The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  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.

  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, rubbi
ng 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.”

  Marie-Thérèse’s dress was more red than it was orange, Midhat thought, and he appreciated the diffuse quality of the satin. But he nodded nonetheless; it was unusual to have Jeannette’s attention like this. Since his arrival a week ago she often smiled at him, but only from afar, and she did not engage much in conversation. Her father on the other hand pestered him with questions whenever he could, most often at breakfast. Sometimes Jeannette joined in these discussions—just that morning, for example, she appeared to enjoy explaining the difference between très, trop, and tellement, the last two of which they discovered had no direct Arabic equivalents. But more often than not she slipped from the table before they were finished and disappeared into some remote quarter of the house, and Midhat did not see her again until he returned from the Faculty in the evening.

  “That
man talking with Carole is Carl Page, he works in a bank. His mother is a friend of Sarah Bernhardt’s. His son has already been called to Ypres. And that one in the red cravat is Xavier, my cousin, Marian’s brother. He is studying law. And Laurent, he is also at the Medical Faculty. I will introduce you.”

  Laurent was a tall blond man, stooping to talk with a squat fellow in a bowler. Jeannette did not, however, make any motion to initiate an introduction. She continued:

  “With him is Luc Dimon. He owns the largest vineyard in the region.”

  “And these are all friends of the bride?”

  “The ones I have named. I don’t know the groom’s party. They are mostly from Nice.”

  Docteur Molineu was now in conversation with Patrice Nolin near the entrance to the dinner tent. There was something girlish about Nolin’s appearance. His eyes were far apart and his cheeks had a high colour. Molineu’s face was puckering with animation. That was exactly how he looked at breakfast, jumping with excitement whenever they encountered any phrase that could not be translated.

  The crowd began to move, and a footman raised an arm by the tent entrance. Midhat’s name, spelt “Monsieur Methat Kemal,” was written beside Jeannette’s on the board. They collected slices of fowl in brown sauce from the table at the back, and as they took their seats Sylvain Leclair appeared across the table, alongside Luc Dimon.