A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

The Sidiks had a daughter, a lovely girl who had been named Leona after a French prime minister called León who was a great friend of the Muslims in Algeria. Yet so great was the village’s hatred and suspicion of her father and brothers that none of its young men could think of marrying her, despite her good looks and good nature. “Never mind,” her father said to her. “If we can’t find you a husband in the village, we’ll find one somewhere else.” And so he sent one of her brothers to an old uncle in a far-off place, hoping that someone there, perhaps a cousin, might agree to marry her.

Samaher looked up from her notebook to see whether her teacher was listening. He had removed his eyeglasses and was wearily sprawled in his chair, fascinated as always by the Hebrew spoken by her generation, which alternated between a clumsy translation of her native Arabic and a true command of Israeli idiom.

Meanwhile, this plan became known to a fine young man named Ahmed ed-Danaf, the son of farmers in Leona’s village. Ahmed ed-Danaf was secretly in love with Leona and was tormented by the thought that she would marry someone else far away. Leona, too, had set her eye on this young man, even though she never spoke to him. How, thought Ahmed ed-Danaf, could he keep his beloved from marrying? Not that he believed that his father would let him marry her himself. But at least, so he hoped, she would not be taken someplace else, where he could never see her again. And so he did something desperate.

Not far from the village was a large French estate whose owners raised wheat and fodder and scattered rat poison in their fields to protect their crops. Although the Frenchmen had tried convincing the Muslims to do the same, the farmers were afraid that their little children, who roamed the fields freely, might eat the poison and die. Now Ahmed ed-Danaf went to the Frenchmen and told them that he wished to do as they did. They were happy to see such a modern Arab and gave him a sack full of poison pellets. But he did not scatter these pellets in his fields. He hid them.

Meanwhile, a husband was found for Leona. He was indeed a cousin, a middle-aged widower who lived in France and had come to Algeria on a brief visit. He was ready, he said, to take an Algerian woman back to France with him, and the rumors made the rounds that the Sidiks would soon be holding a betrothal ceremony. And so Ahmed ed-Danaf made up his mind to put poison in the Sidiks’ stable. It didn’t kill their horses, but it made them very sick.

Of course, the Sidik family also had donkeys, which could have been harnessed to the betrothal wagon, too. But a donkey was not as dignified as a horse — and the horses were sick. This grieved the Sidiks greatly, especially since something told them that their horses were not the victims of Allah but of a curse someone had put on them. The question was who.

Meanwhile, Ahmed ed-Danaf, seeing the great sorrow of Leona’s family, let alone the suffering of the horses, who lay miserably in their stable, all grassy-eyed and foaming at the mouth, began to feel sorry for his evil deed.

The phrase “grassy-eyed,” uttered in the heat of the narration, brought a faint smile to Rivlin’s lips, even though his head was now lolling to one side and his breathing had grown heavy. It was one of those comic slips that sound natural.

“Hold it, Samaher,” he said. “Isn’t Ahmed ed-Danaf also the name of a character in One Thousand and One Nights, the one in Scheherazade’s story about the old woman?… You know who I mean… Delilah!”

But the name meant nothing to Samaher. Nor did she remember any such story in the great prose classic of the Arabs.

And so Ahmed ed-Danaf decided to make amends. He found his courage and lay in wait for Leona and said to her, “I’ve heard that someone has cursed your horses and made them sick. If your family is afraid to leave them alone in order to go to your betrothal, I’m willing to look after them, because I love horses and it hurts me to see them. You can’t blame the horses for our village feud, because they aren’t part of it.”

The Sidiks did not know what to do about Ahmed ed-Danaf’s offer. But Leona, who felt he had made it because he was in love with her, persuaded her father to take it in good faith.

And so it was. The Sidiks harnessed plain donkeys to their wagon and set out for the betrothal. Yet on the night after their departure, one of the horses died. When Ahmed ed-Danaf arrived at the stable in the morning and saw this, he was frightened and even cried. Then he called for his two brothers, and they dragged the carcass away to keep it from saddening the other horse, which was fighting for its life. From that day on, Ahmed ed-Danaf was determined to stay by its side day and night, thinking only of it and of his beloved, who was being betrothed far away.

“Actually, Professor Rivlin,” Samaher said, “I haven’t got to the main part yet. I’ve only summarized the beginning. The rest is awfully long and gruesome. It tells how Ahmed ed-Danaf fights with all his strength to save the life of the horse he poisoned, because it belongs to the family of his beloved, who will go to France and never see him again…. Are you still listening, Professor? Perhaps it’s too much for you.”

This remark was well timed, because the last sentences, entwined in the sweet faintness mounting within him like a rampant ivy, had been dissipated in a desperate struggle with a fatigue of such uncommon violence that he slumped sideways in his chair and nearly stretched out on the Persian rug on the floor by the bed of his M.A. student, who had infected him, it seemed, not only with her depression, but with the fatigue of her false pregnancy.

11.

SINCE RASHID, NOT trusting Rivlin’s patience to hold out until the end of the day’s fast, had hurried off to Ma’alot to photocopy the Jerusalem scholar’s material, the bedridden M.A. student had to summon her mother, who whisked the Orientalist off to sheets as white and soft as any his wife had ever made his sister-in-law’s bed with. Assisted by Samaher’s grandfather, who bent to remove his shoes, Rivlin felt the flame of his tiredness welding him to his lost sleep of the night before, which had doggedly followed him all the way to the village.

Later that evening, seeking to apologize for his attack of somnolence, he blamed it on the pill for “feeling blue,” which he confessed to having sampled from Samaher’s tray of medicines. Afifa, however, ruled this out.

“No pill could knock you out like that, Professor. Your tiredness came with you from Haifa. You were a sight when you arrived. If you had listened to us and gone right to sleep after El-Tifl el-Faransi il-Murafrif, we wouldn’t have had to drag you off to bed more dead than alive. Believe me, Professor, il-habbeh illi a’tatak iyaha Samaher hiya friendly l’il-nas . *It’s just a pill to cheer you up a bit. I sometimes even let my little girls have one. It gets them through their homework.”

And indeed, curious to find out whether Ahmed ed-Danaf had saved the life of the horse he had poisoned, he returned with the last, fading light to his armchair by Samaher’s bed not only showered and refreshed, but greatly cheered. He felt as if the entire narcoleptic afternoon had been cranked out musically inside him in something called the Symphony of the Great Sleep. The first movement had been a brutally violent fortissimo: In it, a man, stripped of identity and consciousness, had lain fully dressed without knowing whence he had come, to what or whom he belonged, or whether he would ever wake again. An occasional errant dream notwithstanding, he had been as impermeable as a block of black stone. Yet after a while, his titanic stupor pierced by the scent of a strange soap that energized him sufficiently to pull off his shirt and pants in the hope of a more intimate contact with the wonderfully friendly sheets, the Jewish Orientalist had detected the theme of a second movement, which took command of a slumber made doubly delicious by the absence of his beloved wife. Whisked away that morning by a party of competent and responsible men, she had taken with her all worry for her welfare and even all worry for her worry for him. Guaranteed a minimum twenty-four-hour exemption from his daily accounting to her, he reached down and pulled off his socks.