turned to spring, Antoine received multiple telegrams from Michaels. “Waiting for your report. J.M.” “Report to HQ. J.M.” “Shall we send someone? J.M.” To the fourth telegram, Antoine sent the reply:
“My apologies but I have lately become very sick and am confined to bed. I will soon go to the hospital. Yours A.K.”
At least that last statement was not a lie: he set out for the hospital that afternoon. It was May, and in the silent streets, severed telegraph lines swung in the breeze. Outside the post office, sandbagged against bombs, a bloodstain coated the pavement. Around the corner a British army car lolled on its back, windows smashed, the horseshoe on the dashboard pointing its tines to the ground. A demolished house crouched between mounds of rubble, as though ready to emerge at any moment to its full stature.
He nodded at the nurses in the hospital foyer and took his old position in the corner of the veranda. His rocking chair had gone. On one of the ordinary chairs he sat facing the grove, thinking of Louise. When they laid her on the dining table in her shroud, he had spent a long time looking at her. He thought of her hands, placed over each other on her chest, the skin draped over the bones of her fingers like a thin yellow fabric.
Men’s voices leaked from the hall, louder and louder, until the veranda door shook open and a nurse bolted it in place. A dozen men sloped onto the balcony. Bandaged arms, bandaged legs, plenty of crutches, one man with a head wound, another apparently without a hand. They sat noisily, chatting. One or two nodded at Antoine; he nodded gravely back. He could not recall so many patients taking the air at once before. Two chairs down from his, a man with flame-blue eyes and grey hair cracked his knuckles. “Sharp and then dull,” he said. He spoke with a refined urban accent. The next man along said nothing. This one, despite the gauze around his arm and head, had the bearing of a ready fighter, and looked as though he might at any moment reach out and grip the peeling wooden rail that separated them all from the wilderness, launch himself over it as over a vaulting horse, and disappear among the bushes. Next along, an elderly white-turbaned gentleman with a chiselled nose was drinking coffee. Someone switched on a wireless. It droned, then began to speak. “… An attack on the road between Nablus and Tulkarem at approximately oh eight hundred hours. Two casualties have been reported …” An hour had passed, and a nurse knocked on the windowpanes. At the signal, the sunbathers swung upright from their stations of repose, and surrendering the blankets to their chairs, trundled indoors in single file.
The following morning, Antoine arrived to find the veranda occupied by female patients. He walked behind their chairs and stationed himself in the corner. He had not been sitting long when a whisper shot down the balcony, and propelled everyone into an animal silence. A crowd of Arab men had appeared in the grove below. They carried a motley array of weapons—full rifles, kitchen knives, some sharpened sticks. In an instant they raced up the slope and separated to scramble over the rocks. British soldiers came in pursuit, but their vehicles could not pass through the woodland, and after an ungainly dismount they trooped under the branches in their big boots, hesitating and swivelling to study the vantage, disappearing and re-emerging back and forth between the bushy hair of the olives. When they finally made their way up the hill, so Antoine was later informed, they found only peasants, tilling the land and pursuing ordinary farming work.
Returning on every day of fine weather, Antoine heard all manner of stories. Who fought here, who fought there, who was a traitor, who killed that Jewish settler, who killed that policeman. Aref Abd al-Razzaq was a well-known character, famous for turning up in one place and appearing ten kilometres away a moment later shooting at something else. Rumours about the Jews ranged from plausible to outlandish: rumours of slaughter, of designs to occupy the Haram, of other deep, disgusting perversities which the fighters imbibed like fuel. Vivacity of story was an elixir to violence. The strongest tonics concerned the British, source of all evil and oppression, of which the flogged and weeping bodies in the hospital provided sufficient proof.
None of the patients seemed particularly bothered by