than the others. The same desk stood before the window; the same chair. The same bookshelf, though the books it held were different. An old copy of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois lay on top of the others, as though studied recently and carelessly returned. It was a dun-coloured volume with vertebral ridges above and below the title. He tipped it from the shelf, and let it fall open in his hand.
The motion of the people is always either too remiss or too violent. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms they overturn all before them; and sometimes with a hundred thousand feet they creep like insects.
His brain moved stiffly through the words. He had not read French in years. His bookshelves at home were full of French books, but he had stopped opening them because it tired him to push uphill through their pages.
A few years ago, he tried to speak French to one of the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph. The “Ebal Girls,” as some people still called them, had long before relinquished the management of the municipal hospital, and handed it over to a few local Western-educated doctors and nurses they themselves had trained. But with an affection for the building and its regulars the Ebal Girls still made visits now and then, imparting odds and ends of obsolete advice. His grandmother, who for all her initial mistrust had come to adore the hospital, visited for a checkup at least once a week. Occasionally he accompanied her, and on one of these occasions had attempted to address an emaciated elderly nun who was bedridden with illness. Her name was Sister Louise. Beyond “Bon soir,” however, Midhat found he could not say anything. The words were like dry objects in his mouth that he could not chew. Teta’s embarrassment made him feel even worse—and when he returned home he reached for the old poets he used to like. Fatima said she found him asleep in his chair half an hour later, glasses on his head and the pages of the book squashed on his chest.
He forced his way through the paragraph of Montesquieu. He was shifting heavy sand, trying to uncover something hard beneath. He felt the pieces of his mind like the wheels of a clock running too slow.
The daylight was full now. Glancing up he saw rays stretching indoors; and yet it was cold, his shoulders were hunched, he was holding the book up to his face. A low sun shone in through the window at a blinding angle and lit his fingers so they glowed red. All along its path dust sparkled, washed around in the air’s current. A sharp beam outlined the shadows on the floor, and he caught sight of a tiled corner. An object used to stand there. A chest of drawers, perhaps; or a shelf, or a chair. How odd, you could know a room for years, be familiar with its contents, but when something was removed, you could not for your own life recall what it was. And there, that tile where whatever-it-was used to stand was sharpened by the light. An outline of black. He set Montesquieu aside and, crouching in the corner, noted with his fingers that it wobbled. He needed a blade.
The kitchen was the same; the cutlery in the drawer was different. He selected a knife with a bone handle, and kneeling once more in the study, slid the knife’s rounded end into the side of the tile. It yielded with a scraping sound. The fingers of his left hand grabbed the edge: it was heavy, he felt the blade suffering and bending under the weight. The tile was deeper than it looked, and when he managed at last to draw it upward, a small puff of dirt and crumbled cement flakes flashed in the air. He put his hand into the hole, felt the edges of something smaller and lighter than the stone, and drew up a wooden cigar box.
He wiped off the dust. The broken halves of two grey-green labels lay across the opened edge. The coloured paper around the perimeter was tattered. The lid opened easily, and the box exuded a strong smell of tobacco, sharp and sweet, full of cedar. He smelled his father. He felt his father’s beard scratching his cheek.
Inside the box lay several objects. He wiped his fingers on his trouser legs to touch them: two bronze figurines, Grecian women, with a pale green tarnish caught in the folds of