“Thank you. But I still can’t help feeling ashamed of myself.”
“It will be less abhorrent, you’ll find, observing the living organism. Unfortunately they must start you on the dead because it’s better for pointing out the organs. I think there is something of the object quality of the dead that is alarming. But what one must realise, what we must accommodate, as students of medicine I mean, is that death is absolutely a part of life. And as we progress scientifically, as a race, we must overcome those social taboos that relegate death to a separate sphere. What I mean to say is, don’t worry about it.”
Midhat took a deep breath and tried not to sigh. “I am still—I feel—”
“Human nature …” said Laurent. He looked up at the sky, eyes half-shut against the sun. “The meaning of illness … We are never without death, in life. You could argue we exist in a constant state of dying, like a flame, unstable, decaying. And what is sickness, therefore? Sickness is a part of life. We talk of life as renewal, but really it is decay. The fight against decay, sometimes, but decay nonetheless.”
While Laurent spoke, Midhat thought of the tour they had taken on the first day of term, during which he had followed the other new students into an enormous hall with a trompe l’oeil ceiling. The walls of the first gallery were lined with cabinets, and everyone had gasped as they turned to look.
Deformed foetuses pressing against the glass walls of jars. Human and animal skeletons hanging from nails; skulls branded with the names of diseases stacked at jaunty angles. In a glass-topped cabinet lay a mummified head, chemical black, the brain half-exposed. The cabinets extended: more brains, quartered and labelled, bodies strung up, black like the head. Burnt, perhaps. The diagrams on the walls, the paintings, all of them depicted gaudy excrescences, specimens of monstrosity, phases of venereal disease. Charts compared abnormality with abnormality, infection, atrophies, palsies, leprosies. A two-headed baby with twin tufts of hair creased four eyes at him.
Laurent brought them to a stop. At the top of a tall, pale-green gate a curlicued sign of beaten iron stated: UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTPELLIER, JARDIN DES PLANTES, FONDÉ PAR HENRI IV EN 1593. The gate scraped open over the gravel, and they faced a track up a shallow incline that split in two: to the right alongside a hedgerow, to the left by a stone wall finished with an urn. They took the hedgerow path. Beyond, white paths sliced green lawns and a stone building arched upward, speared with cypress trees.
“This garden is one of the oldest in Europe,” said Laurent. “It was created by the king for a famous scientist called Belleval. They added parts to it in the last century, though I’m afraid I can’t remember which is which.”
The air carried a cool fecund smell. Smoke-white leaves from the trees above lay in heaps where the turf met the pathway, the light shafting between the boughs scattered shadows, and Midhat soon lost any sense of direction. They passed a thicket of bamboo, and a pond of giant water lilies basking in the sun, and geometrical flowerbeds lined with shrubs. They shaded their eyes at the greenhouse windows and saw underwater plants reaching large green hands from their berths.
“What was it you were saying,” said Midhat. “About death, and life?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m always pontificating. That’s what my father says. Too much talking, not enough doing, he says.”
“It was interesting …”
“What is life? That is interesting. From whence did it begin?”
Midhat laughed. A blast of sunlight replaced Laurent’s shadow on the glass: he had abandoned the greenhouse and was facing the shrubbery.
“God, of course,” said Midhat.
“Yes. But well the problem now, it seems to me, is there is starting to be too much knowledge. It cannot be contained by a single brain. Before, we could—more or less, I mean—hold it all in. But now, practically speaking, we are all more or less brains floating in a sea of knowledge.” Laurent touched a fern and the wand jogged under his finger. “That’s not quite the image I wanted to conjure.”
“Did God create the universe, or was he coexistent with it.”
“Quite. You should talk to Jeannette, she studied philosophy.”
“The syllogism of life is an impossible thing,” said Midhat. “We cannot trace the endless stream of cause and effect.”
“How have you found her, by the way?”
“Because if we try to go further back, to the father’s father’s father and so on, it is like trying to reach Him, up there, by building a tower. What did you say?”
“Jeannette. As a house companion, how is she.”
Midhat paused. “We have not talked very much.” He imitated Laurent and touched the end of a fern. “I like her.”
“Yes. I’m sure it must seem odd to you, how we treat women here.”
“In some respects. There is more freedom. What is this way?”
“Just another lawn. Have a look.”
They returned to the path. Under the sun the embarrassment of the morning was washing off, and the umbrella helped the rhythm of Midhat’s footfall. Insignificant thoughts bloomed in French in his mind, and in an access of sincerity he released a few and described the scene around them: the beauty of the human touch on the unseeing bark of the tree trunk, labelled by age and species, which continued to stretch according to its nature, sideways and upward, blistering knots and rough fuzz.
“This is so unlike anything I have seen before, even though I know many of these plants. Sometimes I feel tired from looking at new things, but sometimes it makes me feel … more awake! But look, that is an olive tree. That is everywhere in my country, but I see it now and it sets off a curious system of joy in my mind, to have found it here, in a place so strange to me.”
“I am delighted you like the garden so much.”
Although his new friend’s tone was not unkind, Midhat felt deflated. Of course, it was difficult to communicate any profound sensation, let alone in another language.
“I’d like to travel around Europe,” said Laurent. “Like you, I suppose. My grandfather kept a diary about his travels to Greece and Rome. When I go to war I might travel, if they send me further than Picardy.”
“The world is dilating,” said Midhat. “Or—perhaps not ‘dilating’ …”
“Developing?”
“No, I mean—the trains, for instance. The trains are all over the world … they sell oranges from Jaffa here in Montpellier. I saw them!”
Laurent laughed. “Ah Midhat Kamal, you are a special case.”
Beside the path, four young women sat in the shade of an oak tree. Midhat watched one bite into a peach. He felt pricked by Laurent’s laughter, and wished he had said nothing.
In his last year at the Mekteb-i Sultani, the divisions between the Turkish boys and the rest of them had appeared like a sudden chasm in the earth. He and Jamil returned from Nablus after Ramadan to find a variable network of alliances drawn up without their consent, and sometimes the Arabs and the Armenians were together and sometimes they were apart; similarly with the Jews and the Greeks; for the children had listened to their parents during the holiday, and following the newspapers and the example of the teachers they enforced the external currents within the school corridors with surprisingly little resistance. After lessons Midhat and his cousin sought each other out, fearing the game they were being forced to play whose rules were often unclear. You never knew when someone might turn on you, and if you never shot an unkind glance or whispered behind your hand you risked being accused of disloyalty and getting your arm twisted by a member of your own side.