display her aggression. Those few seconds gave the woman time to begin saying her part.
“Madame—I came to see your husband.”
“Who?”
“Your husband.” For the first time, the woman faltered. “Midhat Bey?”
“What do you want with him?” Fatima shouted.
“I wanted to say I am sorry.”
The stranger took a step forward, as though to mount the terrace, and Fatima could see the skin around her eyes wrinkling around old folds as she dropped her glance to the ground. “Will you tell him for me? I am sorry …” Real tears appeared, silver on her face. “Tell him … Um Mahmoud is very sorry for leaving him. She is sorry for his father, Allah yirhamo. Tell him, please Madame.” She met Fatima’s gaze once, and resuming her grip around the shawl across her chest started to retreat down the steps, waving with her free hand, turning and bowing as she went. “Yislamo ideyki, Madame, yislamo ideyki, Allah ma‘ek.” She reached for the gate and pulled up the latch. “Allah yikhaleeki. Salam. Salam. Salam.”
PART THREE
1
Half an hour before he was due to be hanged, Hani’s uncle, Fuad Murad, composed a will on a blank page from the back of a novel. Sitting beside his warden near the gallows, he tore the sheet out very carefully. Then he leaned on the book cover with his back to the sun and wrote in the clarity of his own shadow.
I write this commandment in the eighth hour and a half of the Saturday night on 14 Shawwal thirteen hundred and thirty-three by the Arab calendar where I am sentenced to death at the ninth hour of tonight mentioned. I mean I write this commandment half an hour before my death. I write as one of my companion convicts, Muhammad Abd al-Karim, is taken to be crucified, and I am glad for him that he has gone to meet the Lord Almighty. And I welcome death with an open breast, and if I leave this world I leave it as a Muslim, believing in God and the afterlife.
See how my hand does not shake,
wrote the pen, tripping over the indents on the cover where the letters were gilded. He appointed his uncle the executor, and specified the money for each of his sisters, and the amount for his wife. The majority of his fortune would go to his daughter Sahar.
And so that I shall greet death with a clear conscience, I also owe Rabea al-Dura, for fetching me those towels at the Hotel Continental, five and a half qurush.
That year, 1915, the year her father Fuad stood on the gallows platform in Aley, flanked by two other Syrians, necks in nooses and literally wrapped in their crimes, which had been written on huge pages and pinned under their arms like aprons, Sahar Murad was six years old.
Her memory went like this. At their home in Jenin, a messenger arrived with an envelope. Her mother fell to her knees outside the front door. It was summer, and very hot. Some days or possibly some weeks after that, they received a visitor.
“Good morning, sister,” said a tall man, stepping into the hallway. He looked down at Sahar, bent to her height, and said, “Mashallah,” and touched her hair. Eyes on Sahar, he addressed her mother. “We have things to discuss.”
A few days after that, Sahar heard another man’s voice in the hall. Thinking it was her father, she came to investigate.
“There she is,” said the man. It was not her father. His arms reached out for her, and, cautiously, she walked into them. At once she was in the air, resting against the man’s shoulder, his arm her seat. She was too large for this, and she could hear his breath. In a bright voice, he said: “I’ll be seeing you in just a few years, habibti.”
The third visitor Sahar remembered most clearly. There were circles under his eyes and he did not smell nice. He looked at her but unlike the others did not greet her. He simply turned to her mother and said: “Yalla. Talk.” Her mother looked worried; that Sahar always remembered.
She was unsure when exactly she learned that her father was dead: whether it was a gradual process of understanding, or if there was a moment of revelation, which she afterwards erased. She remembered her mother’s anxiety. The only times she left Sahar alone were weekday mornings, when a woman named Mariam came to teach her to read, and Saturday afternoons, when Noura the maid helped with