The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  It did become easier. The following morning Ariane smiled at him as they packed their things for the journey south. On the road between Lyon and Grenoble, she said: “I think this man needs a haircut.”

  She was pointing at a calèche in front of them. Long sheaves of hay stuck out from the rear of the vehicle. Frédéric laughed, and Ariane gazed at him, then joined in laughing, drawing breath and laughing again.

  Ariane even laughed when they first made love, in the rented guest room near the water. Her body was soft but her limbs were strong, and her legs gripped him from behind. At the moment of entry she gazed up at him with her transparent eyes, and Frédéric let out a strangled moan. For a week they slept late and made love on waking, then bathed and walked along the shore to drink coffee by the pier where the sea smacked against the wall.

  After they returned to Paris, Frédéric took on the teaching of two more undergraduate anthropology courses, while he worked to make his dissertation worthy of publishing. His manuscript was particularly ambitious in trying to combine two lines of contemporary thought under a single thesis: one being the recent theories of cranial development and criminality, and the other the program of physical anthropology that was emerging at the time from scholarship in the African colonies. On their return from the south, however, Frédéric discovered to his dismay that during the very week of his honeymoon an old doctoral colleague named Émile had published his own manuscript, a work on the anthropology of crime based on firsthand knowledge from the Central Prison Infirmary. The news was a blow to Frédéric’s confidence. Émile’s work was fairly pedestrian but it was undeniably thorough, and its flaws paled before the simple fact that he had published before Frédéric had—and at that Émile was three years younger than him. The whole thing cast a shadow over Frédéric’s manuscript, which had been proficient at the time of defence but now seemed unwieldy and even in places a little thin. If his first publication did not meet with the esteem of his peers, if it failed to win him prestige, Frédéric feared humiliation and an irreversibly minor status in the development of the discipline.

  Ariane was his relief. She was like a crocus, her blades just starting to part. Her cheeks shone with new colour as she set about decorating the apartment. All by herself she bargained over a salon set from Saglio on Rue de Vaugirard, and marshalled the neighbours to hoist a bowlegged commode up the stairs. The misery of his days at the university was soothed when Ariane met him at the door and showed him the walls almost finished in a sprigged paper, or a new lacquer on the skirting board. Over dinner she offered him simple but sound wisdom; she said better to take longer than to rush and regret, and Frédéric was delighted at least as much by her confidence in providing solace as by the actual solace provided, and said yes, you are right, thank you my darling. After a year, he had still not published. But after thirteen months, Ariane was showing the first signs of pregnancy.

  The baby was born earlier than expected. Her limbs were meagre and she cried through the night. They hired a Swiss nurse named Ingrid to help, and when Jeannette turned four, Ingrid left and was replaced by a nursery governess named Eva. When Jeannette turned eight, Eva left and was replaced by Lorena. It was during the epoch of Lorena that Ariane’s health began to suffer most noticeably. She spent more and more time in bed with various ailments, cheerfully resigned to the slow progress of recovery. No sooner would she be physically well again than she would plummet into a state of despair and confine herself once more to the bedroom. This behaviour was inexplicable to Frédéric. Ariane expressed extreme feelings of guilt over minor mishaps, often as trivial as misspeaking, or picking up the wrong glass in company. When he returned from the university in the evening, she would report the anguish of her day, how she entered a room wanting to do one thing and did another, and it was not right, it was not right, and Frédéric, bewildered, tried to soothe her as she had once managed to soothe him. The pattern of his days had reversed. His fears of ignominy had been unfounded, and he had secured a good position in the department following his publication. It was when he came home that the terror began.

  How much did the neighbours know? Too much. The walls of those Montparnasse apartments were thin, and sometimes Ariane even went onto the balcony to wail. Though she said her pain was compounded by the dread of what other people knew and thought about her, even that did not stop her. Fearing their censure Frédéric did not confide in the Passants, nor did he want to send Ariane to a psychiatric hospital. For nine years she had been healthy! If it was an endemic neurological condition, he was anthropologically certain that she would have exhibited symptoms before now. Instead he took her to see a psychiatrist associated with the university, and employed a doctor to visit the house.

  The child Jeannette suffered. All things circled around her mother, whom she could not reach. Ariane was the void in the whirlpool. The family moved to the edge of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and the new, thick-walled house was filled again with nightly wailing, and whispers and fingers on lips, as Lorena the governess pulled Jeannette from her mother’s door, dangling toys. Sometimes, during a particularly bad flare, the governess would simply join Jeannette by the door and cover the child’s ears as she peered through the crack.

  When her mother lapsed, Jeannette became frantic and tormented the governess with crying, and her resentment persisted throughout her school years. But when her mother died, and her father confessed the details of this foregoing account, Jeannette’s anger was overlaid with other emotions. Some of what she felt was guilt. Some of it was the same curiosity that made her governess put an ear to the door. For the next four years she examined and rearranged the fragments of the narrative, like her tarot deck spread over the carpet, until the moment had arrived when the hold of the past became unbearable, and for a while she could not think about it anymore.

  In the spring of 1915 the fighting started again at Ypres. The Germans were using poison gas. Sudden clouds, yellow-green, whistled free from canisters along the front between Steenstraat and Langemarck. They rallied and advanced as a single luminous mist, just as the French troops were called to the firing line. Among the dead were the Molineus’ chauffeur Pisson, and Marian’s husband Paul Richer. Marian wore her wedding dress to the memorial service. The photograph from the newspaper announcement was framed by a garland, and where “Paul Richer” had curled beneath his chest now a line of roses nestled. The Tricolore was propped beside it, and when the breeze paused the flag furled, its colours tipped vertical, so that it resembled, to Midhat’s mind, a cloak with a stained hem.

  A few days afterwards, Marian announced that she was joining the volunteer nurses. She was posted at Divonne-les-Bains on the Swiss border, and in her letters to Jeannette she described the disfigured men whose wounds she was cleaning. One was paralytic, and another had lost the use of both hands. One had no thumbs, one had a leg as fat as an elephant’s, one had lost the lower half of his jaw and smoked cigarettes through his nose. And the violets were blooming in the fields, she said, more fragrant than at home, and yellow primroses lined the forest floor.

  Given that Paul was the first relative of the Molineus killed in action, Midhat expected Jeannette to withdraw further from him in her grief. Ever since the party in December, his feelings towards her had become tangled with his feelings about Laurent. Even though, to examine it logically, Laurent’s confession that he still loved Jeannette implied that Jeannette had not responded in the first instance, he remained helplessly jealous all the same, not only because someone had usurped him by desiring Jeannette first, but also because Laurent was French, and more advanced than Midhat in his studies, and had gone off to war, and was from every angle more suitable to be Jeannette’s husband than a Palestinian from Nablus who was a citizen of the enemy.

  But, in fact, after the news of Paul’s death Jeannette turned towards Midhat. She sought him out after meals, asking him questions about his studies; she knocked on his door while he was reading, apologised for the interruption, but would he
like a biscuit and a cup of tea? Midhat’s classes at the Faculty were in the afternoons, and the clinics in the morning were optional for first-year students. So the mornings became time to spend with Jeannette. They parted at the breakfast table, and when the door banged with Docteur Molineu’s departure, they reunited in the hall, as though casually, without acknowledging the subterfuge.

  The first time came about by accident. Midhat was in his bedroom trying to learn the bones of the body. Ilium, sacrum, patella. Tarsus, metatarsus. He copied the lines in his notebook, and the words became paler and paler. He shook the pen. Tibia, fibula, calcaneus.

  The door of Docteur Molineu’s study was ajar. He pushed it open, and found himself in a surprisingly grand room. Three of the walls were lined with books up to the ceiling, and the fourth gave a view of the neighbouring farm and the blue hills through a bay window flanked by maroon curtains that sprawled from a tasselled pelmet. The woodwork was painted dark turquoise. In the corner stood an armchair, and in the centre a large desk with a leather work surface, spread over with piles of paper and a few volumes. Two inkwells sat on the far edge, both half-full of black. One was rimmed with green, the other with red. He hesitated.

  “Monsieur Midhat?”

  He spun round. Jeannette was standing in the shadow of the door.

  “I have run out of ink,” he said.

  He noticed that her neck was red, and a couple of hairs from the front of her head had trailed down from their pins. Oddly, at his words the redness spread over her entire face. It was an opening, he saw: they were dislocated from their usual positions—across a table, seated—and neither had the usual composure. He took a step to the side.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “Oh.” Her dark pupils cooled, and in a moment she replied, with renewed self-possession: “Thank you. That would be lovely.”

  They met in the hallway wearing their coats, left the house without speaking, and walked up to the Boulevard du Jeu de Paume. Day was brightening, the streets were full of people, and there were enough distractions for them to ignore their mutual silence. The Beaux Arts steeples, the Palais de Justice decked with flags, submarine windows bulging out from slate roofs, shining with daylight. Midhat led the way to the Botanic Garden. Ilium, sacrum, patella, sang in his head. They reached the green gates.

  “I used to come here with Laurent,” he said, touching the railing.

  But he found he knew the park no better now than on that first visit, and he slowed his pace. He chose the hedgerow path, and after that did not force any particular direction. Spring had brought out new colours in the beds, and violets spread rampant along the paths.

  “Tell me more about yourself,” said Jeannette.

  “What would you like to know?” He was happy they were side by side and he did not have to look at her; otherwise he might have found it hard to speak.

  “I don’t know. What about your school.”

  “Well, it has one long building, like this. And on one side there is a big gate, and on the other side is the Bosphorus.”

  Sensing that this wasn’t quite what she wanted, he changed direction and described how with two friends from the dormitory he used to sneak out at night by climbing a wall behind the oak tree. Once, they were caught on their way home from the city, and gave the warden false names.

  “Samir became Izz ad-Din Izz ad-Din, Ilhan said Simeon Simeon, and I said my name was Ahmad Ibn Ahmad. It was very funny. The warden laughed and rode us home, and we weren’t even punished. I mean, we never went anywhere really, we only walked around the streets for a while. Sometimes we bought ice cream. Ha! We didn’t know what to do with the freedom. It was just for the sake of being free.”

  Next Jeannette asked about the different religions, and Midhat listed the various groups in the Empire, running a mental finger over the boys in his Mekteb dormitory. Again, this clearly wasn’t what she wanted. So he elaborated some details of his own experience, and described how there weren’t many Christians in Nablus, but his neighbour Hala was one of them, and he used to play with her when they were very young. They made a house in the woodshed and his Teta would bring them tea.

  “It sounds like a very free childhood.”

  “It was, I think so. We lived at the bottom of a mountain. My father wasn’t at home often, because he worked in Cairo, works in Cairo, and I had a nurse when I was small but mostly I grew up with my grandmother.”

  More and more fluently, he asked Jeannette about her own life. He wondered if she would tell him more about her mother, but she did not, and he did not ask. Slowly she unravelled some other facts about her childhood in Montparnasse, and narrated some amusing stories to match the ones he had shared. Then, as they reached the greenhouse, she burst out that she had felt uneasy during her studies at the university. There among all those men—she laughed, the little creases beneath her eyes clarifying in the sunlight.

  They met again the following morning at eleven o’clock. This time they walked around the neighbourhood, and peered up the driveways at the other houses, their shutters and paintwork cracked and faded by the hot breezes that came off the Mediterranean. Conversation moved beyond simple facts and memories into the realm of speculation: perhaps I feel this, perhaps I feel that. Midhat reeled from the blaze of Jeannette’s interest and tried to temper his enthusiasm about what she shared with him. But his joy was precarious, and attended by strong gusts of anxiety. At times he felt their privacy threatened by the hypothetical judgements of other people, and became distracted by the view he imagined from the windows they passed, a man and a woman seen from above, unchaperoned. This notion sent his thoughts on a worn path: first back to his school friends, and his cousin Jamil, with the query accompanied by a slightly gleeful pride as to whether any of them were encountering women the way he was. Directly this thought would sink under the thought of Laurent, and his shadowy history with Jeannette, and Midhat’s comparative ignorance of European convention, in which for a man and woman to walk side by side and discuss their childhoods might quite easily signify nothing at all. He began expending considerable effort trying to stop his mind from enlarging upon the looks she gave him, and the remarks she made, and the silences she allowed. Everything about it was new to him. Presumably, it was not new to her. He wondered if she used to go walking with Laurent, and this thought alone was often sobering enough to check the elaboration of his fantasies. And yet, though he knew it would in all likelihood appease his conscience, he could not summon the courage to ask her about Laurent, nor even to mention his name.

  One morning, while he was studying in his bedroom waiting until it was time to meet Jeannette in the hall, he heard crying downstairs. He hesitated, then resolved to remain where he was and pretend he had not heard anything. The wailing became more intense. An upstairs door creaked, and Jeannette’s voice said:

  “What on earth is going on?”

  Midhat opened his door to see Georgine, face aflame, bursting out of the salon. She grasped the balusters at the bottom of the stairs like the bars of a jail cell.

  “Please,” she said, rattling the bars.

  Docteur Molineu came after her, and raising his hands, which were full of letters, directed a dark look up at Midhat and Jeannette in the gallery.

  “I’m sorry but we just cannot afford it,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Georgine.”

  “What’s happened?” said Jeannette.

  Glancing at Midhat, Molineu said, with apparent reluctance: “They are reducing funding at the university. I’ve looked at the numbers and we can’t keep the staff anymore. We are only three, we don’t need—”

  “No,” said Georgine. Her mouth stretched wide, and fresh tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Any day now they will start rationing.”

  “I can ask my father,” said Midhat.

  “No no no no.” Molineu flapped his hand.

  “Where is your family?” said Jeannette.

  “She’s from Normandy,” said Mol
ineu. “Georgine, listen to me.”

  “Shall I go?” Midhat mouthed at Jeannette.

  She shook her head, and held out her hand, low down, to indicate that he should stay. This hand, being hidden, seemed to Midhat to refer to their secret walks, and it pulled taut a bond between them.

  “Are you worried about your family?” said Molineu.

  Georgine took a shuddering breath and nodded. “Please, professor, master, please—”

  “Let’s talk about this calmly. For God’s sake, Georgine,” he added, as she erupted again and covered her face, “you must calm down.”

  Gradually, she did. Then, to their collective amazement, she proceeded to convince Molineu—still addressing him by a variety of hyperbolic titles, which may have helped her case—to keep her employed at a low rate of pay until further notice.

  Midhat and Jeannette did not go walking that day. Jeannette helped Georgine to close off the cream salon, the guest bedrooms, and Pisson’s apartments, where they threw white sheets over the furniture. They ate dinner together in weary silence, Georgine serving them with swollen cheeks and glossy eyes.

  The dead stacked up. Every morning they read the tableaux d’honneur: John Bertrand from Port-Marianne on April 28th, Maurice Carrignon on the 30th, Jean Rival the dentist’s son at St. Julien in early May, Basile Vallon at Ypres a few days later. Convents, seminaries, colleges, high schools—every large building in Montpellier was crammed with beds and wounded soldiers. Jeannette volunteered to read to convalescents. She began walking into town with Midhat after lunch carrying books and magazines, and from the main roads they heard the singing of the peasant women bearing stretchers. Sometimes they caught sight of their swinging brigades: four women to a pallet, their skirts knotted to keep their legs free.