The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “Le jeune Turc!” said Sylvain Leclair.

  “Actually,” said Jeannette, “Monsieur Midhat would call himself a Palestinian Arab.”

  Midhat glanced at her. Something thawed in his chest.

  “So, Monsieur l’Arabe,” said Sylvain, pulling out his chair, “what brings you to Montpellier?”

  “Medicine,” said Midhat. “I am studying medicine at the university.”

  “Escaping the barracks?” Without moving the rest of his face, Sylvain Leclair winked. “This is my friend Dimon—Luc, this is a young Arab man, staying with the Molineus. Monsieur Mid—quoi Mid—ha? He is here avoiding the war.”

  “Sylvain,” said Jeannette.

  “I’m just playing. Dimon owns a vineyard. The largest in the region. With the best wine.”

  “Ho ho, how do you do. Sylvain is very modest, he is an excellent vigneron. But you know, we all had trouble with the blight, it was an awful thing.”

  “Some of us had more trouble than others. Did you know about this, Monsieur Kamal? It attacked the plants. They were very, very small.” Sylvain curled his forefinger inside his thumb. “Phylloxera vastatrix. Une petite friponne. The little grues destroyed my entire vineyard. The vine leaves all had little balls on them. This is a Clairette Languedoc, would you like to try, Monsieur Midhat?”

  “No, thank you. Yes, a little. Thank you.”

  “How did you come to know the Molineus?” said Luc Dimon.

  “My father contacted the university, and Docteur Molineu kindly offered himself as a host.”

  “The sacrifices,” said Sylvain. “Tell us some things. We’d like to know all about your way of life.”

  Midhat could not tell if Sylvain was mocking him. “Excuse me?”

  “Midhat, may I introduce you to Monsieur Laurent Toupin.”

  Jeannette moved back in her chair to reveal the tall blond man on her other side.

  “How do you do.”

  “Enchanted to meet you,” said Midhat. He turned his head, and a crisp breath of wind from a gap in the marquee alerted him to the sweat on his face.

  “He speaks French well,” said Laurent.

  “He does,” said Jeannette. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  Laurent took Jeannette’s vacated seat. His sleeve was rolled before the elbow, and his forearm was covered in wiry blond hair.

  “You know, I think I have seen you at the Faculty … you are very recognisable. I am in my fourth year, but you have just started? How have you found it, the classes? The first year is a little boring, I remember, you have all the preliminaries in the sciences. But have you started the clinics?”

  “Not yet,” said Midhat. He took a deep breath. He was conscious of Sylvain Leclair, swilling his wine across the table from them. “Next week, I believe.”

  “And you are enjoying it? I love medicine, I really do, I love the Faculty. It’s the best discipline in the world. We are at the very tip, the edge, pushing into the unknown. You know, they say you can look out there into the unknown, or you can look in here. People are so afraid of it, and that’s why. But—is it common to visit France to study medicine, for men in your region? I imagine the traditions must be different. I mean, it was only two centuries ago they were using Avicenna’s book in the Faculty, but I imagine things have diverged since then.”

  This mention of Avicenna struck Midhat as artificial. He realised Laurent was trying to impress him, and warmed to him instantly.

  “We have a university in Cairo,” he said. “It is a good university. There is another in Beirut. But more and more men from Syria are studying in Europe, in England, France, Germany. And the same is happening in the other direction. Though not for university of course. We do have good universities … they are not the best. The best is Europe, everyone knows that. But they use the French way, too, in Syria and Egypt.”

  “Interesting. You know it’s very interesting to meet you. Jeannette tells me you are a Muslim. There was an Oriental who graduated from the Faculty the year I began, though actually now I think of it I believe he was Christian. Anyway, they aren’t common here but certainly he was a good doctor.”

  “Midhat, how are you, is everything fine, everything going well?”

  “Yes, thank you Docteur.”

  “Stop calling me Docteur now Midhat, I am Frédéric. You have met Laurent, I see. Laurent it’s good to see you. Your hair is too long, however.”

  “The army will cut it soon enough.”

  “Ah, pff. Patrice, Patrice, come and meet Midhat Kamal. Here.”

  “Enchanté.”

  “Patrice is my colleague now, we are in the same discipline. It used to be the human body for him, and now it is the social one.”

  “Frédéric. Un livre, seulement un livre.”

  “So you don’t think you will return to the university at all?”

  “As I’ve said, the problem for me is that when the war begins … immédiatement c’est fini, ou sinon immédiatement, assez vite. No more free thought, no more free … exchange.”

  “Ah … yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Marian!” said Jeannette, who had returned and was standing behind them, addressing the bride on the other side. “I have not seen you since the church. You look so beautiful. Where is Paul?”

  “Oh, Jojo I am exhausted. Ouf—I have to go.”

  Laurent said: “When is he going to Flanders?”

  “After they return from Nice, I think.”

  “Are you not going, Laurent?”

  “I’m exempt for a while, because I volunteered. Not for long though.”

  “Oh come on, you have to join us! You should just volunteer again. Don’t be a mouse.”

  “Xavier is going.”

  “When?”

  “With the others. Two weeks.”

  “And all the ladies will be nursing you.”

  “Did you hear about the Alberts’ German governess?”

  “Governess? No, I only know the story about the bank …”

  “Maman … Maman …”

  Around them the guests were rising with a racket of chair legs. Four pyramids had appeared at the back of the pavilion. Midhat followed Jeannette between the tables. The pyramids, he saw, were constructed of tiny round cakes.

  “Midhat, may I offer you one?”

  “Bonjour, I am Madame Crotteau.”

  “Bonjour Madame, I am Midhat Kamal.”

  “I know. How do you find Montpellier? Is it not beautiful. Has Frédéric taken you to Palavas-les-Flots?”

  “Why in hell would I take him to the sea?” said Frédéric. “Imagine, you travel to an entirely new country and they say—let us show you the water on which you came! No, Nicole. He needs to see the culture, the city, the landscape of the interior. Hear the music, read the trobairitz … that’s the important … the smells, the terroir of Occitan …”

  “Only a Parisian could be tellement fier du Languedoc.”

  Frédéric raised an eyebrow. “My mother was from Dordogne.”

  “You must come for a walk with me, Midhat,” said Laurent, shaking icing sugar onto the floor. “I’ll show you the gardens. Yes?”

  “Yes, that would be wonderful.”

  “Fantastic. We’ll meet at the Salle Dugès when the sun is out.”

  They decided on Thursday, if the weather was good. Thursday came and it was raining, so they decided on the Friday. The morning session that Friday was an introduction to practical dissection for the first years; Midhat would meet Laurent afterwards, at noon by the statue of Lapeyronie.

  Each week the crowd in the Salle Dugès had diminished. Now only a handful of French students remained, exempt from combat for medical reasons, to which some confessed while others remained rigidly silent. Nonetheless eager to prove their nerve, all made pointed use of frontline slang, referring to the Germans as “Boches” and quipping about the weakness of the Prussian gene. Many younger professors had also been conscripted, and several names on Midhat’s timetable did not corre
spond to the person who appeared at the front of the classroom. His classmates were mainly Spaniards and Belgians and there were also two Swiss and one Englishman. Midhat was the only Arab and the only student not from Europe, and in the morning atmosphere of the Salle he felt shy. He observed, remote from conversations, how someone could introduce an anecdote as funny, might even begin by outlining the final joke: the listening company would anticipate the ending and laugh in unison. Once a humourous tone was established, anything could be amusing, and each person was ready to laugh even at the weakest joke in the spirit of including everyone.

  Despite his shyness, his accent was improving, and he pronounced “le thorax” and “le capillaire” with the precision of a foreigner. On the Rue de la Loge he bought a new French hat, an overcoat, and a black umbrella, and he brought all three items with him to the Faculty on the Friday he was to meet Laurent, despite the fact that their walk was dependent on fine weather.

  Professor Brogante stood at the head of the operating table.

  “Medicine is not an exact science,” he intoned, stretching over the implement tray and flipping a scalpel so its blade faced the same direction as the others.

  The walls of the dissection hall carried Brogante’s voice far over the raked seats, so that, to the students standing close around the corpse, on which a white sheet rose to points at the feet and knees, the professor’s statements seemed to boom.

  “The fact that its data are so complex, that it deals usually with probabilities rather than certainties, does not destroy the scientific character of medicine.” Brogante’s hands descended to the lower edge of the sheet. “It only adds a reason for greater scientific caution.”

  The students rustled for a view.

  “Every point I, the physician, observe is a suggestion. I look for other indications to confirm my diagnosis, or I try a certain procedure, the outcome of which will decide whether I have read the situation correctly.”

  A head of black hair appeared at the top of the sheet, shining blue in the glow from the high windows. The waxy shaven face of a man emerged, followed by his torso. Brogante flattened the sheet over the legs, wrapped his fingers around a scalpel, and approached the grey neck.

  “In order to expose the thoracic and abdominal cavities, we will make the first incision from the sternum …”

  Professor Brogante’s voice expanded so much it seemed to have no edges, and Midhat no longer heard the individual words. He saw the blade pierce the skin of the neck, and watched the top layer of epidermis split quickly, as though it had been tied tightly shut and was just released. The first long incision complete, Brogante cut a second lateral line. Then he turned the flaps of skin back, one by one, four dry slaps. Inside was an inhuman assemblage of organs. Overripe red and purple and sick yellow. Midhat looked at the bloodless strings of sinew lacing the stomach, and gave way. His vision thronged with black spots, which crowded together and closed the cadaver from sight.

  The next thing he knew he was sitting alone, in the front row of the auditorium. He saw the backs of the other students ahead, and Brogante’s voice continued, more distantly:

  “The gallbladder lies to the extreme right of the epigastric zone. The caecum in the right iliac compartment and, can you see, that there is the ascending colon. Can anyone tell me what region that is in? Monsieur Havonteur?”

  Midhat could not see the body for the students. One head turned: it was Samuel Cogolati, a Belgian. Cogolati twisted his neck to check no one was watching him, then bounded over and crouched beside Midhat’s chair.

  “Tout va bien?”

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe? I fainted, didn’t I.”

  “Yes.” Cogolati breathed a laugh. “Ça va, I caught you, you didn’t hit the floor.” He shook his head up and down very quickly. “I have to go back, but … Ça va?”

  “Fine, fine, go back. I’ll take a moment. Thank you, Samuel.”

  “De rien.”

  In spite of the bread roll Cogolati brought from the dining hall, Midhat’s legs were still trembling when he met Laurent at noon beside the statue, and he was grateful for his umbrella to lean on.

  “Philosophically speaking,” said Laurent, as they moved off down the boulevard, “your reaction was totally natural. I recall my first practical dissection. Not a … not a pleasant experience.”

  “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.”