Gorin. “Where are you from?”
“Nablus, a town north of Jerusalem, south of Damascus.”
“Magnificent.”
“He is going to be a doctor,” said Jeannette.
Midhat twisted his torso. The position kept him more alert. It also allowed him to look again at the man’s face.
And as he looked now, a conviction solidified that this was not, after all, Captain Gorin. Those ginger whiskers were not familiar, nor the sunburnt cheeks. This was a stranger, his name was Paul Richer, and given the smile on his lips he was clearly aware that Midhat was studying him. The realisation jarred as strongly as the instant of his first mistake, and Midhat was overcome by a sour-tasting unease.
“Monsieur Midhat,” said Jeannette. “You must be very tired. Would you prefer to go to bed? Georgine, perhaps Monsieur Midhat would like to see where his bedroom is? He looks—he must be very tired from his journey.”
And so, shortly before seven o’clock in the evening, on the twentieth of October 1914, Midhat Kamal was shown into a corner room in the upstairs of the Molineu house in Montpellier. The window showed the dim garden, a large tree at the far end. The walls of the room were striped yellow, and opposite the bed, beside the fireplace, a wooden chair faced a table with a vase of lilies dropping orange dust on its shiny veneer. His trunk stood upright beside an armoire. He untied his shoes and lay down.
Flat on his back, he thought again of the stranger downstairs named Paul Richer, and tried to picture his captain. Red curls, grooves in his cheeks. The rest was harder to fill in. He felt the rocking motions of the sea, and the images of the day plotted themselves on the insides of his eyelids: the French coast that morning, emerging from the blue distance; the passengers abandoning breakfast to crowd at the windows; the port of Marseille, the bustle for gangplanks onto shore, the motorcars, the whistling; Jeannette stepping towards him with her hand out; the town from the car window, darkening; the cordial, the salon, the bedroom, the ceiling. He realised his eyes were closed, and opened them.
The colours had gone. He was on his side, and the floor by the window was quilted with moonlight. In the dark the bedroom was large and soft. Sleep was half off and half on. He pulled himself up; a chill seared. Jacket off, braces down, unbutton the shirt. And then a whisper, a patter—nothing human, the sound of two objects shifting past each other. He stared at the door, and watched it puff open with an intruding breeze. The latch had not clicked shut.
On his feet, he pulled the handle and the door turned silently on its hinge. There lay the upstairs hall. Grey and empty. No draught, although the air was a little cooler. The lip of the carpet that ran up the stairs lay supine at the top, slightly furled. Above it the banister turned, descending. And in the far corner at the other end of the gallery, where the gloom deepened, a lamp stood beside a closed door.
He retreated. He pressed the door until he heard the latch, and slid under the cold sheets. His eyes shut on the dark ceiling and soon the bedclothes were as warm as his skin, and he could imagine he was back in Nablus. A memory rose up, of a time he had walked in his sleep, when he was fourteen or so. He had woken at the warble of the call to prayer to find himself in bed beside his grandmother, his Teta, with one of her arms around his waist. Confused, ashamed, he tried to pull himself upright, stuck a foot out onto the cold tile—until Teta stretched forward and touched his hair. You were talking, she said. Habibi don’t worry, habibi, go back to sleep.
2
In the twilight years of the Empire, keeping time had become a problem. The official year still began in March, when the tax farmers plagued the fellahin. But the Christians used the Gregorian calendar, led by January with the leap years and a few variations according to their liturgies; and while the Jews adjusted their terms to accommodate the cycles of the earth, the Muslims followed the lunar Hijri and gradually fell out of step with the seasons as they turned.
While Midhat was a child everyone in Nablus, even the non-Muslims, followed the moon and, in spite of Sultan Abdülhamid’s new Frankish clock tower, kept religiously to