A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

And so, while Akri was enlightening his audiences in Florida and even inviting one of his grandsons to join him for a tour of Disneyland, his temporary replacement moved back into his old room, the spacious and well-lit office of a department head. Putting up with the gaze of both grandsons, one blond and one dark, he resumed his job of advising students — new and old, Arab and Jewish — on how best and least onerously to fulfill their obligations and keep the department from losing them.

He avoided serious phone talks with Ofer, the depth of whose hostility he did not dare to gauge for fear of a brutal rebuff. (On their trip to the airport, his son had kept his vow of silence, uttering a total of three inconsequential sentences.) Letting Hagit conduct their weekly conversation with Paris, he listened over the second receiver like a circumspect aide-de-camp, asking an occasional pointless question. Ofer’s acquiescence in this arrangement, however artificial, allowed him to hope that his son, who had lost all self-control that day at the hotel, was taking himself in hand.

Even after getting his new glasses, he did not hurry to type his handwritten reflections on Algeria into his computer. Perhaps he feared that weaknesses and inconsistencies not apparent in the heat of composition might show up on the bright screen. Meanwhile, to the delight of the two secretaries, he spent much of his time in his old office, comfortably ensconced in the big armchair that had been his own acquisition. No one, he knew, could run the department as well as he could. Though he was only doing so on a stopgap basis, he did his best to solve the problems brought to him.

One morning he heard Rashid talking to the secretaries. Straining to listen, he learned that Samaher’s cousin was on a secret, Rivlin-bypassing mission to obtain certification, at least of a provisional nature, of his M.A. student’s completion of all her course requirements for the previous year. The secretaries, remembering him as their driver to the wedding in Mansura, asked about the vanished bride.

“She hasn’t been feeling well,” Rashid said. “That’s why she asked me to take care of this.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She isn’t well,” he repeated. “She can’t concentrate. It’s the situation.”

“What situation?”

“Ours. The country’s.”

They checked Samaher’s file, saw that she had an incomplete from Professor Rivlin, and dispensing with further formalities, waved Rashid in to the department head. Much to his surprise, the trusty messenger, who had had no intention of doing so, found himself facing Samaher’s teacher.

“Are you running the department again?” he asked.

“Just for a while,” Rivlin apologized. “Shut the door. What’s new? What does Samaher want now?”

“Temporary certification that she’s completed her requirements.”

“Temporary certification? There’s no such thing as temporarily completing something. You shouldn’t let her use you like this, Rashid.”

The coal black eyes, taken aback, stared at him, then looked thoughtfully down at the floor.

Rivlin felt a pang. “You didn’t bring me anything from her? Not even one story? Not a single poem?”

“She can’t…,” Rashid murmured, in genuine anguish. “She really can’t…” He regarded the Orientalist as if deciding whether to trust him, then whispered in Arabic:

“ Al-hayal sar kabt, u’l’kabt b’dur ala ’l-jnun. ” *

“You’ll drive me crazy, too,” the Orientalist said absently, with a bitter smile.

Rashid seemed to have thought of that possibility, for he did not look surprised. He merely laid a defensive hand on his heart and asked:

“Why me?”

“Listen here, Rashid. I want the truth.”

The truth, it seemed, was a long story. It had to do with Samaher’s father-in-law, the contractor, a difficult man who had insisted on hospitalizing his confused daughter-in-law in Safed, so that she could be cured of…

“… of… the horse.”

“The horse?”

Rashid sighed. “Yes. She keeps imagining it.”

“And she’s still there?”

“Who?”

“Samaher. In the hospital.”

“Just a little while longer. We have to be patient. Soon she’ll get out. That’s what the doctor says. She wants to very badly….”

The sky outside the window had clouded over. A bolt of lightning pawed at the bay. But Rashid, though he had never been in this room, had no interest in its views, neither of the bay nor of the mountains. Running his glance over the books on the shelves, he let it linger on the photographs of Akri’s grandsons, as if committing them to memory. His silence filled Rivlin with a warm memory of their night journey. He would have liked, in obedience to an old longing, to take to the road once again with the messenger, who now reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled white skullcap that he smoothed with his hand.

“Is that for The Dybbuk, Rashid?”

An Arab librarian, Rashid explained, had helped him find the play and had convinced the student at the checkout counter to let him borrow it under Samaher’s name. They were already rehearsing it.

“Then the festival is really taking place?”

“Of course it is.” Rashid was insulted. “When did I ever lie to you?”

Everyone in Ramallah, he told Rivlin, even the police, was organizing for the event. The date was set for a Saturday night in late November, which worked out well for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In fact, it turned out to be on the anniversary of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution for Palestine. He, Rashid, would bring the professor from Jerusalem if he didn’t want to drive through Palestinian territory himself. There would be plenty of room in the minibus. Professor Rivlin had seen how no checkpoint could stop him. And there would be no political skits like those in Zababdeh, just poems of love and friendship, some new and some old. The professor wouldn’t be the only Jew there. There would be Israeli poets and peace activists, progressive people, all guests of the Palestinian Authority. There would even be a poetry contest, with prizes. The judge had already been chosen: a British professor who taught at Bir-Zeit University. It would all be in a spirit of fun. Everyone was tired of politics. Ramallah wasn’t Gaza, where people loved to hate each other. The Ramallans knew how to live. And the professor should bring his wife this time. The judge would enjoy it. She mustn’t miss the Lebanese nun, that divine little scamp who had promised to come on another tour of Palestine. She had even asked the Abuna — or so he said — whether the Jew would be there.

4.

AUTUMN ARRIVED AT full blast, bringing wind and rain and the promise of a real winter. Yet there were also days of warm sun and sweet light, with fleecy white clouds hanging quietly in the sky. Although her blinds were opened less often now, the ghost, dressed in two heavy sweaters that Rivlin recognized from the previous winter, continued to sit on her terrace. She no longer played solitaire. Seated at the little red table with a pad of stationery, she seemed to be — as far as he could make out from across the street — filling page after page with writing.

The semester began. The Oriental department head returned from the Occident, buoyed by his audiences of decent Christians and wealthy Jews politely worried about the future. He thanked Rivlin for filling in for him, and especially for preventing the rector and the dean from making off with the half-time teaching slot.

Relieved of the duty of substituting for his successor, Rivlin no longer had an excuse to put off typing his wildly scrawled and illegible notes, the product of his days without glasses, into his computer, to prepare them for submission to the critical eye of the brilliant young Dr. Miller, the keys to whose academic career he held. He knew that Miller was attuned to the latest winds blowing from German and American universities and that his approach to scholarship, and to Orientalism in particular, was revisionist. (Indeed, the young doctor had even announced at a departmental meeting that he refused to be called any longer by the intellectually pretentious and discredited title of “Orientalist”; he preferred the more modest description of “Middle Eastern social ethnographer.”) For this reason, Rivlin, wishing to present his draft in a softer, more ambivalent light, took care to insert in more places than necessary a number of self-critical qualifications and to replace exclamation points with question marks. He then ran his remarks off on the printer, put them in Miller’s mailbox with a jocular note, and postponed the next meeting of the secret appointments committee until the following week.