Authors: Selma Dabbagh
‘Yes, yes, but you saw what happened last night and I heard another strike just now. What is the point, really? Do you think these people care? No. You tell Khalil. You tell him that it is time to get out. You tell him to come to London with you. You have a girlfriend there? That’s lovely. See? He can get a girlfriend too. You can go out. Have some fun. I don’t know what he wants with staying here. I really don’t.’
‘Shall we go?’ Khalil picked up his bag from the table by the window where the maid had placed it. But the drinks had hardened his mother’s resolve and she held on tight to her son’s arm.
‘You should follow your friend. Get out of here.’ Through the open veranda doors the view down the coast was clear to where the smoke streamed upwards and then dissipated over the sea.
‘Yes, Mama.’
Her face peered up at him. The sea breeze caught in the light damask curtains and they inflated into air pockets behind them.
‘I don’t know what you want. This
politics
,’ her face contorted, ‘it will make you like your
father
.’
Khalil stood very still, the curtain pushing up around his back like a satin pillow for a jewel. His mother had sunk low and she knew it.
Rashid chose to leave them for a while. He waited in the bathroom for some time, his fingers tracing along the labels of the sedatives, tranquilisers and mood stabilisers lined up inside the bathroom cabinet until he felt it was safe to come out.
Sabri and Lana had run against each other for the Student Council in the year that they had met. Lana’s platform, as an Independent, was one of opposition. She opposed Sabri’s party, the Outside Leadership, on the basis of its corruption and condemned the Islamic alternative on the basis of its social conservatism. No one had anticipated her success. She had attained over five per cent more votes than Sabri and all other Outside Leadership representatives, fifteen per cent more than the Islamic alternative. Sabri’s friends had stopped laughing at her shoes and started examining her flyers instead.
When Sabri had tried to persuade her to join his party, she responded with a diatribe, an unnerving diatribe against the abuse of power by the Outside Leadership, against his party’s receipt of funding from conservative regimes, their undermining of ‘true’ revolutionaries, their failure to enforce discipline for a ‘true’ guerrilla fighting force, and their nepotism, cronyism and errors of judgement.
The corruption! The corruption! The corruption!
Sabri did not ask her again. He had instead channelled his energies into a more primitive form of wooing, an attempt to seduce her body by pleasing her mind. His strategy was developed around her obsession with history and love of folklore. In those days it had not been so hard to travel across the boundaries from one enemy-controlled area to another and into the land that was once theirs. So he took her to Greek fountains in the Occupied Syrian lands of the north, to Roman ruins lying under destroyed villages, to Canaanite temples and Solomon’s wells. Wherever he could, he found cafés to take her where
qassaseen
, storytellers, recounted tales passed down from generation to generation.
The strategy had worked.
Lana agreed to marry Sabri after a night spent huddled at the back of a Jerusalem café listening to three hours of recitation of the story of the one-eyed ghoul. The audience had been rapt. Each line had been followed up by commentary from the coffee-drinking,
argeela
-smoking gathering. He had watched her looking towards the crowd in the soft light with her hair the way he liked it, fluffed into curls at the front, hanging down long at the back over the chain of red cross-stitches running around the collar of her shirt. He had surprised himself by the thought that maybe this in itself could be enough: just to see her like that sometimes, to give her pleasure that way. Maybe he did not need to try to have her, or even to touch her. But she must have felt his gaze because she had turned and, with a gesture that was both manufactured and aimless at the same time, popped a piece of sticky, honeyed
baklava
into his mouth with her fingers, as though it was something she had done many, many times before, and then he knew that he had never thought anything quite so
stupid
in his whole life.
Her family had opposed the marriage. They objected to Sabri’s place of origin, to his religion and to the party he was affiliated with. They did not dare to voice their objection to his peasant lineage as they knew that if they did, she would have only become even more determined to stay with him. But their objections did not stop Lana.
Sabri and Lana had married in a small Jerusalem hotel where their faces were beamed by a video camera into hearts dancing on a wall and Lana’s head had been scraped with combs, rose stems and metal pins; her face had been whitened to that of a Geisha.
‘Like a death mask,’ she whispered to Sabri as they placed her next to him on a raised velvet throne. He had lost her in this pile of tacky lace. This was not what they had wanted. The Intifada was going on. Celebrations were banned. They had asked for something simple, old-fashioned: a dress with embroidery, hennaed hands, and a troop of men dancing the
dabke,
at most. They didn’t want the hall. Or the mealy-mouthed waiters. Or the Lebanese and Egyptian pop music about lost love and dying hearts. But both families had vetoed their modest plans absolutely, far more effectively than they had vetoed the marriage itself.
‘I want you to take it off. Now,’ he had whispered back to her.
‘What, this?’ she said, pointing up to her face. ‘Or this?’ and she had plucked at the neckline of her dress revealing just enough cleavage to drive him wild.
Afterwards, his extended family commented on how inappropriate it was that she looked so relaxed. She had not appeared to be intimidated by the prospect of the night that was to follow. But she had neither cared about upsetting everyone then, nor had she cared later when she had screamed at a delegation of women from Sabri’s family who came to ululate outside their window.
‘But I thought you liked tradition, custom, hmm?’ Sabri had asked after the women had obediently got lost, his nose nuzzled against her cheek, his bent knee resting against the side of her newly waxed one, the agitated voices of the dismissed women dying away outside.
‘All traditions and customs except for those that subjugate women and deprive them of sleep.’ She turned to him so that their noses touched. ‘And other pleasures.’
Naji had been born nine months later, disappointed by his surroundings. The baby’s colicky objection to the universe rarely subsided. From being dedicated to the pursuit of national liberation, his parents’ lives were transformed into a perpetual quest to find something, anything, that would quell their son’s grief. There was no pattern as to what pleased him. On some days it was afternoon sunlight fluttering between the leaves of a tree; on others touching the shorn hair of boys’ heads would make him gurgle and coo, his toes curled into each other with excitement. He was, according to all who met him, a cranky baby and his parents sometimes said that he was only saved from being given up on altogether by the look of absolute trust that he gave them when he fed. With his mouth around the bottle’s teat, he would make an eye-to-eye plea for understanding of quite how difficult it was, how hard it was for him to accept his disappointment. His eyes would widen, one hand holding on to the bottle, the other seeking out tenderness of any kind: a hand to hold and play with, a forearm to stroke.
Like everyone else in Gaza they were living the Intifada and it was still going strong. Sabri had had to go underground on more than one occasion, hiding in the camps for long periods. It was a time of smuggling messages across the border in swallowed sealed capsules, of army raids to remove fax machines, of banned flags, songs and school books, classes being held at home with the curtains drawn, of food being grown in back gardens to encourage self-sufficiency, boycotted produce being smashed against the walls in front of cheering crowds. Those were the heady days of resistance. Heady days indeed!
It was in that first year of their marriage when, buoyed up with international support, the Outside Leadership had made a Declaration of Independence. Sabri, like many, was sure that it would work. Legally and morally (as he kept stressing to his audiences), their position could not be disputed. And even Lana, Sabri assured himself, almost confessed to being in accordance with the Leadership’s position.
The Occupier’s response to the Declaration was predictable, but harsh: a curfew had been imposed and all lines of communication with the outside world were severed.
Sabri needed to speak to his leaders, to let them know what the situation was on the inside. He needed to find a phone line that had not been cut.
‘We could try the hospitals?’ Lana had suggested.
‘I wouldn’t get through the roadblocks. The army’s everywhere.’
‘We could come with you. If they stop us we can say Naji’s ill. I’m sure the doctors will let you make a call,’ she replied.
‘That’s not what I’m worried about. No, I’d rather you didn’t come.’
‘What is it? You want us to stay at home? Do you want me to take up crochet too?’ Naji wailed at his mother’s raised voice.
‘The army’s very jumpy at the moment. I don’t think we should take unnecessary risks.’ Sabri said, putting a bent finger into Naji’s mouth for him to chew on.
‘You do want us to stay at home, don’t you?’
‘That’s not it,’ Sabri said. One year into marriage, he was already getting sloppy about hiding his petulance from his wife.
‘How else are you going to talk to them? There’s no other way. Stop arguing about it. We’ll go tonight.’
The night before, Naji had slept and they had managed to be together in a way that had they had not been for such a long time, and well into the next day he could feel himself inside her. The night had wound itself around them throughout the day, tying them back to each other. He had not wanted it to break. He had not wanted to argue with her.
Sabri’s car had been parked outside the gate for so long that he was not sure it would start. They had spent a long time deciding what outfit Naji should wear, trying to imagine what would appeal to the soldiers at the checkpoints and had settled on a sailor suit that had been a present when he was born. They were still fussing as they started loading themselves into the car, about whether made-up powdered milk bottles could be reheated and where the spare nappies were. They kept asking each other whether Naji was going to be warm enough and going backwards and forwards on the question as to whether it was better for Naji to be in a car seat in the back or on Lana’s lap in the front. They had been hissing at each other as Naji had been asleep. Lana said it was more convincing for the baby to be with her. And so Sabri had tucked Naji in on his mother’s lap and had put the spare nappies by her feet, the water bottle by her side and the dummy (wrapped in plastic cling film) into the glove compartment. He had walked around in front of the car, irritated, until he looked up and saw his wife through the windscreen, her head bent down to their son, her hair falling forwards and had felt the old pride that they were his. His family.
They had just exchanged a final ‘All right?’ as he had put the key in the ignition when Naji, predisposed to diarrhoea, produced something of such vast and gaseous proportions that it woke him up into a state of bawling indignation. Sabri had looked at his watch.
‘I’ll do it upstairs, it’s easier,’ Lana said, opening the car door, leaning backwards to get out, making her way to the porch, jogging the bundle of baby and blanket with one arm as she searched in her back pocket for the door key with the other.
They had been a while. Seven minutes. Sabri had waited. The moon had been full that night, an orange disk strung between the buildings at the end of the road shining like a Ramadan
fanoos
. Sabri had seen the bedroom light go on. He had heard Naji’s wails from the window and had been able to make out the murmur of Lana’s comforting. The crying continued as the light went off and Naji had only stopped as they entered the stairwell. Sabri had seen them come back out on to the porch.
He must have turned the key in the ignition when they reached the gate. He was not sure. It was a guess. He did not know what had happened. He could not remember. Something white and definitive had blasted reality from him and then they were gone. The psychiatrist who visited Sabri in hospital afterwards said that it was surprising he remembered so much. But it was all untrustworthy. If asked what his last memories were before the explosion he would have said that they were of being with Lana and Naji on the staircase (he could clearly see them walking down the stairs: Naji in a beige blanket with a satin rabbit in a bow tie on the corner, his hair tufty with patches of baldness at the back where its softness had been rubbed off by sleep, a face blotchy from tears, his eyes trying to focus on the thick blue ceramic tiles outside the neighbour’s door. There was Lana too, her blow-dried hair stuck behind her ears, lipstick remaining only on the edges of her lips, her hand on Naji’s back). But for all its clarity, it was a scam, that memory. A fabrication. He could not have seen them on the stairs. He had never been on the stairs with them. He had been in the car.
To hell with memory. It was like feeling around in basket of apples only to be confronted by a snake.