The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  A matter of months, they had said last year, and the posters in town were peeling; some of the older ones had ripped through. A soldier kissed a child, a buxom woman triumphed in a kitchen. A tattered Tricolore waved as an elderly man passed packages to a trench. There were few gatherings or parties now in Montpellier, and at those few, news from the Front was all.

  In the Molineu house, death had its old way of unbuttoning the truth and loosening tongues. Under the general sadness Jeannette found she could no longer bore herself into unfeeling. Her thoughts returned to her mother, and she let them. And she began to confide in Midhat.

  They were sitting on the terrace one morning in May, holding books they had no intention of reading. Wildflowers interrupted the lawn ahead, and where the lip of the terrace met the grass, the spears had cracked the grouting to poke up between the flagstones.

  “No, it had nothing to do with the supernatural,” she said. A brief spring cold had left a croak in her voice. “It was all her. I think she made herself ill on purpose. I think it gave her something to focus on. Because the moment she was well again she would do something extreme, like make herself vomit by eating too much, or starve herself and leave the house on a rainy night with no shoes on. They called her a hysteric afterwards, but that never seemed right to me.”

  “Hysteria,” said Midhat, resting his jaw on the heel of his palm. “Yes.”

  “My mother was all I wanted, and I couldn’t touch her.”

  “I had the same. I felt the same about my father.”

  “Not about your mother?”

  “Well, I was two when she died. Sometimes I think I have a memory of her. But it’s blurred, and I’m not certain. I remember her sitting on the floor, doing something with her hands. I don’t know.”

  “All my memories of my mother are of her lying pale in bed. She was happiest when she was ill, I’m sure of it. I used to visit her bedside when she had the flu, and so on. Isn’t that strange? And when she wasn’t ill she was a terror, a ghost, and those were the times I hated her. The house was in disarray, she used to whip up the … the servants, they were all over the place, my father … But illness—that was when she thrived. I mean it’s difficult now even to try to imagine these things. I don’t have anything to hold, it’s just little bits my father told me. And some things I remember. But even then, how can we know if it’s real or not, or if we made it up ourselves, as you say.”

  “Will you explain it to me though,” said Midhat, shifting along so he could face her. “Because I still don’t understand exactly. Psychiatry is not until the third year.”

  Jeannette chuckled, then sighed and looked serious. “They called it a nervous illness,” she said. “Which meant it was neurological, in the brain. Which part did you not understand?”

  “The part about her being happiest when she was ill.”

  “Ah, well—nor do I. It’s just that, as far as I can remember, her time was divided between being sick, physically, and healthy. Only when she was sick was I allowed to see her. Do you see? I mean, this woman stayed more or less the whole time in her bedroom. Then there was a certain period when Sylvain used to come, and she seemed to get better again. She wasn’t in bed. He was there for dinner quite often, Maman would be there, and he would bring me little gifts. I remember these glass grapes, like this, they were purple, and the stem was carved from wood. Anyway, Sylvain came for a few years. And then I don’t remember what happened exactly. But it was unexpected, certainly, her suicide. I was sixteen, I think I told you.”

  “Yes. I am so sorry, Jeannette. Really. It is a tragedy.”

  “Well. There was a time when I thought about it a lot, trying to work it out. Then I realised there wasn’t much point in becoming preoccupied with these things. I had this idea that when she was ill it was as though she was filling up a doorway with stones, so that she couldn’t leave the house, then spending days pulling out stone after stone, until she could see the street outside. But then the moment she would have been able to walk out freely, she would just pick up new stones. I do think … I think it’s true she distracted herself … I think being alive was hard for her. I don’t know, I don’t know anything, this is only from what my father told me, and some things Laurent was reading about a few years ago.”

  “Laurent.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause. Midhat ventured, “I miss him.”

  “So do I.” She sniffed. It may have been from her cold. “I had a letter from him last week.”

  “Oh,” said Midhat, unable to restrain his surprise. “Is he well?”

  “He is fine, he is well. He is coming back, in fact, soon. Would you like to see the letter?”

  “If it’s private—”

  “Not at all. I’m surprised he has time to write letters, to be honest. One moment, I will run up for it.”

  He walked by the pond to wait. He was compelled by a sudden, powerful wish that Laurent should die. But even the salutary prospect of Laurent’s disappearance was swamped by the likelihood that Jeannette’s love for him would only swell with his heroic memory. The water in the pond had risen over the winter, and lines of reflected light wriggled on the inside of the wall. The lower part was covered in a greenish fur. He turned around and Jeannette was on the terrace again, holding an envelope. She came towards him.

  “Take it.”

  28 April 1915

  Dear Jeannette,

  I was sent to the Dardanelles in the end, not to Ypres. I’m working on the Pioche cruiser under a hero named Bastien who has already been offered five stripes. Most of the boys here are from Lyon and Toulon. Two days ago more French landed with the English on the European coast, while our regiment set about taking Koum Kaleh, and they say a quarter of our men are down. It has been difficult to make a hospital on a boat in which thousands of men have been crowded for weeks, let alone in the middle of battle. Nearly all the cabins for the wounded were still occupied by soldiers at the height of it, so I spent the afternoon dragging saddles and mailbags into one of the kitchens and replacing them with sterilised sacks and bandages and drugs.

  From twilight until dawn the convoys of wounded followed one after another and we spent those hours working constantly. I was in the children’s playroom of the ship where we have some big tables—I’m meant to be a junior but all the ranking gets forgotten once you’re in it. The first casualty was a Senegalese—he lay unconscious on a raft. One bullet had gone through his ear, another two through the abdomen. He died at noon without waking up. Then a master corporal came back with his chest shattered by shrapnel, and for a moment I saw his naked heart, still beating. This is the fastest I have learned anything, Jeannette, honestly it makes a mockery of old Dean Rivaut’s “observation and inference” at the Faculty.

  The sight of the Dardanelles these last two days and nights has been unimaginable. You can see a mass of dead on the Koum Kaleh shore. On the European side Krithia is burning. Before Yeni Sher there are ships everywhere—battleships, cruisers, torpedoes, dredgers—a whole fleet surrounds the peninsula—and on the Pioche men are sleeping in every corner. This morning the smoke from the cannon is mixing with the dawn mist and the whole thing seethes and smoulders.

  All yesterday the Gallipoli Peninsula seemed to be on fire—the castle of Sedd-el-Bahr was burning. The Australians joined us and fired on the Asiatic coast directly on Koum Kaleh, and sent up cascades of fumes and dust and flames. When the soldiers were waiting in the dining-saloon, someone got hold of a gramophone and played it as though it was the end of the world while the Charlemagne shelled Besika Bay. Since then our warships have been firing unceasingly. We’re an auxiliary but even so we saw a shell fall just in front of us today, and a second sent up a jet of water in the same place, and then a swarm of other shells came soaring above our heads. Since then we’ve been hit a number of times, and with our very thin plating a single shell does a great deal of harm, so there’s always more work to keep the place in order.

  By 12 o’
clock Yeni Sher was destroyed. The Pioche directed her guns on Intepe and we all got up on deck to watch. Firing continued all through the night and the ship trembled. In the morning the corpses were heaped before us along the front for a stretch of about three hundred metres.

  Enough. It feels good to have written after so much seeing, though I hope it is not upsetting to read. I hope Midhat is well, and enjoying his classes at the Faculty. It is very peculiar to think about that now. I still keep time by his watch, though it is necessary to hide the Turkish numerals from the other soldiers. When this battle is over I will be released on furlough, which they say could be next week, or next month. Either way, I look forward to seeing both of you.

  With love and affection,

  Laurent.

  “He’s coming back.”

  “The battle ended on Friday. We haven’t heard from Xavier …” She turned over the envelope.

  “Did you love Laurent?” he said, forcefully.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Laurent said he loved you.”

  Jeannette stared at him. “When did he tell you that?”

  Blood hooted in Midhat’s ear. He looked down at his shoes. “It was at the party.”

  “Midhat.” She expelled a throaty syllable of breath. “I—I’m not sure what I should say.” She held out a hand for the letter. Her face had fallen. She looked distraught.

  “Jeannette, please, I’m sorry.”

  She left him on the lawn. Her skirts folded and unfolded as she climbed the steps.

  Over dinner, she did not meet Midhat’s eye. The following day after breakfast he waited on the terrace, but she did not come. He left for the Faculty without his umbrella and, as luck would have it, within a few minutes it began to rain. Umbrellas sprouted around him, and his shoes smacked through the puddles, his socks spreading the cold around his ankles. Before long, the entire avenue was ablaze with watery pavements, and when he arrived at the Salle Dugès a scent of damp wool was rising from his coat.

  7

  Docteur Frédéric Molineu’s office at the university was smaller and far less grand than his study at home. Still, he worked at the university most days: if he wanted a promotion after his next thesis he needed to accentuate his presence there, which meant being physically present as much as possible. He arrived in the morning at eight o’clock, lectured until noon, then retired to the office to continue his own research and answer questions from any students who came by. So few were left now; one lectured to a mere handful in the auditorium, most of them women and foreigners who regarded Molineu and his pointer with the glazed eyes of victory statues, delirious with so much sorrow.

  The office was a corner room on the second floor, accessed by two sets of swinging double doors before the final one with the frosted window. Inside, west-facing windows gave him afternoon sun and a view of the courtyard, and two watercolours above his desk depicted the Hérault River. The offices on the other side of the hall had views of an actual river, a small tributary of the Lez. Frédéric’s desk knocked up against the window, and he kept his liquor in a low cabinet on which he stacked books that wouldn’t fit on the shelves. Any visitor or student would sit in the chair, while Frédéric sat on the desk. He often caught himself thinking about the other, spacious offices in the department, emptied now by war—though of course one would never ask.

  The door opened a crack. “Good evening Frédéric.”

  “Patrice. Come in, take a seat.”

  Frédéric sat on the desk and rested his foot on an open drawer.

  “What time is dinner, I told the girls …” Patrice hung his hat on the back of the door.

  “I think we said eight?”

  “Good.”

  “What can I offer you, I have whisky, absinthe—”

  “Absinthe?”

  “Oh, it’s empty, pardon.”

  “I’ll take a cognac—if that’s cognac. How is the work going?”

  “I have been working on a few ideas. I am making some progress. One has to test the kinks, you know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Frédéric swilled the liquid in his glass. He did feel threatened by Patrice’s new interest in anthropology. The truth was that he also still relied on Patrice to be his fresh pair of ears: he was the only person with whom Frédéric felt he could sound out his thoughts without being judged. That was in part because Patrice remained outside the department, which made any competition between the two of them personal rather than professional. While Patrice was certainly intelligent enough to have made a career in the discipline, even at this late stage, he had not; he was only, as he called it, “dabbling in his dotage.”

  “Inspired by your good self!” he even said last year when he published that book on animal behaviour, and Frédéric had reacted with a panic, and hurtled into his own work with new fervour. Clearly professional advancement was not enough to motivate Frédéric Molineu; for that he required a rival with a face.

  “First of all,” said Frédéric, pushing the drawer open slightly further with his heel, “language.”

  “Go on.”

  “Language and the progress of civilisations.”

  “Well. That sounds quite—”

  “German, yes. I wouldn’t publish until after the war. I mean I haven’t started writing yet. I haven’t finished reading.”

  Patrice rested an elbow on the back of the chair, sending his shoulder into a hunch. “So it’s a philological treatise?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. I have two strands. One is, yes, philological, linking philology and development. A word can deviate from a grammatical rule, so why not a human being? And what would that mean, exactly? I’m thinking about this specifically with relation to the Muslims.”

  “Islamic civilisation.”

  “The Muslim as a deviation from the onward progression. That’s the sort of thing you might say.” Frédéric released a clumsy gust of laughter.

  Patrice frowned. “Certainly, determinism is something I’m intrigued by.”

  “No, of course. But what I meant was, and this is more interesting to me than the onward march to the universal what-have-you, that they chose the wrong messiah, Muhammad not Christ and so on—which to be frank has always been slightly apocalyptic for my taste… . Then the question becomes, for me at least, the extent to which one might actually recuperate a deviation. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “You mean, one would teach them to conform?”

  “More or less. The value of liberty, for example. What isn’t present in their religious texts.”

  A car sounded on the road outside. Patrice fixed on Frédéric, and said: “You’re thinking of your Oriental.”

  “Midhat?” said Frédéric. “Well, in fact, I suppose yes I did feel somewhat inspired by—I mean, clearly, this is evidence that one can teach the Arab.”

  “Just because he is a student.” Patrice shook his head. “Rich Turks are constantly sending their sons abroad. And you’re talking about civilisation as a whole. There are always exceptions. It’s a bit of a leap.”

  “But look, what about language. Humboldt says—”

  “Don’t quote a German, there are people in the hall. And I never want to be a defeatist but I would also point out that you don’t read Arabic.”

  “Yes. I was thinking about that.” He tapped his forefinger on his glass. “But really I am … Patrice, not everyone has a person living in his—who has such remarkable … But yes, it’s only thoughts at the moment. As you say, if I’m calling on the Boches with all their—their Weltansicht, of course I must wait. And I want to be more empirical. As you say. You are right. As always.”

  Frédéric sipped and watched his friend. Patrice looked up at the window, pursing his lips in little contractions.

  “I suppose it could be interesting. It’s ambitious, Frédéric, especially if you don’t have the language. Perhaps—you know I don’t want to discourage you—keep playing with the ideas. But if you’re using German scholarsh
ip as your framework, it’s tricky, you know? It might be worth waiting.”

  Patrice was right, Frédéric was ambitious. But he was ambitious in a particular way. After his first publication at L’École Normale Supérieure more than twenty years earlier, Frédéric had derived the most lasting pleasure not from the actual promotion the book had secured—which was a victory quickly assimilated, as victories usually are—but from the reaction of his colleague Émile. Émile was gracious: he congratulated Frédéric, complimented the scope of the work, described it as “admirable” for the way it breached disciplinary boundaries, even if those boundaries were internal to anthropology. But beneath his grace Frédéric heard accents of jealousy. He spied hostility in the notes Émile presented for discussion, and in the haughty way Émile greeted him in the dining hall thereafter. At that, Frédéric had felt nothing but glee.

  After four years as maître de conférences at Montpellier, however, he had yet to produce the thesis required for promotion to professeur, and all the while was becoming embarrassingly senior for his lecturing position. But he had been galvanised by Patrice’s publication last year, and now that the war had magnified his youth—since he happened to be at the younger end of those too old to fight, saved by a margin of eleven months—Frédéric was spurred to replicate his previous success while the corridors of the department were still quiet. He would continue as he had begun, by breaching boundaries. The majority of scholars these days specialised ad infinitum, carving out a piece of terrain so minute that each became an expert on a single detail, a speck of dust, trusting with the capacious vagueness of religious faith that his small corner would in the end contribute to some entirety. What a dreary, unglamorous life. Frédéric was an architect, not a carpenter. And this time he would stretch even further than anthropology. Philology was the new terrain—the life of words, which led one back to the life of humans with fresh paradigms.