a doctor.”
Antoine glanced at him. The joviality had gone, and the face, full-cheeked and slender browed, sharpened. A wind swarmed down the valley and thrust itself over the veranda rail. Midhat’s hair blew back from his forehead and he shut his eyes. The pockets of soft flesh above his cheeks seemed to press back into his skull, his mouth assumed a grim horizontal, and the threads of his small moustache ruffled minutely in the current.
“Which bed are you sleeping in?”
“Oh—” said Antoine. “I am not a patient.” He laughed.
Midhat tutted. “No bed for a holy man! What are we coming to.”
And then, with extraordinary slowness, Midhat wrapped his fingers around the arm of the chair and stood up. He moved off behind the others, and stopped dead before the door. A nurse rushed out.
“There you are!” She grasped his arm. “Why are you dressed? Come on. Come back, Amo, come back.”
It rained on the way home. Drops, invisible and fast, fell cold on Antoine’s hands and face. He found Sister Marian outside the chapel, holding an umbrella and stretching out one of the lapels of her overcoat. She smiled when she recognised him.
“Are you very happy, Sister?”
She held the umbrella over his head and fell in step.
“It is odd that one’s mood should be so affected by the behaviour of one’s pupils.”
“You have been teaching.”
“Children can be so unpredictable. Today they were very enthusiastic.”
“How old?”
“Seven and eight. They drew flowers mostly, except—look at this one. Isn’t it marvellous.”
He took charge of the umbrella as she revealed the bundle of papers hidden under her coat. She held up the first page: a childish depiction of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, red and small and pulsating with gold daggers of light. On the page beneath he could just see the tip of a purple flower with a strong green stem.
“Very accomplished.”
“She is a Muslim.” Sister Marian pressed her lips together and elongated her jaw, suppressing a smile. “They gave them to me as gifts. I’m going to hang them in the dining room. How was the hospital?”
As Antoine was contemplating how to describe his day, he nodded at the driver of a two-horse cart trotting past.
“We are having lamb for dinner,” said Sister Marian.
“Very good.”
“Sister Margareta was given a sheep by one of the villagers who was wounded outside Jenin.”
“Did she heal him?”
“I think he lost an arm.”
The door was at hand. Sister Marian turned the key, and as they stepped into the cool shade of the hall, she asked: “Have you decided, yet, what it is you will write next?”
This, at last, unlocked him. “I don’t suppose, Sister,” he said expressively, “that I shall write anything.”
As the words left his mouth he felt their significance. But this was lost on Sister Marian, whom, yet again, his heart had mistaken for Louise. Marian did not have the field of reference to read or take an interest in Antoine’s meaning; her questions were pleasantries. She held out a page wrinkled with gouache and raindrops.
“We must all retire at some point,” she said, drawing it aside and picking up the next. “We were visited last week by the education director’s assistant, Mister Jerome. He was very eager to suggest our curriculum should not be too literary. They are worried we will give the girls ideas.”
“What does that mean, literary?”
“They would prefer we taught them to embroider and left it there, I think. And hygiene, which they are obsessed with. The inspector calls it maintaining the status quo, keeping Arab girls at home … or maintaining tradition, he said. What’s comical”—she said this without smiling, she had noticed a stain on the tablecloth and hunched over to scratch it with her nail—“is that it has become rather fashionable to send them to school. We have hardly enough staff to keep up. Every father in Nablus seems to want his daughters to learn history, and do you know why? To make appealing wives. Nabulsi men like good conversationalists. So in the end,” she sighed, straightening up, “I suppose they all have the same purpose in view.”
She set the paintings on the sideboard and gathered the cloth, revealing the burnished brown nakedness of the table beneath, scarred in places by a less fastidious housemistress.
“In any case,” she said, opening the cabinet for a fresh one, “controlling the history books didn’t stop them.”
“How long, Sister, have you been helping?”
“The Arabs?”
“Yes.”
“Me, personally?”
“All of you.”
“Since the end of the war.” She met his eye. “You know, Father, help can be very broadly