Haj Taher spent his mornings at a sandalwood desk in the back room marking up the books. During the afternoons he mingled with the customers. This was a regime worked out over years, with a rhythm so precise that on more days than not the moment his assistant knocked on his door for lunch he was just inking a final digit in the accounting book, and this temporal economy pleased him, this sense of moving from one activity to another without a moment wasted.
Shortly after his wife’s death, however, his regime was disrupted. Catching wind of his bereavement, a medley of Cairene businessmen began to disturb him in the mornings, and the hours devoted to accounting spilled unhappily into the afternoons. Every other day another man appeared, entered with caution, and puffed out his chest before the desk to describe the virtues of his daughter. Haj Taher thanked each one for the offer and declined. But after several weeks the interruptions began to work on him, and some of his polite dismissals became resentful acceptances of their invitations to call. After a longer while the flattery began to work on him too, and his acceptances became ceremonious. For it was beginning to seem plain that of course he deserved to marry again, and to marry well. And with his nose for business, Haj Taher was aware of the inconstancies of fashion and favour, and that for the time being he was a rich merchant, famous among the ladies, and he would do well to make use of it.
Without any female relatives in Egypt, he had no one to inspect the contenders. He might have called on his mother, but he considered her continued grief for his first wife and decided against it. Instead, he employed a friend named Rabab, a light-blooded dancer to whom he often made love after her performances in Zamalek. For a small fee Rabab agreed to investigate the girls on offer, and sift, discreetly, through the reputations of their families. A week passed, and on the Thursday evening Haj Taher caught Rabab wrapping herself in a gown behind the stage. Smiling with her lips together she produced a list written on the back of a menu. This one had a wealthy family, she said, but the mother was a pig. This was one of four girls, and the least appealing of the four. A shame; her two older sisters were very nice. This one was not wealthy, but the family was pleasant. Popular, well known. Pretty? So-so, very small teeth. This one was a Copt. Irritating. This one was certainly the most beautiful of all of them—
“What is her name?” said Taher.
“Layla. The family is so-so. Well off, not terribly.”
“What is the mother like?”
“A nice person. Attractive, too.”
He did not take long to decide. He wrote to Layla’s father, and within days they had arranged the signing of the book and the wedding date. Only then did he invite his mother from Nablus for the ceremony, where she did not join in the ululations, nor did she dance.
Layla had thick hair and a thin neck, and in keeping with tradition she did not take to her stepson. She was especially hostile to touch, and whenever she could she would detach Midhat’s fingers from her husband’s thumb. Since she preferred to stay near her own family, Haj Taher’s visits to Nablus became infrequent. More often now he sent an envoy to check on the stall there and conserved his travelling time for the Golan, leaving Midhat alone with Teta on Mount Gerizim for longer and longer periods.
Around this time, Midhat’s memories started to congeal. His father became a big knee, a voice on the other side of a room. Teta was a cushion of breasts smelling of rose water and sweet violet. Layla was a bony wall. His mother, a soft nothing.
As Taher and Layla’s visits to Nablus became rare, gossip about their fortunes bred in the schoolrooms. Midhat’s cousin Jamil, who lived in the house below theirs, heard a rumour that Haj Taher had won his wealth by uncovering pharaonic artefacts in his garden in Cairo.
Teta burst out laughing. She was crouching in the doorway, fixing something. “Remember boys, the most unhappy people are the envious ones.”
But when Taher did appear in Nablus, Teta glared at his new wife. Taher cracked pumpkin seeds between his teeth and Midhat stood looking at the large knee, which bounced as his father reached for the bowl. He liked the square hole made by his father’s shelved leg, one ankle on the other thigh, and, preoccupied then by an urge for fitting things into holes, he longed to climb under his father’s lap and stand up inside that human cubicle. Then the legs crossed, and the big dangling foot with its shiny leather vamp became a swing, perfect for sitting on. Beside him, Layla watched.
One memory of his father prevailed over the others. Later Midhat could not have said how old he was—six perhaps, or seven—but with that uncertainty the image earned the status of a myth or a recited dream and occupied undue space in his mind, for while there must have been similar mornings this was the one that endured.
In the memory, it is dawn on Mount Gerizim, and the bread tin lid claps shut on the sideboard. Two valises stand by the door. And there is Baba, wearing a tarbush and brown wool travelling coat, and he whispers good morning and leans down for a kiss. His breath is human and sweet, and two red swollen pores are visible under his moustache. From the doorway Midhat watches his father attach the bags on either side of his horse. Baba mounts, and before he moves, pauses on the back of the animal to look at his son. The watery exhalations of the morning hover over the distant olive trees in a bluish haze, and Haj Taher, Abu Midhat, descends into the mist.
It was spring when a letter arrived with news of Layla’s pregnancy. Teta clapped her hands, and the ladies arrived to congratulate her. After that, months passed without a single letter or telegram. Summer opened up and heat poured from the sky. The bricks of the houses turned ash white. Groundling plants yellowed and died. Samoom winds made suffocating visitations under the cover of dust and dried up four of Nablus’s freshwater springs. When the rains finally came, they came in torrents.
At first Midhat thought it was the storm that had woken him. Then he heard voices. Creeping to the door he saw the shape of his father in the hall, standing in the glow of a lamp, shaking water from his arms. Teta stepped into the light beside him, collecting layers of clothing in the jerking dark. When Midhat woke again it was morning, and his grandmother was sitting on his bed. She put a hand on his ankle through the cover, and said quietly: “Your father is here. He is upset by the death of the baby.” His father’s clothes, deformed by the damp, hung for days from the hooks on the kitchen wall.
When the second baby came, Taher and Layla returned to live in Nablus. A short while later, Midhat was sent off to school in Constantinople. His cousin Jamil had already completed his first year at the Mekteb-i Sultani, so the departure was not as fearsome as it might have been. In fact, all year Midhat had felt envious of Jamil, who at thirteen was already so like a man, and careless of his schoolbooks, which he brought home during the holiday. Midhat had seen the pile on his cousin’s bedroom floor knocked sideways so the spines were visible, and strained to decipher the lettering of the titles. When he himself was sent off, the change felt less like going away than going towards.
The Mekteb-i Sultani—also known as the “Lycée Impérial”—was a large yellow boarding school beside the Bosphorus, with black-and-gold gates and formal gardens. His classmates hailed from all over the Empire: Armenians, Greeks, Jews from Macedonia, Maronite Christians from Mount Lebanon, even Bulgarians and Albanians until that territory was lost; and though the majority were Turks and most of the others were sons of officials and officers, it was nonetheless here that Midhat had his first taste of cosmopolitan life. After an intensive course in French, he perfected his Ottoman Turkish, and learned a little English and a little Persian; he studied astronomy and mathematics, was bored by calligraphy and geography, and excited by philosophy and science. School timetables were set to Frankish time, so that instead of riding the twelve hours between sunrise and sunset as they did in Nablus, the schoolboys counted from noon to noon.