It was time to unplug the computer. He coiled its wires and packed it in two black traveling bags padded with small towels. Then, grinning foolishly, he stopped by the window of his study for a last look at his dead mother, who liked to putter around on the second-floor terrace of the building across the street. And indeed there she was, in a red, sleeveless summer dress. She had opened the venetian blind and was leaning on the railing while following a big garbage truck, which was proceeding slowly down the narrow street, with a glance cross, curious, and indifferent.
This ghost of his mother had begun appearing to him not long after they had moved into their new duplex. At first he had placed his desk against a wall so as to be able to concentrate better. It was his wife who had persuaded him to move it to a window. “If you run out of ideas,” she said, “the wall won’t give you any new ones. And if you don’t, the view won’t harm them.”
He took her advice. A week passed before he tired of the panorama of the western Carmel, with its rich patches of green and red-tiled roofs immersed in pine trees. Shifting his gaze to the houses across the street, he scanned their windows and terraces. Suddenly, he spied the apparition playing solitaire on a terrace. Her straw-colored hair and her heavyset frame, hunched forward to preempt a hostile world, was the spit and image of the mother who had died three years ago. Dumbfounded and bemused, too distant to make out her features clearly, he imagined for a moment that she was the same lonely figure he remembered, withdrawn and sunk in a cosmic and trivial boredom.
The terrace across the street had four blinds. Only one of them was ever opened, and that, too, never more than halfway and for only a few hours a day. The woman was the only person he ever saw there. The rest of her apartment, which could not have been small, remained beyond his ken. She emerged from its gloom and vanished into it. Unlike his mother, who had liked to read old foreign-language magazines, this woman spent her time playing cards. Sometimes she appeared with a knife and a piece of fruit. Leaning on the railing, she sliced and ate the fruit quickly, spitting the pits into the garden below.
His youngest son and his wife, whom he, with mixed humor and anxiety, had apprised of the resemblance, were slow to acknowledge it. Hagit was actually indignant. “You’re heartless!” she cried. “Your mother was never that ugly or awful-looking.” Rivlin’s sister, on the other hand, who had hated their mother, thought the double was better-looking. She understood her brother’s fascination and stood for a long time by the window herself, smiling with grim satisfaction at the ghost as though viewing her in a peep show with no risk of a reprimand. Rivlin was so intrigued by the discovery that during their first month in the apartment he asked Tsakhi to bring him a pair of binoculars from his army base. Magnified, their neighbor resembled his mother — a strident peacock of a woman who had painted herself with flamboyant colors until her dying day — less closely. She used no makeup and had a yellowed, time-weathered face like that of an excavated sphinx. At first he took care to observe her from a place of concealment, afraid that he and his binoculars might drive her away or cause her to complain. Eventually, however, he realized that the danger was nil, since her gaze was always directed downward, as if the world lay only in that direction.
Now he would be parting from her for two weeks. He couldn’t say he’d miss her. Yet sometimes, observing her in an idle moment, he had found a strange consolation in her manner, so familiar to him from his childhood. The difference was that this time, he felt no guilt or sense of obligation.
11.
ON THE TWENTY-THIRD floor of the university tower, on a desk in the office of the Near Eastern Studies Department, surrounded by student papers and faculty mail, sat a round copper tray filled with baklava. It was a gift from the attentive bride to the teachers who had missed her wedding, so that they wouldn’t feel left out.
“It isn’t fair,” Rivlin protested. “The slackers shouldn’t be rewarded.”
“You can’t deny that the effort was worth it,” said the secretaries. They were treating him, the morning after, with an excessive friendliness. “It was a brilliant idea to go see our whining students in their natural habitat. They’re so different in their own world. And how we enjoyed your delightful wife!” They already missed Hagit, who had vanished and left them once more with her morose husband.
“Yes. She knows how to have a good time,” the professor admitted with a tight-lipped smile. “That’s because I take such good care of her. Why shouldn’t she?”
They chuckled at his outrageousness. They had tended to his needs for so many years that they couldn’t imagine him doing the same for somebody else. Although it was awkward for him to be striking such an intimate note with these two women, with whom he had always been so formal, he knew that whoever was introduced to his wife did not quickly relinquish her. Perhaps she represented a path to him.
The door of the department head’s office was shut. He was wondering whether to enter and tell Akri how pointless his previous night’s harangue had been when the secretaries decided for him. “Professor Akri,” they told him, “would like to see you.”
Rivlin stepped into the large, brightly lit room that had long been his office. Even though he was glad to be relieved of the burden of running the department, he had left some of his books on the shelves and even kept a key as a way of retaining part ownership.
“Professor Tedeschi is in a coma,” Akri greeted him. A normally taciturn man, he kept an orderly workroom. Mounted on his computer were photographs of his two grandsons, one blond and one dark like himself. Perhaps they had helped to inspire his theories about the wrong turn taken by Arab history.
“So I’ve heard,” Rivlin answered dryly. He felt disappointed that Hannah Tedeschi, not content with his sympathy for her husband, had also turned to a more mediocre scholar than himself. If Tedeschi valued Akri, it was only for the thoroughness with which the new department head helped the old man to index and footnote his articles. “How come,” Rivlin asked, “you’re still afraid of his wife’s hysteria after having been his teaching assistant in Jerusalem for so many years? Don’t you realize that she needs and even enjoys her husband’s attacks, which is why she’s always so happy to tell us about them?”
Akri’s head drooped slightly. Intrepid when battling Arabs, he was cautious about taking on Jews, especially insofar as it might affect his academic career. “This time it sounds serious,” he said in defense of the SOS from Jerusalem. “He’s been in a coma for two days.”
“I know. He was in the exact same coma in April 1992. It didn’t keep him from coming to his senses a few days later and giving the opening lecture at that big conference about Arabs and Turks at the Dayan Center. He was also in critical condition in February 1994. For four days he was in another world, but in the end he remembered to wake up in time for a sabbatical at Princeton. And I might remind you that here in Haifa, when he was our guest a few years ago at that mini-conference I organized on North Africa, he passed out after lecturing on the Turkish withdrawal from Algeria, spent the night in the emergency room, and caught a flight the next morning to the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo. The irrepressible Carlo Tedeschi is a devoted husband. As such, he knows that only his illnesses can keep his wife sane in our morbid Israeli reality. That’s why he’s always in perfect health when he’s abroad. Relax, Ephraim. A week ago he returned from a trip to Tierra del Fuego. It would never have occurred to him to have a coma there.”
“Tierra del Fuego?” Although the skullcapped department head found the Tedeschis’ far-flung itineraries bizarre, he was not prepared to surrender his concern. “But suppose this time it’s real,” he persisted, wary of dubious psychological explanations that subverted the rabbinic commandment to visit the sick, hypochondriacs included. “Even if he’s only doing it for his wife, shouldn’t we be supportive?” He wished to propose to Rivlin that the two of them, after the afternoon’s departmental seminar, drive to Jerusalem to see their old teacher. It would give them an opportunity to talk about business and perhaps discuss his little sermon at Samaher’s wedding, which was admittedly not beyond challenge. Even if neither of them succeeded in convincing the other, the department head said with a hint of a smile, they would keep each other awake.