According to Molineu’s decree, the following morning Midhat, Jeannette, and Georgine met him in the hallway dressed in their linens; and equipped with parasols and a bag of pears, they set out for the train to Palavas-les-Flots, where they requisitioned an entire cabin and shut the door. Frédéric insisted that Midhat take the window to observe the view, and they sat as the engine began to moan. This time it was Midhat who could not look at Jeannette, who was opposite him. He spent the journey scrutinizing the contents of the window, the landscape he had not seen since his arrival as it materialised abruptly from behind him and receded slowly into the distance behind the body of the train, the olive groves rattling past and tapping at his memory, that sight of olive groves in France as well as in Palestine, as around them the ligaments of the train clattered and banged.
The news that morning notwithstanding—half a mile advanced at the price of sixteen thousand dead—the shore at Palavas was dense with bathers beneath an obscenely colourful sky. A concrete jetty elbowed far out from the coast and the water thrashed against its walls. Among the thistles bordering the beach, Georgine discovered an unmanned booth stacked with deck chairs, dark green, salt-stained; Midhat volunteered to climb over the counter and extract one for each of them. He and Frédéric carried them to a spot between a tent and a coloured hut. Midhat removed his shoes: between his toes the dune was ice-cool. He unfolded a chair, and pointed it out to sea.
Docteur Molineu was the only one who swam in the end. He tried his best to cajole Georgine but she refused, going redder and redder in the face until finally Jeannette admonished her father for being so insistent, and he let it go, and tore off into the water on his own.
The waves were still breathing in their ears when, speechless and sand-heavy, they took the train back to town. Through the windows the sky glowered purple, and on their way from the station they were forced to take shelter in the awning of a closed café as the clouds suddenly emptied their weight with great force on the city. They waited and watched the rain shiver down the awning. Jeannette paced from end to end. Out on the road the water was falling in dollops that splashed upwards, so copious they looked like bowls of silver. After a while she sighed and upturned a chair, arranging over the damp seat the canopy of a half-closed parasol. She perched, looking uncomfortable.
Molineu, who was peering out with his arms behind his back, said: “I think we should run. We can use the parasols as umbrellas.” He turned to look at them. “What do you think? Otherwise we really will be here for hours.”
“Run?” said Georgine. “But Docteur, my shoes …”
“Oh come on Georgine, it’ll be fun,” said Molineu. “You can have an old pair of Jeannette’s. All right, everyone ready? Get on your feet Jojo. Don’t be morose.”
They could not help laughing as their linens turned transparent, and at the parasols, which did not function as umbrellas at all but were completely useless against the downpour. Midhat tried not to look at Jeannette’s dress which, going grey, was sticking to her waist, revealing the socket of her navel. He increased his pace to catch up with Docteur Molineu and left the women shrieking behind. They reached the house out of breath and dispersed to change.
When Midhat came back downstairs, the door to the cream salon was open; he could see Jeannette inside, standing with her back to him. Courage flashed. He stepped in and, after bolting the door, turned and jumped to find her already right behind him. She laughed, then he laughed, and he took her body in his hands, and to the soft wet of her parted lips his heart reacted violently.
Grief excused intimacy, but was also real and demanded it. Even their spasms of guilt, felt on occasion over the next few days, could only be assuaged with further closeness. It was a miracle they kept it a secret. Their colour was always rising in company, they could not help smiling at each other across full rooms, and clasping fingers just out of sight, under the skirt of a tablecloth or behind backs as they filed through a doorway. And yet the most Docteur Molineu seemed to notice were the shadows and red fever spots that appeared beneath Midhat’s eyes.
“Nothing is worth losing sleep over,” he said, saluting Midhat and wishing him good luck before class. “Remember they are only exams. It will turn out fine in the end. And if the worst comes to the worst and you do need to repeat the year,” he opened his arms, “we will still be here. Provided we are not bombed, of course. All right, off you go.”
All day long Midhat’s insomniac brain vaulted between euphoria and fear, and Docteur Molineu’s sympathetic speeches only doubled the terror of confronting him. He would postpone the proposal to Jeannette, at least until the end of the academic year, and yet the prospect remained an agony even at that distance. The rules of guest and host were so ingrained, he knew the shame of trespass in his bones. From this again he sought refuge in Jeannette’s lips and whispers, and her head resting softly on his shoulder.
It was also during this period that he discovered a side of the Molineu house that was entirely new to him. For the first time he understood just how limited his experience of the building had been, confined, as a guest, to his bedroom and the ground floor, and that single glimpse he once stole of Docteur Molineu’s study. The house was far larger than he had imagined and most rooms were, like the cream salon, closed off with sheets thrown over the furniture, turning them into secret white ranges, labyrinths of approximating silhouettes that evoked a past with imprecision, more pungent, somehow, for how they forced the imagination to carve and colour and populate. Midhat’s soared off, conjuring ghosts of inhabited rooms, always projecting this imagined past onto an imagined future. In the corners, dust collected in spirals. When Georgine creaked along the corridors the pair of lovers hid beneath the dusty sheets, biting their fingers and stifling their breath under the tinkle of Georgine’s quarter bar of soap dipping into the bucket.
Only with hands and lips did he and Jeannette touch, and their restraint became an exquisite torment. Fingers on palms, fingers on faces. They deliberately avoided their bedrooms: at most one would teeter on the threshold while the other retrieved something, but even that felt dangerously close. Sometimes in a frenzy Midhat did pull her to him, and bruised her lips so that the skin around her mouth turned pink, and seeing the mark he had made he would pull her to him again, and she responded easily. But mostly they delighted in the agony of resisted desire, which being resisted was sustained, and in this mutual abnegation they colluded like thieves.
Further along the upstairs corridor, beyond Georgine’s door and a dim bathroom full of brass, a narrow set of stairs led to an entire third floor. Midhat was amazed. The windows up there were so small they did not from the outside even suggest a space tall enough to stand up in. Yet two unused rooms of full height held a miscellany of objects, and a third was a slope-roofed attic of boxes and abandoned furniture, much of it rickety and broken, and a little alcove with a velvet chair where Jeannette spent her time searching, “among my mother’s things,” she said, pointing at a glass-fronted cabinet through whose windows, smoky with dust, loomed shelves of trinkets, porcelain ornaments, printed books, a candlestick with a bare stub of old wax, and something made of lace bundled in the corner.
It was a morning love. They were forced to leave the house before noon, he to go to the Faculty, she to the convent or to stand in line for the bread ration. And so it was a love with morning’s freshness, and they never saw the shadows of evening seep through those unclean windows. Midhat often woke before dawn, and in that hour before the sun rose caught Jeannette in the corridor, and they whispered in the dark unselfconscious with sleep. Then the day began in earnest, and with a thumping heart Midhat staggered until evening on a precipice of exhaustion.
Aside from confronting Docteur Molineu, the other terror, of course, was his own father. That reckoning too must be postponed, at least until after he had spoken to Molineu, perhaps even until the end of the war. He fantasised about spurning his inheritance and striking out on his own. Each of these thoughts rippled with
fear. At least Teta would love Jeannette, he could be certain of that. In the afternoons over his textbooks he pushed a finger into his soft cheek and felt his teeth between his eye socket and jaw. All of it must be postponed, all of it: June was upon them now, the holiday was in sight, and regardless of whatever Docteur Molineu said about staying on longer the examinations required serious work if he were to pass into the second year.
A physics practice paper he completed in the library one afternoon was returned the next day with a 45 scrawled on the first page. The pass grade was 70. He entered the lecture theatre in a trance, and sitting at the back heard the lesson only intermittently, as though the lecturer’s voice were carried to him on a fitful wind. When he emerged an hour later he felt someone tap him on the arm. It was Samuel Cogolati.
“Hello, Midhat.” He smiled, grimly. “I just want to say how sorry I am. I am very, very sorry. Unexpected but, I mean, these things …”
Midhat looked down at the 45 on his physics paper. “How on earth did you know?”
“Pardon?”
“I only received it this morning,” said Midhat. “Oh,” he caught himself, “you are talking about Laurent. Oh yes! It is really terrible. We are in despair. Thank you, Samuel. I, I really appreciate it.”
“But there’s another thing, wait. Would you consider, I was wondering, would you like to study together?”
“Study together?”
“I enjoyed our time in the library when we were researching psychiatry. And I was impressed by your interest, your curiosity in these different areas of medical science. I think that you and I, we could make revision for the examinations rather pleasurable.”
Cogolati’s large nostrils spread open with his smile. Midhat hesitated. Then, he held out his hand, and as he shook Cogolati’s the thought warmed up in his brain that this man had been sent to save him, and Cogolati began to chortle at this eagerness, now shaking his entire arm, saying I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased.
The following day at eleven o’clock, armed with several sets of example papers, textbooks, and element tables they had drawn up themselves, the pair met in a recess behind the cathedral.
“Let’s start with botany, shall we?” said Cogolati.
That corner, in the shade of the cypress trees, became the place where they sat every day from eleven until two as June turned into July, and the summer heat struck the ashy stone of the anatomical theatre, bleaching their eyes so that when they turned away they discovered green and purple oblongs floating across the pages of their books. From the first it was apparent that, after a year of diligent study, any further revision of the material was for Cogolati merely a pleasant supplement. This caused Midhat even more anxiety, which he tried to disguise under his enthusiasm, asking questions and tutting at the responses as if to say, oh of course, yes I knew that. If Cogolati ever felt irritated by this he hid it well, for he only giggled and tipped his head back as Midhat asked, for the third time: “And catalysis? Remind me what that was again? Oh yes, oh yes, of course.”
They sat the examinations in the first week of July. Two hundred seats were arranged in the hall with metre-wide gaps between, and a dead space at the back where the examiners marched and congregated. Zoology and botany came first. Midhat thought both the written and the oral tests went well: there were questions on photosynthesis and the agents of seed dispersal, which he and Cogolati had studied thoroughly, and a section on vertebrates and invertebrates; in the zoology oral Midhat confidently identified the gill raker, the spiracle, proboscis, cilium, and tentacle, and outlined the history of a frog before a panel of two professors; in botany he sketched the life of an alga, a fungus, and a liverwort; he listed the characteristics of a gymnosperm, a monocotyledon, a dicotyledon; he defined respiration and triumphantly discussed the life of the deciduous.
Physics was also relatively straightforward. The key to it, Cogolati had explained, was to memorise the formulae and then recognise from the question which of them was needed. After that it was a simple matter of substituting numbers. “This is the problem with rudimentary science assessment,” said Cogolati. But if he wanted Midhat’s collusion in his disdain, he was met only with the astonished face of a man who felt he had just been saved. “Thank you,” said Midhat. “Thank you.”
The real trouble came with chemistry. It was not that Midhat didn’t know the material; he had spent the three days’ interval between the physics written test and the chemistry one beside Cogolati in the library, completing practice papers and discussing their answers, and on the day of the examination he entered the hall feeling prepared. The problem was rather that, looking down at his paper in the cool plaster-walled chamber, with the sound of two hundred pens scratching, and the hollow clop of the examiners’ strides between the desks, he was distracted. He read and reread each question without haste; he worked on one answer and then another, abandoning calculations mid-tally.
Today, on the day of the chemistry written test and the final day of the academic term, Sylvain Leclair was due to dine at the Molineus’. Since Laurent’s death, Midhat’s romance with Jeannette had been flowering of its own accord, and his theories about Ariane Molineu and the cause of her suicide had moved to the periphery. But though he had not consciously dwelled on them, something had continued to develop down below, and now unsettling ideas of abuse were floating up, along with strange remembered images: Sylvain sneering across a table, Jeannette leaving a room in distress.
He looked up from the exam paper and saw a young woman ahead of him in the adjacent column of desks. She was agitated: rattling her pen on the desk, twitching the heel of one foot over the other ankle. The young man at the next desk swivelled around.
“Shh!”
She started, and the pen made a final dying movement between her fingers.
“One hour remains,” said the examiner. His chalk squeaked on the board: “ENCORE UNE HEURE.”
It was then that Midhat finally jumped into action and looked down at the paper, on which only one question had been completed. He had made a start with number 5: he turned to it again.
5. (a) Calculate the weight of sulphur in 50 g. of Cr2(SO4)3. Find the result to three significant figures. (Atomic weights Cr 52, S 32, O 16.)
When the hour was up he had answered half of the questions, and at the call, “Put your pens down now!” he rose from his chair dizzy with concentration. They were released alphabetically. Midhat found Cogolati outside, standing on the steps in exaggerated contrapposto.
“How was it for you?” he asked, as they fell in line.
“Fine, I think.”
Across the courtyard, the cypresses shushed and waved.
“Would you like to take a coffee?”
“Thank you,” said Midhat, “but you know, I’m quite exhausted. I think I should go home.”
This was their goodbye then, because Cogolati was leaving for Geneva in the morning. Midhat thanked him, and Cogolati grinned awkwardly. They embraced and parted at the gate.
Summer was in full flare. All around him trees expressed tiny pink flowers, clouding the streets with blossom. Everything was calm. He walked back to the house in slow motion, set free from the regime of academic time, the blocking of days into hours and half hours. He reached the house and climbed the stairs: the door to Docteur Molineu’s study was ajar. In the slit he saw, on the floor by the bay window, the back of Jeannette’s head. He knocked.
“Come in.”
Beside her on the floor were a stack of albums and a small pile of photographs. The first photograph showed a woman wearing a lace collar and a flower in her hair.
“How did it go? Come, kiss me.”
“It was fine. I am tired, my brain is tired. Keep reading, don’t let me disturb you.”
The last time Midhat had entered Docteur Molineu’s study was in that furtive search for inkwells. It was not a room they chose on their secret mornings; it was implicitly out of bounds. And yet standing now in the centre, the woman he loved reading befor
e him, he experienced a new sense of entitlement. The desk was covered in a mess of papers and a few stacked books with bookmarks flopping out like tongues. Resisting the impulse to sit in the chair, he indulged a momentary vision of the future, in a room just like this one. He closed the image, and moved to join Jeannette on the floor.
It appeared in his mind before he realised he had read it. His own name. He reversed his steps.
Near the edge of the desk was an open notebook. The page was titled in large letters: “Notes Préliminaires—Midhat Kamal.” Underneath the title were a variety of illegible markings in green ink, sometimes at angles up the margins. Midhat picked up the notebook. At the bottom of the page he made out two inscriptions: “Naplouse—deux montagnes, Ebal et Gerizim,” said one, and the other, “Les Samaritains—la magie? L’Araméen & l’Arabe & l’Hébreu.” He turned the page. “Proverbes” was the next title. Three were listed: all of them proverbs Midhat had heard as a child in Nablus and had translated for Docteur Molineu in a conversation last winter by the fire, here transliterated. “Newspaper talk” said one; “Kalam jarayed—something that is hard to believe.” Another: “Kalamo waqif—his speech is standing—i.e. aggressive”; “the words of the night are coated in butter—will melt in the sun—promises not kept.” At the bottom of the page was written: “La langue peut affecter le cerveau? La traduction pure est impossible.”
“What is this?” said Midhat.
“What is what?”
“Your father …”
“My father what?”
“He has been writing about me.”
Jeannette got to her feet. “What do you mean, writing about you?”
He turned back to the desk. Among the volumes there were two translated copies of the Quran. He passed the notebook with his name in it to Jeannette and picked up the first Quran, an old French edition bound in brown leather with a ridged gilt spine, entitled: “L’Alcoran de Mahomet Tom 1.” The second was a more recent translation in English.
The Parisian Page 14
