Two glasses half full of trembling liquid slid across the polished table.
“Santé. Now, I’m going to tell you some things. Are you ready?” Faruq leaned back against the bench, and pulled the prayer beads from his pocket as he reached for his drink. “First of all, women in France. Now, this is strange, but they are treated like queens. Always they will enter a room first. Remember that. Expect a few things that might make you uncomfortable. Try to have an open mind. Remain true to your origins, in French we’d say rester fidèle à vos racines, fhimet alay? You know I have many French friends. And Spanish. The Spanish are more like the Arabs—the French are something different. They are mostly Christians, so consider them like your Christian friends in Nablus. I presume you have met or at least seen French pilgrims in Palestine. Are there missionaries in Nablus?”
“Yes. But I also went to school in Konstantiniyye. I know many Christians.”
Faruq was not listening. “Well you should know that missionaries are always different from the natives. The religion is less strong in France, first of all. So try not to be shocked by their kissing, and their alcohol, and so on.”
Midhat laughed, and Faruq gave him a look of surprise. Desiring at once to prove that he would not be shocked, Midhat took a sip from the other glass. It was like drinking perfume; he tasted it in his nose. He had tried whisky once when he was sixteen from an illicit bottle in his school dormitory. He had only wet his tongue, however, whereas the owner and his accomplice finished the bottle between them, and when in the morning the schoolmaster smelled it on their breath they were whipped and banned from class for three days.
“There are many things you will like. The way of thinking, the way of life, it’s very refined. In this I feel there is some affinity between Damascus and Paris.”
“And Nablus,” said Midhat.
“Yes, Nablus is very nice.” Faruq sipped and exhaled. “Where will you live in Montpellier?”
“At the house of Docteur Molineu. An academic.”
“An academic! Ah, yes. You will like that.”
Midhat did not mind being told what it was that he would like. He took it as a sign of kinship. He wanted to agree with everything Faruq said.
He spent the remaining four days of the journey reading Faruq’s books on the upper deck. Or, at least, holding the books open in his lap and looking out to sea, and occasionally pronouncing some sentence in French from one of the pages he had pressed down against the wind. His mind, newly relaxed, wheeled off into daydreams. He indulged three scenarios in particular. The first featured a thin-necked Parisian woman lost in Jerusalem, whom he directed in perfect French to Haram ash-Sharif. An onlooker, often a notable from Nablus, reported on the incident, rendering Midhat famous as a man of great kindness and linguistic skill. In the second fantasy, he sang a dal’ona—“ya tayrin taayir fis-sama’ al-aali; sallim al-hilu al-aziz al-ghali”—inspiring awe to the point of weeping in those who passed under his window and heard him mourn the distance between himself and his imagined lover. In the third fantasy he saved another passenger from falling overboard by catching him around the middle with the grace of a dancer. The onlookers applauded.
These daydreams were fortifying. They increased his sense of fluidity with his surroundings and gave him confidence when entering rooms. He took a dose at regular intervals like a draught of medicine and emerged from the dream after a few minutes’ elapse renewed and refreshed. Thus he managed, more or less, to soothe the hard outline of his body—which still at times oppressed him with its stinging clasp.
On the Marseille docks Faruq shook Midhat’s hand and held his arm. “Good luck. And be brave. When the holidays come, you must visit me in Saint Germain.”
The train to Montpellier departed an hour later. Night settled on the countryside, which looked rather like Palestine: similar rugged hills, dry greenery. Midhat slept against the loud, vibrating glass, and in the groggy morning waded through another two chapters of The Three Musketeers as the hills drew a wavy horizon line, and raindrops snagged and shuddered down the panes. He fell asleep again after lunch, and when the announcer called, “Montpellier!” it was a quarter to five: he stood and followed the other passengers onto the platform, fatigued and in need of a wash.
The fore of the Montpellier station resembled a temple. Midhat dragged his trunk between the columns and watched the figures and motorcars move over the quadrangle ahead. He had no idea what Docteur Molineu looked like. There had been no description in the letters from the university, and therefore every man walking nearby was a possibility. That thin person with long shirttails, was he looking at Midhat with interest? Or that elderly gentleman; with those spectacles he certainly looked like a scholar. At the moment when his true host would have turned towards him, however, each candidate continued walking. The man by the ticket booth was definitely staring, but rather too intently, and Midhat avoided his eye.
The crowd before the station thinned, and a lamplighter carried his ladder between the standards. A flock of nurses crossed into the foyer of a building opposite and shook their umbrellas. The lit end of a cigarette flashed double in a puddle, vanished, and someone passed Midhat close on the right. He had a large blond moustache. He was too young to be the Docteur, surely—and as he drew nearer Midhat saw the man’s expression was not kindly, and that his eyes, encircled with blond lashes, were not on Midhat’s face but on his tarbush. The man’s own hat was lipped and shallow, and as he fixed Midhat he put a finger on its brim. Midhat recognised the French sign of respect, the gesture en route to the gesture of lifting the hat, which showed you weren’t hiding anything underneath. But he couldn’t help feeling that this blond man was pointing out the brimlessness of Midhat’s own hat. He frowned, and the man disappeared down a side street.
“Monsieur Kamal?”
At the end of the concourse, a young woman raised her hand. Beneath her cap, short curls of brown hair hugged her ears. A diagonal crease across her lap switched from side to side as she approached.
He hesitated. “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Midhat Kamal.”
The woman laughed, and wrinkles appeared beneath her eyes. “Et je m’appelle Jeannette Molineu.”
Jeannette Molineu extended a pale hand with knuckly fingers. Midhat held them; they were rather cold. It was peculiar that the wife should come to collect him, but he thought of what Faruq had said about French women, and followed Jeannette to a green motorcar parked on the concourse.
“I hope you weren’t waiting for long,” she said, opening the door and squeaking onto the backseat. “How was the journey?”
“It was … for many days.”
The chauffeur drove fast and the motor overwhelmed their voices. From the window, Midhat watched the city rise and fall and thin into alleyways, with shoals of umbrellas and overcoats swelling and contracting on the sidewalks. They turned down a narrow road on which the buildings were gridded with black balconies and roofed with terracotta. The car slowed.
“This city,” said Midhat, “it is similar to Nablus. The two mountains, the stone buildings, the small streets. But it is bigger, and the stone is more yellow.”
“Nablus is where you are from?”
“Yes. And you were born here.”