In a corner of the courtyard Afifa now kindles a savage fire and throws blackening eggplants in it. Enveloped in bitter smoke, you find yourself defending the political acrobatics of a right-wing prime minister you didn’t vote for. “It will take a shrewd operator to get the right to cross the Rubicon,” you say, and a college graduate who remembers Caesar explains the image with an Arabic proverb that has to be explained once more in Hebrew for your benefit.
Afifa has an idea. “Since your wife, Professor, is out of the country, why not sleep here tonight in the bed you’ve gotten used to? Rashid won’t need it because he works nights during Ramadan, and you’ll have all evening and tomorrow morning to make more progress with Samaher.”
“Sleep here?” You run a hand through your gray curls. “It’s very tempting, but inni el-yom azuz, marbut fi ’l-leil fi frasho.”*
The glitter of a smile in her eyes tells you that once again you’ve made a comic blunder in your Arabic, which you learned from texts and documents at the university and not, like the new department head, whose supple, serpentine speech transfixes his listeners before biting them, in the streets of Mesopotamia. Still, you insist on dropping an Arabic sentence or expression here and there, not just to keep your listeners on their toes, but to let them know that their world is your second home.
And all this while fierce old Ali won’t let you alone, coming and going with his little tray and refusing to take no for an answer, as if the barbecued lamb would be mortally injured unless you consumed its innards. Having eaten, as your wife put it, “half a lamb” at Samaher’s wedding, you’ll soon have eaten the other half unless you stop now. And so, though you wouldn’t mind another helping, you deem it best to rise and call for your displaced citizen, although only after first asking Samaher, promoted by her mother to the position of your research assistant, for one last story, that of the moonstruck murderer.
18.
SAMAHER’S ROOM was unexpectedly crowded. The full moon, the only light apart from her little reading lamp, sketched on the walls the shadows of the young women, some wearing Islamic kerchiefs, who had come to see how their friend had survived the fast in her confinement. Samaher had changed clothes again and was wearing a loose, colorful peasant dress like her mother’s. A tray of food, most of it left uneaten, lay on the lacquered chest beside the new photocopies of Dr. Suissa’s material.
Samaher gave him a timid smile. Her pale face, sallow by day, was now as heavily made up as on the night of her wedding. The Lebanese kohl around her eyes hid any sign of tears.
“I see you have visitors,” Rivlin said.
“They’re here for you, not me, Professor,” she answered with her old impishness. “They want to get a look at you and hear you speak Arabic.”
The young women giggled shyly. The more religious tightened the kerchiefs on their heads.
“There are even two students here from your survey course. Don’t you recognize them?”
“That’s not so easily done,” he murmured, afraid of being approached with yet another request for a change of topic or extension. “Well, do we have time for another story? Perhaps we should make it ‘The Local Stranger,’ as your mother suggested.”
“Yes. It’s special and not very long. If you don’t mind, my visitors would like to hear it, too. I think it’s the perfect story for your research, Professor. I came across it in the photocopies this afternoon, while you were sleeping. That poor man who was killed in Jerusalem didn’t notice it. To tell you the truth, it was Rashid who did. ‘ The Local Stranger’—that’s an eye-catching title, isn’t it? It was written by a journalist named Jamal bin el-Maluh as an attack on an important French author. He’s mentioned in the introduction — Albert Camus. Have you ever heard of him, Professor? But what a question! Of course you have. Who hasn’t? Rashid even found books of his in Arabic right here in the village, and his novel The Stranger was published in Syria. Just imagine: even the Syrians know him and honor him! I took a look at it just now, while you were eating. Jamal bin el-Maluh’s story starts out exactly like it, but it’s also a criticism of it….”
She spoke animatedly, smiling at her guests. Rivlin recalled how years ago, in the same survey course, she had been one of the first students whose name he had mastered. Thin, alert, and adversarial, from her regular seat at the front of the large lecture hall, she had frequently raised her hand to argue with him, making up for her lack of knowledge with a keen, if sometimes perverse, intelligence. Although he had tried being patient with her, he had secretly hoped that the more practical-minded Jewish students in the course would silence her — as, eventually, they did.
It was eight o’clock. From the village mosque, the prayer call of the muezzin came pleading over the rooftops. Was he still in a Jewish state? Or had he been, like his wife, transported to a far land? He wondered whether the new department head would be more pleased or appalled to know how he had spent the day. Once more turning Samaher’s quarters into a seminar room, he explained to her and her guests why the Syrians were right to not to fear the French writer’s philosophy of the absurd. Meanwhile, they were joined, his clothes clean and his hair wet from the shower, by Samaher’s husband, who waited for her to make room for him on the edge of her bed. He, too, wanted to hear the story of the Local Stranger. So did Afifa and Samaher’s grandmother. Even the large contractor peered in bewilderedly from the hallway. Everyone was there but the black horse.
The Story of the Local Stranger
Jamal bin el-Maluh, a Tunisian journalist and author, had written a rather sardonic preface for this story, which was published in 1949 in a small magazine called El-Majaleh. “Not long ago,” he wrote, “on a visit to France, I noticed that all Europe was praising a short, absurdist novel by a French colon named Albert Camus. It told the story of how, one hot day on the beach, for no reason at all, a young Frenchman named Marseault murdered an Algerian he had nothing against. ‘ The sun was too much for me,’ he casually told the court. And yet if that young Frenchman had no reason to murder anyone, and reality is absurd, as our philosophical author claims, why would it have been any less absurd of him to kill a Frenchman like himself? Why must he absurdly kill an Arab?”
And so Jamal bin el-Maluh decided to invent an absurd Arab to balance the absurd Frenchman. If everything was absurd, let the absurdity be equal. His story, a parody of Camus’s novel, began in almost the exact same words: “Today my father died. Or maybe it was yesterday. I can’t remember.”
“In The Stranger, it’s his mother,” Rivlin mused.
“Yes, I noticed that, Professor. But here it’s the father, because it would be hard to imagine a young Arab who didn’t mourn the death of his mother. A father is something else. The character’s name, Musa, even sounds like Marseault. He lives in Algiers, and he puts his dead father in a car and takes him to his village to bury him without feeling any grief. That same night he returns to the city for a date at the movies with his girlfriend. And the next day he takes off from work and goes swimming, just like the character in Camus. But he doesn’t go for an afternoon walk on the beach, because who can take the midday sun in Algiers? He waits for it to be evening — say, like now — and then strolls on the sand looking at the waves. After a while he approaches a nice French couple, a boy and a girl sitting on a bench, and asks how they are and what time it is. They tell him the time but not how they are and go on talking to each other. He’s standing near them, staring at the moon rising over the bay. It’s like a big egg yolk, and it scares him, and he can’t take his eyes off it. And so he decides to wait for the two French to start kissing in the moonlight. That’s what the French like to do, and he thinks it will calm him. But they just go on talking, and he gets more and more scared, because now the moon is overhead and could fall on him at any minute. So he goes over to the couple and asks in French, ‘What do you think of that moon?’ ‘It’s a very nice moon,’ they say. ‘You don’t think it will fall on me?’ he asks. That makes them laugh. Let them laugh, Musa thinks, at least they’ll die happy. And he takes out a big knife, slits their throats because it’s absurd, and goes home for a nap.”