THERE WERE TWO messages on the voice mail. One was from Professor Tedeschi in person. In a despondent tone, he informed the Rivlins that the doctors had again despaired of diagnosing his condition and were sending him home to let it make up its own mind. The second message was from Ephraim Akri. With an insistence not typical of his pliant Oriental nature, he requested his colleague to stop by the departmental office on his way to class.
The secretaries in the office were waiting for him. Clearing out the students who were hanging around, they shut the door and ushered him with secretive glee into an inner room. There he was presented with two nameless term papers and asked to confirm that the comments in the margins were his own.
They were in his handwriting. Obviously, he had read the papers thoroughly and thought little of them. Yet, idiotically, the secretaries informed him, they had then been photocopied and submitted for another course with his marginal notes still on them.
“I just wanted to make sure,” one of the two said triumphantly. “I knew the comments were yours.”
“From their handwriting or their brilliance?” Rivlin asked, with a smile. He glanced at the gloomy Akri, whose pessimistic view of the Arab conception of freedom was in no way lessened by so primitive a deception.
“Can you identify the student who wrote these papers?” Akri asked. Rivlin shrugged.
“Whoever it was could have copied them from someone else,” said the older of the two secretaries, who took pride in seeing through students in general and Arab students in particular. “They just might have done a better job.”
“I’ve been told that in the English department,” the younger secretary volunteered, “they’ve got papers that were written in Beirut and Damascus, even Baghdad. There’s a market all over the Middle East, especially for Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare?”
“He’s the safest bet.” The younger secretary had studied English literature herself for two years. “Every day someone publishes a new book about him. There’s no way to tell what’s original and what isn’t.”
“Then how do they know these aren’t?”
“They’re too good. And their bibliographies list Arabic books that aren’t available in Israel. There are hard-up instructors and even professors in Arab countries willing to sell term papers on Hamlet, Othello, or Romeo and Juliet to the highest bidder.”
“Not to mention The Merchant of Venice,” Akri put in. “Dr. Dagut once told me that he was given a term paper on Shylock by an Arab student that was full of anti-Semitic remarks.”
“I hope he didn’t flunk him because of it.”
“God forbid. The liberals in the English department love anti-Semitic remarks. These just seemed suspicious because they were so extreme….”
Rivlin sank slowly into the armchair in which, as department chairman, he had frequently napped. The battle of the boutique had been tiring, though by no means unpleasant. He leafed through the two term papers, trying to guess their author by their style and subject. He thought of Samaher.
“Well, what do you think?” Akri asked.
“I’d turn it over to the disciplinary committee. They’ll find out who sold what to whom.”
“That could get nasty. It will make the student newspaper, and the Arab students will raise a rumpus.”
“Let them.”
“I wouldn’t want to impugn their honor.”
“You?”
“Me above all. There’s a difference between historical generalizations and personal accusations. The rules call for expulsion in a case like this. It will end badly.”
Akri glanced at the two secretaries. His sudden solicitude for the misconceivers of freedom did not seem to please them. “Whatever we do, we mustn’t be hasty,” he declared heatedly. “Before we make our staff happy by besmirching our own department, let’s try to work this thing out. Why step on toes if you don’t have to?”
“By doing what?”
“Something stupid.”
“You sound like a politician.”
“There’s nothing wrong with politics if it can prevent conflict.”
The new department head adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses and politely signaled the two secretaries to leave him alone with his colleague.
10.
“CAN YOU GUESS who wrote these two papers?”
“You say they were written by the same person?”
“Yes. They’re in the same style.”
Rivlin leafed through them. How, he wondered aloud, could he possibly know? He had graded so many papers in his life.
“But these were written recently,” Akri said.
“How can you tell?”
“Your handwriting dates from the last two years.”
“What do you mean?”
“I compared it with your writing from previous years in some old files. It’s changed. Your letters used to be larger, more upright and decisive. Lately they’ve become… well, a bit scrawled- and scrunched-looking. The lines are crooked, as though something were pressing on them.”
“If ever they make you a cabinet minister, Ephraim, I’d suggest the ministry of police.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Since when have you become graphologist?”
“We all agreed that the marginal comments were yours. I wanted to know when they were from.”
“But why all this sleuthing around? It’s a waste of time. Get the two students to talk.”
But the Oriental Akri was so sensitive to the feelings of his Arab students that he was concerned even for the cheats among them. He didn’t want to make use of informers. This was a Jewish method, far worse than discrimination or neglect, that had left a festering sore in Arab society. He preferred to solve the case by himself.
Out of the corner of his eye Rivlin noticed, beside the two photographs on top of the computer, a new picture of an infant in a crib. Did Akri have another grandson? Until officially informed of this, he decided bitterly, he would ignore the newcomer and assume him to be an earlier version of Grandson One or Two.
He rose awkwardly from his chair. “I have a class,” he said. But the department head continued to detain him.
“We have to determine whether, when she gave those papers to someone else, she knew what would be done with them.”
“How do you know it was a she?”
“Because she uses the feminine case for herself.”
Rivlin pictured a young woman in a wedding gown, pulling a black horse away from a gate. “Sometimes I don’t know what to make of you, Ephraim,” he said, with a patronizing smile. “On the one hand, you speak about Arabs with the most awful despair. And on the other, you coddle them like a social worker.”
“It’s all connected,” the department head replied, flattered to be considered a paradox. “It’s our human and scholarly responsibility. The better we understand the Arabs, the better we can defend ourselves against them. We have to distinguish the crucial from the trivial, what’s important to them from what isn’t. That’s the only way we’ll ever know what to expect from them. We have to honor their feelings and realize what hurts them in order to guard against betrayal and lies. It’s a question of patting their backs with one hand while squeezing their balls with the other. Without romantic or egotistical illusions. Because it’s the purest egotism on the part of their so-called friends — I’m talking about our own bleeding-heart colleagues — to treat the Arabs as our clones who share our values and hopes. It exasperates me how the same types who are always accusing our Jewish society of decadence and fanaticism expect the Arabs to think just like them. If you don’t like your own self, at least don’t impose its norms on others.”
“Do you know who wrote those papers?” Rivlin asked, interrupting. “It was our bride, Samaher. The one whose wedding you made us go to.”