Rashid was in low spirits, disappointed by his failure at the Civil Administration Bureau and embarrassed to have been found naked. He drove silently, with his eyes on the road, passing in front of the walls of the Old City and heading for the underground parking lot on Mount Scopus. Bluish clouds were stamped on the skies above Hebrew University. To the east, over the desert, hung a thick haze.
The guard at the entrance to the parking lot found an Orientalist in a hunting jeep suspicious and insisted on seeing Rivlin’s invitation to the conference. This, however, was not to be found, having been lost in the hotel or the basement. Not even a faculty ID card from Haifa could persuade the guard to let the car through. Rivlin felt he had had enough of Rashid. Why not, he suggested lamely, start back for the Galilee without him? He would probably find someone to give him a ride back to Haifa.
Rashid demurred. “I’ll come for you at the end of the session,” he said. “Your wife won’t like it, Professor, if I leave you here in Jerusalem.” Despite the anger in his voice, he still held the judge in high esteem.
In the reception room of the Truman Institute, a large gathering was crowded around the refreshment-laden tables. The translatoress of Ignorance, circulating excitedly, lit up when she saw Rivlin. “Where did you disappear to?” she scolded. “Everyone has been looking for you. Hagit called, too. She said not to try calling her back — she’ll try again. Look how many people came in the end! Do you think we should move to a bigger auditorium?”
“There’s no need for it,” he assured the happy widow, explaining that the more crowded the audience, the better the lectures, since packed rows of listeners were an erotic stimulus to an intellectual.
The rows of the little hall were indeed so full that a janitor had to bring extra chairs. Although many of those present were unfamiliar to Rivlin, he had a good idea of who they were. Apart from university officials and administrators, there were members of the small Italian-Jewish community of Jerusalem, most of them slight, elderly women in high heels and black dresses set off by colorful scarves, who took pride in their scholarly compatriot and hoped to hear stories that would remind them of their childhoods in the beautiful land of fascism they had fled. There were also Arabists from various universities and colleges, and, to his surprise, quite a few young M.A. and Ph.D. students, as well as strange hybrids spawned by pseudoacademic think tanks and research institutes. These, in the spirit of the times, were confusingly interdisciplinary, their Orientalism combined with sociology, law, literature, political science, philosophy, education, Jewish history, computer science, and other things. As he was wondering what they were doing at a memorial for Tedeschi, who had done his best scholarship before most of them were born, he noticed a group of them swarming around Dr. Miller. With a mixture of amazement and consternation, it dawned on him that this pale, quiet man whose promotion he had foiled had disciples. One day, no doubt, they would take their revenge on their guru’s nemesis.
Yet his envy had no time to linger on Miller, because it had already shifted to the dead man himself and his well-attended memorial. For a moment, Rivlin even begrudged Tedeschi his own eulogy. Who, he lamented, would mourn him? Would he have a successor, in this generation that did not want to succeed anyone because everyone wanted to be his original self? Going off to a corner, he reviewed his talk in solitude, ignored by the colleagues invited according to a list drawn up by him.
The afternoon session was opened by the university rector, a vigorous, middle-aged mathematician who, too old to discover new theorems, had embarked on a second, administrative career. Since he had never known Tedeschi, the doyen of Orientalists having retired before his time, he chose to say a few words about peace with the Arab world and invited Dr. Miller to give the first lecture, the topic of which was “Colonial Desire.”
The young lecturer strode unhurriedly to the podium. He wore new eyeglasses with clear, light frames so transparent that they seemed not to be there at all. In a soft voice, he read from a prepared text.
“In his book Colonial Desire, published in 1995, the British cultural historian Robert Young writes about the longing for the cultural Other as an escape from one’s own cultural world. One subject he discusses is the active, sometimes even erotic, desire for the Other that informs all cultural crossovers.
“Such cross-cultural contacts, as has been observed, leave their perpetrators in what the University of Chicago’s Homi Bhabha has termed ‘an in-between space’—or as Kipling put it, they are ‘East-West mongrels.’
“The existential plane of this androgynous hybridism is the European colony, whose inner cultural dissonance creates a fractured and divided self…”
Rivlin felt exhausted. In the end, he thought bitterly, his Circe had not let him rest for a moment. At least he would not have to do the driving back to Haifa.
“Young, like other students of culture, argues that following Sartre in 1960, Mannoni in 1964, Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi in 1967, and Aimé Césaire in 1972—the founding theoretical fathers, as it were, of postcolonialist theory, that theory has emphasized the dichotomy between the binary forces of the colonizer and the colonized.
“This dichotomy treats the colonized as the Other of the colonizer, knowable only by a false representation that reinstitutes the same static, essentialist categories it wished to do away with. By contrast, the multiculturalist outlook has encouraged many populations to assert their separate individualism. Thus, both Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis maintain that even extremist groups need to be encouraged in their struggle for representability.
“Historically speaking, we can, therefore, say that only recently, in the final decade of the twentieth century, have critics and scholars grasped the significance of cross-cultural contact as a mapper of the full complex of constructive and destructive social forces. And yet the available models for describing this complex are far from satisfactory.”
Rivlin noticed that some members of the audience were taking notes. Pleased by this, Miller slowed his pace to enable them to keep up with him.
“We can say that the main theories of cross-culturalism have been based on the three models of diffusion, assimilation, and isolation. None of these, however, takes into account the effects of interaction, even though historical studies have shown the importance of cross-cultural stimulus and response in such areas as religion, commerce, epidemiology and health care, and so on. The most productive paradigm to date has been the linguistic one.”
Someone tapped Rivlin on the shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”
He hurried outside to the telephone at the entrance. “Where are you?” asked Hagit.
“Right here.”
“Your sister called two hours ago. She’s in the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing serious. She’ll need tests. There’s a problem with her eye. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I want to know where you ran off to again.”
“Where do you think? I had lunch off-campus to get away from Hannah and her hysterics. Now I’m back keeping an eye on things and waiting for the memorial session.”
“Hannah complained there were very few people this morning.”
“She should stop whining. What does she want? There were as many people as could be expected for a conference in honor of a dead old professor. And it was snowing. But now a whole Italian contingent has arrived, and the place is packed.”
“Then you’re happy?”
“Happy? What for? It’s not a memorial for me.”