae and publications — which, though not numerous, had appeared in a number of prestigious American journals well known to the political scientist. Now they had to review his academic references and to discuss whether the fact that some of them had not been received was due to negligence or disapproval. Rivlin chose to read the recommendations aloud and to parse them sentence by sentence, dwelling especially on any reservations expressed between the lines.

He was cut short by the head of the Political Science department, who did not think this was necessary. He, too, had heard of the tempting offer made to the young lecturer by the University of the Negev, which had a reputation for body snatching, and suspecting Rivlin of setting a trap, he warned against permitting the provincial nitpicking so prevalent on their campus to lead to the loss of a promising talent.

Just then the door opened. An unfamiliar fragrance wafted into the office. Before the door could be shut again, Rivlin spied a woman in a silk shawl.

It was Afifa. “Professor,” she said. “If I could have just a minute with you, please…”

He hurried into the corridor, leaving the door open for the committee members to see him take the hand of the flustered woman and ask, with concern and in Arabic, about his M.A. student.

“She’ll be fine,” Samaher’s mother answered in Hebrew.

But Rivlin insisted on continuing in Arabic, his voice echoing loudly down the corridor.

“ Le’inno hunak fi Ramallah kunt kalkan min shanha, bad-ma shuft kif kanet mujtahida kul-halkad fi ’l-masrahiyya ma’a hada ’l-jinni. Le’inno hada kan ra’i’. Samaher mitl hahim yahudi… bitjanin! If-takaret inno fakat b’ilnisbi lahada b’tistahik h’al-alameh. ” *