Hisham narrowed his eyes. “Salim who? I don’t know of a Bint Salim getting married any time soon.”
“Oh, they are from the East of Nablus.” Midhat waved his hand. “You wouldn’t know them.”
Hisham nodded. “Tayyeb.” Gently, he closed the accounts book. “You can go home now. It’s late.”
5
“Now Fatima,” said Widad Hammad, on the way to the hammam, “Um Taher Kamal has invited us for coffee this afternoon.”
Fatima and Nuzha walked a step behind their mother. Three figures in black muslin; the shortest, Nuzha, carrying a basket.
“Who, Mama?” said Nuzha.
“Not you. Just Fatima.”
Fatima did not reply. Outside the storefront ahead, a group of men sat around a nargila pipe in silence. The one holding the mouthpiece leaned back as they approached. Smoke furled up his face from the crack of his mouth. Widad, Fatima, and Nuzha marched, and the tacks in their heels sounded on the hard ground. They rounded the corner and Widad continued:
“Um Dawud says this Kamal lady has not stopped talking about her grandson since he returned. My grandson did this, my grandson lived in Paris. Hala’ no, this way habibti. She will certainly ask you to marry him Fatima, so there is no need for your sister to come. Haram, Nuzha. It’s pointless anyway because Fatima is going to marry Yasser.”
“But Mama.”
“We are not talking about this now.”
The road narrowed as they passed the Yasmineh Quarter and came upon the khan. It was that hour after the midday prayer when the market was quiet, and shopkeepers rotated fruits in their crates to hide mould, or sat and chatted on chairs outside their stalls, watching children roll balls between the arches. Ahead, the clock tower; to the right, the Nasr mosque. The three black figures turned past the mosque and through a stone entrance into the hammam.
Widad took her daughters to the baths once a week. It was important for the health of the physical body, but even more important for a healthy social body, because aside from the istiqbalat held in private homes a hammam was a place for ladies to talk. It also gave one a chance to inspect the other daughters of the town for one’s sons: at an istiqbal a girl would be covered in velvet and embroidered lace or whatever drapery best displayed her twin virtues of wealth and taste, as much as she had them—but here, unclothed in the steam, one could observe what nature had given her.
“Who is Kamal?” said Nuzha.
“Give me the towels, habibti.”
Their mother led them into the darkness of the vestibule, and they removed their veils as she paid the attendant. In the first room they unbuttoned their gowns and pulled on striped wizra robes and wooden clogs, and in the second room the other bathers congregated in groups, glossy as creatures of the sea, clouded with steam. Widad ululated at her friends. Pretending to keep her gaze to the ground, Fatima transferred her eyes to where the women entered the private khulwa washrooms. She liked to watch as they dropped their robes. Don’t stare, her mother always told her. How could one not stare? Displayed before her, the anatomies of all the ladies from town. Flesh shining with water and sweat, dimpled and variegated in the coloured light from the roof. She liked the backs of older women the most, the way the fat draped down over the hips in thick rolls like layers of cream.
Fatima followed Nuzha into a khulwa. She looked down at the stammer of her heart pushing her chest up down, up down, as the arms of the gown fell off her shoulders, and then she peered down at her feet, already wrinkled around the heel, the base flushed with walking, the black debris of stockings caught in the sweaty clefts between her toes. The only thing Fatima’s mother ever told her about her body was that she must scrub it. Or be scrubbed, as the maids released the scrolls of dead skin in a froth of olive oil soap, leaving limbs and belly and back soft red with attrition. And that was it, the job was done, and they would leave the hammam into the dry air without another word said about it. When Fatima changed clothes at home she did so at speed and without much thought for the body she was covering and uncovering, but here at the hammam, where the hot dark rooms carried a religious charge, where the light from the tinted circles in the roof caught on the mist, and the slow women striped in wizra gossiped on benches around the walls, inhaling vapour as they picked at watermelon and cheese brought by the maids on cane trays—here Fatima looked down at her own naked legs with interest. Blue veins spread from her groin down her thighs. The blood pulsed in her feet.
Two maids dipped luffas in a copper basin. The water clicked in the walls, the marble floor blared heat. The sisters sat on the benches in the khulwa, and Nuzha’s breasts swayed as she leaned forward. She was only fifteen but her breasts were already larger than Fatima’s, though Fatima’s were rounder. Fatima’s veins dipped away from the surface, and her ribs showed through the skin, and below that her belly curved, the lacuna in the middle broad and deep as though the cord that once tied her to her mother was unusually thick. Her sister was wider in the hip, but otherwise their bodies were quite similar. It was in the tangle of hair below that lay the strangest accident of biology, and Fatima had never seen her sister’s to compare. Another mouth hidden under there, ugly and red. Not only was that where the blood came from but other secretions appeared there also, or began there and spread elsewhere: briny odours, strange nocturnal aches that shuddered up her limbs. This body, with its hectic motions and sensations, was the central mystery of her life. Sweat crept down her forehead. She leaned forward for the maid to scrub her back, and one bead sped down the side of her nose.
Her mother was near the doorway, speaking to someone in her social voice. “Hakayt ma‘a Um Hashim imbarrih.” Fatima abhorred those false undulations. She thought they sounded servile. “An jad? Is that so?”
“Turn please, ya sitti,” said the maid.
“Ma‘roof,” said Widad.
Nabulsi women were always proclaiming something was “ma‘roof,” that it was known. Out on the mountain road every house was visible, and it was a platitude that anyone who needed directions could be shown the spot from a neighbour’s rooftop, though such a thing seemed unlikely ever to have happened, for who would ask who did not already know? Fatima’s mother used the word interchangeably with “of course,” so perhaps it had more to do with the way women related to one another, each as keen as the next to assert how much she knew.
Fatima’s curiosity about the Kamal family was piqued. She had met Um Taher once at an istiqbal, but the little else she knew was based on details her brother Burhan brought home from Café Sheikh Qassem one evening two weeks ago. A man named Midhat Kamal had returned to Nablus from France, and was working in his father’s shop in the khan. He had been involved in politics. And he wore beautiful clothes, and was very handsome. And he had had a lover in Paris, she was called Pauline—but at this point their mother had scolded Burhan for indecency and smacked the back of his hand.
Fatima and Nuzha rinsed, and wrapped again in their stripes returned to the main room for refreshments. Trays of food were laid out beside the fountain, and nargila pipes set up along the walls, coiled around their cylinders. Their mother made a space for two on the bench beside her. When the girls were younger they always competed over food. Rather than trying to eat the most and most quickly, as one might in a household of need, the sisters had competed over who could eat the slowest, and leave the most food until last, because to consume was no longer to have, and she who had the most on her plate was king. Fatima watched Nuzha deliver a square of watermelon to her lips. Her teeth crushed the fruit, her lips glistened.