“I have in mind an Arab brethren,” Nuri went on. “In view of the national ties between Palestine and Iraq, and in view of the sound friendship between the Iraqi and British Governments, in agreement with their Majesties, we will seek to resolve the Palestinian issue. We will look after you. The British want a Royal Commission as soon as possible to investigate the causes—”
“We cannot stop the strike,” rumbled Darwish, “without an end to immigration. That is the first condition.”
“Of course,” said Nuri, flicking his tie. “Now, in June I spoke with Weizmann. Yes, I spoke with Weizmann. And he said the Zionists would stop immigration for a year. That was in June.”
Darwish’s face remained blank.
“Are you sure?” said Hani.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“He said they would stop immigration for a year,” said Hani.
“He said they would be willing to consider it.”
“All right, there’s the difference,” said Darwish. “Willing to consider.”
“Look,” said Nuri, leaning forward in his chair. “You are going to have to end the violence at some point. It can’t go on forever. I know, I know, that the harvest is soon. And I think the Brits have enough of your critical people here now to make supplying the rebels difficult. Listen, Hani, listen to me.”
Hani’s jaw throbbed.
“They will win,” said Nuri. “One way or another they will win. Don’t you see? Your little armed force getting ready around Nablus is not an army. It’s not a real army. But if you get out now, if you announce an end to the strike willingly, without being forced, then you can tell your men, you can tell Palestine, that you have won something—a stop to immigration before the Commission arrives—and then you’ll be heroes.”
Darwish’s face was tightening into a scowl.
“If we call off the strike,” said Hani, “and they do not stop immigration, the rebels will actually kill us. I have no doubt.” He held his jaw. “We cannot give in, Nuri.”
“Are you all right?”
“It’s nothing. My tooth, I have a toothache.”
“Salamtak. They must have a doctor here.”
Hani waved his hand.
“The people are suffering,” said Darwish suddenly. “This is the truth.”
Hani looked at him in surprise.
“What?” he said.
Darwish raised his eyes to Hani, with an almost apologetic expression. Delicately, he said: “A full strike for six months. No activity at all …” He raised his hands. “Nuri does have a point. It will not be sustainable for much longer. Perhaps we should—take advantage of the circumstances. And twist them to suit the struggle, as best we can.”
In an instant, Hani revised his understanding of Darwish’s scowl. He had assumed his colleague was unconvinced, angered, but in fact the opposite was true. He had never heard Darwish express doubts like these before; he thought rather that everyone in Sarafand understood that they were all sacrificing for the larger project, and they would never back down, they must preserve their solidarity. It was for that very reason that Hani had decided not to see a dentist. But looking at his colleague now he experienced an upwelling of energy, not anger precisely, but something like alarm, and it crossed his mind that, of course, since they were all in different barracks, varying reactions and revisions and objectives would be burgeoning between those other beds. Divide and conquer: that was the design. A cord snapped in his chest as he realised both Nuri and Darwish were waiting for his assent. He wondered whether Darwish had already agreed to Nuri’s plan before he arrived.
“What’s in it for you?” he said to Nuri, allowing some spite into his tone.
Nuri blinked. “It is my duty, my sense of duty, my Arab—but what do you mean, what’s in it for me?”
Hani raised an eyebrow, preparing his verbal weapons. Even if he must eventually accept this plan to end the strike, he would not capitulate without at least probing Nuri’s virtue, which now seemed to him to be very much in question. But as he was opening his mouth to deliver his accusation, an unbearable pain shot through his lower jaw, and he bent forward, holding his cheek.
“Salamtak,” said Darwish again.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Nuri. Hani could tell from his voice that he was smiling. “Come to the meeting in Jerusalem. Next week. We’ll get you out of here, Hani Bey. We’ll get you home to your wife. And we’ll get you to a dentist.”
When Midhat saw Abu Jamil and Jamil standing at the foot of his bed, both wearing suits and ties, he assumed he was hallucinating.
He had been downgraded to the acute ward since the incident with Henryk, and here, in addition to enduring the noises, he was keeping a constant vigil against hallucinations. He had deduced that the pocket watch in Henryk’s hand was illusory—though less because of its own logic than because, using the internal logic of a dream, he understood that the vision of Jeannette could not have been real. And if that was not real, then that was not real either. At the sight of his uncle and cousin, therefore, his heart sank: he had been so sure he was improving. Then he noticed that Abu Jamil was fatter than before, and his moustache was big and grey. Jamil was thinner, hair slicked back with pomade. He stared at Midhat.
“Excuse me sir,” said an English nurse. “You cannot be in here.”
“What did she say?” said Abu Jamil.
Jamil shrugged.
“Midhat, what did she say?”
Midhat grinned—he couldn’t help it—and croaked: “You can’t be in here.” He had not spoken in days.
“Forbidden,” said a Palestinian nurse, striding forward. “You must leave immediately.”
“That is my nephew. That one. We want to take him out.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“He is a patient, he …” Her voice fell into a whisper.
“Majnun!” Abu Jamil burst out, opening his fingers from his mouth, as if throwing the word at her, “You are majnuna!”
Three more nurses and two uniformed men appeared. Jamil caught Midhat’s eye and winked, and then the crowd of staff escorted him and his father out. Abu Jamil’s voice still carried from the hall, however, where it was clear they were making a scene. A chorus of rustling bedsheets indicated the other patients turning to listen. Midhat’s heart pounced; he thought he discerned Wasfi’s voice, and then Um Jamil’s thin fast chatter. Next came Teta’s wailing: unmistakeable, dramatic. After that, a silence. The man to Midhat’s right gave him a questioning look. The ceiling pressed down. Midhat gripped his fists on nothing.
“Put your slippers on.”
It was the matron. She was standing beside his bed. The angle magnified her jaw and the black cavities of her nostrils.
“I said, get up.”
Midhat eased himself upright and followed her out of the ward.
Abu Jamil, Jamil, and Wasfi stood along the far wall of the corridor. Wasfi was wearing a bright red tie. They stood erect as Midhat entered; Abu Jamil puffed—“Ho ho!” Jamil opened his mouth, then took a deep breath and grinned; Wasfi punched the air. Two veiled women stood beside them—Teta and Um Jamil. Teta rushed towards Midhat and her gown, separating from the outline of Um Jamil’s, revealed a third woman behind.
“And now that we have agreed on the transfer,” said the matron, “please all of you leave the vicinity. Show them where he can change his clothes.”
“Fatima,” said Midhat.
Slowly, Fatima raised both her arms. But Teta had already reached for Midhat’s face, and was moving her thumbs across his cheeks. “Your wife is very clever,” she whispered. “Abu Jamil give me the bag. Suit, shirt, socks, shoes, tie. Yalla habibi put your clothes on.” As Midhat stepped towards his wife, Teta patted his arm. “You’ll see her after. Go.”
The nurse took him to a small room containing a narrow medical bed with a cross on one wall and a chart of numbers on the other. A long spotted mirror rested between a chair and a dusty glass-fronted
cabinet, and he saw, beneath the window, a pair of scales. The latch clicked. This was the room where they had weighed him when he first arrived. Here, he had surrendered his clothes. He remembered this thin, sheeted mattress, where he had laid his trousers and arranged his socks. He looked across at the mirror and saw a gaunt unshaven man with longish hair, and hairy arms and ankles sticking out of a green gown. A reflected section of window showed an empty road.
“Abu Taher.”
The door was open. Before he saw Fatima he smelled the scent of her body; the scent of their home. When she didn’t move, he pulled her across the threshold by the arms.
“Please,” he said. “Sit.”
She did not sit. She kept to the spot where he had let go of her, staring at the chart on the wall. Her eyes were large and shining.
“Please take that off,” said Midhat. “Let me see you.”
For a moment he thought she would refuse. Then she flipped the veil back from her temples and walked into the light. Instead of the fear he had come to expect he saw a face folded with distress, and though he could not see tears the muscles around her eyes were so strained she must be keeping them back.
“How is the shop?” he said at last, and heard, with regret, the wound in his voice.
Fatima covered her eyes with her hands, tapered like a pair of wings, heavy-veined from the heat. Midhat took one wrist and her body followed, and she pushed against his chest.
“Oh no no,” he said, touching her quivering hair.
She separated herself, wiping her eyes with the knuckles of her forefingers. “You need to dress.”
“I missed you,” said Midhat. “Why did you never come to see me here?”
A noise of wheels outside half eclipsed the latter part of his question, but Fatima had heard him. She made no attempt to stop her face from seizing up like a child’s. Midhat’s hands extended, far apart, fingers outstretched as if to catch or to embrace, or perhaps he was reaching, for her, for a word to undo what he had just said. Fatima’s storm gradually subsided. She looked exhausted, tensed on the brink of speech. But without saying anything she bent from the waist and started to unbuckle his bag. She placed his garters on the mattress and, wrinkling up a dark blue sock, crouched at his feet.
“Yalla.” She waved the sock at him, and he lifted his gown. Once the elastic had sprung to his calf she took up the second one. Next, the trousers: fly unbuttoned, she opened the legs into two puddles on the floor. He put a hand on her shoulder and sought out the flagstone with his feet, and she helped the fabric over his ankles. She tugged off the gown and eased him into a shirt, flipping the buttons into their holes from bottom to top. She let him fasten his belt by himself. Right arm into his jacket, left arm in, and as she was relaxing the laces of his shoes, pulling up the tongues, she said: “You want the tie too?”
Midhat chuckled. She had never dressed him before. It was funny how quickly that sticky silence smoothed, and this renewed habit of company sent the unspoken accusation that he had abandoned her floating off above his head. He pressed his heel past the leather of the shoe. Here it came, the first breeze of relief. He was leaving this place.
But as Fatima rolled up his hospital gown, he was overwhelmed with the contrary heaviness of a strong, physical loss at the prospect of leaving. Some trace of that virus must be surviving inside him, tempting him even now with the amnesiac allure of that other woman. Like waking in a chilled bed and yearning after the disappearing scraps of a dream, even while knowing the object of yearning was a part of his own mind. A fraudulent allure, an ignis fatuus, and yet, and yet: that vision of her in the ward was—he slipped his heel into the second shoe, and with the thud his stomach dropped and he experienced an echo of his rise to that summit, the very real sensation of Jeannette’s living shoulder beneath his hand, her voice, her breath—if that was a hallucination, then hallucinations were a kind of heaven.
He watched his wife approaching with the tie, holding the two ends in her hands to noose it around his neck. There in the mirror stood a haggard man in a suit, a second column of silver buttons appearing under his pale fingers. He bent his head to accept the tie. As if by this motion of his head he had tipped the balance of fluids in his ear, the bronze sound of bells thronged through the air. He jerked back and searched Fatima’s eyes.
“Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Bells,” he breathed.
She frowned. “Yes, I can hear bells,” she said. “Bethlehem is full of churches.”
She reached again to put the tie around his collar. He gasped and grabbed her hands—soft, small, damp—and prised them open to cover the palms with kisses.
“Thank you, thank you.”
“Stop it!” said Fatima. But her fingers were yielding to his lips, and she was laughing.
Jamil drove faster than normal, and Wasfi watched through the windscreen for British army cars. Um Jamil and Abu Jamil had arrived separately. (“Will you be all right?” said Wasfi. “Your aunt has the eyes of a fox,” said Abu Jamil.) Fatima sat behind Wasfi, Midhat in the middle holding her hand, Teta on his other side.
“Hani meant well,” said Teta, pulling her skirts between her legs and arranging her feet. “But how is he to know? He has other things on his mind. Heyk az-zuruf. But look, Midhat is not mad, is he? Are you habibi? Just sad.”
“Yes, I’m just sad.”
“Good good,” said Teta. And looking out the window: “Horrible place.”
“How did you get me out?” he said.
“Fatima did,” said Teta. “She told them you were a doctor. Trained in France. Then she said you had taught her how to care for the sick. Then she said—what did she say? She said you were grieving for your father, and that she would look after you. Then she said, the conditions in that hospital are shameful, much worse than in your house, where she is with you the whole time. But, ya‘ni, she didn’t say it like that, she said it in a way that made it impossible to argue. She made that woman, the tall one, embarrassed.”
“We call this an attack of multiple angles,” said Wasfi.
“She did it in English?”
“No,” said Fatima quietly. “Wasfi translated.”
Midhat wrapped his hand around her fingers. “God bless you.”
Everyone looked out of the windows. They were cautious of him, that was obvious. In all honesty so was he, watching himself, nervous, fearing that something illogical might at any moment emerge onto his field of vision and once more disrupt the fabric he shared with everyone else, expose that his senses still could not be trusted, that all the parts that allowed him to speak and be understood were only superficially restored, and beneath them lay other parts whose damage was irreparable. He watched Jamil’s hands, brown and knuckly, mastering the steering wheel.
“How is the strike?”
Wasfi turned in his seat. “Shu mn’ulak … busy. Jamil is organising a lot.”
“Really?”
Jamil nodded in the rearview mirror.
“And what about fighting?”
“Jamil is fighting,” said Wasfi, “and what’s his name, Basil Murad.” He turned back as they passed a group of houses and ducked his head to look. “Wait, wait.” He held an arm out to Jamil. “Slow. Bas … anyway yes—most people help with money and organising. Also to enforce the strike … ya‘ni it’s hard. It gets hot, it gets harder. When the harvest comes …” He sucked his teeth. “But Khalto—did you see all those Jews in the hospital?” He glanced at Teta. “What are they thinking.”
“I know,” said Teta. “Stupid. Stupid al-ingliz.”
Midhat looked through Fatima’s window. “Everyone gets sick.”
At the Jerusalem-Nablus highway, a stationary army car came into view. A group of soldiers were nudging rifles into the ribs of fellahin, who held their arms in the air as their bodies were searched. Everyone in the car, including Fatima, faced mechanically forward, except for Midhat, who watched the scene revolve as they passed. A soldier in
shorts and helmet was patting one of the Arabs all the way down to his shoes.
The hills gathered round. Olive trees laced the rises, terraced with white rock. Nablus appeared in the windows and Jamil drove past the disused railway line and the empty streets.
They parked in front of the house. Wasfi opened the rear door and Midhat, kissing his grandmother, slid out after his wife, embracing Wasfi and thanking him. Jamil stepped out of the car but remained waving from the other side. His oiled hair shone in the sun.
“Give him a kiss!” said Teta.
He rounded the bonnet at an awkward, lurching jog, wrapped his bony arms around Midhat’s neck, and kissed him quickly on each cheek.
“God with you.”
Midhat looked Jamil in the eye. That urgent stare from the hospital was gone. Everyone was watching them: their distance was a public affair.
“Don’t go out at night,” said Teta, poking her head out the door as Jamil returned to the driver’s seat. “They fight at night.”
The car was pulling away. Fatima started up the steps.
“Where are the children?” said Midhat.
“My parents’. They’ll be back in an hour or so. We need a siesta.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, I need a siesta. You do what you like.”
In the daytime gloom, the bedroom furnishings seemed strange. The chairs, the high window, that mirror, the cupboard, this bed—their familiarity was uncanny. Fatima faced the cupboard to undress, the bones of her back slipping around beneath her skin as she pulled on a nightgown. Everything would be better tomorrow. After a night’s sleep, this strange familiar furniture would have impressed itself on his brain, having been plunged into darkness and recreated in the new day. And before long he would escape his sense-memories of those cold, painted bedposts, which struck the tops of his feet when he turned in the night. He faced the ceiling and thought of Jeannette. He tried to summon the rush of touching her shoulder. It was too faint. It would not rise.
Fatima was opening a drawer in the nightstand. She pulled out a cigarette and struck a match.
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