It was also at the Lycée that Midhat first discovered his own separateness. He was bathing in the shower room one morning, his feet on the varnished wooden boards above the drain, rubbing the suds as the water sheeted his legs and thinking vaguely about the boys in line outside while he was alone in here. Then it came to him. He looked down at his body and realised that his hands were only his hands, and that his eyes were only his to look out from. It was peculiar, provoked only by the barrier the door made keeping the water in and the other boys out. And it was not exactly something he hadn’t already known; only he now felt it more concretely. It had never occurred to him before to question why Midhat should be Midhat, and that no one else should be Midhat, or that Midhat should be no one else. And at the same time that it now mystified him, looking down at his legs, red with heat and lightly tufted with straight black hairs, he also could not imagine how things might be otherwise. This realisation was like a tiny jolt of electricity that both locked him inside his body and alienated him from it. The jolt was as curious as it was painful, and when later he tried calmly to recall the feeling, he could not. He even tried to recreate the experience by entering the showers and looking down at his hands, but the jolt would not come. Over the next four years the sensation did visit him again, but rarely. Once or twice he felt it in a classroom when his mind wandered from the lesson and he looked at the pen between his fingers. And sometimes in that half state between waking and sleeping, when he was lying in bed and Jamil was snoring in the cot beside him, and his mind blurred the events of the day—then it came: the electric feeling of aloneness, victorious and agonising, unearthly.
During the holidays Midhat and Jamil took the ferry back over the Bosphorus to the Asian side, and then the train from Haydarpasha to Damascus, before travelling south to Nablus. The baby, Musbah, grew older in lurches. One year Layla was round with pregnancy again, the next year there was a second child, the following year a third. One year Midhat returned and found that his father and Layla had moved back to Cairo, and again he and Teta were alone on Mount Gerizim.
Then the Ottomans joined the war effort, and time literally began to change. There was an argument over some warships—the British wanted them back, the Turks sold them to the Germans—and though the Ottomans continued to pretend they were neutral, they signed a secret treaty with Germany in August 1914 on the Gregorian calendar. Mobilization began, and, in a bid for discipline, all the clocks were set to Frankish time.
At school, the Turkish boys were excited. But many wealthy sons of the provinces scrambled to avoid the barracks; the men of Haj Taher’s generation paid a fee to evade conscription in the Ottoman army, but the rules had changed. Some young men in Nablus made use of a conscription loophole and married impoverished women from the villages; others hid in their family homes; others escaped to Europe. Jamil found employment as a military clerk in Constantinople and managed that way to avoid the front line, while the income from the Kamal store in Cairo was by now so plentiful that Haj Taher made plans to send Midhat to France.
Even though the Turks would soon be at war with her, France remained, in the minds of everyone at the Mekteb-i Sultani, the pinnacle of Europe and exemplar of the modern age. The great travellers of North Africa and the Levant always chose to visit France, and even European “Frankish” timekeeping was by an accident of etymology tied to the French. What an opportunity, therefore, to go straight to the heart of modernity and be educated there. At nineteen, Midhat Kamal was becoming ambitious. And he was pleased by the confidence in him his father’s decision displayed, and the love that wished to put him out of war’s way.
He travelled to Cairo for the first time en route to Alexandria. On the journey he thought about his mother. These thoughts had little substance beyond a familiar nightgowned shadow—often summoned, always deficient in reality—and an indelible sense that, despite the two years they shared on earth together, his mother had died so that Midhat might live. A fatal logic of correlation: when she was, he was not, and when he was, she was not. He observed the commotion of the Cairene streets as through a thick pane of glass. The Europeans surprised him, clustered in separate cafés from the Egyptians and the Greeks; they wore pale colours and cast distinctive silhouettes against the imperial sun. His father’s house also surprised him. A white villa with two storeys, surrounded by fruit trees that knocked their goods against the windows. It did not surprise him that Layla scowled when he arrived, and whispered in the hall outside the bedroom where he slept, and tried to exclude him from conversation at dinner.
The evening before his departure, his father caught him on the stairs.
“Habibi, come with me, aal-maktab.”
The office shutters pleated along their joints to disclose the remaining day, and Midhat watched his father reach over the desk against those pale slats of light, and heard the wheeling of a drawer. He returned with a handful of purple silk; amid the fabric something gleamed. A gold disc. He rubbed the silk over its engravings.
“This is for you, Midhat.”
The watch was heavy and cool. Midhat popped the clasp. From an ornate enamel dial three tiny black hands protruded. One trotted around the rim, pointing at the Arabic ciphers.
His father produced a penknife. “This is how you open the back.”
He slotted the blade into the edge, and the back of the disc swung open on an invisible hinge. Inside, a series of corrugated wheels were fastened with screwed silver plates, all motionless except for two: one spinning in a fury, and pushing a smaller adjacent wheel, which turned at regular intervals. The smaller wheel was clicking. Click, click, click.
“Thank you. Father, thank you.”
“God keep you, habibi. Keep it safe.”
3
“Where is the mother of the bride?” the photographer called, emerging from the curtain.
A woman ran across the lawn, the wind pushing her dress between her legs. The assembled group made a space for her in the first row. One flash and a loud pop, and the photographer emerged again to replace the slide.
“Hello Monsieur Kamal,” said a large man in an ivory waistcoat. “My name is Sylvain Leclair.”
Sylvain Leclair’s moustache twitched as he spoke. Midhat returned the greeting, and Sylvain gave him a long impassive look. He removed his hat, drawing his fluffy hair up into a peak on the back of his head.
“Are you a relation of the bride, or of the groom?” said Midhat.
Leclair’s expression did not change. He turned to Docteur Molineu.
“Frédéric, come here. I want to talk to you.”
The two men moved off, and Midhat wondered if he had said something wrong.
“Monsieur Kamal, are you enjoying yourself?”
Jeannette was beside him, wearing a blue dress and white lace gloves.
“I’ll tell you who everyone is,” she said. “Bonjour Patrice! That—that in the big hat is Madame Crotteau. Her husband died last year of meningitis. She can be a little annoying, you have been warned. And that one I said hello to is Patrice Nolin. Actually he used to be a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, although he has retired, unfortunately. He wrote a book last year about the social life of animals. And right up until the war he was in the Congo. His daughters are Carole and Marie-Thérèse, those two. That’s Marie-Thérèse in the orange dress. God, isn’t it hideous.”