A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

At three that afternoon you folded the backseats of the minibus, loaded the bundles and kitchenware, and hid the children among them. Ra’uda sat up front with the baby. Ismail and Rasheed put on their big glasses, so that whoever had seen them in the Jewish state would recognize them. Their father gave them some farewell gifts, and they parted with a few words. It had clouded over and begun to drizzle, and you were in a hurry to get back to Israel before dark. The Palestinian police in Kabatiyeh and Jenin knew you were on your way. “Good luck,” they said to your sister. “We too will return some day.” But cutting across the field, you saw a new checkpoint that hadn’t been there before and two soldiers waiting for something, perhaps for you — and you panicked. In fact, you did the worst possible thing. You stopped the car and turned around. And Calamity thought: if one checkpoint with two soldiers can make this Israeli Arab turn and run, how much Right can he have?

The report of the vehicle that had turned back spread like an ink stain. More and more checkpoints went up. You headed east toward Mount Gilboa and reached it at twilight, hoping to find an unguarded path, only to run into a roadblock there too. And yet Calamity was still preventable. The three soldiers, all middle-aged reservists, had no idea what to look for. They checked the bundles and suitcases, searched for explosives and drugs, and lined the children up in a row and demanded to know the history of each. You kept calm. The children, you explained quietly, were all little Israelis who had been visiting their cousins in the Palestinian Authority with their mother. Now they missed their village in the Galilee, which was why it was wrong to detain them, because they were hungry and wanted their Israeli supper.

The dark Arab’s light manner did not entirely assuage the Jews, who failed to grasp what so many ID-less little children were doing at the foot of Mount Gilboa at dusk on a winter day. And yet their commander, a sergeant in his forties whose hair was streaked with gray, was not looking for problems. He had a family of his own, which was sitting down to its supper now, too, and he felt sorry for the children, especially for the black baby sleeping in the arms of its curiously well-dressed mother. He was ready to turn a blind eye — but only one. He would let them all through except for the two older boys, the ones with the funny glasses, who would have to wait for their ID’s.

And then, Rashid, you made your second mistake. You should have noticed the fear in little Rasheed’s coal black eyes and insisted, “Hold on there, my fellow citizens. I have too much Right on my side to compromise. I’m not going anywhere without the two boys. Their grandmother is waiting for them too.”

But you didn’t. You were rattled and started to squirm, afraid the sergeant would open his blind eye too, and you turned tail and headed for the village of Arabuna to find a place for the two boys for the night. Bolts of lightning sliced the air, and you heard a boom of thunder and thought, “I have to hurry,” and you knocked on the door of the first house. The old woman who opened it looked as ancient and used as a ghost from Turkish times. And then you made your third mistake. Instead of saying, “Sorry, I’ve come to the wrong house,” you appointed her temporary grandmother in charge of the two returnees. You even gave her twenty shekels for milk and eggs and told the Dybbuk ’s two candle bearers to wait for you, making the younger one promise to obey the older and the older one swear to look after the younger, so that Grandmother Ghost, who had by now awakened Grandfather Ghost to help her, would not be annoyed with them.

And now, sitting day and night by the boy’s bed, you wonder how Calamity took over that night and Right stabbed you in the back. Because Rasheed freaked when you didn’t come back. He didn’t even take off his funny glasses, because he was sure you would return in a minute to bring him to Israel. He must have thought you loved him best of all because his name was just like yours. And you did, because he was the most darling. But when the two old folks gave him his supper, he began to cry and scream at the old lady that he didn’t want to be left behind in Palestine. And even then she might have calmed him if only Ismail, a moody child in the best of times, hadn’t slapped him and made him cry even harder for his mother. And at night, when they were all asleep with the windows shut and the door locked, he wriggled through a transom in the bathroom. Although at first he meant to wait for his uncle, he was lured on by the lights of Israel in the distance. He was sure that once he reached them, no one would ask him for any ID. He didn’t know that Fate prowled on the mountain, disguised as the hunter whose gun would fill out the forms you had thrown away.

17.

’CAUSE WHY NOT TRY? The lights are bright and near and I can reach them. Why be afraid of the soldiers if my mother was born there and can speak their language? The village is called Mansura. We were there twice. Grandmother gave us candies and told us to come back. What made Mamma leave? She shouldn’t have done it for Babba. He’s sick. Let him die in Jenin, where he was born.

But why does this path keep going up? I thought it was just a little mountain. Now I see it’s a big one. And there’s nothing on it. I should have slept in that old witch’s house. But I made a mistake and I can’t go back.

THE DRUZE OFFICER SLEPT all day and all night in his friend’s dental clinic, woozy from the painkillers he took for his pulled tooth. At dawn he arose, amazed and contentedly refreshed by his long slumber. He phoned headquarters to make sure his leave had not been canceled, went to his jeep, which was stocked with six battle rations, two canteens of fresh milk mixed with grated cheese, and a carton of stale bread, and took out a military map of Mount Gilboa. Spreading it on the floor of the clinic, he studied it carefully. Then he picked out a route and some good spots for hunters’ blinds, committed them to his photographic memory, and folded and put away the map. The dentist, none of his patients protesting, called off his appointments for the next day; the lawyer postponed all his meetings, giving each client a different excuse; and the two Christian hunters sat down to clean and oil their guns in preparation for the Druze extravaganza.

A light rain was falling in the glare of their headlights as they set out. They stopped in a field, to pick some alfalfa for the lamb half of the lambcat, and arrived at evening, fully armed and bundled in their windbreakers, at Netur Kontar’s father’s house. There, over a cozy supper, the old hunter described what he had seen. The main thing, he warned, was to catch the animal alive. This was important not only for science, but also for tourism, especially if — though the task seemed impossible — the sexless lambcat could be made to propagate.

It was nine o’clock when the three hunters returned to their jeep and set out for Mount Gilboa. Parking by a spring chosen by the Druze officer, they spread the alfalfa on a rock, poured the milk and cheese into a bowl, and added a fish head given them by Netur’s mother, who knew nothing of the strange beast that had frolicked with her husband. The Druze positioned his two friends and climbed a tree that looked down on the bait. In the next few hours the bait drew partridges, conies, and even a wary young fox, who left nothing for the lambcat. The rain beat down harder.

IT WAS RAINING SO hard that I couldn’t even see the darkness and had to take off my glasses. As soon as I did, I lost them. That’s too bad, I thought, ’cause now no one in Israel will know me, and I’ll be like Babba, without a right to return. It’s best to cross now in the dark when the soldiers are asleep, ’cause if they see that I don’t know any Hebrew except for “Hello” and “Screw you” they’ll bring me back to my sick father in the basement.