“As-Salameh alaykum.”
The man with the enormous beard was also on his feet now. His smock had gathered up around his torso, and he flattened it before reaching out a hand to shake Midhat’s, and nodded at Um Taher. His eyes were set so close he seemed to be frowning, his eyeballs pinkish and small.
Abu Salama introduced him. “Hada Abuna Antoine. Faransawi.”
“Marhaba,” said Teta.
“Marhaban,” said Father Antoine. He pronounced his “r” in the French way.
“Bonjour,” said Midhat.
Father Antoine blinked.
Enunciating pedantically, and using a few classical verb forms, Abu Salama said to the Frenchman: “I can ask this lady and her grandson to wait, if you believe you will be—quick. Otherwise, feel free to visit tomorrow, at the same time.”
Father Antoine responded with equal meticulousness:
“With gratitude for your kindness, Abu Salama. I shall visit tomorrow.”
The French priest knelt again on the carpet to replace the page he had lifted, then gently pulled the red satin over the four corners, and tied the black ribbon that lay beneath. The three standing watched. The Frenchman’s thick fingers were gnarled and spotted and tufted with white hairs. On his feet again, Father Antoine nodded at the high priest, and rather than pass by Midhat and Um Taher to reach the door, turned through another archway around the far edge of the synagogue. His clacking footsteps circled around them, and as he came into view at the last moment Midhat adjusted his head to watch the figure and full beard silhouetted against the daylight. The clacks changed tone and receded.
“Um Taher, tell me,” said Abu Salama. “How can I help.”
Midhat stared at the closed parcel of satin.
“We need a charm,” said Teta.
“Fine. For or against?”
“For,” said Teta. “For love.”
Midhat snapped his head back to look at his grandmother. The sharp movement sent a new pain down his temple.
“Have you brought any—” said Abu Salama.
“I have hair.”
From the inside of her robe Teta produced a drawstring bag, and slid two fingers in. A single black hair appeared on her forefinger. The ends dangled: one curled, silver with light; the other was white-tipped. An entire root from Fatima’s head. Midhat felt hot.
“No. Not possible. No, Teta.” He put a hand on her back. “I am sorry for wasting your time, Abu Salama. But the fact is … no. Teta, put that away.”
The black hair wobbled with the force of Midhat’s breath, and Teta gripped it with her thumb to stop it falling.
“Well, if he doesn’t want to,” said Abu Salama, “I’m afraid we can’t do it. It won’t work, unfortunately.”
Abu Salama opened his palm upwards and lifted his gaze to the ceiling. It was out of his hands, he seemed to be saying. The second she was released from the high priest’s gaze, Teta turned her eyes on Midhat. Outlined by her veil, they skewered him. She slid the single hair back into the drawstring bag, and as she pulled the strings gave a long emphatic blink of irritation. Then she bowed at the priest. Midhat fought an impulse to laugh.
He led his grandmother back across the courtyard, and as they descended the steep steps, she said again: “It’s up to you.” He wished he could see her face. They walked back through the Samaritan quarter in exhausted silence, and she left him at the store. Hisham had placed a chair in the entrance. It was the time of afternoon prayer and the muezzin’s voice sounded down the quiet khan. Midhat sat on the chair and two cross-stitched panels swung around his ears as Teta walked off. The pain in his temple was softer now, and had a rhythm. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, rested his fingers on his eyes.
Part of him did not object to the idea of a love charm. In fact, part of him was receptive to the idea. Yes, he had been educated in the sciences and rational argument, but superstition was a survival of childhood that was hard to erase. And when he thought of the supposed magic of the Samaritans, even now he felt a whisper of that old awe, standing on the dark threshold of knowledge. Superstition was not just for children and old ladies. Beliefs ran deep, and apparent sceptics were often secret zealots, murmuring in the high priest’s office the names of fathers and mothers, unfolding palms to be tickled by a deciphering thumb, whispering astrological verdicts on the way home so they would not by forgetting lose what they had paid for. As a child he had heard rumours of dead birds encased in the plaster above doorways. As an adult, he retained some of the mystical sense laid down in infancy, that fearful curiosity, so that his heart still turned a little at a mention of the infamous book and its occult runes, even though he had since understood it was simply a set of religious texts written in their language. His thoughts dropped to the discoloured pages on the floor of the synagogue, and to the French Father Antoine and his beard.
When he opened his eyes, Hisham’s thin figure was visible from the direction of the Nasr mosque.
“You can go for the day,” he said, as he approached. “Khalas. There’s no one here.”
As Midhat climbed the mountain home he decided he had become too suggestible in his fatigue. He should not have let Teta take him all the way to the synagogue. Jeannette stepped into his thoughts: he could not imagine what she might say about all this. Or rather, he could—but he didn’t want to.
They ate the kusa mahshi Um Mahmoud had prepared in silence. His mind relaxed, and forgetting the battle with his grandmother he remarked:
“Teta, you have to eat more. Have another kusaya.”
Um Taher waited several moments before replying: “I am not hungry.”
As though it were a normal evening, they repaired to the salon after dinner. Um Taher stitched, and Midhat tried to put his thoughts in order while pretending to read a novel. Um Mahmoud made a racket over the next day’s breakfast in the kitchen and ducked her head in to wave goodnight.
The more his thoughts progressed, the more his headache, uncannily, receded. The pain lessened, and moved lower and lower in his skull until it seemed to disperse around his collarbone. If in the end he would have to marry someone, what held him back from saying yes to Teta, and conspiring for her choice? Fatima Hammad was indeed very beautiful.
The problem was Jeannette. It was remarkable that after years of silence his imagination was still able to invent reasons and ignore facts to preserve hope. He needed to concentrate, to run his fingers over the facts and make them real. He did not desire to revisit the episode with Sylvain Leclair and Frédéric Molineu. Yet how else could he be rid of her, except by recalling his suffering at the dinner table and her failure to defend him? She had transformed into a sticky substance, adhering to the walls of his brain. Faruq would call it forbidden love or some other cliché, but that was not it, not at all. Every description was like a sliding piece of ice that missed the point, and there she was below, darkly unexplainable. That house, its corridors, they trespassed onto the present—this must be why they called lovers insane. If a person lost everything that tied him to a place, no one could say that any of what occurred there was real. He had no photographs of Montpellier. Nothing but the coat he had bought, and the French hat, and his suits and ties.
Teta spun her panel round and pulled a thread tight. She licked a finger and caressed a new strand off the spool.
Nablus was where his duty lay. He was indebted to his father, and for that alone he must marry. This debt was arranged before he was born. His father’s care was always based on this future sense, that Midhat would mature like a bond and yield to him. So although one might be convinced momentarily that family ties were petty, in the end, as Jamil said, they were everything.
Darkness rose in the windows, and the fire glowed more brightly. Midhat stopped thinking, and as the flame clarified in the corner of his vision, reflexively he played a game from his childhood. When he looked at the fire directly the edge receded into a blur: the game was to move his eyes fast enough to catch the flame when it was most clear, and
there was no end, because it was impossible.
“You’ll have to decide soon, ya Midhat,” said Teta suddenly. She dropped her sewing into her lap. “You can’t do nothing,” her voice grew higher, “and not decide. Because we have to find another girl, and then it could be too late. Too late!”
“Teta, it has been one day since you asked me.”
She picked up the fabric, lifted her eyebrows at the needle, and said mildly: “You are a stupid, stupid boy.”
“Unbelievable,” said Midhat. “You are pretending to give me a choice, but I don’t have a choice. Clearly. Because you have already decided.”
“Who do you think you are?” She cocked her head to the side. “You come here with all your … clothes—who do you think paid for this?”
She was pointing at his jacket, slung over the footstool. From the pocket, a silk handkerchief was hanging. Midhat turned his face to the window.
“I have given you a very good choice,” said Teta. “Why are you making it difficult?”
She stood up, and something flew by. It was her sewing; she had thrown it onto the sofa.
“I’m finished. You do whatever you like. Fatima Hammad will be married to her cousin, your father will disinherit you, and then you’ll be sorry, and alone, or with a stupid cow who will bear you no sons.”
She bent and plucked up the sewing again, then slammed the door, leaving Midhat alone in the dark room. His breath was heavy. He looked straight at the blurred edge of the flame.
The following day was a Thursday. Dawn lifted on the khan as it filled with people, and shopkeepers from neighbouring stores dragged over their chairs to chat. A few customers touched fabrics but most lingered to talk and not to buy. As the shopkeepers swapped stories, Midhat watched the thoroughfare for veiled figures.
“Fa … when he talks, you know, really he believes what he did. He says when he arrived in Alexandria …”
“I remember this story.”
“He found a soldier on the beach.”
“Yes I remember this story.”
“His eye is coming out of his … his …” The man telling the story lost his breath to laughter and slapped his knee.
“From his socket.”
“He put it ba—”
“He put it back for him!”
The other man wheezed, and started coughing.
“Is there more coffee, amo?”
“Lahza,” said Midhat.
He filled the coffeepot from the faucet, and as he struck a match to light the flame he slipped into a mechanical fantasy, in which someone ran through the khan calling his name.
In Paris, Faruq had expounded an idea that marriage could be a kind of romantic limitation, though not the province of romance itself. He extracted various such theories from his readings, When he first described this one to Midhat he was lying on his sofa in Saint Germain, shoeless feet on the armrest and head on one of his hands, in the manner of certain Western photographs of Arab women in staged repose. The more external restrictions, he said, the more profound true love becomes. It becomes pure—this is love for another woman, of course, not the wife. The stronger the limitation, the richer the life inside. At the time Midhat had nodded and made a mental note, desperate for any principles to steer his life by. But standing in the Kamal store in Nablus, coffeepot in one hand and stack of cups in the other, Faruq appeared to him in retrospect as guilty as the next man of parceling life off into pocket theories. He wondered what had changed, that his trust in Faruq, before so sound, should now falter. Was it simply the geographical fact of being back in Palestine? Or was it being faced with the prospect of an actual marriage, rather than some dream of it?
“Meen bidu qahwe?” he said to the circle of men. All raised their hands.
Every one of these men was married. Some had divorced and married twice, three times. Famously, the man telling the story of the eye, who went by the moniker “Abu Islam,” had married a Christian woman from the east of Nablus. That was proof of a love match, if anything was.
Pouring the first cup of coffee, he wondered if it could be possible to defy his father, and at the same time obey his imperatives. The secrets of his life in France, the joys there but also the shame—that something large and dramatic had happened to him, leading him to abandon the course his father had chosen and begin anew, moving to Paris of his own accord, seeking other men to guide him, studying history instead of medicine, so that he knew the entire saga of Western Europe but nothing about healing a human body—he could see all of this taking on its own charge, so that his very privacy would become a kind of power. Never mind that much of what he was hiding was painful. His languishment would be more bearable because it was poetic, and suppression of the past would become a virtue, a secret source of grace.
The rest of the day passed unremarkably. The merchants packed up their wares and pulled the gates over their stalls. Midhat was bolting the green door when someone did actually run through the khan calling his name.
“Midhat! Midhaaat!”
Tahsin Kamal, his trouser legs riding up his knees.
“Habibi ta‘al. There’s a rawi at Sheikh Qassem.”
Midhat shrugged, sliding on the padlock.
“Yalla. Ta‘al.”
“Wait a moment, I’m coming. Do you know what tale he’s telling?”
“We’ll find out.”
They weren’t the only ones walking in the direction of Sheikh Qassem. Before long they were in the middle of a nodding throng. Kufiyas trailed from the heads of fellahin, older men wore sagging shirts and belts around their soft bellies, the younger men slick-haired with cheap grease. Three shoeshine boys with dirty tarabish carried their equipment under their arms and shouted at each other like tiny adults. An old fellah in a red headdress and overlarge suit smiled at Midhat with a toothless mouth, his kinked fingers pointing at the café.
Sheikh Qassem was already crowded and dark. A circle of lamps in one corner indicated the rawi, sitting beside a qanun player with a stage space around them where the tables were pushed back. Behind him stood an idle gramophone, its silent horn like a huge black lily. The rawi was conversing with some nearby members of the audience, while his player plucked at the instrument in his lap and adjusted the pegs. Tahsin rested his head against the back wall and made a face: when are they going to start? Men from the major families occupied the chairs. By the window Midhat saw Abdallah Atwan hunched with a hand on the shoulder of his young son, and then a few tables nearer by he recognised Jamil’s broad back. He slid between tables to kiss his cousin hello. A few people were singing along to the qanun music now, tripping in and out of a familiar melody. The rawi looked up: a little boy had entered, carrying a drum. The qanunist pulled up a third chair, and as the boy wriggled back on his seat the poet’s practised face cooled the audience. Moving his head he hummed, and the qanun’s notes ran like water around his voice. Men cheered and whistled.
“Abu Zayd al-Hilali,” he sang. “Ana sa-aqool lakum qissat Beni Hila-a-al.”
The qanun quietened, the little boy trilled his fingers lightly on the drum. The poet began to speak:
“In the name of God, the Almighty, this is the story of the Arabs of the Beni Hilal. In the time of the Sultan Sarhan, the mightiest warrior of Beni Hilal was Rizq the Brave, son of Nayil. Rizq the Brave had married eight women and sired many daughters. But not one of his eight wives had ever borne him a male heir. His soul grew troubled, and he began to sing:
Ah-ah-ah the World and Fate and Destiny
all I have seen with my eyes shall disappear
My wealth is great, oh men, but I am without an heir
and wea-alth without an heir after a life will disappear.
“Jamil,” Midhat whispered. “Can we talk?”
His cousin sucked on his pipe and nodded. They slid along the back wall, and the boys by the door stood aside to let them pass. Outside, the light was leaving the sky.
“What’s wrong?” Jamil looked back through the glass,
on which scratches made yellow circles around the lamps inside.
“Where to begin. I have my own story to tell you.”
The rawi’s voice crescendoed: A dark bird from the distance came to them.
“This is Abu Zayd!” someone shouted, and people clapped.
A dark bird … (“Ayyyywa!” “Allah.”) … frightful to behold …
“Don’t tell anyone this, uh?” said Midhat. “My grandmother wants me to marry Fatima Hammad. The daughter of Haj Nimr. He’s a judge, he was the mayor last year.”
“I know him, of course.”
“Teta invited the girl and her mother to the house, and then she showed me their faces through the keyhole of the salon door.”
Jamil leaned his shoulder against the wall. “Mish ma‘ool, Midhat. How did she … I mean, what did she look like?”
“Her face was—actually, you know, she looked like the moon.” He laughed at the cliché, as he would have with Faruq, and observed a twitch of noncomprehension on his cousin’s smiling face. A light flashed for an instant on a new gulf between them.
“A face like the moon,” he repeated, looking out at the dark street, where a lone figure walked in the direction of the Western Cemetery.
Of course Jamil would not laugh; cliché was a French notion. There was no such thing as cliché in Nablus; there were only public channels for behaviour, the common currencies of desire.
And Khadra cried, the rawi’s voice surged, O how beautiful you are, O bird, and how beautiful your darkness …
“Teta wants me to do a charm. I said no.”
“You don’t believe in that?” said Jamil. “Yeah, I suppose I don’t either. It probably wouldn’t hurt.”
A musical interlude was beginning, with a light drumbeat.
“Listen,” said Jamil. “I know you are fixated on this French woman, but that shouldn’t stop you. I mean, Fatima Hammad? If you can …”
Jamil folded his arms at the window, and Midhat looked at the side of his cousin’s closed face. Jamil was older than Midhat by almost a full year, which when they were children gave him an upper hand. Not only had he been ahead at school but his bones were always longer, his muscles more powerful, and when they fenced with branches he was always the victor and pinned Midhat to the ground with a faceful of twigs. Now time had levelled them and they were more or less the same height; still, Midhat was attentive to his cousin’s tone. Was that disdain, or admiration, that made him say, “If you can …”? He had impressed Jamil with his stories of France, he could see that. He sensed his largeness vacillate in his cousin’s eyes, with the weird embarrassment of reflected glory.
The Parisian Page 25