‘It’s OK, I talked to him.’ He patted his chest and closed his eyes. ‘Tell me when you’re ready and I’ll take you to them.’
Michal was still hugging me. ‘Give her time to rest,’ she whispered, ‘she needs a second to calm down.’ I saw them exchange muted looks above me, the way parents do over a child’s head.
‘They’re here.’ He tilted his head at the balcony window. ‘Down the road in Jaffa.’
She nodded and pointed at the kitchen. ‘I put water on to boil.’
After a few moments’ delay, I heard myself say hoarsely:
‘What’s in Jaffa?’
‘Aren’t they from Jaffa? He said it happened in Jaffa.’
‘What happened.’
‘The beach, where his brother drowned—’
chapter 35
I can see him standing here. Barefoot on the waterline, with his face to the sea breeze. His arms hang beside his body and his hair is tussled by the wind. I can close my eyes and picture his face, relishing the silky curls fluttering over his cheeks and the threads of warm and cool air between his fingers. I can close my eyes and see him standing with his eyes shut, surrendering to the wind, feeling it touch him. It gets through the fabric of his shirt, caresses his skin, his chest hair, the space between his collar and nape, and it slips into his armpits to dry the sweat.
His shirt is a light cotton knit, with pale blue horizontal stripes that ripple like the water at my feet. The trousers are his faded jeans, cuffs folded up below the knees. He dips his big, pale feet in the water, and with every wave the sand beneath them softens and they slowly sink in, imprinting the surface with the indentations of his heels. With every wave comes the cool, retreating touch of the water, lapping at his toes.
He slowly opens his eyes, and he is calm. Very calm. Not a hundred feet away, Siham and Shadi play in the waves like kids. Shadi stands waist-high in the water and slaps it with his hands, mixing and frothing the waves with cheers of joy, while Siham, with wet hair, splashes around up to her shoulders, squealing and spraying Shadi. Hilmi smiles at the wild sounds of Shadi’s laughter and at Siham’s thin shrieks. But when they call to him and wave excitedly, drunk with happiness – ‘Hilmi! Come on! It’s amazing here, come on already!’ – he just widens his grin and waves back distantly. He keeps moving his arm slowly from side to side, savouring its broad sweep, as if an unimaginable distance has opened up between him and them.
Now I see his hand drop, and when he breathes deeply, I fill my lungs and imagine the sharp, salty air he inhales. I can see his chest expand, the outline of his ribs visible through his shirt – and I can imagine his great, liberating sigh. I can see the astonishment on his face from here. His wakeful, dreamy eyes amble out to the horizon, where they float serenely, drinking in the generous curve of the earth as a bird flies low over the water.
My hand moves up to my forehead, and his hand also rises to shade his eyes. The sun is warm and yellow and ripe, beginning to lean out of the centre of the sky, and the white-hot midday August light blinds him. When his hand shelters his forehead and he blinks, his eyes cut away from the horizon to the pile of rocks on his right, and onwards to the desolate, narrow strip of golden sand.
For a long moment his gaze lingers on the jetty, watching a lone fisherman – the dark silhouette of a slim man holding a rod – so that he can memorize the scene. In his heart he etches the way the light dances on the waves, the glassy surface of the sea under the sun’s glare, the dimpled sand, the terraced rockery. And the blurred dots that mark three or four swimmers.
Someone suddenly calls out behind him: ‘Hilmi!’
He turns around and squints but he can’t see anyone. Not on the beach and not on the promenade. There’s no one there. He looks at the empty benches, the light posts, all the way back to the promenade steps, then searches for Marwan among the vehicles in the car park.
He knows there’s no reason to worry. It hasn’t even been half an hour. Marwan is still at the market and he can take care of himself. But the memory of the police cars in the square, and the thought of his brother walking around there on his own, prompt him to feel in his back jeans pocket for Shadi’s phone. Perhaps he also thinks of me when he touches the phone, and to be on the safe side he takes it out and makes sure there are no missed calls. Perhaps he expected me to see that he’d called three times. That I would hear the message he’d left when they got out of the taxi and he realized it was the beach I’d told him about, at the foot of Jaffa, the open beach under the clock tower. And perhaps when he looked back to the promenade steps he was also searching for me. Perhaps there was a fleeting anticipation that I would appear there, that he would suddenly see me, that I would have heard his excited message and hurried over to meet him. That it was me calling out, ‘Hilmi.’
Or perhaps not. In those quiet moments while he stood here at the water’s edge with his eyes closed, perhaps he heard nothing but the regular cooing of the waves and the moaning wind. No other voice crossed into his consciousness, nor a single worry or expectation. I want to imagine him in that simple, final moment before his eyes opened. I want to linger in him, until he looks back to the place where Shadi and Siham are playing. Until he discovers, suddenly, that there is no one there.
He glances quickly right and left, anxiously scans the sand, still hoping they might have come out of the water without him noticing. He looks at Siham’s bag behind him, and the pairs of shoes tossed next to the single towel. Again his eyes move – darting this time, squinting – back to the glimmering expanse, which now beats along with his pounding heart.
The waves that looked soft and tame before seem higher, and they cast a shadow. The sound of their rhythmic, hypnotic hum, which earlier filled him with comfort and deep serenity, now sounds like a roar or a strangled yell.
‘Shadi! Siham!’ You hear your own panicky voice. ‘Shadi!’ You shriek again, in vain: ‘Sha-di! Si-ham!’ Gripped with fear and an urgent spasm of sobs, you hold your head in both hands.
But then you suddenly notice Siham’s head in the distance, bobbing up from the waves, hair swept back. You see her appear and disappear, her head emerging then sinking back into the water. But you cannot see Shadi. Siham cries and shouts, waving at you desperately, but the roar of the waves swallows up her voice, and only then – with a horrible noise, too late – it all shatters inside you: Shadi is gone.
I can see his pale face, his crazed look. I can hear what he might have yelled towards the empty jetty – the fisherman, where is he? – the terrified whimper that might have escaped his lips, aimed at the distant bathers. Perhaps he turned back to the promenade and caught sight of someone, and he shouted and waved his arms wildly and pointed to the water, screaming and begging in Arabic, then in English, sobbing.
If he then saw the man respond and start running to the square, perhaps he wrung his hands again for a moment, debating whether or not to go into the water. But after he looked back and saw Siham again, floating and disappearing among the waves, and Shadi still gone, he knew he could not stand there watching, and he tore off his shirt and quickly tugged off his jeans and waded into the water with large strides.
chapter 36
At first you run. You run through shallow water, skipping quickly over and through the waves. You trample through water that feels cold, slippery, pulverized under your heels. Your face is strained against the sun, squinting at the wind. You run and hear yourself panting and shouting through the sea’s thundering groan. You almost trip when the water rises and wraps itself around your shins, and again a few steps later when it suddenly zigzags between your trembling, sinking knees.
You get up and keep moving. With heavy, bearish steps, you resist the current that keeps raking you leftwards and backwards. You pad over the muddy sand and row with your arms through the stubborn, relentless thicket of waves. They gallop up to break against your waist, they rise with a roar to flood you with burning, salty water. You turn your face to the side and keep pushing them away
in disgust, and again you are borne – wet and shaking on waves of warmth and cold – over the frothing water, bobbing up and down, rocking from one wave to the next.
All this time your eyes are torn wide, crazed with worry, searching everywhere. Searching around and around for Shadi. Flushed and stinging from the salt, your eyes scour the massive blue expanse that keeps swirling around you, empty and glistening in the blinding light. You can hear yourself breathing, and the waves thunder, towering up around you like walls, separating you from the still-distant, bobbing head of Siham.
Then the ground drops away under your feet. The mound of sand you were walking on vanishes when you take your next step and gives way to the yawning emptiness of an abyss. Your feet flutter, trying to brake, and your hands clutch at the air. Your breath is fast, hollow, tearing out of your lungs, and the water piles up on all sides, too heavy to bear, closing in on you. Your entire body is snatched by the muscular grip of a strong undercurrent that sucks you under, indifferent to your frantic kicking, and sweeps you into darkening waters – which now surround you, as endless as air – into the dark, cold bottom of the pit. Your mind flickers for a second with the possibility that this is the end: that not only will you not be able to rescue Shadi, but that you yourself are drowning. Then your feet suddenly hit the sand. They reach down and are shoved back against the thick heaviness, kicking up a billow of dust in their wake and soaring up with you.
You rise to the surface and ravenously suck in air, then splutter and cough viciously. You painfully vomit out the masses of water cramming your intestines, choking and spitting out their bitter, fermented taste, which singes your nostrils, and all the time your legs move, shaking with exhaustion, pedalling an invisible bike, and your hands try to grip the surface of the water, clutching, falling away, with your head thrown back and your face reaching up.
The bottom of the pit is infinitely deeper, the water lapping at your neck now. You look around, blinking fearfully up at the blue sky: that might be all you can see, a great sky spread low above you. The shore looks so far from here, further perhaps than the horizon. Siham, just like Shadi, can no longer be seen in any place that your fearful, weary eyes can reach – because while you were pulled down they both reached the shore. Shadi was spat out of the water in a state of collapse, Siham swam after him in tears. You cannot see the two of them out there, trembling and terrified, searching for you. All you can see is that the water around you is darker now, but it seems that if you can just hold on a little longer, if you can just paddle to the frothier, lighter waters, the waves might sweep you back ashore. Except that something happens then. Perhaps the wind changes, or a wave pulls you back and kicks up a viscous current that grips your legs possessively, insistently. A thick, dense drift coils around your ankles, wrenches your knees and hips with a force you can no longer withstand.
Screens of water are lowered, layer after layer of billowing curtains. Little by little the light is washed away and swallowed up by the water. Here and there fish wander, tails twitching, fins fluttering. Here and there pieces of garbage: a ripped plastic bag, a chocolate milk container, a string of buoys, a gym shoe. Shadowy threads of light spread over rocks and craggy stones, fantastical anemones, tangles of seaweed. There’s an old car tyre and some wooden planks. A fishing net is wrapped around the skeleton of something. Mossy iron stakes. A thicket of black seaweed. Shards of shells.
Further on there are crumbling fields of sand, pocked like the moon’s face, and grey beds of silt and mud and heavy alluvium. Clouds of glistening green and purple and gold arrive in continuous throngs, swerving schools of blennies and groupers, blinding screens of glass catfish and red mullet, a glowing swirling chain of peacock wrasses, another silver mass and the folds of a spreading accordion of red and black, and more mullets.
Your body is carried through the water, gliding along the current as though it were wind. Your curly hair is unravelled and your face shines, slightly faded, babyish, like in tattered old photographs. But your hands, Hilmik – only your kind hands look pale and furrowed. Old hands.
A mass of life grazes and nests here: beds of molluscs and snails and tiny bivalves, barnacles flourishing on membranes of orange and bright red, pale yellow cypress-like trees. A blooming thicket of sea lilies and sea sponges and forests of feathery ferns and inflorescences of seaweed. Eels and delicate starfish, quavering cuttlefish and octopi with long tentacles. Sea urchins and crabs, a chain of four lovely seahorses standing erect alongside each other like a series of question marks.
You flow through the water, the circular ripples of ink-blue and reddish purple slowly flushed away in all these blues, the blues of your rivers, the blues of the sky, the blues you always run out of before all the other colours. All those shades and sub-shades we saw that time, on our first evening, packed into thick tubes, now they blend and swirl all around and you float inside them and they wash over you, the day blues and the night blues, the green-blues and the grey-blues, the silver-blues and the china blues and the pale blues, all mixed together by the giant marine brushes and suffusing the endless liquid canvas.
chapter 37
We planned to go back to Washington Square before dark and get our picture taken on the bench opposite the fountain. We didn’t have a single picture together, and we’d wanted one for ages. That day was our last chance. By the time we got there it was after six, and the soft twilight flickering through the trees cast a syrupy golden light that was made for a photograph backdrop. But when we opened the box and Hilmi started reading the instructions, it turned out the battery had to be charged for twenty-four hours before we could use the camera.
Not one single picture from all those winter months. Not standing together at a crowded party, or alone, as we often were, with a tourist site in the background. No domestic scenes and no photo-booth strips. There was only the phantom picture not taken that day, in the pale-orange golden light of Washington Square – the picture seen only in our minds’ eyes a moment before we left.
‘No, wait,’ he said, and pulled me back to the bench. ‘Wait here a second.’
My taxi was coming at eight, in less than two hours. Where would we find a photography shop or a booth now? Or a tourist to snap a picture of us? I started crying about the stupid camera and flaky Hilmi who didn’t know that digital cameras had to be charged. My angry, frustrated sobs liberated the other ones, the ones I could no longer hold back.
‘Oh, Bazi… My Bazi.’ He put his left arm around me. ‘Is this what you want to look like in our picture?’ He held his right arm forward and aimed the camera at us. ‘Come here.’
The invisible eye focused on our cheeks pressed together, the tails of his curls falling over my eyes.
‘Ready?’ he asked tensely, trying to cheer me with a sideways kiss and a firmer embrace. ‘Smile!’
I replied with silence and a snivel.
‘You’re smiling, right?’ he insisted. ‘Are you smiling?’
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