A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“An angel?”

“A Greek Orthodox nun brought from Lebanon to sing in the Abuna’s church so that the Christians won’t feel left out during Ramadan.”

“Your Abuna sounds like a wise man.”

“He can’t be mine if I’m a Muslim,” Rashid tactfully corrects you. “But he is a wise and good man. He helps everyone. And I tell you, Professor, the Song of Paradise is heavenly. You can ask the Muslims from Nablus and Kalkilya who came to hear it last year.”

“What do they know about Paradise?” you ask, to take the young man down a peg.

“They haven’t been to it yet,” Rashid admits. “But if the angels there sing like she does, they’ll have no complaints when they get there.”

“What does she sing?”

“Byn… Bynza… how do you say it?”

“Byzantine.”

“Right. Byzantine chants. They say she makes the heart tremble. Sometimes she faints at the end. That makes it even better.”

“Faints?”

“Yes. She has these dizzy spells. That’s why they send her here and to Jordan, because they don’t like her to faint in Lebanon. They think she does it for effect. But what effect can fainting have in Palestine? None at all.”

You laugh. You’re beginning to like this young Arab more and more. He must be aware of it, too, if he wants to take you to church with him tonight.

It’s nine o’clock. No one is waiting for you at home. You haven’t been this free in ages. If you were in Jerusalem, you could return to the Hendels’ hotel.

But you’re in the western Galilee, with a driver who will take you anywhere. It’s a time to sit back and to think, not about your wife and sons, or even about your stuck book, but only about yourself. A full moon, the moon of Arab absurdity, casts its royal glow on Haifa Bay and the Carmel. Not only will it not fall on you, it will light your way wherever you go.

“But tell me, Rashid. Can we cross the Green Line and drive into Jenin in the middle of the night just like that?”

The Arab is surprised by your question.

“We’re Israelis, Professor, have you forgotten? Why would anyone stop us at a checkpoint?”

21.

AS ON THE night of Samaher’s wedding, this time too the minibus pulled into the all-night vegetable stand with its colorful dolls that made him think of Canaanite household gods. Its Arab owner, now revealed to be a Christian, recognized Rivlin at once. But it was Rivlin’s wife whom he missed and to whom — after helping to load a sack of beans, a gift to the Abuna and his flock, onto the minibus — he sent a small bag of cherries as both an offering and a warning that, if she did not return as a customer, he might turn up as a plaintiff in her court.

At Yagur Junction, before turning left for Arab Nazareth rather than continuing on to Jewish Haifa, Rashid glanced at his passenger to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind. In Nazareth’s crowded downtown, they stopped to pick up some cartons of eggs and a crate of canned goods, a present from the Church of the Annunciation to the Church of the Temptation in Zebabdeh. Then, the engine purring softly, they glided down into the Valley of Jezreel with its good old Jewish farming villages laid out in neat arrangements of lights. They sped through Adashim Junction; passed Mizra and Balfouria; drove through the broad, deserted streets of sleeping Afula, which made no attempt to detain them; and headed south on an empty road to the whir of the sprinklers of Kibbutz Yizra’el. The lights of the Israeli settlements grew fewer, and the plastic frames of greenhouses alone gleamed white in the faithful moonlight that was prepared to cross the border, if such it was, together with them.

For now the Arab was saying:

“The army checkpoint is right ahead of us, Professor. Getting through it is no problem. It’s just that if they see a darky like me with a high-class type like you, they may think you’re being kidnapped. It’s better to take a detour. It will add ten more minutes, but we have time.”

“What if I really am being kidnapped, Rashid?”

“Then it’s only to Paradise,” the Arab laughed. “That’s for your own good, Professor.”

The minibus turned right toward Mukibla and then left onto a harvested field, jolting lightly. Rashid maneuvered it slowly over a narrow ditch, reached a fence, switched off the engine, and got out. Several kicks and a section of fence was down. Shadowy in the moonlight, he wiped his hands and climbed back into the driver’s seat. It was the moment chosen by Rivlin to touch the shoulder of the messenger and ask, in the silence of the night, whether Samaher was really pregnant. The unexpected question, as though given urgency by the border they were crossing, made Rashid start. “That’s what her mother says,” he answered, as evasively as before. This time, though, he added hesitantly: “Who knows for sure, Professor? Only God and the ultrasound.” He looked dolefully down at the floor of the car, as if having said too much.

“Then what keeps her in bed?”

“She’s confused. It started before the wedding. Maybe her soul is looking for another body. But don’t be angry at Samaher, Professor. She’s always liked you, from the first day of her first class with you. I swear, she’s in love with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous….”

The Arab gave him a searching look, puzzled why this should make him angry. Starting the engine, he crossed the fallen border with his parking lights on. “We’re in Zone C,” he explained, gesturing at the vagaries of the Oslo Agreement in the darkness around them. “Two kilometers from here we’ll enter Zone B, and in Jenin we’ll be in the middle of A. Then, on the way to Kabatiyeh, we’ll cross back into B and come to Zababdeh, which is one half B, one quarter C, and one quarter none of the above, because a small Jewish settlement has squeezed itself in there.”

Jenin was full of life, a wild festivity of Ramadan lights. Its shops and markets were open despite the late hour, and a steady stream of cars and horse- and donkey-drawn wagons clogged the streets. Slow-moving men stood in groups; women, cloaked and uncloaked, hurried laughing through the smoke of charcoal grills. And children, no end of children, clung to the minibus, which Rashid steered with great patience, yielding right-of-way to all comers. The city seemed engaged in a great orgy of eating that took place in the dark passageway between one day’s fast and the next. Two armed Palestinian policemen peremptorily flagged down their vehicle, but only to banter with the Israeli Arab, who was known and liked on this side of the border, too. The Jew was looked through as if he weren’t there.

If here, too, Rivlin thought, not for the first time, the Arabs stay up all night partying, who, really, will look after us Jews by day? Not sure how Rashid would respond to such a reflection, however, he watched in silence as the latter excused himself politely and drove as far as the city’s last street lamp, whose light fell on a macadam road that had once been part of a British Mandate highway running the length of Palestine. The bright Israeli man in the moon had now been transformed into a cloud-veiled Palestinian woman — who a few kilometers further on bared her face to shine on two more armed Palestinians wearing camouflage suits and carrying black Kalachnikov assault rifles. This time Rashid was grilled about his passenger before being allowed to head southeast for Kabatiyeh, a town notorious during the Intifada for the long and cruel curfews imposed on it. Perhaps this was why its inhabitants, refusing to go to sleep, were still up and about with pots, trays of food, and holiday gifts, vanishing and reappearing in the lit doorways of shops and houses and sometimes thumping the Israeli vehicle with a jovial or hostile fist. The minibus made its way through twisting side streets, emerged in a cool, dim valley, and climbed a hilltop to a village whose houses were half hidden by trees behind empty streets. At the top of the hill, in front of a drowsing iron gate that opened on the courtyard of a church, Rashid stopped and pulled a rope that rang an old gong.