A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

31.

23.4.98

Galya,

You answered me even though I asked you not to. So much for your right to tell me whether or not to answer you. (As for our lost and entirely imaginary “honor,” let’s leave such things for others.)

You should be thankful that I wrote what I did and not worse. If you’re so sure of yourself and of your family, both the living and the dead, why violate your “sacred vow of fidelity” to your husband by hiding my letter? If the “truth” is on your side, you should want him to see it, since it’s the perfect chance to prove to him how truly mad your first husband is and how right you were to leave him. (Just be careful, though. My insanity is a boomerang. Who falls in love with a madman but a madwoman? And you did love me. Terribly.)

Do you want to know what made my father visit you during the bereavement? It had nothing to do with feeling sorry for you or your family. The man is quite simply still tortured by our separation, because he doesn’t understand what happened. He’s a historian who has to understand everything. His own self too, because, despite his position, he’s consumed by doubt about himself and anyone he suspects of being like him.

It’s a good thing my mother, at least, has some faith in me.

If my father is foolish enough to try to make contact with you again, don’t let him. I’ll try to restrain him, too. Sometimes I wonder why I chose to spare my parents by not telling them what happened between us. Was I afraid that they, like you, would be unable to believe me and would end up begging you to forgive me? Or did I keep my promise because of the accursed hope you held out to me?

Enough. Too much. Every word is superfluous. You can go back to mourning the man I never could mourn for.

Ofer

YET THERE HAD to have been signs, early warnings, by which a serious scholar looking unflinchingly at the present could unlock the past. How could the simple desire to avenge the 1991 elections, whose canceled results robbed the Islamic Salvation Front of victory at the polls, have so inflamed Algeria’s religious fundamentalists and army that they fought a ten-year civil war in which armed bands repeatedly attacked their own people and massacred simple villagers like themselves, women, children, and old people?

Writers in academic journals, scholars from the Universities of Montpelier and Aix-en-Provence, in which were deposited the archives of the colonial rule that turned Algeria into a French province in the early nineteenth century while disenfranchising the country’s population, had racked their brains over questions like: “Where did we go wrong? What was it that made Algeria incapable of institutional stability? What have we not accounted for in the ledger of the past? What still veils the violence of the Terror of the 1990s?”

Reading these SOSs sent by his colleagues across the sea, he had felt obliged to help. His scholarly conscience rose to the challenge posed by the slashed throats of infants.

Prudently, he had opened a new computer file and begun a long essay entitled “Early Warnings of the Horror of the Disintegration of National Identity.” Then, as a responsible historian who thought in sober categories, not a hack journalist, he erased “Horror” and substituted “Shock to” for “Disintegration of.”

FOR EXAMPLE: was it possible to see in the riots that broke out in October 1934, at the tomb of the Muslim saint Ibn Sa’id, between Berber pilgrims and the reformists of the Salafia movement in the Constantine district, a first warning of the indiscriminate Terror of the 1990s? A report recently discovered in a military archive in Toulon, filed by the French officer who had rushed to the scene, suggested a surprising perspective, worthy of careful consideration.

Certainly an Israeli Orientalist, no matter how secular, might be expected to sympathize with the reformist vision of the Salafia, which sought to return Islam to its pristine origins by purging the dross from its monotheistic core. Nor could an enlightened or rational person fail to be repelled by the pilgrims’ superstitious revels and commerce in amulets and holy water. Even though, as the latest studies showed, the reformists too had their fanatical side, their leaders’ high intellectual level, rhetorical gifts, and staunch defense of Algerian nativism against French military brutality and colonial rapacity had to appeal to a liberal observer like the Orientalist.

In the course of the Constantine riots, two men were killed, and many more wounded. Based on the assumption that the reformists were waging a moral and spiritual war against the pilgrims’ paganlike practices, which distracted the faithful from the struggle for individual and communal self-betterment, it seemed natural to blame the violence on primitive Berbers clinging to otherworldly beliefs. And yet, surprisingly, this was not the picture painted by the French officer summoned to restore order between the warring parties. It was the Berbers, he reported, who were attacked first, the opening shots having been fired from the ranks of the reformists, who were led by prominent clerics and intellectuals. The shots were aimed at a slender, white-cloaked Sufi monk capering by a sacred tomb.

Was this an early warning, subtle but unmistakable, of the ruthless Terror that would come sixty years later? Could the reformists’ descendants, the supporters of the Islamic Front, be venting their wrath not only on their traditional enemies — heretics, Westernizers, corrupt army officers, writers and journalists — but also on innocent villagers who, rather than joining the political struggle, remained benightedly mired in pilgrimages, amulet peddling, and necromancy? Did the fundamentalists, in the chaos following the cancellation of the elections, turn on their own illiterate brethren as if to say: “So it’s graves, saints, and holy men that you want? Be our guests! We’ll fill your villages with the graves of so many old men, women, and children that you’ll never have to flock to a saint’s tomb again, since you’ll have plenty of your own.”

Or take this forgotten item, found in a transcript of court proceedings from the Eyn-Sifra district bordering on the Sahara: perhaps it, too, was an early warning of the senseless brutality now taking place. In 1953, inspired by a recently published story by Albert Camus, three French students from the University of Marseilles, two young men and a woman, set out with an experienced local guide named Hamid el-Kadr to get a sunset view of the Sahara. Camus’s story concerned a depressed Frenchwoman named Jeannine who accompanies her husband, a traveling salesman, on his rounds in the Algerian countryside. One day the childless couple find themselves in a small town at the desert’s edge, where they climb to a hilltop fort with a view. So shattered are the remote, frozen depths of Jeannine’s being by the vast empty spaces she sees that she undergoes an inner revolution. In the middle of the night she awakes with an unsettled feeling, leaves her hotel room, and climbs back to the fort, from which she stares longingly at the Bedouin tents in the distance, her unfulfilled femininity thirsting for the infinite freedom of the Sahara.

It was under the influence of this story that the three French students decided to spend their Christmas vacation on a quest for Camus’s heroine, hoping to relive her experience. Their guide even managed to find a hilltop fort and brought them to its panoramic vista. There they saw, like the childless Jeannine, the black tents of nomads and the silent camels nibbling at the edge of infinity. Unwilling to make do with mere longing, they asked their guide to take them to the encampment. Having reached the edge of the desert, why not push a bit farther into the cold night for a meatier taste of its eternal essence?