A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Ra’uda: Malsuk wa’mulassak ana bi’zowjati wala atrukha ila ’l-abd.

Despairing of getting the stubborn dybbuk to depart peacefully, the Arab rabbi strode with small steps to the leather-coated Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun — who, enchanted by the performance, was standing off to one side excitedly fingering his little pistol.

“O Archangel Michael!” the rabbi commanded him. “Have seven Torah scrolls taken out and prepare seven ram’s horns and seven black candles.”

But either this was as far as the rehearsals had gone or Ibn-Zaidoun had forgotten his lines, because, shaking with laughter, he saluted, bowed, and went to turn on the lights. Then, to the beating of the drum, which spurred the lute, the rebab, and the shepherd’s pipe to make music, he broke into loud applause. The audience followed suit. The lace curtain fell, and the older of the two boys snuffed out the candles. Samaher had tears in her eyes. Visibly moved, she pulled off her beard and earlocks and turned shyly to Rashid, who gallantly dipped the head of his doll to her. Yet when he gestured to his sister to join him for a curtain call, she fled the auditorium with her two sons, overcome by stage fright. The two cousins dropped everything and ran after her.

Rivlin, touched to the quick, turned to his wife.

“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “Simply unbelievable….”

14.

THE TABLE, RETURNED to its place, was now a judgment seat. The judge was an elderly Scotsman. As a young man he had served with British intelligence in the Holy Land, where he had learned Hebrew and Arabic in order to investigate the “terrorists” of those days. Now a pensioner, he sometimes came to the Middle East to lecture at Bir Zeit University on “The Bounds of British Democracy.” It was this that qualified him to be the arbiter of the poetry contest.

He sat behind the table, a lanky thoroughbred whose eyes, too, were blue from sheer blue-bloodedness. Two panelists joined him, for balance: a pudgy Egyptian diplomat, in the area on state business, and the Tel Aviv critic-poet — who, however, could hardly be accused of bias in favor of his own people. At the last moment, the learned translatoress, having impressed one and all with her renditions of the mystical verse of Al-Hallaj, was added too. Her confidence had grown by such leaps and bounds that Rivlin easily persuaded her to accept the nomination “for the honor of Israeli Orientalism,” as he put it. Hannah nodded and ran a small comb through her stringy hair before letting herself be led to the table.

One by one, the contestants were called upon to read their verse. First, however, the rule was restated that the contest was for love poems only. No entries on political themes would be accepted, even if cast in such lyric form as a Palestinian lament for a field expropriated by Jews, a Palestinian dirge for an olive tree uprooted by Jews, a Palestinian elegy for the childhood memory of a fragrant orange grove built on by Jews, or a Palestinian threnody for the tears of an abandoned horse in a village destroyed by Jews. Likewise, there were to be no refugees, no occupations, no anti-Semitism, no Holocaust, no death, and no bereavement. Only love.

The contest had attracted a large number of competitors, old poetic hands and newcomers alike. Most were residents of Ramallah or nearby villages, though some came from as far afield as Jordan, and others were Arabs from Israel, several of them equipped with Hebrew translations of their verse. The Israeli contingent was small, even after being reinforced by an overweight and bashful German woman and a slightly tipsy American, both reading their verse in their own languages.

And yet, starting with the very first poem, it was evident that the elegy and the threnody, the uprooted olive tree and the tearful horse, were not so easily forgotten in love’s name. Not a few contestants sought to outwit the organizers by disguising their national grief as erotic outpourings for a stolen beloved, her splendid belly compared to a lost wheat field, the chime of her bracelets to the enemy’s machine guns. One old villager wrote a poem to his wife in which a younger rival for her affections was likened to a Jewish settler.

In his seat in the murmuring, smoke-filled auditorium, the Orientalist was growing weary of the same repetitive images in the same unchanging rhymes and meters, the gist of which had to be translated for his wife. The one poem he was looking forward to was Fu’ad’s — but the maître d’, intimidated by so many Palestinians from across the border, passed up his turn with a wave of his hand.

Intermission came at last. The audience flowed back to the buffet, leaving the Scottish judge and his panelists to tally their scores. Arabs and Jews stepped up to congratulate Hannah Tedeschi on her translations. Flustered by so much praise, she shrugged it off by explaining in tedious detail each mistake she had made while promising to correct them all in good time. “It was a brilliant idea of yours to get her away from that tyrannical hypochondriac,” Rivlin said to Hagit as he fondly watched his old classmate struggling to keep the attention from going to her head. The judge, well aware of her judiciousness, merely smiled at her husband — who, thinking he had caught a glimpse of the fluttering robe of the Lebanese nun, decided to go to the men’s room before the intermission ended.

The nun, however, failed to materialize, Rashid and his possessed women had disappeared, and even the men’s room proved elusive and was to be found only with the help of the poetry-reading coat-check attendant, who had resumed her position by the checkroom. Following her directions, the Orientalist climbed a staircase to the third floor. This was a loft whose wide-open windows failed to dispel the heated atmosphere of the loud young men and women gathered there, evidently more in search of love than of poetry. Several of the women had chosen to cool off by removing their shawls and letting down their hair.

There was a long line for the men’s room. In it was Fu’ad, looking as athletic in his tightly cut jeans as the young men around him. Noticing the Jewish Orientalist, he turned around and said loudly in Arabic for all to hear, “Please move up, Professor. I’ve saved a place for you.” When Rivlin, embarrassed, shook his head, Fu’ad moved back to join him.

“You look so youthful that I didn’t recognize you,” Rivlin said, almost grudgingly.

“Youthful?” The maître d’ laughed. “How can I be youthful, Professor? Look around you and you’ll see youth. I’m just without my dark suit and Miss Hendel bossing me. Come back to the hotel and you’ll see the tired old Fu’ad you know.”

The Jew looked at the Arab reproachfully. “How come you got cold feet?”

“How do you mean?”

“You didn’t read your poem.”

“You call that flimflam a poem, Professor? The poems tonight made me realize that all the juice has gone out of my Arabic. With the pepper and the hot sauce. I’ve hung around you Jews for so long that my Arabic is like a rusty faucet. Do you want them to think in Ramallah that that’s the best Abu-Ghosh can do? Better to listen and to learn…”

The line advanced slowly. From somewhere Rivlin made out the rich voice of the Lebanese nun. His heart beating faster, he turned and spotted her on a balcony at the far end of the loft. Petite and smiling, she stood in the cigarette smoke of her choir of drones, looking bridal herself with a nun’s dickey over her white robe. With her was Ibn-Zaidoun, who appeared to be telling her a funny story, at which she burst out laughing in the same throaty tones in which Rivlin had heard her lament the death of God.

“ Hadi hiyya ’l-mutribba ’l-lubnaniyya, ” *he said excitedly to Fu’ad, who made sure to remain a half-step behind him as they neared the bathroom. “You’ll love her singing.”