Authors: Selma Dabbagh
That had been Lisa’s second visit to Gaza, only a couple of months previously, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. The first time she had come, when he met her, she had walked into the Centre wearing a crisp shirt and combat trousers and he had been overwhelmed. He had thought, possibly panic-struck, during her first visit to the Centre, that her interest was in Khalil, not him. He tried to put that down to Khalil’s greater involvement in the Centre and when he had questioned her later (in between kisses when he had snuck her back to his roof), she had reassured him that that was all there was to it.
Lisa!
A water pipe next to the road had been hit and there was water everywhere in the streets, a brown rush of it slopping around the potholes. The roads were narrow and the mass of people were so close together that they seemed to follow each other using their sense of smell, not sight. And then everyone stopped completely and the crowd became jammed up and stuck between the walls. The blockage was being caused by an old man and a donkey. The donkey had ground to a halt in a puddle in the centre of the road and the traffic, headed up by an old Nasser car, was wedged behind it. Someone was ramming at Rashid’s ankles with a suitcase. ‘Watch it!’ Rashid called out, but the suitcase’s owner was on a mission to get away and seemed determined to ignore the humiliation that was involved in getting there.
The crowd took their frustration out on the donkey’s owner (‘Which one of you is the donkey? Take it around the edge, you fool. It thinks it’s going to drown,’ someone was shouting) but it did not help. They were still blocked in the road when a bullet-proofed Mercedes drove up. The crowd changed with the arrival of the car. They started spitting at the sight of their leaders.
Look at them! Negotiated us away in exchange for that car, did you? So you can move it up and down the one kilometre of Gaza you liberated, did you? Bravo!
Bravo.
They turned on the anonymous figures behind the car’s tinted windows and the donkey’s owner became their brother. They gave him the reverence of a pilgrim (
Ya hajji! Ya hajji!)
and were working with him in trying to coax the donkey across the puddle when a scrap of a boy sprang from the crowd holding a carrot, which the animal went for, almost bolting straight out of the puddle.
The crowd held up the Mercedes for as long they could, trapping it behind them as they walked slowly, slapping at each other’s backs before they allowed the car to push forward, leaving them with just the vision of its large, shiny bottom bouncing over the potholes ahead of them.
As the crowd thinned out, the people appeared from within it, the craned neck of the suitcase owner pushed into an opening, his arm pulling at the case behind him as though dragging an errant child. It was a flat suitcase with buckles hanging off its straps. Rashid recognised the back of a head in front of him, the dyed hair and pocked dome of Abu Omar. His neighbour was not in his usual tracksuit bottoms and vest but dressed in an ironed short-sleeved shirt and trousers with creases running up from the elbows and down from the knees. And it was into the backs of those knees that the suitcase collided, sending Abu Omar reeling forwards to the edge of a puddle, his hands catching at a wheelbarrow on his way down. Rashid, whose emails had enhanced his sense of goodwill to the rest of humanity, moved ahead to help. Abu Omar’s hand had fallen on to a torn bag of cement in the wheelbarrow and a cloud had lifted up around him. His face was covered in a cloying film. He brushed down the dust covering him, and smoothed back his hair with two palms.
‘Are you all right now,
Ammo
?’ Rashid wanted to convey his empathy with the man’s land squabbles with his mother, addressing him respectfully. He tried to do this with a look, but on seeing Rashid’s face, his neighbour tore away from him and pushed through the crowd.
The woman, Raed and Taghreed’s aunt, had brought Iman to a house with two small rooms where the bodies were. The sun had moved up from the smoky horizon and pitched itself high in the sky by then, and the walk had been hot, the rooms they entered even hotter. They had gone through alleyways and areas where Iman had never been before, where camp and town became indecipherable from one another, where alleys became streets, streets became alleys. There were no other women like Iman walking bareheaded in the area where the house was.
There were two bodies in the house: Taghreed’s and her cousin Raed’s. The corpses were lined up next to each other in cotton sheets. Taghreed’s sheet had been wrapped double and formed a bulbous shape around her. But on Raed, the sheet was not enough, his feet protruded at its end, as though he had hastily decided upon a siesta and not a death.
‘She was visiting her cousin when they struck the hospital,’ Raed’s aunt had told Iman on the way to the house. ‘Her mother said that Taghreed would want you to be here. She said she loved you more than her own mother.’ She paused. ‘Raed also spoke of you. He used to ask Taghreed about you,’ she made it sound like a secret, ‘in a special way, I felt, and it is for that that I came to find you.’
The room was overburdened with a sense of duty and disbelief. Iman cleared her throat against the antiseptic air. Outside the sun was bright, but distant and the sounds of children teasing and fighting each other along the alleyway made their way into the room as though transmitted down a pipe.
Taghreed’s school bag had been left in the hallway. On the outside zip pocket a pink and blonde princess smiled two white bands of teeth into the room. Iman saw the bag bobbing through the schoolyard on Taghreed’s back, under plaits that jumped.
Taghreed’s mother was wading around in her grief trying to find her bearings with social niceties.
The bodies were burnt mostly; we had to hide those bits.
Last week I tried to tuck her shirt in for school but she was screaming and moving and the nail on my little finger caught her skin and scratched her back . . .
Would you like coffee?
God let them rest in peace.
The faces are not so bad.
May their lives live on in yours.
All day I felt that skin being scratched under my fingernail . . .
I knew, as soon as I heard the strike I knew it had taken them.
Your mother is well?
The room swelled out with women and Taghreed’s bag in the corridor, and Raed’s feet under the sheet, were lost from sight for a while and Iman found it a little easier to converse.
Something just under my navel went very tight, like a baby turning when it is too big and a sick, sharp feeling and I knew with the blast, I knew.
I keep thinking she will come in now, shouting, showing me one of the pictures she drew. Always drawing, Miss Iman, especially for you.
Your brothers are well?
We thought they might not find the bodies but they did. It was so hot, so much smoke . . .
Iman had never seen Raed’s feet before, only felt them close to her. Now the foot that had pressed against hers was bare and hanging like a clodden thing off the side of the table. She had thought of him as
a body
and done so with an ache that was so alive that it was embarrassing to remember in this setting, in any setting. She could not bring herself to look at his feet.
She turned in the other direction and found herself focussing on the hem of a woman’s skirt that had come unstitched. It is harder to cry with your mouth open. Somewhere in her inner ear she heard that laugh that came up out of him, so rich and fat that everyone around would turn to smile at it. It could lift the whole room.
She had even talked to him about poetry and he recited some back to her.
Ya mualima
, he called her. Oh teacher.
The loss went to her chest and her ribs felt yawned apart by it. The dark bodies of the women moved in and out of the room. Iman became focussed on where she was now, on the precise nature of the attack, on the details of the burns on the bodies, and the sense of loss made way for something greater, more directed, that forced her to breathe more and faster.
Manar was waiting for Iman in the alley outside the house. Iman felt no surprise. It was right that she should be there. Manar looked exactly as she always did, just a little prouder this time. She had been expecting Iman to be there and greeted her as though she was escorting her to a groom. Her hands reached forwards to take Iman’s.
“You know your role now Iman, don’t you?” Manar asked.
‘Yes,’ said Iman. ‘Yes.’ Because it had to stop. Immediately. It had to end.
‘You will know him. The contact. He knows you already.’
Manar left by way of a small alley between the houses, leaving Iman who did not know where she was. The road Iman was left on was sloped, sandy and populated only by children. She walked towards something pale and fluttering on the ground ahead of her. It was the head of a pink carnation. The road was scattered with them: heads, stems and small clusters of flowers in the colours of toilet paper.
There was a farmer with some boys and the farmer had bunches of flowers in his hand, a gathering of people around him and he was shouting. About the closure. About the flowers rotting. About the flowers being a high security risk. About it being an end to him. He would feed the flowers to his cows. He would shoot them (the crowd like this). No, he would give them to the women. Then the boys were running around with the flowers and Iman found herself cradling a wet bouquet in her arm as though it was a baby. She could see all this, but distantly as though it was all going on on the other side of a thick wall of dirty Perspex of the type that their guards sat behind and she stood in the street motionless waiting for nothing more than for the wall to lift.
Sindibad’s appeared packed, although once inside Rashid could see that it was only one table that was occupied. A long banqueting set-up had been assembled through the café’s centre. At it a group of fighters, half in half out of fatigues, hunched over plastic bowls spread across a newspaper surface.
The two armed men, the thin one and the fat one, who had been in the garage across from Rashid’s house that morning, sat at the heads of the table. The fat man had a thick Stalin moustache and welted skin whereas the other man in green fatigues was gaunt and bony. He sat completely still and struck Rashid as having a sympathetic air about him.
The café took on silence on hastily when Rashid came in, like a child putting on a makeshift disguise. The men stopped wiping bread on the edges of plates, made it pause on the way to mouths, or held it mid-mastication. Rashid, awkward at the shut-down his arrival seemed to have caused, found a table and stared up at the TV. It was prayer time and the screen displayed a low-angle shot of a crenulated mosque with clouds behind it. He watched the streaming clouds and the static mosque with feigned curiosity until the fighters accepted he was going to do nothing else and turned back to their food.
Khalil was not there yet. The metal shutters were only pulled up halfway and Rashid had had to stoop as he came in. The café was dark. The strip lighting plasticised the food under the counter and a small fly kept settling on Rashid’s face. Sindibad’s was poised to destroy his good mood; he could feel it. He hoped that if it had been Khalil’s father in the Mercedes he would not have recognised him, or heard him shouting with the rest of them against the Leadership. But then again, who cared? Khalil’s father didn’t speak to Rashid’s father any more and no one spoke to Khalil’s father, not even Khalil unless he absolutely had to. What could the repercussions be? He was leaving anyway. Could Khalil’s father stop him from getting an exit permit somehow? Could he? Would he? It was far-fetched, paranoid. He was smoking too much.
Lisa. London.
Rashid sang to himself, trying to imagine Lisa in Sindibad’s, but the image was confused. He saw her legs first, the way they protruded from her light floral skirts. Her knees were square like her face. He would have to cover her up completely to get her into Sindibad’s, if he could get her in at all. He had explained that to her a million times; there were no women in Sindibad’s. None. Rashid tried to put an imaginary
abaya
on her imagined body, but all he kept seeing were her bare knees and the curved shadowy triangle between them.
The fighters filled the place with a smell of exertion like a changing room and the clanking of their guns gave the café a spiky, industrial feel. Rashid realised that he’d got the group’s pecking order wrong when he had assumed that the fat one with the moustache was in charge. Now, upon examination, he realised that it was not the fat one but the thin one in the green jacket who was their leader. With just a look, the gentle closing of his eyelids, he could get the whole table to fall silent. This realisation was followed by a glow of an unfamiliar sensation in Rashid, something positive, strong but yet so intangible in its nature that he found himself clutching his fists together, as though that gesture would help him to grasp the feeling, to name it. It didn’t.
Rashid got up and went to stand at the entrance to the café. It was midday and bright now but the outside world viewed from the doorway of Sindibad’s seemed like a parade of the walking wounded: stooped moving figures of adults run through with flurries of schoolchildren. At the corner of the road, the carrot boy was peddling mobile phone chips, and next to the boy a woman in jeans with a bare head stood staring down the road in the opposite direction with several bouquets of flowers in her arms. Her hair was vast and magnificent, but she had to be deranged to be walking around with it on display like that. Some passers-by stopped to look at her. A man approached her, but then carried on when he realised that he had achieved nothing from trying to talk to her. Rashid wondered if her face looked as good as her hair. He didn’t have to wait long. The woman soon turned towards him and Rashid found himself staring at the face of his sister.