“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….”
10.
RIVLIN 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.