The Liberated Bride (65 page)

I
T WAS SPRING.
The winter having been a real one, with rain, snow, storms, and floods, all Israel felt that it had earned the vernal scents
and colors and was entitled to enjoy them before dun summer took over.

The spring semester had started. On his way to the university for the first meeting of his seminar on the Algerian revolution, Rivlin noticed a new traffic sign. The municipality, although not answering his letter regarding the corner of Moriah and Ha-Sport Streets, had acknowledged it nonetheless—not by accepting his suggestion to narrow the sidewalk, but by banning U-turns completely. And so, the professor thought self-mockingly, I only made things worse here, too. So much for citizens' initiatives! Yet on second thought, he had to admit that the new arrangement made better sense. Any U-turn at a busy traffic light like this was dangerous and pointless.

Before his seminar, he went to the departmental office for a list of its students. Knowing their names in advance helped him encourage them to be active. In the office, a new young secretary informed him that a middle-aged woman had been waiting for him all morning. They'd told her that he had no office hours today, but she had insisted on remaining.

He walked to the end of the corridor with a sense of foreboding. There, as he had guessed, was Afifa. Stripped of her jewelry, she wore a simple shawl draped over her head and shoulders that accented her femininity even more.

“Is it me you're waiting for?” he asked gently.

“Who else?” Her voice was anxious yet intimate, as though he were her family doctor.

“But . . .” He glanced at his watch. “I have a seminar.”

“I know. I checked the catalogue. I've only come to give you Samaher's term paper and get her grade.”

She wasn't requesting or beseeching it. She was asking for it as you might ask a bank teller for your money.

He made no reply. Leading her to his office, he sat her down unsmilingly, with none of his usual small talk in Arabic, and took the bright green folder. The translated stories and poems were neatly typed, with titles, notes, and two pages of bibliography. He leafed through them and looked up at Afifa, whose black shawl—more a moral than a religious statement, he assumed—deepened the glow in her eyes.

“It looks good,” he said. “I'll go through it and give Samaher a grade.”

“But what is there to go through, Professor? You already know everything that's in there, even if it was only read aloud to you. Take my word for it, it's everything you asked for. Now give her what she has coming to her.”

“
Shu b'ilnisbilha?
”
^*
He couldn't resist a few Arabic words.

Declining to collaborate in a fruitless ritual, she answered in Hebrew:

“Samaher will be fine. She's a strong girl. Her mind is all right again, like before her illness. And she's in a new house her husband built for her at the end of the village. There's no more grandfather and grandmother and everyone else looking over her shoulder. But the whole family and the whole village, Professor, want her to have her grade. I'm here to get it.”

He smiled and leafed through the neatly typed work again, studying its matching pages of Arabic and Hebrew texts, the fantastical names of which reminded him of hours spent in Samaher's bedroom and in his own dimly lit office. He felt an old yearning for strange roads and a trusty driver.

“
U'feyn Rashid hala?
”
^†
he asked. “
Lissato bubrum laf u'dawaran hawlkun?
”
^‡

But Afifa would not play the game. She gathered her shawl around her. “He's a poor devil, Rashid. He spends all his time in the hospital with that boy . . . the vegetable . . .”

“Vegetable? What vegetable?”

“Ra'uda's boy, Rasheed. He ran away to the hills one night, and some hunter with crazy ideas put a bullet in him. Only Allah knows how it will ever end.”

“I didn't know!” Rivlin cried, rent by pain. “I remember Rasheed. I'm so sorry . . . Believe me, I loved that little boy.”

“So did everyone,” Afifa said angrily. “A lot of good it did him! A
lot of good it did my mother, the boy's grandmother, who only wanted all her children home again! What has it brought us? A vegetable. . . .”

Rivlin glanced at his watch. “And you?” he asked Afifa, who now had not only his sympathy but his esteem. “Don't you want to finish your B.A.?”

To his surprise, she didn't reject the idea.

“Allah is great . . . ,” she replied, leaving the matter open while continuing to regard him with suspicion, as if he were looking for another excuse to postpone Samaher's grade.

“Leave Allah out of this,” he said bitterly, as if suddenly identifying the real problem. “Great or not, he has nothing to do with this. Go to the secretary and register. What's it to you? There's no obligation. Go on, don't be afraid. Now that Samaher has left home, you'll have time. Sign up for a course, mine or anyone's. Meanwhile, I'll grade this paper.”

Although he hadn't meant to link the two things, this was how she understood it: Samaher's seminar grade swapped for her registration. A smile lit her face. She rose, tightened her shawl around her, held out her white, pudgy hand, and took her leave. Rivlin stayed in his chair, leafing through the paper a third time. Turning to the last page, he wrote an 80. Then, thinking better of it, he crossed this out, and wrote 90. Should he add some comment? He reflected briefly and wrote a sentence that he hoped was meaningful though addressed to no one in particular:

“
I have read, listened, accompanied, and lived with this paper and am pleased with it.
”

Although this struck him as rather bland, it was too late to change it. Nor could he think of anything else to add. And so he simply signed his name.

I
N EARLY SUMMER,
three months after Ofer's return from Paris, Tsakhi finished his military service. Remembering his fears when his youngest son went into the army with the thought of volunteering for
a commando unit, Rivlin thanked his lucky stars for having enabled him to sleep well at night. The army, deciding it needed Tsakhi's brains more than his fighting prowess, had sent him from the induction center to an intelligence course that landed him in a secret base well-protected from the perils of the Jewish state. His officer's pay had even allowed him to squirrel away a tidy sum in the bank, there having been nothing to spend it on in the secret bowels of his mountain that he was forbidden to discuss even with his inquisitive father.

And yet since this high-interest savings account was a long-term one that could not be dipped into, the provident ex-soldier had no money to pay for the traditional post-army trip taken abroad by young Israelis—a problem aggravated by his intention of traveling, not on the cheap in the Far East or South America, but with his brother in France and Europe. And so, the day after his discharge, he wasted no time in finding a job. In fact he created one, going into business with the blond, baby-faced sergeant who had been his aide. Receiving permission to use Rivlin's computer, the two found room on it, between the professor's reflections on the disintegration of Algerian identity, to design an attractively colored ad for two experienced, responsible, and reasonably priced housepainters and plasterers.

“But what do you know about painting and plastering?” the amazed Orientalist asked. “Who would hire two nerds like you? And how do you know the walls you paint won't start peeling the day after?”

“Don't worry, Abba,” Tsakhi assured him. “Nothing will peel.” Without his uniform, he looked like the high-school boy he had been before being drafted.

Rivlin had grown accustomed, in the morning hours before Hagit came home from court, to a quiet house in which he was alone. Now he had a young partner—a most pleasant and much loved one, to be sure, but also a noisy and messy one who never switched off a light and who played strange, pounding music.

The blond sergeant arrived that same evening. He and Tsakhi ran off dozens of ads on the printer, waited until late at night for the municipal inspectors to be gone from the streets, and went to stick their notices on every electric pole, tree, traffic sign, storefront, bus station, and café they could find. Their coverage was so extensive that when a
week later Rivlin glanced at a university bulletin board on which his colleagues had posted grades, he discovered a piece of paper with his own telephone number on it.

Another week went by, and one morning Tsakhi asked if the old jalopy could be spared so he and his sidekick could transport materials from a large hardware store, whose owners had promised to give them some professional tips. A few hours later, while Rivlin was hard at work trying to abstract a valid generality or two from Samaher's texts, the telephone rang. It was his son, asking whether he needed anything.

“Like what?”

The two youngsters were at the hardware store and wanted to know if he needed any tools, a new hammer or screwdriver, say, or perhaps some spare lightbulbs. They could get everything at a discount.

“No, Tsakhi,” Rivlin said, delighted to have been thought of. “I don't need a thing, honestly.”

“How about the car?”

“You can have it.”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely.”

The main thing the ex-officer wanted to know was whether his father could direct him to the income-tax bureau.

“What do you need that for?” Rivlin asked.

He and his friend, Tsakhi explained, wanted to give their customers receipts. That meant registering with the tax authorities.

“You want to register before you've earned your first cent? Forget about it.”

His son heard him out imperturbably and asked again:

“But do you know where they are?”

“Of course I do. But there's no point going there. You've just been discharged. You don't owe any taxes. Why register now?”

“Never mind,” the young officer said soothingly. “Just tell me where they are.”

“On Ha-Namal Street, near the outdoor market. Ask when you get there.”

“Thanks,” Tsakhi said, offering to buy fruit and vegetables for the house.

Rivlin was touched. “You needn't bother,” he said. “You have enough on your mind. Do your thing.”

“You're positive?”

“Well, if you insist, I suppose you could bring home some artichokes.”

“How many?”

“You're asking me? Five or six.”

“Fine. Anything else?”

“No. Just artichokes.” He was impatient to get back to work.

Since their storeroom in the basement of their building was too small for all the ladders, paint cans, rollers, and brushes, some of this equipment was moved into Tsakhi's bedroom, along with a folding cot for the blond sergeant. The two got along well, at least to judge by the quiet, mutually respectful way they sat planning their business. Although the tax authorities were happy to open a file, and receipt books were printed, prospective customers were hard to find. The few who phoned often did so when Tsakhi was out, and Rivlin, who took to identifying himself as “the housepainter's father,” had to take their calls.

The problem was the baby-faced sergeant, whose blond hair and blue eyes failed to win the confidence of potential clients, especially given the high prices the two asked for. This led to a revised marketing strategy, whereby Tsakhi's partner stayed below while his former CO, unshaven and wearing paint-spattered overalls, visited the apartment to be painted and gave a low estimate. Then, the deal concluded, he called in his expert assistant to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb and suggest a few extras for a slight increase.

This worked better. The two young housepainters soon acquired a reputation on the Carmel. Returning in the evening proud and pleased after a hard day's work, they lingered in their overalls, wearing them like a badge of distinction while cooking their supper and planning the next day. So great was their comradeship that Rivlin was tempted to come downstairs from his computer to join them. It was a chance to hear about small, old apartments with their rickety terraces and strange storerooms and funny owners, elderly pensioners or widows who, infected by the two young workers' enthusiasm, decided to do another wall or door . . . and then another and another . . .

“What a waste,” Rivlin teased. “Here the army invests a fortune in teaching you high technology, and you end up painting walls.”

But they didn't see it that way. Heatedly they defended the house-painter's profession, which needed skill and judgment and rewarded them with the bright colors and good smells that they had been deprived of all the years that they had lived, while staring at flickering screens, like moles in the belly of their mountain.

T
HE DAYS WERE GETTING
warmer. Rivlin, opening his study window as far as it would go, tried longingly to remember the aroma of spring flowers that had bathed their old apartment in the wadi. His eyes, tired from hours at the computer, instinctively sought out the old woman across the street. She, too, had raised all the blinds on her terrace. A large ladder was standing there. On it, Rivlin was astonished to see the blond sergeant. He was talking to the young officer, who was seated at the card table, while slapping plaster on the wall.

Without thinking twice, or even saving the text on his computer, Rivlin left the duplex and hurried excitedly to the building across the street, in which he had never been before.

He didn't know the ghost's name. But he did know her floor, and he knocked on her door without looking at what was written there. The old woman, wearing a large apron and a hairnet, opened it. The smell of some cheese dish came from the kitchen. A radio on the terrace was playing the rock music his son liked. The ghost's face was soft and smiling, unlike the time he had met her in the pharmacy. Perhaps this was because she was in her own territory, protected from all harm by two sturdy young workmen newly discharged from the army.

“Good morning, ma'am,” Rivlin introduced himself. “I'm the boss of the two painters working for you. I came to see how they're doing and to ask if you're satisfied.”

The ghost's weather-beaten face gaped at him. She looked back into the apartment, as if racking her brain for something to complain about.

Meanwhile Tsakhi, hearing his father's voice, appeared in the
hallway, a lively mixture of amusement and astonishment in his big, brown eyes.

Rivlin warned his son with a look not to give him away. “I want you to be entirely satisfied with my staff and their work, ma'am,” he continued. “You should feel you're getting the best possible service. That's why I need to know if you have any complaints. Think carefully. Perhaps they've been noisy, or impolite, or not neat enough. Just tell me. I'll give them a piece of my mind and change them immediately. Why, if you'd like I'll take their place myself. Just say the word and I'll put on my work clothes. . . .”

This was already too much for the ghost. The smile of pleasure fracturing her face was positively alarming. So much consideration could be fatal for a hard-bitten woman like her.

“There's no need,” she murmured, thrilled and grateful to be getting such attention. “Everything is fine. Don't put yourself out. Your workers can stay. Just tell them to hurry up and finish . . .”

“You're sure? Perhaps you'd like to think about it.”

“Oh, no.” She was suddenly worried she might lose them. “They're just fine. They're nice boys . . .”

Brimming with pride that his younger son had vanquished so fearful an apparition, he strode quickly out to the open terrace, which was bright with morning sunlight. Curiously, he glanced at the window of his study across the street. Through it he could spot his computer. He went over to the red card table. Despite all the flying plaster, a deck had been dealt for a game of solitaire. He carefully picked up a card. The old woman, though concerned that the strange contractor might ruin her game, said nothing. It was too beautiful a morning to be angry at the world. She stared at the middle-aged man with the gray curls, who did not seem to fit his own job description.

“Tell me,” she said, “don't I . . .” Her clear khaki eyes squinted at him. “Don't I know you from somewhere?”

“No,” he said, giving her a firm, friendly smile of encouragement. “You don't know me from anywhere. But now, ma'am, if you don't mind my saying so, you do know me a little bit. . . .”

Haifa, 1998–2001