could take a pointer to the vandals and show them that in the annals of Greek and Aramaic the Israelites had splintered from the Samaritans as far back as the time of Moses. To a dispossessed farmer they were all the same, all “Jews.”
One evening in the spring before the earthquake, Eli had invited Midhat to dinner. The last time Midhat had been to the Samaritan quarter was with his grandmother on that abortive trip for a love charm seven years prior, and indeed it had taken almost as long for Eli to invite him. On the way, they stopped to call on the old high priest, and found the front door to Abu Salama’s house open. The priest was not in the first room. Eli led the way into the second, calling out:
“Good afternoon, Abu Salama.”
It was quite possible, since Abu Salama was an old man, that he simply did not hear them approach. Or he may have been too slow to hide what he was doing. Either way, the instant they entered the room Midhat saw they had interrupted something.
Abu Salama was sitting beside a young boy at a table on which a series of objects were arranged. In the centre, a long piece of parchment was held down with stones at the top and bottom, its four corners curling. A bowl of clear water on one side held a lace of colour; beside it slouched a pile of murky rags; on the other side, a pestle and mortar stood near a bottle of dark liquid. The residue on the neck of the bottle had a sticky sheen. At the edge of the table near Midhat and Eli lay an open paper of saffron threads. A rag hung from Abu Salama’s hand. Rather than greeting them the old man stared, his mouth a crack in the withered rock of his face.
Midhat glanced at Eli for a cue. Eli’s skin had lost colour. He bowed at Abu Salama, murmured his greeting, and hurried Midhat out of the house.
At the appalled look on his colleague’s face, Midhat realised he had witnessed something he should not have. He had long learned by example not to record what he must not see, but as Eli led the way in silence to his own home, Midhat’s instinct to ignore was overridden by some force of attraction. Part curiosity, part something less easy to define. Recognition—or, perhaps, affinity. That was a glimpse of a wider operation. The high priest was dyeing that parchment. There had been a smear of colour on the paper. And that was saffron he had seen, and in that sticky bottle some kind of juice or pigment.
Throughout the meal Eli refused to meet Midhat’s eye. His bottom lip twitched and he stared so incessantly at his elderly mother serving the stuffed potatoes that at one point she asked, “What is wrong with you? Do I have something on my face?” Midhat was grateful for the silence. His colleague’s panic spoke transparently of shame. Which might signify that some documents the Samaritans sold to foreigners were faked—which might, of course, indicate some charlatanry in their other activities. Was it shameful? Not necessarily. He envisioned a foreigner, a Frenchman, holding the counterfeit document, interpreting the Samaritan specimen in his European library, sliding his authentic facts into the bookcase. And with that view in mind the real Samaritans went sliding about beneath the indices. They fabricated in order to be free, that was it: materially, because they were poor, but in other ways too. To invent one’s self was to resist the inventions of others: to forge was to author. It made perfect sense that the high priest did the dyeing, for instance, and not someone of a lesser stature. One needed to be precise in one’s fakery. It took delicacy, an artist’s eye, to choose the marks that would conceal.
* * *
When Butrus arrived at the store, an hour after Midhat was presented with the broken lamps, it took him three minutes to uncover the third. He had hidden it, entire, under a lump of fabrics, which he confessed was his habit in case the others went missing. Of the broken lamps he said: “It was probably a bat.” He took off his coat and set about scrutinising the body of the first customer with a tape measure dangling from his teeth.
The rest of the day passed unremarkably, and Midhat excused himself ahead of closing time because they had guests for dinner.