Out of It

by Selma Dabbagh

  His breathing was becoming more regular although his eyes were still bleary. He moved back into the corner of the porch stepping on a drink can. The strong smell of urine overrode all others, even the burnt-rubber air, the rush of dust and bodies outside. Six men carrying an orange stretcher lumbered down the street in a running march like a pantomime animal. Iman tried to salivate, to spit out the grit from her mouth.

  ‘They want you…’ he was calmer now, and trying to be clear and to be loud enough, ‘…because of the family that you come from, that’s all. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person. It’s got nothing to do with whether they think you can do anything that will make any difference at all.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Iman pulled her shoulders back. Her bag was still there, a strap ripped off by the fall or by his pull. She picked up the body of it and held it against her stomach.

  ‘Listen.’ He reached towards her forearm, not harsh as before but to get her to look up at him. The tenderness in the gesture made her more afraid of him. ‘Listen, I know these people, I know how they operate, and I know that they approached you. I’ve been watching that man you were following, Seif El Din, and the others that are with him.’

  Iman tried mentally to grab at something she could say that would push him away. She felt that he was forcing her backwards.

  ‘Who are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you before. But today you’re everywhere, following me, spying on our house, in that café with my brother, chasing me down the street.’ Iman worked herself up with the absurdity of it. As she spoke she convinced herself that she was entirely innocent, a girl going about her business, someone to be liked, not reprimanded. He refused to see her in that way.

  ‘It was not you that we were watching by your house.’ He waved his hand in front of his face, no matter. ‘It will become clear later what I was doing, but I am from the Authority, from the Patriotic Guard and I can tell you that these people, Seif El Din’s people, are only trying to recruit you so that they can undermine us. They are trying to attack us so, yes, what you are trying to do for them is very much my business.’ He spoke slowly weighing up each word, pausing to find exactly the right way to communicate his message. ‘It’s internal. They want to get people like you, people from families like yours, who are historically associated with our party, not because they think you can really do anything worthwhile, but as a show of strength on their part. It’s divisive. Internally divisive.’ His shoulders dropped; he kept double-checking; he needed to be reassured that she had got to the point where she understood. ‘Haven’t you seen that the enemy – and you mustn’t forget who that is – that the enemy is justifying last night on the basis of that Hajjar girl’s attempted attack? Do you want to be like her? The spittle that allows them to unleash this hell on us?’

  ‘What Hajjar girl?’

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘No. I haven’t heard anything. I was up all night at a meeting. I’ve lost a girl, a sweet girl in my class and her cousin who was…’ she wanted it out too: You want suffering? I’ll give you suffering, ‘…a good friend of mine. And I saw their bodies. That’s what I have been seeing and hearing all day. Not the news. Just dead bodies and crying relatives.’

  She needed to punch this man. There was something in the way he pulled her around and stood there with his legs apart, as though she was not a woman at all, or as though he had had enough women not to care whether she was one or not.

  She trusted no one from the Authority.

  She trusted no one.

  And yet she had trusted Manar.

  ‘Who told you to follow Seif El Din?’ His eyes were hostile. She disgusted him.

  ‘They weren’t trying to recruit me,’ she lied, and flipped her head back in his direction to try to dislodge the growing sense of having been duped that was taking possession of her and making her feel ill.

  He shrugged, whatever you say, however you want it to be. His disappointment in her was palpable. It was also deeply personal. He leant forwards. ‘Sometimes, Miss Iman, you will find that saying nothing when you know something is as damaging as doing the wrong thing.’

  She didn’t want to look at him, but she had; she didn’t want him to think that she was afraid. He was now holding her arm as a friend or a companion would and it scared her. His T-shirt was pulled down from his neck by the strap of his gun and his collarbones stuck out like bars.

  ‘This could’ve been the end for you,’ he continued. ‘It did not end as they would have wanted, but they won’t see this as being the end of their plans for you.’ He did not expect her to respond or, if he did, whatever she had to say was of little interest to him. ‘You will have to get out of here.’ He nodded as though it was a conclusion that they had reached together.

  ‘Get out of where? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You need to get out of Gaza. To leave, at least for a couple of months.’ Now that he had regained himself, he could talk more easily. His eyes appeared less sickly, but they were remote. He was still restless for her to understand. ‘Get out. Do you see? It will become a matter of pride for them to get you involved in whatever plans they have for you and you can’t do that. It’s a pointless sacrifice. Nothing you do for them will harm the enemy, the real enemy, it will only draw in more support for them as a party.’

  A small ambulance drove past, forcing Iman to give up on the effort of responding. Raised voices ordering the crowd to stand back echoed in the porch. She could not remember her reasons for chasing Seif El Din any more. She had lost them. She wanted to cry because the reasons had gone and for a moment there had been a purpose to it all, a purpose to it and to her. She couldn’t cry and she wouldn’t because of him. Iman focussed on the poster on the wall behind the fighter, an advertisement in a metal frame that depicted a big-nosed man smoking an argeela in front of cluster of mezza bowls. Hummingbirds with flowers in their mouths chased each other around the edge of a menu.

  ‘Why should I trust you anyway? You are nothing to me. I don’t even know who you are. Patriotic Guard or not.’

  ‘I’m Ziyyad.’ The man’s arms hung down straight at his sides, his voice seemed a little saddened by its own identity. ‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi.’

  ‘Iman Mujahed,’ she replied automatically as though he had challenged her to spar by announcing his name.

  ‘Miss Iman, I know. I know who you are and I am asking you, explaining to you now, why you must leave. But if you don’t listen to me, and I fear that you won’t, I will get you out of here, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Get me out of here? You can’t do that. Who do you think you are? You can’t.’ He was treating her as though she was dispensable, or worse, simply exportable.

  ‘Your father used to work with us. It is easy for us to contact him and to tell him to get you out.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. How could you? Interfering in my life like I’m a child. I have a job, you understand? I have my family here, my mother, my brothers.’ But he was now back into his official role and she suddenly realised just how far she had witnessed him slip out of it.

  ‘Go with your brother to England, or join your father in the Gulf. I don’t care. I’d rather you did it of your own accord; I don’t want to have to make contact with your father, but you look like you are going to force me to do so.’ Iman’s glare had no effect on him. The decision had been made and her feelings about it were immaterial. He had no choice. Neither did she.

  ‘I am coming with you.’ He held her arm as she started to leave and the words said in a neutral voice, even from him, conveyed a protection that she wanted to hold on to. His arm alone, it felt, could carry her out of the mass of mangled life outside.

  ‘No, you’re not.’ She had to say it. She didn’t want to be left to choose where to go, but she didn’t want him to think he could tell her what to do either.

  ‘I am, but it’s nothing to do with you. You will follow me back to your house. I have business there and I am late for it,
so you will follow me, understand?’

  He breathed twice before stepping back into the street. As he did so, the body of a live woman with drowning eyes carried by three men jogged past them. The woman was screaming at her blood-stained hand. Her head and legs were bare, sandals hung off her toes, pale hair fell over an arm. Ziyyad stepped back so quickly that he knocked Iman against the door handles. He tripped awkwardly. His neck was next to her face and some of his sweat dropped on to her.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she screamed. His skin was runny with perspiration as he turned to check on her, breathing hard from the bottom to the top of his chest, before he moved off into a smaller alley away from the crowds, walking with huge paces ahead of her. He looked back every minute or so to ensure that she was still with him, but he never let on that he might care whether she was or not.

  Chapter 14

  It did not look good to Rashid. In fact, to Rashid, the road to the refugee camp where the Centre was based was littered with portents that Khalil was refusing to see.

  Khalil kept trying Jamal’s phone and Jamal’s phone kept telling him that it was unobtainable. Barbed wire in spangled loops lolled around the outskirts of the camp. A man sat on his haunches by the entrance, cleaning out his front teeth with a thumbnail. A truck loaded with valuables (either cement or flour, it was not clear) was attracting a small gathering by the side of the road. Most of the destruction was new. Two buildings, their sides punctured but the concave half bubbles of bullet holes, were still smoking. The alley was empty of people. Unnaturally empty. No rugs hung on the walls waiting to be beaten and no clothes were pegged on to the lines that fanned out from single hooks, slicing the sky up into long triangles. It was just cement, graffiti and the sandy earth.

  Rashid walked behind Khalil, close to the wall, avoiding the slow run of liquid through the middle of the street. Wild grasses sprouted around the edges of the puddles. The chemical smell of burnt rubbish came and went. The houses were all the same on this stretch: two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Boxy squares of concrete with roofs of corrugated iron held down with breezeblocks and bricks. Occasionally one had a tiled floor, otherwise it was just sand on the ground and cables and wires strung across the ceiling.

  A metal door to a house stood open. The inside walls were painted in the patterns of the mosques of Granada. Beige rugs, their corners folded with precision, covered mattresses on the floor. The floor tiles had just been mopped. A large engraved copper plate was propped up on foldable wooden legs, Bedouin-style. A girl sitting on a mattress drawing stuck out her tongue at Rashid as he passed.

  Rashid started formulating a question about place, belonging and his role in all this as he walked, contemplating whether it was worth asking Khalil and if he would know the answer. He wondered whether he owed it to Khalil’s mother to talk to Khalil about leaving, but there would be significant fallout if he did. It would be no less than treacherous, no more than self-interest, as on some levels the idea of having Khalil with him in London was an amazing possibility, on other levels it was the carting of all of this over there with him, when London was the opportunity to reinvent himself. Would that be such a bad thing for him to do, to have a break from this for a while, to come back revived? He wondered what Khalil thought. He thought he should drink cocktails before visiting the Centre more often. It took the edge off things.

  ‘Khalil,’ Rashid started, but Khalil was calling out to a man walking towards them. The man was not looking up. Khalil called out his name again.

  ‘Ah!’ The man finally stopped and smoothed his beard down several times. ‘Khalil Helou. Greetings. What brings you here?’

  ‘We’re just going to check on the Centre.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ The man looked awestruck at the ignorance before him.

  ‘Know what?’ Khalil asked, hiding the irritation and anxiety that Rashid could nonetheless see. The man’s hands expanded outwards from his thumbs. ‘Nothing. Nothing. God be with you.’

  ‘And with you,’ Khalil replied, although the man had already gone.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Rashid asked, hoping to find something to discredit the man as a source of alarmist statements.

  ‘You know that boy who comes to the Centre who’s a computer whizz? The one who can hack? That’s his father.’

  ‘Religious?’

  ‘Who isn’t?’

  ‘That’s what Iman says.’

  They stopped and said nothing more because by then they had seen the Centre and there was nothing else to say.

  The destruction ran right up to its doors: graffiti, bullet holes and gutted buildings. The door to the Centre had been blown out into a rubble-filled cavity. A tetchy-looking cat sprinted down the stairs and out of the entrance.

  It was worse inside than they could have imagined. The smell was overwhelming. The afternoon heat was invigorating every stinking molecule in the room. It was hard to breathe. A pinboard covered with children’s paintings had been removed from the wall and shat upon. Computer screens were smashed; wires had been cut; the drawers of the filing cabinet had been emptied and thrown to the floor. Everything left in the room was sprayed with paint, pissed on, scribbled over. All the documents had gone and the computer disks removed. Khalil examined the backs of the computers.

  ‘They took the hard drives.’

  ‘And Jamal? Shit. They must’ve taken him.’ Khalil walked around. ‘We have to find out where. That’s what I have to do first.’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Rashid’s chest felt as though it had a thin plastic sheet wrapped around it that was being tightened twist by twist with a tourniquet. ‘Why would they take him? He’s just a volunteer.’

  Khalil kicked against the wall leaving a newer, fainter mark than the others. ‘It’s my fault. I should’ve taken the risks more seriously. I know they’ve taken him. I can feel it. It’s my fault. Fuck. And he’s getting married.’ Khalil crouched down with his back against the wall, his head on his knees. Fuck.

  Rashid tried to move into his friend’s space. Khalil’s ponytail was not silly. There was nothing silly about Khalil.

  ‘Come back to our place, Khalil. Talk to Sabri. He’ll know what we can do to find out where he is. Don’t stay here.’

  Khalil looked up from his hands. ‘Raed and Jamal in the same day. One killed, the other taken. And the Centre? Three years’ work and look at it.’

  Something had attracted Khalil’s attention; he got up and walked over to the other side of the room where a small line of army graffiti, ‘Feeling fucked now?’ was scrawled in red marker pen across the newly painted wall.

  Khalil laughed out loud at the communication from the departed forces of destruction that had trashed his Centre. ‘See that? Feeling fucked now? That’s excellent. Ha!’

  ‘How is it excellent?’ Rashid’s skin was telling him that the army could be waiting to come back and get them too. The skin on his face felt really tight.

  ‘It’s excellent. It’s excellent.’ When excited, Khalil’s voice had a tendency to squeak slightly. ‘If this poxy little Centre really disturbs them that much, it has to be good. It must be worthwhile. It means that what we are doing is annoying them, even if it is just an irritation factor. It’s important. It’s something. Just to bug them. Get under their skin. This,’ he said, tapping at the writing on the wall, ‘is a victory.’ He stood back and smiled at it again. ‘I will put a frame around it.’ He glanced up at Rashid. ‘You think Sabri can help us to find out where Jamal is?’

  He walked around the room as he spoke, moving whiteboards against the walls, straightening chairs. He went into the kitchen and emerged with a broom.

  ‘You want to start clearing up now?’ Rashid asked. ‘Right now? I thought you were going to find out about Jamal? Don’t you think we should leave?’ The stink of the place seemed to be coating itself around the sides of Rashid’s mouth.

  ‘Sure. Yes. I just wanted to show you that this is all very superficial. We can clear it u
p in no time. See? We did a full backup only last month. Of course it’ll be a bit harder getting that data for Lisa, but not a total disaster. And the computers are just money. We’ll get the funding, see? Nothing to worry about, minor setback, that’s all.’

  Khalil was brushing splintered glass into a small heap in the corner of the room, making the broom stop along the edges of a tile so that the lines of grouting delineated the pile of glass. Rashid put his hand around Khalil’s back.

  ‘Let’s go now. Let’s leave it for now. We’ll clear this up tomorrow. Iman will come and we’ll organise some volunteers. And gloves. We need gloves. You’re right, a lot of it is superficial. A bit of paint and it’ll be fine. But right now it really stinks.’ Rashid coughed.

  ‘I know. I know.’ Khalil kicked at a broken CD case on the floor.

  ‘Just leave it for now, OK? Let’s go and see Sabri and find out how we can sort things out for Jamal at least.’

  Half of Khalil’s face was covered with the bent palm of his hand, in a gesture that was partly down to stress, partly to block the smell. The eyes that looked up at Rashid from over the hand expressed more affection than Rashid had felt in a very long time.

  Chapter 15

  Two pairs of feet stuck out of one of the larger tents in the wasteland around the Mujahed home. The man’s feet still had shoes on, shoes that had been transformed into morose moulds of over-stretched leather, and the woman’s feet were knubbly and wide. The woman was wearing men’s socks with panels of pale leg flesh visible above them. The two pairs of feet were locked around each other’s ankles.

  Lisa! Rashid ached at the tenderness of the connected feet. Lisa! Lisa!

  ‘Watch it.’ Khalil pulled Rashid back as he nearly walked into one of the zigzag metal joists that had been left sticking up out of the ground.