“How?” Rivlin asked.
“In that bus bombing near Pisgat Ze’ev.”
“That’s the first university teacher killed by a terrorist that I’ve heard of.”
“He wasn’t just a teacher,” Tedeschi protested angrily. “He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind. Not that that stopped them from snuffing him out one fine day.”
“Those aren’t the same Arabs,” Rivlin protested.
“Yes, they are, yes, they are!” bitterly declared Hannah Tedeschi, who generally avoided political arguments. “Don’t be naive, Yochanan. Anyone who has burrowed through ancient Arabic poetry as much as I have knows it’s all one world.”
“How can you let her say such a thing?” Rivlin scolded his old professor.
Tedeschi waved him off. “Let her say what she wants. She loved that young man. And rightly so, because he belonged to that scholarly nobility that, far outside the limelight, does the dirty work that clears the way for the rest of us, correcting old errors and pointing out new directions.”
“It was horrible,” their hostess told the two sisters. “He was carrying a briefcase full of rare Arabic newspapers and magazines, and they were all spattered with blood. I cried when his wife showed them to me — I, who have gone through hell with Carlo and never shed a tear. What a loss to the world of scholarship. And to think of what those sons of bitches in the department made him go through to get a lecturer’s rank!”
“What was he doing on a bus? Didn’t he own a car?”
“What car? He gave his all to his work and barely made a living. If it hadn’t been for Carlo, who managed to arrange a small fellowship for him last year, he would have been on welfare. You should have seen his apartment.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“Yosef Suissa.”
“An Orthodox Jew?”
“One of the decent ones.”
“The field has recently been flooded by such types.”
“Flooded?”
“Enriched.” Rivlin corrected himself while signaling his wife that the visit was over. Hagit, however, paid no attention and even agreed to a second cup of tea, as an antidote to the ghastly cake.
“So what do you say?” their hostess demanded. She looked so weary and distracted at this hour of the morning that Rivlin wondered whether Tedeschi’s first wife wasn’t making a comeback in her.
“About what?”
“About having a look at Suissa’s material. You never know. Perhaps you’ll find a spark of inspiration for your book.”
“In old poems and stories? No thanks. They’re not my line.”
“No, but they’re not far from it,” Tedeschi said. “You can spice your work up with them. Believe me, it’s not a bad recipe….” He winked again at the two sisters. “Not bad at all. At Cambridge, when I illustrated the Turks’ casual attitude toward state corruption with examples from popular nineteenth-century theater, it went down rather well.”
“But you’re asking me to look at things written in a local dialect that I would have a hard time translating.”
“Do as some of your colleagues do and find an Arab student to help you,” their hostess suggested. “Carlo always has a few talented young Arabs doing the drudgery.”
“What makes you think they’ll understand Algerian dialect?”
“They will if you give them a reason to — say, a research assistant-ship. They’ll use far-flung family connections to find out what they don’t know. Take a look at Suissa’s material. It’s a shame to let it go to waste.”
“But why not find someone in his own department?” Rivlin asked, trying to get out of it. “There must be someone who wants to carry on his work and publish. I’d just be muscling in.”
Hannah Tedeschi was relentless. “No one gives a damn about popular culture. They think it’s beneath them. They’d rather write about that blind Egyptian who won the Nobel Prize.”
“I thought he was deaf.”
“Deaf, blind, who cares? They don’t have Suissa’s feel for everyday life.”
“That’s enough talking,” Tedeschi told his wife. “Call Mrs. Suissa and tell her that Yochanan is on his way over now to take everything. She’s so swamped by all the papers her husband left behind that she’s liable to torch them in desperation.”
“But it’s Saturday….”
“Don’t worry about it. His wife is no longer a Sabbath observer. The religious one in the family was him. Look here, Yochanan. Listen to your moribund old professor. Do it. You know I’m your loyal friend, whatever our mutual reservations and recriminations. Take my advice. Don’t miss the chance to see what Suissa had. It has nothing to do with my jubilee volume. I couldn’t care less about that. It’s only making me sicker. Phone her, Hannah. As long as you’re already in Jerusalem, you might as well benefit from it….”
Rivlin felt a wave of the same affection that had moved him in the distant days of his doctoral studies, when he had sat for hours in this room under the strict but patient tutelage of the dedicated teacher who had pinned great hopes on him. Back then the smells from the kitchen came from the cooking of Tedeschi’s first wife, cooking that alone was sufficient evidence that she was losing her mind. He cast a questioning glance at Hagit and Ofra.
Hagit threw up her hands in cheerful surrender. “What do you have to lose?” she asked. Even his sister-in-law, who always minded her own business, nodded ever so slightly in agreement.
15.
SINCE MORNING SHE had been waiting under the carob tree at the geriatric home, a hundred meters from her old apartment in the neighborhood of Bet ha-Kerem. She had left the apartment twenty-five years ago to wander from one mental institution to another, either physically ill or else punishing herself with a Pirandellian, profoundly phantasmagorical madness that, alternately under and out of control, withstood the many assaults of electric shock and drugs. Her older sister, having attended her in her disturbance with anxious devotion, died and left two daughters to carry on. The elder of these took pains to keep in touch with her aunt writing from the remote lands she traveled in, while the younger and jollier one made sure, despite her own numerous obligations, to phone regularly and visit once a month. Deferring with a smile to the old woman’s many delusions — old and new alike — she kept reminding her of what no one else dared tell her, namely, that all things are permitted the insane except the abdication of love. And if their sick aunt truly loved her two nieces, she would bestow on them the gift of memory, telling them all they had known and forgotten, or had never known at all, about the dead.
Indeed, in recent years their aunt had begun to mine from her melancholy glittering diamonds forged in the darkness of time. With a renewed curiosity about the past, she had plunged to astonishing depths to retrieve these bright, hard nuggets. A first harbinger of this change was the sweetly ironic tone in which she took to speaking to Rivlin, the faithful driver who accompanied her niece to their meetings and sat in the shade of the trees by the front gate, reading a newspaper and fending off the mental patients seeking to approach him, until the time came to retrieve his wife, gently but determinedly, from the sick woman’s clutches. In the early years of her institutionalization, these appearances of his had so stricken her with fear that he had had to be instantly ejected. Slowly, however, her attitude yielded to a quiet resignation, which was in turn transformed, at first behind his back and eventually to his face, into a coquettish coyness. Hagit, encouraged, kept her aunt informed of all Rivlin’s activities, as though by dangling the bait of him before the old woman’s reawakening sense of humor she might lure the silken butterfly of sanity from its grim cocoon.