The walls of the first gallery were lined with cabinets, and everyone had gasped as they turned to look.
Deformed foetuses pressing against the glass walls of jars. Human and animal skeletons hanging from nails; skulls branded with the names of diseases stacked at jaunty angles. In a glass-topped cabinet lay a mummified head, chemical black, the brain half-exposed. The cabinets extended: more brains, quartered and labelled, bodies strung up, black like the head. Burnt, perhaps. The diagrams on the walls, the paintings, all of them depicted gaudy excrescences, specimens of monstrosity, phases of venereal disease. Charts compared abnormality with abnormality, infection, atrophies, palsies, leprosies. A two-headed baby with twin tufts of hair creased four eyes at him.
Laurent brought them to a stop. At the top of a tall, pale-green gate a curlicued sign of beaten iron stated: UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTPELLIER, JARDIN DES PLANTES, FONDÉ PAR HENRI IV EN 1593. The gate scraped open over the gravel, and they faced a track up a shallow incline that split in two: to the right alongside a hedgerow, to the left by a stone wall finished with an urn. They took the hedgerow path. Beyond, white paths sliced green lawns and a stone building arched upward, speared with cypress trees.
“This garden is one of the oldest in Europe,” said Laurent. “It was created by the king for a famous scientist called Belleval. They added parts to it in the last century, though I’m afraid I can’t remember which is which.”
The air carried a cool fecund smell. Smoke-white leaves from the trees above lay in heaps where the turf met the pathway, the light shafting between the boughs scattered shadows, and Midhat soon lost any sense of direction. They passed a thicket of bamboo, and a pond of giant water lilies basking in the sun, and geometrical flowerbeds lined with shrubs. They shaded their eyes at the greenhouse windows and saw underwater plants reaching large green hands from their berths.
“What was it you were saying,” said Midhat. “About death, and life?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m always pontificating. That’s what my father says. Too much talking, not enough doing, he says.”
“It was interesting …”
“What is life? That is interesting. From whence did it begin?”
Midhat laughed. A blast of sunlight replaced Laurent’s shadow on the glass: he had abandoned the greenhouse and was facing the shrubbery.
“God, of course,” said Midhat.
“Yes. But well the problem now, it seems to me, is there is starting to be too much knowledge. It cannot be contained by a single brain. Before, we could—more or less, I mean—hold it all in. But now, practically speaking, we are all more or less brains floating in a sea of knowledge.” Laurent touched a fern and the wand jogged under his finger. “That’s not quite the image I wanted to conjure.”
“Did God create the universe, or was he coexistent with it.”
“Quite. You should talk to Jeannette, she studied philosophy.”
“The syllogism of life is an impossible thing,” said Midhat. “We cannot trace the endless stream of cause and effect.”
“How have you found her, by the way?”
“Because if we try to go further back, to the father’s father’s father and so on, it is like trying to reach Him, up there, by building a tower. What did you say?”
“Jeannette. As a house companion, how is she.”
Midhat paused. “We have not talked very much.” He imitated Laurent and touched the end of a fern. “I like her.”
“Yes. I’m sure it must seem odd to you, how we treat women here.”
“In some respects. There is more freedom. What is this way?”
“Just another lawn. Have a look.”
They returned to the path. Under the sun the embarrassment of the morning was washing off, and the umbrella helped the rhythm of Midhat’s footfall. Insignificant thoughts bloomed in French in his mind, and in an access of sincerity he released a few and described the scene around them: the beauty of the human touch on the unseeing bark of the tree trunk, labelled by age and species, which continued to stretch according to its nature, sideways and upward, blistering knots and rough fuzz.
“This is so unlike anything I have seen before, even though I know many of these plants. Sometimes I feel tired from looking at new things, but sometimes it makes me feel … more awake! But look, that is an olive tree. That is everywhere in my country, but I see it now and it sets off a curious system of joy in my mind, to have found it here,