Authors: Selma Dabbagh
Walking into Sindibad’s with Iman and her bare head was not easy. It was as though she had mistakenly tucked her skirt into her knickers. Her entrance was met with jubilance by the fighters, one of whom began tapping out the rhythm for a
dabka
with his fingertips on the table. They only stopped when they picked up their leader’s disdain, the flick of his index finger made them shut up completely.
The leader looked from his men to Iman, nodding at her and she seemed to almost balk at the sight of him and moved closer to her brother. Iman’s face flushed and her eyes watered as if stung.
‘How do you know him?’ Rashid asked when they sat down and the fighters had gone back to their own business again. The café owner had brought out a large napkin for Iman and was indicating that she should tie it around her head.
‘I don’t,’ Iman said. ‘I don’t know him at all.’
‘It looked like . . .’ Rashid left his observation hanging. Now wasn’t the time to second-guess Iman. If she said she didn’t know him, she didn’t know him. There was no point in pushing it. ‘What are they for?’ Rashid asked gesturing at the flowers. It was about as close to the question of
What the hell were you doing walking around like a mad woman in this part of town after being out all night?
as he could get away with.
‘Demonstration.’ Iman put the flowers on the table and cupped her hands in front of her as though not quite sure what the purpose of them was. Her palms were greenish and crinkled from holding the stems.
‘He wants you to put it on your head,’ Rashid said, nodding at the napkin that the café owner was still holding.
Loose, her hair was too big for the napkin so the owner returned with an elastic band apologising that it was a little dirty. He waited for Iman to use it and once he was able to assure her that every wisp was hidden from sight, he tapped Rashid on the shoulder:
You owe me one, brother
.
‘Here.’ Iman held out the flowers to the café owner. ‘For you.’
‘Oh no, miss. I can’t. They take so much water.’
‘Please take them.’ She pushed them towards him. ‘I can’t have them.
Please
.’
The owner looked at them suspiciously before spreading them out on the counter.
The fighters murmured and straightened up as a small eager-looking man entered. The room fell still again as he sat down on the table next to Rashid and Iman. With not a small degree of theatre, the café owner poured him a glass of water from a great height.
Rashid tried to swat a fly with the menu as it sat rubbing its forelegs together in drips of water that had come off the flowers, but it nipped up to the wall before flying to the back of Rashid’s head.
‘What were you doing in this area?’ Rashid asked.
‘Attending a wake,’ Iman replied, watching the man who had taken the table next to them. He was sinewy and bearded and was staring at his table as though an invisible chess game was being played out on it.
Iman appeared to have forgotten that Rashid was there. She was lost somewhere behind her face. The fighters’ interest in her had gone, except for their leader who had moved his chair to an angle so that he could see her more clearly. His nose was like Rashid’s; it went straight from the hairline to the tip, Greek like the Mesopotamian priests of Ur. He had the same body type as well; his long limbs hung off the back the chair.
The fighters were also watching the bearded man on the table next to them. He had spent some time flipping the menu back and forth before demanding plain tea. Did the owner understand? Just plain tea: no sugar, no mint.
‘Do you know him too?’ Rashid asked as the bearded man looked towards Iman.
‘His daughter’s in my school. He’s from the Seif El Din family.’ She was studying the man’s shoes; they were slip-ons and he was shuffling them around slowly on the linoleum tiles. ‘This woman in the Committee, Manar, is related to him – I heard he lost two brothers in three months.’ She was barely audible. The leader of the fighters was still staring at her and did not look away when she turned towards him. Iman confronted him with a glare.
Drop it,
Rashid thought.
Stop it, Iman. Enough.
‘Where were you last night?’ Rashid asked sharply. She was his sister. He could ask.
‘Women’s Committee.’
‘All night?’
‘All night.’
‘He looks religious,’ Rashid observed, looking back at their bearded neighbour, Seif El Din.
‘Who isn’t?’
‘Err, well, I’m not; those guys aren’t; you aren’t; Khalil isn’t; Mama isn’t; Baba isn’t; Sabri isn’t. Stop being like this, Iman. What’s happened to you?’ He put his hand down on the table so that he could reach across and try to connect with her but she wanted none of it. She pulled her arms away behind the table.
He wanted to tell Iman about the scholarship, to squeeze her very tight and to tell her that absolutely everything was going to be all right, not just because of the scholarship but for other reasons as well. He was sure of it.
The individual coils of smoke that had curled like strips of chiffon over the men’s heads now spread out into a beige cloud absorbing them all. One of the fighters had got hold of the remote and was flicking through the satellite channels.
Flick.
To a Lebanese dance competition.
Flick.
To a Gulf Arab in a white
dishdasha
singing in a meadow to a woman in black lace with heavily outlined lips.
Flick.
To the picture of the scene of the suicide attack by the Hajjar girl, of a ripped-up park bench, of an overturned pushchair.
Flick.
Lebanese dancers again.
Flick.
Back to the pushchair. The fighter had turned up the volume so that Rashid could no longer eavesdrop on their conversation. He was not able to catch the end of a long-winded joke told by the one with the Stalin moustache, except for the word for arse,
teez,
upon which the joke centred, and then the name Hajjar, spoken in seriousness by a fighter with a husky voice whose hand would throw itself out into a bulb in the centre of the table before it opened up in explanation.
That Hajjar girl. What she’s done.
Khalil entered the café looking like he had walked through the wrong door. He was hot and frowning, but coming in next to the metal and grime of the fighters he looked out of place, too clean-shaven, too slight. Seeing him enter Sindibad’s, Rashid saw for the first time quite how silly Khalil’s ponytail was and understood why Khalil had once been described as pretty.
‘What’s going on here? What’s with the flowers?’ Khalil asked, avoiding commenting on the more obvious anomaly of Iman being in there. The owner had arranged the carnations in jugs and placed two of them on the fighters’ table and one on Rashid’s and Seif El Din’s. Rashid started to answer but as soon as Khalil sat down Iman started to talk.
‘Your friend Raed got killed in the bombing of the hospital last night.’
‘Raed Abu Warde? The communist?’ Khalil and Rashid asked at the same time.
‘Yes. Dead. And his cousin Taghreed who was in my class. You remember her, Rashid? You called her Tagweed because she couldn’t pronounce her “r”s. The one who drew those pictures of tanks and cows? Cows eating tanks, that sort of thing. Remember?’
Rashid did remember a girl, a springy little thing presenting Iman with pictures,
‘And this one, Miss. Is this one better than the other one? Shall I do another one, Miss?’
‘Raed Abu Warde. He was seriously impressive. I always thought that one day he might . . .’ Khalil’s head fell, almost involuntarily, until his hand caught his forehead. The gesture held the café, held everyone in the room, tore them away from the TV and froze them, froze them all because by doing so he was breaking an unwritten rule, the one against spreading despair. ‘That’s such a terrible loss. I’m sorry about his cousin, Iman. Are you OK?’ Khalil tried to get Iman to look up so that he could see for himself, but she refused to do so.
‘I’m OK. What’s new? A student of mine got killed. It’s hardly the first time is it? It’s not going to be the last. Does it matter any more?’
‘Of course it matters. It has to. Otherwise they’ve won.’ Khalil spoke with more urgency now. ‘Listen, the only way to get through this is to retain humanity and compassion, not to abandon it. You know that, don’t you?’
Iman glanced up for a moment. Khalil raised his hand as though there was so much more to be said in a far grander way, but nothing else accompanied the gesture. Rashid waved the fly away from Iman’s face.
‘I don’t mean to lecture. But the family? He’s the oldest son, isn’t he? Are they OK?’ Khalil’s hands were unable to reach out to Iman in the café.
‘No. They’re not OK. I don’t know about the father, as obviously he was not there this morning. He’s probably out and about pulling his party into the funeral arrangements. You know he’s with the religious parties.’
‘Of course, he’s . . . Yes, I’d forgotten.’
‘The mother looks like someone has sucked the bones out of her. She kept giving these practical, hospitality, yes-of-course-it’s-for-the-good-of-the-nation speeches, but she is all collapsed inside. It was awful. It’s just . . .’ Her arm jerked out as if hitting something away. ‘It’s
intolerable
. It has to stop.’ She looked up and her eyes latched on to those of the man on the neighbouring table, who did not look away. No one spoke for a while.
Khalil stood up to readjust himself. His flannel shirt was buttoned up and tucked in at the front but it had come loose from the back of his trousers. There were streaks of dust down the side of one of his arms and a slight tear close to his collarbone. He removed his bag from his shoulder showing the sweat under his armpits, tucked the tail of his shirt back into his jeans and started brushing himself down. It didn’t make much difference.
‘I thought maybe this place wouldn’t be open,’ Khalil said as he sat down. ‘Most of the restaurants are closed. There are queues at the bakeries everywhere. They were waiting for an excuse to close us in again and attack and this Hajjar girl handed them one on a plate. Every border is absolutely sealed. Nothing’s going in. Nothing’s going out. Strawberries, flowers, and vegetables – everything’s rotting at the borders, north and south.’
‘You were in the south?’ Rashid asked.
‘I tried to get down there as early as possible because I knew they were going to close the roads. I wanted to see how bad things were,’ Khalil said.
‘I would have thought it would be impossible.’
‘It was almost impossible.’ Khalil brought out a map. Some of the fighters turned around to watch. ‘They closed the main road and all the arteries off it.’ Khalil traced his finger along the stretch of road. His fingernails were always perfectly trimmed, cut square across the top, but today they were blackened and, noticing them against the map, Khalil tried to clean them with a corner of paper, but it didn’t work. ‘You can’t get to any of the southern camps; they are totally isolated. You can’t even get as far as that village.’ Khalil stabbed at the map.
‘Shit.’ Rashid’s hands drummed against the table. ‘Shit.’
‘They have totally sealed us in. And they are bulldozing houses on the outskirts of the camp.’
‘Why?’ Rashid asked.
‘Who knows? They don’t indulge us with
reasons
any more.’ Khalil folded up his map. It was made out of four printed sheets of A4 taped together and he smoothed it flat along its joins. He turned back to Iman. ‘Why did the family want you there? You didn’t need to see the bodies. I don’t get it. Why did they ask you to go?’
‘I did need to see them like that. It’s important. It will help me . . . I need to know what to do. It will help me decide.’
Iman was looking up now, past Khalil at their neighbour. Khalil looked as though he had so much more that he wanted to say. He cleared some ash off the table with the side of his hand.
‘What is it?’ Khalil asked Rashid, who was looking agitated.
‘Nothing. Well, actually, this doesn’t seem like the right time but you should both know that I got it. I got an email this morning.’
‘Got what?’ Khalil asked.
‘The scholarship.’ Rashid’s hands opened up,
what else?
‘For London.’
‘Well done,’ Khalil said. ‘Congratulations.
Mubrook
.’
‘
Mubrook
,’ Iman said, looking up at Rashid. ‘Is that the proposal you were working on with Sabri?’
‘That’s what Mama said.’
‘What does that mean?’ Iman asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it. It just means I’m out of here. A couple more weeks then I’m gone for a year, at least a year. Hopefully longer if I can get to stay there for a while.’ He would ignore them. It was just the wrong time. He could still fly. He was still going. It would still work out.
‘Stay there? No chance,’ Iman said. ‘They’ll kick you straight out of there once you finish your studies. You would need a visa to stay, which no one would give someone like you or me. The only way you could stay would be to find an English wife.’ She cleared out her nose by blowing it hard, so hard that her jaw moved as she did so. No one spoke for some time.