Although his new friend’s tone was not unkind, Midhat felt deflated. Of course, it was difficult to communicate any profound sensation, let alone in another language.
“I’d like to travel around Europe,” said Laurent. “Like you, I suppose. My grandfather kept a diary about his travels to Greece and Rome. When I go to war I might travel, if they send me further than Picardy.”
“The world is dilating,” said Midhat. “Or—perhaps not ‘dilating’ …”
“Developing?”
“No, I mean—the trains, for instance. The trains are all over the world … they sell oranges from Jaffa here in Montpellier. I saw them!”
Laurent laughed. “Ah Midhat Kamal, you are a special case.”
Beside the path, four young women sat in the shade of an oak tree. Midhat watched one bite into a peach. He felt pricked by Laurent’s laughter, and wished he had said nothing.
In his last year at the Mekteb-i Sultani, the divisions between the Turkish boys and the rest of them had appeared like a sudden chasm in the earth. He and Jamil returned from Nablus after Ramadan to find a variable network of alliances drawn up without their consent, and sometimes the Arabs and the Armenians were together and sometimes they were apart; similarly with the Jews and the Greeks; for the children had listened to their parents during the holiday, and following the newspapers and the example of the teachers they enforced the external currents within the school corridors with surprisingly little resistance. After lessons Midhat and his cousin sought each other out, fearing the game they were being forced to play whose rules were often unclear. You never knew when someone might turn on you, and if you never shot an unkind glance or whispered behind your hand you risked being accused of disloyalty and getting your arm twisted by a member of your own side.
Midhat had experienced pressures he was sure Laurent had not. He felt an urge to prove that his enthusiasm was not a sign of unworldliness.
“Do you know what you will specialise in?” said Laurent. “I’m doing psychiatry.”
They halted by a ruin in the classical style, a roofless set of arches laced with red blossoms.
“Psychiatry?” said Midhat. “That’s not the body.”
“No. But I have developed an interest in it. And if you must know, it was because of a woman.”
Midhat could not reclaim the energy of a few moments before. He remained silent. Just as Laurent started walking off from the ruin, he threw out:
“I had a mistress in Constantinople.”
Laurent glanced back. Midhat continued, casually: “She spoke neither Arabic nor Turkish. I rented a chambre in the Etiler neighbourhood, for privacy.”
He felt a hand on his arm.
“I am impressed,” said Laurent. Again, he laughed. “I am also rather amazed!”
“Her name was Marie.”
“Where was she from?”
“Sweden.”
“Bra—vo.”
He had drawn them in a loop: ahead was the green gate, the letters in reverse. Midhat also felt amazed, and even a little alarmed. Apparently, it was quite as easy to invent something as to put on a new hat and coat.
4
The water in the garden pond was shallow and did not completely cover Jeannette’s knees, which rose above it like pink islands. The fountain had stopped working and the cherub’s jug was empty. A white scar around the stone perimeter marked the water level from the previous summer. She heard the wind in the trees before it reached her; a second later, goose pimples rose on her submerged legs.
A head bobbed in an upper window. It was Georgine, in Midhat’s bedroom. Jeannette had spent the morning in the room adjacent, her father’s study, organising a box of photographs into two leather albums. The box contained images of her mother as a young woman. Some Jeannette had never seen before. She had not thought intently about her mother in a long time, and the photographs were hard to look at. And yet she had looked, and for hours, searching ravenously for signs of herself in her mother. She came to when Georgine called for lunch. Then she decided to sit in the garden pond and meditate.
As a child, Jeannette had resembled her father and everyone thought she would take after him. Like Frédéric she was energetic: she spoke quickly, she liked drama. But over the years she had changed, and now she loathed the beating of her mind, and deliberately sought out boredom in order to avert it. Her father liked to call her “the Sphinx.”
When she thought about her childhood, she thought of her bedroom in Montparnasse. She thought of the pink and white wallpaper, embossed with gold curls that sprouted into tiny flowers, which she loved to pick in secret near the skirting board behind the chairs, digging her nail into the flowers and scratching out the cakey plaster underneath. A row of dolls dressed in coloured lace ran the length of the window seat, with heavy cold hands, white bisque faces, and real hair. Jeannette rarely touched them. Her favourite toy was a sticky tarot deck, which she spent whole afternoons arranging and rearranging on the floor, casting incantations. The girls from school were jealous of the miniature ivory elephants, the music boxes, the tin ship with the painted crew, and when they came round to play they wanted to wind them up and work their limbs, and at first Jeannette would sit patiently and allow them to do so. But sooner or later she demanded the other girl play with her instead, and together they would invent religions on the window seat, directing spells at the hats of passersby. Jeannette selected chants from a book of poetry, and her favourite was on page 92, from a poem called “Resignation”:
As a child, I dreamt of the Koh-i-Noor,
Persian and Papal richness, sumptuous,
Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus!
Héliogabale et Sardanapale! they called from the window, pointing their fingers at solitary men, watching how they reacted or did not react to the effect of the witchcraft, and the doom that lay ahead of them.
Papa was the patron of the toys. Jeannette had no brothers or sisters, and her mother Ariane was affectionate but withdrawn, and often kept to her bedroom. After lessons, or when she came home from school, Jeannette read the books her father gave her under the bed until her elbows were sore from the carpet bristles. When she thought about her childhood in later years, she thought of the view from the bedroom floor: the spaces beneath the chairs were shelters from equatorial typhoons, the woodwork below the window a carving from an ancient civilisation. On the bookcase she could remove the panel behind the encyclopaedia to access a round hole in the wall, which was a hiding place for scrolls and treasures. As she grew older she imagined different kinds of adventures and began reading novels, which she bought on her way home from class and concealed inside the dust jackets of history books.
One Friday afternoon, the year she turned sixteen, Jeannette returned from school to find their neighbour sitting with a policeman at the kitchen table. Her mother, they said, had shot herself with a pistol in the courtyard. Her father was not yet back from the university. The neighbour heard the shot and called the policeman, who had already called the undertaker. They looked at Jeannette with frightened eyes and offered biscuits and tea. She was surprised to find that she could not even open her mouth to form a yes or a no.
In the aftermath, all parental reserve evaporated and Frédéric told his daughter everything. Her mother had expressed the urge to end her life on at least two other occasions, but those episodes were so far apart that he had not considered them cause for serious alarm. “Forgive me,” he said, pulling a handful of his hair near the crown. Every now and then he would say, “Oh,” and cover his mouth, and she knew he was remembering something.
Jeannette seized at these details with appetite, at every memory that slipped out of her father’s mouth between his silences, while he sat in the living room staring at the floor, mouth contorted with regret. Death had loosened the truth from him and he was miraculously unguarded: gone was the man who cantered off midconversation; in his place stood a mass of uncatalogued private facts. Thus exposed he gave Jeannette everything. In the days leading up to th
e funeral he described his courtship, his impressions of the woman who became her mother at each stage of knowing her, how she changed and did not change over the years.
Without meaning to, with these stories he opened a whole hemisphere of his daughter’s imagination, so that once the coffin was finally laid in the earth and he began to close his wounds Jeannette was still picking at hers. A woman was taking shape in her mind. Not only was this woman her mother, she was also Mademoiselle Ariane Passant, and Madame Ariane Molineu, a figure made out of the darkness from before Jeannette was born. Before long, in the natural way, her father learned to live with sadness, and soon that sadness lost its sting, and what had been unsealed in shock began to clam up again, and he would not release any more of what he knew. He brushed Jeannette off when she asked him to, with an appalled look, as if forgetting how much he had already told her.
They moved to Montpellier after Jeannette finished school. Frédéric’s sister lived in town with her children Marian and Xavier, and also nearby was the vineyard of Sylvain Leclair, an old friend of Ariane’s. Frédéric took up a position as maître de conférences at the university, and Jeannette enrolled to study philosophy, becoming one of only nineteen women in her year.
Father and daughter settled in quickly. They entered the society around the university and formed acquaintances that became friendships. It did not matter here if you were indigenous or from elsewhere since within those lecture halls and libraries all accents converged on a standard, and the commerce of knowledge dissolved regional difference. Sylvain brought the Molineus into the orbit of the vignerons, who also accepted them, albeit with reservations. The society of the vignerons had clotted over the last fifty years under pressure of various external disasters, including the droughts and the Algerian wine surplus. In distinction to the northern Gauls, they clung to the archaic identity of Occitania—although that was a name so diluted by now that half the restaurants along the seafront had it daubed in enamel on their front boards. But between the vines Sylvain was such a beloved and strange personality that he secured invitations for his friends “les Molineux” without any trouble, in spite of their voices and clothes, which recalled Paris through and through.
At the end of each weekday, father and daughter reunited in the blue salon to discuss philosophy. They drank from new china and debated Bergson’s notion of freedom experienced through time, which Frédéric liked for its emphasis on the action of the mind. Jeannette preferred Boutroux’s point that formulae can never explain anything because they cannot explain themselves, which she sometimes mistakenly distilled into the view that there is no point in commenting on any phenomenon since we are all part of the same fabric, which meant you could at most grasp the corner of something but never see the whole. These discussions, in which Frédéric encouraged the expansion of his daughter’s sympathies to consider alternative points of view, often touched on themes of significance but they were never applied to their own lives. Although father and daughter avoided candour, these evenings brought them into a new kind of intimacy from which each drew strength.
Since Jeannette earned her diploma, even this had dissipated. Her friends from the university were all married, and though she had no desire to leave her father their discussions had stopped, and without an emotional repertoire to buttress the intellectual bond they grew apart. Now Jeannette relied on her own powers of stillness for succour. Her philosophical education had sharpened the apparatus of her mind, which she had repurposed into ramparts. She let the hours of the day fall by remotely, and her thoughts slid from object to object without engagement.
Lately she had encountered a few difficulties. The arrival of Midhat was one cause. She had kept a distance from their visitor, but even at a distance his presence made it harder to submerge herself in her own mind. The war was another cause, and although that too was distant it was all anyone wanted to talk about. At least, she considered, they were fortunate to have left Paris—though, of course, the boys would be leaving soon, Xavier, Paul, Laurent. These small changes wrought vast work, and the corners of Jeannette’s mind had begun once again to glimmer with activity. And then that morning, the photographs of her mother. Her face and figure before the photographer’s painted screen. The freckle under her eyebrow, the lace around her collar, the stray hairs curving out, marked in immortal grey lines on the gelatin silver.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”
Jeannette started. Midhat Kamal was standing on the terrace at the back of the house. He held an umbrella between his graceful hands, and his thin black eyebrows were raised in greeting. As she lifted her arm to wave, he bowed, but remained on the terrace amid the iron furniture. He could have been a European from this distance; the coppery tone of his face, and his dark brow and eyes—these were the only signs that he was what her father would call “Semitic.” If she hadn’t known she might have guessed he was Italian.
“How are you?” she called.
“Quite tired, but I am well. I have walked from the Faculty, it was beautiful. I am afraid I have interrupted you bathing.”
“Not at all, I was going to come in. It is getting cold.”
She stood, and as the chill air whipped her wet legs and flapped the bathing suit on her stomach she saw the whites of Midhat’s eyes.
“Let me get my towel, I am sorry. One moment. Perhaps then, would you like to take a coffee? One moment, Monsieur Midhat.”
She tried not to run. She crossed the lawn, lowering her eyes as she wrapped the top edge of the towel over the fabric on her breasts; wet feet on stone, on floorboard, on carpeted stair. In her bedroom she peeled out of the swimming costume, rubbed the damp off her body, and dressed quickly in a cotton house gown. At a dignified pace, she descended the stairs. Georgine was already bringing in the coffee, and curtsied as Jeannette passed.
“Alors,” Jeannette exhaled, meeting Midhat’s sidelong glance. He was sitting very upright on the sofa. She chose a wicker chair and drew her sleeve out of the way to pour the coffee into two cups. “Tell me, Monsieur Midhat. I haven’t asked about your family at all. Your parents, are they … do you have siblings?”
“My father is a merchant. From Nablus. A merchant of textiles and clothing. He is quite successful.”
“How lovely. And your mother?”
“My mother was from near Nablus, a town called Jenin, but she died, Allah yirhamha, when I was very small.”
“Oh dear, I’m so sorry. But you are like me then, Monsieur Midhat. We are both without our mothers.”
“My mother died from sill, in Arabic, la tuberculose, in French.”
“That’s very sad, I am extremely sorry.”
“How did your mother die?”
“I was also young.” She looked through the doors at the terrace, where her wet footprints slashed the paving stones. “She was ill, also. A problem with her heart, I don’t know precisely. Perhaps when you are a great doctor you will be able to explain it to me!” Her mouth smiled, her eyes were closed.
“Yes I do hope I will be a doctor,” said Midhat. “Sometimes, in Nablus, men do not always profess as they studied.”
“Profess?”
“Profess … comme une profession.”
She faced the garden again. The silence lengthened.
“What is Nablus like?”
“Nablus is a little village. It’s a town, I mean a city. It’s not large but we call it a city. What I mean is, even when you leave Nablus, you take it with you. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t mean I don’t love Nablus. I do. Only, everyone knows about everyone else’s life. It can be a little …” He made a clawing gesture at his throat until she smiled, albeit weakly. “I’m sure that is why my father likes it in Cairo.”
“Egypt?”
He nodded.
“And for you, you chose medicine …”
“That was his choice, my father’s. He founded, I mean he is one of the founders of, a new hospital in Nablus. H
e considers it very respectable, you know. But I am also very content from it. I love science, I always loved science. So it is my choice too. I am excited by …” He looked down, thinking of the words. “The work is so exact, so particular. But,” he sighed, “one has to be too detached, you know.”
To his surprise, Jeannette erupted with laughter. He looked up to see her face glowing, her whole body rippling with amusement. When after several moments she was still laughing, he tentatively joined in, watching her carefully to know when to stop. An abrupt little cough was the signal, and as she sighed back into silence and he dropped his smile, it occurred to him that she could not possibly have known he was thinking of the dissection, or of the legless man he saw that morning in the clinic, neither of which seemed to him very funny. He looked at her still-smiling eyes and tried to imagine what she thought about him.
“I have been walking with Laurent regularly,” he said.
She squinted and drew her cup to her lips.
“We walk to the botanical gardens, sometimes we walk into town. He shows me the city. I enjoy him.”
Jeannette chuckled again but without sound, pinching her lips together, examining her fingers as they turned the cup in her saucer. Midhat’s hand involuntarily twisted palm-up, questioning, but she didn’t notice. He was not offended by her laughter, the way he was by Laurent’s. It was mystifying but did not seem spiteful. In fact her continued hilarity was drawing a smile again to his own lips. His eyes kept falling to where her dress exposed the upper part of her chest. The skin was pale but freckled, and shiny—perhaps with sweat. Or with water from her bathe.
“Why did you sit in the pond?”
Her smile vanished. “Why?” she said. “Oh. I was feeling a bit hot.”
He considered her, and hung fire. Since arriving in Montpellier a month ago, he had developed a habit of pausing whenever he felt uncertain. Ever mindful of his ignorance of convention, he strongly wished to avoid making a fool of himself. And it might well be customary to sit in a pond when hot, and how would he know? On the other hand, Jeannette did look discomfited by the question. Then again, that might be because of something else; for example, her own preconception about his discomfort with outdoor bathing. About which, if the truth be told, she would not have been wholly incorrect.
The Parisian Page 5