The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  The chant caught, strengthened by other voices: “Falastin arad-na, al-Yahud aklab-na! Falastin arad-na! al-Yahud aklab-na!” The words rushed through the crowd, mouth to mouth. Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs. They bored into Midhat’s ears and pervaded his brain, and soon he lost his sense of discomfort, of dirt and sweat, of his thirst which the lemonade had awakened. His body was their body. And again in his chest, that weird swelling joy. The chant beat there without words, and this time the feeling spread to his limbs, which moved as if acted upon by reflex hammers. He clapped, his feet stamped.

  Turning his head, Midhat saw a fist meet someone’s face by the gate, and dark spatters on the wall, and in that instant he came unglued. A metallic taste arose in his mouth. His chest and ears hurt, and the percussion kindled a spurt of panic. Someone staggered and other faces changed, grooved like masks. Saliva flew, eyeballs flashed, limbs hardened into batons. The words were real now, in all their violence; his body peeled back into itself, and through his sweat-weakened shirt, his back and arms prickled with the wool fibres from his coat. At last the first speaker on the balcony began his oration, and the drumbeat went quiet like a dead breeze.

  Behind the speaker a banner was unfurled with Emir Faisal’s likeness, and Midhat looked back again. That cameo of violence he had witnessed was gone; he could not see the blood spatters, but the clock tower that marked Jaffa Gate was far off, there were so many people in the way. What a mistake to think he could find Jamil here.

  The crowd started roiling again. The nearest wall was on his right. Midhat pushed, sweaty arms met sweaty backs. “Excuse me, excuse me.” He put on a distressed face, which did nothing to expedite his passage. The wall was dank and rough. The unlucky ones nearest to it were so squashed he could see why many had resorted to climbing. One young boy was crying. Midhat pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed towards him, but the boy did not register the cotton uncrumpling before his face. Tears continued to fill his eyes, breaking and falling.

  The chant was up again. Beyond the boy, Midhat saw an opening in the wall.

  “Amo, take it.”

  He reached to touch the boy’s back. The boy flinched and hit him in the stomach. Midhat panted in surprise. He stared at the puckered face now turning from him, and then with a deep breath pushed past for the opening in the wall. It led to an alleyway crammed with people squeezing up into the square, but the gradient showed the crowd was not deep. He forced his way through, still mimicking his own dismay, his lip curving outward perversely like the crying boy’s.

  In the air of the street the sweat on his clothes ran cold and he gasped. His ribs were sore. The alley took him under a heavy arch and before long the crowd was nothing but a dim vibration in stone. He rested against the wall; it cooled his neck. Looking upwards he saw a patch of blue sky trapped between the buildings.

  There was a new sound, coming from the other direction. Another rhythm, another drumbeat, coming closer. The beat clarified into the thud of marching. One two, one two, chopping the flagstones.

  The first pair appeared from around the corner. Then like a ghost troop they filed past, paying him no attention. One two, one two. Beige jackets with ties, tan shorts. Military boots, one two. His first thought was that the British had brought in an army to guard the festival. But looking at the faces he realised they were not Englishmen, nor Indian colonials. He recalled Basil’s comment about a “Zionist army.” They continued to file past, there must have been hundreds, and not only men: he could see hair curled and pinned back from faces, all of them marching in rhyme, rifles on their backs, straps of bullets around their torsos. One, two, their feet smacked the ground. The last pair turned the corner, and they were gone.

  Midhat fled. Perhaps if he had fought in the military he would have understood how so many people, all together, were no longer like people. He had read about crowds before, written about them in university essays on the French Revolution, seen photographs, heard reports—he had never been in one. What frightened him most, what made him shudder as his walk sprang into a run and he heard shouts behind him, was that he had felt something. That fever of unity, out there by the Arab Club.

  Coming out through Zion Gate, he passed a few police by the city walls panicking inward, swinging their weapons. A noonday sun beat down. The taxi rank was all the way round by Damascus Gate, and his adrenalin faded at the prospect of the walk. He had only taken a few steps when a policeman in a pith helmet ran towards him, steadying his gun.

  “I need to check you.”

  “Pardon?”

  The policeman raised the gun. Midhat raised his hands.

  “I need to check you.”

  “But—I’m leaving.”

  “Keep your hands up!”

  The policeman’s rough fingers woke the soreness in his ribs. He pressed the area around Midhat’s waistband, then ran his hands down each of his legs, investigated the cuffs of his trousers, and finally asked him to remove his shoes. His socks were soaked in sweat and his soles were very tender on the ground.

  “All right. You can go.”

  A taxi careened up the road. Midhat whistled, waved, and from the backseat breathed: “Nablus.”

  “We have to take the long route,” said the driver.

  “Mashi, take the long route.”

  He shut his eyes and rested against the leather. Honks, shouts. His breath became regular: he would sleep. On the red of his closed lids, Jamil appeared. Jamil, dropped into a pool of bodies. His eyes snapped open.

  A line of pilgrims was straggling down the road parallel to theirs. Peddlers along the roadside held palms to their foreheads.

  “Someone should warn them,” said the taxi driver. He leaned across the wheel to look out the window.

  “Yes,” said Midhat.

  The pilgrims struck their drums. Midhat summoned a new image of Jamil: several heads taller than everyone else, forcing his way through the crowd like a swimmer, sated, wading from a lake.

  * * *

  “What happened?” said Teta.

  “I need some water.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. We shouldn’t have gone, it was a stupid idea.”

  “Where’s Jamil?”

  Midhat gulped and wiped his mouth.

  “You left him?”

  “No, Teta, it was a crowd. You won’t understand.”

  “What? What won’t I understand?”

  “It was a crowd, Teta! It was … it was …” He sat down and rested his head in his hands. “He will be fine.”

  “We have to tell Um Jamil.”

  “Why worry her? Just wait. A bit longer.”

  Teta fixed him. That “bit longer” was a concession, and he stood, in recognition of his defeat.

  “Yalla,” he said.

  One look at Um Jamil’s face and Midhat knew he would soften the truth for her. At the kitchen table the women besieged him with questions, and through his exhaustion he forced into a few coherent facts and images what he had seen: the crowd, the numbers; the heat, the chanting; being separated from Jamil; his decision, which he emphasised, that it was best to follow the crowd and find him, but which he afterwards realised was impossible; the speeches, which he could barely remember; the banner of Faisal; his escape. They gaped like children at a hakawati. After a while Um Jamil raised a hand and pressed her lips together. Midhat noticed her head beginning to tremble and wished she had not stopped him, he wished to correct what he had said, to intervene in the progress of her imagination. Now that he was no longer defending himself against Teta, it was striking him with full force what a terrible thing he had done, leaving Jamil. The facts he had shared, even in their censored form, admonished him for it.

  “I will boil water,” said Teta.

  She tossed a bundle of dried sage onto the table, and Midhat picked the first leaf from its stalk. “Nothing has happened, I’m sure of it.”

  Tears pooled and dripped down Um Jamil’s wrinkles.
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  “Nothing has happened,” Teta sang.

  The water boiled, the tea steeped into a gold liquid. Um Jamil’s chest rose in fits. Teta poured three cups, and rummaged in the pantry for some bread and a jar of labneh balls in olive oil, and spilled a few onto a plate. Midhat mopped the oil slowly, watching it wander round the porcelain.

  It was nearly seven o’clock when they heard the front door.

  “Oh mama!” Um Jamil cried.

  Their chairs screeched. Jamil had a black eye and his lip was cut, the collar of his shirt dark with sweat and dirt. He suddenly clutched the side of a dresser, as though he had seen it was about to fall.

  “Oh my God,” said Midhat.

  “You’re here,” said Jamil.

  Midhat tried to say something. To his horror, he found he could not.

  “What happened to your face?” said Um Jamil.

  “Someone elbowed me.” Jamil winced. “They were dancing. Where did you go? I lost you, I was trying to find you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Midhat, “the police—I—I left.”

  “You left him!” said Teta. “You left him to be beaten up!”

  “He was right,” said Jamil.

  “Sit, habibi,” said his mother.

  Jamil did not sit. “It was bad. They went straight to the Jewish quarter.” He looked Midhat in the eyes, and Midhat perceived there was more he was not saying. “The British locked the gates. I had to wait until dark to climb the wall.”

  “Did Basil …”

  “I didn’t see Basil. I was just trying to get out of there. Honestly I have no idea what happened.”

  “You’re hurt!” shouted Um Jamil, pointing at his shoulder. Um Taher gasped.

  “No, Mama,” said Jamil, shrugging her off. “It’s not my blood.”

  There was silence.

  “We shouldn’t have gone,” said Midhat.

  “You should not have gone!” Teta shouted back, as though contradicting him.

  “No, no,” said Jamil. He raised a tired hand. “We were right to go. It is important to have seen this.”

  From the writhing crowd the women had retreated quickly in single file. Outside Jaffa Gate, the commotion was even worse. They pushed to the hem of the crowd, and Fatima, reckless with panic, ran from the hot sun under the awning outside the Christakis Pharmacy. Several women followed close behind, holding their veils to stop them from slipping, and crowded with her against the glass. The pharmacy was closed for Sunday, and the window display was a picture of stillness. The sunlight exposed the dust on a line of green medicine bottles; beyond the diagonal cast by the awning, the shadow was absolute. Then the dusty light was blotted with darkness, and English voices shouted over the din. Ten or so policemen came jogging down the road, red discs of field caps on their heads. They hovered as Jaffa Gate emitted a loud shrieking. Amid the motion it was difficult to make out any actual violence—until someone at the margin grabbed someone else’s shirt, and one tall, seal-like Englishman with a heavy nose and sloping shoulders charged forward with his gun ready.

  “Yalla ya banat,” said the leader. She raised her umbrella over two companions. “To the taxi rank.”

  They clung together on the road and separated into the cars. Fatima put her face in her hands to recite the Throne verse. Suddenly she cried: “I don’t have any money!”

  “I have money,” said Muna. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have taken you if I’d known.”

  “I’m fine. Thanks be to God. We’re all fine.”

  The taxi dropped Fatima first. She steeled herself to meet her mother, to formulate a least shameful version of the truth; for how would anyone believe a lie, covered as she was in dust? In the hall she listened, but heard nothing. Her mother had not returned.

  In the bathroom she sponged her forehead, stripped, and rinsed her whole body. Her ears throbbed with the crowd. Images of the procession and riot, that churning sea of men, settled into mental drifts, and between them a conviction emerged, sculpted by their shapes, resolving in that space into something hard and intelligible.

  In their bedroom, Nuzha lay on her stomach reading a magazine.

  “Is Burhan here?”

  “Oh, you’re back. Yes he is, but he won’t tell. How was it?”

  “Violent.”

  Nuzha twitched in surprise.

  “Do you want anything from the kitchen?”

  Her sister shook her head. Fatima withdrew and descended the stairs, and whispered outside her father’s study: “Baba.” Silence. She let her voice into the breath. “Baba.”

  A chair creaked. “Meen?”

  “Fatima.”

  The door resisted, caught on the carpet.

  “You have to push.”

  It swished into an office warm with sunlight. Two large books lay open on the desk at which her father sat. The room was stifled with cushions and a musty smell of paper and bodies. A glaucous sheen covered the window glass.

  “What.” A pair of spectacles dimpled the skin on Nimr’s forehead.

  “May I sit?”

  He looked slightly baffled, but did not object.

  “Baba …” she breathed. “I want to ask you about …” She ran a fingernail across the skirt on her leg and looked up. Not at his face; at the shelf of books. A sound came from somewhere; music, from another room. “I’m frightened.”

  “Frightened?”

  She looked down.

  “Ah. Don’t be frightened about that. And don’t listen to your mother.” He extracted his glasses from his forehead and sat sideways on his chair. “She doesn’t know. Listen, habibti, we will find you a husband, don’t worry. Someone wealthy, a good name, a good family.”

  “What about Midhat Kamal?”

  He inhaled to speak. Then he released the breath, and shaking his head said, “The Kamal family is nothing, Fatima.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want better. I want—” His lips moved rapidly without sound, catching words and dropping them. “How dare you question me,” he reached at last, a sharp note of surprise entering his voice. “I am your father. Really, shame, Fatima, shame.”

  “I’m sorry. I am just afraid, and I think that Midhat—”

  “Why do you want him? Did your mother tell you to say this?”

  “Burhan told me things about him. I would like—”

  “You would like to marry this Kamal.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s not a good match for you.”

  “Why? Why is he not a good match?”

  His mouth opened again. But this time she had startled him out of rage and into a quick answer. “Because he’s not good enough. He’s not good enough to be my relative! Who is Kamal? Nothing!” His throat rasped. “Yalla, what is it that you like about him. Tell me.”

  She hesitated. What a peculiar day! Making holes where she had not expected them. She tried to summon the features of Midhat that she knew, of which there were not many. “I like that he was in France,” she said. “They call him the Parisian. He’s very refined—they say. I like the way he looks.

  And I like …”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Burhan showed me,” she said quickly, “through the window.”

  “I have to speak to Burhan.”

  “He didn’t mean to, I asked him, in fact. I wanted to know, it’s my fault, because I heard you talking about him, about Midhat, with Mama, and I wondered what he was like. And Burhan was with me and he pointed at the window when he was passing, with some other people, and Burhan said that one, that one is him.”

  “And you have decided you like him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ya Rubbi. Ya … Rubbi. Where is the money from?”

  “Clothing. There’s a business. In Nablus and in Cairo, I believe.”

  “Well. I suppose the money will be safe. Not everyone’s money is safe.” He shook his head. “I have to think about it.”

  He slid back in his chair. It was some
moments before she realised that this had been the signal for her to go.

  “Thank you, Baba.”

  “Yalla.”

  The resolution Fatima had come to in the bathroom was this. Had she invented Midhat’s difference from the other men, her invention still remained better than the pure unknown. Better to ride an ungrounded conviction and make her own choice, than to find herself being thrust by the neck, flung wide over the precipice, and out into the sea.

  11

  How did the riots actually begin?—that was one question people asked. Every account conflicted with another, and every eyewitness swore his own testimony was definitive. According to one version, the fighting started when a Jewish boy grabbed the Prophet’s flag and tore a corner off the silk. Others said the flagbearer spat on an elderly Orthodox lady, and called her a Zionist son of a dog. Other accounts did not feature a flag at all, but centred on an event in the lobby of the Amdursky Hotel, where an old man was beaten to the ground with sticks. Some said the old man was Jewish, his assailants Arab; others said the man was Arab, his assailants Jews from Jabotinsky’s army; all of them said that when someone came to help the man, whose head was bleeding over the marble floor, his helper was promptly stabbed by the assailants, and it was those savages who should be held responsible for the violence that immediately broke out in the street in front of them, in which four Arabs and five Jews were killed, and many more wounded.

  One cause of the uncertainty was the nature of the old city of Jerusalem herself. Her alleys twisted unpredictably and her steps continually frustrated the passage of any horse or vehicle, and the stone of her buildings was so thick and unyielding that what happened in one street could not be heard in the next. Never mind that the British had spent months plotting a map of the town, and were in the process of dividing it into four quarters for the four main identities, a design that would become famous and presumed eternal by everyone, so that even the Arabs selling pendants demarked with the four quarters fifty years hence would by then have forgotten that it was a British invention, enforced so that the soldiers could navigate the roads more easily, and say of each man they met: you are a Christian, you are a Jew, you are Armenian, based on the nearest street name. But by April 1920, the Brits were still getting lost and asking for directions, and were so low on personnel on the morning of the Nebi Musa festival that the ensuing mayhem lasted for a full three days. For three days, feathers ripped from bedding flowed from windows like the snow that had lately thawed, and falling to the ground, mingled with the blood that shone black in the gutters, seeping at its touch into red. By the time the curfew was imposed at the end of those three days, the red was black again with muck, and the leaders who had ridden ahead of the crowds and urged them from the roof of the Arab Club to protest the Zionist program at all costs, or else to behave nobly and quietly in their protests, had fled to Egypt and were sentenced to imprisonment in absentia.