heard about the riot? Riots in Nablus. In Yaffa, Haifa. All the country is in riots. It’s very bad.”
“Because of the Zionists.”
“The Zionists are very bad. They want the land.”
“What are people … what are people doing about it?”
“Ya‘ni.”
“What?”
“They will fight.”
“Who will fight?”
“The boys.”
Antoine turned the page back to his drawing, and lightly outlined a small rock in the foreground, and then another. He shaded with his pencil at an angle.
“Tell me … how did people feel after the events at Nebi Musa?”
“People argue.”
He waited.
“Some people say, let’s give the Jews something.” She sighed. “Others say, you give them something, you’ll give them everything, and we’ll have nothing. Because in England there are many Jews. And the Mandoub es-Samme, the new Palestine governor, is a Jew. So it will be a Jewish empire. Arguing, arguing. This is always the way. Nablus is a city built on envy and intrigue.” This old Nabulsi adage, “al-hasad wa al-fasad,” stuck out from Randa’s speech as a sudden eloquence amid the dialect.
“And what do you think, Randa?”
She played with her fingernail. “I don’t know, ya Abuna.”
“I have a question. Is Nablus, in your opinion, more—how shall we say … forceful than other towns in Palestine? More, I mean—”
“Of course!”
Antoine waited. Hodges’s words, a town of fanatics, rang in his head. “In what ways?”
“In Nablus, they bring weapons.” Randa stuck her lips out.
Antoine was astonished. “Weapons?”
“From the Bedu.”
“I see. Only Nablus?”
She shrugged. A spider on the rail was lifting one gossamer leg, probing the air. Antoine struggled to think of another question.
Then Randa said: “I heard Marwan say they carry them inside lentil jars. They meet at a village …” She stopped.
“Marwan?” said Antoine.
But Randa would not continue. His pencil rolled to the seam of the pages.
“And how is your family?”
“We are very hungry. The chickens, we had trouble with the chickens. It was too hot for them last week.”
Antoine reached for his leather purse, and pulled out a shilling.
12
In May 1920, while everyone else was discussing the Mandate, Midhat was thinking about Fatima Hammad. Specifically, he was thinking of her at Nebi Musa. Each time he summoned that hesitant figure he unbuckled a sharp, bodily feeling, close to the compulsion that used to draw him to pace like a sleepwalker outside her house in the early mornings, willing the windows to return his gaze.
It was almost dinnertime, and he smelled onions and heard the clink of porcelain. He stared up at his bedroom ceiling, resisting the edge of sleep. Some months ago he had wished to persuade himself to desire marriage, and it did occur to him now that he might have succeeded. But summoning the girl’s eyes looking at him, the allure of fatedness remained, of recognising her and being recognised amid all those hundreds of people.
The remembered crowd throbbed in his chest, with its smooth disguising violence, and he sat upright. Across the windowsill lay his books, touched at angles by the late light. He rifled for a slip of paper and a pen. He did not even have a desk here. The only desk in the house was next door, in his father’s unused study.
“Um Mahmoud?” came his grandmother’s voice.
He perched on the mattress, plucked a book to lean on, and aimed the nib at the top left-hand corner of the page. This was an old impulse, to trace out the strands of event, draw up a diagnosis, and explain what had led to what. He wrote the title: FATIMA HAMMAD. He looked at the words, left to right, in the Latin alphabet. Should he not do this in Arabic? He wrote “Fatima Hammad” in Arabic. After that, however, he could think of no more words. Every one that came was French. He looked up and with a blast of nausea perceived the striped wallpaper of his bedroom in Montpellier, the window onto the green lawn, and felt the cold floorboards under his feet.
That movement of his mind, that dance of logic and contingency—surely it could not be forever marked by his experience at the Molineus’. He did not want to ride along life’s surface without at least trying to work it out. He did not desire the part of himself that moved darkly at the sight of the dervish, in the heat of the chanting crowd. He hesitated, pen in hand, for a long time. After a while, he wrote: “Dear Jeannette.” Dear Jeannette what? He looked stupidly at the page. His pen drew a circle, and he coloured it