The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  Sahar

  9 January 1926

  Dear Sahar,

  The details you share are not boring in the slightest. It is always wonderful to hear what you have been doing, day by day. Very soon you will be telling me this over dinner, God willing. I hope I have already told you this, but your Arabic has improved tremendously and your handwriting is also very nice.

  Excuse me for being brief, but I must now prepare for a reception tonight with the new High Commissioner, and tomorrow I will be attending a meeting with a few of my colleagues in the Old City. I very much look forward to seeing you in May. The house is ready.

  Salamat,

  Hani

  When Sahar walked out through the school gates for the last time that spring, unveiled, she took a taxi straight to her husband’s new home in Musrara, a West Jerusalem neighbourhood not far from the Old City walls. And there he was, waiting at the top of the steps before the open door. He was not as tall as she remembered. Certainly, he looked older. At school this man had been the envy of her classmates and source of her quiet pride. But her first sensation, as she stepped over the threshold, buttoned up in her new dress and carrying her bags of books, was that Hani did not quite match the picture she had created and shared and adored.

  The house had two floors and plenty of bedrooms, and the windows onto the street were arched. The ground level was centred in the traditional style on a courtyard with a pool and fountain, and a floor of ornate black, red, and blue tiles. The tiles made a deep smacking sound as Sahar followed her husband to view the living rooms.

  One year later, when the Jericho earthquake shook through Jerusalem, a fault appeared in these tiles, spining across the courtyard and stopping just before the pool in the centre. Once the dust had settled on the city and the casualties had been counted, Sahar took on the responsibility of restoring the floor. She and her maid collected the broken pieces, cracked and poking upwards from their places, leaving a rough diagonal of cavities across the floor. Hani, preoccupied as always, could not recall where the architect had sourced the tiles. Sahar borrowed copies of Egyptian homeware catalogues from her colleagues in the Women’s Association, and donning one of her turban hats visited the ceramics shop in the Armenian quarter, bringing with her a small bag of fragments to show as examples. The shopkeeper knew who she was because of her husband, and, instantly deferential, covered his counter with scores of samples in terracotta and porcelain with various varnishes. None were suitable: all were too bright, and those with patterns were completely wrong, internally coherent and repetitious, rather than part of a design that would stretch across the floor. The shopkeeper, now perspiring, insisted on searching his back room, until Sahar said the name of the architect quite fiercely and asked if that man had ever purchased any ceramics from his shop.

  “Oh Madame,” he said. “I would be greatly honoured if that were so.”

  “I suppose that means no.”

  As she turned to leave, the shopkeeper threw out that if she wanted to ask the architect himself, she would find him at al-Aqsa mosque. He was leading the repairs there after the damage caused by the earthquake.

  The architect was crouching at the western corner of the mosque compound dressed in a dark blue suit. Upon seeing Sahar beside him, he stood and smiled. He held a ruler in one hand and a dirty piece of paper in the other. His waxed black moustache was threaded with grey, and his mottled hair swept up into a peak on one side.

  “You built my house,” said Sahar. “I am trying to find the tiles you put in the courtyard.”

  At first, the architect pretended to recall the house she described. But it was quickly obvious that he was pretending, and he confessed that having constructed so many buildings in that neighbourhood, he had delegated cosmetic decisions like tilework to his trainees and assistants, who were innumerable, and on constant rotation.

  “I believe,” he said finally, “they may have been ordered from Italy.”

  “Italy?”

  “Yes. But I can’t remember where.”

  She thanked him, sadly, and he asked for her name, holding her hand an instant longer than necessary and looking into her eyes. Sahar withdrew and wound her way back to the Armenian ceramics shop, where the shopkeeper, at the sight of her, burst out from behind the counter.

  “May I see those tiles again?” she said.

  She chose a stack of plain black, plain blue, and plain red ones, examining them next to her broken chips regretfully. The new reds were the worst; slotted into place on the courtyard floor beside the soft orangey originals, they glared with a vulgar, burnished discordance.

  Within the year, however, the new tiles began to fade. Hani had barely noticed them, and when she pointed them out merely said: “Well done.” Within two years, the sight of the mismatched tiles did not even bother Sahar anymore; she became used to and even fond of them. One day during the autumn of 1929, their courtyard was packed with two hundred female delegates of women’s organisations from all over the country, wearing hats and heeled shoes that multiplied the dull sound of the tiles into a cannonade. The Jerusalem women with the highest-ranking husbands sat in chairs while the rest stood around the walls listening and raising their hands to interject.

  Everyone was in a fury about the riots over the Wall. It was the Jews’ Wailing Wall and the Muslims’ Buraq Wall, where the Prophet ascended to heaven. The Jews had set up a gender partition that violated the Status Quo of Holy Sites, as established by the Ottomans and maintained by the British, and looked like a step towards taking possession of the whole. Riots ensued: Arabs died, Jews died; but the Arabs were treated far more harshly in the aftermath and several were sentenced to hanging.

  The women elected Madame Husseini to the chair. She raised her hand for quiet. They would march on the Government House. A delegation—Sahar, only twenty years old, among them—would go straight to the High Commissioner and his wife with their list of demands and announce their plan to demonstrate.

  (“And they threw their veils back,” said Hani, reciting the story to Midhat, “like this, and they told him, we are going to march, we are protesting the Balfour Declaration and the maltreatment of Arabs. What does the Commissioner say—he says, I’ll stop the protest by force if I have to. So, what did the women do?”

  “What,” said Midhat.

  “They would still demonstrate. But—they would demonstrate in cars.”

  “No,” said Midhat, smiling.

  “Yes. One hundred and twenty cars.”)

  * * *

  Sahar sat in the back of a Buick 154, behind the chauffeur; beside her was a Christian woman from Jaffa named Jamila. From the passenger seat, elderly Mrs. Abdul reached across the steering wheel to pump the horn. Cars before, cars behind, the pavements on either side crammed with police officers. The women streamed past Damascus Gate in a honking convoy, screaming slogans from their opened windows. At each of the foreign consulates five women exited the foremost vehicles and walked as one to deliver their memoranda. By half past six, the hot red sun descending, the formation of cars splintered into banners that fluttered apart through the city towards their neighbourhoods and towns and villages.

  One evening in 1933, Hani told Midhat this story again. It was one of several about his wife that, proudly, he seemed always to have at hand. That night he had just returned from Iraq and, fatigued, was walking out to buy cigarettes when he caught sight of his friend at the top of Jaffa Street near the new King David Hotel. He knew Midhat’s silhouette at once: the upright posture, the idle progression along the street as though taking in his surroundings at leisure and quietly judging them, a pair of gloves flapping from his hand. Hani reached him in ten long strides.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, taking Midhat by the shoulder.

  They stood before the hotel, vast and many-windowed like an office of state.

  “Hani!” said Midhat. “We came to the cinema.” His look of wonder contracted into a smile. His eyelids hung low; his moustache wa
s waxed finely on his upper lip. “My grandmother and the children—they went in, but I needed some air. But, Hani I miss you, it has been over a year since I saw you last. Where have you been?”

  “Just recently I was in Baghdad. King Faisal’s funeral.”

  “Bravo,” said Midhat, nodding his approval as though Hani was fulfilling a task he had assigned him. “Allah yirhamo, a great man. Shall we, what do you think, get a drink?”

  A woman in a grey ball gown passed into the hotel lobby on the arm of a man in tails. Midhat and Hani followed, and the woman glanced anxiously over her shoulder. They turned down a corridor into the hotel bar. Piano music floated out from a gramophone in the corner. The walls were dark and the barman’s shelf was mirrored at the back, giving a chandelier-like impression of endless bottles and faces. Midhat chose a pair of stools beside the window, which displayed the lush enclosure of a hotel garden, electric lamps among the bushes illuminating tables of flushed tourists and grey journalists.

  “Two whiskies.”

  “You’ll never guess who I saw,” said Hani.

  Midhat shook his head, as though clearing his ears to hear better.

  “Faruq al-Azmeh.”

  “Oh my goodness. In Baghdad?”

  “He was travelling to meet a woman. You remember how he was.”

  Midhat leaned away from the bar, holding the edge for balance.

  “He asked after you,” said Hani. “He wanted to know if you were still reading, and still in love.”

  “Oh, well then, you may tell him I am in love.”

  “Do you know, he is going bald? He is not married, of course.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Are you? His entire philosophy was against marriage.”

  An attractive middle-aged figure in a black dress appeared in the mirror behind the bottles. Midhat watched her wander out again through the back door. “I don’t think Faruq was against marriage,” he said. “He just particularly liked the idea of the extramarital.”

  Hani chuckled and took a sip. “Look at us. Two married men.”

  This was the preamble to Hani’s story, into which he plunged after a lengthy sigh. Midhat had heard several versions of this tale, but this was the first time Hani described with such detail the way he saved his young wife from the clutches of three miserly uncles, and brought her, in the dead of night, to Jerusalem.

  The entire affair, recounted thus in Hani’s words, became a tale of action that verged at points on absurdity. For most of its duration Midhat grinned and chuckled at appropriate moments. But as Hani went on to describe his wife’s role in the women’s committees and demonstrations—facts so well known that Midhat’s expressions of surprise were completely feigned, though conversationally necessary—certain earlier parts of the story continued to strike him with an eerie force. In this account of Sahar’s uncles something lay untapped, some other mood or meaning. Even the parts that were comical, or, perhaps, especially those parts—the three men, the phone call from the aunt, the nighttime journey—glinted with something sharper, something deeper than a mere question of power thwarted. It occurred to Midhat that a tragic story told quickly might contract easily into a comedy, and without the measure of its depths make the audience laugh. His friend carried on about the newspaper reports in praise of his wife—“And the speeches she makes, about unity, about freedom—really, I am proud of her”—but Midhat was only half listening, because he was thinking about the way his own charade might be told after he was dead, when he no longer held the reins on his memories, and they galloped off into the motley thoughts and imaginations of others.

  “The tragedy,” said Hani, “is that three Arabs were still hanged. Far fewer than were sentenced in the first place. But it’s enough to burn in the memory and make a martyr. Death creates these myths, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Midhat. “Terrible. Do you remember that story of the man nicknamed Barbar in Nablus?”

  “No,” said Hani. “I don’t know it.”

  “You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you. It is said this man hated his nickname. It was given to him because he was very talkative when he was young.”

  In the mirror between the gin bottles and the brandy, the woman in black briefly reappeared, accompanied now by a wraithlike man in a tweed suit.

  “So when he grew up, he founded a mosque in Nablus in his real name. Salim Basha or something, I can’t remember. And then he left for many years to as-Salt, and when he returned to Nablus he asked a little boy in the street, where is the mosque of Salim Basha? And the boy replied, ‘You mean Barbar’s mosque?’”

  Hani laughed hard and slid back on his stool. The barman flinched; then he saw that they were laughing, and he snickered.

  2

  Midhat never felt guilty about nights like this, spent drinking in a café or a bar populated by Jews and Europeans. He needed a little freedom from Nablus, from her stuffy, fervent atmosphere. He needed respite, truthfully, from his own home, from Fatima’s increasingly tart replies, and from the children’s easy leap to violence, which had turned the house into a kind of martial zone in which he was constantly disentangling their limbs and delivering verdicts as to who was in the right and who in the wrong.

  Midhat and Fatima had four children. Massarra came first, followed by Taher. Khaled, the third, was born the year of the Jericho earthquake, and was the only one who did not cry in the midwife’s arms.

  The fourth child arrived in 1929, two years after Khaled. That was the year of the Wailing Wall riots, of the massacre of Jews in Hebron, of Sahar Murad’s march to the High Commissioner, and Fatima, desolate on the cusp of yet another pregnancy, forced to concede at the age of twenty-eight that she had never been the mistress of her own body, lay in secret in the bathtub one day and ate with a spoon the entire contents of a bottle of powdered harmal seeds, which smelled and tasted foully of earth. She had acquired the bottle at great expense from one of the few remaining quack doctors in the old city, who handed it over with a euphemism and an unpleasant wink. Within a few hours the nostrum resulted in some hot and painful diarrhoea, but no sign of blood or a foetus, and several months later the red skin of baby Ghada met the cool spring air of the municipal hospital, to Midhat’s delight and Fatima’s exhaustion.

  In preparation for one of his wife’s receptions, which she held once a month, year in year out, for all the important ladies of Nablus, Midhat would usually deposit the children with his grandmother and travel by taxi down to Jerusalem to spend a night with his friend the journalist Qais Karak and the dancing girls at the Ma‘arif Café. He no longer invited Jamil, who only ever scoffed at the suggestion, but he did sometimes persuade Adel Jawhari to join, and the three men motored to the seaside and swaggered along hotel balconies overlooking the water. Midhat would smoke one of Adel’s cigarillos, his double-lined robe de chambre flowing open, around his neck one of the printed scarves he had imported from France heavily scented with his Farina Gegenüber cologne.

  In the coastal towns there existed an unspoken shift between the attitudes of the night and those of the day, between the animosity of the working man with his needs, and the freedom of the dancing one. This, at least, was how Midhat conceived of the contradictions, which did not trouble him as much as they troubled Adel. One night at the Casino Café in Jaffa, in the summer of 1934, they fell into conversation with a man who revealed himself to be a fervent Zionist.

  “I can’t believe I was even talking to him,” said Adel, stepping after Midhat onto the lamplit pier. “Can you believe it? I can’t believe it.”

  Midhat patted his back and embarked on a soft utopian argument, as the dark sea crashed nearby. To prevent intermingling was impossible, since they were living in the same country; and tonight they were watching the same dancing troupe, and the music was playing and the wine was flowing, and someone had just told a joke, so why not enjoy the camaraderie even if it would end at daybreak?

  “Habibi Midhat,” said Adel, beneath a streetlamp. “Y
ou are naïve.”

  Midhat was silent. He was thinking of Jamil. He still occasionally saw his cousin at family meals, and knew the basic facts of his life, but since that argument after Midhat’s wedding they had not been close and rarely saw each other. Since Nebi Musa, even. Jamil was unmarried, and had devoted the last fifteen years of his life to “the Cause,” rallying support for a boycott of the Mandate and its institutions. Midhat could tell that Fatima admired Jamil for his commitment, and he took this as an implicit criticism of his own lack thereof. The children, on the other hand, seemed wary of their uncle when they sat near him at Eid. Except for Khaled, who studied Jamil with a fascination that made Midhat feel ashamed.

  He signalled the waiter as they went back inside, and within the hour Adel was kissing a black-haired Russian girl named Polinka. Midhat saw them from the corner where he sat with one of the dancers on his knee.

  Although he took pride in being a bon vivant, by the age of thirty-nine Midhat could no longer truthfully call himself a healthy man. The doctor said he ate too much. He also drank too much coffee, and smoked too many cigars. And he was very fond of arak—though this last was a secret vice, which even the doctor did not know about.

  For a period of about a week and a half after Ghada was born, he had suffered from a weird nocturnal paranoia: every time he closed his eyes to sleep he felt the bed shaking. At first he accused Fatima of doing it, and when she denied this, he started to imagine the entire room was shaking, and that someone was walking on the roof. Logic lost authority after midnight, and the next evening the shaking was so strong he was certain it was a tremor from the earth itself, prelude to another earthquake. He was so alert, awaiting and registering every tiny vibration, that he barely slept at all. Nor did he suffer in silence, but repeatedly woke his wife to ask her if she had felt that one, or that one. In the morning, Fatima took charge of the investigation. She forced Midhat to lie down on the sofa and then to lie on the grass. These experiments yielded nothing, but the next night Midhat spoke suddenly into the darkness above their bed.