Arab time. According to the Muslims, the Almighty had so designed the universe that every day as the sun disappeared the timepieces of humanity should be set to the twelfth hour, in obedience to the clock of the world. And so as darkness fell and the muezzins called for the maghrib prayer, wealthy Nabulsis all over town pulled watches from their pockets, extracted the crowns with their fingernails, and fiddled to make the hands clap on twelve, before, if so inclined, rushing off to the mosque.
As a very young child Midhat would sleep beside his Teta, Um Taher, in the winter. When he was five they moved beyond the old city walls, from a house with a shared courtyard and rounded chambers to a modern building with private rooms and squared edges at the foot of Mount Gerizim. He watched the seasons from his new bedroom window with the snowy gussets of Jabal al-Sheikh on the horizon.
The day Haj Taher, Midhat’s father, announced his second engagement, Teta declared she had seen the carriage on the mountain a month before. Teta’s prophecies protected no one, for she never knew what they meant at the time, and suffered only from the haunting of retrospect. Among other things, she had foreseen her own husband’s death.
“I had a vision of a coffin on a blue carpet. I saw the corner of the wood on the blue carpet. I was at my mother’s house, and I saw it again when they brought the coffin from Jaffa and put it at my feet. My eye, this eye, looked quickly down and I saw the corner of the coffin and, underneath it, the carpet.”
Haj Taher’s first marriage, to Midhat’s mother, was Teta’s doing. The girl came from a good Jenin family, and Taher had loved her.
“Your mother had green eyes. Her face was almost flat under them, like this,” and she pressed her fingers over her cheeks, “wallah, like a little boy.”
If she had prophesied this girl’s death by tuberculosis, Teta kept it to herself. Midhat was two years old. His father was in Egypt. The house was filled with women crying, and as they washed the body on the dining table the housekeeper brought semolina pastries out to the hall, which Midhat crumbled in his fists before licking the sweet grit off his palms. The moment his father appeared in the doorway Teta yowled and gripped the edge of the table as though she might fall over.
Haj Taher did not stop long in Nablus. His clothing business in Cairo was growing fast and required more of his attention, and though he had hired extra staff for the shop on Muski Street and more young men to bring silks from the Golan, he never forgot his own father’s lesson about the importance in business of maintaining personal relations, and since “Al-Kamal” was entering the Cairene lexicon to signify clothing of particularly high quality, Haj Taher Kamal himself could not run the store as an absentee. Nor could he rely on anonymous couriers to collect the silks from the merchants. He must both appear regularly on the selling floor and travel north for the stock, using the new envoys only to keep pace with the turnover. This ceaseless engagement was exhausting but profitable: it ensured the loyalty of the consumers and the honesty of the traders. Besides, the journeys added variation to his life; he could visit Nablus on the way, stop in on his agent Hisham at the local store, spend an evening with his mother and young son, before returning to check the accounts on Muski. When he returned to Cairo after his wife’s funeral, he would have liked to set out on a trip again, but business had no time for grief. The holiday was approaching, sales had escalated, and he needed to stay in Cairo to supervise the shop.
Haj Taher spent his mornings at a sandalwood desk in the back room marking up the books. During the afternoons he mingled with the customers. This was a regime worked out over years, with a rhythm so precise that on more days than not the moment his assistant knocked on his door for lunch he was just inking a final digit in the accounting book, and this temporal economy pleased him, this sense of moving from one activity to another without a moment wasted.
Shortly after his wife’s death, however, his regime was disrupted. Catching wind of his bereavement, a medley of Cairene businessmen began to disturb