his mind, for while there must have been similar mornings this was the one that endured.
In the memory, it is dawn on Mount Gerizim, and the bread tin lid claps shut on the sideboard. Two valises stand by the door. And there is Baba, wearing a tarbush and brown wool travelling coat, and he whispers good morning and leans down for a kiss. His breath is human and sweet, and two red swollen pores are visible under his moustache. From the doorway Midhat watches his father attach the bags on either side of his horse. Baba mounts, and before he moves, pauses on the back of the animal to look at his son. The watery exhalations of the morning hover over the distant olive trees in a bluish haze, and Haj Taher, Abu Midhat, descends into the mist.
It was spring when a letter arrived with news of Layla’s pregnancy. Teta clapped her hands, and the ladies arrived to congratulate her. After that, months passed without a single letter or telegram. Summer opened up and heat poured from the sky. The bricks of the houses turned ash white. Groundling plants yellowed and died. Samoom winds made suffocating visitations under the cover of dust and dried up four of Nablus’s freshwater springs. When the rains finally came, they came in torrents.
At first Midhat thought it was the storm that had woken him. Then he heard voices. Creeping to the door he saw the shape of his father in the hall, standing in the glow of a lamp, shaking water from his arms. Teta stepped into the light beside him, collecting layers of clothing in the jerking dark. When Midhat woke again it was morning, and his grandmother was sitting on his bed. She put a hand on his ankle through the cover, and said quietly: “Your father is here. He is upset by the death of the baby.” His father’s clothes, deformed by the damp, hung for days from the hooks on the kitchen wall.
When the second baby came, Taher and Layla returned to live in Nablus. A short while later, Midhat was sent off to school in Constantinople. His cousin Jamil had already completed his first year at the Mekteb-i Sultani, so the departure was not as fearsome as it might have been. In fact, all year Midhat had felt envious of Jamil, who at thirteen was already so like a man, and careless of his schoolbooks, which he brought home during the holiday. Midhat had seen the pile on his cousin’s bedroom floor knocked sideways so the spines were visible, and strained to decipher the lettering of the titles. When he himself was sent off, the change felt less like going away than going towards.
The Mekteb-i Sultani—also known as the “Lycée Impérial”—was a large yellow boarding school beside the Bosphorus, with black-and-gold gates and formal gardens. His classmates hailed from all over the Empire: Armenians, Greeks, Jews from Macedonia, Maronite Christians from Mount Lebanon, even Bulgarians and Albanians until that territory was lost; and though the majority were Turks and most of the others were sons of officials and officers, it was nonetheless here that Midhat had his first taste of cosmopolitan life. After an intensive course in French, he perfected his Ottoman Turkish, and learned a little English and a little Persian; he studied astronomy and mathematics, was bored by calligraphy and geography, and excited by philosophy and science. School timetables were set to Frankish time, so that instead of riding the twelve hours between sunrise and sunset as they did in Nablus, the schoolboys counted from noon to noon.
It was also at the Lycée that Midhat first discovered his own separateness. He was bathing in the shower room one morning, his feet on the varnished wooden boards above the drain, rubbing the suds as the water sheeted his legs and thinking vaguely about the boys in line outside while he was alone in here. Then it came to him. He looked down at his body and realised that his hands were only his hands, and that his eyes were only his to look out from. It was peculiar, provoked only by the barrier the door made keeping the water in and the other boys out. And it was not exactly something he hadn’t already known; only he now felt it more concretely. It had never occurred to him before to question why Midhat should be Midhat, and that no one else should be Midhat, or that Midhat should