Free Yasmine by Eli Amir

participants. The first to speak was the scientific advisor, Professor Kishinevsky, who favoured strengthening Israel’s Western orientation:
    “You’re wasting your time, Minister,” he declared at the outset, and went on to argue that the Arabic language was petrified, inferior, lacking theoretical literature or any modern scientific and cultural terminology, that Arabic culture as a whole lacked the tools for abstract thought, and so on and so forth.
    This was my first experience of attending a meeting of experts, whose knowledge seemed unchallengable, and I hadn’t intended to speak at all. Nevertheless, I found myself proposing a different approach: “Our great lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda considered Arabic to be a language which was engaged in a process of revival, dealing successfully with the modern world. He even introduced Arabic words into Hebrew.” The professor froze me with a glance.
    I saw the Minister, himself an impressive and authoritative figure, rubbing his thick mane and listening uneasily. In the end he summed up by saying, “The issue is not ready for resolution.” When faced with irreconcilable positions, he always found a neutral formula that the opponents could not object to. After the meeting he told me to wait. “You didn’t stand up for your opinion as you should have,” he said reproachfully.
    “There is an Arabic saying, ‘Who dares to tell the lion he has bad breath?’” I replied in my defence, and he laughed. “How can a person who doesn’t know any Arabic and knows nothingabout the Arab world make such statements about the language and the culture?” I added, saying what I hadn’t dared to say to the professor and his colleagues. “We need Arabic speakers as much as speakers of English and French. We live in the Middle East and our future is here. We still have Iraqi and Egyptian immigrants who know the language, but if we don’t take care there won’t be any in the next generation.”
    “Don’t be so pessimistic, young man,” he said and stood up, and that was that.
    A week later Levanah informed me that the Minister had decided to accept the scientific advisor’s position. She invited me to have coffee, her way of sweetening the pill. But this was ages ago, before the war.
     
    “Shula, could you get in touch with the hospital in Ashkelon, please?” I asked. “My brother is there.”
    She tried again and again but couldn’t get through. Then, without warning, a bearded man in a black suit and black hat came into the office. Without bothering to introduce himself, he said, “I have to see the Minister immediately!” Shula asked him who he was and what he wanted, but in reply he launched into a passionate sermon calling for the restoration of the Temple, with verses flowing from his mouth like lava, and all the time swaying back and forth as if praying: “Since the destruction of the Temple there has not been a day that was not cursed…” He took out a glossy pamphlet with impressive illustrations of the Temples, the First, the Second, and even the Third Temple, “which will be built soon in our lifetime and will not wait for the coming of the Messiah. At long last we have triumphed and Jerusalem the Holy has been delivered from the hands of the Gentiles, God damn them!” he intoned.
    Shula looked at me, at a loss, and I stared helplessly at the eccentric who, taking advantage of our confusion, barged into the Minister’s office. She shot out of her seat to try to stop him and was stunned as the bearded one, smiling triumphantly, slammed the door in her face.
    “What a nutter!” she exclaimed.
    “The Minister told me about Levanah’s brother,” I said. “I’d like to visit her.” So Shula summoned Chaim, the Minister’s driver to take me there.
     
    The entrance to Levanah’s parents’ house on Herzl Boulevard was white with pasted-up sympathy notices from friends and neighbours. I stood there a long time, uncertain about going in. How do