She studied his face and added with a smile:
“But so am I.”
“You are?” he marveled bitterly. “How can you be right, too?”
“I can be right because how could I finish a seminar paper with a sick grandmother to take care of? And then, on top of it all, this wedding.”
“That’s enough excuses, Samaher,” he said, loath to give this devious Arabic-studies major standing beside him in a wedding gown the chance to extort a new postponement.
Her smile brightened even more, as if she not only had been granted a postponement but had also been offered course credits for her wedding. Taking hold of his arm, she steered him with dexterous confidence toward an iron gate blocked by a large black horse.
Samaher scolded the horse in Arabic. When this made no impression on it, she seized it by its bridle and in her wedding gown, high heels and all, wrestled it out of the way. The battle was quickly over and left Rivlin struck by her determination. Raising her head proudly, she pulled the horse after them into the yard, shut the gate, put on her glasses after extracting them from a previously hidden case, and led him up the heavy, dark stone steps of her home.
He now found himself at another celebration, this one for women only. Squeezed together, in bright dresses, they sat on pillowed divans in a large guest room whose walls were covered with photographs of ancient elders wearing fezzes. A few old crones in a corner were puffing on glass narghiles. A younger, heavily adorned woman hurried over to him with a smile. “Professor Rivlin!” she exclaimed. This was Afifa, Samaher’s mother, who long ago — back in the nineteen-seventies — had been a first-year undergraduate in the Near Eastern Studies Department. She had taken an introductory survey course of his and might have gone on to get a B.A. as her daughter would, had she not broken off her studies to have her.
“You know,” Rivlin told the handsome woman, “it’s not too late for you to go back to school. We’ll readmit you. You can continue from where you left off.”
She replied with an embarrassed laugh, as if he had made her an intimate proposition. Dismissing with a charmingly sinuous gesture the possibility of recovering lost time, she took possession of him from her daughter and led him to a large, spotless bathroom where he was given, as if he had come not just to relieve himself but also to take a leisurely bath, two fresh towels and a new bar of soap.
There was no lock or latch on the door. Quite apart from not wishing to worry his wife by his disappearance, this was sufficient reason for leaving the bathroom’s contents uninspected, despite the opportunity afforded him to learn more about the private side of Arab life. He urinated in silence, washed his hands and face, took a large green comb from a shelf, rinsed it carefully, and ran it through his silver curls. Then, picking up a small bottle, he studied its Arabic label until satisfied that he understood it, and daubed a few drops from it on his forehead to sweeten the relentless bitterness assailing him.
The bride had returned to the wedding party on the hill without waiting for him, leaving her friendly mother to guard the bathroom door. It was an appropriate moment, he thought, to pay a sick call on Samaher’s grandmother.
“Sick?” Afifa was startled. “Who told you she’s sick?”
“But of course she is. The poor woman is bedridden.” He deliberately mimicked Samaher’s manner of speech.
“But who told you? She’s not sick at all!” Triumphantly, Afifa pointed to a gaily dressed old woman puffing heartily on a narghile with her friends. Samaher’s grandmother smiled back with a mouth full of smoke.
And yet, he decided, as Afifa — fearful he wouldn’t find his way back by himself — went off to look for an escort, you didn’t upbraid a lying bride on her wedding night. Samaher’s mother returned with the bride’s grandfather, a sturdy, taciturn old man in a gray satin robe and white kaffiyeh who stood waiting by the gate with his head bowed respectfully. Noticing the horse in the yard, he commanded it to join them. The three of them walked back up the lane, the solemn grandfather in the middle as he gallantly struggled to understand the Arabic of the Jewish professor.
The lit-up dance floor was now crowded with youngsters gyrating to the music. The Oriental wail had been replaced by Western tomtoms. From afar, Rivlin cast a yearning glance at his wife. She was where he had left her, seated beneath the fig tree, with her slender legs stretched in front of her, intent on the conversation. As always, especially in moments of distress, he was aware of how perfectly true and unquestioning was his old, faithful love for this woman, who was now engaged in tempting with a pack of cigarettes two departmental secretaries who had attached themselves to her. He knew that from now on, whenever they saw him, they would remember to send their special regards, coupled with words of admiration, to this woman whom they had just met, who sometimes said to him only half-jokingly:
“You’re a lucky man! Luckier than you deserve to be.”
3.
“YOU’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.