Authors: Selma Dabbagh
He was typing something into the keypad of his phone. ‘Who were you hiding from over there?’ Mahmoudi asked, indicating the playground with his nose. ‘Hiding or watching, which was it?’ He didn’t look up as he spoke.
Rashid thought about the foolishness of the cat hunt and weighed it up against the alternative assumptions.
‘I was looking for a cat, a gingerish cat,’ Rashid said, laughing slightly. Damn it. The man was as slimy as they came, his fingernails long enough to make a tapping sound against the metal phone cover as he communicated something long and complex to someone distant (or perhaps uncomfortably near?),
tap, tap, tap.
‘It’s cats now, is it? Not girls, just cats.’ He looked up at Rashid, altering his face to show Rashid the undulating horizontal line of stain crossing his teeth. His smile cracked at the sore on the side of his mouth. ‘You should be careful – there’s a lot going on at the moment. You shouldn’t be wandering about, acting all suspicious.’
‘I heard gunshots earlier, near here.’ Inside his pocket, Rashid turned the notes over in his hand, he just needed a small tab of the stuff, the equivalent of an eighth; he should have enough money for that. He would make it last for as long as possible; then he would try and find someone else or he would be out of there. He would not use Mahmoudi again.
‘That would have been Ayyoubi.’
‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi? What, making an arrest or something?’ Rashid remembered the gun swaying on the slightly stooped back of the fighter, the tying up of Abu Omar’s hands.
‘No, no. It was to
get
Ayyoubi.’ Again, Rashid noticed the tidal wave of scum across his teeth and a slight tick around the dealer’s eyes. ‘Man’s got enemies,’ Mahmoudi said, anticipating Rashid’s unformulated question. He took out a see-through plastic bag filled with
bizer
and started cracking the seeds between his front teeth. He dangled them close to Rashid, who lifted his head,
No. No thanks.
‘They killed him?’ Rashid asked, trying hard to act as though he couldn’t care less.
‘Here it is.’ Mahmoudi took out a wrap in cellophane from his inside pocket and held it against the palm of his hand with his thumb by his side. His other hand was still busy feeding his mouth
bizer
and in the movements of his mouth the rabid anxieties of Ahmed Mahmoudi became all too apparent.
Rashid repeated himself, trying to keep the almost personal sense of offence out of his voice. ‘They killed Ayyoubi?’
‘No, but they will. They got him, but he’s not dead; it should not be hard to track him down.’ In the distance, up by the boundary fence, some tank shells thudded on to the ground, a helicopter juddered low over them. ‘They’ll try again. Do his car or something. So you should watch yourself, because it’s parked just around here. What is it? Are you doubting what I say? It’s not as if he can leave this place now, is it? Of course they’ll get him. Listen, you want this or not?’
Mahmoudi moved his arm out straight from the shoulder to draw attention to his closed hand; Rashid reached over to take the wrap and swapped it over with the money.
‘See you when? Next week.’ Ahmed Mahmoudi turned his back slightly, placing the
bizer
back into his jacket pocket, and counted out the notes in the shadows. ‘You’ll probably need me by then, huh?’ Rashid could tell just by the feel of it that he had not been given the quantity that they had agreed on.
It was dark, with only the one streetlight working and the shadows were long and ill-defined. Rashid slipped the hash into his back pocket. Screw the wedding, he thought again, and anyway, if the bastards struck as heavily as they were expected to (there were even two gunships off the coast), well then, with any luck, the wedding would probably be cancelled anyway.
The television in the living room was never turned off, or even down. A broadcast continued:
‘. . . the Islamist groups who have taken over
de facto
control over this area of the Gaza Strip are vowing revenge following the incursion by tanks and bulldozers and the subsequent demolition of over sixty homes by the Israeli forces . . .’
‘Anarchy,’ said Sabri. ‘We’re getting torn apart. They’re getting exactly what they wanted.’
‘Divide and rule,’ Iman said in a voice softer than her usual one as she was still dabbing at the skin around Ziyyad’s bullet wound with disinfectant.
‘And how we let them!’ Sabri exclaimed. ‘There’s the shame of it. There have always been examples of it, of how we killed off our brightest and best because they cast others in a bad light, but not to this extent. Trying to get rid of a man like this, we can’t even remember who the enemy is any more.’
He went over to the shelves and started smoking. Not a regular smoker, when Sabri did smoke, he tended to make a great show of it, never leaving the thing alone, tap, tap, tapping the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, puffing smoke up to the ceiling in a great dramatic sigh.
‘Do you think you should smoke around him?’ Iman asked, gesturing at Ziyyad.
‘Eh?’ her brother replied. ‘Why not?’
‘Just like Baba,’ she giggled.
‘Eh? Eh?’
She was imitating him when the knocking started on the door. ‘Probably Rashid’s forgotten his key again,’ she said.
But it was not Rashid; it was Khalil and Eva. Sabri had managed to remember Eva’s name and had told Iman that it was Eva whom Khalil had met in London, but it was not until Iman saw Eva, her Eva, standing there that she came close to believing that she was there, in Gaza, in her house.
Meeting them at the door, Iman blocked them from moving further into the apartment. She had closed the double doors to the sitting room behind her. However, the lock had come loose and the double doors creaked apart behind Iman as she tried to explain to Khalil, in Arabic, why he should take Eva somewhere else.
‘What’s wrong with that man?’ Eva said, breaking Iman off. She was pointing behind her into the living room to where Ziyyad lay comatose and half-naked in front of the television.
‘Nothing. Nothing,’ Iman said.
‘But maybe I can help. I’m a medical student; you know that. Do you want me to take a look at him?’
‘Yes,’ Iman’s mother, who had come out of the kitchen to see their most recent guests, said. ‘Yes, we do. Don’t we, Iman?’ She took Eva over to the purple sink that stood in the corridor against wallpaper depicting beech trees in the spring. ‘I have been trying to find a doctor to come over but I was running out of ideas. The only man I could trust has left the country and the others? Well, you never know; there are so many who are willing to talk. He has a bullet inside him, you see. We need to get it out. Not deep, it got stuck against the hipbone. It’s shallow, but it can’t stay there.’ Iman’s mother guided Eva towards the basin in the corridor.
‘I see.’ Eva had tied her hair back tight with an elastic band behind her head. She was washing and washing her hands, soap and fingers running around after each other in the dark toothpaste-splattered basin. ‘You know I’m not a qualified doctor. I’m just a medical student.’
‘No matter. You’ll do. It’s not deep. Here, clean your hands with the bandage. We have lots of bandages, they’re old but they’re sterile, from my son.’ She indicated Sabri to Eva with the nod of her head; he was examining Eva while pretending to be absorbed by the news. ‘We have more bandages. I’ve sterilised these already with detergent on a flame.’ Their mother held out two narrow metal crochet hooks to Eva and held her fat, dry thumb up in front of Eva’s face and cut across it with the forefinger of her other hand. ‘Only this far down. I’ve sterilised the needle already for the stitching.’
It was easier once Eva was in front of him, looking into the wound, with the light in place. She had done worse things before. In London, she had been instructed to remove all kinds of objects from patients’ rectal passages: coke bottles, vibrators and potatoes. That was worse. This was a clean, shallow wound, not unlike a tightly pursed mouth, with the bullet, a shiny little tube pointing up at her. The scraps of fabric were harder, but she was able to pick them out with tweezers. Once out, the suturing was always pleasurable; she knew she had a neat hand and this wound closed up perfectly.
In the south she had seen the effect of the dum dum bullets, their ends cut so that they would scatter inside the body. It was starting to get to her, the dirtiness of it all, but at that point in time, dabbing disinfectant on to the delicately sown wound of an unconscious patient, it was offset many, many times over. Khalil fed greedily from Eva’s look of satisfaction. Sabri’s mother claimed the victory as her own. ‘See, I told you that we could do it!’ she said, moving back on to the sofa after she had looked closely at the stitching and picked up the bullet, twisting it around under the light.
No one spoke for some time until the advertisements followed the news:
Now New! New! Detergent for You!
a family sang over a sparkling alpine kitchen.
Ping!
went the sparkles!
Ping!
went the stars on the floor.
‘Managed to get a lift both down and back,’ Khalil said, ‘I’m glad we didn’t have to leave it any longer. It’s getting rough down there.’ Khalil broke the silence that seemed to have come about due to the awkwardness between the two women.
‘When did you come here?’
‘How did he get shot?’ Iman and Eva asked each other two different questions at the same time while the television family went forth into the snow-capped mountains. Iman waited for an answer rather than giving one.
‘When did you come here?’ she asked again.
‘It seems like for ever, but it was only ten days ago. I’ve volunteered for three months. It’s been crazy. Tonight we meant to stay but it went mad. They say it was sixty houses they knocked down, but we think it was more – they did the whole area. It looks like they did that around here, too? I just can’t believe they get away with it. We meant to stay in one of the threatened houses tonight but yesterday one of us, this young Jewish girl, Irene, she got shot at. She’s fine, but none of us had ever been shot at before, and then Khalil came and convinced our organisers to stop; they were pretty much there already. We kind of knew that there was nothing we could do.’ Eva stopped talking. It was as though she didn’t know where she was.
‘Are you all right?’ Iman asked, goading herself into a guise of friendship with this girl that she found awkward to put on, after all the time spent criticising her at close quarters. But it seemed like this was a different girl in many ways.
‘I feel completely overwhelmed,’ Eva started. ‘Utterly overwhelmed. We were so happy last Tuesday. I can’t forget that feeling, like nothing I have ever had: the closeness we, the volunteers, all felt together and with the families. We kept smiling at each other and hugging each other, as if we needed to confirm with each other what we had gone through, how good it felt. I can never forget that evening, the memory of it will be sacred until I die; nothing I ever did before compares with that. It scares me that I could’ve lived without coming close to ever feeling that.’
Sabri had gestured to Khalil that he and Eva should take the two-seater sofa and Khalil had guided Eva towards it. She did not seem to notice that she had sat down.
‘And that was only Tuesday, but it seems so long ago, so long ago. I don’t think I’ve slept since then. The noise of the bulldozers – you don’t understand – well, you do, but it’s new for me, it just rolls through my head all the time, I can’t sleep. On Tuesday all we did, and it seems almost pathetic now, but we stopped two houses being demolished, we all stood in front of them and chanted and managed to get the soldiers to back off (but they are not soldiers, they are
boys
– can you believe how young they are? They say they listen to music in their headsets while they ride around in those bulldozers. Is that true?). And it was like we were crazy-drunk. We felt so good after that, but now they’ve gone too. The houses we saved, they’ve been demolished. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I’m sorry, but I just can’t get it straight in my head.’
‘It’s not something that you ever get “straight in your head,”’ Sabri said, turning away from the television screen to look at Eva. ‘It is too wrong to be justified, too screwed up to be straightened out. If you force yourself to understand it in any way that leads you to justify it then you are fucked and we are lost.’
‘Yes, sure,’ Eva nodded eagerly. ‘Absolutely. Got it.’
Rashid had gone down to the beach, trying to find somewhere to have a smoke, now that the roof was out of bounds to him. But it had not felt safe down by the shore at all. There were trucks of armed men speeding over the tarmac and bumping over the sand dunes. Open trucks overloaded with men in uniforms, their guns spiked up at the sky, some masked, some bearded, some ridiculously young but all restless (restless, jubilant, both), and all of them spoiling for something, some release from it all. Some attack on the other. Rashid had smoked fast and deep behind the wooden pavilion where sweets and footballs were sold during the day, smoked too fast and he was not as used to it as he had been. The effect was bad: a desperate, bleary body and an overly anxious brain.
It came over him suddenly as an extended epiphany:
that the trucks were only speeding so that they could find him, Rashid;