The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “I feel sorry for his son,” Um Jamil went on. “Nothing to inherit.”

  Only later, after Um Jamil left her on her doorstep, did Um Taher realise the party had been a failure for her. Of enquiries about available girls she had made none at all.

  A cough hurtled up through her belly and out through her mouth. At least if she was dying, she would join Um Midhat in heaven. She pictured herself laid out across the board, and Um Jamil, weeping, ministering to her body. A dignified face, eyes closed. No: eyes open. Let them close the eyes before the burial, that was a lovely action. She raised a hand in the darkness and imitated the movement with her fingers. Then, swinging her weight to the side, she thought of Midhat. She could not leave him. She sighed, and a hock of phlegm caught in her windpipe, and coughing again she felt wisps of electricity conferring in her chest.

  The morning was bleak. The storm last night had left nothing but cold behind. She wrapped herself slowly in many layers, resolved at last to visit the hospital.

  The wind hurt her throat and tore the breath from her lungs. Taking the northern road that curved west she cleared the town and approached the foot of Mount Ebal. The first thing she noticed in the hospital foyer was the odour, sharp and chemical-sweet, penetrating to the back of her head. A large coffer with a slit for coins stood in the centre, and beyond it a row of tall windows showed a tree-filled garden and arable land. From the bottom of one window poked the ends of two posts, perhaps the ears of a chair—a veranda. She slipped a hand into her purse for the coffer, and a nurse materialised on her right. She gestured for Um Taher to follow.

  The ward was long and dense with beds. Pictures hung crookedly on curved plaster walls and a large gas lamp swayed from the ceiling. Um Taher avoided looking at the occupants, but saw from the margins of her vision that all were girls, wearing nothing on their heads but a thin bit of fabric tied under the hair. The nurse’s heels clapped across the tiles, and the bedcovers writhed as the patients watched her follow. Was this what they did all day, lie in bed surveying whoever came through? There must be another room, a private one, in which the older, distinguished ladies took their rest.

  At the last bed but one, her gaze digressed. The bedclothes were so still that at first they appeared empty; there was, however, a woman lying there. On her back, staring up at the ceiling. It was not an attitude of repose.

  “Keefek, madame?” said the nurse.

  “Shu,” said Um Taher, indicating the motionless woman. “Hayye?”

  “Yes, she’s alive,” said a girl with an eye patch from the next bed. “She’s mad.”

  From a lighted doorway a man called, “Could I have your name please?” and the nurse jumped into action. “Tfadali.” She ushered Um Taher through the door and closed it between them.

  A bald Arab man was washing his hands in a basin.

  “I am Doctor Ibrahim. Your name?”

  “Mahdiya Um Taher Kamal.”

  “Thank you.” Doctor Ibrahim dried his hands on a flannel, and picked up a clipboard. “Please, sit.”

  The only place to sit was on a flimsy-looking bed with a white blanket. This room was both immaculate and crowded with objects. Um Taher fixed her attention on the shelves opposite, which held an assortment of translucent bottles with their labels facing her. As the doctor opened a drawer and shut it again, she reached out for a very small bottle at the end. The letters on the tag resembled grains of rice.

  “You can read French?”

  She looked up. The doctor had put on an apron.

  “I cannot read at all.”

  “Ah, so it’s the same. Don’t worry, I won’t be examining you. I am a surgeon. Here she comes, Sister Sarah. Bonjour Sister, meet Madame Kamal. La madame vient avec une maladie pulmonaire.”

  The nurse who had just opened the door was short, with black hair and a gaunt face. “D’accord.”

  The doctor swung a rubber pipe off his neck and handed it to her. “Fursa sa‘ida, Madame Kamal,” he said, raising a hand as he left.

  Sister Sarah spoke slightly more Arabic than the other nurse. She asked Um Taher to remove her veil, and applying the cold metal plug at the end of the rubber pipe to Um Taher’s chest, asked her to breathe in and out. Next, she told her to lean forward and lifted her gown to apply the metal to her back, warmed slightly by her skin but still cool, and asked her again to breathe in and out. Um Taher obeyed and heard the rattle of her lungs, amplified by the nurse’s attention. Something hard and metallic tapped her around the spine. Her back went cold with exposure and she knew the nurse had moved away.

  “Is it sill?”

  “No,” said Sister Sarah. She was writing in a large book. “No, it is not tuberculosis.”

  She would not need to stay the night. The nurse presented a small bottle of medicine with a rubber stopper and instructed her to put two drops in a big pan of hot water and inhale it in the evenings before bed.

  As she was leaving, Um Taher saw a bald pate through the window in the foyer, ridges in the skull like sand dunes. Descending the outer steps she took a long route round the back. There he was, in the corner of the railed veranda, rocking on a chair. His whitish robe involved a kind of shawl over his shoulders, and on his head he wore a black hat with a wide brim. He had a blanket over his lap, and he appeared to be sketching the view.

  She chose a chair beyond the remit of the window, and her heart began to calm as the animate landscape paused, the wind drawing breath before stirring the grasses again.

  After a while the priest stood and approached. In careful, accented Arabic, he asked if he might sit nearby, pointing at a particular chair, not directly beside hers but a few chairs down. She nodded, shrugged her shawl a little closer and adjusted the veil over her neck. But instead of turning to her, or paying her any attention at all, the priest simply arranged his blanket, faced the landscape, and continued to sketch. Perhaps he had only moved to adjust his perspective. She wheezed. She listened to his pencil whisper over the page, and to some faint birdsong, and the clock ticking on the farther wall. After a few moments he asked, still drawing:

  “Do you come to the hospital often?”

  “No. I am not often ill. Ba‘dayn, my grandson has trained to be a doctor.”

  “Oh really?” He was looking at her. “Where did he train?”

  “France.”

  “Ah, I am from France! Where in France?”

  “Paris. And … Montpeliano. Montpe …”

  “Ah,” said the priest.

  They exchanged pleasantries about the hospital, the war, the British; the priest made her laugh with a joke about the rivalry between England and France. She was telling him a funny story of her own, a famous one about the Samaritans and a lascivious Greek pastor, when she noticed that the priest’s pencil was writing words in the notebook, not drawing, and she cut herself off with: “What are you writing?”

  The pen ran backward over the page and stopped.

  “Something I wanted to remember. I’m sorry. Go on.”

  She would not go on. She must go and take her medicine, she said. She unlocked the gate on the veranda to depart that way, through the trees. From the lower path, she looked back and saw two figures on the balcony: the priest, and a woman. The black figure of the woman was moving, hands gesturing beneath her veil.

  She returned two days later, and arriving half an hour before the clinic opened was shown onto the veranda. There was the priest, in a rocking chair with his book. He returned her nod and faced the view. Birds sang, the clock ticked. The priest did not speak. She watched the minute hand turn. Finally, she took a long, unsteady breath.

  “I hear you have been talking to the Hammad family.”

  The long beard quaked with the movements of his face, and he blinked several times.

  “Haj Nimr Hammad has been very kind to me,” he said. “And of course, this is their hospital.”

  “How are they?” said Um Taher. “What is their news? I have not seen them for some time.”

&nb
sp; There was a pause. “Did you know about Haj Hassan’s exile?” said the priest.

  “Oh yes, yes, ma‘roof. And he sold his land in the Jordan Valley. Poor man.” She was quiet. “Anything else?”

  “I’m afraid that may be all I know about the Hammad family. Let me … let me look in my notes.” Pages sighed as he ran his hand over the corners.

  “And what about, who has been … visiting the Samaritans lately?”

  She challenged him with her eyes, thinking of her story about the Greek pastor. It was a transaction. She gave him one, he gave her one.

  “Well, there was a lady who wanted to do a charm for her grandson …”

  Her chest pounded.

  “Apart from that, while I was there once I saw a man from one of the major families, but I wasn’t allowed to sit in for that. They went into another room.”

  “Ah. And the family was?”

  “The man was an Atwan.”

  “Atwan. And you don’t know who the charm was for?”

  “No. I remember something about a bird. I’m afraid I didn’t write it down, I was trying to be … respectful.”

  The sides of his face spread apart and fell, and his arms shook as he made a hiccoughing noise. She realised he was laughing.

  “Of course, of course,” she said, hurrying to catch up.

  The door opened. “Madame,” said the nurse.

  “Thank you, Abuna,” said Um Taher, rising to her feet.

  “You are welcome. I hope to see you again, Madame.”

  9

  From an eastern peak of Mount Gerizim, Père Antoine watched the wind run through the valley, ruffling the trees and disturbing the grasses, and the whole landscape pulsed as the wind lost energy and mustered it again. He felt the alternating pressures on his sturdy body, pushing him gently back and forth, as the black cappa of his habit was tossed upwards like the skirt of a woman dancing.

  The rock on which he sat was shaped like a gigantic molar, and the depression in the crown was so smooth it was easy to imagine that hundreds had used it as a chair over the ages, shepherds and wanderers and mendicants like himself. And there was another, smaller rock in front for one’s foot to rest upon, before the declivity sharpened and the earth vanished, and a view rushed out of white citadels and walking figures. A vast and ancient olive tree stood rooted to his left, its bark so contorted and rivuletted that, squinting, one saw a crowd of figures stretched and crouching open-mouthed, like medieval lechers on a Last Judgment relief. All in all, the specimen had a girth of some three metres, which Antoine had estimated himself one morning by embracing it. More than once he heard it alleged the oldest tree in Palestine. Such allegations had to be taken with good humour; guides were always reporting prodigies they hoped would propel the hearer’s arm a little deeper into his or her pochette. But quite rightly they perceived it was a marvel. Antoine found himself at this spot again and again on account of this tree, this beautiful crone, which made such superb company for the view.

  Down there in the valley was Jacob’s Well. The Russians had begun building a church around it more than a decade ago, but stopped when their revolution broke out, so the church resembled a ruin before it ever lived as an entire building, and Jacob’s Well, though cleared of rubbish, remained half-exposed to the air. That was despite the fact that all the faiths of Abraham, which could squabble for eternity over relics and geographies, agreed at least on this one site, that it was Jacob’s, which was where Jesus Christ met the woman of Samaria, and he, according to the Gospel of John, “being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well” and asked that she might give him a drink. Yet no Nabulsi had gone out of his way to dress up the well for visitors, never mind the care they lavished on other shrines in the valley. No Nabulsi, aside from the odd enterprising guide, cared for European tourists at all. Other cities were forming whole quarters for pilgrims and artefact seekers. Nablus had not a single hotel for foreigners.

  But this was why Nablus was perfect for Antoine’s research: the city was nigh untouched. Her inhabitants did not perform, as he had watched impoverished Jaffans do, dressing up as shepherds to greet passengers from cruise ships with splinters of Christ’s own cross. Never in Nablus. Despite or perhaps even because of the Christian and Samaritan elements, Nablus was a perfect specimen of the Islamic city. Antoine observed her lovingly from below as well as above, and noted down all the hearsay he gleaned from the patients in the municipal hospital.

  Père Antoine’s official position was Professor of Oriental Studies at L’École Pratique d’Études Bibliques in Jerusalem. He joined the school as a student some twenty years ago, around the time of the Dreyfus affair when France expelled the religious orders and the Dominicans left Lyon in a flood. On the clerical grapevine, young Antoine had already heard about Père Lavigne’s new École in Jerusalem. Lavigne’s school wanted to defend Catholicism against the Modernists. The method, however, was unorthodox: the scholars would actually try to satisfy the demands of science and history, contextualise the gospel using “modern” methods—but use what they found to defend supernatural faith.

  Antoine was then nineteen years old and had never left France. He travelled by ship from Marseille to Port Said and thence to Jerusalem by train, and discovered on arrival that the strength of Lavigne’s reputation had imputed to his project more substance than it had in reality. The priory was not yet built, though the priests had measured out the ground across the old tomb of St. Stephen. Along with three other seminarians who had arrived for the start of term, Antoine was directed to lodge in a temporary dormitory on the premises of the former Turkish slaughterhouse.

  Père Lavigne, however, did not disappoint. A man of middling height, with a twisted friendly mouth, modest brown beard, and balding head, he infected the boys at once with his enthusiasm. His speech at the inaugural assembly gave Antoine the impression of a large-hearted visionary, striving, not without fear, but with courage enough to lead them all in their course towards truth.

  Within a couple of weeks the impact was mutual: brother Antoine was star of his class in the Semitic languages, and in him Lavigne said he detected a capacious mind marked already by the anxieties of high ambition. Throughout the ensuing five years of his studies, and long after his anointment, Lavigne operated as Antoine’s personal mentor. He encouraged Antoine’s rigour, his independence, his virtue. Antoine’s was a mind after Lavigne’s own: that rare meticulous Catholic with a faith so pure he could keep one clear-sighted eye trained always on the earth.

  The modernist crisis was a personal crisis for every exegete. Lavigne’s courage was to bring this into the open, and steer the school to battle en masse. To defend the faith, he taught them, to seek out true meaning, they must fearlessly apply techniques of literary analysis to biblical text. Was it a camel that passed through the eye of a needle? Or was it, by a corruption of text and misunderstanding, a rope? Strengthened by their master’s faith, and every day crossing the very ground that Jesus trod, living one storey above the sepulchred relics of Stephanos, the young brothers read the Gospels in Greek, studied and spoke Aramaic, closed in on the incalculable questions, confronted with valour the awful fact that the Latin vulgate they were raised on was itself a dilution. But in the mad breath of Jerusalem it was easy to visualize Christ’s real body, the bony hands that healed and were maimed under the pale hot sky before that skull-white Golgotha stone, and these visions equipped them with courage where the Protestants, they knew, had already faltered.

  Although the larger aim was metaphysical, therefore, Lavigne’s vision for the school was absolutely local and material. He spent great energy seeking a faculty to develop the curricula of languages, archaeology, and geography. The school grew in size and sprouted a wing for another dormitory. The brothers and fathers considered themselves in Aquinas’s image: all things in heaven and earth converged, and everything had its essence. As scholars they were stretching through their intellects to touch those essences, like pilgrims placing hands on
the Anointing Stone.

  The watchful eye of the papacy was not so sure. From that Latin vantage Lavigne’s “historical method” looked suspiciously similar to the modernism it purported to attack. Lavigne’s annotation of Genesis was banned. Far from discouraging the seminarians, however, this news of pontific suspicion actually spurred them on. A fever of devotion ran down the makeshift lecture halls. They were pioneers. First they had incurred the wrath of France, and now the wrath of Rome. They were a fellowship of brothers, navigating the rationalist storm together, aiming at the divine beacon of the Church’s authority, with their minds.

  At the farther edge of the city a motorcar appeared. It progressed like a beetle along the valley road and passed a tiny figure holding something; the figure moved to the side, and a puff of dust rose around the wheels as the vehicle turned a corner. A Brit’s car, undoubtedly; no Arabs in Nablus owned cars, though chauffeurs were sometimes locals. Through the dust the figure continued walking. Antoine made a note:

  “Ask ladies at the hospital—motorcars?”

  The muezzins began to interrupt each other. He shifted his foot. A woman in a cloak was stepping off the path towards him. She wore a headdress—no, a wimple. It was Sister Louise.

  “Sister! I didn’t recognise you.”

  He stood and gestured at the vacated rock. She mimed a protest, then reached out for the back of the rock and circled her way around it, stepping carefully. With some difficulty, he crouched on the ground beside her.

  “How are the patients today?”

  “Another boy with influenza.”

  “You sound peeved.”

  Sister Louise tightened her lips. “Perhaps I am peeved.” She sighed. “I have something to tell you. We have been debating it for some time, and now it is agreed. We will soon leave the hospital in Nabulsi hands.”

  “Truly?”

  “This time, yes. We’ll continue training the local girls, but eventually that will be enough. They want us to expand the girls’ school. Don’t look at me like that, it’s by popular decree. They like the fact that we are very clean.” In lieu of a smile, she pouted. “They see it as a Muslim attribute. So we will have a dispensary attached, and continue with the village visits. But the hospital … you know, Ibrahim is extremely competent. I don’t know what that means for your research, father, but I imagine he won’t mind you on the veranda. You see I’m tired. They accuse us of espionage, and then the moment the injured arrive from Jerusalem they are desperate for us to stay again. It is exhausting.”