Authors: Selma Dabbagh
that there were armed men everywhere looking for him, Rashid;
that every car shadow held a man crouched with their guns readied, searching for him, Rashid;
that the cars parked down the side of the beach were all wired up, waiting (again) for him to touch them so that they could blast him, Rashid, into the sky in a chute of flames.
The dunes hid tanks and bulldozers; each helicopter searched for him with its beam; the gunships pointed at him and him alone, Rashid.
Rashid had found himself walking fast, bent and angular, his eyes watery with the sea wind, teary with blown sand. He walked with his shoulders held low, in a silly attempt to make himself small. There was a rainy spray spitting at him and the wind that carried it tugged at his clothes, pushed him back as he came to the crest of the dunes, wriggling like a stranded eel. The house was miles from him across a treacherous terrain that he had lost faith in crossing. He felt himself ant-like and squashable beneath the weight of the swarmy sky.
How he got home, he was not sure, but he did it. He had done it. And once there, he held on to the door handles to his home offering a prayer of gratitude to them and to God (whom he found at times like this) while cursing Mahmoudi’s spiked shit to hell. But when no one in the living room looked up as he came through the door, it made him wonder whether he was there after all, and then he saw that his body was there already, splayed backwards over a chair, stripped down to the waist, drugged, half-naked with his jeans covered in blood.
He, Rashid, was dead. His body was lying out in front of the TV in a state of undress. He was dead but they were talking about someone else.
Typical,
he thought,
typical.
‘His parents were assassinated in Beirut,’ Iman was explaining to a Western woman sitting with her back to the door. ‘Intellectuals. Both of them.’
‘He’s fought for the cause all his life. A man of integrity. The type we need more of,’ Sabri added.
‘A hero you could say.’ Sabri’s mother directed this at the passed-out Ziyyad. ‘Could be my own, don’t you think? Looks like he could be my son, no?’
‘The son you never had,’ Rashid said, but his mouth was dry and the scene was so surreal he didn’t know whether his words had been spoken or dreamt. He didn’t understand how, in a couple of hours, his house could be so changed. His sister fawning over a man lying with his jaw hanging open on a bed sheet; Khalil whispering to a bespectacled white girl (and he had told Khalil all about English girls after Lisa; he had figured it all out and yet Khalil apparently had not listened to a word of it).
‘Ah, Rashid.’ His mother eventually noticed him. He was there. ‘This is Ziyyad Ayyoubi.’
‘He’s been shot by his own people,’ Sabri added.
‘We’re looking after him,’ his mother continued. ‘He’s a brave man.’
‘Wonderful,’ Rashid said. ‘Wonderful.’ And he wandered into the corridor and leant over the basin. He splashed water over his face and picked the sand out of the corners of his eyes, rubbing them before snorting water up into his nose from the palm of his hand and blowing it out while holding the bridge. He did this several times until he started feeling a post-swim tingle of water going down the wrong way somewhere in his nasal passages and realised that Khalil was standing behind him.
‘You OK?’ Khalil asked.
‘Sure,’ Rashid said, drying his hands on his trousers and his face on a piece of bandage left next to the basin. ‘Sure. Just hungry. Really, really hungry. You want to eat?’
Over a plate of
bamya
and rice in the kitchen, Rashid discovered that Khalil had brilliantly discovered two heroes in one afternoon, one of either sex: Eva (
‘So brave! I mean what’s it to her? She could’ve got killed!’
) and Ziyyad (
‘Did you know his parents were assassinated? And they tried to get him too? A gifted leader, I understand.’
). He had apparently also formed a solid friendship with Sabri of the type Rashid had never had (
‘I never knew that it was Abu Omar who had informed on Sabri. Why’re you looking at me like that? Didn’t you know? He just told me.’
).
Wonderful. Wonderful.
Rashid had approved but didn’t look up from his bowl. That was it. Rashid decided he hated all forms of hero worship. All forms of secrecy. He realised that he had had it with the farce of family and that romantic relationships should be banned (
‘What d’you think? It looks like Iman has struck something up with Ziyyad, don’t you think?’
). The
bamya
was all slime; someone had picked out all the okra, all the meat; it was a tasteless tomato soup with loose vegetable fibres that he had to force himself to ingest. On the sideboard was one of his mother’s trays for Sabri.
Bet he got meat,
thought Rashid. It was the worst
bamya
Rashid had ever had, despite his hunger, despite the joint. His mother had probably had him in mind when she made it; she’d spooned it full of her own disdain.
Khalil was watching him. There had been a way, before, that Khalil used to look at him, that Rashid always tried not to register on a conscious level. A look that when he caught it, he wished he had not. More than love, even. He had never dwelt on it before and had preferred to pretend that it was not there. But now it was gone, Rashid missed it more than he would have believed possible.
There was no place for Rashid in the other room. They had formed a ring of seats and had positioned the unconscious Ayyoubi at its head.
He could hear Sabri’s radio: ‘. . .
vowing to continue its aerial attacks on Palestinian territories. The Israeli officials spoke of fierce reprisals following Sunday’s failed rocket attack . . .’
Rashid sat alone in his bedroom, his computer at his feet on the tiles in a mangle of plugs and wiring, its screen dusty and dumb. There was no one he wished to hear from now. No news that he wanted to receive.
A group laugh burst out from the sitting room and he found himself standing very close to the window, so close that night coldness touched at his cheeks. He rolled his forehead against the chilled, bare pane.
He was not stoned any more. He was not even fuggy.
His family must have been in his room looking for something while he was out; his shirts had been pulled out of a bag on to his unmade bed. The sweatshirt Lisa used to wear was spread out flat and empty in the centre of his bed. Rashid sat with his passport open and thumbed through it, as though it was a religious text, a path to salvation. They must have been looking for a shirt for Ayyoubi.
Raised voices in agreement came from them now, and then another laugh. The sound of Khalil’s goat-like bray even cut through the argument going on between the neighbours upstairs and over the TV news broadcasts and the screams of the neighbour’s kids.
It was then that it came to him, what he needed to do. It suddenly all became clear to him.
Rashid stood up and looked at the bed, the clothes, and the bags on the floor. He looked down at his computer. He stared at the photograph in his passport. It all confirmed what had come to him, the solution that had been revealed to him.
And once he found it (his destiny), he became wired with a sensitivity to his surroundings that he had never previously experienced. The decision seemed so obvious, once found, it closed down all other choices absolutely.
A jet plane burnt through the sky above with a low wail and a heavy thud juddered the house into silence leaving only the rise and fall of the commentators’ broadcast voices.
Rashid felt above it, high up, above it all.
Wired with purpose.
Reborn.
He strutted a bit once he was past the wasteland and away from the house. The gun hanging across his back gave him the zest to do so, gave him a purpose: to belong. Rashid headed towards the place where he had been so afraid, down to the seafront, stepping over spangles of barbed wire and collapsed fencing as he went. But it was quieter down there than it had been. No trucks of men roared past and his play for visibility was not picked up on. There was no one there. Even the sky was quieter. He could hear a drone buzz, but when he stopped to listen that was all he could hear. A gunship stood in the moonlit sea, stuck like a rig.
He crossed back towards the town, taking a different route along the edges of some farmland; the greenhouse plastic crackled and flapped in the wind and the earth was rutted in the ancient ways of Iraq, of Egypt. The moon illuminated it all with its fullness and across a field a porch light warmed the doorway of a house into an orange cube. How wondrous at this time of night this place was; even the deep, thick smell of manure was rich in its dankness. Rashid felt he could see and feel everything twice, with a heightened perception, a touched-up brightness, a childlike sense of wonderment and awe.
He ignored the helicopters circling over to the south, the clouds whirling like smoke in the shafts of light shooting down from their nostrils. Instead, he looked straight above him at the night clouds, high puffs of them stuck on to a moving dome pricked with stars beyond which was a fine muddled net of whiteness.
Occasionally a jet would crash through it all:
Keeooww
, a wild pre-emptive scream followed by a thud, a blast and the kind of horror he had no desire to think about.
Walking with the intention that he now had made him freer than he could believe possible. When he remembered what it was that he had resolved to do – something far better than anything else that he had ever done – his heart reverberated with massive pride and then shrank into itself, scared. His face became hard and insensate as did his hands, but this was a different kind of fear; it was a calculated, necessary one and he could force himself into its pace, into a liberated step he never thought he would have.
The key had been in the pocket of the jacket, as he knew it would be. There was a small pendant with it, a turquoise eye on a string to protect the bearer from
hasad,
the evil eye, to stave off the envious. The key had the name of the car model and registration number on it, as he had hoped. It was enough; he would be able to find the car.
The town was deserted, lines of hard walls and metal shutters padlocked to the ground. The rubber from Rashid’s soles squeezed against the paving stones. He was coming up to the corner of the street, with the main road next to the playground in front of him, when a wave of it, the fear, came over him, almost uncontainable this time until he set it firm in his jaw, in his hands which now held the gun up, pointing straight at the sky, up in front of him. Nothing moved, but he could hear somewhere the cry of a baby in a room and the
tunnanana tunnanana
of the drumroll which introduced the beginning of the news. The precarious street lighting that still worked spat in its casing. He had never been there when it was so dark. Across the road, one of the signs boasting European funding swayed forwards out of the playground, catching a streak of light on its painted letters, the space behind it flat as a black card.
A
click
. First one, then a couple together.
Click, click, click
, fast like a marble finding its way down a run. He turned to where he thought it was coming from, but the street stopped dead after the lamp post, its light dull, grey on the dusty roofs of the cars. Then he saw a figure. Not that little sneak of Sabri’s, Abu Omar’s grandson, that Wael from upstairs?
Click!
He turned back again, but there was nothing. Even the baby had stopped crying.
Eva had fallen asleep in the middle of a long sentence filled with question marks and qualifying clauses. She had been given, despite her insistence that she should not, Iman’s bed and Iman was on a mattress on the floor. It was like camping under a flyover; the planes roared and thudded; the helicopters circled. And through it all Eva snored, small sniffly snores, her mouth slightly open. Her hair spread out in sticky wisps around her head.
The snoring became more obvious as the planes became less frequent; it rose in flurries of snuffles and fell into troughs of baby snorts. Above, with the departure of the planes, Iman could hear children being settled to sleep, moved on to blankets in the centre of their rooms, away from the windows. If she lay on her front she could feel her heart.
She was wide awake. More awake than she had ever been. More happy than she could remember, so happy that she could not trust it at all. It was going to be taken from her; someone would just come in and take it from her.
They would get him.
Iman sat up to listen.
They would take him from her. Probably now, his enemies were searching for him and someone would inform on him. Her neighbours would have no idea what other members of his party wanted from him, that they wanted him harmed. They weren’t to know that. They could say, ‘Yes, yes, Ayyoubi. We saw him, didn’t we?’ (She could hear them say it.) ‘That way, he went over towards the Mujahed house, over there.’ They could break in to find him, smash panels in the front door, slide the locks across, and drag him out. She got out of bed. She should check outside for bloodstains again; there was one splotch of it that kept coming back to her, on a fallen cement pillar in the wasteland that he must have stepped over. Not all the blood had come out when she had tried to smear it away with her foot without drawing attention to herself. His enemies would see it and come over the wall, like he had.