A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“Don’t you remember him?”

It was Rasheed, Ra’uda’s son from Zababdeh, whose West Bank father had deprived him of an Israeli identity. Now, while the authorities considered his mother’s request for repatriation, his uncle Rashid was accustoming him to Israel by taking him around in his minibus.

“Rashid is here too?”

“Of course. How else would I get back to the village?”

“Then why doesn’t he say hello?” Rivlin, livening up, ran into the corridor to look for his driver-guide and found him in the gloom at the end of the corridor.

“Is that you, Rashid?”

“How are you, sir?” came the quiet answer.

“But who are you hiding from?”

“I’m not hiding, Professor. I just didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Let’s have a look at you.”

Rashid took a few slow steps. He was wearing horn-rims like his nephew’s.

Rivlin had to laugh. “What are you doing with those glasses?”

Rashid laughed, too. “It’s for the checkpoints. It makes them think we’re father and son.”

He stopped his clowning and put the glasses in his pocket. “How are you, Professor? I owe you an apology for that night in the Palestinian Authority.”

“What for?”

“For the hundred shekels those punks took from you. They had no business doing it. Here, let me return it….”

“ Bikafi, ya Rashid, shu is-siri? ’lrsh birja. Es-safar wara ’l-hudud kan fazi’, ma bintasa. Lissa bitghani fii ir-rahbi. *By the way, how is she?”

“In the end she performed in Nablus and fainted.”

“She did?” Rivlin felt cheated.

“I told you she was embarrassed in front of you. But she’ll be back in the autumn. There’s going to be a music and poetry festival in Ramallah. Nothing political or patriotic, just love songs. There’ll be Jewish poets, too. Maybe she’ll agree to faint for them….”

“Wonderful. Now come and join us. Samaher hasn’t finished her story, and I’m in a hurry.”

The End of the Story of the Dancer and His Deaf Mother

“The French dance teacher,” Samaher continued, picking up where she had left off while her cousin’s nephew snuggled in her lap and Rashid stood behind her, lapping up every word, although he had already heard it, “realizes right away that the little boy, who looks Berber but acts French, has a great talent for dancing. As small as he is, he dances with the French girls and is the star. And then World War I breaks out. Even in Algeria, across the sea, everyone is worried because the French are getting killed like flies. The dance teacher, an ‘easy come, easy go’ type who only likes men, is so upset that he decides to return to Paris. First, though, he asks the French farmer and the deaf and dumb mother’s permission to take the little Berber boy with him. It seems he’s in love with him and wants to make him famous. And so the two of them go to France, and it’s wartime and hard to stay in touch. Colette describes how sad the Berber woman is, even though her little boy is now a dancer in a Paris night club called Er-Ra’iya il-Majnuna. †She’s not even comforted when they send her a photograph of him. His real father, the French farmer, keeps promising to bring him home as soon as the war is over. But after the war there’s a drought, and he can’t leave his farm with all its problems. And so the years go by, and one year the farmer dies, and his wife sells the farm and returns to France with Colette, and the poor deaf and dumb Berber woman has to go back to her deaf and dumb husband.”

Rivlin tried catching Rashid’s eye. But Rashid, like an attentive bodyguard, kept his eyes on Samaher. A worried expression Rivlin had never seen before crossed his dark, friendly face.

“Meanwhile,” Samaher continued, “Colette lives in France but keeps thinking of her Berber half brother. She even starts going to dance clubs to look for him. She wants so badly to find him that she doesn’t have time for a boyfriend. But as the years pass she begins to realize that they may not recognize each other even if they meet. And so — we’re almost up to World War II — she goes back to Algeria to look for the deaf and dumb mother, because she’s sure she’ll recognize her son. It’s not easy to find her village, and Colette discovers when she gets there that the woman died from heartbreak a few years before. That leaves the old deaf and dumb husband, a simple, good-natured man who’s forgotten whatever sign language his wife managed to teach him. But he’s better than nothing, and Colette takes him to France. Maybe, she thinks, he’ll recognize his son, the lost dancer.

“And so Colette returns to France with this gray, gloomy old Algerian in a big burnoose who can’t talk. She doesn’t even know whether he knows what she wants from him. But he does his best, and Colette puts him up in her house and makes the rounds with him of the dance clubs and fancy cabarets. Everyone stares at this elegant woman, who’s no longer young, dragging along an old, deaf and dumb Muslim in a white robe who can’t hear the music and just looks at the dancers. And now it’s wartime again, and soon the Germans are in Paris, and no one goes to nightclubs any more. Colette is about to give up. But one day they’re in this café and a dark, fat, unshaven Frenchman of about forty sits down next to them and keeps looking at them. The deaf and dumb villager, who has never spoken a word, begins shaking all over. He puts out his hand and touches the Frenchman and says the first word of his life:

“ Ibni. ”

“ Ibni? ”

“Yes. ‘My son.’ And that’s the end of the story.”

“That’s the end?” the Orientalist asked, disappointed.

“Yes. There isn’t any more,” Samaher said firmly. “The moral is obvious. You can dance all you want — you’ll still never lose your true identity.”

The worried Rashid smiled with relief. Once again, as in Samaher’s bedroom, their forbidden love sent a chill down Rivlin’s spine. He thought of Paris, and of the loneliness of his son, who would soon be starting his night shift.

“So if you think about it, Professor,” his “research assistant” said, “you’ll see why I was in a hurry to tell you about it. It’s an important story about identity.”

Rivlin had run out of patience. He glanced at his watch, rose, patted the boy on the head, and declared:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to go home.”

Rashid took charge of the timid boy, while whispering something to Samaher. Reminded, she took a paper from her purse and laid it on Rivlin’s desk.

“This is for you, too, Professor. It’s a poem, translated.”

“Another one?”

She nodded almost dreamily.

He folded the page in four and stuck it in his shirt pocket as if it were a note from someone. Then, before Rashid could say anything more, he proceeded to the door to let the two young Arabs know the meeting was over.

At a traffic light on his way home (feeling guilty and concerned for his wife), he took out the poem and looked at it. It was in Rashid’s clear, curly hand. Once more it gave proof that the poetry of the Arabs was much more sophisticated than their prose.

I Am a Prize Given in Your Name

I will never call you by a musical name.

I will volunteer no surprises.

Your nakedness is my desire,

Because in it my reveries attain their glory.

I am a prize given in your name.

Your navel makes the world vanish

Like a whirlpool on water.

Your face is armed indolence,

And I am a one-celled animal amid your breasts.

I will call you by a name I will never forget.

There are books that smell like rooms,

And I say to them: “Books,

You smell like rooms!”