And yet he was determined to hold the line and not wake up. As though rising to the challenge, he now stripped off his underpants and surrendered the last fraction of himself to the accommodating bed. Lying naked between the sheets and under a light blanket, he recalled the case of a Haifa accountant, a recent widower sent to audit the suspicious books of a Galilean township not far from Mansura. Entering the house of the town council’s treasurer, the accountant had soon found himself immersed, not in the books, but in the bed of the man’s youngest daughter, in which he fell fast asleep.
And yet this accountant was a public servant who had nodded off on the job among Jews, whereas Rivlin, though no widower, was his own master and among Arabs. Why not, then, doze a little longer in the bed of this young man the age of his eldest son while delving in its sheets for his old dream of tasting the essence of Araby? Curling up like a fetus beneath the blanket, therefore, he took firm possession of the pillow, but his thoughts, slipping from his grasp, dragged him back to Ofer’s dawn rebuke. Surprisingly, he felt no pain or resentment. If anything, his position had been strengthened. If both son and ex-daughter-in-law had been truthful enough with each other to be nasty, the venom of the past retained its potency, and there were boundaries to be crossed.
Thus it was that, in this Galilean village, in this cool stone house, the thick walls of which muffled all superfluous sound, Rivlin, while continuing patiently to pursue the fluttering nymph of sleep, reassured himself that he had been right to overrule his wife, and even to risk her ire, by forcing a confrontation between two young people who had agreed too lightly, as if they were all alone in the world and responsible to no one, to separate, five years ago.
He knew how infinitesimal was his influence over his ex-daughter-in-law, now remarried and about to give birth, and even over his distant son, who, though suffering, refused to concede injury or accept help. Still, he was not prepared to forego the understanding that every parent has a right to demand. How strange that here, in this far corner of the country, secluded in willful sleep in a remote Arab village, his desire to know remained as great as ever, so that he seemed to hear his hosts encouraging him as they moved silently from room to room. “Keep it up, Professor,” their inaudible voices said. “Don’t give in. Here, among us Arabs, you can bathe in the true river of time.”
And so, confident that time would continue to flow from the underground springs of Mansura, Rivlin curled up once more to catch the nymph of sleep in his bosom. And since Samaher’s cousin had left no dream for him, he created a nude apparition of his own and made love to himself.
13.
YET ANOTHER HOUR passed in symphonic slumber. Young and old, the members of the household kept as silent as if the visitor were not Samaher’s professor from Haifa but the Caliph of Baghdad in person. Awakening for some reason at the end of the third movement more exhausted than at the end of the second, Rivlin realized that it was only polite to get over his ill-mannered sleeping sickness, for which his insomnia of the night before was but a pretext, one that had unleashed an ancient weariness that must have been handed down from his earliest progenitors.
He rose, switched on the bed light, and studied the space around him. A photograph of Rashid stared down at him from the wall opposite the bed. The messenger looked younger and sat on a horse while gazing into the distance. Prior to dressing, Rivlin folded the sheets and tucked them into the pillowcase. Next, he folded the bare mattress and laid the blanket on top of it, as he had been taught to do in basic training before a furlough. Then he washed, soaping himself and rinsing his mouth with toothpaste to freshen up before rejoining the Arabs.
It was a pity, he thought, that he had not managed to dream a single dream of his own in the intimate atmosphere so generously provided him, now lambent with the soft, coppery light of a village afternoon astir with the shouts of children. Limply, he sat down at a small, old-fashioned secretary covered by a plastic map from Beirut showing the countries of the Middle East in bright colors. The State of Israel, though included, had been shrunk to the borders of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution, marked by a dotted line, like an illusion waiting to be dispelled. Above the little cubbyholes of the desk, each with its handsome brass handle, an empty artillery shell served as a vase for some artificial flowers, their dusty plastic blossoms inclined toward a gold-rimmed glass containing sharpened pencils in different colors. Behind the secretary, a bulletin board had bright notes from a memo pad pinned to it — reminders, scrawled in a clear, curling hand, of jobs for the minibus. The messenger, a tidy tenant, clearly liked his surroundings to be cheerful, as evidenced also by the lively book jackets with which he had covered not only the old Arabic novels, published in Beirut and Damascus, that stood in orderly rows on the shelves, but also two stray volumes of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and a book called The Israelis. A heavy black photograph album, on which some faded blue receipt books had been neatly stacked, contributed a more somber note.
Rivlin reached for the album, whose black binding reminded him of the condolence book in which several weeks ago he had written a sentence, no longer regretted by him, to a dead man. He was curious to see how Samaher’s family had looked when younger.
To his disappointment, however, the photographs were of no one he could recognize. No youthful Afifa or middle-aged grandmother stared out at him, not even Samaher as a child. There was only page after relentless gray page of an unfamiliar, dark-skinned woman with eyes that resembled Rashid’s. Her stony face was unsmiling and grave, both as a stiff young girl and as a married woman surrounded by sad, frightened-looking children — at first two or three of them, then four or five. In the background was a village, less picturesque than Mansura, sometimes seen from the courtyard of a run-down house and sometimes through two olive trees or from the window of a large kitchen full of big black pots. There were shots without it, too — one was of the woman standing by the bed of a sick-looking man in pajamas. Rivlin had the sense that this mysterious woman, with her solemn, frozen air, had been photographed not for her own sake but for some ulterior motive.
He sat leafing through the dreary album in the cheerful room of the bachelor tenant, amazed at the patience of the Arabs who, having laid an exhausted Jew to bed three hours before, hadn’t checked to see if he had risen from the dead. The Ramadan sun streaked the wall with a first, golden hope of day’s end as the fourth and final movement of the symphony began. Strong yet soft as fur, the tail end of his slumber now stroked the roots of his consciousness, from which ancient brainchildren, the fossil relics of his doctoral days, shuddered to life and carried him off to an Asiatic country of fertile steppes. A huge, open shed stretched to hills on the horizon. It was a giant barn, full of large, quiet cows with golden spots, the markings of a breed long thought to be extinct, which here, thousands of miles from the sea, were gathered in noble silence in a global, cosmic farm bristling with snow white udders whose bountiful milk fed the calves and lambs that descended, naked and shorn, from the hills. One of these, spotted from afar by Rivlin’s sharp eye, raised a cropped head: its expression, sad, suspicious, and lost, was his eldest son’s. Spying its dreaming father across the wide expanse, it wagged a stubby tail in recognition. Not only did it look like his son, it was his son, who had undergone, unknown to his parents, a horrid transformation that had compelled him to wander with a Turkish flock from Europe to Asia.