A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Yet his envy had no time to linger on Miller, because it had already shifted to the dead man himself and his well-attended memorial. For a moment, Rivlin even begrudged Tedeschi his own eulogy. Who, he lamented, would mourn him? Would he have a successor, in this generation that did not want to succeed anyone because everyone wanted to be his original self? Going off to a corner, he reviewed his talk in solitude, ignored by the colleagues invited according to a list drawn up by him.

The afternoon session was opened by the university rector, a vigorous, middle-aged mathematician who, too old to discover new theorems, had embarked on a second, administrative career. Since he had never known Tedeschi, the doyen of Orientalists having retired before his time, he chose to say a few words about peace with the Arab world and invited Dr. Miller to give the first lecture, the topic of which was “Colonial Desire.”

The young lecturer strode unhurriedly to the podium. He wore new eyeglasses with clear, light frames so transparent that they seemed not to be there at all. In a soft voice, he read from a prepared text.

“In his book Colonial Desire, published in 1995, the British cultural historian Robert Young writes about the longing for the cultural Other as an escape from one’s own cultural world. One subject he discusses is the active, sometimes even erotic, desire for the Other that informs all cultural crossovers.

“Such cross-cultural contacts, as has been observed, leave their perpetrators in what the University of Chicago’s Homi Bhabha has termed ‘an in-between space’—or as Kipling put it, they are ‘East-West mongrels.’

“The existential plane of this androgynous hybridism is the European colony, whose inner cultural dissonance creates a fractured and divided self…”

Rivlin felt exhausted. In the end, he thought bitterly, his Circe had not let him rest for a moment. At least he would not have to do the driving back to Haifa.

“Young, like other students of culture, argues that following Sartre in 1960, Mannoni in 1964, Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi in 1967, and Aimé Césaire in 1972—the founding theoretical fathers, as it were, of postcolonialist theory, that theory has emphasized the dichotomy between the binary forces of the colonizer and the colonized.

“This dichotomy treats the colonized as the Other of the colonizer, knowable only by a false representation that reinstitutes the same static, essentialist categories it wished to do away with. By contrast, the multiculturalist outlook has encouraged many populations to assert their separate individualism. Thus, both Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis maintain that even extremist groups need to be encouraged in their struggle for representability.

“Historically speaking, we can, therefore, say that only recently, in the final decade of the twentieth century, have critics and scholars grasped the significance of cross-cultural contact as a mapper of the full complex of constructive and destructive social forces. And yet the available models for describing this complex are far from satisfactory.”

Rivlin noticed that some members of the audience were taking notes. Pleased by this, Miller slowed his pace to enable them to keep up with him.

“We can say that the main theories of cross-culturalism have been based on the three models of diffusion, assimilation, and isolation. None of these, however, takes into account the effects of interaction, even though historical studies have shown the importance of cross-cultural stimulus and response in such areas as religion, commerce, epidemiology and health care, and so on. The most productive paradigm to date has been the linguistic one.”

Someone tapped Rivlin on the shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”

He hurried outside to the telephone at the entrance. “Where are you?” asked Hagit.

“Right here.”

“Your sister called two hours ago. She’s in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing serious. She’ll need tests. There’s a problem with her eye. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I want to know where you ran off to again.”

“Where do you think? I had lunch off-campus to get away from Hannah and her hysterics. Now I’m back keeping an eye on things and waiting for the memorial session.”

“Hannah complained there were very few people this morning.”

“She should stop whining. What does she want? There were as many people as could be expected for a conference in honor of a dead old professor. And it was snowing. But now a whole Italian contingent has arrived, and the place is packed.”

“Then you’re happy?”

“Happy? What for? It’s not a memorial for me.”

“You’re unbelievable. You even envy the dead.”

“I can envy anyone. But tell me what happened to Raya.”

“She has a torn retina in three places in her left eye.”

“For God’s sake! That’s exactly what happened to my father.”

“Except that the treatment nowadays is much simpler, provided the retina isn’t detached. They use lasers at low temperatures. We’ll know more when the head eye doctor examines her tonight. Meanwhile she has patches on both eyes and is feeling low. She keeps thinking of your father.”

“Is anyone with her?”

“Noa was, but she had to leave at seven to relieve the nanny. And Ayal won’t come before nine. That’s why I thought that, if you weren’t too tired, you might drop by the hospital on your way home. Your sister is all alone there…. Do you hear me?”

“Of course.”

“Is Rashid still with you?”

“Yes. I’m lucky he tags after me everywhere, even though we accomplished nothing at the Civil Administration Bureau.”

“I’ll take a look at what the law says. But what’s up? Do you feel ready to give the eulogy?”

“Pretty much.”

“Put some feeling into it. Carlo deserves it.”

“I’ll do my best. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Just a minute. Why are you so remote?”

“I’m not. I’m just tired.”

“Do you still love me a little?”

His felt his heart turn over.

“What do you mean? You’re my whole life…”

13.

THE LAST GLIMMERINGS OF daylight sifted in among the audience, which had not diminished the second session. Although neither the “Sudanese” from Bar-Ilan nor the “Iraqi” from Beersheba had directly challenged Miller’s conclusion that Orientalism was a meaningless concept, each preferring to make a modest point in his own field, the two had demonstrated that Orientalist research was on solid ground. Disappointed by such evasive tactics, a number of Miller’s followers left at the session’s end. Yet the auditorium remained full, since the empty seats were taken by an Italian consular delegation and some Italian priests and nuns, come to pay their last respects to the fellow countryman who had often lectured to them on various subjects.

The memorial session began at five-thirty. A black lace shawl around her slender shoulders, the widow stepped forward to place two large framed photographs on the podium, one of the young Tedeschi in the Israeli desert and one of an older man getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Turin, the city he had fled on the eve of World War II. The green-ribboned mortarboard above his heavy academic robe gave his nose a pinched and ugly look.

Two young musicians played a lively Rossini serenade for flute and violin. When the applause died down, the chairman of the Hebrew University’s Near Eastern Studies department delivered a brief review of Tedeschi’s scholarly achievements — which, he declared, were a guiding light to an entire generation. He was followed by the director of the Truman Institute, who regaled the audience with recollections of Tedeschi the public figure. The Jerusalem polymath, he related, had never refused to put aside his scholarly pursuits for a luncheon or dinner in honor of the university’s Middle Eastern guests — Turks, peace-loving Jordanians, Arabs from the Persian Gulf, brave Pakistanis — and to teach them a thing or two about their own history.