A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“I’m glad to see you two,” he said with a sagacious smile, brushing the crumbs from his suit. “I wasn’t sure you were coming. The mother of the bride has been working for us even longer than for you, ever since she was a girl. She stayed on after my wife died, until I moved to a senior citizens’ home seven years later. But we’re still on good terms. When you think of the difficult background she comes from, she’s an amazingly pleasant and well-adjusted person. Of course her cooking isn’t exactly — what’s the word the young folk like to use? — awesome. Let’s hope tonight’s meal was cooked by someone else, ha, ha, ha…”

Rivlin permitted himself a covert smile, which did not escape the old widower’s sharp eye.

“Yes, I know all about you,” he said, picking at the roll with palsied fingers. “She brings me up-to-date when she visits me — all about your new apartment, and your sons and what they’re doing. She’s very attached to you, Your Honor, and always says how patient you are with her. Which reminds me… if it isn’t intruding… I mean, as long as we’re at the same table… you see, I couldn’t tell from yesterday’s paper… what exactly were your reasons for acquitting that damned spy? Why, he’s not even an Arab.”

“Not an Arab?” Rivlin asked in puzzlement.

“You see, Professor,” the widower said, taking him into his confidence, “we all know our judges go easy on Arabs. They do it even with ordinary murderers and rapists, not to mention terrorists. They’re afraid — oh, yes, they are! — to be accused of something as unfashionable as patriotism. But in your wife’s case, the defendant was Jewish and a big fish at that. That’s why I wondered why she let him off the hook as if he were an Arab.”

Pleased with his irony, the old widower took a sip of wine, broke into a cough, turned red, and nearly choked.

Hagit, perking up to the sound of a European wedding march played in a Middle Eastern style, did not even glance in the choking patriot’s direction. Her eyes bright with emotion, she leaned forward to take her husband’s hand and led him to the wedding canopy behind the procession that the large curtain had parted to admit. Ahead of them, accompanied by their families and a video crew, the bride and groom walked slowly and majestically.

Rivlin remembered the groom as a quiet, easily frightened boy. Now, dark-complexioned and thin, in a wide-lapelled suit and a black hat, he looked like a pensive secret-service agent. He was holding the hand of his father, a greengrocer, whose own suit was a summery white. Its color matched the muslin veil of the bride, who was now floating down the aisle between two women, one big and fat and one slim and attractive. For a moment, Rivlin failed to recognize the slim woman as their housekeeper. She bore herself gracefully in a bare-shouldered yellow silk dress, her head topped by an auburn hairpiece glittering with sequins, her heavily made-up eyes regarding the world as if it were no longer quite worthy of her. Meeting the surprised glance of her employer as she passed him twice, once in front of him and once on a large screen above his head, she flashed, so he thought, a triumphant smile.

2.

STANDING IN LINE at the pharmacy of his health clinic for his blood-pressure medicine, Rivlin took a step back from the old woman in front of him, whose blue-tinged hair he found distasteful. She sensed his presence and turned to look at him. It was the ghost in person, her baggy old jacket grazing his clothes. He smiled at her desiccated face, which was heavier and infinitely harder than his mother’s. Failing to place the bespectacled, scholarly voyeur, the ghost stared blankly at him and turned around again, shifting a long list of prescriptions from hand to hand. As soon as a new window opened, she darted for it more quickly than he would have thought possible at her age and was the first to reach it. The Orientalist, amused, did not bother changing lines.

When Rivlin was a small boy, his father kept a journal of his son’s exploits that he read aloud to whoever would listen. Sometimes, wishing to relive his childhood, Rivlin browsed in it. The boy rather sentimentally described in its pages was capable of great and even extreme obstinacy and was not always very clever. Sometimes, Rivlin succeeded in dredging from the depths of memory the incidents his father related — the time he pretended to conduct an orchestra of children in nursery school; the time he chased a runaway chicken. Yet the most famous of these stories, the one in which he proposed marriage to his mother, was one he had no recollection of. Perhaps this was why, although its psychological significance seemed obvious, he smiled mysteriously whenever he read it.

The Six-Year-Old Rivlin Proposes Marriage to His Mother

When Rivlin attended first grade, his father walked him to school on his way to work every day, crossing the streets of the old downtown with him. The little boy liked to take his time, especially when he spied a pile of builder’s sand or gravel, which he felt duty-bound to climb. One day his father lost his temper at his dallying. When this didn’t help, he pointed to a neatly dressed and combed blond boy walking with his schoolbag on his back, and said:

“That does it! I’m trading you in for that nice blond boy. From now on he’ll be my son.”

Rivlin, who was standing on a big pile of gravel while regarding the old Knesset building, was thunderstruck. Turning red with indignation, he began to call the little stranger names, even declaring that he was Hitler’s son, a cruel boy who had to be watched out for. Reaching the school with his father, who now regretted the whole thing, he refused to kiss him good-bye.

The first-grade student — so his father’s journal continued — sat in the classroom in an agitated state. As soon as the recess bell rang, he raced into the schoolyard to vent his feelings to his big sister. By the time he found her standing with some friends, however, the bell had rung again, and there was no time to say a word. Instead of returning to class he burst into tears and ran home, dashing blindly across streets whose dangers he had been warned of without stopping to climb a single pile of sand. His mother was in the kitchen. Without mincing words, he said:

“You should never have married that man. I’d make a better husband. Why don’t you leave him and marry me?”

His mother, pleased by the unexpected proposal, did not reject it out of hand. She made Rivlin repeat it and finally coaxed the whole story from him, after which he calmed down and regained his old brashness — so much so that, when his exhausted father came home at the end of a day’s work, he opened the door and said:

“Hurry up and go to Ima! She wants to spank you!”

His father ended this episode by remarking:

“Who would have thought, my little boy, that a passing remark of mine would stir up such a dreadfully strong spirit of jealousy and contention? From now on I shall never cease to worry, for if every little thing excites you so badly, what will happen when you grow older?”

3.

DEAR, SWEET AUTUMN, don’t let us down, Rivlin exhorted the skies every morning, as he opened the shutter to study the color and shape of the clouds drifting over the Carmel. “Another rainless, stormless winter like the last two and I’ll go out of my mind,” he told his wife. Hagit lay self-indulgently beneath the big white quilt that he had made her take from the closet in the hope of coercing the cold weather to come.

The fall semester was about to begin, students were flocking to ask for advice, and the department head was still in America. His lecture at the conference on “Twenty Years of Edward Said’s Orientalism ” had gone so well that even exiles from Iraq and Sudan had asked him for a copy of the text, which he had delivered in Arabic as a symbolic provocation. If Akri was to be trusted, the New York — based Palestinian professor, or one of his disciples, would now have to rewrite the book, in order to defend it against the Haifaite’s challenges, hot off the Middle Eastern griddle. Of course, some of the conference’s participants had sought to dismiss the Israeli Arabist as simply another Western Orientalist like those accused by Said of marginalizing the Arab world — a pseudoscholar treating the Middle East as an absence to be filled by his presence, or as a shadow play waiting to be brought to life by its colonialist puppeteers. And yet how could the Middle East be absent, or a shadow, in a courageously original Middle Easterner like Ephraim Akri, a stalwart, God-fearing Levantine, albeit a Jewish one, whose brown skin and sad Bedouin eyes were those of a true son of the desert and whose command of the subtleties of Arabic put to shame the politically correct professors from New England and northern California who couldn’t pronounce correctly a single Arabic curse? His bold new ideas had made such an impression that he had been invited to speak to numerous Jewish and Christian groups, who were eager to hear an Old Historian’s reasons for believing that the situation in the Middle East was more hopeless than anyone thought.