The Liberated Bride (2 page)

“Y
OU'RE FEELING BETTER.
”

It was a statement of fact, not a question, uttered with the precision with which she always diagnosed his moods. “You needn't be ashamed to admit that you're having a good time like the rest of us.”

Admitting enjoyment, however, did not come easily to him—certainly not at a wedding, even an Arab one. Instead, omitting his visit to Samaher's bathroom—an episode that might strike his colleagues as unintelligibly bizarre—he began to relate with an odd relish his encounter with their old student Afifa. His proposal to reinstate her in the department met with cautionary remarks from the two secretaries. He should not, they warned him, arouse false Arab hopes. The Law of Return did not apply to abandoned studies. Afifa would have to start again from scratch.

“Sit down,” his wife said good-naturedly. “Standing will get you nowhere.”

She was right. It was pointless to hope that remaining forlornly on his feet might persuade anyone to set out for home. The refusal of their Arab hosts to be insulted by a premature departure was only part of the reason. The Jews, too, had lost all sense of time and of the long ride back to Haifa still ahead of them. Basking in the oriental languor of the spring night, they were awaiting a final course of homemade ice cream. It did not escape him that his wife—for whom dessert, especially if it promised to be exceptional, was the raison d'être of every meal—had become the secret ringleader of a sweet-toothed conspiracy.

“I wish you'd sit down,” she chided him again. “Stop making us nervous. You're not the driver. No one is leaving this wonderful wedding without dessert.”

He sat, forced to yield to the popular demand for ice cream while attempting to follow, above the pounding of the rock music, an argument between the department head and some of the Arab students. Tensely but politely, the latter were listening to Akri's heated exposition of a theme that pained them despite its delivery in flawless Arabic—namely, that ever since the Arab world had been conquered by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, Arab intellectuals had failed to confront the inner dysfunction of their society. Rivlin knew well that Akri, a Jew of Middle Eastern origin, was gracious to his Arab students, whose weddings he attended and whose language he went out of his way to speak, although less from admiration for their culture than from despair of it. Not that he had an aversion to Arabs. He felt no contempt or disdain for them. He simply had arrived at what he believed to be a scholarly conclusion: that they could never understand—let alone respect, desire, or implement—the idea of freedom. This was a theory, which Akri supported with an odd and astonishing assortment of facts morbidly assembled from the gamut of Arab history, that Rivlin firmly rejected. It smacked to him of racism, and he scoffed vehemently at it whenever it was mentioned by his colleagues. And yet tonight, whether because it fed or was fed by his own gloomy associations, he, too, felt Akri's despair, felt it to the point of paralysis. He sat there silently, one hand on the shoulder of his wife as she awaited her dessert.

The Arab students from the department, however, having listened respectfully to a man who was both their guest and their academic senior executive, were running out of patience, especially since they had been joined by other students who neither knew Akri nor needed to defer to him. Akri, continuing to deride the Arabs' history in an impeccable display of their language, was now surrounded by a shocked circle of listeners. The prospect of a row hung in the soft, mild air and threatened to spoil the gesture of their coming. Just as Rivlin, a full professor, was about to pull rank on Akri and nip the quarrel in the bud, there was a flurry of excitement. A chilled, glittering serving bowl was placed on the table while crystal dishes and golden spoons were handed out. How, Rivlin wondered as he tasted his first spoonful of the ice cream, could this remote little village, a
bastion of chickens and donkeys, have produced such a magnificent last course, so lavishly creative in its flavors and deliciously chewy in its texture that he had to keep an eye on his ravenous wife, who had put on not a little weight in recent years? Not that this bothered him. He liked her company in any shape or form.

D
ESPITE THE HOUR
, it seemed entirely natural to Hagit, halfway home between Amihud and Shfar'am, to ask the Arab driver to stop by an illuminated greengrocer's stand, where she talked the two secretaries, as well as two young teaching assistants who had taken a fancy to her, into some late-night shopping, as if, Rivlin reflected, saddened to bid her Arab hosts good-bye, she were determined to bring home as a memento their freshly picked cucumbers, eggplants, squashes, and strawberries. His protests unavailing, he remained seated on the bus, boycotting the proceedings while regarding with amazement the sleeping Ephraim Akri, after his diatribe slumbering so sweetly that not even the sudden stilling of the motor could awaken him. Irritable and weary, he watched his wife circulate eagerly in the bluish light of a kerosene lamp. Several large dolls dangling from a thatched roof suggested idols in an ancient Canaanite temple. There she goes again, he thought angrily. Once more she was witlessly letting some shrewd merchant sell her a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that would end up rotting in the refrigerator unless he ate them all himself.

A car drove up. Two young women climbed out and joined the midnight shopping spree. Despite his desire to intervene and put an end to it, the sight of the yellowish fog from a nearby gas station, into and out of which cars were pulling busily, had an immobilizing effect on him. Who would be left to rise early in the Jewish state, he wondered, if the Arabs, too, had begun to burn the midnight oil? His wife, meanwhile, having struck up a conversation with the two newcomers, added her spruce legs to theirs in another tour of the pagan greengrocery. The memory of the hale old grandmother sucking on the snake head of her narghile heightened his bile. How had he ever agreed to such a wasted evening? And especially when weddings, even
of close family and friends, were becoming increasingly painful to him. Had he and Hagit stayed home tonight, they surely would have made the love that had disappointingly eluded them all week. And tomorrow he was expected to vacate his study for ten days in order to make room for Ofra, his sister-in-law from abroad, who would be staying with them until her husband joined her and they moved to a hotel. His prospects for the next week and a half were slim. The evenings without Hagit would be long, and the mornings with her short, not because she was attached to her only, elder sister by twin strands of love and guilt, but also because there would be no chance for him to make love to her while they were all together under one roof. A single item of Ofra's clothing in the next room, even a pair of her shoes, was enough to banish all thought of sex from Hagit's mind.

R
IVLIN'S BOYCOTT
was dealt with by the simple expediency of having the greengrocer bring Hagit's bulging bags to the minibus and arrange them there carefully. “Here you are, Your Honor,” he declared, having discovered who she was from the two lady passengers—recent law-school graduates entranced by their unexpected encounter with a district judge. Perhaps aware that, like all Arabs, he would sooner or later end up in court himself, whether in the dock or on the witness stand, the man seemed in awe of the genial magistrate who had chosen this time of night to patronize his stand.

“You should know better than to make friends with lawyers,” Rivlin scolded her. “Don't you realize they're out to make a dishonest man of every judge?”

“Man, my dear,” Hagit repeated with a grin. “You said so yourself. Not woman.” Producing a small comb from her handbag, she invited him, as if the night's entertainment were just beginning, to run it through his hair. “Don't worry,” she assured him. “I know where the bounds are. And I make sure others do, too.” She could only have been referring to judicial bounds, because the minibus hadn't gone far before she was opening the paper bags at her feet to probe their contents. She popped into her mouth several cherries whose pink
globes must have reminded her of the munificent nipples she had sucked when she was a child, and deposited the pits carefully in the palm of her hand.

It was past midnight. The first guests to have been picked up by their driver, they were the last to be dropped off. First they had to awaken Akri. Although Akri's antics had nearly ruined the evening, Rivlin watched him fondly as he walked with a springy gait to his apartment building. He was pleased that he had used his influence with the Appointments Committee to get Akri his promotion and tenure—thus relieving himself of the long-standing burden of running the department.

On the East Carmel his wife parted with affection from one of the secretaries, and, two blocks farther, just as lovingly from the other. The minibus snaked through a new housing development, looking for the street of a young instructor with a bright academic future. Only now did Rivlin notice that the instructor's bashful wife was in the early months of pregnancy.

The two merry young teaching assistants got off downtown. A Jew and a Druze, they shared an apartment. At Carmel Center, Rivlin descended from the vehicle to lead an old professor emeritus, who never missed a departmental event, to the front door of his old-age home. They parted with unaccustomed warmth, as if an evening spent among Arabs had reawakened their sense of Jewish solidarity. In years to come, he knew, his wife's keen memory would preserve, if not the name, then at least some identifying mark, of every person at the wedding.

Home at last in their new duplex on the French Carmel, to which they had moved half a year previously, they were happy to see that, as always, they felt no regret for the lush wadi that had abutted the terrace of their old apartment, where they had lived for thirty years before exchanging the wadi for the slow but sure elevator that now brought them and their shopping bags to the fifth floor. The Arab driver, a young man with almost sable skin and handsome, fiery eyes, was distrustful of elevators but insisted on accompanying them to their door and carrying their purchases inside. He was indignant when Hagit sought to tip him. How could she think of such a thing? He, Rashid, was one of the family. He was Samaher's cousin and would do
anything for her or her guests. Everyone in the village loved her and was proud of her. She had character and education and was one of Mansura's most prominent young people. Samaher would go far, despite having been ill all winter.

“Samaher, ill? Rivlin objected. “You must be mistaken.”

Rashid stuck to his guns. Samaher had been ill.

“With what?”

He didn't know the name of the illness. He only knew it was a bad one. This was the reason Samaher had agreed to be married as soon as she had recovered: to make up for lost time.

T
HEY MADE DO
with giving the driver a cold drink, pleased with his
oohs
and
ahs
over the duplex. Informed that he intended to rejoin the festivities, which would go on all night, Hagit asked Rashid what the name
Samaher
meant in Arabic. Rivlin, indignant she hadn't turned to him, blurted:

“It means a javelin.”

The young Arab begged to differ.
Samaher
meant a lance, not a javelin. His coal-black eyes glowed as he pointed out the difference.
Samaher,
he repeated solemnly, was a lance. A
samaheri
was a lancer. And with that he took his leave.

At last they were alone. The first thing they did was check the voice mail for a message from Ofer, their older son, who had spent the last four years in Paris. None of the three messages were from him. One, quick and bashful with an Arab accent, came from the cleaning woman's son, whose regular job it was to tell them she wasn't well, especially when her illness was imaginary. The second voice—clear, good-natured, and always a pleasure to hear—belonged to their younger son, Tsakhi; an officer in the army; he was calling to apologize for unexpectedly having to be on duty over the weekend, which meant that anyone wanting to see him would have to visit his base in the Galilee. The last message was from Hannah Tedeschi. In crisp, firm tones she announced that although she and her
husband had returned to Israel a week ago from a long trip to South America, they were not yet installed in their Jerusalem home because before they could unpack, Professor Tedeschi's notorious asthma, having waited patiently for their vacation to end, had struck more cruelly than ever. If Rivlin wanted to see his old academic patron and doctoral adviser, he had better come to Bikkur Holim Hospital, where the barely conscious professor could be found on the third floor, in Room 8 of Internal Medicine. He needn't rush, though. This time, he was informed triumphantly by Hannah (an Orientalist herself and a first-rate translator of the poetry of the Jahaliya, the pre-Islamic “Age of Ignorance”), Tedeschi was in for a long hospitalization.

“It's unbelievable how she loves him to be sick,” Rivlin said.

“Needs, not loves,” his wife corrected him. Often a single word was enough to remind him of how admirably clever she was. “Come, let's go to bed,” she urged when he wanted to listen to Hannah's message again, hoping to discern the difference between love and need with his own ears. “The house is a mess. And there's no cleaning woman tomorrow. You'll have to pitch in. I'll need your help to tidy up a bit. . . .”

“A bit?” he repeated resentfully. He knew full well that in the end most of the work would fall on him. Unlike his wife, who had a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and a defendant all waiting for her to appear in court in her best judicial form, he had only the incomplete draft of a book that would be happy to be left for another day.

Hagit knew that her husband liked nothing better than to complain while taking refuge from his recalcitrant research in the chores of a malingering cleaning woman or an inadequate housewife. Careful to show no disrespect for the sacrifice demanded of him by her sister's visit, she let him go to the kitchen and—grumbling loudly about the food she had bought—switch on the dishwasher despite the late hour. When he finally climbed the stairs to their bedroom, she was sprawled on the bedspread fully clothed, watching the TV news with a bowl of cherries in her lap. Her “presomnial relaxation,” as she called it, took precedence, like her postsomnial relaxation, over putting away the disorder of dresses, skirts, blouses, and shoes that testified to the difficulties of deciding what to wear to an Arab wedding.

“How can you possibly still be hungry?” Rivlin asked, scooping up a few cherries, more to help rid the bowl of them than because he was hungry himself.

“Why not?” She smiled serenely. “All I had to eat all night was ice cream. I never touched the lamb. That's more than I can say for some people, who ate half of it single-handedly.”

“You're sure it was only half?” His own smile was glum. He was already feeling nostalgic for the juicy meat heaped unceasingly on his plate by the villagers. It was gone now, devoured without a trace, leaving only the faint strains of Oriental music pulsing inside him. He turned to regard his wife, whose face was pallid with fatigue. As of tomorrow he would have his childless sister-in-law on his hands, ten days' worth of advanced middle age. Though tired and dejected, he was determined as a matter of principle to assert his conjugal rights. Sitting at the foot of the bed, he lightly stroked the soles of Hagit's feet, so as to gauge his own desire before making any claims on hers.