The daylight was vanishing. So, Rivlin thought, that’s what our blond wunderkind has to say.
The young postmodernist now came back to Rivlin’s introduction, picking it apart like a stale roll. “National identity” was bad enough, a thoroughly dated notion. But worse yet was this business of a rainbow. Was national identity some kind of weather condition? What was the point of the whole, perfectly absurd theoretical exercise? It was only there to justify the professor’s obsession with artificially linking the past to the present. But what entitled him to assume that the poor devils who murdered villagers at night and slit the throats of babies snatched from their mothers’ wombs had any memory of wanting to be French? Had the more original thought never occurred to him that they might be pursuing their own authenticity, acted out by their darkly passionate souls? Surely Professor Rivlin was aware that beneath the tinsel of national identity, with which the military dictatorship in Algeria sought to distract the country, there was something more genuine and primitive. The Arabs were too fluid and unbounded to be subsumed under a single national grid.
“Excuse me,” Rivlin said softly, “but I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any light here?”
The little cubbyhole had no ceiling light. There was only the lamp on Miller’s desk. But its bulb was burned out, and the administration had not yet bothered to replace it.
Although the Orientalist was free to beat a retreat, he remained sprawled limply in his chair, unable to tear himself away from the young lecturer, whose sandy hair glowed golden in the gloom. Dr. Miller, having finished taking Rivlin apart, now turned to the outdated profession of Orientalism itself, which had proved incapable of absorbing the new theories of multiple narratives. It was time the professor realized that the news coming from Algeria was simply one narrative among many, propagated by the corporate press to uphold the dictatorial regime….
It was getting dark. Perhaps, Miller suggested, they should continue the discussion in the professor’s office.
“We can stay here,” Rivlin said. “If you don’t mind talking to someone you can’t see, neither do I.”
And as a wistful night descended on the world, lighting up the Druze houses on the Carmel one by one, he continued to offer his head to the guillotine, summoning the last of his patience to listen to the new theories whose very language he had despaired of understanding long ago.
7.
WINTER CAME EARLY, prolifically. After two years of little rain there were no complaints about the torrential storms and gale-force winds, only about the unpreparedness for them — especially in Tel Aviv, where streets were so flooded that they looked, at least on television, like the canals of Venice, without their gondolas and lovers. Meanwhile, the official opening of the Khalil es-Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah was postponed by a month and rescheduled for Christmas, which coincided with Hanukkah that year. The abbess of the Greek Orthodox convent in Baalbek had not considered a poetry contest, or even a fifty-year-old United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between two headstrong peoples, sufficient reason to send his singing nun to Ramallah and had preferred to wait for the holiday season to cast its religious aura over the event.
That Saturday morning it rained so hard that Rivlin, anticipating crawling back underneath the big quilt for an afternoon nap, did not bother to make the bed. Now, to the cozy patter of the rain and the shriek of the wind, he lay wondering whether the Palestinians of Ramallah deserved to be visited in such weather.
“I’ve seen enough real Arabs in the last few months,” he grumbled to his wife. “From now on I’d rather meet them on my computer screen.”
The judge, who had been looking forward to the event with keen curiosity, refused to hear of this.
“You’ve lost all joie de vivre,” she accused the big gray head sticking out from the quilt. “Life with you is becoming unbearable. You’re so busy controlling everyone that you can’t enjoy yourself anymore. You can’t even sit through a movie. At night you can’t wait to go to bed, and in the morning you can’t wait to get up and start eating your heart out again. I’m not calling off a trip we’ve been planning for so long. And you promised Carlo and Hannah that we’d take them with us.”
“They’ll just change their minds in the end anyway. They’ll be afraid to go to Ramallah at night.”
“But what is there to be afraid of if that Arab of yours…”
“Rashid.”
“If Rashid takes us and brings us back, the way he took you to Jenin. What’s the problem? Why are you backing out?”
“That festival can go on all night.”
“Let it. I’m off from work tomorrow. We can return to Haifa in the morning. I need to get out into the world and see some new faces.”
“In Ramallah?”
“What’s wrong with that? Do you have a better suggestion? There’s sure to be good food, just as there was at that village wedding that I enjoyed so much. And this isn’t a wedding, so you don’t have to envy anyone. Besides, I want to see that nun you were so wild about…”
“Don’t exaggerate. I wasn’t so wild about her.”
“What does it matter? Live! Experience! Lately you’ve been pure gloom. Every day you’re nursing some new injury.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About that young lecturer who attacked your theories a bit. You were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Every fly on the wall puts you in a panic.”
“In the first place, he didn’t attack them a bit. He attacked them a lot. And secondly, he’s no fly on the wall…”
“So he’s not a fly. He’s a screwed-up young man who wants to be original at any cost. I knew what he was up to when I saw him at that wedding in the Galilee. It was enough to see how he put down his wife.”
Rivlin smiled with satisfaction, rubbing his feet under the blanket. His mood brightened. In the west, a patch of blue sky was showing through the rain. His love for his wife, who now lay down beside him, welled within him. “All right,” he said. “But on two conditions. You know the first. And the second is that we leave early and get to Jerusalem in daylight.”
You couldn’t exactly call it daylight. The wet city, when they arrived, was struggling with a premature darkness brought on by the storm, contravening the laws of nature by being darker in the west than in the east. As it was too early to rouse the Tedeschis from their Sabbath nap, Hagit suggested driving to the Agnon House to see whether it was really closed on Saturdays.
It was indeed, and looked gray and unwelcoming with its little window bars. Rivlin had no intention of following the trail of the tattooed widow into the dismal yard. The hometown of any famous French or German author, he thought, would do better by its native son.
He put his arm around Hagit and steered her down the little street for a view of the tail end of sunlight that was wriggling between the desert’s pinkish curves. He didn’t know whether he felt more glad or alarmed when she said unexpectedly, with one of her wise looks:
“All right. As long as we’ve come this far, I’m ready to take a look at the happiest memory of your life.”
“Now? Are you sure?”
“We won’t enter the hotel. We’ll just have a look at the garden.”
“Then let’s walk.”
“It’s not too far?”
Even though the rain was more illusory than real, they shared a black umbrella. Arm in arm, they headed up the wet street toward the hotel, which had not yet switched on its lights, cut through the parking lot, and quietly entered the murky garden from the rear. Rivlin took a wary route through the bushes, apprehensive of encountering the tall proprietress. He had to hand it to Hagit: although she had not been in this place for years, she spotted the gazebo at once and went right to it. True, she did not notice that it had been moved from its old location by the swimming pool. But even if it was not her happiest memory, there was no denying that the night of her son’s wedding had been a joyous one. Little wonder that she gripped her husband’s arm tightly as he led her on a tour of the wet, fragrant garden.