A noise of wheels outside half eclipsed the latter part of his question, but Fatima had heard him. She made no attempt to stop her face from seizing up like a child’s. Midhat’s hands extended, far apart, fingers outstretched as if to catch or to embrace, or perhaps he was reaching, for her, for a word to undo what he had just said. Fatima’s storm gradually subsided. She looked exhausted, tensed on the brink of speech. But without saying anything she bent from the waist and started to unbuckle his bag. She placed his garters on the mattress and, wrinkling up a dark blue sock, crouched at his feet.
“Yalla.” She waved the sock at him, and he lifted his gown. Once the elastic had sprung to his calf she took up the second one. Next, the trousers: fly unbuttoned, she opened the legs into two puddles on the floor. He put a hand on her shoulder and sought out the flagstone with his feet, and she helped the fabric over his ankles. She tugged off the gown and eased him into a shirt, flipping the buttons into their holes from bottom to top. She let him fasten his belt by himself. Right arm into his jacket, left arm in, and as she was relaxing the laces of his shoes, pulling up the tongues, she said: “You want the tie too?”
Midhat chuckled. She had never dressed him before. It was funny how quickly that sticky silence smoothed, and this renewed habit of company sent the unspoken accusation that he had abandoned her floating off above his head. He pressed his heel past the leather of the shoe. Here it came, the first breeze of relief. He was leaving this place.
But as Fatima rolled up his hospital gown, he was overwhelmed with the contrary heaviness of a strong, physical loss at the prospect of leaving. Some trace of that virus must be surviving inside him, tempting him even now with the amnesiac allure of that other woman. Like waking in a chilled bed and yearning after the disappearing scraps of a dream, even while knowing the object of yearning was a part of his own mind. A fraudulent allure, an ignis fatuus, and yet, and yet: that vision of her in the ward was—he slipped his heel into the second shoe, and with the thud his stomach dropped and he experienced an echo of his rise to that summit, the very real sensation of Jeannette’s living shoulder beneath his hand, her voice, her breath—if that was a hallucination, then hallucinations were a kind of heaven.
He watched his wife approaching with the tie, holding the two ends in her hands to noose it around his neck. There in the mirror stood a haggard man in a suit, a second column of silver buttons appearing under his pale fingers. He bent his head to accept the tie. As if by this motion of his head he had tipped the balance of fluids in his ear, the bronze sound of bells thronged through the air. He jerked back and searched Fatima’s eyes.
“Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Bells,” he breathed.
She frowned. “Yes, I can hear bells,” she said. “Bethlehem is full of churches.”
She reached again to put the tie around his collar. He gasped and grabbed her hands—soft, small, damp—and prised them open to cover the palms with kisses.
“Thank you, thank you.”
“Stop it!” said Fatima. But her fingers were yielding to his lips, and she was laughing.
Jamil drove faster than normal, and Wasfi watched through the windscreen for British army cars. Um Jamil and Abu Jamil had arrived separately. (“Will you be all right?” said Wasfi. “Your aunt has the eyes of a fox,” said Abu Jamil.) Fatima sat behind Wasfi, Midhat in the middle holding her hand, Teta on his other side.
“Hani meant well,” said Teta, pulling her skirts between her legs and arranging her feet. “But how is he to know? He has other things on his mind. Heyk az-zuruf. But look, Midhat is not mad, is he? Are you habibi? Just sad.”
“Yes, I’m just sad.”
“Good good,” said Teta. And looking out the window: “Horrible place.”
“How did you get me out?” he said.
“Fatima did,” said Teta. “She told them you were a doctor. Trained in France. Then she said you had taught her how to care for the sick. Then she said—what did she say? She said you were grieving for your father, and that she would look after you. Then she said, the conditions