Authors: Selma Dabbagh
Rashid popped at the lids of the pickle jars with a wooden spoon.
Pickles. London. Pickles.
A sense of the previous night came over him. Part fear, part thrill. The leap under the helicopters, Gloria’s stars under his skin. He stopped. A small pink-rimmed mirror hanging on a hook over a dishcloth shot a look back at him, one that said he must’ve been truly stoned, no not just
truly
stoned but
royally
stoned; his eyes were amassed with stringy red veins. Rashid picked a pair of mirrored sunglasses from the top of the microwave and put them on.
‘The belligerent aerial attack, their military sources claimed, was in direct response to the bombing of a park yesterday afternoon for which the Islamic Justice Party has claimed responsibility . . .’
It was the local station who had chosen not to name the bomber.
‘Did you hear she’s a Hajjar?’ his mother asked. ‘Foolish girl gave those bastards the excuse to bomb the hospital.’
‘I saw them do it.’ Rashid moved so that she could get to the sink and lifted his sunglasses on to his head. They were scratched and covered with fingerprints and kitchen grease. His mother pulled her sleeves up from the elbow and banged again at the base of the pan with a wooden spoon. Steam hissed out from under a wodge of brain-like meat.
‘They cut the power for over five hours this morning. Everything’s partly defrosted; blood dripping out of the freezer when I opened it. All I can do is cook the lot, put it back and hope they leave the power alone. At least fifteen kilos I have still to do.’ Arrayed on the floor on a waterproof sheet, shoulders of lamb and cubes of beef lay bagged up and oozy in see-through plastic bags.
She turned in his direction, as though there was something she remembered. Rashid pulled the sunglasses down. The sight of him appeared to confuse her. It was as though he were somehow misplaced, a lost man in her kitchen. His mother could do that. She could choose not to see things. She could choose, for example, not to see that Sabri was in a wheelchair with sores across his buttocks that she had to treat every night, a catheter bag that she had to empty several times a day, a body that she helped lift in and out of bed. Instead, she spoke as though he was still her strapping son, her noble warrior. Once Rashid had heard her say, ‘Sabri could still have children, you know,’ in a tone that challenged the world to contradict her.
And their father leaving? That, of course, hadn’t happened either.
He would ask her about the split. He would sit her down, here in the kitchen and ask her why their father had suddenly shot out of the marriage like that, propelled himself out of it so rapidly, like a cockerel from a canon, only to find himself in the Gulf preening down his feathers and resuming a perfectly cordial relationship with them once he had landed, financial commitments intact, civility impeccable, marriage ruined.
He wouldn’t ask her today though. Another day would be better for that. She was dealing with all that meat for a start.
Maybe it was not the time to tell her his news either, not with the bombing, the power cut and everything. His eyes focussed on her marked-up newspapers, piled up on top of a battalion of water bottles that spread out across the kitchen floor. She had done today’s paper already. Blue pen circled items on British arms exports to Saudi, bread riots in Cairo and the death of a Marxist leader in Colombia. On the last evening of the month she would date the side of each article, cut them out and place them all into a large brown envelope. ‘I can get you any article you want, whenever you want it. You can even find them by subject matter,’ Rashid had tried to explain the Internet to her once, showing her a basic search function, but she had been distracted by Gloria’s presence behind the screen. ‘And when they cut our electricity, what will you do then?’ was all that she had asked.
He could hear his mother saying something about his father from under the sink. She was moving detergent bottles and glass jars around so he was not sure exactly what it was.
‘Is it his health?’ Rashid asked.
‘Health? Maybe. Who knows? But the last time he called he started to say that maybe you and Iman should leave. He even suggested that you visit him.’
‘Seriously?’ Rashid made small crescents in the line of blackened putty around the sink with his fingernail.
‘He’ll probably change his mind tomorrow,’ she said to the cabinet. ‘Ah, here it is.’ There was a clattering of glass as she sat back on to her knees, breathless.
‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he said, but her response was not clear; she had gone back into the cabinet. It sounded like, ‘Probably drunk.’
‘What?’
‘Your father, he was probably drunk. Men, they get old. They get drunk. They get sentimental. They wonder what they’ve done to their lives, to their families.’
She handed a glass jar to Rashid and pulled herself up holding the sink edge with one hand, a yellow cloth in the other. The idea of a tipsy, maudlin father phoning late at night appealed to Rashid. Maybe he had misunderstood the man.
‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he repeated.
‘Sabri helped you with the application, did he?’ She looked up at him now. Rashid knew she had heard him the first time.
‘He just checked it.’
‘You should never cheat anyone or anything.’
‘I didn’t
cheat
anyone; he just gave me some advice.’
‘You will get into such a mess if you start cheating and having things to hide,’ she said. ‘Such a mess.’
‘I never cheated; he just checked through it and made some points. We talked about it.’
She stared at him, motionless. The cotton neckline of her
thoub
was frayed to a soft fluff. Some of the embroidered cross-stitch had come loose. It had been her mother’s dress, the only thing of hers that she had, and she wore it out like a rag. She must be seeing herself in the blue curve of his lenses. Her face would be as distended as one of her aubergines, her pinched nose ballooning into something broad and squat, her eyes receding back into an endless forehead, her teeth bucked out, her mouth large.
‘Stupid, that Hajjar girl. The harm she’s done. Gone against her family’s loyalties, playing into this factional outlook that is going to get us into so much trouble we won’t know what’s happened, and backing such a misguided mission. A park. To go and bomb a park? What’s the point of that, I ask you? The sympathy our enemy will get for that one. Military targets only. We must stick to military targets. The only person she killed was herself.’ Rashid’s mother spat something nasty into the sink. ‘Idiot.’
‘She’s dead, Mama.’ Rashid watched Sabri’s tray being prepared, the olive oil and
zaatar
laid out, fresh mint stirred into the tea, sugar added.
‘Deserves to be dead. The twit. Look what they did last night, supposedly in
return
for that. The hospital! Bastards.’ She looked up and flinched at the sight of Rashid without his glasses. ‘I should give your brother his breakfast.’ She gave Rashid a small squeeze to his upper arm before she picked up Sabri’s tray and left the kitchen.
Sabri’s body was good at ghosts. It conjured up body parts that weren’t there and made them itch. For example, his right ankle was prone to bites. These were normally, he surmised, two-day-old mosquito bites; there was still the pressure of the fresh bite but the skin had broken leaving a scab. There was often also a recurring itch behind his left knee, where phantom sweat had dribbled down and caught itself in a crease, forming a little mat of hair on the way down. The big toenail on that foot often felt ingrown. But that morning it had been a ghost of her body part that had come to him. It was her nose breathing out the prelude to a whisper in his ear, and when he woke up he stretched out his arm as he used to, to feel for her waist under the twisted wrap of nightdress but she had not been there and his knuckle had hit the wall instead.
During the night he had kept a record of the attack. He kept his notepad, binoculars and two sharpened pencils on the end of a shelf by the window in preparation for his eyewitness accounts. He timed strikes using a digital watch that he set against the
bip, bip, bips
of the BBC World Service. Last night was three pages of notes. The night before that had just been one.
Documenting destruction.
Chronicling chaos.
Point by strike by shot.
That was what he did and he liked to think he did it well.
His room had shelves all along the floor that went up higher than Sabri could reach. Each shelf was partly supported by the books underneath it. Many of the books lay horizontally, some diagonally. The sight of his books calmed him whenever he entered the room; they appeared to talk to each other like old men resting against cushions smoking
argeela
.
A photograph of Sabri’s wife, Lana, and their son, Naji, leant back on its curled edge against the books; there was something nonchalant about its attitude as though it had been taken only the day before and that there were many more to come. Frequently it slipped on to the pile of loose papers and medical prescriptions that were washed up together into a heap by the slow movements of the room.
Sabri also had a signed photograph of their former leader. This had been ceremoniously gifted to him by a delegation that came to the hospital after he had lost his legs. He handled this picture with a greater sense of purpose; from time to time, he would drop it on to the floor and roll his wheels over it. As a result of this special treatment, the face of the Great Leader of the Resistance had lost patches of its gloss and gained the appearance of someone who had opened a letter bomb.
Sabri was tired. That was the problem. He had been up until the bombs had stopped, which was not until around dawn, and he could not stay in bed any more after that dream, or whatever it was. He needed a bit more sleep. That was all. Fatigue sat fat and greasy on his eyelids. A bad night. Too bright a morning.
He could smell her that morning too. He was sure of it. Not always, but it had happened once when he lifted his head up from the page. He had just managed to capture it when Rashid had walked in. And then it had gone. He had tried to save that smell of her before. It was unique: a French perfume which came in a white bottle with pastel roses painted on it, a touch of coffee and cigarettes and her own sweat. He had found that smell on the neck of a shirt after she had gone. It was the shirt she had worn for that first evening together in a Jerusalem café and he had wrapped it up tightly in a plastic bag to save it. He kept the bagged-up shirt in his cupboard.
He had broken the back of his work. He was sure of it.
Sabri wrote longhand, listing points for additional research on two strips of paper; these were usually in a mixture of Arabic and English, in pencil. One was for book research, the other for Internet research. A tidier ruled card system denoted those areas that awaited archival research, mainly in London’s Public Records Office. He had written out the text longhand before typing it up, and now he was now doing rewrites. Not owning a printer, Iman had taken his work on a memory stick, a tiny thing no bigger than a finger, to an Internet café and printed it out for him in full.
His manuscript (the word still secretly thrilled him) had come back smelling of cigarettes and cockroach spray. It now sat on his table, bound up in treasury tags, fluttering with yellow reminder notes. He did not pay any particular attention to it when anyone else was in the room, but each night he squared its pages by bringing its bottom edge down against his desk. He enjoyed the satisfying
clunk
that it made against the wood, and the look of the strips of light and dark of the pages clustered together as seen from the side.
After he went to the bathroom with his mother to change his bag she came into his room and sat across the desk from him, smoking and sipping at her tea. They did not talk about the bombing, Rashid’s scholarship or Abu Omar’s car, and disregarded the silence that yawned and stretched around them.
‘Where’s Iman?’ Sabri asked at one point.
‘Committee meeting.’
‘Until now? It’s past nine.’
‘They got the hospital, not the university.’ She moved about the room, picking up the wet tissue that had landed next to the bin, wiping the top of the radio with the sleeve of her
thoub
. Sabri moved his papers away and brought out some clean writing paper. The door to Rashid’s room opened and let out some music, that black female singer whose voice swept around aimlessly like a strip of lace on the end of a stick. The door to the bathroom opened and the pneumatic thump
of the water heater banged against the wall. Sabri sharpened a pencil and his mother placed the glass cups back on the tray and stacked up the saucers. The bathroom door opened and closed again, then the door to Rashid’s room did the same. Rashid turned his music off before he left his room so that his steps down the hallway and the slam of the front door behind him were clear. They were alone now. It was time to go back to what had once been.
‘The Doctor,’ Sabri’s mother started, referring to her old leader, ‘he was very upset by what they were saying.’
‘This is 1971?’
‘Nineteen seventy-two, June.’