it.” He sipped the coffee. “I’m not sure it means much. What are you making?”
After a beat she replied, in a voice liquid with incredulity: “Vine leaves!”
“You’re very good.” He dipped his head low to the table, as if to get a view from the side. “They are very small.”
“My mother taught me. In fact no, my mother didn’t teach me, I learned from a Turk. You know there used to be Turks in the upstairs of our house.”
She dipped a new leaf in the oil. She could feel him looking at her.
“I didn’t know that.”
The last rice grains were stuck into a cake along the bottom of the pan. She took a spoon to them, and they fell out onto the plate in the crammed shape of an oval.
“Now we are married,” she said, and bit the inside of her cheek.
Midhat laughed, and she knew he had turned away.
“Yes. Now we are married.”
By evening Fatima considered herself the victor. She did not feel particularly cheerful about it, however. Midhat had not touched her all day, nor made any reference to the night before. They continued to speak in the same genial, sidelong manner, but with none of the behaviour one might expect between a husband and wife in private. Fatima kept thinking about the laughing women in the hammam. They knew how it was supposed to be. This marriage really belonged to them, those naked figures gossiping in the steam, loitering in the corners of her mind. As afternoon progressed, she found she had used up all her self-possession in making those vine leaf parcels. She took a moment to cry weakly at the kitchen window. In retrospect, the terror of last night seemed easier than this footless unknowing of the waking day, now that the light was turned off the positions of a woman’s body in one part of a room and a man’s in another, and onto the vaguer profile of future uncertainties, in which time and space far exceeded what one girl’s mind could map, and dwarfed by thousands her fear of a few inches, a few moments, the sound of his breath. Even standing there at the window, she did not know what to do with her hands. She ended by clasping them so tightly together the fingers blotched pink and white. She tried to concentrate on the hours ahead, but her unruly mind kept expanding to the panorama of years, years of this same unknowing, to which an end was swaddled in mist.
As night fell, Midhat read in the salon while she played the oud. This was taken for a virtue, a woman who could play the oud. She tried to play as though for her own pleasure, as if she barely knew he was there, and she even half sang the words, as though practising for another event. But there was no danger of him looking up, and this left her free to examine him. He looked tired, she thought. He was pale and his lids hung low. She quite liked the sight of his arms under his rolled-up shirtsleeves. After abandoning the halfway point of a few melodies, she rested the instrument on her legs, and touched the tuning pegs.
“What are you reading?” she said.
“Hm?”
That was the same look he gave her earlier, when she asked him what he was thinking about. His face was quite demonstrative. An appealing quality, but, perhaps, also one that spoke of a kind of carelessness. He lifted the spine of his book to show her. It was written in a European language. The woven cover was red, and a black silk bookmark dangled from the binding, heavily frayed.
“Flaubert,” he said. “You speak French?”
“No. Some English. I know three words in German.”
“What are these three words?”
“Abendessen. Mittagessen. Heisse. There were some others, I forgot.”
He frowned, head to the side, lips parted. She answered:
“After the Turks left, we had Germans.”
“Oh—yes, I remember this. My father told me that.”
He lingered on her, then returned to the page. She wondered if the story was sad. He looked up again, apparently on the point of speech. For a second he held the position; she waited, unhappily, until he shook it off. She set the round back of the oud against the wall.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“The kitchen.”
There was nothing to do in the kitchen. She ran a damp cloth along the edge of the table, where a little ridge might gather dirt. The cloth was clear; she had done the