At first he thought he had been given the wrong room number. The room he entered was small and dark and had only one bed, its bare mattress folded in half as though someone had recently died. His heart sank. Could Tedeschi have made a terrible mistake and gone too far? A moment later, though, he heard the low drone of a radio and noticed that the room had a niche in which the patient, hooked up to three brightly colored transfusions, was lying with his eyes shut. The tops and bottoms of Tedeschi’s pajamas did not match. The pants, on which were stamped the name of the hospital, hung agape around his private parts. The shirt was his own; Rivlin recognized it from previous sick calls. The renowned Arabist seemed to be in a state not so much of unconsciousness as of anticonsciousness. His round face, branded by the Argentine sun, was flame red. Only his thinning but still boyish hair, dancing lightly in the breeze of a small fan aimed directly at him, looked untouched.
The female broadcaster finished the news bulletin and began to interview several politicians, seeking to embroil them in an argument. It seemed doubtful that Tedeschi could hear the altercation, much less follow it, although he was usually addicted to the airwaves, which was why his wife had left the transistor on in her absence. He was breathing with difficulty, choked by a severe asthma that was either holding back or forcing up — Rivlin could not tell which — the phlegm gurgling from his depths, prevented by the blue oxygen mask on his face from clearing his lungs with one of the violent coughing fits, commonly commenced after finishing a lecture and taking his seat in the hall, that had shocked many an audience of Orientalists. Although Rivlin had seen the old mentor from whom he had learned so much (however dated some of it now was) in such twilight zones before, and although he had always been able, by pressing on the lever of Tedeschi’s fine sense of irony, to lift him over the awkward hump of his self-pity, now, facing the red flame kindled in the Argentine, he felt less sure of himself.
“Carlo?” he whispered, calling the old man by his first name, as had Tedeschi’s teachers, Professors Benet, Maier, and Goitein, who had taught the young Italian in the delicately arched buildings of the Hebrew university campus on Mount scopus in the days of the British Mandate. Although he had been forced to take a Hebrew name upon joining a mortar unit at the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence, during which the old campus was lost, Tedeschi, now a rotund, energetic young teaching assistant, became Carlo again in the university’s temporary postwar accommodations and remained so at the new campus at Giv’at Ram, where he soon received his professorship.
The sick man opened one eye and shut it immediately. Rivlin thought Tedeschi recognized him but lacked the strength, or so it seemed, to emerge from his fog and explain (let alone justify) his condition. Most likely he was waiting for his wife — the loyal impresario of his illnesses — to return and bring Rivlin up to date, with her usual brutally frank histrionics, on her husband’s condition and hopeless prognosis. Once she had gone on long enough, she would let Rivlin range far afield to the latest academic gossip. That alone, he knew, was capable of rousing his old mentor, not only from his stupor, but even from the grave.
And yet he restrained himself and said nothing, his eyes taking in, with a mixture of curiosity and slight nausea, the ugly yellow puncture marks from the intravenous needles in the arms of this man who as a youngster, in 1939, after the signing of the Hitler-Mussolini pact, had fled Turin for Palestine and wandered there from one lonely asylum to another before beginning the career that was to win him an international reputation as an expert on the decadent but long-lived Ottoman Empire.
“Just what do you call this, Carlo? What’s going on?” Rivlin asked softly again, somewhat frightened by the fiery shade of unfamiliar, astonishingly strong red in Tedeschi’s face. It was as if the Israeli Orientalist, having gone to the end of the world, had there been transformed into an Oriental himself.
Again one eye opened. Weary and irritable, it quickly shut once more, to protest the impatience that refused to wait for the woman who, with true dramatic flair, would tell the tale of his latest attack. Meanwhile, he stretched his short legs. From between his feet, still clad in the blue plimsolls given to travelers on El Al’s business class, fell an anthology of Jahaliya love poems. Finely penciled in its margins were the notes of Hannah Tedeschi, who just a year ago had published a selection of wonderfully translated verse from this same volume.
Rivlin glanced at his watch. If his sister-in-law’s flight was on time, he would have to leave for the airport in half an hour. Who would give him credit for his visit if the sick man went on clinging to his comatose state? Leaving the room, he roamed the corridor until he found Hannah, who was talking animatedly to one of the nurses.
“Yochanan? Here so soon? What was the rush? I told you in my message that Carlo wasn’t going anywhere.”
The visitor smiled at this strange woman, Tedeschi’s second wife, who had been smitten by him as a student, after his first wife was committed to a mental hospital. As young as she was, she soon adopted her stormy husband’s eccentricities. Cultivating his medical problems was her way of avoiding her predecessor’s fate.
“This time,” Rivlin said, embracing her loosely, “you’ve managed to scare me. I thought it best”—a trace of sarcasm crept into his voice—“to get here before Carlo jumped out of bed for some new conference or expedition.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Hannah Tedeschi said indignantly. “What conference? What expedition? Stop being so cynical. Can’t you believe what you see with your own eyes?” The cold glitter in her own eyes signaled her satisfaction that Rivlin, Tedeschi’s oldest student and close and loving friend, did not take her husband’s condition too seriously.
“But I do believe it,” he replied, hugging her more tightly. “I certainly do. He looks terrible. He has the most awful color. What do the doctors say?”
“The doctors,” Hannah snorted, “don’t know a thing. That’s the whole problem.” Only the constant need to minister to her husband had kept her, the wonderful translator, from an academic career as brilliant as his.
“It’s the same story each time,” Rivlin could not resist pointing out. “You go from doctor to doctor, and from one treatment and medicine to another, and nothing ever comes of it. That’s because you won’t face up to the truth.”
“And just what might that be?” Hannah snapped, aggressively opening the door to the sick man’s room.
“That it’s purely psychological. It’s entirely in your heads, his and yours.” The eternally rebellious pupil regretted his words immediately.
14.
RIVLIN, WHO SOON had to leave for the airport, was beginning to fear he wouldn’t be able to exchange a word with the defiantly unconscious man, whose wife was now describing, with cruel academic exactness, their tribulations since returning to Israel. In Tierra del Fuego, she told Rivlin, Tedeschi’s breathing had been normal, despite the hardships of the trip.
Rivlin, who had no idea why such a trip had been taken, tried to interrupt her torrent of words long enough to understand. “But what were you doing in Tierra del Fuego?” he asked. “what possessed you to go there?”
Tedeschi, it seemed, had been invited to Argentina for a lecture series. And since the government of Italy, many years ago, had volunteered to honor its responsibility toward the young victim of fascism by treating him to an annual week of convalescence from his asthma at any rest home of his choosing — anywhere — the Tedeschis had decided on a Patagonian adventure. After journeying all the way to the bottom of the world, they thought it a shame not to explore what lay beneath it.