From his habit he drew out the envelope, and opened it. Inside was a single page. At the head was typed: TOP SECRET.
Categories
Nationalist
Pro-French
Anti-British
Anti-Zionist
Amenable
“Amenable,” said Sister Louise, after some moments. “Goodness me. Did you agree to it then? To help them?”
“No, I told you. I said no.”
“But you were tempted?”
“Tempted—oh yes, I was tempted! Let me go back. First, before that, I was at Nebi Musa. I saw those awful things—I felt … Sister Louise, I felt that perhaps I had been wrong. I was so sure it was better not to be involved. But when I saw those things, how can I pretend—for it is a pretence! that I could look at civil custom only. As if civil custom existed alone. I mean, to look only at habits inscribed within the law—their laws, or British laws—as though to transgress were not also a part of communal life. But I was wrong—it is all a part of the whole!”
Sister Louise glanced at him quickly and then turned to face the garden doors.
“One cannot note down,” Antoine went on, feverishly, “as if there were no frame—one always has a frame. I am from France, I do believe in France as protector of Catholics in the Levant, I am part of that, I am not separate—critical, yes. Not separate. I began to wonder if, in my work, if there might be a purpose, to aid some clarifying of the why, to accept my position as part of this mechanism, not to pretend I existed somehow beyond …” He broke off. “I don’t know, Sister. I cannot locate my error. I am at a loss. Only I know I have erred. If it was in saying no, or if it is this,” he gestured at himself, his body and his face, “this continued questioning. There was a temptation. Sister, I do not trust my own instincts.”
“Oh come, father. Come.” She leaned across, casting the list onto the table. “Don’t weep.”
“I am not weeping. I am simply at a loss.”
“I wonder if you may have heard something.”
“I have heard several things. The women at the hospital tell me all manner of facts, small in appearance, but together they give a glimpse, if not a picture, of the kinds of activities—whether criminal or not I don’t know, certainly covert, certainly of use …”
“Certainly, yes, you have heard many things. But in fact I meant something else. I shall ask you outright. The fact is, I wonder father that you are confessing to me. And not to a priest who is properly ordained, which you might easily have done in Jerusalem.”
“What? Do you mean—”
“You mustn’t think I am rejecting you.”
He examined her face. Despite the dark he could see she was flustered.
She added: “Only it does beg the question.”
The ceiling began to thump with footsteps. A loud creak, and the knock of something heavy being set down.
“When you said that I am alone,” said Antoine quietly, after a pause. “What did you mean?”
“I was referring to my sisters, naturally, since we make our choices together. Of course you have L’École Biblique, but I know, since you have told me yourself, that it is not the same, that people come and go. There is not this same shared … it is not a vision, exactly, but a purpose, which we share. When one of us falls, there are several at hand to pick her up again.”
“You did not mean to say I am alone, then, in the sense that I am without God.”
“Oh.” Her self-possession fell away again and she looked aghast. “No—gracious.” She was apparently unable to go on. The knife went further into Antoine’s shame.
The door handle began to shake, and someone called from the hallway:
“Is there someone in there?”
“One moment.”
Sister Louise rose and unclicked the door on a young woman wearing a nursing habit and a bewildered expression, a candle in her hand.
“I’m very sorry, Sister Marian. I must have locked it by accident.”
“I came to light the lamps.” Sister Marian peered in at Père Antoine.
He also stood, and reaching quickly for the page curving up from the table, bowed to conceal his face.
“If you would excuse us for just a little longer, Sister,” said Louise, “we will be finished with our conversation in a few moments.”
Sister Marian curtsied, and reached for the handle. Sister Louise locked eyes with Antoine and waited for Marian’s footsteps to recede.
“My advice,” she said curtly, “is continue with your work. It does have a value. Do not let thoughts of nations and laws and powers impinge on that. L’École Biblique has a reputation for remaining impartial, remember, and that is of consequence. If you can help it, do not become involved. Take it from me.” Her glare was full of desperate meaning. “It is not worth it. If you will excuse me now, I must go to bed.”
In the morning, as everyone took their coffee, the garden doors of the dining room were opened wide to admit a breeze. Sister Louise was returned to her impenetrable, capable self, though she was not, Antoine noted, among those leaving for the hospital. As they walked he heard Sister Marian say she was on another village visit.
Their conversation last night had not settled Antoine’s dilemma. In fact, Louise’s final words so surprised him that he had lain awake thinking over them. And over what Hodges had said, that this type of work was quite common among your profession, believe it or not. We asked the French nuns to keep an eye.
But for the chairs, the hospital veranda was empty. In the far corner Antoine’s old rocker faltered in the wind. He sat back against its familiar ridges, opened his notebook to a blank double page, and began to sketch the view. He knew it so well he barely needed to look. In the foreground, three olive trees. A slope of earth with shadows and stones. In the back, Ebal rising. Above the mountain, the sky.
“Abuna,” said a bright voice. “Zaman ma shoofnak.”
The veranda door was open, and a small woman with a long neck trod out.
“Randa,” said Antoine. “As-salamu alaykum, keef halek.”
Randa was the wife of a soap factory labourer. She worked as an itinerant housemaid, and since she liked to gossip for gossip’s sake had been a helpful source for Antoine’s research. After their conversations he always gave her a few pennies. At first he had murmured the words: “for your trouble,” but he had come to the conclusion that it was better to claim it was an act of charity from priest to pauper, separate from the information she gave him. It was not always easy to disguise the transaction: she spoke, he paid her. But Randa did her part by complaining of her back problems, how difficult the week had been, how expensive food was becoming, which all supplied pretexts for his payment as a spontaneous action.
“Oof, my back hurts,” she said, as she took a seat beside him.
Antoine turned over the page.
“Salamtek. So. Have there been any stories, lately?”
“There was one blood feud,” she said breathily, “between the Murad family and the Shawwaf. A Murad man went to visit the Shawwaf. The Shawwaf man chopped down his trees.”
“Why did he chop down the trees?”
Randa looked dismayed. “Because he wouldn’t pay the money!”
Antoine nodded. He wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner: 20 Mai 1920, and made a note: Murad—Shawwaf.
“And what else are people talking about in town, these days?”
“Oof,” she said again. “Problems, problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Ya‘ni.” She chewed her lip. “You heard about the riot? Riots in Nablus. In Yaffa, Haifa. All the country is in riots. It’s very bad.”
“Because of the Zionists.”
“The Zionists are very bad. They want the land.”
“What are people … what are people doing about it?”
“Ya‘ni.”
“What?”
“They will fight.”
“Who will fight?”
�
��The boys.”
Antoine turned the page back to his drawing, and lightly outlined a small rock in the foreground, and then another. He shaded with his pencil at an angle.
“Tell me … how did people feel after the events at Nebi Musa?”
“People argue.”
He waited.
“Some people say, let’s give the Jews something.” She sighed. “Others say, you give them something, you’ll give them everything, and we’ll have nothing. Because in England there are many Jews. And the Mandoub es-Samme, the new Palestine governor, is a Jew. So it will be a Jewish empire. Arguing, arguing. This is always the way. Nablus is a city built on envy and intrigue.” This old Nabulsi adage, “al-hasad wa al-fasad,” stuck out from Randa’s speech as a sudden eloquence amid the dialect.
“And what do you think, Randa?”
She played with her fingernail. “I don’t know, ya Abuna.”
“I have a question. Is Nablus, in your opinion, more—how shall we say … forceful than other towns in Palestine? More, I mean—”
“Of course!”
Antoine waited. Hodges’s words, a town of fanatics, rang in his head. “In what ways?”
“In Nablus, they bring weapons.” Randa stuck her lips out.
Antoine was astonished. “Weapons?”
“From the Bedu.”
“I see. Only Nablus?”
She shrugged. A spider on the rail was lifting one gossamer leg, probing the air. Antoine struggled to think of another question.
Then Randa said: “I heard Marwan say they carry them inside lentil jars. They meet at a village …” She stopped.
“Marwan?” said Antoine.
But Randa would not continue. His pencil rolled to the seam of the pages.
“And how is your family?”
“We are very hungry. The chickens, we had trouble with the chickens. It was too hot for them last week.”
Antoine reached for his leather purse, and pulled out a shilling.
12
In May 1920, while everyone else was discussing the Mandate, Midhat was thinking about Fatima Hammad. Specifically, he was thinking of her at Nebi Musa. Each time he summoned that hesitant figure he unbuckled a sharp, bodily feeling, close to the compulsion that used to draw him to pace like a sleepwalker outside her house in the early mornings, willing the windows to return his gaze.
It was almost dinnertime, and he smelled onions and heard the clink of porcelain. He stared up at his bedroom ceiling, resisting the edge of sleep. Some months ago he had wished to persuade himself to desire marriage, and it did occur to him now that he might have succeeded. But summoning the girl’s eyes looking at him, the allure of fatedness remained, of recognising her and being recognised amid all those hundreds of people.
The remembered crowd throbbed in his chest, with its smooth disguising violence, and he sat upright. Across the windowsill lay his books, touched at angles by the late light. He rifled for a slip of paper and a pen. He did not even have a desk here. The only desk in the house was next door, in his father’s unused study.
“Um Mahmoud?” came his grandmother’s voice.
He perched on the mattress, plucked a book to lean on, and aimed the nib at the top left-hand corner of the page. This was an old impulse, to trace out the strands of event, draw up a diagnosis, and explain what had led to what. He wrote the title: FATIMA HAMMAD. He looked at the words, left to right, in the Latin alphabet. Should he not do this in Arabic? He wrote “Fatima Hammad” in Arabic. After that, however, he could think of no more words. Every one that came was French. He looked up and with a blast of nausea perceived the striped wallpaper of his bedroom in Montpellier, the window onto the green lawn, and felt the cold floorboards under his feet.
That movement of his mind, that dance of logic and contingency—surely it could not be forever marked by his experience at the Molineus’. He did not want to ride along life’s surface without at least trying to work it out. He did not desire the part of himself that moved darkly at the sight of the dervish, in the heat of the chanting crowd. He hesitated, pen in hand, for a long time. After a while, he wrote: “Dear Jeannette.” Dear Jeannette what? He looked stupidly at the page. His pen drew a circle, and he coloured it in with a zigzag of ink.
The following day, while Hisham was out, he sat reading at the store. The air was yellow with pollen. He had bought this book two years ago by the Seine, when while browsing the volumes for sale he chanced upon a passage about the Holy Land and immediately handed over the francs. Since then, it had become an illicit pastime to read descriptions of the place he came from, to be transported by a landscape so precisely drawn and tinted in this other language that he ended up longing for the sights of his childhood as though he were not already among them. A shadow fell over his page and he jumped.
“As-salamu alaykum,” said Haj Nimr Hammad.
Midhat mumbled a response. Haj Nimr was wearing a summer coat, belted around the waist. He looked thin. With one stride he entered the corner where jackets were hanging ready for sale, then looked down at the small stove and coffee things. He approached a shelved wall stocked neatly with folded fabrics. He touched one at eye level, a print of blue flowers on yellow, and pulled it down like a doctor inspecting a bottom lip. He rubbed his thumb over the pattern.
“Can I help you with something in particular?” said Midhat. “If you are looking for a special occasion, may I recommend the Samaritan tailors.” He was speaking too fast. His consonants became meticulous: “They work just around the corner. We,” he shrugged, “mostly stock items for the fellahin.”
Nimr returned to the fabric shelves. “The fellahin,” he repeated. “And this is where you will be working?”
“Pardon?”
Haj Nimr faced him. The hollows of his eyes were very pronounced, and his moustache was full and grey.
“I’m training here,” said Midhat carefully. “Ba‘dayn I’ll be in Cairo, where my father is.” He paused. “The store in Cairo is larger, you know. Spacious.”
Nimr nodded. “And you are not yet engaged?”
“No,” said Midhat. “I am not engaged.”
He nodded again. “In that case … in that case, if you wish to marry my daughter, you may.”
Midhat gaped. A twitch of laughter advanced up his chest, and a hand appeared at his mouth, his own hand, to stop it.
“Thank you. God bless you, ya Haj.” He slipped from his chair onto legs full of liquid. “Of course, yes,” he heard himself say. “By God I would like to marry your daughter.”
Haj Nimr’s eyes slid away. “We will expect you soon, then, for the proposal.”
“Yes.”
“The wedding will have to be after Ramadan.”
“Yes, yes, of course …”
“Ma‘salameh.”
After the last flap of Haj Nimr’s coat in the yellow light, the silence in the store was enormous. Midhat laughed once, very loudly. Suddenly, he wanted to run. He sat down and crossed his legs. His arched top foot rapidly pressed and released an invisible pedal. At last a figure appeared in the doorway, and he jumped to his feet.
“Hisham, I have to go! I have to go!”
He sprinted up the mountain. Three fellaha women blocked the road as it steepened: he skirted them up the crag to the side, loose soil rolling, and ran along the path to the house.
“Teta! Teta! Where are you? Haj Nimr said yes!”
His grandmother appeared from her bedroom in a nightgown, her grey hair tied in a plait. She squealed and grabbed his ears, pulling his head down to her height.
“When when when?”
“Aha-ow!”
“We have to tell your father immediately!”
“He said we will wait until after Ramadan.”
“What changed his mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell Jamil, go, we’ll tell your father after. Habib alby!”
She clapped her hands together, and gave a little scream.
“Yo
u are mad,” said Midhat.
Um Jamil was slicing tomatoes in her kitchen, her fingers covered in juice and unbound seeds.
“Jamil is at the store,” she said. A smile broke on her face. “What’s happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. I want to tell my cousin first.” He squeezed her upper arm, and gave her a kiss.
He flew down the mountain. Near the bottom he stopped in the shade of a large tree and found he was out of breath. He turned his chin to the clear sky. Unburdened by the sun, he could see it glowing in the foliage above him, the green leaves fluorescent like the bodies of insects. He walked the rest of the way, straightened his tie, and pushed back the hair at his temples. Outside the market, men smoked pipes in the heat, and he saluted their rotating faces. A slew of water appearing from the entrance to a cheese shop caught his trouser leg, splashing dark grey. “It’s nothing!” he shouted. He could smell milk fermenting. At a crossroads, four English policemen walked by. Behind them, three Arabs—also in uniform. Rifles. Cloth bandoliers of ammunition. One of the Englishmen nodded at him: his joy must be that obvious. Midhat nodded back, his love so general he could share it, even, in that moment, with them.
His thoughts had a long, smooth shape. What a city this was! He paraded down the alley, reflecting that children belonged de facto, webs of allegiance tied their little feet to the ground, their resemblances to others remarked upon, predictions made on such and such a basis. But for an adult, though allegiances from childhood might subsist they no longer constituted belonging. You needed something else—and now he had it. Now he would belong. The aims of his actions were clarifying, like a sturdy wall at midday. This was what was missing from his life in Nablus—how funny that he had barely a moment to recognise the absence before it was filled with the glorious flood of being known, of knowing, as he advanced towards the carpet shop. In those years of distance from Nablus, this being known was the subject of his nostalgia—how wrongheaded that was, since this feeling was not of the past. No, no, no, it was of the future! That was plain; it was fantastically coherent. Everything that had happened led to the present. All the hazards of Europe, all accident and wonder, even Nebi Musa, terrors seen and felt, all shame and pain, all objects in the corridors of that old museum pointed towards him at this moment. Yesterday he could not have teased his desire for Fatima Hammad from the other strands, from his father, from the need for what was denied, from the need for a woman. But with the prize virtually in hand he could see it all. That was a solid wall ahead of him; it was the foundations of a house. He had obeyed—and he had defied. He was of them, and he was his own. He with his strong body had laid the first stone, and others had seen it, Haj Nimr Hammad had seen it, and with him foresaw the edifice that would now arise.
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