Eventually Hani had persuaded Faisal to visit a French tailor, and since the emir removed his abaya and donned a trouser suit things had begun to improve. But Hani’s task was still extremely taxing, charged as he was with balancing the personality of His Royal Highness with the iniquities of the French. After eight months, his hair had turned grey at the root.
There was a knock at the door. The voice sounded before Hani could turn in his seat.
“Habibi, keefak.”
Midhat Kamal strode into the room. He wore a pinstriped suit, hair oiled in a side parting, whiskers on his upper lip trimmed. A red sweet william dangled from his pocket, squashed between the folds of a green mouchoir.
“Midhat bey. Habibi, come sit.”
“You are working?”
“I am, but I needed a break. Take a sandwich. Sit, Midhat.”
“All right. No, I can’t sit. I have to talk. Hani, I know you’re busy but I have to talk to you. I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s fine. What’s wrong?”
Midhat Kamal was never not in a state of agitation. As long as Hani had known him Midhat was always either laughing down a boulevard with a woman on his arm, or silent with a woman on his mind, obsessed by the next and the next, discarding the last with sweat on his brow as though looking for something he had still not found; rifling through the women of Paris, driven by a magma of sadness that could flare without warning in a salon over cups of tea.
“I am leaving. My exams are finished, the boats are going again, I’ve run out of money. I have to face up, finally, to what my father expects of me. I have to go back to Nablus. I have to do my duty.”
“That sounds very well, Midhat. That is what we all must do, eventually.”
“Oh but Hani I … I can’t. I can’t just leave.”
“Habibi, sit down.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Is this Jeannette?”
“Yes, Jeannette.”
Hani laughed. “After all these women and you are still obsessed. Really, you are so much like a character from a poem.”
Whenever Midhat laughed his eyebrows reached upwards, as though laughter and surprise were allies; he also had a strange habit, Hani had noticed, of switching his facial expressions between laughter and distress, silliness and sadness, which sometimes made it difficult to grasp his mood. The eyebrows went up.
“Should I write to her? What do you think I should do? I know, so much time has passed. She’s only a woman. But she has remained with me. I forget about it for periods. It slips my mind for whole weeks, it becomes the background, and I don’t notice it. And then, I start to hear it again.”
Apparently exhausted by this speech, Midhat finally sat in the chair Hani had offered. He played with his tie, running it between two fingers. He laughed, switched, frowned.
“Ha, I know, you don’t need to say it, yes, it wasn’t my fault, I tried to do the right thing, the Molineus were not honourable. I should be proud of how I acted. I didn’t mean to become so … I just want to know if you think I should write to her.” He leaned forward and looked into Hani’s face. “You are a man who makes good decisions, Hani. And it’s not because I think she’ll reply. Though if she did then at least it might clarify … but no, it is because I want to write. I am capable, now, of writing what I could not say before. Do you see? I have many things to say, which I have not said.”
Before answering, Hani waited to make sure Midhat had finished.
The character of Jeannette Molineu had become famous among the Syrians in Saint Germain. Hani first heard about her from his Damascene friend Faruq al-Azmeh, in whose apartment Midhat was lodging. This young Nabulsi, said Faruq, he is tormented. I find I must be his philosopher as well as his friend, he clings to my every word as though one of them might save him.
“Midhat, I think you should write the letter,” said Hani, in a reasonable voice, picking up one of his sandwiches. “Even if you don’t send it.”
“I have to send it.”
“Well then. But mostly it will be beneficial to get out the words. I have always found that about writing.” He took a bite of the sandwich.
“I have already written it.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Can I read it to you? And you can tell me if I should send it?”
“Please, itfadal.”
3 September 1919
Dear Jeannette,
I write to you from Paris, though I am soon to leave it. After these four years I am returning to Palestine. I am sorry that I did not write to you before. I wish I had. Regrets pile on regrets. You see I had hoped I would forget you. In my mind you were bound up for so long with pain that to think of you was always to feel again the sting of everything else. I hoped that somehow my memories of life before I came to France might be the ones to stick, and that you would slide off them, and I would remain the same beneath. But I fear that on the contrary my experience with you has in fact become one of those primeval shapes of the mind, to an imprint that burdens everything that comes afterwards. The sting has weakened with time, a little. My memories of you have not.
I have many things to apologise for. I am sorry I did not tell you where I was going. I am sorry that I left suddenly. Three years ago I met M. Samuel Cogolati from the Medical Faculty and he told me that you had become a nurse. I imagine you have returned to Montpellier now. It is funny that I should have studied medicine, but you should have been the one to practise it. I hope that you have not seen too many terrible things. I feel shame at the thought that you probably have.
Jeannette, you have stayed in my mind for four years. You are always, always here in this mind. Not only because pain has lasted: you have lasted. I hear your voice every day. I see you beside me on the terrace. I see your hair—all those different shapes on different days! I recall your smell. And your yellow dress. I remember your breath when you kissed me. I remember your anger when you turned from me.
I hope you understand how painful it was to discover your father’s writings. I had hoped to marry you, but I was shy and could not say so. For this, again, I am sorry. I do stand by what I said, however. I became myself here, in this country, and for that reason I cannot represent anything. I belong here as much as I belong in Palestine.
I wish you to know that I always meant well. It was all out of love for you.
I wish you a good life. I shall never forget you.
Yours,
Midhat
“Well,” said Hani. “You’re not a bad writer, Midhat. I’m impressed. Here’s an envelope. There are stamps in the drawer.”
3
In October 1919, the unrest in Egypt was still simmering. Britain had denied her request for independence at the Peace Conference, and when the leaders of the resistance were exiled to Malta the women of Cairo marched in protest. But the general strike had at last been called off and trade was returning to healthy levels between Egypt and the Levant. As a result, Midhat’s father, Haj Taher Kamal, had set out from Cairo for Damascus to purchase more silks, and on the way he decided to stop in Nablus.
The autumn heat oiled the faces that passed under the midday sun. Haj Taher went by the khan, saluted his agent Hisham through the hanging yards of canvas outside the Kamal store, accepted a coffee heavy with sugar and cardamom, and chatted with some old customers passing through. They praised God for the end of the war; they grumbled over the liberties of the British soldiers; they acknowledged the provisions of seed grain and livestock, and the happy revival of normal commerce.