A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

6.

GHOSTS? HE LET the word run through his racing mind. Perhaps. But this ghost was pregnant. The fact that he had got Galya to answer, however “nastily,” an equally “nasty” letter from his son took the sting out of Ofer’s rebuke. He leafed through the morning paper, took off his clothes, and strode around the apartment while waiting for the Jacuzzi, installed as a prize for the ordeal of moving, to fill with foam that would consign the night to oblivion by caressing private parts never touched by others underwater. Once in the bath he shut his eyes and let its currents churn past him while imagining himself on the airplane with his wife. Soon he was swooning in the arms of the accursed slumber that had eluded his advances all night long. Here, of all places, water jetting all around him, his soul was at last trapped in its embrace…

It was thus that the coal-eyed messenger, arriving at the appointed hour, was required to demonstrate his faith by persisting in short, polite rings of the doorbell, reinforced at intervals by a thoughtfully civilized drumming of his knuckles in various rhythmic measures, to which the duplex responded with a stubborn silence. Indeed, had Rivlin surmised that the empty-handed Arab had come not to deliver but to fetch — and first and foremost, to fetch the Orientalist himself — he would never have risen in the end to throw out the love baby of sleep with the golden bathwater rippling in the early-morning light by running to the front door, dripping wet and blind, and petitioning abjectly from his side of it:

“Is that you, Rashid? You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a bit woozy because my wife had to catch a plane this morning and I didn’t sleep all night. Just leave Samaher’s material behind the big flowerpot and tell her I’ll get in touch.”

The Arab, however, had precious little material to leave. On the contrary, since it was too immaterial to be left behind a flowerpot, he was prepared to wait for the professor to make up for lost sleep and to return that afternoon or evening. “It makes no difference,” he declared from his side of the door. “The day is shot anyway.”

Rivlin felt a new burst of anger at Samaher, who was now enlisting her entire family to make a fool of him. Yet before he could tell the messenger to go shoot himself along with the day, it occurred to him that Suissa’s texts were still in Mansura. Slowly, the leaden crust on his eyes was dissolving. Rashid, he decreed, should return in an hour.

“Only an hour? Are you sure, Professor? You don’t want to sleep more than that?”

“An hour will be fine. Don’t make it any longer.”

An hour later, fully dressed and ready to cope, the slippers on his feet the only sign of his untimely abduction from the bosom of sleep, he sat in the living room looking irritably at the sable-skinned young man, who had refused all refreshment except for a glass of water, which had not touched his lips. On the table lay a Hebrew translation of a poem by a Berber from Oran, Hatib Abu el-Slah. Written in the early 1940s, it had been excellently translated by Samaher:

The world, sharp as a razor, / Slashes my cheeks. / Pursued by the law as though by a whale, / I amuse myself by making a paper star. / Fire worshipers gather around its light. / An Ethiope attendant fans me. / I rise on straws toward the windows, / Snuff out the honeymoon lamp, / And climb on the radiant beams of teeth / While incense ascends from me. / I sculpt an angel that is eaten like a raisin along the way, / Sit chewing on ice like a ball rolled off the playing field, / Travel on a reed, / And transport painted eggs, chicks, and kerosene. / In pants as short as an entry in a diary, / I jump to the stars through the glass panes of the observatory. / I unbutton my shirt, breathe the pure air, / And create a lion of stone / Infested by fleas and the secrets of the microcosm.

“Where is the Arabic?” he asked, surprised by the poem’s playful tone.

This time too, however, there was only a translation.

“Tell me, Rashid, what’s going on here? Is Samaher subjecting me to Chinese water torture by dripping one poem at a time on me? And where are the stories?”

The young man’s sense of truth and justice was unshaken by Rivlin’s sarcasm. With a candid look that demanded credence, he swore that his cousin had read everything marked by the murdered scholar and even filled a copybook with her notes and summations. It was just that, being bedridden, she found it difficult to write. Her handwriting was so bad and full of spelling mistakes, in Arabic as well as in Hebrew, that she was embarrassed to let her professor see it.

“But this poem is perfectly legible.”

“That’s because I wrote it. The poems are easy. She learns the Arabic by heart, goes over it with her mother, puts it into Hebrew, learns that by heart too, and dictates it to me on Saturday when I have the day off.”

“But how long is this going to go on?” the sleepy Orientalist wanted to know. “Is she really pregnant?”

“So her mother keeps saying,” Rashid said again without indicating whether he believed it.

The messenger sat straight in his chair, the glass of water still untouched. He was, Rivlin thought, a devoted, sensitive young man. The coal black eyes were neither cunning, sardonic, nor obsequious.

“Well, what now?”

“Both Samaher and her mother think an oral exam would be best.”

“An oral exam?”

“Yes. She’ll tell you what’s in the stories, and you’ll write it down for your research. Dictating them to me in Hebrew would take too long.”

“I’ve had quite enough of this,” the professor snapped, though not in genuine anger. “Samaher and her lovely mother have gone bonkers. They think they can make a soft touch like me rewrite the rules of the university.”

Rashid, solemn, said nothing. Like a sorrowful but obedient disciple, he crossed his arms and waited for the professor to think better of it.

“So when will she come to take these orals of hers?”

“But how can she come?” Rashid spread his arms in amazement. “The doctor won’t even let her go to the bathroom. That’s why her mother wants you to come to us… to the village….”

“ I should drive to the village?”

“Of course not. I’ll drive you. I’ll bring you back, too. Whenever you like. It could even be now. That’s what Samaher’s mother says.”

Why did Rashid keep bringing her into this? Did he suspect him of having a crush on the attractive woman who had cried in his office?

Rivlin glanced at the translated poem. Could so sophisticated a piece of free verse have been written in the Algeria of the 1940s, or was this a hoax concocted for his benefit in Samaher’s Galilee village? In either case, he had to retrieve the photocopies of Suissa’s texts before they disintegrated between the sheets of her bed… unless, that is, the promised spark of inspiration depended on direct contact with the rare originals returned to Jerusalem.

And yet the dawn parting from his wife, without even a definite reunion to look forward to, coming on top of a sleepless night that weighed on him like a sick, heavy cat on his shoulders, had turned him into such a passive, malleable, and perhaps even seducible creature that, instead of terminating his special arrangement with Samaher and demanding the material back, he sat drowsily contemplating her jet-colored intercessor, whose noble and refined manner reminded him of his younger son’s. Although sensing the professor’s bewilderment, Rashid did not avert his glance. Willing to put up with a reprimand but not a refusal, he cocked a guileless head. One might have thought, from the way he kept his gentle eyes on the Orientalist while awaiting a reply, that he had all of Araby behind him. He did not even turn to look when a key scraped in the door and the housekeeper, in tight jeans and high heels, made her bored appearance.