“You should never have married that man. I’d make a better husband. Why don’t you leave him and marry me?”
His mother, pleased by the unexpected proposal, did not reject it out of hand. She made Rivlin repeat it and finally coaxed the whole story from him, after which he calmed down and regained his old brashness — so much so that, when his exhausted father came home at the end of a day’s work, he opened the door and said:
“Hurry up and go to Ima! She wants to spank you!”
His father ended this episode by remarking:
“Who would have thought, my little boy, that a passing remark of mine would stir up such a dreadfully strong spirit of jealousy and contention? From now on I shall never cease to worry, for if every little thing excites you so badly, what will happen when you grow older?”
3.
DEAR, SWEET AUTUMN, don’t let us down, Rivlin exhorted the skies every morning, as he opened the shutter to study the color and shape of the clouds drifting over the Carmel. “Another rainless, stormless winter like the last two and I’ll go out of my mind,” he told his wife. Hagit lay self-indulgently beneath the big white quilt that he had made her take from the closet in the hope of coercing the cold weather to come.
The fall semester was about to begin, students were flocking to ask for advice, and the department head was still in America. His lecture at the conference on “Twenty Years of Edward Said’s Orientalism” had gone so well that even exiles from Iraq and Sudan had asked him for a copy of the text, which he had delivered in Arabic as a symbolic provocation. If Akri was to be trusted, the New York — based Palestinian professor, or one of his disciples, would now have to rewrite the book, in order to defend it against the Haifaite’s challenges, hot off the Middle Eastern griddle. Of course, some of the conference’s participants had sought to dismiss the Israeli Arabist as simply another Western Orientalist like those accused by Said of marginalizing the Arab world — a pseudoscholar treating the Middle East as an absence to be filled by his presence, or as a shadow play waiting to be brought to life by its colonialist puppeteers. And yet how could the Middle East be absent, or a shadow, in a courageously original Middle Easterner like Ephraim Akri, a stalwart, God-fearing Levantine, albeit a Jewish one, whose brown skin and sad Bedouin eyes were those of a true son of the desert and whose command of the subtleties of Arabic put to shame the politically correct professors from New England and northern California who couldn’t pronounce correctly a single Arabic curse? His bold new ideas had made such an impression that he had been invited to speak to numerous Jewish and Christian groups, who were eager to hear an Old Historian’s reasons for believing that the situation in the Middle East was more hopeless than anyone thought.
And so, while Akri was enlightening his audiences in Florida and even inviting one of his grandsons to join him for a tour of Disneyland, his temporary replacement moved back into his old room, the spacious and well-lit office of a department head. Putting up with the gaze of both grandsons, one blond and one dark, he resumed his job of advising students — new and old, Arab and Jewish — on how best and least onerously to fulfill their obligations and keep the department from losing them.
He avoided serious phone talks with Ofer, the depth of whose hostility he did not dare to gauge for fear of a brutal rebuff. (On their trip to the airport, his son had kept his vow of silence, uttering a total of three inconsequential sentences.) Letting Hagit conduct their weekly conversation with Paris, he listened over the second receiver like a circumspect aide-de-camp, asking an occasional pointless question. Ofer’s acquiescence in this arrangement, however artificial, allowed him to hope that his son, who had lost all self-control that day at the hotel, was taking himself in hand.
Even after getting his new glasses, he did not hurry to type his handwritten reflections on Algeria into his computer. Perhaps he feared that weaknesses and inconsistencies not apparent in the heat of composition might show up on the bright screen. Meanwhile, to the delight of the two secretaries, he spent much of his time in his old office, comfortably ensconced in the big armchair that had been his own acquisition. No one, he knew, could run the department as well as he could. Though he was only doing so on a stopgap basis, he did his best to solve the problems brought to him.
One morning he heard Rashid talking to the secretaries. Straining to listen, he learned that Samaher’s cousin was on a secret, Rivlin-bypassing mission to obtain certification, at least of a provisional nature, of his M.A. student’s completion of all her course requirements for the previous year. The secretaries, remembering him as their driver to the wedding in Mansura, asked about the vanished bride.
“She hasn’t been feeling well,” Rashid said. “That’s why she asked me to take care of this.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She isn’t well,” he repeated. “She can’t concentrate. It’s the situation.”
“What situation?”
“Ours. The country’s.”
They checked Samaher’s file, saw that she had an incomplete from Professor Rivlin, and dispensing with further formalities, waved Rashid in to the department head. Much to his surprise, the trusty messenger, who had had no intention of doing so, found himself facing Samaher’s teacher.
“Are you running the department again?” he asked.
“Just for a while,” Rivlin apologized. “Shut the door. What’s new? What does Samaher want now?”
“Temporary certification that she’s completed her requirements.”
“Temporary certification? There’s no such thing as temporarily completing something. You shouldn’t let her use you like this, Rashid.”
The coal black eyes, taken aback, stared at him, then looked thoughtfully down at the floor.
Rivlin felt a pang. “You didn’t bring me anything from her? Not even one story? Not a single poem?”
“She can’t…,” Rashid murmured, in genuine anguish. “She really can’t…” He regarded the Orientalist as if deciding whether to trust him, then whispered in Arabic:
“Al-hayal sar kabt, u’l’kabt b’dur ala ’l-jnun.”*
“You’ll drive me crazy, too,” the Orientalist said absently, with a bitter smile.
Rashid seemed to have thought of that possibility, for he did not look surprised. He merely laid a defensive hand on his heart and asked:
“Why me?”
“Listen here, Rashid. I want the truth.”
The truth, it seemed, was a long story. It had to do with Samaher’s father-in-law, the contractor, a difficult man who had insisted on hospitalizing his confused daughter-in-law in Safed, so that she could be cured of…
“… of… the horse.”
“The horse?”
Rashid sighed. “Yes. She keeps imagining it.”
“And she’s still there?”
“Who?”
“Samaher. In the hospital.”
“Just a little while longer. We have to be patient. Soon she’ll get out. That’s what the doctor says. She wants to very badly….”
The sky outside the window had clouded over. A bolt of lightning pawed at the bay. But Rashid, though he had never been in this room, had no interest in its views, neither of the bay nor of the mountains. Running his glance over the books on the shelves, he let it linger on the photographs of Akri’s grandsons, as if committing them to memory. His silence filled Rivlin with a warm memory of their night journey. He would have liked, in obedience to an old longing, to take to the road once again with the messenger, who now reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled white skullcap that he smoothed with his hand.