Out of It

by Selma Dabbagh

  The cramps had started just when it seemed like it was all over, after they had carted her outside to sit in a bus shelter with all her things on a trolley, guarded by one of the uniformed recruits. It felt as though a lizard was trapped inside her. She felt its teeth and claws as though it was convinced there was a way out at the base of her lower back and it bit and scratched and pushed with a thick tail flaying out at the contents of her stomach. She bent over. Please. No. No. Not my period now.

  And the bastards had not let her get to her bag for a pad, a tissue, a painkiller, or to visit the bathroom, and when she finally got to the Egyptian side, they had decided to give her their special treatment, which was a room – God, that room! No, she did not even want to go there in her head – and a military escort (and it was not as though they could not have spent the money on something else). It was not until Cairo Airport where a cleaning lady had asked if she was OK, ‘Malik ya habibti? Salamtik ya habibti, and given her a stack of tissues, that she had been able to sort herself out a bit in the bathroom.

  A shower. I just need a shower.

  Chapter 24

  Iman’s plane had landed over an hour before, but Jibril was counting on his daughter being the last one out. Sensing the prod of Suzi’s phantom finger in his gut, he had ordered a skinny latte but it was tasteless, pointless, so he had got the chap to add a vanilla shot and then a touch of cream.

  A woman with lilac combs in her hair and matching nail varnish had smiled up at him at the sound of his ringtone: toot-a-toot, toot-a-toot toot. A recognisable tune by a nubile Egyptian singer Jibril rather fancied. Charming. He raised his eyebrows at the lilac woman – a look, he believed, that combined a sense of intelligent irony with nonchalant seduction. She smiled back. Ah, maybe he had not reached the end of it all, the end of women. Perhaps there was still time. He did have Suzi, and Suzi was Suzi and there was no trying to undermine that. He was a lucky man. But to know that the door to others was closed for ever? Was, quite simply, terrifying.

  It was Jibril’s fixer ringing. Telling him that Iman had been held back for questioning. Well, of course she had. What did the stupid man expect?

  He ordered another coffee before returning the lilac woman’s smile, but she got up and walked off before he was able to take it any further.

  It did not take long for the newspaper to upset him. He had read the Sheikh A bin B meets Sheikh B bin A to discuss bilateral relations bit, skimmed the runaway housemaids and discontented manual labourers section, sought and found some hidden nuggets of adultery charges and rogue sexual activity and (oh joy!) he even found a piece about further evidence of lesbian activity in school bathrooms. Jibril chuckled happily. Un-Islamic behaviour tickled him to the core.

  He braced himself as he turned over the page to the international section, his eye automatically finding the news from home. The same images seemed to have been repeating themselves for years now, the perpetual cycle of violence and diplomatic grins, dead child, stone-throwing youths, exploded car, crying woman outside a demolished house, grinning Leadership, dead child again.

  ‘The worse the loss, the more we grin,’ Jibril said staring at a particularly despicable picture of the Leaders standing on a golf course in Texas.

  ‘They treat their dogs better than us,’ said the young man behind the counter, gazing at the sprightly Labrador at the President’s feet. ‘A dog’s life would be a blessing compared to what some of us have to live through.’ He nodded, this time to the picture of a mother crying over her dead child.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Jibril had been having problems reconciling the boy’s face and Arabic with his badge. ‘Hi!’ it said. ‘I am ERNESTO. Welcome to Starbright®. I am happy to serve you.’ If he had to guess, he would have said the boy was the same as he was, only brought up in Jordan. ‘Mr Ernesto?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s only my work name,’ the boy said turning to Jibril from the milk steamer that was hawking and spitting behind him. ‘HQ designates our names and market research has found that Spanish names are more amenable to the clientele. My true name is Salem Abu Wazir.’

  ‘Abu Wazir? You are from…? You are from my village?’ Jibril named his village, to which the manager raised his eyebrows.

  ‘You know the Abu Wazirs? You know my family?’

  The café was filling out. A woman with prawn skin was leaning down close to Jibril’s legs tapping over a chocolate cake with a fingernail, her cleavage a gathering of creases and sunspots.

  ‘Know your family? Know your family?’ Jibril exclaimed. ‘I practically am your family! I am Jibril Mujahed, the Mujaheds and the Abu Wazirs have married each other for years. Centuries, in fact, since the time of the Crusades.’

  The boy laid out a piece of cake on a plate for his customer and looked up, bemused.

  ‘I’ve heard of you, Ammo, Uncle. You were with the Outside Leadership, were you not?’

  The boy was a bit spotty. His pimples had white tips and clustered together around his nostrils. Other than that, he would be a fairly good-looking chap if he calmed down on the hair cream a bit.

  ‘I was with the Organisation. Yes. Not any more though. Left it years ago. And you’re…? A manager here?’

  ‘I manage all the airport branches. We had two outlets when I started; now we have fourteen. It’s a growth industry.’

  ‘A franchise, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course.’ The boy, Salem Abu Wazir (Abu Wazir, eh?), turned back to his staff. A queue was forming of servicemen, businessmen and backpackers. All pushed up behind Jibril to see into the counter. Jibril thought of trying to recreate their village using the salt and pepper pots to show this boy where the Abu Wazir house had been compared to the Mujahed’s, but it would be difficult as the village had been built on the slopes of two hills and the houses had been like cubes stacked up the sides.

  Jibril could quite clearly see and feel himself as a child in Palestine. When he was there he wore shorts and a dangly belt, always (the outfit had been frozen in a photograph). Behind him, the village was a series of blocks and arches, rough stone straddling from one building to another in semicircles, arched windows, domes smoothed over with sand and outdoor staircases. There were days when the smell of his village would come and sit on his nose like a flirtatious djinn. He would wake from a dream and feel himself boyish, a spirit running through alleyways, over roofs, in the olive groves, leaping in the sun, a sun that was always bright but never harsh. And then at other times (it was there in him), when he had maybe drunk a bit too much, or been talking to someone who knew his village or a similar village, he would suddenly feel like saying, ‘Yes, that place! How about it? How about we go back and see how that place is doing?’ as though he had just gone around a corner and if he were to turn back quickly enough it would be there. But it would take less time than the words took to get to his mouth for him to realise that it was absurd. He could never go back to that place, it had been sealed off to him for ever, blown to the sky with explosives then flattened to the ground with bulldozers, built over with tarmac, lived on top of by other people.

  People of a faith he didn’t have.

  He tried to go back to his newspaper, but Abu Wazir, eh? He wished it would stop affecting him. He wished he didn’t care. He wished that he were free of it all. It was now almost eight years since he left the Organisation and all political involvement with it, but it still got to him. When Jibril announced that he was leaving, their Leader had looked him hard in the eye. ‘You can leave the Organisation, Jibril,’ he had said. ‘Of course, Jibril, we do not want you to leave, for you to leave is your choice. But, Jibril, you must understand that you can leave the Organisation but the Organisation will never leave you.’ Jibril did not know what that meant, but to be safe he had decided to treat it as a threat.

  It was true though, people still acted as though he was part of it. ‘This is Jibril Mujahed of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,’ his Western friends would say, as though they had a piranha in their fish tank
, and he had no idea how they knew. The Arabs would just mouth ‘the Organisation’ at each other, ‘Jibril was with the Organisation,’ they would say with a nod and that was enough.

  Enough for some of them, particularly those who had been in Kuwait, to never stop banging on about the fraction of their salary that had been deducted every month to support the cause. ‘So, your children went to school in Switzerland, did they? And us? Kicked us out of our homes in Kuwait because of your leadership and then what? Left to rot; the education of our children disrupted. And you? Went to live in Paris, did you? So where’s our five per cent? Lost it in the casinos of Monaco, did you? While our families rot in the refugee camps? Bravo my friend, bravo!’ He never encouraged any of this talk about the Organisation. No, he never encouraged such discussions. There was nothing he could do, anyway. It was all in the past.

  Not for the first time Jibril offered up a prayer of gratitude to this Gulf state that had taken him in despite his background and his papers, or lack thereof, and had allowed him to work. He thanked the glittering forest of duty-free shops around him, complete with their electronic moose heads singing Christmas carols, the three-floor high columns of mirrors, the polished four-wheel drives displayed high on velvet platforms. He even thanked the posterior of the cleaner squeezing out her mop. I’m so glad to be here. I’m so glad to be out of it. He had done his bit. No one could hold him to account for the Organisation’s mistakes. No one. He had wiped his hands of it long ago.

  ‘I’m waiting for my daughter,’ Jibril announced when it quietened down. ‘She’s coming from Gaza.’

  ‘I didn’t know that was possible,’ the Abu Wazir boy said.

  ‘Not directly, of course. She’s gone through the borders into Egypt and then been flown out. They held her up for days.’

  In the middle distance an electronic tape of red dots was revolving around a screen informing Jibril and other potential customers about the discounts in the electronics store, particularly the substantial reductions on portable DVD players.

  ‘You’re sure that she got on the plane?’

  ‘Yes, yes. She got on, and she’s here. They’re just asking her a few questions. Nothing to worry about.’

  Nothing that he knew he should be worried about, but of course it was possible that they had picked up on something. The message he had heard was that she, his mousy little daughter, his Iman, named after the belly-dancing star of all stars of the Cairo nights, was trying to get herself mixed up with some Islamic movement. Naturally, there were those who said that she would be backing the right horse there, if she wanted to side with what they thought was the winning team. That lot had been popping up everywhere: elections, coups, guerilla stunts. All action, that lot but not so great when it came to ideas or the bigger picture. Their time was up, Jibril felt and he was ready to celebrate it. He could not stand them himself, so dour and sanctimonious. He had never had any time for religion and saw no reason to change: God had hardly smiled on them this far; in fact he had verily shat upon them.

  Problematic generation, Jibril thought, looking at the Abu Wazir boy and thinking of his daughter. They might at best be capable of revolt, but that in itself did not make them capable of revolution; they lacked the sophistication of ideology that was required for that. Silly girl. He would give her a good talking-to. That was all it would take.

  More red dots. This time the text stopped and flashed several times before rolling along. Even the main Japanese brands had come down in price. Sixty per cent off the original price for DVDs. Flash. Flash. Sixty per cent!

  ‘Terrible,’ said the boy. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-five,’ Jibril replied, although he had the feeling he had been saying that for a couple of years now.

  ‘Terrible,’ said the man again. ‘It appears that it is our destiny to get hassled in these places; airports, borders, checkpoints. That’s our unifying national destiny.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jibril agreed. ‘Yes, yes.’ His tongue was dried out from the coffee. He considered buying Iman a present: a shawl, some jewellery, a peaked cap with a designer name on it, a diamante pin, a stuffed camel, a box of dates. She would need so many things that he was not really sure where to start. He squeezed, rubbed and stroked many potential gifts and found out their prices, colours and sizes and had reached the cash till with armfuls of goods when he decided it best to leave it for Suzi to get things for his daughter. She could take Iman to the malls. Lots of time for sorting her out.

  Happy with the thought of Suzi’s adoption of Iman’s upbringing (and feminisation; the girl really should be thinking of settling down), Jibril sauntered into the electronics section, where he remained, haggling over several seven- to eight-inch screens, until the fixer called to say that they were both through.

  Chapter 25

  It was good to hug her father at the airport, to find his smell of cigar, sweet chewing gum, coffee, sweat and aftershave intact. Held by him she felt small, young, little, and found herself so affected by the embrace that she did not want to talk afterwards, fearing that she might not be able to, but instead would squeak or purr like a baby animal. The hug made her able to overlook (and even to quite like) his shoes, which were a disaster. Like a pimp, she could hear Rashid saying. He looks like a Cairo pimp.

  But by the time they reached his car she was screaming at her father. She was yelling and cursing but none of it could be heard by anyone else except her, to whom it was deafening. The one-way flow of passengers out of the arrivals hall and the finality of the ten dollars and fifteen shekels in her pocket stopped any of it being said because it all prevented her from going anywhere else. I come here because he demands it of me. I’m held up and questioned for days and when I get here and I just ask is there time to go to the bathroom? I say I need to get something out of my suitcase and get changed. What time would that take? And he says, Oh no, no time for that. But yet he decides to take me to a café to fix me up with a waiter from some family he knows? A waiter? And working in that place? Has he never heard of the boycott?

  Iman, her father and their car were guided into the five-lane traffic jam leading out of the airport in silence. How insensitive was her father exactly? Was it possible that he was quite that dumb? But there did seem to be something defensive in his movements (the way he kept touching his neck, for example) that showed that on some level at least he was picking up on her annoyance with him, or was she seeing things?

  It was hard to tell what around her was real. She had seen a skyline of thirty- or forty-storey buildings, blunt blades pointing at the sky, but once she was closer it turned out that they were just outsized billboards. The skyscrapers on the road they were on were real. If she craned her neck upwards she could see their tips, flashing red and white. Some of the other buildings looked like they had been squashed by a giant thumb, to form pads for helicopters, smooth stepping stones for the gods. Where there was a gap between the towers of buildings, it was desert and in the desert a vertical grid of cranes grew up, their uplifted arms creating bulb-lit ladders to the sky. On the sides of the buildings fair-haired girls, hundreds upon hundreds of feet tall, giggled as they ate watermelons and clasped video cameras to their breasts.

  The newness and foreignness of this world around her sucked Iman in so much that for the first time she felt herself momentarily broken out of the chase that kept being rerun in her mind: her feet pounding down an alleyway after a man who was about to be killed, her body bent over. She covered her face at the thought that somebody else might have seen her (it was bad enough that the Ayyoubi man had).

  ‘Sometimes the traffic’s bad.’ Jibril looked out at the silky red banners fluttering down the centre of the road; Go to the Paradise Isle Where Life is Best, they enticed.He turned off his engine as did the other drivers. No one was going anywhere. Jibril peered between the cars. ‘It must be those construction workers rioting again.’ He fiddled around for news on the radio ‘…The rise of the Islamic party in the Gaza Strip has led to fighti
ng between the Palestinian factions, but as our correspondent points out, this could also mark the end to the widespread corruption which has marred the rule of the current Authority, the former Outside Leadership…’

  ‘Corrupt? Who isn’t corrupt in this world? Even the bloody Norwegians are up to it. For that we get this miserable religious mob ruling us? Corrupt? Show me a clean government. What’s this latest American war about if not about corruption?’ Jibril snapped off the radio.

  ‘What construction workers?’ Iman asked.

  ‘Idiots,’ her father said. ‘Idiots. They’ll all get deported in the morning, the lot of them.’

  Iman looked for the fresh faces of the giant-sized watermelon-eating girls among the passengers of the other cars, where middle-aged Western men stared hard at the stationary traffic, gripping their steering wheels as though they were about to be pulled away from them, women in black headscarves chewed gum with open mouths, East Asian women in the safari uniforms of the Chinese proletariat held toddlers in backseats, their foreheads slumped against the windows. An open-backed truck slotted into the space next to them, and two bearded men gesticulated to each other from either side of a suspended cardboard disc imprinted with the image of a Lebanese cleric.

  Jibril turned his engine back on and the cars started nudging up around each other as though trapped in a dense jelly. ‘Don’t worry, habibti,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there soon.’ He patted his daughter’s leg. Iman flinched. She had tried to wash out the worst of the blood from her trousers in the bathroom on the plane thinking that it would dry as soon as she arrived, because of the desert heat that she had heard so much about. But the jeans had become too wet and the airport had been freezing. The exposure to un-air-conditioned heat in the carpark had been brief and the outdoor air was perverse; dank and intimate, it wrapped itself about her, seeming to push at her temples and to exhale odours of sulphur and half-baked dough up her nose. It festered in her nose. Sweat released itself from her like pee and slid down her body between fabric and skin. Her jeans had only partially dried and Jibril had felt their dampness. ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘What happened? You spilt something?’