defined. This with Qassam … at first, it was only a question of keeping quiet. Then, little by little, one realises one has taken a side. To help one party can simply mean not helping the other.”
“Yes, of course,” said Antoine coolly. But in a few seconds his wish for knowledge overrode his desire to prove he already had it, and he said: “And Sister Louise? Was she …”
“The same. We all did. We all do. If our purpose is here, why would we act against the local people?”
“Why indeed. And where—can I ask, where did you acquire the arms?”
“Oh father, that was only a bit of ammunition.” She thrust the new cloth over the table. The linen fluttered and sank heavily past the edge, and she stretched across to push out the furrows with the flat of her hand.
He turned to go. In the doorway, he could not help throwing out:
“I’m interested, you know, in how much all of this is inevitable. The fighting, and the … situation.” He watched for her reaction. “One people in need, trespassing on the rights of another, I wonder how much …”
Sister Marian’s frown rose into an expectant triangle.
Antoine said, “I have spent the latter part of my career”—to his surprise, the word pained him—“trying to construct a pattern of this town. According to my training, all that is was there to begin with. But is one always to simplify, to make a picture more coherent?”
She opened the cutlery drawer.
“To impose …” He was losing her. He could not stop. “Sister Marian, I am literally watching them. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I am here. Nablus has become my whole life, I cannot leave it. But there is no discernible point to watching them. I am not helping anyone.”
“Do you need to help?” said Sister Marian, counting forks. “You are not a missionary.”
“I am not.”
“You are in the service of knowledge,” she said simply, and the forks in her hand crashed onto the table.
5
The ward was smaller in Midhat’s mind. Every time he opened his eyes the space surprised him, measured out by the beds that pulled the walls apart. All the others stirring, sleeping, blinking, coughing, praying—but when he closed his eyes his ears blocked up, and a curtain drew around his cot, and it was warm and quiet.
Opening his eyes on the huge ward, Midhat twisted his neck to look through the window behind him. An olive grove. In rows the trees stood, frozen in the act of passing along their loads. The young ones were thin and sprightly, the crones squat, volute. He extended a hand and grabbed one around the waist, and with a roar of soil pulled it up out of the earth, churning a thick brown fog. The problem with objects is that even when they fall they leave something behind, and the tree remained standing although it was also in his fist, and he grabbed at the tree that remained standing undisturbed in the field, but now it was made of thin wafer that melted in the heat of his hand and passed through his palm.
The olive harvest was just completed, but the trees already carried new green fruits, little hard things amid their leaves. Obviously, everything was always growing.
The nurse, Jumana, helped him into a seated position. She unbuttoned his shirt with her dry fingers and slid it off his back. He heard the patter of the sponge as she squeezed it over the bowl, and his anticipating flesh tingled. The wet warm began first over his shoulders, then entered the soft, haired places under his arms, tinkling back into Jumana’s bowl. She drew the sponge along his wrists where the rough edge tickled, and at last reached his hands—this was the part that made him laugh. Someone else washing his hands, a sensation never dreamt of. Next the chest, the rolls of his torso, squeezing into those crevices for dirt; then the neck, the area expressive above all the others of cleanliness, for when your neck was scrubbed you felt so clean you might not even need a bath; why was that? Perhaps because it was close to the brain—and down his lower back went the knifing heat, the warmth already cooling in the air.
There were times, while the rest of the ward moaned and coughed and spoke and prayed, and he turned his neck to look out the window at the moonlit grove, for at night Jumana left the shutter