“What are you talking about, we are as thin as reeds.”
“Speaking of which, is there any food?” said Raja. “I brought carrots.”
“It used to be chocolate we’d bring to a party,” said Bassem. “Now it’s carrots and potatoes. And bread.”
“Did you bring bread?” said Faruq.
“No, sorry, I was just saying …”
“Well we don’t have bread. But we do have some biscuits,” Faruq slid off the desk, “they’re in the cupboard, there should be enough. And there’s a stock boiling.”
“I actually bought some bread on the way home,” said Midhat.
“Habibi that’s marvellous.”
“Midhat the Messiah,” said Yusef. “Oh, it’s warm, ya Allah.”
“But what I was saying is,” said Raja Abd al-Rahman, carrying his carrots into the kitchen, “the Jews are good agriculturalists. You know? They might be a boost to the local economy.”
“That’s because you’re in Damascus, Raja,” said Hani. “You’re not Palestinian.”
“We are all Syrians,” said Yusef. “None of this ‘Palestinian, mish Palestinian.’ We are united, we will be one nation.”
“Enough,” said Omar. “I’m starving, I can’t think anymore.”
“See?” said Yusef to Faruq. “How could we break your chairs. Look at Omar’s stomach. He doesn’t even have one.”
As Midhat grew in confidence he became more vocal during these evening conversations. Remembering what Jeannette had once said to him, about how she began to speak up at the university without fear of making errors, he felt his ability to argue develop like a muscle, which he exerted in his essays on the Revolutionary Wars and Jeanne d’Arc as much as over coffee and cigarettes, and which, though not totally detached from any notion of truth, seemed discrete from it, as if words could wind around and through the truth without manifesting it link by link. Besides, the fluidity of these debates and the changing political facts meant that none need be held to any assertion he had made, and each was free to swap between positions as served the present conversation. Then came victory in the Hejaz, and finally, the Ottoman Empire fell. Emir Faisal came to Paris for the Peace Conference, and what had been speculation, mere banter in high rooms off a boulevard, now these questions of nation or not were on the very threshold, and the blissful years of exile and indeterminacy were coming to an end.
It was three years since Midhat left Montpellier for Paris. Over that time, his life had become multiple. At one moment he was the student of history, meeting acquaintances after class in barrooms and cafés; at another he was the companion of women, with a gentle manner and easy laugh; then he was the mysterious lover; then the debater; and then he was the Arab. The divisions, though sometimes porous, were abiding, for with all the talk of origins and truth in his university essays and among his Syrian friends, Midhat was learning to dissemble and pass between spheres and to accommodate, morally, that dissemblance through an understanding of his own impermanence in each. But as despondence broke out among his friends, Midhat found it was the arguing Arab, that least interesting of roles, which he performed more and more. He loved this country, he loved her lines of rationalism, the sciences that put a veil on the unknowable, the lines of verse about the Orient, which Faruq read aloud on Sunday afternoons, even as they pinned him and his ancestors into effigies of themselves. Standing on Faruq’s balcony, looking down at the black cars in the street like a procession of hearses, he felt that some great frame had cracked. He turned back to the apartment and the scene trembled through the quartered glass, the room appeared dislocated, the faces of his friends unfamiliar. Faruq was dressed in a velvet waistcoat, there was a stain on his shirttail that had been washed and preserved, like a pale brown birthmark.
Once the war ended, the meetings in Faruq’s apartment became less frequent, and when the friends did assemble the tone of conversation was sober and apprehensive. Yusef Mansour was fixated on news of the famine in Beirut. Omar became inarticulate in his anger against the Triple Entente. Midhat drew closest to the other Nabulsi in the group, Hani Murad. Hani was the only one directly involved in politics, and his insights did not provide any of them with much hope.
When it came to Bonaparte and Bismarck, Hani Murad sympathised with the Germans. It was clear to him that to unify a country was the supreme goal of mankind. And after all, the people in Alsace did speak German.
Though enthusiastic about his own analyses, Hani had learned not to air all of them in public. The one occasion when he broached the question of Bonaparte and Bismarck, with a French colleague at Le Matin where he was working as a translator, the man looked up at him through the steam issuing from the kettle as though Hani had just blasphemed, and only later as they stepped into the street at dusk did the man address the issue gently, explaining as if to a child that language is not the source of nationhood, that there are other things that mark a person’s origin and nature. Hani could not have disagreed more, but realised he should hold his tongue.
In December 1918, Hani was sitting at the typewriter in his room at a pension in the Latin Quarter, a fire flapping in the grate, the wallpaper peeling with damp. For the last year, while moving back and forth between journalism jobs and the boarding school where he took children to visit castles and gave spontaneous, imaginative lectures on French history, Hani had been spending his evenings with a pen in hand. He was translating a book from Turkish into French, and in the process had turned his desk into a morass of handwritten papers. A few weeks ago, a series of urgent letters had arrived at the pension from one Monsieur Payot, who agreed to publish the book on the condition that Hani present a typewritten manuscript as quickly as humanly possible. France, said Monsieur Payot, was peaking in her curiosity about the Ottomans, and now was the time to strike and see the gold wink beneath the rock.
The title was “The Historical Fate of Turkey.” The original author was a Turk named Ahmet Rasim, who had written the four volumes almost a decade prior. The Empire’s defeat now coloured the whole thing differently, of course, and over the month since the armistice Hani found himself taking particular authorial liberties, inserting proleptic glosses in some places and on other occasions simply marvelling that certain passages already held their own shadows within their stances.
He paused over one of his own remarks, contrasting Bismarck’s designs to unify Germany with the brutality of the Young Turks and their “Turkification” policy. Was this another vanity of the amateur historiographer? Doubt was a sign: if one doubted, one must not do. He ripped the page from the typewriter with one hand, wound the next one up the platen with the other, snapped across the lever, and was about to begin typing out the first paragraph again when there was a knock at the door.
“Monsieur Hani Bey Murad!”
Grinning at him from the hall, holding their hats, stood two old school friends, Qadri Muhammad and Riyad Assali, grown into balding men, and sporting twin woollen suits and coloured scarves.
“Mon Dieu! Ha! What the hell are you two doing here? Ya salam I’m shocked! Kiss me, kiss me, you frightened me …”
Qadri and Riyad embraced him, laughing. Qadri smiled under his thick moustache, and Riyad, the taller, bowed his polished head.