The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “Where’s Hisham?”

  “He has gone to find you,” said Eli.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Eli looked at Butrus, who was sitting at his desk.

  “Wait for Hisham,” said Butrus.

  A peculiar half hour followed this exchange, during which Midhat repeatedly interrupted the conversation to press them for answers. Each time the tailors passed the same uneasy glance between each other, and shook their heads. “Wait for Hisham.” Butrus made coffee, and the Samaritans drew up chairs to ask about the wedding. Midhat, so fixated on what they were withholding, examined their faces for clues and answered their questions without interest. He did not even watch out for Hisham, and was surprised when he appeared behind his chair.

  “Did you already tell him?” said Hisham to the tailors.

  “No, they didn’t tell me,” said Midhat, standing. “What has happened?”

  Hisham looked afraid. “Your father,” he said.

  Midhat waited. “What about my father?”

  “He, he …” Hisham swallowed and looked at the ground.

  “What?” said Midhat.

  “He wrote the business in Um Musbah’s name.”

  “What?”

  “The business. It’s in his wife’s name.”

  Midhat was silent. “What?”

  Hisham raised his hands.

  “What does that mean?”

  The meaning was already clear. Their faces were bursting with pity. Eli grasped the ears of a chair, apparently in pain.

  “We are contracted, me and him,” Hisham gestured at the tailor, and Midhat saw that his hands were trembling, “to work for her. You, habibi … I’m sorry I’m I’m—”

  “Did you know?”

  “I’m sorry.” Hisham’s mouth crumpled.

  Midhat gasped. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me. Hisham!”

  “I didn’t want you to go to your father like that,” Hisham pleaded. “I didn’t want you to see him, feeling that, feeling angry.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Midhat felt his face puckering. He wished the others weren’t there. It was a stupid question, and of course no one answered. “For how long are you contracted for?”

  “Our pay comes from Cairo. There are no sales in Nablus.”

  “Hisham, how long are you contracted for?”

  Hisham shot a desperate glance at the tailor.

  “I understand,” said Midhat. “You need to be paid. It’s fine.”

  It was not fine. Shock crested into anger as he walked onto the street. He looked around for something to kick. A loose stone from the paving. An old tomato half-erupted from its skin. He hit the wall with the back of his fist, felt a good pain down the side of his hand, and then started off at a brisk pace. He couldn’t risk one of the tailors coming out to console him.

  How could he now go and face Fatima? Tell her his livelihood had suddenly come to an end? The livelihood which had been instrumental in convincing Haj Nimr he would make a suitable husband. All he had left to his name was the small dark house he had just purchased, with its empty shit-stained chicken cage at the bottom of the garden. He would have to divide the proceeds from the sale of the old house with Teta, and even that wouldn’t last long. At the thought of Teta, he put his face in his hands. He caught one of the workers in the entrance to the carpet shop.

  “Where’s Jamil? Jamil, do you have a moment? I need to talk to you.”

  He led his cousin onto the street and explained what he had just found out.

  Jamil looked aghast. “What? That’s not possible. Surely she will at least employ you.”

  “What, like she employs Hisham? Do you know how much Hisham earns? I cannot support a family, my grandmother … anyway I wouldn’t work for that woman if she paid—”

  “But it’s not possible. This isn’t possible, Midhat. Have you made sure? I thought he promised you the business?”

  Midhat opened his hands.

  “I can’t believe this. It must be her, she has persuaded him. What is wrong with that woman—”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “This is unbelievable.”

  “Yes, yes, it is unbelievable,” Midhat snarled.

  “But your father ba‘dayn. I’m really surprised.”

  At that word, “father,” a knot in Midhat’s chest swelled and he screamed: “My father!”

  Jamil shot a look down the road. “Yalla. Let’s go for a walk.”

  Midhat let himself be led. Down the street alongside the Fatimiyah School. Past Rafidia by the upper outskirts. By the village of Balata, they took a route north through the mountains, and after a while Midhat lost the impulse to speak. Fury had left him like a flock of birds, and he felt sedated. He looked stupidly out across the plain. The blue sky was white by the brow of hills, where the green separated over raw pink. The slope beside them was pilled with wild round shrubs, and ahead a sharp light outlined the striations in the grey rock.

  “I’m exhausted,” he muttered. The words felt good. He said them again. “I’m exhausted.”

  It was not really true, however. The walking itself had begun to clear through his fatigue, disrupting the stagnant waters in which, left suspended, he felt at risk of drowning. The uphill motion made his thoughts fluid.

  “You know how everyone calls me the Parisian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s strange, it’s only been a year. I already feel so far from it. I’ve been wondering. What would happen if I went back.”

  “You can’t, habibi. Your life is here.”

  “What life?” He gave a humourless laugh. “I have nothing.”

  “Please. You just married the most beautiful woman in the town. You’re a success. Everyone thinks so.”

  “I married her for him. I may as well have left for all the good I achieved. There was nothing to keep me here—”

  “You did not only marry for him. I know you. You love her.”

  Midhat clicked his teeth. “You can’t love a stranger. There’s no such thing.”

  They had reached a kind of summit before the hill dipped again and rose. As they stopped moving, everything around them came to life.

  “You want to know what happened last night? Fatima, she—she ran from me. She climbed on top of the cupboard and wouldn’t come down.”

  He flicked his eyes onto his cousin and waited for the laugh. Jamil, who had his foot on a rock and was catching his breath, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It will get easier. She’s a woman. She doesn’t know anything yet.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, will you?” said Midhat. “Though to be honest, Teta has probably told everyone already.”

  “You’ll be fine. I know you’ll be fine.”

  “Why do you only love me when I make a mistake?”

  “My God,” said Jamil, pulling his hand away. “That is not true. Midhat. You are so arrogant!” He burst out laughing.

  “What do you mean? Arrogant how?”

  “What do I mean. Really, you think you are in the centre of everything. Oh no, I don’t mean like that. Shwaya, don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I just don’t understand.”

  “All right. Do you want to know what happened in my life the past two months? Are you interested?” Jamil made a strange lurching motion with his neck, and seemed, for a moment, to be in some kind of communication with himself. He resumed in a gentler tone. “First of all, I saw two people killed. First one, and then the other. Right before me, a few feet. All the blood, everything. I saw the last …” His lips pressed together. “The first one was a Jew, young guy, our age. Second one was Arab, killed by the Jew’s friends. This has been in my mind, you know? It sticks there …”

  “This was at Nebi Musa? I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t ask! You didn’t even ask. We got back and you were away in your world again, reading poetry. The Parisian, wandering around with your coloured ties. You didn’t even ask me, y
ou just left.”

  Midhat was trying to recall the period of time after Nebi Musa, what had happened, what he was doing, when his mind caught on the barb of that final accusation.

  “I already said—you know I lost you in the crowd, how was I supposed to find you?”

  “I know,” Jamil waved his hand. Perhaps he had not meant to bring that up, it had slipped out in the fever of argument. “You should just look outside yourself a bit. The country is going to shit. We have starving fellahin walking around robbing people. You know how many people were robbed last week? Do you even listen to what people talk about?”

  “Jamil, my father died. How you can say that, you don’t know what I’ve been—you hardly even see me!”

  “No one is buying carpets, but still they come in, they look, pretend they’re going to buy things, and you know why? Because they have nothing else to do. I’m sorry about your father, but we’ve lost Damascus, now we’re going to have a Jewish country, because that’s what the British are making. Ya‘ni, khalas. It will be the Turks in their worst years. Worse, probably.”

  Jamil continued walking, but Midhat stayed where he was. It took Jamil a second to notice, and he paused slightly further up the slope. Both were still out of breath.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” said Midhat.

  They were by a breach in the mountainside, a little hollow of a cave. The wind chilled Midhat through his shirt. Over Jamil’s calm face, a lock of hair flew to the wrong side.

  “I can’t believe you could be so unsympathetic.”

  Jamil’s bony arms jerked upward. “Sympathy!” he said.

  Midhat pivoted away and started walking in the other direction, back down the hill. God bless gravity: if not for gravity, his body would have stopped and fallen. All he wanted was to disappear, to go back in time. The present was a bare rock without shelter. In the past all pain was finished, everything was known, nothing could hurt him any longer.

  “Midhat!”

  He kept going. The sun shone down with terrible clarity. There was no safety.

  When he regained the path he saw that Jamil had not followed. By his foot, a lizard tongued over a rock and vanished. Then, as he faced the empty stretch ahead, it came back to him: that searing sensation he used to long for, safe in his dormitory in Constantinople. It was far stronger now. The outline of his body clamped down, burning his skin. The only way to relieve it was to run.

  Fatima unpacked her clothes into the cupboard, and dragged Midhat’s trunk down the steps to the bedroom. When the lid fell open, she laughed. This man had far more clothes than she had. She touched the first layer; something soft, a kind of house gown, it was thick and the lining was a deep maroon. Shirts, ties, satin and patterned cotton. She reached for the lid to close it, and as her right arm lifted, a sharp twinge in her neck forced her to drop it again. She rubbed the spot and stood looking at her reflection. One of her shoulders was noticeably higher than the other. She needed fenugreek.

  The pantry was stocked with trays of food prepared by their relatives. Dishes of rice lay atop bowls of mulukhiyyeh and kusa and maqluba, and there were two bags of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and two bowls of fruit. No sign of fenugreek. She did find a bag of dried grape leaves. With the arm that didn’t hurt she brought out the fruit, and set it on the table. The guavas were small and hard. Oranges, white dirt in the craters of their skin. She put a pan of water to boil, and reached for an onion and a large knife. On the table she halved the bulb, then sliced it crossways so it fell apart in glassy shards. She sang. When the steam filled the room she opened the window to the garden, where the iron chairs looked poorly with tarnish in the daylight. She plied her fingers into her neck.

  The rice was cooling when the front door made a noise. She did not turn as Midhat entered; she set the naked leaves in a pile and released a pool of olive oil into a bowl. After a moment he walked out. She folded the first parcels, listening hard for anything else that might situate him in the house, any creaks or footfalls. But the next noise came from right behind her again, from the hall just beyond the kitchen. She was quick to hide her surprise.

  “May I have coffee?” he said.

  She wiped her hands on the dishcloth tucked into her belt, and opened a cupboard. Stacks of plates. “It’s in this one, here.”

  “And the pot?”

  “This one—no, this one. You have … everything you need?”

  “Fenugreek. We don’t have.” She untwisted the coffee jar. “But yes, I have everything. Oh, except …” She turned.

  “Except what?”

  “Who will fetch the water? At our house we had a well.”

  “The water carrier will come here,” said Midhat. “We aren’t so far. But will you be all right, I mean, will you be needing a maid?”

  “Oh. I don’t think so. At least, not for now.”

  The coffee was foaming. He accepted the cup she poured but did not, at first, drink from it. He sat at the table and looked at the opened window as Fatima’s fingers worked. She set four vine leaf parcels on the plate with the others.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  Midhat looked up at her. She wondered if he was affronted by her question. But in a moment he said: “I was thinking … about something that happened to me in France.”

  “It makes you sad?”

  “Not particularly. It was—I had a friend who died. He was a very intelligent man. He had this idea about life. That it was all one thing, with death in it.” He sipped the coffee. “I’m not sure it means much. What are you making?”

  After a beat she replied, in a voice liquid with incredulity: “Vine leaves!”

  “You’re very good.” He dipped his head low to the table, as if to get a view from the side. “They are very small.”

  “My mother taught me. In fact no, my mother didn’t teach me, I learned from a Turk. You know there used to be Turks in the upstairs of our house.”

  She dipped a new leaf in the oil. She could feel him looking at her.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  The last rice grains were stuck into a cake along the bottom of the pan. She took a spoon to them, and they fell out onto the plate in the crammed shape of an oval.

  “Now we are married,” she said, and bit the inside of her cheek.

  Midhat laughed, and she knew he had turned away.

  “Yes. Now we are married.”

  By evening Fatima considered herself the victor. She did not feel particularly cheerful about it, however. Midhat had not touched her all day, nor made any reference to the night before. They continued to speak in the same genial, sidelong manner, but with none of the behaviour one might expect between a husband and wife in private. Fatima kept thinking about the laughing women in the hammam. They knew how it was supposed to be. This marriage really belonged to them, those naked figures gossiping in the steam, loitering in the corners of her mind. As afternoon progressed, she found she had used up all her self-possession in making those vine leaf parcels. She took a moment to cry weakly at the kitchen window. In retrospect, the terror of last night seemed easier than this footless unknowing of the waking day, now that the light was turned off the positions of a woman’s body in one part of a room and a man’s in another, and onto the vaguer profile of future uncertainties, in which time and space far exceeded what one girl’s mind could map, and dwarfed by thousands her fear of a few inches, a few moments, the sound of his breath. Even standing there at the window, she did not know what to do with her hands. She ended by clasping them so tightly together the fingers blotched pink and white. She tried to concentrate on the hours ahead, but her unruly mind kept expanding to the panorama of years, years of this same unknowing, to which an end was swaddled in mist.

  As night fell, Midhat read in the salon while she played the oud. This was taken for a virtue, a woman who could play the oud. She tried to play as though for her own pleasure, as if she barely knew he was there, and she even half sang the words, as thoug
h practising for another event. But there was no danger of him looking up, and this left her free to examine him. He looked tired, she thought. He was pale and his lids hung low. She quite liked the sight of his arms under his rolled-up shirtsleeves. After abandoning the halfway point of a few melodies, she rested the instrument on her legs, and touched the tuning pegs.

  “What are you reading?” she said.

  “Hm?”

  That was the same look he gave her earlier, when she asked him what he was thinking about. His face was quite demonstrative. An appealing quality, but, perhaps, also one that spoke of a kind of carelessness. He lifted the spine of his book to show her. It was written in a European language. The woven cover was red, and a black silk bookmark dangled from the binding, heavily frayed.

  “Flaubert,” he said. “You speak French?”

  “No. Some English. I know three words in German.”

  “What are these three words?”

  “Abendessen. Mittagessen. Heisse. There were some others, I forgot.”

  He frowned, head to the side, lips parted. She answered:

  “After the Turks left, we had Germans.”

  “Oh—yes, I remember this. My father told me that.”

  He lingered on her, then returned to the page. She wondered if the story was sad. He looked up again, apparently on the point of speech. For a second he held the position; she waited, unhappily, until he shook it off. She set the round back of the oud against the wall.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “The kitchen.”

  There was nothing to do in the kitchen. She ran a damp cloth along the edge of the table, where a little ridge might gather dirt. The cloth was clear; she had done the same thing earlier.

  She made sure to precede Midhat to the bedroom, undressed before the mirror, and donned a nightgown. When he knocked and entered, he was already wearing a two-piece pyjama suit, blue with black piping. Last night, this was an image that might have terrified her. Now, she giggled: it meant he had anticipated her, and collected his pyjamas earlier. The shirt, not buttoned to the top, flapped open slightly beyond the lapel as he climbed into the bed. She slid in beside him. The sheets were heavy. They lay for a while in silence on their backs. Then Midhat said: