Hala endured as Midhat’s model of a female. She was the only girl he could picture who did not have the face of Teta, Layla, or a hazy something of his mother, which looked a bit like his aunt. Hala could not age: she was always ten years old. Her hair was always long and triangular over her shoulders, her knees were always muddy. Those poetical abstractions learned by candlelight could not be animated with Hala’s face and body, for she was unchangeable and unsexual. The ancient poems took force in Midhat’s mind as the engines of a vaguer longing, which lacked a face, ached for flesh but thrived on deprivation. The madness of the poet could never be brought off by a woman herself, she in possession of a living body: it was only ever her imprint in his soul, that ideal echo itself the true Beloved, compound of his mind and her being. Midhat knew this much of love before he left for France, and Teta had secured that knowledge: during the school holidays in Nablus he always asked for stories before bed, and Um Taher lay happily beside him unwrapping slivers of her history, her almost loves and secret encounters, her long breasts spilling down her sides. Teta took refuge in the past, repeating the same turns of phrase as she recited her prophecies about the man she fell in love with as a girl, a poor relation who left jasmine flowers on her balcony in the months before she was married off and became the wife of the wealthy merchant they knew as Abu Taher. Stories of longing were the only stories. To desire was as good as to possess.
But here in the Molineus’ house things seemed to be different, and Midhat was not equipped. He had not read the right books. Even French words felt thicker lately in his mouth, and like a heavy screen they separated him from what he wanted to say. Each day he was more the fool, the foreigner unable to control his own meanings, lost in the wild multiple of language. And Jeannette was no echo, no Beloved in any sense that he could map. It seemed to him that he desired her herself, not her imprint; he wanted to hear her voice again, to see her eyes again—but if she responded so badly to jealousy, how was he to express that desire? He did not enjoy longing for her, as Teta had seemed to enjoy longing. Even to remain in the house made him ache, because she was also in the house, in another room, choosing not to speak to him. At the same time, he resisted going out because then he might miss an opportunity to encounter her. So he waited, exhausted by a perpetual state of readiness, his stomach clenched as he grasped after eye contact at dinner, hoping to meet her by accident in the hall, distracted, ashamed, heavy with an explosive and unwieldy desire which only increased in strength the longer she ignored him.
Meanwhile, his old shocks of separateness were coming thick and fast. More than separation now, it was that purer loneliness he had felt on the ship to Marseille. During classes, walking to the Faculty, in bed at night, the outline of his body oppressed him as a hard shape. He felt no curiosity about the sensation, which was pure unalloyed pain. His awareness of his limbs was an agony, he wanted to get out of them, to be elsewhere; but he was locked inside his body, and relief from its pressure came only with sleep. And yet even sleep did not sustain him, for he rose already tired, and when he arrived home in the evenings he was too exhausted to change his clothes, and he wore the robe he had worn all day to the dinner table.
That morning Docteur Molineu had announced that Sylvain Leclair and the Nolins were coming to dine, and on returning from the Faculty Midhat chanced a rare sighting from his bedroom window: a flash of yellow silk blown into view by the wind. Afterwards he would wonder if that was deliberate, somehow, whether she knew he was watching for a signal and had made him wait before giving him one.
She did not turn around when he opened the glass door. He left a space between them on the terrace, and looked out at the darkening lawn. It was difficult to speak. At last, he managed: “I’m sorry.”
A silence followed.
“Well, that’s something.”
She said this with such an air of moral authority that he turned his entire body to glare at her in disbelief. Unperturbed, or perhaps unseeing, she offered him a cigarette without meeting his eye. He declined. She did not even register this gesture: she had seen her father through the glass door, and was opening it.
Dinner was a roasted fowl divided between eight—Docteur Molineu, Jeannette, Midhat, Patrice Nolin, Marie-Thérèse, Carole, Sylvain Leclair, and Georgine, who ate in the kitchen—swamped on the plate by beans seasoned with tarragon. Flour-thick gravy sat in jugs between the candelabras, and the steam through the kitchen door misted the spring-cool glass.
The faces lit up and went dark as they leaned in and out of the candlelight, which shot theatrical shadows up from Sylvain’s eyebrows over his spherical forehead. Docteur Molineu stumbled out a prayer, and the clinks and sounds of eating commenced, and murmurs of polite conversation.
“What truly is the difference,” Nolin broke out, “between a man making arms in a war factory under military control, and the man who dons a uniform and holds a gun?” He wiped his lips. “We are imagining these boundaries. Is it just the women and children who count as ‘civilians’? What am I, or you, Frédéric? Are we also incapable of our own defence?”
Docteur Molineu made a stretching gesture of consideration and Midhat perceived that Molineu admired Nolin and wished to impress him. In an instant, his understanding of his host was changed, and he saw him as a man who yearned. He thought of Molineu’s wife, and wondered whether he continued to suffer the way his daughter did.
Marie-Thérèse flickered a wine-stained tongue, and tittered. “Carole and I are volunteering at the Auguste Comte School. The mathematics exercises encourage the children to buy war loans.”
“My daughters have also both become marraines de guerre. Do you know what that means?” Nolin’s eyes narrowed pre-emptively, and he pursed his lips as if tasting the words before he released them.
Midhat shook his head.
“It means they are writing letters to soldiers. But they don’t know who they are writing to, they just pretend. It’s meant to give the soldiers comfort, a letter from their ‘godmother.’”
The three Frenchmen laughed.
“I think it is a very nice thought,” said Jeannette.
Nodding, Midhat tried and failed to catch her eye. Sylvain rumbled another laugh, and Jeannette turned so sharply that her hair shook around her head. A memory sprang to the surface: Jeannette distressed, talking to Sylvain, on the other side of a room. With it rose the echo of a powerful dislike, and an obscure imperative to protect her.
“But our view of war is practically picturesque,” Nolin said, ostensibly to Docteur Molineu, but loud enough for the entire table. “We continue with our cavalry charges, dashing, Napoléon, you know? These exotic escapades. I was there when Carl lost Sébastien, so I’m not being flippant. I only mean the glamour will fade.”
“Mm.”
“We were young, Frédéric, during the Prussian war. But my brother fought and I remember even as a child I knew it was a sore thing, a low thing, and this being the largest we have ever seen—it is not an escapade, at any rate.”
A sigh came from across the table. It was Jeannette.
Sylvain said: “We all know it is not an escapade, Patrice.”
How odd this was, thought Midhat. These three men too old to fight, dining with three young women left in a world of women and fathers and crippled absentees, and himself a rarity, not only as an Arab but as a young man. No one spoke for a few moments. Midhat made a decision that he would speak. His stomach flipped. He cleared his throat.