The Lesson

Karen Alkalay-Gut

I was doing pretty well.  The room was crowded and my friend who had invited me to lecture on theories of feminist poetry in the women’s studies department at the University of Michigan was still smiling, so I was beginning to feel confident about my talk.

But then, just as I was getting to my point about theories of feminism in Adrienne Rich, a man stood up from the back of the room.  “I know you!” a bass voice boomed out in a strong Middle Eastern accent.  He was large and looming, and as he began to walk down the long aisle to the podium he seemed to fill the entire room.

All eyes turned from me, all heads moved together following the figure as he rumbled forward.

Perhaps the lighting was coming from behind, maybe I was just too flustered, perhaps it was out of context, but it was only when he reached the middle of the hall that I recognized him.

A few years before, studying in an American Studies course in Salzburg, there had been two other Israelis and about a dozen Arabs.  Three of them were from Egypt, but they, like most of the other Arabs from neighboring countries, watched each other and endeavored to stay clear of us. We too were a bit afraid, a bit uncertain about how to behave.  The other two Israelis stuck together.   Only one elderly Lebanese professor agreed to walk with me as we strolled through the town, and only with him did I have long and deep conversations about poetry. 

But I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, one of the Egyptians watching our conversations, following our walks, listening to our jokes. He looked familiar with his bald head and his generous and mobile features, familiar and approachable.  I thought that perhaps that if I could only get him away from the other two – who were very serious-looking professors and always walked with him in the middle  – he might be an interesting person to get to know.  But it was only on the last evenings that we found ourselves together at the elegant dinner tables that characterized the seminar we were attending. That’s when I learned that he was a playwright, a writer, and a film actor of some renown.  And that was why he looked familiar – he was one of the comic character actors in Egyptian movies that my daughter and I always watched on the only Israel channel on Friday afternoons.

“I know you,” he boomed again and the hall echoed as everyone silently waited, frozen in their seats.

“Ali!” I shouted suddenly, jumping from the podium and racing into his arms.  We pasted three slow kisses onto each other’s cheeks and looked into each other’s eyes before he turned and created a seat for himself between two startled women.

I returned to the podium and after a few moments, composed myself and continued with the section in my lecture about gender violence in Rich’s poetry and the need for alternative visions.

Later, over falafel in a Palestine restaurant, Ali and I admitted that the kisses had been spontaneously staged between us – a dramatic gesture to awaken an audience to the possibilities of friendship between what were then warring countries, to cooperation between rival groups. 

            Ali introduced me to the proprietor who muttered something under his breath after we were forced to shake hands. 

But the muttering was muted, and that smile we flashed one another when I stood up to leave, was a smile that acknowledged that here too, we were playing roles in a drama we didn’t write.  That smile was real.