The Liberated Bride (58 page)

“Your coffee, Professor,” she said, with a hint of mockery, “is waiting downstairs.”

“But Fu'ad said he would have it sent up,” Mrs. Hendel complained.

“So he did. But I told him not to, because I didn't want you to miss your lunch. We're closing the kitchen soon.”

“You can send my lunch up too.”

“No, Mother. I have no one to wait on you today.”

“Then I'll skip lunch.”

“No, you won't. You think you will, but at three o'clock you'll decide you're hungry, and I'll have to wake up the chef and make him light the oven. You need to show some consideration, because it's been a crazy day even without the snow. And don't worry about our guest. He'll be back—won't you, Professor? Just because we tell you we know nothing is no reason to believe us, is it?”

T
EHILA DESCENDED THE BROAD,
old-fashioned staircase ahead of him to the ground floor. Her long stride made her look like an ungainly bird that had forgotten how to fly. If Ofer knew to what depths I've descended to look for the fantasy he's marooned by, Rivlin thought,
he'd wipe me from his mind instead of just cold-shouldering me. In the large lobby he halted, stuck out a hand, and said:

“Thank you. I'm afraid I'm running late. I'll have my coffee on Mount Scopus.”

“But why?” She gave him a whiskey-colored glance. “The coffee is ready. What can you be late for? You have plenty of time until your talk.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw an ad for the conference in the newspaper. The afternoon session starts at four, and your eulogy comes at the end of it. You're in no hurry. And where are you going on a day like this? Don't let the sunny skies fool you. The temperature is dropping.”

“I see you've decided to manage me too.”

“Let's say I'm giving you a bit of friendly advice. Not that you couldn't use some managing—especially when you're away from your wife, with no one to keep an eye on you.”

He recoiled. “My wife,” he said softly, “keeps an eye on me everywhere—from within me . . .”

There was an awkward silence. Her birdlike face, sharp, hard, and offended, lost its teasing look. He felt suddenly sorry for this ugly Circe of the hotel, her bright apron perched absurdly on her hips like a chambermaid's in an Alpine inn.

“All right,” he relented. “Let's have some coffee. I wouldn't want to hurt Fu'ad.”

The little table in the smoking lounge was set with elegant cups and saucers and a plate of cookies. Rivlin looked for Rashid. “I gave him a bed to rest in,” Fu'ad said, pouring their coffee. “He's feeling low because of all those forms for his sister's children. Why does an Arab have to be sick to be allowed back into his own country?”

“What's wrong with having to live in a village near Jenin?” Tehila asked, warming her ivory hands on her coffee cup. “Isn't that Palestine too?”

“But Ra'uda grew up in the Galilee.”

“So what? Why must every one of you live where he or she was born? What babies you are, missing Daddy and Mommy's home
when you're parents and grandparents yourselves! I swear, you deserve a spanking, not a state.”

Fu'ad glanced at Tehila and then down at the floor, unsure what to make of her barb. His arm in the sleeve of its black maître d's jacket trembled as it lifted the cover of the canister to see how much coffee was left. “
Afay'o, ya Brofesor?
”
^*
he glumly asked of Rashid.

“Give him a few more minutes,” Rivlin replied. “He needs to rest.
Sar majnun u'murtabir min kul el-ashyaa illi hawil yi'milha.
”
^†

“
Mitl el-masrahiyya,
”
^‡
Fu'ad said. “
Hada el-dibbuk illi mat
.”
^§

“A jinni,” Rivlin said. He looked wearily at the proprietress, who was nursing her coffee in slow sips. Sallow and sickly-looking, she sat plotting her next move while trying to follow the Arabic conversation—until, with a gesture of impatience, she signaled the maître d' to be gone.

“As long as your driver is resting, you may as well, too,” she said to Rivlin when they were alone. “Is your eulogy ready?”

“More or less.”

“Will you read it?”

“I'll speak from notes.”

“Good,” she said approvingly. “That way you can cut it short if you're losing your audience.”

He regarded her sardonically. “Don't worry. That's never happened to me.”

“I should hope not. But tell me, what made this Tedeschi such a big shot that he's getting a whole day in his honor?”

“You don't have to be such a big shot to get a day for dying. But he was an important scholar. And a dedicated and much-loved teacher.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, with a sly gleam. “Yours is a generation that still loves its teachers. Nowadays, I'm told, university faculties are full of dumb women.”

“That's ridiculous.” He felt a chill of fatigue. “You've never even been to a university.”

“What if I haven't?” She took another calm sip of coffee. “It's not because I couldn't have, as you seem to think. It's because I went to work for my father, helping him to put the hotel on its feet. Believe me, I've learned more from life here than I could have at a university. But you're cold!”

“Something is wrong with the heating.”

“Nothing is wrong with it. Fu'ad likes to save electricity, especially when he's mad at me. As soon as the dining room empties out, he turns the heat off. This part of the building cools quickly. Down in the basement, where you were the last time, you wouldn't know the difference, not even when it was freezing out. There's natural heat down there.”

“Natural heat?” He scoffed at the idea. “It must come from those old tax files.”

“Perhaps,” she said with a hearty laugh, throwing back her head as though remembering something. “I wouldn't be surprised if it did.”

“So you want to stick me in that hole again?” He met her small, eagle eyes, their gaze fearful with anticipation.

“You can rest there undisturbed, polishing your eulogy beneath a warm blanket in perfect equilibrium.”

He smiled uncertainly and glanced at the thick curtain on the window. A ray of blue light slipped through the space between the hooks and the curtain rod. Why was it, he wondered, that during the year of his marriage Ofer had hardly ever mentioned Tehila? He had only enthused about Galya's father and the hotel. Had he paid no attention to his wife's shrewd sister, or was she, too, part of his “fantasy”?

“
Yallah, ila l-amam.
”
^*
He rose and touched her bony shoulder. “
Ta'ali nitdafa shwoy bil-kabu.
”
^†

For the third time, he found himself walking through the hotel kitchen. In the between-meals silence, the carving knives and cleavers gleamed above the big, clean vats and the empty tables and cutting
boards. They passed the large freezer and came to the little door whose concrete steps led to the underground corridor with its broken bicycle, torn tire, and bucket of hardened whitewash. A new broom was the one addition to this display. In the space at the corridor's end the baby crib stood beside the old boiler, whose chimney was rammed into the ceiling like the tooth of an ancient, petrified mammoth that still gave off its secret heat.

Rivlin watched the tall woman search in vain for the key to the accountant's room beneath the oilcloth mattress of the crib. The door to the dark room was open. Sound asleep on its bed was the protean driver-messenger-brother-cousin-uncle–displaced citizen–and-dybbuk for a day. Undressed, he lay dead to the world with his face to the wall, the splendid rear of his dark, smooth, naked body pointed at the door.

The proprietress was startled by the liberty taken by the maître d'. Yet touched by the sight of the naked Arab, who had instinctively availed himself of the freedom offered by this subterranean grotto, she asked Rivlin for his name, knelt by his side, and gently poked him as if he were a soldier being awakened for guard duty. “All right, Rashid,” she said. “You've slept enough. Give someone else a chance.”

His name spoken by an unfamiliar woman, followed by her gentle touch, caused the sleeper to bolt to an upright position and wrap himself in his sheet, the hot coals of hastily extinguished sleep still glowing in his eyes. As if he were in the midst of a dream whose interpretation they were, he groped with a beseeching hand toward the two Jews. Before he could utter an apology, if not for his sleep itself, for which he had permission, then at least for his nakedness, he was fully clothed and holding a folded sheet beneath his arm, with which he departed, to return it to Fu'ad.

“Wait. Don't turn on the light,” Rivlin told the proprietress, who had shown no sign of doing any such thing. In the gloom pierced by a few murky rays coming from the direction of the staircase, he moved the accountant's chair to the desk and sat down with his arms on his chest. He did not look at his Circe—who, instead of remaking the evacuated bed for him, sank onto it like a white ghost. It's hopeless, he told himself, and there's no time for it anyway, but if I don't
ask her now I never will. And although she had still made no move to do so, he said again, “Don't turn on the light. Maybe it will be easier in the dark to tell me what you know about your sister. You can see how I'm suffering. Be kind just once.”

She said nothing. Unable to make out her expression in the dark, he did not know what she was thinking. One after another, her shoes dropped to the floor. The bed creaked. Only then did she say:

“You're a hard man, Yochanan Rivlin. Really hard. Your Ofer was much nicer. What a pity you didn't make a career in the police or the secret service instead of wasting your time teaching. You would have felt at home there, looking for the truth in all the wrong places. It's too bad, because I thought you wanted something else from me—something I could have given you.”

A shiver went through him.

“Come to think of it, why not ask my sister? You can go on giving her the third degree. If anyone knows what happened to her, she does.”

“She refused twice,” Rivlin said. “I couldn't get anything out of her.”

“And so you've decided to pick on me?”

“You're a liberal woman. You're open for a relationship. And you've chosen, if I may say so, an uninhibited single life that lets you be frank and do what you want despite your loyalty to your family and the hotel . . . or am I wrong?”

She sat up on the bed. His eyes, now accustomed to the dim light, discerned the shadow of a smile as she pulled off her sweater, unfastened her apron, and opened the linen drawer beneath the bed. She took out a sheet, spread it on the mattress, and lay down again.

“Thank you for telling me how liberal and open I am. But it won't do you any good, because I really know and understand nothing about my sister and Ofer.”

“But you must!” he burst out, placing professorial hands on his heart.

She laughed out loud. “You don't believe me, do you?” she said easily. “And maybe you're right not to. In a family, after all, everything is connected, even what no one understands. But there has to
be some closeness before one can talk about such things. And if you're really such a big-time sleuth, I have a proposal, or rather a condition, to make . . . yes, a condition. That's the right word for it. Before I can loosen up with you, I need some love. I don't suppose you would mind a secret little bedtime adventure, would you? We might as well start now. After all, you're a busy man—and you must realize by now how uninhibited I really am. . . .”

His arms stayed crossed. Although he wasn't sure whether he was being challenged to a test of his determination or a battle of wills, he knew deep down that he had expected this—that his unforeseen visit had been made with it in mind.

“If such is your condition,” he said with mock formality, “I am prepared to surrender my precious faithfulness to my wife. But what is it you look forward to in an old man like me?”

She smiled. “Leave that to me. You already made me curious at the bereavement, when I saw how lovingly you embraced my mother. That's why I insisted you wait for Galya. And when I saw you pleading with her in the garden, I said to myself, this is a man who will come back. And you did. . . .”

“But curious about what?”

“About what you're like when you're turned on.”

“But what good to you is my pretending to be turned on?”

“As good as my pretending to know something is to you.”

“Then you don't?”

“Don't know and don't care. I'm not like you. I respect other people's boundaries and wills. I've never understood how you dared snoop on your son's life, poking into his affairs while pretending to save him. If I were your daughter I'd have murdered you long ago.”

“
Murdered
me?”

“With my own hands.”

“Then how lucky I'm not your father.” But the feeble joke fell flat. Her hard face jutting with disappointment, she turned to the wall, curled up her long body, and withdrew. At that moment he knew that, in a basement full of files, he had lost his last link to a world that would forever keep his son's secret. Reluctantly he rose, wanting to touch the long body one last time. But he lacked the courage to do so
and only said a weak good-bye that was not acknowledged. He walked past the silent stove, running his fingers over the crib, then traversed the corridor and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, in which a solitary chef was concentrating on beheading a large fish.

The two Arabs were in the smoking lounge, talking quietly like old friends. Fu'ad was smoking a cigarette while Rashid twirled a cigar between his fingers as if uncertain what to do with it. They looked at him accusingly as he entered. For the first time he felt that neither of them liked him. “
Shu hada, ya Brofesor
?” Rashid asked in a cold voice. “
Kul halkad b'sur'ah hillis nomak?
”
^*