“Why, it’s Samaher!” Rivlin cried excitedly. “Samaher, this is my wife. You must remember her from your wedding.”
His still-ungraded M.A. student gave him a frail and poignant smile. “Who could forget your wife, Professor?” she whispered hoarsely, nodding to Hagit. “Never…”
The minibus turned right on Gaza Road, passed Terra Sancta, and headed for East Jerusalem, skirting the walls of the Old City — which on this wintry Saturday night were illuminated only symbolically, as if in discharge of a formal obligation. The rain came down harder as Rashid drove through the Arab half of town. “Don’t forget to stop in Pisgat Ze’ev,” Rivlin reminded him. “I’ll direct you.” But Rashid, having rehearsed the route earlier that day, needed no directions, leaving Rivlin free to turn around and chat with his “research assistant.” Her answers to his questions, though laconic, were to the point.
They reached Pisgat Ze’ev in northern Jerusalem. There, in the yellowish glare of the headlights, flagging them down at the bus stop where they had agreed to meet him — the same stop from which the murdered scholar had gone to his death — was Mr. Suissa in his gray fedora. With him was the murdered scholar’s wife.
“I hope it’s all right,” Suissa said to Rivlin, who reddened at the sight of the young widow. “She didn’t want me to go by myself. Do you have room for her?”
“Of course we do,” Rashid said, jumping happily out of the car. No one even had to move. He went to the back, opened the rear door, and squeezed the widow in beside Samaher.
They drove on to the Palestinian Authority. Although a black, overcast sky hid the first three stars that ended the Sabbath, these were surely glittering somewhere above the clouds — in token of which, despite the heavy rain, the streets filled with cars as the Jews of Jerusalem, exhausted by their day of rest, emerged to see what had changed in the world while they slept. At Atarot Junction the traffic lights were rattling in the wind, which soon turned to a howling gale. In the foggy darkness, with nothing around them but dim buildings and empty lots, it wasn’t clear whether they were heading in the right direction. But gradually the billboards changed from Hebrew to Arabic, and they saw that the border was close. In the end, they flew across it. The soldiers on the Israeli side, warming themselves around a campfire, showed no interest in the passengers bound for food and entertainment, while two gun-toting policemen on the Palestinian side were so eager to help that, although unaware of any festival, they piled with their weapons into the minibus, now equally full of Arabs and Jews, and guided it to the Ramallah police station.
In the stone building of the police station, the festival was better known. There were even name tags for the guests from Israel. Rivlin was told to climb some stairs to the second floor. There, in a large room whose long, curtained windows made it look like a cross between an office and a salon, sat a corpulent police officer decorated like a Russian general and surrounded by men, civilians or plainclothesmen, who made the Orientalist feel rather nervous. Taking some plastic tags from a drawer, the officer inscribed them with the names of the Israeli entourage and stamped each with a bloodred stamp.
There was a timid knock on the door. In walked a bewildered-looking Hannah Tedeschi, her thick glasses halfway down her nose. Drawn magnetically by her anxiety to the telephone on the officer’s desk, she inquired in quaint seventh-century Arabic whether she could call her husband in Jerusalem. Rivlin, putting a hand on her shoulder to calm her, hurried to translate her speech into something more modern, while introducing her, complete with all her academic titles, to the astonished gathering.
“Be my guest, Madame Doctor. It’s an honor.” The fat officer sat up, reached for the phone, and poised a long-nailed finger on the dial.
It took many rings to get the doyen of Orientalists to answer his wife’s call. While the officer and the plainclothesmen listened at one end to the shaky voice of the translatoress, the old professor at the other end was deliberately cool. He answered Hannah’s questions brusquely, was vague and uninformative, and soon hung up. As though reluctant to part with it, she slowly handed the receiver back to the fat officer and took out her purse to pay for the call.
“La, walla la, ya madam, la!”* the Palestinians cried at once, commiserating with the strange Jewess. “Don’t insult us. What’s a telephone call to Jerusalem? Nothing. You can call all you like… even to America… to Japan… a kul hal, b’nidfa’sh el-hasab l’isra’il.”†
There was a sense of merriment in the room. When they left it, properly name-tagged (Rashid must have told someone he had important passengers), a jeep with a machine gunner was waiting to escort them. The rain had tapered off to a thin drizzle. They traveled in a little convoy through the streets of the brightly lit Palestinian city. At the new Khalil el-Sakakini Cultural Center, teenagers holding torches directed them to a nearly full parking lot. If last summer he had crossed the border as a one-man show, Rivlin thought, he was now heading a multinational, multisexual, and multigenerational delegation. He took care to keep his five women together as they climbed out of the minibus, while saying some encouraging words to Mr. Suissa, who had sat in the car looking tense. Meanwhile, Rashid handed each of his nephews a small carton and disappeared with them around the back of the building.
They climbed some stairs to the aristocratically arched stone entrance of the Cultural Center, which looked like a wealthy private mansion. There to greet them was the festival’s director, Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun, an energetic, gap-toothed, baby-faced man who in his old leather coat, Rivlin thought, resembled a trade union official. Ibn-Zaidoun shook hands briskly with the Israelis, introduced them to the British judge of the poetry contest, who towered over him like a thoroughbred horse, and urged them to help themselves to refreshments on the second floor. Tonight’s festival, he assured them, was meant for body and mind alike.
10.
A LOCAL BEAUTY welcomed them to the high-ceilinged second floor and politely but firmly made them take off their coats, for which there would be no room in the auditorium, and hang them in the checkroom. With the thrill of old intimacy Rivlin spied, beneath Hagit’s fur-collared coat, her beloved blouse and velvet pants on Ra’uda’s tall, dark figure. He tried to catch her eye, wishing to share his amusement at her simulacrum from the other side of the border. But Hagit, still involved with the translatoress, who was greatly distressed by her husband’s coolness, had no time for her old clothes, which now vanished with their wearer in the wake of Samaher.
Rivlin let himself be carried along by the festive hubbub of the guests, most of them young people of unclear identity. It was hard to tell the Arabs from the Jews, or either of the two from anyone else. Taking Ibn-Zaidoun’s advice, he headed for the buffet, followed by Suissa’s widow with Suissa senior on her heels. The murdered scholar’s father, awed by the occasion despite his vengeful feelings toward its Palestinian organizers, had taken off his fedora and put on a big, colorful skullcap that might have been knit back in his North African childhood. At the buffet, by plates of stuffed grape leaves and cigar-shaped meat pastries, the conversation flowed in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with an occasional German exclamation mark. Holding a glass and surrounded by Israeli peace activists, the most famous of Palestinian poets stood by the auditorium door. An aging, though still boyish, bachelor and full-time exile who circulated among the world’s capitals reading his poetry, he was trying to follow, a bored glitter in his eyes, the singsong English of an Israeli poet of his own generation, a tall, balding, protuberant man with thick glasses, who was known for his marvelously erotic sonnets — which, though politically naive, were said to embody his lust for peace. At his side, seeking to elbow his way into the conversation, was another poet from Tel Aviv — a literary critic as well, whose brilliant but nasty essays took advantage of the Middle East conflict to settle scores with his numerous rivals.