A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“What was he doing on a bus? Didn’t he own a car?”

“What car? He gave his all to his work and barely made a living. If it hadn’t been for Carlo, who managed to arrange a small fellowship for him last year, he would have been on welfare. You should have seen his apartment.”

“What did you say his name was?”

“Yosef Suissa.”

“An Orthodox Jew?”

“One of the decent ones.”

“The field has recently been flooded by such types.”

“Flooded?”

“Enriched.” Rivlin corrected himself while signaling his wife that the visit was over. Hagit, however, paid no attention and even agreed to a second cup of tea, as an antidote to the ghastly cake.

“So what do you say?” their hostess demanded. She looked so weary and distracted at this hour of the morning that Rivlin wondered whether Tedeschi’s first wife wasn’t making a comeback in her.

“About what?”

“About having a look at Suissa’s material. You never know. Perhaps you’ll find a spark of inspiration for your book.”

“In old poems and stories? No thanks. They’re not my line.”

“No, but they’re not far from it,” Tedeschi said. “You can spice your work up with them. Believe me, it’s not a bad recipe….” He winked again at the two sisters. “Not bad at all. At Cambridge, when I illustrated the Turks’ casual attitude toward state corruption with examples from popular nineteenth-century theater, it went down rather well.”

“But you’re asking me to look at things written in a local dialect that I would have a hard time translating.”

“Do as some of your colleagues do and find an Arab student to help you,” their hostess suggested. “Carlo always has a few talented young Arabs doing the drudgery.”

“What makes you think they’ll understand Algerian dialect?”

“They will if you give them a reason to — say, a research assistant-ship. They’ll use far-flung family connections to find out what they don’t know. Take a look at Suissa’s material. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.”

“But why not find someone in his own department?” Rivlin asked, trying to get out of it. “There must be someone who wants to carry on his work and publish. I’d just be muscling in.”

Hannah Tedeschi was relentless. “No one gives a damn about popular culture. They think it’s beneath them. They’d rather write about that blind Egyptian who won the Nobel Prize.”

“I thought he was deaf.”

“Deaf, blind, who cares? They don’t have Suissa’s feel for everyday life.”

“That’s enough talking,” Tedeschi told his wife. “Call Mrs. Suissa and tell her that Yochanan is on his way over now to take everything. She’s so swamped by all the papers her husband left behind that she’s liable to torch them in desperation.”

“But it’s Saturday….”

“Don’t worry about it. His wife is no longer a Sabbath observer. The religious one in the family was him. Look here, Yochanan. Listen to your moribund old professor. Do it. You know I’m your loyal friend, whatever our mutual reservations and recriminations. Take my advice. Don’t miss the chance to see what Suissa had. It has nothing to do with my jubilee volume. I couldn’t care less about that. It’s only making me sicker. Phone her, Hannah. As long as you’re already in Jerusalem, you might as well benefit from it….”

Rivlin felt a wave of the same affection that had moved him in the distant days of his doctoral studies, when he had sat for hours in this room under the strict but patient tutelage of the dedicated teacher who had pinned great hopes on him. Back then the smells from the kitchen came from the cooking of Tedeschi’s first wife, cooking that alone was sufficient evidence that she was losing her mind. He cast a questioning glance at Hagit and Ofra.

Hagit threw up her hands in cheerful surrender. “What do you have to lose?” she asked. Even his sister-in-law, who always minded her own business, nodded ever so slightly in agreement.

15.

SINCE MORNING SHE had been waiting under the carob tree at the geriatric home, a hundred meters from her old apartment in the neighborhood of Bet ha-Kerem. She had left the apartment twenty-five years ago to wander from one mental institution to another, either physically ill or else punishing herself with a Pirandellian, profoundly phantasmagorical madness that, alternately under and out of control, withstood the many assaults of electric shock and drugs. Her older sister, having attended her in her disturbance with anxious devotion, died and left two daughters to carry on. The elder of these took pains to keep in touch with her aunt writing from the remote lands she traveled in, while the younger and jollier one made sure, despite her own numerous obligations, to phone regularly and visit once a month. Deferring with a smile to the old woman’s many delusions — old and new alike — she kept reminding her of what no one else dared tell her, namely, that all things are permitted the insane except the abdication of love. And if their sick aunt truly loved her two nieces, she would bestow on them the gift of memory, telling them all they had known and forgotten, or had never known at all, about the dead.

Indeed, in recent years their aunt had begun to mine from her melancholy glittering diamonds forged in the darkness of time. With a renewed curiosity about the past, she had plunged to astonishing depths to retrieve these bright, hard nuggets. A first harbinger of this change was the sweetly ironic tone in which she took to speaking to Rivlin, the faithful driver who accompanied her niece to their meetings and sat in the shade of the trees by the front gate, reading a newspaper and fending off the mental patients seeking to approach him, until the time came to retrieve his wife, gently but determinedly, from the sick woman’s clutches. In the early years of her institutionalization, these appearances of his had so stricken her with fear that he had had to be instantly ejected. Slowly, however, her attitude yielded to a quiet resignation, which was in turn transformed, at first behind his back and eventually to his face, into a coquettish coyness. Hagit, encouraged, kept her aunt informed of all Rivlin’s activities, as though by dangling the bait of him before the old woman’s reawakening sense of humor she might lure the silken butterfly of sanity from its grim cocoon.

Gradually, their aunt emerged from her fortress of self-imposed oblivion with a great desire to know. So reinvigorated was her interest in the numerous details, large and small, of the lives of friends and relatives that Rivlin wondered whether — listening, making connections, cross-referencing, and double-checking — she didn’t know better than he did what went on in his wife’s courtroom or what the young officer was up to in the depths of his mountain. And so, having driven the two sisters to their midday rendezvous and spied from afar their aunt’s white tresses beneath the large carob tree — where, leaning on her cane, she had been standing in anticipation for over an hour beside a table transported for the occasion from the dining room and set for four — he yielded to his wife’s entreaties to donate a few minutes of his time to the soothing effect of allowing her aunt a few jibes at his expense.

And in fact, no sooner had Ofra embraced her aunt and Hagit gaily presented her with a bar of chocolate than the observant old lady began teasing Rivlin for his impatience to be gone.

“You can’t wait to get away from me, can you?”

He joined his palms together, Indian-style, to signify having come in peace.

“I’d be superfluous today. You have a special guest. I wouldn’t want to rob you of your time with her.”

She smiled wanly in agreement. Like a powerful computer scanning his file for recent entries, she asked in her deep, rehumanized voice: