Three Daughters: A Novel (10 page)

“What has that to do with me?” asked Miriam curtly. “I will be spared a few insults.”

“Why, Mrs. Mishwe,” said the nurse, stressing her Scottish accent, “it seems to me Doctor hasn’t cuffed or damned you in quite a while.” She winked. “But in the end you proved him wrong. Lord help me for disloyalty, but the look on his face when he saw the maggots!” She began to laugh helplessly. “To see that manly, intelligent face so at a loss. Totally confused.” Isabel wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron and hurried away, leaving Miriam with a great deal to think over.
That manly, intelligent face
. . . oh, how she yearned to see it.

Worry over Khalil had kept Max Broder safely at the edge of her awareness, but now he overran her mind as chaotically as the Tenth Roman Legion had overrun Jerusalem. She was restless, tossing and turning in her bed as if sleeping were a waste of time when she could be thinking of him. At first her thoughts were idolatrous. She imagined his movement when she wasn’t there: touching a wrist, lifting a listless hand with concern, hoping to transfer his own vigor into it, peering tirelessly into the cloudy eyes of all who came to his eye clinic, conferring with other doctors with perfect concentration that excluded everything—excluded any thought of her. When had she transferred those hands from a fevered forehead to her own body?

“Madam, I asked for the silk spreads, not linen. And I wanted the plain sateen border, not the scalloped.”

Miriam jumped, startled and embarrassed. As the overly perfumed matron before her had been talking of tailored hems, she had been struck by the most desolate thought. Before Max Broder she had never been drowned in feeling—she had missed the main purpose of life! “Of course. Forgive me. I will bring the tailored hems with the sateen border.”

She closed the shop half an hour early, not to visit Esa at the American Colony but to visit the baths, needing the scalding cascade of water to calm her overstimulated nerves. She inspected her body with dismay. Her breasts did not slope gently into the provocative swelling that she noted on many of the ladies who came into the shop. She was too bony. Her neck was long, however, and her eyes, in the dewy aftermath of bathing, dominated her face like two deep blue pools of refracted light. She washed her hair vigorously and combed it until it dried in silken folds that she coiled hastily—for she had stayed longer than intended.

As she crossed Christian Quarter Road on her way to the hospital, she caught sight of the parched, fading yellow thistle, the last of the summer blooms, and realized it was fall. In the courtyard of the White Fathers’ rectory the arbors were heavy with grapes, each little cluster encased in a small bag.
Ya Allah!
The harvest had come and gone. She couldn’t remember a year in her life when she hadn’t participated in harvesting. Though she was late, she stopped in the charming garden around St. Anne’s Crusader Church to pray. This was where Jesus had healed a man who had been infirm for many years and she prayed that he would also help Khalil.

Although Khalil’s leg was healing rapidly, there was a sizable depression where the infection had done the most damage. He needed laborious physical therapy to keep his leg flexible. He spent two hours in traction and in the afternoons and evenings Miriam helped him through exercises in a large tub of water. Movement was so painful she had to wait an hour between sessions for the boy to recover.

Khalil was tense when she arrived. “I’ve already done the exercises,” he said quickly.

“You’ve done half of them, according to Isabel. Now we’re going to do the other half.”

“What good are they? I don’t want to do them anymore. They hurt. I want to go home.” He was using that whiny monotone that fatigued her as no amount of hard work did, but she fought it off.

“Home? And where do you think home is? You need care and I’ve closed the shop to give it to you. This is home for now.” Her voice rose in frustration. “If you’re going to waste this time, all the money I could have made in the shop will be gone for nothing.” Unblinking will was the key to Khalil. “Come, I’ll help you into the tub.” She pushed him to rotate the knee inward and out, a millimeter more each time. Once he was loose, she massaged the limb to relax it further and fill it with blood. Finally she helped him navigate a barred corridor so that he could simulate walking without putting too much weight on the leg. After an hour’s rest, they repeated the exhausting procedure.

Every time he passed the corridor that connected the two wings she was there, bent over her black cloth, her fingers pushing the needle in and out. It seemed to him that each time she pushed it in, she did so with a dutiful self-righteous jab that annoyed him. In and out. In and out. And when she pulled it out, her mouth, normally wide and curved, pursed into a stingy oval. She was stubborn as a mule. Courageous. Proud. But she lost all of it hunched over that stupid, useless cloth. “Surely by now,” he said, “the embroidered linen of Judea could cover every woman in the Ottoman Empire silly enough to crave it.”

She looked up, startled by the attack and not entirely sure it was directed at her. He stood before her breathing deeply. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just mystifying to me to see you jabbing that needle into that infernal cloth hour after hour, day after day.”

“That’s what we do,” she said stiffly. “In our village, we embroider. In Nablus and Ramleh, they make Mt. Carmel soap. In Bethlehem, they make beautiful silk wedding dresses. In Bireh, the women are lazy.”

“Then Bireh is for me,” he said defiantly. She continued jabbing the needle into the cloth with alarming thrust and accuracy until he strode away, his long coat flapping angrily behind him.

The next day when he saw her there again, she didn’t have her embroidery, but sat looking ahead with indifference. Her hands were crossed neatly on her lap. His footsteps stopped before her but she refused to look up. His shirt and belt showed between his lapels. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no right to speak to you that way.”

“You are free to say anything,” she said primly. She wanted to bury her head against him. “It’s your right. It is for that very reason there was a revolution in Constantinople.” The moment she said it, she felt she had made a fool of herself. The revolution had only brought more censorship. And how could she hope to analyze the motives of the Turkish government? His hand was dangling inches away from her. Each finger had a fine tuft of reddish hair; the fingers were slightly curved, conveying strength. She focused on those fingers as if they were a lifeline and she was drowning. Oh, to touch those hands . . . to feel them on her face!

“No, it isn’t. I have no right to impose my values on you. And certainly I had no right to ridicule. The Committee of Union and Progress didn’t have that in mind.” He smiled. “It is our European conceit that we know best. Forgive me.” He tilted her chin so she would be forced to face him, but she kept her eyes lowered. “Accept my apology.”

“As you like,” she whispered.

“Would you like some good news?”

Anything that would end this moment would not be good news. “What sort of good news?”

“How suspicious you are. Good news about Khalil.”

My God.
She had forgotten the exercises and now it was too late. Someone else would need the tub. “I’m late for the therapy. What could I have been thinking of?”

“Shh.” He held her arm. “It’s all right. I did them with him. I wanted to see what progress he had made. He was able to put weight on the leg without having it cramp up. It’s remarkable. Does that make up for my rudeness? Here’s an admission that hurts. It was your stubbornness that did it. Remember?” He sat down next to her companionably. “You said my head would come off before his leg.” He was trying to coax her into a forgiving mood, but there was nothing to forgive.

The afternoon had turned to dusk and the room filled with the characteristic light that set Jerusalem’s native building stone on fire twice each day. Out of the small window in the door she could see the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock. The faint strains of the municipal band sounded in the distance. The air was heavy, as if they were in water. Her breathing sounded loud.

“Those words were spoken in fear and bewilderment. I’m ashamed each time I think of them.”

He looked down at her hands. “No embroidery today?”

“It’s useless work.” She exhaled deeply.

“You have the patience and firmness to make a first-rate nurse.”

“I’m not trained. What would I do?” she asked dully.

“There are many things.” His head was bent close to hers; his hands hung between his legs. His eyes—were they gray? Green? Yellow? It was impossible to tell in this light. They caught and held her own. To her surprise she stared back, hungering for his attention and welcoming the deep wellspring of emotion he touched off in her. “You could do physical therapy. You could talk to some of the mothers and persuade them to bring the children in on a regular basis. Khalil will be here for a while.”

“I could do that,” she said in a tense whisper that made her voice breathy and haunting. He tensed, too, and moved toward her. Her heart was beating out of her chest, thundering like a herd of wild gazelles. Couldn’t he hear it?

“Isabel tells me you live in a monastery and work for your keep. We could find room for you here and relieve you of that responsibility. Then you could give the extra time to us.”

Why did that harmless statement frighten her? No.
Frighten
wasn’t the right word. It made her fearful in a thrilling way.

As they were speaking, two women came in helping a third, who was in distress. “She swallowed a leech,” one of the women said in Arabic. “She took water from a fountain and it had leeches.” The lack of hygiene around the cisterns often resulted in leeches entering the mouth and attaching themselves at the opening of the throat. The woman in question kept her mouth opened awkwardly, afraid to swallow.

“You can close your mouth,” said Dr. Max. “That little fellow isn’t going anywhere. I’ll get my tweezers.” He returned and took the woman out in the sun to look down her throat. “It’s too far down,” he said to Miriam, who had followed them out. “I can’t get ahold of it.”

“Let her sit awhile in the sun with her mouth open,” said Miriam. “The warmth will coax the leech out where you can get him.”

Max gave her a look of tolerant amusement. “That’s your advice, is it? Well, since I don’t have a simple solution, I’ll give yours a try. I’ll leave it to you to arrange the patient.” He raised his eyebrows in a look that implied she was on her own.

“Very well,” said Miriam, “but leave me the tweezers.”

He shrugged and disappeared into the inner part of the hospital.

An hour later when he returned, Miriam was holding the leech between the pincers. “I bow to your expertise,” he said extravagantly. “The fee will go to you.” Though she still felt shy with him, she couldn’t repress a triumphant smile. “We’ll ask Isabel to find a bed for you and . . . a uniform. The scarf will have to go, you know.” He did a quick inventory of her attire. “And the sandals.”

“I’ve got to think about it,” she stammered. “Perhaps in between Khalil’s therapy . . . I don’t know.” Fortunately at that moment he was called away and she was safely alone again.

A shiver of apprehension went through her. Did he think she was more than she was? Would she end up disappointing him? Could she manage all the shop’s business in the morning hours? And what would her family think about her association with the hospital? The images of Khalil, Nadeem, and Mustafa appeared in her mind. Khalil’s look was mutinous, Nadeem’s was sad. But Mustafa understood.