completely feigned, though conversationally necessary—certain earlier parts of the story continued to strike him with an eerie force. In this account of Sahar’s uncles something lay untapped, some other mood or meaning. Even the parts that were comical, or, perhaps, especially those parts—the three men, the phone call from the aunt, the nighttime journey—glinted with something sharper, something deeper than a mere question of power thwarted. It occurred to Midhat that a tragic story told quickly might contract easily into a comedy, and without the measure of its depths make the audience laugh. His friend carried on about the newspaper reports in praise of his wife—“And the speeches she makes, about unity, about freedom—really, I am proud of her”—but Midhat was only half listening, because he was thinking about the way his own charade might be told after he was dead, when he no longer held the reins on his memories, and they galloped off into the motley thoughts and imaginations of others.
“The tragedy,” said Hani, “is that three Arabs were still hanged. Far fewer than were sentenced in the first place. But it’s enough to burn in the memory and make a martyr. Death creates these myths, you know.”
“Yes,” said Midhat. “Terrible. Do you remember that story of the man nicknamed Barbar in Nablus?”
“No,” said Hani. “I don’t know it.”
“You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you. It is said this man hated his nickname. It was given to him because he was very talkative when he was young.”
In the mirror between the gin bottles and the brandy, the woman in black briefly reappeared, accompanied now by a wraithlike man in a tweed suit.
“So when he grew up, he founded a mosque in Nablus in his real name. Salim Basha or something, I can’t remember. And then he left for many years to as-Salt, and when he returned to Nablus he asked a little boy in the street, where is the mosque of Salim Basha? And the boy replied, ‘You mean Barbar’s mosque?’”
Hani laughed hard and slid back on his stool. The barman flinched; then he saw that they were laughing, and he snickered.
2
Midhat never felt guilty about nights like this, spent drinking in a café or a bar populated by Jews and Europeans. He needed a little freedom from Nablus, from her stuffy, fervent atmosphere. He needed respite, truthfully, from his own home, from Fatima’s increasingly tart replies, and from the children’s easy leap to violence, which had turned the house into a kind of martial zone in which he was constantly disentangling their limbs and delivering verdicts as to who was in the right and who in the wrong.
Midhat and Fatima had four children. Massarra came first, followed by Taher. Khaled, the third, was born the year of the Jericho earthquake, and was the only one who did not cry in the midwife’s arms.
The fourth child arrived in 1929, two years after Khaled. That was the year of the Wailing Wall riots, of the massacre of Jews in Hebron, of Sahar Murad’s march to the High Commissioner, and Fatima, desolate on the cusp of yet another pregnancy, forced to concede at the age of twenty-eight that she had never been the mistress of her own body, lay in secret in the bathtub one day and ate with a spoon the entire contents of a bottle of powdered harmal seeds, which smelled and tasted foully of earth. She had acquired the bottle at great expense from one of the few remaining quack doctors in the old city, who handed it over with a euphemism and an unpleasant wink. Within a few hours the nostrum resulted in some hot and painful diarrhoea, but no sign of blood or a foetus, and several months later the red skin of baby Ghada met the cool spring air of the municipal hospital, to Midhat’s delight and Fatima’s exhaustion.
In preparation for one of his wife’s receptions, which she held once a month, year in year out, for all the important ladies of Nablus, Midhat would usually deposit the children with his grandmother and travel by taxi down to Jerusalem to spend a night with his friend the journalist Qais Karak and the dancing girls at the Ma‘arif Café. He no longer invited Jamil, who only ever scoffed at the suggestion, but he did sometimes persuade Adel Jawhari to join, and the three men motored to the seaside and swaggered along hotel balconies overlooking the water. Midhat would smoke one of Adel’s cigarillos, his double-lined robe