The Liberated Bride (24 page)

H
E SOAKED IN
the foamy water, examining the ceramic tiles on the walls with the expertise of a man who had recently been through the construction of a new apartment. The truth was trite but sad: the Arab workers did a better job of tiling in their own homes than they did in the homes of their Jewish customers. And why, really, should this be surprising?

He dried himself with both towels and dressed. As the sun went down to the smells of dinner from the kitchen, he stepped into Samaher's room, reinvigorated and shiny-faced, to continue her “term paper,” which now seemed to him a marvelous invention.

Her own bath, to judge by an empty washtub in a corner and a puddle of water on the floor, had taken place in her room. Though
she had changed to a brighter robe, she looked pale, worn, and anything but refreshed. Propped exhaustedly on a large pillow, she suggested—perhaps because her hair was now done up in two braids—a suffering child more than an M.A. student. Her sorrowful eyes reproached him for abandoning her for his monumental sleep in the middle of her story.

“Where's Rashid?” he asked of his now indispensable sidekick.

“Why do you need him?” she answered sullenly, as if to erase the smarting passion of being swept up in her cousin's arms.

“Never mind. It's not important.”

“I can tell him to come right away.”

“There's no hurry.”

Through the large window, a last, vivid drop of sun sizzled in the cleft between two distant hills.

“Don't worry, Professor. He'll take you home whenever you want.” There was a new, hurt note of disappointment in her voice.

“But there's no hurry, Samaher,” he repeated serenely, seated in the armchair by the open window, through which he caught a first whiff of the dialogue of hot coals and meat. “I'm not worried in the least. I've already caught a bad case of nirvana from all of you.”

She reddened at what seemed another of his anti-Arab digs. Looking tense and miserable, she wriggled anxious legs beneath the blanket.

“Well, what happened in the end with Ahmed ed-Danaf?” he asked, like a teacher encouraging a stuck pupil. “Did he save the horse he poisoned?”

“Do you really want to know?” Her eyes flashed with resentment. “I thought you found it so silly that it put you to sleep.”

“Silly?” He was amused. “Not at all. It was no sillier than the other story.”

“The other one?” she repeated dreamily.

“The literary value of these stories doesn't matter. I'm looking for something else—the spirit of the times, some sign of the future.”

“The future?”

“The insane Terror, for example.”

“What Terror?”

“The one in Algeria. They've been butchering one another there.”

She gave him a guarded look, as if searching for a mysterious new drift that five years of his courses had not revealed to her.

“I've never heard of it. Is there a book about it?”

The Orientalist stared hard at the young Arab.

“It's been going on for eight years.”

“
Masakin . . .
”
^*
Dismissing the butcher and the butchered alike, she reached out with a thin hand for her bed lamp. The bulb beneath the red lampshade lit up like a little sun in place of the real one that had vanished. Opening her notebook, she softly continued the tale of the young villager who fought to save the life of the horse he had poisoned.

Ahmed ed-Danaf's unhappy love for Leona, the daughter of a family of hated shepherds betrothed to a relative from France, was now joined by the suffering of the poisoned horse sprawled on its straw in the stable. Samaher's summary was so full of detail that Rivlin couldn't tell what was in the story and what had been invented by her. Descriptions of lights and shadows, smells and sounds accompanied the drama of the horse, which failed to grasp why the strange young man who had poisoned it two days ago was now sitting up with it all night, hand-feeding it mashed oats and kissing and petting it with loving words. After a few days Ahmed ed-Danaf tied a thin rope around its neck and led it daintily around the stable. In the end it recovered and even carried its rescuer to a hilltop above the village, from which he was the first to greet his beloved upon her return from the betrothal that would take her to France. And that was the end.

“The end?”

“Of the story.”

“Very good,” the professor said, with an approving glance at his student. She was definitely not pregnant. No doubt her mother had confined her to bed to keep her from doing something rash.

Samaher, calmed by her teacher's patient attention, stopped wriggling her legs. Her long lashes drooped. Evening shadows clung to the walls of the room.

“Can you use such a story, Professor?” she asked with a ghostly smile.

As he was reassuring her that there was value even in a folktale, written at the height of Algeria's struggle for independence, about unhappy love and a sick horse, the sound of a shell rang out. Soon afterward, Samaher's husband, still in his plaster-spattered work clothes, warily entered the room. Acknowledging Rivlin with a nod, he turned anxiously to see how his new wife's depression was doing.

T
HE HOLIDAY DINNER
, announced by the setting of the sun, was held in the courtyard. Joining them was Samaher's father-in-law and his two sons, as well as several neighbors and village notables who had come to break the fast with the Jew
illi bisum zay il-mu'amin, lakin al-fadi
.
^*
Now that his marathon slumber in Rashid's bed, already famous throughout the village, had been interpreted not only as a sign of great weariness brought from afar, but also as a vote of confidence in the Arabs, he was greeted with warmth as well as respect, like a potential kinsman who might become a real one if plied with enough food.

Yet oddly, though he hadn't touched a thing since his cup of coffee and piece of baklava in the gas station that morning, Rivlin was not very hungry. So lackluster and almost abstract was his appetite that it was satisfied with a bit of pita bread dipped in warm hummus, thus compelling Afifa to provide him with a special carver, a mysterious old man named Ali who was either somebody's uncle or Samaher's second grandfather. A punctilious, square-shouldered man, he came and went grandly from the kitchen bearing a copper tray of choice morsels plucked from the head, ribs, rump, and inmost organs of the lamb and arranged by him on Rivlin's plate, from which he sternly force-fed them to the Jewish professor.

It was hard for the Orientalist to say no, especially since the guests, although deriving no benefit from Ali's labors, urged him to obey the old man, brought from another village to coax him out of a fast unrequired by
Allah. Moreover, the morsels put on his plate being few and select, Rivlin had to assume them to be a mere prelude, a symbolic tasting meant to lure him back, stomach and all, from the ominous steppes of his dream.

The village was coming to life. Passersby stopped to peer through the iron gate at the Jewish professor. A few entered to introduce themselves—elderly teachers, brawny high-school graduates, even some old students who had had children and grandchildren since taking his courses at the university. All seemed pleased by his long sleep and gratuitous fast. Someone wanted to know about Samaher. Was it true, as her mother claimed, that he had made her his research assistant? And what, precisely, was the research?

It was a calm Galilean evening. Rivlin, clear of mind and unlimited of patience, gladly answered the villagers' questions. Who could say whether they, too, might not provide a spark of inspiration? His research met with general approval. Algeria was a country dear to the Arabs. Its inhabitants had suffered almost as much as the Palestinians. You couldn't blame them if bad things had rubbed off on them from the French. “But when will you write something about us, Professor Rivlin?” they all asked.

Good-humoredly he explained that even when writing about Arabs in far-off times and places he looked for the connecting link with what was nearby. “After all,” he told them, “you all have the same roots and come from the same desert.” While this was still being digested, there was a whinny from the black horse. Sticking a bridleless head between the bars of the gate, it had come to remind Samaher's grandfather to take it back to the stable.

“What's the bottom line, Professor? Will Samaher get her final grade?”

The impatient question came from the contractor, Samaher's father-in-law, who had been eating silently beside him.

The man's two sons tried silencing him. Rivlin, however, gave him a friendly pat on the back.

“Of course she'll get it,” he said. “In time to be given her M.A.”

“But what can anyone do with an M.A.?” the contractor wondered out loud. “What good is it?”

“Every case is different,” Rivlin reassured him. “Samaher could continue for her next degree.”

“Her next degree?” The man turned despairingly to his son. “
Fi kaman thaleth
?”
^*

“It's called a doctorate,” Samaher's sad husband whispered back.

W
HERE IS RASHID
?

Yet not even the thought of your missing driver can prevent you from calmly dismissing all worries. Whether it's your magical sleep that has scrambled your biological clock and muddled the hours, or the absence of your wife, even the greenish stars in the village sky now patiently await your confirmation that night has arrived.

Rashid, it seems, is lying low because of Samaher's husband. Hence the repeated reassurances that he'll drive you where and when you want. “Rashid is all yours, Professor. Relax,” Afifa half-scolds, half-soothes you, as if you'd been given a black slave, rather than a citizen, albeit a displaced one, of the state of Israel—one who, on the way out of Ma'alot this morning, pointed to a Jewish community center and some tennis courts on a hillside and said, “That's our village, Dir-el-Kasi.” “Was your village,” you corrected him. “Right,” he conceded after a moment's thought. “Was.”

In a corner of the courtyard Afifa now kindles a savage fire and throws blackening eggplants in it. Enveloped in bitter smoke, you find yourself defending the political acrobatics of a right-wing prime minister you didn't vote for. “It will take a shrewd operator to get the right to cross the Rubicon,” you say, and a college graduate who remembers Caesar explains the image with an Arabic proverb that has to be explained once more in Hebrew for your benefit.

Afifa has an idea. “Since your wife, Professor, is out of the country, why not sleep here tonight in the bed you've gotten used to? Rashid won't need it because he works nights during Ramadan, and you'll
have all evening and tomorrow morning to make more progress with Samaher.”

“Sleep here?” You run a hand through your gray curls. “It's very tempting, but
inni el-yom azuz, marbut fi 'l-leil fi frasho.
”
^*

The glitter of a smile in her eyes tells you that once again you've made a comic blunder in your Arabic, which you learned from texts and documents at the university and not, like the new department head, whose supple, serpentine speech transfixes his listeners before biting them, in the streets of Mesopotamia. Still, you insist on dropping an Arabic sentence or expression here and there, not just to keep your listeners on their toes, but to let them know that their world is your second home.

And all this while fierce old Ali won't let you alone, coming and going with his little tray and refusing to take no for an answer, as if the barbecued lamb would be mortally injured unless you consumed its innards. Having eaten, as your wife put it, “half a lamb” at Samaher's wedding, you'll soon have eaten the other half unless you stop now. And so, though you wouldn't mind another helping, you deem it best to rise and call for your displaced citizen, although only after first asking Samaher, promoted by her mother to the position of your research assistant, for one last story, that of the moonstruck murderer.

S
AMAHER'S ROOM
was unexpectedly crowded. The full moon, the only light apart from her little reading lamp, sketched on the walls the shadows of the young women, some wearing Islamic kerchiefs, who had come to see how their friend had survived the fast in her confinement. Samaher had changed clothes again and was wearing a loose, colorful peasant dress like her mother's. A tray of food, most of it left uneaten, lay on the lacquered chest beside the new photocopies of Dr. Suissa's material.

Samaher gave him a timid smile. Her pale face, sallow by day, was
now as heavily made up as on the night of her wedding. The Lebanese kohl around her eyes hid any sign of tears.

“I see you have visitors,” Rivlin said.

“They're here for you, not me, Professor,” she answered with her old impishness. “They want to get a look at you and hear you speak Arabic.”

The young women giggled shyly. The more religious tightened the kerchiefs on their heads.

“There are even two students here from your survey course. Don't you recognize them?”

“That's not so easily done,” he murmured, afraid of being approached with yet another request for a change of topic or extension. “Well, do we have time for another story? Perhaps we should make it ‘The Local Stranger,' as your mother suggested.”

“Yes. It's special and not very long. If you don't mind, my visitors would like to hear it, too. I think it's the perfect story for your research, Professor. I came across it in the photocopies this afternoon, while you were sleeping. That poor man who was killed in Jerusalem didn't notice it. To tell you the truth, it was Rashid who did. ‘ The Local Stranger'—that's an eye-catching title, isn't it? It was written by a journalist named Jamal bin el-Maluh as an attack on an important French author. He's mentioned in the introduction—Albert Camus. Have you ever heard of him, Professor? But what a question! Of course you have. Who hasn't? Rashid even found books of his in Arabic right here in the village, and his novel
The Stranger
was published in Syria. Just imagine: even the Syrians know him and honor him! I took a look at it just now, while you were eating. Jamal bin el-Maluh's story starts out exactly like it, but it's also a criticism of it. . . .”

She spoke animatedly, smiling at her guests. Rivlin recalled how years ago, in the same survey course, she had been one of the first students whose name he had mastered. Thin, alert, and adversarial, from her regular seat at the front of the large lecture hall, she had frequently raised her hand to argue with him, making up for her lack of knowledge with a keen, if sometimes perverse, intelligence. Although he had tried being patient with her, he had secretly hoped that the more
practical-minded Jewish students in the course would silence her—as, eventually, they did.

It was eight o'clock. From the village mosque, the prayer call of the muezzin came pleading over the rooftops. Was he still in a Jewish state? Or had he been, like his wife, transported to a far land? He wondered whether the new department head would be more pleased or appalled to know how he had spent the day. Once more turning Samaher's quarters into a seminar room, he explained to her and her guests why the Syrians were right to not to fear the French writer's philosophy of the absurd. Meanwhile, they were joined, his clothes clean and his hair wet from the shower, by Samaher's husband, who waited for her to make room for him on the edge of her bed. He, too, wanted to hear the story of the Local Stranger. So did Afifa and Samaher's grandmother. Even the large contractor peered in bewilderedly from the hallway. Everyone was there but the black horse.

The Story of the Local Stranger

Jamal bin el-Maluh, a Tunisian journalist and author, had written a rather sardonic preface for this story, which was published in 1949 in a small magazine called
El-Majaleh.
“Not long ago,” he wrote, “on a visit to France, I noticed that all Europe was praising a short, absurdist novel by a French colon named Albert Camus. It told the story of how, one hot day on the beach, for no reason at all, a young Frenchman named Marseault murdered an Algerian he had nothing against. ‘ The sun was too much for me,' he casually told the court. And yet if that young Frenchman had no reason to murder anyone, and reality is absurd, as our philosophical author claims, why would it have been any less absurd of him to kill a Frenchman like himself? Why must he absurdly kill an Arab?”

And so Jamal bin el-Maluh decided to invent an absurd Arab to balance the absurd Frenchman. If everything was absurd, let the absurdity be equal. His story, a parody of Camus's novel, began in almost the exact same words: “Today my father died. Or maybe it was yesterday. I can't remember.”

“In
The Stranger,
it's his mother,” Rivlin mused.

“Yes, I noticed that, Professor. But here it's the father, because it would be hard to imagine a young Arab who didn't mourn the death of his mother. A father is something else. The character's name, Musa, even sounds like Marseault. He lives in Algiers, and he puts his dead father in a car and takes him to his village to bury him without feeling any grief. That same night he returns to the city for a date at the movies with his girlfriend. And the next day he takes off from work and goes swimming, just like the character in Camus. But he doesn't go for an afternoon walk on the beach, because who can take the midday sun in Algiers? He waits for it to be evening—say, like now—and then strolls on the sand looking at the waves. After a while he approaches a nice French couple, a boy and a girl sitting on a bench, and asks how they are and what time it is. They tell him the time but not how they are and go on talking to each other. He's standing near them, staring at the moon rising over the bay. It's like a big egg yolk, and it scares him, and he can't take his eyes off it. And so he decides to wait for the two French to start kissing in the moonlight. That's what the French like to do, and he thinks it will calm him. But they just go on talking, and he gets more and more scared, because now the moon is overhead and could fall on him at any minute. So he goes over to the couple and asks in French, ‘What do you think of that moon?' ‘It's a very nice moon,' they say. ‘You don't think it will fall on me?' he asks. That makes them laugh. Let them laugh, Musa thinks, at least they'll die happy. And he takes out a big knife, slits their throats because it's absurd, and goes home for a nap.”

“For a nap?” Rivlin asked. He couldn't tell whether that, too, was part of the story or one of Samaher's embellishments.

There was a stir in the room. From a corner of it, the coal black eyes of the messenger signaled his readiness to set out and at the same time stole a glance at Samaher's husband—who, seated on the edge of the bed, was as curious as anyone to know whether the Arab murderer would stick to his absurdity in court or come up with explanation for his deed.

The shrewdly ironic Jamal bin el-Maluh kept his hero faithful to the absurd. Like Camus's stranger, the Arab refused to say he was sorry or ask the court for mercy, and blamed it all on the moon. The one difference was that in the Arabic version, the judge, too, was so affected by the spirit of absurdity that he acquitted the defendant. And so, Samaher concluded triumphantly, Jamal bin el-Maluh proved that the Arabs could be even more absurd than the French.

The room laughed at the French defeat.

“But how could he have acquitted him?” Rivlin chided her, as if Samaher had made the whole thing up. “Are you sure that's the end?”

“I'm afraid so,” she said, with a complacent smile. “I can't help it, Professor.”

The Jewish Orientalist felt a tremor of delight. Though weakly and dully perhaps, the spark of inspiration promised by his Jerusalem mentor was beginning to glow like a dusty coal. He rose, took a cup of Turkish coffee from a tray brought by Samaher's sister, downed it in a gulp like a shot of brandy, and asked the jet-colored messenger if he could locate Jamal bin el-Maluh's wonderful and important story in the photocopied material waiting in the minibus.

“Of course he can,” Samaher answered for him. “I told you, it was he who found it.”

The young ladies bowed their heads, fearful of being blinded by the dazzling light of illicit love that flashed past the tired husband.