The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “Did you go to see the Nebi Musa procession in Jerusalem?”

  Her breath stopped. “Yes.”

  “I saw you there.”

  Danger shot through Fatima’s mind. Husbands were like parents, conscious of a woman’s shame. She waited, frozen.

  “Did you go alone?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. She felt a powerful urge to weep.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  But all those words did was bring to mind the night before, which seemed no longer distant but rather very present, and her heart thumped hard. She longed for the darkness, she wanted to cover the heat rising to her neck and face, and she glanced, helpless, at the lamp beyond him. She felt exactly as exposed as she had before she climbed onto the cupboard.

  “Why are you afraid?”

  The sheet shifted. He was turning towards her. She could see his white eyeballs.

  “I can feel you, you are afraid. I don’t mind that you went to Nebi Musa. I was asking because … I wondered if you had seen anything. Anything terrible.”

  “I saw nothing. I was hardly there, I came, I left …”

  “It was odd, though, didn’t you think?” he said. “That crowd, all those angry people.”

  She inhaled too loudly. “They are uneducated. Ya‘ni, poor people. Poor people are angry. This is why we have zakat.”

  Midhat turned onto his back. He switched off the lamp. Fatima’s blush began to fade, and she listened to the soothing murmur of a draught. When she was calm she addressed him in a quiet voice.

  “Will you tell me about Paris?”

  “Paris?”

  “I want to know.”

  He began, with slow, formal phrases. “I lived in Paris during the war. There were only a few men. Except for old ones. And, in addition, there were some Arabs.”

  Although at first he seemed reluctant, he soon relaxed into a monologue. His words drew pictures, and Fatima saw balconies and terraced cafés, heard voices and the sounds of glass and crockery as she walked down deserted streets and theatre aisles full of women in glitter pining for men at battle. Set free by the dark, she came closer to the vibrations of his voice, low in his throat, to the heat coming from his half-bared chest. She felt it on her shoulder as he turned over, surprised by how near his body was to hers. She was sensitive enough to realise that in this speech he was revealing some part of his inner life, and that it was a struggle to hold onto and translate it for her. It moved her to be taken into his confidence. With fresh temerity she put her hand on his chest, and under the silk of his pyjama shirt she felt his heart come to meet it.

  “Might we one day go there?”

  He pressed the back of her fingers. “We might.”

  He said something else she didn’t hear. She had found his mouth and kissed it. Their foreheads touched awkwardly. There was some perspiration on his shaven lip. She immediately reached to touch him between the legs, amazed and shocked by her own courage. She was even more amazed at the weird shape of his anatomy that reared under the fabric, and snatched her hand away.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said.

  “I can’t see you. It’s completely dark.”

  That was clearly a lie, because she could still see him. She closed her eyes, boiling with shyness, and his fingers began, very gently, to wrinkle the nightgown over her legs. When it was necessary she raised her hips off the mattress, and then lifted her arms to help it over her head. Though her skin was flushed she was also pimpled over with cold, and when his hand met her hip she winced. Then she saw his shadow hesitate, and grasping him by the neck pulled him over her.

  The pain was incredible. Whatever shame was left over, it evaporated at once in that unbearably specific heat. His arms trembled under his own weight, and his hair, flopping from his head, brushed her brow. Only when his eyes met hers and he said, “Are you all right?” did she realise how heavily he was breathing.

  She smiled. “Yes. Thank you for asking.”

  In the morning, she woke alone. Two workers were shouting outside, instructing or greeting each other. She rose, and set the sheet to soak in the kitchen. The red stain lifted and clouded the water in the bowl. She jerked open the rickety window and the wind hurried in to startle the water’s surface, cooling the skin on her neck.

  Not at ease, precisely; she felt steady, that was it. The wind rifled through the garden, pushing the two trees near the bottom in circles and agitating the bushes. That space out-of-doors, both enclosed and open, all her own—she dashed to the bedroom and drew a coat from the cupboard, wrapped a cotton shawl around her head; below the coat her ankles were just visible above her slippers. She unbolted the salon doors to the first terrace, turned the handle, and tipped one of the iron chairs leaning against the table upright. Although all she could see beyond the garden was the mountain, nonetheless she stayed close to the back door.

  Why, if there was no one to see her? They lived on the outskirts. That had been a worry at first, but now it seemed wonderful. Her anxiety about being far from the centre, from the famous houses, from her family, was fading—for perhaps, after all, this meant she would be liberated from the approval of others. Would it not be wonderful—thinking of the voices that had woken her from the fields—to be a fellaha, to be free like this? To shout in the morning alongside the men, as one set to work?

  This view was indeed a spectacle. Even before the eye reached that churning froth of white and blue above, the wind below was magnificent, and as she watched it dismantle the garden’s stillness, a washing rope on the patio began to swing from side to side like a necklace, and she had the thought that she should hang the sheet out here to dry. Inside, she wrung the fabric in the sink and carried it out. The uncoiled cotton smacked the washing line, and the wrinkles unravelled under her numbed fingers.

  Perhaps it was the wind’s noise that prevented her from noticing the figure at first. When it entered her awareness, it was standing perfectly still. She flinched, and the soreness in her neck reawoke. No gate had sounded, no footstep. The apparition was entirely in shadow, on the penultimate ledge, bottom half severed by the slant. She raised her hand to her forehead to block out the sunlight, and saw that whoever it was was now moving, climbing the steps. Her first terror was allayed when she saw it was a woman: heavy peasant dress; no veil. The woman stopped on the second terrace, and now Fatima could see her face. An old woman, too many teeth in her mouth. Her eyes were soft and large, her forehead long. She was holding her shawl over her chest with one hand.

  “I knocked,” she called out, in a low harsh voice.

  Fatima took a step towards the chairs and the salon door, which she saw, to her horror, had swung open.

  “You did not hear me,” said the woman.

  “Who are you?” shouted Fatima, but the wind snatched her voice away.

  The woman continued to stand there, brazen, and Fatima was struck with the alien sensation that it was she, and not the woman, who was the interloper; this had something to do with her opponent’s gravity, her fixedness, while Fatima felt as insubstantial as a piece of linen. She could be a previous incumbent; she might have worked for the old man. Or she might be a jinni. Fatima thrust out her arm and shrieked, as loud as she could:

  “Get out of my house! My garden—get out!”

  “Madame.” The woman held her curved palms together as though catching something. “Madame, please.”

  Fatima stared. Was this woman here to beg? Should she try to run for the salon door—perhaps the woman had heard about her, the new young bride, and saw in her seclusion and youth a chance for robbery—one heard terrible stories. But instead of running for the house, Fatima was filled with blistering outrage that someone might think she could be taken advantage of. She pulled her coat tight across her body, fixed her scarf well around her head. She performed these small actions briskly and pointedly, in an attempt to display her aggression. Those few seconds gave the woman time to begin saying her part.

  “Madame—I came to
see your husband.”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.” For the first time, the woman faltered. “Midhat Bey?”

  “What do you want with him?” Fatima shouted.

  “I wanted to say I am sorry.”

  The stranger took a step forward, as though to mount the terrace, and Fatima could see the skin around her eyes wrinkling around old folds as she dropped her glance to the ground. “Will you tell him for me? I am sorry …” Real tears appeared, silver on her face. “Tell him … Um Mahmoud is very sorry for leaving him. She is sorry for his father, Allah yirhamo. Tell him, please Madame.” She met Fatima’s gaze once, and resuming her grip around the shawl across her chest started to retreat down the steps, waving with her free hand, turning and bowing as she went. “Yislamo ideyki, Madame, yislamo ideyki, Allah ma‘ek.” She reached for the gate and pulled up the latch. “Allah yikhaleeki. Salam. Salam. Salam.”

  PART THREE

  1

  Half an hour before he was due to be hanged, Hani’s uncle, Fuad Murad, composed a will on a blank page from the back of a novel. Sitting beside his warden near the gallows, he tore the sheet out very carefully. Then he leaned on the book cover with his back to the sun and wrote in the clarity of his own shadow.

  I write this commandment in the eighth hour and a half of the Saturday night on 14 Shawwal thirteen hundred and thirty-three by the Arab calendar where I am sentenced to death at the ninth hour of tonight mentioned. I mean I write this commandment half an hour before my death. I write as one of my companion convicts, Muhammad Abd al-Karim, is taken to be crucified, and I am glad for him that he has gone to meet the Lord Almighty. And I welcome death with an open breast, and if I leave this world I leave it as a Muslim, believing in God and the afterlife.

  See how my hand does not shake,

  wrote the pen, tripping over the indents on the cover where the letters were gilded. He appointed his uncle the executor, and specified the money for each of his sisters, and the amount for his wife. The majority of his fortune would go to his daughter Sahar.

  And so that I shall greet death with a clear conscience, I also owe Rabea al-Dura, for fetching me those towels at the Hotel Continental, five and a half qurush.

  That year, 1915, the year her father Fuad stood on the gallows platform in Aley, flanked by two other Syrians, necks in nooses and literally wrapped in their crimes, which had been written on huge pages and pinned under their arms like aprons, Sahar Murad was six years old.

  Her memory went like this. At their home in Jenin, a messenger arrived with an envelope. Her mother fell to her knees outside the front door. It was summer, and very hot. Some days or possibly some weeks after that, they received a visitor.

  “Good morning, sister,” said a tall man, stepping into the hallway. He looked down at Sahar, bent to her height, and said, “Mashallah,” and touched her hair. Eyes on Sahar, he addressed her mother. “We have things to discuss.”

  A few days after that, Sahar heard another man’s voice in the hall. Thinking it was her father, she came to investigate.

  “There she is,” said the man. It was not her father. His arms reached out for her, and, cautiously, she walked into them. At once she was in the air, resting against the man’s shoulder, his arm her seat. She was too large for this, and she could hear his breath. In a bright voice, he said: “I’ll be seeing you in just a few years, habibti.”

  The third visitor Sahar remembered most clearly. There were circles under his eyes and he did not smell nice. He looked at her but unlike the others did not greet her. He simply turned to her mother and said: “Yalla. Talk.” Her mother looked worried; that Sahar always remembered.

  She was unsure when exactly she learned that her father was dead: whether it was a gradual process of understanding, or if there was a moment of revelation, which she afterwards erased. She remembered her mother’s anxiety. The only times she left Sahar alone were weekday mornings, when a woman named Mariam came to teach her to read, and Saturday afternoons, when Noura the maid helped with the housework. Guests were rare, but Sahar knew if someone was visiting because her mother put on a veil and locked her in the bedroom. During those lonely hours Sahar opened the drawer that held her mother’s scarves and wrapped them around her own head. There was no mirror in the bedroom to witness the effect.

  In general, however, Sahar’s childhood was not lonely. Under the aegis of the three women—her mother, Mariam, and Noura—she developed a noisy curiosity, and played for hours in the garden behind the house, examining the roots of the walnut tree, pulling at the grass, exploring the soil. Mariam provided books, gateways to distant countries and remote pasts, and as her reading ability improved Sahar plunged through the paragraphs of Islamic history on her own, and worked through the romantic plots of Egyptian novels, and in the evenings would summarise what she had learned for her mother, who could not read.

  Of her father she remembered two things. One was sitting on his knee. The knee went up and down and she laughed as it jogged her, a bouncing kind of laugh, which was itself quite funny. The other was the feel of his large hands picking her up under the arms. The year she turned eleven, the year after the war ended, Sahar finally asked her mother why he was dead. To her surprise, her mother—sitting in a chair at the time, wiping dirt off a shoe with a damp cloth—gave her a direct answer.

  “He was friends with people who did not like the Turks.”

  Sahar stood on one leg. “Why did they not like the Turks?”

  Her mother rested her hands and looked straight ahead, wrists curling upwards to keep the shoe from touching her lap. “Because—it was an empire.”

  Sahar sighed. This was becoming familiar: this confused sensation of disappointment and pity, as she watched her mother reach a limit to her knowledge.

  Then her mother said, “The Arabs, you know, we wanted independence.”

  Beneath the rag, a band of light stretched around the leather heel.

  “And where are the Turks now?”

  “In Turkey, I suppose.”

  “Now we have the English,” said Sahar.

  “Correct. They say it is only temporary, before we have independence. Inshallah. Inshallah it will be better than the Turks.”

  Sahar was thirteen when she began to menstruate. She was given plenty of warning. “You come and tell me,” her mother had told her, “the moment it happens, you tell me.” After such warnings, how could Sahar not be afraid, not knowing what it signified? She trudged to the bedroom and delivered the news. Whatever she might have expected, it was not this: her mother squeezing her hand so tightly it throbbed. She stared at Sahar, as though trying to look through her.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  Her mother drew long, emphatic breaths. “You will get married.”

  Another wave of that disappointed feeling came over Sahar, and she kept still, waiting for it to pass. Pity for her mother’s limitations, her loneliness. Finally, she said: “I will allow you to live with me.”

  Her mother opened her mouth and looked as though she might laugh. But, alas, it was only the drawbridge to weeping.

  “Oh no, no Mama, don’t do that.”

  “Sahar I have to tell you something. First, get me a handkerchief.”

  When her father died, three uncles had visited. Did she remember?

  Sahar thought of the rancid man with the dark circles. “Yes.”

  “Each of my brothers wants you to marry his son. Why? Because you are the heir to most of your father’s fortune. They are bad men. They still visit us. Frequently. Every month I see them. I have not allowed them to see you. And now—no, we will not tell them you are ready. We will find a way—”

  They decided to keep Sahar’s puberty a secret. They even concealed it from Noura and Mariam, and unplucked the seams in Sahar’s dresses to hide the breasts that would begin to grow.

  In this way Sahar passed an entire year. For the first time the small world in which she lived had woefully shrank, and two of its
three inhabitants she was no longer permitted to trust. In the daytime she looked at the garden from the doorway with longing, not daring to step out into that uncovered space in which someone might see her or snatch her. Though her curiosity was no less robust, it was mixed now with terror, and her preoccupation with her uncles verged on obsession.

  Mariam showed no sign of being aware of what had happened, or was happening. Her lessons became conversations, since Sahar was nearly her equal in reading and required only practice. Sometimes they read the newspapers together and discussed recent events. There was not much to report on; after the riots the previous year the country was quiet, and most of the gossip Mariam brought was about the railway, which was being refurbished. And something called a telephone: there was one at the post office, you could have a conversation with someone all the way in Jerusalem, she said; the voices travelled through tubes. In the spring, Mariam brought a piece of news from even further afield. She had read about it in one of the local papers, and then came across a double-page spread in an Egyptian magazine to which she had a personal subscription.

  On the twenty-eighth of May 1923 two women had descended from a train in Cairo. One was very famous, the wife of someone killed by the British. The women were returning from a congress in Rome, and as they stepped off the carriage, all the friends and admirers who had gathered on the platform to welcome them fell silent. Both women were dressed in black, with skirts that reached the ankle; one wore a large silver pendant on a thick chain; the other, a rosette. Their headpieces were pinned above their ears. Many people gasped. Neither woman was wearing a veil. One smiled. The other lifted her chin. And then, the crowd of women around them burst into rapturous applause. Several tore off their own veils and revealed their faces. The cameras flashed.

  Sahar noticed a tremor in Mariam’s fingers as she turned the page of the newspaper.