“Where is the Arabic?” he asked, surprised by the poem’s playful tone.
This time too, however, there was only a translation.
“Tell me, Rashid, what’s going on here? Is Samaher subjecting me to Chinese water torture by dripping one poem at a time on me? And where are the stories?”
The young man’s sense of truth and justice was unshaken by Rivlin’s sarcasm. With a candid look that demanded credence, he swore that his cousin had read everything marked by the murdered scholar and even filled a copybook with her notes and summations. It was just that, being bedridden, she found it difficult to write. Her handwriting was so bad and full of spelling mistakes, in Arabic as well as in Hebrew, that she was embarrassed to let her professor see it.
“But this poem is perfectly legible.”
“That’s because I wrote it. The poems are easy. She learns the Arabic by heart, goes over it with her mother, puts it into Hebrew, learns that by heart too, and dictates it to me on Saturday when I have the day off.”
“But how long is this going to go on?” the sleepy Orientalist wanted to know. “Is she really pregnant?”
“So her mother keeps saying,” Rashid said again without indicating whether he believed it.
The messenger sat straight in his chair, the glass of water still untouched. He was, Rivlin thought, a devoted, sensitive young man. The coal black eyes were neither cunning, sardonic, nor obsequious.
“Well, what now?”
“Both Samaher and her mother think an oral exam would be best.”
“An oral exam?”
“Yes. She’ll tell you what’s in the stories, and you’ll write it down for your research. Dictating them to me in Hebrew would take too long.”
“I’ve had quite enough of this,” the professor snapped, though not in genuine anger. “Samaher and her lovely mother have gone bonkers. They think they can make a soft touch like me rewrite the rules of the university.”
Rashid, solemn, said nothing. Like a sorrowful but obedient disciple, he crossed his arms and waited for the professor to think better of it.
“So when will she come to take these orals of hers?”
“But how can she come?” Rashid spread his arms in amazement. “The doctor won’t even let her go to the bathroom. That’s why her mother wants you to come to us… to the village….”
“I should drive to the village?”
“Of course not. I’ll drive you. I’ll bring you back, too. Whenever you like. It could even be now. That’s what Samaher’s mother says.”
Why did Rashid keep bringing her into this? Did he suspect him of having a crush on the attractive woman who had cried in his office?
Rivlin glanced at the translated poem. Could so sophisticated a piece of free verse have been written in the Algeria of the 1940s, or was this a hoax concocted for his benefit in Samaher’s Galilee village? In either case, he had to retrieve the photocopies of Suissa’s texts before they disintegrated between the sheets of her bed… unless, that is, the promised spark of inspiration depended on direct contact with the rare originals returned to Jerusalem.
And yet the dawn parting from his wife, without even a definite reunion to look forward to, coming on top of a sleepless night that weighed on him like a sick, heavy cat on his shoulders, had turned him into such a passive, malleable, and perhaps even seducible creature that, instead of terminating his special arrangement with Samaher and demanding the material back, he sat drowsily contemplating her jet-colored intercessor, whose noble and refined manner reminded him of his younger son’s. Although sensing the professor’s bewilderment, Rashid did not avert his glance. Willing to put up with a reprimand but not a refusal, he cocked a guileless head. One might have thought, from the way he kept his gentle eyes on the Orientalist while awaiting a reply, that he had all of Araby behind him. He did not even turn to look when a key scraped in the door and the housekeeper, in tight jeans and high heels, made her bored appearance.
7.
WAS AGREEING TO his Arab driver’s suggestion to take along a blanket and two small pillows an early warning of the depth of the seduction? For although Rivlin protested that he never slept in cars, Rashid insisted on making a bed of the backseat for the comfort of the Jewish professor, who would travel “just like in an ambulance.”
Before turning onto the Northern Highway, the minibus entered a gas station on a side road. The station’s name appeared only in Arabic, the pennants decorating it were colored an Islamic green, and each driver was given a copper tray with Turkish coffee and a piece of baklava instead of the usual mudslinging Hebrew newspaper. Rashid handed these to his passenger. It was the holiday of Ramadan, and besides, he never felt hungry before evening.
“You’re right, it’s Ramadan,” Rivlin said, remembering that it was the month in which Muslims fasted by day and ate at night. “I would never have come today if I had realized that.”
“But why not, Professor? Why should Ramadan bother you? It’s a time when guests are especially welcome.”
The sleepless night, coupled with the infusion of morning slumber, had left him fuzzy-headed. He emptied the coffee cup, catching sight, as he threw back his head to drain the last drops, of the university tower in Haifa, a thin needle on the horizon.
“Still, Rashid,” he said, “tell me the truth. I need to know it before we reach the village. What’s wrong with Samaher? Is she depressed?”
Samaher’s cousin put his head in his hands, as if to think the matter through.
“Sometimes. But sometimes she’s happy and even sings songs.”
He took out a pocketknife and strode to a field behind the gas station. Finding a bush with blue flowers among the dry brambles, he deftly cut a few fresh branches and made a bouquet of them.
“You can give this to Samaher’s grandmother,” he said, with a twinkle. “We Arabs never give flowers. That’s why we’re always so glad to get them.”
The village lay silent, struck by a withering noon light. The minibus climbed a small hill and parked between the wrecks of two fifties pickup trucks, near which red Arab chickens of an obsolete stock were pecking at the ground. Rivlin, his head aching, stopped by a large, dusty fig tree, trying to remember something.
“Yes, the wedding was here,” Rashid said with a hint of melancholy. There was no telling whether his doleful tone had to do with the event itself or with its being over so soon. “We put all the Jewish guests by this tree. Your wife sat over there. She laughed all evening. We even talked about it afterward, how a woman could be a judge and laugh so much.”
“But these old trucks weren’t here then, were they?”
“They were, but we covered them with a tarpaulin. We spread olive branches on it and put the D.J. and his equipment on top of them.”
Here was the narrow lane down which Samaher’s wedding dress had rustled as she resolutely transferred her illness to her grandmother. In broad daylight it was a short, simple path. The black horse rubbing its head against the bars of the front gate was familiar, too.