particular direction. Spring had brought out new colours in the beds, and violets spread rampant along the paths.
“Tell me more about yourself,” said Jeannette.
“What would you like to know?” He was happy they were side by side and he did not have to look at her; otherwise he might have found it hard to speak.
“I don’t know. What about your school.”
“Well, it has one long building, like this. And on one side there is a big gate, and on the other side is the Bosphorus.”
Sensing that this wasn’t quite what she wanted, he changed direction and described how with two friends from the dormitory he used to sneak out at night by climbing a wall behind the oak tree. Once, they were caught on their way home from the city, and gave the warden false names.
“Samir became Izz ad-Din Izz ad-Din, Ilhan said Simeon Simeon, and I said my name was Ahmad Ibn Ahmad. It was very funny. The warden laughed and rode us home, and we weren’t even punished. I mean, we never went anywhere really, we only walked around the streets for a while. Sometimes we bought ice cream. Ha! We didn’t know what to do with the freedom. It was just for the sake of being free.”
Next Jeannette asked about the different religions, and Midhat listed the various groups in the Empire, running a mental finger over the boys in his Mekteb dormitory. Again, this clearly wasn’t what she wanted. So he elaborated some details of his own experience, and described how there weren’t many Christians in Nablus, but his neighbour Hala was one of them, and he used to play with her when they were very young. They made a house in the woodshed and his Teta would bring them tea.
“It sounds like a very free childhood.”
“It was, I think so. We lived at the bottom of a mountain. My father wasn’t at home often, because he worked in Cairo, works in Cairo, and I had a nurse when I was small but mostly I grew up with my grandmother.”
More and more fluently, he asked Jeannette about her own life. He wondered if she would tell him more about her mother, but she did not, and he did not ask. Slowly she unravelled some other facts about her childhood in Montparnasse, and narrated some amusing stories to match the ones he had shared. Then, as they reached the greenhouse, she burst out that she had felt uneasy during her studies at the university. There among all those men—she laughed, the little creases beneath her eyes clarifying in the sunlight.
They met again the following morning at eleven o’clock. This time they walked around the neighbourhood, and peered up the driveways at the other houses, their shutters and paintwork cracked and faded by the hot breezes that came off the Mediterranean. Conversation moved beyond simple facts and memories into the realm of speculation: perhaps I feel this, perhaps I feel that. Midhat reeled from the blaze of Jeannette’s interest and tried to temper his enthusiasm about what she shared with him. But his joy was precarious, and attended by strong gusts of anxiety. At times he felt their privacy threatened by the hypothetical judgements of other people, and became distracted by the view he imagined from the windows they passed, a man and a woman seen from above, unchaperoned. This notion sent his thoughts on a worn path: first back to his school friends, and his cousin Jamil, with the query accompanied by a slightly gleeful pride as to whether any of them were encountering women the way he was. Directly this thought would sink under the thought of Laurent, and his shadowy history with Jeannette, and Midhat’s comparative ignorance of European convention, in which for a man and woman to walk side by side and discuss their childhoods might quite easily signify nothing at all. He began expending considerable effort trying to stop his mind from enlarging upon the looks she gave him, and the remarks she made, and the silences she allowed. Everything about it was new to him. Presumably, it was not new to her. He wondered if she used to go walking with Laurent, and this thought alone was often sobering enough to check the elaboration of his fantasies. And yet, though he knew it would in all likelihood appease his conscience, he could not summon the courage to ask her about Laurent, nor even to mention his name.