The Liberated Bride (60 page)

D
ESPITE THE PATCHES ON
her eyes, she knew it was her younger brother even before he opened his mouth. The intimacy of a childhood shared in one room in their parents' small Jerusalem apartment had taught her to sense him from afar.

“You shouldn't have come,” she said. “I told Hagit it was too much for you.”

“It's all right. It was on my way.”

“Did that Arab at least drive you?”

“Yes. I'm lucky he sticks by me.”

“But why does he? I've heard you don't even pay him.”

“Don't ask me. It's he who doesn't want to take anything.”

She lay, small and thin, on a couch in the head eye doctor's office, a black patch on each eye, waiting for the doctor to finish an operation and determine whether the low-temperature laser suture performed that afternoon had repaired her retina and made surgery unnecessary.

“In which eye did it happen to our father?” he asked.

“The same one. The left one.”

“Couldn't you think of a better way to take after him?” He couldn't resist teasing his sister, even while she lay dismally in the dark, with her good eye covered too—a precaution taken, she told him, not on orders from the doctor, but on the suggestion of a nurse. Although her son's kindhearted wife had spent the afternoon with her, she had only made Raya's fears worse by overidentifying with her condition. Now Rivlin's sister lay waiting for her son to appear with his calming presence. Her brother, glum and tired, was not having a reassuring effect. On the contrary, he soon lapsed into a listless silence, from
which she tried to arouse him by changing the subject to the snow in Jerusalem.

“That old bitch!” she declared of their mother, as angry at the age of sixty as if she were still a teenager. “All the kids were outside having fun while we were protected from pneumonia by having to ski a doll in a bowl of snow in the bathtub.”

“What doll are you talking about?”

“Don't tell me you don't remember!” Just because she couldn't see she was not about to give up on her never ending struggle to keep her childhood memories alive in him. “That little black doll you went with everywhere . . .”

His silence only deepened as he tried remembering the black doll. He had no wish to rage with his sister against their mother. He hadn't seen her ghost for ages. Would he end up having to eulogize her too?

Two hours ago he had been speaking in honor of Tedeschi. The lights in the auditorium had come on, the light switch behind Rashid having been discovered, just as he was describing in a tremulous voice how the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance, that pre-Islamic period so crucial for understanding the Arabs, had combined scholarship with her love of poetry and devotion to her husband's health. But had it been fair to say what he had about Tedeschi's illnesses, or had this been cheap psychologizing on his part? Before he could answer that, his son's dreary solitude again pierced the twilight of his mind. For the first time, he felt no sympathy for Ofer, only anger. That's it, my boy, he addressed him in his thoughts. I've failed just as you hoped I would. There's no more hotel and no more Arabs to help me.

As in a dream, this, too, quickly faded. Now he saw his pale, lanky Circe, curled on the basement bed like a long fetus, osmosing into her own freedom.

“Listen,” he said to his sister. “I'm getting hungry. Shall I bring you something to eat too?”

“I'm too worried to eat. But I can feel how edgy you are. Why don't you go home? It's late.”

“It's all right. Hagit made me promise to stay until Ayal comes.”

His sister smiled, reaching out a blind hand toward him.

The corridor outside was empty. The visitors had gone home. The
nurse on duty sat reading a book. There was no telling whether the patients, lying in their rooms with bandaged eyes, were awake or asleep. A large figure was blocking his path.

“What's up, Professor?”

To his amazement, he found himself looking at his sister's former husband, a tall, thin, balding ex-playboy. Hearing from his son that Raya was in the hospital, he had come to have a look. Although he was a strange, difficult man who had given his wife a hard time, Rivlin felt a nostalgic affection for him.

“Look who's here!” he said, giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don't believe it! Come, say hello to Raya. She'll flip when she sees you.”

“Shhh,” his ex-brother-in-law said. “If she does see me, she's liable to detach her other retina.”

“But isn't that what you're here for?” For some reason, his encounter with this man, whom he had not run into for years, had improved his mood.

“To see Raya? What a thought! The head eye doctor is my tennis partner. Ayal asked me to speak to him.”

“But as long as you're here,” Rivlin persisted. “why not look in on her? Don't be childish. What are you afraid of? She won't even know it's you. Her eyes are covered.”

“They are?” The temptation to be invisible in his wife's presence was too great to overcome. Silently, he followed Rivlin to Raya's room.

She was still lying on the couch, small and thin. A lamp, buzzing softly on the table, lit her face. The black patches over her eyes gave her the look of an airplane passenger trying to get some sleep. For a moment, Rivlin thought she was drowsing. But sensing her ex-husband, who was standing in the doorway with a crooked smile, she raised her head and asked anxiously:

“Yochi, is that you?”

“What's up?” Rivlin asked quietly.

“Did you eat so fast?”

“It seems I did . . .”

“But there's someone else with you,” she said worriedly. “Who is it?”

He dodged the question. “Who could it be?”

“But there is!” She sounded fearful. “Someone is with you! Is it your driver?”

“My driver?”

The unseen husband smiled ironically. His blue, froggy eyes darted with amusement, as if reconfirming the oddness of the woman he had married and suffered with. Putting a finger to his lips, he turned and left.

Ayal arrived at last, tired but in full possession of himself. When told of his father's visit, he said angrily to Rivlin, “You shouldn't have let him come near her,” as if he were talking about two disturbed children.

It was ten o'clock when, back in a wet, glittering Tel Aviv street full of strollers taking the air after the storm, he climbed into the jeep and woke Rashid—who, having filled the vehicle with smoke from one of Fu'ad's cigars, now lay fast asleep beneath a blanket.

“Look here, Rashid,” he said. “It's turned into such a long day that I'm not driving back with you unless you let me pay you.”

“Pay me?” The messenger's coal black eyes regarded him blearily. “You couldn't afford what a day like this costs.”

“I wouldn't say that,” the Orientalist said, offended. “I'm not a charity case. I can afford whatever you would normally take. Just tell me honestly what that is.”

“Normally?” Rashid smiled to himself, as if at a new thought. “For a long, hard day like this with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I'd take . . . at least . . . at least fifteen hundred shekels.”

“Fifteen hundred?” Though unable to conceal his shock, he quickly recovered and laughed derisively. “If that's the going price, fine. Why not?” Grandly he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check, while promising Rashid that his wife would read up on the immigration laws dealing with the reunion of families.

The Arab jammed the check in his pocket and replied in a half hopeless, half newly dismissive tone:

“You can tell the judge not to try too hard, Professor. Laws have got nothing to do with it.”

I have a strange pet, half kitten, half lamb. It's a hand-me-down from my father, but only now has it begun to grow.

—Franz Kafka

T
HE HEAVY RAINS, WHICH
went on falling in the north for another week, turned the dirt roads of the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon into treacherous bogs. After a Bedouin tracker was killed by a mine concealed in the mud, Central Command suspended all foot patrols and kept the roads open with armored vehicles. The Commanding Officer of the trackers' platoon, a lieutenant whose name was Netur Kontar, hurriedly applied for leave and was granted it.

The CO was a Druze of about forty, a heavy man with a big mustache. Before leaving his base, he informed his family on the Carmel that he was going first to the village of B'keya in the Galilee, where he had promised to let his Christian dentist friend Marwan pull an infected wisdom tooth. If the weather improved, he might also join him and his friends for a night of hunting.

Kontar had been an avid hunter since he was a small boy. His father, discovering early that he had a natural instinct for finding his way at night without getting lost, took him along on his hunting trips, during which young Netur sometimes spent entire nights perched silently in the treetops. It was so hard to wake him the next morning that he was almost expelled from school. If it hadn't been for his older sister, who did all his homework, he would never have graduated.

It was in the army, however, that his abilities became fully appreciated. As a recruit in boot camp, he so impressed his officers with his navigational skills that they vied to take him on their nighttime maneuvers. When his three years of conscripted service were over, the Northern Corps, loath to lose an ace tracker, made him the unusual offer of a commission, without requiring him to take an officers' training course, and immediate command of a platoon in southern Lebanon.

The young Druze accepted, not only because the conditions were good and the job was a feather in his cap, but also because the army
was a first-rate base from which to pursue his life's passion. Throughout his long years of daily exposure to mines, bayonet charges, and booby traps, he took comfort in the regimental armory, out of which he enhanced his collection of weapons with an array of silencers, telescopic lenses, starlight sensors, and other devices, to say nothing of camouflage nets, which made excellent snares, and stale bread from the kitchens, which was good bait for wild boars. After losing his right thumb to a mine blast, he was afraid he had impaired his trigger finger, and for a while he suffered from depression. But the impediment was overcome, and the old army jeep that he was given in compensation, which he quickly filled with the equipment that now went with him everywhere, made him a legendary figure among the hunters of northern Israel and even of southern Lebanon.

Today, however, as he knocked on the door of the dental clinic in B'keya, Netur Kontar was in a troubled mood, both because of his painful wisdom tooth and of a strange story told him by his father. At first he didn't mention it. Leaning back in the dentist's chair, he opened an uncomplaining mouth and let his head be jerked this way and that while his friend gaily pulled his tooth and told funny stories to distract him. Yet once Netur Kontar had spat out the last of the blood, rinsed his mouth thoroughly, admired its new hole in a hand mirror, and taken off his bib, he asked the assistant to leave him alone with the dentist so that he could speak his mind.

Netur Kontar's father, the renowned hunter of his childhood, was now an octogenarian. Yet several nights ago, Netur told the Christian dentist, the old man had gone hunting in the hills near Megiddo—where, in the moonlight, he spied a creature like none he had ever seen before. It had the height and shape of a large lamb and the head and claws of a cat, and it moved by alternating wriggles and skips. Its round, green eyes, wild and roving, were catlike and lamblike at once. Instead of cat's whiskers it had heavy muttonchops that gleamed pink in the light of the moon.

Surprisingly, the old hunter told his son, this strange mongrel made no attempt to flee. Curious and frisky, it let out a sound that was neither a meow, nor a purr, nor a bleat, but rather a hoarse groan, and approached the old Druze in a friendly manner, nuzzling him
and sniffing at his clothes as if they were on the best of terms. Yet as the old Druze was wondering how best to trap the animal and bring it back to his village, it seemed to guess his intentions and sprang from his arms, scratching his forehead and disappearing on the bushy hillside.

The old man was determined to pursue the matter. Although being clawed by an unidentified beast required medical treatment, he spent the next day secretly making a large rope net, with which he returned to the scene of the encounter the following night. He set out a bowl of milk and a chopped fish, sprinkled them with fresh alfalfa, and hid in the branches of a tree to see what would happen.

It was only toward dawn, as he crouched in the tree half-asleep and half-shaking from cold, that the mongrel appeared again. This time it resembled neither a cat nor a lamb, but a cross between a goat and a German shepherd. It sniffed at the food, consumed it all, and glanced fearlessly at the old hunter as he slipped slowly down from his tree. This time, too, it let itself be petted and even turned over on its back, enabling him to see that it was sexless—neither male, female, nor in between. “Well, then,” Netur Kontar's father thought, his desire to show the strange animal off to his friends and family growing stronger by the minute, “this is a pure miracle, a one-time creation of God's that will never reproduce itself.” Yet as soon as he spread the large net he had brought, the animal gave a great leap and—before bounding off toward the valley of Jezreel—nearly tore out the eye of the old Druze who had planned to catch it.

Even now, however, the old hunter refused to give up. Despite his eighty years, he set out in pursuit of the fleeing beast, at first on foot, and then, seeing that it was following the road to Afula, in his old pickup truck. Near Mount Gilboa, not far from the Jordan, the mongrel vanished from sight.

“And then?” the dentist asked. He had listened with no sign of emotion while disinfecting and arranging his tools.

And then a week went by. The old hunter's wounds were treated by a doctor, who gave him anti-tetanus shots. Fearing to be made fun of by his family, he said nothing about the beast that had clawed him
and waited for his son to come home from the army. He was prepared to tell his story to him alone.

The dentist felt concern for the Druze officer still sitting in the revolving chair, his eyes red from lack of sleep. Not only had he just had a tooth pulled, he had lost a tracker earlier in the week. “With all due respect to your father's wounds,” said the Christian dentist, who had heard his share of Druze tall tales in his life, “don't you think he might have imagined it?”

Netur Kontar frowned. He knew his father well. He had learned to hunt from him. They had spent long nights together in the mountains. Although he questioned the mysterious lambcat's sexlessness, he didn't doubt that the beast existed. His father, though possibly confused, was not making it up. He had been hunting since the days of the British Mandate and had seen every animal there was, and if he said at his age that he had found a brand-new one, he was to be taken at his word. Indeed, it was the duty of every hunter to bring the lamb-cat alive to the Nature Authority, or else to the University of Haifa or even the government in Jerusalem, since it was sure to be named for its discoverer, thus bringing scientific glory to the Kontars and the entire Druze community.

“But where do you suggest looking for it?” the dentist asked gently. He was beginning to wonder whether his old friend was in his right mind.

“On Mount Gilboa. That's where it was last seen.”

“But where on Gilboa? It's a big mountain.”

“It's not as big as all that.”

“It's also a nature reserve on which hunting is forbidden.”

At this the Druze officer turned livid. Forbidden? To whom? To an officer like himself who risked his life day after day for the State of Israel? You might think he was proposing to kill the animal and eat it in revenge for its having clawed his father. All he wanted was to further scientific knowledge of the country's wildlife.

The dentist feared his friend might burst out crying. He would think about it, he said. Meanwhile, he urged Netur Kontar to wash up, change his clothes, and lie down in a little side room of the clinic.

The Druze officer took the dentist's advice and was soon fast asleep. Going to the telephone, Marwan called his fellow hunter Anton, the lawyer in Nazareth, to ask for his opinion of the story. The lawyer tended to agree that it was all the old man's fantasy, taken seriously by his son out of filial loyalty and mental exhaustion from his long service in Lebanon. Still, he, Anton, would be happy to hunt the lambcat together with them tomorrow night. “Don't worry, Marwan,” he laughed loudly. “Even if we're arrested for poaching, I'll file such an appeal with the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, arguing that we can't be convicted of hunting a nonexistent animal, that the judges will pee in their pants. So why not spend a night on Gilboa protected by an army officer? While we're looking for Netur's animal, we may bag a boar or a nice juicy gazelle. In Nazareth we say, ‘The Arab harvests the Druze's dreams.'”