“Things are never perfect. And there is usually some separation between inside and outside. In our lives. The way we behave. Don’t you think?”
Hani made a recognisable gesture, which had hardened now into a full-blown mannerism: tipping his head to one side with his mouth open, closing both eyes tight and then opening one of them, looking up into the corner of the room as if trying to do some mental arithmetic. “Um, I mean, actually no I don’t agree. I believe in being consistent. I think—well ideally I believe in consistency.” He turned his glass little by little on the table as he spoke. “You know there are those people who stick to their position as though their honour depends on it, so, regardless of the situation, they will cling to this position because—their family says they should, or whatever. It’s a question of honour. Apparently. But in the end those people are nearly always corrupt. They say one thing, they do another. Of course everyone makes mistakes, but half the time those ones who are so emphatic—that’s because they feel the need to cover their tracks.” He jabbed the air with a finger. “Having said that, I also think that when you find something you believe, you have to stick to it.” His hand sliced horizontally, clearing a surface. “For example, we must maintain a policy of non-cooperation with the English. Absolutely. And I still believe we should have a united Syria—eventually, at least. That’s what we’re owed, we fought alongside the English, and that’s what we’re owed. And we almost, almost had it. The main point though is that we shouldn’t be dogmatic at the expense of—possibly changing our minds. It’s a different kind of consistency, to be flexible. I suppose I have always believed that. Believed in … doubt.”
This had deviated so far from Midhat’s original intention that he was momentarily flummoxed. Just as he was angling for a way back in, Hani continued:
“Take the issue of women, for example. I believed, and I’m sure you believed, that women should never, ever enter politics. I believed that, absolutely, I thought it was a bad idea, women have their role, their duties end at the door. And now, I’m proven wrong. What can I say. I stand corrected. Why was I saying—oh yes, because one should be flexible, not dogmatic. Of course, I wasn’t married back then. And marriage does change everything …”
“Yes,” said Midhat with energy, grappling for the reins, “marriage changes everything. In fact I wasn’t actually thinking about politics when I made that remark—though I think you are correct, that is a very—observant philosophical point.” He laughed. He felt they had gone back twenty years; they were in Paris, in Faruq’s sitting room. “I meant something more simple, about the life inside. When your life isn’t … per-fect …” He eyed Hani, wary of discomfiting him. “The things you wished for as a young person—I mean, the past becomes a kind of private philosophy, the things you remember. I remember things …” He shook his head theatrically.
Hani’s mouth opened in a grin. “Oh, I see. The old Midhat!” He swirled the arak around his glass. “My philosophe, my amoureux …”
Midhat had misfired again. Silent, he met his friend’s smile. The recorded strings crescendoed, and after the scratchy break a new, slower song began. He uttered a laugh and flourished his hand. “I miss you, habibi.” He poured more arak, followed by a cloud of water from the jug.
“I miss you too.”
They shared a fond look. He saw Hani only once or twice a year, and yet nothing about their friendship had ever faded. It was the opposite of Midhat’s relationship with Jamil. With Jamil it was all physical proximity and emotional distance.
“But what you were saying,” Midhat began, in a new serious voice—for if he could not speak from his heart, all the same he could avoid being trapped in the role of romantic clown—“could also be a result of the radical turn, could it not? When people stick to their convictions, ignoring reality. Perhaps, could it be, the nature of religion itself. To see the unity underlying the discord.”
“Oh, I wish, habibi. I wish,” said Hani. “If only that were true.” He shook his head. “Actually I think it’s the discord that makes someone like Qassam so appealing. An outsider, a preacher, accessible to everyone. Ya‘ni, imagine you are a poor Muslim farmer. What is the word ‘nation’ to you? You never had one before. You have never travelled, don’t read, why would you want one now? Ya‘ni, it’s quite abstract—you have your land, your livelihood, and your religion. So the question—how to get these people involved—we show them, there is a threat to your land, you deserve to be a citizen, you deserve rights. This is what we have tried. But now what Qassam is doing, appealing directly to their faith …”
They heard the front door. Then, the voice of Midhat’s youngest daughter:
“Ahlen!”
“Hi baba,” said Midhat, leaning back and placing his hands on his chest.
“Stop it. I said stop it.”
“What’s going on?” said Midhat.
Nuzha poked her head through the door. “They’re fine, just squabbling. Good evening, oh Hani keefak, I didn’t see you, shu akhbarak.” She grinned with her head to the side. She was out of breath. “Where’s Sahar?”
“Salon,” Midhat replied. “Hi baba—oh but what’s happened to your shirt?”
Khaled had appeared under Nuzha’s arm, with a face of thunder.
“Ghada put dirt on me.”
Midhat glanced at Hani, and then back at his son. “Yalla, wash it quickly before your mother sees.”
“I’ll do it,” said Nuzha.
The telephone rang in the salon. Midhat heaved to his feet and nudged Khaled aside. Fatima looked up from the sofa as he walked in.
“The children are here?”
He nodded and reached for the receiver. This was a gesture he loved to make, the one strong hand stretching out to the instrument clearing its brassy throat. But the instant the disc met his ear this pleasure was sapped by an odd, arak-infused sadness, a passing vision of a man proud of his telephone.
“This is the operator. Eli Kahen is calling for Midhat Kamal.”
“Midhat Kamal with you.”
The line crackled.
“Midhat!”
“With you.”
“Midhat there’s been a fire!”
“What?”
“A fire! Fire in the shop! Someone set fire to the shop!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“I’m coming now.”
The mouthpiece rattled on the hook.
“What’s happened?” said Fatima.
“Baba tell him to stop it,” shrieked Ghada. She ran into the room.
“Baba!”
“NOT NOW,” boomed Midhat.
Ghada flinched by the doorway.
“What’s happened?” said Fatima, getting to her feet.
“Nothing,” said Midhat. “There’s just a problem at the shop.”
Hani drove. The sky hung like a black liquid on the point of bursting. Already Midhat was imagining Fatima’s reaction when he told her. Her shame, always her shame. For himself, failure did not mortify him the way it once had; he had some sense now that the broken edges were part of the whole, and the future narrowed to a point. If there was only one outcome, what was the point of being afraid? But Fatima—she was balanced so precariously between her notions of what was done and not done, of who had seen and not seen, that such a disaster would drive her to the floor in a rage. Two roads from the shop, a burning smell reached the passenger seat. Was that smoke, floating in the dark above the rooftops?
“No no no no.” He clasped his sweating hands together. “No no no no.”
They turned the corner on a crowd of people. The blaze appeared to be quenched. British police uniforms; dismounted horses; two Model T Ford Tenders parked at angles with spent hosepipes unfurled. Hani pulled up and Midhat clambered out, peering through the foggy darkness. A terrible, acrid smell hit him, at once sweet and sour, and as he walked down the incline, scraps of burnt matter flew erratically through the air around him like black butterflies. Someone called his nam
e. Eli ran forward, the thinness of his legs exposed as the wind drew his trousers back. His hands were black, and Midhat saw he had been weeping.
The building looked blinded. The window glass was broken, the stonework charred with vast upward streaks. A sedate plume of smoke billowed up, unfurling into a shapeless fog and smothering the stars. A fireman waited for them to unbolt the warm metal safety door and then led the way into the interior. It was hard to see, the beam of the fireman’s wind-up electric torch kept catching on swirls of grey. The room smelled, peculiarly, of old meat. The boxes at the top of the stairs appeared untouched, the char reaching only partway up the banister. But as they entered Butrus’s room, the stench doubled with a sourness of destroyed fabric. A policeman pointed at the table, collapsed into a pile of cinders, and said: this was where the fire started. Then he pointed at the back window through which they had forced the hose: a thick shaft of black soot covered the gap between the top ledge and the ceiling. Eli gripped Midhat’s upper arm.
“Everything will smell so terrible.”
Midhat saw Hani had followed them in, and avoided his gaze. Cinders disintegrated under their feet as they walked out again. On the street, the crowd had dispersed.
“And the other buildings weren’t affected?” said Midhat, taking a step towards the sports equipment shop.
“No, and the bank is fine too,” said Eli. He lowered his voice. “That lamp. I knew something like this would happen.”
“Does Butrus know?”
“He doesn’t have a telephone, I called his mother. Go home and sleep now, Abu Taher. We’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“I’ll be here at daybreak.”
“Oh no, you won’t.” Eli turned to face him. “You will look in your house for that thing I told you about.”
“Let’s go home,” said Hani. “Yalla habibi. Imshi.” As they opened the car doors, he said: “I am so sorry, I can’t tell you. This is terrible. If there is anything I can do—or even if you just want us to go, if you need time on your own—”
“No, absolutely not,” said Midhat. He managed to smile. “It’s a shock, I’m sorry. You mustn’t leave. I’m the one who should be sorry. This is not what you expected after a long journey.”
“Khalas, I’ll do anything to help. I’m in Jenin tomorrow in the morning, but if there’s anything I can do when I come back …”
There was a clean feeling in the air when they arrived at the house, and the car doors made a clapping sound in the darkness. The house was quiet, and as Midhat descended the steps to his bedroom, sprung with nerves, he heard his wife moving inside. A fire, and the evil eye: hazard and scandal, two things that would set Fatima alight.
3
That their life was not more illustrious was clearly a source of pain for Fatima. That she was married to the co-owner of a shop, and not someone of high rank. In the early years they had rehearsed the myth of their romance, how Midhat proposed once, twice, and the third time she had chosen him. This story was the bedrock of all that came after, all the things they had imagined about each other from afar—most of which had transpired either not to be true or to be complicated by other factors, so that the foundation tilted and required extra work to balance. Fatima no longer liked to go over those early days. Apparently it tormented her to recall the time before her future was foreclosed. What was it she had wanted from her marriage, exactly? In what exactly had Midhat failed? To be rich? To take her abroad? To be, simply, different?
The first crack came with the news that the Kamal business was written in Layla’s name. At first, Fatima did not seem to understand what it meant. But as the years went on and she watched Midhat struggle to build something from nothing, she exaggerated his achievements among her friends, and opened the gap between her wish and the reality, a gap in which a violent disappointment resided. At the same time, he was certain her fibs boosted the popularity of Nouveautés Ghada among the Nabulsiyyat, and for that he was grateful. Women admired Fatima. Unlike Midhat, they fell for, and wished to emulate, her attitude of ornamental boredom. If Fatima told a few choice persons that the Cairene suits her husband sold were the height of fashion, then they quickly became so.
That night Midhat did not tell Fatima that someone may have put the evil eye on him: the fire was quite enough news for one evening. He downplayed it as they undressed for bed, he said it was small, he ascribed his involuntary sighs to Eli’s overreaction, he said these Samaritans, they are always hosting huge funerals for tiny animals. There was nothing destroyed that could not be replaced.
He woke in the morning full of dread. Hani left for Jenin, and when Midhat returned from taking the girls to school he found a note in the hall explaining that Fatima and Sahar had gone to a friend’s house. When he telephoned Eli, Eli’s wife picked up: her husband was taking care of the wreckage, she said, but had left a message: begin with the doorways. After that, look between the roots of trees, near beds, and beneath loose floorboards or stones. Also, although the clients who paid for Samaritan magic were advised against using storage spaces, he must inspect them anyway, because if the client had panicked they may have hidden something quickly in a cupboard.
Their house had eight doorways. He found no loose stones or any cracks in the plaster. He could see nothing hidden above or below the thresholds. He recalled one of the paving blocks at the back door had been unstable for years, but kneeling before it with a kitchen knife he found the cement would not give, and after a while he decided it was pointless.
Getting down to his knees, holding the rails of each bed to peer underneath, he soon wished he had a leaner companion to help him. He should have gone to the shop and insisted that Eli join and advise. Apart from anything else, if there had been someone to witness this he might have found it in himself to laugh.
Ten years after the opening of Nouveautés Ghada, Midhat had received a letter from his half-brother Musbah. They had not spoken since their father’s funeral, and the voice of this letter was the voice of a grown man, with a grown man’s sense of guilt. He was writing to explain, belatedly, that at the time of his death their father had been very much in debt.
Midhat was reading the letter in the salon, and at this point steadied himself against the wall by the door. Musbah went on to describe how Haj Taher had paid a large sum of money to bail a friend out of prison in Cairo, and died before he could be reimbursed. He and his mother had spent much energy and time trying to extract a reimbursement from this man, but owing to a variety of legal perversities their endeavour was to no avail; the family business was depleted in value, and they had moved out of Abbassia into a smaller house in a cheaper neighbourhood.
The letter did not end there. Guessing perhaps that Midhat’s sense of injustice was acute and enduring, Musbah seemed to find this present misfortune an occasion for further reflection upon their circumstances. Even before his eye travelled down the page Midhat saw the direction this was going. He shut the door before sitting in the chair by the telephone. A fire was dying in the brazier, and the smell of Fatima’s cooking wafted in through the cracks in the doorframe.
Our father was proud of you. He said this more than once to me, and I have to tell you he often said it in front of my mother and she was not always pleased. He was proud of your education, he was proud that you were trained as a doctor, and he was proud that you were well esteemed by your peers. For this reason I believe, and in fact I have to say that I know, that he felt you were capable of standing on your own, now that you were equipped with your fine education and your excellent engagement and for these reasons you did not require the support my mother did. My mother was burdened with five young children. I am sorry that the inheritance was not more equal, but given how little money there was left I can also understand why he decided that she needed what stability the business might still be able to provide, in our diminished circumstances.
It was a groping kind of apology; part excuse, part defence. Unclear also was how much of this explanation of the
ir father’s actions was being expressed with authority and how much was speculation. Midhat looked at the phrasing of the statements about their father’s pride, his belief that Midhat was “capable.” It was impossible to divine the degree of certainty from the syntax.
He folded the letter three times, scoring it with his fingernails. Why even revisit these old injuries? Death had long solidified his father’s command; after that, nothing else would ever be known for certain. That he had acted as Musbah claimed seemed plausible, and might mitigate the blackness of his cruelty. But no explanation, however convincing, could entirely close the wound that, unvisited, remained untended, and lay as one of several open sores in the back of his mind. Any pleasure at his father’s pride was swamped too fast by sadness, and historic shame at the unchallenged fiction, propagated by Teta, that Midhat was trained as a doctor. And shame always summoned anger, and he was done with anger. He folded the letter once more and tossed it onto the fire. The coals ate the paper and it curled directly into a cinder.
Cold comfort, indeed, that his father was proud. Fatima was calling for dinner, her shout echoed in the corridor. He waited for the pain to pass, but it was severe, and he pushed his fist against his forehead. Yet again his time in France had determined what came after. How perfect, that his father should have thought that period had endowed his son with strength.
He never spoke of Musbah’s letter to anyone. But as the months accumulated, he began to wonder whether his father was not entirely wrong. Having stood alone perhaps he was indeed better off than his half-brothers and -sisters. After living abroad, unprotected, acquainted early with the frailty of life and its relations, he might be more equipped than they to face catastrophe when it came.
After no luck with the cabinets, Midhat approached the tree in the garden. Lacking a spade he applied a dinner spoon to the soil around the roots. He sweated; beneath his shirt the heat was rising on his chest. He found an old newspaper to kneel on and scrabbled with his hands. The previous morning’s mist had returned with less force, and as the sun squeezed through the clouds, baking the back of his neck like a fever, the chickens in the coop at the bottom of the terrace burst into a clamour. He sat back on one foot in a crouch, wiping his face with the heel of his palm. The cement roof of the coop was visible from here. As the disturbed birds settled down, it occurred to him their lodging might be a perfect place to hide a curse. So near to the gate—someone could easily climb over unseen and bury something amid the hay.
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