remain. Forget local rivalries, in the end it was as the Bedouin said, the enemy of one’s enemy was a friend; and though Midhat might not be active the way Jamil and Adel were active, he was a Nabulsi, and everyone in Nablus breathed the same haunted air.
He did not often pause to reflect on what might have been, but every now and then he looked up from the inventory books and heard a sound like a strong wind whooshing past his ears, and with a vertiginous feeling, as though standing on the prow of a ship, his life slipped into view. Suspended there on the bright blade of the present moment, he turned his head and glimpsed from a distance how his fate had rolled out. The shape of his marriage, his profession, his family, his house. Viewed from this angle, the question of choice seemed quite irrelevant.
It was mostly Adel who brought him news of Jamil. Jamil was debating in the nationalist clubs, making speeches, writing petitions, amassing allegiance, employing connections across the Jordan River to collect arms from the Bedouin. Sometimes Midhat saw in his cousin’s life another path for his own. He thought about his youthful days as a student, caught up in the drama of “exile” in Paris with Faruq and Hani and the others, drunk on the notion that to argue was important, with a productive end, and that he, gesticulating at his friends with a glass of liqueur, was engaged in a significant path of thought, a small piece of a wider picture of men arguing in rooms. Now, speech clogged with arak, he murmured and smiled at his cousin and compatriots. That was not his life.
* * *
As Midhat approached Nouveautés Ghada, he saw Eli hunched at the counter. Eli’s ears poked out under his tarbush, and he was running two fingers through his beard.
“Good morning, Abu Taher,” said Eli, lurching upright, eyes wide. A newspaper sighed as he shifted it across the counter. Midhat angled to see the headline.
“What happened?”
“No, not there,” said Eli. “We had an accident.”
“An jad?”
“Come and look.”
He followed Eli into the tailoring room. Butrus had not arrived, but the window shutters were open. Positioned on the table between the flywheel of the sewing machine and a stack of cottons stood two naphtha lamps. The glass of each flute was broken, jagged all the way around.
“Ah, what a shame.” Midhat touched a peak. “It isn’t a disaster. Where are the pieces?”
“This is not about expense,” said Eli, in a warning voice. “It’s about how did this happen. Why are these broken.”
Midhat was well acquainted with the symptoms of superstition, since it was an affliction from which his own wife suffered, as well as his grandmother. He had recognised them before in Eli’s behaviour: that eye lingering on a dark corner, a twitch of the lips murmuring a protection. Unusual, however, was for Eli to admit something like this so directly.
“You think someone did that? I don’t think so, Eli.”
“I’m telling you. Both lamps? To me, that’s a signal.”
The shards of one, Midhat saw, were as regular and upright as the tines of a mock crown. “We have a third. Where is it?”
The shutter banged the outer wall as Eli pushed the casement bar, and in the tiny extra light the window afforded, Midhat opened the cupboards.
The lack of electricity in Nablus had, like many things, a political basis. More than a decade ago the council voted to boycott the Electric Company, a Zionist enterprise backed by the British. This abstinence from electric light remained a point of pride: nowhere in Palestine was such cohesion in evidence. Not in Haifa, not in Jaffa, not in Jerusalem. Fortunately for Midhat and Eli, the breadth of their shopfront windows meant they had little need for oil lamps during the day; Butrus, however, used them a great deal in this back room, where he often hemmed into the night.
Midhat mounted the stairs to the storeroom. He stacked one empty crate on top of another, and moving along the banister caught sight of Eli hovering between the shelves below. Presently he landed on the lowest step, and contorted his body to send his voice up to Midhat.
“Abu Taher I have to tell you something.”
He twisted further to meet Midhat’s eyes. His skin was so clear that in certain lights he looked like a child. As though he had coiled too tightly, his body swung back round and he spoke to the display shelf