“Is that for The Dybbuk, Rashid?”
An Arab librarian, Rashid explained, had helped him find the play and had convinced the student at the checkout counter to let him borrow it under Samaher’s name. They were already rehearsing it.
“Then the festival is really taking place?”
“Of course it is.” Rashid was insulted. “When did I ever lie to you?”
Everyone in Ramallah, he told Rivlin, even the police, was organizing for the event. The date was set for a Saturday night in late November, which worked out well for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In fact, it turned out to be on the anniversary of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution for Palestine. He, Rashid, would bring the professor from Jerusalem if he didn’t want to drive through Palestinian territory himself. There would be plenty of room in the minibus. Professor Rivlin had seen how no checkpoint could stop him. And there would be no political skits like those in Zababdeh, just poems of love and friendship, some new and some old. The professor wouldn’t be the only Jew there. There would be Israeli poets and peace activists, progressive people, all guests of the Palestinian Authority. There would even be a poetry contest, with prizes. The judge had already been chosen: a British professor who taught at Bir-Zeit University. It would all be in a spirit of fun. Everyone was tired of politics. Ramallah wasn’t Gaza, where people loved to hate each other. The Ramallans knew how to live. And the professor should bring his wife this time. The judge would enjoy it. She mustn’t miss the Lebanese nun, that divine little scamp who had promised to come on another tour of Palestine. She had even asked the Abuna — or so he said — whether the Jew would be there.
4.
AUTUMN ARRIVED AT full blast, bringing wind and rain and the promise of a real winter. Yet there were also days of warm sun and sweet light, with fleecy white clouds hanging quietly in the sky. Although her blinds were opened less often now, the ghost, dressed in two heavy sweaters that Rivlin recognized from the previous winter, continued to sit on her terrace. She no longer played solitaire. Seated at the little red table with a pad of stationery, she seemed to be — as far as he could make out from across the street — filling page after page with writing.
The semester began. The Oriental department head returned from the Occident, buoyed by his audiences of decent Christians and wealthy Jews politely worried about the future. He thanked Rivlin for filling in for him, and especially for preventing the rector and the dean from making off with the half-time teaching slot.
Relieved of the duty of substituting for his successor, Rivlin no longer had an excuse to put off typing his wildly scrawled and illegible notes, the product of his days without glasses, into his computer, to prepare them for submission to the critical eye of the brilliant young Dr. Miller, the keys to whose academic career he held. He knew that Miller was attuned to the latest winds blowing from German and American universities and that his approach to scholarship, and to Orientalism in particular, was revisionist. (Indeed, the young doctor had even announced at a departmental meeting that he refused to be called any longer by the intellectually pretentious and discredited title of “Orientalist”; he preferred the more modest description of “Middle Eastern social ethnographer.”) For this reason, Rivlin, wishing to present his draft in a softer, more ambivalent light, took care to insert in more places than necessary a number of self-critical qualifications and to replace exclamation points with question marks. He then ran his remarks off on the printer, put them in Miller’s mailbox with a jocular note, and postponed the next meeting of the secret appointments committee until the following week.
He thought sorrowfully of his eldest son and of their harsh exchange in the parking lot of the hotel. I won’t defend myself against his accusations, he told himself. On the contrary, I’ll admit openly that I should never have slept in the basement with all those superannuated tax files. Still, he doesn’t have to be angry with me just because I did something foolish. If he’d told me the reason for his separation, I’d never have had to sink to such depths.
Self-pity vied with self-blame. He envied the old ghost on the terrace her outburst of writing.
His thoughts weren’t only of Ofer, his face twisted with rage. He also thought of his Circe, deftly making a bed for him with snow white sheets. Had it been the brackish light of the basement or her low-grade fever that had made her skin look so translucent and virginal? It was curious. You could count on someone like her not to take a night’s fling seriously or to expect anything from you afterward, her only loyalty being to the hotel. And yet what pleasure could there be in making love to such a bony, unattractive woman, who, for all her haughtiness, wanted protection, too? And how did you make love at all to a woman so much taller than yourself? Did you expand or did she contract?
And then there was Fu’ad. What had he been up to, turning up like that with a pillow? Had he come to warn him against an involvement that an ex-in-law should have known better than to risk, or was he protecting the proprietress? And in either case, why hadn’t the discreet maître d’ stuck to his philosophy of playing it safe and putting his own interests first?
And on the other hand, if this were really Fu’ad’s credo, why write an elegy for Ofer? Why mention it? Simply to demonstrate his friendship for an Orientalist who had told him in polished Arabic that he was dying? Or was it a signal not to give up in his pursuit of a secret that he, Fu’ad, was unable to discuss?
On a whim, Rivlin called the hotel. Without identifying himself, he asked to speak to Fu’ad, who had to be summoned from the garden.
“Anna ba’awek aleyk?”*
“La, abadan, ya ahi.”†
“What’s new? How’s Galya?”
“God be praised. She’s giving birth soon.”
“And the elegy? Al-marthiyya? Did you find it?”
“I’ve stopped looking for it, Professor. So should you. What’s gone is gone. Why lose sleep over it? If you want a new elegy, it’s no problem. I can even write you a love poem. Lately, the rhymes just keep coming. I even wrote a little poem in Hebrew.”
“Good for you.”
“I don’t know what it is, but since Mr. Hendel passed on I’ve been full of feeling. I can be in the middle of work, running the dining room or the cleaning staff, and suddenly I want to write. It’s a pity it’s all lost in the end, like that elegy. No one in our village appreciates a good poem. I wish I knew someone who could give me some constructive criticism. Back in the fifties we had a poet of our own, a fellow named Ibn Smih. Then he got into trouble with the law, and they took him away….”
5.
THAT WEEK, a movie called Passage of Memory was playing at the Japanese Museum. Two young lawyers, stopping their debate in Hagit’s chambers long enough to discuss it, had recommended it. Whereas famous stars and good reviews could not persuade Rivlin to go to a European or American movie unless he first got a detailed synopsis from his wife, he was more tolerant of films from more exotic places. Lately, he had particularly enjoyed several Iranian ones made under the regime of the ayatollahs. “Even if the plot doesn’t hold up,” he explained to Hagit, “there are still new faces, landscapes, and foods… who knows, perhaps even new and better ways of making love.”