The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  The smell of chicken faeces was always a surprise. Midhat slipped through the crack in the wire door with his neckerchief pulled over his mouth and nose, and the birds crowded on one side, yapping and jerking and treading absurdly in the fashion he adored.

  “Yalla, ya shabab, yalla,” he said. “Tell me, yalla, where did he put it?”

  The shelves where they roosted dripped with hay, empty of eggs. One bold chicken came to investigate his foot, snatching her head in different directions and peering from the side. Midhat kicked the tray of seed with his toe.

  “Abu Taher,” came Fatima’s voice. “What are you doing?”

  He turned. Fatima and Sahar were standing by the lower gate, squinting at him from beneath their scarves.

  “Are you collecting eggs?” said Sahar.

  Fatima’s face was white.

  “Habibti,” said Midhat, lifting his trouser legs by the knee to climb out. He rubbed his grimed fingers together, shifted a lock of hair off his face with a bent wrist. His wife was trying to control her breathing. He saw a choice: either to weather her fury, or to tell her the truth, and by appealing to her superstition gamble that he could divert her rage into needy fear. Telling the truth seemed kinder, to both of them. “I have to talk to you,” he said.

  Sahar took the cue. The gate squeaked; she mounted the steps to the house. Fatima’s ears drew back and her forehead tightened, as though she were ready to charge or back away. There was no time to gauge whether she would in fact take his part or blame him, but he had begun now, and must continue.

  “Eli told me there was a curse,” he whispered. “Someone put the evil eye on me. On us.”

  Her eyes ran very fast over his face. Her breathing shallowed, and he knew he had succeeded.

  “Are you sure it’s this house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When was the curse made? If it was a long time ago it could be in your old house.”

  “Ah yes. Yes, you might be right.” He opened the wire door, as the chickens crooned and nodded forward. “Yes, habibti that’s an excellent thought. He did say it was a long time ago.”

  “Excellent?” said Fatima. “No. No. This is not excellent.”

  She winced, and her eyes darted to the terrace, as if she had just seen something move.

  The old house now belonged to his cousin Wasfi. Um Taher still lived downstairs with Um and Abu Jamil and Jamil, and collectively they had decided to sell the upper part to a family member: choose the neighbour before the house, as it was often said. Um Mahmoud was working there again, employed by Wasfi and his wife. Despite her age Um Mahmoud had remained agile, and cuddled Midhat each time she saw him. The house thus occupied, when Midhat visited one he visited all, and although he now tiptoed to Wasfi’s front door, hoping to go unnoticed, someone soon shouted out to him from a lower window.

  “Khalto!”

  Um Jamil was waving enthusiastically from behind a vase of flowers.

  “Oh hello, Khalto,” said Midhat. “This is a nice tree over here.” He pointed vaguely, then reversed his steps to the downstairs door.

  “Hi teta,” called his grandmother.

  Teta was draped over the sofa beneath a quantity of embroidered fabric, and on the seat beside her lay a jumble of coloured spools stabbed with needles. An uproar of pans and boiling water issued from the kitchen; above them, Um Jamil called:

  “We heard about the fire!”

  “Yes what happened?” said Um Taher. “Sit down.”

  “Oh, dear.” Midhat sighed into an armchair and set his tarbush on the table.

  “Well?”

  “We don’t know what happened, Teta.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “No, it’s not bad. Eli is sorting it. It’s just an accident. With the lamps, you know.”

  “Ya Allah,” said Um Jamil, gliding in with hot coffee on a tray. “It would be better if we just got the electricity.”

  Um Taher sucked her teeth. “Ta‘awun,” she said to her stitches, pulling the needle like a violin bow and rotating the fabric. Cooperation: it was now one of those words even ladies in their eighties could recite with an air of righteousness.

  “Jamil is at a meeting,” said Um Jamil to Midhat.

  “I see.”

  “Something, you know, nationalist. Something about a strike?”

  She cocked her head hopefully. She still reported Jamil’s activities to Midhat, apparently in the hope that he might have some other information to contribute. She also often expressed her worry that Jamil showed no interest in getting married. Sometimes she said, “People don’t marry so much nowadays,” but in a voice that lacked conviction, her eyes lingering on Midhat for a confirmation or a denial. At times he felt sympathy; he saw the struggle to understand her son’s behaviour from the limited facts she could accrue in her living room. But even Midhat’s strongest sympathies could be tested by overuse.

  “Mashi.” He smiled, and was saved from spouting an inanity by Teta, who said suddenly:

  “Mashallah you look like your father.”

  “Do I? Oh, Teta.”

  “Usually you look like your mother, but today you look like Taher. Allah yirhamo. It’s your face. You have a bigger face now.”

  “Thank you. How is your health?”

  “I’m always dying. Will you pass the sugar. I have pain in my lung, and in my bladder, thank you, but that’s life. Fatima didn’t want to come?”

  “She is at home, we have guests. Hani and Sahar.”

  “Hani! How is Hani? Habibi Hani. I like him.”

  “He is well, he is well. Busy, busy.”

  “Busy.” Um Taher sucked her teeth. “Everyone is busy.”

  “Is Wasfi at home?”

  “Oh Wasfi, he is the worst,” said Um Taher. “He barely comes to see us. Does he khalti?”

  Um Jamil grimaced blandly and shook her head, sipping her coffee as she eyed a crack in the wall.

  Neither Wasfi nor his wife was at home, but their front door was unlocked. Much of the furniture from Midhat’s childhood had remained, and the changes imposed by Wasfi and his wife were mostly imperceptible—bar the elaborate porcelain ornaments on the walls about which Teta still complained, because the blue and white did not go well with the Damascene chairs. Midhat always felt he was trespassing, especially when peering into his own childhood bedroom—into which a second bed had been squeezed for Wasfi’s younger son—in part because of all the known objects. They no longer held any magic from the past. They only made him feel his age, his distance from the time when they were familiar.

  He ran his fingers over the plaster of the kitchen doorway. He stared down at the slabs on the threshold, and poked the edges with his toe. He entered his old room. Wasfi’s boys were tidy, and nothing lay under their beds except their shoes. The cupboards held only clothes, spare sheets, and blankets.

  He stepped into his father’s bedroom, which Wasfi now shared with his wife. It amazed Midhat that they still slept on the same European-style bedstead that Layla had brought from Cairo, back before the roads were even paved, before the trains ran direct. He glanced at the floor, the walls. He opened the cupboard and felt around among the clothes as quickly as possible, then, finding nothing, pushed the cupboard doors closed to enter his father’s study.

  This room had changed even less than the others. The same desk stood before the window; the same chair. The same bookshelf, though the books it held were different. An old copy of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois lay on top of the others, as though studied recently and carelessly returned. It was a dun-coloured volume with vertebral ridges above and below the title. He tipped it from the shelf, and let it fall open in his hand.

  The motion of the people is always either too remiss or too violent. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms they overturn all before them; and sometimes with a hundred thousand feet they creep like insects.

  His brain moved stiffly through the words. He had not read French in years. His bookshelve
s at home were full of French books, but he had stopped opening them because it tired him to push uphill through their pages.

  A few years ago, he tried to speak French to one of the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph. The “Ebal Girls,” as some people still called them, had long before relinquished the management of the municipal hospital, and handed it over to a few local Western-educated doctors and nurses they themselves had trained. But with an affection for the building and its regulars the Ebal Girls still made visits now and then, imparting odds and ends of obsolete advice. His grandmother, who for all her initial mistrust had come to adore the hospital, visited for a checkup at least once a week. Occasionally he accompanied her, and on one of these occasions had attempted to address an emaciated elderly nun who was bedridden with illness. Her name was Sister Louise. Beyond “Bon soir,” however, Midhat found he could not say anything. The words were like dry objects in his mouth that he could not chew. Teta’s embarrassment made him feel even worse—and when he returned home he reached for the old poets he used to like. Fatima said she found him asleep in his chair half an hour later, glasses on his head and the pages of the book squashed on his chest.

  He forced his way through the paragraph of Montesquieu. He was shifting heavy sand, trying to uncover something hard beneath. He felt the pieces of his mind like the wheels of a clock running too slow.

  The daylight was full now. Glancing up he saw rays stretching indoors; and yet it was cold, his shoulders were hunched, he was holding the book up to his face. A low sun shone in through the window at a blinding angle and lit his fingers so they glowed red. All along its path dust sparkled, washed around in the air’s current. A sharp beam outlined the shadows on the floor, and he caught sight of a tiled corner. An object used to stand there. A chest of drawers, perhaps; or a shelf, or a chair. How odd, you could know a room for years, be familiar with its contents, but when something was removed, you could not for your own life recall what it was. And there, that tile where whatever-it-was used to stand was sharpened by the light. An outline of black. He set Montesquieu aside and, crouching in the corner, noted with his fingers that it wobbled. He needed a blade.

  The kitchen was the same; the cutlery in the drawer was different. He selected a knife with a bone handle, and kneeling once more in the study, slid the knife’s rounded end into the side of the tile. It yielded with a scraping sound. The fingers of his left hand grabbed the edge: it was heavy, he felt the blade suffering and bending under the weight. The tile was deeper than it looked, and when he managed at last to draw it upward, a small puff of dirt and crumbled cement flakes flashed in the air. He put his hand into the hole, felt the edges of something smaller and lighter than the stone, and drew up a wooden cigar box.

  He wiped off the dust. The broken halves of two grey-green labels lay across the opened edge. The coloured paper around the perimeter was tattered. The lid opened easily, and the box exuded a strong smell of tobacco, sharp and sweet, full of cedar. He smelled his father. He felt his father’s beard scratching his cheek.

  Inside the box lay several objects. He wiped his fingers on his trouser legs to touch them: two bronze figurines, Grecian women, with a pale green tarnish caught in the folds of their hammered robes and obscuring their faces. Beside them, a twisted length of fabric. He unravelled it: it was soft and cream-coloured. There were no marks upon it and the edges were not hemmed. A rag for polishing the figurines? A tiny cardboard box, inside it a ring, for a woman—a silver ring with an engraving. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and felt genuinely shocked. Could these trinkets belong to Wasfi? But he was sure, sure by the smell, that they were his father’s. Then whose was this ring? His mother’s? He was perplexed. Without his father these objects had no meanings, their threads had all been cut. But already in the light of them, that man named Haj Taher Kamal was changing shape; the side of him that lay in shadow loomed larger in the darkness. Never would his father have struck him as superstitious; on the contrary, he was highly rational, he had turned the business he inherited into a lucrative enterprise, observed jealously by many ungenerous neighbours. But this hoarding and hiding—this was the behaviour of a suspicious person. A silver ring in a cigar box hidden under a stone? There was no jewel, the item was not valuable enough to warrant concealment. And what else was there—he put his hand in. A series of documents. A thin and worn-out leather strap, punctured with holes for buckling. The paint on the leather was cracked and disintegrating; it left a brownish dust on his fingers. He turned to the documents. The first envelope contained a tintype of a house he did not know. He tilted it in the light, and the metal shone. It was not a Nabulsi house. The entrance was of striped stone, the windows were barred. There were no people in the picture. He turned to the second envelope. It was lilac-coloured. Written upon it were the words:

  Monsieur Midhat Kamal

  Maison de Famille Kamal

  Naplouse

  Palestine

  He stared at the handwriting. In a practised motion, he pressed the edges together to open the top, and pulled out the letter. His hands started to shake. Unlike Montesquieu’s, the words entered his head with no difficulty at all.

  7 October 1919

  Dear Midhat,

  It has now been four years since you left us in Montpellier. Four years!—I cannot believe it even as I write it. I find myself thinking about you often. Thank you for your letter. To tell the truth it causes me some distress to discover that you were in Paris—the thought that we might have spoken before now. You may also wonder why I have not tried to write to you—the truth is that for a long time I was angry and in pain. And I suppose that most of all I was confused. I am afraid this might not reach you before you leave, so I am sending it to Nablus—which means you are reading this at your home. I hope the journey was safe and pleasant.

  Oh—I have been wanting to write to you for so long—and now I am here at last with a pen I don’t know what to write!—All the things I had thought to say are suddenly difficult to put into words.

  When you left, the warmth of the house followed after you. I think we had not noticed how much delight and joy were supplied by your presence. I wish I had behaved differently—if we could recover ground that has already been lost. But you are right, it is senseless to try. I wish only that what has happened might not be final.

  I feel as though I am writing into space—it is strange not knowing how you will feel when you read this. I wish I could see your face. Oh, Midhat. Sometimes I think I feel you in my breath. This is difficult to bear.

  The long years of this war have been a strain on all of us, and now they are lifted I want to ask of you one last thing: will you come back? I know you have recently arrived so I wouldn’t expect you immediately, and I don’t want to beg, I want only to tell you how much I long for your company. I have wronged you—please know that the error was not only yours—and I hope, and wish, that we might remake some of what was broken during that incident over dinner. I cannot tell you how mortified I was to wake and find you had gone. I cannot tell you—I am still so filled with remorse, and pain, even four years on. At first I don’t think I knew it was remorse, I distracted myself, I went to join Marian at Divonne-les-Bains. I was useless as a nurse, truly, but they needed hands even to help with the cleaning, and though there wasn’t much time with so many wounded coming in, I liked to read to them in the evenings, especially the ones who were certain to die.

  Divonne was not a happy place, but I had not been in the company of so many people for a long time and that was a distraction. I am glad also for Marian’s sake that she did not have to witness this devastation on her own. And there was a garden, a little way from the hospital, which was usually empty, and where I would feel peaceful, and sit very still and think of you. When I left, when the war ended, which had been a cloud on everyone’s vision, all I know is it was suddenly quite obvious to me what I had done.

  I do not know what exactly happened between Sylvain and my mother, but my understandi
ng is that she was probably in love with him. I do not think he behaved dishonourably; in fact, it was he who severed the connection. He was like an older brother to her, I think, and he certainly cared about her. I only know that when my grandfather asked if he would marry her, he declined. That is all I know. That is probably all I will ever know; Sylvain is difficult, and as he gets older he gets more difficult, and the few times I have tried to ask him, he was unkind to me. I sensed some soreness there, which it was not my right to touch. And besides, these days he is spending much more time in Paris, so we hardly see him.

  I’m sorry for drawing you into this story of my mother, and for making you think I wanted you to solve it. Really I just wanted comfort, and someone to talk about it with. It was an unhealthy obsession. That awful night, before you left, I did not defend you—and I am so sorry. The only excuse I can suggest is that I was shocked and not strong enough to handle my own mind, and morals, and desires. In that moment it was my loyalty to my family—to my father—for it is, in the end, only him and me together, I have no other family—that dictated my actions in the face of a rupture. It was instinctive, though on reflection I know I was in the wrong. As for my mother—I feel very strongly now that it is beyond time to close off the past, and to stop trying to find out why she died. My obsession with her has prevented me long enough from fully experiencing the present time. I feel my mind has snagged on that mystery, as on a broken ho ok, and it has been and will be hard to tear it off without suffering—but I must do so or I will never go anywhere. I refuse to hang there forever. How many of the things I ascribed to her are really true about myself—not wanting to live, making herself sick so she would not have to step out into the world. I believe this could just as easily be said of me—because above all I feel it has prevented me from appreciating you, dear Midhat. But how many times shall I say “I feel” in this letter! I am not a good writer of letters—.