The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “I was thinking I would ask Fatima Hammad. Daughter of Haj Nimr.”

  Jamil leaned forward for the baklawa, and Haj Taher turned to Teta. “She’s a nice girl?”

  Teta shrugged and nodded at the same time.

  “Hammad is a good family,” he said. “You should ask soon. She’s how old?”

  “I don’t know, actually.”

  “Seventeen years,” said Teta, with some force.

  “Shu malik?” said Haj Taher. “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s the food? Yalla.”

  “Um Mahmoud is cooking. It will be ready in half an hour.” She eyed the door.

  “Where’s your watch, Midhat?”

  It took Midhat a moment to process the question. He became aware of his hands, which he had placed on his thighs. He could not tear his eyes from his father’s face, the black beard tipping as he rearranged his tie, the grey hair at his temples. The silence persisted. His father looked directly at him.

  “It’s being fixed,” said Midhat.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Oh it’s only the … mechanism … he said it would be easy to fix.”

  “Who’s he.”

  “The watch … fixer. On the road to … the road in …”

  “Jerusalem?” Jamil supplied.

  “Jerusalem. Greek guy, he does watches, and clocks, cameras … and all of that.”

  “Well I hope it’s not expensive.” Taher extracted another piece of baklawa. “And how is the store? I saw Hisham.”

  “Good, yes, it’s good. I’m enjoying it.”

  “Enjoying. Well, we’ll get you to Cairo soon. You’ll enjoy that much more.”

  To Midhat’s relief, the conversation at dinner turned back to politics. Some of the notables in Jerusalem were not so keen on Faisal, his father said. They wanted Palestine to fight for independence on her own.

  “And there have been some disturbances. You know what the people are like, when something catches fire …”

  “What kind of disturbances?” said Jamil.

  “I don’t think that is going to help the cause,” said Midhat. “We aren’t strong enough to threaten anyone. The Europeans will always have better armies. If you’re violent and you’re also the weakest party, I don’t think that works out well.”

  “How do you know we would be the weakest?” said Jamil.

  “Look at the war.”

  “With the help of the Arabs, Britain and France won the war.”

  Midhat grimaced and shook his head. “That was something else. That was about being on the inside. It was a different situation.”

  “Mashi,” said Haj Taher. “I agree with you on that last point. But about the violence, I mean of course that’s reasonable. We are going about it on that basis, ba‘dayn, all this in Haifa. Bas remember that not everyone is reasonable in a crowd. And how can you say this to someone when they’re hungry. You and I, we’re not hungry. You can afford to think the way you do. I’m not saying I don’t agree with you, I’m just saying ash-sha‘ab, ya‘ni, the people work differently. It’s economic, in a way.”

  Midhat nodded. He examined his father’s face for any sign he might be irritated. All he could detect were the beginnings of a smile in his mouth and eyes, at which he experienced a minor thrill. In its glow he rushed over some new arguments, constructing a balance between the two perspectives, one for pan-Syrian unity, the other for Palestinian independence, trying to gauge, as he talked, what precisely his father’s position might be in order to align himself with it. But after that initial speech about the people, Haj Taher became difficult to pin down. The smile had not materialised. He gave Midhat several long, inscrutable stares, and nodded occasionally, as though storing the information for a later judgment.

  “But Palestine is tiny,” said Jamil. “I don’t see how we can fight without Damascus.”

  “My grandmother was from Damascus,” said Teta, loftily.

  “Since it’s clear the Zionists don’t want to mix with us,” said Taher, “their economy is their own, then it means we have to work ourselves out on our own.”

  Midhat ran over this statement several times, but could not make sense of it. He realised he was frowning, and unclenched his forehead.

  “And how is your wife, and the children?” said Teta.

  “Fine, everyone’s fine. Musbah is away at school.”

  “Habibi, give me the bread.”

  “And when will you be coming back again, Father?”

  “To Nablus? The spring. The spring is the best time for a wedding.”

  The plates cleared, Jamil went home, and Haj Taher took his coffee in the salon. In the hall, Teta grabbed Midhat’s arm.

  “Why did you tell him that? He said no to you.”

  “Who?”

  His father’s legs were just visible through the salon door, one foot dangling over the other. A thread of cigarette smoke stretched across the doorway.

  “Haj Nimr!” she whispered.

  “Oh, just—Teta hold on. Let me try one more time.”

  “Castles in the air. You know this will be on my head.”

  “Why on your head?”

  “Because I am supposed to be arranging it.”

  “Just wait. Let me try first. And if it doesn’t work, then we’ll talk.”

  In the morning, Taher refused Midhat’s offer to accompany him to the station, but he did put an arm around him, and kissed his cheek. Midhat waited by the door as the footsteps died on the rocks. Memories of his father leaving coalesced into a single departure, like a stone hewed in one place by the repeated touch of water. This chill of being left behind, with the whole day ahead, this was a far stronger dose of childhood than anything he had recognised or recalled since his return.

  Although his father’s suggestion of a spring wedding would not leave long to secure a bride, Midhat did not immediately start planning a second proposal to Haj Nimr. Instead, over the next week he became preoccupied with the house in which the Hammad family lived. The building itself, with its three arched windows and grand entrance, began to feature in the landscapes of his dreams. He visited the road in secret, rising earlier than usual to walk by on his way to the khan. He stood on the dark morning street and stared up at the roof, then crossed over to the other side to catch the top of the front door. He did not investigate his reasons. Nor did he ever attempt to go beyond the wall. At first he tried to map out, from the configuration of windows, the room in which he had first proposed, with the sloping ceiling above the kitchen. But it was impossible to navigate the interior with only an external view. Sometimes, the slits of a shutter flashed as a body moved inside, but the house gave no other signals.

  By the end of that week his resolve had hardened. He managed to forget the feeling of the first humiliation, and his courage was renewed. Sparing little time for self-reflection, his mind ran clearly. He worked well; he made cheerful conversation with Butrus in the back room and Eli at the Samaritan store. He did not pray; he thought too little about life beyond the present moment to give any thought at all for what might transcend it.

  While doing the accounts one afternoon, he turned to the back of the book where his drawings were. The first was a page of waistcoats. He gripped the leaf at the seam, and began to tear. The sound was loud and pleasant. Gone the Parisian dresses. Gone the three-piece suits. As he was crumpling the ripped pages, his eye fell on the next. It was covered in drafts of the same woman’s face. Dimple in the chin, little wrinkles under the eyes. He dropped the screwed-up balls of paper, and slid this page into the light. His heart fell. He had done the hair in different styles: short, long, pinned back. But he had accentuated those two features—chin and eyes—at the expense of the others. The lips were wrong.

  “If we need more blue taffeta, we need more blue—” came Hisham’s voice from the back room, where he was talking to Butrus.

  Midhat blushed to think Hisham might have seen these. He placed
his hands flat on the warm wooden counter. He was going to give in—just this once. Like falling into an illicit sleep: first, he summoned her chin. He waited for the rest. Broken lines came, movements, the shape of her face. Her lips. Sweet, soft, rounded at the bottom. His stomach twanged. The eyes had not come, and he was still waiting for them when Hisham’s footsteps sounded behind him. He forced himself awake, tore the page three times with shaking hands, and threw it with the others into the bin.

  “Before you say, ‘I want to marry Fatima,’” said Jamil, “make sure you describe yourself. I am Midhat, I have lived in Paris, I am educated. Shayef? And then you say, I would like to marry your daughter, and so on, kaza wa kazalek.”

  “That’s what I did last time.”

  “Well this time spend more time talking about yourself. And after that, don’t forget to compliment the family. And maybe … dress up a little. What were you wearing last time? Try a nicer tie.”

  Midhat chose a blue mouchoir and a pair of matching blue silk socks, and had his shoes shined. He started sweating on the street below. He pressed the outer doorbell and the guard showed him up the steps, past the trellis, to the house itself.

  Even after hours of talking it over with his cousin, he was unable to imagine this event happening in any other way than exactly as it had happened the first time. Widad would open the door, show him upstairs; he even anticipated the same group of men drinking orange juice. But it had been autumn then, and now it was the verge of winter, and the northern winds brought a whisper of snow. He climbed the steps and was about to knock when the door opened of its own accord. Haj Nimr was standing on the other side.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Midhat.

  “Ah … Hello. How can I help? I’m leaving, I’m afraid.”

  “I would like … My name is Midhat Kamal.”

  “Midhat Kamal. As-salamu alaykum. I’m going to the diwan. Walk with me.”

  “I have studied medicine,” his voice echoed under the arch to the gate, “as well as philosophy, and history also. And my father’s business is doing extremely well in Cairo.”

  Nimr waved at the guard as they stepped onto the street.

  “The name is becoming quite famous. Kamal. And he is involved in politics also, my father. He has just returned from Damascus, and he was at the general conference in Haifa. He will be one of the representatives for Nablus at the Palestine Committee meeting, with the aim of unification with Syria.”

  This last assertion was not exactly true, but it was a nice embellishment, which Jamil had said would leave an impression on Nimr’s mind after he had forgotten the particulars.

  “Oh, very good,” said Nimr.

  Midhat felt confident to proceed. “For these reasons, I believe I would make an excellent husband for your daughter Fatima.”

  They had reached the point in the street where the paving dipped over the shape of the mountain. Nimr stopped and turned his head. His mouth was slightly agape.

  “You have already asked me this.”

  Midhat drew breath to interrupt. Nimr continued: “And I did tell you that the answer—unfortunately—is no.”

  “I know, I know,” said Midhat. “I wanted to try again.”

  “The answer will still be no.”

  “Is she marrying Yasser Hammad?” Midhat had not planned to ask this, and knew he was blushing.

  “Excuse me? No … no, she is not marrying Yasser.” Haj Nimr considered him. And then, belatedly, seemed to take affront. “I am going to be late now,” he said. “Ma‘salameh.”

  Haj Nimr walked down the hill. Midhat stayed where he was, denied a second time. But at least he had learned that she was not marrying Yasser.

  Even after this second rejection, he did not stop visiting the Hammad house. There was no snow yet, only rain, which came in heavy blasts, unpredictable and intermittent. Dawn shivered in the peaked windows that showed over the high wall. His morning visits became a secret compulsion, and over subsequent weeks he split into two people; one was the doctor of the other and made a point of checking his appetite. His doctor-self limited the visits to the Hammad house to every other day, and under this restriction he effected in his chest a strenuous longing on the days he was deprived. And on the days he surrendered and ran early down the mountain, he began to feel the same blissful consolation of running to meet a lover. Except that all he was meeting was a house, and not even an entire house: only what segments of window and roof were visible over the wall.

  At least, this was the case until one morning, when he was waiting down on the street under a light drizzle, and the front door opened. Out stepped two figures in black. A shorter and a taller. One of them must be Fatima. On his tiptoes he squinted, the rain cold on his face. One of them half turned on the steps, and opened an umbrella. They disappeared behind the wall. The gate opened, and they slipped onto the road. He met the eyes of one, he did not know afterwards if she was the taller or the shorter, only that she met his eyes and he knew it was her. And then she had covered her head beneath the umbrella, and they were pattering away down the street.

  The rain sharpened and crashed around him. Midhat felt sick. He looked at the stone wall, streaked with darkness by the rain, and vividly Jeannette came to him. He saw her turning in the upstairs corridor, her soft rejecting cheek, and with a rush of loathing pulled the tarbush from his head. His shirt was wet. The puddles on the road were wide and deep and when he arrived home his feet were soaking, and Um Mahmoud shrieked at the footprints in the hall. On the table lay an envelope, addressed to him. He rubbed his arms with a towel and tore it open with a finger: the hand was Hani’s.

  9 February 1920

  18 Jumada I 1338

  Cher Midhat,

  I write to you from Damascus—though I will be returning with Emir Faisal to Europe soon—I hope you are well—the last time I saw you, you were writing a letter—I hope that all worked out for the best. You must be happy back in Nablus with your family. I miss you dear Midhat—when the region is settled I hope we shall see each other again—for now as you may know it is a difficult time and the latest round of talks with Clemenceau has been a failure and yet there seems to be nothing else to do but continue to negotiate—even while the people of Damascus or really all of Syria are in distress.

  After the withdrawal of the British troops the French have been in the coastal areas—there have been many clashes. Faisal has been corresponding with General Gouraud hoping to settle the tension and Gouraud has just now accused him of incitement. This is absurd of course—Gouraud is asking Faisal to deny rumours that the French want to invade. How can they expect him to do that when that is exactly what it looks like? How can they expect him to approve the imprisonment of Mahmoud Abd al-Salam and the other ones when in their demonstrations in Sidon they were calling out “Long live King Faisal”? How are we supposed to stop the newspapers from naming Faisal a king to whom Syria is his due kingdom? Tripoli expresses allegiance to Syria—how can they expect us to take action against them? Syria is in insurrection—it is imperative that we send Arab representatives to cool down the Western region. The French say this would have terrible consequences—how can it be terrible I ask you when they would be Syrians discussing with their compatriots the future of their country—reassuring them that they are all members of an independent Syria? The French say the Christians want to be separate from the Muslims—again this is not true—and they keep calling the Syrian army Sharifi when not one soldier is from the Hejaz—they are all Syrians! We are all Syrians. The French want to provoke religious warfare and now they have stopped the convoys of food from going to Aleppo. Would you call that the behaviour of an ally? I do not think so.

  As for Palestine—the Zionist program is trouble for everyone. Faisal is trying to be honourable and naturally the French are putting pressure on him to compromise. I hesitate these days over whether to call myself Syrian or Palestinian—and what about “Arab”—when the Europeans use the word I am sure th
at in fact they only mean a Muslim—they often also seem to mean a man who lives in a tent. What does that mean for the Christians and the Jews and the people of the Levant in general? And while we’re on that topic we should be clear about what exactly we ourselves mean by the term when we use it—is it simply a question of language or something larger—because in the end “Arab” might be no finer than “European”—and we know how different the French are from the Germans. This is why I think we should be called Syrians—were the Jews called Syrians at the time of Christ and before him? Yes—Herodotus had already called them thus.

  In the end I hope we will be able to name ourselves—the American Commission reported that no solution that has only a single people in mind can prevail but on the contrary habibi Midhat we all know that the strongest power will prevail as it always prevails.

  As for Faruq—when I left Paris he was continuing at the language school where the numbers had risen since the armistice—he misses you—he asked after his favourite lover and it reminded me to write—and of course I also miss you. I hope your journey was safe and Nablus is not yet too troubled by what is happening.

  Your brother,

  Hani

  8

  “Examine me,” said Um Taher. “I’m sick.”

  “What?”

  “I said, examine me.”

  “I can’t,” said Midhat. He hesitated, searching for an excuse. “I have none of the equipment.”

  “You can’t do it without equipment?”

  He closed his book. “Are you coughing at all?”

  “Of course I’m coughing. You don’t hear me at night?”

  “Is there anything in the cough?”

  “Sometimes.” She tested her throat: nothing came. She whimpered. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “What about pain?”

  “All the time.”

  “Where?”

  “Sometimes here, sometimes here. I might be dying.”

  “You think if you were dying you’d be walking around? I don’t think so,” said Midhat, and roughly opened his book again.

  With mock nonchalance, hand on the door handle: “In that case, I suppose I’ll go to the clinic near the Green Mosque.”