The Arab students from the department, however, having listened respectfully to a man who was both their guest and their academic senior executive, were running out of patience, especially since they had been joined by other students who neither knew Akri nor needed to defer to him. Akri, continuing to deride the Arabs’ history in an impeccable display of their language, was now surrounded by a shocked circle of listeners. The prospect of a row hung in the soft, mild air and threatened to spoil the gesture of their coming. Just as Rivlin, a full professor, was about to pull rank on Akri and nip the quarrel in the bud, there was a flurry of excitement. A chilled, glittering serving bowl was placed on the table while crystal dishes and golden spoons were handed out. How, Rivlin wondered as he tasted his first spoonful of the ice cream, could this remote little village, a bastion of chickens and donkeys, have produced such a magnificent last course, so lavishly creative in its flavors and deliciously chewy in its texture that he had to keep an eye on his ravenous wife, who had put on not a little weight in recent years? Not that this bothered him. He liked her company in any shape or form.
4.
DESPITE THE HOUR, it seemed entirely natural to Hagit, halfway home between Amihud and Shfar’am, to ask the Arab driver to stop by an illuminated greengrocer’s stand, where she talked the two secretaries, as well as two young teaching assistants who had taken a fancy to her, into some late-night shopping, as if, Rivlin reflected, saddened to bid her Arab hosts good-bye, she were determined to bring home as a memento their freshly picked cucumbers, eggplants, squashes, and strawberries. His protests unavailing, he remained seated on the bus, boycotting the proceedings while regarding with amazement the sleeping Ephraim Akri, after his diatribe slumbering so sweetly that not even the sudden stilling of the motor could awaken him. Irritable and weary, he watched his wife circulate eagerly in the bluish light of a kerosene lamp. Several large dolls dangling from a thatched roof suggested idols in an ancient Canaanite temple. There she goes again, he thought angrily. Once more she was witlessly letting some shrewd merchant sell her a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that would end up rotting in the refrigerator unless he ate them all himself.
A car drove up. Two young women climbed out and joined the midnight shopping spree. Despite his desire to intervene and put an end to it, the sight of the yellowish fog from a nearby gas station, into and out of which cars were pulling busily, had an immobilizing effect on him. Who would be left to rise early in the Jewish state, he wondered, if the Arabs, too, had begun to burn the midnight oil? His wife, meanwhile, having struck up a conversation with the two newcomers, added her spruce legs to theirs in another tour of the pagan greengrocery. The memory of the hale old grandmother sucking on the snake head of her narghile heightened his bile. How had he ever agreed to such a wasted evening? And especially when weddings, even of close family and friends, were becoming increasingly painful to him. Had he and Hagit stayed home tonight, they surely would have made the love that had disappointingly eluded them all week. And tomorrow he was expected to vacate his study for ten days in order to make room for Ofra, his sister-in-law from abroad, who would be staying with them until her husband joined her and they moved to a hotel. His prospects for the next week and a half were slim. The evenings without Hagit would be long, and the mornings with her short, not because she was attached to her only, elder sister by twin strands of love and guilt, but also because there would be no chance for him to make love to her while they were all together under one roof. A single item of Ofra’s clothing in the next room, even a pair of her shoes, was enough to banish all thought of sex from Hagit’s mind.
5.
RIVLIN’S BOYCOTT was dealt with by the simple expediency of having the greengrocer bring Hagit’s bulging bags to the minibus and arrange them there carefully. “Here you are, Your Honor,” he declared, having discovered who she was from the two lady passengers — recent law-school graduates entranced by their unexpected encounter with a district judge. Perhaps aware that, like all Arabs, he would sooner or later end up in court himself, whether in the dock or on the witness stand, the man seemed in awe of the genial magistrate who had chosen this time of night to patronize his stand.
“You should know better than to make friends with lawyers,” Rivlin scolded her. “Don’t you realize they’re out to make a dishonest man of every judge?”
“Man, my dear,” Hagit repeated with a grin. “You said so yourself. Not woman.” Producing a small comb from her handbag, she invited him, as if the night’s entertainment were just beginning, to run it through his hair. “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I know where the bounds are. And I make sure others do, too.” She could only have been referring to judicial bounds, because the minibus hadn’t gone far before she was opening the paper bags at her feet to probe their contents. She popped into her mouth several cherries whose pink globes must have reminded her of the munificent nipples she had sucked when she was a child, and deposited the pits carefully in the palm of her hand.
It was past midnight. The first guests to have been picked up by their driver, they were the last to be dropped off. First they had to awaken Akri. Although Akri’s antics had nearly ruined the evening, Rivlin watched him fondly as he walked with a springy gait to his apartment building. He was pleased that he had used his influence with the Appointments Committee to get Akri his promotion and tenure — thus relieving himself of the long-standing burden of running the department.
On the East Carmel his wife parted with affection from one of the secretaries, and, two blocks farther, just as lovingly from the other. The minibus snaked through a new housing development, looking for the street of a young instructor with a bright academic future. Only now did Rivlin notice that the instructor’s bashful wife was in the early months of pregnancy.
The two merry young teaching assistants got off downtown. A Jew and a Druze, they shared an apartment. At Carmel Center, Rivlin descended from the vehicle to lead an old professor emeritus, who never missed a departmental event, to the front door of his old-age home. They parted with unaccustomed warmth, as if an evening spent among Arabs had reawakened their sense of Jewish solidarity. In years to come, he knew, his wife’s keen memory would preserve, if not the name, then at least some identifying mark, of every person at the wedding.
Home at last in their new duplex on the French Carmel, to which they had moved half a year previously, they were happy to see that, as always, they felt no regret for the lush wadi that had abutted the terrace of their old apartment, where they had lived for thirty years before exchanging the wadi for the slow but sure elevator that now brought them and their shopping bags to the fifth floor. The Arab driver, a young man with almost sable skin and handsome, fiery eyes, was distrustful of elevators but insisted on accompanying them to their door and carrying their purchases inside. He was indignant when Hagit sought to tip him. How could she think of such a thing? He, Rashid, was one of the family. He was Samaher’s cousin and would do anything for her or her guests. Everyone in the village loved her and was proud of her. She had character and education and was one of Mansura’s most prominent young people. Samaher would go far, despite having been ill all winter.