counted, Sahar took on the responsibility of restoring the floor. She and her maid collected the broken pieces, cracked and poking upwards from their places, leaving a rough diagonal of cavities across the floor. Hani, preoccupied as always, could not recall where the architect had sourced the tiles. Sahar borrowed copies of Egyptian homeware catalogues from her colleagues in the Women’s Association, and donning one of her turban hats visited the ceramics shop in the Armenian quarter, bringing with her a small bag of fragments to show as examples. The shopkeeper knew who she was because of her husband, and, instantly deferential, covered his counter with scores of samples in terracotta and porcelain with various varnishes. None were suitable: all were too bright, and those with patterns were completely wrong, internally coherent and repetitious, rather than part of a design that would stretch across the floor. The shopkeeper, now perspiring, insisted on searching his back room, until Sahar said the name of the architect quite fiercely and asked if that man had ever purchased any ceramics from his shop.
“Oh Madame,” he said. “I would be greatly honoured if that were so.”
“I suppose that means no.”
As she turned to leave, the shopkeeper threw out that if she wanted to ask the architect himself, she would find him at al-Aqsa mosque. He was leading the repairs there after the damage caused by the earthquake.
The architect was crouching at the western corner of the mosque compound dressed in a dark blue suit. Upon seeing Sahar beside him, he stood and smiled. He held a ruler in one hand and a dirty piece of paper in the other. His waxed black moustache was threaded with grey, and his mottled hair swept up into a peak on one side.
“You built my house,” said Sahar. “I am trying to find the tiles you put in the courtyard.”
At first, the architect pretended to recall the house she described. But it was quickly obvious that he was pretending, and he confessed that having constructed so many buildings in that neighbourhood, he had delegated cosmetic decisions like tilework to his trainees and assistants, who were innumerable, and on constant rotation.
“I believe,” he said finally, “they may have been ordered from Italy.”
“Italy?”
“Yes. But I can’t remember where.”
She thanked him, sadly, and he asked for her name, holding her hand an instant longer than necessary and looking into her eyes. Sahar withdrew and wound her way back to the Armenian ceramics shop, where the shopkeeper, at the sight of her, burst out from behind the counter.
“May I see those tiles again?” she said.
She chose a stack of plain black, plain blue, and plain red ones, examining them next to her broken chips regretfully. The new reds were the worst; slotted into place on the courtyard floor beside the soft orangey originals, they glared with a vulgar, burnished discordance.
Within the year, however, the new tiles began to fade. Hani had barely noticed them, and when she pointed them out merely said: “Well done.” Within two years, the sight of the mismatched tiles did not even bother Sahar anymore; she became used to and even fond of them. One day during the autumn of 1929, their courtyard was packed with two hundred female delegates of women’s organisations from all over the country, wearing hats and heeled shoes that multiplied the dull sound of the tiles into a cannonade. The Jerusalem women with the highest-ranking husbands sat in chairs while the rest stood around the walls listening and raising their hands to interject.
Everyone was in a fury about the riots over the Wall. It was the Jews’ Wailing Wall and the Muslims’ Buraq Wall, where the Prophet ascended to heaven. The Jews had set up a gender partition that violated the Status Quo of Holy Sites, as established by the Ottomans and maintained by the British, and looked like a step towards taking possession of the whole. Riots ensued: Arabs died, Jews died; but the Arabs were treated far more harshly in the aftermath and several were sentenced to hanging.
The women elected Madame Husseini to the chair. She raised her hand for quiet. They would march on the Government House. A delegation—Sahar, only twenty years old, among them—would go straight to the High Commissioner and his wife with their list of demands and announce their plan to demonstrate.
(“And they threw their veils back,” said Hani, reciting the story to Midhat, “like this, and they told him, we are going to march, we are protesting