A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Why not make us a meal to demonstrate what you’ve learned over there?” Rivlin suggested.

Ofer was not keen on the idea. He and Tsakhi were returning from Sinai on Saturday, and on Monday he was flying back to Paris. That left barely a day.

“A day,” his father said, “should be enough.”

“We’ll see,” was the only commitment received.

Ofer went to phone his brother and came back with the news that Tsakhi’s request for leave had been approved and that a soldier under his command, who lived across the bay in Acre, had enough diving equipment for the two of them. He would have to drive there now to pick it up.

Rivlin, thinking sadly that his son should be looking at baby carriages rather than at diving equipment, gave him the keys to the old jalopy. Soon Hagit came home from court. Setting the table for a second lunch, he allowed her to tell him about the two-to-one verdict, dismiss his criticisms of Ofer, and go to the bedroom to nap while he returned to his study in the hope of recapturing the morning’s inspiration. But the writing that had gone so easily then had dried up and now felt pointless.

The front door opened and shut with a bang. It was Tsakhi. Rivlin went down to set the table for a third time. Although the young officer had already eaten at his base, he agreed to eat again for his father’s sake. And in the end, still in his uniform with its officer’s bars, he did so heartily.

“Listen, Tsakhi,” Rivlin said. “You and Ofer will be spending a few days in another world. We’re happy that he wants to spend most of his vacation with you. Ever since he went to France and you’ve been in the army, you haven’t had a chance to be together. Now you’ll have a few unpressured days on the beach. It will be an opportunity to find out what happened to him. What’s bothering him. Why he can’t find another woman.”

His son’s large eyes regarded him attentively.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

“All right. So you’ll try tactfully to find out what happened. How and why his marriage fell apart. Maybe there was some mistake…”

“What kind of mistake?”

“Even a fantasy.”

“A fantasy?” The young officer seemed alarmed.

“I said maybe. What do we know about it? Nothing. But in the peace and quiet of a beach in Sinai, you can find out more. Okay?”

Tsakhi gave no sign whether it was okay or not. He just went on listening with the same concentration, although by now looking distinctly uneasy.

“You’ll have lots of time to find out — just do it unobtrusively — why he’s so secretive. You should know that he loves you and trusts you without limit. You can let us know afterward, in a general way, what he told you, so that we can think of how to help him. You know I’m worried sick about him. Do you follow me?”

“Of course.”

“And you promise to try?”

The young officer put down his knife and fork and said nothing. His fretful glance made Rivlin think of the rabbit he had seen hop out of the bushes on his walk near his son’s base.

“Are you listening?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll do it for me? You promise?”

And still the young officer said nothing. Not wanting to hurt or embarrass his father, he kept his large eyes on him, their pain and anxiety growing. Only now did it dawn on Rivlin what his silence meant.

32.

ON HIS WAY to the university the next day, he stopped by the optician’s to demand the speedy delivery of his new glasses. Five days had gone by since his old pair was broken. “You mean demolished,” the optician smirked, promising that during his lunch break he would fetch them himself from the lab in Haifa Bay.

It was the summer-vacation doldrums, and the campus was quiet. Ephraim Akri was in Florida, at a conference sponsored by the University of Miami to mark the twentieth anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism. One of the conference’s organizers, having read some of Akri’s articles in various semischolarly magazines, had been impressed by their metahistorical sweep and intellectual boldness. Hearing that the man was a Middle Easterner not only by birth but by looks and had a remarkable command of Arabic despite being Jewish, he had immediately invited him as a counterweight to the Palestinian professor’s disciples, who were terrorizing the academic community.

Consequently, although the fall semester was still far away, Rivlin had been asked to be the temporary department head, if only to prevent the university’s dean and rector from taking advantage of Akri’s absence to pirate a disputed half-time teaching slot. Reluctant to use Akri’s room, Rivlin functioned from the main office, where he’d had to ask the two secretaries to read the mail to him. He was in the middle of tearing up and throwing out some routine circulars and giving instructions to the pair, who seemed glad to have him back, when in walked Dr. Miller and asked to have a private talk. He had just received, he told Rivlin, a tempting offer from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba and had come to inquire about his long-deferred promotion. Did he have a future in Haifa, or should he accept the invitation from down south?

Rivlin refrained from revealing that he was chairman of the secret committee considering Miller’s case. Promising rather vaguely that the promotion was on its way, he pointed to the window and said, with a smile:

“If I were you I’d be patient before moving to the desert — if not for the university’s sake, then at least for this view’s.”

The promising young scholar, however, was not appeased by the bluish hills of the Galilee. Not even the gleaming expanse of the Mediterranean could make up for the delay in his promotion. And since his keen analytical mind told him that the guileful professor was on the secret committee, he had come to present him with an ultimatum. Rivlin nodded, remembering Miller’s bleached-out wife, who had been pregnant at Samaher’s wedding. When, he inquired discreetly, was she giving birth?

“Giving birth?” The young scholar glanced askance at him.

Rivlin felt his cheeks burn.

“Excuse me. It’s just that… at Samaher’s wedding… I thought that… or at least I guessed…”

He had guessed correctly, Miller told him. Unfortunately, the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the Orientalist said, without feeling sorry in the least. He promised to speak to the dean without waiting for Akri to come back from Miami and asked in return, with a twinge of anxiety, whether his analytically minded colleague would care to look at a recently written first draft of an article on Algeria. Not that Algeria was Miller’s field, but there were some theoretical points that might interest him.

His head felt heavy. Late last night he and his wife had driven their two sons to the bus for Eilat, after which he had been unable to fall asleep. Not wishing to usurp the department head’s armchair, he took the cup of coffee given him by the secretaries and went to his room at the end of the corridor. There he shut the door and dialed Fu’ad.

“ Wallah, Professor!” boomed the deep voice of the maître d’ from Jerusalem. “I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. But if you’d like, I can write a new… what’s the word?”

“Elegy.”

“Elegy? Sorry. The same as at a funeral. That must be why I can’t remember it.”

Over the phone came the sound of a woman’s laughter.

“Who was that?” Rivlin asked. “Let me talk to her.”

“So,” the voice chortled, “you ran away in the middle of the night! What happened to you? Don’t tell me you were afraid of the tax authorities.”

He joined her laughter. “For a second I thought there was an earthquake.”