In the spring of 1915 the fighting started again at Ypres. The Germans were using poison gas. Sudden clouds, yellow-green, whistled free from canisters along the front between Steenstraat and Langemarck. They rallied and advanced as a single luminous mist, just as the French troops were called to the firing line. Among the dead were the Molineus’ chauffeur Pisson, and Marian’s husband Paul Richer. Marian wore her wedding dress to the memorial service. The photograph from the newspaper announcement was framed by a garland, and where “Paul Richer” had curled beneath his chest now a line of roses nestled. The Tricolore was propped beside it, and when the breeze paused the flag furled, its colours tipped vertical, so that it resembled, to Midhat’s mind, a cloak with a stained hem.
A few days afterwards, Marian announced that she was joining the volunteer nurses. She was posted at Divonne-les-Bains on the Swiss border, and in her letters to Jeannette she described the disfigured men whose wounds she was cleaning. One was paralytic, and another had lost the use of both hands. One had no thumbs, one had a leg as fat as an elephant’s, one had lost the lower half of his jaw and smoked cigarettes through his nose. And the violets were blooming in the fields, she said, more fragrant than at home, and yellow primroses lined the forest floor.
Given that Paul was the first relative of the Molineus killed in action, Midhat expected Jeannette to withdraw further from him in her grief. Ever since the party in December, his feelings towards her had become tangled with his feelings about Laurent. Even though, to examine it logically, Laurent’s confession that he still loved Jeannette implied that Jeannette had not responded in the first instance, he remained helplessly jealous all the same, not only because someone had usurped him by desiring Jeannette first, but also because Laurent was French, and more advanced than Midhat in his studies, and had gone off to war, and was from every angle more suitable to be Jeannette’s husband than a Palestinian from Nablus who was a citizen of the enemy.
But, in fact, after the news of Paul’s death Jeannette turned towards Midhat. She sought him out after meals, asking him questions about his studies; she knocked on his door while he was reading, apologised for the interruption, but would he like a biscuit and a cup of tea? Midhat’s classes at the Faculty were in the afternoons, and the clinics in the morning were optional for first-year students. So the mornings became time to spend with Jeannette. They parted at the breakfast table, and when the door banged with Docteur Molineu’s departure, they reunited in the hall, as though casually, without acknowledging the subterfuge.
The first time came about by accident. Midhat was in his bedroom trying to learn the bones of the body. Ilium, sacrum, patella. Tarsus, metatarsus. He copied the lines in his notebook, and the words became paler and paler. He shook the pen. Tibia, fibula, calcaneus.
The door of Docteur Molineu’s study was ajar. He pushed it open, and found himself in a surprisingly grand room. Three of the walls were lined with books up to the ceiling, and the fourth gave a view of the neighbouring farm and the blue hills through a bay window flanked by maroon curtains that sprawled from a tasselled pelmet. The woodwork was painted dark turquoise. In the corner stood an armchair, and in the centre a large desk with a leather work surface, spread over with piles of paper and a few volumes. Two inkwells sat on the far edge, both half-full of black. One was rimmed with green, the other with red. He hesitated.
“Monsieur Midhat?”
He spun round. Jeannette was standing in the shadow of the door.
“I have run out of ink,” he said.
He noticed that her neck was red, and a couple of hairs from the front of her head had trailed down from their pins. Oddly, at his words the redness spread over her entire face. It was an opening, he saw: they were dislocated from their usual positions—across a table, seated—and neither had the usual composure. He took a step to the side.
“Would you like to go for a walk?”
“Oh.” Her dark pupils cooled, and in a moment she replied, with renewed self-possession: “Thank you. That would be lovely.”
They met in the hallway wearing their coats, left the house without speaking, and walked up to the Boulevard du Jeu de Paume. Day was brightening, the streets were full of people, and there were enough distractions for them to ignore their mutual silence. The Beaux Arts steeples, the Palais de Justice decked with flags, submarine windows bulging out from slate roofs, shining with daylight. Midhat led the way to the Botanic Garden. Ilium, sacrum, patella, sang in his head. They reached the green gates.
“I used to come here with Laurent,” he said, touching the railing.
But he found he knew the park no better now than on that first visit, and he slowed his pace. He chose the hedgerow path, and after that did not force any particular direction. Spring had brought out new colours in the beds, and violets spread rampant along the paths.
“Tell me more about yourself,” said Jeannette.
“What would you like to know?” He was happy they were side by side and he did not have to look at her; otherwise he might have found it hard to speak.
“I don’t know. What about your school.”
“Well, it has one long building, like this. And on one side there is a big gate, and on the other side is the Bosphorus.”
Sensing that this wasn’t quite what she wanted, he changed direction and described how with two friends from the dormitory he used to sneak out at night by climbing a wall behind the oak tree. Once, they were caught on their way home from the city, and gave the warden false names.
“Samir became Izz ad-Din Izz ad-Din, Ilhan said Simeon Simeon, and I said my name was Ahmad Ibn Ahmad. It was very funny. The warden laughed and rode us home, and we weren’t even punished. I mean, we never went anywhere really, we only walked around the streets for a while. Sometimes we bought ice cream. Ha! We didn’t know what to do with the freedom. It was just for the sake of being free.”
Next Jeannette asked about the different religions, and Midhat listed the various groups in the Empire, running a mental finger over the boys in his Mekteb dormitory. Again, this clearly wasn’t what she wanted. So he elaborated some details of his own experience, and described how there weren’t many Christians in Nablus, but his neighbour Hala was one of them, and he used to play with her when they were very young. They made a house in the woodshed and his Teta would bring them tea.
“It sounds like a very free childhood.”
“It was, I think so. We lived at the bottom of a mountain. My father wasn’t at home often, because he worked in Cairo, works in Cairo, and I had a nurse when I was small but mostly I grew up with my grandmother.”
More and more fluently, he asked Jeannette about her own life. He wondered if she would tell him more about her mother, but she did not, and he did not ask. Slowly she unravelled some other facts about her childhood in Montparnasse, and narrated some amusing stories to match the ones he had shared. Then, as they reached the greenhouse, she burst out that she had felt uneasy during her studies at the university. There among all those men—she laughed, the little creases beneath her eyes clarifying in the sunlight.
They met again the following morning at eleven o’clock. This time they walked around the neighbourhood, and peered up the driveways at the other houses, their shutters and paintwork cracked and faded by the hot breezes that came off the Mediterranean. Conversation moved beyond simple facts and memories into the realm of speculation: perhaps I feel this, perhaps I feel that. Midhat reeled from the blaze of Jeannette’s interest and tried to temper his enthusiasm about what she shared with him. But his joy was precarious, and attended by strong gusts of anxiety. At times he felt their privacy threatened by the hypothetical judgements of other people, and became distracted by the view he imagined from the windows they passed, a man and a woman seen from above, unchaperoned. This notion sent his thoughts on a worn path: first back to his school friends, and his cousin Jamil, with the query accompanied by a slightly gleeful pride as to whether any of them were encountering women the way he was. Directly this thought would sink under the thought of Laurent, and his shadowy history with Jeannette, and Midhat’s comparative ignorance of European convention, in which for a man and woman to walk side by side and discuss their childhoods might quite easily signify nothing at all. He began expending considerable effort trying to stop his mind from enlarging upon the looks she gave him, and the remarks she made, and the silences she allowed. Everything about it was new to him. Presumably, it was not new to her. He wondered if she used to go walking with Laurent, and this thought alone was often sobering enough to check the elaboration of his fantasies. And yet, though he knew it would in all likelihood appease his conscience, he could not summon the courage to ask her about Laurent, nor even to mention his name.