“I couldn’t have, Abba. I never said a word to you.”
“Well, then I suppose I assumed that’s what you would do,” Rivlin said, trying to keep his presence of mind. “Don’t forget that she was once your wife.”
There was a heavy silence behind the green door, on the other side of which an early-morning Parisian breeze was perhaps already blowing. Then came the unexpected query:
“Have you told Ima?”
“Told her what?”
“What you’ve been hiding from her. That you told me about Hendel even though she asked you not to….”
“Not yet.”
“But why not, Abba?” Ofer’s laugh was cynically provocative. “It’s not like you to act behind her back. In the end you’ll have to pay for that.”
“Don’t worry about what I’ll have to pay for. And don’t romanticize your parents. We’re good friends, not Siamese twins. Your mother is a judge. It’s her job to put a line through the past by passing sentence. I’m a historian. For me the past is a gold mine of surprises and possibilities.”
“A gold mine?” Rivlin heard a note of scorn. “A dunghill is more like it.”
“Dunghills have their surprises too.” He spoke softly, the telephone pressed to his ear like a rifle tracking a bird. “So? Did you get an answer from Galya?”
“What does it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t. But I had the feeling she wanted you to know about her father’s death. The first thing she asked when I came to the hotel was, ‘Does Ofer know?’”
Silence. Then:
“She did? How strange.”
“Yes. In the garden. Don’t get me wrong, Ofer. I’m angry at her, too. But it pained me to see her in such grief. She was devastated, desperate for comfort. Even from you.”
“Devastated. The poor thing….” There was vindictiveness rather than compassion in those words. “Yes, that’s what she said in her letter.”
“So she answered you.” He had bagged the bird with a single, well-aimed shot.
“Yes. With a very sad note. And a nasty one.”
“Nasty?” He gave a start, excited to hear the same word that had been used by Galya to describe his son’s condolence note. Perhaps so much nastiness between a couple that hadn’t spoken for five years held out hope for new understanding. In a soft but authoritative voice, like that with which he had soothed his son when, cranky and troubled, he had been wakened as a child by bad dreams, Rivlin asked:
“Nasty? Why? What did she say?”
“Never mind.”
“But what? Explain yourself. You can’t just leave it like that. Why don’t you ask her what she wants?”
That did it. Ofer suddenly let loose with a bitter grievance that became a harsh tirade.
“That’s enough, Abba! There’s a limit. What do you want from me? What are you trying to do? You should listen to Ima. She knows better than you what is and isn’t possible. You think you can call up ghosts and control them. When will you realize there are things that you don’t have to understand? There are things I don’t understand myself. Have some faith in me…. No, no,” he continued when his father sought to apologize. “Please, don’t. I know what you’re going to say. Listen to me for once. Ima is right. It’s annoying how uptight you are. You’re always poking at things. Well, poke at your Arabs, not at me. And don’t be angry. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But you should talk to Ima. You’re wrong about her. She doesn’t want to put a line through anything. She wants boundaries. And that’s something you’re a world champion at crossing and getting others to cross. I’m not blaming you. But it’s amazing how naive you can be despite all your education and knowledge. And when you start being stubborn about your naïveté, you become impossible….
“No, don’t,” he went on, not letting his father reply. “Please. Don’t tell me you’re worried. Worry can be real and smothering anyway. I’ve told you a thousand times, but you won’t listen…. Yes, I have! More than a thousand! Get it into your head that I know exactly how and why my marriage broke up. I may not have been happy about it, I may not have come to terms with it, but I know why it happened. I do! Do you hear me? I do! And if I decided to spare you what I know and keep silent for five years, don’t think I’m going to start talking now….
“No, no…. You mustn’t be upset. You know that I love you, even if I’m angry. But it gets harder all the time, believe me. Maybe that’s because I’m like you…. No, listen. Don’t start in on that again. I have to hang up. It’s nearly morning, and there are things to be done before opening the office. We’re on an emergency phone. Take my word for it, none of this has been an emergency for quite some time….”
6.
GHOSTS? HE LET the word run through his racing mind. Perhaps. But this ghost was pregnant. The fact that he had got Galya to answer, however “nastily,” an equally “nasty” letter from his son took the sting out of Ofer’s rebuke. He leafed through the morning paper, took off his clothes, and strode around the apartment while waiting for the Jacuzzi, installed as a prize for the ordeal of moving, to fill with foam that would consign the night to oblivion by caressing private parts never touched by others underwater. Once in the bath he shut his eyes and let its currents churn past him while imagining himself on the airplane with his wife. Soon he was swooning in the arms of the accursed slumber that had eluded his advances all night long. Here, of all places, water jetting all around him, his soul was at last trapped in its embrace…
It was thus that the coal-eyed messenger, arriving at the appointed hour, was required to demonstrate his faith by persisting in short, polite rings of the doorbell, reinforced at intervals by a thoughtfully civilized drumming of his knuckles in various rhythmic measures, to which the duplex responded with a stubborn silence. Indeed, had Rivlin surmised that the empty-handed Arab had come not to deliver but to fetch — and first and foremost, to fetch the Orientalist himself — he would never have risen in the end to throw out the love baby of sleep with the golden bathwater rippling in the early-morning light by running to the front door, dripping wet and blind, and petitioning abjectly from his side of it:
“Is that you, Rashid? You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a bit woozy because my wife had to catch a plane this morning and I didn’t sleep all night. Just leave Samaher’s material behind the big flowerpot and tell her I’ll get in touch.”
The Arab, however, had precious little material to leave. On the contrary, since it was too immaterial to be left behind a flowerpot, he was prepared to wait for the professor to make up for lost sleep and to return that afternoon or evening. “It makes no difference,” he declared from his side of the door. “The day is shot anyway.”
Rivlin felt a new burst of anger at Samaher, who was now enlisting her entire family to make a fool of him. Yet before he could tell the messenger to go shoot himself along with the day, it occurred to him that Suissa’s texts were still in Mansura. Slowly, the leaden crust on his eyes was dissolving. Rashid, he decreed, should return in an hour.
“Only an hour? Are you sure, Professor? You don’t want to sleep more than that?”
“An hour will be fine. Don’t make it any longer.”
An hour later, fully dressed and ready to cope, the slippers on his feet the only sign of his untimely abduction from the bosom of sleep, he sat in the living room looking irritably at the sable-skinned young man, who had refused all refreshment except for a glass of water, which had not touched his lips. On the table lay a Hebrew translation of a poem by a Berber from Oran, Hatib Abu el-Slah. Written in the early 1940s, it had been excellently translated by Samaher:
The world, sharp as a razor, / Slashes my cheeks. / Pursued by the law as though by a whale, / I amuse myself by making a paper star. / Fire worshipers gather around its light. / An Ethiope attendant fans me. / I rise on straws toward the windows, / Snuff out the honeymoon lamp, / And climb on the radiant beams of teeth / While incense ascends from me. / I sculpt an angel that is eaten like a raisin along the way, / Sit chewing on ice like a ball rolled off the playing field, / Travel on a reed, / And transport painted eggs, chicks, and kerosene. / In pants as short as an entry in a diary, / I jump to the stars through the glass panes of the observatory. / I unbutton my shirt, breathe the pure air, / And create a lion of stone / Infested by fleas and the secrets of the microcosm.