A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

2.

EVEN THOUGH THE professor was not sufficiently prepared, the class he taught was absorbing. Perhaps his hyper-wakefulness had made his usually tightly structured lecture, held in a large hall, more spontaneous. More tolerant than usual of the many questions and criticisms of his students, Jews and Arabs alike, he responded with an equanimity that led to a lively discussion. Despite its subject, the treatment of minorities in Egypt during the Second World War, he was forced, contrary to his habit, to run five minutes past the bell.

Outside the large windows of the lecture hall, the light was gray. An overcast sky held the promise of a rare summer rain. His class over, Rivlin felt his high spirits flag before the tedious prospect of a loveless, unsmiling apartment. So when he was approached by two female Arab students, he did not immediately refer them to his office hours, but instead steered them gently back into the empty lecture room and asked solicitously what they wanted. They were both, it turned out, from Mansura and had attended the “seminar” in Samaher’s bedroom, with its story of the Algerians who beat the French at their own game of absurdity. Having concluded that an acquaintance with a senior, if slightly eccentric, professor met on a pleasure jaunt to an Arab village deserved to be cultivated, they took the liberty of informing him that his “research assistant,” far from resting on her laurels after his departure, had translated yet another story that same night.

The Orientalist was greatly amused by these two Near Eastern Studies majors, who were happy to reveal their names and minor fields while coyly inquiring about his final exam. Reassuring them that it would not be difficult, he turned the conversation back to Mansura and its inhabitants. They giggled as they plied him, each interrupting the other, with copious details about Samaher’s and her husband’s families. Samaher’s cousin Rashid, they confessed with a blush, was a fine, devoted young man. But he was wrong about his cousin’s pregnancy, for if it wasn’t real, why was she in bed? “She’ll be giving birth soon, Professor. That’s why you need to give her the final grade she deserves.”

His M.A. student’s devious, hoarsely excited voice buzzed in his brain. Rather than return to an apartment in which only silence awaited him, he headed for the library, free and well rested, to look for Ahmed ed-Danaf, whose errant name had migrated from a medieval story to the modern Algerian tale “The Poisoned Horse.” Easily found in an index to One Thousand and One Nights, ed-Danaf turned out to have been a far more engaging rogue than the morbidly confused horse poisoner of the amateur author Yassin bin Abbas. Although bin Abbas may have borrowed his hero’s name with the intention of giving his readers a lively and picaresque narrative worthy of the great Hārūn ar-Rashīd, the dreary reality of the Sahara had dulled the gay rascality of old Baghdad and muted its human color. The unresolved inner conflict that weighed heavily on the author had burdened his story and his hero as well.

Now, in the university library, the glowworm of his night journey to the Palestinian Authority flickered again. While a gray sky subtly shaded the silhouettes of Haifa Bay, tracing a column of flame that rose from its refinery, the Orientalist whispered to himself:

“No.”

Absolutely not.

Not even the pangs of love could make a man poison a horse, just as no woman would gaily toss a French baby out the window of a speeding train because she believed in miracles, and no judge, not even an Arab one, would trample justice by freeing the moonlight murderer of a French couple. Something else was at work here, deforming and barbarizing the imagination. Could it be, he wondered, a cautious hypothesis forming in his mind, that these folktales, written in the 1930s and 1940s, long before the Algerian War of Independence, were the first foreshadowings of an ongoing dialogue between Algeria and a French conqueror-seducer that was both the country’s oppressor and its object of desire? It was now 170 years old, this jumble of temptation, promise, injustice, and affront that had wreaked havoc on the soul of the country and turned its inhabitants into local strangers.

Was this the spark of inspiration that might cast light on the senseless nighttime raids that ravaged remote villages? Could it be that, forty years after the last French colons had departed and left scorched earth behind them, they still existed as a phantasm in the Algerian brain? Did the Muslim fundamentalists and army death squads imagine as they brutally slaughtered women, children, and old people that these were not their kin or countrymen, flesh of their flesh, but Frenchmen in shadowy disguise, their ancient, intimate enemy the pieds noirs, the black-footed colons of North Africa — who, though long returned to their home across the Mediterranean, their great farms abandoned, still haunted a native self that no longer knew what it was?

The unexpected rain trickling down the windows of the library reminded the worried Orientalist that the window of his study, next to which was his computer, had been left open. Hastily scribbling his reflections on a notepad and sticking it in his pocket before some recalcitrant fact or sober second thought could quench the spark, he left One Thousand and One Nights with its red leather binding and hurried off to his old apartment.

The rain had stopped, refreshing the wadi, which clung at its lower end to a fiery sunset burning out at the point where the horizon met the sea. Rivlin knew every mark and crack on the stairs to his old home, which descended between flowering hedges. Yet not even the memory of his children running happily up and down these stairs could arouse in him the slightest regret at having moved. It was one thing to be a guest, waxing ecstatic in the living room about the sea and the wadi in bloom, and quite another to have to live in the tiny bedrooms whose walls were moldy from the salt air.

The iron gate at the top of the stairs, a gate that had served as a largely symbolic defense of a house that could easily be broken into, was wide open. The couple that had bought the place did not seem concerned that a voyeur, detouring past the front door, might cross the little lawn and peer into the bedrooms or take someone on the terrace by surprise. The doorbell, which still had “Rivlin” written by it, no longer rang. In its place, he had to use the big brass clapper that he and Hagit had bought years ago in a Cairo bazaar and proudly hung by the entrance. Its luster, like hopes for peace with the Arab world, had faded with the years and been covered by the violent vines that scaled the house. Now, however, it was back, salvaged by the new tenants. Its chime, which Ofer had loved listening to, was still delicate despite its coat of verdigris.

The wife of the couple, whom he had met only once, at the closing of the sale at the lawyer’s, recognized him at once. “It’s about time,” she scolded. “We were going to return the package to the post office.” She went to get it without inviting him inside, leaving him standing, surprised and affronted, outside his old home. Cautiously he peered inside, searching for some memory that could be retrieved together with the package. Just then the woman’s husband hurried out of a room, not only more friendly than his good-looking wife, but eager to show the old tenant the changes made in the course of tearing down and rebuilding. Though not in the least interested, Rivlin mumbled a perfunctory expression of interest and let himself be led through the apartment, tagged after by two small children, in order to see how the rooms had been redivided and a little den carved out for a huge television set. The man seemed anxious to convince him that he and his wife had made wise and even witty decisions, as evidenced by a window installed for air in the bedroom closet that offered a surprise view of the terrace — where his wife, having bequeathed the visitor to her husband, had resumed her conversation with a younger and even prettier woman than herself.