same thing earlier.
She made sure to precede Midhat to the bedroom, undressed before the mirror, and donned a nightgown. When he knocked and entered, he was already wearing a two-piece pyjama suit, blue with black piping. Last night, this was an image that might have terrified her. Now, she giggled: it meant he had anticipated her, and collected his pyjamas earlier. The shirt, not buttoned to the top, flapped open slightly beyond the lapel as he climbed into the bed. She slid in beside him. The sheets were heavy. They lay for a while in silence on their backs. Then Midhat said:
“Did you go to see the Nebi Musa procession in Jerusalem?”
Her breath stopped. “Yes.”
“I saw you there.”
Danger shot through Fatima’s mind. Husbands were like parents, conscious of a woman’s shame. She waited, frozen.
“Did you go alone?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She felt a powerful urge to weep.
“Don’t be afraid.”
But all those words did was bring to mind the night before, which seemed no longer distant but rather very present, and her heart thumped hard. She longed for the darkness, she wanted to cover the heat rising to her neck and face, and she glanced, helpless, at the lamp beyond him. She felt exactly as exposed as she had before she climbed onto the cupboard.
“Why are you afraid?”
The sheet shifted. He was turning towards her. She could see his white eyeballs.
“I can feel you, you are afraid. I don’t mind that you went to Nebi Musa. I was asking because … I wondered if you had seen anything. Anything terrible.”
“I saw nothing. I was hardly there, I came, I left …”
“It was odd, though, didn’t you think?” he said. “That crowd, all those angry people.”
She inhaled too loudly. “They are uneducated. Ya‘ni, poor people. Poor people are angry. This is why we have zakat.”
Midhat turned onto his back. He switched off the lamp. Fatima’s blush began to fade, and she listened to the soothing murmur of a draught. When she was calm she addressed him in a quiet voice.
“Will you tell me about Paris?”
“Paris?”
“I want to know.”
He began, with slow, formal phrases. “I lived in Paris during the war. There were only a few men. Except for old ones. And, in addition, there were some Arabs.”
Although at first he seemed reluctant, he soon relaxed into a monologue. His words drew pictures, and Fatima saw balconies and terraced cafés, heard voices and the sounds of glass and crockery as she walked down deserted streets and theatre aisles full of women in glitter pining for men at battle. Set free by the dark, she came closer to the vibrations of his voice, low in his throat, to the heat coming from his half-bared chest. She felt it on her shoulder as he turned over, surprised by how near his body was to hers. She was sensitive enough to realise that in this speech he was revealing some part of his inner life, and that it was a struggle to hold onto and translate it for her. It moved her to be taken into his confidence. With fresh temerity she put her hand on his chest, and under the silk of his pyjama shirt she felt his heart come to meet it.
“Might we one day go there?”
He pressed the back of her fingers. “We might.”
He said something else she didn’t hear. She had found his mouth and kissed it. Their foreheads touched awkwardly. There was some perspiration on his shaven lip. She immediately reached to touch him between the legs, amazed and shocked by her own courage. She was even more amazed at the weird shape of his anatomy that reared under the fabric, and snatched her hand away.
“Don’t look at me,” she said.
“I can’t see you. It’s completely dark.”
That was clearly a lie, because she could still see him. She closed her eyes, boiling with shyness, and his fingers began, very gently, to wrinkle the nightgown over her legs. When it was necessary she raised her hips off the mattress, and then lifted her arms to help it over her head. Though her skin was flushed she was also pimpled over with cold, and when his hand met her hip she winced. Then she saw his shadow hesitate, and grasping him by the neck pulled him over her.
The pain was incredible. Whatever shame was left over, it evaporated at once in that unbearably specific heat. His arms trembled under his own weight, and his hair, flopping from his head, brushed her brow. Only when