ward was long and dense with beds. Pictures hung crookedly on curved plaster walls and a large gas lamp swayed from the ceiling. Um Taher avoided looking at the occupants, but saw from the margins of her vision that all were girls, wearing nothing on their heads but a thin bit of fabric tied under the hair. The nurse’s heels clapped across the tiles, and the bedcovers writhed as the patients watched her follow. Was this what they did all day, lie in bed surveying whoever came through? There must be another room, a private one, in which the older, distinguished ladies took their rest.
At the last bed but one, her gaze digressed. The bedclothes were so still that at first they appeared empty; there was, however, a woman lying there. On her back, staring up at the ceiling. It was not an attitude of repose.
“Keefek, madame?” said the nurse.
“Shu,” said Um Taher, indicating the motionless woman. “Hayye?”
“Yes, she’s alive,” said a girl with an eye patch from the next bed. “She’s mad.”
From a lighted doorway a man called, “Could I have your name please?” and the nurse jumped into action. “Tfadali.” She ushered Um Taher through the door and closed it between them.
A bald Arab man was washing his hands in a basin.
“I am Doctor Ibrahim. Your name?”
“Mahdiya Um Taher Kamal.”
“Thank you.” Doctor Ibrahim dried his hands on a flannel, and picked up a clipboard. “Please, sit.”
The only place to sit was on a flimsy-looking bed with a white blanket. This room was both immaculate and crowded with objects. Um Taher fixed her attention on the shelves opposite, which held an assortment of translucent bottles with their labels facing her. As the doctor opened a drawer and shut it again, she reached out for a very small bottle at the end. The letters on the tag resembled grains of rice.
“You can read French?”
She looked up. The doctor had put on an apron.
“I cannot read at all.”
“Ah, so it’s the same. Don’t worry, I won’t be examining you. I am a surgeon. Here she comes, Sister Sarah. Bonjour Sister, meet Madame Kamal. La madame vient avec une maladie pulmonaire.”
The nurse who had just opened the door was short, with black hair and a gaunt face. “D’accord.”
The doctor swung a rubber pipe off his neck and handed it to her. “Fursa sa‘ida, Madame Kamal,” he said, raising a hand as he left.
Sister Sarah spoke slightly more Arabic than the other nurse. She asked Um Taher to remove her veil, and applying the cold metal plug at the end of the rubber pipe to Um Taher’s chest, asked her to breathe in and out. Next, she told her to lean forward and lifted her gown to apply the metal to her back, warmed slightly by her skin but still cool, and asked her again to breathe in and out. Um Taher obeyed and heard the rattle of her lungs, amplified by the nurse’s attention. Something hard and metallic tapped her around the spine. Her back went cold with exposure and she knew the nurse had moved away.
“Is it sill?”
“No,” said Sister Sarah. She was writing in a large book. “No, it is not tuberculosis.”
She would not need to stay the night. The nurse presented a small bottle of medicine with a rubber stopper and instructed her to put two drops in a big pan of hot water and inhale it in the evenings before bed.
As she was leaving, Um Taher saw a bald pate through the window in the foyer, ridges in the skull like sand dunes. Descending the outer steps she took a long route round the back. There he was, in the corner of the railed veranda, rocking on a chair. His whitish robe involved a kind of shawl over his shoulders, and on his head he wore a black hat with a wide brim. He had a blanket over his lap, and he appeared to be sketching the view.
She chose a chair beyond the remit of the window, and her heart began to calm as the animate landscape paused, the wind drawing breath before stirring the grasses again.
After a while the priest stood and approached. In careful, accented Arabic, he asked if he might sit nearby, pointing at a particular chair, not directly beside hers but a few chairs down. She nodded, shrugged her shawl a little closer and adjusted the veil over her neck. But instead of turning to her, or paying her any attention at all, the