Authors: Selma Dabbagh
Parts of the crowd seemed to be reconsidering their direction, watching the drone move ahead of them; they were heading back in the direction they had come from and by doing so they made space for Iman to move forwards and catch sight of Seif El Din ahead of her. His head held up against the other heads that were bare and bent.
They worked fast that group. Manar had said they would contact her and it was just hours later that the man was there, addressing her, persuading her. The contact had come. She had said she was ready. Well, she was. Maybe that morning, after the meeting, she had not been, but that was a long time ago, before Taghreed, before Raed. She needed to contact him, tell him that she was ready. That was all.
Khalil had to rethink. They could do it his way but it was not for her, not any more. She needed to act. She had been there. They had not seen Taghreed and Raed all burnt like that, all charred and twisted. It changed things. Deaths of children changed everything. Resistance movements started with dead children. And there she was, for it did not matter
who
it was that she followed really, all this hair-splitting about what party you backed, which leader and what position that had been taken on the agreements of 1973, ’78, ’94. Who cared? To hell with it. The thing was to
act
and that was what she was doing. Peoples Fronts, Popular Wings, United Leaderships – the hell with them, too. It was all about
action
; there were no alternatives.
She was not about to stay at home making pickles like her mother. For all her talk, what had her mother actually done? Marry her father? And her father, for all his former days of glory, where had he ended up but out of it? Fobbing them off with a money transfer every couple of months, away from this place, from family, from politics. Living in the Gulf. The Gulf? And Rashid just prostrated himself before anything Western. Sabri tried, but fussing over his book was not going to solve anything. It was not as though the world did not know what they had done. Rashid’s assumption that gathering evidence of these violations mattered was flawed.
It went back to what Seif El Din said. They were relying on conscience, on a sense of guilt, but these people did not have one towards them. Violence was justified if the other side viewed you as less than human (Mandela, right? Or was it Brecht?). And that was how it was. They would not expect it of her. No one would expect it of her, Iman, to act in this way. She spent her time reading poetry in her room. Maybe they would say that it was being unmarried at her age that drove her to it? They would need to find some kind of justification for a non-religious girl like her doing such a thing.
The solid mass of human traffic pushed out into the square and fanned out around its sides. Seif El Din was just ahead of her. His step was far younger than his age. Now out of the alleyway, Iman became aware that there was someone following her, someone trying to match her pace through the crowd. Maybe it was one of Seif El Din’s men. She could not look. She needed to keep moving. He was in front of the statue of a phoenix that the Leaders had built, now scrawled with graffiti.
Return to the Egg! Embrace the Ashes!
demanded the red spray paint.
She was about to catch up with him (there
was
someone behind her; he was almost running now), and then he would just have to look and he would know that she was ready (why was somebody following her?). She just needed to establish contact. They would talk elsewhere. The drones had now gone but a helicopter was coming in close, the palms were bending down low, low, deferential, bent like reeds, to clear a path for this machine cutting through the sky. Water was being sprayed out of the dirty fountain in the square. It was like those Vietnam films with a cloud of dust blowing back at the sky, rushing into her face, and the helicopter was low, low so that, with its open sides, she could almost make out through the window a real face, a human one next to the profile with feathers painted on the side,
Apache
. Are we to be killed off in reservations by helicopters named after others killed off in reservations? The marketplace was emptying fast, back into the alleys and side roads, but Seif El Din moved ahead, not looking up, weaving between parked cars.
And then it came. So instant and heavy that the ground seemed to bounce up beneath her and the air was alive with light and dust, screams filled her eyes, her mouth, her ears.
They killed him! Mustafa Seif El Din! Abu Mohammed! They killed him!
Hands on her arms, around her waist, pulled her back, had pulled her back, before the strike, and the heat was so angry that she was red in the face from it, and there was a burnt hair smell like that morning with the cigarette, and something sweet-smelling and fleshy. But the noise had stopped, the whirring engine noise that had been coming and going since she was in the café. It had gone and she was left with something trivial, almost domestic, a ringing sound in her ears as though somewhere, far off, a fridge door had been left open.
‘Damn it,’ Khalil swore at the packed beach that had absorbed his key. ‘We’ll never find it. We’ll have to go back to my place and get the spare.’ He scraped the lumps of wet sand off his shoes on to the kerbstone. ‘And I think my mother’s there.’
They were taking the beach route to get to the Centre and it seemed as though the whole coastline was on the move. The overriding current was heading north but there were streams of people that were going against it, pushed to the limits, on one side paddling through the edges of waves with children on their shoulders and plastic bags in their hands. Arms were being pulled from their sockets and baby fingers were slipping over eyes from foreheads, blocking visions of makeshift paths. The centre of the beach bore the heavy traffic of carts and donkeys while bicycles were carried and dragged across the sand.
Iman had been in a state in the café. Rashid couldn’t remember when he had last seen her like that. He had wanted to follow her, had meant to take her home, but by the time the bill had been sorted out there was no sign of her and she didn’t seem to want him around. He resolved to spend more time with her before he left. Maybe this evening he could get her to come and sit on the roof with him for a while. Khalil could talk to her and there was always Sabri. Iman went to Sabri for guidance and Sabri went to their mother, and his mother never needed guidance from anyone. She had probably come out of the womb that way.
The smell of the sea, the expanse of water, the salt of the air, the seagulls shouldering each other in the sky, the sense of being part of a purposeful mass lifted Rashid. He had run into two friends that he had not seen for years and they had laughed about what a lucky, lucky bastard Rashid was for getting the scholarship.
‘It’s sort of romantic,’ Rashid had said when they first joined up with the rest of the human traffic.
‘There is nothing romantic about being bombed and starved back into the Middle Ages,’ Khalil had replied, unwilling to risk looking up from his feet for a minute.
It did not take long for Rashid to stop seeing the charm of the beach. He grazed himself on an upturned fishing boat; his trouser legs had become plastered to his calves; his cuts stung with salt and splinters; his shoes were heavy with water, his toes gritty with sand. Khalil had stumbled when his toe caught in a half-buried plastic bag, but it was not until they got to the pavement that he realised that the key for the Centre must have dropped out with the fall.
‘You won’t find it in there,’ Rashid said looking back at the lumbering crowd of people walking down the beach. ‘Impossible.’
The only spare was in Khalil’s flat. He had no choice but to go there with Rashid and risk Rashid meeting his mother. Since moving to Gaza, Khalil had only once asked Rashid back to his family’s flat and he had made sure that his mother was in Paris and his father in DC, when he had done so. Khalil could not bear anyone talking about his parents, let alone meeting them. Khalil tried to put as much physical distance between his family and himself as he put political distance.
‘Sure,’ said Rashid, trying to ease Khalil’s anxiety, ‘no problem.’
The Sea View development where Khalil’s family lived was a row of eggshell-coloured apartment blocks along the beachfront. Khalil knew a lot about the financing structure for the construction of Sea View and he had once, when stoned, divulged what he knew to Rashid and then regretted having done so as most of it had implicated his father.
The pale Sea View buildings hovered on the shore as though they were contemplating slipping away into the sea and dissolving palidly into its watery mass. They were calm, clean buildings with elevators that worked and doormats that were guarded by plant pots that shone with the spit and polish of imported labour.
If he had allowed himself to be, Rashid would have been insulted by Khalil’s determination to keep him away from his family. It wasn’t as though Rashid didn’t know them. The two families had been close in Beirut, in Tunis, and briefly in Scandinavia, but as the Outside Leadership made peace with their enemy, they had made enemies of each other. The families had split apart at the same time that Rashid’s parents had.
As Khalil’s mother ran to kiss Rashid, her mercurial, silky outfit billowed around her. Her orange-streaked hair was noodle-like, her eyebrows accentuated by a bluish pencil and her front teeth had caught on a lipstick, as though she had taken a quick snap at it.
It was after greeting Rashid that she noticed the state of Khalil. ‘Look at you! What happened to your shirt? You are filthy. You smell terrible. What is this smell?’
‘It’s gas. I went to the south, Mama.’
‘You went to the south? Are you mad? One of these days you’ll get yourself killed. You go right now and take a shower. But wait, before you go, stay here. Stand here. You two boys, I haven’t seen you together for so long . . .’
She brought both boys into the sitting room and got them to stand next to each other and appraised them, compared them, while blowing smoke into the air above her face with the mannerisms of a twitchy dressmaker.
There was something so brittle about her. It was as though she had snapped and was jangling around inside. Here was a woman who had been brought up according to the best of French educational systems, who had been groomed assiduously to find a husband from the best of families, to cook, entertain, and to pack suitcases in ways that emulated the preferences of the European aristocracy. All this she had done to perfection. She had hosted and preened, spent and saved, complimented and listened while furthering the path of her husband’s career. But no one had taught her how to deal with her husband’s infidelities, to cope with the humiliation of their multiplicity, their diversity, and the publicity that surrounded them. For everyone knew about them, from the Spanish waitress in the restaurant bathroom, to the Indonesian maid molested in the kitchen in front of her. She never got used to them; each one had floored her, each one had struck her down afresh.
‘Just so high, up to here!’
She had started upon seeing Rashid, as they feared that she would. Rashid had not seen her for possibly as much as a decade and Khalil had not been able to stop her grabbing at his friend.
A little devil you were as a boy, we used to say to your mother. No more boys for you Jehan, this one is more work than five!
And so handsome. How did you get so handsome? Better-looking than both your parents.
A scholarship! You’re getting out! Khalil, you didn’t tell me! Why didn’t you tell me? This is wonderful. Wonderful. Here, we shall drink to it!
She propped Rashid up on a cane bar stool against Khalil’s protestations. ‘Mama, we’re going to the Centre. He can’t go into a refugee camp smelling of alcohol.’
The bar was backed with mirrors and adorned with whisky bottles, china windmills and miniature crystal pigs. A clay model of a man smoking a pipe sat in the centre of this display.
‘No. I insist. This is a great day for Rashid, a great day. Go Khalil. You go have your shower. Change your clothes. We’ll have a drink. Catch up on old times.’ She was busy mixing two multi-layered cocktails, calling to the maid for ice, for lemon slices. ‘See how pretty!’ she said. ‘A cause for celebration, Rashid.
Mubrook
. Congratulations. What are you studying? Such a clever boy and so good-looking.’
Two drinks for the two of them and then another two.
Your father! The stories I have about that man. There was the one time that we were all together in Paris . . .
No, that was after the assassinations in Rome before we left Beirut—
Your mother is not really one for – how shall I say? – relaxing, enjoying herself . . .
The years in Stockholm were the best for us.
Tell me, your uncle – is he still with that woman?
All of this was merely a warm-up for what she really wanted to say, which she did as soon as Rashid had drunk the first drink, urgently, holding Rashid’s arm.
‘You must help me with Khalil. You must persuade him to do what you do, to get out of this place, get a scholarship like you. He’s a bright boy. I don’t know what he’s thinking. This Centre? In a camp? Things are not like they were; he could get into such trouble and for nothing. For
nothing
.’
‘The Centre’s doing very important work. A lot of people – my girlfriend, her organisation in London – they use our data to lobby the British Government. For them it’s vital.’