It was too dark to see anything. Yet the Druze hunter was used to such nights and tracked the animal by ear. Now and then, glimpsing a silhouette that didn’t match his father’s description, he wondered if it might have changed shape again.
But it was too quick for him. And so after a while, fearing to disappoint his father, he stopped running, dropped to his knees, and began making friendly animal noises, yowling, bleating, purring, and sighing to convey his good intentions. Yet the beast that had been so playful with his father refused to approach his father’s son, though it did pause for a moment in the bushes to stare curiously at him with its coal black eyes. That was when, desperate, Netur Kontar menacingly shouldered his shotgun. The doctor and lawyer, running up to him at that moment, barely had time to say “Hold it,” as he pressed the trigger in spite of his father’s warning…
IT WASN’T MY BROTHER or the pen. It was some metal in my back that knocked me down and didn’t let me move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. All right, I thought. I’ll forget about Grandmother in the village. Just let me go back to Babba, ’cause he’s sick in the church and I want to be with him. But I couldn’t make a sound, not even a whimper, and my head hurt real bad. Something heavy pressed on me and pinned me down. I wanted to go to sleep and die. Oh, Babba, Babba, oh, Abuna, help me, help me and save me from this earth.
18.
MIDWAY THROUGH YOUR CLASS, the door at the top of the lecture hall opened, and a bulky woman with an overnight bag walked in and sat down in the last row.
Startled, you lost the thread of your lecture for a moment. Since it wasn’t the origins of French colonialism in North Africa that had brought this very pregnant woman to the last class of the winter semester, she had to be a former student coming to display her condition before asking for an extension on a term paper. Yet a second later, your heart did a flip-flop. It was Galya, the lost bride herself. You waved to let her know she should wait for you after class, then resumed your lecture.
The lecture ended. She struggled toward you with her bag down the tiered rows, carrying her pregnancy as though it were a gift for you. While the students crowded around you to ask about their final exam, she sat again and waited for them to leave. Gone from her glance were last spring’s haughty impatience and anger at her father’s death, their place taken by a wistfulness that verged on defeat. She made a move to get to her feet. You told her not to and hurried to her from the lecture podium. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” you said, bending to embrace her before she could reply. Her body yielded willingly, soft and unresisting like her mother’s. She seemed not to know what to say. It was as if, having come all this way and received a warm welcome from you, she no longer remembered the reason.
But you weren’t asking for it. You treated her sudden appearance as a perfectly normal family visit, gave her big belly a fatherly appraisal, and asked when she was giving birth. The due date, she answered with some embarrassment, was this week, perhaps even today or tomorrow.
This was already too much for you. Was she planning to have her child in your lecture room? “What kind of time is this to be running around the country?” you rebuked her mildly, as if the baby in her womb were partly yours too.
Her overnight bag at her feet, she tried to defend herself. First births were usually late. She was counting on that. She had come to see your son. She needed to speak to him immediately, if possible before she gave birth. Of course, she could have got his telephone number from you. But she wanted your help in persuading him to come to Israel. After all, you were also responsible.
“I am?”
Yes, you were. She was firm about that. That’s why you had to help her. She would pay for Ofer’s ticket. She had already reserved a seat for him on tomorrow’s flight from Paris. She had a face-to-face confession to make, and she needed to ask his forgiveness, if only for her baby’s sake. She had sworn to herself that she would do it.
Her voice echoed emotionally in the empty lecture room. You were beside yourself with joy. At last, though you had no idea what it was, the truth sought by you for nearly a year was about to materialize. You asked, not recognizing your own happiness:
“Forgiveness for what?”
19.
SEATED IN THE EMPTY lecture room like the last student to finish an exam, Galya realized that this man who had pursued her with his frenzied questions hadn’t a clue. As much as she needed his help, she wasn’t about to give him one now. If Ofer wanted to tell him, that was his business. He had had the past six years to do it in, even though she had asked him not to. She respected him for that. He had acted not from weakness or guilt, but from gallantry toward a woman he loved. She would never compromise him.
As in their meetings at the hotel, Rivlin felt that his ex-daughter-in-law still harbored a resentment against him. He had to nurture the new trust between them if he didn’t want to lose her again. He reached for her bag, surprised to feel how heavy it was.
“But why are we standing here?” he asked, adopting a light tone. “Giving birth in this lecture room won’t get your child free tuition in the future. Let’s go to our place. We’ll call Ofer and tell him you’re waiting for him. Believe me, he would have come running even without the ticket you bought him. It’s his attachment to you that’s made me so worried about him. That’s why you mustn’t be angry at me for saying that, quite apart from forgiveness, the truth matters, too.”
She bowed her head, as if the truth he saddled her with were too heavy for her. Carefully, she eased her way out of her seat. How strange, Rivlin thought, that of all the women, Jewish and Arab, who had asked to be taken under his wing this past year, she had waited to do so until now, in the final days of her pregnancy. Yet in spite of everything, he would grant her wish and be the father she had lost.
Gripping her arm lightly but firmly, he led her through the gloomy corridors of the building, which had been designed without any provision for letting in the copious sunlight from outside. Passing the large show window of the library, in which were displayed new works by the faculty, he thought sadly of his own book, held up by this, his parallel quest for the truth. The university, he told the perfunctorily nodding Galya, had grown enormously in recent years. Her steps faltered as they entered the dark underground parking lot, along a wall of which some cartons with old files were waiting to be thrown out. But they were already at his car, stowing her bag and his briefcase in the back. He adjusted the front seat for her, as if to let the baby know that the world was making room for it.
The late winter day was bright and crisp, the rainstorms of the past months now a pleasant memory. It was Galya’s first visit to Haifa since leaving Ofer. “I forgot how beautiful it is,” she said, gazing at the sweeping view of the bay and sea. “Well,” he answered, half in jest and half temptingly, pointing at a large hospital on a ridge of the Carmel, “if you feel like it, or don’t manage to get back in time to Jerusalem, you can always give birth up there, with a nice view. Does the baby have a name?”
The question seemed to upset her. It had had one, she told him, and then fell silent, as if she had begun to say too much and had changed her mind.
Rivlin lapsed into silence, too. He did not wish to risk losing his mysterious stake in this child with a careless word. In the parking space of his building on the French Carmel, he backed into a spot and exclaimed when Galya went on sitting in her seat belt:
“But I haven’t told you that we moved!”
“To here?” She looked disappointedly at the discolored brick paving and the old houses farther down the narrow street. “How could you have given up your beautiful wadi?”