Out of It (9 page)

‘I expect you’ll be more interested in this then.’ Rashid spread out Lisa’s message flat in front of Khalil. Khalil would not have had the chance to get to the Centre yet, but at the thought of it Rashid jerked as though someone had just kicked the seat of his chair. Rashid forced Khalil to look up by covering his hand over the message that Khalil was trying to read. ‘Is the Centre OK?’

‘I really don’t know. I presume it is, because I spoke to Jamal last night and he told me that their army had not entered the camp, that they were all on the outside, but I haven’t spoken to him since around midnight. His phone is disconnected again. I am going up there after this. I just needed to go south first before it all got closed up.’

Iman looked at Khalil. ‘It’s got more doors than a CIA safe house, your Centre. I’m sure it will be fine.’

‘Yes, it’s got to be,’ Rashid agreed.

Khalil lifted Rashid’s hand up and read Lisa’s message carefully. ‘Ouch.
“Small fry”
?’ And then he read it again. ‘I think we can get what she wants. We’ll need to mention Raed, of course. I think he had a fairly senior position with the Party, didn’t he? That’s worth mentioning.’

‘Do we have casualty figures for last night?’ Rashid asked.

‘We can get them. I sent some fieldworkers out.’ Khalil’s hands were moving again; his voice had lifted. He looked up at Rashid and paused. ‘What’s this?’ He brushed a bit of sand away from the edge of Rashid’s scalp.

‘Who? Which fieldworkers?’ Rashid was finding it difficult to stay focussed. Their neighbour, Seif El Din, seemed interested in everything that they were saying. The fighters were making no bones about staring at their table. The conversation was not going as Rashid had expected at all. Iman was in and out of it and the man on the table next to them, this supposedly religious man, could not stop checking Iman out. Neither could the fighter in green.

‘Jamal would have tried to collect those figures without even being asked,’ Khalil said.

‘Of course, Jamal,’ Rashid said. Iman and Khalil’s admiration of Jamal bugged Rashid.
What does Jamal think?
Iman would always ask following a political development and Khalil would always know, because the camp viewpoint that Jamal represented was the one that would always give them the authenticity that they needed.

Iman was smoking. She seemed to be completely unaware that she was in public. Saying something about it would make her worse. He should take her home.

‘I expect Jamal’s doing eyewitness statements around the hospital. I left one of the newer volunteers over at the camps in the south. It’s a nightmare down there. They demolished this house – well, a row of houses – but in this one house a gas canister in the kitchen had blown up. I went inside to get a bike for this kid who was standing outside screaming for it.
My bike! My bike!
on and on. Anyway, the smell?’ Khalil closed his eyes and shook his head, ‘Smoke, sulphur, sewage, rot, the lot. I can’t even describe it.’ He shuddered.

‘You don’t have to. It’s still on you,’ Rashid said.

‘There were these chickens running everywhere and once I got inside the family started shouting for blankets and fridges and I don’t know what, and I started telling them that I was not a removal man for God’s sake. It was pathetic. We are pathetic. They brought a donkey with a bucket of water to put out the fire. A
donkey
.’

‘Maybe a fire engine wouldn’t have made it in there,’ Rashid suggested.

‘Still, come on, a donkey?’ Khalil seemed beaten down and then rose up again. ‘But from our point of view, it’s good.’

‘It is?’

‘For the talk. It backs our argument about the applicability of human rights law in areas under siege. We can use it to evidence the complete sealing-off of an area. It backs up what we are trying to say about the breaches of the Conventions.’

‘Ha!’ said their bearded neighbour, and with it finally acknowledged that he had been listening to everything that they had said. ‘You think that will make a difference?’ Khalil’s eyes widened, the applicability of international human rights and humanitarian law to areas under siege was Khalil’s passion. ‘I have been listening to you two,’ Seif El Din said, ‘and it’s all well and good this work, but all you are doing is just playing their game. You create some interesting little jobs for some friendly Europeans and you ease their consciences a bit, but if you want change, if you
really
want change, this is not the way.’

Iman and Khalil were now completely alert. The whole café was. Rashid could tell that Khalil liked the ‘interesting little job creation’ angle; Rashid had heard him say similar things himself.

‘We don’t have enough of the world supporting us. Nor do we have the time,’ their neighbour continued.

Although the man’s words were addressed to Khalil, Seif El Din appeared to speak only to Iman, who had stubbed out her cigarette and now sat up as though she was about to take notes.

‘You,’ their neighbour said, deliberately poking a finger towards Khalil, ‘are taking the legal route which is, of course, virtuous. But what are we waiting for? The conversion of the Jews? The Conventions? It does you as much good to consider the laws of Hammurabi. These Conventions will turn to dust without our situation improving. Little girls and brave men will continue to die before your international laws are enforced. We’re not trying to discipline children from some private school here. And then you say “international”, but is that right? Was your grandfather’s village leader consulted, or any representative of his? No, my friend, these are the justifying laws of conflict and empire. They are the Occupier’s laws; they create them and they benefit from them, as and when it suits them.’

The man stared hard at a transfixed Iman.

‘It is essential,’ Khalil started after swallowing, moving his head slightly to emphasise each word, ‘that we believe in the Western governments’ ability to change. It is crucial that we communicate our situation. It is imperative that we document the Occupier’s abuses. It is . . .’ but Seif El Din seemed to know these arguments already.

‘If you want them to change, let me ask you this: what would alter your behaviour if you were benefiting from a situation? Feeling guilty about something? The loss of money? Or the prospect of someone you love getting hurt or killed? I would say only the last two, and those are the only things we can use to get this situation to change, to get them to stop.’

He stared at the group, bowed his head to Iman and left. He seemed to leave a vacuum in the room behind him.

Outside, the carrot boy had made a sale.

‘I’m going,’ Iman said, pulling the napkin off her head. Rashid had not thought that it would be possible, but she looked even worse now than she had when she first came in.

‘Where? Where are you going?’ Rashid asked.

‘I have to do something. I need to do something.’

Iman pushed herself out of the door as the carrot boy pushed his way in. The boy went up to the counter and ordered as much food as the fighters had had all together.

‘Where are your shoes?’ the café owner asked.

‘Are you bourgeois or something?’ the boy replied. ‘Food comes before shoes.’

The fighters liked this and repeated it. They rallied to the boy’s support until the owner capitulated. Once his mouth had been thoroughly stuffed at least a couple of times, the boy turned to the audience that had been held spellbound by his eating and spoke, his mouth still full of bread.

‘They’re using that gas again.’

‘What gas?’ asked the fighter with the Stalin moustache.

‘That gas, the one without a name or an antidote but with a nice sweet minty smell, the gas that makes you do this.’ The boy started kicking his legs and throwing his forearms about in convulsions. His head lolled to one side, the bread fell from his mouth. He replaced it and went back to eating.

‘Where?’ Khalil was ready to burst now. ‘How do you know? When? Where? How much?’

‘Last night, on the edges of the Shore Camp. They say some canisters were also dropped by the Sultan’s Well. And I know these things. I get around.’

He had hummus smeared around his mouth now. Rashid’s fly had adopted the boy and buzzed twice around his bread before the boy reached out and squashed it between the fingertips and the palm of his left hand. He continued to eat with his right hand.

‘Gas. Do you believe that?’ Khalil asked.

Rashid shrugged. ‘They’ve done it before.’

‘That’s all we need. That and some zealot making me feel like a neurotic housewife who only focusses on the things she can control: she can’t stop her husband screwing around so she puts her energies into keeping the lid tight on the toothpaste tube. It’s that kind of behaviour. So what kinds of bullets were used? How many metres of barbed wire? What kind of gas? What the hell? Is he right? Is there no goddamn point in any of this anymore? Maybe the donkey with half a bucket of water is of greater use.’ Khalil could feel the weight of his fall on Rashid and checked himself, straightening up. ‘We should go and check on the Centre.’

‘Sure. Sure. But it sounds like we’ll need to take the beach route if all the roads are closed.’

‘Not closed,’ said the boy relishing his expertise, ‘dug up. Dug the whole lot up. Bulldozers all over the place. Back to the beach.’ He started singing a song to the sea, spitting grainy particles of green
zaatar
across the room.

The owner presented Rashid with the bill that included the cost of their neighbour’s tea. ‘No way. He was not with us!’ Rashid protested.

‘But he’s a religious man.’

‘That doesn’t mean I have to pay for his tea now, does it?’ Rashid tried to argue. He didn’t mind paying, but he didn’t want to be seen to be paying, people might think all types of things, ‘Look, I’ll pay for him but I’ll pay for the boy too, OK? No special favours or anything, all right?’

‘
Bon abeteeh
,’ the boy said, one of his feet propped up on the seat in front of him as he munched at his bread.

Rashid was watching the boy, wondering how anyone of his size could eat so much so fast, when he noticed Abu Omar for the third time that morning walking quite fast outside the window. Surprisingly fast for such a lazy-arsed man. Rashid was following his neighbour’s movements when the fighters all stood up at the same time and blocked out his view. It was only when they crammed their way out of the door that Rashid realised that their green-jacketed leader had gone before them.

Hope. Rashid recognised it as soon as the men had gone. That was what he had felt. Hope. That was the feeling that the leader had evoked in him when he first saw him. Rashid felt ashamed for having experienced it; so often it felt like the thing that could devastate them all.

Chapter 10

In the café it had been as though a jeep had her in its headlights at the end of an alleyway. She had realised who the Seif El Din man was and what it meant that he was there. It was when he had started staring that the noise in her ears had begun. The approach had come, as Manar had said it would.

It was too much in there, Seif El Din and that fighter in the same place at the same time. Twice in one day she had seen that fighter in green. He had to be after something. When Khalil had cleared his throat to respond to the man’s arguments, she had almost wanted to touch his leg under the table and tell him not to, not to say anything, but she could not move. The fighter in the green jacket had seemed too interested in decoding her actions for her to make a move like that.

The noise in her head did not stop when she left the café. It followed her; it was not constant but as though a vacuum was pulling all sound away only for it to return with an intense rush. Maybe it was just too crowded in there: the stares, the sound of the chairs scraping, the echo, the muttering of the fighters, the fear in Khalil’s voice, his leg juddering on the ball of his foot under the table, scratching sand into the flooring as it moved around, the smoke, Rashid’s eyes with the irises strung up by crazed red veins. And then there was her heart and the clenching, clenching, clenching of it. She had thought she was panicking deliberately which was why it was racing so fast and she had tried to calm it and it had not, it would not, and so it had started panicking her more because she could not believe that it could continue to go that fast without breaking. Her lungs had gone, too. It was like gum inhaled backwards into her throat so that there was nothing to breathe with any more.

Being outside made no difference this time. The noise in her ears had not been left behind in the café. It didn’t help that the air was stale and that the crowd was thick, human, and full of close smells of bad nights and sick children. She could not feel the air above her because those around her were breathing it in faster than she could get at it. It was hard to keep sight of Seif El Din, her contact. She plunged into the crowd; angles of elbows were between her and where she wanted to be, wheelbarrows pushing up against her shins, carts bruising her legs. The roads were down, blocked and dug up. You could tell. The alleys were packed.

‘What do they want with us now?’ some woman was screaming up at the sky where others were pointing at a surveillance drone. ‘Didn’t they get their fill last night?’

‘They’re never satisfied,’ said another. ‘Never.’