A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“If you’re feeling sorry for anyone besides yourself,” his wife said, “it’s not an experience to miss. But keep it short. I’m hungry and I’m tired and I’m feeling low. Get it over with and come cheer me up. And don’t forget to give her my regards.”

“Your regards?”

“Why not? I was at her wedding.”

“If I start giving her your regards, we’ll never be rid of her. But fine. On the contrary. She’ll be happy. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

From the corridor came a muffled but familiar-sounding whisper. Could it be the department head, coming to commune with his grandchildren? Rivlin hurried out, switching on the light in time to catch a glimpse of a small silhouette, child or puppy, that passed by in the darkness. But it was already gone.

Samaher had opened the window and was standing beside it. She was staring, not at the landscape of the Galilee, in which the lights of her village glittered too, but at the paved plaza at the tower’s base. Her ponytail, dark and quiet, fell down her back.

“My wife sends you her regards. Do you remember her?”

His student’s suffering face lit up with gratitude.

“Who could forget your wife, Professor? Whoever likes you has to like her twice as much.”

He turned red and waved a hand. “All right, let’s begin. And next time, please make an appointment. You may not realize it, but I’m a busy man. What’s the new story called?”

“ Er-rakid u’immo et-tarsha. ”

“The Dancer and His Deaf Mother?”

“That’s correct.”

The shadows were thickening in the room. The idea, given him by Tedeschi and the translatoress, of seeking inspiration in the posthumous papers of the Jerusalem genius now seemed preposterous. But I’ll see it through to the end, he thought resolutely. He flicked on the ceiling light, although the last beams of the sunset were still honey clear. It would be inadvisable for a Druze cleaning woman to enter the room and imagine things.

The Dancer and His Deaf Mother

“I already told you, Professor, that this is a story written by a woman pretending to be a man. It’s about this Frenchwoman named Colette. I think the author had to hide who she was because the story appeared in a semireligious magazine called Al-Masjid al-Zhagir , *which also published, if you can believe it, sermons from mosques. So how does a story like this get into such a magazine? That beats me. Even the date of publication is given according to the Muslim religious calendar. But there’s a teacher in our village who can turn Muslim dates into Christian ones, and he told me it’s May 1948. Isn’t that the period in which you’re looking for — how did you put it? — the black hole of identity that spawned the Terror of the nineties? If I follow you, you want to prove that it didn’t come from the Algerians themselves, but from the French….”

“From the relationship between them.”

“Right. From the relationship. It’s as if, if I follow you, the French left this poison behind when they pulled out.”

“Something like that.” Recalling that Hagit was in a bad mood, which rarely happened with her, he wished his student would hurry up. “Get to the point, Samaher.”

“I thought this story could help you with your research because it’s more realistic than the others. There are no miracles or poisoned horses in it. It’s understated. I had tears in my eyes when I read it. And my mother and grandmother cried, too, when I read it aloud to them.”

“Come on, Samaher, give us the gist of it. We don’t have all night.”

“All right. The woman telling the story is French. She’s fifty-five years old, born in Algeria at the end of the last century on a big colonial farm. She writes about this Muslim woman, a Berber, who was born deaf and dumb in a nearby village. The deaf and dumb girl’s parents are poor, simple shepherds and don’t know what to do with their daughter. And the farmer, Colette’s father, is a really good-looking man who was an officer in the French army. One day he sees this deaf and dumb shepherdess with her goats and sheep and feels sorry for her, because she’s beautiful and has a good heart, even though she keeps losing her flock. That’s because she can’t hear its bells or make anything but funny gurgling sounds. And so he goes to her parents and says, ‘Let me have your deaf and dumb girl. She’ll help my wife around the farm, and we’ll teach her sign language.’ You see, Professor, they’d just invented sign language in Europe.

“The parents, who have nine other children, like the idea. They say, ‘Why not? Take her and do what you want with her. When it’s time for her to marry, we’ll lend a hand.’”

“Lend a hand?”

“That’s what they say. Don’t look at me, Professor, it’s in the story. So the Frenchman takes her to his farm to help his wife. You see, she’s a weak, tired woman, all worn out by the desert and the heat, and she’s always thinking of her parents in France and going to visit them. Well, you can see what’s coming, Professor, can’t you? It’s obvious. The deaf and dumb Berber girl learns sign language, and the Frenchman falls for her quiet beauty. But even though he’s very smart and educated, he’s not careful, and he gets her pregnant. And she — not only is she unable to tell her parents, she doesn’t want to, because she’s happy with the Frenchman.

“Colette describes how she has grown up with this Berber woman on the farm. The woman is half a sister and half a mother, and Colette has become attached to her. But in the meantime, there’s this matter of the pregnancy. The Frenchman goes to the Berber parents and tells them that it’s time to keep their promise and help their daughter get married. It can be with anyone, he says. She’ll give birth in her husband’s Berber village and then come back with her child to the farm. And that’s what she does. They marry her off to this deaf and dumb shepherd from a far-off village, a good, simple man who doesn’t know sign language and can’t talk to a wife with a French education, and she goes back to the farm when her baby is born.”

“Is there much more to this?”

“It doesn’t look so long in writing,” Samaher apologized. “But it’s very condensed. It gets longer when I tell it. Maybe that’s because I add explanations. What should I do, Professor? Should I go on?”

“As long as we’re here, you might as well. You say the story was published in a religious magazine in the 1940s?”

“Semireligious.” His “research assistant” wanted to be precise. “But it’s always like that. If a story has the right ending, it can be about anything.”

Rivlin smiled with pleasure at her insight. Samaher, encouraged, whisked her ponytail around from her neck to her throat.

“So now she’s his mistress.” She took out an index card and glanced at it. “It’s called a maîtresse. That’s the French word. It’s the one used in the story, maybe to avoid offending readers. Colette doesn’t like the idea that her father has two wives, a French one who talks normally and a Muslim one who talks sign language. But at least she has the Berber woman’s child, who’s like a little brother to her. She takes him with her everywhere, even to visit friends on the nearby French farms. And it’s the beginning of the century, and the latest dance craze is the cancan, and they bring this teacher from Paris to give them lessons.”

10.

THERE WAS A scratch on the door. Timidly, it was opened. A dark-skinned boy of about ten with large, horn-rimmed glasses entered, head down, and threw himself into the M.A. student’s lap.

“Who is this?” the astonished Orientalist asked.