The judge glanced at her husband.
The salesman now swung into action. Inserting a thin, round pad into the vacuum cleaner, he ran the machine over the spotless crannies of their living room. He kept this up at length, changing the pads frequently before arranging them in a gray alluvial fan at the hastily withdrawn feet of the duplex’s tenants. Just look at the filth masquerading as cleanliness that the Kirby had unmasked! “You can imagine,” he said, “what your grandchildren must leave behind after they’ve been here for the weekend!”
Rivlin inched closer to his wife, feeling her warmth. He could feel old age creeping up on them both.
The ponytailed salesman mixed water and a fragrance in a small container and sprayed the couches with an aerosol attachment. Next he vacuumed the curtains and polished the parquet floor and asked to go upstairs to the bedroom. There, running the talented appliance over the bedspread and skimming the noduled mattress with its gleaming hulk, he removed from it yet another pad caked with a strange, white powder — the remains, he explained, of invidiously invisible mattress worms.
Rivlin glared at his wife, who seemed overcome by an inexplicable sorrow. Invited by the salesman to try out the machine and to take apart and put together its easy-as-pie components, she smiled demurely and volunteered her husband — who was soon vying to prove that he was as capable as the Hashemite royal house.
The salesman lauded the Orientalist’s quick grasp.
“Maybe you should hire him as your assistant,” Hagit suggested.
An hour later, as the ex-Border Patrol officer was repacking his equipment prior to departing, Rivlin told him morosely:
“All right. We understand the principle. We’ll think about it. But I want you to know that I’m devastated, because you’ve shown me that my home, which I always took to be clean, is a repository of filth. In the end we’ll have no choice but to spend a fortune on a machine that we’ll never use.”
“If you buy it,” the salesman reasoned, “why shouldn’t you use it?” Yet judging by his sly smile, such things had been known to happen.
7.
ON A QUIET Saturday morning, in a modest apartment, shaded by pine trees, whose living room was lined with books that no one read anymore, a paralyzed man sat silently in a wheelchair. Slender and erect, he wore an old blue suit with a red bow tie that was awry on his neck. Although the whites of his eyes had yellowed and faded, their blue pupils still shone with the bright chivalry of a judge who, years ago, had been compelled by moral scruples to take a purely fatherly and jurisprudential interest in a young intern with whom he had fallen in love. Even after her appointment to district judge, he had played the role of a stern teacher entrusted with her professional supervision. Now, in the methodical spirit of the German Jewry he sprang from, several low coffee tables, placed between a couch and some chairs, were set with refreshments. There were little dishes with squares of chocolate; silver bowls full of peanuts, pretzels, and petit fours; and, on an antique plate in the center of the table, a raisin cake sliced into quarters with a dollop of whipped cream by each piece. What you saw was what you got. Freedom of choice was coffee or tea.
Hagit, her cheeks hot, felt her heart go out to the old judge. While giving his veiny arm a squeeze, she seemed, in her distress at being a judicial minority of one, more in need of encouragement than he was. The former Supreme Court justice, however, though raising a yearning head toward her, could only move his lips sorrowfully, as if to say, Now, my dear friend, you’re on your own. All you can do is remember all that I’ve told you, because I will never say anything more.
This left the conversation to Granot’s wife, a slender, aristocratic woman of Yemenite extraction who had spent the last fifty years so immersed in Germanic kultur that — true freedom lying in obedience to the kategorischer Imperativ—she had practically become a dark-skinned German Jewess herself, though one tinkling with the antique silver Yemenite jewelry adorning her meticulous clothes. Refusing to be disheartened by her husband’s stroke, she had taken it upon herself to represent him and his opinions to the world and had even begun to talk with his old voice, including a trace of a German accent. Now, she was telling her visitors about the painting they had acquired at its full, undiscounted price.
“You, Professor, see puppies or jackals, and your wife sees little children. You think you are looking at a sad woman in black, and your wife thinks it’s a grotesque devil…. You never said it was grotesque? Pardon me…. Well, dear friends, the truth lies halfway between you. Granot intended to paint children, not puppies. But what makes you think, Mrs. Rivlin, that they’re being led by a devil? Really, I’m surprised at you. What would a devil be doing here? It’s their natural mother, a quietly tragic woman who has gathered her children from all over the world in order to bring them home. That’s why the painting is called The Return of the Little Ones.”
The paralyzed judge hung on the words of the woman speaking in his voice.
“Granot painted this wonderful work a year ago. Do you remember? You got out of bed that morning with the whole thing in your head. By noon the painting was finished. And it came out just as you wanted it to, didn’t it? That’s why it’s so moving and well done. Our friends have fallen in love with it and wish to buy it. Well, what do you say? Shall we let them have it?”
The Supreme Court justice tried spreading his hands in a vague gesture.
“You see?” the Yemenite told him. “What a pity you’ve stopped painting this past year.”
“He’s stopped painting?” Hagit exclaimed sadly. Her gaze clung steadfastly to the old judge’s wide-open blue eyes, which seemed unable to fathom why his old intern looked so troubled.
“Yes, yes,” the woman chided, her German accent growing stronger. “Granot has stopped painting. He just sits all day and does nothing. He makes no use of his time. Isn’t that so, Granot? You’ve become a frightful idler. That’s very bad. All day he sits looking at me instead of at his easel.”
A heartbreakingly guilty smile creased the silent judge’s face. Honest to a fault, he nodded to confirm his wife’s verdict while his eyes filled with large tears.
But the woman just went on chastising him. “Paint, don’t cry! Don’t you see how everyone loves your paintings?”
Back in their car, Hagit laid the unframed painting in the back. “This is a good time to put me to work,” Rivlin told her. “I’m in the mood to go to the courthouse and clean out your drawers. We can’t afford any more missed invitations.”
Yet no prospect seemed more dreadful to Hagit than having to go through her drawers, and her husband’s eagerness only heightened her reluctance.
“Next weekend,” she said, with a smile, as if she were doing him a favor. “Won’t you be in the mood next weekend?”
8.
THAT TUESDAY, midway through his introductory survey course in the large hall whose very air seemed jaundiced by long hours of lectures, the classroom front door opened slowly, and in came Samaher, wearing a black dress embroidered with little flowers and a white scarf wrapped around her head and shoulders.
Well, well, Rivlin thought with a streak of meanness: the pregnancy that never was is over. He watched his “research assistant” take a seat, her sudden appearance causing a stir among the Arab students, not a few of whom were her friends or relations. Had she recovered from her illness or simply run away from her mother?