Authors: Selma Dabbagh
Outside!
No one stood outside.
Iman had not spoken in the car or at the mall. She had just hung around the shop entrances like one of the delinquent
shabab
who came over from neighbouring countries to gawp at women. She seemed completely disinterested, only waiting for Suzi to finish, when the trip had been for her. It was hopeless.
‘Now we shall lunch.’ Suzi escorted Iman along with steely camaraderie. Suzi’s large shopping bags were carried low, hiding her legs in a way that made it seem like she was gliding.
The café was in the mall’s atrium. The reflection of a glass dome held up by an exoskeleton of white piping created a goldfish bowl of sky and sunlight in the polished marble below their feet and the pipes’ shadows cut through everything under them. Suzi identified a table under a canopy to protect them from the air conditioning.
Iman found the mall overwhelming. The amount of glass for a start. Even a weeny little bomb, Iman thought, would lead to carnage in there. She saw large jagged panes of it dropping down on the croissant eaters, the lipsticked smokers, and the backs of adults bent over children.
Oh God,
Iman thought again.
What had she done? What had she nearly done?
Walking with Suzi in the mall she kept finding herself stopping and being there again. Chasing the man (and in this vision her limbs flew out, the street gawped) or with that man, Ayyoubi, in the porch explaining to him why, why she had got to that point, why. But she hadn’t explained anything to him. What could he think of her?
‘How is your brother?’ Suzi asked to get Iman to look up. Iman was weaving the salt and pepper pots in between the flower vase, the disk showing that they were on table twelve, and the olive and chilli oil dispenser. In, round, and out again.
‘He’s in London,’ Iman started. ‘He needed to get out.’
‘Everyone needs to get out,’ Suzi said, dabbing at the oil on her lips. ‘Everyone.’ She waved at the waiter to come back. There seemed to be something wrong with her salad.
‘I don’t agree with that. We can’t just run away. It’s our land. Our people. We have a duty,’ Iman said.
‘Your duty is to yourself,’ Suzi replied. ‘That’s what I have learnt. He’ll stay in London, you think?’
‘He would not be able to; he’ll come back, but with his master’s and by then, if things have improved, you know, he might be able to get a job – But with duty, I don’t agree—’
‘And you? What are you going to do?’
‘I – I don’t know. I needed to leave for a while.’
‘I heard.’ Suzi spoke with distaste as she dabbed at her lips with a thick napkin. She had eaten the mozzarella in her salad, but now was not sure whether that sort of cheese complemented her blood type or not. It needed to be changed for goat’s cheese. Did the waiter understand that? Cheese made from the milk of a goat, not a sheep. If he didn’t understand she would explain it to the manager.
‘Rashid was doing some work with Khalil Helou at the Centre they set up in the camp—’
It was almost insulting for Suzi to hear Iman talk of refugee camps. The girl knew nothing about them. Suzi knew about camps. She could tell Iman all about them. At first, when she was a child in Beirut, the camp had been their womb; it was home to all of them and there was to be one birth and that birth was return. Return and only return. But there were others who didn’t want this to happen. Many powerful others and they were determined to stop it. And they did. They stopped it. No birth. No return. And then?
Suzi did not want to dwell on it. She wiped her lips and reapplied her make-up. They go on in Gaza about bombing this, closure that, but compared to what she’d seen? Nineteen eighty-two in the camps of Lebanon, screams of women being raped, stabbed, shot, bodies heaped the way sacks were piled when you wanted to prevent a flood, bodies crawling with flies, women with their fingers chopped off at the joints, bodies . . . Enough! Suzi snapped her mirror closed and explained goat’s cheese to the manager.
The newspaper headlines caught Iman’s attention:
Strike Kills 4, Injures 25 as Islamic Parties Rise
.
. . Peace Process Not Dead Claims President of the . . . Internal Strife Claims 3 in recent outbreaks of fighting . . .
The owner of the newspaper lowered his paper to find Iman staring at him.
‘Please,’ he said, offering the main section of the paper, ‘please, take it. I’ve finished with it.’ He smiled at Iman and Suzi decided that she should at the very least point out to Iman how much a blow-dry would complement the lines of her face even if she had refused to have one that morning. The man smiled at Iman and an awkwardness came over her. The girl was so gauche. Her arms kept crossing over her chest and she hunched herself up as though there was something to hide. Her hands kept holding at her upper arms as though it was her
breasts
that were bare not her
arms
. She moved with the jerkiness of a baby camel. At the end of the day there really was no woman in this girl. No woman at all. The man pushed the paper across the table before standing up and leaving the food court.
It
was
him. Ayyoubi. In the picture on the front page. His back turned. The green jacket. He was everywhere. Even there, in the mall.
‘
Smile
!’ Suzi commanded with the sharpness borne of the knowledge that she had been far prettier than Iman would ever be. Iman, the paper tight in her hand, slowly turned to Suzi.
‘You want to get me to dress up and smile at men? Is that what you and Baba want?’
‘We just want the best for you,’ Suzi snapped back, ‘and if you take my advice you will start to work on developing yourself as a
woman
rather than . . . whatever it is that you are trying to do. You want to be a
politician
of some kind? Or an
activist
? Is that it?’ Suzi disregarded Iman’s stare. With this type, Suzi decided, it was far better to just be rude. ‘
Yallah
!
Allons-y!’
Suzi brushed the breadcrumbs off her herringbone skirt. Come now.
Allez!’
Iman folded the newspaper section up again and again until it was small enough to be pushed into her back pocket, ‘Maybe a little bag, too? You seem to need a little something like that,’ Suzi suggested, re-armouring herself with her shopping before she took Iman’s arm and led her back into the shops.
Iman had come to accept that he was everywhere and now he was there in her room, in her father’s flat, in this oasis of boredom. In her hand she held a piece of evidence that that world of meaning and horror still existed. He was in the newspaper she had stuffed into her jeans pocket. Of all the objects that she had brought back with her to the room from the mall, it was only the newspaper that was meant for her. She took it out of her pocket, unfolded it and stood next to the window so she could see the picture clearly. It was definitely him: the green jacket, the slight stoop. It was not clear what story the photograph was linked to, whether it was to illustrate internal strife or the well-being of the peace process. Whatever it was, it showed that he was there and she was here. And that there was a link.
How fickle was love. Or at least how fickle was Iman’s experience of it. These men she hardly knew, had not really even touched, had barely spoken to, who expanded to take over her brain, the core of her purpose, who had filled out into idealised figures that she was free to adore for a period, until for some spurious reason they would disperse as quickly as they had entered, without leaving a trace. Raed she had barely thought of since that day, since his death. She had not just forgotten him because he was dead. There had just been so many other things that had happened since then, but now, and she was shy to admit it even to herself, the man Ziyyad was taking over space in her mind.
Outside, a stream of traffic made its way down from the ports: trucks carrying shipping containers blocked the road as far as the eye could see, grinding and beeping forwards under a low net of electricity cables. On a diagonal to the road stumpy pylons stretched far into the desert, lined up like crucifixes after a slave uprising.
She knew now that he had been right. Right about Manar and Seif El Din. Right to stop her and to send her away. She had been manipulated and she had been stupid. Her lower lip was sore from being pulled at and now it bled. She looked again at the picture of him. All she could make out was some green jacket and a blurry hint of his profile. But still, there was something in it.
She could trust him. The secret of her stupidity was safe with him.
The skin around her mouth still burnt from the threading. She had been dressed by Suzi and had agreed to being made up in a department store in one of the malls. Grains of mascara were stuck in the edges of her eyes. She wanted to scratch at herself, to get herself out of all this frippery.
You should concentrate on developing yourself as a woman.
What did Suzi mean? The hell with Suzi and her father telling her to get fixed and settle down as though she was a dog needing to be neutered.
But there were the phrases of the Jahali
poetry that sometimes ran around her head,
body lapping, hair pulling.
What did it feel like? Why was she the age she was, where she was, with no experience of these things at all, although she felt inside her that she had lived all of them in another life? She was not surprised that her lacking showed; she felt it everywhere. It almost hurt.
She would have to get a job to get out of there. For all the shopping in the world piled up in her cupboard, without her father she still had just ten dollars and fifteen shekels.
As a woman.
What did that mean? What had Suzi picked up on? Suzi knew, she was sure of it, of her inexperience and ineptitude in
that
way, in the sexual way; women like Suzi could sniff these things out.
She could not sell the shopping for a flight out of there. She could not sell anything. No job. No money. No visa. Stuck.
She looked at the newspaper photograph again: Ziyyad Ayyoubi. He had treated her like one of his deputies. He had spoken to her, not as a girl, but as someone of significance in all of this, even though he had seen the stupidity and the madness of that day. He had seen her deranged with grief and caked with mud but yet he had treated her as though she had the balls of a man. Iman folded the sheet of newspaper and fed off the exhilaration of it.
The air conditioning, which had stopped earlier, started up again and the bags of shopping rustled in its first gust.
The place was deadening. Iman kicked out at the wide-bottomed office chair left in the deskless room, thrashed out at the ghost of a fat-bottomed executive who sat there. It swung around and knocked into the towers of cardboard boxes behind it. They started falling and Iman kicked again. She wanted the whole lot to collapse. They fell incompetently: some backwards, others forwards, one tower staggered on its base until it finally toppled. At the top of the pile was one shoebox, heavier than the others, and this tumbled to Iman’s feet, spilling photographs on to the floor.
There were photographs of them as a family in Cyprus and Geneva, several of her father standing next to his Lancia in Monte Carlo, others of her and Rashid at school in Switzerland. There were some enlarged ones of Sabri and Lana by their wedding cake that she passed over quickly, two of Naji as a baby, and then in a brown envelope scribbled with rough calculations were photographs of her mother. These were professional photographs on thick card with clipped decorative edges and in them her mother was wearing fatigues and standing in the desert with a Kalashnikov. Iman switched on the desk light and checked the pictures. She looked from one to the other until she was absolutely sure of what she was looking at. The badge on her mother’s sleeve was that of the leftist group, the Front, and her mother’s nose had since been completely altered by plastic surgery.
LONDON CROWDS
Six months later
London was quiet to Iman. The traffic, planes and people worked along allocated channels. They moved along the grooves cut out for them. It was not a world shaken down and cut through night after night. The noise was conformist and the talk and expressions appeared to operate on one level only. People behaved in ways that seemed unconnected to others. Their actions had repercussions only for themselves. There was an enviable ability to relinquish involvement in the bigger picture, to believe that it was all under control, that somebody with your interests in mind was looking out for you.
But close up the whole place was talking. London was babbling. The air was crossed through with questions and fragments of sentences, the tails of the kites of conversations that flew elsewhere:
. . . so I said to Nisha . . .
. . . could always do Ibiza if we can’t do Goa . . .
. . . machine-washed my dinner jacket three times already . . .
. . . knocked through into the dining hall . . .
. . . like a crêpe rim around the bottom . . .
. . . he just won’t talk to the children . . .