It was morning, and there was a nurse beside his bed.
“You have a guest. Come to the visitors’ room. Come on now,” she said again, in a bright voice that did not match her expression.
He put on his slippers and followed her out into a corridor with beds against one wall and chairs along the other. He wondered what it was like to lie there, with people walking back and forth along your feet. Next, a set of stairs led to a small, unplastered room with doors open onto a dry garden. He was stunned to realise it was summer. Two other patients were sitting with visitors, and Teta was near the door, twisting her fingers in her lap. He took the empty chair beside hers and saw, reflected in her eyes, that the hospital was dreadful.
“Oh, Teta,” he said.
He felt as ashamed as if he were the hospital’s representative. She leaned over to whisper something to him, and he caught a glimpse of the cotton dress she was wearing under her coat, with its close pattern of stars, stitched in navy blue. After a moment he realised she had still not spoken, and looking in her eyes again he saw, with a snag in his chest, that she had decided he would not understand. A wall arose between them. Badly, he wished to say: I understand. But every time he tried to speak something hot and low and laden with pain surged up and stopped his mouth. He could feel the tension in his face. He wanted to tell her he did not belong here. He watched her conducting her distress on the chair across from his, inhaling deeply and then letting the breath go. Behind him, a woman was saying:
“And Bassima is going to start school next week …”
Suddenly, Teta was struggling onto her feet. He fell in her shadow as she bent for a kiss. She addressed the nurse beside the door, then waddled out on her bad hip, and every point of his body stretched towards her.
When he returned to the ward, Henryk was wearing a pair of spectacles and reading a book. The title was hidden under his fingers.
“Qu’est-ce que vous lisez?”
“Un roman.”
He waited for more. Light from the window shone bluish on the wall ahead, and it struck Midhat as a shame they had not positioned the beds to give the patients a view. Not that it would be much of a view. Perhaps the nurses did not want to put ideas into their heads. His neighbour in the previous ward had told him about the ones who attempted to escape.
“It was very cold on the boat,” said Henryk.
At first, Midhat thought he was reading aloud from his book. Then he noticed the novel was face down on Henryk’s lap.
“Pardon?”
“And so cramped.” He met Midhat’s eyes. “I’m talking about the boat. How I came here, we came here, my family and I.”
“Ah.”
“It was September. So we thought the weather would be mild. The weather was terrible.” He said this with the rhythm of a joke, and smiled. “There were hundreds of us, we took the train, my wife and I and our son Aleksander, to Bulgaria. The quota for that year was exceeded already, so we were tourists. We were coming to Palestine for the holidays. We did not have many things. The guards, I’m sure, knew we were not on holiday. In fact, I think they were told to help us along. But we were due to set sail from Bulgaria on this ship, and my wife said I could not bring my violin—because who brings a violin on holiday? And at first, you know, I resisted her. I was determined to bring my violin. Then we met one of the representatives, Lejba his name was. We paid … we paid seven hundred fifty zlotys each, so with my son that is over two thousand, that is two thousand two hundred fifty zlotys. Can you imagine? They gave us passports with new names. We became the Wolmarks. Henryk Wolmark is my new name. I will not tell you my old one, because that belongs in Poland with my violin. Then, this representative, he also said I could not take my violin. Tourists with musical instruments are suspicious, he said. But if”—Henryk turned and looked at Midhat again, and for the first time his eyelids lifted, displaying the immaculate whiteness around each grey-blue iris—“if the border guards knew what we were doing, what was the problem with taking my violin?”
He seemed genuinely waiting for an answer. Midhat said nothing. He had decided he did not wish to hear this story.
“The British,” said Henryk at last, “is the answer to that question. But I’ll come to that. First we set out on our pleasure cruise.” He cackled. “My wife and I, we each brought two coats, and we wore both of them all the time.” Another laugh. “Aleksander—poor Aleksander. Papa, he said to me. Papa, I am so cold, will you share your coat with me? I do not know why, if they were so intent on moving us here, they did not make the experience more pleasant. The food—the captain, I swear, was deliberately screwing us over. I put Aleksander under my coat, and we sat together like that, singing.”
There was a silence. Yusef Qadri gave out a moan, and Henryk sighed. Midhat waited. Henryk picked up his book and looked at the cover. Midhat could see the title, and that it was written in Polish.
“The situation was already bad for the Jews,” said Henryk at last. “But it was not this bad. We were lucky. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Danzig.”
He turned away and his pyjama top rode up over his bony flank. Midhat wondered whether Henryk had admitted himself, or whether, like Midhat, his family and friends had brought him. He decided to pay attention next Tuesday to see whether a nurse took Henryk to the visitors’ room. Obvious symptoms of instability in him Midhat could not detect, but then, perhaps—and thinking this he slid down so he was completely horizontal—his own predicament might affect his ability to distinguish sanity from its inverse in other people.
Now, that was a fearful thought. Locked in his brain, Midhat could not trust his own perceptions. He thought of the sharp ringing sound that sometimes burst into his ears, and considered, unguarded, the nature of his own case.
He had had twenty years to think over what happened at the Molineu house. Long ago he had diagnosed his accusation of Sylvain Leclair as the fatal misstep, the final act that pushed Jeannette away in the instant she might have been his ally. And this he had accepted as one accepts the ending of a story about someone else—already assimilating that ending when he wrote to Jeannette from Paris to say goodbye, expressing himself at last in good French as he wished to express himself, deliberately and with grace, reading his declaration aloud to Hani on Rue Spontini, making sure each comma was correct. Then he had returned to Palestine and erased, gradually but with determination, every vestige of hope. He had faced forward with valour—yes, he commended himself for it—addressing the onward thrust of time. And as time went on, the past had receded. He married, he had children, an income, social standing—was, in effect, a self-made man.
Hard, then, not to see this letter as a weapon sent across the barrier to skewer him. If he had stayed in Montpellier, if he had not been so proud, everything might have been different. That gesture when she turned from him in the hall was branded on his brain; she would not look at him. How could he have known—it was not final! His anger rose and shot towards Jeannette. She was incredibly selfish. How like her it was, really, to stretch out her arm and ruin his life at this late stage.
For a moment, he allowed himself. He closed his eyes and imagined. He felt the barricade he had been holding up against this fantasy, and as he lowered it his entire body sighed. Here he was, in Nablus. Fresh from the ship. And here, in the hall, was the letter with his name on it. He picked it up, his finger tore the flap. He heard Jeannette’s voice, and her words had different meanings now, they filled him with a sense of imminence, of chance, of hope—he grabbed his still-packed bag with his heart bursting and stepped back onto the mountain. Train to Tulkarem, train to Alexandria. He was leaving it all—Teta, his father, his family, everything. He was on a train to Egypt, he was boarding a ship to Marseille. And there she was, waiting for him, on the docks. He saw her from afar, her dark hair. And now, her face, he could see her, and now he was holding her real body, and his nose was in her hair. Tears filled his eyes and his whole self smiled, gazing up at Jeannette on the hospital ceiling
.
Something squeaked: a nurse’s rubber footstep. A few beds along a patient sneezed. Midhat blinked, and wiped the tears from his face.
His thoughts, he noticed, had gained facility. He logged his sensations: calm, no discomfort in his eyes, no blurry vision. He interlaced his fingers on his stomach and concentrated. Was it possible? Had his storm of confusion reached an apex and withdrawn? There was a cramp in his foot, and lifting his leg he twirled his ankle to unlock it. The leg was weak and sore. He shifted to look over at Henryk, who was also on his back, arms folded, chewing his bottom lip. He looked over at Yusef Qadri; Yusef was sleeping.
Onto this new clear stage of his mind stepped Fatima, and then Teta, and Eli and the burnt-out shop, and all the facts of home, his children. His heart lunged. He needed to go back. They required him. He had assimilated pain before; he would do so again. The only thing Jeannette’s letter actually revealed was that his father was cruel and had betrayed him. And, of course, that love was not lost when he thought it had been. But now it was, so it meant nothing.
“We loved our fathers too much,” he said aloud.
He extended his lower jaw, trying to stopper his tears. He thought of Ghada, of lifting her up: would he do to her what his father had done to him? Would he leave her? It was agony, it would not end, but in the light of that, what was there to revise? He could not write back, call her on the telephone, say: Jeannette, here I am, would you like to meet? He could not board a ship to Marseille. He could not cover that distance.
He caught a darkened flash of his younger self—there, standing on the other platform. A residue of Henryk’s story, the pattern and tone of it, that part about his old name, left in Poland with his violin—something about that property of distance, blending time and place, gave form to a vision of a young man stepping off a train in Montpellier. Look at him: awash with fatigue, dragging a vast trunk, blank with the richness of an unmarked future, full of enthusiasm and fear. How did one get from there to here? The gap was too enormous. With his foot Midhat felt the edge of a gorge dividing that life, possessed of that old future sense, from what had transpired, from the bank he stood on. He was two men: one here, one there, that one, he saw, young and slender, guileless, untrained for battle. He felt sorry for that young man; he did not know what he was in for.
“It is very different here,” he said, “from what I had been led to expect.”
Henryk exhaled. “Quite.”
The ceiling began to secrete noises, rumbling feet, a clash of plates. Brandishing a clipboard a nurse ushered them up for lunch. Midhat pushed his feet into the rectangular slippers by his bed, and shuffled after Henryk.
The dining room steamed with the aroma of stew. Midhat stood behind Henryk in line for the tureen, and observed the faces of those carrying their plates to the tables. He wondered if any were as sane as he was, likewise imprisoned because they had witnessed some part of the world’s cloth slashed and corrupted. Some, to be sure, resembled lunatics of the type a child might recognise: singing, or torpid and silent, incapable of sitting up properly in their chairs. But many, like Henryk, gave an appearance of civility and control.
“Wakey-wakey,” said the woman with the ladle.
The green-brown liquid careened to film the plate-sides with a gritty spume as he made his way towards Henryk. Yusef Qadri followed close behind. They sat either side of a plate of buckwheat, and Yusef’s fork trembled between his fingers.
Midhat hated the way the nurses watched them eat. He had learned it was best to eat slowly and inconspicuously, since he who refrained from eating, or he who ate with appetite, was he who attracted their eyes and their scribbling pencils. The chief matron, the giantess, strolled between the tables like the captain of a ship. Midhat inserted his bread into the stew.
“I like to listen as they chat,” said Henryk. Midhat noticed three nurses talking together on his other side. “They think we can’t hear them.” Henryk lifted his spoon. “I can. A demonstrative theatrical line, that one just said. What a phrase.”
Everything had its proper order. First the nurses scraped the leftovers off the plates into a bucket, then they stacked the plates on their steel contraptions and wheeled them away, and only then did the chair legs squeal as the patients were allowed to file out.
In the ward, someone had switched on the ceiling lights against the gloom, and the barred patch of sun on the wall had stretched to the right and almost faded. Midhat removed his slippers and slid under the blankets.
“In the Dardanelles,” said Henryk, “the British caught us.”
Midhat listened without speaking. He did want to know the story of Henryk’s demise. He wanted to know how Henryk had arrived here. He closed his eyes and saw giddy pictures, a violet sea, and a fine powder, particles of water, stirred and swooped over his bed. He confronted his body in the darkness, his blood beating. He opened his eyes and sent his energy to his ears.
“They pursued us and stopped us from reaching port. So we had to go back to Greece. We were so dejected, you can imagine. My wife was crying. We docked at Tinos. By this time, we had made some friends among the others, there were more than three hundred of us. Three hundred fifty, I think. In particular we liked this man Julian, young, very enthusiastic about the Hehalutz movement. We, not so much. My wife she liked it, but mostly you know it was that we were poor in Poland, life was not good, we had the pogroms, she did not want to raise Aleksander there, she was frightened that what was happening nearby was going to happen at home. We heard these stories about Palestina, the life here … Julian, he was a real enthusiast. He taught me a lot about Zionism I didn’t know. We stayed in Greece one month, and set out again in November. Oh, Midhat. It was terrible.”
At the direct address, Midhat shifted to view his storyteller. Henryk was on his back, gazing straight up, gesticulating with his hands.
“Ten weeks at sea. I wondered why we had come in the first place. Why did we come? I remember.” He tapped the fingers of one hand on the back of the other. “It was my wife. My wife wanted us to come. We tried to go back to Greece, but this time Greece didn’t want us.” Midhat watched Henryk’s hands move like seaweed in the weak sun from the window. “We tried once more at Tel Aviv, but no, and now, can you imagine, I have been at sea for months, I am longing for my violin. This is not a small thing. I ache, all I see is water. Not blue water. Dirty, grey, sick green water. It is winter, the sky goes black, and we have bought one more coat for Aleksander to wear from Greece, but we do not have enough money for anything else. We did not imagine we would be at sea for so long, remember.” Forefinger and thumb extended, the right hand wagged. “The rations, little portions, worse than here. Stale bread. Horrible.
“Finally, one night, we are lingering in the Mediterranean close to shore, and Julian wakes us up in our bunks. He says, we are going to go alone, will you come with us? How, I say. The lifeboats, says Julian. I say, what about the lookout boys? And Julian says, the boys know, they are coming with us. We were perhaps forty, fifty persons in total, everyone got on the deck, some still in pyjamas but wearing boots. We did a terrible thing, taking the lifeboats. We rowed in the dark, it was so cold, and we left most of our things, since these are small boats, you cannot take your luggage. That night on the sea, my God it was dark, and there, us, trembling towards the lights of the shore.”
He was silent.
“And what happened next?” said Midhat.
“Well, here I am,” said Henryk. He lowered his hands onto the bedcover, arms straight, like a child.
Midhat had the feeling of being forcibly ejected from the story. He wondered if he had somehow missed the climactic event that explained Henryk’s presence in the asylum. He tried to think of some way to ask about the wife and child. No words seemed appropriate. The patch of light on the wall presently disappeared, and on the ceiling the yellow circles from the lamps grew brighter. A mosquito cried, lethargic with someone’s blood, and carried its legs to rest on the wall by the bed.
>
“Thank you for your letter,” said a voice.
A hand smacked, and a streak of blood emerged from the plaster.
Midhat did not need to look around for the speaker. He could sense her beside him. He felt a glow of excitement.
“Oh, yes, the letter,” he said. “You are most welcome. Really. It was my pleasure. I have to say”—he chuckled—“I am relieved that it reached you.”
He twisted round to look at her face. How extraordinary. Far more precise than he had ever remembered her. She smiled, and little soft creases appeared in the skin under her eyes. He reached out and touched her shoulder, and gasped at the familiar pressure of her body under his hand. All his anger was gone.
“When you left,” said Jeannette. She looked down, struggling for the words. “The warmth of the house followed after you.” She smiled. “I was useless as a nurse, but they needed help even with the cleaning.”
“I’m sure you were better than you think you were.”
She touched his hand, and her cold dry fingers sent another flutter to his chest. He inhaled, feeling the heat from her body. This was really happening.
“It has been four years since you left us in Montpellier,” she said. “Four years! I cannot believe it.”
“Nor can I. Your voice …” He shook his head. “I missed your voice.”
“I wish that what has happened might not be final.”
Puckers of anguish travelled over Jeannette’s forehead, her cheeks, slid down from the corners of her eyes.
“For a long time I was in pain,” she said.
“I know.”
That face! How often he had tried to picture it, and grasped only a thin residue of associations. He fastened his grip on her shoulder, felt the hard bone, with his other hand touched his finger under her chin, felt the miraculous cold soft of her cheek, and a rush of sensation met his ears, nose, and palate—sunlight on a lawn, the crystal of a chandelier, a tree through a window—the echo of a high dark church, the smell of must, voices clattering off walls—and he felt a burning in his stomach, a heat ascending to his neck. There was a high ringing sound.
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