A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

The nun’s singing had now infected the Ramallah audience, which swayed in its seats as if straining to join in. The musicians, prepared for such an uprising, changed tempo to nip it in the bud. Rivlin turned to his wife, wishing to share the experience. Her ironic smile left him uncertain that she was enjoying it. “Well, what do you say?” he asked excitedly, as if he were the nun’s impresario. “Doesn’t she have a wonderful voice?” Hagit gave her husband a pitying look. “I wouldn’t exactly call it wonderful,” she answered judiciously, while smiling at the Arabs bouncing up and down to the insurrectionary beat of the drum. “But it is special.”

Disappointed in her, Rivlin surveyed the rest of his entourage, hoping for greater enthusiasm. Hannah Tedeschi, bent over the lyrics that she was no doubt translating in her head, did not appear to be listening to the music. Mr. Suissa, on the other hand, had a look of wary satisfaction on his face, as if he had discovered here in Ramallah the Arab music he had been deprived of in his North African Jewish childhood.

O my Lord, who spreads the heavens,

We are purged of our carnality,

And the earth quivers with love.

Your long arm

Summons us to the Redemption.

The nun now began a new exchange, with a tambourine — which, however, rather than following her, took the lead. Its percussive rattle rising above the diminuendo of the musicians, it, too, sought to throw her off balance, forcing her to cling to more and more sobbing grace notes of an increasingly Oriental character. Supposedly above it all in her Lebanese cloister, she now seemed, like the oppressed Palestinians of the Holy Land, to be fighting for an existence that vibrated with them on one wavelength.

Rivlin felt one of Ra’uda’s dark-haired boys slump sleepily against his knee. Laying a hand on the warm little head, he tapped the rhythm of the drum on it. He gave his wife a loving look, glanced fondly at the translatoress immersed in her lyrics, and was surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, Mrs. Suissa junior, who had not said a word to him all evening, crying as he had cried for Jephthah’s daughter.

16.

BUT WHEN WOULD the promised fainting take place? Was it possible in front of such an openly non-Christian audience? And who, apart from Rivlin and Rashid, even hoped for it?

Song followed song, and the little nun showed no signs of tiring. The lute and rebab kept pace with her, their ancient erotic rhythms luring her so far from the sacred that there were times when she could have been performing in a Cairo cabaret.

A thin, reddish gas drifted upward near the musicians. Produced by a secondhand smoke machine bought by Ibn-Zaidoun from an Israeli disco club, it thickened and spread, forming a mist that enveloped the choir and curled around the plain sandals of the nun. From there, like a friendly animal, it crept toward the Palestinians sitting on the floor near the stage. At first they backed away, as if from a tear-gas bomb. Yet seeing that the odorless substance did not burn or make them cry and was no more than a symbol of the world’s insubstantiality, they began to laugh and to try to get a whiff of it or even catch it in their hands.

The Lebanese nun, startled by this special effect, which seemed about to turn her performance into a rock concert, stopped singing. She shut her eyes and hugged her shoulders as if fending off the audience’s clapping to the rhythm of the drum. Now is the time, Rivlin thought. He tugged at his wife and whispered: “Watch her. She’s going to faint. I just hope she doesn’t blow it.”

The judge looked at her husband as if he were deranged. “But what good does it do if she faints?” she asked.

The Orientalist did not expect such a question. Automatically, however, as though from the depths of a trance, the answer came to him. “It’s a warning,” he said. “A warning of the abyss we’re all about to fall into.”

Yet the nun was taking her time. Indeed, if she had been supposed to faint at the point of her hushed climax it was already too late, because the music had resumed and passed the point of no return. Even Ibn-Zaidoun’s smoke machine was now out of control and rapidly fouling the auditorium, in which several veterans of the Intifada had risen to their feet and were shouting the nun down with nationalist songs.

She turned pale and retreated to the rear of the stage. Something unpleasant, a serious and perhaps even violent misunderstanding, was in the air. In another minute, it seemed, she would have to hide behind her choir of hefty drones. And yet oddly, so loyal until now, they were doing nothing to protect her. Droning and clapping, they pushed her almost comically back, as if holding her to the terms of her contract. Rivlin was on his feet, trying to sight the white robe, which was surrounded by a crowd that had burst onto the stage. At its head, talking to the still-singing nun, was Rashid. He made a gesture, and suddenly, with no warning, she collapsed at his feet and disappeared from the sight of the Jew.

17.

IT WAS AFTER midnight when the audience dispersed, in high spirits. The Lebanese nun’s fainting fit had met with sympathy, and numerous well-wishers had come up to her once she regained consciousness. Despite their repeated requests, however, she declined to go on with her performance — which was just as well, since anything more would only have been anticlimactic.

Rivlin and his entourage took their coats and umbrellas from the checkroom and said good-bye to Nazim Ibn-Zaidoun and the blue-blooded judge. The Scotsman, against the advice of his panelists, had awarded first prize in the poetry contest to an elderly village bard who had written his first verse in the days of the British Mandate. The famous Palestinian poet had already departed for Amman, where the air of exile was purer, setting out in a taxi for Jordan as soon as the nun fainted. Ibn-Zaidoun bade everyone farewell for him, especially the Jewish student of the Age of Ignorance, his mystical dialogue with whom he would long remember.

It was bitterly cold when they left the large stone building. The skies were clear, with no sign of more rain. The orange moon that had barely cleared the mountains earlier in the evening was now floating palely and effortlessly among the stars.

They all took their places in the minibus except for Ra’uda, who was given a ride back to Zababdeh by a Christian family. Her two boys remained with Rashid, the older of them sitting by the young widow, whose eyes still shone with emotion. Samaher, bundled up in her shawl, sat self-consciously in the back as if anxious to forget her role as a Jewish rabbi. But Rivlin would not let her. Stooping to enter the vehicle, he said loudly:

“Samaher, you were marvelous! It was a fabulous idea to do a scene from The Dybbuk. I told my wife that the way you got into your part was incredible.”

“Well, Professor,” Rashid said, his dark face smiling at Rivlin in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of his parking place with a honk of the horn, “maybe that’s a reason to give Samaher her final grade tonight.”

“Her final grade?” Rivlin chuckled. “It’s a bit too early for that. But if it’s a question of extra credit for her Arabic translation of The Dybbuk … yes, I suppose that’s possible.”

Deep down the Haifa professor had to admit that not giving Samaher a grade was more than just a matter of maintaining academic standards. The fact was that he did not want to part with these two young people, whose love traced an invisible arc in the bulky van.

They joined a convoy of Israeli cars, its peace and poetry lovers escorted by a Palestinian police jeep to the military campfire at the border. This time, the soldiers — unwilling to rely on their instincts to tell an Israeli physiognomy from a Palestinian one in the dead of night — asked for IDs. Through the window of the minibus Rivlin saw Fu’ad led off to the campfire, as if to be examined by its light. Feeling responsible for the maître d’, he climbed out of the minibus and hurried over. The intervention of the aging Jewish professor had its effect, and Fu’ad — perhaps singled out because of his singularly crumpled ID — was allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, however, the car he’d been in had driven off without him, leaving him hurt and bewildered. Still smarting over Rivlin’s remarks, he accepted his offer of a lift to Jerusalem without knowing what to make of his sudden protectiveness.