A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

His tone growing dramatic, the Jerusalem professor invited his little audience to join him in entering a small structure that housed the town theater. The details grew thicker, as if he were now sketching not a distant century but a recent experience. Before raising the curtain on the stage, he described the layout of the little auditorium, the seats, the audience, and even the smell of grilled meats and the steam rising from the glasses of tea.

Rivlin, feeling a keen intellectual delight such as he had not experienced in ages, sensed in his old mentor’s glance, which came to rest on him increasingly, that the sleepless night’s revisions had been for his sake. Tedeschi had wanted to show him, the heir apparent, how a research project bogged down in dry, recalcitrant facts could be revived by a single, bold artistic stroke — at least enough to yield an article for a jubilee volume.

The curtain went up. He had never realized what a born actor his old teacher was. After reading the list of the cast, a medley of comically mangled Turkish, Arabic, and Greek names, the Jerusalem professor declaimed the opening lines with a comic leer, reciting them first in Turkish and then in a free Hebrew translation:

O despicable thief!

Where hast thou hidden my daughter?

Thou hast enchanted her, damn thy soul!

What sane man would not understand, as I do,

That, if not for thy enchantments,

No lovely maiden would have spurned such fine suitors

And fled her father for a black body,

Terrifying, not pleasuresome, like thine?

“ Othello! ” Hannah Tedeschi — who had not known of her husband’s change of plans — cried with childish glee.

“Right you are, madam, as always,” the lecturer confirmed, with a bow to his wife’s sagacity. “Perhaps our adaptation of this famous play can help us to understand, better than historical abstractions, the shift that occurred in the Turks’ perceptions of the Arabs as early as the mid-nineteenth century — a shift from an attitude of contempt, disdain, and disregard to one of suspicion, hostility, and even fear, especially among the upper classes. This is why, in the popular theater of Antakiyya, a town close to Syria, the Turkish translator and adapter of Othello chose to make of Shakespeare’s tragically powerful black man, a figure who appears like a hurricane from beyond the bounds of civilization with no tangible national or religious identity — yes, to make of this wonderful and terrible man, whose danger-fraught life has caused a nobleman’s daughter to fall in love with him — an addled, pompous, absurd general from the desert, a black Arab of unbounded ambition who joins the Venetians as a mercenary against the Turks and barbarously thinks that an accidental victory in a trivial battle entitles him to possess a paragon of Christian womanhood, even though she is culturally and psychologically worlds above him.”

The doyen of Orientalists paused, his heart going out to his old student, who, though now a full professor himself, albeit at a somewhat provincial university, was sitting open-mouthed in the middle of the morning, gaping like a freshman. To help him relax after a hard night of bed-hopping, he now faced him and explained, in precise, analytic language, how the Turkish adapter had killed two Arab birds with one stone — for not only had he made an Arab of Othello, he had done the same with his treacherous adjutant Iago, now known as Yassin. The latter, however, was an Arab of a different stripe: not a black savage from the desert, but a shrewd, educated, cunning Lebanese urbanite who knew the hidden codes of his Bedouin compatriot and used them to plant in him the maddening fantasy of being cuckolded by the unworldly Christian with whom he was mismatched.

And thus, moving from play to play and theater to theater, the Jerusalem professor demonstrated how already in the middle of the nineteenth century, even though nothing had changed in official Turkish policy, the sinking empire was permeated by feelings of enmity toward and estrangement from its Arab subjects, now seen as potential traitors. Little wonder, then, that these fears turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy at the end of World War I in the form of the Great Arab Revolt — which, aided by the British, brought four hundred years of Ottoman rule crashing down. Indeed, Tedeschi concluded, with a roguish wink, the bad feeling between the two peoples has persisted to this day, giving the Jews some hope that they, too, might find a corner of their own in the Levant.

28.

RIVLIN CAME FORWARD at the lecture’s end to congratulate Tedeschi for his original methodology and to say good-bye, nodding wordlessly to Suissa senior and his anxious daughter-in-law, who stood retiringly by her father-in-law’s side.

As he was in no mood to argue with Ephraim Akri about the latter’s harangue at Samaher’s wedding, or even about Tedeschi’s lecture, Rivlin let the department head do the talking while piloting them expertly northward. Loosely strapped into his seat, he listened with patient passivity to Akri’s opinionated views, which grew most vocal at stoplights. The deeper his silence grew, the more cheerfully pessimistic about the Arabs his junior colleague became. Had the hard night rendered Rivlin apathetic toward opinions that usually exasperated him? Perhaps his strength had been sapped by Fu’ad’s tale of Ofer’s nocturnal prowling.

Although Akri was hurrying to a meeting at the university, he detoured to drop Rivlin off at his home to reward him for being so agreeable. He hoped, he said in parting, that his senior colleague’s docility was not a sign that he was coming down with something. “I just may be,” Rivlin replied with a smile. “What else could make me put up with your racism?” Yet he immediately clapped his driver warmly on the shoulder to mitigate the remark, while affirming that he had not yet said his final word.

The thought that he might actually have caught something from the proprietress was not totally unpleasant. Nevertheless, as he emptied the mailbox of mail that he couldn’t read, his mood changed, and his lapsed anger at the woman who had recklessly broken his glasses flared up again.

The afternoon light was honey clear, the living room clean and tidy, and the food left in its pots on the counter by the housekeeper still warm. Although he had absconded for barely a day, his isolation from his wife, with whom he had not spoken since their quarrel, made the time seem much longer. Still unwilling to make up, however, he decided, even though he wasn’t hungry, to eat lunch without waiting for her, which was something she hated. After eating, he went to his study. Unable to make out the letters on his keyboard, he took some paper and scrawled a few thoughts about the four languages that contributed to the conflict of national identity in Algeria. Now and then he paused to glance at the ghost of his mother sitting unconcernedly on her terrace in a summery green dress, her heavy arms bare and her stout, pale legs propped on a chair.

Yet reading and writing were impractical. Better, he thought, to lie down and ascertain whether he had really brought back a fever from Jerusalem. To his surprise, he found the bedroom neatly arranged, as if his wife had wished to prove she could make order without him. He pulled off his shoes and stretched out with a bittersweet feeling, then rose to lower the blinds and draw the curtain to make the room dark. He took off his trousers, unbuttoned his shirt, and tried to picture — a difficult task in such bourgeois surroundings — the dark depths of the hotel’s basement.

It was not the basement, however, that he saw in the half-light. It was the tall, bony woman who had talked without inhibition while making the swan-sheeted bed with quick, snapping movements. She must have a crush on me, Rivlin thought with a start. Perhaps, despite her resentment of her dead father, she misses having an older man in her life.