Ishmael's Oranges

by Claire Hajaj

  Marc was ordering his ice-cream, arguing with Sophie about whether the chocolate or the strawberry dahab cone was tastier.

  Salim put his arm around Jude’s waist. ‘I’m so relieved,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I know you must feel a little sad, my love. It’s just for a while longer. A short while, to secure the rest of our lives.’ She smiled up at him, loving him for his awkward attempt at reassurance.

  Marc came up beside her and tugged on her arm. ‘Mummy, can we go and buy the plants now? I waited all week.’ It took a moment before she remembered it: the garden and Marc’s obsession. It had started as a notion of their paper-skinned English headmistress; dreaming of cool summer roses under the Arabian sun, she decided to challenge the children to make English gardens at home. They’d each worked for a month, finding plants and flowers that would grow in the gasping air.

  Marc’s garden had been a fantastical and elaborate construction – flowers, stone towers and a spiral of wires taken from a hoard of trash outside the house.

  But the very night before the class visited, Salim destroyed it by accident. Coming home late from the office, he’d stepped on it blindly in the near dark. She’d heard the thin sounds of Marc crying the next day, seen his small hands frantically repositioning his plot in the early morning glare.

  The prize went to a girl whose mother had planted a circle of geraniums. Marc pushed all of his disappointment into a ball of belief that they could be persuaded to change their mind if only he could make his garden better.

  ‘Let’s take the children to the Friday market,’ she said to Salim. ‘We did promise Marc last week.’

  Salim frowned, and looked at his son. ‘Is this about the garden again?’ She sensed irritation seeping around the corners of his words.

  ‘It needs to be brighter,’ Marc said, blue eyes staring fearlessly into brown. ‘Dina’s had lots of colours, and that’s why she won.’

  Salim shrugged. ‘Sure, let’s go. But this is the last time, Marc. I’ve had enough of the fuss around this garden. It’s not like a man to cry about flowers.’ He chucked Marc under the chin as he spoke.

  Marc jerked his head away. This one knows how to carry a grudge. Jude suddenly thought back to Hassan’s words to her, about Salim. He can’t let anything go. You’ll see.

  The Friday Market was Kuwait’s largest. Jude could always hear it before she saw it – a vast river of sound springing from a thousand throats, animal and human, conjuring camels and bronze pots, the shriek of dealers and beggars wailing. The market itself sprawled under the noonday sun like a disrobed woman with her entrails open in the heat. Flies crowded them as they walked through row upon row of people lying in the dirt, a legion of the armless, eyeless and legless. Hundreds of palms reached out to them as they passed. Those fingers tore into Jude’s conscience until she felt blooded with guilt; every time she came, she dreaded it more. Her husband, though, had never given the beggars a second glance. Marc and Sophie, she saw with sadness, did not notice them either.

  Under a low tarpaulin sheet ahead of them, the stench from the animal market rose off chokingly small cages. Sophie grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled it as they walked past a box full of baby chicks popping over each other with soft cheeping sounds. Each one was dyed a startling pink, green or blue. She heard the tinny rattle of little claws batting against cages and the desperate screech of birds calling for the sky.

  Sophie touched the bars as they passed. ‘Mummy, can we take another one?’ Jude shook her head and said, ‘Sorry pet, you know what we said last time.’ There was a limit to how many times a child could bring home an animal and wake up to find it dead the next morning.

  Marc had raced ahead to a stall of trees and plant pots. He began pulling small tubs of bright, shrub-like flowers to one side. Then he pointed to a small, slender tree with sweet-smelling white blossoms. ‘That one can go in the middle,’ he said, brimming with excitement. ‘The others can go round the edge.’

  ‘The others, fine,’ Salim said, coming to stand beside him and motioning the stallholder to put the pots on the back of a wheelbarrow shuttling backwards and forwards between the stall and the cars. ‘But not the tree. It’s a lime. They don’t grow here, not in this heat. In one week it will be dead. He’s trying to rob you.’ He gave the stallholder a sarcastic smile, while the dark man flashed his yellow teeth back.

  Marc shook his head. ‘It won’t die. I won’t let it. I’ll water it every day.’

  Jude saw Salim wipe his forehead and then bend down to the boy. ‘Listen, Marc. I was a farmer once. I know about citrus trees. I can tell you this isn’t going to work. You should listen to me. Now don’t cry,’ he said hastily, as tears started to flow down Marc’s cheeks. ‘Oh come on now,’ he said, straightening up in embarrassment. ‘What is it? Shall I get you a bucket?’

  Jude stepped up to the two of them. She had to fight the urge to hug Marc to her chest, knowing that it would inflame Salim. He would say why can’t you let him learn to be a man? And she would answer he’s only six – he’s hardly learned how to be a child.

  ‘What’s the harm in taking this tree home?’ she said. ‘He’ll learn something from it, even if it dies. You could help him look after it. It might be good for both of you.’ She whispered this last to Salim, lightly pinching his arm.

  Salim looked at them both, and then threw his hands up in defeat. ‘You’re too soft with him,’ he said. She watched with sorrow and irritation as his hands found Sophie’s head and rubbed her soft dark hair while Marc stood aside, his white arms crossed.

  ‘Let’s go home, us and all the plants,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘Let’s make the best garden in Kuwait.’ She took Marc’s hand in her own and reached for Salim with the other.

  For a second Salim’s face looked just as pained as Marc’s. But then he rolled his eyes, paid the stallholder and followed his family back to the broiling car.

  They planted the tree in the centre of Marc’s garden, back at the villa. Long after Jude and Sophie had gone inside to make dinner, Salim saw Marc sitting on the steps outside the glass front door. The white sky had cooled to pink and violet, and the little lime tree fluttered in the rising night breeze.

  The boy looked up as Salim came to sit beside him. Marc’s eyes were red from the dust of planting. Around them, the hoarse song of the muezzin filled the dusk.

  ‘Are you happy with your tree, then?’ he asked his son. Marc nodded. Salim felt the boy’s weariness drift over him, like a cloud of dust.

  ‘Did you know that when I was a boy, I had a tree too?’ The blond head shook slightly. ‘My parents planted it when I was born, and I used to look after it and pick the fruit off it every year. You and I can do that together, if you want.’

  Marc looked up again, eyes suddenly wide. ‘Okay.’ Then suddenly he slid along the stoop until he touched his father’s leg. Salim put his arm around him, and they sat in silence, letting the sunset bleed through the air from the wasteland outside. He felt the wind pull through Marc’s white hair, as insubstantial as thistledown. The boy’s fingers were on his leg, clutching through the fabric. There was a weakness to him that terrified Salim. What chance would he have against the Mazens of this world?

  Marc stirred, and he heard the small voice say, ‘It’s too hot to grow things here, you said.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Salim’s eyes were drawn to the garden, the wet dust and the lime tree planted with an anxious tilt. ‘It’s the desert here. Trees and fruit like that one need water and cool air. That’s why I told you to leave it, habibi. So I don’t want you to be disappointed when it dies. You have to learn to face facts.’

  There was a pause while Salim watched Marc contemplating this truth. Then the boy squeezed his hands together and said, ‘Things grow in England. I wish we lived there. Then my garden would be amazing.’

  ‘But we live here, Marc. This is our home.’ Above the surprise Salim felt something colder settling on him. ‘You’re an Arab too. You belong here, not t
here.’

  ‘I wish I was there,’ said Marc again. He got to his feet, turned around and went back into the house, leaving Salim alone in the gathering dark.

  They spent the evening at a party in the desert, with friends and men who called themselves family. Kuwait was full of family, Palestinian ay’an who’d travelled to this honeypot where the black wealth oozed out of the ground for anyone to scoop up. Round their dinner tables and at their desert feasts, they’d talk about the brothers dying in Beirut and the camps. And then they’d sigh, wipe their hands and drive back to their villas with their jewelled wives and their plump children.

  The family car pulled up in a valley between two high dunes – a place they called Il-Saraj, the Saddle. It was famous for its monthly rallies beloved by westerners and Kuwaitis alike. Salim’s heart would swell as he filmed Sophie and Marc with his Super 8mm camera, their faces red with cheering from the height of the dunes, exhilarated by the echoing roar of engines and the squeal of tyres ripping up the ground into red strips of dust.

  On this evening, the Saddle was quiet. High tent walls were swaying slowly in the breeze of the valley floor. A goat and a sheep bleated sadly on the back of a pickup truck, their legs tied together. ‘Oh no,’ wailed Sophie, pressing her face to the car window as Salim turned off the engine. ‘Are they going to kill them?’

  ‘That’s right,’ her brother shot back. Salim could feel his feet kicking the back of the seat. ‘They’re going to pull their heads off and then we’re going to eat them.’ Sophie screamed, ‘No, we won’t, you’re so horrible!’ and started to cry.

  Salim shook his head and left Jude to sort it out. As he closed the car door on their voices, he saw a bedou wrapped in a red-checked keffiyeh hoist the sheep onto his shoulders, and carry it slowly away towards the stake and the knife.

  Inside the red-fringed tent, the burned smell of Turkish coffee lay thick on the men sprawling on their low cushions. Adnan Al-Khadra was in the corner; he saw Salim and waved him over. Drums drifted in, and the wailing of a fiddle as a bedou raised his thin voice to the sunset sky.

  Adnan had been the first name on a list provided by Nadia for their arrival in Kuwait – more cousins of cousins, linked by a fragile trail of bloodlines to Abu Hassan and his long-dead first wife. He’d clapped Salim on the back, kissed him on both cheeks and called him nephew. Adnan honoured tradition by referring to Abu Hassan as my brother but his other habits screamed modernist: he liked to be called by his first name, and his youngest son – a keen gun of twenty-five – was a company man in Salim’s new division at Odell.

  Tonight he was cracking nuts with his teeth, in a finely tailored open-necked shirt and light linen trousers. His combed silver hair and deep black eyes made Salim think of a big, sleek American car.

  ‘So tell me,’ Adnan spat out a shell. ‘Everything’s good with you? You start work tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Insha’Allah,’ Salim replied. Adnan grinned. ‘That’s right, that’s right! Never trust the Americani until you get your first paycheque. They messed my Omar around on his salary like he was a dog begging for dinner. But now you and he will be working together. That’s very good. He’s a young man, still wild, you know? He needs someone with experience to show him how to ride the horse.’

  Salim had heard it before. Riding the horse in Kuwait City meant clinging onto the mane of the American beast as it galloped through the Arab world. Adnan was saying: look after my boy, he’s one of your own. He wasn’t so modern that he expected his son to get by purely on his own skills.

  Salim fantasized about telling Adnan he would happily pass his son’s papers on to Human Resources. But the ropes of guilt and duty were wound too tight.

  He nodded at Adnan. ‘I’ll be happy to keep my eye on Omar,’ he said as courteously as he could. ‘He seems talented enough.’

  Adnan hooted with laughter. ‘Talented! Yes, for sure he thinks he is. And what can his old father say? We’re as useless as old cars to your generation, isn’t that it? Let me tell you something. In your father’s day and mine, people took different measures of a man. A successful man wasn’t just rich – he was – how shall I say it?’ He sucked the salt off his fingers and tapped his fist to his chest. ‘Generous. He shared his money, his wisdom if he had any. Or even if he didn’t! Your father was no genius, you know that. But he was generous in his way. He had an open hand. These days, it’s all about how well you did in school, how smart you dress and how much you can cram onto your own plate. My son thinks he’s a genius because I sent him to school in the States and the Americani gave him a job. He thinks that’s all there is to life. And what about you, eh, Salim? Are you an old fellow or a new?’ He beamed a white smile.

  Jude came into the tent, her blonde hair glorious in the lamplight. A wave of cool air followed her in from the clear darkness outside. She smiled as she came up to him and his heart melted as it always did. Adnan rose to kiss her on the cheek. ‘The lovely Jude. You look splendid. How are you, my lady?’

  ‘Hot as the devil in this tent,’ Jude said, with a smiling sideways glance at Salim. ‘Why don’t you all come outside? The children are playing round the fire and the women say they won’t dance without an audience.’

  ‘What are we waiting for, then?’ Salim took her hand and followed his wife out of the tent. Night had come down like a knife, and the desert cold sliced into him. The fire played underneath the bodies of the sheep and goat, their fat dripping in faint sizzles onto the crackling wood. Inside the tent, bedouin had laid large oval plates of rice with vermicelli, balls of cracked wheat and spiced lamb, cabbage leaves cooked in yoghurt and fragrant salads of cucumber and parsley.

  Salim sat down on a rug in the sand next to Adnan. A young man came rushing up out of the firelight, his face flushed, all the absurdity of youth in his tight t-shirt and gulping Adam’s apple. The famous Omar. He bent to shake Salim’s hand. ‘Wow, Salim Al-Ishmaeli! Right? So good to see you again. I can’t believe we’ll be working together!’ Enthusiasm blazed from every syllable. Working under me, not with me. Salim bit back the words as he returned the handshake.

  The women had started dancing around the flames. Jude was among them; he saw her, the sequins in her skirt flying like sparks, her feet bare and her hair around her shoulders darkening to deep gold. The secret of her heritage – their secret – sometimes made him love her even more. It was a hidden part of herself, visible only to him – like those Kuwaiti wives in their long black shrouds filled with the seductive power of the unseen.

  She’d tried her best to blend in, taking Arabic lessons and imitating Arabic dancing. But her feet betrayed her roots. She was a northern girl skipping under a cloudy blue sky, to the light rhythms of dockyard shanties. There was nothing of the swaying, sliding east in her. Perhaps that was why he’d wanted her so much.

  Marc and Sophie joined her in the dance, their skin and hair turned to bronze against the fire. Sophie followed her mother, but Marc whirled and spun like the dervishes at Nabi Ruben. That was the last time Salim had seen his mother dance, on a night like this one in another world.

  ‘Such beautiful children.’ It was Adnan, beside him. ‘You’re blessed to get two at once.’

  ‘I know I am,’ Salim said quietly. He watched them dance around and around in the golden haze. Ashes from the blaze were falling. They brushed his cheek like tears. It was bewitching to see his family so apart from him; like visions on a screen, their radiant happiness vanishing like sparks from the fire into the night sky.

  ‘Your wife is a brave woman to come here,’ Adnan continued. Salim looked at him sharply. ‘Why so?’ he said.

  The older man shifted, his eyes fixed on the dancing children. ‘It’s hard for a western woman to bring up Arabic children. In the Arab way, I mean. Look at your ones. They can’t speak to my grandchildren in Arabic. They don’t know the Qur’an.’

  ‘Wait there, Adnan,’ Salim said, trying to laugh. ‘You can’t tell me you know the Qur’an. I don’t know it either
– I went to Catholic school, remember?’

  ‘But you learned it, Salim. We all did and we all do now. So what if you’re a believer? Who cares? It’s the thing we share. It’s what binds us together in this divided world.’

  ‘My children know their heritage,’ Salim said. He tried to keep emotion out of his voice. ‘They know where they come from.’

  Adnan smiled and put his hand on Salim’s shoulder. ‘My son – you could be my son, you know – you forget something. Men don’t raise children. Women do. What those children learn, what they take into their hearts, will come from her. That’s why I say she’s taken on a big challenge. I hope you can guide her with it, or your kids will be as much of an Arab as she is.’

  Salim searched for a protest – but suddenly there were plates of rice and dripping meat in front of them, and Adnan was seizing the first eager mouthful as the children danced on and on.

  The twins fell asleep in the back of the car on the way home. Salim looked at them, their closed eyes shadowed and pale under the hard brilliance of the street lights, their faces dark with soot. Fingers of unbearable love took his heart and squeezed it. Jude rested against the window, eyes half-closed.

  ‘I want the children to have Arabic lessons,’ he said suddenly. The words surprised him, racing ahead of his thoughts.

  He saw her raise her head, startled out of sleepiness.

  ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘They can join my lessons if you like. Or you could do it yourself?’

  The thought of speaking Arabic to his children disturbed Salim in a way he could not explain.

  ‘I’ll teach them too, but you have to make sure they learn,’ he said. ‘I always listened to my mother more than my father. No reason ours should be any different.’

  ‘All right,’ Jude said again. But he could see she was puzzled. ‘Why now, though? You never seemed to care much about it before.’

  He struggled for an answer. The road reeled out ahead of him, a blur of neon. ‘They’re getting older. We don’t know how long we’ll be here. I want them to understand that they’re Palestinians, before it’s too late.’