Midhat uncrossed his legs, nostrils fuming. “I wish I had not missed the beginning.”
The implied candour of this remark took Antoine off guard. He stole another look at his companion. Midhat was gazing at his little girl. Perhaps he took it as a given that everyone knew of his confinement.
“Yes,” said Antoine. “The beginning was quite beautiful. Now, people seem rather tired. I doubt they will want to miss the harvest.” Midhat opened his hand—agreeing, qualifying?—and Antoine tipped his head back and blew into the air: “I hope they will succeed. That some good will come of this.”
“Well,” said Midhat. “We deserve it.”
He had put no pressure on that “we.” Nevertheless, Antoine felt the force of his correction.
“Of course you are justified, there’s no doubt about that,” said Antoine. “All I meant was, now the British are bringing more troops, and there is talk of martial law, and, you know, if there is anything I have learned in my life—and though I am an old man the truth is I have only learned a few things! But I do know we can never predict the future. So I only meant—that it might go either way, if you see.” He sucked the cigar and rotated it as he held his breath, looking at the smouldering end. “More and more, I find, I struggle to hold the larger picture in view. Every year, my … mind,” he drew his palms together, “becomes smaller.”
Somewhere, someone was playing scales on a piano. The sound brought the cicadas on the mountain to life, so that the silent veranda was abruptly full of noises. The pianist wavered between two notes.
“Do you work with the nurses?” said Midhat.
“Oh no,” said Antoine. “I was a researcher. I wrote a book.”
“Bravo.”
“So-so.” He tipped his head from side to side. “I am also a priest,” he gestured at his robes, “and once, I taught at L’École Biblique. In Jerusalem.”
“Now I really envy you.”
“Really?”
“I would love to be at a university. In France, I went to two universities. I loved them. The classes, I loved …” Midhat shook his head, lifting his eyes again to his little girl, who, seeming to sense his gaze, also glanced up. “You know this sense that everyone around you is arguing,” he said. “When you are writing you are writing to one another, even to people who are dead. Even to people who are not alive yet.”
“Well now,” said Antoine, “this is really the dream of the university! My experience was usually of a bleaker sort of monastery. Of course, L’École Biblique is attached to a convent. But, actually, convents are not bleak places to live, generally speaking. Contrary to popular opinion perhaps.”
Midhat’s eyes grew round. “Bleak?” He laughed in disbelief. “But at a university, where every man can think for himself—”
“And can count on being wrong half the time.”
Midhat was shaking his head.
“At least half the time,” said Antoine. “Probably more.”
“That’s the point.”
“To be wrong?”
“To be … sharpened against others, against their … you know.”
Down in the grove, a ragged cat pranced out from under the veranda, tail erect, stalking something too small to be seen.
“You had a wonderful time at Montpellier, then,” said Antoine.
“And the Sorbonne.”
Antoine chuckled.
“I have forgotten everything now. I remember some things. I remember I loved … the medicine bottles.” He contracted his lips around his cigarillo, puffing repeatedly before exhaling through his nose. “I can’t explain.”
“The bottles?”
“No, not the bottles. That’s not what I meant.”
“Tell me. I’m interested.”
“Are you?”
“Very much.”
Midhat met his eye. “Are you going to write it down?”
“What?”
“I said, are you going to write it down?”
Here, it seemed to Antoine that several moments passed. He was quite unable to speak. His skin ran cold. His mind was bursting with Louise.
“I know you have been writing about Nablus,” he heard Midhat say. “My wife told me.”
“Your wife?”
“Fatima Hammad. The daughter of Haj Nimr.”
Very slowly, Antoine released his breath and shut his eyes. “Yes. I did write about Nablus. I am not writing anymore. So—no, I will not write it down.” He pretended to laugh. Only now, as the conversation was slipping against him, did he recognise how he craved the approval of this francophone Nabulsi. A crescendo of footsteps indoors heralded the end of their exchange, with its little window of sympathy: any moment now, more patients would be coming out for air. He cleared his throat for the goodbye. The footsteps vanished, and the doors did not open. Midhat tapped the ash