A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

But he wasn’t about to miss the ride to the airport. “You can’t leave me here by myself,” he implored them. “Take me with you. I promise not to be a backseat driver.”

They couldn’t say no. Unwashed and unshaven, in a polo shirt and old jacket, he heaved himself like an empty sack into the rear seat. Ofer, his eyes shut and his head thrown back at an odd angle, sat next to Hagit, who gripped the wheel tensely. The traffic, although heavy despite the early hour, moved at a good clip. Rivlin, dead to the world, did not wake up until they arrived at the airport.

After Ofer had checked in, they went for coffee at a small, noisy corner counter.

Father and son, both groggy from their brief but deep sleep, regarded each other with wonder and suspicion, like two lawyers faced with summing up a case that had been thought to be interminable. Rivlin gulped some coffee, not knowing whether his son was as sad as he looked or merely tired and pensive.

“And so in the end,” he said, a note of resignation in his voice, “you’re leaving us without a clue to what happened or why anyone had to be forgiven.”

“That’s right,” Ofer replied. He gave his father a faint smile, the first in recent memory. “Although you did your best to wreak havoc, you’ll have to go on guessing, because you’ll never know or understand more than you do now.”

Hagit shifted her glance from one to the other, afraid of a last-minute row.

“But why?” Rivlin asked with bitter fatigue, refusing to accept defeat. “Why can’t we know? Is it only because you still believe she’ll come back to you?”

Ofer said nothing, avoiding his mother’s pitying eyes.

Rivlin threw caution to the winds. “You’ll be worse off than ever,” he declared.

The judge squeezed her husband’s thigh like an iron vise.

“No, I won’t,” Ofer answered serenely. He looked, Rivlin thought, less sad than lonely.

“Why not?”

“Because even if I’m still tied to her in my thoughts, and maybe in my feelings, I’m morally a free man. And that, Abba, is all you should care about.”

He swallowed the rest of his coffee, got to his feet, hugged and kissed his father, and disappeared through the departures gate.

25.

IT WAS SPRING. The winter having been a real one, with rain, snow, storms, and floods, all Israel felt that it had earned the vernal scents and colors and was entitled to enjoy them before dun summer took over.

The spring semester had started. On his way to the university for the first meeting of his seminar on the Algerian revolution, Rivlin noticed a new traffic sign. The municipality, although not answering his letter regarding the corner of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets, had acknowledged it nonetheless — not by accepting his suggestion to narrow the sidewalk, but by banning U-turns completely. And so, the professor thought self-mockingly, I only made things worse here, too. So much for citizens’ initiatives! Yet on second thought, he had to admit that the new arrangement made better sense. Any U-turn at a busy traffic light like this was dangerous and pointless.

Before his seminar, he went to the departmental office for a list of its students. Knowing their names in advance helped him encourage them to be active. In the office, a new young secretary informed him that a middle-aged woman had been waiting for him all morning. They’d told her that he had no office hours today, but she had insisted on remaining.

He walked to the end of the corridor with a sense of foreboding. There, as he had guessed, was Afifa. Stripped of her jewelry, she wore a simple shawl draped over her head and shoulders that accented her femininity even more.

“Is it me you’re waiting for?” he asked gently.

“Who else?” Her voice was anxious yet intimate, as though he were her family doctor.

“But…” He glanced at his watch. “I have a seminar.”

“I know. I checked the catalogue. I’ve only come to give you Samaher’s term paper and get her grade.”

She wasn’t requesting or beseeching it. She was asking for it as you might ask a bank teller for your money.

He made no reply. Leading her to his office, he sat her down unsmilingly, with none of his usual small talk in Arabic, and took the bright green folder. The translated stories and poems were neatly typed, with titles, notes, and two pages of bibliography. He leafed through them and looked up at Afifa, whose black shawl — more a moral than a religious statement, he assumed — deepened the glow in her eyes.

“It looks good,” he said. “I’ll go through it and give Samaher a grade.”

“But what is there to go through, Professor? You already know everything that’s in there, even if it was only read aloud to you. Take my word for it, it’s everything you asked for. Now give her what she has coming to her.”

“ Shu b’ilnisbilha? ” *He couldn’t resist a few Arabic words.

Declining to collaborate in a fruitless ritual, she answered in Hebrew:

“Samaher will be fine. She’s a strong girl. Her mind is all right again, like before her illness. And she’s in a new house her husband built for her at the end of the village. There’s no more grandfather and grandmother and everyone else looking over her shoulder. But the whole family and the whole village, Professor, want her to have her grade. I’m here to get it.”

He smiled and leafed through the neatly typed work again, studying its matching pages of Arabic and Hebrew texts, the fantastical names of which reminded him of hours spent in Samaher’s bedroom and in his own dimly lit office. He felt an old yearning for strange roads and a trusty driver.

“ U’feyn Rashid hala? ” †he asked. “ Lissato bubrum laf u’dawaran hawlkun? ” ‡

But Afifa would not play the game. She gathered her shawl around her. “He’s a poor devil, Rashid. He spends all his time in the hospital with that boy… the vegetable…”

“Vegetable? What vegetable?”

“Ra’uda’s boy, Rasheed. He ran away to the hills one night, and some hunter with crazy ideas put a bullet in him. Only Allah knows how it will ever end.”

“I didn’t know!” Rivlin cried, rent by pain. “I remember Rasheed. I’m so sorry… Believe me, I loved that little boy.”

“So did everyone,” Afifa said angrily. “A lot of good it did him! A lot of good it did my mother, the boy’s grandmother, who only wanted all her children home again! What has it brought us? A vegetable….”

Rivlin glanced at his watch. “And you?” he asked Afifa, who now had not only his sympathy but his esteem. “Don’t you want to finish your B.A.?”

To his surprise, she didn’t reject the idea.

“Allah is great…,” she replied, leaving the matter open while continuing to regard him with suspicion, as if he were looking for another excuse to postpone Samaher’s grade.

“Leave Allah out of this,” he said bitterly, as if suddenly identifying the real problem. “Great or not, he has nothing to do with this. Go to the secretary and register. What’s it to you? There’s no obligation. Go on, don’t be afraid. Now that Samaher has left home, you’ll have time. Sign up for a course, mine or anyone’s. Meanwhile, I’ll grade this paper.”

Although he hadn’t meant to link the two things, this was how she understood it: Samaher’s seminar grade swapped for her registration. A smile lit her face. She rose, tightened her shawl around her, held out her white, pudgy hand, and took her leave. Rivlin stayed in his chair, leafing through the paper a third time. Turning to the last page, he wrote an 80. Then, thinking better of it, he crossed this out, and wrote 90. Should he add some comment? He reflected briefly and wrote a sentence that he hoped was meaningful though addressed to no one in particular: