by Claire Hajaj
‘What the hell is up with you, Sal?’ Her foot tickled his, but the eyes were not friendly. ‘Smoked the wrong shit? I’d have more fun with a fish tonight.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, supremely indifferent. Why did he even like Margaret, apart from the obvious things? Margaret only liked him because he was tall, exotic and – above all – older. At twenty-five, he was a man to her pretty teenage doll. ‘I’m still thinking about my father.’ That put a stop to Margaret nine times out of ten these days. It’s hard to argue with a man whose father died less than two months ago, right in the middle of end of term exams.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Then you should have gone to his funeral.’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said, irritated by the effort of having to lie. ‘I told you.’
‘Yeah, well, you haven’t got exams now. So you could still go, if you don’t want to stay around here and be a full-time drag.’ Margaret disengaged her legs and looked around the sweaty room. She had the most amazing eyes. They could pierce the back of a man’s head and see through to the more interesting thing beyond him. Something out there is more promising than me, he thought. Go find it, why don’t you. As if in answer, Margaret pinched Salim’s arm with brittle fingers.
‘I’m getting a proper drink,’ she said pointedly, setting her pink punch down on the windowsill. ‘This sweet shit is giving me a headache.’
Salim watched the crowd swallow her like a tiger disappearing into the tall grass. This was Margaret’s kind of room – the dense smoke, the long-legged crowd, the music he’d never heard of sliding out of the turntable in the corner. This is the end, my only friend, the man sang. Of our elaborate plans, of everything that stands.
It had been the end of Abu Hassan, two weeks before Christmas. A stroke had taken him right in the chair where he used to sit and crack nuts all day. One minute the hand was at his mouth, and the next it lay by his side, flaccid and empty.
Abu Hassan’s death had been many years in coming. But any tears he’d cried had been for an imaginary dream of a father, not the man himself. The far more powerful feeling had been a deep reluctance to return for the funeral.
He had a good excuse. It was his final year of an economics degree at University College, London. Exams were upon him. He was the only Al-Ishmaeli ever to go to university, and Nadia and Tareq assured him repeatedly that his father was very proud. Although Salim doubted it, he was happy to let Hassan take the burden of going back to Nazareth. Tradition decreed that a burial must take place within twenty-four hours. In any event, neither son could get there in time to attend to their father’s body. It was left to Nadia, the oldest child, to usher her father out of the world with all the consideration he’d denied her while he was in it.
Salim stayed behind while Hassan performed the other family duties – and saw to the will. When Hassan mentioned this to Salim, he’d actually laughed out loud. ‘They teach you how to count at university, you know,’ he said. ‘The last time I checked, nothing divided by two is still nothing.’
Margaret had not come back. But Salim was happy to stand on his own, and watch the dance of strangers. He never looked out of place in London. He was made to be here, with his attractive, pale darkness, his long, slim body and his smile that people called easy, as if they knew anything about him. It was a revelation to Salim how ready English women were to throw themselves at a penniless Arab who could make them laugh, and make them cry too. They imagined he would be passionate, unknowable, charming and cruel, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. And he obliged on all counts. But all those arms around him never seemed able to creep inside him – and in the end he was left preferring his own company.
After a few minutes, he decided to go and look for the blonde girl. He walked through the crowd to the drinks table, but couldn’t see her. Margaret was there, though, deep in conversation with someone else. Salim walked once around the room and ended up back by the windowsill. This is ridiculous. I should just go home.
He saw the party host rushing by, a tall green hat falling over his eyes. Salim reached out to grab his wrist. ‘Hey, Mike.’
‘Sal, man! What’s up?’
‘I was looking for a girl.’
‘Aren’t we all? Where’s Margaret?’
‘Clawing someone else,’ Salim said. ‘This one was kind of small, long blonde hair, dressed like a nun.’
‘Jude? You flake, she’s right behind you.’ Salim blushed for the first time in years as he realized his mistake and the unnoticed girl at his elbow began to turn at the sound of her name.
‘Sorry, man,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll leave you cats to get to know each other. Bathroom calls,’ he said, tapping his nose.
She was small, he saw, and perhaps that’s why he had missed her. Her head would barely have grazed his chin. Her blonde hair was long but somehow boyish, cut in a fringe framing a serious face. She was white as a bird, and her slightly worried blue eyes called up a fleeting memory of Lili Yashuv with a scarf over her hair.
‘Am I really dressed like a nun?’ she asked. She sounded curious. Salim looked again at her gawky dress, and she put up her hands unconsciously, smoothing the front of it as if to protect herself from his judgement. The gesture stirred something unexpected inside him – a kind of mirrored sympathy.
‘A cute nun,’ he replied with a smile. ‘The kind about to break her vows.’ She grinned and shook her head.
‘This isn’t really my kind of party,’ she said, looking around the room and then at her feet. ‘I only came with my roommate. And I know Mike from class – he’s studying literature too. What about you?’
‘This isn’t my kind of party either,’ he said. She looked up, sceptical.
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘You came here with Margaret.’
‘Everyone came here with Margaret, I think.’ Salim grinned, trying to catch her eye. But she just looked at the ground again. Irritation bubbled up inside him. What do I have to do to make this girl look at me? ‘I went all over the place looking for you, you know. And you were hiding here all the time.’
‘I wasn’t hiding,’ the girl said, her blue eyes finally fixing on his, with a touch of defiance. ‘Maybe you didn’t really know who you were looking for.’
‘Maybe I didn’t,’ Salim agreed, seeing for the second time the gold chain with its six-pointed Star of David lying on her chest. He pointed to it. ‘So what’s the story with that?’ Her hand went up to it and he saw her fingers trace the edges as if it was something done many times. Years later he would wonder if it was that moment that caught him, if he had really been so jealous of a piece of jewellery and longed to be cherished in the same way.
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ she answered, before hesitating. ‘A Star of David. It’s…’
‘I know what it is,’ he said quickly, thinking not of Abu Hassan and the flight from Jaffa but of Elia and that afternoon they said they could never be friends. There was a pause and she looked startled. He sensed he’d made her anxious. But he couldn’t find the words to turn it into a joke.
‘So, where are you from?’ she asked him, finally. It was his turn to hesitate now.
‘London.’
‘Really?’ She smiled, and shook her head again.
‘What is it?’ he said, worried she had caught him in the lie.
‘It’s just… well, you look like one of my uncles.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, laughing. ‘I hope he’s a handsome uncle.’
‘No, not like that.’ Now she was laughing too. ‘You just remind me of him. You’re both very… very dark and intense.’
‘And where is this most excellent uncle?’
‘He lives abroad.’
‘Well, thank God for that.’ Salim held out his hand. ‘I’m Sal.’ She took it, and shook it earnestly up and down, like a child after receiving a medal.
‘I’m Jude,’ she replied. ‘I’m glad you finally tracked me down.’
‘Me too,’ he said, with a complete sincerity that
matched her own.
It was only two days until they met again. Jude had agreed to a coffee in Bloomsbury, near to her classes. She was only in her first year of university, and London still felt terrifying. It operated on a different speed to Sunderland – a jerky, racing world full of noise and hurry. People thought the north was grey, but Jude used to sit under London’s endless winter sleet and dream of the sharp blues of Sunderland’s breeze-blown skies, the clouds chasing across the docks like seagulls.
When the man called Sal suggested that they see each other for coffee, Jude had not been sure what to think. At nearly nineteen, she’d never had a boyfriend. There’d been Stuart, a boy nearly as shy as she was, who used to talk to her at swimming practice and once went so far as to walk her home holding her hand. He did it again a week later, and she’d wondered if he might kiss her, but he was the perfect gentleman. In the end she became so irritated by that limp, moist palm in hers that she’d run home early to avoid him, feeling a wicked relief every step of the way.
She knew about love from the news; from stories about the war in Vietnam and the kissing protests in America. But it was no more real to her than a trip to the pictures. Even now, after five months in London, love seemed fake, painted-on – like the flowers she saw everywhere on people’s clothes and in their hair, floating through Chelsea and Soho in swirling patterns. There were no flowers around Jude’s student lodgings on Camden Lock. Only concrete and steel, bare cracks in the pavement and row upon row of windows dirtied by the smoky rain.
In Jude’s world, it was polite to be early. She sat in the corner of Virginia’s and pulled out a book. Outside, the silent drizzle of late February drifted down. The faint music in the café was nearly drowned by the keening of a harmonica outside. Buses surged past, dimly red through the cigarette smoke and fogged glass.
Sal. It was a name that told no story. Who was he, with those fierce eyes so like Uncle Max and that odd, gentle way of speaking? He had seemed even more a stranger at the party than her.
That, more than anything else, made Jude want to say yes to him, to see a real smile come to his face and wipe away the practised one. How does he smile for Margaret? She shook the thought away, and clutched Rebecca’s chain for courage. The gold felt like warm water in her hand.
When she looked up, he was standing in front of her. His awkward smile sent a thought flashing across her mind – he made a mistake, he doesn’t want to be here. Before she could speak, he’d pulled up a chair and sat down.
The daylight showed him paler than her memory, his hair seemed blacker and his eyes more serious. His face was soaked with rain and his thick overcoat and green scarf dripped onto the floor. Her instinct was to ask why he came without an umbrella, but she stopped herself. Just because, that’s why, as Dora used to say. Why was a habit Jude had trained herself out of, along with all the other Jews of the world.
There was a moment of silence and then he asked, ‘What are you reading?’
She held up the book for him and he squinted at the title. ‘The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky.’ His expression was a polite blank, and she stumbled on. ‘One of my course options is foreign literature. I’m doing Russian and French.’
‘Sounds good,’ he said, although she heard a note of uncertainty. ‘Why did you go for those two?’
She had to think for a moment, to find the true answer under the rationalizations she’d given her parents.
‘I had a holiday in France once,’ she said. ‘It was the first time I’d been abroad.’ She remembered the rich grey of the Seine as it glided along the Left Bank, the rough song of Parisian laughter, the smell of paint and the exhilarating emptiness of the sky. ‘I never saw anywhere like it before. I felt so alive there. They think in a different way to us, a freer way. I wanted to…’ She ran out of words to describe the longing she’d felt, and bit her lip in embarrassment. But then, to her amazement, he found the words for her.
‘You wanted to take a piece of it away, so you’d never really have to leave.’
‘That’s right.’ She flushed in the warm surprise of feeling understood. ‘The French writers like Stendhal, they’re so brave. They don’t have limits like us. They make these characters – Fabricio or… or Candide – who get to be different people wherever they go, to live a thousand different lives.’
His eyebrows went up, in mock surprise. ‘A thousand lives? Would it take you a thousand lives to find one you were happy with?’
‘No,’ she said, considering seriously. ‘But isn’t it interesting to imagine who you could be, if you didn’t mind giving up everything you are now?’
‘It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Is it a trade worth making? Suppose you gave everything up for something or someone, and then you found it wasn’t really worth it after all?’
Jude smiled and shrugged. ‘I don’t know the answer. That’s why I read the books, to see what happens at the end of the story.’
‘But these brothers of yours aren’t French.’ He pointed to the book still open in her hand.
‘They’re Russian. My grandmother was Russian too, originally.’ Jude grasped the star around her neck, feeling its points worn to reassuring smoothness. She asked again the question that had been on her mind since she first met him. ‘Where is your family from?’
He looked up at her and down at the table again; his face seemed sad, almost shamed. ‘My name is Salim.’ He said it casually, but it sounded like a confession. ‘Salim Al-Ishmaeli. We’re an Arab family, not a Russian one, I’m afraid. Or a French one.’ He raised his eyes to hers.
Jude said, ‘That’s okay,’ automatically, but her heart started to race. The overwhelming urge inside her was to reassure him – of what? ‘My uncle lives in Israel.’ That one escaped her too, the stupid, uncontainable words stumbling off her tongue.
‘I guessed it.’ He nodded towards the gold star in her hand. ‘That’s where I’m from too. It was Palestine, we called it back then.’
Jude sat in silence. She almost forgot she was at the table, part of the story, waiting to hear what would come next from his mouth. He was hunched over, his elbows and forearms on the table and his hands clasped together. At first she thought he might be in pain, but then he looked up with a wry smile. ‘You weren’t expecting that one, were you?’
‘No,’ she said. She could not speak for fear of saying the wrong thing, of hearing Dora’s voice come out of her mouth. The bloody Arabs. Eventually he threw his hands up and sat back in his chair.
‘What a goose you are. I had Jewish friends back there and I’ve made Jewish friends here too. We can get along, you know.’
Jude raised her coffee to her lips. It was weak and white and bland. She put it down and pushed it away from her.
‘I never met any Arabs,’ she said. ‘I just heard about them through Uncle Max. And to be honest, I thought you must hate us.’
‘Who says I must do anything? You’re a person. I’m a person. Why should I hate you before I get to know you?’
‘I’m not worth hating,’ she said. ‘I’m just a girl from Sunderland who had to be forced to go to Hebrew school.’
‘I guess you don’t even know yourself. You’re clever, and kind and honest. You’re very pretty too, as it happens. Maybe you’re absolutely worth hating.’
Jude put her book down on the table, and waited for her face to turn red. Blushing was the only thing that she and Gertie shared – their white faces transforming into the same beetroot colour at the slightest provocation. But the only warmth in her cheeks was from the raw wind, and now her heart beat more slowly.
‘Were you born there?’ she asked.
‘In Jaffa, before the war.’
Jude felt a sudden deep rush of sorrow. ‘I can’t imagine,’ she said quietly. ‘I never learned much about it.’
Salim shrugged. ‘I was just a boy when we left Jaffa. Seven, maybe. I don’t remember it so much. Afterwards we just got on with life.’
; Jude saw his hands were clasping and unclasping, and he was running one finger over his pale knuckles like a child trying to rub off a dirty mark.
‘Did your family come with you?’ she asked.
‘No.’ He looked up at her. ‘My mother left us years ago. She was one of those people in the stories you talked about. She wanted a different life. My father was an old man, and not that smart. He died a couple of months ago.’
Jude nodded. She put her hand over his on the table, and he stopped moving. Suddenly she realized what she’d done. Her hand jerked away, as if from a flame, and she clenched her fist. His eyes flicked up to meet hers. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘I’m sorry.’ She felt miserable – for him, for her clumsiness, for all the wrongs suffered and wrongs done. ‘I wanted to say I was sorry.’
His eyes held hers, and he didn’t smile. ‘I wasn’t asking why you held my hand,’ he said. ‘I was asking why you let go.’
Salim didn’t understand why he’d left without making a plan to meet again. He’d just gone without a backwards glance, wrapping the sopping wet scarf around his neck.
He knew through the pounding of his feet on the pavement that he was angry. Later he left a message for Margaret. That night he spent getting drunk and listening to her pluck the guitar, lying naked between his legs.
They’d ended their coffee like guilty children caught kissing. She’d told him about the grandmother who fled the Russians and he had talked about the siege of Nazareth and the Jewish commander who’d refused to sack the city. They’d agreed that religion didn’t matter, that they had a lot in common and some nonsense about peace that reminded Salim of the flower songs.