The Liberated Bride

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Tedeschi’s Orientalism was a by-product of the tragedy of World War II. Even after the war, he could easily have returned to Italy and resumed his medical studies. But the fate of Europe’s Jews caused him to burn all his physical and spiritual bridges to his native land. He sold his parents’ home in Turin for less than market value, renounced his Italian citizenship, and began a new career on Mount Scopus as a student of Near Eastern history. His mentors, great Orientalists from Germany and Central Europe, had turned to the field for similar reasons. But Tedeschi was not satisfied with their classroom learning and decided to polish his spoken Arabic with a strict old Arab instructor known for his rigor in inculcating a proper accent. The young Italian threw himself into his new field with total dedication. It was more than a career for him. It was a calling, his contribution to integrating the Jewish people into the region they had chosen to live in—a crucial task if they were to survive there.”

  There was wonder on the face of the translatoress, who had never heard Rivlin’s vividly told story of her husband’s doppelgänger climbing Mount Cortina in the sunset. He smiled at her tenderly. Getting no response, he turned to the consular officials, who were listening to his Hebrew with attentive incomprehension.

  “In recent years,” he continued, “the field of Orientalism has been under unremitting attack. Edward Said’s renowned book, published twenty years ago, is but one illustration of this. Even though the radical accusations of this literary and intellectual critic living in New York were rejected out of hand by most scholars, among them such serious Arab academicians as Jalal el-Azem, Nadim el-Bitar, and Fu’ad Zakariyya, they have served to legitimize the ongoing criticism leveled at their own profession by many young Orientalists. So dubious are they of the scholarly integrity of their field that they would deny it its very name. Suddenly, a time-honored belief in the capacity of rational Western thinkers to understand the history and reality of the Arab world has been called into question. At the end of the twentieth century, we have been asked to adopt a postmodernist sensibility—a rather nebulous concept, I must say—characterized by a more flexible, relativistic, multicultural approach. This alone, we are told, can get us to the heart of an elusive essence that—so forthright Arab writers like Fu’ad Ajami lament—even the Arabs have despaired of understanding.

  “The problem is especially severe for Israeli Orientalists, who are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they are suspected by both the world and themselves of being unduly pessimistic about the Arab world because of Israel’s conflict with it. And on the other hand, they are accused of unrealistic optimism because of their deep craving for peace. For the Israeli scholar, whether he likes or admits it or not, Orientalism is not just a field of research. It is a vocation involving life-and-death questions affecting our own and our children’s future. This is why we have a greater responsibility to be accurate in our work. Just as we must refrain from all condescension toward the Arabs, so must we avoid all romanticization of them. We are not German philologists, retired British intelligence officers, or literary French tourists, who can afford to be deluded about who the Arabs are or should be. We are the Arabs’ neighbors and even their hostages—participants in their destiny who are unavoidably part of what we study. We are the old and yet new stranger in their midst, the constant shadow of the Other that, by their own testimony, has become their twentieth-century obsession. The problematic indeterminacy of Jewish identity undermines the old stability of the Arab world that slumbered peacefully for centuries in the desert.”

  From the throes of Israeli Orientalism’s double bind, the eulogist gave his worried audience a sorrowful, we-must-carry-on-nonetheless smile. Even the Italians who did not understand him nodded trustingly at his impeccable logic.

  “And here,” Rivlin continued, pointing to the photograph of the Jerusalem polymath in the desert, “lies another of Tedeschi’s unique contributions. Growing aware many years ago of the dangers posed to Israeli Orientalism by this symbiotic relationship with the Arabs, he decided to draw a clear boundary. ‘Let us,’ he declared, drawing on his fund of knowledge, ‘learn from the Turks how to belong and not belong to this region at one and the same time.’ And so turning away from Iraq, putting Sudan aside, and even abandoning great Egypt, he traveled northward to Turkey, in whose relations with the Arab world he saw a paradigm for our own.”

  The eulogist regarded his audience. It suddenly struck him that the elegant young woman seated several rows behind the eternal fedora of Mr. Suissa, her eyes riveted on him in the dim auditorium, was not an Italian consular worker but Mrs. Suissa junior, who had come to express her sympathy for a colleague of her murdered husband and for a newer widow than herself. The sight of this restless soul, looking calm and pretty with her hair pinned up, a new life ahead of her now that she had freed herself from the clutches of her in-laws, should have gladdened him. Instead, however, he was flooded with such sorrow for his own son that an involuntary groan escaped him. Seeking to obey his wife’s bidding, he fought to concentrate on his feelings for Tedeschi. The dead man deserved no less.

  “Nevertheless,” he continued, “though the Turks, ancient and modern, became Professor Tedeschi’s main concern, he did not neglect the Arabs completely. Indeed, having reached a stage in his career in which he could afford to take a panoramic view, he grew increasingly worried by our inability to understand the Arab mind. While he did his best to conceal it, he was fearful that we Jews, having failed catastrophically in Europe, were about to fail again in the Middle East—that the new homeland meant to be our final destination could become another bloody trap. Despite the natural optimism of a man who had taken his fate in his hands and saved his own life by coming to this country, he felt torn, as Israel’s leading Orientalist, between his responsibility to warn his colleagues of the pitfalls of wishful thinking and his reluctance to sow despair by declaring—he, who had educated generations of Arabists!—’It is hopeless to try to understand the Arabs rationally. Back to their poetry, then, for that is all we have to go on!’

  “Ladies and gentlemen, from this inner rupture came Tedeschi’s many imaginary illnesses, whether they were an escape from the harsh truth of reality or a cry for help to his friends, asked to come still his fears.”

  The profound silence told him that he had said something unexpected and true. Reaching for the glass of water on the lectern, he took a slow sip while summoning his strength for the love and compassion he had promised his wife. It surprised him that no one had turned on the lights to dispel the darkness that had become almost palpable. Perhaps this was because Rashid, an anguished look on his face as he strained to hear the eulogist’s painful words from the back of the hall, was standing in the way of the light switch.

  14.

  DESPITE THE PATCHES ON her eyes, she knew it was her younger brother even before he opened his mouth. The intimacy of a childhood shared in one room in their parents’ small Jerusalem apartment had taught her to sense him from afar.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I told Hagit it was too much for you.”

  “It’s all right. It was on my way.”

  “Did that Arab at least drive you?”

  “Yes. I’m lucky he sticks by me.”

  “But why does he? I’ve heard you don’t even pay him.”

  “Don’t ask me. It’s he who doesn’t want to take anything.”

  She lay, small and thin, on a couch in the head eye doctor’s office, a black patch on each eye, waiting for the doctor to finish an operation and determine whether the low-temperature laser suture performed that afternoon had repaired her retina and made surgery unnecessary.

  “In which eye did it happen to our father?” he asked.

  “The same one. The left one.”

  “Couldn’t you think of a better way to take after him?” He couldn’t resist teasing his sister, even while she lay dismally in the dark, with her good eye covered too—a precaution taken, she told him,
not on orders from the doctor, but on the suggestion of a nurse. Although her son’s kindhearted wife had spent the afternoon with her, she had only made Raya’s fears worse by overidentifying with her condition. Now Rivlin’s sister lay waiting for her son to appear with his calming presence. Her brother, glum and tired, was not having a reassuring effect. On the contrary, he soon lapsed into a listless silence, from which she tried to arouse him by changing the subject to the snow in Jerusalem.

  “That old bitch!” she declared of their mother, as angry at the age of sixty as if she were still a teenager. “All the kids were outside having fun while we were protected from pneumonia by having to ski a doll in a bowl of snow in the bathtub.”

  “What doll are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember!” Just because she couldn’t see she was not about to give up on her never ending struggle to keep her childhood memories alive in him. “That little black doll you went with everywhere . . .”

  His silence only deepened as he tried remembering the black doll. He had no wish to rage with his sister against their mother. He hadn’t seen her ghost for ages. Would he end up having to eulogize her too?

  Two hours ago he had been speaking in honor of Tedeschi. The lights in the auditorium had come on, the light switch behind Rashid having been discovered, just as he was describing in a tremulous voice how the translatoress of the Age of Ignorance, that pre-Islamic period so crucial for understanding the Arabs, had combined scholarship with her love of poetry and devotion to her husband’s health. But had it been fair to say what he had about Tedeschi’s illnesses, or had this been cheap psychologizing on his part? Before he could answer that, his son’s dreary solitude again pierced the twilight of his mind. For the first time, he felt no sympathy for Ofer, only anger. That’s it, my boy, he addressed him in his thoughts. I’ve failed just as you hoped I would. There’s no more hotel and no more Arabs to help me.

  As in a dream, this, too, quickly faded. Now he saw his pale, lanky Circe, curled on the basement bed like a long fetus, osmosing into her own freedom.

  “Listen,” he said to his sister. “I’m getting hungry. Shall I bring you something to eat too?”

  “I’m too worried to eat. But I can feel how edgy you are. Why don’t you go home? It’s late.”

  “It’s all right. Hagit made me promise to stay until Ayal comes.”

  His sister smiled, reaching out a blind hand toward him.

  The corridor outside was empty. The visitors had gone home. The nurse on duty sat reading a book. There was no telling whether the patients, lying in their rooms with bandaged eyes, were awake or asleep. A large figure was blocking his path.

  “What’s up, Professor?”

  To his amazement, he found himself looking at his sister’s former husband, a tall, thin, balding ex-playboy. Hearing from his son that Raya was in the hospital, he had come to have a look. Although he was a strange, difficult man who had given his wife a hard time, Rivlin felt a nostalgic affection for him.

  “Look who’s here!” he said, giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t believe it! Come, say hello to Raya. She’ll flip when she sees you.”

  “Shhh,” his ex-brother-in-law said. “If she does see me, she’s liable to detach her other retina.”

  “But isn’t that what you’re here for?” For some reason, his encounter with this man, whom he had not run into for years, had improved his mood.

  “To see Raya? What a thought! The head eye doctor is my tennis partner. Ayal asked me to speak to him.”

  “But as long as you’re here,” Rivlin persisted. “why not look in on her? Don’t be childish. What are you afraid of? She won’t even know it’s you. Her eyes are covered.”

  “They are?” The temptation to be invisible in his wife’s presence was too great to overcome. Silently, he followed Rivlin to Raya’s room.

  She was still lying on the couch, small and thin. A lamp, buzzing softly on the table, lit her face. The black patches over her eyes gave her the look of an airplane passenger trying to get some sleep. For a moment, Rivlin thought she was drowsing. But sensing her ex-husband, who was standing in the doorway with a crooked smile, she raised her head and asked anxiously:

  “Yochi, is that you?”

  “What’s up?” Rivlin asked quietly.

  “Did you eat so fast?”

  “It seems I did . . .”

  “But there’s someone else with you,” she said worriedly. “Who is it?”

  He dodged the question. “Who could it be?”

  “But there is!” She sounded fearful. “Someone is with you! Is it your driver?”

  “My driver?”

  The unseen husband smiled ironically. His blue, froggy eyes darted with amusement, as if reconfirming the oddness of the woman he had married and suffered with. Putting a finger to his lips, he turned and left.

  Ayal arrived at last, tired but in full possession of himself. When told of his father’s visit, he said angrily to Rivlin, “You shouldn’t have let him come near her,” as if he were talking about two disturbed children.

  It was ten o’clock when, back in a wet, glittering Tel Aviv street full of strollers taking the air after the storm, he climbed into the jeep and woke Rashid—who, having filled the vehicle with smoke from one of Fu’ad’s cigars, now lay fast asleep beneath a blanket.

  “Look here, Rashid,” he said. “It’s turned into such a long day that I’m not driving back with you unless you let me pay you.”

  “Pay me?” The messenger’s coal black eyes regarded him blearily. “You couldn’t afford what a day like this costs.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” the Orientalist said, offended. “I’m not a charity case. I can afford whatever you would normally take. Just tell me honestly what that is.”

  “Normally?” Rashid smiled to himself, as if at a new thought. “For a long, hard day like this with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I’d take . . . at least . . . at least fifteen hundred shekels.”

  “Fifteen hundred?” Though unable to conceal his shock, he quickly recovered and laughed derisively. “If that’s the going price, fine. Why not?” Grandly he pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check, while promising Rashid that his wife would read up on the immigration laws dealing with the reunion of families.

  The Arab jammed the check in his pocket and replied in a half hopeless, half newly dismissive tone:

  “You can tell the judge not to try too hard, Professor. Laws have got nothing to do with it.”

  15.

  I have a strange pet, half kitten, half lamb. It’s a hand-me-down from my father, but only now has it begun to grow.

  —Franz Kafka

  THE HEAVY RAINS, WHICH went on falling in the north for another week, turned the dirt roads of the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon into treacherous bogs. After a Bedouin tracker was killed by a mine concealed in the mud, Central Command suspended all foot patrols and kept the roads open with armored vehicles. The Commanding Officer of the trackers’ platoon, a lieutenant whose name was Netur Kontar, hurriedly applied for leave and was granted it.

  The CO was a Druze of about forty, a heavy man with a big mustache. Before leaving his base, he informed his family on the Carmel that he was going first to the village of B’keya in the Galilee, where he had promised to let his Christian dentist friend Marwan pull an infected wisdom tooth. If the weather improved, he might also join him and his friends for a night of hunting.

  Kontar had been an avid hunter since he was a small boy. His father, discovering early that he had a natural instinct for finding his way at night without getting lost, took him along on his hunting trips, during which young Netur sometimes spent entire nights perched silently in the treetops. It was so hard to wake him the next morning that he was almost expelled from school. If it hadn’t been for his older sister, who did all his homework, he would never have graduated.

  It was in the army, however, that his abilities became fully appreciated.
As a recruit in boot camp, he so impressed his officers with his navigational skills that they vied to take him on their nighttime maneuvers. When his three years of conscripted service were over, the Northern Corps, loath to lose an ace tracker, made him the unusual offer of a commission, without requiring him to take an officers’ training course, and immediate command of a platoon in southern Lebanon.

  The young Druze accepted, not only because the conditions were good and the job was a feather in his cap, but also because the army was a first-rate base from which to pursue his life’s passion. Throughout his long years of daily exposure to mines, bayonet charges, and booby traps, he took comfort in the regimental armory, out of which he enhanced his collection of weapons with an array of silencers, telescopic lenses, starlight sensors, and other devices, to say nothing of camouflage nets, which made excellent snares, and stale bread from the kitchens, which was good bait for wild boars. After losing his right thumb to a mine blast, he was afraid he had impaired his trigger finger, and for a while he suffered from depression. But the impediment was overcome, and the old army jeep that he was given in compensation, which he quickly filled with the equipment that now went with him everywhere, made him a legendary figure among the hunters of northern Israel and even of southern Lebanon.

  Today, however, as he knocked on the door of the dental clinic in B’keya, Netur Kontar was in a troubled mood, both because of his painful wisdom tooth and of a strange story told him by his father. At first he didn’t mention it. Leaning back in the dentist’s chair, he opened an uncomplaining mouth and let his head be jerked this way and that while his friend gaily pulled his tooth and told funny stories to distract him. Yet once Netur Kontar had spat out the last of the blood, rinsed his mouth thoroughly, admired its new hole in a hand mirror, and taken off his bib, he asked the assistant to leave him alone with the dentist so that he could speak his mind.