are unemployed. Mish heyk?”
The Frenchman’s eyes rose to the ceiling as he digested this remark.
“What I mean, baba,” said Haj Nimr to Fatima, smoothing with his tone the corner of her last remark, “is that they like a local leader. This is the fellahi mentality. They like a sheikh, a wali. Hala’ the two are combining fi Qassam, religious and political. This was not the way before.”
“You’re not going to like me saying this,” said the Frenchman. On cue, Haj Hassan frowned. “But there are some studies on this at my school.”
As though he had not heard, Nimr said brightly: “You will stay with the Ebal Girls in Nablus?”
“Yes.” The Frenchman smiled. “But I’m not sure they are girls any longer.”
Fatima saw a twitch pass through her father’s forehead.
“Khalas Fatima.” Her mother was on her feet, making a big gesture with her hand, as though to a recalcitrant animal. “Ta‘ali, we’ll make the tea.”
Fatima rose. To conceal her irritation at being taken away, she adopted a blank expression, just as she had done when she arrived at the front door twenty minutes ago, concealing her distress.
After her morning with Sahar, Fatima had been unable to return home alone, so frightened was she of the building that might or might not have the evil eye upon it. She was also smarting from the incident in the garden, that view of her husband in the chicken coop with his earth-stained hands, Sahar a witness over her shoulder. Envy jostled shoulders with the evil eye, and yet Fatima coveted envy, and dreaded the loss of it. And who would envy the picture of her marriage that Sahar had seen? When Sahar left for Jenin, Fatima sought shelter in her parents’ house.
She often came here when she felt perturbed, even though the house never turned out to be the shelter she needed. Of course it was unreasonable to expect the place to remain unchanged after she married, or somehow to revert to its old nature, yet she always hoped against the evidence of her last visit there that she might step through the doorway and find the mood of the building, the behaviour of its inhabitants, the colour of the ornaments, exactly as they were when she was seventeen. She yearned for the place where her status was secure, and where, most importantly, she was not responsible for maintaining it. Until she married, Fatima had been a prize, famous for being not yet won. Marriage meant someone had named her price. It did not matter that she herself chose her mate: in the eyes of Nablus she was appraised and evaluated, stripped of the precious mystery of being young and undefined. This was the reality she was forced to live under. Forgetting how much as a girl she had hated feeling amorphous, she looked back at her youth and saw, with what she thought were clear eyes, that the anticipation of glory had itself been the real glory, and should have been treasured.
In such moments of distress, the changes in her parents’ house impressed Fatima powerfully, but the needs of her heart always prevailed over any memory of disappointment, and she never retained the facts. Ah, now she recalled: her mother, petulant where she used to be passionate. Her father, ossified where once he was flexible. Today he was belabouring his point about Qassam through the same old contours of his rigid cosmology, ignoring those facts even Fatima was aware of. After all these years of learning, of striving for clarity, Nimr had frozen halfway up the summit, and his ideas set in stone at some stage of their development, to be applied now to everything without discretion.
Her mother sneezed as they entered the cold kitchen.
“You wanted to talk alone?”
“Yes.”
“What is it then. Yalla.”
“I am just worried. And I’m tired.”
“What’s happened?” Widad picked up a plate that was leaning on the sideboard and touched with her fingernail a fine crack in the lip.
“There was a fire in my husband’s shop.”
Her mother jerked up. “Mish ma’ool, a bad one?”
“He says it is a small one.”
“You think someone did it.”
“I don’t know,” said Fatima, defensive. She circled the table. “I’m just nervous, that’s all.”
“Don’t be. Inshallah kheir.”
“Yes, yes.”
Widad put down the plate. “What did your husband say?”
“He said it was not a big problem,” said Fatima. She hated discussing Midhat with her mother. Midhat, in the field of their relations, was Fatima’s expression of free will. “I don’t know, Mama. I feel … I don’t know