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  ‘You wanted a role.’ Manar chose her words studiously. ‘They are not giving you one are they?’

  ‘I have to find my own role.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Manar did not move, but nodded. ‘Exactly. But I think I could give you some help with that. There are people—’

  ‘What people?’ Iman asked.

  Manar did not reply but closed her eyes slowly as though they had together chosen to listen to the swish and slop of the mop on tiles and dragging back of the sea on the sand.

  ‘Manar, maybe we can talk another time? I want to get home. I don’t know what’s happened to my family. And besides, you heard the chairwoman, she reached her conclusions and I am not part of them.’

  ‘You can do better than this. There are people who asked me to talk to you.’

  ‘Who can want to talk to me?’ Disquiet came over Iman together with a sense that she needed to listen to everything in order to be able to recall this conversation verbatim for Sabri who would be able to tell her what it all meant.

  ‘It’s OK Iman. I have been listening to what you say in there. You are right about making a difference.’ The statement was delivered with significance, like a medal dropped around Iman’s neck. ‘You were right to come back to Palestine. You do have a role here.’

  ‘And what is my role?’ Iman’s bag rattled on her arm. Her house keys, a lighter and some children’s bangles that a girl she taught had given her knocked together, ‘Who are you talking about when you say “we”? I don’t get this “we’’.’

  ‘A group. A serious group.’ Manar replied. ‘We don’t meet, not like this. It is a question of being contacted. It just depends whether you are ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘To make a difference. To really impact the situation.’ Manar’s pretty ringless hand rested on Iman’s arm. ‘They think you are capable of it. Only you. Of all of the Committee, they asked me to speak to you, Iman Mujahed. They chose you.’

  ‘They chose me? Who did?’ Exam-result expectation flushed to Iman’s hands. She always did well in exams. Behind her water sloshed out of the bucket on to the floor.

  ‘Yes, they did and I am here to ask you. You need to think carefully about what you do and say, because once you have been contacted, then you cannot change your mind. Our group is, as I say, serious, and we have to be – how will you understand this? –strict. Yes, we have to be very strict.’ Her eyes challenged Iman. ‘With anyone who changes their mind. So if you decide to do something that will make a difference,’ she gestured in the direction of the room they had just been in, ‘rather than all this, you know, talk, then you need to let them know. That’s all.’

  A jet struck through the sound barrier. The slam of it seemed to pull up the floor, shaking them and the contents of the room. It appeared to gloat that theirs was a world that rested only on a sheet. Boom! Iman’s ears split. Down the corridor someone – the caretaker’s wife possibly – yelled out for the mercy of God. The jet returned. Boom! Somewhere a pane of glass slid and smashed to the floor.

  You see? Manar’s lids said. What did I tell you?

  ‘The question is, are you ready?’ Manar’s smile signified that the conversation was coming to an end. ‘We knew that you were,’ Manar continued, as though Iman had replied to her, ‘We just wanted to be certain.’ She nodded before she left, leaving Iman standing by the main entrance with nothing but the sound of the sea shooting on to the beach and the residue of a limp hand on her arm.

  Chapter 3

  The emails were like certificates of release in Rashid’s hand. He’d got as far as the door with them where he waivered, undecided as to who to tell and how to tell them. It wasn’t really the morning for it.

  He looked back at the room that he was now destined to leave. Brown corn bent in the wind along the hem of his curtains. Half-drawn, the curtains let in the light, but kept out most of the view. Between them, in the middle distance, two smoke spirals were pulled and twisted by their own clouds. A darker stretch of smoke stemmed out of the hospital. Black clouds spumed across the sky.

  Rashid went to the window for a closer inspection of it all. Was it possible that the building teetering on concrete legs across the wasteland had tilted further since the day before? He leant his head to one side. Maybe it was his vision that needed altering. Three cars crouched beneath the building in cloth covers. There were days when everything needed to be checked. The trees with the sea beyond them, were all aadi, normal. The cars were aadi, too. The tents with his neighbours in them were the same as ever. The odd thing – and it took a while to figure out what it was that he hadn’t identified yet – was not so much the smoke, nor was it the building, the sea, the trees or the cars, all of which had their place and were in their place, but those men. The men coming around the building were not aadi at all. Not at all. There were two of them. Two of them and they were armed.

  Oh, piss off. Just get out of here for today.

  But the men neither pissed off nor did they get out of there. One fat, one thin, they moved around the garage pillars. The thin one leant against a car. One looked left, the other right, then both looked up at Rashid at the same time.

  He stepped back and drew his curtains across the smoke, the buildings, the sea, the men, their guns.

  There were days when brown corn was preferable.

  But the emails were still there in his hands. Yes! Again he flew. He was above it all. Levitating, aloof. Was off. To London. To Lisa! Nothing could take that news away. Nothing. He would not let it. Not anyone. Not anything.

  Chapter 4

  Iman found a changed world around her when she came outside. The sea was still ahead of her, the university building behind, the city curling around to her left. A hut next to the corniche that sold beach balls and puffy orange crisps still had its placard with prices screwed on to its side. Everything was where it had been the night before, but the air was now thick with the smell of metal filings. Smoke leaked out of the places where the earth had been hit, as though the horizon itself had been punctured; whorls of it twisted and expanded, walling them in. She could not place herself in that landscape. It seemed ominous, extreme, almost fake. It had been a visitation. The thought of Manar now made her panic. Manar was a visitation and now it was all over: the voice, the face, the darkness, the smoke and then the end. Over.

  The peachy campus buildings were not where she thought she would be when she saw all of this: the beginning of the end. A disembodied face in cheap, dark fabric. A role for you. We have a role for you.

  She was seeing things. Hearing things. She had been up all night and now the weird high of fatigue was making her delusional.

  The strikes were far from her home. She had taken that in at first glance. The smoke was far from their place. Her family would be OK. She found that she was breathing again, albeit cautiously, as though it was something that could only be done with deliberation.

  But there, under it all, below the smoke, the air was soft, almost balmy. The clouds were ruffled over the sea and the scratches of jet trails were already dissolving up into the atmosphere. Close around her it was quiet, still, fresh. The streets were empty.

  It was not over. It was not the end. Her family was safe. She was being melodramatic.

  She walked towards her home, past buildings that without the daytime crush that normally surrounded them appeared serene. The workers who had permits to pass through tunnels of wire and cattle gates to jobs on the other side had already done so. The rest, the unemployed and the underemployed, still slept. The streets without their people were new, foreign, hers. Graffiti spread over the walls and the shuttered shops. Tree trunks were wrapped tight with posters of the dead.

  There really was no one around at all. The curtains of smoke had created a veiled world around her that she had never been in before.

  Iman sat on the playground wall away from the signs of donors promising reconstruction. A ginger cat strutted out in front of her and lay on its side, ma
king a show of its belly, before it gathered that Iman was no fun at all and gave her its back. It leapt up on to the wall further down, lifting its head to squeeze its eyes at the growing light.

  This was her lot. This was her life, the life of her father, her mother, her brothers. This was their lot, their country, their place in the world. This was what she had come back for and it was for her to find a meaningful role within it. At the time she had decided to join her family in Gaza there had been change, hope, peace agreements, agreements that, however faulty, had enabled what before had always seemed impossible. And she had returned valiantly, triumphantly to find that there was no role offered to her at all, except for that of wife and mother, both of which were pushed at her constantly.

  The religious lot gave her the creeps though. Superior as well, that Manar. We have a role for you. Who were they? What group? They chose her? For what exactly?

  It was quiet enough for her to smoke, right there in public, sitting on a low wall in the street. No one would see her. With her cigarettes, she pulled out a creased brochure for a centre for the disabled that she had visited months ago. The walls for the centre had been covered with pictures of bandaged children holding up their stumps and smiling at the camera, their mouths full of tubes. The brochure provided double, triple and quadruple digit figures of amputees in loopy script together with advertisements for prosthetics: ‘Liberation 2000 Lower Limb Range’, ‘Empowerment Arms and Hands’.

  ‘A disaster,’ the receptionist had said when Iman had visited. ‘My boss, he doesn’t think. An organisation for the disabled on the third floor with no lift?’ She had plied Iman with paperwork. ‘You can help us – you were educated abroad, write us a proposal, get us moved. Up and down the stairs all day I am, the entrance jammed up with wheelchairs, the neighbours complaining.’

  That was what she would do, Iman thought, smoothing out the brochure. Something small. She could write a proposal. It was a start. Forget Manar and her group.

  She hurried with the lighter and the flame, on too high a setting, leapt up to singe a strand of curls, creating a stink in her nose.

  She realised as she sat there with the knowledge that the house was all right, that it had really got to her, the extent of her agitation about her family. Now it had passed, she felt the calm, the cigarette, the morning air, the sense that the world hadn’t completely exploded, that the destruction was only partial. The type of elation that followed on from despair was lifting her out of it.

  Someone was watching her. She could feel it as she sat there.

  She looked up at the buildings. The shutters were blank. There was no one on the street. Iman got up, dropped her cigarette and paced across the road pretending that she had purpose, somewhere to go, that she hadn’t been sitting, smoking on a playground wall in the aftermath of a bombing. There was mud on the road, the paving slabs broken. She took a small leap over some cracks around a tree’s roots then, sensing again with the sickening pump of a lost heartbeat that someone was watching her, looked up.

  It was her brother Rashid… but it wasn’t. The same profile, height, slimness, but not the same stance or clothes, nor the same look.

  The man was wearing a rough green jacket with large pockets and toggles like those on a child’s jacket, and was propped up, shoulder blades resting against the wall, as if this was New York or Paris and he had just come out for a smoke in a back street. He looked stuck on to the scene; everything close to the ground was sunken and sepia, but to Iman the jacket’s green was somehow out there with the sky in this other world where trees were allowed to respond to light, a world where Mediterranean sunrises were allowed to just be.

  He rocked on to his feet as she approached and gave her a familiar look, although she was sure she had never seen him before. Long and gaunt like Rashid, he had the high-cheekboned looks of a North African and the posture of a foreigner. He also had a gun.

  By taking a step backwards he indicated that she could pass in front of him on the dry pavement. As he did so, his gun hit against a shutter sending a metallic judder down the street. She stepped so close to him that she would have been able to smell him, had she inhaled any breath at all, and then she was past him and he had not moved. He made no effort to follow her but he was still watching when she turned back to check.

  Iman’s family lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-storey block that had been one of eight of the same style. The buildings stood on a road that could, with a little imagination, once have been described as leafy.

  Now the Mujahed home, unclad and progressive in style, with its long, triangular wall on its flat roof, stood alone in the middle of a tented wasteland. To Iman, it appeared to sit in an elephant’s graveyard of arched steel and clumps of concrete. Bent strands of metal twisted up, catching the pink light of dawn, and appeared like the legs of buried flamingos. Light caught on fragments of sheets and toys held down by slices of painted walls.

  The army had come one night months ago to destroy their area. They had demolished the neighbourhood’s structures, pulled out its roots, and dug up its foundations. Soldiers had rollicked over their mess in yellow bulldozers, chasing the newly homeless. The trees had burnt for days.

  Iman’s neighbours’ tents did not have groundsheets. Triangular constructions pulled to by wooden sticks, they sprouted limbs and blanket corners. That morning the Mujaheds’ home, standing alone among the tents, seemed to protest that it was the bit that had been forgotten. Knock me down with my friends. Let me lie with them. Bougainvillaea bulged over the wall. The one remaining olive tree stood like a fig leaf across the door. Not even buildings should be singled out for survival.

  Iman tried not to look too eager to cross the threshold into her building. It was essential that she concealed her desire to put a gate, a path and two metal doors between her and the mess outside, out of respect to those who were forced to live there. She strained to talk to the neighbours, to ask after their children, and to find something to chat about with those who were open to it. She could not offer help, she kept telling herself, because if she did, there was no knowing where it would end. But whatever she did, they always watched her and she always heard them in her head, commenting on her clothes, her foreignness, her virginity, her marriageability, or her lack thereof.

  And then she was through. The gate would close and she could forget them and their mile-long walks for water (the Mujaheds’ own supply was too intermittent to be shared), their haggling for cement and building materials, their tempers lost on bored, hungry children. She could close the gate behind her and walk down the stretch of tiles leading through the narrow, underutilised garden, past the entrance to Abu Omar’s apartment and upstairs into her own home with its smells of jasmine air freshener, cardamom, bleach and cigarette smoke.

  But today one of them had got in. There was someone from out there inside the gate: a bundle of an old woman with a tattooed leathery chin sat on their doorstep. She had pushed back a clump of vegetation to find the parts of the tiles that were still coloured and was running her finger over the traces of patterns on the Nablus tiles, proprietarily almost, it seemed to Iman. She was stroking them.

  The woman stood as Iman entered, but standing made little difference to her. She was still bent and lumpy. There was so much stuffed into the internal chest pocket of her thoub that it looked as though her breasts were distended well below her string-tied waist.

  ‘You’re back,’ the woman said, as though it was not just a matter of fact, but an acknowledgment of an achievement. ‘I have been waiting,’ she continued. ‘I’m the aunt of Raed and your student Taghreed. You need to come with me.’

  Chapter 5

  Something wild had taken over his arms, an energy that translated itself in his brain into a desire to spin his brother around and around right there where he sat. But as Rashid’s hands pulled back on the wheelchair handles, he felt the resistance of its brakes (the radio was on: The bomber has now been identified as coming from the Hajjar family�
��), saw the cup in his brother’s hand, realised the spill that would follow, heard Sabri’s voice over the broadcast, ‘Stop it! Stop it! What are you trying to do? What the hell?’ and felt his brother’s hands pushing his away from the chair. ‘Did they say Hajjar?’ Sabri wiped at the coffee on his desk with tissues, dabbed at the splatterings of it on his small lap. ‘Was that Hajjar?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Sorry, ya akhi, brother, but Sabri—’

  ‘Why did they choose a Hajjar? It was Hajjar they said, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, Sabri—’

  ‘What is it? You got the scholarship, did you?’ Sabri tossed a sopping coffee-filled tissue across the room.

  ‘The whole thing. Accommodation, fees—’

  ‘And Professor Myres is retired or not?’

  ‘Semi-retired, but he wants to do the thesis with me. I’ll be living somewhere in North London.’

  ‘He’s still going then. Must be well into his seventies by now. I suppose I should give you some of his work.’ Sabri started pulling out books from his shelves; not just books, tomes – one looked over a thousand pages long – slamming them on to his desk before ordering them by date of publication.

  Rashid waited by the window. There was a better view of the town from there; the smoke from the hospital was strong, darker than the rest. Downstairs, their mother was haranguing Abu Omar again – in the man’s own garden too. His mother wanted their neighbour’s garden. She coveted it and regularly demanded it from its owner. She also asked for his apartment. She had been proposing that they exchange apartments ever since Sabri had lost his legs over fifteen years previously (‘So that the boy can get out on his own, so we don’t have to carry him down those stairs.’). She was now, in a protest gesture of sorts, kicking at the bare soil, which flew up around them. There was no need to actually hear it. Rashid knew what she would be saying. It would be along the lines of: ‘You do nothing with your land, nothing, whereas I could grow tomatoes, I could plant thyme, potatoes…’