The following day at eleven o’clock, armed with several sets of example papers, textbooks, and element tables they had drawn up themselves, the pair met in a recess behind the cathedral.
“Let’s start with botany, shall we?” said Cogolati.
That corner, in the shade of the cypress trees, became the place where they sat every day from eleven until two as June turned into July, and the summer heat struck the ashy stone of the anatomical theatre, bleaching their eyes so that when they turned away they discovered green and purple oblongs floating across the pages of their books. From the first it was apparent that, after a year of diligent study, any further revision of the material was for Cogolati merely a pleasant supplement. This caused Midhat even more anxiety, which he tried to disguise under his enthusiasm, asking questions and tutting at the responses as if to say, oh of course, yes I knew that. If Cogolati ever felt irritated by this he hid it well, for he only giggled and tipped his head back as Midhat asked, for the third time: “And catalysis? Remind me what that was again? Oh yes, oh yes, of course.”
They sat the examinations in the first week of July. Two hundred seats were arranged in the hall with metre-wide gaps between, and a dead space at the back where the examiners marched and congregated. Zoology and botany came first. Midhat thought both the written and the oral tests went well: there were questions on photosynthesis and the agents of seed dispersal, which he and Cogolati had studied thoroughly, and a section on vertebrates and invertebrates; in the zoology oral Midhat confidently identified the gill raker, the spiracle, proboscis, cilium, and tentacle, and outlined the history of a frog before a panel of two professors; in botany he sketched the life of an alga, a fungus, and a liverwort; he listed the characteristics of a gymnosperm, a monocotyledon, a dicotyledon; he defined respiration and triumphantly discussed the life of the deciduous.
Physics was also relatively straightforward. The key to it, Cogolati had explained, was to memorise the formulae and then recognise from the question which of them was needed. After that it was a simple matter of substituting numbers. “This is the problem with rudimentary science assessment,” said Cogolati. But if he wanted Midhat’s collusion in his disdain, he was met only with the astonished face of a man who felt he had just been saved. “Thank you,” said Midhat. “Thank you.”
The real trouble came with chemistry. It was not that Midhat didn’t know the material; he had spent the three days’ interval between the physics written test and the chemistry one beside Cogolati in the library, completing practice papers and discussing their answers, and on the day of the examination he entered the hall feeling prepared. The problem was rather that, looking down at his paper in the cool plaster-walled chamber, with the sound of two hundred pens scratching, and the hollow clop of the examiners’ strides between the desks, he was distracted. He read and reread each question without haste; he worked on one answer and then another, abandoning calculations mid-tally.
Today, on the day of the chemistry written test and the final day of the academic term, Sylvain Leclair was due to dine at the Molineus’. Since Laurent’s death, Midhat’s romance with Jeannette had been flowering of its own accord, and his theories about Ariane Molineu and the cause of her suicide had moved to the periphery. But though he had not consciously dwelled on them, something had continued to develop down below, and now unsettling ideas of abuse were floating up, along with strange remembered images: Sylvain sneering across a table, Jeannette leaving a room in distress.
He looked up from the exam paper and saw a young woman ahead of him in the adjacent column of desks. She was agitated: rattling her pen on the desk, twitching the heel of one foot over the other ankle. The young man at the next desk swivelled around.
“Shh!”
She started, and the pen made a final dying movement between her fingers.
“One hour remains,” said the examiner. His chalk squeaked on the board: “ENCORE UNE HEURE.”
It was then that Midhat finally jumped into action and looked down at the paper, on which only one question had been completed. He had made a start with number 5: he turned to it again.
5. (a) Calculate the weight of sulphur in 50 g. of Cr2(SO4)3. Find the result to three significant figures. (Atomic weights Cr 52, S 32, O 16.)
When the hour was up he had answered half of the questions, and at the call, “Put your pens down now!” he rose from his chair dizzy with concentration. They were released alphabetically. Midhat found Cogolati outside, standing on the steps in exaggerated contrapposto.
“How was it for you?” he asked, as they fell in line.
“Fine, I think.”
Across the courtyard, the cypresses shushed and waved.
“Would you like to take a coffee?”
“Thank you,” said Midhat, “but you know, I’m quite exhausted. I think I should go home.”
This was their goodbye then, because Cogolati was leaving for Geneva in the morning. Midhat thanked him, and Cogolati grinned awkwardly. They embraced and parted at the gate.
Summer was in full flare. All around him trees expressed tiny pink flowers, clouding the streets with blossom. Everything was calm. He walked back to the house in slow motion, set free from the regime of academic time, the blocking of days into hours and half hours. He reached the house and climbed the stairs: the door to Docteur Molineu’s study was ajar. In the slit he saw, on the floor by the bay window, the back of Jeannette’s head. He knocked.
“Come in.”
Beside her on the floor were a stack of albums and a small pile of photographs. The first photograph showed a woman wearing a lace collar and a flower in her hair.
“How did it go? Come, kiss me.”
“It was fine. I am tired, my brain is tired. Keep reading, don’t let me disturb you.”
The last time Midhat had entered Docteur Molineu’s study was in that furtive search for inkwells. It was not a room they chose on their secret mornings; it was implicitly out of bounds. And yet standing now in the centre, the woman he loved reading before him, he experienced a new sense of entitlement. The desk was covered in a mess of papers and a few stacked books with bookmarks flopping out like tongues. Resisting the impulse to sit in the chair, he indulged a momentary vision of the future, in a room just like this one. He closed the image, and moved to join Jeannette on the floor.
It appeared in his mind before he realised he had read it. His own name. He reversed his steps.
Near the edge of the desk was an open notebook. The page was titled in large letters: “Notes Préliminaires—Midhat Kamal.” Underneath the title were a variety of illegible markings in green ink, sometimes at angles up the margins. Midhat picked up the notebook. At the bottom of the page he made out two inscriptions: “Naplouse—deux montagnes, Ebal et Gerizim,” said one, and the other, “Les Samaritains—la magie? L’Araméen & l’Arabe & l’Hébreu.” He turned the page. “Proverbes” was the next title. Three were listed: all of them proverbs Midhat had heard as a child in Nablus and had translated for Docteur Molineu in a conversation last winter by the fire, here transliterated. “Newspaper talk” said one; “Kalam jarayed—something that is hard to believe.” Another: “Kalamo waqif—his speech is standing—i.e. aggressive”; “the words of the night are coated in butter—will melt in the sun—promises not kept.” At the bottom of the page was written: “La langue peut affecter le cerveau? La traduction pure est impossible.”