him at the store. Hisham had placed a chair in the entrance. It was the time of afternoon prayer and the muezzin’s voice sounded down the quiet khan. Midhat sat on the chair and two cross-stitched panels swung around his ears as Teta walked off. The pain in his temple was softer now, and had a rhythm. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, rested his fingers on his eyes.
Part of him did not object to the idea of a love charm. In fact, part of him was receptive to the idea. Yes, he had been educated in the sciences and rational argument, but superstition was a survival of childhood that was hard to erase. And when he thought of the supposed magic of the Samaritans, even now he felt a whisper of that old awe, standing on the dark threshold of knowledge. Superstition was not just for children and old ladies. Beliefs ran deep, and apparent sceptics were often secret zealots, murmuring in the high priest’s office the names of fathers and mothers, unfolding palms to be tickled by a deciphering thumb, whispering astrological verdicts on the way home so they would not by forgetting lose what they had paid for. As a child he had heard rumours of dead birds encased in the plaster above doorways. As an adult, he retained some of the mystical sense laid down in infancy, that fearful curiosity, so that his heart still turned a little at a mention of the infamous book and its occult runes, even though he had since understood it was simply a set of religious texts written in their language. His thoughts dropped to the discoloured pages on the floor of the synagogue, and to the French Father Antoine and his beard.
When he opened his eyes, Hisham’s thin figure was visible from the direction of the Nasr mosque.
“You can go for the day,” he said, as he approached. “Khalas. There’s no one here.”
As Midhat climbed the mountain home he decided he had become too suggestible in his fatigue. He should not have let Teta take him all the way to the synagogue. Jeannette stepped into his thoughts: he could not imagine what she might say about all this. Or rather, he could—but he didn’t want to.
They ate the kusa mahshi Um Mahmoud had prepared in silence. His mind relaxed, and forgetting the battle with his grandmother he remarked:
“Teta, you have to eat more. Have another kusaya.”
Um Taher waited several moments before replying: “I am not hungry.”
As though it were a normal evening, they repaired to the salon after dinner. Um Taher stitched, and Midhat tried to put his thoughts in order while pretending to read a novel. Um Mahmoud made a racket over the next day’s breakfast in the kitchen and ducked her head in to wave goodnight.
The more his thoughts progressed, the more his headache, uncannily, receded. The pain lessened, and moved lower and lower in his skull until it seemed to disperse around his collarbone. If in the end he would have to marry someone, what held him back from saying yes to Teta, and conspiring for her choice? Fatima Hammad was indeed very beautiful.
The problem was Jeannette. It was remarkable that after years of silence his imagination was still able to invent reasons and ignore facts to preserve hope. He needed to concentrate, to run his fingers over the facts and make them real. He did not desire to revisit the episode with Sylvain Leclair and Frédéric Molineu. Yet how else could he be rid of her, except by recalling his suffering at the dinner table and her failure to defend him? She had transformed into a sticky substance, adhering to the walls of his brain. Faruq would call it forbidden love or some other cliché, but that was not it, not at all. Every description was like a sliding piece of ice that missed the point, and there she was below, darkly unexplainable. That house, its corridors, they trespassed onto the present—this must be why they called lovers insane. If a person lost everything that tied him to a place, no one could say that any of what occurred there was real. He had no photographs of Montpellier. Nothing but the coat he had bought, and the French hat, and his suits and ties.
Teta spun her panel round and pulled a thread tight. She licked a finger and caressed a new strand off the spool.
Nablus was where his duty lay. He was indebted to