“Silly?” He was amused. “Not at all. It was no sillier than the other story.”
“The other one?” she repeated dreamily.
“The literary value of these stories doesn’t matter. I’m looking for something else — the spirit of the times, some sign of the future.”
“The future?”
“The insane Terror, for example.”
“What Terror?”
“The one in Algeria. They’ve been butchering one another there.”
She gave him a guarded look, as if searching for a mysterious new drift that five years of his courses had not revealed to her.
“I’ve never heard of it. Is there a book about it?”
The Orientalist stared hard at the young Arab.
“It’s been going on for eight years.”
“Masakin…”* Dismissing the butcher and the butchered alike, she reached out with a thin hand for her bed lamp. The bulb beneath the red lampshade lit up like a little sun in place of the real one that had vanished. Opening her notebook, she softly continued the tale of the young villager who fought to save the life of the horse he had poisoned.
Ahmed ed-Danaf’s unhappy love for Leona, the daughter of a family of hated shepherds betrothed to a relative from France, was now joined by the suffering of the poisoned horse sprawled on its straw in the stable. Samaher’s summary was so full of detail that Rivlin couldn’t tell what was in the story and what had been invented by her. Descriptions of lights and shadows, smells and sounds accompanied the drama of the horse, which failed to grasp why the strange young man who had poisoned it two days ago was now sitting up with it all night, hand-feeding it mashed oats and kissing and petting it with loving words. After a few days Ahmed ed-Danaf tied a thin rope around its neck and led it daintily around the stable. In the end it recovered and even carried its rescuer to a hilltop above the village, from which he was the first to greet his beloved upon her return from the betrothal that would take her to France. And that was the end.
“The end?”
“Of the story.”
“Very good,” the professor said, with an approving glance at his student. She was definitely not pregnant. No doubt her mother had confined her to bed to keep her from doing something rash.
Samaher, calmed by her teacher’s patient attention, stopped wriggling her legs. Her long lashes drooped. Evening shadows clung to the walls of the room.
“Can you use such a story, Professor?” she asked with a ghostly smile.
As he was reassuring her that there was value even in a folktale, written at the height of Algeria’s struggle for independence, about unhappy love and a sick horse, the sound of a shell rang out. Soon afterward, Samaher’s husband, still in his plaster-spattered work clothes, warily entered the room. Acknowledging Rivlin with a nod, he turned anxiously to see how his new wife’s depression was doing.
16.
THE HOLIDAY DINNER, announced by the setting of the sun, was held in the courtyard. Joining them was Samaher’s father-in-law and his two sons, as well as several neighbors and village notables who had come to break the fast with the Jew illi bisum zay il-mu’amin, lakin al-fadi.* Now that his marathon slumber in Rashid’s bed, already famous throughout the village, had been interpreted not only as a sign of great weariness brought from afar, but also as a vote of confidence in the Arabs, he was greeted with warmth as well as respect, like a potential kinsman who might become a real one if plied with enough food.
Yet oddly, though he hadn’t touched a thing since his cup of coffee and piece of baklava in the gas station that morning, Rivlin was not very hungry. So lackluster and almost abstract was his appetite that it was satisfied with a bit of pita bread dipped in warm hummus, thus compelling Afifa to provide him with a special carver, a mysterious old man named Ali who was either somebody’s uncle or Samaher’s second grandfather. A punctilious, square-shouldered man, he came and went grandly from the kitchen bearing a copper tray of choice morsels plucked from the head, ribs, rump, and inmost organs of the lamb and arranged by him on Rivlin’s plate, from which he sternly force-fed them to the Jewish professor.
It was hard for the Orientalist to say no, especially since the guests, although deriving no benefit from Ali’s labors, urged him to obey the old man, brought from another village to coax him out of a fast unrequired by Allah. Moreover, the morsels put on his plate being few and select, Rivlin had to assume them to be a mere prelude, a symbolic tasting meant to lure him back, stomach and all, from the ominous steppes of his dream.
The village was coming to life. Passersby stopped to peer through the iron gate at the Jewish professor. A few entered to introduce themselves — elderly teachers, brawny high-school graduates, even some old students who had had children and grandchildren since taking his courses at the university. All seemed pleased by his long sleep and gratuitous fast. Someone wanted to know about Samaher. Was it true, as her mother claimed, that he had made her his research assistant? And what, precisely, was the research?
It was a calm Galilean evening. Rivlin, clear of mind and unlimited of patience, gladly answered the villagers’ questions. Who could say whether they, too, might not provide a spark of inspiration? His research met with general approval. Algeria was a country dear to the Arabs. Its inhabitants had suffered almost as much as the Palestinians. You couldn’t blame them if bad things had rubbed off on them from the French. “But when will you write something about us, Professor Rivlin?” they all asked.
Good-humoredly he explained that even when writing about Arabs in far-off times and places he looked for the connecting link with what was nearby. “After all,” he told them, “you all have the same roots and come from the same desert.” While this was still being digested, there was a whinny from the black horse. Sticking a bridleless head between the bars of the gate, it had come to remind Samaher’s grandfather to take it back to the stable.
“What’s the bottom line, Professor? Will Samaher get her final grade?”
The impatient question came from the contractor, Samaher’s father-in-law, who had been eating silently beside him.
The man’s two sons tried silencing him. Rivlin, however, gave him a friendly pat on the back.
“Of course she’ll get it,” he said. “In time to be given her M.A.”
“But what can anyone do with an M.A.?” the contractor wondered out loud. “What good is it?”
“Every case is different,” Rivlin reassured him. “Samaher could continue for her next degree.”
“Her next degree?” The man turned despairingly to his son. “Fi kaman thaleth?”*
“It’s called a doctorate,” Samaher’s sad husband whispered back.
17.
WHERE IS RASHID?
Yet not even the thought of your missing driver can prevent you from calmly dismissing all worries. Whether it’s your magical sleep that has scrambled your biological clock and muddled the hours, or the absence of your wife, even the greenish stars in the village sky now patiently await your confirmation that night has arrived.
Rashid, it seems, is lying low because of Samaher’s husband. Hence the repeated reassurances that he’ll drive you where and when you want. “Rashid is all yours, Professor. Relax,” Afifa half-scolds, half-soothes you, as if you’d been given a black slave, rather than a citizen, albeit a displaced one, of the state of Israel — one who, on the way out of Ma’alot this morning, pointed to a Jewish community center and some tennis courts on a hillside and said, “That’s our village, Dir-el-Kasi.” “Was your village,” you corrected him. “Right,” he conceded after a moment’s thought. “Was.”