The Liberated Bride (19 page)
Read The Liberated Bride Online
Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
Certainly an Israeli Orientalist, no matter how secular, might be expected to sympathize with the reformist vision of the Salafia, which sought to return Islam to its pristine origins by purging the dross from its monotheistic core. Nor could an enlightened or rational person fail to be repelled by the pilgrims' superstitious revels and commerce in amulets and holy water. Even though, as the latest studies showed, the reformists too had their fanatical side, their leaders' high intellectual level, rhetorical gifts, and staunch defense of Algerian nativism against French military brutality and colonial rapacity had to appeal to a liberal observer like the Orientalist.
In the course of the Constantine riots, two men were killed, and many more wounded. Based on the assumption that the reformists were waging a moral and spiritual war against the pilgrims' paganlike practices, which distracted the faithful from the struggle for individual and communal self-betterment, it seemed natural to blame the violence on primitive Berbers clinging to otherworldly beliefs. And yet, surprisingly, this was not the picture painted by the French officer summoned to restore order between the warring parties. It was the Berbers, he reported, who were attacked first, the opening shots having been fired from the ranks of the reformists, who were led by prominent clerics and intellectuals. The shots were aimed at a slender, white-cloaked Sufi monk capering by a sacred tomb.
Was this an early warning, subtle but unmistakable, of the ruthless Terror that would come sixty years later? Could the reformists' descendants, the supporters of the Islamic Front, be venting their wrath not only on their traditional enemiesâheretics, Westernizers, corrupt army officers, writers and journalistsâbut also on innocent villagers who, rather than joining the political struggle, remained benightedly mired in pilgrimages, amulet peddling, and necromancy? Did the fundamentalists,
in the chaos following the cancellation of the elections, turn on their own illiterate brethren as if to say: “So it's graves, saints, and holy men that you want? Be our guests! We'll fill your villages with the graves of so many old men, women, and children that you'll never have to flock to a saint's tomb again, since you'll have plenty of your own.”
Or take this forgotten item, found in a transcript of court proceedings from the Eyn-Sifra district bordering on the Sahara: perhaps it, too, was an early warning of the senseless brutality now taking place. In 1953, inspired by a recently published story by Albert Camus, three French students from the University of Marseilles, two young men and a woman, set out with an experienced local guide named Hamid el-Kadr to get a sunset view of the Sahara. Camus's story concerned a depressed Frenchwoman named Jeannine who accompanies her husband, a traveling salesman, on his rounds in the Algerian countryside. One day the childless couple find themselves in a small town at the desert's edge, where they climb to a hilltop fort with a view. So shattered are the remote, frozen depths of Jeannine's being by the vast empty spaces she sees that she undergoes an inner revolution. In the middle of the night she awakes with an unsettled feeling, leaves her hotel room, and climbs back to the fort, from which she stares longingly at the Bedouin tents in the distance, her unfulfilled femininity thirsting for the infinite freedom of the Sahara.
It was under the influence of this story that the three French students decided to spend their Christmas vacation on a quest for Camus's heroine, hoping to relive her experience. Their guide even managed to find a hilltop fort and brought them to its panoramic vista. There they saw, like the childless Jeannine, the black tents of nomads and the silent camels nibbling at the edge of infinity. Unwilling to make do with mere longing, they asked their guide to take them to the encampment. Having reached the edge of the desert, why not push a bit farther into the cold night for a meatier taste of its eternal essence?
Hamid el-Kadr was agreeable and took them to the encampment, where their unexpected appearance met with a warm welcome. They were fed and given a place to sleep under the desert sky, huddled beneath layers of blankets. Yet in the morning, when they awoke, the Bedouin had vanished, tents, camels, flocks, and all. Going to wake
their guide, asleep in his blanket roll, they discovered to their consternation that the Bedouin had made off with his head.
The three terrified tourists ran for their lives, uncertain whether to report the brutal murder to the local Berber gendarme or to go straight to the French garrison in the district capital. In the end, duty prevailed over fear, and they went to the gendarme, who did not seem overly surprised. To ensure their personal safety, he locked them in his house until a French officer arrived.
It took three months to find the murderer, who was caught when he returned with his family and livestock to the foot of the fort, confident that all was forgotten and perhaps even hoping to attract new tourists. When asked by the French judge what his motives had been, he answered that the guide's French was too good for a believing Muslim and Algerian patriot like himself, and that not knowing to what lengths such a treacherous tongue might go, he had cut it off with the rest of the head. And in reply to the judge's astonished query as to how someone ignorant of French could assess its fluency, the Bedouin pointed to the freedom of the young Frenchwoman's laugh when Hamid el-Kadr spoke to her.
A
ND PERHAPS HE
, Professor Rivlin, had found another harbinger of the Terror now rampant in Algeria. To be sure, one had to be careful about going all the way back to the 1850s, when the French, having commenced their colonial administration, disbanded the guilds known as the
jama'at.
Yet having recently supervised a doctoral dissertation on the subject that suggested some curious conclusions, he decided to return to it.
During the long period of Turkish rule in North Africa, many Algerian villagers, especially in times of drought or economic hardship, migrated to the cities for their livelihood. They did not settle in them permanently, however, or mingle with the urban population. Rather, organizing themselves by place of origin and occupationâthat is, flour miller, butcher, perfume merchant, bathhouse keeper, and so onâthey formed cooperative guilds, each led by an elected official, recognized by the Turkish authorities, called the
amin.
Each
amin
was empowered to judge and discipline the members of his
jama'a,
bachelors
unwilling to marry out of their tribe or village who accepted his decisions without challenge. This arrangement officially ended in 1868, when the French government, after considerable debate, revoked the autonomy of the
jama'at
and the authority of the
amins.
At first the
jama'at
refused to accept the French decree. Particularly angered were the now unemployed
amin
s, who had derived many benefits from their position. For years the guilds struggled to maintain themselves on an unofficial basis, the members continuing to obey the
amin
s despite their unrecognized status. Not until the early twentieth century did these voluntary cooperatives lapse completely, leaving the French exclusively in control.
And yet the ancient memory of these independent guilds stayed with the villagers from the desert, who were now an urban proletariat dependent on French colonial rule. The longing for the little
jama'a
with its strongman was passed down. From time to time, it even induced certain simple villagers to imagine that they were the new
amin
s and to blame the failure of their dreams not on the authorities but on their illiterate neighbors, whom they accused of refusing to submit to them. This situation culminated in 1927, in a bizarre incident that took place in the village of Mezabis, on the fringe of the desert, 560 kilometers from the capital. There, a local resident, in a throwback to Turkish times, gathered a small
jama'a
that appointed him its
amin
and launched a punitive campaign that only came to an end when the French caught him and put him to death.
Had the elections of 1991, held during a conflict between a brutal, disorganized army and furious fundamentalists, led to a new outbreak of atavism? Were its new, self-fantasized
amin
s taking back the power they had lost one hundred years before? Were the vicious bands formed by them none other than the old
jama'at,
sallying forth once more to judge and punish at night?
O
NCE THE MERRY
émigrés, having filled their suitcases with the Israeli pharmaceuticals they always took back with them, were gone, Rivlin wondered whether his fears of their visit had not been exaggerated. It
had passed slowly, yet in a tender Chekhovian ambience, full of mellow conversations over glasses of tea on the large terrace, and in leisurely walks on the beach. Although being exiled from his study to the university had not unstuck his blocked book, perhaps some wisdom had rubbed off on it from all the computers humming on the top floors of the tower overlooking the Galileeâfrom which his own computer, having sat quietly for two weeks, had been carried home again wrapped in soft towels. As he watched it light up against the background of his mother's ghost playing solitaire on her terrace, the breeze teasing the Carmel seemed to whisper, “Be of good cheer! Steady at the keyboard!” To bolster his and the computer's spirits, he made the words “Be of Good Cheer!” float across his display screen.
Meanwhile, a letter had arrived from Samaher. Written for some reason in Arabic, it informed him in a patronizing toneâas if she were doing her favorite professor a favor by accepting his offer to help her salvage the semesterâthat she had begun the new project assigned her. Indeed, she appeared to be enjoying it, for the stories and poems brought to her by her cousin, she wrote, were so interesting that she was actually “wild” about them. (Samaher wrote “wild” in Hebrew, as if Arabic lacked a word to express the cuddly Israeli concept of wildness.) For the first time, she was discovering the grandeur of the Arab nation that stretched from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and the pride she felt in it. She had already translated two love poems and would soon finish summarizing two stories. One of these was realistic, the other, a naively sentimental (although, in her opinion, highly political) bit of folklore. If allowed by the doctorâfor she was happy to inform Rivlin that she was pregnant and temporarily restricted to her bedâshe would bring everything to the university when it was ready.
“Damn!” Rivlin swore under his breath. “What made me get involved with her? All I've done is given her a new batch of excuses.” Worse yet, he no longer possessed Yosef Suissa's original collection, which had been returned to Jerusalem at the urgent request of the murdered scholar's father, who wished to see for himself what in the Arab soul had so intrigued his beloved son. Not that Rivlin had any illusions that Suissa's texts might rescue his own book. Still, now that
they had been brought to his attention, he felt obliged to deal with them. It was even with a feeling of relief that he turned to them, as they gave his marooned project an immediate direction that it lacked.
He telephoned Samaher to reprimand her, only to be told by Afifa, who sounded alarmed by his angry demand to be sent at once whatever was finished, that her daughter was bedridden. Two days later, Rashid brought him two short love poems translated into a fluent Hebrew. The first went:
Who has seen her in the morning, When her brow opens like a flower, / Restful with dew and lilies, / Roses, violets, / Flowers, and the nests of ruins? / Who has seen the dawn of her glory? / Who has seen her nightclothes, / Woven among mulberries, / On which hang two berries, / And half a berry again, / Two kingdoms of silk / And half a kingdom? / Matchless among unmatched women, / Who can see her hips / And stay sober? / O follow the curve/ And the slide of them / To a different star! / They are a way-point of the future, / A journey from death / To life. There they stand and lament / The ruins of the Arabs, / The desert of the Arabs.
The hypnotic, coal black eyes of the messenger stared intently at the baffled professor, who failed to fathom the swift transition from the curves of an unmarried woman awakening in the morning to the ruins of lamenting Arabs.
“Where is the Arabic original?” he asked.
The messenger had brought the translation alone.
The second poem was written by the same poet, Farouk el-Janabi, and was about the same mystery figure:
How stunning is night's color in her eyes! / In them she hides a note from her lover, / And a cool ring with which to cheat Time. / How stunning is night's color in her eyes! / She paints a tattered flag, / A black cloak, / For those turned back / By the gates of her glory. / She paints the night / So that none are seen by none. / O unmatched woman. . . . / How beauteous is her misfortune!
“What about the stories?” Rivlin asked disappointedly.
“Samaher is still working on them,” her cousin said. “She spends
all her time in bed. It's easier for her to do short poems. But don't you worry, Professor. She'll have it all in good time.”
“Can she really be pregnant so soon?” he asked incredulously.
“That's what her mother says,” was the noncommittal answer.
M
EANWHILE, THERE WAS
a new development in the closed-door trial. A key witness for the prosecution, who, fearing for his life, had fled to an Asian republic of the former Soviet Union, had now agreed after concerted pressure to testify, but only on condition that the court, in whose closed doors he had no faith, hear him in a place of his own choosing outside of Israel. At first, a single judge had seemed sufficient. But the defense, worried that the testimony might be highly damaging, had insisted that all three judges attend. This meant Hagit too.
“The court agreed without knowing where it's going?”
“That was the condition. But there's no need to worry. We'll be told the exact location as soon as we get to Vienna. And the Israeli embassy will know where we are.”
“But suppose I were to abscond like that?”
“I'd be annoyed,” Hagit admitted with an unflappable smile. “But that's only because you could always take me with you. I can't take you. But why should you care? Won't it be nice to be rid of me for a while?”
“Not like this.”
“Then like what?”
“I'd need a more thorough break from you.”
Taken aback, she laughed and went to kiss him.
“Don't imagine it's going to be all fun and games. This is a working trip.”
Yet she did not seem put out by the prospect of it. Her mood was one of excitement. Besides the adventure itself, there was the prospect of new evidence deciding a case that had dragged on inconclusively for months. And surrounded by male colleagues, she would surely be getting at least as much attention as could be provided by a single husband.
Rivlin felt an anxious sadness, coupled with an unfamiliar aggressiveness. Their impending separation, though short, was a rare event, and his wife's forensic talents, marshaled to convince him that it was a blessing in disguise that might revive his powers of concentration, did not reassure him. He grumbled not only about the fancy restaurants and good meals she would enjoy without him and the new places he would not get to see with her, but about the chronic disorder she always left behind. This was why he insisted, on the eve of her departure, on her keeping an old promise, made earlier in the year and repeated before her sister's visit, to go through the clothing in her closet and throw out what wasn't needed. It was time they gave their stuffy life an airing.