by Jane Johnson
“Kamal’s ‘friends’ are one of the reasons I urge you to go to Damascus. Bashar’s brother joined the hashshashin last year, got himself killed in Aleppo in some crazy assassination attempt. Bashar was talking about joining them and carrying on where his brother left off. I don’t want Kamal around him. He’s too impressionable. He needs a firm hand, or he’ll take a wrong turn. I fear for him, Zohra.”
“I do my best!” she cried defensively.
“I know you do, but he needs good men around him. The cousins in Damascus will take him under their wing, teach him the business, set him on the right path. And you will have help with Ummi, and can share the chores with the girls. And Ummi can receive proper medical care. Baba too, if he will only let someone help him.”
Zohra knew Malek had the best of intentions, but suddenly she could bear this no longer. “If you can’t persuade Baba to move to Damascus, I don’t know how I can, as a mere woman! And now I have a woman’s chores to see to, so please excuse me.” She stood up, dropped the unmended robe down on the clothes chest, dusted her hands down her skirts and gave him a firm look.
Malek sighed. “If you need me, I’ll be with Tariq and Rachid.” He looked down at his sleeping mother. “Goodbye, Ummi. May Allah grant you peace.” He kissed her forehead, then turned and left the room without looking back.
Zohra watched him go, seeing how his back was rigid with tension, and was assailed not only by guilt but also the overwhelming feeling that she would never see him again.
12
That afternoon, Nathanael lay with Zohra in his arms, dozing sweetly with the air from the open window drying their sweat.
She sighed. “I wish we could do this all the time.”
“You would kill me within a fortnight, little wildcat!”
A lazy smile. “More like a contented butcher’s cat. I wish … I wish there were just the two of us in a house of our own and all the time in the world to be together. And I would make it beautiful and always clean because it would be my pleasure and no chore. And I would cook for you—oh, what I would cook! Capons stuffed with almonds and coriander; lamb roasted with honey and garlic; tarts of goat’s cheese and onions cooked in sugar cane; bread studded with olives; parcels of saffron chicken; fruit poached with cinnamon and cloves—”
“And then when I was so fat I could no longer move, you would roast me whole and eat me up!”
“I would never want to eat you.” She turned and caught Nat’s eye, gleaming provocatively. “Well, there is eating and eating!”
“Wicked girl: I am your slave.” He had never felt like this before. Her amber glances pierced him like knives. Any absence of more than a day felt like a physical pain.
“Well then, lie still and let me eat you up, slave.” Zohra grabbed his hand and started to nibble at his fingers, and they fought and rolled like beasts in the tangle of fabrics until Nathanael managed to straddle her with a knee on each wrist to keep the marauding hands at bay.
His face became solemn. “I want you to promise me that if we are ever starving and likely to die that you will eat me.” And as Zohra began to protest, “No, I mean it.”
Zohra screwed up her face in disgust. “You are gruesome. I expect it’s what comes of being a doctor’s son and having to deal with death and bodies all the time.”
“I am a doctor myself. For a year in Jerusalem and a year back here, in case you’d forgotten,” he chided. “Anyway, they say that human flesh tastes no worse than pork.”
“And how would you know about that?”
“I have tried a little pork. I believe in trying everything once. How else are we to truly know the world?”
Zohra flung him off at last. “Ugh, to eat a pig! You are atrocious. Whatever made you bring up such a horrible subject anyway?”
He hesitated, not wanting to tell her of the unsettling dream he’d had. She would think him strange. It would cast a shadow. Instead, he tried for briskness. “Come now. Get up, lazy lump, and show me you have retained what I taught you the last time you were here—no, not that, little wanton!”
They were laughing so hard they never heard the first knock at the door. Then Nat put a hand over Zohra’s mouth. “Shh … shh. Stay. Be quiet.”
The knock came again. Crawling across the divan with the patchwork cover pulled over his loins, he peered through the jalousie, then drew back swiftly. “It’s a boy. He must be looking for my father. Maybe I should go down in case it’s something urgent.”
“If it’s urgent he’ll knock again.”
They waited, and through the wooden blind Nathanael saw him move away. He sat back on the divan, but the spell was broken now.
“Come on. Your letters. I am beginning to wonder whether you ever actually wanted me to teach you how to read and write, or if it was just some ploy to keep coming here for other reasons.”
Zohra chewed her lip as she dressed. “My father believes only boys need to be educated. Ummi took my side and even talked with the ma’alema to give me lessons, but she’s been too ill this past year to take an interest in anything so trivial.”
“There’s nothing trivial about education,” Nat said fervently. “It’s the only way anyone develops their own thoughts, becomes a real person, not just some reflection of their little world. And no woman will ever be independent without some learning, unless she’s as wealthy as the Queen of Sheba.”
“Well, I’m never going to be that.” Zohra unwrapped the little leather-bound book and set it on the table, then shook the inkpot and dipped a sharpened reed pen in it. After much deliberation, she formed a long row of markings upon a new piece of paper.
It had thrilled Nat to teach her the connection between the sound of a word spoken or chanted and the shape made to represent it with ink, to see what a revelation it had been to her. Although she had in the beginning found it difficult to memorize the Arabic characters, now her struggle was more in the form of the exercise, making them flow elegantly across the page without constantly having to lift the pen and chew the end and think hard. He was surprised by how profound a pleasure it gave him to be able to give her something so intangible, yet with such infinite value.
He watched her for several minutes as she concentrated, frowning slightly over her letters. The choice of exercise had been deliberate: to copy a love poem by Ibn Hazm, that great classical Arabic poet. But he rather suspected she had not taken in the import of the lovely words, being so caught up in the difficulty of the transcription.
Nat waited till she lifted the reed-pen then pulled the paper towards him. “You’ll never make a calligrapher: your hand is uncommonly poor, and your spelling, too! ‘I would cut open my …’ What on earth does that say?” He pointed to a formless squiggle.
“ ‘Heart.’ It’s quite clear to me.” Zohra threw the pen down, much put out. “You can read what it says, can’t you? Isn’t that all that matters?”
“What, are you only going to write little love notes to me all your life?” He tousled her hair.
Zohra smoothed it down again. “It’s not a little love note to you, it’s just a poem by some man in some other time that I’m copying as an exercise. I’m no scholar. I just want to be able to understand writing and to make myself understood.” She yawned and stretched. “I should go back. I’ve been longer than I should. It’s not fair on the twins.”
Nathanael felt a little affronted. Was she punishing him for his criticism? Did she realize she held such power? “You’re always complaining they don’t do their fair share. Still, I expect Abi will be back from the citadel soon, and if he catches you here you’ll never get away.” The equanimity with which his parents had accepted Zohra’s frequent presence had at first disturbed him. Were they being deliberately dense? He wondered at first, but then one day he had heard them talking quietly in the salon when they’d thought him upstairs.
“I’m thinking of Zohra. If her father finds out there will be hell to pay. And he’d be within his rights to denounce Nat to the judge.”
His mother’s voice.
“If the qadi comes we will talk to him. He will see we are decent people, not out to cause trouble. There are worse matches to be made. Look at the two of us.” There had been a smile in Yacub’s voice. Sara, Nat’s mother, had also been born to a Muslim family and given the name Zohra. When she converted she took the Jewish version of the name.
“You think everyone is as accepting as my family were?” she said. “It’s only because my mother and her sisters were romantics to the bone that I was not killed on the spot.” This was not the full truth. The family ran a farm. For Zohra to marry a doctor—Jew or no—was a huge step up the economic ladder, and they all knew it.
A pause. Then Yacub said, “The heart knows no bounds, my love. If we break them apart, they will only be in greater jeopardy, meeting one another in secret, in places of lesser safety. They do no one harm.”
“You say that now, but what if he gets her pregnant?”
“If he gets her pregnant, he’s a poor student of anatomy, my dear, and no son of mine!”
Nat, listening, had winced and coloured. So they knew the whole of it. And so did he. He knew full well that every day they met, every time they touched, he put Zohra in danger. A Muslim girl’s reputation was fiercely guarded by her family. Any hint of scandal and she would be unmarriageable in the eyes of her community. But he could not have stopped, not even if he’d wanted to. And he did not want to. The very idea turned him cold from the inside out.
Zohra laughed now. “Your father could talk the legs off a mule!”
“He’s always like this when Mother’s away visiting her sisters.” Sara’s sisters still lived on the family farm outside the city walls. “You’d think he didn’t pass a word with his patients all day long.”
“My father hardly talks to me at all. And Sorgan, he just sings to himself, and the twins are … well, they’re young. As for Malek, I don’t think he’ll ever speak to me again.”
Nat put a hand to her cheek. “I’m glad you didn’t go to Damascus, sweetheart. I think if you had, I would have died.”
Zohra stared at him, and at once he could see he’d overstepped the mark. In all their time together he had never made anything but light of the way they were with each other, and so she was able to make light of it too: a friendship, just a loving friendship, but not something that would drive you to despair or death—that was for the tellers of tales only, the men who sat in the marketplace and told stories of love-fraught emirs and beautiful, merciless maidens; of girls forced to marry ugly old men, girls who pined away for the love of a young carpenter.
Zohra looked uncomfortable, and when he leaned in to kiss her she laughed and ducked her head away. Nat felt wounded.
He watched her pick up the little volume and rub a thumb across the soft, worn leather. “Can I borrow the book?” she asked, surprising him.
“Of course. Keep it as a gift.”
When they parted company at the door to the alley he caught her by the arm, pulled her roughly back and kissed her full on the mouth. It was something he felt he had to do—somehow she seemed to have slipped away from him, and he needed to lay claim to her once more.
“Zohra!”
The cry caused them to spring apart. Out of the shadows on the other side of the alley stepped a young man. For a moment he looked like a total stranger, older than his years, unfamiliar in this context. Zohra recognized him with a shiver—of shame, and fear. “Aisa—what? What is it?” But suddenly she knew with a horrible certainty who had been knocking on the door earlier and why. “Ummi.” A statement, not a question.
“I was looking for the doctor, Yacub …” He was uncomfortable, would not meet her eye.
Nathanael took charge of the situation. “I’ll come with you.” He stepped back into the house and seconds later re-emerged with a large leather bag over his shoulder.
Aisa was bewildered. “We need the doctor, old Yacub—”
“I am the doctor,” Nat told him firmly.
They ran through the narrow streets of the medina, avoiding the impenetrable crowds in the bazaar by skirting the market on its shortest side, a route that took them past the leatherworkers, the furniture makers and the woodworkers’ stalls. They had just come within sight of their street when a bloodstained figure came running towards them.
Zohra turned and stared. “Kamal?”
He did not stop.
“Kamal!”
The volume of her own scream shocked her, but he did not even look back. Dread gripped her now. “Allah, Allah … what has happened?”
The door to the house was wide open. Inside, distantly, the desolate lowing of an animal in unbearable pain could be heard. And someone else was singing, a child’s song, sweet and melancholy. The two sounds merged into something nonsensical, something jarring and discordant.
Zohra ran up the stairs, shoes and all, towards her mother’s room. Just outside, in the corridor, Sorgan sat on the floor, rocking from side to side, his eyes closed, his arms around himself, singing. It was an unnerving sight to see a grown man so, but worse were the noises from up on the terrace. Her father, Baltasar, bellowing as if possessed. She was about to charge on up the stairs when she glimpsed through the half-open door her mother, arms outflung, on the divan.
She ran to the bedside. Nima’s face was turned towards her, mouth open, features contorted. Her eyes stared into space; her hands were claws. Zohra sank to her knees. “Oh, Ummi. Oh no, no …”
Just moments behind her, Nathanael crouched and pressed his fingers against Nima’s neck. Then he bent his head and placed an ear against her belly. At last he straightened up.
“She’s dead, Zohra. I’m so sorry.” With a practised hand, he closed the lids over the staring eyes.
Aisa, propped against the wall beside the door as if it were the only thing holding him upright, made a small, inarticulate sound.
“This is a hard thing to say, but I’m afraid she did not die naturally.”
Zohra looked up at Nat, uncomprehending.
“I’m sorry, my love, but someone hastened her end.” Nathanael picked up the yellow cushion from the floor, the one Zohra used to prop Nima up in order to ease the passage of food and water. He turned it over, frowned, held it out to her.
The yellow silk bore a damp stain the size and shape of a mouth.
13
The Syrian hills
Malek Najib was unaware of the drama unravelling at his family home as he rode out of Akka. All that he had come to do there he had failed at. He had been so determined, this time, not to rise to his father’s bait, not to lose control, to put the case—so clear to any right-thinking person—coolly and rationally. He had planned to introduce the subject of moving the family back to Damascus gradually over the course of his visit, to let the idea take root in his father’s stubborn mind, then to shore it up with unassailable argument and soothing reason. But he had reckoned without Baltasar’s savage, wounded pride and contempt for the man Malek held highest in his esteem, the Commander of the Faithful, Salah ad-Din.
He should, he knew, have allowed Baltasar to voice his criticisms without reaction, as the sultan himself would have done. Faced with the bitter fury of the broken veteran, Salah ad-Din would have listened to what the old man said with that grave smile on his thin, intelligent face, his eyes pinned on the speaker, as if weighing every word. And then he would have nodded, conceded the validity of Baltasar’s opinion and quoted some apposite verse from the holy Qur’an that turned the attack aside. He would have re-engaged the man the next day, patiently, before slipping in a quiet doubt here, a gentle cavil there, until at last—even if it took many days—Baltasar would have announced he was moving the family back to Damascus after all, and any man who told him not to he would call a fool.
Malek sighed deeply. The sultan had given him permission to make this visit, having urged his lieutenant to move his family back to the capital. He was not sure which was worse: that he had not succeeded in his mission, or t
hat he had to tell Salah ad-Din and see the disappointment—fleeting, well-masked but indubitably present—in the sultan’s eyes.
He was oblivious to the beauty of the day, to the artistry of the ancient city gates he passed through, to the soft ochre limestone of the city walls, to the bounty of the orchards through which he passed—the oranges and apricots glowing in their nests of luxuriant green leaves, the lemons shining like stars, the plums and figs swelling on the branch, the pomegranates just beginning to take on their blush—and, beyond, to the olives and dates growing by the river, to the swoop of swallows over the crops and the call of larks in the brilliant blue bowl of the sky. He took no pleasure in the smooth flow of his horse’s gait, the sheen on its chestnut coat, the intelligent carriage of its head, or in the smart figure he cut in his green tunic, embroidered with fine silver thread; the curved, damascened sword at his waist in its scabbard of figured leather; the supple riding boots that had cost him two weeks’ pay. All was as ash in his mouth.
He took the old road along the coast, skirting the marshland, then turned north and west towards the uplands. Tell el-Musalliyin, the Hill of Prayers, loomed on the skyline to his right; to his left, the sea stretched turquoise and sparkling, its waters plied by shipping on its way to dock in Akka’s spacious harbour, bearing trade goods from every corner of the world. Usually, this would have been enough to lighten his heart, the idea that the markets were full to bursting, that his pay bought his family all they needed. But riding out that morning, he could not help but feel misfortune was brewing. At the moment it was a storm far out at sea, but soon it would sweep inland, and there would be nothing he could do to avert it.
Perhaps this was why he tarried rather than take the fastest route, up through the Toron range, north-east back towards Salah ad-Din’s camp. The thought of the sultan’s displeasure, no matter how courteously masked, was too painful to contemplate; he thought he might take the longer route and consider the words he would use to explain away his failure.
