A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Already asleep?” he scolded.

“No. Just for a second. What’s happening? Are you following it?”

“God knows. It’s awfully complicated. But you can relax. No one is going to get killed because they’re all dead already.”

She laid an affectionate hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s see what happens,” she encouraged him. “Lean back. My lawyers said it was a good movie.”

A crew-cut, ornery-looking old man now appeared on the screen and told an interviewer about his native village. He remembered the wind and the grass. Rivlin felt cheered. The first happy memory was on its way.

But it wasn’t so simple. The ornery man couldn’t decide which memory was his happiest. And the next time Rivlin awoke, it was only a quarter of an hour later. The attractive woman was asleep now, too, leaning on him lightly. He tried moving away from her. But this only made her lean more, and in the end he had to push her gently back toward her husband. She awoke annoyed, and he turned back to his own wife, who was now sleeping so soundly that her bowing had stopped.

The rain had died down. A deadly quiet prevailed in the little theater. The camera panned on the industrial area of a large city, where a dead Japanese woman was stonily describing the accident that had killed her.

This continued for an hour and a half before the lights came on for intermission. Rivlin, his head full of Japanese memories, awoke with a start. Hagit greeted him brightly, while his attractive neighbor gave him a dirty look, as if he had done something indecent to her during their joint sleep. Her husband rose and stretched himself groggily.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rivlin said.

“Maybe the second half will be better.”

“It won’t be.”

“I hate leaving in the middle. There’s nothing terrible about falling asleep from time to time. The movie is made of separate episodes.”

But he found falling asleep at movies and concerts embarrassing, and exhausting to fight against. He rose and made their whole row rise with them. People stood by the buffet, sipping coffee and cold drinks while discussing whether to remain for the film’s second half. Those who had stayed awake explained what it was about to those who hadn’t and coached them for the remainder. Rivlin, tired of happy Japanese memories, took Hagit by the arm and steered her toward the exit.

A storm-buffeted moon staggered through the sky between tattered clouds. He brushed wet leaves from the windshield of their car and said, pierced by sorrow,

“I would have been through with that interview in a minute. I could have said right away what my happiest memory was and gladly forgotten everything else.”

She bowed her head. “Yes. I know.”

“You know what?”

“The memory you would have taken with you.”

“Which?”

“Ofer’s wedding. The garden of the hotel.”

“You’re right,” he said, a bit annoyed to have his thoughts read so easily. “Ofer’s wedding. Despite, or maybe — who knows? — because of all that’s happened since then.”

He started the car as his wife climbed into it, then backed carefully out of the narrow parking space.

“And I,” Hagit mused, “would have ended up stranded between worlds. I have too many happy memories to choose just one. Especially of things that happened before I met you.”

6.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER giving his preface to Dr. Miller, Rivlin found it returned to his mailbox, without an accompanying note. What did Miller think he was doing? Was he being provocative or just stupid? Rivlin couldn’t believe that the young lecturer was so unafraid of him.

At first he was inclined to say nothing until they saw each other at the next departmental meeting. That night, however, he slept poorly. In the morning, unable to restrain himself, he called to straighten the matter out.

“I was wondering if you’d read it…”

But reading Rivlin’s introduction had been a piece of cake for the theoretical mind of the young lecturer. He just hadn’t been sure whether the professor, with whom he had such ideological and methodological differences, really wanted to know his opinion.

“But that’s just it,” the Orientalist said, feeling better. “It’s precisely those differences that make me want to know what you think.”

Nevertheless, he was careful to set their meeting in Miller’s room, a few floors above his own. That way he could get out of it any time he wanted.

Although Miller’s standing at the university did not entitle him to his own office, the young lecturer, who was two or three years older than Ofer, had found a little cubbyhole between two rooms near the rector’s office — a space originally intended for a coffee machine or a file cabinet — and talked his way into getting it. His sense of his own uniqueness, it seemed, made him prefer a cramped room of his own to a larger one shared with someone else.

It was late on a gray winter day. Miller’s narrow window looked out on neither mountains nor sea, but on some houses of a Druze village that appeared engraved in the dust on its glass pane. Rivlin, a tense smile on his face, surveyed the tiny room’s overloaded bookshelves with what was meant to be a benevolent glance. Most of the books were recently published American and German studies of political and sociological theory. Not a single Arabic volume was in evidence. Did this man demanding tenure in the Near Eastern Studies department know Arabic at all, or did he rely entirely on translations for his postmodernist opinions? Moving the empty chair away from Miller’s desk so as not to have to face him like a student, Rivlin positioned himself diagonally and stretched his legs out in front of him. “To judge by your tone,” he began magnanimously, “I take it that you have some objections. Well, I’d like to hear them. I’m open to criticism.”

Miller ran a hand through his sandy hair and took off his glasses. To Rivlin’s surprise, his light blue eyes were childishly innocent. Although the young lecturer could easily guess that the full professor was on the secret appointments committee, he did not beat around the bush. In no uncertain terms, he rejected the Orientalist’s thesis that an academic study dealing with the origins of Algerian national identity could have any relevance to the current bloodshed in Algeria. His tone quiet and considered, he stressed the need to demolish not only the theoretical foundations of his senior colleague’s introduction — which, Rivlin now saw, he had not only read but could remember every word of — but the premises of the still unwritten book to follow. Its reification of the concept of national identity, he contended, doomed it to failure on moral and intellectual grounds.

“Reification?” Rivlin forced a smile while concealing his anxiety over a word whose exact meaning he was unsure of.

Yes, Miller said. National identity was not a natural or empirical given, there being no such thing. It was a fictive construct used by the power structure to enslave the population it purportedly described. He found it deplorable that a senior faculty member, writing at the end of the twentieth century, should collaborate in such an anachronistic, long repudiated, and even dangerous point of view, much less base a book on it.

“A fictive construct in what way?” Stiffening, Rivlin did his best to overlook the connotations of the word “collaborate.”

The young postmodernist was happy to explain. In articulate, if rather mechanical and (Rivlin thought) smugly jesuitical language, he demystified the devious concept of national identity, which served to ghettoize the lower classes and deprive them of their rights within the rigid framework of the national state, whether — for there was no difference — this was of an openly totalitarian or an ostensibly democratic nature.