The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  There were times, while the rest of the ward moaned and coughed and spoke and prayed, and he turned his neck to look out the window at the moonlit grove, for at night Jumana left the shutter open a crack for him, especially for him he thought, that Midhat believed he had never been more lucid in his entire life. He had arrived in the hospital some time ago, he was not sure exactly how long. Months, possibly. He had recovered in himself a great facility for thinking, which he supposed must have lain dormant for years. Who knew why such things happened. Perhaps he had been sleepwalking; emptied out by days that revolved and disintegrated, by his family, by the shop, by other little things that absorbed time like grains of rice in water. Lying in this hospital bed, however, surrounded by coughing and spluttering and weeping and raving, but released from the nets of those daily facts, he engaged in thinking and felt relatively placid. Problems arose when his mind stopped and he became a body, because he could not do both activities at once. When he stopped thinking, his flesh started to inflate. There was nothing to be done, it was a great pink thing and he looked at his hands with horror. Think; think; a balm—achieving nothing—an action only, a soothing motion over things that threatened, breeding in corners of the ward. Thought flowed from thing to thing, he wrapped his hand around them and fingered their textures. The content of these thoughts? Mostly himself. He danced between two, three, four ideas of himself, that is to say of Midhat Kamal, and these ideas overlapped like conflicting maps of the same place. He looked at the inconsistencies in his thoughts and did not come to any conclusions. Sometimes his father entered them. For short bursts he looked at the man sidelong, he did not look at the box, he did not agitate those things that did not make sense.

  To his right lay a boy named Sami with two broken legs who wept during the night.

  “Can you hear that noise?”

  “What? What noise?”

  “It’s loud. It keeps me awake.”

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “It’s unbearable.”

  Midhat said: “It must be the plumbing.”

  It occurred to him that he was someone who often said things like that: “It must be the plumbing.” “Oh, it must have been the weather.” “It must have been this, it must have been, must have been—must it have been?” Yes, it must.

  Her long thin fingers, and round fingernails like full moons. And why did he remember her chin so well? The chin was very small, and there was a dimple in it. A light fixture swayed from the ceiling.

  Seized at once by a shaft of terror, he grasped at the bedsheets: she wouldn’t look like that any more. He gripped the sheets and stretched his arms. How many years—one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen—fifteen years he counted. More than fifteen! Twenty years. Twenty years. She turned her face. Pity cramped his stomach, his face hot and wet, drenched in tears—poor Midhat. He said aloud: “Poor Midhat.” Sheets whispered and he knew someone was turning to look at him. “Habibi Midhat,” said Midhat. “Ayuni. Poor, poor Midhat …” He started to weep again. In that moment, wound up in self-pity, happiness did not seem far off.

  He dreamt about Jeannette’s mother, Ariane Molineu, and that Ariane was Jeannette. He woke and checked the olive trees—still there, dawn lurid—and recalled the dream and the fact that the two women were one person. Something might be cleared up by this. At the same time it went black with fog, like the glass on the inside of a lamp.

  The light began changing on the lawn. He walked up the steps of his back garden, he felt the familiar rhythm of his footfall, leading with the right leg and switching halfway to lead with the left, and on the top terrace he came across the day he had found the letter, like a playing card mislaid and recovered. He looked at the day and his limbs moved, striking hard things and soft things. He thought about his horror—approaching it side-on, not to expose too much surface area—the first horror of the dream materialising, his innards crossing the boundary of his skin into the exposing air. At that stage, he felt mostly disgust.

  Now that he had regained his ability to think, the invasion of the past no longer horrified him so much. The new horror, surpassing that first, was the fact that everyone pretended the past didn’t do that. Everyone lived on this skin of life and pretended they didn’t know what they were standing on. How could he, Midhat Kamal, go back to pretending, now he knew how flimsy it all was?

  “Hello,” said Teta.

  He was surprised to see Teta sitting at the foot of his bed. On a chair, facing him. It was daytime. He was a little hungry. He heard a footstep in the hall. His grandmother was wearing a mingled expression of fatigue and fright. He examined her appearance as if from a photograph. An extremely wrinkled face. Far more wrinkled than it was in his mind, if he were to summon it separately. Upper lip hidden by a moue, lower lip pink and flat and shiny, little wrinkles below leading up, as though the chin was being sucked up into that pink skin-ledge. Watery eyes, bluish brown, mixed. Creamy heavy cheeks collapsing into wrinkles at the jawline. Hair grey, long, thin, tied back from her face. Body large and small: large on the breast, but also diminished, shrunken. She looked weak and if it weren’t for her cheeks her face would articulate her skull. It struck him that life does not usually leave a person at once but that it gutters, slowly thins and lengthens, like a tall flame.

  “Don’t leave, Teta,” he said.

  Her lips pursed, drawing lines over her face. “I have to go eventually. You don’t want me to eat?”

  Midhat sank back into the mattress. He wondered whether he might disappear. It was hard to cling onto himself when there were so many others, there were so many other people and they were crowding him out. He tried to summon one of his four ideas of himself that he had had only a few moments ago, a few days ago, but he couldn’t even locate one. All he had left was this strange cut-out. He was a likeness in reverse. He was a cameo.

  Weeks passed. Teta visited again. Midhat adopted smiles and phrases of the old formula, tinned exasperation at his grandmother’s foibles, such as rolling eyes, and other habits of expression. Observing her frown he felt a movement of sympathy in his breast. She was excessively wrinkled. He began to put on a most reasonable, doctorly voice, but it soon turned false and impracticable. He became tired after a while and wanted a nap.

  A memory appeared at the front of his mind. His daughter Ghada stamping in the garden in a pool of water. She lifted her arms behind her to jump, and the water reached up and stroked her legs. A banner unwound and fell.

  It was winter when Teta announced that, in a few months, they would be taking him to the psychiatric hospital in Bethlehem, which was run by the British. The nurses there were properly trained to deal with cases like his.

  “Yes,” he said. “Good idea.”

  Hani had pulled some strings to move him up the waiting list. These facts entered his mind like hearsay, and later he wondered where he had learned them.

  Another time, he said: “I’m feeling better. I don’t think I need to go to Bethlehem.”

  “Yes, yes you do. The nurses here—”

  Teta’s brow quivered, and she looked scared. A dollop of fear dropped into Midhat: what had he done to scare her?

  “You have misunderstood,” he said in a gentle voice. “I am not sick. I am not majnun. I am only very sad. That is all.”

  “Yes,” said Teta faintly.

  Fatima visited. She sat where Teta had sat and fixed him with a look of glazed fury.

  “Where are the children?”

  “At home.”

  “How are they?”

  He watched her, the clenched hands in her lap, and felt, as he had for Teta, an incredible pity. His feelings were at a distance. He said nothing. Rather, as he lay there pitying his wife, Midhat felt his self dissolving again. To survive the wave he gripped the edges of the mattress with both hands. When the wave broke, he opened his eyes and saw a woman sitting where Fatima had been, wearing a thick black veil that exposed only her eyes.

  “Wh
y are you wearing a veil?”

  “We all have to wear the veil,” said Fatima.

  “This is a hospital,” said Midhat. “Not a mosque.”

  She sighed. A nurse walked past, carrying a roll of lint.

  “I’m surprised they let you in here,” he went on. “They’re very unhygienic.”

  “Midhat, the thuwwar have ordered us all to wear the veil.”

  “Thuwwar?”

  “To make us different from the Jewish women probably.”

  “Thuwwar?”

  “Yes. There is an uprising. We are led by the glorious fellahin.”

  “What happened to the shop? There was a fire in my shop, Fatima.”

  “There is a strike. All shops are closed.”

  He did not remember the rest of this conversation. He knew he had struggled because he was tired afterwards, and when he woke he found they had strapped him into the bed by pulling the cover very tightly, securing its edges under the mattress. The air was warm, and the stretched cover, consisting only of a double sheet, displayed the contour of his legs and stomach. A glissade of sheet connected the high point of his belly with his knees, like a tight sail in wind.

  The next time Fatima came, she was wearing a scarf but it was under her neck, so that her entire face, and not just her eyes, was exposed. He laughed humourlessly.

  “You are changing your fashion, my dear.”

  Whether she replied to this comment he had no idea. He was absorbed entirely into a thought, with only a vague awareness that he was still speaking and she responding, and when he woke she was gone and he could not remember any of it.

  Since the weather was growing mild, Jumana allowed him to take the air on the balcony. He felt awake with the draught on his face, and some of his more lucid moments occurred here, out of doors. He exchanged remarks with other convalescents and visitors, and watched in shock as spring usurped winter over the fields.

  One day, after Jumana had helped him into his suit and tie, Midhat stepped out towards the rail, leaning on his cane. He turned his head, and caught sight of a man sitting at the far end of the veranda. His heart swooped below his stomach. He heard a sharp ringing sound.

  “What is he doing here?”

  “Who?” said Jumana, turning to look.

  It was Docteur Molineu. Aged a great deal, and certainly no longer with that elastic, limber body. Fuller, bearded—but it was him, unmistakeably. Midhat looked into Jumana’s eyes.

  “Get me away,” he whispered.

  At the instant he said those words, he was struck by a new thought. His heart rose up from beneath his stomach. If the Docteur was here, he might convey a message to Jeannette.

  “Away from who?” said Jumana, stroking his arm. “What did you see?”

  “A man I knew—” said Midhat, beginning to tremble. His mind frothed. What should he ask him to say? He lifted his arm to point. “There.”

  “Where?”

  He looked again, and fell silent. The man sitting at the far end was not Docteur Molineu. In fact, it was an old priest. With a big white beard, and a large-brimmed black hat.

  They took him to Bethlehem in a hot car.

  “Where is Hani?” he asked.

  “Sarafand.”

  “Sarafand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Fatima?”

  “Looking after the children.”

  On either side of him in the backseat, Teta and Um Jamil began to pray.

  Two nurses were waiting for them outside the Bethlehem hospital. One of them addressed Um Jamil as she helped Midhat into a wheelchair.

  “You can visit on Tuesdays.”

  Midhat spluttered into tears. Teta appeared from the other side of the car and steadied herself against the bonnet.

  “What is the treatment you will give him?”

  “There is no treatment,” said the taller nurse.

  “What?”

  “We have no treatments.”

  “If you want treatment, go to the Jewish clinics in Jerusalem.”

  “What was the point in putting him here?” said Teta to Um Jamil.

  “Do you want the bed or not,” said the taller nurse. “There is a very long waiting list, there are at least a hundred people—”

  “How long will he have to stay?”

  “It depends.”

  They kissed Midhat many times. He did not conceal his weeping. The corridor they wheeled him down was dark, and voices rumbled from behind doors. When they tried to remove his suit he insisted on doing it by himself. To his surprise they consented. He wondered, bitterly, as he unbuttoned alone in a small room and laid his trousers on the bed, if this would be the final dignity bestowed by his association with Hani Murad. He placed his jacket and shirt neatly on the thin-sheeted mattress, and then his socks, and pulled on the green gown they had given him. They weighed him and wheeled him to a bed at the far end of a ward between a cold plaster wall and a man with a prominent forehead, who was also quite fat. At the sight of Midhat, this man looked gleeful. One glance at the man’s inert other neighbour and Midhat guessed he had been deprived of company. Aware of his own physical volume as his wheelchair neared the bed, he felt a stab of revulsion that this insane person might perceive some similarity between them.

  “Bon soir, Monsieur,” said Midhat. As the nurse turned over his cover, he muttered: “Thank you, Mademoiselle.”

  “Oh la la,” said the man. “Al-Barisi.”

  “Yes,” said Midhat, sitting on the mattress. “I have lived in Paris.”

  This did not discourage the man from talking, and before long Midhat was apprised of the rumours that had been travelling between the beds, including one about the previous matron, Miss Whitaker. Miss Whitaker had innhablat, gone what the British nurses called “off the rails,” and locked a Palestinian nurse in one of the maniacal cells. Miss Whitaker had been deported and admitted into an asylum outside Beirut.

  “And the British had to pay for it,” he said. “They pay for her but they can hardly pay for us. How long were you on the waiting list?”

  “Not long,” said Midhat coldly.

  At last, silence. After a while, Midhat heard him accost his other neighbour, but he could not make out any replies.

  He did not feel calm in this ward. Over the next few days he noticed smells lingering when they returned from the dining room, and in order to avoid a sticky residue on the floor by his bed it was necessary to bend his leg and aim with his foot when standing up. He spent his energy trying to ignore the sound of moaning, as well as the more sinister wails that penetrated from the hallway at night. When the wails stopped abruptly, Midhat wondered whether his mind had triumphed, whether he had so successfully blocked out the noise that he now could no longer hear it even when he tried. But presently he heard the bits and pieces of other sounds, shufflings and murmurs, and then he worried why the wailing had ended, what vile sedations and other narratives it implied. He missed the benign muttering in the municipal hospital in Nablus, and when a British nurse came to his bed to tell him he had been selected for a private interview with the matron, he could not help replying: “Please, do let me out of here. I am not actually mad.” The nurse helped him into the wheelchair as he continued to explain how he would rather take the opportunity to walk, and then drove him through the dank corridor of his arrival into an office at the farther end.

  The matron was a tall, bronzed woman with freckles and erratic black hair pinned beneath a white hat. In English she informed him from across her steel desk that the nurses had diagnosed him as “docile.” Midhat parsed her words and translated them into French, and she eyed him with something like suspicion. Understanding that a response was required, he nodded and interlaced his fingers in his lap. It was a gesture his muscles knew well, the gesture of a shop owner condescending to listen to his client. He experienced a strong wave of humiliation and pressed his fingertips into the spaces between his knuckles.

  “We are upgrading you, Mister Kamal,” said t
he Matron, “to the rehabilitation ward.”

  She had a mouth, he noticed, somewhat like a beak, with a space between the front of her teeth and the inside of her lip, where grain might be stored for her offspring.

  The new ward received more daylight, even though the barred window by his bed only gave the view of another internal wall. To his left lay Yusef Qadri of Hebron. To his right, a Pole named Henryk. Henryk was very thin and blond and his feet poked out between the posts. He was a violin player, and he had suffered in the pogroms. Yusef was likewise thin, and never said a word. Henryk said many, many words. He spoke perfect French.

  On the second day, Henryk said: “Do you know why we are here?” He shot a glance at the window, and the tendons lifted from his neck like the treble strings of a piano.

  “Why,” said Midhat.

  “Because we have an inner life.”

  “A what?”

  “This is the disease of being civilised. That is why there are more mad Jews than mad Arabs.”

  Midhat looked at Henryk’s face. The sharp corners of his cheekbones brought out the largeness of his eyeballs, whose lids hung halfway down like a pair of waxy shades.

  “No.”

  “Yes. We are alienated from nature,” said Henryk. “We are civilised. Whereas the Arabs—you are one with nature.”

  Midhat groaned, and pulled his pillow over his head. He shut his eyes and followed the rhythm of his footfall in the garden, going up the terraces. Right left, right left. Halfway up, he switched: left right, left right. He woke with a start, and the top of his bare foot hit the cold enamel of the bedpost.