The streets of the Abbassia neighbourhood were almost empty. It was that hour of the afternoon when the inhabitants lay in a stupor under shutter-strained daylight. He reached his father’s house: a white villa with pillared balconies in the baroque Ismaili style. The orange trees in the front garden were in their final bloom. Half-brown flowers decayed on the grass.
Layla opened the door with a child on her hip and a thin black veil over her face. For a moment she said nothing. Then suddenly, she cried: “Midhat!” The child turned away and wiped his mouth on her shoulder.
She ushered Midhat in with her free hand, and peered out before closing the door, as if the street might hold more surprises. When she turned and removed her veil to kiss him, he laughed in spite of himself at her enthusiasm. Perhaps time and distance simply wiped away ill will. Layla smiled naturally, as if no malice had ever passed between them.
“How tall you are!”
She set the child on his feet, and he pulled at her skirt. Layla seemed smaller than Midhat remembered. He looked down at her thin wrists and her long black hair, and her fingers, which she still hennaed, pale red from a former ointment.
“You are truly a man.”
This pleased Midhat not a little. She led him further into the house and shouted for more coffee. As she turned a door handle, the boy ducked under her arm and fled down the corridor.
Midhat recalled this room from his last visit, when it had been a bedroom. Now it contained two satin couches and a writing desk by a window, which was crowded with jasmine.
“Did you write? Your father is in Nablus, he said nothing about you coming.”
Midhat was silent for a moment. Layla raised her eyebrows.
“Oh,” he said. “I assumed he would be here. I suppose I thought no one was working … I heard about the strike.”
“Yes, but it will soon return to normal. For that your father went to Damascus to buy more silks.”
“Of course. Well, in that case I’m sorry to have interrupted you. I should take a train, and go to Nablus.”
“Nonsense! Sit down. You must stay at least a night, you will have supper with me.”
“No, thank you, I should go and see Teta, I should get back to Nablus.”
“Midhat, I have not seen you in five years. Haram aleyk, you want to leave me after just hello? You must at least meet your brothers and sisters.”
She opened the door to shout for the children. Then she sat again, and they did not speak for a few minutes. A maid entered with a tray of coffee, and the children followed.
There were five. The eldest, Musbah, was as tall as his mother’s waistline and had a thick brow. He remained near the doorway, staring. The next eldest was a blonde girl named Dunya who reached forward for Midhat’s hand. Then there were Nadim and Inshirah, both dark-haired, Nadim dressed as a sailor, Inshirah in a white dress. And then Nashat, the shy boy he had already met. Layla lifted Nashat and balanced him on her hip.
Midhat shook their delicate hands one by one. Nashat refused to look at him, sucked a finger, and hid in his mother’s hair. As Midhat stepped back again, his stepmother fixed him with a determined look, and whatever rancour he had felt towards her suddenly vanished.
In Paris, he had often thought over his formative years in Nablus. Considering that each man was a product of his experiences, he thought that Layla’s actions may indeed have done him some harm as a child. Too early she had exposed him to the shocking insubstantiality of the family, to the fact that parents are just two people who have been united.
When Musbah was born, Midhat had been thirteen. The baby, he recalled, was very small, with ridges under his eyes that made his cheeks bulge, and deep pleats in the flesh of his arms. Sometimes he looked demure and sometimes like an angry little man, punching himself with his tiny fists and yelping.
A load of furniture had followed the couple and the baby to Nablus from Cairo, in a convoy of three carriages pulled by chained horses. The house was soon full of trinkets, and the rooms became at once much bigger and more crowded. An ornate wooden table sat in the centre of the sitting room near a wardrobe covered in petals of mother-of-pearl; and identical octagonal side-tables perched all over the house like strange implements, tall, narrow, clawed. The European-style bedstead, carried in by three men, took four hours to assemble.
Because Taher was conducting business in Jerusalem, Layla supervised the workers. She did not rebuke Midhat when he peered around the door to watch. “There was a beautiful headboard, zey kida,” she said, holding up her hands. “Fabric everywhere, silk. Bitjannin, haram. It would have been ruined on the journey.” The men were clumsy in their bare feet, holding odd segments of wood and iron, bowing occasionally to the veiled mistress.
That was the first time Midhat had entered the bedroom since Layla and his father returned. The second time was after school when he met his friend Adel Jawhari on the road. Adel was weeping.
“They beat me in class.”
“Why?”
“I laughed when Abu Nasir knocked his leg against his chair.” Adel smiled, and showed Midhat the backs of his skinny calves. The dark bruises were red with wet slits.
“Teta uses alum. We have some, come inside.”
As the door fell closed behind them, Midhat recalled that the medicine cabinet was in his father’s bedroom. While Taher and Layla were in Cairo, of course, it was just another empty room in a house full of empty rooms, where, in addition to keeping medicine, they stored sweets and marmalade for guests. He motioned for Adel to be quiet, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The famous bedstead stood in the centre, covered in bright cushions. He approached the cabinet, unclicked the latch, and put his hand in to feel for the bottle. A dark-headed figure appeared in the doorway and screamed.
“Get out of here! How dare you come in here!”
Adel sprinted out the door. Before Midhat could follow, Layla had stopped the door with her body and raised her hands. Ten red fingertips.
Teta appeared behind her. “Habibi get out of there.”
Midhat aimed for his grandmother. But Layla grabbed his arm and slapped him across the back of the head and neck, awkwardly and with force so that her long nails scraped the skin. He wrenched himself free and ran out through the front door, which Adel had left ajar. There was no sign of his friend out on the mountain. He cornered the building; no sign. Two sheets hanging on adjacent ropes formed a corridor; Midhat ran inside it and sat down, as the maid beyond pulled another sheet from a basket.
“Midhat?” came Adel’s voice after a few moments. “Midhat?”
Then all that was left was the sound of the wet cotton rasping on cotton, and the flap of fabric as the maid slung the laundry onto the ropes. The sky grew dark, and the hairs rose on Midhat’s legs. Rattling hooves announced Taher’s return from Jerusalem; the door fell shut; Layla’s voice began its uninterpretable squall, gusting out of windows as she passed them. The sounds settled. At last the maid called Midhat in for dinner, and they ate in silence around the low table.
He could never remember if this came before or after it was decided that he would leave for Constantinople. He remembered only that one night as Teta lay beside him on his bed she described the Turkish capital, and the new school he would be going to. He would say goodbye to his father, goodbye to the tiny baby, goodbye to Layla.
Midhat looked down at his stepmother, her hands on the shoulders of her sons, and recognised that above all she was extremely young. She could not be more than thirty. Which meant she had been approximately Midhat’s age now when she married his father, if not younger. No wonder she had hated the heir of her predecessor. And no wonder she had preferred to live in Cairo near her family, and had used her energy to persuade Haj Taher to arrange it so. It had been necessary to claim her territory and expel the foreign boy when he trespassed into her bedroom. Marriage was her life’s great venture, and, happily, she had prevailed.