A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Come, come,” Rivlin drawled, in what he intended to be a patronizing manner. “No difference between totalitarianism and democracy? Isn’t that going a bit far?”

But the sandy-haired jesuit, now sitting in the shadow of a passing cloud, stuck to his guns. National identity was an illegitimate concept even in a country like Israel that still pretended, albeit with increasing difficulty, to be democratic. Rather than let people decide for themselves who they were and how they wished to be defined, it trapped them in a rigid category that had no room for change, development, personal experience, or multiple identities. With the full complicity of the academic community, the ruling classes sought to impose an inflexible model of reality, privileging some and marginalizing others, for the purpose of exerting total control.

Rivlin sighed. “I’d say you were the proof that they haven’t succeeded,” he said, wishing he could dampen the young postmodernist’s ardor.

“They can never succeed,” Miller agreed triumphantly. “In the end the whole system will implode.” Ordinary thinking people would rebel against being labeled by the antiquated notions that the professor (sitting now in evening shadow, his head jerked back in dismay) wished to construct his book with. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy would understand that national identity enslaved rather than enhanced them, by curbing their freedom and mobility and preventing a rich interchange of perspectives across permeable frontiers. And the moral absurdity of it was that the enslavers, the engineers of identity who locked the doors and sealed the borders, kept open these possibilities for themselves. They alone retained access to the rich interfaces of language and culture, traveling widely and associating with different peer groups while the masses, locked within the gates of the state, were chauvinistically regimented. And to what end? But that was obvious…

“Not to me,” Rivlin said honestly.

“To make cannon fodder for the next unnecessary war.”

“Whoa there!” he protested. “Begging your pardon! How can a political progressive like you call an anticolonialist struggle against a century of oppression in Algeria unnecessary?”

But the theoretical jesuit was unimpressed by anticolonialist platitudes. Colonialism, he maintained, was not so much a historical or political phenomenon as a ubiquitous condition that co-opted all elements of society. It was present even in countries that had never had colonies, such as Austria or Sweden, to say nothing of Israel, a colonialist entity from the start. You didn’t even have to look at the Occupied Territories to see that. “Take, for instance,” Miller said, with a thin smile, “the hierarchical organization of the university tower we’re in, surrounded by a national park that has wiped out every remnant of the Arab villages that once were in it. Think of the internal division of the floors, with the administration at the top and the slowest elevators serving the lower and middle echelons, where the liberal-arts faculties are, while the high-speed elevators zoom up to the appointments committees and the personnel department and financial offices. That’s where the real power of this university is. And what sits, disgracefully, on top of everything? A military installation, an army radar station! Of course, we pretend it’s not there. Its operators are made to look like students. But let’s not kid ourselves. It combs the area and sends its information to an intelligence base in the Galilee in which everything is secretly processed. That’s where the legitimacy of the whole oppressive power structure comes from…”

The daylight was vanishing. So, Rivlin thought, that’s what our blond wunderkind has to say.

The young postmodernist now came back to Rivlin’s introduction, picking it apart like a stale roll. “National identity” was bad enough, a thoroughly dated notion. But worse yet was this business of a rainbow. Was national identity some kind of weather condition? What was the point of the whole, perfectly absurd theoretical exercise? It was only there to justify the professor’s obsession with artificially linking the past to the present. But what entitled him to assume that the poor devils who murdered villagers at night and slit the throats of babies snatched from their mothers’ wombs had any memory of wanting to be French? Had the more original thought never occurred to him that they might be pursuing their own authenticity, acted out by their darkly passionate souls? Surely Professor Rivlin was aware that beneath the tinsel of national identity, with which the military dictatorship in Algeria sought to distract the country, there was something more genuine and primitive. The Arabs were too fluid and unbounded to be subsumed under a single national grid.

“Excuse me,” Rivlin said softly, “but I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any light here?”

The little cubbyhole had no ceiling light. There was only the lamp on Miller’s desk. But its bulb was burned out, and the administration had not yet bothered to replace it.

Although the Orientalist was free to beat a retreat, he remained sprawled limply in his chair, unable to tear himself away from the young lecturer, whose sandy hair glowed golden in the gloom. Dr. Miller, having finished taking Rivlin apart, now turned to the outdated profession of Orientalism itself, which had proved incapable of absorbing the new theories of multiple narratives. It was time the professor realized that the news coming from Algeria was simply one narrative among many, propagated by the corporate press to uphold the dictatorial regime….

It was getting dark. Perhaps, Miller suggested, they should continue the discussion in the professor’s office.

“We can stay here,” Rivlin said. “If you don’t mind talking to someone you can’t see, neither do I.”

And as a wistful night descended on the world, lighting up the Druze houses on the Carmel one by one, he continued to offer his head to the guillotine, summoning the last of his patience to listen to the new theories whose very language he had despaired of understanding long ago.

7.

WINTER CAME EARLY, prolifically. After two years of little rain there were no complaints about the torrential storms and gale-force winds, only about the unpreparedness for them — especially in Tel Aviv, where streets were so flooded that they looked, at least on television, like the canals of Venice, without their gondolas and lovers. Meanwhile, the official opening of the Khalil es-Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah was postponed by a month and rescheduled for Christmas, which coincided with Hanukkah that year. The abbess of the Greek Orthodox convent in Baalbek had not considered a poetry contest, or even a fifty-year-old United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between two headstrong peoples, sufficient reason to send his singing nun to Ramallah and had preferred to wait for the holiday season to cast its religious aura over the event.

That Saturday morning it rained so hard that Rivlin, anticipating crawling back underneath the big quilt for an afternoon nap, did not bother to make the bed. Now, to the cozy patter of the rain and the shriek of the wind, he lay wondering whether the Palestinians of Ramallah deserved to be visited in such weather.

“I’ve seen enough real Arabs in the last few months,” he grumbled to his wife. “From now on I’d rather meet them on my computer screen.”

The judge, who had been looking forward to the event with keen curiosity, refused to hear of this.

“You’ve lost all joie de vivre,” she accused the big gray head sticking out from the quilt. “Life with you is becoming unbearable. You’re so busy controlling everyone that you can’t enjoy yourself anymore. You can’t even sit through a movie. At night you can’t wait to go to bed, and in the morning you can’t wait to get up and start eating your heart out again. I’m not calling off a trip we’ve been planning for so long. And you promised Carlo and Hannah that we’d take them with us.”