Authors: Selma Dabbagh
The fighter had pulled Iman backwards just before the strike and she had landed in a slump on her bottom, like a girl in a mood. Then he had pulled her forwards and lifted her up on to her knees, off the ground and away from the crowd that had surged into where the strike had been. Once he had her on her feet, he led her, his forearm around her waist, to the entrance of a derelict building where they could be out of sight. She realised dimly that they were in the entrance to the old Andalus Hotel, the one with the roof terrace, but was not sure what the hell the building was doing there. He was wearing the same green jacket that he had worn that morning and the gun was still across his back, but he had gained a new intensity, a focus that seemed to be her. All pleasantness had gone. There was anger in the way he grabbed her arm and dragged her there, and the way he looked at her was filled with unblinking contempt. It was a reflex, and she hated herself minutes after experiencing it, but she had found herself smiling at him in an attempt to dispel his derision. Her smile angered him more. He hated her.
‘Who told you to follow him?’ he asked. ‘Who was it? Where did they find you?’
Her heart was still pounding up in her eyes, in her fingertips and the palms of her hands. There was dust and gravel in her mouth and grazed into her hands and knees. The gentlemanly courtesy of that morning had gone. She had smiled at him like a fool, asking him to forgive her.
Look,
her smile tried to say,
I’m only a girl,
but he had refused that absolutely. He hated her like an equal.
‘You have to tell me who it was.’ It was an attempt at a shout but his voice faltered. ‘Who contacted you?’ He had a sickly look about him and his lips were dry. He appeared to have forgotten that his hand was still clasped on to her upper arm.
‘Let go of me.’
He was not up to it. She could tell that, even with her burnt eyelashes and the blast of caked dust over her face, she was in a better state than he was. He was breathing hard, his chest lifting and falling in an exaggerated way like an asthmatic and his hands weren’t steady. She pulled herself away but he grabbed her back into the porch. Her feet crunched on broken glass. They were in the entrance to the hotel. Circles were punched out of the sides of the concrete porch, while the aluminium swing doors, their handles all wrapped up with chains, were criss-crossed with triangles, where only shards of the coloured glass remained.
‘I know what you were trying to do.’ His tongue was sticking to the top of his mouth and filling out into the space he needed for it to function. ‘I know that you were trying to make contact with that man, Mustafa Seif El Din.’ He was barely audible above the panic outside.
‘I was not trying to do anything.’ Her voice took its strength from the weakness in his. ‘And anyway, it’s none of your business what I do.’
‘But it is my business.’ He coughed at the dust.
She dropped her voice. ‘Let go of my arm. Let go of me. I’m not going to run off, but you can’t hold me like this. Stop it.
Bikafee.
Enough.’
She pulled herself back from him and he let go, but she didn’t step back. She had no desire to be seen from the road, standing there with a man she did not know and was not related to.
It was not possible that he knew about that girl, Manar, and about the conversation. Even if he had been in the café it was impossible that he could know anything – Manar had gone in the opposite direction to her when they had parted that morning.
His breathing was becoming more regular although his eyes were still bleary. He moved back into the corner of the porch stepping on a drink can. The strong smell of urine overrode all others, even the burnt-rubber air, the rush of dust and bodies outside. Six men carrying an orange stretcher lumbered down the street in a running march like a pantomime animal. Iman tried to salivate, to spit out the grit from her mouth.
‘They want you . . .’ he was calmer now, and trying to be clear and to be loud enough, ‘. . . because of the family that you come from, that’s all. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person. It’s got nothing to do with whether they think you can do anything that will make any difference at all.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Iman pulled her shoulders back. Her bag was still there, a strap ripped off by the fall or by his pull. She picked up the body of it and held it against her stomach.
‘Listen.’ He reached towards her forearm, not harsh as before but to get her to look up at him. The tenderness in the gesture made her more afraid of him. ‘Listen, I know these people, I know how they operate, and I know that they approached you. I’ve been watching that man you were following, Seif El Din, and the others that are with him.’
Iman tried mentally to grab at something she could say that would push him away. She felt that he was forcing her backwards.
‘Who are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you before. But today you’re everywhere, following me, spying on our house, in that café with my brother, chasing me down the street.’ Iman worked herself up with the absurdity of it. As she spoke she convinced herself that she was entirely innocent, a girl going about her business, someone to be liked, not reprimanded. He refused to see her in that way.
‘It was not you that we were watching by your house.’ He waved his hand in front of his face,
no matter.
‘It will become clear later what I was doing, but I am from the Authority, from the Patriotic Guard and I can tell you that these people, Seif El Din’s people, are only trying to recruit you so that they can undermine us. They are trying to attack us so, yes, what you are trying to do for them is very much my business.’ He spoke slowly weighing up each word, pausing to find exactly the right way to communicate his message. ‘It’s internal. They want to get people like you, people from families like yours, who are historically associated with
our
party, not because they think you can really
do
anything worthwhile, but as a show of strength on their part. It’s divisive. Internally divisive.’ His shoulders dropped; he kept double-checking; he needed to be reassured that she had got to the point where she understood. ‘Haven’t you seen that the enemy – and you mustn’t forget who that is – that the enemy is justifying last night on the basis of that Hajjar girl’s attempted attack? Do you want to be like her? The spittle that allows them to unleash this hell on us?’
‘What Hajjar girl?’
‘You haven’t heard?’
‘No. I haven’t heard anything. I was up all night at a meeting. I’ve lost a girl, a sweet girl in my class and her cousin who was . . .’ she wanted it out too:
You want suffering? I’ll give you suffering
, ‘. . . a good friend of mine. And I saw their bodies. That’s what I have been seeing and hearing all day. Not the news. Just dead bodies and crying relatives.’
She needed to punch this man. There was something in the way he pulled her around and stood there with his legs apart, as though she was not a woman at all, or as though he had had enough women not to care whether she was one or not.
She trusted no one from the Authority.
She trusted no one.
And yet she had trusted Manar.
‘Who told you to follow Seif El Din?’ His eyes were hostile. She disgusted him.
‘They weren’t trying to recruit me,’ she lied, and flipped her head back in his direction to try to dislodge the growing sense of having been duped that was taking possession of her and making her feel ill.
He shrugged,
whatever you say, however you want it to be
. His disappointment in her was palpable. It was also deeply personal. He leant forwards. ‘Sometimes, Miss Iman, you will find that saying nothing when you know something is as damaging as doing the wrong thing.’
She didn’t want to look at him, but she had; she didn’t want him to think that she was afraid. He was now holding her arm as a friend or a companion would and it scared her. His T-shirt was pulled down from his neck by the strap of his gun and his collarbones stuck out like bars.
‘This could’ve been the end for you,’ he continued. ‘It did not end as they would have wanted, but they won’t see this as being the end of their plans for you.’ He did not expect her to respond or, if he did, whatever she had to say was of little interest to him. ‘You will have to get out of here.’ He nodded as though it was a conclusion that they had reached together.
‘Get out of where? What are you talking about?’
‘You need to get out of Gaza. To leave, at least for a couple of months.’ Now that he had regained himself, he could talk more easily. His eyes appeared less sickly, but they were remote. He was still restless for her to understand. ‘
Get out
. Do you see? It will become a matter of pride for them to get you involved in whatever plans they have for you and you can’t do that. It’s a pointless sacrifice. Nothing you do for them will harm the enemy, the real enemy, it will only draw in more support for them as a party.’
A small ambulance drove past, forcing Iman to give up on the effort of responding. Raised voices ordering the crowd to stand back echoed in the porch. She could not remember her reasons for chasing Seif El Din any more. She had lost them. She wanted to cry because the reasons had gone and for a moment there had been a purpose to it all, a purpose to it and to her. She
couldn’t
cry and she
wouldn’t
because of him. Iman focussed on the poster on the wall behind the fighter, an advertisement in a metal frame that depicted a big-nosed man smoking an
argeela
in front of cluster of
mezza
bowls. Hummingbirds with flowers in their mouths chased each other around the edge of a menu.
‘Why should I trust you anyway? You are nothing to me. I don’t even know who you are. Patriotic Guard or not.’
‘I’m Ziyyad.’ The man’s arms hung down straight at his sides, his voice seemed a little saddened by its own identity. ‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi.’
‘Iman Mujahed,’ she replied automatically as though he had challenged her to spar by announcing his name.
‘Miss Iman, I know. I know who you are and I am asking you, explaining to you now, why you must leave. But if you don’t listen to me, and I fear that you won’t, I will get you out of here, whether you like it or not.’
‘Get me out of here? You can’t do that. Who do you think you are? You can’t.’ He was treating her as though she was
dispensable,
or worse, simply
exportable
.
‘Your father used to work with us. It is easy for us to contact him and to tell him to get you out.’
‘You wouldn’t. How could you? Interfering in my life like I’m a child. I have a job, you understand? I have my family here, my mother, my brothers.’ But he was now back into his official role and she suddenly realised just how far she had witnessed him slip out of it.
‘Go with your brother to England, or join your father in the Gulf. I don’t care. I’d rather you did it of your own accord; I don’t
want
to have to make contact with your father, but you look like you are going to force me to do so.’ Iman’s glare had no effect on him. The decision had been made and her feelings about it were immaterial. He had no choice. Neither did she.
‘I am coming with you.’ He held her arm as she started to leave and the words said in a neutral voice, even from him, conveyed a protection that she wanted to hold on to. His arm alone, it felt, could carry her out of the mass of mangled life outside.
‘No, you’re not.’ She had to say it. She didn’t want to be left to choose where to go, but she didn’t want him to think he could tell her what to do either.
‘I am, but it’s nothing to do with you. You will follow me back to your house. I have business there and I am late for it, so you will follow me, understand?’
He breathed twice before stepping back into the street. As he did so, the body of a live woman with drowning eyes carried by three men jogged past them. The woman was screaming at her blood-stained hand. Her head and legs were bare, sandals hung off her toes, pale hair fell over an arm. Ziyyad stepped back so quickly that he knocked Iman against the door handles. He tripped awkwardly. His neck was next to her face and some of his sweat dropped on to her.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she screamed. His skin was runny with perspiration as he turned to check on her, breathing hard from the bottom to the top of his chest, before he moved off into a smaller alley away from the crowds, walking with huge paces ahead of her. He looked back every minute or so to ensure that she was still with him, but he never let on that he might care whether she was or not.
It did not look good to Rashid. In fact, to Rashid, the road to the refugee camp where the Centre was based was littered with portents that Khalil was refusing to see.
Khalil kept trying Jamal’s phone and Jamal’s phone kept telling him that it was unobtainable. Barbed wire in spangled loops lolled around the outskirts of the camp. A man sat on his haunches by the entrance, cleaning out his front teeth with a thumbnail. A truck loaded with valuables (either cement or flour, it was not clear) was attracting a small gathering by the side of the road. Most of the destruction was new. Two buildings, their sides punctured but the concave half bubbles of bullet holes, were still smoking. The alley was empty of people. Unnaturally empty. No rugs hung on the walls waiting to be beaten and no clothes were pegged on to the lines that fanned out from single hooks, slicing the sky up into long triangles. It was just cement, graffiti and the sandy earth.