“Dear Marian, I cannot believe it is so soon,” said Jeannette.
“This is our young guest du Proche-Orient,” said the Docteur, “Monsieur Kamal, who has come to study medicine at the university. He has just arrived, in fact. We expect he is feeling a little désorienté at the moment.”
“Papa.”
“Vraiment!” said the man who was or was not Captain Gorin. “Where are you from?”
“Nablus, a town north of Jerusalem, south of Damascus.”
“Magnificent.”
“He is going to be a doctor,” said Jeannette.
Midhat twisted his torso. The position kept him more alert. It also allowed him to look again at the man’s face.
And as he looked now, a conviction solidified that this was not, after all, Captain Gorin. Those ginger whiskers were not familiar, nor the sunburnt cheeks. This was a stranger, his name was Paul Richer, and given the smile on his lips he was clearly aware that Midhat was studying him. The realisation jarred as strongly as the instant of his first mistake, and Midhat was overcome by a sour-tasting unease.
“Monsieur Midhat,” said Jeannette. “You must be very tired. Would you prefer to go to bed? Georgine, perhaps Monsieur Midhat would like to see where his bedroom is? He looks—he must be very tired from his journey.”
And so, shortly before seven o’clock in the evening, on the twentieth of October 1914, Midhat Kamal was shown into a corner room in the upstairs of the Molineu house in Montpellier. The window showed the dim garden, a large tree at the far end. The walls of the room were striped yellow, and opposite the bed, beside the fireplace, a wooden chair faced a table with a vase of lilies dropping orange dust on its shiny veneer. His trunk stood upright beside an armoire. He untied his shoes and lay down.
Flat on his back, he thought again of the stranger downstairs named Paul Richer, and tried to picture his captain. Red curls, grooves in his cheeks. The rest was harder to fill in. He felt the rocking motions of the sea, and the images of the day plotted themselves on the insides of his eyelids: the French coast that morning, emerging from the blue distance; the passengers abandoning breakfast to crowd at the windows; the port of Marseille, the bustle for gangplanks onto shore, the motorcars, the whistling; Jeannette stepping towards him with her hand out; the town from the car window, darkening; the cordial, the salon, the bedroom, the ceiling. He realised his eyes were closed, and opened them.
The colours had gone. He was on his side, and the floor by the window was quilted with moonlight. In the dark the bedroom was large and soft. Sleep was half off and half on. He pulled himself up; a chill seared. Jacket off, braces down, unbutton the shirt. And then a whisper, a patter—nothing human, the sound of two objects shifting past each other. He stared at the door, and watched it puff open with an intruding breeze. The latch had not clicked shut.
On his feet, he pulled the handle and the door turned silently on its hinge. There lay the upstairs hall. Grey and empty. No draught, although the air was a little cooler. The lip of the carpet that ran up the stairs lay supine at the top, slightly furled. Above it the banister turned, descending. And in the far corner at the other end of the gallery, where the gloom deepened, a lamp stood beside a closed door.
He retreated. He pressed the door until he heard the latch, and slid under the cold sheets. His eyes shut on the dark ceiling and soon the bedclothes were as warm as his skin, and he could imagine he was back in Nablus. A memory rose up, of a time he had walked in his sleep, when he was fourteen or so. He had woken at the warble of the call to prayer to find himself in bed beside his grandmother, his Teta, with one of her arms around his waist. Confused, ashamed, he tried to pull himself upright, stuck a foot out onto the cold tile—until Teta stretched forward and touched his hair. You were talking, she said. Habibi don’t worry, habibi, go back to sleep.
2
In the twilight years of the Empire, keeping time had become a problem. The official year still began in March, when the tax farmers plagued the fellahin. But the Christians used the Gregorian calendar, led by January with the leap years and a few variations according to their liturgies; and while the Jews adjusted their terms to accommodate the cycles of the earth, the Muslims followed the lunar Hijri and gradually fell out of step with the seasons as they turned.
While Midhat was a child everyone in Nablus, even the non-Muslims, followed the moon and, in spite of Sultan Abdülhamid’s new Frankish clock tower, kept religiously to Arab time. According to the Muslims, the Almighty had so designed the universe that every day as the sun disappeared the timepieces of humanity should be set to the twelfth hour, in obedience to the clock of the world. And so as darkness fell and the muezzins called for the maghrib prayer, wealthy Nabulsis all over town pulled watches from their pockets, extracted the crowns with their fingernails, and fiddled to make the hands clap on twelve, before, if so inclined, rushing off to the mosque.
As a very young child Midhat would sleep beside his Teta, Um Taher, in the winter. When he was five they moved beyond the old city walls, from a house with a shared courtyard and rounded chambers to a modern building with private rooms and squared edges at the foot of Mount Gerizim. He watched the seasons from his new bedroom window with the snowy gussets of Jabal al-Sheikh on the horizon.
The day Haj Taher, Midhat’s father, announced his second engagement, Teta declared she had seen the carriage on the mountain a month before. Teta’s prophecies protected no one, for she never knew what they meant at the time, and suffered only from the haunting of retrospect. Among other things, she had foreseen her own husband’s death.
“I had a vision of a coffin on a blue carpet. I saw the corner of the wood on the blue carpet. I was at my mother’s house, and I saw it again when they brought the coffin from Jaffa and put it at my feet. My eye, this eye, looked quickly down and I saw the corner of the coffin and, underneath it, the carpet.”
Haj Taher’s first marriage, to Midhat’s mother, was Teta’s doing. The girl came from a good Jenin family, and Taher had loved her.
“Your mother had green eyes. Her face was almost flat under them, like this,” and she pressed her fingers over her cheeks, “wallah, like a little boy.”
If she had prophesied this girl’s death by tuberculosis, Teta kept it to herself. Midhat was two years old. His father was in Egypt. The house was filled with women crying, and as they washed the body on the dining table the housekeeper brought semolina pastries out to the hall, which Midhat crumbled in his fists before licking the sweet grit off his palms. The moment his father appeared in the doorway Teta yowled and gripped the edge of the table as though she might fall over.
Haj Taher did not stop long in Nablus. His clothing business in Cairo was growing fast and required more of his attention, and though he had hired extra staff for the shop on Muski Street and more young men to bring silks from the Golan, he never forgot his own father’s lesson about the importance in business of maintaining personal relations, and since “Al-Kamal” was entering the Cairene lexicon to signify clothing of particularly high quality, Haj Taher Kamal himself could not run the store as an absentee. Nor could he rely on anonymous couriers to collect the silks from the merchants. He must both appear regularly on the selling floor and travel north for the stock, using the new envoys only to keep pace with the turnover. This ceaseless engagement was exhausting but profitable: it ensured the loyalty of the consumers and the honesty of the traders. Besides, the journeys added variation to his life; he could visit Nablus on the way, stop in on his agent Hisham at the local store, spend an evening with his mother and young son, before returning to check the accounts on Muski. When he returned to Cairo after his wife’s funeral, he would have liked to set out on a trip again, but business had no time for grief. The holiday was approaching, sales had escalated, and he needed to stay in Cairo to supervise the shop.