archaeological chairperson two floors up. Flags waved from every cornice as though Allenby had done nothing, and while the diplomats pretended to be secular there was always an overlap with the general fanatics, who ran the gamut from saviours of their own souls to saviours of others’, to those merely avaricious for anything ancient or well esteemed. In a word, there was no such thing as being disinterested. Even among those apparently present sola fide one struggled to extricate the throb of the mystical in their breasts from the national impulse, which was something that seemed to live in the bones these days. The blood rose in their faces at a newly discovered scroll, any mention of Byzantine legend or Mesopotamia, and amulets by the dozen were quarried daily, and inscriptions scrutinised at desks in offices overlooking the spice market, and though these types called themselves scientists and attached badges to their lapels, it was becoming hard to distinguish between a tourist and an academic when everyone had that same wild look in the eye.
But Antoine had persevered in his private rigour, with his monograph on the Bedouin communities. And now, his work on Nablus. With a zeal that belied his ivory beard his mentor Père Lavigne continued to stress the importance of ethnographic practice, even before one could perceive how it would illuminate faith. He laced his praise with reminders from across his paper-strewn desk: “Be precise, Antoine, while all around are vague. Never impute to the object of study what is not already there.”
Antoine wondered whether scholars were always fanatics in some sense. Only, Jerusalem possessed a kind of chemical power to bring out what might otherwise lie dormant. The other day he saw a Swedish woman, generally known to be living on an academic fellowship from the Theological Society, actually howling in the wake of a cross reenactment, which comprised an Arab with a long nose dragging the burden of timber and trailing his feet like a marionette’s down the Via Dolorosa. To be sure, even he sometimes felt it, a rustle of the desert baptism; and as the wind nudged the prongs of his beard, while he sat there by the oldest tree in Palestine before the valley of Nablus, he noted down in his long book how the appeal of the metaphysical had an amazing ability to reach all the way from the Judaean hills to the stacks of one’s quiet library, where one could almost hear the British Zionists hurrying on the storm of progress with a thrill in their voices.
A massive cloud shadow, jagged like the shape of a continent, passed over the town and bent against the inclines of the mountains. Antoine could just about see the municipal hospital: a tiny oblong where the base of Ebal cradled an olive grove. He could not see the residence of the French sisters, however. Hidden, probably, behind one of those overgrown palaces.
As he packed his things and walked down to the bus station, he thought of what Louise had said about leaving the hospital. It was odd that the Nabulsis should miss the Turks so much as to continue worrying about espionage on their behalf. Had not the Turks been their tormentors, when all was said and done? A fellah passed him on the road, leading a packed mule up the mountain.
Perhaps men had an ability to forget the strictures of past law. The past appeared eternal: what had happened was inviolable; one did not keep forever the contingencies; what did not happen was forgotten. But in the present moment, one was made more aware of what would be possible if only; the bonds of present law held one by the wrists, and caused one to recall looseness where there was now firmness. Which meant it was natural that as the British soldiers paraded before the old prison houses, the Nabulsis would remember the amity of the Ottoman officers, and the marriages to their daughters, as it struck them that these British fathers would never bring a daughter to marry an Arab.
He found the first bus to Jerusalem and paid his fare. The sun was setting as they approached Damascus Gate.
10
That night, the snows began. In the morning, the sky smothered Nablus in a thick white smoke, which settled into thigh-high banks and silenced all the houses. No birds sang. Within days damp invaded stored grain and rotted the vegetables. Neighbours wrapped their legs in sackcloth to plough to one another’s front doors, and