The Liberated Bride

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HAD HE KNOWN that on this evening, on the hill where the village held its celebrations, an evening suffused by the scent of a fig tree bent over the table like another, venerable guest, he would again be struck — but powerfully — by a sense of failure and missed opportunity, he might have more decisively made his excuses to Samaher, his annoyingly ambitious M.A. student, who, not content with sending him an invitation by mail and then repeating it to his face, had gone and chartered a minibus, after first urging the new department head to make sure the faculty attended her wedding. It wasn’t just for her sake, she said. It would be a gesture to all the university’s Arab students, without whom — the cheek of it! — the department would count for nothing.

His wife, Hagit, who knew all too well how weddings had depressed him in recent years, had warned against it. “Why do you need the aggravation?” she had asked. “But they’re Arabs,” he’d answered mildly, with the innocence of a man pursuing an academic interest. “As opposed to what?” she had wanted to know. “Human beings?” “On the contrary… on the contrary…” he had tried defending himself, at a loss to explain how Arabs, although not among the many objects of his envy, could be more human than anyone else.

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