A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Thank you. I’m afraid I’m running late. I’ll have my coffee on Mount Scopus.”

“But why?” She gave him a whiskey-colored glance. “The coffee is ready. What can you be late for? You have plenty of time until your talk.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw an ad for the conference in the newspaper. The afternoon session starts at four, and your eulogy comes at the end of it. You’re in no hurry. And where are you going on a day like this? Don’t let the sunny skies fool you. The temperature is dropping.”

“I see you’ve decided to manage me too.”

“Let’s say I’m giving you a bit of friendly advice. Not that you couldn’t use some managing — especially when you’re away from your wife, with no one to keep an eye on you.”

He recoiled. “My wife,” he said softly, “keeps an eye on me everywhere — from within me…”

There was an awkward silence. Her birdlike face, sharp, hard, and offended, lost its teasing look. He felt suddenly sorry for this ugly Circe of the hotel, her bright apron perched absurdly on her hips like a chambermaid’s in an Alpine inn.

“All right,” he relented. “Let’s have some coffee. I wouldn’t want to hurt Fu’ad.”

The little table in the smoking lounge was set with elegant cups and saucers and a plate of cookies. Rivlin looked for Rashid. “I gave him a bed to rest in,” Fu’ad said, pouring their coffee. “He’s feeling low because of all those forms for his sister’s children. Why does an Arab have to be sick to be allowed back into his own country?”

“What’s wrong with having to live in a village near Jenin?” Tehila asked, warming her ivory hands on her coffee cup. “Isn’t that Palestine too?”

“But Ra’uda grew up in the Galilee.”

“So what? Why must every one of you live where he or she was born? What babies you are, missing Daddy and Mommy’s home when you’re parents and grandparents yourselves! I swear, you deserve a spanking, not a state.”

Fu’ad glanced at Tehila and then down at the floor, unsure what to make of her barb. His arm in the sleeve of its black maître d’s jacket trembled as it lifted the cover of the canister to see how much coffee was left. “ Afay’o, ya Brofesor? ” *he glumly asked of Rashid.

“Give him a few more minutes,” Rivlin replied. “He needs to rest. Sar majnun u’murtabir min kul el-ashyaa illi hawil yi’milha. ” †

“ Mitl el-masrahiyya, ” ‡Fu’ad said. “ Hada el-dibbuk illi mat .” §

“A jinni,” Rivlin said. He looked wearily at the proprietress, who was nursing her coffee in slow sips. Sallow and sickly-looking, she sat plotting her next move while trying to follow the Arabic conversation — until, with a gesture of impatience, she signaled the maître d’ to be gone.

“As long as your driver is resting, you may as well, too,” she said to Rivlin when they were alone. “Is your eulogy ready?”

“More or less.”

“Will you read it?”

“I’ll speak from notes.”

“Good,” she said approvingly. “That way you can cut it short if you’re losing your audience.”

He regarded her sardonically. “Don’t worry. That’s never happened to me.”

“I should hope not. But tell me, what made this Tedeschi such a big shot that he’s getting a whole day in his honor?”

“You don’t have to be such a big shot to get a day for dying. But he was an important scholar. And a dedicated and much-loved teacher.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, with a sly gleam. “Yours is a generation that still loves its teachers. Nowadays, I’m told, university faculties are full of dumb women.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He felt a chill of fatigue. “You’ve never even been to a university.”

“What if I haven’t?” She took another calm sip of coffee. “It’s not because I couldn’t have, as you seem to think. It’s because I went to work for my father, helping him to put the hotel on its feet. Believe me, I’ve learned more from life here than I could have at a university. But you’re cold!”

“Something is wrong with the heating.”

“Nothing is wrong with it. Fu’ad likes to save electricity, especially when he’s mad at me. As soon as the dining room empties out, he turns the heat off. This part of the building cools quickly. Down in the basement, where you were the last time, you wouldn’t know the difference, not even when it was freezing out. There’s natural heat down there.”

“Natural heat?” He scoffed at the idea. “It must come from those old tax files.”

“Perhaps,” she said with a hearty laugh, throwing back her head as though remembering something. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.”

“So you want to stick me in that hole again?” He met her small, eagle eyes, their gaze fearful with anticipation.

“You can rest there undisturbed, polishing your eulogy beneath a warm blanket in perfect equilibrium.”

He smiled uncertainly and glanced at the thick curtain on the window. A ray of blue light slipped through the space between the hooks and the curtain rod. Why was it, he wondered, that during the year of his marriage Ofer had hardly ever mentioned Tehila? He had only enthused about Galya’s father and the hotel. Had he paid no attention to his wife’s shrewd sister, or was she, too, part of his “fantasy”?

“ Yallah, ila l-amam. ” *He rose and touched her bony shoulder. “ Ta’ali nitdafa shwoy bil-kabu. ” †

For the third time, he found himself walking through the hotel kitchen. In the between-meals silence, the carving knives and cleavers gleamed above the big, clean vats and the empty tables and cutting boards. They passed the large freezer and came to the little door whose concrete steps led to the underground corridor with its broken bicycle, torn tire, and bucket of hardened whitewash. A new broom was the one addition to this display. In the space at the corridor’s end the baby crib stood beside the old boiler, whose chimney was rammed into the ceiling like the tooth of an ancient, petrified mammoth that still gave off its secret heat.

Rivlin watched the tall woman search in vain for the key to the accountant’s room beneath the oilcloth mattress of the crib. The door to the dark room was open. Sound asleep on its bed was the protean driver-messenger-brother-cousin-uncle — displaced citizen — and-dybbuk for a day. Undressed, he lay dead to the world with his face to the wall, the splendid rear of his dark, smooth, naked body pointed at the door.

The proprietress was startled by the liberty taken by the maître d’. Yet touched by the sight of the naked Arab, who had instinctively availed himself of the freedom offered by this subterranean grotto, she asked Rivlin for his name, knelt by his side, and gently poked him as if he were a soldier being awakened for guard duty. “All right, Rashid,” she said. “You’ve slept enough. Give someone else a chance.”

His name spoken by an unfamiliar woman, followed by her gentle touch, caused the sleeper to bolt to an upright position and wrap himself in his sheet, the hot coals of hastily extinguished sleep still glowing in his eyes. As if he were in the midst of a dream whose interpretation they were, he groped with a beseeching hand toward the two Jews. Before he could utter an apology, if not for his sleep itself, for which he had permission, then at least for his nakedness, he was fully clothed and holding a folded sheet beneath his arm, with which he departed, to return it to Fu’ad.

“Wait. Don’t turn on the light,” Rivlin told the proprietress, who had shown no sign of doing any such thing. In the gloom pierced by a few murky rays coming from the direction of the staircase, he moved the accountant’s chair to the desk and sat down with his arms on his chest. He did not look at his Circe — who, instead of remaking the evacuated bed for him, sank onto it like a white ghost. It’s hopeless, he told himself, and there’s no time for it anyway, but if I don’t ask her now I never will. And although she had still made no move to do so, he said again, “Don’t turn on the light. Maybe it will be easier in the dark to tell me what you know about your sister. You can see how I’m suffering. Be kind just once.”