Although his new friend’s tone was not unkind, Midhat felt deflated. Of course, it was difficult to communicate any profound sensation, let alone in another language.
“I’d like to travel around Europe,” said Laurent. “Like you, I suppose. My grandfather kept a diary about his travels to Greece and Rome. When I go to war I might travel, if they send me further than Picardy.”
“The world is dilating,” said Midhat. “Or—perhaps not ‘dilating’ …”
“Developing?”
“No, I mean—the trains, for instance. The trains are all over the world … they sell oranges from Jaffa here in Montpellier. I saw them!”
Laurent laughed. “Ah Midhat Kamal, you are a special case.”
Beside the path, four young women sat in the shade of an oak tree. Midhat watched one bite into a peach. He felt pricked by Laurent’s laughter, and wished he had said nothing.
In his last year at the Mekteb-i Sultani, the divisions between the Turkish boys and the rest of them had appeared like a sudden chasm in the earth. He and Jamil returned from Nablus after Ramadan to find a variable network of alliances drawn up without their consent, and sometimes the Arabs and the Armenians were together and sometimes they were apart; similarly with the Jews and the Greeks; for the children had listened to their parents during the holiday, and following the newspapers and the example of the teachers they enforced the external currents within the school corridors with surprisingly little resistance. After lessons Midhat and his cousin sought each other out, fearing the game they were being forced to play whose rules were often unclear. You never knew when someone might turn on you, and if you never shot an unkind glance or whispered behind your hand you risked being accused of disloyalty and getting your arm twisted by a member of your own side.
Midhat had experienced pressures he was sure Laurent had not. He felt an urge to prove that his enthusiasm was not a sign of unworldliness.
“Do you know what you will specialise in?” said Laurent. “I’m doing psychiatry.”
They halted by a ruin in the classical style, a roofless set of arches laced with red blossoms.
“Psychiatry?” said Midhat. “That’s not the body.”
“No. But I have developed an interest in it. And if you must know, it was because of a woman.”
Midhat could not reclaim the energy of a few moments before. He remained silent. Just as Laurent started walking off from the ruin, he threw out:
“I had a mistress in Constantinople.”
Laurent glanced back. Midhat continued, casually: “She spoke neither Arabic nor Turkish. I rented a chambre in the Etiler neighbourhood, for privacy.”
He felt a hand on his arm.
“I am impressed,” said Laurent. Again, he laughed. “I am also rather amazed!”
“Her name was Marie.”
“Where was she from?”
“Sweden.”
“Bra—vo.”
He had drawn them in a loop: ahead was the green gate, the letters in reverse. Midhat also felt amazed, and even a little alarmed. Apparently, it was quite as easy to invent something as to put on a new hat and coat.
4
The water in the garden pond was shallow and did not completely cover Jeannette’s knees, which rose above it like pink islands. The fountain had stopped working and the cherub’s jug was empty. A white scar around the stone perimeter marked the water level from the previous summer. She heard the wind in the trees before it reached her; a second later, goose pimples rose on her submerged legs.
A head bobbed in an upper window. It was Georgine, in Midhat’s bedroom. Jeannette had spent the morning in the room adjacent, her father’s study, organising a box of photographs into two leather albums. The box contained images of her mother as a young woman. Some Jeannette had never seen before. She had not thought intently about her mother in a long time, and the photographs were hard to look at. And yet she had looked, and for hours, searching ravenously for signs of herself in her mother. She came to when Georgine called for lunch. Then she decided to sit in the garden pond and meditate.
As a child, Jeannette had resembled her father and everyone thought she would take after him. Like Frédéric she was energetic: she spoke quickly, she liked drama. But over the years she had changed, and now she loathed the beating of her mind, and deliberately sought out boredom in order to avert it. Her father liked to call her “the Sphinx.”