And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity.
And yet by the end of this wrenching tale, the thin maiden with the snakelike tresses had not exactly submitted, for she now told her story again. The drumming grew faster. Her movements, stylized and measured the first time, were now sweepingly defiant.
Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead and Manasseh, and he passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon.
For the second time she came to her cruelly loving father’s words as he rent his clothes: Alas, my daughter! Thou has brought me very low and art my downfall! For I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and cannot go back. The lump was back in Rivlin’s throat. The tears almost shed for the childless Sarah stung his eyes for the senselessly sacrificed maiden.
And yet in her despair, Jephthah’s daughter — having gone with her friends to bewail her virginity upon the mountains before being sacrificed by her father because of the vow he had vowed without stopping to think who might run excitedly to greet him — was not content with telling the story twice. As the drums’ frenzy mounted and the music gathered force, she told the tale of her immolation a third time. The staid, obedient child of the first version was now a proud, wounded tigress, snarling ferociously at her father’s mad vow and the vile deed about to be done her. Her at first sinuous and then sweeping movements turned out to have been but preliminary sketches for the savage paroxysm of her slender body, now lashing out at the world.
And so, when for the third time she uttered her father’s cry as he rent his clothes and blamed not himself but her—Alas, my daughter! Thou hast brought me very low and art my downfall—a shudder convulsed Rivlin’s being. Quickly, he removed his eyeglasses and hid his face.
30.
DESPITE THE PLAY’S length, it was not yet midnight when the Rivlins’ car groped its way along the dirt road strewn with sputtering lanterns in order to bring Ofra and Yo’el back from their corner of nature to the glitter of civilization. Although the parking lot was mostly empty, the savage music still shook the tall eucalypti as if a great multitude were continuing to dance.
Yo’el and Ofra sat off to one side at an empty table. The former youth-movement counselors, eternally young themselves, looked weary, old, and sad. Their clothes damp from the night vapors rising from the stream, they ignored the commotion on the dance floor with its melee of fat aunts capering with small nephews and grandchildren and ecstatic youngsters hoisting on their shoulders not one bridelike figure but three, all in various states of undress.
Loath to let the last gasps of the wedding spoil his high spirits, Rivlin was for making a quick getaway with his exhausted brother-and sister-in-law. Genuinely indignant, however, the bride’s father insisted that the two shirkers at least have some dessert.
It didn’t take much to persuade the laughing judge to agree, especially as the tray handed to her held not one dessert but many, each more scrumptious-looking than the last.
“How was the play?” Yo’el asked. In twenty-four hours he and his wife would be far away.
“Wonderful. It’s a must. If I were you, I’d postpone my flight just to see it.”
But the two émigrés were anxious to leave their muggy native land.
“He actually cried,” Hagit told on him merrily, licking whipped cream from a long golden spoon.
“He did?” Yo’el and Ofra marveled.
“Buckets.” Hagit grinned. “With every word.”
“That isn’t true. I only cried in a few places,” Rivlin asserted with an odd pride, helping himself to a piece of chocolate cake. “The story of Jephthah’s daughter broke me up especially.”
31.
23.4.98
Galya,
You answered me even though I asked you not to. So much for your right to tell me whether or not to answer you. (As for our lost and entirely imaginary “honor,” let’s leave such things for others.)
You should be thankful that I wrote what I did and not worse. If you’re so sure of yourself and of your family, both the living and the dead, why violate your “sacred vow of fidelity” to your husband by hiding my letter? If the “truth” is on your side, you should want him to see it, since it’s the perfect chance to prove to him how truly mad your first husband is and how right you were to leave him. (Just be careful, though. My insanity is a boomerang. Who falls in love with a madman but a madwoman? And you did love me. Terribly.)
Do you want to know what made my father visit you during the bereavement? It had nothing to do with feeling sorry for you or your family. The man is quite simply still tortured by our separation, because he doesn’t understand what happened. He’s a historian who has to understand everything. His own self too, because, despite his position, he’s consumed by doubt about himself and anyone he suspects of being like him.
It’s a good thing my mother, at least, has some faith in me.
If my father is foolish enough to try to make contact with you again, don’t let him. I’ll try to restrain him, too. Sometimes I wonder why I chose to spare my parents by not telling them what happened between us. Was I afraid that they, like you, would be unable to believe me and would end up begging you to forgive me? Or did I keep my promise because of the accursed hope you held out to me?
Enough. Too much. Every word is superfluous. You can go back to mourning the man I never could mourn for.
Ofer
PART III. Samaher’s Term Paper
YET THERE HAD to have been signs, early warnings, by which a serious scholar looking unflinchingly at the present could unlock the past. How could the simple desire to avenge the 1991 elections, whose canceled results robbed the Islamic Salvation Front of victory at the polls, have so inflamed Algeria’s religious fundamentalists and army that they fought a ten-year civil war in which armed bands repeatedly attacked their own people and massacred simple villagers like themselves, women, children, and old people?
Writers in academic journals, scholars from the Universities of Montpelier and Aix-en-Provence, in which were deposited the archives of the colonial rule that turned Algeria into a French province in the early nineteenth century while disenfranchising the country’s population, had racked their brains over questions like: “Where did we go wrong? What was it that made Algeria incapable of institutional stability? What have we not accounted for in the ledger of the past? What still veils the violence of the Terror of the 1990s?”
Reading these SOSs sent by his colleagues across the sea, he had felt obliged to help. His scholarly conscience rose to the challenge posed by the slashed throats of infants.
Prudently, he had opened a new computer file and begun a long essay entitled “Early Warnings of the Horror of the Disintegration of National Identity.” Then, as a responsible historian who thought in sober categories, not a hack journalist, he erased “Horror” and substituted “Shock to” for “Disintegration of.”
FOR EXAMPLE: was it possible to see in the riots that broke out in October 1934, at the tomb of the Muslim saint Ibn Sa’id, between Berber pilgrims and the reformists of the Salafia movement in the Constantine district, a first warning of the indiscriminate Terror of the 1990s? A report recently discovered in a military archive in Toulon, filed by the French officer who had rushed to the scene, suggested a surprising perspective, worthy of careful consideration.