“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!”
There are poems like broken glass,
And I say: “Broken glass,
I have not found you a listener.”
My dream flees to your bedroom,
But your room is nothing but a trick.
Listen, I may have to call you by a different name.
Damn it! What name can I call you by?
I’ll make you a new prison,
But who will help me to escape?
11.
A Draft for an Introduction
It was in the early 1990s that I began work on this study of tendencies and conflicts in the national identity of Algeria between 1930 and 1960. It forms a natural sequel to my previous book, The Reconstruction of the New Algerian Identity through Municipalism, which dealt with the early formation of an Algerian sense of self via the institutions of local government. After I had begun the present study, a bloody civil war broke out in Algeria in the wake of the cancellation of the 1991 election results; it is still going on as I write these lines.
A historian of the recent past must choose between two approaches. The first is to write as if the present did not exist—or, rather, under the assumption that any serious and responsible examination of the present will have to wait for historians of the future, who will analyze it with the help of reliable documents and appropriate scholarly tools. In other words, any attempt to explain the flux of a hotly contested present with a methodologically responsible study of the past is doomed to hasty conclusions that will distort our understanding not only of the present but of the past as well.
Hence the warning of Professor Uriel Hed, a great Orientalist of the last generation:
“Especially in our field, in which we deal largely with recent events, we must resist all temptation to blur the boundary between scholarship and political journalism. The historian must do everything to resist the siren song of ‘contemporary relevance.’”
And yet there is also, it must be said, a second approach, one that the intellectually honest and morally sensitive historian cannot simply overlook. How, after all, can the serious student of the past, taken by surprise by extreme and unexpected developments (and the writer of these lines must admit that although he has been studying the history of North Africa
for nearly three decades)—how can he simply shut his eyes and engage in his research as though nothing had happened? Inasmuch as all who believe in the continuity of historic process know that every turning point has had turning points before it, does he not have a scholarly obligation to search for the connection between the examined past and the experienced present?
But perhaps there is yet a third approach (a modest footpath, it may be, yet a real one) that can be taken by the scholar wishing to trace an arc from past to present—one that will, rainbowlike, connect these two poles of his interest.
I choose the image of the rainbow advisedly, for, as both a promise and a stimulus, evanescent yet spanning our field of vision, it represents the joining of the past to the dramatic events of the present.
What has happened to the identity of the Arabs, in which the Algerians share? This question, repeated interminably in cultural and political forums, has recently become a concern of academic research as well. What has kept the Arabs from a new ascendancy in which they might reclaim their proud place in history, a place held by them for hundreds of years? Why have they responded in such self-crippling ways to the challenges of technology and liberal democracy?
What is it that brought the well-known Syrian poet Nizar Kabani to publish his notorious 1995 poem, “When Will the Death of the Arabs Be Announced?” Despite the literary and political scandal caused by this work, and the subsequent attempts to ban the Syrian poet from Egypt, there were courageous Egyptian intellectuals who rallied to Kabani’s defense.
These fundamental questions, which the body of my book refrains from discussing, stand to be illuminated in this introduction by the many-hued and perhaps chimerical rainbow that I propose to sketch from the past, the proper subject of my research, to the contemporary events that hover on its horizon.
Is the covert source of Arab society’s inability to internalize the concept of personal freedom to be found in its attitude toward women? Does the early childhood identification of the Arab son with his docile, marginalized, and sometimes humiliated mother seriously damage his capacity to develop a sense of inner freedom as he matures? I believe that the identification with the passive female lies in the hidden depths of his construction of his masculinity, thus producing a binary passive-aggressive loop.
And why does the memory of colonialism continue to sear the Arab mind more than that of other Asian and African peoples with similar experiences? Is it the Arab world’s relative proximity to the West, or the memory of its former dominance in part of Europe, i.e., in the “lost Paradise” of Andalusia, that makes the pain and frustration of a remembered colonialism so great?
An ethereal, chromodynamic, vanishing and reappearing rainbow may suggest a number of hypotheses. . . .
12.
ON SATURDAY MORNING, the Russian immigrant guard was waiting as agreed for Judge Rivlin and her husband to appear by the iron gate of a small wing of the District Court. Instead of giving them the key, he told them that he intended to keep it and lock the gate behind them until summoned to let them out. Rivlin did not like this arrangement at all. “Suppose you fall asleep?” he asked. “What if one of our telephones isn’t working or you have to go somewhere? Do you want us to spend the day locked up in the courthouse?” In the end, in violation of standard procedure, the guard reluctantly left the key with them, on the condition that they return it to him personally.
And even then, as they were climbing the worn white steps of the old building, once the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Division of the British Mandate in Palestine, the judge, perturbed by her husband’s eagerness to reorganize her drawers, had second thoughts. Perhaps, she suggested, they should put it off for another week.
Rivlin did not even break stride. “Are you crazy?” he said. “Now you think of that?”
He hadn’t been in the courthouse in two years. Not much had changed in the halls of justice. Yet he was curious to have a look at the new electronic system, with its security buzzers and hidden alarm buttons, which had recently been installed outside the judges’ offices and beneath their desks. He took pleasure in using the code his wife had given him to unlock the door to her office. In fact, he announced with a flourish, the protection offered by such a system, if installed in his study, might give his hobbling book a push.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Hagit said.
Her dark, cold chambers had a new feature: the desk and chair, formerly on floor level, were now set up on a low podium. Despite her husband’s populist protest, the judge seemed pleased by her new elevation. Raising the heavy blinds to let in some light, she pointed to some paintings on the walls, salvaged from their old apartment, whose absence Rivlin had not even noticed. At once he proposed hanging Granot’s watercolor alongside them. It might encourage her colleagues on the bench to invest in the paralyzed ex-Supreme Court justice’s work. But Hagit, her loyalty to her old patron notwithstanding, thought that neither the colors nor the subject of The Return of the Little Ones was appropriate for her office. Since it was her husband who liked it so much, she observed, he should hang it in his study, instead of letting it gather dust in their apartment.
She went to water the little flowerpots on the windowsill. Rivlin, eager to form a first impression of the chaos of paper awaiting his sound judgment and firm hand, mounted the podium and sat at her desk. As he had surmised, its drawers were bursting with documents and notices that should never have survived the day of their arrival.
“It simply can’t be that you’re unable to throw out a single piece of paper,” he grumbled.
“But it can be,” Hagit said, with a doleful smile. “And don’t forget. You’re here to make order, not to destroy.”
“True order demands the courage to destroy,” he replied, as though it were his credo. If she was going to haggle with him over every absurd item, they might as well forget about it now.
“But you have to promise to show me what you’re throwing out . . .”
Having no intention of complying with her request, which would take more time than he had the patience to spend, he murmured a vague answer. He was, after all, not only a historian who understood something about documents, but also a loving and sympathetic husband who trusted himself to decide what his wife had accumulated unnecessarily.
He began by carefully collecting all her trial files and arranging them on a separate shelf. Then he pulled out the top drawer, dumped its contents on the cleared desk, gave its empty bottom a hearty thump to rid it of cobwebs and dust, slipped it noisily back into place, pushed the chair back, and invited his wife to have a seat, while planting an encouraging kiss on her neck. Positioning himself between her and the mountain of papers, he seized on an old protocol of an inconsequential meeting and handed it to her for consideration. No sooner had she taken off her distance glasses to read it than he quickly gathered an armful of commercial brochures, invitations to already-held conferences, professional newsletters from the Judges Guild, old updates of income-tax regulations, weekly court bulletins, and pointless communiqués from the police—all of which, crumpled and compacted, were made to vanish into a wastepaper basket hidden beneath the desk.
“What did you just throw out? Show me!”
“Nothing of value. Perfectly useless drivel that you’ve never read and never will.”
“I want to see it.”
He sighed and pulled a brochure from the basket. “You tell me,” he said scornfully. “Do you need this? Are you in the market for a printer?”
She took the brightly colored advertisement, turned it wonderingly around, and let it drop into his clutches without a word.
It did not take long to eliminate, to his considerable joy and satisfaction, most of the papers on her desk. Only a few were returned to the drawer. Hagit, whose helpless aversion to systematic housecleaning forced her to cooperate, found herself the object of a tender love that gradually changed to an ancient desire. Her naked eyes, staring bewilderedly at the documents that he handed her to
distract her from the demolition taking place beneath her nose, reminded him of the distant days when he had fallen in love with a young soldier and future law student and introduced her to his mentor in Jerusalem as a useful appendix to his doctorate. And so, before proceeding to the next drawer, he dropped uncontrollably to his knees, showered her with kisses and caresses, and whispered soft endearments while carefully licking her little earlobe. The thought of seducing his wife here in this room, in which so many anxious litigants had awaited her pronouncements, appealed to him greatly.
His kisses grew more expert and precise. Hagit’s eyes shut. She gave her impassioned husband a limp but warm embrace, which encouraged him to press his campaign by opening several buttons on her blouse. All at once, however, he was pushed sharply away with his own words:
“Are you crazy? Now?”
“Why not?” The idea excited him. “The building is locked, and I have the key. Just think of the good time you’ll have tomorrow, surrounded by all those lawyers, thinking of the good time you had today. . . .”
13.
BUT GOOD TIMES that came from crossing boundaries and mixing worlds were not his wife’s cup of tea, quite apart from the fact that ever since she’d returned from her judicial junket a minority of one, her self-confidence and good nature were gone. He was thus compelled to pull out the next drawer and dump its contents too on the desk, where they were revealed to consist largely of legal circulars and official announcements. It was hopeless to conduct a separate argument about each. The trick was to convince her, in a gentle appeal to reason, that each document had its neatly catalogued double in the court library across the street. And since there was no need of it there either, why not donate the entire collection to the law library of the university for the greater enlightenment of its students?
The Liberated Bride Page 34