That was a technique with German origins. But what could he do, while the men were on the battlefields? Study in secret. Only bring to the university notes written in French, lest a colleague catch sight of an umlaut and cry traitor.
Unlike most, however, Patrice Nolin was highly critical of the war and took no care to conceal it. Which also made him the only man Frédéric knew who wouldn’t flinch if he happened to cite a scholar who came from the other side of the Rhine.
They finished their drinks, put on their hats, and walked back through town for dinner. Night fell slowly on the empty street.
“And what was the second?” said Nolin.
“Second what?”
“Strand. You said there were two.”
“Oh, Hegel. He has a passage on Herodotus. He says the ancient Greeks drew most of their art and philosophy from the Orient, from Babylon and so on. Egypt. Pallas Athena coming from the moon goddesses. Which might lead you back to the same point about the Orient deviating from the line of progress, but it summoned something else for me too, about origins, primitive form. It sparked a thought, anyway. I must blow, and see if it catches fire.”
In the driveway, the car windows were collecting dust.
“Bonsoir Georgine.”
“Bonsoir Monsieur.” She curtsied as they entered. “Ma’amoiselle Jeannette et Monsieur Midhat sont sur la terrasse.”
Frédéric led Patrice into the blue salon and saw them through the glass, his daughter and the Arab. The firelight shot long shadows down the lawn. Jeannette was smoking a cigarette, and as she turned to look back at them a rush of wind pushed her hair over to one side, exposing a tender white spot of scalp. She held the cigarette away and opened the door.
“Is it time for dinner?”
“Almost. The girls aren’t here. Nor Sylvain.”
She stepped back to let Monsieur Midhat pass into the room.
Midhat bowed. The black robe he was wearing signified, Frédéric knew, that he had visited the clinics that morning. It was strange, even amusing, that he had not changed out of it for dinner. Perhaps the boy was proud of his education and wanted to parade it. But as he sat down and responded flatly to Nolin’s questions about his day, Midhat’s overall solemnity became conspicuous. He must have seen something terrible at the hospital. Or perhaps he was simply worried about his upcoming examinations. Certainly he would need to do well if he was to pass into the second year. At least that was something Frédéric could look forward to: it was going to be very interesting to see how Monsieur Midhat performed.
Frédéric was almost correct. Both the prospect of the first year assessment and the scenes of the war-wounded and dying at the hospital were causing Midhat anxiety, and he was feeling increasingly uncertain about his capacity to become a doctor. But Frédéric had failed to identify the overriding factor, the one that eclipsed the others; for despite his knowledge of the human brain and of society, in which like any anthropologist he knew the structural significance of marriage, Frédéric never dwelled much on the part played by love in the life of man, outside his own experience of it. Love was something else entirely, little studied in anthropology precisely because it was capricious and often eluded diagnosis: it might appear to its victims like an illness, or be experienced as a state of grace. Often it manifested itself simply as anxiety. Thus Frédéric could not at sight diagnose the maj or cause of Midhat’s suffering, since it never occurred to him that the young Arab might be in love.
A week had passed since Midhat’s exchange with Jeannette on the lawn, during which she had continued to avoid him at every turn. In the daytime the house seemed empty, except when Georgine clattered along a passageway with her bucket of sudsy water. Apparently Jeannette spent all day in her bedroom, for Midhat only saw her at mealtimes, and then briefly: always she arrived after him and left before and looked down at her plate throughout, so that the impression of the whole was a rustle of skirts and an impassive face onto which Midhat could paint nothing. Apparently she even managed to cross the hallways when he wasn’t there. Sometimes he thought he heard footsteps and would quickly open a door, but it was eternally too late, or it was Georgine, who started, alarmed, the bucket in her hand rocking drips onto the floor. In moments of deep anguish he felt he might reach her only if he broke all bonds of propriety, and all the laws of host and guest, and stood at the top of the stairs and cried out her name.
His jealousy that day over Laurent was unwarranted to be sure, perhaps even insensitive, but it was only because he loved her. He could not comprehend what had so gravely caused offence. Was it the fact that, as with Laurent, Jeannette simply did not return Midhat’s love, and so his jealousy had embarrassed her? Or, was his frankness inappropriate in and of itself, the kind of blunder that destroyed delicate webs of peace and decorum? That much was surely true, even he knew that; but he also felt certain that indelicacies were where real life resided, and that people usually forgave a blunder if it turned out well in the end. Or was it that Jeannette loved Laurent after all, and Midhat’s question had touched a nerve? And with that letter in his hand—he knew enough of romance to understand what absence might have done to her feelings. And in addition Laurent was in danger. And in addition Laurent was returning. So, there was nothing to be done: if she did not love him, she did not love him. If she loved Laurent, she loved Laurent.
As a child, Midhat had loved a girl in Nablus: the Christian girl, Hala, whom he had mentioned to Jeannette. She came from an impoverished farming family on the edge of town not far from the Kamal house, and when Midhat was young, Teta encouraged him to go over there with bags of flour and eggs on Fridays. Often he would wrap a secret handful of sugar in a roll of muslin and carry that down too, hidden in his pocket.
Hala had red hair. Some said her ancestors were Crusaders who settled there centuries ago; but since neither her parents nor any of her siblings were red-haired, the family denied this. Hala’s hair was dark at the root and pale orange at the ends where the sun seemed to have washed off the colour, and her skin was pale and freckled. Midhat loved Hala as children love; he loved her beauty, and her smell, which in his mind was faint and white, and linked forever to sitting beside her in the woodshed in summer, looking through the doorway at the scuffed earth and tufts of green. When he turned eleven he was no longer allowed to spend time with her and, just like the Muslim girls, Hala donned a veil and stayed indoors. Then Midhat left Nablus for Constantinople, and he never saw her again.
His love for Hala was unnameable except in the terms already available to him, and so he used to whisper that he would marry her, and little Hala would bite her lip and smile. Even at the ages of seven and eight they knew about shame, and that fiancés should not spend so much time alone together, and that the differences in wealth and faith would cause problems between their families. And so “marriage” was a secret word, al-zawaj, he breathed in Hala’s ear, and from their small hands the steam of mint tea went on rising.
In Constantinople, his understanding of love changed. The curriculum at the Mekteb-i Sultani exposed him to the poetry of the pre-Islamic Jahiliyyah and Abbasid verses which he committed to memory, and the chronicles of the grammarians, the works of Imru’ al-Qays and the love lyrics and ghazals. Some texts they read in class, some they passed between their bunks on pages torn from books, or transcribed by the Iraqi boy Rafiq, who did the best calligraphy. Midhat’s child-love for Hala was blotted out by these older stories, which, saturated with time and retelling, described the kinds of madness wrought by a beautiful woman: a universal, faceless figure that devastated the viscera of men and inhabited their minds, a lawless revenant composed of verses, hypnotising the inner ear. There were no real girls at school, but on their nocturnal adventures Midhat and his friends would joke about meeting young women on the streets, although the most they ever saw was a skirt in a doorway. As they passed the waters of the Bosphorus clicking in the darkness, the boys shared stories in arch tones that implied expertise in the ways of their bod
ies and those of the other sex, always pretending there was more to tell, and they were withholding only for the sake of decency.
Hala endured as Midhat’s model of a female. She was the only girl he could picture who did not have the face of Teta, Layla, or a hazy something of his mother, which looked a bit like his aunt. Hala could not age: she was always ten years old. Her hair was always long and triangular over her shoulders, her knees were always muddy. Those poetical abstractions learned by candlelight could not be animated with Hala’s face and body, for she was unchangeable and unsexual. The ancient poems took force in Midhat’s mind as the engines of a vaguer longing, which lacked a face, ached for flesh but thrived on deprivation. The madness of the poet could never be brought off by a woman herself, she in possession of a living body: it was only ever her imprint in his soul, that ideal echo itself the true Beloved, compound of his mind and her being. Midhat knew this much of love before he left for France, and Teta had secured that knowledge: during the school holidays in Nablus he always asked for stories before bed, and Um Taher lay happily beside him unwrapping slivers of her history, her almost loves and secret encounters, her long breasts spilling down her sides. Teta took refuge in the past, repeating the same turns of phrase as she recited her prophecies about the man she fell in love with as a girl, a poor relation who left jasmine flowers on her balcony in the months before she was married off and became the wife of the wealthy merchant they knew as Abu Taher. Stories of longing were the only stories. To desire was as good as to possess.
But here in the Molineus’ house things seemed to be different, and Midhat was not equipped. He had not read the right books. Even French words felt thicker lately in his mouth, and like a heavy screen they separated him from what he wanted to say. Each day he was more the fool, the foreigner unable to control his own meanings, lost in the wild multiple of language. And Jeannette was no echo, no Beloved in any sense that he could map. It seemed to him that he desired her herself, not her imprint; he wanted to hear her voice again, to see her eyes again—but if she responded so badly to jealousy, how was he to express that desire? He did not enjoy longing for her, as Teta had seemed to enjoy longing. Even to remain in the house made him ache, because she was also in the house, in another room, choosing not to speak to him. At the same time, he resisted going out because then he might miss an opportunity to encounter her. So he waited, exhausted by a perpetual state of readiness, his stomach clenched as he grasped after eye contact at dinner, hoping to meet her by accident in the hall, distracted, ashamed, heavy with an explosive and unwieldy desire which only increased in strength the longer she ignored him.
Meanwhile, his old shocks of separateness were coming thick and fast. More than separation now, it was that purer loneliness he had felt on the ship to Marseille. During classes, walking to the Faculty, in bed at night, the outline of his body oppressed him as a hard shape. He felt no curiosity about the sensation, which was pure unalloyed pain. His awareness of his limbs was an agony, he wanted to get out of them, to be elsewhere; but he was locked inside his body, and relief from its pressure came only with sleep. And yet even sleep did not sustain him, for he rose already tired, and when he arrived home in the evenings he was too exhausted to change his clothes, and he wore the robe he had worn all day to the dinner table.
That morning Docteur Molineu had announced that Sylvain Leclair and the Nolins were coming to dine, and on returning from the Faculty Midhat chanced a rare sighting from his bedroom window: a flash of yellow silk blown into view by the wind. Afterwards he would wonder if that was deliberate, somehow, whether she knew he was watching for a signal and had made him wait before giving him one.
She did not turn around when he opened the glass door. He left a space between them on the terrace, and looked out at the darkening lawn. It was difficult to speak. At last, he managed: “I’m sorry.”
A silence followed.
“Well, that’s something.”
She said this with such an air of moral authority that he turned his entire body to glare at her in disbelief. Unperturbed, or perhaps unseeing, she offered him a cigarette without meeting his eye. He declined. She did not even register this gesture: she had seen her father through the glass door, and was opening it.
Dinner was a roasted fowl divided between eight—Docteur Molineu, Jeannette, Midhat, Patrice Nolin, Marie-Thérèse, Carole, Sylvain Leclair, and Georgine, who ate in the kitchen—swamped on the plate by beans seasoned with tarragon. Flour-thick gravy sat in jugs between the candelabras, and the steam through the kitchen door misted the spring-cool glass.
The faces lit up and went dark as they leaned in and out of the candlelight, which shot theatrical shadows up from Sylvain’s eyebrows over his spherical forehead. Docteur Molineu stumbled out a prayer, and the clinks and sounds of eating commenced, and murmurs of polite conversation.
“What truly is the difference,” Nolin broke out, “between a man making arms in a war factory under military control, and the man who dons a uniform and holds a gun?” He wiped his lips. “We are imagining these boundaries. Is it just the women and children who count as ‘civilians’? What am I, or you, Frédéric? Are we also incapable of our own defence?”
Docteur Molineu made a stretching gesture of consideration and Midhat perceived that Molineu admired Nolin and wished to impress him. In an instant, his understanding of his host was changed, and he saw him as a man who yearned. He thought of Molineu’s wife, and wondered whether he continued to suffer the way his daughter did.
Marie-Thérèse flickered a wine-stained tongue, and tittered. “Carole and I are volunteering at the Auguste Comte School. The mathematics exercises encourage the children to buy war loans.”
“My daughters have also both become marraines de guerre. Do you know what that means?” Nolin’s eyes narrowed pre-emptively, and he pursed his lips as if tasting the words before he released them.
Midhat shook his head.
“It means they are writing letters to soldiers. But they don’t know who they are writing to, they just pretend. It’s meant to give the soldiers comfort, a letter from their ‘godmother.’”
The three Frenchmen laughed.
“I think it is a very nice thought,” said Jeannette.
Nodding, Midhat tried and failed to catch her eye. Sylvain rumbled another laugh, and Jeannette turned so sharply that her hair shook around her head. A memory sprang to the surface: Jeannette distressed, talking to Sylvain, on the other side of a room. With it rose the echo of a powerful dislike, and an obscure imperative to protect her.
“But our view of war is practically picturesque,” Nolin said, ostensibly to Docteur Molineu, but loud enough for the entire table. “We continue with our cavalry charges, dashing, Napoléon, you know? These exotic escapades. I was there when Carl lost Sébastien, so I’m not being flippant. I only mean the glamour will fade.”
“Mm.”
“We were young, Frédéric, during the Prussian war. But my brother fought and I remember even as a child I knew it was a sore thing, a low thing, and this being the largest we have ever seen—it is not an escapade, at any rate.”
A sigh came from across the table. It was Jeannette.
Sylvain said: “We all know it is not an escapade, Patrice.”
How odd this was, thought Midhat. These three men too old to fight, dining with three young women left in a world of women and fathers and crippled absentees, and himself a rarity, not only as an Arab but as a young man. No one spoke for a few moments. Midhat made a decision that he would speak. His stomach flipped. He cleared his throat.
“I have been thinking, cher Docteur.”
All faces turned towards him.
“About what you once said to me regarding consistency.”
Molineu looked surprised, but also delighted. He put his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers.
“And I have been thinking,” said Midhat, “that there is always a cause of inconsistency, since nothing is without cause. I have
been studying Newton.” He laughed, anticipating smiles of condescension from the older men. But Nolin and Molineu merely continued to look expectant. “Docteur Molineu and I were discussing what it means to be consistent. Whether it is in our nature or—but I have come to understand it all as a puzzle of two,” he wobbled his upturned palms like scales, “that covers more than a few questions about human beings. It stayed in my mind, this conversation we had, and I have concluded that it has to do with causes. There is a lovely phrase by one of our philosophers in Islam, Ibn Rushd, who believed in a beginning and an end …” At once, his point about Ibn Rushd didn’t seem relevant. “I mean, if something appears to be without cause it is usually an aberration … with regard to the body, at the least. And even if there doesn’t appear to be a cause there is always a cause, only that cause might be obscured, and being obscured, we may deduce from its obscurity that almost certainly something is seriously wrong with the body internally, the apparently causeless aberration … say a rash, or great fatigue, or a strange pain … being therefore a symptom of something invisible. And similarly I think that if we look at the mind and character of man, aberrations in behaviour will always have a cause. That is if we could map mind onto body—but if we could, and if we looked at motives and experience and we still cannot find the cause of the inconsistency, it would tend to mean that there is something quite seriously wrong, something that is causing aberrant behaviour. Madness, for example.”
These were thoughts he had begun to play with on the days he walked alone to and from the Faculty, and they were not ready to be shared with others. Though he had not decided whether as a whole they held water, he liked to return to the various themes, and derived from them a private confidence in his own mind, as he had once derived confidence in his body through daydreaming. But as his words about the invisible left his mouth he suddenly saw their flaws, how they didn’t address other invisible causes. Crucial among the invisible being, of course, God.
The Parisian Page 10
