A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Hamid el-Kadr was agreeable and took them to the encampment, where their unexpected appearance met with a warm welcome. They were fed and given a place to sleep under the desert sky, huddled beneath layers of blankets. Yet in the morning, when they awoke, the Bedouin had vanished, tents, camels, flocks, and all. Going to wake their guide, asleep in his blanket roll, they discovered to their consternation that the Bedouin had made off with his head.

The three terrified tourists ran for their lives, uncertain whether to report the brutal murder to the local Berber gendarme or to go straight to the French garrison in the district capital. In the end, duty prevailed over fear, and they went to the gendarme, who did not seem overly surprised. To ensure their personal safety, he locked them in his house until a French officer arrived.

It took three months to find the murderer, who was caught when he returned with his family and livestock to the foot of the fort, confident that all was forgotten and perhaps even hoping to attract new tourists. When asked by the French judge what his motives had been, he answered that the guide’s French was too good for a believing Muslim and Algerian patriot like himself, and that not knowing to what lengths such a treacherous tongue might go, he had cut it off with the rest of the head. And in reply to the judge’s astonished query as to how someone ignorant of French could assess its fluency, the Bedouin pointed to the freedom of the young Frenchwoman’s laugh when Hamid el-Kadr spoke to her.

AND PERHAPS HE, Professor Rivlin, had found another harbinger of the Terror now rampant in Algeria. To be sure, one had to be careful about going all the way back to the 1850s, when the French, having commenced their colonial administration, disbanded the guilds known as the jama’at. Yet having recently supervised a doctoral dissertation on the subject that suggested some curious conclusions, he decided to return to it.

During the long period of Turkish rule in North Africa, many Algerian villagers, especially in times of drought or economic hardship, migrated to the cities for their livelihood. They did not settle in them permanently, however, or mingle with the urban population. Rather, organizing themselves by place of origin and occupation — that is, flour miller, butcher, perfume merchant, bathhouse keeper, and so on — they formed cooperative guilds, each led by an elected official, recognized by the Turkish authorities, called the amin. Each amin was empowered to judge and discipline the members of his jama’a, bachelors unwilling to marry out of their tribe or village who accepted his decisions without challenge. This arrangement officially ended in 1868, when the French government, after considerable debate, revoked the autonomy of the jama’at and the authority of the amins.

At first the jama’at refused to accept the French decree. Particularly angered were the now unemployed amin s, who had derived many benefits from their position. For years the guilds struggled to maintain themselves on an unofficial basis, the members continuing to obey the amin s despite their unrecognized status. Not until the early twentieth century did these voluntary cooperatives lapse completely, leaving the French exclusively in control.

And yet the ancient memory of these independent guilds stayed with the villagers from the desert, who were now an urban proletariat dependent on French colonial rule. The longing for the little jama’a with its strongman was passed down. From time to time, it even induced certain simple villagers to imagine that they were the new amin s and to blame the failure of their dreams not on the authorities but on their illiterate neighbors, whom they accused of refusing to submit to them. This situation culminated in 1927, in a bizarre incident that took place in the village of Mezabis, on the fringe of the desert, 560 kilometers from the capital. There, a local resident, in a throwback to Turkish times, gathered a small jama’a that appointed him its amin and launched a punitive campaign that only came to an end when the French caught him and put him to death.

Had the elections of 1991, held during a conflict between a brutal, disorganized army and furious fundamentalists, led to a new outbreak of atavism? Were its new, self-fantasized amin s taking back the power they had lost one hundred years before? Were the vicious bands formed by them none other than the old jama’at, sallying forth once more to judge and punish at night?

1.

ONCE THE MERRY émigrés, having filled their suitcases with the Israeli pharmaceuticals they always took back with them, were gone, Rivlin wondered whether his fears of their visit had not been exaggerated. It had passed slowly, yet in a tender Chekhovian ambience, full of mellow conversations over glasses of tea on the large terrace, and in leisurely walks on the beach. Although being exiled from his study to the university had not unstuck his blocked book, perhaps some wisdom had rubbed off on it from all the computers humming on the top floors of the tower overlooking the Galilee — from which his own computer, having sat quietly for two weeks, had been carried home again wrapped in soft towels. As he watched it light up against the background of his mother’s ghost playing solitaire on her terrace, the breeze teasing the Carmel seemed to whisper, “Be of good cheer! Steady at the keyboard!” To bolster his and the computer’s spirits, he made the words “Be of Good Cheer!” float across his display screen.

Meanwhile, a letter had arrived from Samaher. Written for some reason in Arabic, it informed him in a patronizing tone — as if she were doing her favorite professor a favor by accepting his offer to help her salvage the semester — that she had begun the new project assigned her. Indeed, she appeared to be enjoying it, for the stories and poems brought to her by her cousin, she wrote, were so interesting that she was actually “wild” about them. (Samaher wrote “wild” in Hebrew, as if Arabic lacked a word to express the cuddly Israeli concept of wildness.) For the first time, she was discovering the grandeur of the Arab nation that stretched from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and the pride she felt in it. She had already translated two love poems and would soon finish summarizing two stories. One of these was realistic, the other, a naively sentimental (although, in her opinion, highly political) bit of folklore. If allowed by the doctor — for she was happy to inform Rivlin that she was pregnant and temporarily restricted to her bed — she would bring everything to the university when it was ready.

“Damn!” Rivlin swore under his breath. “What made me get involved with her? All I’ve done is given her a new batch of excuses.” Worse yet, he no longer possessed Yosef Suissa’s original collection, which had been returned to Jerusalem at the urgent request of the murdered scholar’s father, who wished to see for himself what in the Arab soul had so intrigued his beloved son. Not that Rivlin had any illusions that Suissa’s texts might rescue his own book. Still, now that they had been brought to his attention, he felt obliged to deal with them. It was even with a feeling of relief that he turned to them, as they gave his marooned project an immediate direction that it lacked.

He telephoned Samaher to reprimand her, only to be told by Afifa, who sounded alarmed by his angry demand to be sent at once whatever was finished, that her daughter was bedridden. Two days later, Rashid brought him two short love poems translated into a fluent Hebrew. The first went:

Who has seen her in the morning, When her brow opens like a flower, / Restful with dew and lilies, / Roses, violets, / Flowers, and the nests of ruins? / Who has seen the dawn of her glory? / Who has seen her nightclothes, / Woven among mulberries, / On which hang two berries, / And half a berry again, / Two kingdoms of silk / And half a kingdom? / Matchless among unmatched women, / Who can see her hips / And stay sober? / O follow the curve/ And the slide of them / To a different star! / They are a way-point of the future, / A journey from death / To life. There they stand and lament / The ruins of the Arabs, / The desert of the Arabs.