We have been very busy and have not had the opportunity to explain the situation at home. Mama and I are well, but things in the house have changed.
Abu Omar’s family left only a few days after you and Iman. It became apparent that Abu Omar was fairly high up in the ranks, if collaborators can be considered to have ranks, and must have provided some extremely useful information to the enemy about very important resistance leaders on our side…
Why had Sabri underlined this? Was Sabri hinting that these were leaders that they knew? He didn’t know any leaders. The man who looked like him, Ziyyad Ayyoubi, the man who had arrested Abu Omar, was a leader; could he have been targeted by Abu Omar in the past? Was Abu Omar’s arrest connected to that, was it a revenge arrest? The obliqueness was annoying as hell and just so typical of Sabri.
…because his family were taken out of Gaza to a camp in Israel for the families of people of his ‘stature’. We have been given to understand (his wife, Umm Omar, told Mama) that he has been working in the service of our enemies for over fifteen years. You know how these things start. First they asked him for petty information about student elections in exchange for a permit that was required for him to take his mother to a Jerusalem hospital. Apparently, or so the man claims, Abu Omar’s brother in the States urged him to provide the information to our enemies for the sake of his mother. Of course, once he had provided this information there was no way back. The man chose his family over his people and for that he is now paying the price.
Before she left, Umm Omar paid us a visit and gave Mama the key for their apartment (they have no other relatives in Gaza, you understand), asking her to look after it and saying that we should live in it while they were away. I always thought Umm Omar had a good heart, God only knows what life lies ahead of her and her family. They should not be cursed for the sins of Abu Omar, but of course it seems unlikely that they will ever be able to escape them. Needless to say, Umm Omar’s family have benefitted considerably and materially for years, which should be a factor we bear in mind before we displace too much pity in their direction.
Mama and I decided that it would be best to move downstairs and have brought all of our belongings with us. Mama is, of course, far more excited than she will allow anyone to see. She has dug up half that ring of soil around the tiles already and planted tomatoes, thyme, potatoes and mint.
I say that Abu Omar’s family left, but one of them chose not to. The middle grandson, Wael, apparently refused to leave and says that this is his place and he will not set foot on enemy territory. We have therefore decided to take the boy under our wing and to treat him as one of the family.
Wasn’t Wael that lanky teenager with the large nostrils and the bum fluff for a moustache, the one with the greenish skin around his mouth? Was Sabri telling him that they had decided to adopt that devious little shit? No, worse, that that devious little shit was so noble as to choose country over both self and family?
In the circumstances, we couldn’t just leave our flat empty upstairs. Mama and I decided it best to arrange a rota for our neighbours who are still in tents to get a roof over their heads. We can’t house all of them so we have arranged for stays in two-week shifts per family per room and have formed a small residents’ committee to supervise this. It’s working fine at the moment. I just hope that as the weather gets colder, tempers don’t rise when we have to ask people to leave at the end of their two-week sojourn.
Politically, you will have seen the news, it’s not as bad as it has been, but the signs are not good.
Wishing you the best, Rashid. I trust that this year will help you in your quest to find your own role in our struggle for justice and understanding in the world.
Your brother,
Sabri Jibril Mujahed
Chapter 19
When Professor Myres opened a book he would automatically open his mouth at the same time. His tongue would widen across the base of his mouth, loll out, and then the tip would touch his upper lip as he found the point he was looking for.
‘Yes, yes that’s it. That’s the one.’
Myres soothed the book, verbally patting it for its loyal delivery of information. The apartment smelt of wet dog. The coffee was wet dog. Rashid’s essays came back after supervision as though they had been rolled upon by wet dog. Rashid drew himself closer to the geraniums. Their dried-out odour reminded him of a relative’s courtyard he’d been in as a child – Amman or Damascus, perhaps? Or that aunt in Alexandria?
‘Yes, yes, these accounts, you see, show how some of these early Jewish immigrants to Palestine were absolutely shocked. There they were, just escaped from the jaws of hell in Nazi Germany or elsewhere in Europe. They’ve arrived in Palestine, this Holy Sacred Land, this place of new beginnings, where they soon find themselves witnessing the same tactics being used by their people against the Arabs – the Palestinians – as had been used against them. Just three years. It’s nothing in an adult’s life. Some of them left Germany as late as 1945 and by 1948 they are being asked to join people – their fellow Jews – who are blindfolding men, bundling them into trucks and dumping them across borders. These accounts are important. There aren’t many of them, but they are the ones that interest me, not the ones where the Jews complain about their own treatment by the British, but the ones where they consider how they are treating the ‘Other’ the Arabs. Many of them chose not to see them at all. They still don’t.’
Professor Myres’ mouth widened again, the tongue drawn back waiting for its next find. Unsuccessful, it fell back into place on the floor of his mouth. Eyebrows raised, Myres looked over at Rashid. ‘Not pretty, discrimination, bad treatment. Always makes people rather vicious, doesn’t it? Vicious and ugly. That old adage about the repressed of yesterday and what not.’
Rashid thought of the accounts of their Authority using Israeli torture methods against their own people. ‘It’s made us ugly, too.’ Rashid conceded national flaws easily to Professor Myres. He would not have done so with Ian.
‘Ah, yes. Ah, yes, but everything can be changed, everything. Nothing ugly about you, at any rate. Fine-looking young man. Shall I make us some coffee?’ Myres marked the book with a strip of paper covered in intricate pencilled script. The book joined the others on the pile prepared for Rashid, forming a rustling cascade of scrawly paper tongues.
‘You’ve always worked on Palestine?’ Rashid asked. He wondered what he would have done if Palestine had played no part in his life. Film, he thought, or music. The only time he had heard the word ‘talent’ being used in connection with him was when he had had piano lessons. He had been about twelve. That was in Beirut and then they had moved to Paris, and couldn’t start them again because Paris was only ‘temporary’ (everywhere was temporary but Paris, for some reason, had been known to be temporary from the day they arrived; for the next two years, they had only unpacked two boxes to show quite how fleeting it all was). They had just decided to unpack the rest of them when one of their representatives was shot and Baba was asked to replace him. This, of course, led to another move and the piano lessons had not been as important as anything else that was going on, and by then he hadn’t had any for at least two years so what was the urgency?
‘Always Palestine,’ Myres said with a sigh. ‘I do often think, though, that I could have done it differently.’ He was speaking from the kitchen and Rashid stood by the narrow door to hear him.
‘Oh really?’ Rashid said, as Myres seemed to have lost the thread of his speech together with the coffee lid that had slipped off the sideboard and on to the floor. Myres looked down at it, bereft, as though it was stranded at the bottom of a deep pool. Rashid dipped down to pick it up and pass it back to Myres. The professor did not acknowledge the gesture and went back to stooping over the kettle, concentrating on getting the tremulous fairtrade coffee granules to make it into the two half-clean mugs with brown oval motifs.
Myres’ tongue touched base on his lip. ‘Take the Kurds,’ he said to his raised teaspoon
.
‘The Kurds?’ asked Rashid, who had by now also lost where Myres had been going.
‘As an example. I do ask myself, why did I choose one group of destitute and abandoned people rather than another?’ Rashid did not feel like being thought of as either destitute or abandoned but did not say so. ‘It would have been quite different had I chosen the Kurds.’
‘Why did you choose us, then?’
‘Well, that’s just it, you see. I have gone through this with myself again and again and I feel that, well, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, I just did not have a choice. It’s a funny thing this idea of decisions being made for you, of how one becomes involved in an intractable dilemma you can’t find a way out of. It doesn’t happen often. I know people say they met this or that woman and they knew she was their destiny. Not that that happened to me, mind. Fine woman that I married, but it was not that feeling. No, no. Not at all, but with Palestine it was like that.’
Rashid wondered whether Lisa was his destiny. When he had first seen her come into the Centre in Gaza he had felt so desperate for her he could hardly stand up. Then there had been her response to him. All that bright-eyed enthusiasm that flooded back at him despite the errors in his speech, the gaps in his knowledge (both of which could sometimes feel overwhelming around her). It was as though she saw a place and a purpose in him that no one else did. But it was not quite the same thing as Destiny. (‘Don’t say ass,’ she had said to him the night before – right in the middle of everything, ‘It’s so American.’)
Myres passed him a cup; it was not particularly hot and the milk had formed small oil bubbles on the top of the brown liquid.
‘My brother told me that you were in Palestine during the war,’ Rashid started.
‘Oh yes, I was there. As a terribly young man, posted there as a junior police officer. Not much choice about things like that then. Came from a big family. Too many boys. The first went to university; the second to the clergy; the third to teach; the fourth to the services, and then it was me and I was packed off to the colonies. Just missed the war, you see. Too young. Lost two of my brothers, though. I was still in my teens when I got to Palestine. Seventeen. Apish, foolish kind of a boy. I spent most of my time moping around wishing I had a girlfriend.’
Again, Rashid thought of Lisa. He could never call her his girlfriend in front of her, or to anyone who might know her, in case it got back to her. But what was she other than his girlfriend? They slept together, didn’t they? But when he had said that he loved her, she had looked two things neither of which were good: one had been indulgent and the other had been put off. She had looked put off. It was the only way that he could explain it.
‘But, you know, it got to the point where even I, clueless as I was, could not help noticing that things were getting really rather nasty. It just was not fair play.’ Myres appeared to be addressing an invisible commission of enquiry. ‘The sugar’s over here if that’s what you are looking for.’
‘What kind of things?’ Rashid asked. He tried to find in Myres’ face the features of the past, tried to make out whether Myres’ nose would have been distinguished or goofy, but it can be as hard with some old people, as it is with some babies, to tell what or where a face has come from, and where it will be going. Clearly, the man had always been stupendously tall, even now with his stooped stature he was a head taller than Rashid.
‘In my capacity as a member of the Mandate Police, we were required to go round the Arab villages on weapons searches. This was 1947 and tensions were high. Our orders were to go into the villages and search these fellahin peasants in their houses, often at dawn, waking the women, slashing through the mattresses, pouring the olive oil on to the floor, sifting through flour. For what? Occasionally we would find a bullet. Once in a blue moon we might turn out a pistol of some sort, even then it was often Ottoman and antiquated. And when we did find something – well then, it was out with the men, marched down to the police station, handcuffed and the rest of it. Women crying, usually.’
Professor Myres had not sat down since Rashid arrived. He did now, on a high three-legged stool.
‘We hung a man once. I was there. We found a rusty German revolver under a ledge in his well and a round of bullets. He told us that he’d sold half his livestock to purchase it. Hung him for that. All justified under the Emergency Laws of His Majesty’s Government in Palestine, the same laws that are now being used for closures, house-sealings, curfews, demolitions and the rest of it. All British, those laws.’
Myres raised his hands in a gesture of what? Rashid wondered, admission? Responsibility? Guilt?
‘Strung him up in the village like a sheep. Big, portly man. He was not the mukhtar, the leader, but he was not far off. Huge moustache and a cigarette filter. Could not get that out of my mind for some reason, that filter. Very dignified chap. The whole way through he was an absolute gentleman. Shameful. I think it was that cigarette filter that sealed my fate. But it would not have mattered so much,’ Myres continued, ‘I think it would not have changed everything for me – I am sure I would have found a way to justify it to myself, as the necessities of Empire etcetera – if it weren’t for this disparity of treatment, which annoyed me even then, wet boy that I was. You see, the Jewish immigrants were being trained by us, armed by us, when we were shooting Arabs for hiding a couple of rusty bullets. And then the Jews decided that we weren’t doing enough so they started attacking us, too. Well, of course, you know the rest of the story. By 1948 it was a total walkover for them. The Jewish settlers were – what did one observer say? – cock-a-hoop? No fight needed at all.’
Myres pushed the window open. A small pocket of autumn air challenged wet dog until it was absorbed by it too.
‘Disgraceful conduct on our part. A disgrace, really and truly.’
‘And the Kurds?’ Rashid asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know anything much about the Kurds. It just would have been a lot easier. Could have been the Armenians. Why not, indeed? Damn shoddy history all of them. I just know it would have all been different: the ability to get published, to get and keep university tenure, to get heard, not to have this hate mail, not to…’ Myres looked around his somewhat mouldy-looking purpose-built property, gestured vaguely. ‘Well, they would have given me my own office at the university, for example. Instead I am persona non grata, relegated to the backwaters of the Thames. All would have been different I can tell you, if I had not chosen the Palestinians or Palestine had not chosen me.’
Myres seemed glad it was out. It steadied his resolve. He wandered back into the sitting room, stately, expecting to be followed even in his humble premises, especially to be followed in his humble premises.
‘Now, young man, what do you have for me on this fine morning? What have we here?’ His pencil ran smoothly down the edge of the page of Rashid’s draft thesis, his tongue curled up at the ready. ‘Ah, yes, good. Good. I am glad you picked up on that point, I thought you would.’
Sabri, Sabri, Rashid was starting to think again, You so should be here instead of me, when he noticed some markings at the side of his essay. Next to the paragraph Rashid had taken straight from an email from Sabri on the topic were two question marks and a large cross and below, clearly marked, next to the paragraph he, Rashid, had typed out without looking at any other source, as an articulation of ideas that rippled away at the back of his mind, was a large tick and a word before an exclamation mark. Rashid leant closer to this man with his smell of old waxy things and cloth left in damp drawers for too long, he leant through the mist of wet dog to make out the word. A solitary, magnificent word scribbled out by an accomplished hand:
‘Excellent!’
It was unmistakable.
Chapter 20
Rashid had been driven through the area the restaurant was in on the first night he arrived in London. It had been a similar evening, post-rain clear, the gleaming black pavements pattering with feet. There had been hurry in the air as the street dres
sed itself up for the evening. And he liked the way that each building on the High Street had a different height, face, origin, but they sat alongside each other amicably, like members of a Cuban jazz band. The lights had been on already, many neon but others were strung from trees to the buildings across the road. Some of the windows were slatted with white wood and jutted out from the bottoms of the buildings like birdcages. Chairs and tables had been arranged in squares and rectangles under striped canopies.
On that first night, the street had been rich with promises for his future in London. These were bars and cafés that were waiting for him. They were places where Rashid would be known. There would be a cheer from the tables as he entered. His friends would pull him into discussions, jokes would be told, and they might even cajole him into playing instruments that he would discover an untapped talent for. He would be known. He would be loved. He would be free.
Lisa did not understand what he saw in these places. She had pointed out the number of chains, laughed at the prospect of going to a couple of restaurants he had named (‘I don’t think you can afford that place, Rashid’), and described the rest as ‘passé’, ‘singles joint’, ‘gay’. With a little time he had learnt to view the street and ultimately the rest of London in the same way that she did.
The sign for the restaurant Lisa had chosen was lit by bulbs in copper cups. In the window a carpet hung like a curtain and a clay pot sprouted gnarled twigs. Lisa was already there by the door, twisting her tube pass in her teeth. ‘You look beautiful,’ Rashid said, leaning over to kiss her. She winced. He wondered whether he had let the street Arab inside him (a horny vagabond hiding right there under his skin) slip out again. This beastly doppelgänger seemed to be making his appearance more and more frequently around Lisa. He was unable to get him under control. Rashid wanted to pull her towards him or to say something to lift her agitation, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. He didn’t know how it might sound. Perhaps there was a way of kissing her that would soften her, or maybe she would hate that, too. He felt taken over with Hey, pretty girl, come look at my carpets. I give you nice price and it made him unable to act.
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