Sister Celine was correct. Over the course of that winter it became clear the Brits had accidentally made this Qassam into a martyr, and now their object, a population of biblical peasantry and Levantine crooks, diseased with desire for a nation, stirred uncannily into life. In January 1936, local politicians met in a Nablus soap factory to discuss a general strike. Qassam-inspired armed bands continued to roam the countryside. Attacks on Jewish civilians were followed by retaliations against Arabs. In April, the Arabs set up strike committees across the country, agreeing on a list of demands and aims—proportional representation, a stop to Jewish immigration—and embarked on a countrywide refusal to pay taxes or to trade. In the hills, violence heaved against soldiers and Jewish settlers.
The British possessed neither sufficient manpower nor adequate knowledge of the terrain. As winter turned to spring, Antoine received multiple telegrams from Michaels. “Waiting for your report. J.M.” “Report to HQ. J.M.” “Shall we send someone? J.M.” To the fourth telegram, Antoine sent the reply:
“My apologies but I have lately become very sick and am confined to bed. I will soon go to the hospital. Yours A.K.”
At least that last statement was not a lie: he set out for the hospital that afternoon. It was May, and in the silent streets, severed telegraph lines swung in the breeze. Outside the post office, sandbagged against bombs, a bloodstain coated the pavement. Around the corner a British army car lolled on its back, windows smashed, the horseshoe on the dashboard pointing its tines to the ground. A demolished house crouched between mounds of rubble, as though ready to emerge at any moment to its full stature.
He nodded at the nurses in the hospital foyer and took his old position in the corner of the veranda. His rocking chair had gone. On one of the ordinary chairs he sat facing the grove, thinking of Louise. When they laid her on the dining table in her shroud, he had spent a long time looking at her. He thought of her hands, placed over each other on her chest, the skin draped over the bones of her fingers like a thin yellow fabric.
Men’s voices leaked from the hall, louder and louder, until the veranda door shook open and a nurse bolted it in place. A dozen men sloped onto the balcony. Bandaged arms, bandaged legs, plenty of crutches, one man with a head wound, another apparently without a hand. They sat noisily, chatting. One or two nodded at Antoine; he nodded gravely back. He could not recall so many patients taking the air at once before. Two chairs down from his, a man with flame-blue eyes and grey hair cracked his knuckles. “Sharp and then dull,” he said. He spoke with a refined urban accent. The next man along said nothing. This one, despite the gauze around his arm and head, had the bearing of a ready fighter, and looked as though he might at any moment reach out and grip the peeling wooden rail that separated them all from the wilderness, launch himself over it as over a vaulting horse, and disappear among the bushes. Next along, an elderly white-turbaned gentleman with a chiselled nose was drinking coffee. Someone switched on a wireless. It droned, then began to speak. “… An attack on the road between Nablus and Tulkarem at approximately oh eight hundred hours. Two casualties have been reported …” An hour had passed, and a nurse knocked on the windowpanes. At the signal, the sunbathers swung upright from their stations of repose, and surrendering the blankets to their chairs, trundled indoors in single file.
The following morning, Antoine arrived to find the veranda occupied by female patients. He walked behind their chairs and stationed himself in the corner. He had not been sitting long when a whisper shot down the balcony, and propelled everyone into an animal silence. A crowd of Arab men had appeared in the grove below. They carried a motley array of weapons—full rifles, kitchen knives, some sharpened sticks. In an instant they raced up the slope and separated to scramble over the rocks. British soldiers came in pursuit, but their vehicles could not pass through the woodland, and after an ungainly dismount they trooped under the branches in their big boots, hesitating and swivelling to study the vantage, disappearing and re-emerging back and forth between the bushy hair of the olives. When they finally made their way up the hill, so Antoine was later informed, they found only peasants, tilling the land and pursuing ordinary farming work.
Returning on every day of fine weather, Antoine heard all manner of stories. Who fought here, who fought there, who was a traitor, who killed that Jewish settler, who killed that policeman. Aref Abd al-Razzaq was a well-known character, famous for turning up in one place and appearing ten kilometres away a moment later shooting at something else. Rumours about the Jews ranged from plausible to outlandish: rumours of slaughter, of designs to occupy the Haram, of other deep, disgusting perversities which the fighters imbibed like fuel. Vivacity of story was an elixir to violence. The strongest tonics concerned the British, source of all evil and oppression, of which the flogged and weeping bodies in the hospital provided sufficient proof.
None of the patients seemed particularly bothered by Antoine’s presence. He credited his tie to the “Ebal Girls,” who were still held in great esteem by the hospital establishment, and, of course, were so recently helping the rebels, though one did wonder how thoroughly that was ma‘roof. Also possible was that since he was French rather than English, they considered him comparatively benign. They might even think he was another inmate in the ward, soon to return to bed. Or perhaps they didn’t mind him because they thought he was a mad old man. One could get away with a great deal, being a mad old man.
He held neither book nor pen in his hands. He made no notes. He simply observed as the premise of his monograph disintegrated before his eyes. His premise had been that Nablus, shielded from the world by her two mountains, possessed some qualities of amber: liquid first but hardening into a preservative, and presenting to the curious eye a picture of essences. But now look, how fast custom could degrade from its pure form. Even this habit on the veranda, people of all classes sitting side by side—for although sickness had always levelled station, the hospital had previously been the haunt only of Christians and the lower classes. And with the local clinics in Nablus obsolete, beliefs in modern medicine absolute, plus the hospital facilities enlarged, catering improved, midwives trained, and especially with these novel habits of taking the air—one would be forgiven for construing the changes in the municipal hospital as a microcosm of larger shifts in the town. That was not necessarily unusual, of course; war changed habits, and this was beginning to feel like war. Above all, the strike itself, the fact that the Arabs could undertake a cooperative action so far-reaching and long lasting—it was all completely remarkable, and completely beyond the compass of Antoine’s understanding.
One afternoon in May, he sat steadying the brim of his hat against a strong spring wind. The weather had not deterred the patients, however, who came out as usual for their sunbath. Not that there was much sun. Antoine peered at the gradations of white over the sky, blending tinges of yellow and blue.
“Good morning tout le monde!”
A large man in a light wool three-piece suit strode onto the veranda, beaming at the patients with his hands behind his back.
“Ya Haj,” he addressed the old man by the door with a frown. “How is your lung? Better?”
“Better, better,” said the old man.
“Thanks be to God.”
The next invalid twisted around in his chair. Though he could not hear the doctor’s response, Antoine saw his head shaking in sympathy. Apparently fearless in the face of contagion, the new doctor rested his hands on the chair backs as he passed, and Antoine caught snippets of conversation in a variety of accents. Several fellahi men and boys, villagers from outside Nablus, and upper-class patients, who seemed, judging by their intonation, already well acquainted. A flicker of irritation passed over the features of one middle-aged man with an ear infection.
“What?” said a bandaged fighter. “Of course I’m in pain. Two of them shot me, up close. Not more than a metre. Thank you, yes.” He nodded and turned aside, wincing dramatically as he touched his elbow.
; “And sometimes it is sharp,” said another voice. “And sometimes it is dull.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“They gave me ice, but the ice felt very hot, which worried me.”
“Don’t be worried, that’s normal.”
An uproar of bushes announced another onset of wind, which drove the voices in the other direction.
“Bonjour, Monsieur.”
The three-piece suit was beside him, face dark against the sun. A pair of hands asked if the chair was vacant. Antoine held out his palm.
“Merci.”
“Vous parlez français?” said Antoine.
“Bien sûr.” The man sniffed. “J’ai habité en France depuis longtemps. Pendant la guerre.”
“Pendant la guerre—en battaille?”
“Non, non. Pour les études.”
“De médécine?”
“Oui. J’ai pris le serment d’Hypocrite.” He began to pat his pockets. The maroon tie around his neck was patterned with green hoops.
“D’Hippocrate,” corrected Antoine.
“Oui, le même.”
“Ah,” said Antoine, gently hitting his own knee. “Now I know who you are. You own the clothing shop. Kamal.”
There was a silence. Monsieur Kamal drew a long handkerchief from his front pocket and blew his nose. Antoine looked out at the orchard as if out at sea, listening to the trees.
“La Provence,” said Midhat. “C’est tellement belle.”
“C’est vrai,” said Antoine. “Mais moi, je préfère ici. Le paysage de la Provence me rappelle cette vue—mais vous parlez français très bien, Docteur.”
Midhat replied in Arabic. “I am not a doctor.”
Antoine glanced at him. The joviality had gone, and the face, full-cheeked and slender browed, sharpened. A wind swarmed down the valley and thrust itself over the veranda rail. Midhat’s hair blew back from his forehead and he shut his eyes. The pockets of soft flesh above his cheeks seemed to press back into his skull, his mouth assumed a grim horizontal, and the threads of his small moustache ruffled minutely in the current.
“Which bed are you sleeping in?”
“Oh—” said Antoine. “I am not a patient.” He laughed.
Midhat tutted. “No bed for a holy man! What are we coming to.”
And then, with extraordinary slowness, Midhat wrapped his fingers around the arm of the chair and stood up. He moved off behind the others, and stopped dead before the door. A nurse rushed out.
“There you are!” She grasped his arm. “Why are you dressed? Come on. Come back, Amo, come back.”
It rained on the way home. Drops, invisible and fast, fell cold on Antoine’s hands and face. He found Sister Marian outside the chapel, holding an umbrella and stretching out one of the lapels of her overcoat. She smiled when she recognised him.
“Are you very happy, Sister?”
She held the umbrella over his head and fell in step.
“It is odd that one’s mood should be so affected by the behaviour of one’s pupils.”
“You have been teaching.”
“Children can be so unpredictable. Today they were very enthusiastic.”
“How old?”
“Seven and eight. They drew flowers mostly, except—look at this one. Isn’t it marvellous.”
He took charge of the umbrella as she revealed the bundle of papers hidden under her coat. She held up the first page: a childish depiction of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, red and small and pulsating with gold daggers of light. On the page beneath he could just see the tip of a purple flower with a strong green stem.
“Very accomplished.”
“She is a Muslim.” Sister Marian pressed her lips together and elongated her jaw, suppressing a smile. “They gave them to me as gifts. I’m going to hang them in the dining room. How was the hospital?”
As Antoine was contemplating how to describe his day, he nodded at the driver of a two-horse cart trotting past.
“We are having lamb for dinner,” said Sister Marian.
“Very good.”
“Sister Margareta was given a sheep by one of the villagers who was wounded outside Jenin.”
“Did she heal him?”
“I think he lost an arm.”
The door was at hand. Sister Marian turned the key, and as they stepped into the cool shade of the hall, she asked: “Have you decided, yet, what it is you will write next?”
This, at last, unlocked him. “I don’t suppose, Sister,” he said expressively, “that I shall write anything.”
As the words left his mouth he felt their significance. But this was lost on Sister Marian, whom, yet again, his heart had mistaken for Louise. Marian did not have the field of reference to read or take an interest in Antoine’s meaning; her questions were pleasantries. She held out a page wrinkled with gouache and raindrops.
“We must all retire at some point,” she said, drawing it aside and picking up the next. “We were visited last week by the education director’s assistant, Mister Jerome. He was very eager to suggest our curriculum should not be too literary. They are worried we will give the girls ideas.”
“What does that mean, literary?”
“They would prefer we taught them to embroider and left it there, I think. And hygiene, which they are obsessed with. The inspector calls it maintaining the status quo, keeping Arab girls at home … or maintaining tradition, he said. What’s comical”—she said this without smiling, she had noticed a stain on the tablecloth and hunched over to scratch it with her nail—“is that it has become rather fashionable to send them to school. We have hardly enough staff to keep up. Every father in Nablus seems to want his daughters to learn history, and do you know why? To make appealing wives. Nabulsi men like good conversationalists. So in the end,” she sighed, straightening up, “I suppose they all have the same purpose in view.”
She set the paintings on the sideboard and gathered the cloth, revealing the burnished brown nakedness of the table beneath, scarred in places by a less fastidious housemistress.
“In any case,” she said, opening the cabinet for a fresh one, “controlling the history books didn’t stop them.”
“How long, Sister, have you been helping?”
“The Arabs?”
“Yes.”
“Me, personally?”
“All of you.”
“Since the end of the war.” She met his eye. “You know, Father, help can be very broadly defined. This with Qassam … at first, it was only a question of keeping quiet. Then, little by little, one realises one has taken a side. To help one party can simply mean not helping the other.”
“Yes, of course,” said Antoine coolly. But in a few seconds his wish for knowledge overrode his desire to prove he already had it, and he said: “And Sister Louise? Was she …”
“The same. We all did. We all do. If our purpose is here, why would we act against the local people?”
“Why indeed. And where—can I ask, where did you acquire the arms?”
“Oh father, that was only a bit of ammunition.” She thrust the new cloth over the table. The linen fluttered and sank heavily past the edge, and she stretched across to push out the furrows with the flat of her hand.
He turned to go. In the doorway, he could not help throwing out:
“I’m interested, you know, in how much all of this is inevitable. The fighting, and the … situation.” He watched for her reaction. “One people in need, trespassing on the rights of another, I wonder how much …”
Sister Marian’s frown rose into an expectant triangle.
Antoine said, “I have spent the latter part of my career”—to his surprise, the word pained him—“trying to construct a pattern of this town. According to my training, all that is was there to begin with. But is one always to simplify, to make a picture more coherent?”
She opened the cutlery drawer.
“To impose …” He was losing her. He could not stop. “Sister Marian, I am literally watching th
em. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I am here. Nablus has become my whole life, I cannot leave it. But there is no discernible point to watching them. I am not helping anyone.”
“Do you need to help?” said Sister Marian, counting forks. “You are not a missionary.”
“I am not.”
“You are in the service of knowledge,” she said simply, and the forks in her hand crashed onto the table.
5
The ward was smaller in Midhat’s mind. Every time he opened his eyes the space surprised him, measured out by the beds that pulled the walls apart. All the others stirring, sleeping, blinking, coughing, praying—but when he closed his eyes his ears blocked up, and a curtain drew around his cot, and it was warm and quiet.
Opening his eyes on the huge ward, Midhat twisted his neck to look through the window behind him. An olive grove. In rows the trees stood, frozen in the act of passing along their loads. The young ones were thin and sprightly, the crones squat, volute. He extended a hand and grabbed one around the waist, and with a roar of soil pulled it up out of the earth, churning a thick brown fog. The problem with objects is that even when they fall they leave something behind, and the tree remained standing although it was also in his fist, and he grabbed at the tree that remained standing undisturbed in the field, but now it was made of thin wafer that melted in the heat of his hand and passed through his palm.
The olive harvest was just completed, but the trees already carried new green fruits, little hard things amid their leaves. Obviously, everything was always growing.
The nurse, Jumana, helped him into a seated position. She unbuttoned his shirt with her dry fingers and slid it off his back. He heard the patter of the sponge as she squeezed it over the bowl, and his anticipating flesh tingled. The wet warm began first over his shoulders, then entered the soft, haired places under his arms, tinkling back into Jumana’s bowl. She drew the sponge along his wrists where the rough edge tickled, and at last reached his hands—this was the part that made him laugh. Someone else washing his hands, a sensation never dreamt of. Next the chest, the rolls of his torso, squeezing into those crevices for dirt; then the neck, the area expressive above all the others of cleanliness, for when your neck was scrubbed you felt so clean you might not even need a bath; why was that? Perhaps because it was close to the brain—and down his lower back went the knifing heat, the warmth already cooling in the air.
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