“Stop!”
Haj Taher’s face was red.
“It appears to be a love letter,” said Hubbard, putting it down and raising his glasses to his head. “Who is Midhat?”
Taher did not answer. He inhaled, bowed, and said decorously as he rose and reached out for the letter, “Thank you, Mister Hubbard,” and, turning, mumbled: “A great kindness.”
Hubbard half stood from his own chair, and bade Haj Taher goodbye.
“Salaam.” Hubbard pronounced the word to rhyme with “alarm.”
“Salam,” said Haj Taher. “Allah yabarak fik.”
In Cairo, Layla’s chauffeur was driving Midhat to the Bab al-Hadid station. From the car window Midhat watched the locals and foreigners walking separately, the clatter and babble of the traffic dulled by the heat.
“One ticket to Jerusalem, please,” he said to the ticket attendant in the booth.
“No Jerusalem train today.”
“What?”
“Delayed. The tracks are being fixed.”
“Damn. When is the next one?”
“It is the same train, it is delayed,” said the attendant. “It is leaving in the morning, at six o’clock Frankish time. A ticket is seven piastres.”
Midhat sighed, and counted out the money.
“Ya mu‘allim,” he called to the chauffeur. “Take my bag, and meet me in the morning here at half past five. The morning, not the afternoon. Mashi?”
“Yes, ya haj.”
“Haj!” repeated Midhat, sardonically. “Ya‘tik al-afieh.” He handed the driver a piastre and turned back to the ticket attendant. “Are there any good restaurants nearby for lunch? Ishi baseet, ya‘ni, not too heavy.”
The attendant leaned forward at his desk and looked Midhat up and down. Then he disappeared from the booth and reappeared from around a corner in the foyer. He beckoned Midhat, shielded his eyes against the sun, and directed him to the Ezbekiya Garden, which was surrounded by restaurants and hotels where efendi will surely find something to his satisfaction. Then he waited for his tip. In the sunlight, Midhat saw that a thin layer of dust covered the blue uniform and grouted the crevices of the outstretched hand.
The path through the garden channelled the wind. Midhat dawdled in the shade of the beefwoods and gum trees, inhaled the breath of flowers beside the banyan trunks trailing hair with hollows like open mouths; he passed the spindly rubber trees and the royal palms, and reaching out across the pathway, the weird dangling fruits of an African sausage tree beside their big, crude red petals. The thicket opened onto a lawn where a band was assembling. The musicians wore galabiyas but their stringed instruments looked imported, and the sound they produced was definitely not Egyptian; nonetheless on the grass before them a trio of bare-bellied ghawazi women in billowing trousers began to swing their pelvises and beckon passersby as if to a native melody. Next he passed an empty Japanese pagoda, then a gabled building with a timber and mortar facade that resembled a chalet but whose signpost indicated the YMCA “Soldiers’ Recreation Club.” European couples in broad hats and white trousers danced on a terrace. The sun fell between the trees and Midhat’s despondence lifted as the long hours of the night ahead began to appear rich with possibility. What had been lost by the delayed train was far outweighed by the gains of an evening suddenly unaccounted for.
For the past week he had walked every day over the decks of the Caucase, the engine pulsing under his feet, bitter air curling off the spume and pricking his cheeks with salt. Each turn roused a memory of his fearful self on the outbound trip, nineteen years old, with a shaky grasp of European manners, and sore with isolation. From his new vantage of self-possession and social grace, he could look back at that young man and laugh. But the pleasure of these thoughts was only a brief respite from the real anxiety of returning to Palestine.
Although his old fantasies of becoming French had expired, he still clung to a particular idea of cosmopolitan life. These circular walks, therefore, from the stern around the hurricane deck to the prow and back, or below deck between the velvet salon and the galleried halls, were not only a time to congratulate himself on his recent maturity; they were also a time to prepare for what lay ahead. A new era of prudence was upon him, and there would be no more retiring at daybreak from nights abroad, no more brandy to numb doubt, no more eight o’clock uncertainty over where or what he would be in a few hours’ time. Gossip travelled fast in Nablus. Recklessness brought shame on families. But perhaps he might negotiate with his father over his future and go to Jerusalem, or to one of those port towns already loosened by pilgrim routes, perhaps, indeed, to Cairo; or perhaps they could even work out a way for him to return to France. He might expand the business in a westerly direction, and travel there for French fabrics.
There were things to look forward to in Nablus: his cousins, his grandmother, the family at the diwan. But there would also be boredom, and deference to views not his own. The hours on the ship were therefore a time to meditate on the notion of duty, and on his place in that constellation of purpose and tradition which had for the last five years in France been suspended, when with a freedom born of strangeness he had bypassed the laws of family and dallied in the alleyways of chance and rapture.
Beside him, always, lingered the shadow of Jeannette. There had been no reply to his letter, and he told himself not to expect one. The act of writing had settled his yearning for the interim, and so it was his father and Nablus, the Bride of the North, that occupied him as he stepped onto the Alexandrian shore. And again his father, as he climbed into the back of the caleche outside the station. And again his father, as on the dust road the great pyramids emerged with their colossal geometry to shadow the desert horizon.
Yet by some strange arrangement of Providence he had been favoured. For here he was, the train delayed, Nablus delayed. Here, alone in Cairo, granted one last night of freedom.
He arrived at a lake fringed with white lights, and circling it passed through a gate back onto the crowded street. Ahead a sign announced the Grand Continental, and beside it a stream of café awnings shaded a cross-legged clientele. He walked a little further to the place with a French name: Le Grand Café Egyptien.
Inside, his eyes took a moment to adjust. A room lit with oil lamps, and crammed with circular tables, around which the patrons sat facing a stage. He chose an empty table near the front.
“Steak-frites. Et un verre du vin, s’il vous plaît.”
The waiter frowned and conferred with a colleague. The oil lamps dimmed and a woman walked downstage. Her eyes were lined with black, and her hairpiece and bodice were draped with coins that twisted on their strings and glinted. The flesh of her midriff hung out from under her bodice; she churned it around her hips. A line of men at the back of the stage began clapping castanets; the woman revolved a veil with her raised arms and a new line of attendant dancers appeared. They twirled and arched their backs behind her, and just as the musicians exchanged their castanets for other instruments—a qanun, a tambourine, a violin, a darabuka—the woman opened her mouth and began to sing.
Her voice had a hard vibrato; at times she sang a single note and the oscillations were so pronounced she seemed to dance between them. Her chin turned, a secret half smile. Midhat glanced around the room. Some of the audience were certainly European—the blonds were probably Englishmen, others could be Greek or perhaps Italian, some were obviously Levantines, and a great many were aristocratic Egyptians, wearing elaborate clothes. The dancer teased them, stroking the air. Midhat watched her catching the eyes of particular men, inspiring expressions of envy from the other men at their tables, or claps on the back, hollers, and whistles. Midhat craved to be one of those chosen. He kept very still and stared as the dancer turned away from the audience and displayed two beautiful dimples in the flesh of her lower back. And then she turned again, and at last she looked directly at Midhat. He felt, immediately, the rush of glee and arousal he knew was intended.