The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “We are members of Al-Fida’iya, the Self Sacrifice Society.”

  Now it was Qais Karak and Adel Jawhari’s turn to exchange a glance, and Adel rolled his eyes.

  “What is that?” said Midhat. “I haven’t heard of it.”

  “It’s new,” said Basil.

  “It’s a Jaffa society,” said Tahsin Kamal.

  “Yeah, well now it’s a Nablus society too,” said Basil.

  “They work with the fellahin,” said Burhan.

  “Are you an authority on the subject?” said Basil.

  “Basil, come on,” said Qais Karak.

  “Really? Like farm work?” said Midhat.

  Jamil kicked Midhat under the table.

  “No,” said Munir. “We want to enlist the whole of Palestine.”

  “They have to take an oath that if someone is a traitor, then that person should be killed. Even if he is your own friend,” said Tahsin, breathlessly.

  Burhan Hammad clamped his teeth together and widened his eyes.

  “Tahsin,” said Munir. But he did not protest. If anything, he sat up a little straighter at the description.

  “The problem with these societies,” said Adel Jawhari, “is that they want money. And because Nablus is the richest city, we end up paying, and no one else does their share.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, Adel.”

  “It is,” said Adel. “These societies are meant to be countrywide, but not everyone does their bit. As usual we have the most qawmiyyeh, and the others … I mean, the societies send petitions, they buy arms, I mean, little pistols, not exactly German rifles. Not that German rifles did the Turks much good, but the British have a ton of stuff and we’ve got nothing.”

  “As long as the Jews don’t have anything, it doesn’t matter if we don’t have anything either. Fair is fair,” said Tahsin Kamal.

  “Fair is fair? Are you out of your mind?” said Munir Murad. “The Jews in England, do you know how much money they have? They have an empire. They’ve started colonizing here, they’re messing with the peasants in the north, that’s why there’s no money—it’s all going to the Jews. You can say it’s the war, but the war has been over for more than a year now, and what has changed?”

  Now, Abdallah Atwan took the reins.

  “We must resist all of the Jews,” he said. “Even our own Jews, the ones we have here.”

  “We only have about ten Jews in Nablus,” said someone, “and they’re Arabs.”

  “What about the Samaritans,” said someone else.

  “The Samaritans aren’t Jews,” said a third.

  “Yes they are,” said Abdallah.

  The truth was that very few of the men sitting in Sheikh Qassem that day had ever met a European Jew. The Yishuv settlements were mostly quite far from Jabal Nablus, and as a result their only conception of European Jewish men and women was based on those devout incumbents of Jerusalem who were not even Zionists, and on the Samaritan Nabulsis, who claimed to be the original Israelites, and considered Mount Gerizim the sacred summit upon which Ibrahim was called to sacrifice his son.

  But Abdallah Atwan’s rage was general and his prejudice limitless. He was capable of seizing the hot zeal of indignation and, through a few words that reasserted his wisdom as an elder, impressing upon it the shape of tribal fury, that cared not for such subtle distinctions as those that existed between Jew and Jew.

  When they left Sheikh Qassem it was already five o’clock, and darkness was beginning to rouse the evening winds that collected in the valley. Midhat raced back to the khan with numb cheeks. He reached the corner of the shop, and although the tailor’s office was shut for the night he could see the glow from Hisham’s oil lamp on the counter. He prepared an expression of friendly nonchalance, which he had honed for the craft of discarding vexed women. It was a technique based on the insight that an injured party will most likely forget the wrong done them if you pretended it had never happened, or that it was a trifling mistake

  “Hisham, ya Amo! It was difficult to tear myself away,” he said, stepping inside. “I was in a conversation with young Salim something or other, he was thinking of purchasing from us the fabric for his daughter’s kiswa, it would be a big order, he said. Anyway, we were discussing for a long time outside Sheikh Qassem, and … he might come by tomorrow. Then again, perhaps he was only saying he wanted to purchase because he had not seen me in so long.” He shrugged with mock humility. “But I guess that is the problem with being new in town, everyone is especially polite to you. Don’t worry, I will soon become old news.”

  Hisham narrowed his eyes. “Salim who? I don’t know of a Bint Salim getting married any time soon.”

  “Oh, they are from the East of Nablus.” Midhat waved his hand. “You wouldn’t know them.”

  Hisham nodded. “Tayyeb.” Gently, he closed the accounts book. “You can go home now. It’s late.”

  5

  “Now Fatima,” said Widad Hammad, on the way to the hammam, “Um Taher Kamal has invited us for coffee this afternoon.”

  Fatima and Nuzha walked a step behind their mother. Three figures in black muslin; the shortest, Nuzha, carrying a basket.

  “Who, Mama?” said Nuzha.

  “Not you. Just Fatima.”

  Fatima did not reply. Outside the storefront ahead, a group of men sat around a nargila pipe in silence. The one holding the mouthpiece leaned back as they approached. Smoke furled up his face from the crack of his mouth. Widad, Fatima, and Nuzha marched, and the tacks in their heels sounded on the hard ground. They rounded the corner and Widad continued:

  “Um Dawud says this Kamal lady has not stopped talking about her grandson since he returned. My grandson did this, my grandson lived in Paris. Hala’ no, this way habibti. She will certainly ask you to marry him Fatima, so there is no need for your sister to come. Haram, Nuzha. It’s pointless anyway because Fatima is going to marry Yasser.”

  “But Mama.”

  “We are not talking about this now.”

  The road narrowed as they passed the Yasmineh Quarter and came upon the khan. It was that hour after the midday prayer when the market was quiet, and shopkeepers rotated fruits in their crates to hide mould, or sat and chatted on chairs outside their stalls, watching children roll balls between the arches. Ahead, the clock tower; to the right, the Nasr mosque. The three black figures turned past the mosque and through a stone entrance into the hammam.

  Widad took her daughters to the baths once a week. It was important for the health of the physical body, but even more important for a healthy social body, because aside from the istiqbalat held in private homes a hammam was a place for ladies to talk. It also gave one a chance to inspect the other daughters of the town for one’s sons: at an istiqbal a girl would be covered in velvet and embroidered lace or whatever drapery best displayed her twin virtues of wealth and taste, as much as she had them—but here, unclothed in the steam, one could observe what nature had given her.

  “Who is Kamal?” said Nuzha.

  “Give me the towels, habibti.”

  Their mother led them into the darkness of the vestibule, and they removed their veils as she paid the attendant. In the first room they unbuttoned their gowns and pulled on striped wizra robes and wooden clogs, and in the second room the other bathers congregated in groups, glossy as creatures of the sea, clouded with steam. Widad ululated at her friends. Pretending to keep her gaze to the ground, Fatima transferred her eyes to where the women entered the private khulwa washrooms. She liked to watch as they dropped their robes. Don’t stare, her mother always told her. How could one not stare? Displayed before her, the anatomies of all the ladies from town. Flesh shining with water and sweat, dimpled and variegated in the coloured light from the roof. She liked the backs of older women the most, the way the fat draped down over the hips in thick rolls like layers of cream.

  Fatima followed Nuzha into a khulwa. She looked down at the stammer of her heart pushing her chest up down, up down, as the arms of
the gown fell off her shoulders, and then she peered down at her feet, already wrinkled around the heel, the base flushed with walking, the black debris of stockings caught in the sweaty clefts between her toes. The only thing Fatima’s mother ever told her about her body was that she must scrub it. Or be scrubbed, as the maids released the scrolls of dead skin in a froth of olive oil soap, leaving limbs and belly and back soft red with attrition. And that was it, the job was done, and they would leave the hammam into the dry air without another word said about it. When Fatima changed clothes at home she did so at speed and without much thought for the body she was covering and uncovering, but here at the hammam, where the hot dark rooms carried a religious charge, where the light from the tinted circles in the roof caught on the mist, and the slow women striped in wizra gossiped on benches around the walls, inhaling vapour as they picked at watermelon and cheese brought by the maids on cane trays—here Fatima looked down at her own naked legs with interest. Blue veins spread from her groin down her thighs. The blood pulsed in her feet.

  Two maids dipped luffas in a copper basin. The water clicked in the walls, the marble floor blared heat. The sisters sat on the benches in the khulwa, and Nuzha’s breasts swayed as she leaned forward. She was only fifteen but her breasts were already larger than Fatima’s, though Fatima’s were rounder. Fatima’s veins dipped away from the surface, and her ribs showed through the skin, and below that her belly curved, the lacuna in the middle broad and deep as though the cord that once tied her to her mother was unusually thick. Her sister was wider in the hip, but otherwise their bodies were quite similar. It was in the tangle of hair below that lay the strangest accident of biology, and Fatima had never seen her sister’s to compare. Another mouth hidden under there, ugly and red. Not only was that where the blood came from but other secretions appeared there also, or began there and spread elsewhere: briny odours, strange nocturnal aches that shuddered up her limbs. This body, with its hectic motions and sensations, was the central mystery of her life. Sweat crept down her forehead. She leaned forward for the maid to scrub her back, and one bead sped down the side of her nose.

  Her mother was near the doorway, speaking to someone in her social voice. “Hakayt ma‘a Um Hashim imbarrih.” Fatima abhorred those false undulations. She thought they sounded servile. “An jad? Is that so?”

  “Turn please, ya sitti,” said the maid.

  “Ma‘roof,” said Widad.

  Nabulsi women were always proclaiming something was “ma‘roof,” that it was known. Out on the mountain road every house was visible, and it was a platitude that anyone who needed directions could be shown the spot from a neighbour’s rooftop, though such a thing seemed unlikely ever to have happened, for who would ask who did not already know? Fatima’s mother used the word interchangeably with “of course,” so perhaps it had more to do with the way women related to one another, each as keen as the next to assert how much she knew.

  Fatima’s curiosity about the Kamal family was piqued. She had met Um Taher once at an istiqbal, but the little else she knew was based on details her brother Burhan brought home from Café Sheikh Qassem one evening two weeks ago. A man named Midhat Kamal had returned to Nablus from France, and was working in his father’s shop in the khan. He had been involved in politics. And he wore beautiful clothes, and was very handsome. And he had had a lover in Paris, she was called Pauline—but at this point their mother had scolded Burhan for indecency and smacked the back of his hand.

  Fatima and Nuzha rinsed, and wrapped again in their stripes returned to the main room for refreshments. Trays of food were laid out beside the fountain, and nargila pipes set up along the walls, coiled around their cylinders. Their mother made a space for two on the bench beside her. When the girls were younger they always competed over food. Rather than trying to eat the most and most quickly, as one might in a household of need, the sisters had competed over who could eat the slowest, and leave the most food until last, because to consume was no longer to have, and she who had the most on her plate was king. Fatima watched Nuzha deliver a square of watermelon to her lips. Her teeth crushed the fruit, her lips glistened.

  “I heard they are making their own soap, now,” said someone to their mother on the other side.

  “Ma‘roof,” said Widad.

  Another woman was holding forth on a more interesting topic. “And she was so angry she said I won’t sleep with you, I want a divorce, so, ya‘ni, she went on strike, she wouldn’t sleep in the bed, she moved to the floor of the bathroom, she said I will sit here in the bathroom until you divorce me. And she took in her blankets, ya‘ni, and flowers, and she made it nice in there. And khalas she came back one day and he had gone in there and was sleeping on the floor where she put all her nice things, and she says shu sar? He says you made it so nice in here I want to sleep in the bathroom too.”

  The women leaned back into their laughter.

  Fatima’s fingers were wrinkled when they left the hammam. She and her mother walked Nuzha home, and then continued up to the Kamal house on Mount Gerizim. Her muslins were soft on her skin and the wind pushed the fabric against her mouth, so that as she exhaled the moisture warmed her whole face.

  A maid answered the door; Widad addressed her as Um Mahmoud. Um Mahmoud led them to the reception room, where they sat beside each other on the sofa, and the wind rattled the window.

  “As-salamu alaykum,” said Um Taher in the doorway with a smile. Her red dress was stitched with black and her thin grey hair pulled back into a chignon. She had a round face and colourful lips.

  “Wa alaykum as-salam,” said Widad, rising to remove her veil. Fatima copied her.

  “Mashallah, Fatima,” said Um Taher. “You are much taller than when I saw you last.”

  They sat and Um Taher and Widad discussed the guests at a recent wedding in the town. Beside Fatima, on the windowsill, a fly was struggling on its back. Now it paused, tiny black legs kinked. Now it scrambled, fluttering its limbs.

  “The girl has a beautiful singing voice,” said her mother.

  “Mashallah,” said Um Taher.

  “Fatima, would you sing?” said Widad.

  “She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want,” said Um Taher. “Another time. Perhaps at the Atwan istiqbal. And you play the oud?”

  “Of course.” Fatima’s voice croaked; she cleared it.

  “She is very talented with the oud.”

  Um Taher said, “Oud is very good for the soul, ya‘ni … it can be a relief for—especially for women. I mean, for God. You hear about this … God keep us all in his mercy.” There was a long pause. Um Taher gave them another breathy smile. “Would you ladies excuse me, just one moment.”

  Although Um Taher was clearly advanced in years, her manner was not of the elderly. She moved slowly, but she was not frail. Her wrists were thick and strong, but not peasant-like; her skin was pale and her eyes were penetrating. As the door closed, Fatima’s mother wriggled in her seat and sighed. She put a hand on Fatima’s leg, as if to reassure her.

  Beyond the window, two large black birds stood on the stone garden wall with scraps of something hanging from their mouths. One bent over to eat while the other remained on guard, and its down flashed indigo as it waddled along the wall, and then with a flourish of wings, hopped onto the gatepost and began to feast on its scrap. The pair flapped back and forth for a while, then abruptly departed, mounting the air and crying out. All at once, the limestone walls were marred with long white slashes.

  “Look,” said Fatima. “The birds left kaka all over their wall.”

  Her mother gasped. Fatima realised it must be some kind of omen. Widad hesitated, as if choosing how to react. She slapped Fatima’s hand. “Fatima that is disgusting.”

  Fatima looked out again at the white slashes, and wondered if it was true that Um Taher was inspecting her for her grandson. She had not asked to hear her singing. Why, if her mother did not support the match, had she even brought her here? In an instant she recognised the pa
th of her mother’s logic. Her mother was showing her off, regardless that she was not on offer. She felt very aware of her face, and a little depressed. She asked:

  “What was it she was saying, Mama, about God and the oud?”

  “Not about God. About the wife of Haj Hassan, Yasser’s mother. Unhappy for years, she was. She became fanatical.”

  “Nazeeha?”

  “Yes. Hassan was gone too many years. When he came back she had … khalas, we shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, he gave her the oud. Hassan did. He made her play it, because she was seeing things. This Nazeeha, she was always religious, you know, she was seeing this and that every day. But it became more and more, and prayer was not enough to get rid of the religion in her. But the music worked. She became very good at the oud. Beautiful voice. She used to sing the Egyptian folk songs about Harun ar-Rashid with all the trills. But we shouldn’t talk about it.” A moment passed, and she added: “She is a very nice lady. She will make a good mother-in-law for you.”

  “Where did she go?” said Fatima.

  “Zawata.”

  “No, I mean Madame Kamal.”

  Widad tapped her on the knee. “Shh.”

  Widad was correct about Um Taher’s intentions: the moment their hostess closed the door, she had rushed along the corridor to find Midhat. Midhat was sitting on his bed with an open book on his raised knees.

  “Quickly,” she hissed. “We don’t have much time.”

  Midhat followed her into the hall. She held a hand behind her to grip his wrist, and paused after each footstep. At the closed door of the sitting room, she pointed to the handle. He reached out.

  “Hemar!” she hissed, and grabbed his wrist again. “Don’t open the door, are you insane! Look through the keyhole. Quickly. Get on the floor.”

  Midhat tried not to laugh. He crouched on his heels and began to brush some of the dirt on the floor away with his fingers. His grandmother hit him on the back of the head. He looked up, incredulous; she widened her eyes and jabbed a finger at the keyhole.