she is pregnant you know. I hope it will end soon, the strike, I want to go back to normal. Every night we hear gunfire. Khaled comes and sleeps with me, sometimes.”
“Hani’s in prison,” said Midhat, “Oh—” He put his hand to his lips. “I think I knew that. Someone told me. At Sarafand.”
“And Uncle Hassan sold more land to the Church,” said Fatima, “to fund the cause.”
“Wallah.”
“The last time I saw him was … last year.” She closed her eyes; she was talking randomly. “There was a priest there. French.”
“Oh, yes, I know him. Brother of the Virgins.”
“He wrote a book about Nablus.”
A memory blurted across Midhat’s mind. He saw the Nablus hospital in the fog of his derangement, and there, Frédéric Molineu, sitting beyond the other patients on the far edge of the veranda. He looked at the memory in astonishment; anger flooded him, pursued by a kind of holy terror. Then, quite as abruptly, he recalled a desire to speak with his old enemy. He turned his head, and Docteur Molineu had vanished. In his place sat a priest.
“Are you all right?”
He made a noise. “I was just remembering something at the hospital. A man.”
“A man?”
“A—yes. A Jewish man.” He cleared his throat. “I met him, I mean. In the bed next to mine.”
She tapped into the ashtray, and Midhat wondered how much she knew about his psychosis. How much did any of them know? Who knew what one let slip in a delirium? He teetered, exposed, as though a gale had forced open his greatcoat. He looked over at his impenetrable wife.
“Fatima.”
“Yes.”
“How did you really get me out?”
“The way Teta said.”
“By telling them I was a doctor?”
“Among other things.”
She shrank down against the pillows.
He said, “You look so sad.”
She closed her eyes. Tears slid down her lashes. He did not try to comfort her. He returned onto his back, and as her breathing slowed the mattress shifted under her slackened muscles. He still had a strong desire to talk. It had been so long since his last clear conversation, and he was remembering the pleasure of it. He looked again at his wife’s face, her breaths short and light from her open mouth.
“Fatima,” he whispered. A long silence followed before the next breath, which came like a gasp, in, out. His energies gathered to a point. “I know,” he said, “this was not what you expected.”
He arranged his head in his palm, propped on his elbow. A crease quivered down her brow, and he waited before resuming: “I’m sorry. When the strike is over, when we have money again, I promise we’ll leave Nablus. We’ll go to the sea. We’ll go to Beirut, we’ll go to Jaffa. Alexandria—”
Her lips started to tighten. Her cheekbones emerged into distinctness. She opened an eye.
“Salut,” he whispered, smiling.
She twisted to face the ceiling.
“Sorry.” He closed his eyes as if to sleep. But the need to speak remained caught in his chest, like an unexpressed cough. So much had happened, was still happening. He wanted to say how peculiar it was to wake up after having been asleep for months. Though physically only a couple of hours’ drive from Nablus, really he had been abroad, in another country, while in his hometown a kind of war was going on—he wanted to talk about the strike; what it might achieve; what it meant to walk down these empty, menacing streets. He wanted to ask Fatima questions, he wanted their words to come out and meet in the middle. He wanted to tell her about his delusions, and by telling them draw out what remained of their poison—he wanted to tell her how changed he felt. That he could see himself a little more clearly from the outside. And he could see Fatima, beside him. Her nightgown had risen above her knees, above the gentle curve of her whalebone shins, crossed like the arms of musical instruments; she had taken off her stockings, and from her locked ankles, wisped with pale hairs, her pinkish feet protruded, her slender-necked big toes. She inhaled slowly. He felt her weariness, he knew she was blinking at the ceiling. Beside him, this breathing, opaque body. No, he would not tell her any of this. The wave crashed.
“I think,” he said, “that I should go on a walk.”
“You need to rest.”
There was fear in her voice. He reacted to it as he always used to: with a ludic grin. “You know how long I have been in bed