A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

Nor could the sounds of children returning from school or the glow of two o’clock on the alarm clock convince him that the time had come to wake up. After all, if the first prime minister of Israel, with all his many obligations, had nevertheless asked — or so said the Orientalist’s wife — for four hours of sleep, why should he, whose obligations were few, make do with less than three? And so even upon rising from his cozy bed he left the lights off and refrained from any noise that might encourage members of the household to look in on him. With every intention of falling asleep again, he turned his temporary attention to the room he was in, hoping to make out, by the shimmering slivers of light that fell through the slats of the shutter, where and in whose realm he was.

Much to his pleasure, he saw that Samaher’s wise mother had put him in the bed of the trusty cousin and not in that of some elderly aunt or uncle forced to forfeit an afternoon’s nap for his sake. He was in a small wing of the house that included a shower and a bathroom, the abode of an independent, stouthearted, and — so it seemed — passionate young man. Perhaps this was why the door was equipped with a large bolt, which the Orientalist immediately slid into place while debating whether or not to return to full consciousness.

He chose not to. His rightful quota of sleep was not yet exhausted, and besides, he was feeling hungry and did not wish to show weakness by reneging, scant hours before sunset, on his apparently poignant but absurdly inappropriate pledge to fast on Ramadan. Groping his way in the dark to the toilet, he sat down on it slowly and encouragingly whispered to himself:

“As a human gesture, it’s the least you can do.”

12.

THE THIRD MOVEMENT began at 3 P.M. Rondo? Andante? Allegro? Although the visitor was still celebrating his exemption from reporting in, not only to his widely scattered family, which was not about to go looking for him, but even to the patient Arabs who had hushed for his sake the children playing in the yard, the second movement’s keen, anarchic sense of freedom had faded. Thoughts he had driven away came creeping back from beneath the pillow.

And yet he was determined to hold the line and not wake up. As though rising to the challenge, he now stripped off his underpants and surrendered the last fraction of himself to the accommodating bed. Lying naked between the sheets and under a light blanket, he recalled the case of a Haifa accountant, a recent widower sent to audit the suspicious books of a Galilean township not far from Mansura. Entering the house of the town council’s treasurer, the accountant had soon found himself immersed, not in the books, but in the bed of the man’s youngest daughter, in which he fell fast asleep.

And yet this accountant was a public servant who had nodded off on the job among Jews, whereas Rivlin, though no widower, was his own master and among Arabs. Why not, then, doze a little longer in the bed of this young man the age of his eldest son while delving in its sheets for his old dream of tasting the essence of Araby? Curling up like a fetus beneath the blanket, therefore, he took firm possession of the pillow, but his thoughts, slipping from his grasp, dragged him back to Ofer’s dawn rebuke. Surprisingly, he felt no pain or resentment. If anything, his position had been strengthened. If both son and ex-daughter-in-law had been truthful enough with each other to be nasty, the venom of the past retained its potency, and there were boundaries to be crossed.

Thus it was that, in this Galilean village, in this cool stone house, the thick walls of which muffled all superfluous sound, Rivlin, while continuing patiently to pursue the fluttering nymph of sleep, reassured himself that he had been right to overrule his wife, and even to risk her ire, by forcing a confrontation between two young people who had agreed too lightly, as if they were all alone in the world and responsible to no one, to separate, five years ago.

He knew how infinitesimal was his influence over his ex-daughter-in-law, now remarried and about to give birth, and even over his distant son, who, though suffering, refused to concede injury or accept help. Still, he was not prepared to forego the understanding that every parent has a right to demand. How strange that here, in this far corner of the country, secluded in willful sleep in a remote Arab village, his desire to know remained as great as ever, so that he seemed to hear his hosts encouraging him as they moved silently from room to room. “Keep it up, Professor,” their inaudible voices said. “Don’t give in. Here, among us Arabs, you can bathe in the true river of time.”

And so, confident that time would continue to flow from the underground springs of Mansura, Rivlin curled up once more to catch the nymph of sleep in his bosom. And since Samaher’s cousin had left no dream for him, he created a nude apparition of his own and made love to himself.

13.

YET ANOTHER HOUR passed in symphonic slumber. Young and old, the members of the household kept as silent as if the visitor were not Samaher’s professor from Haifa but the Caliph of Baghdad in person. Awakening for some reason at the end of the third movement more exhausted than at the end of the second, Rivlin realized that it was only polite to get over his ill-mannered sleeping sickness, for which his insomnia of the night before was but a pretext, one that had unleashed an ancient weariness that must have been handed down from his earliest progenitors.

He rose, switched on the bed light, and studied the space around him. A photograph of Rashid stared down at him from the wall opposite the bed. The messenger looked younger and sat on a horse while gazing into the distance. Prior to dressing, Rivlin folded the sheets and tucked them into the pillowcase. Next, he folded the bare mattress and laid the blanket on top of it, as he had been taught to do in basic training before a furlough. Then he washed, soaping himself and rinsing his mouth with toothpaste to freshen up before rejoining the Arabs.

It was a pity, he thought, that he had not managed to dream a single dream of his own in the intimate atmosphere so generously provided him, now lambent with the soft, coppery light of a village afternoon astir with the shouts of children. Limply, he sat down at a small, old-fashioned secretary covered by a plastic map from Beirut showing the countries of the Middle East in bright colors. The State of Israel, though included, had been shrunk to the borders of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution, marked by a dotted line, like an illusion waiting to be dispelled. Above the little cubbyholes of the desk, each with its handsome brass handle, an empty artillery shell served as a vase for some artificial flowers, their dusty plastic blossoms inclined toward a gold-rimmed glass containing sharpened pencils in different colors. Behind the secretary, a bulletin board had bright notes from a memo pad pinned to it — reminders, scrawled in a clear, curling hand, of jobs for the minibus. The messenger, a tidy tenant, clearly liked his surroundings to be cheerful, as evidenced also by the lively book jackets with which he had covered not only the old Arabic novels, published in Beirut and Damascus, that stood in orderly rows on the shelves, but also two stray volumes of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and a book called The Israelis. A heavy black photograph album, on which some faded blue receipt books had been neatly stacked, contributed a more somber note.

Rivlin reached for the album, whose black binding reminded him of the condolence book in which several weeks ago he had written a sentence, no longer regretted by him, to a dead man. He was curious to see how Samaher’s family had looked when younger.