Authors: Selma Dabbagh
The bouncer moved in from the front door. ‘Ladies,’ the bouncer said. ‘All right?’
‘I need to be going.’ Rashid got up. The bouncer was standing behind him, blocking his way out.
‘All right, ladies?’ he asked.
‘All right. All right, love, see you,’ the ladies replied, one of them stirring the ice around her glass with her finger. Rashid wondered whether it was a trap, whether the door, like in the films, although appearing close, was actually going to be impossible to reach. Whether he would be grabbed back into the bar. He tried to walk close to the wall, away from the bar to where the bouncer stood, but found himself banging into chairs (‘All right?’). It could be a trap and if it was a trap then the barmaid in the glasses would save him, but, when he looked around one more time
(
‘All right
?
’
),
he realised that she had already gone.
GULF INTERIORS
The same week
Iman flew over the Gulf in the dark and below her the tankers bobbed around in its water like fireflies in oil. The coast was elaborate; it had been dredged into loops, pearl drops and crowns, pinpricked a million times over with electricity, but Iman could think of nothing except the state that she was in.
They had questioned her for over ten hours at the Gaza border. Rotating the young soldiers with the old, the men with the women, the clean-shaven with the bearded, the plain-clothed with the uniformed, the hugely muscular with the puny and bespectacled, until the only thing they had in common with each other was their guns: hand guns, dinky pocket revolvers for the women, Uzis for the men.
‘Why were you in Switzerland?’
‘For school.’
‘You went to school in Switzerland?’
‘For a while.’
‘How many others, like you, in Switzerland?’
‘You mean Palestinians?’
‘Yes. Like you.’
‘I don’t know, say, three or maybe five?’ Iman was not sure what answer they wanted.
‘What are their names?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How do you not know?’
‘I did not know them.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ The good-looking one had gone off to talk about her with a small man in plain clothes with metal-framed glasses.
‘Do you belong to a political party?’ It was a woman with cropped hair now.
‘No.’
‘Do you belong to a political party?’
‘No.’ Look them in the eye.
‘Why are you leaving?’
‘To see my father.’
‘Who is your father?’
‘Jibril Ali Mujahed.’
‘We know your father.’ Then why ask? ‘He’s in the Organisation.’
‘He left.’
‘When? Why?’
‘He wanted to get out of politics.’
‘I said, when?’
‘About eight years ago.’
‘Do you belong to a political party?’
‘No.’
They went through everything: every seam, every tube of antiseptic, face cream and toothpaste, every scrap of paper. Then they stuffed it all in see-through plastic bags and threw them back in her case. The charade of personalities and questioning techniques seemed unrelenting, the questions being asked from behind her and in front, from the side, from ones, twos and threes, while she watched the others who were trying to enter or leave having their belongings thrown across the long white tables and on to the floor in the fluorescently lit room. Old women in embroidered
thoubs
being screamed at by girls a third of their age in uniform. The abuse shrieked through the room like jets flying low. Everyone was being yelled at, except Iman who got questions, and more questions, and more changes of personnel. She was moved from chair to chair from one side of the room to the other and back again. Iman thought to herself that it was fine, that she had been through it all so many times before. It was all fine, but still one of her hands kept trying to soothe the loose skin of her bent elbow as she sat, her fingers looking for consolation or to console.
‘What year are you in at school?’ a girl with a puppet sitting next to Iman had asked her, and for a moment Iman had felt younger than the girl and had wanted her mother too, and then the Uzi woman returned and they went back to the questions and the anger rose up again, until she no longer had any idea of who was in charge, what she had told whom, and why she wanted to leave anyway. I just need to get
away
from them. Screw it all. I just need to be away from these people, away from their nastiness, their hate.
And there really was nowhere she could mentally escape to now either. The textured surroundings and tender feel of the place where she used to mentally go to be with Raed, or at least an idea of him, was no more than a burnt-out shell of a room, with nothing to show for it except for his bare, dead feet hanging off a table on a stifling day, and after that the madness of the chase through the streets, being pulled back, falling. The man with the jacket and the gun, Ziyyad Ayyoubi, whose presence there was mortifying to her. That he had seen her run after that man, even though he, Ayyoubi, was really just another one of their heavies, paid to drag men like Abu Omar out of their houses, in front of their families, on dubious second-hand information to further some grudge or another, a feud between families, a political rift at most. Of course, no one liked their neighbour – there was something pathetic and ineffectual about him – but a collaborator? He had lived there for years. They’d known him for years, as long as they had been in that apartment, even back when Sabri had had his legs.
Sitting here like this. Being made to wait, and wait, and wait. Move here. Sit there. No, there. Get up. Sit down. No purpose to it except for the humiliation. What enemies they had, these masters of humiliation. They prided themselves on it. Well, she could sit it out. They were getting nothing from her.
The cramps had started just when it seemed like it was all over, after they had carted her outside to sit in a bus shelter with all her things on a trolley, guarded by one of the uniformed recruits. It felt as though a lizard was trapped inside her. She felt its teeth and claws as though it was convinced there was a way out at the base of her lower back and it bit and scratched and pushed with a thick tail flaying out at the contents of her stomach. She bent over.
Please. No. No. Not my period now.
And the bastards had not let her get to her bag for a pad, a tissue, a painkiller, or to visit the bathroom, and when she finally got to the Egyptian side, they had decided to give her their special treatment, which was a room –
God, that room!
No, she did not even want to go there in her head – and a military escort (and it was not as though they could not have spent the money on something else). It was not until Cairo Airport where a cleaning lady had asked if she was OK, ‘
Malik ya habibti? Salamtik ya habibti
,
and given her a stack of tissues, that she had been able to sort herself out a bit in the bathroom.
A shower. I just need a shower.
Iman’s plane had landed over an hour before, but Jibril was counting on his daughter being the last one out. Sensing the prod of Suzi’s phantom finger in his gut, he had ordered a skinny latte but it was tasteless, pointless, so he had got the chap to add a vanilla shot and then a touch of cream.
A woman with lilac combs in her hair and matching nail varnish had smiled up at him at the sound of his ringtone:
toot-a-toot, toot-a-toot toot
. A recognisable tune by a nubile Egyptian singer Jibril rather fancied. Charming. He raised his eyebrows at the lilac woman – a look, he believed, that combined a sense of intelligent irony with nonchalant seduction. She smiled back. Ah, maybe he had not reached the end of it all, the end of women. Perhaps there was still time. He did have Suzi, and Suzi was Suzi and there was no trying to undermine that. He was a lucky man. But to know that the door to others was closed for ever? Was, quite simply, terrifying.
It was Jibril’s fixer ringing. Telling him that Iman had been held back for questioning. Well, of course she had. What did the stupid man expect?
He ordered another coffee before returning the lilac woman’s smile, but she got up and walked off before he was able to take it any further.
It did not take long for the newspaper to upset him. He had read the Sheikh A bin B meets Sheikh B bin A to discuss bilateral relations bit, skimmed the runaway housemaids and discontented manual labourers section, sought and found some hidden nuggets of adultery charges and rogue sexual activity and
(oh joy!)
he even found a piece about further evidence of lesbian activity in school bathrooms. Jibril chuckled happily. Un-Islamic behaviour tickled him to the core.
He braced himself as he turned over the page to the international section, his eye automatically finding the news from home. The same images seemed to have been repeating themselves for years now, the perpetual cycle of violence and diplomatic grins, dead child, stone-throwing youths, exploded car, crying woman outside a demolished house, grinning Leadership, dead child again.
‘The worse the loss, the more we grin,’ Jibril said staring at a particularly despicable picture of the Leaders standing on a golf course in Texas.
‘They treat their dogs better than us,’ said the young man behind the counter, gazing at the sprightly Labrador at the President’s feet. ‘A dog’s life would be a blessing compared to what some of us have to live through.’ He nodded, this time to the picture of a mother crying over her dead child.
‘Where are you from?’ Jibril had been having problems reconciling the boy’s face and Arabic with his badge.
‘Hi!’
it said.
‘I am ERNESTO. Welcome to Starbright®. I am happy to serve you.’
If he had to guess, he would have said the boy was the same as he was, only brought up in Jordan. ‘Mr Ernesto?’
‘Oh no, that’s only my work name,’ the boy said turning to Jibril from the milk steamer that was hawking and spitting behind him. ‘HQ designates our names and market research has found that Spanish names are more amenable to the clientele. My true name is Salem Abu Wazir.’
‘Abu Wazir? You are from . . .? You are from my village?’ Jibril named his village, to which the manager raised his eyebrows.
‘You know the Abu Wazirs? You know my family?’
The café was filling out. A woman with prawn skin was leaning down close to Jibril’s legs tapping over a chocolate cake with a fingernail, her cleavage a gathering of creases and sunspots.
‘
Know
your family?
Know
your family?’ Jibril exclaimed. ‘I practically
am
your family! I am Jibril Mujahed, the Mujaheds and the Abu Wazirs have married each other for years. Centuries, in fact, since the time of the Crusades.’
The boy laid out a piece of cake on a plate for his customer and looked up, bemused.
‘I’ve heard of you,
Ammo,
Uncle. You were with the Outside Leadership, were you not?’
The boy was a bit spotty. His pimples had white tips and clustered together around his nostrils. Other than that, he would be a fairly good-looking chap if he calmed down on the hair cream a bit.
‘I
was
with the Organisation. Yes. Not any more though. Left it years ago. And you’re . . .? A manager here?’
‘I manage all the airport branches. We had two outlets when I started; now we have fourteen. It’s a growth industry.’
‘A franchise, I suppose?’
‘Of course.’ The boy, Salem Abu Wazir (Abu Wazir, eh?), turned back to his staff. A queue was forming of servicemen, businessmen and backpackers. All pushed up behind Jibril to see into the counter. Jibril thought of trying to recreate their village using the salt and pepper pots to show this boy where the Abu Wazir house had been compared to the Mujahed’s, but it would be difficult as the village had been built on the slopes of two hills and the houses had been like cubes stacked up the sides.
Jibril could quite clearly see and feel himself as a child in Palestine. When he was there he wore shorts and a dangly belt, always (the outfit had been frozen in a photograph). Behind him, the village was a series of blocks and arches, rough stone straddling from one building to another in semicircles, arched windows, domes smoothed over with sand and outdoor staircases. There were days when the smell of his village would come and sit on his nose like a flirtatious
djinn
. He would wake from a dream and feel himself boyish, a spirit running through alleyways, over roofs, in the olive groves, leaping in the sun, a sun that was always bright but never harsh. And then at other times (it
was
there in him), when he had maybe drunk a bit too much, or been talking to someone who knew his village or a similar village, he would suddenly feel like saying, ‘Yes, that place! How about it? How about we go back and see how that place is doing?’ as though he had just gone around a corner and if he were to turn back quickly enough it would be there. But it would take less time than the words took to get to his mouth for him to realise that it was absurd. He could never go back to that place, it had been sealed off to him for ever, blown to the sky with explosives then flattened to the ground with bulldozers, built over with tarmac, lived on top of by other people.