“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.
26.
IN 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.