PART ONE
1
There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azmeh, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other. He sat, tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, and started to describe without any introduction how he was returning from Damascus to resume his teaching post in the language department of the Sorbonne. He had left Paris at the outbreak of war but after the Miracle of the Marne was determined to return. He had grey eyes and a slightly rectangular head.
“Baris.” He sighed. “It is where my life is.”
To young Midhat Kamal, this statement was highly suggestive. In his mind a gallery of lamps directly illuminated a dance hall full of women. He looked closely at Faruq’s clothes. He wore a pale blue three-piece suit, and an indigo tie with a silver tiepin in the shape of a bird. A cane of some dark unpainted wood leaned against the table.
“I am going to study medicine,” said Midhat. “At the University of Montpellier.”
“Bravo,” said Faruq.
Midhat smiled as he reached for the coffeepot. Muscles he had not known were tense began to relax.
“This is your first visit to France,” said Faruq.
Midhat said nothing, assenting.
Five days had passed since he said goodbye to his grandmother in Nablus and travelled by mule to Tulkarem, where he joined the Haifa line for Kantara East and changed trains for Cairo. After a few days at his father’s house, he boarded the ship in Alexandria. He had become accustomed to the endless skin of the water, broken by white crests, flashing silver at noon. Lunch was at one, tea was at four, dinner was at seven thirty, and at first he sat alone watching the Europeans eat with their knives. He developed a habit of searching a crowded room for the red hair of the captain, a Frenchman named Gorin, and after dinner would watch him enter and exit the bridge where he supervised the helm.
Yesterday, he started feeling lonely. It happened suddenly. Sitting beside the stern, waiting for the captain, he became conscious of his back against the bench, a sensation that was bizarrely painful. He was aware of his legs extending from his pelvis. His nose, usually invisible, doubled and intruded on his vision. The outline of his body weighed on him as a hard, sore shape, and his heart beat very fast. He assumed the feeling would pass. But it did not, and that evening simple interactions with the quartermaster, dining attendants, other passengers, took on a strained and breathless quality. It must be obvious to them, he thought, how raw his skin felt. During the night he pressed the stem of his pocket watch compulsively in the dark, lifting the lid on its pale face. The ticking lulled him to sleep. Then he woke a second time and, continuing to check the hour as the night progressed, began to see in those twitching hands the spasms of something monstrous.
It was with a strong feeling of relief, therefore, and a sense that his sharp outline had softened slightly, that he smiled back at his new friend.
“What do you imagine it will be like?” said Faruq.
“Imagine what, France?”
“Before I came, the first time, I had many pictures of it in my mind. Some turned out to be quite accurate, in the end. Some were—” He pinched his lips and smiled in self-mockery. “For some reason I had an idea about wigs. You know, the false hair. I’m not sure where I got it from, possibly I had seen an old drawing.”
Midhat made a sound like he was thinking, and looked through the window at the sea.
His high school in Constantinople was modelled on the French lycée. The textbooks were all French imports, as were half the teachers, and even most of the furniture. Midhat and his classmates had sat on ladder-back chairs with woven rush seats reading “la poésie épique en Grèce,” memorizing the names of elements in a mixture of French and Latin, and only when the bell rang did they slip into Turkish and Arabic and Armenian in the corridor. Once formulated in French, certain concepts belonged in French, so that, for instance, Midhat knew the names of his internal organs as “le poumon” and “le coeur” and “le cerveau” and “l’encéphale,” and understood philosophical abstractions by their French names, “l’altruisme,” “la condition humaine.” And yet, despite being steeped for five years in all things French, he struggled to conjure a picture of France that was separate from the furnishings of his classrooms, whose windows had displayed a hot Turkish sky, and admitted shouts of Arabic from the water. Even now, from the vantage of this ship, Provence remained hidden by fog and the earth’s unseeable curves. He looked back at Faruq.
“I cannot imagine it.”
He waited for Faruq’s scorn. But Faruq only shrugged, and dropped his eyes to the table.
“Were you ever in Montpellier?” said Midhat.
“No, only Paris. Of course, the university is famous for medicine. Didn’t Rabelais study there?”
“Ah, you know about Rabelais!”
Faruq chuckled. “Have some marmalade before I eat it all.”
Faruq returned to his cabin after breakfast, and Midhat climbed the staircase to the deck and sat beside the stern. He stared at the sea and listened with partial comprehension to a group of European officials—Dutch, French, English—shouting from the next bench, first about the technology of the vessel and then about the German advance on Paris.
Boards quaked beneath Midhat’s feet: a child was scampering along the deck. Beyond, a pair of young women compared cartes postales, and the wind harassed the tassels on their parasols. Those were the same girls who last night at dinner had displayed their lovely hair like hats, crimped and waved and decorated with jewels that sparkled under the chandeliers. At last, the door to the bridge opened and a red-haired man, Captain Gorin, stepped out and cracked his knuckles. A uniformed official leapt from the bench to address him, and as Gorin’s lips moved—soundless to Midhat in the wind—the grooves in his face deepened. He cupped his hands over a cigarette, shook a match free of its flame, and held the lit end in his palm against the wind. The other man departed, and Gorin smoked over the rail for a while. His curls flung about; they seemed barely attached to his head. He flicked the butt overboard and retreated below deck.
Midhat decided to follow. He crossed before the shouting Europeans just as Gorin disappeared under the hatch, and swung after him down the metal stairs. The first door on the passage gave onto a saloon, which was full of people. In the corner a gramophone sang. He scanned for Gorin, and met the eyes of Faruq, who was sitting at a table with a pile of books.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Faruq. He had changed his clothes and was now wearing a dark suit and a yellow tie with green hexagons. “I found these for you. They are the only ones I have with me. Some poems … poems again, this one is quite good actually … and Les Trois Mousquetaires. Essential reading for any young man on his first trip to France.”
“I am very grateful.”
“I will buy us something to drink, and then we shall practise French. Whisky?”
Midhat nodded. He sat, and to hide his nerves, reached for The Three Musketeers. The page fell open at the authorial preface.
While doing research at the Royal Library for my History of Louis XIV, I accidentally fell upon the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, printed—as were most works of that period in which the authors