“Afraid of what?”
“Of your having thought he was making fun of the Jews in that play in Ramallah.”
“But it’s his right to make fun of us. His Dybbuk was marvelous.”
“Well, I’m telling you, Professor, you’re all he thinks and talks about.”
“Honestly, Afifa, would it make sense to separate Ra’uda from her husband by bringing her back to Israel?”
“But of course it would, Professor. She’s Israeli. And this husband of hers, he’s from the West Bank and a Christian and sick. He could die at any time. Where will that leave her?”
“I suppose so.” Rivlin felt exhausted. He rose, stretched, led Afifa to the departmental office, and asked a secretary to look for her old file and tell her what credits she could get for courses taken twenty years ago.
Afifa, who had no intention of going back to school, stood embarrassed in a corner. Rivlin went to check his mailbox. As he emptied it, he smelled the scent of Miller’s aftershave. The young lecturer was in the middle of sealing an envelope, doing a thorough job of it. Rivlin gave him a friendly smile and invited him to speak at a one-day Orientalists’ conference soon to take place in Jerusalem, on the first month’s anniversary of Tedeschi’s death.
6.
THE WINTER, HAVING BEGUN at Hanukkah with an impressive display of wind and rain, had petered out. Days of unseasonably high temperatures arrived and parched the earth. “If the summer has no bounds,” Rivlin said to Hagit, “I may as well take some vacation.” He intended, he told her, to take all the shopping coupons accumulated over the past year and exchange them for gifts. “They lose their value after December 31,” he explained. “Pick what you want from the catalogs, and I’ll get it.”
Equipped with the coupons and Hagit’s instructions, he set out. His first stop was a shopping mall, where, after climbing up and down many flights of stairs, he came to a small office near the washrooms, signed a form in triplicate, and was given a large, green plastic carrying bag. Next, in a department store, he received a beach towel and an apron. From there he went to a supermarket and after patiently standing in line was rewarded with two small bottles of olive oil and — for only two extra shekels — a bottle of detergent.
A second shopping mall, at the southern edges of the city, was his next-to-last destination. Here they were out of Teflon frying pans and offered him a choice between a saucepan with a transparent cover and six flower-patterned Turkish coffee cups. Lacking clear directives, he phoned the courtroom and found Hagit between trials. A brief discussion ended in a decision to take the saucepan. “When do we ever drink Turkish coffee?” Hagit asked. Finally, he went to a store where, although his coupons for it had become invalid, he obtained a rather odd-looking desk lamp as a premium for buying a cookbook of pasta recipes. Burdened with his acquisitions, he returned home in time for lunch and wrote the following letter to the municipality:
Traffic Department
Municipality of Haifa
Re: U-turns at the intersection of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets.
To Whom It May Concern:
I wish to propose a way of facilitating U-turns at the intersection of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets. Such turns, though legal and unavoidable for drivers heading from Carmel Center for the shops and cafés on the east side of the street, are impeded by the unnecessarily wide sidewalk. As a result, even cars with power steering, like my own, must make a broken U-turn, reversing in the middle of the intersection and in the face of oncoming traffic.
A careful examination has led me to conclude that, were the unnecessary pavement on the left-hand side of the entrance to Ha-Sport Street (which is of little use to anyone, since it slopes and is fenced off from the street) to be reduced, it would be possible to execute a U-turn in a single maneuver, making it easier and safer for drivers in both directions.
I would greatly appreciate your giving this matter your careful consideration. I would also be happy, should it be deemed helpful, to come to the municipality in person to explain my plan.
Sincerely,
Professor Yochanan Rivlin
Department of Near Eastern Studies
University of Haifa
7.
HANNAH TEDESCHI TELEPHONED EVERY day to consult with Rivlin about the memorial conference in Jerusalem. If Hagit picked up the phone first, Hannah took advantage of the opportunity to ask for legal advice regarding Tedeschi’s first wife, never divorced by him despite her many years in an institution.
Ever since Tedeschi’s retirement from teaching eight years previously, his connection with the Near Eastern Studies department at Hebrew university had grown tenuous. Hannah was concerned, therefore, that if the conference were left to the department to plan, it would become a dumping grounds for second-rate papers unpresentable elsewhere. And so, making Rivlin her adviser, she chose the lecturers herself, leaving only the administrative details to the university. She asked Rivlin to give the main lecture, on the subject of literary sources of the Algerian Terror.
“I’m sorry, Hannah,” he excused himself. “Carlo knew this was a subject in which I was still groping in the dark. I’m still not prepared to lecture on it. But I will give a eulogy. I’d like to talk about Carlo’s humanity.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That’s my secret.”
“Be careful, Yochanan. There are sensitive areas…”
After much debate and changing of minds, the program was decided on. The morning would begin with two Ottomanists, one discussing the age-old relationship between Turks and Arabs, and the other, Ataturk in retrospect. They would be followed by a scholar with some new ideas about the period of the great Abbasid caliphate, on which Tedeschi had written his doctorate, after which the translatoress would present several Sufi texts by Al-Hallaj, polished versions of her improvisations in Ramallah.
The afternoon session would begin with Dr. Miller and a provocative lecture in the spirit of Said’s Orientalism (a book Tedeschi had been surprisingly tolerant of) on the profession of Near Eastern Studies. Then would come two traditional scholars, the “Sudanese” from Bar-Ilan and an “Iraqi” from the Dayan Center, who would defend their approach against Miller’s revisionism.
In the evening, as dusk appropriately fell, the Orientalists would be joined for the last, memorial session by a number of prominent Jerusalemites and members of the city’s Italian-Jewish community. There would be a violin and flute duet and three eulogies. The first of these would be given by the head of the Near Eastern Studies department in Jerusalem, who would review Tedeschi’s scholarly work; the second, by a speaker from the Truman Institute, who would talk about the Jerusalem polymath’s public activities; and the concluding one by Rivlin, who, if not as the dead man’s successor then at least as his close friend, would mourn Tedeschi’s passing and reveal a secret.
“But what kind of secret?” Hannah asked again.
“Wait and see.”
“Just be careful you don’t say anything you’ll regret, Yochanan. Don’t be carried away by truths no one needs to hear. I’m still living, remember?”
“How could I forget?”
Meanwhile, the winter that had petered out returned full force. The skies clouded over, and fierce winds blew. Three days before the conference, the forecasters predicted snow in Jerusalem. Hannah Tedeschi now phoned several times a day. What should they do? Should the conference be postponed? Who of Tedeschi’s elderly Jerusalem friends would brave the heights of Mount Scopus in a snowstorm?