Authors: Selma Dabbagh
It had made up for the rest of Sabri’s day to see the fighters finally arrive across the wasteland. Every afternoon for several days now, Sabri had wheeled himself into the living room hoping to witness their approach.
Bureaucracy! Bureaucracy!
Even in these matters of internal security, the Authority was slow. ‘Do not underestimate the appearance of the leader, Ziyyad Ayyoubi,’ they had told Sabri when he had called the day before to ask why the hell it was taking them so long. ‘He’s more than he seems.’ And there he was, Ziyyad Ayyoubi, son of the martyred intellectuals of the revolution, the hope of the people, tramping over the wasteland behind his men, with what looked like Iman in tow for some reason.
Iman?
The leader did not look up to much
.
And then from the other direction came Rashid and that Khalil Helou friend of his, as if this was a spectacle they had all paid to come and watch.
Roll up!
thought Sabri,
Roll up for the de-ratting that is about to take place!
Infuriatingly, they had all disappeared just below him. If he were able to stand he would have been able to see them. He sat and waited for a while, not entirely sure what for, as it was unlikely that the punishment would be meted out right there and then, but he stayed there all the same, by the window. Alert, hearing the murmur of voices, a shout was it? The scream of a boy. Not the boy he hoped, not Wael, not the middle grandson. He stayed waiting, listening, hoping for a gunshot.
Got you! Ha!
The day had gone bad that morning an hour or so after his mother had left his room. The smell of Lana had come back to him again, teasing his nostrils with nostalgia. He had a shirt of hers that he had bundled into a plastic bag at the back of one of his cupboards and he had made a mess searching for it that afternoon. Piles of ironed shirts had cascaded down on him before he found it. The bag was dated now,
Toys for Fun
was advertised on it and that place had shut down years ago. The bag was not closed as tightly as he had remembered. Sabri had wheeled himself a little closer to the wall before he took out the shirt to sniff at it. It smelt of woven cotton and dust. A moth had eaten out two spots on the shirt’s front. He had put it back where it had been and looked out at the wispy smoke. He couldn’t find her in it. She had gone.
He had felt it happen. It happened often.
The ballast would slide across his decks causing him to list dangerously before he capsized completely and was down.
Goddamn
the ghost smell that had been sent to tease him.
Afterwards, the lump of papers sat in the centre of his desk, pathetic. There was no point in it. No point at all. Now he could see that the thesis was flawed. The focus was wrong. All wrong. What he really needed to write about was
us
, not them. Not how
they
screwed
us
, but how
we
let ourselves be screwed by
them
. About how
we
were now about to screw
ourselves
. It was all contemptible and disgusting. No one had the guts, the balls, to admit it, to confess to it, except him. He, Sabri Mujahed, knew the truth.
Our neighbours collaborated with them when they took our country in 1948. Our stinking feudal system allowed for that. Then our Arab brothers assisted (although they say that they countered, no, worse, that they fought against) in the takeover of our lands in 1967 and since then we have missed opportunity after opportunity. Pusillanimous diplomacy. Corrupt leadership. Can’t even fight. No discipline. A bunch of men wanting their own piece of the pie, yearning for cheap suits and desks with name plaques. No ability to work together, to fight together, to assist each other. It was one long history of betrayal. They screw us; we betray ourselves.
Sabri’s thoughts had continued along the same murderous trammels until the arrest of Abu Omar, and he was in a considerably better mood when Khalil and Rashid came into the living room than he had been in all day.
Khalil and Rashid hesitated at the door as Sabri was sitting with his amputated leg ends thrust out at them. The younger men wavered as though they had caught him naked. Sabri liked people (even his own family) to see him behind a desk or on the other side of the kitchen table, where he would slide down the sides of the wheelchair so that only his arms were visible and everyone could pretend that the chair was not there and that his legs were. He was getting a bit fat too, this last year, and tables and desks hid the rope of soft flesh around his midriff. Sabri gestured for them to sit down.
Khalil had never been in that room before and Sabri watched him take it in as he hovered around the pea-coloured velvet chairs. None of the large objects in the house held memories for their family. Fragments of personal recollection were attached only to the small things, the ones that could be thrown into suitcases and scurried away with as the family had, like escaping thieves or decamping gypsies, run from invasions, wars, upheavals, the cranking up of political heat, or the increased activities of professional assassins.
The small objects in the room were mainly souvenirs: an engraved wooden plate with the leaning tower of Pisa on it, the cuckoo clock that Iman had spent a summer saving up to buy in Geneva and which was still functioning to a rhythm of its own, and a tin replica of Big Ben together with its own static red bus that had been Rashid’s. There were also the embroidered cushions his mother had made, with the pictures of eighteenth-century white-bosomed French women in crinolines. The other furnishings had all belonged to Sabri’s aunt, anonymous furniture made in the Far East out of mashed wood and strong glue.
Sabri feigned disinterest as they told him about Abu Omar’s arrest and then appeared to only half-listen to the pink-skinned Khalil (
Naaim! Naaim!
Such a soft, soft boy!) who explained, so plaintively, so touchingly about the feared fate of their comrade in arms, Jamal Baseet. Had it been another day, there would have been nothing Sabri would have liked better than to discuss prison with men who had not known it. He had some fond memories of his internment, of the camaraderie of the committees they formed, the lectures they gave. He even liked explaining torture methods to men who cringed. But it was not a day for reminiscing.
‘Try what you like,’ Sabri said. ‘Go get a lawyer if you wish, but they will have put him in preventive detention which means that a lawyer can do nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Khalil said, laughing slightly, as though discovering that maybe at the heart of it all Sabri was just another fool.
‘Yes, a lawyer can do nothing, because they don’t have to show that your friend’s done anything. So what can a lawyer do except say, “He did nothing,” and maybe the judge will agree and say, “You are right. He did nothing,” and then how much further along would anyone be?’
Sabri rolled himself back to the television screen under the framed photographs of the grandfathers, their mother’s father smiling triumphantly as he sat outside the family house in Jaffa, their father’s father staring furiously at the camera. The television continued to broadcast the image of the overturned pushchair in the Israeli park.
‘Still not mentioning the hospital,’ Sabri said. ‘Shocking.’
‘I know,’ Khalil replied, unable to keep the impatience completely out of his voice. This offhand way that Sabri addressed him was all because of who his father was, because his father was a sell-out, a profiteer, a Class A prick. Khalil was sure of it. They never let you free of your parents. Even the leftists. No,
especially
the goddamn leftists, with their emphasis on equality of birth – disregarding poverty was one thing, but was one allowed to surmount having a political wanker for a father? No chance. These guys believed political wankery passed from generation to generation unaltered like an extra chromosome. ‘Could Jamal have been arrested because of his involvement with the Centre?’ Khalil asked with not a little pride.
‘That’s not the point. It’s of little relevance whether or not he’s done anything. It’s
preventive
detention so they just need to show that he could
one day
do something.’ Sabri, it appeared, was bored.
‘What about challenging the order on a technicality?’
‘The order is valid no matter how low-level the issuing authority. The burden of proof is on your friend Baseet to show that he is innocent.’
‘Innocent of what?’ asked Khalil.
‘Who knows?’ Sabri lifted his palms to the ceiling. ‘There is the rub. As he doesn’t have to be charged with anything, it is very difficult to show that he is innocent because no one knows what it is that he has to be innocent of.’ With that Sabri gave a smile that was particularly disagreeable.
Idiot,
Sabri thought looking at Khalil,
setting up a Centre with glossy brochures and business cards and he doesn’t even know how preventive detention works.
Twit.
No one spoke for a while as Sabri smirked and Khalil smouldered.
‘How is the book going today?’ Rashid tried to avoid looking at Sabri, as he didn’t want to see the stumps any more than he had to. The way they ended like the knots on sausage meat was disconcerting. He closed the window with a slam as the air was blowing in dust and the smell of manure from a nearby farm.
‘Not bad but I was sidetracked. I came across something different.’ He looked at Khalil. ‘It may be of interest to you, perhaps. Maybe not, but it was a transcript of the conversation between the soldiers when they shot that girl last week by the checkpoint. The one that was leaked to their press somehow.’
‘Oh yes?’ Khalil said, still trying to digest the concept of preventive detention (he would get a second opinion; he found it hard to believe it was quite that arbitrary) and the loss of Jamal. It annoyed him that his inner desire to ingratiate himself to Sabri had not been dislodged.
‘Soldier on guard says that they’ve identified “someone
on two legs
a hundred metres from the outpost”. The other soldier, in the lookout, says, “A girl about ten,” but by then they are already shooting. Girl’s dead, etcetera, etcetera.’ Sabri wheeled around to Rashid who was still standing by the window and looked him up and down.
‘I remember that incident,’ Rashid said. ‘I’m sure I heard about it on the TV or something.’
‘The point is this use of code,
on two legs
, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts
walking on two legs
. I thought I could make something of this. The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking in to “if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?” That kind of thing.’ He stopped and twisted around to face Rashid before going back to Khalil. ‘My thesis being that the Occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us.’ He forced Rashid to look at him. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’ The boys nodded although Rashid didn’t do so with much vigour. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Khalil after sneering slightly at Rashid.
‘Well, it’s an interesting idea,
Ammo
. It’s an interesting idea.’ Khalil’s eyes were not focussing on Sabri. He was struggling. ‘I mean Levi is—’
‘You can pass me the blanket,’ Sabri gestured towards a tartan rug on a chair, ‘if it makes you feel better.’
The clock whirred and cuckooed twice although it was well past five. No one spoke.
‘Oh, could you do something for me?’ Sabri said. ‘Could you possibly bring up the notice that they pinned on Abu Omar’s door? They did pin a notice, didn’t they?’
‘Of course.’
Khalil and Rashid jumped up as though in front of them a door was sliding shut leaving them only enough space through which to fit their fingers before it closed.
LONDON VIEWS
Two months later
From Rashid’s window he had a bit of everything: vast poplars bouncing light off their leaves, stained wooden telephone poles, smutty-faced Victorian town houses, grey drainpipes, a squat spire, the tower of a council estate and the rail tracks that spread out over the foreground like entrails.
Rashid turned the toast over in his mouth, giving the jam direct contact with his taste buds. His tongue sought out the sugar lodged in the bread’s perforations. He gulped to wash it down.
Lisa’s tea was bad. Lisa’s tea was gully water.
He had woken some time before her. His sober sleep rarely carried him through until morning as it was, but here the morning came early slicing a chunk out of the night. Lisa had slept pyjama-ed hugging at her boobs sulkily, as though trying to reclaim them from his grasp.
As soon as she had woken, she was up and out, down to the shower room, back to get dressed, then out to the shared kitchen in the corridor and bringing him tea and toast. Englishy things for old ladies with blanket-covered knees. Lisa had been bent on coddling him since the visit to her parents’ house and the dream incident that he was trying to forget.