nicknicknicknick reviewed The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
Review of 'Parisian' on Goodreads
5 stars
1) "Midhat returned his attention to Jeannette, who was staring at her bowl. He was always watching her distress from afar, across a room, a garden; he blinked as the image recurred of water falling off her thighs. The anger he felt on the terrace was already cooling, deposed by her apparently worthier annoyance at his mention of madness. That hardly seemed much of an indiscretion, especially given that the speech in its entirety had drawn enough embarrassing attention to himself that no one would be thinking of her mother. All the same, he had forfeited his high ground. Was it a game of oneupmanship, of who could be more annoyed with whom? At least, if it was, then she could not be indifferent to him. At this thought he was surprised to feel a hot little glow of hope."
2) "He spent his days in cafés with books on …
1) "Midhat returned his attention to Jeannette, who was staring at her bowl. He was always watching her distress from afar, across a room, a garden; he blinked as the image recurred of water falling off her thighs. The anger he felt on the terrace was already cooling, deposed by her apparently worthier annoyance at his mention of madness. That hardly seemed much of an indiscretion, especially given that the speech in its entirety had drawn enough embarrassing attention to himself that no one would be thinking of her mother. All the same, he had forfeited his high ground. Was it a game of oneupmanship, of who could be more annoyed with whom? At least, if it was, then she could not be indifferent to him. At this thought he was surprised to feel a hot little glow of hope."
2) "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."
3) "Taher left the room and Teta strode over, pulled Midhat back down beside her on the couch, and wrapped her arms around him. She smelled of olive soap.
'Everything forbidden is desired, ya sitti.'
'I don't understand, Teta.'
'He thinks you had too much freedom. But what can we do, there was a war.'
'I don't understand. I haven't done anything wrong.'
'You are tired. Sleep and bathe. Um Jamil is looking forward to seeing you. She will come up in a few hours, after you've had a rest.'
Midhat pushed his way out of his grandmother's arms, though she was not resisting, and entering his old bedroom lay down immediately on the bed. He felt nothing at all, being in this room. At the sight of that old window, where he used to sit as a child: nothing. All his reactions were spent, darkened by his father's voice, which echoed in his mind, cutting him. What a fantasy to have expected any warmth, any show of pride, of care. Doors were slamming that he had not known were open; he knew not what lay beyond them, that he might have seen. Uncontrollable sense-memories of Montpellier started to fill his mind, seeping out of corners. A treacherous yearning uncoiled, it broke loose from Faruq's lessons in romantic narrative; it was ugly and incoherent, and it hurt. His head burned. He squeezed his wet eyes shut and thought of that house, every inch of it intimate; he thought of his first walk in the gardens with Laurent. How absurd it was that a single afternoon in which very little occurred should feel more vital to him now even than his homecoming, to the family not seen in five years, to the bed he slept in as a boy. How senseless, what a strain to his rational mind, to long this badly for a time that had in the end been so poor in pleasure, and so rich in pain."
4) "How did the riots actually begin?—that was one question people asked. Every account conflicted with another, and every eyewitness swore his own testimony was definitive. According to one version, the fighting started when a Jewish boy grabbed the Prophet's flag and tore a corner off the silk. Others said the flagbearer spat on an elderly Orthodox lady, and called her a Zionist son of a dog. Other accounts did not feature a flag at all, but centred on an event in the lobby of the Amdursky Hotel, where an old man was beaten to the ground with sticks. Some said the old man was Jewish, his assailants Arab; others said the man was Arab, his assailants Jews from Jabotinsky's army; all of them said that when someone came to help the man, whose head was bleeding over the marble floor, his helper was promptly stabbed by the assailants, and it was those savages who should be held responsible for the violence that immediately broke out in the street in front of them, in which four Arabs and five Jews were killed, and many more wounded.
One cause of the uncertainty was the nature of the old city of Jerusalem herself. Her alleys twisted unpredictably and her steps continually frustrated the passage of any horse or vehicle, and the stone of her buildings was so thick and unyielding that what happened in one street could not be heard in the next. Never mind that the British had spent months plotting a map of the town, and were in the process of dividing it into four quarters for the four main identities, a design that would become famous and presumed eternal by everyone, so that even the Arabs selling pendants demarked with the four quarters fifty years hence would by then have forgotten that it was a British invention, enforced so that the soldiers could navigate the roads more easily, and say of each man they met: you are a Christian, you are a Jew, you are Armenian, based on the nearest street name. But by April 1920, the Brits were still getting lost and asking for directions, and were so low on personnel on the morning of the Nebi Musa festival that the ensuing mayhem lasted for a full three days.
5) "'We loved our fathers too much,' he said aloud.
He extended his lower jaw, trying to stopper his tears. He thought of Ghada, of lifting her up: would he do to her what his father had done to him? Would he leave her? It was agony, it would not end, but in the light of that, what was there to revise? He could not write back, call her on the telephone, say: Jeannette, here I am, would you like to meet? He could not board a ship to Marseille. He could not cover that distance.
He caught a darkened flash of his younger self—there, standing on the other platform. A residue of Henryk's story, the pattern and tone of it, that part about his old name, left in Poland with his violin—something about that property of distance, blending time and place, gave form to a vision of a young man stepping off a train in Montpellier. Look at him: awash with fatigue, dragging a vast trunk, blank with the richness of an unmarked future, full of enthusiasm and fear. How did one get from there to here? The gap was too enormous. With his foot Midhat felt the edge of a gorge dividing that life, possessed of that old future sense, from what had transpired, from the bank he stood on. He was two men: one here, one there, that one, he saw, young and slender, guileless, untrained for battle. He felt sorry for that young man; he did not know what he was in for."
6) "'I will be sad when the revolt is over,' said Khaled.
'Will you?' said Fatima.
'There will be nothing to focus on. Ordinary life is boring.'
His mother swatted his leg. 'Shame.'
'I don't want to go back to school,' Khaled replied, with dignity.
'When was the last time you saw Hani?' said Nuzha.
Fatima winced.
'Last year,' said Midhat.
Here they all were, watching him return, gently, to this world. Ready to press him back into the shape of a person. Their impressions glanced off him like beams of light. There had been times in his life when he thought the need for them was illusory, this group of people, living in the same place, tied by their names and inherited stories. But if that was illusory, what was real? Without them, he was a body floating in the air—he stuck his foot out onto the cold tile, and struck a match to light Abu Jamil's cigar."
7) "Hani kissed his cheek. Midhat looked down, stunned. With the energy of a new bad habit he reached into his mind for Jeannette. The vision of her in the hospital grew colder each time he reached for it, but he could not stop himself. He concentrated, trying to see her. He squeezed Hani's shoulder.
'Thank you for coming.'
'God with you,' said Hani.
Midhat moved off towards the window. Her fading from his memory might, it occurred to him, simply be in the nature of the mystical. These things did not stay. Or was it rather—he touched his eyes with his fingers—was it that calling delusions by divine names was just a way to cope with yet another unutterable loss? He looked up as Fatima appeared in the doorway. Her powdered face, her knee-length blue dress, her brown leather shoes, all lit by the garden behind him. Time was a treacherous distance, and it would not be crossed but through the dangerous substitutions of the imagination. He reached. His hand brushed her neck. Fatima eyed him, appraising. No, it could not be resolved. For there she was, and there she was."
