The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  Fatima was sixteen. She had stopped attending school two years ago, and was now apprenticed in the art of running a household. In the mornings she packed away the bedding, rolled up each mattress and tied it with string, folded the sheets and slotted them into the cupboard. Even though they had a maid who did most of the laundry, her mother was emphatic that Fatima master everything. She herself came from a poorer family and knew the importance of self-reliance in case of hard times. And so, after packing away the nightclothes, Fatima began the ironing, heating the coals first in a brazier and inserting them with tongs into the flatiron. Afterwards she set the iron on a trivet to cool, and helped the maid fold the sheets and garments into piles. Then she joined her mother in the kitchen where she would usually eat a piece of bread before helping with the preparations for lunch.

  Until that year and ever since Fatima could remember, the upper part of the house had been occupied by Turkish soldiers, who used it for accommodation and sometimes as a meeting house, and with that curious mixture of fearful deference and the pride of the chosen Haj Nimr had made no show of resistance. Turkish cuisine infused the Hammad kitchen, and Fatima learned to cook white bean pilaf, stewed spring lamb, and stuffed chicken at the side of the Turkish cook. With the onset of war the Turks were replaced by Germans, who helped stock the kitchen as prices soared in the markets. And now, three years later, Fatima’s family at last recovered the use of their upper rooms, and her father’s rise to prominence in the town was matched by her mother’s delight at being in charge of the house again.

  Once lunch was on the boil or in the oven, Fatima returned upstairs to her clothes iron, which she brushed with hot beeswax to ward off rust. She spent the time that remained reading magazines and stitching, and just after four o’clock her sister and brother came home from school and the family gathered for lunch.

  Fatima had lately developed an awareness of the length of life. Now that she was entering a new phase she saw both that it was long, and that it was a portion with an end. She considered the two mountains that formed the shoulders of Nablus and gave the city its finitude; however much the city might attempt to mount the crags and spread its suburbs, the earth was its body and it was bound to the valley. If Nablus grew at all it would have to spill out between the crevices where the valley ended in the plain, and even then it would only reach so far.

  But the war had wrought changes, and in its wake Nablus was for the moment troubled with uncertainty. Trade was restored, the rationing was over. But tales of Salah ad-Din and Crusader battles were surfacing in the common memory as newspapers read aloud in coffee shops reported the redrawn maps, and their beautiful city, which had always been the southern sister of Damascus, officially became a province north of Jerusalem. That dignity the ruling families had so coveted under the Turks, developed over centuries, and campaigned tirelessly to protect, was at once under a far greater threat.

  Travel was again possible between cities; Jerusalem was electrified, and under the new lamps and to the tunes emanating from the shiny phonographs, modern nightlife arrived in the Holy City. Young men rode down from Nablus to rent apartments within the old city walls, counting the hours on their watches as they passed into the night, smoking by the roadsides and dancing in bars.

  Fatima dreamed of the Nebi Rubin festival. She had been ten years old when they went with their cousins from Lydda and spent two weeks in a big tent by the sea in Jaffa. Markets, cafés, and restaurants were set up for the festival; in the daytime there were horse and camel races and at night theatre troupes performed, and singers from Egypt and Lebanon, and in roped-off circles magicians played tricks, poets recited, and dervishes whirled. She doubted she would be allowed to attend Nebi Rubin again until she was married.

  As Fatima finished her prayer a wind blew into the cave and curled the dust at her feet. Through the cave’s mouth she saw night settling over the town, and hurried to extinguish the three lamps she had lit, then pulled her veil back over her face. The oil and matches in one hand, the other grasping the rocky entrance to the cave, she stepped out onto the mountainside. At once she pulled her muslin tighter and bent to keep steady against the wind. The movement of something black in the trees jolted her attention. But it was only the branches as they wagged and crossed each other, blocking sections of the violet sky.

  Everything was close in the dark. She gripped the tiny bottle and listened, heard only the nightjars, the crickets, the broken call of the wind. She padded down the slope, clicking the bottle against the rocks for balance, her heart pounding. By the time she reached the town, her fear of the wild darkness had turned into a fear of the scolding she would receive for being out so late alone.

  Closing the door, head bowed, she walked straight towards the bedroom she shared with her sister. But her mother was listening for her, and came rushing up from the kitchen.

  “Where have you been?” she screamed. “Shame! Shame on you!”

  “I was praying, Mama, I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you praying at this hour? Imagine who could have seen you! Shame on you Fatima!”

  Fatima raised her arms to protect herself.

  “Get to your room before your father whips you!”

  For good measure, her mother reached out to pull down Fatima’s arms, and then her veil, and slapped her hard across the face.

  2

  After the night of his disgrace, Midhat left the Molineu house without saying goodbye. Before the sun could rise the next day he had softly closed the front door and dragged his trunk to the centre of town, where he bought a ticket to Paris and sent a telegram ahead to his friend from the ship, Faruq al-Azmeh. He arrived at the Gare de Lyon several hours later, his lungs raw with loss.

  As he took his first look at Paris—the cluttered pavements, the zinc roofs, the faceless rush—that same changing sensation of the night before, when he realised he would have to leave the Molineus’, stirred again within him. The people seemed less to walk down the street than to hurtle; he heard the cry of a seagull and the earth muttered beneath his feet as though somewhere below water was churning.

  With all the clothes he had bought over the last year there was no space in the trunk for his overcoat and tarbush, so he was wearing them now and he was sweating. Surrounded by black bowlers and blue uniforms, he noticed Tricolores angled from the military bureau and realised he could not have marked his difference more obviously. There were some frowns of confusion and clear distaste. But no: he would not take the tarbush off.

  “Taxi?”

  Above the bridge the gulls applauded. The taxi window showed a river and wide tree-lined banks. He wished he could recall the name of the neighbourhood where Jeannette had spent her childhood, and her mother had taken her life. As they crossed onto the farther bank a light rain began to pester the roof of the taxi; they drove alongside the river past a fenced park, and easels lined up on the quay, and the buildings rose on either side as they turned inward to where the city thickened. At last they halted on the Rue du Four, and Midhat opened the car door and paid the driver.

  “Monsieur Kamal!”

  At a metal table under an awning, a pair of spectacles dangling from his neck, sat Faruq al-Azmeh. The globe of Faruq’s forehead seemed to have grown with his receding hair. They shook hands.

  “I was so pleased to receive your telegram. My good friend, how are you? Turn around, this is our front door.”

  “I have missed you,” said Midhat, as they climbed the stairs. “On the ship, do you remember, you told me all those things about the French. I wish somehow you might have stayed near me, there was so much more I needed to ask you.”

  “Mais bien sûr,” said Faruq. “There will be time!”

  The apartment was on the third floor of the building, with a balcony onto the street, and a window at the back onto a shared courtyard. The main room was furnished sparely but richly—dark green wainscoted walls, full bookshelves, windows ceiling-high and hung with damask curtains. Faruq helped him carry the t
runk into a bedroom, rubbed his hands, instructed him to sit, and reached for a bottle of whisky and two glasses.

  Thus began Midhat’s life in Paris. His days of medical study were behind him. He enrolled in the history course at the Sorbonne, and by the end of the summer was attending lectures in wood-panelled halls smelling of chalk dust alongside other foreigners, young women, and elderly men. He spent his days in cafés with books on ancient Greece and seventeenth-century Spain, and Faruq supplied him with additional reading, stories of forbidden love, mystical texts, narratives of peripatetic foreigners living in Paris. Among them were Goethe’s Sorrows and the story of a Lebanese priest’s daughter trapped by her marriage and in love with someone else. These books were preoccupied with the senses, Faruq pointed out. Their authors pleaded openness to the world.

  “We are all scarecrows turned philosophers,” he said, “with crows living under our hats.”

  Sometimes after dinner Midhat would go out with Faruq to bars and cabarets. As the city moved from her mood of wartime grief to one of revelry, Parisian nightlife began to thrive on the electric atmosphere of the home front. Ration-dimmed streetlights greyed the boulevards but cinemas and theatres still packed out nightly and even stayed open during zeppelin attacks. Under the sustained pressure of war, the people of Paris behaved as though they had approached the end of the world. Faruq liked to joke that an atmosphere of “désastre” led to “déshabillement”—but Midhat said no, this was something greater, far more significant and penetrating. It was a charge shared between strangers, it was a pure thrill of Being. It lived in the body like a drug, this being alive in the jaws of the full, flying night.

  His first sexual experience was with another student at the Sorbonne, named Claire. Claire was petite and blond and, Midhat was shocked later to learn, almost thirty years old. She expressed disdain for men who were not at war, and when he tried to defend himself she reached out and placed two fingers on his lips.

  “Je ne veux pas entendre vos raisons.”

  He caught sight of her first at a lecture on the origins of religion. She was on the opposite side of the lecture hall, and as she watched the professor Midhat watched her. When the students flooded out into the courtyard, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find her standing there with a hand on her hip.

  “Je veux voir la wreckage, du raid la nuit dernière.”

  They found a five-storey building on the Rue de Ménilmontant where the wall had been ripped off, the cross section exposed, the remaining support wall now a coastal profile, half a bathroom rudely displayed, a kitchen, stocked shelves. He stared up in silence at the chair suspended on the top floor. He was thinking of a note Jeannette once read aloud to him, written in her mother’s hand, about a house that stopped being a house once a thief had entered.

  Claire took his hand in hers. “My God.” Her dress was cut low, the skin on her chest pale and patterned with freckles that gathered below her clavicle. She placed herself closer to him. What a strange person, he thought; stripped of fear. She released his hand and moved past him to the garden wall. She pulled up her skirt, put her foot in the crevice, hauled herself over, and disappeared.

  Midhat looked around. Only a few people were walking on the street. He heard a voice say, “Maman, regarde,” but nothing more. He approached the wall and jumped up, and a thin vertical plate of concrete crumbled under his weight. In his haste he scraped a knee, sharp dust grooved his hands; he landed on dry grass and debris and saw Claire moving towards a shed with a collapsed roof. The corrugated door lying on the ground clanged with her footstep. She giggled, and slipped her body through the remaining gap of an entrance. Midhat followed her into the darkness.

  Inside smelled of sawdust, and the dented roof left barely a space to stand. It was a woodshed: some logs remained in their stacks, most had scattered over the floor. A bucket glinted with fissures of daylight; Claire laughed, kicked it over. For no reason, and they heard the swish of the water as it tipped. It disturbed Midhat, this display of havoc. His shoe released a squelch as he raised it. Momentarily he feared her—but as this fear struck her little grip pulled at his jacket, and he fell forwards and reached for the wall. Her breath was loud in his ear. She kissed him. He tried to mimic her courage and, tensing the muscles in his hand and arm, slid his fingers under the collar of her dress, revealing her pale shoulder. Even in the gloom her eyes were bright. She stole a hand down below to where he was already hot and stiff and unbuttoned his trousers, and for a cruel second Midhat was reminded of his nurse, the only other person in his life who had ever undressed him thus. Claire was laughing softly, pulling her skirt up, her drawers down; he reached out and gripped her instinctively under the legs, braced her against the wall. She kissed him again, and with her hand helped him to enter her.

  An eruption of sensation. He drew an enormous breath. His fingers clawed into the backs of her thighs. She was squirming, whispering in pain. Let me go. He checked his gasping, he held himself; she pulled back and forth, he copied her and tried to thrust. The pleasure surged and for a long, staggering moment he was totally unselfed. Then he was out again. Feet sounded on the street outside and faded. Claire released a puff of exasperated laughter and Midhat turned to catch his breath, his left foot completely wet with the bucket water.

  Though at first the experience was painful to recall, before long it was a triumph in Midhat’s mind. It was easy to rewrite a story in a city of strangers, and reporting it to Faruq over cognac Midhat changed the location—to Claire’s apartment—and laughed, as a man who has done something for himself laughs, fortified by action. And then, having conned himself with this picture of manly achievement, and having teased out some details of Faruq’s own affairs under the guise of sharing knowledge, he found the next time infinitely easier.

  This girl was from Lyon, also a student at the university; he saw her across a lawn in the Bois de Boulogne, and reversing his direction met her as if by accident where the paths intersected. He complimented her on the ribbon in her hair; accepted the dinner invitation; helped when her corset-clasp snagged on her underdress, and touched the small hole it had torn with its little harp of exposed fibres. Then there was a society girl with bony shoulders who wore flannel suits and shoes with canvas spats. Sometimes she wore a monocle at parties. Another woman sold charity badges on the Rue de Rivoli; her curls were the colour of marmalade. He met her in June, and in the sunny mornings found orange hairs spiralled on the pillow beside him. He befriended a whore at the Café Napolitain who was slight and flat chested, and addressed Midhat as “Mon Exotique.” After a month of evenings in rented rooms and breakfasts by the Seine this girl left the city for Provence with her mother, and Midhat regretted the loss of her scornful voice and her firm thighs. He began to visit the whorehouses in Pigalle, in part searching for another such woman, in part simply for the physical release.

  Two whores he visited, but soon there was only one, for the first became syphilitic and was transferred to the local infirmary. The other was a woman named Pauline, whose skin was very soft and who sprayed herself with rosewater to mask the sewer-stench that reached the windows in summer. Pauline had a comic pout. When the Americans joined the war effort and filled Paris on furlough, she mimicked their voices with a wah wah drawl and swagger of her head, and lighting a cigarette watched Midhat produce the franc notes to pay the madam.

  But after a while he began to feel the dullness of paid pleasure, and, of course, with all the soldiers on rotation one needed to be careful of venereal diseases. Still, on occasion, when induced by cheap wine, he could happily leave a bar in a group of men to carouse in the foyer of Le Chabanais, and accept without much forethought whichever boudoir he was shown into.

  Through all this, Jeannette lived on in his mind. The more experience he gained, the less he could commit to any of these women he met in the Folies Bergère, or the Concert Mayol, or in the salons of cocktail parties. Sometimes in the dark he felt Jeannette’s lips, and sometimes smelled h
er over some woman’s head. Emerging from the fantasy to find a stranger in his arms, he would hear a high ringing sound and make love half in disgust before returning to Saint Germain heavy with renewed shame and longing. That sound moved into and out of his awareness for whole weeks at a time, and yet he carried his longing with him always like a crest of seriousness, and it gave him a gravity both real and performed, which the women of Paris sensed on him like a cologne and were captivated by.

  One day, in the summer of 1916, he crossed the Rue de l’Odéon on his way to the university and caught sight of the back of a woman’s head through the window of a bookshop. With a leap in his chest he recognised Jeannette’s hair. She had cut it short again, it was blooming out the back of her head. What was she doing in Paris? She could not know he was here, he had left no forwarding address. There she was, Jeannette, in a matching shirt and skirt, pale grey.

  But as she turned to face the window through which Midhat was staring she moved under the sheen of the reflected sun, and he could not tell if she had seen him. His body trembled as it took him through the tinkling shop-door. She was facing away, picking up a book to examine the spine.

  “Jeannette.”

  At his voice, she turned. It was not Jeannette. Her brow furrowed, she blushed. Her eyes were small and lower down than they were supposed to be, and she was too short, and although she was perfectly fine looking the sight of her was to Midhat monstrous. She was at the counter, and now she was approaching him, whispering, “Excuse me”; he fumbled aside to let her exit, and the door chimed shut. Her face haunted him for several moments. A panic loomed: he could not remember what Jeannette looked like. He tried to conjure her face, but all he could see was this new anonymous woman with her low eyes and her grey skirt. He walked out in a concentrated daze, ransacking his memory. Then—at last—there it was: the little chin, tapering, the eyes, the look in the eyes, the smiling, the kiss, the ending. She was still there, intact.