Authors: Selma Dabbagh
They got up to change trains, squeezing past Saturday shoppers and women with pushchairs. The air was sticky. On the platform, Rashid found a dented drinks can and kicked it around for a while. He considered telling Iman to apologise to Eva, but he knew that that wasn’t something that she was likely to do, even though he could sense that she was urging him to tell her to do it.
‘You’re not worried about missing Khalil?’ Iman asked.
‘We’ll meet him at the demonstration.’
‘And Lisa?’ Iman had been waiting for her brother to mention Lisa and was pleased that he had not. Rashid found some dead skin on the side of his left middle finger and bit at it.
‘Don’t do that.’ Iman pulled his hand away.
‘She’s fine. Fine. She’s just been really busy organising speakers for today’s demonstration. Ziyyad Ayyoubi will be speaking. Do you remember that name? The fighter from the Patriotic Guard?’
‘He’s coming? Here?’ But of course he was; he had to be, she decided dramatically, he was here because of her. ‘He can’t be here. Why? Why did Lisa ask him of all people?’
‘It was a last-minute change of plan by the Authority; they switched him. But it seems he has a foreign passport of some kind so it’s easier for him to attend. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing. Why does he have a foreign passport?’
‘How would I know?’
Two girls in matching outfits with soft stomachs and hard, moving jaws got onto the train.
‘Do you know he’s the son of Mona Zahlan and Khaled Ayyoubi?’ Iman whispered.
‘The couple who were shot in Beirut? No, I didn’t know that.’
The girls sitting in front of them were sharing earphones plugged into a phone. One of them had caught Rashid’s eye earlier and had wiggled her bottom a bit in her seat, crossed her legs this way and then the other way. For him.
Who cares?
thought Rashid annoyed by this Ziyyad Ayyoubi.
It’s not him. It’s his parents. Why should being orphaned make you a better person? A braver person? A more worthy person? More likely to just fuck you up.
He could see it impressed his sister though. He wasn’t going to get into that one with her. She could be so predictably like Sabri. Like his mother. They were a family. He was the outsider.
‘I feel we haven’t caught up on anything since you came. I’ve hardly seen you. How’s your course? You still haven’t told me about it,’ Rashid asked.
‘Expensive.’
‘Worth it?’
‘Not in the least. I told Baba that he was crazy to send me here but he was insistent that I don’t go back to Gaza.’ Iman made another face. ‘He was also determined that I didn’t stay in the Gulf.’
‘What exactly was the fallout about with him? What happened?’
‘Nothing
happened.
I didn’t make a fuss or anything. I am just not really Suzi’s type and I started making excuses not to go to coffee mornings and ladies’ lunches and then she stopped inviting me.’
‘Was that it?’
‘Nearly, but the final blow was a date that Suzi had lined up for me with this Palestinian American guy. Rashid, you should have seen him . . .’
‘Ugly was he?’
‘No, I mean you had to
hear
him. He was just . . .’ Iman waved her hands about. ‘I got this long lecture about how we deserve the fate we have got, how Arabs are immature and don’t think logically, all these quotes from UN reports about our underdevelopment and cultural backwardness.’ Iman waved at the air. ‘Oh, yes, and how we just have to believe in the Peace Process as it is the Best that We are Ever Going to Get. All this from a guy wearing a tweed jacket in fifty-degree heat who has never even
been
to Palestine.’
‘You didn’t get personal, did you?’
‘No, not personal but just . . . you know, I went through the history of the Arabs, the effects of colonialism, the need for resistance. You know, standard stuff. It would have been fine, but he went back and told his mother, who told Suzi, who told Baba that I was a militant communist who held dangerous beliefs.’
Rashid started to laugh. ‘Was he in the CIA, too?’
‘Could’ve been. I don’t know. I thought it was funny but Baba went crazy. Started screaming about his reputation and my reputation and who the hell was I involved with in Gaza anyway? Basically that was that; there was no place for me in the Gulf. I thought he would calm down and get over it. And he did calm down but he didn’t change his mind. He went off and found out about this teaching course, applied for a visa and here I am. Never seen the man as determined about anything.’ She shrugged. ‘Great that you’re here though.’
‘It’s good to have you here. Not that I seem to be able to get to see you. What happened to you at Steffi’s party? You just disappeared.’
‘I was tired, I got a lift home.’
‘Who with?’
‘This English man.’
‘We’re in London.
There are lots
of English people here. Does this one have a name?’
‘Charles.’
‘Charles Denham?’ Rashid asked, remembering the name from the thick crested card. ‘The civil servant? The stiff guy? You were talking to him for ages. You liked him?’
‘He’s not stiff; you’re just saying that because he’s English. Typical stereotyping on your part. He’s OK. Look, this is our stop, isn’t it? Come on.’
The voice on the intercom had sounded harassed and urgent, ‘I can’t hear you. Sorry, I can’t hear you. Can you just come up?’
Khalil had pushed himself into a hallway walled with bicycles and plastered with takeaway flyers and made his way up a muddy, once pastel carpeted staircase to the top floor flat where a shabbily dressed girl with marble skin and weak eyebrows stood against the doorway. She looked exhausted.
‘I’m Khalil, a friend of Iman and Rashid’s.’ Khalil was out of breath by the time he reached the top.
‘Oh, you just missed her. Iman, unusually for Iman, has just gone out. I don’t know where she is.’ The girl was about Khalil’s height, and wore bent glasses. ‘You’re unlucky because she hasn’t so much as left the house for the last week or so.’ The girl had a slight twitch in her nose and seemed to be suffering from a cold. She looked at Khalil’s bags, a small canvas rucksack and a sizeable sports bag. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Leeds. But I’ve known Iman and Rashid all my life. We live in Gaza together.’ Khalil felt a need to explain himself, to be clear in his English. ‘I can’t understand why they aren’t here. I only came down to see them and because of the demonstration. They were the ones insisting that I attend it.’
‘You better come in and wait,’ Eva said, opening the door wide, ‘or leave your bags at least?’
Khalil removed his shoes and placed them outside. They both looked at his feet in his electrician’s socks.
‘I don’t really know what she gets up to,’ Eva continued. ‘Sometimes she’s gone all night. Other days she’s just holed up in front of the news for days on end, particularly this week.’
Khalil was still holding the door open. This girl seemed to be on her own in the flat. If he were back home he would leave the door open, to show the neighbours that there was nothing going on. He waited for a while, to gauge her possible reaction before he shut it tentatively behind him. His embarrassment at their isolation together did not seem to be felt by her. She offered him the TV remote.
‘You want to see what’s going on?’
Khalil took in a large Gauguin print in a clip frame and a wrinkled apple in a fruit bowl.
‘I was just doing coffee,’ she said, indicating the kitchen, ‘if you’d like?’
‘Yes,’ Khalil was unsure about what to do. He could study while he waited he supposed.
‘You’re Iman’s flatmate?’ It didn’t feel right to ignore the girl when she was making him coffee.
The room was vibrating with traffic noise: revs, car stereos, brakes, accelerations, the scream of sirens. Eva dulled it by pulling down the sash window, leaving them with the sound of the neighbour’s music through the wall.
‘In a way, but I don’t think Iman would have
chosen
me as a flatmate,’ she said with a fake-sounding
hah!
‘It’s more of a flat-share arrangement by the university. We didn’t know each other before we moved in.’
Eva swatted at some fruit flies buzzing over the apple, momentarily disturbing their orbits. She sat on the edge of her chair as though she was Khalil’s guest and was not quite sure what to do with herself.
‘Why wouldn’t she have chosen you?’ Khalil had thought about going through the notes from the workshop he had just attended and had pulled them out, but then he changed his mind and shoved them back into his bag.
‘She doesn’t approve of my politics, or rather my apparent lack of them.’ Eva gestured with her hand and snorted slightly.
‘Oh, really?’ Khalil smiled at the idea of Iman flipping out, ‘Don’t worry about Iman. She’s a bit hard on people. She’s probably just upset about what’s going on.’
‘You think so?’ Eva picked a piece of skin off her lips and bit at it.
‘Completely. I’ve known her since we were kids. She does sometimes give the wrong people a piece of her mind at the wrong time.’
‘Oh, really? I thought it was just me.’ Her eyes disappeared as the steam from the coffee covered her glasses. She took them off and rubbed her eyes. ‘Does she know you’re coming?’
‘Her brother Rashid definitely knew. We set it up weeks ago. There’s this huge demonstration starting at two. But I can’t seem to get hold of either of them this morning.’
Khalil took off his jacket. Eva rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. Khalil gestured at a chair, even though it was her place, but she seemed to want to talk.
‘What was it you said that set her off?’ he asked.
‘That Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East. That’s bad is it?’
‘Unforgivable,’ Khalil replied sternly, ‘and no longer accurate either.’
‘I only said something because she seemed so distressed. I wanted her to explain. It is such a dominant conflict in the world. To have the kind of limited understanding of it that I have, is kind of sad.’ Eva looked appropriately miserable.
‘You need to come to the demonstration then,’ Khalil said as though it was an obvious conclusion. ‘The speakers are excellent.’
Eva was about to object. She had her finals coming up. She had 124 pages left to do that afternoon on blood. She should be studying. Demonstration? She had never been on a demonstration. She didn’t know this man at all. Going on a demonstration about
the Middle East
? No. That just was the kind of thing she did not do. Khalil looked up at her again, his eyebrows raised a fraction, just enough to make her feel the challenge in them.
‘Yes. Yes. OK. I’ll do that.’ Her mouth expressed that she had resolved something of significance.
‘Good. It starts at two. We’ll go together.’ It being agreed, Khalil and Eva sat together in silence. He had never managed to master small talk. He thought of his papers. ‘I could show you some maps that would help to explain the background,’ he said, not wanting to push it. ‘If you are interested that is.’
‘Yes,’ Eva said. ‘Yes, that would be good.’
‘These maps show it graphically, which is the most important thing, and you can see here that the whole conflict is about land and the depopulation of that land of one group of people for the benefit of another. Ethnic cleansing, basically.’ Khalil pulled out a book and bent back the spine to show three dated maps of the same land with different borders and blocks of shading. ‘Here, in 1917, we have a hundred per cent of the land under the Mandate. Go to 1947, the recommendation is that we should have thirty-three per cent. Currently, what we are actually given is less than five per cent of the land, and then no real autonomy in that part . . .’
Eva looked at a solid elongated country with its hatched grey land becoming blotched with amoeba-shaped patches of the same colour. She also looked at the hands holding the book open to her, delicate male hands with noticeably clean fingernails.
‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’ Rashid was asking. ‘You knew and you didn’t tell me.’
After filling in multiple forms, Iman and Rashid had been taken into a room with bright blue carpet tiles and lined with empty shelves the colour of bleached oak. They had read the memo that was on the top of the file twice and had looked at the one photograph clipped on to it of their mother challenging a cameraman with a gun in her hand.
‘They told you, didn’t they? Sabri and Mama? They just decided that it was me who shouldn’t know.’
Rashid’s internal tumble and slide to somewhere below and apart from the rest of his family was quick and brutal. The sense of being punched out from the group was not a new one and once the realisation (and the shove that came with it) that they had been in on this together came to him, it felt obvious, as though it was something he should have always have known was going to happen. It was an eternity ago that he had had any expectation that it wouldn’t. His family were on a piece of ice that had broken off and was scudding away from him on a different current. He was no part of it, no part of the struggle and no part of them. He didn’t know why it had taken him so long to understand that this was the case.