The Orientalist, however, mindful of his mission, was more interested in what Georgette did. The answer was that, having changed not her profession but only her students, she still taught Arabic. Yet her salary was better, for she was now paid both to improve the Arabic of the young GSS investigators and to teach them her linguistic methods for detecting lies in that language. A divorcée with children living abroad, she was so devoted to her work that she sometimes slept in her office. Hence, its resemblance to a private apartment.
Rashid just stared at her.
They chatted for a while before Rivlin disclosed why he had come and asked Rashid to produce his documents so as to be advised by Georgette as to who in the GSS might be suitably softhearted. Flattered and amused to be asked, she leafed through a packet of Palestinian birth certificates and tattered old Israeli passbooks in which Rashid and Ra’uda were listed as brother and sister. When she was done she said that although she was no expert on such things, she imagined that to turn little Palestinians into Israelis more was needed than a mother’s longing for her native village.
“Such as?”
An intelligent woman, she stopped to think. Did any of his sister’s children, she asked Rashid, have a chronic disease or rare health problem that called for treatment in Israel? A medical reason, she explained to the Orientalist, who nodded while stretching his hands out to the electric flames, was better than an emotional one, perhaps because the Jews thought their curative powers made the Arabs more trusting and less dangerous….
An enigmatic smile played over Rashid’s lips.
Rivlin turned to him. “Well?”
He shrugged. As far as he knew, both of his nephews in Zababdeh were healthy. If there were no other choice, however, he would try to find something wrong with them.
“The problems people have,” Rivlin sighed as the messenger gently shut the door and headed for the ground floor to obtain application forms for medical treatment in Israel. He took another sip of his tea.
Georgette shot him a distrustful look. “What do you want us to do, open the gates to all of them? Don’t we have enough of them already?”
“Excuse me,” he said, turning crimson as if accused of high treason. “Those children are half-Israeli.”
“So is the West Bank, which is why it should be good enough for them. I see no reason to separate them from their father. Tell me, Rivlin: how did you get involved with this Arab in the first place?”
“He’s sometimes my driver. And also…”
“Also what?”
“Jinni ’l-aziz alay…. ”*
9.
FOR A SECOND, the falling snowflakes wavered between turning to sleet and keeping their pristine whiteness. Yet those falling quickly behind them stiffened their frozen resolve, and the white carpet outside the window grew thicker. Under a large umbrella they stepped back onto it, the careful Jew and the glum Arab, whose pockets were stuffed with useless medical forms. It took a moment to spot the jeep, now a white mass like the cars around it. Perhaps, Rivlin thought amusedly as he directed his driver toward a majestically white Mount Scopus, the snow was Europe’s farewell salute to the young man it had tried to murder sixty years ago. The idea so appealed to him that he decided to include it in his eulogy.
In the university parking lot, he sought to part with Rashid. “Why waste the day waiting for me?” he said. “Start back now. I’ll make it to Haifa on my own. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for your sister’s children. We have to sit down and work out a plan.”
“No plan will work if no one has a heart,” Rashid said. “But thanks for trying.”
He put a gentle hand on the Arab’s shoulder. “Don’t give up. It’s not like you.”
“It may not be like me, but it’s how I feel.”
“It’s not like you at all,” the Jew repeated reprovingly.
Rashid turned a dark, stubbled face full of anguish toward the road. His profile against the snow made Rivlin think of the dybbuk’s white shrouds. “If this snow keeps up, Professor,” he said, “you’ll need a jeep to get out of Jerusalem.”
“Don’t worry,” Rivlin said. “I’m tenth generation in this city. I know these Jerusalem snows. By this afternoon the sun will be out and it will all melt.”
But even if Samaher’s teacher was holding up his cousin’s grade, the messenger insisted on sticking by him. He had no other work lined up for the day, which he would spend in Jerusalem, returning for the Orientalist’s eulogy at the end of it. An Israeli Arab in a jeep could go where he wanted in this two-part city. Perhaps he would visit Fu’ad at his hotel. The two of them had got along well on the night of Tedeschi’s death. He had even stopped in Abu-Ghosh on his way back to Mansura because Samaher hadn’t been feeling well.
Rivlin felt a sweet frisson.
“Don’t worry about me, Professor,” Rashid said. “The ride to Jerusalem was my treat, and the ride home will be too. Your wife will feel better if she knows you’re with me.”
Rivlin smiled at Rashid’s intuition. “Listen,” he said, reminded by the gurgle of melting snow in a nearby drainpipe of the basement of the hotel, the symbol of his lost and longed-for happiness. “Come back at lunchtime and we’ll go together. Fu’ad will feed us.”
He took an invitation to the conference from his pocket and handed it to Rashid, showing him the building and the number of the room in which he would be.
The auditorium was empty. Hannah Tedeschi was pacing irritably up and down, her eye on the white maelstrom outside the window. The dark, masculine suit she had on looked as though it might have been Tedeschi’s. Though they had spoken often by telephone since the day of the funeral, he was surprised to see how she had changed. Thinner, and with a new, short haircut, she suggested, despite her makeup and high heels, a melancholy youth. “I warned you!” she scolded Rivlin despairingly as soon as she saw him. “We should have postponed it or moved it to town, where at least the streets are plowed. You forgot, Yochanan, that Jerusalem can cope with war, siege, and terrorism but not with snow — and especially not on Mount Scopus.”
Rivlin defended himself calmly and logically. In the first place, there was no guarantee that a more suitable place in town would have been available at the last moment. Secondly, even if one had been, there hadn’t been time to inform the public. And thirdly, what would Carlo have said had he known that a little snow would make them forsake a campus that meant so much to him? After all, not only had his entire career taken place on it, he was almost killed trying to break through to it in a relief convoy during the 1948 war.
“A little snow? Yochanan, don’t you see what’s going on out there?”
Once again Rivlin trotted out his Jerusalem pedigree to make light of the snow. By noon, he promised, the skies would clear and there would be nothing left but a white frosting. The timid souls who missed the morning session would surely have enough northern blood in them to turn out in the afternoon.
“You wait and see,” she accused him. “This snow will be an excuse to trample on his memory. We’re in for another disaster like the Othello lecture. He never said a word about it, but I know how hurt he was.”
“But what made you take him to the emergency room?”
“He was afraid.”
“Of those political scientists? You’re kidding.”
“But he was. All those theoreticians frightened him. He didn’t know what they were talking about.”
“Neither do I. So what?”
She looked startled. “You don’t?”
“Not always. But to hell with them. You have new glasses.”
“Just the frames. Was it wrong to change them?”