Authors: Selma Dabbagh
The corridor smelt of cardamom, disinfectant and cigarettes. A strip of fluorescence lit the hall above the basin catching the Russian beech trees plastered on the wall behind it. She stepped down towards the living room, where the double doors hung open. Khalil was asleep on a sofa, his feet bare and hairy, poking out from under a blanket, his shoes tucked into a corner, the socks rolled up inside them. And he, Ziyyad, was still there, also covered partly with a blanket, his head tilted to the side, resting on the back of the sofa. She crept into the room and turned on the table lamp so that she could see him better.
The tablecloth was decorated in a loopy pattern made up of fine synthetic tubing and satin trim. Small imitation crystal droplets hung off it over the side of the table. It was old and dust had darkened the undersides of the tubing, dulled the trim; it had been coloured with children’s pens and branded with the rings of saucepans too hot for it, but it was not the stains that Iman found herself wondering at, but at Rashid’s passport, lying open at the page of his Canadian visa. Someone had placed a book of Myres’ across the pages to keep them open.
She thought that she should, perhaps, remove Ziyyad’s shoes. It couldn’t be comfortable to sleep with shoes on. She untied them and loosened them hole by hole. Rashid probably needed something more for his visa and he had put out the passport for that, so that they could remind him in the morning. She tugged at the heel of the right shoe and eased it off, spilling out some sand on to the floor, and started on the other foot. She should have washed his feet before he passed out, but then her family would have known, would have guessed she was not the type to wash strange men’s feet.
But Rashid had said the visa was ready. He had emphasised that that was
it
; he even had an exit visa. She rolled off the socks, dark socks that smelt of Rashid’s room, a familiar smell of unkempt man, but even that was not distasteful; she liked the element of need about it. She tucked the socks into the shoes after rolling them up the way Khalil did (he was so funny about his feet, his socks, his shoes, his clothes, so particular). She wanted something more to do, something caring and nurturing for this wounded fighter. She would place them away from him, by the table next to his jacket. But the green jacket was not on the chair where they had left it. It was not in the kitchen either, or hanging up by the front entrance.
Iman checked Rashid’s room. Pulled the sheets off the bed. She had known it. She had sensed it. He was gone.
She stood by the front door and checked the locks, the upper and the lower bolt had been pulled across but the door had also been locked from outside with a key. She rubbed her forehead with two fingers hard.
She was missing something, something so obvious.
The passport, the jacket. The passport, the jacket.
Rashid’s passport, Ziyyad’s jacket.
Iman swallowed twice, breathed a couple of times, quick, quick, found herself walking in a small circle, but still she could not get it, her head was screwed tight. She went back to the doorway and looked for it. The gun was not there and she felt her hands, feet and stomach go cold and solid with fright.
She could not run well in her mother’s
thoub
. It was a bad choice, too long, too narrow, but she had grabbed at it and the scarf from a chair in the kitchen, pulled it on over her pyjamas and found the spare keys in a drawer (how long these things took. It was ridiculous! What if there was a fire? She would tell her mother). And then out into the darkness, just the moonlight caught in the ridges of the mud, picking up the old white of the tents, the painted walls of destroyed homes and she could hear him now, almost like he was shouting it, but at the time it had been a mumble and they had just ignored it, because it was Rashid after all (which was probably it, really, the reason, if you thought about it), Rashid standing by the door saying, ‘The son you never had,’ in that self-pitying way he would sometimes adopt. Stupid.
You would not. You could not.
She found herself cajoling him, teasing him in her head, the sound of the words falling with her feet against the hard sandy surface she had now reached.
You would not! You could not! You would . . .
But that was probably a big part of it. Of why he would. She could not say that. She had to say something else when she stopped him (because of course she would stop him). She would say, ‘It’s enough that you tried,’ or, ‘You were ready to do it. That’s enough.’ The last one was better and she could say, ‘He can look after himself,’ but that didn’t convince even her and she found that she had to stop, because her breathing was too heavy, her head was full of blood and she didn’t know what she wanted (
who
she wanted?) any more and a sick, hateful part of her wanted it done with, so that it was no longer her responsibility to act.
Go on, kill yourself, you fool
. I don’t care. Her face was wet, wet, wet. Enough. She had had enough.
She started running again, but in a way it was more like a running fall, stumbling over the earth somehow, anyhow, and she was still running when she heard the car start on the main road and the thing explode like a meteor hitting the earth, flames leaping up to lick at the sky behind the buildings just there, right there in front of her.
Although the course of his family’s life had largely been determined by them and despite the fact that he had seen more of them and listened to more of them than most people would ever care to, Rashid had never actually
used
a gun. He released the safety catch of the one he now had (he knew that much from television), and put the leather strap across the back of his neck, since the sound behind him (
click! click!
there it was again), or possibly above him, had started. His finger was in place, and surely the rest, he thought, was obvious, just a question of applying pressure.
A plane passed and then the street was completely silent again: no televisions, no babies, and no clicking sounds. And with the silence came the smells of rotting rubbish and cooked rice.
‘Hey! Ayyoubi!’ the voice had called out from the shadows at the side of the wall. ‘Hey!’
Whoever it was shouting was not more than two steps behind him. The voice was croaky but young. Rashid was further from the street lamp now, at least half his face would be in the shadows. He stopped and turned slightly. The boy stepped out into the centre of the road, the lamplight coming in behind him. He was wearing Sabri’s shoes on his sockless feet. A phone hung around his neck like a security tag.
Rashid could (and he was still holding himself back against the wall where it was darker) make a run for the car. He could shoot the boy, as he didn’t appear to be armed, but the boy was unlikely to be alone. But if he could shoot one, then another surely could not be so hard. He had not anticipated anyone; he had imagined that his choice, and not the execution of it, would be the hardest bit. But the boy was someone who could screw it all up. He could not do it; he could not shoot this boy while he was able to see Sabri’s unlaced brogues on those sockless feet. Rashid closed his eyes and moved the gun in front of him, but the boy must have just stepped away from the line of fire, towards him because his voice was now very close, next to Rashid’s face.
‘Hey. I thought there was something odd. I didn’t think you were walking like a man who had been shot,’ the boy said pleased at his own deduction. ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing in Ayyoubi’s clothes, with his gun? Where’s Ayyoubi?’
Rashid lowered the gun. Hopeless, even in this, he had failed.
‘You could get yourself killed, walking around like that.’
‘That was the point,’ Rashid said. ‘That was the point.’
The boy laughed and started cleaning at his teeth with a fingernail. ‘Easier ways to kill yourself; you don’t have to dress up in someone else’s clothes to do it.’ The kid chewed at the side of his mouth, trying to evaluate the extent of Rashid’s deception.
‘The point was to let him live,’ Rashid said, ‘as me.’
The boy laughed again.
Ha!
a cruel stupid laugh. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘It’s important that he lives. No one should be trying to get rid of him, particularly not one of us.’
‘They say he’s a traitor.’ The boy hawked out a large bolus of saliva from the back of his throat and propelled it out against the wall with his tongue. ‘Where is he, anyway?’
‘He’s not a traitor.’ Rashid was not sure how much the boy would understand, for however bright and darty the kid’s eyes were, he and the boy came from very different worlds on the same tiny piece of land. ‘Ayyoubi is a hero. He’s a leader, see? The only reason the others want him gone is because he made them look bad. He was trying to stop some of the others from stealing the people’s money for themselves.’
The boy was looking at Rashid curiously, his finger itching at the entrance of one nostril, one leg lifted up to scratch the other leg. Rashid stepped back a little. Probably the boy had fleas.
‘What’s it to you?’ Rashid continued. He felt a great urgency in the execution of his plan. He had to do this, end like this. It would cancel out everything else. A boy, the carrot boy, could not thwart it. He would not let him. ‘Listen, I die. They think Ayyoubi dies. Ayyoubi lives as me, goes away, comes back and saves Palestine. What’s it to you? You can pretend you never saw me. You can say, “Hey, yes. It was Ayyoubi. I saw him. He’s dead. Job done.” Ask them to give you a promotion or payment or whatever it is that you need from them. See? It’s easy.’ But if he could not trust this boy, there was little point in him going ahead.
The boy continued to watch Rashid who put his hand into his back pocket making the boy pull out his gun and aim it at Rashid’s body.
‘What are you doing?’ The boy had something cruel in him now. Rashid acted as though he had not seen either the look or the gun.
‘Calm down, calm down,’ Rashid said, bringing his hands in front of him. ‘You know, it’s good I saw you because I’ve got something for you. I was hoping to see you, but then this came up, so it was not going to be possible. Here.’
He handed over the dry-cleaning slip to the boy, who turned it over suspiciously.
‘What’s that?’
‘The ticket to a suit of great beauty,’ Rashid replied. ‘It’s being cleaned at Abu Faris’ and will be ready tomorrow. You take it. You pick it up. It goes with the shoes.’
‘Suit? What kind of suit?’ The boy looked at the ticket under the light. It had a stamped number on it, a perforated edge and nothing else.
‘How can I explain? It’s in the style of what I would call “American Gangster”,’ Rashid said, catching himself thinking how much he would have enjoyed telling Khalil about this scene. Khalil would have loved the whole set-up, loved it so much that Rashid was no longer certain that he wanted to do anything that robbed him of the chance of telling Khalil about the way things had gone.
‘American gangster?’ the boy smiled. It was a great term, and Rashid hung the gun over his head so that he could use his hands.
‘Ah, American gangster. You don’t know this style? Well, the shoulders are
hayk,
like this, broad, at the shoulders with white lines on the fabric coming down and the lining is red silk.’ Rashid rubbed his fingers together. ‘So soft,’ and then he added, ‘it was made in Paris, by a very high-class tailor.’
‘Paris?’ the boy smiled lopsidedly like they were sharing a dirty joke.
‘Paris.’ Rashid nodded. ‘You know, it’s very lucky that I met you like this, because I thought it was really your thing.’
Rashid worried that he had gone too far, that he had pushed his luck with this boy, whose eyes were now glazing over while staring hard at Rashid.
‘Understand something?’ the boy asked. ‘You want to understand something? Well, I tell you that this show, this part of it: this is
my
show,
fahem keef?
You see how it is?’ He lifted the phone up by the chain that it was attached to around his neck. ‘I’ve got the number in here to do the car, see? So it’s my show. But this time, just as, you know, the usual strategy requires, there’s someone else too. He’s just the lookout, but you should know that he’s there.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘OK, well, we’re here, you go straight down here and you hit the playground in front of you, yes? OK, now what you do is . . . the car is to your right when you turn into the main street. It’s blue, third car along. Opposite where the car is parked down that small side street next to the playground is the lookout. Now . . .’ The boy licked the end of his index finger repeatedly with his tongue, then looked again at Rashid as he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together as if he was about to start counting money. ‘
Fa
, this Ayyoubi,
batal aanjad
?’ he asked. ‘He’s a hero, really?’
‘
Batal aanjad.
He’s really a hero,’ Rashid confirmed. ‘
Aanjad
, really,’ Rashid said seriously.
‘Well, if you’re prepared to die for him,’ the boy smirked and puffed himself out a bit, ‘
Ya zalame,
I’d die for no one. Never,’ he said proudly. ‘Except Palestine, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Rashid replied. ‘I understand.’