But after a while he began to feel the dullness of paid pleasure, and, of course, with all the soldiers on rotation one needed to be careful of venereal diseases. Still, on occasion, when induced by cheap wine, he could happily leave a bar in a group of men to carouse in the foyer of Le Chabanais, and accept without much forethought whichever boudoir he was shown into.
Through all this, Jeannette lived on in his mind. The more experience he gained, the less he could commit to any of these women he met in the Folies Bergère, or the Concert Mayol, or in the salons of cocktail parties. Sometimes in the dark he felt Jeannette’s lips, and sometimes smelled her over some woman’s head. Emerging from the fantasy to find a stranger in his arms, he would hear a high ringing sound and make love half in disgust before returning to Saint Germain heavy with renewed shame and longing. That sound moved into and out of his awareness for whole weeks at a time, and yet he carried his longing with him always like a crest of seriousness, and it gave him a gravity both real and performed, which the women of Paris sensed on him like a cologne and were captivated by.
One day, in the summer of 1916, he crossed the Rue de l’Odéon on his way to the university and caught sight of the back of a woman’s head through the window of a bookshop. With a leap in his chest he recognised Jeannette’s hair. She had cut it short again, it was blooming out the back of her head. What was she doing in Paris? She could not know he was here, he had left no forwarding address. There she was, Jeannette, in a matching shirt and skirt, pale grey.
But as she turned to face the window through which Midhat was staring she moved under the sheen of the reflected sun, and he could not tell if she had seen him. His body trembled as it took him through the tinkling shop-door. She was facing away, picking up a book to examine the spine.
“Jeannette.”
At his voice, she turned. It was not Jeannette. Her brow furrowed, she blushed. Her eyes were small and lower down than they were supposed to be, and she was too short, and although she was perfectly fine looking the sight of her was to Midhat monstrous. She was at the counter, and now she was approaching him, whispering, “Excuse me”; he fumbled aside to let her exit, and the door chimed shut. Her face haunted him for several moments. A panic loomed: he could not remember what Jeannette looked like. He tried to conjure her face, but all he could see was this new anonymous woman with her low eyes and her grey skirt. He walked out in a concentrated daze, ransacking his memory. Then—at last—there it was: the little chin, tapering, the eyes, the look in the eyes, the smiling, the kiss, the ending. She was still there, intact.
It seemed the universe would not let Midhat’s conscience lie. Only a few months later he spotted Monsieur Samuel Cogolati, his Belgian friend from the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, in the audience of the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens during the performance of a comic opera about a magical pear. When their gazes collided, Cogolati jerked his head back in surprise. During the interval Midhat found him by the bar.
“Monsieur Kamal! I did not expect to see you again. I thought you had returned to Palestine.”
Although only a year had passed, Cogolati looked older and his waxy face had at last grown some down. Midhat himself had grown an inch and been forced to buy new suits on the Rue Royale. He was also starting to comb his hair with a side parting, and carried a steel-topped cane.
“No, no, I am in Paris … I decided …” He stopped. “I decided that I needed a change of scene. And, you know how it is, new experiences, and so on.”
“What do you mean?”
“New scenery, new people … I never wanted to outstay my welcome. And to see Paris! How can one visit France and not see Paris?”
“Indeed. I am here for the weekend on my way to Geneva. But we miss you at the Faculty, I was not expecting you to leave. I heard you did well in your examinations.”
“Oh, well, all thanks to you. How—have you heard from my host family at all?”
“The Molineus haven’t written?”
“Of course, only, it was a while ago …”
“The last I heard, Jeannette went off to be a nurse, but I’m sure you know more than I do.”
“Well.” An usher in red lapels was calling for the second act. “We should meet when you next come through Paris.”
Midhat reached for a napkin with a shaking hand and drew a fountain pen from his pocket. Rue du Four, he wrote. He did not recognise his handwriting.
“Who was that?” said Faruq, as the curtain went up and the cast reassembled onstage to general applause and a few whistles.
“A Belgian.”
Midhat struggled to focus on the remainder. All that time he had been studying at the Faculty of Medicine, and in the end it was she who worked in a hospital! Insipid images of Jeannette as a nurse tending wounded soldiers, stolen from newspaper illustrations; imprecise jealous pangs. And there was something uncomfortable about seeing Cogolati, an anxiety that he might not have presented himself as he wanted translated back to the Molineus. If only, in his vain haste to impress upon an old colleague his new urbanity and poise, he had borne in mind what Jeannette might have thought of such a Midhat, had she caught wind of it. Midhat the Levantine, with his mouchoir and new suit, now thoroughly estranged: the figure of the Parisian Oriental as he appeared on certain cigarette packets in corner stores. Cogolati surely only saw him as a colleague and an equal—and yet, that innocent, hardworking man would be forever linked in Midhat’s mind with the moment he was awakened to his own otherness, when on the day he completed his examinations and said goodbye to his classmate he returned to the house to discover the other way in which he had been examined—by his host, and without his knowledge. Harrowed by the glimpse of a strange outside view of himself. And in just a year he had undergone such an alteration, from that stranger who had once desired to become European both inside and out, closer already in appearance to the pale Italian or Greek—when he was not blithely offering his genealogy to anyone who asked—than to the inhabitants of those apostasized subaltern continents who had so defected from civilisation as they occurred in picture books and nursery rhymes and the imaginations of French children. He had fallen so easily into the compromise available in Paris, this type, by an embrace of otherness that at first he had admired in Faruq but which now appeared in his mind a skewed, performed version of what it was really like to be in a place but not of it, not to know it truly. Docteur Molineu lurked at the edges with his notebook and his analysis, his charts of cranial development, observing him at the dinner table.
The husband had been duped! The pear was not magical, after all. Applause; the curtain, the bow.
That same summer, while preparing for a seminar on the history of modern philosophy, Midhat returned one evening from the café where he had been reading Spinoza to find the apartment fuller than usual with Faruq’s friends and clouded with smoke. Faruq raised a hand in welcome; he had rotated the desk chair away from the desk, and standing, now offered it to Midhat.
The men around the room were animated with discussion. Most Midhat recognised; all were Syrian Arabs. The coffee table and floor were spread over with periodicals and papers, cups of cigarette stubs and saucers of spilt coffee.
“You cannot extrapolate and extrapolate, saying we for I,” said someone from the sofa. He turned his head and Midhat saw it was Bassem Jarbawi, with his long chin. The Jarbawis were among the founders of the Lebanese Alliance in Paris, a diaspora body that lobbied for French political support for the Lebanese nationalist cause.