A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Li’annahu fakat bihukmi ’l-Carmel tajiddu rahataka. *

A short while later, as his fingers were still burrowing in the dry earth of a long-since-wilted dwarf potted palm, the front door opened silently, and Tedeschi, in his eternal corduroys and a blue hospital shirt taken from the emergency room, stood beaming at the old student who had not forgotten to turn up in the end. With a grand gesture he beckoned him into the large library, in which, between two windows opened to the darkness of the night, glowed a cloyingly colored computer.

“Listen!” The Jerusalem polymath leaned with confidential excitement toward Rivlin, who, drained of the last of his vitality, sank exhaustedly into an armchair. “Don’t think that visit to the emergency room was wasted. I’ve decided to change the subject of tomorrow’s lecture.”

“Just a minute, Carlo. Let me catch my breath. Did Hagit try getting me on the phone?”

“No one tried getting you.”

“You’re sure?”

“What’s wrong? Have the two of you quarreled?”

“A bit.”

“Never mind. You worship her too much. The first time you brought her here, I could see you were under her thumb. You were so swept off your feet that you had to get married at once and postpone finishing your doctorate by a year, which cost you a position in Jerusalem…. But what happened?”

Rivlin smiled. The wave of warmth he felt for the old man, who read him so well, was also a warning to watch what he said.

“It’s nothing. We’ll get over it. So you’ve decided, just like that, in the middle of the night, to change your subject?”

“More the approach to it. Instead of talking about Turkish-Arab relations in a lifeless, abstract way, I’m going to do it so vividly that it may inspire even you. I want to show how the Turks saw the Arabs concretely, in terms of their literature — and especially, in terms of Ottoman popular drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the debacle of the First World War.”

“There was popular theater way back then?”

“Where have you been? Have you forgotten that seminar you took with me back in the sixties? Of course there was theater. Everywhere. In Istanbul, in Ankara, in Izmir, even in the south. Little folk theaters that put on original plays, as well as European dramas and drawing-room comedies. They changed the names of the characters and places, replaced Christian allusions with Muslim ones, reworked some themes, and fed the audience a Turkish delight. Sometimes they even adapted the classics, Shakespeare or Molière. As You Like It and Le Malade Imaginaire were performed in Turkish villages. The audiences loved them…”

“ Le Malade Imaginaire? ” Rivlin grinned, giving Tedeschi a weary but loving glance. His mentor’s face reddened.

“Why not? It’s not a wonderful play?”

26.

THOUGH THEY WERE talking in whispers, the conversation of the two professors woke Hannah Tedeschi. Barefoot and unkempt, in a wrinkled nightgown, she scolded their cavalier attitude toward the remaining hours of sleep and — it being beyond her powers to drag her husband away from his computer — led Rivlin irmly away to his room. As they stood in its dark doorway, quietly listening to Ephraim Akri’s light, regular breathing, Rivlin felt an old, puzzled sorrow for this once lively and talented student, the faculty’s favorite, who had chosen to devote her life — first as his secretary, then as his teaching assistant, and finally as his living companion — to a professor with a mentally ill and institutionalized wife. Perhaps it was his fear of this ancient dementia still haunting the apartment that had deterred Akri, who had forgotten to bring his own pajamas, from wearing the pair offered him by the doyen of Orientalists, on whose good offices he counted in the future. He had placed it, still folded and ironed, by his black skullcap and steel-rimmed glasses and was lying starkly and swarthily naked beneath a thin blanket. His large, woozy eyes, so different without their glasses, flickered open for a moment to watch his senior colleague, a not unimportant member of the appointments committee of the university senate, open the window and lie down by his side.

Although it was a big double bed, the thought of contact with the new department head’s naked body gave Rivlin gooseflesh. He put on his pajamas, wrapped himself in his blanket, and embarked on the second, academic half of the convoluted night. The familiar aroma of old journals tickled his nose. A feeling of calm possessed him, as if he were back under the aegis of his strict old doctoral adviser — who, by virtue of this position, shared the blame for his students’ errors and the responsibility of defending them from their critics. A spark of inspiration flashed momentarily in the spacious room, meant for the children Tedeschi never had, neither from the wife who lost her mind nor from the lively student who took her place. I’ve been to this house so many times, Rivlin thought. I’ve learned much here, and argued much, and once even taken an exam. And yet never did I think to see the day when I would sleep here.

Ephraim Akri groaned in his sleep. To Rivlin it sounded like a general protest at the sorry state of the Middle East. Taking advantage of the break in Akri’s slumber, he asked the new department head if anyone had tried getting in touch with him.

“No one,” Akri avowed, his eyes shut. Discreetly turning his naked back, which was as smooth as a bar of chocolate, he added hoarsely:

“But don’t worry…”

In that case, Rivlin thought with fresh anxiety, she’s picked up the gauntlet I threw down. She, too, wants to loosen the reins of our love. Not, as I do, for Ofer’s sake, but for her own, to keep aloof from the mistakes that I’ve made and will make. And if that’s what she’s up to, why did I bother making two nights out of one by hurrying here to see if she had called? I could have stayed in the basement. The last thing he saw, as his mind went blank and he fell into a short but powerful and delicious sleep, was the angular face of the tall proprietress.

27.

IT WAS APPARENT as soon as Rivlin entered the lecture hall that the postponement had been for the worse. The political-science faculty that had come to hear Tedeschi the night before, only to be told he was in the hospital, had no way of knowing, as did his colleagues in Near Eastern studies, of his propensity for miraculous recoveries. When he mounted the dais, therefore, spreading out his notes with their new approach, barely a dozen people were in the audience, and these included his wife, the two colleagues who had slept in his home, and three young political scientists, the organizers of the event, who had hurriedly mustered several secretaries and typists so that the renowned polymath wouldn’t be demoralized. Tedeschi, however, was unflustered. Seeing Suissa senior enter the lecture hall in his gray fedora, along with Suissa junior’s widow, he gave them a friendly wave and invited them to sit in the front row. Then he glanced at the sunlight pouring through the window, stripped off his jacket like a prizefighter — unselfconsciously baring two puny white arms riddled with yellow intravenous marks — and began in a stentorian voice to relate the story of a play produced in 1867 in a little theater in the town of Antakiyya, not far from the Syrian border.

Though punch-drunk from a night divided between two such different and distant beds, Rivlin was all concentration, as if he had instantly reverted to the loyal and eager student of thirty years ago. And indeed Tedeschi started off in fine form, using his narrative skills to introduce his subject with a concise but vivid survey of the Turkish hill town’s geography, history, archaeology, and sociology, which broke down into Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, each group with its distinctive occupations and religious and cultural institutions.