Authors: Selma Dabbagh
‘OK,’ said the boy, rolling his tongue around the front of his mouth between the gums and the lips as he thought, nodding his head in a way that seemed to indicate some kind of delinquent purpose. ‘
Shuuf.
See here, here’s what you’ve got to do,’ and he told Rashid what it was that Rashid had to do.
‘I can trust you,
ya zalame
?’ Rashid asked.
‘With your life, brother,’ the boy said, bending the dry-cleaner’s ticket in half and putting it in his back pocket, ‘with your life.’
And with that Rashid had agreed to do what it was that the boy had said he had to do.
It was just around the corner, but it must have been that Iman had not moved for a while from where she stood. She had been frozen somewhere in time and place on a badly lit street on a strip of land in the far corner of the Mediterranean where people fought over something which she could not remember. ‘We’re two sides of a walnut,’ Rashid had said to her. When was that? When she had cried at school in Switzerland frustrated by another move, another loss of friends, another departure of her parents to greater things? Was it in an airport somewhere? On a border? ‘We’ll never be apart. I’ll always be with you.’
The people were coming out of everywhere with the explosion, out of dark houses with torches and candles. There was a cameraman jogging past her with a furry pink boom microphone and a flak jacket and she was being pushed along too with the crowd around the corner to where the flames fed off tangled cars, fuel and the lives of idealistic people. She found herself in the crowd where she was one of the women, one of many dressed like her in
thoubs
and scarves, screaming and crying for the loss of her brother, her brother.
‘Ayyoubi!’ the scream goes up. ‘They killed Ayyoubi!’
‘A dead fighter!’ someone is crying as the stretcher is carried above her, past her head, but it is not Rashid; she can see the legs, the size of the body, the feet are not his, the shoes are not his.
‘From the Authority!’ they cry. ‘A fighter from the Authority!’
‘They wired his car! Ayyoubi was the target!’
‘Death to the Islamists!’ a cry went up from a boy. ‘Up with the Mainstream party of the Authority!’
‘I can’t stand it any more!’ a woman next to Iman wailed, beating her chest. ‘I just can’t take it any more, not if we are killing ourselves. No! I can’t take it! Not after all we’ve been through.’
‘What an explosion! The force of it! No trace of him left from the car! Must’ve been right under him!’
‘Just some of his jacket here. See, the green. I would always recognise that jacket.’
‘Rashid.’ Everything was pouring from her nose, her eyes; it was messy, red and stinging all around her face and each time she wiped it away with the arm of the
thoub
it was back until she could not see. ‘Rashid,’ she was wailing now and there was someone behind her, a figure, the bulk of Umm Nidal from the Women’s Committee, holding her up.
‘You can’t find your brother,
habibti
? He probably followed the body, with the other men. Go that way. There, go,’ and with that Iman was guided to go back the way she came, with a big warm hand on her back. Not knowing what else there was for her to do or who it was she was to grieve for, Iman joined the crowd mourning the death of the unknown fighter.
If the boy’s plan had involved taking care of the lookout, then it could have been said to have gone according to plan.
The main street had been even darker than the one he had left the boy in. From the moment he turned into it, he could feel the blood pumping in his ears as though he were in an upturned boat on the shore with the sea pounding at it. The moon was still fat and bright in the sky and he felt his way out into the street,
pat, pat,
only so many single steps to the car door, only so much space to cover. He concentrated hard on the practical element of it, and by trying hard to forget all else: this new brightness under his skin, the drugged-out beat of his heart. His breathing that was so heavy it was like someone there, behind him,
huuh, huuh, huuh,
like an obese old man,
huuh,
but it was him; he knew it was him. If he forgot all else and concentrated solely on the line of cars: the dents picked up in the half-light, the bent wing mirrors, the stickers on back windows, the stuffed dogs and leopard-skin fur on the back ledges. He could move forwards, as he usually did, one step before the other, the one foot picking up and coming down, and then the next.
Startled by a foe in the grasses, a cat leapt off the low wall that ran around the playground in an awkward backward twist, as though pulled by a string from its neck. Rashid looked over at it instinctively, without thinking, looked to see whether it was the ginger tabby of that afternoon and by doing so he saw, and was seen, by the fighter, the lookout.
He had expected the lookout to be younger than the boy, or at least smaller. He had not expected him to be the man with the Stalin moustache from the day of Abu Omar’s arrest. ‘You,’ said the man, who was far closer to Rashid than the boy had led him to believe. ‘You?’ and despite all that Rashid had not expected, he had at least expected it more than this man had and it was this advantage of shock – a two-second, perhaps a five-second advantage – which had allowed Rashid to think, ‘But this must be how you do it,’ and to pull down the trigger, aiming the implement at the man’s gut protruding like a question mark towards him. That had been all that was needed before something jumped away from Rashid with a bloody-minded resolve and then whipped back at him with an awful thwack that made him stumble. He was thrown against the car, a side mirror cracking at his hipbone and the lookout was down.
One second, maybe two, the jacket was off and thrown into the car, the gun too. Inside with the door open, he cranked the window down, down. The beating pulse coming now from his face; it was rushed with blood; his head centred his world. The shot would have been heard. Beyond the rushing layer of sea about his head there were voices coming from the houses. Rashid closed the car door and leant in through the window. It was a question of the boy, the question of the reliability of the boy, the triggering of the device with the boy’s phone. He turned the key in the ignition to make it more real.
Now!
his body and his head screamed, running towards the corner, heading away from the car, down towards the small alley, to somewhere tight and secret.
Now!
it screamed again as he reached the turn.
Do it now, boy.
Press it!
And then the blast came like the door of heaven slamming behind him and he was lifted off his feet like a cat, thrown forwards, headlong, like an inanimate thing, on to broken paving stones, wet leaflets and fragments of glass.
The silly fucker had got him right there, in the heart, and he was done for, the lookout knew it. He had fallen on to one leg and then the other one just closed in all by itself. It was as though the raft he had been standing on had been tugged from under him away from where he was leaving life to rush up and down his body under his skin in waves like a sheep with a slit throat, rush up and down and out of him until it left him all together. It was all dark below and wet with a stickiness that he didn’t expect and it is only his son that the fighter thinks of now, not the other fighters and the meetings and the jealousy of that man Ayyoubi who had it all so easy and had never wanted for a thing in his life. He does not think of his mother or his father or the tent he had been born into, which had been so low that you could not step into it without lowering your head, or his father’s second wife who had made sure his father left them there when he had moved out of the camp. He does not think of these things, but just of his boy for whom he had wanted it all to be better, for whom no act was too small or too low for him to carry out. He thought only of the boy’s soft-skinned arm on his neck and the swoop of his trusting eyelashes, for that was what it was all for, but he thinks no longer as he is turning now under these waters, caught by a current in these new depths that let his body rock back and forth giving him only the consolation they can afford.
And how wonderful it was then to run, to feel the mechanism of his body moving how he wanted it to, finding within it a fuel and propulsion that he had not known he had. The synchronicity of mind and body amazing him as he hopped from side to side, along alleys creviced by a run of water in their centre: how he could do this while barely slowing himself down, how he could leap at the end of it all over the cut-up earth, fallen pillars and tent strings of the wasteland that was theirs, how he could feel his heart propelling him forwards with a love of chance, of risk, of the opportunities for tomorrow. And he loved it all: the light of the moon on the sea, the blinking, blackness of the water with the gunboats turned away for the night, for it was his night and their presence in it was not required. And he’s running in such long strides now – a beat, a beat and another – that he is flying high above it all, up, over, out of it all; flying all the way until he reaches the sea.
I would like to thank the following friends, relatives, writing professionals and institutions for taking the time to read my work and to provide advice, encouragement and support over the years: Ghassan Abu Sitta, Layla Al Maleh, Omar Al Qattan, Mitchell Albert, Lorraine Bacchus, Samia Bano, Shameen Bashir, Brenna Bhandar, the British Council, Gaenor Bruce, Emily Burnham, Clem Cairns, Caroline Cederwell, Cathy Costain, Steve Cragg, Amy Cramer, Claire, Dina, Hani, Hassan Salah, Nadia, Salma, Samira and Taysir Dabbagh, Wafa Darwish, Mick Delap, Khaled El Ali, Azza El Hassan, English PEN, Bernardine Evaristo, Fish Publishing, Emanuel Garboua, Haris Gazdar, Vanessa Gebbie, Carlo Gebler, Maggie Gee, Zeina B. Ghandour, Jo Glanville, Francisco Goldman, Katia Hadidian, Annie Hickson, David Holmes, International PEN, Randa Jarrar, Mike Jones, Frederic Joseph, Dina Kasrawi, Kavi Kittani, Rahat Kurd, Maha Ladki, Daniel Machover, Eloise Marshall, Lena Masri, Scott McGaraghan, Abdullah, Lulwa, Linda, Naser, Samir and Jumana Mutawi, Nadia Naqib, Tessa O’Neil, the late Harold Pinter, Christine Pohlmann, Adil Rahman, Caroline Rooney, Jacob Ross, Dana Sajdi, Tope Saraki, Stacy Stobl, Tales of the Decongested, Catherine Viala, Sue Said Wardell, The West Cork Literary Festival, Sarah Leah Whitson and Josh Zimmer.
Special thanks to the following friends and relatives who provided particularly thoughtful and detailed comments on earlier drafts of this novel: Paloma Baeza, Nadia Capy Osgood, Felicity Cunliffe-Lister, Claire Dabbagh, Nadia Dabbagh, Izzat Darwazeh, Christine Habbard, Graham Harfield, Elias Nasrallah and James Richard.
I am also greatly indebted to the enthusiasm and support that I had from Kate Jones, whose sudden death in February 2008 was a shock and a loss to so many. Many thanks also to Amanda (Binky) Urban at ICM and to Margaret Halton for their advice and encouragement.
I have a stupendous agent. Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown could not do more in terms of understanding and furthering my aspirations for both the style and subject matter of my work. Her editorial comments on
Out of It
were incisive and invaluable. This book would have been a lesser one without them. She has always believed in me and always protected my interests and for that I am extremely grateful. Many thanks, Karolina, for everything.
A very special thank you goes to Ahdaf Soueif for praising and promoting my work as well as for making the publication of this novel possible. Her support of individual Palestinian writers, as well as her work with the Palestinian Festival of Literature (PalFest), is critical for those of us who write about a crisis that many would prefer nothing more to be heard about. Her writing is also an inspiration:
In the
Eye of the Sun
changed my life in a way that few books have come close to doing.
Thanks also to Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, most notably to Andy Smart, Seif Salmawy, Jehan Marei for selecting this novel and to Kathy Rooney and Safaa Mraish for working on taking it through to publication, with special thanks to Jehan for her editorial comments.
At Bloomsbury Publishing, I would firstly like to thank the reader Wala’ Qasiah from Hebron who upon finishing
Out of It
told Alexandra Pringle, ‘But this is what it’s like.’ Thank you Wala’. That was important and meant a lot.
I am also indebted to Clare Hey for her eye for detail, detective and editorial skills in general, to Erica Jarnes for editorial work and for seeing the text through to publication, to Alexa von Hirschberg for being so enthusiastic, to Greg Heinimann for taking my idea for a cover and making it beautiful, to Jonathan Ring for being a patient photographer with a restless subject and mainly, of course, to Alexandra Pringle who did nothing less than realise a personal (but very specific) dream by backing this novel.
Thanks to the Bashir family of Somerset Avenue, Karachi, for their extraordinary hospitality when I stayed with them to work on edits in January, and to the O’Neils of Yateem Gardens, Bahrain, for letting me have use of their house for the same purpose the following month.
On a (more) personal note, special thanks to my children, Miro and Maia, for being fabulous, funny, warm and mad, to Ranjanie Nirmala Devi John, without whose unflaggingly high standards and dedication to my family much less would be possible, to Zeina B. Ghandour for giving me a notepad and telling me to just do it, and to Abdullah Mutawi, father of my children, ex-husband and friend.