Out of It

by Selma Dabbagh

  ‘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.’

  Parts of the crowd seemed to be reconsidering their direction, watching the drone move ahead of them; they were heading back in the direction they had come from and by doing so they made space for Iman to move forwards and catch sight of Seif El Din ahead of her. His head held up against the other heads that were bare and bent.

  They worked fast that group. Manar had said they would contact her and it was just hours later that the man was there, addressing her, persuading her. The contact had come. She had said she was ready. Well, she was. Maybe that morning, after the meeting, she had not been, but that was a long time ago, before Taghreed, before Raed. She needed to contact him, tell him that she was ready. That was all.

  Khalil had to rethink. They could do it his way but it was not for her, not any more. She needed to act. She had been there. They had not seen Taghreed and Raed all burnt like that, all charred and twisted. It changed things. Deaths of children changed everything. Resistance movements started with dead children. And there she was, for it did not matter who it was that she followed really, all this hair-splitting about what party you backed, which leader and what position that had been taken on the agreements of 1973, ’78, ’94. Who cared? To hell with it. The thing was to act and that was what she was doing. Peoples Fronts, Popular Wings, United Leaderships – the hell with them, too. It was all about action; there were no alternatives.

  She was not about to stay at home making pickles like her mother. For all her talk, what had her mother actually done? Marry her father? And her father, for all his former days of glory, where ha
d he ended up but out of it? Fobbing them off with a money transfer every couple of months, away from this place, from family, from politics. Living in the Gulf. The Gulf? And Rashid just prostrated himself before anything Western. Sabri tried, but fussing over his book was not going to solve anything. It was not as though the world did not know what they had done. Rashid’s assumption that gathering evidence of these violations mattered was flawed.

  It went back to what Seif El Din said. They were relying on conscience, on a sense of guilt, but these people did not have one towards them. Violence was justified if the other side viewed you as less than human (Mandela, right? Or was it Brecht?). And that was how it was. They would not expect it of her. No one would expect it of her, Iman, to act in this way. She spent her time reading poetry in her room. Maybe they would say that it was being unmarried at her age that drove her to it? They would need to find some kind of justification for a non-religious girl like her doing such a thing.

  The solid mass of human traffic pushed out into the square and fanned out around its sides. Seif El Din was just ahead of her. His step was far younger than his age. Now out of the alleyway, Iman became aware that there was someone following her, someone trying to match her pace through the crowd. Maybe it was one of Seif El Din’s men. She could not look. She needed to keep moving. He was in front of the statue of a phoenix that the Leaders had built, now scrawled with graffiti. Return to the Egg! Embrace the Ashes! demanded the red spray paint.

  She was about to catch up with him (there was someone behind her; he was almost running now), and then he would just have to look and he would know that she was ready (why was somebody following her?). She just needed to establish contact. They would talk elsewhere. The drones had now gone but a helicopter was coming in close, the palms were bending down low, low, deferential, bent like reeds, to clear a path for this machine cutting through the sky. Water was being sprayed out of the dirty fountain in the square. It was like those Vietnam films with a cloud of dust blowing back at the sky, rushing into her face, and the helicopter was low, low so that, with its open sides, she could almost make out through the window a real face, a human one next to the profile with feathers painted on the side, Apache. Are we to be killed off in reservations by helicopters named after others killed off in reservations? The marketplace was emptying fast, back into the alleys and side roads, but Seif El Din moved ahead, not looking up, weaving between parked cars.

  And then it came. So instant and heavy that the ground seemed to bounce up beneath her and the air was alive with light and dust, screams filled her eyes, her mouth, her ears. They killed him! Mustafa Seif El Din! Abu Mohammed! They killed him! Hands on her arms, around her waist, pulled her back, had pulled her back, before the strike, and the heat was so angry that she was red in the face from it, and there was a burnt hair smell like that morning with the cigarette, and something sweet-smelling and fleshy. But the noise had stopped, the whirring engine noise that had been coming and going since she was in the café. It had gone and she was left with something trivial, almost domestic, a ringing sound in her ears as though somewhere, far off, a fridge door had been left open.

  Chapter 11

  ‘Damn it,’ Khalil swore at the packed beach that had absorbed his key. ‘We’ll never find it. We’ll have to go back to my place and get the spare.’ He scraped the lumps of wet sand off his shoes on to the kerbstone. ‘And I think my mother’s there.’

  They were taking the beach route to get to the Centre and it seemed as though the whole coastline was on the move. The overriding current was heading north but there were streams of people that were going against it, pushed to the limits, on one side paddling through the edges of waves with children on their shoulders and plastic bags in their hands. Arms were being pulled from their sockets and baby fingers were slipping over eyes from foreheads, blocking visions of makeshift paths. The centre of the beach bore the heavy traffic of carts and donkeys while bicycles were carried and dragged across the sand.

  Iman had been in a state in the café. Rashid couldn’t remember when he had last seen her like that. He had wanted to follow her, had meant to take her home, but by the time the bill had been sorted out there was no sign of her and she didn’t seem to want him around. He resolved to spend more time with her before he left. Maybe this evening he could get her to come and sit on the roof with him for a while. Khalil could talk to her and there was always Sabri. Iman went to Sabri for guidance and Sabri went to their mother, and his mother never needed guidance from anyone. She had probably come out of the womb that way.

  The smell of the sea, the expanse of water, the salt of the air, the seagulls shouldering each other in the sky, the sense of being part of a purposeful mass lifted Rashid. He had run into two friends that he had not seen for years and they had laughed about what a lucky, lucky bastard Rashid was for getting the scholarship.

  ‘It’s sort of romantic,’ Rashid had said when they first joined up with the rest of the human traffic.

  ‘There is nothing romantic about being bombed and starved back into the Middle Ages,’ Khalil had replied, unwilling to risk looking up from his feet for a minute.

  It did not take long for Rashid to stop seeing the charm of the beach. He grazed himself on an upturned fishing boat; his trouser legs had become plastered to his calves; his cuts stung with salt and splinters; his shoes were heavy with water, his toes gritty with sand. Khalil had stumbled when his toe caught in a half-buried plastic bag, but it was not until they got to the pavement that he realised that the key for the Centre must have dropped out with the fall.

  ‘You won’t find it in there,’ Rashid said looking back at the lumbering crowd of people walking down the beach. ‘Impossible.’

  The only spare was in Khalil’s flat. He had no choice but to go there with Rashid and risk Rashid meeting his mother. Since moving to Gaza, Khalil had only once asked Rashid back to his family’s flat and he had made sure that his mother was in Paris and his father in DC, when he had done so. Khalil could not bear anyone talking about his parents, let alone meeting them. Khalil tried to put as much physical distance between his family and himself as he put political distance.

  ‘Sure,’ said Rashid, trying to ease Khalil’s anxiety, ‘no problem.’

  The Sea View development where Khalil’s family lived was a row of eggshell-coloured apartment blocks along the beachfront. Khalil knew a lot about the financing structure for the construction of Sea View and he had once, when stoned, divulged what he knew to Rashid and then regretted having done so as most of it had implicated his father.

  The pale Sea View buildings hovered on the shore as though they were contemplating slipping away into the sea and dissolving palidly into its watery mass. They were calm, clean buildings with elevators that worked and doormats that were guarded by plant pots that shone with the spit and polish of imported labour.

  If he had allowed himself to be, Rashid would have been insulted by Khalil’s determination to keep him away from his family. It wasn’t as though Rashid didn’t know them. The two families had been close in Beirut, in Tunis, and briefly in Scandinavia, but as the Outside Leadership made peace with their enemy, they had made enemies of each other. The families had split apart at the same time that Rashid’s parents had.

  As Khalil’s mother ran to kiss Rashid, her mercurial, silky outfit billowed around her. Her orange-streaked hair was noodle-like, her eyebrows accentuated by a bluish pencil and her front teeth had caught on a lipstick, as though she had taken a quick snap at it.

  It was after greeting Rashid that she noticed the state of Khalil. ‘Look at you! What happened to your shirt? You are filthy. You smell terrible. What is this smell?’

  ‘It’s gas. I went to the south, Mama.’

  ‘You went to the south? Are you mad? One of these days you’ll get yourself killed. You go right now and take a shower. But wait, before you go, stay here. Stand here. You two boys, I haven’t seen you together for so long…’

  She brought
both boys into the sitting room and got them to stand next to each other and appraised them, compared them, while blowing smoke into the air above her face with the mannerisms of a twitchy dressmaker.

  There was something so brittle about her. It was as though she had snapped and was jangling around inside. Here was a woman who had been brought up according to the best of French educational systems, who had been groomed assiduously to find a husband from the best of families, to cook, entertain, and to pack suitcases in ways that emulated the preferences of the European aristocracy. All this she had done to perfection. She had hosted and preened, spent and saved, complimented and listened while furthering the path of her husband’s career. But no one had taught her how to deal with her husband’s infidelities, to cope with the humiliation of their multiplicity, their diversity, and the publicity that surrounded them. For everyone knew about them, from the Spanish waitress in the restaurant bathroom, to the Indonesian maid molested in the kitchen in front of her. She never got used to them; each one had floored her, each one had struck her down afresh.

  ‘Just so high, up to here!’ She had started upon seeing Rashid, as they feared that she would. Rashid had not seen her for possibly as much as a decade and Khalil had not been able to stop her grabbing at his friend.

  A little devil you were as a boy, we used to say to your mother. No more boys for you Jehan, this one is more work than five!

  And so handsome. How did you get so handsome? Better-looking than both your parents.

  A scholarship! You’re getting out! Khalil, you didn’t tell me! Why didn’t you tell me? This is wonderful. Wonderful. Here, we shall drink to it!

  She propped Rashid up on a cane bar stool against Khalil’s protestations. ‘Mama, we’re going to the Centre. He can’t go into a refugee camp smelling of alcohol.’

  The bar was backed with mirrors and adorned with whisky bottles, china windmills and miniature crystal pigs. A clay model of a man smoking a pipe sat in the centre of this display.