The Liberated Bride (13 page)

O
N
T
UESDAY EVENING
, at seven-thirty, half an hour before he and Hagit were due to leave for a concert at the Israel Philharmonic, Rivlin's sister phoned and asked to speak to Hagit about a strange
dream she had had that day. Ever since attending a course in forensic psychology a few years previously, Hagit had liked interpreting dreams.

“Not now, Raya,” Rivlin told her. “We have a concert, and Hagit isn't dressed yet. And Ofra hasn't decided what to wear, either. . . .”

“All I need with her is five minutes. Otherwise, I'll forget the dream.”

“It can't be that important if it's so forgettable.”

“Two minutes . . .”

“Sorry. I know how long your two-minute conversations can last. I'm tired of arriving at concerts after all the parking spaces have been taken.”

“Two minutes, I promise,” his sister pleaded. “She doesn't have to interpret it. Let me just tell it to her so that she can think about it during the concert.”

“Hagit dreams her own dreams during concerts. I'd be a rich man if I received a refund for every concert she's fallen asleep at.”

“Just a few words.”

“You can tell your dream to me. I'll pass it on to her.”

“My dreams crumble when I tell them to you.”

“Just the gist of it. I'm already dressed. For a small fee, I'll even be your analyst. Who can understand your childhood neuroses better than I?”

But his sister did not want to tell him her dream or have him for her analyst. As children they had fought frequently, just like their parents. Only after his marriage was their relationship put on a more even keel. And since Hagit's feelings of guilt toward her childlessly globe-trotting sister had room in them for Rivlin's sister too, she had let herself become Raya's confidante, the sole person capable of shaking golden coins from the pockets of her dreams. Now, overhearing the conversation, she picked up the receiver.

“I'm warning you,” Rivlin whispered, removing the covers from their king-size bed and folding back the blanket for a quick plunge after the concert.

“Don't be so mean. Give me a minute with her. We've never come late for a concert yet. . . .”

And so Rivlin's sister, a divorcée of many years who never talked about her ex-husband, told Hagit of a short, powerful dream about him. In it she was holding a baby, a little toddler, while imploring her former partner in English, “
Please, don't hurt the child.
” He merely laughed, climbed into his big car, and drove off while leaving her standing in the street. Still clutching the little boy, she hurried off to the house of her ex-husband's old friends to look for some baby food. Yet all they gave her was half a glass of milk, and she ran desperately back out to the street, boarded an empty bus, and sat the hungry baby beside her.

That was the whole dream. As he had feared, Raya now wanted it interpreted on the spot.

“Your brother is having a fit,” the half-naked judge told her. “Offhand, though, I'd say that the baby is you.”

“Me?”

“Well, parts of you.”

“Parts . . . ?” The idea both delighted and alarmed her. “What parts?”

“Let's talk about it in the morning.”

T
HE CONCERT WAS
sold out. The only seats available were onstage. Rivlin, feeling sorry for his pale-faced sister-in-law, who was still agonizing over her dress for the wedding, gallantly surrendered his place beside Hagit and went to sit behind the orchestra.

The program was structured around several unknown young soloists making their debuts and consisted of a number of shorter works and several excerpts from longer ones—an approach that Rivlin found annoying. Apart from being opposed on principal to violating the aesthetic integrity of a musical composition, he feared that the Philharmonic's renowned Indian conductor might try to fit so many young talents into the evening that it would become unduly long. These fears were dispelled by a quick glance at the program notes, which listed the length of each piece; after totaling them up and adding time for applause and intermissions, he concluded that
the concert would end on schedule. Leaning back in his seat, he cast a benevolent glance at the overflow audience on the stage, which was young and unpretentiously dressed. Several rows ahead of him sat a man with a ponytail. For a moment he thought it might be his ex-daughter-in-law's husband. Come to think of it, though, the ponytail was as gray as the coat of a mouse.

He gazed down at the auditorium, looking for the wife who must already be missing him. Would she notice him and wave back? Or feel comfortable enough beside her sister to doze off? Lately she was suffering from fatigue, no doubt from the stress of a long closed-door trial that she was barred from talking about. At concerts, plays, and even movies she was soon so entangled in the cobwebs of sleep that were it not for her husband, who made sure to wake her at critical junctures, and especially before the end, she would not have known what she had sat through.

The opening soloist was a Russian immigrant, a tall, blond adolescent with a self-effacing manner, who played the first movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Rivlin, though fancying himself a lover of music, did not pretend to judge the caliber of the performance. Still, he had a melancholy tendency to doubt the staying power of young prodigies. “Time alone will show what will become of them,” he liked to grumble as they took their bows. “Maybe someone knows what happened to last year's prodigies. Where are they now?”

Deep down he knew that his cynicism was caused by his worry for his stranded son. The night before, they had talked briefly with Ofer on the phone, after which Rivlin had insisted on going over every word of the conversation with Hagit. Resigned to Ofer's telling his mother that he knew of Hendel's death, he was surprised when it went unmentioned. Now, as a long orchestral prelude coaxed the violin from its silence, he wondered whether this was a sign of indifference to his ex-wife or of a secret pact with the father fighting to rescue him, even at the price of more pain, from the tyranny of an old wound.

The sentimental music of the Russian composer—who, the program notes said, was almost driven to suicide each time the critics panned his work—made its sure, swift way toward the final cadenza. From his vantage point behind the orchestra, Rivlin could see the
back and shoulders of the young violinist, quivering with feeling. As his anxiety for his son, an exile mourning his marriage in a distant place, mounted in tandem with the trumpets, flutes, horns, and strings, he sought out the reassuring presence of his wife. Yet the passionate movements of the dark-skinned conductor, his baton pointed from time to time straight at Rivlin, as if he too were expected to contribute a few bars, hid Hagit from sight.

The orchestra fell silent. Having run out of both patience and emotion, the Russian violinist attacked the cadenza with a coldly calculated technique, as if wishing to have done with it as quickly as possible. Now that the musicians seated next to him were idle, Rivlin studied them for a clue to what they thought of the young soloist. Yet he could not tell whether they were even listening. The members of the wind section, busy cleaning their instruments, were whispering and smiling to each other with an old rapport. No doubt they had heard and would hear this concerto dozens of times, and this performance did not appear to have been one of the more impressive. From time to time they glanced at the conductor, whose limp, motionless stance, head down and hands at his sides, cleared the way for the yearning husband to search once more for his wife—only to look away in confusion upon discovering that he was staring at the wrong woman.

“
You have to respect his bounds. You have no right to trespass, not even in your thoughts.
”

“
Not even in my thoughts? What's wrong with you? How can anyone control such painful thoughts?
”

“
You can if you want to. And if you can't, at least keep them to yourself. Be careful. Ofer isn't you. You don't own him. You have no right to interfere in what happened between them. It can't do any good.
”

“
But time is passing. . . .
”

“
Don't exaggerate. It's only four years.
”

“
Five! Five! What makes you say four?
”

“
It doesn't matter. He'll find someone. A woman who suits him better. Stop conjuring up old ghosts. Let him breathe.
”

Several months after Ofer's sudden divorce, their son had stored his possessions in their apartment and gone to Paris to study hotel
and restaurant design, a field he had become interested in after his marriage. That was more than four years ago. He had worked as an apprentice, without pay, for various architects, most of them Jews, while auditing classes at a cooking academy in order to “get the feel,” as he put it, of the relationship between a kitchen and its diners. Meanwhile, he supported himself by working as a night security guard at the Jewish Agency in the 17th arrondissement—a situation shortened by his parents, in response to casual inquiries, to “Ofer works for the Jewish Agency in Paris.”

The conductor lifted his baton and spurred the orchestra, as if it were a pack of hunting dogs, to race to the end of the movement. Rivlin did not join in the applause. Aloof, he watched the flustered soloist take his curtain call and vanish into the wings. Near the exit, by the kettledrum, were some empty seats. Rivlin decided to move to one of these, so as to improve his view of both the soloists and his wife.

The two sisters were chatting happily. Hagit, noticing his new location, seemed pleased that he would be visible for the rest of the concert. She waved, then signaled him with a smile to comb his hair.

The Tchaikovsky interpreter was followed by a parade of young female performers, most of them daughters of Philharmonic musicians. The first was a pianist with eyeglasses. Her long silver dress trailed past him across the floor while he read about her, her studies, and her accomplishments in the program, which announced that she was to play Rachmaninoff's
Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.
Alas, now all he could see, from his vantage point by the bald kettledrummer, were two bare shoulders and a white back with silver ribbons. What, he wondered, was the musical significance of such décolletage? Was there a connection between the low-necked dress and the rhapsody? Were this pianist and the tender young soloists who followed her—bare of shoulder, flowing of hair, alluring of bosom, slyly slit at the leg—offering their carnal bodies in compensation for possible lapses in their renditions, for notes misplayed or omitted, or was this their consolation prize to a sense of sight forced to play second fiddle to the sense of hearing? And what, then, of the performers with
pimples and bad complexions? Of what use were they to an audience promised visual as well as audial pleasures?

As the father of two sons, he had been deprived, once the wife of the elder one left him, of paternal access to young maidenhood. Now, as a steady procession of it passed before him, nubile, fluid, and flushed with excitement, a violin, clarinet, oboe, cello, or flute in its bravely vestal hands, he could not listen to the second concerto of Karl Maria Von Weber or to Ravel's
Les Tsiganes
or Chausson's
Poeme,
without an old sorrow welling up in him. Borne on the alternating waves of the music, his fictional confession in the hotel garden throbbed in him like a real disease.

This time the applause found him ready to join in, and he exchanged smiles with the bald kettledrummer, who had crossed his sticks in the symphonic gesture of approval for a job well done. Yet as he sought to leave the hall at the concert's end, the Orientalist's way was blocked by the ushers, who had shut the doors to prevent the early-to-bed-and-to-rise Haifaites from rushing for the exits.

There was a surprise finale. Never since he and Hagit had taken out their Philharmonic subscription could Rivlin remember such a thing. At the special request of the conductor, a musician rose and asked the audience to remain seated. As much as he loved the local musical scene, the Indian maestro had not forgotten his native land—which, poor, vast, and suffering, had young talents, too, who deserved a hearing. With a sharp wave of the baton, an Indian lad was thrust upon the stage. A fat, bespectacled ten-year-old in a baggy black suit, he stepped forward with a little violin that reminded Rivlin of the instrument once bought for him by his mother, who had dreamed of raising another Yehudi Menuhin.

The solemn boy, looking more like a despondent dwarf than a child prodigy, paid no attention to the applauding audience. Like a well-trained baby elephant, he took his place beside the smiling maestro, who patted him lovingly, as if reminded of his own self fifty years earlier. Leaving the orchestra to its own devices, the big Indian put the little one through his paces, leading him gently and attentively down the enchanted paths of Mendelssohn's First Violin Concerto—paths that
would take him assuredly Westward if only he remained a true son of the East.

Y
O'EL, UNLIKE HIS WIFE
, chose to arrive on a Saturday, thus giving the judge the pleasure of an airport reunion. Invoking recent precedent, the Rivlins decided to detour first to Jerusalem, where Hagit and Ofra's old aunt was impatiently awaiting a visit from her nieces—especially from the fragile émigré, whose Third World peregrinations she had faithfully followed from the inner sanctum of her little room in a geriatric institution. And as long as they would be in the capital anyway, Hagit said, why not recoup the chance, lost the week before, to succor that dubious invalid Professor Tedeschi, now home from the hospital? The judge was never averse to the lavish praise that the illustrious polymath was sure to bestow on her.

Since family meetings in Jerusalem had a way of unfolding with an inner rhythm of their own that made their outcome difficult to foresee—especially when they involved two sisters eager to reminisce about their dead parents with an old aunt who was hard to stop once she got started—it was decided to put the sick call first, which would make it possible to cut short the visit to the aunt with the imperative of setting out for the airport. And so, on a crisp, sky blue Saturday morning, the three travelers were admitted to the Tedeschis' apartment by the translator of Jahaliya poetry, who shook a stern head at them as if to say: “Although you may find us at home and not in the hospital, don't delude yourselves for a moment that our afflictions have passed, much less that they are—the thought of it!—imaginary. On the contrary, the doctors' refusal to face the facts only makes matters worse.” Introduced to Ofra, she gave her a bitter smile, satisfied with this new addition to the anxious circle of her husband's well-wishers, before leading them into the old living room into which, thirty-two years previously, a young instructor had brought his girlfriend, then in the army, for the approval of his academic mentor, the sound of whose slippers was now heard as he came padding from an inner room.

The flame red color of Tierra del Fuego that Rivlin had noted in Tedeschi's cheeks had faded to the ruddy suntan of an Alpine skier, and the hospital pajamas had been replaced by a pair of old corduroy pants. Only the pajama top, flecked with medicinal stains, was unchanged. Tedeschi's skinny arms, proudly bearing the yellow marks of the infusion needles, protruded from the sleeves. He entered the room slowly, ignoring his old student and making straight for Hagit, who kissed him warmly on both cheeks and handed him a bouquet of flowers. Bowing slightly to Ofra, he asked Hagit, with ironic pathos:

“To what do I owe the privilege of Your Honor's coming all this way just to see me?”

“Not just,” Rivlin corrected him. “Also.”

“Come, come, Carlo,” Hagit said, with a smile. “Don't you think you're worth a trip to Jerusalem?”

The old polymath shrugged genuinely skeptical shoulders and sank into a large armchair that had slightly deformed itself to accommodate his shape. The translatoress, on guard lest her husband stray from the subject of his medical condition, thus collaborating with the enemy, who made light of it, kept an irritable eye on him.

“He looks much better than he did last week,” Rivlin told her. Sarcastically he added, “He must be in training for the conference at the Dayan Center later this month.”

The Jerusalem scholar, while regarding Rivlin's two women with approval, dismissed the conference with a disdainful wave and began to cough with gusto, the phlegm rattling so loudly in his chest that Ofra winced in her corner. He winked, still without looking at Rivlin, and declared:

“Who cares about that conference in Tel Aviv? Unless, that is, you'll be presenting something new there that I owe it to myself to listen to. . . .”

“I'm afraid,” the visitor from Haifa replied glumly, “that I have nothing new to present.”

“Those Tel Avivans just want to make a splash. I've informed them that I'll have to feel better than I do now before I give them the benefit of my latest insights.”

The old professor modestly shut his eyes.

“Then you're considering giving a paper?” Rivlin, out of sorts, glared at Hagit, who had insisted on this visit.
You see?
his expression seemed to say.
Why bother when it's all just a big act?

“What paper?” Hannah Tedeschi protested, rallying to the side of the man's illness. “Carlo is fooling himself if he thinks he'll be back on his feet in two weeks. The only conference he'll attend will be about the results of his tests.”

“Rubbish,” Tedeschi murmured, glancing from the wife fifteen years his junior to his ex-student, the pitiable professor from Haifa. “What's the matter with you? Don't tell me your book is still bogged down. Can't you throw the conference some juicy little bone, something heartwarming about the Algerian psychosis?”

“I have no bones to spare,” Rivlin replied, with a hostile air. “You know me. I don't need to go to conferences just to remind the world of my existence. If I have nothing to say, I say nothing.”

Tedeschi shut his eyes again and nodded in vague confirmation.

“But you've been working on that material for years!” exclaimed their hostess, distressed not for the conference in Tel Aviv, but for her husband's jubilee volume. “Don't tell me you can't get a single article out of it!”

“One can always toss something off, Hannah. But you, of all people, who work so hard and have only three or four poems to show for it at the end of the year, should understand the difficulty of producing something solid that will withstand the test of time. I can't write about the fifties and sixties in Algeria, which were a period of vision and hope, without taking into account the insane terror going on now. A scholar with some integrity doesn't just closet himself with old documents and materials. He reads the newspapers and connects the past to the present. It's his job to show that today's developments have their roots in yesterday's.”

“It's hopeless,” Hagit said with a smile, recrossing her legs for the benefit of the old polymath, who, though wheezing a bit, was listening raptly. “I'm married to a man who is convinced that everything has a logical reason. He can't fall asleep at night until he finds it.”

“Tea or coffee?” asked a chagrined Hannah Tedeschi.

The two sisters chose tea. The unkempt house and the state of its
upholstery suggested that the milk in the fridge might not be fresh. The professor from Haifa, knowing the Tedeschis better than the women did, asked for brandy, hoping it might disinfect any dirty glass given him.

Tedeschi wagged a half-threatening, half-approving finger. “He's right,” he said of Rivlin, as though to justify having considered him his successor. “We must never write about the past as if the present didn't exist. On the contrary, we have to look for the hidden symptoms of impending disorder even before it breaks out. Historical research is like prostate cancer: we need a blood test to detect the antibodies that signal the malignancy still contained in one little gland, before it invades the entire body. We must measure both kinds of cholesterol, the good and the bad, to determine the secret relationship that blocks the blood vessels and leads to a sudden heart attack. There are subtle signs that show up in newly coined speech, in imaginative combinations that occur only to poets and novelists. And at the same time, we must not be taken in by mere decadence, by the whiners and complainers who speak only for themselves.”

Rivlin's head began to droop. He was familiar with the latest theories about the tendency of art and literature to signal social transformations. Yet all the studies concocted from such ideas, unless made solid by government protocols, political declarations, and legal and institutional decisions, were too frothy to merit a response.

“Yochi has no time for novels,” Hagit announced. “He says life is too turbulent.”

She was enjoying her visit with the hypochondriac so much that, forgetting to refuse the grayish slab of cake placed before her, she bit politely into it and even praised it. But yet the translatoress, well aware of her shortcomings in the kitchen, shrugged off the hypocritical compliment, while turning impatiently to the recalcitrant Rivlin.

“Surely you could write something about a poem or two.”

“Only if translated by you,” Rivlin warmly answered the tense, severe woman, whose blue eyes, magnified by thick spectacles, were the same as those of the mischievous student he had attended classes with back in the sixties. Knowing it would give her pleasure, he again recited Al-Hajaj's grand soliloquy, this time in Arabic.

“But what,” he lamented, “would the know-it-alls say if I used a wonderful poem written fifteen hundred years ago to explain the murders of terrorists today?”

“Then choose a modern poem. Something hot off the press.” Tedeschi sounded as if he were running a fast-food stand. “Listen, Rivlin. We have something authentically new for you. Hannah, tell him about that friend of yours . . . the poor fellow who was killed. . . .”