The Liberated Bride (22 page)

“
DO YOU HAVE
enough light, Professor?”

“That remains to be seen.”

He leaned back in his armchair and smiled at his student, who removed her hairnet and shook her hair out with a brisk, free movement. Above her bed was a picture of an ancient dignitary, a patriarch belted with a dagger. How, he wondered, had she managed to lure him, first to her wedding, and now into her bedroom?

“Well?” He could not resist taking a dig at all the lies. “This pregnancy of yours—is it definite?”

“Almost . . .” The answer was diplomatic.

“How are you feeling?” he asked in a fatherly tone.

“Better.” A tear shone in her eye.

“Then let's begin.” He took some of the herbs, crushed them between his fingers, and inhaled their scent. “First, where are the originals of the poems you've translated? I don't doubt you've done a faithful job, but I have to check whether the Arabic is quite so modern.”

“But why shouldn't it be, Professor? Do you think we're always going to remain . . . primitive?”

“What a word to use, Samaher!” Her forwardness startled him. “Who said anything about primitive? I merely wanted to see the originals.”

“They're in the binders on the table. I'll call Rashid and tell him to find them.”

“That can wait. By the way, I like your cousin. He's a fine fellow and very devoted to you. How come someone like him isn't married?”

Samaher shrugged. “He hasn't found a wife.” In an irritable whisper she added, “He doesn't want one. What can I do about it? Nothing.”

“You're quite right,” the Jewish professor admitted. “There's nothing you can do. Let's move on. You say that you've read two stories . . .”

“Two? A lot more than that.”

“You mentioned two in your note to me: a realistic one about a feud between village clans, and one that's more like a folktale.”

“A parable.”

“Of a political nature.”

“In my opinion.”

“Let's start with that. Do you remember where you summarized it in your notebook, or do we have to call Rashid?”

She was insulted. “Why Rashid? Of course I remember.”

She leafed through some pages and found it.

The story had appeared in a mimeographed periodical, a quarterly or biannual named
Katarna,
^*
put out with French backing in the
1940s by the Railway and Post Office Workers Union of Algeria. Besides information on the postal and railway services and their development, the volume included articles, stories, and poems written by union members. In January 1942, one Ibrahim Ibn Bakhir, a ticket clerk at the Sidi Bal-Abbas station, published a tale titled “
El-Tifl el-Faransi el-Murafrif.
”

“‘The Floating French Baby'?” Rivlin translated doubtfully.

“That's correct. It's one of the stories you marked, Professor.”

Forbearing to point out that most of the markings were Suissa's, he sat back in his chair.

The Tale of the Floating French Baby

In a small village near Sidi Bal-Abbas lived a hardworking farmer named Yusuf with his wife, Ayisha. Although the two were good, fine-looking people who loved each other greatly, they had no children. “I'm afraid,” Yusuf said to Ayisha, “that I'll have to take another wife to bear me children.” “That,” Ayisha replied, “is only natural. But to prevent my life from being consumed by jealousy, let me first travel through the countryside. Perhaps I can find an abandoned orphan to be mine.” “You're right, my beloved wife,” the farmer said. “Go look for an abandoned child. Just make sure you return to me. Although by then I will have taken a second wife, my love for you is assured until your dying day.”

The farmer's wife decided that the best place to look for an abandoned child was a railway station. People in stations are always in a hurry and often forget suitcases, bags, and even babies. So as to remove all suspicion from herself, and escape being molested because of her beauty, Ayisha cut her hair short, dyed it white, and stuck a beard on her face. Then she sewed herself a short cloak, found a big walking stick, and began wandering from station to station, disguised as a Sufi holy man, in search of an abandoned child.

At first all went well. The old Sufi was treated with respect, and no one suspected a thing. After a while, however, attracted by the Sufi's bare legs, which were unusually smooth and shapely, people began to follow him and seek his blessing. Afraid of being given away by her
soft voice, Ayisha stopped talking and only smiled. But this only increased the number of her devotees, who accompanied her from station to station.

Meanwhile the train management, seeing that the silent Sufi had increased the number of passengers, gave him a free lifetime ticket.

“How very strange,” Rivlin chuckled. “You can see the author was a ticket clerk.”

Yet how was Ayisha, now surrounded day and night by loyal disciples who expected her to work wonders, supposed to find an abandoned baby to comfort her for the many children that her husband's second wife would bear? And so one night, hatching a plan, she talked. In a thick, slow voice like an old man's, she told her disciples that she was planning to work a wonder such as no one had ever seen. She would make a little baby too small to stand on its feet float outside the window of a train. Yet who would agree to volunteer their offspring for such a risky miracle? She had to find an orphaned or abandoned child with no mother. If her disciples would bring her such an infant, she would do the rest.

Several days went by, and then Ayisha's disciples kidnapped a baby. It wasn't an orphan, however. It was French, because only the French leave their babies lying in baby carriages. It was far easier to steal an infant from a Christian pram than from the shoulder sling of a Muslim mother.

This frightened Ayisha greatly. She had intended to get hold of an abandoned child, a poor, dirty little waif whom she could save from hunger, and now she had been brought a big, fat, blond, well-dressed, conspicuous baby. And the police were already searching for its kidnapper!

Nor was that all. Ayisha had planned to wait for her disciples to fall asleep at night and then rip off her beard, change her hermit's cloak for a dress, veil her face, and slip away to her husband's village. How, surrounded by boisterous disciples, with the French police and army on her heels, was she going to do that with a fat, blond French baby?

And what would she tell her angry followers when they discovered that they had kidnapped a baby for a wonder she couldn't work? And so, sitting down beneath a distant tree, she prayed to Allah to have pity on the French child, whose miracle was planned for the next day.

Samaher was leaning cross-legged against the plumped pillows, her long hair grazing the embroidered flowers on her nightgown. There was new color in her cheeks, and her voice had grown stronger, as if this bizarre and tedious tale were now carrying her along with Ayisha's disciples and the trains.

The next day, Ayisha boarded a train with several of her disciples. As soon as it picked up speed, she took the French baby and tossed it out the window. Yet Allah had heard her prayer and had pity. He did not let the child fly away but kept it floating outside the window, laughing and playing with the wind until Ayisha took it back into the train. At the next station it was given to a ticket clerk and brought to the police, who had posted a large reward.

“There's that ticket clerk again,” laughed the visitor.

Ayisha, now a famous—though still childless—wonder-worker, was very sad. Everyone who heard about the floating French baby became more devoted to her than ever. A house was built for her on a mountaintop, and pilgrims came to kiss the hem of her cloak and the dainty soles of her feet. Even her husband's second wife, who also was childless, came to kneel before her without knowing who she was.

“That's the end. Nice, isn't it?”

“Let's not exaggerate,” he said, his headache back again. It was a story for
One Thousand and One Nights.
“What strikes you as political about it?”

“Well, you see, Professor, I thought that if it was written in 1942, during the Second World War, when the French were as helpless as babies, it was a story about how sorry the Arabs felt for them.”

“Sorry? Didn't they throw the French baby out the window?”

“Yes, but only because Allah would save it. The God of the Muslims,” Samaher said gently, “who has mercy on the whole world. I think that's the point of the parable, don't you?”

He recalled how, in her first years as an undergraduate, she had kept getting into political arguments until, tired of them, she had stopped.

There was a profound silence.

“Tell me, Samaher,” he asked. “Do you believe in God?”

She blushed, her eyes flashing. “Why ask me? Ask the man who wrote this story, Ibrahim Ibn-Bakhir. Ask his readers. They were believers.”

“That may be. But are you one, Samaher?”

“In God?” She smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “Not exactly. . . .” Realizing where she was, she checked herself. “But during Ramadan, when we're fasting, I do try to believe . . . And when I'm not feeling well, too. . . .”

R
IVLIN ROSE FROM
his chair and began to pace up and down as though he were in a seminar room at the university. His sleepless night pounded in his temples. What had made him come to this place?

He stumbled across the narghile on the floor. Lifting it, he gave it a sniff, put it carefully down in a corner, went to the tray of medicines by Samaher's bed, picked up a small bottle that rattled with blue pills, and stood there assessing their purpose. “Are these for your depression?” he bluntly asked his student, who was following his every movement with concern.

“I'm not depressed . . . just moody. . . .” She smiled anxiously at the Jew standing so close to her bed. “My mother and grandmother take them sometimes, too. They're good for when you feel blue.”

Did he feel blue? He took a pill from the bottle, licked it with the tip of his tongue, and popped it into his mouth without asking permission. It had a bitter and sour but clean taste.

The pleasant gloom was pierced by the coal black eyes of the trusty messenger, sent to inform Rivlin that his bed was ready. An afternoon
nap was a welcome prospect. Before retiring for it, however, the Orientalist wished to hear the second, realistic story, the one about the feuding clans. Perhaps realism was better suited to uncovering the spark that had kindled the Algerian conflagration.

“Your cousin,” he told Rashid, possibly hoping that his praise would spur the young Arab to continue his efforts on Samaher's behalf, “has quite an original interpretation of the story of the French baby.”

Not that Rashid's loyalty or admiration needed spurring. “Leave it to Samaher,” he said. “She has a B.A. in Arabic language and literature.”

“Then this will be an interdisciplinary project,” Rivlin said. And to prevent them from thinking that he was being ironic at their expense, he suggested that he stay until the end of the day's fast. “After all,” he added, “if you've lured me all the way to your village, I may as well enjoy some good food.”

“A baby lamb, slaughtered just for you!”

Rashid was ecstatic. Going to the table, he carefully collected the large binders to bring to Ma'alot, the nearest town with a photocopier. He did not want a single day to be lost in the career of his cousin, by whose bed he hovered like a dark bird, gently helping her to ease the pressure of the pillow crumpled behind her back. The visitor watched the coals of his eyes burn hypnotically into themselves as he bent over her, as though examining the pimples on her throat. Recklessly turning her on her side, he scooped her up in one arm before she could stop him, while airing and straightening the sheets with his other hand. Rivlin, enthralled and aghast at the passion between the two young Arabs, could not bring himself to turn away.

But it was time for the second, realistic story, which he hoped would be more plausible than the first. If it lacked the rumble of trains and the din of stations, which the author of the first tale knew well, at least it would have no miraculous babies or beautiful women disguised as saints. Set in a remote village in the mountains, it had been written by an author named Yassin bin Abbas and published in the spring 1948 issue of a short-lived Oran literary magazine called
Al-Huriya al-Thalitha,
or “The Third Freedom.” (What the first and
second freedom were remained unclear.) Its language, according to Samaher, was highly colloquial, with so many odd local expressions that Rashid had gone with it to a relative in the Gaza Strip who had spent years working for the PLO in North Africa.

The Story of the Poisoned Horse

There was once,
Samaher began enthusiastically,
a small village on a mountain called Jebl Musa.
She had abandoned her prone position and was now sitting up in bed with her notebook on her knees and her bare feet dangling.
Its poor, simple farming families barely eked out a living from the arid soil. Yet one of them, the Sidik family, had sheep, goats, and two horses. The other farmers hated the Sidiks, whose flocks and horses, they were convinced, ate the villagers' crops at night. No matter how often the Sidiks promised to keep their animals out of the neighbors' fields and graze them only in natural pasture, the farmers did not believe them. It got so bad that hardly anyone even spoke to them.

The Sidiks had a daughter, a lovely girl who had been named Leona after a French prime minister called León who was a great friend of the Muslims in Algeria. Yet so great was the village's hatred and suspicion of her father and brothers that none of its young men could think of marrying her, despite her good looks and good nature. “Never mind,” her father said to her. “If we can't find you a husband in the village, we'll find one somewhere else.” And so he sent one of her brothers to an old uncle in a far-off place, hoping that someone there, perhaps a cousin, might agree to marry her.

Samaher looked up from her notebook to see whether her teacher was listening. He had removed his eyeglasses and was wearily sprawled in his chair, fascinated as always by the Hebrew spoken by her generation, which alternated between a clumsy translation of her native Arabic and a true command of Israeli idiom.

Meanwhile, this plan became known to a fine young man named Ahmed ed-Danaf, the son of farmers in Leona's village. Ahmed ed-Danaf was secretly in love with Leona and was tormented by the
thought that she would marry someone else far away. Leona, too, had set her eye on this young man, even though she never spoke to him. How, thought Ahmed ed-Danaf, could he keep his beloved from marrying? Not that he believed that his father would let him marry her himself. But at least, so he hoped, she would not be taken someplace else, where he could never see her again. And so he did something desperate.

Not far from the village was a large French estate whose owners raised wheat and fodder and scattered rat poison in their fields to protect their crops. Although the Frenchmen had tried convincing the Muslims to do the same, the farmers were afraid that their little children, who roamed the fields freely, might eat the poison and die. Now Ahmed ed-Danaf went to the Frenchmen and told them that he wished to do as they did. They were happy to see such a modern Arab and gave him a sack full of poison pellets. But he did not scatter these pellets in his fields. He hid them.

Meanwhile, a husband was found for Leona. He was indeed a cousin, a middle-aged widower who lived in France and had come to Algeria on a brief visit. He was ready, he said, to take an Algerian woman back to France with him, and the rumors made the rounds that the Sidiks would soon be holding a betrothal ceremony. And so Ahmed ed-Danaf made up his mind to put poison in the Sidiks' stable. It didn't kill their horses, but it made them very sick.

Of course, the Sidik family also had donkeys, which could have been harnessed to the betrothal wagon, too. But a donkey was not as dignified as a horse—and the horses were sick. This grieved the Sidiks greatly, especially since something told them that their horses were not the victims of Allah but of a curse someone had put on them. The question was who.

Meanwhile, Ahmed ed-Danaf, seeing the great sorrow of Leona's family, let alone the suffering of the horses, who lay miserably in their stable, all grassy-eyed and foaming at the mouth, began to feel sorry for his evil deed.

The phrase “grassy-eyed,” uttered in the heat of the narration, brought a faint smile to Rivlin's lips, even though his head was now
lolling to one side and his breathing had grown heavy. It was one of those comic slips that sound natural.

“Hold it, Samaher,” he said. “Isn't Ahmed ed-Danaf also the name of a character in
One Thousand and One Nights,
the one in Scheherazade's story about the old woman? . . . You know who I mean . . . Delilah!”

But the name meant nothing to Samaher. Nor did she remember any such story in the great prose classic of the Arabs.

And so Ahmed ed-Danaf decided to make amends. He found his courage and lay in wait for Leona and said to her, “I've heard that someone has cursed your horses and made them sick. If your family is afraid to leave them alone in order to go to your betrothal, I'm willing to look after them, because I love horses and it hurts me to see them. You can't blame the horses for our village feud, because they aren't part of it.”

The Sidiks did not know what to do about Ahmed ed-Danaf's offer. But Leona, who felt he had made it because he was in love with her, persuaded her father to take it in good faith.

And so it was. The Sidiks harnessed plain donkeys to their wagon and set out for the betrothal. Yet on the night after their departure, one of the horses died. When Ahmed ed-Danaf arrived at the stable in the morning and saw this, he was frightened and even cried. Then he called for his two brothers, and they dragged the carcass away to keep it from saddening the other horse, which was fighting for its life. From that day on, Ahmed ed-Danaf was determined to stay by its side day and night, thinking only of it and of his beloved, who was being betrothed far away.

“Actually, Professor Rivlin,” Samaher said, “I haven't got to the main part yet. I've only summarized the beginning. The rest is awfully long and gruesome. It tells how Ahmed ed-Danaf fights with all his strength to save the life of the horse he poisoned, because it belongs to the family of his beloved, who will go to France and never see him again. . . . Are you still listening, Professor? Perhaps it's too much for you.”

This remark was well timed, because the last sentences, entwined in the sweet faintness mounting within him like a rampant ivy, had
been dissipated in a desperate struggle with a fatigue of such uncommon violence that he slumped sideways in his chair and nearly stretched out on the Persian rug on the floor by the bed of his M.A. student, who had infected him, it seemed, not only with her depression, but with the fatigue of her false pregnancy.