The Parisian

by Isabella Hammad

  “I am quite well, thank you.” Haj Taher bowed and showed the tassel on his tarbush. “I have travelled from Cairo for the trade, and I will be leaving soon for Damascus.”

  “Excellent. It’s extremely hot, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is very hot.”

  “So. What can I help you with?” Hubbard rested his lips on steepled fingers.

  “I have a question.”

  “Fire away.”

  Uncertain what this phrase meant, Taher paused for an additional cue. When Hubbard said nothing, he continued.

  “Do you speak French?”

  “Yes, I speak French. Some anyway, not a great deal.”

  “Would you please read this for me?”

  He reached into his pocket, and standing up from his chair handed Hubbard the lilac envelope.

  “Of course.”

  Hubbard pulled out a folded pair of wire spectacles from his pocket, swung them open, and peered down through the lenses.

  “Monsieur—Mister—Midhat Kamal, Kamal Family Home, Nablus, Palestine.”

  He looked up at Taher, then turned the envelope over, pulled out the letter, and cleared his throat.

  “Dear Midhat.”

  It has been now four years since you left us in Montpellier. Four years!—I cannot believe it even while I write it. I find myself thinking about you often. Thank you for your letter. To tell you the truth it causes me a certain distress to discover that you have been in Paris—the thought that we might have communicated before now. You may also wonder why I have not tried to write to you—the truth is that for a long time I was angry and in pain. And I suppose that above all else I was muddled.

  “Embarrassed or confused, actually. Sort of jumbled up that means.”

  I am afraid this might not reach you before you leave, so I am sending it to Nablus—which means that you are reading this at home. I hope the journey was safe and enjoyable.

  Oh—I wanted to write to you for so long—and now that I am here at last with a pen I don’t know what to write—All the things I had thought to say are suddenly difficult to

  “Exprimer, to express.”

  When you left, the warmth of the house followed after you. I think we had not noticed how much your presence was a source of delight and joy. I wish I had behaved differently—if we could recover ground that has already been lost. But you are right, it is nonsensical to try. I wish only that what has happened is not definitive.

  I have the impression that I am writing into a void—it is strange not to know how you will feel when you read this. I wish I could see your face. Oh, Midhat. Sometimes I think I feel you in my breathing. This is difficult to bear.

  The long years of this war have been a weight on all of us, and now they are over I want to ask you one last thing: will you come back? I know you have just arrived so I wouldn’t expect you immediately, and I don’t want to beg, I want only to tell you how much I am longing

  “Stop!”

  Haj Taher’s face was red.

  “It appears to be a love letter,” said Hubbard, putting it down and raising his glasses to his head. “Who is Midhat?”

  Taher did not answer. He inhaled, bowed, and said decorously as he rose and reached out for the letter, “Thank you, Mister Hubbard,” and, turning, mumbled: “A great kindness.”

  Hubbard half stood from his own chair, and bade Haj Taher goodbye.

  “Salaam.” Hubbard pronounced the word to rhyme with “alarm.”

  “Salam,” said Haj Taher. “Allah yabarak fik.”

  In Cairo, Layla’s chauffeur was driving Midhat to the Bab al-Hadid station. From the car window Midhat watched the locals and foreigners walking separately, the clatter and babble of the traffic dulled by the heat.

  “One ticket to Jerusalem, please,” he said to the ticket attendant in the booth.

  “No Jerusalem train today.”

  “What?”

  “Delayed. The tracks are being fixed.”

  “Damn. When is the next one?”

  “It is the same train, it is delayed,” said the attendant. “It is leaving in the morning, at six o’clock Frankish time. A ticket is seven piastres.”

  Midhat sighed, and counted out the money.

  “Ya mu‘allim,” he called to the chauffeur. “Take my bag, and meet me in the morning here at half past five. The morning, not the afternoon. Mashi?”

  “Yes, ya haj.”

  “Haj!” repeated Midhat, sardonically. “Ya‘tik al-afieh.” He handed the driver a piastre and turned back to the ticket attendant. “Are there any good restaurants nearby for lunch? Ishi baseet, ya‘ni, not too heavy.”

  The attendant leaned forward at his desk and looked Midhat up and down. Then he disappeared from the booth and reappeared from around a corner in the foyer. He beckoned Midhat, shielded his eyes against the sun, and directed him to the Ezbekiya Garden, which was surrounded by restaurants and hotels where efendi will surely find something to his satisfaction. Then he waited for his tip. In the sunlight, Midhat saw that a thin layer of dust covered the blue uniform and grouted the crevices of the outstretched hand.

  The path through the garden channelled the wind. Midhat dawdled in the shade of the beefwoods and gum trees, inhaled the breath of flowers beside the banyan trunks trailing hair with hollows like open mouths; he passed the spindly rubber trees and the royal palms, and reaching out across the pathway, the weird dangling fruits of an African sausage tree beside their big, crude red petals. The thicket opened onto a lawn where a band was assembling. The musicians wore galabiyas but their stringed instruments looked imported, and the sound they produced was definitely not Egyptian; nonetheless on the grass before them a trio of bare-bellied ghawazi women in billowing trousers began to swing their pelvises and beckon passersby as if to a native melody. Next he passed an empty Japanese pagoda, then a gabled building with a timber and mortar facade that resembled a chalet but whose signpost indicated the YMCA “Soldiers’ Recreation Club.” European couples in broad hats and white trousers danced on a terrace. The sun fell between the trees and Midhat’s despondence lifted as the long hours of the night ahead began to appear rich with possibility. What had been lost by the delayed train was far outweighed by the gains of an evening suddenly unaccounted for.

  For the past week he had walked every day over the decks of the Caucase, the engine pulsing under his feet, bitter air curling off the spume and pricking his cheeks with salt. Each turn roused a memory of his fearful self on the outbound trip, nineteen years old, with a shaky grasp of European manners, and sore with isolation. From his new vantage of self-possession and social grace, he could look back at that young man and laugh. But the pleasure of these thoughts was only a brief respite from the real anxiety of returning to Palestine.

  Although his old fantasies of becoming French had expired, he still clung to a particular idea of cosmopolitan life. These circular walks, therefore, from the stern around the hurricane deck to the prow and back, or below deck between the velvet salon and the galleried halls, were not only a time to congratulate himself on his recent maturity; they were also a time to prepare for what lay ahead. A new era of prudence was upon him, and there would be no more retiring at daybreak from nights abroad, no more brandy to numb doubt, no more eight o’clock uncertainty over where or what he would be in a few hours’ time. Gossip travelled fast in Nablus. Recklessness brought shame on families. But perhaps he might negotiate with his father over his future and go to Jerusalem, or to one of those port towns already loosened by pilgrim routes, perhaps, indeed, to Cairo; or perhaps they could even work out a way for him to return to France. He might expand the business in a westerly direction, and travel there for French fabrics.

  There were things to look forward to in Nablus: his cousins, his grandmother, the family at the diwan. But there would also be boredom, and deference to views not his own. The hours on the ship were therefore a time to meditate on the notion of duty, and on his place in that constellation of purpose and traditi
on which had for the last five years in France been suspended, when with a freedom born of strangeness he had bypassed the laws of family and dallied in the alleyways of chance and rapture.

  Beside him, always, lingered the shadow of Jeannette. There had been no reply to his letter, and he told himself not to expect one. The act of writing had settled his yearning for the interim, and so it was his father and Nablus, the Bride of the North, that occupied him as he stepped onto the Alexandrian shore. And again his father, as he climbed into the back of the caleche outside the station. And again his father, as on the dust road the great pyramids emerged with their colossal geometry to shadow the desert horizon.

  Yet by some strange arrangement of Providence he had been favoured. For here he was, the train delayed, Nablus delayed. Here, alone in Cairo, granted one last night of freedom.

  He arrived at a lake fringed with white lights, and circling it passed through a gate back onto the crowded street. Ahead a sign announced the Grand Continental, and beside it a stream of café awnings shaded a cross-legged clientele. He walked a little further to the place with a French name: Le Grand Café Egyptien.

  Inside, his eyes took a moment to adjust. A room lit with oil lamps, and crammed with circular tables, around which the patrons sat facing a stage. He chose an empty table near the front.

  “Steak-frites. Et un verre du vin, s’il vous plaît.”

  The waiter frowned and conferred with a colleague. The oil lamps dimmed and a woman walked downstage. Her eyes were lined with black, and her hairpiece and bodice were draped with coins that twisted on their strings and glinted. The flesh of her midriff hung out from under her bodice; she churned it around her hips. A line of men at the back of the stage began clapping castanets; the woman revolved a veil with her raised arms and a new line of attendant dancers appeared. They twirled and arched their backs behind her, and just as the musicians exchanged their castanets for other instruments—a qanun, a tambourine, a violin, a darabuka—the woman opened her mouth and began to sing.

  Her voice had a hard vibrato; at times she sang a single note and the oscillations were so pronounced she seemed to dance between them. Her chin turned, a secret half smile. Midhat glanced around the room. Some of the audience were certainly European—the blonds were probably Englishmen, others could be Greek or perhaps Italian, some were obviously Levantines, and a great many were aristocratic Egyptians, wearing elaborate clothes. The dancer teased them, stroking the air. Midhat watched her catching the eyes of particular men, inspiring expressions of envy from the other men at their tables, or claps on the back, hollers, and whistles. Midhat craved to be one of those chosen. He kept very still and stared as the dancer turned away from the audience and displayed two beautiful dimples in the flesh of her lower back. And then she turned again, and at last she looked directly at Midhat. He felt, immediately, the rush of glee and arousal he knew was intended.

  By the time he had finished his fourth glass of wine, a table of young Egyptian men invited him to join them. They asked him where he came from and his reply, “Paris,” sent a laugh around the circle. After that, there was little time for conversation. Midhat found himself on his feet with one of the girls from the stage while the men behind him cheered. The girl smelled of jasmine flowers and red wine. Her long black plait was smooth to the touch.

  In the morning, alone in the train carriage, he wrapped his scarf around his eyes and drifted in and out of sleep. A good outcome from a conversation with his father, he thought, would be a position at the Kamal store in Cairo. In Cairo one could be almost as anonymous as in Paris. The line with Europe was thin.

  Just after noon the train arrived at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, where he hailed a taxi and drove north. Valleys of white rock, the wooded plains of Ayn al-Haramiya, stone terraces spilling fields of wheat down mountainsides crowded with harvesters. The sight of the hills had a peculiar effect on him, and he stared out of the car window at the deep shadows they cast in an unexpected state of high emotion. Nablus came into view, banked by olive groves. White houses, round terraces, the onion globes of minarets. The car slowed up the mountain road. Midhat paid the driver, and stepping out of the back, inhaled wild sage.

  “Habib alby!”

  “Teta! Teta, my God you’ve shrunk.”

  “And you have grown. You are so pale, are you ill? Yalla teta, come inside.”

  “Is my father here?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Indoors, he smelled onion and sumac, and beyond that a specific odour like cold plaster and mould, which plucked at a part of his memory grown numb with inattention. A whole section of his brain stirred to life. The shape of the kitchen windows, the one cracked pane, that silver dish, he had not remembered it before but recognised it now. Layla’s short Damascene tables, even they were full of something he could not formulate, and all the latticed light from the strong morning falling on the embroidery. The objects erupted with pastness.

  A fire was going in the brazier. His eye fell on a familiar calligraphic panel opposite the window, and as he approached the divan he wondered about a welcome party, whether Um Jamil and Jamil from downstairs or a couple of the other neighbours. But there was no sign or sound of anyone. Then from around a corner stepped the upright form of his father, dressed in a suit and tarbush.

  “Father.”

  “Welcome home.”

  Midhat reached out to embrace him, and at first Haj Taher did not respond. But as his arms were falling Taher made a small sign, as though against his will, and with a slight incline of his head and a long blink he granted permission. The embrace was brief and stiff.

  “Hamdillah as-salameh. I hope the journey was fine. Now, I must talk to you about something.”

  “Of course.”

  “Sit down here. Good. Now. We have to discuss some things, we have to make some decisions as soon as possible.” He paused, assessing Midhat. His fingers were interlaced and one thumb was kneading the back of the other hand, wrinkling up the skin around his forefinger. “First of all, I understand that a young man has a certain amount of freedom. Should have a certain amount of freedom. This is, ya‘ni, this is normal. Nonetheless, my understanding has always been, Midhat, that you would spend these years in Europe while the Turks were at war, obtain a European education. And after that, my understanding has always been that you would return home to our region as a well-educated and experienced man, ready to continue on the same path as your forebears and your peers. A path of honour, fhimet? Honour and … stability.”

  Haj Taher was using an elevated mixture of classical language and dialect that was quite strange to Midhat’s ears. He longed for a glass of water. His father continued.

  “Il-mohim, you will not be returning to France. If you attempt to go back there, you will be cut off. No money, no support, nothing. You understand? I will not tolerate any shameful behaviour.”

  Midhat sat in a shocked silence. Then he said: “Baba.”

  “You appear to have rented out the upper floor of your brain.”

  “What have I done?”

  “I only hope, I only hope that you have learned at least something about being an adult during these five years abroad. Which I have entirely paid for.”

  “Yes. I mean, I hope so.” His voice dropped. “None is perfect but God alone, from whom we ask forgiveness and aid.”

  “Praise be to God. And, now that you are a grown man, we must make arrangements for your future. Of course ordinarily I would suggest taking at least a few years to gain some experience in your profession, before we make further plans. But I feel that in your case these decisions must be made earlier. You have had all this experience, we cannot keep you … uncertain. First, it is my duty to acknowledge that having now trained as a doctor in France, you should be free to practise medicine here, if you wish. However, since you are my only grown-up son, I also present to you the option of learning my trade. With a view to taking over the family business when I am dead, or at least infirm.”

&
nbsp; Midhat waited. The silence persisted, and he realised that his father was expecting an immediate decision.

  “I …” He stopped. He did not know what to say. At most, he had been prepared for some new constraints over what he could and could not do in his leisure time; he was not expecting such an absolute confrontation with his future. He had always imagined his father’s business might be his eventually. But this was happening much faster than he had anticipated. The facts of his future career were commandeering their very reunion, which his father barely seemed to have registered. The additional notion that he might actually practise as a doctor began to cause Midhat some pain, and he broke out:

  “But why can’t I go back to France?”

  Haj Taher’s ears reared. “If you go back to France,” he said slowly, “you will lose your inheritance.”

  “But what about—what about—Cairo?”

  “Midhat, this is not a time to play.”

  “I’m not asking to play!”

  “You are a man, and I am offering you a choice. Would you like to practise as a doctor, or would you like to learn the family trade.”

  Midhat looked away. “I don’t understand.”

  “Answer me. You have had your education.”

  “I—I would like to learn the family trade.”

  “Good. We will begin that immediately then. I will send you down to work with Hisham after the weekend. And then after a year you will come to Cairo and learn how to keep the books, and deal with the customers on Bulaq Street. But we’ll talk about that later. Now, as I said, we are hurrying things along in your case, since you clearly have strong energies that need diverting. Unfortunately I must continue on to Damascus tomorrow. And then I will return to Cairo, where I will stay for at least three months, probably. Otherwise, of course, I would have taken the matter in hand myself. But given these circumstances, I am leaving your grandmother in charge of selecting a wife.”

  “A wife?”

  “Yes Midhat, a wife.” Taher sucked his teeth. “My heart goes out for my son like fire, and my son’s heart goes out for me like stone. That is my fortune.”