The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  Perhaps it did not matter if he had invented the story. It was a good story, and that was plenty. This was the better way to tell his self; it was no use aiming directly. As the hilarity subsided, he experienced a rare moment of self-perception. He felt his presence from the outside, not only in space, but also in time. In a flash he saw this part he played for the men of Nablus as a kind of inverse of his persona in Paris—the part he used to play for women. He was always marked by his difference. Many times during courtships he had even purposefully weakened his French—which was then near fluent—and found he could play with ease the sweet buffoon and at the same time retain the glamour of hiddenness. There was always some kernel hidden in the folds, some mystery to long for. He could feel it again now, that double view.

  He thought of Jeannette’s piercing look, directed from across a table. He wondered what she would have thought of this fabrication, and noticed, as from a distance, the possibility of shame. It was replaced immediately by anger. He held the anger down, and the moment passed.

  As the dark became total, talk gravitated as usual to Nebi Musa. Adel’s father contended that the ratifying of the Mandate was a reaction to it, and that they had ruined their chances by that bloody scene. Adel, half in support of his father, repeated some of his usual polemic about using dialogue against disenfranchisement. It was a discussion had too many times before and did not take off beyond the usual circular arguments. They lost steam and Midhat suddenly thought of Basil’s gun. Just like his thought of Jeannette, this image arose out of nowhere. How strange: he had forgotten the gun completely. Haj Nimr’s acceptance came so soon after Nebi Musa it must have eclipsed everything else in his brain.

  “Were there any shootings at Nebi Musa?” he said.

  “Of course, there were shots,” said Adel.

  “What?” said his father.

  Mistaking this for deafness, Adel shouted: “I said of course—”

  “You didn’t tell me that!” said his father.

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Who brought the guns?”

  “Why should I know. Jabotinsky had guns. It was probably the Jews.”

  “Oh,” Midhat broke in. “I remember …”

  Another vision flickered. That army, or that militia, in Jerusalem.

  “What do you remember?” said Qais.

  But Qais was the only one who had heard; the others were talking among themselves. Midhat waved his hand. “Nothing.”

  He was surprised at himself. As he walked home he dwelled on the fact that he had blindly forgotten what he saw, Jabotinsky’s men and women marching in formation. The version of Nebi Musa he gave Teta and Um Jamil had replaced his real memory of it. How peculiar. The edges of his brain felt alarmingly opaque. He wondered, dismayed, what else he might have forgotten, or was capable of forgetting.

  The following day after work, Midhat climbed the mountain home, and in the doorway called for his grandmother. A telegram envelope lay on the table. From Cairo.

  “Teta,” he called, picking it up and walking into the kitchen.

  The kitchen was empty. A cupboard door hung open; he closed it. She was not in the salon either, nor her bedroom. He walked to his own room, where a window exposed a red sun touching the horizon. He stood at his mat and began to pray, hands to his ears, bending, straightening, kneeling. After two prostrations he raised his head and started. Teta was sitting on his bed.

  “You scared me! Are you a ghost?”

  “I’ve made a mistake.” Her voice was full of tears. “Forgive me. I was very angry with Um Mahmoud. She left.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what happened.” She threw her hands into the air and let them flop down again. “I don’t know what’s happening to me these days. She burned the dinner, she burned the bottom of the pot, I lost my temper. I never thought she would leave, like that.”

  “Oh, oh. Teta, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter.” He sat beside her, and saw her fingers trembling in her lap. “Look, you have exhausted yourself.”

  “It matters! The wedding! Um Mahmoud, she is an excellent cook, usually she is excellent … we need her for the mansaf.”

  “It’s going to be fine. We’ll find someone else.”

  “I want Um Mahmoud. Don’t tell your father.”

  “We’ll find—you know, why don’t I just go and see Um Mahmoud, and see if we can’t make it better?”

  “Oh, will you?” As she looked at him, the tears began to break. “I love her. She has been with us for so long.”

  “Of course I will. Everything will be fine.”

  “I know, I know. What’s this?”

  It was the envelope, he had thrown it onto the bed. In the old sunlight the white paper was going pink.

  “The mahr, I think.”

  Through her tears, she gave him an ironic smile. “You didn’t open it?”

  “I was praying.”

  “God before money. Habibi is a good Muslim.”

  She ripped open the top, and pulled out the telegram. Her smiling mouth flattened. She frowned.

  “I don’t understand. What does it say?”

  “Let me see.”

  Dear Um Taher and Midhat,

  My dear husband has passed away. God have peace upon him. He had a heart attack. He was in his office. We were all asleep. Please come.

  Layla

  Midhat’s mouth opened.

  “No,” said Teta.

  “Baba.”

  A spasm, sharp and dark, ran up Midhat’s spine. His eyes pressed shut, and he put his chin to his chest, as though to avoid a blow.

  That was enough for Teta. Her weight slid off the mattress and onto the floor, and looking up he saw the shaking curve of her back. She started to wail. A low warning growl, then a long moan, gaining in pitch. One feeble hand percussed the wall. Something slippery was swelling in Midhat’s head. The wailing was a song, a thing to hold onto. His arms and legs were painfully light. He watched her hand hit the wall, and the bed fell away. The floor was gone.

  They would leave for Cairo in the morning. Midhat found some leftover rice, and after setting a pan to boil added some glugs of hot water. He stirred until the misshapen boulders crumbled into a watery mixture, and poured the clouded runoff into the drain by the back door. Teta entered as he was setting old vine leaves on a plate. Without a word she transferred the rice into a saucepan on the hob, and fiddled with spice bundles from the cupboard. The bread he had warmed up was hard by the time she finished. They ate in silence.

  In the morning they woke when the musaharati came drumming by their house. After breakfast they took the train to Tulkarem and changed for the direct line to Cairo. Since it was Ramadan, travellers were few and they had four seats to themselves near the dining car. Midhat took the window seat. Teta prayed the entire journey, rocking back and forth, occasionally raising her head to the ceiling and holding up her hands. Midhat felt a strange dry desolation, as though all the moisture had evaporated from his body.

  It was evening when they arrived in Cairo. The city had been repaired since his visit eight months ago, and seethed with people celebrating after iftar. The taxi from the station brought them down a wide boulevard lined with tearooms and bookshops, and men in tall boots guarded the glittering entrances to department stores. At the house in Abbassia they waited on the doorstep for several minutes before a maid opened the door. She showed them into the salon. Layla was dressed in black. She had gained some weight around her middle, and it was not the shape of a pregnancy. She looked angry as she reached out for Midhat, and up close he saw the red blur of recent weeping.

  “It was a heart attack.” Her upper lip shook. “God have mercy on him. He was eating … he was eating … pistachio nuts. In his office. Stupid man.”

  “Al-awda fi hayatek,” Midhat murmured. His mind began to assemble the scene. He darkened it. He closed his eyes. “Allah yirhamo.”

  “Mama,” said Layla, reaching out to the mother-in-law she
had never loved.

  Um Taher began to cry. “Where is he?”

  “In the earth.”

  “You already buried him? Who washed him?”

  “I washed him,” said Layla.

  Layla sent the maid to show Midhat and his grandmother the bedroom they would share. Teta ogled the gilded ceiling and the velvet cushions on the bed. A thin mattress curled up from the floor; Midhat placed his bag beside it as Teta asked the maid for the bathroom. On her return she whispered, “Go and see,” and then seized slow possession of the chair in the corner. Consulting her compass she twisted the chair to the Qibla, at an angle to the window. Midhat lay on the mattress and was quickly asleep.

  When he woke, the chair was empty. Voices drifted up through the floor. Half-moon creases rippled the back of his suit jacket: he opened his bag for a fresh one.

  “It’s very large, isn’t it?” said a loud voice from below.

  And another: “Marie! I didn’t know you would come.”

  In the bathroom, a modern white toilet stood at the far end. Along one edge rose a free-standing bathtub, and opposite that the long neck of a basin reached through the floor. The three objects gleamed like clean teeth. Midhat knelt on the tiles, where some water had collected in the grouting, and put his head on the porcelain brim of the bath. It was hard and cold. Someone shouted his name. After a long pause he heard the soft footsteps and voice of a child.

  “Midhat?”

  “I’m coming,” he replied, in a public voice. He stood and ran the tap, closed it again, and opened the door.

  The messenger was Musbah, the dark-browed eldest of Midhat’s half-siblings, leggy and afraid, with a downy upper lip. He waited for Midhat to put on his shoes, and then preceded him down the stairs. The hallway below was full of people, men and women both. Layla’s voice said loudly:

  “This is his son. Eldest son.”

  Musbah stepped off the bottom stair and there was a moment of confusion in which no one greeted anyone. Then the guests, discerning the difference between the two, turned to Midhat. He proceeded through the hall after Musbah, shaking their hands, not retaining a single name or face, and saw Layla accept a tray of food from someone and bear it out through a farther door. Chairs lined the walls. Children wandered in and out, Midhat’s little half-brothers, Nadim and Nashat, in matching velveteen suits, and Dunya and Inshirah in checkered dresses. Musbah sat alone in a corner by the window.

  “I knew your father very well,” said an elderly man. He put a heavy silver Quran in Midhat’s hands. “He was a good, kind person.”

  Too late the guests lingered, and respectful murmurs descended into lazy gossip. The children had long been in bed when Teta, at the edge of a circle of Cairene women, broke into a fit of coughing. One of the women rubbed her back, but Layla seized the moment to urge: “You must go to bed, Um Taher. To bed!” At last the final visitors pulled on their coats, and wrapping shawls around their necks bade them farewell.

  In the middle of the night, something pulled hard on Midhat’s earlobe. He opened his eyes to see Teta’s big, pale face leaning over him.

  “Don’t lie on your back like that. You look dead.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t sleep. I’m frightened.”

  He had been dreaming. He did not know of what. Facts came crowding in.

  “Yalla,” she said in a tragic voice, sitting back on the bed.

  He wrenched himself up and slid in beside her.

  “Lie down.”

  Darkness closed over them again. A moment later, a vulgar sun inserted itself through the window and pressed down on Midhat’s eyelids. In another room, a child was crying. The outside of the bedsheet was cold under his hand, and a little damp, and Teta was snoring with her back to him.

  Without meals to rule the quarters of the day, Midhat strung himself by the prayer calls. He counted the hours and half hours between them. Each time the muezzin down the road started up again, he left the room where the family had congregated and went upstairs to wash and pray. Teta spent the entire morning in their bedroom, rocking in the chair, palms facing the ceiling. At noon she joined the rest of the family. The children wept on and off. How much the children understood, how much Layla had told them, was unclear, but at the least they were catching the sadness in the air, and conveying it in rotation so it never lapsed for long. Each time another broke out Teta turned her eyes to heaven. Musbah, who was certainly old enough to understand, hardly cried at all. He was also the only one old enough to fast, and he looked on miserably as his siblings plugged their tears with spoonfuls of food at lunchtime. Food was their only comfort, and even that was temporary. All other attempts to help, or embrace, or soothe, were rebuffed by striking arms. Occasionally they mumbled the syllables, “ma-ma,” but they did not seem to want her when Layla picked them up.

  Fair-haired Dunya looked the most like their father because of her broad cheekbones. Her nose was still sweetly curved with babyhood and her forehead often rumpled by a frown. Nashat had grown since the autumn, and Layla, huffing with exasperation, kept grabbing him to tug his shirt down over his belly. Inshirah and Nadim had Layla’s eyes. Inshirah had her thin nose as well, but Nadim had a wide skull and little lips that did not resemble anybody’s. Such mental observations consumed the hours between prayers. With any luck Midhat need not tread near the abyss today. And tonight there would be no time, surrounded by people. And tomorrow they would leave for Nablus, and by then all this would be shrouded in the past.

  When evening fell and the next round of condolence-givers arrived, Midhat did not have an appetite.

  “I’m fine,” he said, turning away the plate.

  “You have been fasting,” said Teta, outraged. “You are too thin.”

  That might be true, but it was excellent, being hungry. It drew all energy to his stomach. He thought of nothing.

  With night, he slept deeply. Some hours before dawn, however, he started awake. The low drumming of the pipes was loud in his ear, and at first he thought that was what had woken him. Then he realised how raw his stomach felt. It was making him dizzy, even where he lay. He crept out of the bedroom and downstairs. Just as he was about to enter the kitchen, he saw the door to his father’s study. It was closed. He opened it.

  The blinds of both windows were drawn, and the yellow fingers of a streetlamp slid in between the slats. The chair was slotted into the desk, and papers had been stacked around the edges, leaving an empty rectangle in the centre. The room held the smell of his father, the musk, the tobacco.

  It all came in. There was nothing to stop it, he had not planned any defences in advance. Out of sight of his waking mind this scene must have been preparing itself with the details he was given, and now, unstoppable, it was beginning to play. He saw, he felt, in the middle of a mouthful of pistachio nuts, his father’s chest beginning to squeeze. The absolute terror, imminent: his father’s arms seized with that sudden grip and a deep, uncertain pain pulsing in the abdomen, an angel of death entering the room through the half-opened window as the nuts already chewed spilled from his lips and onto his shirt front. His gasp, his burning face. The body convulsing to vomit up those nuts so far ingested. And then still, the body lying where the life ended, slumped over the desk.

  The blank desk stared at Midhat. He lifted one leg and kicked. It was heavy; it turned a little. He kicked again, harder. And again, grunting with all his weight and effort behind the motion of his right leg, and again, and the desk swivelled off wholly to one side, revealing white marks on the floor in the shape of its feet.

  Rage flooded his body. He had done everything for this man. For this man’s opinion, every choice. And he had succeeded! He was engaged to the Hammad girl! And where was his father? Midhat’s whole life, stripped down to feeble reeds. They collapsed without him. He punched down, knuckles first. His fingers felt the ache, and, maddened by it, he pounded with the side of his fist, hammered a rhythm like Teta’s song, and heard a moan seep from his grimacing mo
uth. He grabbed a piece of paper, observed without reading a title about licencing. All of it was business correspondence. With exaggeration he ripped it down the centre, severing the cushion of a letter Saad from its tail. Ripping the paper was like drawing blood and in the shock of the sound he was calm.

  A noise came from the hall, and whatever Midhat was inside of, he fell out again. With a dizzy breath he pulled at the desk—first by the top edge, and when it refused to budge he bent over and grabbed the legs, causing one paper pile not weighted with an ornament to whisper upwards in a curve—and after roughly repositioning the feet he collected the fallen pages. He noticed his hand was bleeding as he opened the door.

  A very pale Musbah was standing there. At the sight of Midhat, he looked relieved. He had been afraid, perhaps, of some returning spirit, some jinni of the passage out—and now he ducked his head and moved to go. Only then did Midhat realise his own face was covered in tears. He wiped them with his sleeves, calling: “Wait.”

  Musbah was already halfway down to the kitchen. Midhat ran a hand through his hair, checked the buttons of his pyjama shirt. He licked the blood off his hand.

  “Wait. I wanted to tell you, to speak to you. Let’s go in there.”

  They sat on the couch in the dark salon. He could hear Musbah breathing, and glanced at the small hands perched on his knees. The boy was already dressed for the day, and his velveteen was a little short in the sleeves. His jaw hung slack behind closed lips and his eyes bulged. He had a strange face: the brow heavy, the features as delicate as a girl’s.

  “I wanted to tell you.” Midhat softened his voice. “You know, I lost my mother when I was very young. As young as Dunya.”

  Musbah’s big eyes turned on him.

  “Everything will be all right.”

  He waited. The boy said nothing.

  “He will be happy in heaven. It is better there. He was a good Muslim, a kind, moral man. He will be rewarded. You see? He will be happy. Yes, I think he is already happy. Think of that.”

  “Yes.”