In his search for the roots of the Algerian disaster--"Early Warnings of the Horror of the Disintegration of National Identity," he calls one paper--Rivlin is led by his mentor, the eminent Jerusalem Orientalist Carlo Tedeschi, to the papers of Yosef Suissa, a promising young academic who had been studying the popular literature of North Africa in the 1940s until his death in a suicide bombing. "He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind," Carlo's wife, Hannah (herself a translator of pre-Islamic poetry), laments. "Not that that stopped them from snuffing him out one fine day." ("Those aren't the same Arabs," Rivlin, ever the decent liberal, protests lamely.)

Tedeschi, an elderly hypochondriac frequently hospitalized by his doting younger wife ("She loves him to be sick," Rivlin observes), pushes the skeptical Rivlin to examine the old stories for hidden signs of Arab society's latent illness: "We have to look for the hidden symptoms of impending disorder even before it breaks out....We need a blood test to detect the antibodies that signal the malignancy...in one little gland, before it invades the entire body."

Suissa's papers are passed off to the newly married Samaher, who has postponed the completion of her degree for more than a year because of various imagined maladies: a "sick" grandmother, an imaginary pregnancy and then a long and unexplained depression. Under pressure from Samaher's mother, herself a onetime student of Rivlin's, to concoct some independent project that will confer a degree on her daughter, Rivlin gives her Suissa's collection of North African poems and fiction to translate. This project, too, drags on for months, during which time Rivlin is delivered occasional updates--which take the form of requests for further delay--by Samaher's cousin Rashid, who is stricken with hopeless love for his just-married cousin, and captive to his devotion to her.

Rivlin's willing entanglement with the young Arabs deepens as Samaher's delays mount. While his wife is out of the country on business, he puts up little resistance when Rashid tries to take him to Mansura, where the bedridden Samaher recites the promised translations aloud. Rashid, who makes a living shuttling Arab day laborers to their jobs in Jewish cities in his minibus, soon becomes Rivlin's personal driver. He ferries the Orientalist back and forth to the Galilee, into and out of the West Bank, and from Haifa to Jerusalem, hopeful that his dutiful service will obtain Samaher her final grade, and perhaps that the eminent professor--several of whose former students are now in the employ of the Shin Bet, Israel's feared internal security service--will be able to help Rashid's sister, who lost her Israeli passport when she married a West Bank Palestinian, return to the country.

The professor--like Yehoshua, the "scion of an ancient Jerusalem family" who moved to Haifa--is the evident center of the novel. And his incessant probing of the past, in search of answers to problems he cannot comprehend, which pushes him to cross boundaries both familial and national, is its engine. He is "still tortured by our separation," Ofer writes to Galya: "He's a historian who has to understand everything" because he is "consumed by doubt about himself." But this endless searching takes its toll, and before long his son and wife alike are furious. "You think you can call up ghosts and control them," Ofer scolds him, in a call from Paris. "When will you realize there are things that you don't have to understand.... You're always poking at things. Well, poke at your Arabs, not at me." Hagit castigates him in similar terms: "We're not putty in your hands to be twisted and molded for your pathetic investigations."

As we follow Rivlin to faculty meetings, weddings, the airport, the shopping mall, orchestra performances, Yehoshua renders a rich human portrait of the man in all his neuroses. But in the end, after Samaher gets her grade and Galya, before giving birth, finally forgives Ofer, Rivlin is no closer to understanding the cause of their divorce or the roots of Algeria's troubles. His son may be liberated from the past--"I'm morally a free man," Ofer declaims with relief--but Rivlin is not.

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