The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “There is a specific rhythm. Dun-dun, dun-dun.”

  The bed rocked as Fatima sat upright and glared down at him. Her eyeballs glowed. Her shadowy hair was spiralled into a pile.

  “That’s your heartbeat,” she said. “You are an idiot.”

  Very carefully, Midhat listened. She was right. The shaking coincided, at a slight delay, with each of his heartbeats. It was the blood in his own body. Fatima struck his shoulder, and Midhat exploded with laughter. She hissed: “You’ll wake the children!” But a moment later she surprised him. She giggled, melting back against the bedhead, and her legs bent under the blanket from the convulsions. It was an intimate moment, which prolonged itself into a happy hour or two, during which the bed shook even more than usual. The following day the doctor told Midhat he must reduce his coffee and sugar consumption in the hours before sleep. But what really happened was that he grew accustomed to the rhythmic shaking, which did not seem so pronounced now that he knew its cause.

  Mornings were the more common occasion for intimacy with Fatima, particularly after a night apart, he in Jerusalem or along the coast, she at one of the Nablus istiqbals. Midhat believed the spark was most likely the change in routine, which made each a little stranger to the other, and revived some nostalgia for the early, more mysterious days of their marriage. Returning home from an evening abroad he would find his wife softened by the breath of change and released from her customary irony, which he assumed she had expended in great quantities of wit the night before. In addition, she seemed pacified by the taste of society which reassured her that the rest of the world, by which she always meant the rest of Nablus, was not better off than they. At these times, desire was tangled with an awareness that other people had seen their spouse, had seen and judged what they now saw, lying on the bedsheets in the sifted morning light. And each welcomed and coaxed the jealousy this thought summoned from the dark, because, in this instance, jealousy was a rise to desire, which by bringing the whole world into the bedroom made it easier to be alone.

  November 1935. Midhat heard voices as he approached the kitchen. His shoe clicked on the terracotta tile, and the voices stopped.

  A morning haze curtained the farther mountain from the kitchen window, and under it the things of the garden—trees, furniture, bushes, wall—were the colour of ash. Fatima was at the table, knees bent to her body, heels balanced on the edge of the seat. Her neck was stringed with tension, which suggested she had only just rested back against the wall. Beside her, Nuzha was leaning over something flat on the table.

  Though younger than Fatima, over the past fifteen years Nuzha had aged much faster than her sister had. She could not be more than thirty and yet the hair around her face was already greying and the sides of her mouth were lined. Behind her back, Fatima often called her sister a simpleton; but Nuzha was not simple. She had only remained carefree, in a way Fatima never had been.

  “Look here,” said Nuzha. “We found this among my mother’s things.”

  Two bony fingers rotated the picture so Midhat could see it the right way up. It was a photograph, faded with age, showing two rows of women in party dresses, a few kneeling in the front. Most of the faces were blurred, mouths and eyes smoky lines and holes, but here and there part of a dress or a jewel was caught perfectly. In the background, the engravings of foliage on the flowerpots were pristine. Above them drifted a blotchy mist of real leaves.

  Midhat pointed his little finger at a figure in the second row, one of the only perceptible faces. “There’s you,” he said. A girlish Nuzha looked dead at the camera. Beside her stood a grey smudge.

  “Yes that’s me. Doesn’t it look like we’re dancing?”

  Midhat studied the figures, trying to see them in motion.

  “Where are you? Where was it taken.”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t that funny? People didn’t really have cameras in those days, so I can’t think …”

  “Atwan istiqbal,” said Fatima, in a jaded voice. The window light polished her nose and forehead.

  “Oh,” said Nuzha. “Yes, Atwan. But why are we moving like that?”

  Midhat said, “It must have been the—”

  “Must it?” said Fatima.

  He looked over at his wife’s strained neck, then picked up the photograph and drew it close to his eyes. He examined the plant pots.

  “It’s raining.” He put it back on the table.

  Of all his wife’s habits, the one that irked Midhat most was the effort she put into not appearing interested. It was an aristocratic trait that he abhorred, and towards which she had a natural advantage, being able to express boredom simply by keeping her face immobile. When the muscles of Fatima’s face were slack the corners of her eyes and mouth drooped south, as though she could hardly bother to keep her eyes open. Sometimes he liked to provoke her, and for this reason he had placed the photograph far away from her on the table. But, as usual, Nuzha blithely interfered and handed the picture to her sister, so that Fatima did not need to move for a view. She eyed it and said nothing.

  Midhat knocked on the girls’ bedroom door, and Ghada ran out to meet him.

  “Baba Baba Baba I dreamt we were in an earthquake.”

  “Oh dear,” said Midhat. “Massarra are you finished with the comb?”

  Massarra, who was plaiting her hair, passed the comb behind her while keeping eye contact with her reflection in the mirror.

  “We were in the earthquake,” Ghada continued, while Midhat sat on the mattress and drew her between his knees, “and then we went on holiday.”

  “Why are you so messy.” He touched the big knot of hair on one side of her head. “Did the earthquake roll you around in bed?”

  Ghada clucked and tipped her head back, gurgling as he turned her by the shoulders to see the rear. He teased the biggest knot by combing lightly several times until the threads began to separate. Ghada gripped her hands over her crown as he laboured, and when the knot fell apart he combed through the bent threads. Two clean socks lay across a chair. He crouched to Ghada’s feet, and she held his head for balance as she stood on one leg.

  “Shoes.” He pointed to the line of shoes beneath the window. “Taher, good morning habibi.”

  His eldest son often approached before anyone had noticed him. Taher was tall for an eleven-year-old, with a silent manner and a bald stare, his long rectangular head drenched in black curls. He ignored his father, walked through the door, and disappeared.

  “Massarra, are you ready? Khaled? Where is he.”

  “Give me four and a half minutes,” said Massarra.

  “Where is Khaled?”

  “He’s in my bed.”

  “You didn’t wake him? Khaled, get up.”

  “I did wake him!” Massarra twisted round indignantly, and the completed plait coiled around her neck as she held the other steady. “He went back to sleep, didn’t he!”

  After a quick breakfast of bread and za‘atar, the boys set off for school. Midhat waited in the hall while the girls said goodbye to their mother and aunt. Then he reached for Ghada’s hand.

  The mist was clearing, but it had rained in the night and a rind of dirt soon gripped his boots. A splatter appeared on the toe of Ghada’s shoe: he lifted her under the arms and balanced her legs over his stomach, arms around his neck.

  Massarra tugged at Ghada’s skirt. “I can carry her.”

  “She’s too heavy.”

  “No she’s not. You’re making a mess of it.”

  He didn’t respond. They had reached paved ground near the school and it was time to set her down anyway.

  “Just take her hand.”

  Massarra seemed satisfied. “Come on little one,” she said.

  His daughters disappeared and reappeared between the bills posted on the gate. Seven or eight bore the same message: “Right Is Above Strength and People Are Above Government.” From a farther street a wind called, and as it reached him the bills flapped like bunting from the railing. “Fight the Bri
tish, Fight the Jews, Fight the Arab Traitors—Signed, The Rebellious Youth.”

  Across the concrete path, the schoolgirls crowded up the steps.

  When they were first married in 1920, Midhat and Fatima had intended eventually to leave Nablus. But the dream each had entertained of Europe, or of Cairo, grew dim the longer they were entrenched here, in this town with its webs of subtle comfort, of knowing and being known, all of which made departure for new territory seem too severe a breach.

  The truth was that without his father’s business everything Midhat had of worth was in Nablus. To begin from scratch in another country, even in another city, would mean starting with nothing at all. Nouveautés Ghada, the shop he had opened with the Samaritan Eli after the local Kamal store closed, was in the new town between Barclays Bank and a sports equipment store. For all the usual fluctuations Nouveautés had been doing well: a high-water mark in sales coincided five years earlier with a surging interest in women’s fashion, when at last Nablus seemed to be catching up with the other cities. Veils, though not gone entirely, had thinned into vapours of chiffon, as in more conservative parts of Jerusalem and along the coast; skirts concluded at the knee, and the black stockings on the shelves of Nouveautés disappeared almost as soon as they were laid there.

  Not everyone in Nablus was glad about their good fortune. Over the course of the last decade, several of Midhat’s acquaintances had turned cold, and more than once a group of women paused in front of his shop and, believing themselves invisible, glowered at the dresses on display. Teta remarked that it was the same in his father’s time: a self-made man was more vulnerable to the evil eye than he who inherited his privilege. “This is partly why he moved to Cairo.”

  “Really?” said Midhat. It never occurred to him that his father might have wished to escape Nablus.

  “They say the bite of a lion,” said Teta, “is better than an envious look.”

  And, of course, when people looked at Midhat, they saw a man who had married above his station, a sybarite, an optimist, a success with women, a carefree lover of the West. Regardless that he had hardly made fortune enough to take his family abroad, Midhat and his wife rapidly became local objects of jealousy. Chic, charming, well educated; their house was no Atwan palace, but Fatima’s istiqbals were renowned for their flair, for the studied nonchalance of the hostess on the Armenian chaise. Her talent at the oud was itself an occasion for spite, and replacing the instrument in its velvet-lined case she would whisper the Daybreak Sura to repel the evil eye as her guests relinquished their last cups of lemonade and trailed out through the garden gate.

  By 1935, fear was afoot in Nablus, and with fear came ill will. The finger levelled at the enemy swung inexorably round to the apostate nearer by, and by “apostate” one meant any neighbour who might be considered wanting in ideological zeal. Armouries had been installed in Jewish settlements, and as the Arab elites continued bickering over degrees of cooperation, their national movement was grinding to a halt. Alarm bells rang in Europe, and Jewish immigration swelled with refugees. Without a proper channel for their anger the Nabulsis became nasty in the markets, so that to walk through the onion souq was to hear voices raised with a passion quite out of proportion to any of the transactions at hand. Even the women’s groups became forces of rage, and thin-veiled Nabulsiyyat took to the podiums before the post office to point at the sky and unleash their fury at British hypocrisy, and at every local person too weak for the Cause.

  Adel bemoaned the infighting. Basil Murad had even accused him of not being radical enough. But often, he added, twisting his glass on the table, one could see that long-standing enmities were rising to the surface and adopting the guise of political indignation. More than once Midhat came home to find Fatima wafting burning sage into the corners of the living room and muttering incantations. He tried to laugh it off. It did not help Fatima’s fear of the evil eye that her husband was not a political activist, and had gone into business with a Samaritan.

  Although Nouveautés remained relatively prosperous, Eli attributed a recent decline in sales to the political situation. People did not want to give the appearance of having money to spend. It wasn’t good for the resistance. Only last month barrels of ammunition for the Jews were discovered in Jaffa, and the Arabs had called a daylong strike all over Palestine. Massarra insisted Midhat take her on the march, but then Ghada had tripped in the garden and hurt her knee, and begged him not to leave her, after which ensued a loud and pointless argument, so in the end the children spent the strike day sulking in their bedrooms while Midhat took a nap.

  The soap industry especially suffered. The Egyptian market withered, and then the Jews set up their own factories for export, selling “Nabulsi-style soap” but using castor oil, instead of olive, which was far cheaper. One night in Jerusalem Qais Karak admitted to Midhat and Adel with a half-amazed laugh that his father, the famous soap manufacturer, now relied on the income from his journalism. Many times Midhat had passed the open front of the Atwan soap factory and heard Abdallah Atwan shouting at someone about the Jews. Penned in by her two mountains Nablus was not, in any case, growing at the rate of other towns. Compared with Jaffa and Jerusalem and Haifa and Akka—all open to the sea, to Christian pilgrimage routes and tourism, electrified and full of cinemas—this town was decaying in her provincial backwaters, subsisting on memories of former glory, her inhabitants recalling with artificial frequency the days when she used to be called “the little Damascus.”

  “When Nouveautés grows,” Midhat sometimes told Fatima late at night, “then we can think about Cairo.”

  Everyone, however, even their children, felt the urgency of staying in Nablus. They had a duty to remain. Forget local rivalries, in the end it was as the Bedouin said, the enemy of one’s enemy was a friend; and though Midhat might not be active the way Jamil and Adel were active, he was a Nabulsi, and everyone in Nablus breathed the same haunted air.

  He did not often pause to reflect on what might have been, but every now and then he looked up from the inventory books and heard a sound like a strong wind whooshing past his ears, and with a vertiginous feeling, as though standing on the prow of a ship, his life slipped into view. Suspended there on the bright blade of the present moment, he turned his head and glimpsed from a distance how his fate had rolled out. The shape of his marriage, his profession, his family, his house. Viewed from this angle, the question of choice seemed quite irrelevant.

  It was mostly Adel who brought him news of Jamil. Jamil was debating in the nationalist clubs, making speeches, writing petitions, amassing allegiance, employing connections across the Jordan River to collect arms from the Bedouin. Sometimes Midhat saw in his cousin’s life another path for his own. He thought about his youthful days as a student, caught up in the drama of “exile” in Paris with Faruq and Hani and the others, drunk on the notion that to argue was important, with a productive end, and that he, gesticulating at his friends with a glass of liqueur, was engaged in a significant path of thought, a small piece of a wider picture of men arguing in rooms. Now, speech clogged with arak, he murmured and smiled at his cousin and compatriots. That was not his life.

  * * *

  As Midhat approached Nouveautés Ghada, he saw Eli hunched at the counter. Eli’s ears poked out under his tarbush, and he was running two fingers through his beard.

  “Good morning, Abu Taher,” said Eli, lurching upright, eyes wide. A newspaper sighed as he shifted it across the counter. Midhat angled to see the headline.

  “What happened?”

  “No, not there,” said Eli. “We had an accident.”

  “An jad?”

  “Come and look.”

  He followed Eli into the tailoring room. Butrus had not arrived, but the window shutters were open. Positioned on the table between the flywheel of the sewing machine and a stack of cottons stood two naphtha lamps. The glass of each flute was broken, jagged all the way around.

  “Ah, what a shame.” Midhat touched a peak. �
�It isn’t a disaster. Where are the pieces?”

  “This is not about expense,” said Eli, in a warning voice. “It’s about how did this happen. Why are these broken.”

  Midhat was well acquainted with the symptoms of superstition, since it was an affliction from which his own wife suffered, as well as his grandmother. He had recognised them before in Eli’s behaviour: that eye lingering on a dark corner, a twitch of the lips murmuring a protection. Unusual, however, was for Eli to admit something like this so directly.

  “You think someone did that? I don’t think so, Eli.”

  “I’m telling you. Both lamps? To me, that’s a signal.”

  The shards of one, Midhat saw, were as regular and upright as the tines of a mock crown. “We have a third. Where is it?”

  The shutter banged the outer wall as Eli pushed the casement bar, and in the tiny extra light the window afforded, Midhat opened the cupboards.

  The lack of electricity in Nablus had, like many things, a political basis. More than a decade ago the council voted to boycott the Electric Company, a Zionist enterprise backed by the British. This abstinence from electric light remained a point of pride: nowhere in Palestine was such cohesion in evidence. Not in Haifa, not in Jaffa, not in Jerusalem. Fortunately for Midhat and Eli, the breadth of their shopfront windows meant they had little need for oil lamps during the day; Butrus, however, used them a great deal in this back room, where he often hemmed into the night.

  Midhat mounted the stairs to the storeroom. He stacked one empty crate on top of another, and moving along the banister caught sight of Eli hovering between the shelves below. Presently he landed on the lowest step, and contorted his body to send his voice up to Midhat.