of one hand into the other palm. “God keep you safe. God keep you, God keep you.”
Jamil pulled on his jacket and left the house.
In general, he avoided thinking about Midhat as much as possible. The day he found his cousin trembling on the floor of Wasfi’s study, he had wept briefly in front of Hani. But he did not visit Midhat in the Nablus hospital where he was all winter, nor in the Bethlehem one where he was moved last month. Nor had he made plans to.
Over the past decade, their contact had been minimal. News of his cousin was mostly mediated by Um Jamil and Um Taher, and by Adel Jawhari and other activists who knew him, and sometimes by those in town who did not know Midhat well but imitated his gestures and referred to him as “the Parisian” with an affection that slid into derision. “I’m going to the banque,” was something still said among Jamil’s colleagues, with a flipping of the non-firing hand. But Jamil always had the impression, even from afar, that Midhat exaggerated this image for the fun of it. So he was not exactly the dupe of these jokes, but rather, with one further remove might be extracted from “the Parisian” entirely, which was not him precisely but some other person whom he took the liberty to play. Still, as the years passed Jamil felt shame and irritation when his cousin’s name was mentioned. Respectful affection in Nablus had shaded into malice once the Syrians rose up against the French Mandate. Everyone knew France was a cancer of imperial force, leaching life from Arab households. To be a Parisian in Nablus was to be out of step with the times, locked in an old colonial formula where subjects imitated masters as if in the seams of their old garments they hoped to find some dust of power left trapped. This was not precisely the case with Midhat, who seemed rather blind to the deep meaning of his costumes, and was certainly not striving for power or superiority when he meticulously crimped a mouchoir in his pocket and said, “Voulez vous?” Blinking when they talked of politics, agreeing mildly and continuing on his way, so literally in love with the pattern on a scarf that he would spend great fortunes behind his wife’s back in order to import it from Europe.
When Midhat had first returned from Paris after the war, Jamil remembered him full of quick energy, with a varnished way of formulating his ideas. France had turned him into a man quite different from the shy schoolboy of their childhood. Many in Nablus even speculated that Midhat might go into politics, given how naturally he discussed Faisal and the Syrian question. Midhat, a politician! Within a year of his return he became so self-absorbed that he jumped when you spoke to him, and between the pair of them a constriction commenced that neither tried to ease. For a while Jamil went on craving the lost affinity of their youth, until it was clear that this quality of sympathy would be impossible to revive. Divided from his cousin in the crowd, Jamil’s resentment decayed into scorn.
In the full sunlight he began to sweat. In a way, it made sense that Midhat was now in a hospital for mad people while Nablus was in revolt. How else would al-Barisi have coped with wearing patched trousers? Where would be that man’s fortitude, confronted with the scrawny limbs of his nieces and nephews, the hunger and tiredness in the eyes of everyone? Anger was making Jamil walk too fast: he cooled his final thought. Not everyone could be a fighter. When Midhat returned from hospital he would probably manage as well as most.
He ducked into the old city and shrank against the wall. The most dangerous rage of all was the rage against impurity. Condemnation of strikebreakers had lately reached the pitch of fever: last week, a group of youths between eight and fourteen had badly wounded a vegetable merchant by stoning him, after giving him a black eye and pouring a bucket of muck over his head. The man’s crime? Suspicion of wanting to break the strike. The Committee were setting up a system of rebel courts allowing witnesses to testify before an audience. They hoped this theatre of persuasion would induce the accused to ratify his or her allegiance to the cause—but mostly they meant to placate the accusers, and conjoin everyone in a