Thus began Midhat’s life in Paris. His days of medical study were behind him. He enrolled in the history course at the Sorbonne, and by the end of the summer was attending lectures in wood-panelled halls smelling of chalk dust alongside other foreigners, young women, and elderly men. He spent his days in cafés with books on ancient Greece and seventeenth-century Spain, and Faruq supplied him with additional reading, stories of forbidden love, mystical texts, narratives of peripatetic foreigners living in Paris. Among them were Goethe’s Sorrows and the story of a Lebanese priest’s daughter trapped by her marriage and in love with someone else. These books were preoccupied with the senses, Faruq pointed out. Their authors pleaded openness to the world.
“We are all scarecrows turned philosophers,” he said, “with crows living under our hats.”
Sometimes after dinner Midhat would go out with Faruq to bars and cabarets. As the city moved from her mood of wartime grief to one of revelry, Parisian nightlife began to thrive on the electric atmosphere of the home front. Ration-dimmed streetlights greyed the boulevards but cinemas and theatres still packed out nightly and even stayed open during zeppelin attacks. Under the sustained pressure of war, the people of Paris behaved as though they had approached the end of the world. Faruq liked to joke that an atmosphere of “désastre” led to “déshabillement”—but Midhat said no, this was something greater, far more significant and penetrating. It was a charge shared between strangers, it was a pure thrill of Being. It lived in the body like a drug, this being alive in the jaws of the full, flying night.
His first sexual experience was with another student at the Sorbonne, named Claire. Claire was petite and blond and, Midhat was shocked later to learn, almost thirty years old. She expressed disdain for men who were not at war, and when he tried to defend himself she reached out and placed two fingers on his lips.
“Je ne veux pas entendre vos raisons.”
He caught sight of her first at a lecture on the origins of religion. She was on the opposite side of the lecture hall, and as she watched the professor Midhat watched her. When the students flooded out into the courtyard, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find her standing there with a hand on her hip.
“Je veux voir la wreckage, du raid la nuit dernière.”
They found a five-storey building on the Rue de Ménilmontant where the wall had been ripped off, the cross section exposed, the remaining support wall now a coastal profile, half a bathroom rudely displayed, a kitchen, stocked shelves. He stared up in silence at the chair suspended on the top floor. He was thinking of a note Jeannette once read aloud to him, written in her mother’s hand, about a house that stopped being a house once a thief had entered.
Claire took his hand in hers. “My God.” Her dress was cut low, the skin on her chest pale and patterned with freckles that gathered below her clavicle. She placed herself closer to him. What a strange person, he thought; stripped of fear. She released his hand and moved past him to the garden wall. She pulled up her skirt, put her foot in the crevice, hauled herself over, and disappeared.
Midhat looked around. Only a few people were walking on the street. He heard a voice say, “Maman, regarde,” but nothing more. He approached the wall and jumped up, and a thin vertical plate of concrete crumbled under his weight. In his haste he scraped a knee, sharp dust grooved his hands; he landed on dry grass and debris and saw Claire moving towards a shed with a collapsed roof. The corrugated door lying on the ground clanged with her footstep. She giggled, and slipped her body through the remaining gap of an entrance. Midhat followed her into the darkness.
Inside smelled of sawdust, and the dented roof left barely a space to stand. It was a woodshed: some logs remained in their stacks, most had scattered over the floor. A bucket glinted with fissures of daylight; Claire laughed, kicked it over. For no reason, and they heard the swish of the water as it tipped. It disturbed Midhat, this display of havoc. His shoe released a squelch as he raised it. Momentarily he feared her—but as this fear struck her little grip pulled at his jacket, and he fell forwards and reached for the wall. Her breath was loud in his ear. She kissed him. He tried to mimic her courage and, tensing the muscles in his hand and arm, slid his fingers under the collar of her dress, revealing her pale shoulder. Even in the gloom her eyes were bright. She stole a hand down below to where he was already hot and stiff and unbuttoned his trousers, and for a cruel second Midhat was reminded of his nurse, the only other person in his life who had ever undressed him thus. Claire was laughing softly, pulling her skirt up, her drawers down; he reached out and gripped her instinctively under the legs, braced her against the wall. She kissed him again, and with her hand helped him to enter her.
An eruption of sensation. He drew an enormous breath. His fingers clawed into the backs of her thighs. She was squirming, whispering in pain. Let me go. He checked his gasping, he held himself; she pulled back and forth, he copied her and tried to thrust. The pleasure surged and for a long, staggering moment he was totally unselfed. Then he was out again. Feet sounded on the street outside and faded. Claire released a puff of exasperated laughter and Midhat turned to catch his breath, his left foot completely wet with the bucket water.
Though at first the experience was painful to recall, before long it was a triumph in Midhat’s mind. It was easy to rewrite a story in a city of strangers, and reporting it to Faruq over cognac Midhat changed the location—to Claire’s apartment—and laughed, as a man who has done something for himself laughs, fortified by action. And then, having conned himself with this picture of manly achievement, and having teased out some details of Faruq’s own affairs under the guise of sharing knowledge, he found the next time infinitely easier.
This girl was from Lyon, also a student at the university; he saw her across a lawn in the Bois de Boulogne, and reversing his direction met her as if by accident where the paths intersected. He complimented her on the ribbon in her hair; accepted the dinner invitation; helped when her corset-clasp snagged on her underdress, and touched the small hole it had torn with its little harp of exposed fibres. Then there was a society girl with bony shoulders who wore flannel suits and shoes with canvas spats. Sometimes she wore a monocle at parties. Another woman sold charity badges on the Rue de Rivoli; her curls were the colour of marmalade. He met her in June, and in the sunny mornings found orange hairs spiralled on the pillow beside him. He befriended a whore at the Café Napolitain who was slight and flat chested, and addressed Midhat as “Mon Exotique.” After a month of evenings in rented rooms and breakfasts by the Seine this girl left the city for Provence with her mother, and Midhat regretted the loss of her scornful voice and her firm thighs. He began to visit the whorehouses in Pigalle, in part searching for another such woman, in part simply for the physical release.
Two whores he visited, but soon there was only one, for the first became syphilitic and was transferred to the local infirmary. The other was a woman named Pauline, whose skin was very soft and who sprayed herself with rosewater to mask the sewer-stench that reached the windows in summer. Pauline had a comic pout. When the Americans joined the war effort and filled Paris on furlough, she mimicked their voices with a wah wah drawl and swagger of her head, and lighting a cigarette watched Midhat produce the franc notes to pay the madam.