Authors: Selma Dabbagh
Sabri thought that he must have been getting soft. He was finding that he was quite enjoying this Khalil Helou’s company. He told Khalil about how his book had to be revised, and about how he had found out who the informer was who had been instrumental in the attack on him and his family. At least he said as much as he was allowed to say, how he had always had his suspicions. The TV was on and whenever the news turned to them – it was normally just anticipating that night’s attack, but sometimes there would be something new, a different angle on the recent violence, some fresh analysis – they had that to discuss, too. It had all been quite pleasant and he had been glad that Rashid had been kept tied up with whatever useless business it was that kept him out of the house, so that he could have Khalil to himself. Mama brought them tea and pistachio
maamoul
; Iman came in and out with tape for the windows.
Sabri had just got on to the subject of his time in prison, when the news channel switched from a report from the south, where most of the demolitions were taking place, to an interview with the Western volunteers down there. They were about to form a human shield to protect some of the houses. Sabri had paused for a little, then continued as he, for one, had seen interviews like this before. But as the camera turned to one volunteer, Khalil stood up and quite abruptly indicated that Sabri should stop. No, worse, that Sabri should basically
shut up
. He had waved his hand up and down in front of Sabri’s face.
‘Eva!’ Khalil had finally said when the girl had stopped talking. And what a strange, androgynous girl she was, with her wispy hair and weak eyes all screwed up and twitchy in front of the camera. Her name with the description
Medical Student, Volunteer
ran in white letters across the bottom of the screen. Khalil had put his jacket on, wavered around his chair hopelessly, as though negotiating something with it, then said, ‘I’m getting her and bringing her back. They might kill her down there. The bulldozers. They don’t care any more what skin colour or passport these volunteers have; they’ll kill her down there. I’ll bring her here.’
‘You know her?’
‘From London. Yes. Yes. We met. We talked. Yes. I told her about the situation.’ Khalil opened the palm of his hand, removed the remains of the
maamoul
that he had mashed into it, placed them on a saucer and walked out of the room.
Sabri looked back at the TV screen where the girl who was the cause of Khalil’s distress could be seen lumbering (the woman walked like she had just crossed the Sahara on a donkey) over the remains of a bulldozed house in an oversized fluorescent overall. He didn’t know what it was with those boys and their girls from London; Sabri could not see it himself. He wheeled himself over to the window where he had left his notepad and binoculars in hopeful, but pointless preparation for the night’s attacks; he could only see smoke from the ground floor. He looked over the notes of the previous night and waited.
‘
Aaaay!’
he suddenly found himself screaming. ‘
Aaaay!’
with an outrage he didn’t know he had left in him, as a man climbed over the back wall and into their garden. The man – some kind of fighter, there was a gun on his back but he couldn’t see his face – bent himself double to less than the height of the bottom of the windows as he crept around the side of their house. ‘
Aaaay!’
Sabri screamed again.
By this time Iman and his mother were already calling. ‘What? You fell, Sabri? What is it?’ and came to find him jammed into the doorway (he had not had the chance to take the arms down on his chair and Iman had closed one of the double doors), swearing and cursing everyone to hell. He started trying to describe the man but before he had a chance to do so, they could make out the sound of someone knocking hard and fast at their front door.
‘Umm Sabri?’ said the voice behind the door. ‘Iman?’
‘Who is it?’ Sabri’s mother whispered at Sabri. ‘Do you know?’
‘No, but he climbed in over the back wall.’ Sabri looked at his mother and his sister’s faces watching the shape of the figure that they could see crouched down through the opaque panes of the front entrance. ‘He’s armed.’
‘I’ll go.’ His mother went to the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi,’ the voice said. ‘Umm Sabri, sorry to trouble you. I’ve been shot. I need to come in.’
‘Mona and Khaled’s boy?’ Sabri’s mother asked, going to the door. ‘Is that possible?’
‘Ziyyad!’ Iman stood back as her mother pulled the locks across and the figure stumbled into their house.
‘This is not how I expected to meet my avenger,’ Sabri said looking at Ziyyad once they had him seated in the living room.
‘What do you mean, your avenger?’ Iman felt shamed and worried by Ziyyad being there, so close to Sabri, as though his presence alone exposed a secret union between them. ‘You know him? Avenger? Sabri? What are you talking about?’
‘I think Sabri is trying to tell you what I wanted to explain to you in London,’ Ziyyad began, ‘about Abu Omar.’
He was far paler now than he had been on the day of Seif El Din’s assassination. Iman’s mother indicated that they should move him on to a seat that she was hastily covering with an old bed sheet.
‘What about Abu Omar?’ Iman was looking at her brother as she helped her mother with the sheet.
‘The man enabled them to take my family. And my legs. We know now that it was his information—’ Sabri said.
‘You knew this and you didn’t tell me?’ Iman was looking at Ziyyad.
‘I wanted to, but we didn’t get the chance,’ Ziyyad started again.
‘You shouldn’t talk,’ their mother said. ‘Be still. I have some of Sabri’s painkillers. They’ll knock you out.’
Sabri felt uncomfortable when others rushed around him. Iman had gone out to get rid of any traces of blood leading up to the house. They had drawn the curtains, removed Ziyyad’s blood-soaked jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, put his gun in a corner by the door and then brought in sponges with hot soapy water and syringes for the painkillers.
‘I can do those,’ Sabri said, taking the drugs and unwrapping a syringe from its paper, easing it full from the bottle (how pleasurable the whole process was, just to think of the release of it filled him with such desire it verged on the erotic). ‘Do you know who it was?’ he said to Ziyyad. ‘Who shot you?’
‘I’m pretty certain he was from my party, I could almost swear it, but he was some distance away, which is why they didn’t get me as well as they wanted to.’
Ziyyad adjusted in his seat with difficulty. Iman standing at his side was trying to dampen his forehead with a flannel. Their mother left the room to get some bandages. Ziyyad clamped Iman’s hand tight, so much so that her fingers were bunched over each other. He was squeezing her hand so hard that Sabri half-expected his sister to scream, but instead she seemed to become invigorated by the pressure. Her face had taken on an expression that Sabri was not familiar with seeing in her and it made him look away. He turned back to Ziyyad.
‘Do you know why they were trying to get you?’ Sabri asked as their mother came back into the room. The injection was ready but if he were to administer it, the man might get knocked out completely. It was better to know before the man was completely gone who was out to get him.
‘I think . . . no, I know, that the other side – the Israelis – want rid of me, that’s for sure. It’s been the case for a long time. This is not the first time they’ve tried. The difference is that before,’ he was wincing at Sabri now, ‘my party would protect me.’
Their mother indicated that Iman should help lean Ziyyad forwards. Once the shirt was removed she cleaned around the wound with cotton wool.
‘Look, see, one of them missed. It’s just a scratch. But there’s a bullet still in there, lodged against the hipbone. It’s not very dangerous but we need to get it out.’ Their mother pressed close to the wound with the heel of her hand to slow the bleeding. ‘You should not have jumped over that wall; you’ve lost too much blood for such a wound.’
Ziyyad tightened his lips; his face was shiny and jaundiced under the overhead light. Sabri put the syringe in its kidney-shaped tray and wheeled over. Iman came around for a better look. Ziyyad continued to stare above their heads to the curtain rail that had come loose from the wall. The dusk call to prayer could be heard outside and a small cluster of birds fluttered up from their perches on the bougainvillea, chirping.
‘Anyone know where Rashid has got to?’ their mother asked.
‘I should’ve thought it through,’ Ziyyad said. ‘I really didn’t think they’d go this far, but I’d been upsetting them, one way or another. I won a popular vote within the party on a couple of things and then – maybe this is what did it – I started saying that we had to run a cleaner shop, that there should be greater financial accountability. I was not trying to discredit anyone, you understand. I just wanted to point out that our opponents were getting so much mileage out of these allegations of corruption.’
‘That would have done it,’ their mother said vehemently. ‘Can’t stand between them and their money.’
‘I’m sorry to have come here, Auntie. I am sorry to bring this into your house. I didn’t know where I could go. I left my car on the main street and I was going to take it, then I thought that they might have tampered with it or something. Wired it up . . .’ He strained again. His left hand hung over the side of the chair, slightly bloodied, at a distance from him. ‘Would you mind?’ he asked, looking at Iman indicating for her to wash it.
‘I’ve been meaning to apologise to all of you, and especially to Rashid, because I heard that his arrest in London was meant for me.’
‘Nonsense,’ their mother said. ‘Rubbish. He got himself into his own mess.’
Sabri caught Iman tracing the tip of her finger along the scratches from the bougainvillea thorns that had come up like rows of red machine stitching on Zayyid’s arm. What exactly had happened with these two in London?
‘No. I believe it was a tip-off from someone in my party. I’m sure that was the whole reason they sent me to London. It probably explains why the Israelis were so ready to grant me an exit visa. They just messed up and got Rashid instead.’
‘You do look quite alike,’ Sabri said.
‘Rashid’s thinner,’ their mother said, ‘but I can see some resemblance. Here, take this,’ she said handing him some mint tea after stirring several spoons of sugar into it, ‘then it’s time for the painkillers.’
Sabri gave the injection with care, but also with jealousy for the release that it brought.
‘He’s scared of blood,’ Iman whispered after Ziyyad passed out in the chair. ‘Phobic. And of crowds.’
‘Nonsense,’ retorted their mother. ‘A man like him, never.’
Things always took longer than expected – most people accepted that – but Khalil had obviously decided he could not wait and was already running off somewhere when Rashid arrived. By the time Rashid reached the wall of the house, Khalil was out of shouting distance, intent on getting away. Khalil’s red tracksuit bottoms (he wore these when he wished to look
shaabi
, like a simple man, one of the people) were moving off towards the sea. The tracksuit bottoms put Rashid off the idea of chasing him. Rashid had just reached his front door when a message bleeped, telling him that Ahmed Mahmoudi was now ready to meet, and so he retraced his steps back towards the town.
But something was going on. He knew that when he turned around; the smell of it came to him. The sense of it had been in his body since the sound of the gunshots, but it was clearer now. Something had happened. Such knowledge communicated itself imperceptibly, but absolutely. He felt he had lost this special Palestinian capability when he was outside in London, but within hours of being back, it had come back too, this ability to know that something had happened, was going to happen, was in the offing. This was both past and future. He looked towards where the gunshots had come from. The pigeons had settled back into their cages. The sun was streaking the sky with red as it set. A drone buzzed overhead, to the north. Otherwise, he could not see anything. There was nothing visible.
But something was definitely up.
Ahmed Mahmoudi was not there. Rashid sat for a while under the playground sign with its faded lettering,
Brotherhood Park
. He walked up and down the row of shuttered shops and considered the parked cars in front of him; they were in the same place as before, none of them had moved. It wasn’t surprising; only the leaders, fighters and ambulance drivers had petrol.
He looked for the ginger cat along the wall and then continued his search in the deserted playground but found only geckos and a heavy-faced tom with a bent tail. The street was quiet and, crouching in the wild grass of the playground, he thought he could see the carrot boy bent low behind the cars, but then he was gone. There was no sign of the cat. Mahmoudi was not there and the sky was being zipped up with drones.
Abruptly and from nowhere, Ahmed Mahmoudi announced his arrival with a whistle that emulated a bird’s warble. He stood at the corner of the road dressed in the style that he had developed long before Rashid had known – or known of – him: an open blazer against a T-shirt, pointed lace-ups in a light shade of tan, sunglasses on his nose, his head or around his neck. There was a likeable air of a Rio beach about his outfits, of music videos with people in white linen, glasses twinkling on jetties, of boats with blue wind in their sails and bikinis on their decks. But his voice, nasal and menacing, cut through this impression each and every time.