The dreamer’s heart went out to the lamb. He would have liked to approach it and ascertain whether, as seemed to be the case from afar, it was unhappy in its metamorphosis. Yet fearful that it might flee in shame or misunderstanding, he knelt instead and threw it a stick to retrieve while clucking his tongue as though it were a dog or stray cat. This proved a miscalculation. The stick only frightened it, turning innocent anxiety to alarm. Rearing on its hind legs, the lamb broke away from its huddled companions and retreated to the hills, its little tail forlornly still.
14.
ALTHOUGH SO HARSH a dream could not but put an end to the final movement, it did not detract from the splendor of the lengthy nap wrested from the no-man’s-time of afternoon. Even if it had only lasted four hours, like the legendary sleep of the first prime minister, its exotic intimacy made it seem twice as long.
He urinated and washed up, and unbolted the door in the hope of finding at least one Arab waiting worriedly for him in the hallway. There was no one. His long nap seemed to have made him one of the family. The old grandmother, whose open door he now passed, was seated beside the grandfather, she listening to Arabic music on the radio while he dozed on a divan beneath a wall clock. She nodded to Rivlin as though he were an old friend and nothing could be more natural than a reputable Jewish professor wandering around her house at twilight. Pointing to the clock, she said:
“Iza inta ju’an, ya eini, il-akl hadr. Ka’yahudi, inta sumt an kul hatayak uhatay eiltak. Lakin iza inta m’samim innak t’kamel, lazim ti’raf inno bad akal min sei’ah b’tiji il-kunbila taba Sadal.”*
The air flowing through the open window had a clear, dry Palestinian tang such as he remembered from his childhood. Grinning with curiosity, he let himself be lured into the old couple’s room as if he were their middle-aged son.
“Il-kunbilah taba Sadal? Shu hada?”†
“In British times there was an old cannon in the next village that fired each day at the end of the fast. Now Israel lets the soldiers of the southern Lebanese Army across the border shoot a mortar shell. We eat on Lebanese time.”
The old lady chortled toothlessly.
“My mother won’t eat on Ramadan unless something goes boom first,” laughed Afifa, entering the room in a large apron that smelled tantalizingly of cooking. “How are you, Professor? Are you sure you’ve slept enough? A person might have thought you had missed three nights’ sleep, not just one. Is that how worried you were about your wife’s trip?”
He nodded amiably, feeling a profound serenity, in a world that was not of this world. Even his hunger, no longer nagging, was pleasantly vague. Could the pill against “feeling blue” have given him a high?
“Where is Rashid?” he asked. “Has he finished photocopying?”
“Long ago. Don’t worry, the material is ready. We’ll call him the minute you want to leave. Bas leysh bidak t’safir? Ma n’halik.* Absolutely not. We’re sitting down to our holiday dinner in an hour, and you’re one of the family. And the bathtub is free if you want to use it. Samaher just bathed and is waiting to finish the story of Ahmed ed-Danaf and the sick horse. She has other stories for you, too. One is about an absurd man who killed two Frenchmen, ‘El-Gharib El-Mahali.’ How would you translate that?”
“The Local Stranger.”
“Exactly.”
Was he, then, personally and professionally, on the verge of a long-craved intimacy with the Arabs, one much greater than the merely literary one proposed by his old mentor in Jerusalem, an intimacy that would prolong the day into a stirring, eventful night? And was the freedom of knowing that his movements could not be tracked by his wife so seductive that he was prepared to abandon himself to it? Not that these Arabs were the same as the Algerians whose crisis of identity had hobbled his computer for over a year. Yet surely the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance was right about their belonging to “one world,” a world sometimes cruel and sometimes indulgently hospitable.
And indeed, in that case why not bathe in the tub remembered fondly from the night of Samaher’s wedding and now put at his disposal by a ruddy and buxom Arab woman redolent of holiday aromas, who had taken a course of his twenty years ago? Let the distinguished Jewish Orientalist be pampered by the same Arabs who brimmed with grievances against the crimes of Western colonialism and frustrated him by their refusal to accept any responsibility for their condition.
“Inti bidal’ini aktar min zojti,”* Rivlin said to Afifa, the white lie making him blush.
“Kif ti’dar el-maskini t’dal’ak, iza-ma kan andeha wa’t?”†
Touched to hear this unexpected defense plea for the judge uttered in a remote Arab village, he happily went off to bathe, accompanied by two towels, a bottle of fragrant liquid soap, and a young girl, who had been appointed to guard his privacy outside a bathroom door that would never, so it seemed, be locked or bolted.
15.
HE SOAKED IN the foamy water, examining the ceramic tiles on the walls with the expertise of a man who had recently been through the construction of a new apartment. The truth was trite but sad: the Arab workers did a better job of tiling in their own homes than they did in the homes of their Jewish customers. And why, really, should this be surprising?
He dried himself with both towels and dressed. As the sun went down to the smells of dinner from the kitchen, he stepped into Samaher’s room, reinvigorated and shiny-faced, to continue her “term paper,” which now seemed to him a marvelous invention.
Her own bath, to judge by an empty washtub in a corner and a puddle of water on the floor, had taken place in her room. Though she had changed to a brighter robe, she looked pale, worn, and anything but refreshed. Propped exhaustedly on a large pillow, she suggested — perhaps because her hair was now done up in two braids — a suffering child more than an M.A. student. Her sorrowful eyes reproached him for abandoning her for his monumental sleep in the middle of her story.
“Where’s Rashid?” he asked of his now indispensable sidekick.
“Why do you need him?” she answered sullenly, as if to erase the smarting passion of being swept up in her cousin’s arms.
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
“I can tell him to come right away.”
“There’s no hurry.”
Through the large window, a last, vivid drop of sun sizzled in the cleft between two distant hills.
“Don’t worry, Professor. He’ll take you home whenever you want.” There was a new, hurt note of disappointment in her voice.
“But there’s no hurry, Samaher,” he repeated serenely, seated in the armchair by the open window, through which he caught a first whiff of the dialogue of hot coals and meat. “I’m not worried in the least. I’ve already caught a bad case of nirvana from all of you.”
She reddened at what seemed another of his anti-Arab digs. Looking tense and miserable, she wriggled anxious legs beneath the blanket.
“Well, what happened in the end with Ahmed ed-Danaf?” he asked, like a teacher encouraging a stuck pupil. “Did he save the horse he poisoned?”
“Do you really want to know?” Her eyes flashed with resentment. “I thought you found it so silly that it put you to sleep.”