The Liberated Bride (23 page)

S
INCE
R
ASHID, NOT
trusting Rivlin's patience to hold out until the end of the day's fast, had hurried off to Ma'alot to photocopy the Jerusalem scholar's material, the bedridden M.A. student had to summon her mother, who whisked the Orientalist off to sheets as white and soft as any his wife had ever made his sister-in-law's bed with. Assisted by Samaher's grandfather, who bent to remove his shoes, Rivlin felt the flame of his tiredness welding him to his lost sleep of the night before, which had doggedly followed him all the way to the village.

Later that evening, seeking to apologize for his attack of somnolence, he blamed it on the pill for “feeling blue,” which he confessed to having sampled from Samaher's tray of medicines. Afifa, however, ruled this out.

“No pill could knock you out like that, Professor. Your tiredness came with you from Haifa. You were a sight when you arrived. If you had listened to us and gone right to sleep after
El-Tifl el-Faransi il-Murafrif,
we wouldn't have had to drag you off to bed more dead than alive. Believe me, Professor,
il-habbeh illi a'tatak iyaha Samaher hiya
friendly
l'il-nas
.
^*
It's just a pill to cheer you up a bit. I sometimes even let my little girls have one. It gets them through their homework.”

And indeed, curious to find out whether Ahmed ed-Danaf had saved the life of the horse he had poisoned, he returned with the last, fading light to his armchair by Samaher's bed not only showered and refreshed, but greatly cheered. He felt as if the entire narcoleptic afternoon had been cranked out musically inside him in something called the Symphony of the Great Sleep. The first movement had been a brutally violent fortissimo: In it, a man, stripped of identity and
consciousness, had lain fully dressed without knowing whence he had come, to what or whom he belonged, or whether he would ever wake again. An occasional errant dream notwithstanding, he had been as impermeable as a block of black stone. Yet after a while, his titanic stupor pierced by the scent of a strange soap that energized him sufficiently to pull off his shirt and pants in the hope of a more intimate contact with the wonderfully friendly sheets, the Jewish Orientalist had detected the theme of a second movement, which took command of a slumber made doubly delicious by the absence of his beloved wife. Whisked away that morning by a party of competent and responsible men, she had taken with her all worry for her welfare and even all worry for her worry for him. Guaranteed a minimum twenty-four-hour exemption from his daily accounting to her, he reached down and pulled off his socks.

Nor could the sounds of children returning from school or the glow of two o'clock on the alarm clock convince him that the time had come to wake up. After all, if the first prime minister of Israel, with all his many obligations, had nevertheless asked—or so said the Orientalist's wife—for four hours of sleep, why should he, whose obligations were few, make do with less than three? And so even upon rising from his cozy bed he left the lights off and refrained from any noise that might encourage members of the household to look in on him. With every intention of falling asleep again, he turned his temporary attention to the room he was in, hoping to make out, by the shimmering slivers of light that fell through the slats of the shutter, where and in whose realm he was.

Much to his pleasure, he saw that Samaher's wise mother had put him in the bed of the trusty cousin and not in that of some elderly aunt or uncle forced to forfeit an afternoon's nap for his sake. He was in a small wing of the house that included a shower and a bathroom, the abode of an independent, stouthearted, and—so it seemed—passionate young man. Perhaps this was why the door was equipped with a large bolt, which the Orientalist immediately slid into place while debating whether or not to return to full consciousness.

He chose not to. His rightful quota of sleep was not yet exhausted, and besides, he was feeling hungry and did not wish to
show weakness by reneging, scant hours before sunset, on his apparently poignant but absurdly inappropriate pledge to fast on Ramadan. Groping his way in the dark to the toilet, he sat down on it slowly and encouragingly whispered to himself:

“As a human gesture, it's the least you can do.”

T
HE THIRD MOVEMENT
began at 3
P.M.
Rondo? Andante? Allegro? Although the visitor was still celebrating his exemption from reporting in, not only to his widely scattered family, which was not about to go looking for him, but even to the patient Arabs who had hushed for his sake the children playing in the yard, the second movement's keen, anarchic sense of freedom had faded. Thoughts he had driven away came creeping back from beneath the pillow.

And yet he was determined to hold the line and not wake up. As though rising to the challenge, he now stripped off his underpants and surrendered the last fraction of himself to the accommodating bed. Lying naked between the sheets and under a light blanket, he recalled the case of a Haifa accountant, a recent widower sent to audit the suspicious books of a Galilean township not far from Mansura. Entering the house of the town council's treasurer, the accountant had soon found himself immersed, not in the books, but in the bed of the man's youngest daughter, in which he fell fast asleep.

And yet this accountant was a public servant who had nodded off on the job among Jews, whereas Rivlin, though no widower, was his own master and among Arabs. Why not, then, doze a little longer in the bed of this young man the age of his eldest son while delving in its sheets for his old dream of tasting the essence of Araby? Curling up like a fetus beneath the blanket, therefore, he took firm possession of the pillow, but his thoughts, slipping from his grasp, dragged him back to Ofer's dawn rebuke. Surprisingly, he felt no pain or resentment. If anything, his position had been strengthened. If both son and ex-daughter-in-law had been truthful enough with each other to be nasty, the venom of the past retained its potency, and there were boundaries to be crossed.

Thus it was that, in this Galilean village, in this cool stone house, the thick walls of which muffled all superfluous sound, Rivlin, while continuing patiently to pursue the fluttering nymph of sleep, reassured himself that he had been right to overrule his wife, and even to risk her ire, by forcing a confrontation between two young people who had agreed too lightly, as if they were all alone in the world and responsible to no one, to separate, five years ago.

He knew how infinitesimal was his influence over his ex-daughter-in-law, now remarried and about to give birth, and even over his distant son, who, though suffering, refused to concede injury or accept help. Still, he was not prepared to forego the understanding that every parent has a right to demand. How strange that here, in this far corner of the country, secluded in willful sleep in a remote Arab village, his desire to know remained as great as ever, so that he seemed to hear his hosts encouraging him as they moved silently from room to room. “Keep it up, Professor,” their inaudible voices said. “Don't give in. Here, among us Arabs, you can bathe in the true river of time.”

And so, confident that time would continue to flow from the underground springs of Mansura, Rivlin curled up once more to catch the nymph of sleep in his bosom. And since Samaher's cousin had left no dream for him, he created a nude apparition of his own and made love to himself.

Y
ET ANOTHER HOUR
passed in symphonic slumber. Young and old, the members of the household kept as silent as if the visitor were not Samaher's professor from Haifa but the Caliph of Baghdad in person. Awakening for some reason at the end of the third movement more exhausted than at the end of the second, Rivlin realized that it was only polite to get over his ill-mannered sleeping sickness, for which his insomnia of the night before was but a pretext, one that had unleashed an ancient weariness that must have been handed down from his earliest progenitors.

He rose, switched on the bed light, and studied the space around him. A photograph of Rashid stared down at him from the wall opposite
the bed. The messenger looked younger and sat on a horse while gazing into the distance. Prior to dressing, Rivlin folded the sheets and tucked them into the pillowcase. Next, he folded the bare mattress and laid the blanket on top of it, as he had been taught to do in basic training before a furlough. Then he washed, soaping himself and rinsing his mouth with toothpaste to freshen up before rejoining the Arabs.

It was a pity, he thought, that he had not managed to dream a single dream of his own in the intimate atmosphere so generously provided him, now lambent with the soft, coppery light of a village afternoon astir with the shouts of children. Limply, he sat down at a small, old-fashioned secretary covered by a plastic map from Beirut showing the countries of the Middle East in bright colors. The State of Israel, though included, had been shrunk to the borders of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution, marked by a dotted line, like an illusion waiting to be dispelled. Above the little cubbyholes of the desk, each with its handsome brass handle, an empty artillery shell served as a vase for some artificial flowers, their dusty plastic blossoms inclined toward a gold-rimmed glass containing sharpened pencils in different colors. Behind the secretary, a bulletin board had bright notes from a memo pad pinned to it—reminders, scrawled in a clear, curling hand, of jobs for the minibus. The messenger, a tidy tenant, clearly liked his surroundings to be cheerful, as evidenced also by the lively book jackets with which he had covered not only the old Arabic novels, published in Beirut and Damascus, that stood in orderly rows on the shelves, but also two stray volumes of the
Hebrew Encyclopedia
and a book called
The Israelis.
A heavy black photograph album, on which some faded blue receipt books had been neatly stacked, contributed a more somber note.

Rivlin reached for the album, whose black binding reminded him of the condolence book in which several weeks ago he had written a sentence, no longer regretted by him, to a dead man. He was curious to see how Samaher's family had looked when younger.

To his disappointment, however, the photographs were of no one he could recognize. No youthful Afifa or middle-aged grandmother stared out at him, not even Samaher as a child. There was only page
after relentless gray page of an unfamiliar, dark-skinned woman with eyes that resembled Rashid's. Her stony face was unsmiling and grave, both as a stiff young girl and as a married woman surrounded by sad, frightened-looking children—at first two or three of them, then four or five. In the background was a village, less picturesque than Mansura, sometimes seen from the courtyard of a run-down house and sometimes through two olive trees or from the window of a large kitchen full of big black pots. There were shots without it, too—one was of the woman standing by the bed of a sick-looking man in pajamas. Rivlin had the sense that this mysterious woman, with her solemn, frozen air, had been photographed not for her own sake but for some ulterior motive.

He sat leafing through the dreary album in the cheerful room of the bachelor tenant, amazed at the patience of the Arabs who, having laid an exhausted Jew to bed three hours before, hadn't checked to see if he had risen from the dead. The Ramadan sun streaked the wall with a first, golden hope of day's end as the fourth and final movement of the symphony began. Strong yet soft as fur, the tail end of his slumber now stroked the roots of his consciousness, from which ancient brainchildren, the fossil relics of his doctoral days, shuddered to life and carried him off to an Asiatic country of fertile steppes. A huge, open shed stretched to hills on the horizon. It was a giant barn, full of large, quiet cows with golden spots, the markings of a breed long thought to be extinct, which here, thousands of miles from the sea, were gathered in noble silence in a global, cosmic farm bristling with snow white udders whose bountiful milk fed the calves and lambs that descended, naked and shorn, from the hills. One of these, spotted from afar by Rivlin's sharp eye, raised a cropped head: its expression, sad, suspicious, and lost, was his eldest son's. Spying its dreaming father across the wide expanse, it wagged a stubby tail in recognition. Not only did it look like his son, it was his son, who had undergone, unknown to his parents, a horrid transformation that had compelled him to wander with a Turkish flock from Europe to Asia.

The dreamer's heart went out to the lamb. He would have liked to approach it and ascertain whether, as seemed to be the case from afar, it was unhappy in its metamorphosis. Yet fearful that it might flee in
shame or misunderstanding, he knelt instead and threw it a stick to retrieve while clucking his tongue as though it were a dog or stray cat. This proved a miscalculation. The stick only frightened it, turning innocent anxiety to alarm. Rearing on its hind legs, the lamb broke away from its huddled companions and retreated to the hills, its little tail forlornly still.

A
LTHOUGH SO HARSH
a dream could not but put an end to the final movement, it did not detract from the splendor of the lengthy nap wrested from the no-man's-time of afternoon. Even if it had only lasted four hours, like the legendary sleep of the first prime minister, its exotic intimacy made it seem twice as long.

He urinated and washed up, and unbolted the door in the hope of finding at least one Arab waiting worriedly for him in the hallway. There was no one. His long nap seemed to have made him one of the family. The old grandmother, whose open door he now passed, was seated beside the grandfather, she listening to Arabic music on the radio while he dozed on a divan beneath a wall clock. She nodded to Rivlin as though he were an old friend and nothing could be more natural than a reputable Jewish professor wandering around her house at twilight. Pointing to the clock, she said:

“
Iza inta ju'an, ya eini, il-akl hadr. Ka'yahudi, inta sumt an kul hatayak uhatay eiltak. Lakin iza inta m'samim innak t'kamel, lazim ti'raf inno bad akal min sei'ah b'tiji il-kunbila taba Sadal.
”
^*

The air flowing through the open window had a clear, dry Palestinian tang such as he remembered from his childhood. Grinning with curiosity, he let himself be lured into the old couple's room as if he were their middle-aged son.

“
Il-kunbilah taba Sadal? Shu hada?”
^†

“In British times there was an old cannon in the next village that
fired each day at the end of the fast. Now Israel lets the soldiers of the southern Lebanese Army across the border shoot a mortar shell. We eat on Lebanese time.”

The old lady chortled toothlessly.

“My mother won't eat on Ramadan unless something goes boom first,” laughed Afifa, entering the room in a large apron that smelled tantalizingly of cooking. “How are you, Professor? Are you sure you've slept enough? A person might have thought you had missed three nights' sleep, not just one. Is that how worried you were about your wife's trip?”

He nodded amiably, feeling a profound serenity, in a world that was not of this world. Even his hunger, no longer nagging, was pleasantly vague. Could the pill against “feeling blue” have given him a high?

“Where is Rashid?” he asked. “Has he finished photocopying?”

“Long ago. Don't worry, the material is ready. We'll call him the minute you want to leave.
Bas leysh bidak t'safir? Ma n'halik.
^*
Absolutely not. We're sitting down to our holiday dinner in an hour, and you're one of the family. And the bathtub is free if you want to use it. Samaher just bathed and is waiting to finish the story of Ahmed ed-Danaf and the sick horse. She has other stories for you, too. One is about an absurd man who killed two Frenchmen,
‘El-Gharib El-Mahali.'
How would you translate that?”

“The Local Stranger.”

“Exactly.”

Was he, then, personally and professionally, on the verge of a long-craved intimacy with the Arabs, one much greater than the merely literary one proposed by his old mentor in Jerusalem, an intimacy that would prolong the day into a stirring, eventful night? And was the freedom of knowing that his movements could not be tracked by his wife so seductive that he was prepared to abandon himself to it? Not that these Arabs were the same as the Algerians whose crisis of identity had hobbled his computer for over a year. Yet surely the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance was right about their belonging to
“one world,” a world sometimes cruel and sometimes indulgently hospitable.

And indeed, in that case why not bathe in the tub remembered fondly from the night of Samaher's wedding and now put at his disposal by a ruddy and buxom Arab woman redolent of holiday aromas, who had taken a course of his twenty years ago? Let the distinguished Jewish Orientalist be pampered by the same Arabs who brimmed with grievances against the crimes of Western colonialism and frustrated him by their refusal to accept any responsibility for their condition.

“
Inti bidal'ini aktar min zojti,
”
^*
Rivlin said to Afifa, the white lie making him blush.

“Kif
ti'dar el-maskini t'dal'ak, iza-ma kan andeha wa't
?”
^†

Touched to hear this unexpected defense plea for the judge uttered in a remote Arab village, he happily went off to bathe, accompanied by two towels, a bottle of fragrant liquid soap, and a young girl, who had been appointed to guard his privacy outside a bathroom door that would never, so it seemed, be locked or bolted.