A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

But it was too late. The little grandfather was already chasing his grandson furiously around the room. Catching up with him by the bathroom door, he hit him hard. The boy threw down his skullcap and spit on it before vanishing into the bathroom without a word.

They went to the bedroom. With an almost religious reverence, the bereaved father conjured up the dead scholar’s thoughts on the green screen of the old computer. Unfortunately, Rivlin apologized, he did not have his glasses. But if Mr. Suissa would remove his hat, which was hiding the screen, the Orientalist would try to follow while listening to a summary such as he was used to hearing from Samaher.

There was a touching innocence in the attempt of the North African — born Suissa senior, an uneducated and academically inexperienced official in the municipal waterworks department, to read the forever silenced mind of his dead son, which he believed he could fathom by virtue of his own paternity. He had ignored, Rivlin gathered, everything in the dead scholar’s texts having to do with tribal and class conflict, French colonialism, and debates about Algerian identity, in order to concentrate — culling his evidence from the stories and poems alone — on popular attitudes toward Allah, the God of the desert who had come to curb the savagery and ignorance of its inhabitants.

The Orientalist, his senses piqued by the widow’s clothes, which were scattered on the double bed beside the computer, was amazed to see how intense were the religious preoccupations of the stories that Samaher had read for their social content alone. He felt a sudden affection for this man, a religious Jew himself, who, no doubt unconsciously, was seeking to overcome his craving for vengeance by exploring the divinity in the Arab soul.

“Actually, Mr. Suissa,” the Orientalist said, “I think you may be onto something. The strong religious underpinnings everywhere, even at the time of the secular Algerian revolution… it fits in well with my own line of thought.”

He felt a touch as light as a caress.

The young widow, wearing a flowery dress, had come home. Overjoyed to find the professor there, she invited him to dine with them. Rivlin, however, begged off. He had come to Jerusalem not to work on her husband’s material but to hear a lecture by an old and beloved mentor who had paid a visit to the emergency room that morning with no knowledge of when he would leave. As fascinating as he found her father-in-law’s research, he had to be off. But he would surely come again soon.

Mr. Suissa, greatly cheered by Rivlin’s interest, switched off the computer, put on his fedora, and offered to drive Rivlin to the hospital. Yet the young widow, chagrined by her visitor’s hasty departure, insisted on driving him herself. Rudely pushing away the son who clung to her, pleading to come with them, she escorted Rivlin out of the apartment in the manner of someone who had long wanted to be alone with him.

18.

AND IN FACT Mrs. Suissa stopped the car after a few blocks, switched off the motor, and began lamenting, as though to an old friend, about how hard and complicated her life was. Ever since her husband’s tragic death, his parents had refused to leave her alone. Not that he had been an easy man himself. Yet his great love for her had atoned for his stubborn principles. He adored her so much that he had been almost afraid to touch her.

Rivlin stared down. The young woman, a bleached blond with deeply tanned legs whose polished toenails fidgeted on the stilled pedals of the car, had a sharp, strange fragrance. The street, seen through the windshield, was dusty and gray. Had he absconded or merely been newly impounded? Was this trip to Jerusalem a liberation or just an aggravation? On that wonderful night with the Arab messenger, he had been made to vanish as though by a magic trick. But here, in Jerusalem, without his glasses or his car, who would be his magician?

Perhaps, the young Mrs. Suissa was saying unhappily, the professor knew of some job for her. It could even be in Haifa. Anything to get her away from the siege she was under. Could he, as a gesture to her husband, find her part-time work as a typist or a secretary in his department, something temporary? She wasn’t asking for much. As a terror victim, she received a stipend from the Ministry of Defense. She could come to Haifa without the children and rent a room there. Once she was settled, she would bring them. But first she had to have a foothold, a position at the university. She wanted Professor Rivlin, as an admirer or at least an appreciator of her husband, to take her under his wing.

The tears welled in her eyes at the thought of the man who had adored her to the point of trepidation. Carried away by her emotion, she laid a soft hand on the aging Orientalist’s knee, asking not only for advice and direction, but also for comfort and warmth. She was certain that here in Jerusalem, fenced in by her husband’s parents, she would never find another man.

Rivlin glanced at his watch, unable to make out the time. He nodded and asked the young widow about her own parents.

Her father had died long ago. She and her mother did not get along. Her husband’s parents, on the other hand, had been nice, considerate people until his terrible death had turned them into evil little hedgehogs.

“Hedgehogs?”

Yes. Little, black, prickly things who had moved in with her to keep her children from being exposed to bad influences. Especially hers. They were worried she might give up religion. That was why they sniffed after her everywhere, the two hedgehogs. She flashed Rivlin a charmingly mischievous smile at the image that had occurred to her before her eyes filled with little tears again.

He didn’t need his glasses to see what an ingenue she was. Laying his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the steering wheel, he wondered what kind of wing she was looking for. Was it for a medium through which to contact the ghost of her husband — the young prodigy who, according to the Tedeschis, had sought in an original way to revive the old Orientalism that studied not documents, speeches, protocols, and pronouncements but the literature whose intricate language revealed the secretive Arab soul?

And yet if, by her own admission, this same prodigy had been reduced to adoring her from a safe distance, what, besides frustration, confusion, and neglect, could be expected from her? The tremor of desire he had felt was already gone. He would, he promised, see what he could do to help her, not just for her husband’s sake, but for her own. But on one condition. He looked her in the eye. She must take the children with her. Children must never be abandoned.

Calmed by this, she gave him a long look and started the car. But to his annoyance, instead of dropping him off by the entrance to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, she parked and got out with him, determined to join him on his visit to the emergency room. She wanted, she said, to say hello to Hannah Tedeschi and see how her husband was.

It took Rivlin a while, without his glasses in the bustle of the emergency room, to spot the illustrious polymath sitting on a little terrace in a thin smock, quietly staring at the Judean desert while awaiting the results of his tests.

“I come to Jerusalem especially to hear you lecture, Carlo, and look what you do to me!”

“But there’s nothing wrong with me,” Tedeschi said. “This morning, on our way to the conference, Hannah decided that as long as we were on Mount Scopus, she might as well bring me in for a checkup. Since then we’ve been stuck here. But never mind, I’ll soon be released. You haven’t missed a thing. Your bed is already made. You’ll sleep over, and tomorrow I’ll give the lecture they canceled tonight. You should have brought Hagit.”