A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“I’m afraid,” the visitor from Haifa replied glumly, “that I have nothing new to present.”

“Those Tel Avivans just want to make a splash. I’ve informed them that I’ll have to feel better than I do now before I give them the benefit of my latest insights.”

The old professor modestly shut his eyes.

“Then you’re considering giving a paper?” Rivlin, out of sorts, glared at Hagit, who had insisted on this visit. You see? his expression seemed to say. Why bother when it’s all just a big act?

“What paper?” Hannah Tedeschi protested, rallying to the side of the man’s illness. “Carlo is fooling himself if he thinks he’ll be back on his feet in two weeks. The only conference he’ll attend will be about the results of his tests.”

“Rubbish,” Tedeschi murmured, glancing from the wife fifteen years his junior to his ex-student, the pitiable professor from Haifa. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t tell me your book is still bogged down. Can’t you throw the conference some juicy little bone, something heartwarming about the Algerian psychosis?”

“I have no bones to spare,” Rivlin replied, with a hostile air. “You know me. I don’t need to go to conferences just to remind the world of my existence. If I have nothing to say, I say nothing.”

Tedeschi shut his eyes again and nodded in vague confirmation.

“But you’ve been working on that material for years!” exclaimed their hostess, distressed not for the conference in Tel Aviv, but for her husband’s jubilee volume. “Don’t tell me you can’t get a single article out of it!”

“One can always toss something off, Hannah. But you, of all people, who work so hard and have only three or four poems to show for it at the end of the year, should understand the difficulty of producing something solid that will withstand the test of time. I can’t write about the fifties and sixties in Algeria, which were a period of vision and hope, without taking into account the insane terror going on now. A scholar with some integrity doesn’t just closet himself with old documents and materials. He reads the newspapers and connects the past to the present. It’s his job to show that today’s developments have their roots in yesterday’s.”

“It’s hopeless,” Hagit said with a smile, recrossing her legs for the benefit of the old polymath, who, though wheezing a bit, was listening raptly. “I’m married to a man who is convinced that everything has a logical reason. He can’t fall asleep at night until he finds it.”

“Tea or coffee?” asked a chagrined Hannah Tedeschi.

The two sisters chose tea. The unkempt house and the state of its upholstery suggested that the milk in the fridge might not be fresh. The professor from Haifa, knowing the Tedeschis better than the women did, asked for brandy, hoping it might disinfect any dirty glass given him.

Tedeschi wagged a half-threatening, half-approving finger. “He’s right,” he said of Rivlin, as though to justify having considered him his successor. “We must never write about the past as if the present didn’t exist. On the contrary, we have to look for the hidden symptoms of impending disorder even before it breaks out. Historical research is like prostate cancer: we need a blood test to detect the antibodies that signal the malignancy still contained in one little gland, before it invades the entire body. We must measure both kinds of cholesterol, the good and the bad, to determine the secret relationship that blocks the blood vessels and leads to a sudden heart attack. There are subtle signs that show up in newly coined speech, in imaginative combinations that occur only to poets and novelists. And at the same time, we must not be taken in by mere decadence, by the whiners and complainers who speak only for themselves.”

Rivlin’s head began to droop. He was familiar with the latest theories about the tendency of art and literature to signal social transformations. Yet all the studies concocted from such ideas, unless made solid by government protocols, political declarations, and legal and institutional decisions, were too frothy to merit a response.

“Yochi has no time for novels,” Hagit announced. “He says life is too turbulent.”

She was enjoying her visit with the hypochondriac so much that, forgetting to refuse the grayish slab of cake placed before her, she bit politely into it and even praised it. But yet the translatoress, well aware of her shortcomings in the kitchen, shrugged off the hypocritical compliment, while turning impatiently to the recalcitrant Rivlin.

“Surely you could write something about a poem or two.”

“Only if translated by you,” Rivlin warmly answered the tense, severe woman, whose blue eyes, magnified by thick spectacles, were the same as those of the mischievous student he had attended classes with back in the sixties. Knowing it would give her pleasure, he again recited Al-Hajaj’s grand soliloquy, this time in Arabic.

“But what,” he lamented, “would the know-it-alls say if I used a wonderful poem written fifteen hundred years ago to explain the murders of terrorists today?”

“Then choose a modern poem. Something hot off the press.” Tedeschi sounded as if he were running a fast-food stand. “Listen, Rivlin. We have something authentically new for you. Hannah, tell him about that friend of yours… the poor fellow who was killed….”

14.

ONCE AGAIN, THE Tedeschis — needing, so it seemed, the constant presence of real death — had a surprise corpse for him. This time it was an unknown young scholar from the Arabic Department in Jerusalem, who, stimulated by a literary, sociological, and ethnographic interest, had undertaken a study of popular literature in North Africa. The translatoress, no mean student of Arabic literature herself, had helped her friend unravel the subtle historical allusions hidden in the intricacies of contemporary Arab writing. And he, an observant Jew intimately familiar with religious sources, had repaid her with many an elegant rabbinic phrase that came in handy in her renditions of Jahaliya poetry. So productive had their collaboration over the past year been that they had even toyed with the idea of putting out a joint anthology of Arabic verse in Hebrew translation, he doing the moderns and she the ancients. And then he was killed.

“How?” Rivlin asked.

“In that bus bombing near Pisgat Ze’ev.”

“That’s the first university teacher killed by a terrorist that I’ve heard of.”

“He wasn’t just a teacher,” Tedeschi protested angrily. “He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind. Not that that stopped them from snuffing him out one fine day.”

“Those aren’t the same Arabs,” Rivlin protested.

“Yes, they are, yes, they are!” bitterly declared Hannah Tedeschi, who generally avoided political arguments. “Don’t be naive, Yochanan. Anyone who has burrowed through ancient Arabic poetry as much as I have knows it’s all one world.”

“How can you let her say such a thing?” Rivlin scolded his old professor.

Tedeschi waved him off. “Let her say what she wants. She loved that young man. And rightly so, because he belonged to that scholarly nobility that, far outside the limelight, does the dirty work that clears the way for the rest of us, correcting old errors and pointing out new directions.”

“It was horrible,” their hostess told the two sisters. “He was carrying a briefcase full of rare Arabic newspapers and magazines, and they were all spattered with blood. I cried when his wife showed them to me — I, who have gone through hell with Carlo and never shed a tear. What a loss to the world of scholarship. And to think of what those sons of bitches in the department made him go through to get a lecturer’s rank!”