that it was the same in his father’s time: a self-made man was more vulnerable to the evil eye than he who inherited his privilege. “This is partly why he moved to Cairo.”
“Really?” said Midhat. It never occurred to him that his father might have wished to escape Nablus.
“They say the bite of a lion,” said Teta, “is better than an envious look.”
And, of course, when people looked at Midhat, they saw a man who had married above his station, a sybarite, an optimist, a success with women, a carefree lover of the West. Regardless that he had hardly made fortune enough to take his family abroad, Midhat and his wife rapidly became local objects of jealousy. Chic, charming, well educated; their house was no Atwan palace, but Fatima’s istiqbals were renowned for their flair, for the studied nonchalance of the hostess on the Armenian chaise. Her talent at the oud was itself an occasion for spite, and replacing the instrument in its velvet-lined case she would whisper the Daybreak Sura to repel the evil eye as her guests relinquished their last cups of lemonade and trailed out through the garden gate.
By 1935, fear was afoot in Nablus, and with fear came ill will. The finger levelled at the enemy swung inexorably round to the apostate nearer by, and by “apostate” one meant any neighbour who might be considered wanting in ideological zeal. Armouries had been installed in Jewish settlements, and as the Arab elites continued bickering over degrees of cooperation, their national movement was grinding to a halt. Alarm bells rang in Europe, and Jewish immigration swelled with refugees. Without a proper channel for their anger the Nabulsis became nasty in the markets, so that to walk through the onion souq was to hear voices raised with a passion quite out of proportion to any of the transactions at hand. Even the women’s groups became forces of rage, and thin-veiled Nabulsiyyat took to the podiums before the post office to point at the sky and unleash their fury at British hypocrisy, and at every local person too weak for the Cause.
Adel bemoaned the infighting. Basil Murad had even accused him of not being radical enough. But often, he added, twisting his glass on the table, one could see that long-standing enmities were rising to the surface and adopting the guise of political indignation. More than once Midhat came home to find Fatima wafting burning sage into the corners of the living room and muttering incantations. He tried to laugh it off. It did not help Fatima’s fear of the evil eye that her husband was not a political activist, and had gone into business with a Samaritan.
Although Nouveautés remained relatively prosperous, Eli attributed a recent decline in sales to the political situation. People did not want to give the appearance of having money to spend. It wasn’t good for the resistance. Only last month barrels of ammunition for the Jews were discovered in Jaffa, and the Arabs had called a daylong strike all over Palestine. Massarra insisted Midhat take her on the march, but then Ghada had tripped in the garden and hurt her knee, and begged him not to leave her, after which ensued a loud and pointless argument, so in the end the children spent the strike day sulking in their bedrooms while Midhat took a nap.
The soap industry especially suffered. The Egyptian market withered, and then the Jews set up their own factories for export, selling “Nabulsi-style soap” but using castor oil, instead of olive, which was far cheaper. One night in Jerusalem Qais Karak admitted to Midhat and Adel with a half-amazed laugh that his father, the famous soap manufacturer, now relied on the income from his journalism. Many times Midhat had passed the open front of the Atwan soap factory and heard Abdallah Atwan shouting at someone about the Jews. Penned in by her two mountains Nablus was not, in any case, growing at the rate of other towns. Compared with Jaffa and Jerusalem and Haifa and Akka—all open to the sea, to Christian pilgrimage routes and tourism, electrified and full of cinemas—this town was decaying in her provincial backwaters, subsisting on memories of former glory, her inhabitants recalling with artificial frequency the days when she used to be called “the little Damascus.”
“When Nouveautés grows,” Midhat sometimes told Fatima late at night, “then we can think about Cairo.”
Everyone, however, even their children, felt the urgency of staying in Nablus. They had a duty to