the cry of a seagull and the earth muttered beneath his feet as though somewhere below water was churning.
With all the clothes he had bought over the last year there was no space in the trunk for his overcoat and tarbush, so he was wearing them now and he was sweating. Surrounded by black bowlers and blue uniforms, he noticed Tricolores angled from the military bureau and realised he could not have marked his difference more obviously. There were some frowns of confusion and clear distaste. But no: he would not take the tarbush off.
“Taxi?”
Above the bridge the gulls applauded. The taxi window showed a river and wide tree-lined banks. He wished he could recall the name of the neighbourhood where Jeannette had spent her childhood, and her mother had taken her life. As they crossed onto the farther bank a light rain began to pester the roof of the taxi; they drove alongside the river past a fenced park, and easels lined up on the quay, and the buildings rose on either side as they turned inward to where the city thickened. At last they halted on the Rue du Four, and Midhat opened the car door and paid the driver.
“Monsieur Kamal!”
At a metal table under an awning, a pair of spectacles dangling from his neck, sat Faruq al-Azmeh. The globe of Faruq’s forehead seemed to have grown with his receding hair. They shook hands.
“I was so pleased to receive your telegram. My good friend, how are you? Turn around, this is our front door.”
“I have missed you,” said Midhat, as they climbed the stairs. “On the ship, do you remember, you told me all those things about the French. I wish somehow you might have stayed near me, there was so much more I needed to ask you.”
“Mais bien sûr,” said Faruq. “There will be time!”
The apartment was on the third floor of the building, with a balcony onto the street, and a window at the back onto a shared courtyard. The main room was furnished sparely but richly—dark green wainscoted walls, full bookshelves, windows ceiling-high and hung with damask curtains. Faruq helped him carry the trunk into a bedroom, rubbed his hands, instructed him to sit, and reached for a bottle of whisky and two glasses.
Thus began Midhat’s life in Paris. His days of medical study were behind him. He enrolled in the history course at the Sorbonne, and by the end of the summer was attending lectures in wood-panelled halls smelling of chalk dust alongside other foreigners, young women, and elderly men. He spent his days in cafés with books on ancient Greece and seventeenth-century Spain, and Faruq supplied him with additional reading, stories of forbidden love, mystical texts, narratives of peripatetic foreigners living in Paris. Among them were Goethe’s Sorrows and the story of a Lebanese priest’s daughter trapped by her marriage and in love with someone else. These books were preoccupied with the senses, Faruq pointed out. Their authors pleaded openness to the world.
“We are all scarecrows turned philosophers,” he said, “with crows living under our hats.”
Sometimes after dinner Midhat would go out with Faruq to bars and cabarets. As the city moved from her mood of wartime grief to one of revelry, Parisian nightlife began to thrive on the electric atmosphere of the home front. Ration-dimmed streetlights greyed the boulevards but cinemas and theatres still packed out nightly and even stayed open during zeppelin attacks. Under the sustained pressure of war, the people of Paris behaved as though they had approached the end of the world. Faruq liked to joke that an atmosphere of “désastre” led to “déshabillement”—but Midhat said no, this was something greater, far more significant and penetrating. It was a charge shared between strangers, it was a pure thrill of Being. It lived in the body like a drug, this being alive in the jaws of the full, flying night.
His first sexual experience was with another student at the Sorbonne, named Claire. Claire was petite and blond and, Midhat was shocked later to learn, almost thirty years old. She expressed disdain for men who were not at war, and when he tried to defend himself she reached out and placed two fingers on his lips.
“Je ne veux pas entendre vos raisons.”
He caught sight of her first at a lecture on the origins of religion. She was on the opposite side of the lecture hall, and as she watched the professor Midhat watched her. When the students flooded out into the