The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

Author:Isabella Hammad [Hammad, Isabella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802147103
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

10

That night, the snows began. In the morning, the sky smothered Nablus in a thick white smoke, which settled into thigh-high banks and silenced all the houses. No birds sang. Within days damp invaded stored grain and rotted the vegetables. Neighbours wrapped their legs in sackcloth to plough to one another’s front doors, and any news that could not be transmitted in this manner was not transmitted at all.

Wrinkled deposits of ice masked the windows on Mount Gerizim. Midhat lurked in his bedroom and emerged only at mealtimes. Since their last exchange, Um Taher had not probed the issue of marriage. But with little to occupy her except sewing, she became obsessed by what the priest had almost told her about the Samaritans. Of course, that fragment of gossip might mean nothing at all; whatever curse he saw administered—a charm involving a bird was always a curse—might have been intended for anyone. And yet, on the blank snow beyond the kitchen window her brain painted images of jealous Nabulsis setting maledictions on her grandson. Against his ability to marry. Against his sanity. Her mind was incontinent: Midhat might struggle to see beyond the end of his nose, but Um Taher imagined future possibilities far too much.

By the middle of February 1920, the first globe thistles thrust their heads through the snow on the mountainsides, which melted in little circles around their necks. The white of the sky curdled and faded, and finally left the air a pale, empty blue. The blanket on the mountains became ragged, the streets turned grey, and the townspeople braved the thoroughfares and the children played in the open spaces.

One morning in March, everyone woke to find the cold had relented. The air was moving, birds singing, ice draining off the mountains into the valley, filling the streets with slush. The women of Nablus hiked out to Ras al-Ayn to sit by the waterfalls with their baskets of nuts, as their children washed lettuce in the icy water and cupped the leaves in their palms to stop them ripping in the flow. Newspapers were once more in circulation, telegraph lines were opened, and at last Nablus heard what was happening in Damascus and Jerusalem.

The negotiations between Faisal and the French that Hani had described in his letter to Midhat were soon public knowledge. So were the outbreaks of violence in the hinterlands. Agitation rippled into Palestine, and people in the coastal cities were photographed with placards saying:

PALESTINE IS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF SOUTHERN SYRIA, and NO ROOM FOR THE ZIONISTS IN PALESTINE. “Violently suppressed by the British,” wrote the reporter. “All rallies have now been banned.”

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