Out of It Read online

  ‘I didn’t cheat anyone; he just gave me some advice.’

  ‘You will get into such a mess if you start cheating and having things to hide,’ she said. ‘Such a mess.’

  ‘I never cheated; he just checked through it and made some points. We talked about it.’

  She stared at him, motionless. The cotton neckline of her thoub was frayed to a soft fluff. Some of the embroidered cross-stitch had come loose. It had been her mother’s dress, the only thing of hers that she had, and she wore it out like a rag. She must be seeing herself in the blue curve of his lenses. Her face would be as distended as one of her aubergines, her pinched nose ballooning into something broad and squat, her eyes receding back into an endless forehead, her teeth bucked out, her mouth large.

  ‘Stupid, that Hajjar girl. The harm she’s done. Gone against her family’s loyalties, playing into this factional outlook that is going to get us into so much trouble we won’t know what’s happened, and backing such a misguided mission. A park. To go and bomb a park? What’s the point of that, I ask you? The sympathy our enemy will get for that one. Military targets only. We must stick to military targets. The only person she killed was herself.’ Rashid’s mother spat something nasty into the sink. ‘Idiot.’

  ‘She’s dead, Mama.’ Rashid watched Sabri’s tray being prepared, the olive oil and zaatar laid out, fresh mint stirred into the tea, sugar added.

  ‘Deserves to be dead. The twit. Look what they did last night, supposedly in return for that. The hospital! Bastards.’ She looked up and flinched at the sight of Rashid without his glasses. ‘I should give your brother his breakfast.’ She gave Rashid a small squeeze to his upper arm before she picked up Sabri’s tray and left the kitchen.

  Chapter 6

  Sabri’s body was good at ghosts. It conjured up body parts that weren’t there and made them itch. For example, his right ankle was prone to bites. These were normally, he surmised, two-day-old mosquito bites; there was still the pressure of the fresh bite but the skin had broken leaving a scab. There was often also a recurring itch behind his left knee, where phantom sweat had dribbled down and caught itself in a crease, forming a little mat of hair on the way down. The big toenail on that foot often felt ingrown. But that morning it had been a ghost of her body part that had come to him. It was her nose breathing out the prelude to a whisper in his ear, and when he woke up he stretched out his arm as he used to, to feel for her waist under the twisted wrap of nightdress but she had not been there and his knuckle had hit the wall instead.

  During the night he had kept a record of the attack. He kept his notepad, binoculars and two sharpened pencils on the end of a shelf by the window in preparation for his eyewitness accounts. He timed strikes using a digital watch that he set against the bip, bip, bips of the BBC World Service. Last night was three pages of notes. The night before that had just been one.

  Documenting destruction.

  Chronicling chaos.

  Point by strike by shot.

  That was what he did and he liked to think he did it well.

  His room had shelves all along the floor that went up higher than Sabri could reach. Each shelf was partly supported by the books underneath it. Many of the books lay horizontally, some diagonally. The sight of his books calmed him whenever he entered the room; they appeared to talk to each other like old men resting against cushions smoking argeela.

  A photograph of Sabri’s wife, Lana, and their son, Naji, leant back on its curled edge against the books; there was something nonchalant about its attitude as though it had been taken only the day before and that there were many more to come. Frequently it slipped on to the pile of loose papers and medical prescriptions that were washed up together into a heap by the slow movements of the room.

  Sabri also had a signed photograph of their former leader. This had been ceremoniously gifted to him by a delegation that came to the hospital after he had lost his legs. He handled this picture with a greater sense of purpose; from time to time, he would drop it on to the floor and roll his wheels over it. As a result of this special treatment, the face of the Great Leader of the Resistance had lost patches of its gloss and gained the appearance of someone who had opened a letter bomb.

  Sabri was tired. That was the problem. He had been up until the bombs had stopped, which was not until around dawn, and he could not stay in bed any more after that dream, or whatever it was. He needed a bit more sleep. That was all. Fatigue sat fat and greasy on his eyelids. A bad night. Too bright a morning.

  He could smell her that morning too. He was sure of it. Not always, but it had happened once when he lifted his head up from the page. He had just managed to capture it when Rashid had walked in. And then it had gone. He had tried to save that smell of her before. It was unique: a French perfume which came in a white bottle with pastel roses painted on it, a touch of coffee and cigarettes and her own sweat. He had found that smell on the neck of a shirt after she had gone. It was the shirt she had worn for that first evening together in a Jerusalem café and he had wrapped it up tightly in a plastic bag to save it. He kept the bagged-up shirt in his cupboard.

  He had broken the back of his work. He was sure of it.

  Sabri wrote longhand, listing points for additional research on two strips of paper; these were usually in a mixture of Arabic and English, in pencil. One was for book research, the other for Internet research. A tidier ruled card system denoted those areas that awaited archival research, mainly in London’s Public Records Office. He had written out the text longhand before typing it up, and now he was now doing rewrites. Not owning a printer, Iman had taken his work on a memory stick, a tiny thing no bigger than a finger, to an Internet café and printed it out for him in full.

  His manuscript (the word still secretly thrilled him) had come back smelling of cigarettes and cockroach spray. It now sat on his table, bound up in treasury tags, fluttering with yellow reminder notes. He did not pay any particular attention to it when anyone else was in the room, but each night he squared its pages by bringing its bottom edge down against his desk. He enjoyed the satisfying clunk that it made against the wood, and the look of the strips of light and dark of the pages clustered together as seen from the side.

  After he went to the bathroom with his mother to change his bag she came into his room and sat across the desk from him, smoking and sipping at her tea. They did not talk about the bombing, Rashid’s scholarship or Abu Omar’s car, and disregarded the silence that yawned and stretched around them.

  ‘Where’s Iman?’ Sabri asked at one point.

  ‘Committee meeting.’

  ‘Until now? It’s past nine.’

  ‘They got the hospital, not the university.’ She moved about the room, picking up the wet tissue that had landed next to the bin, wiping the top of the radio with the sleeve of her thoub. Sabri moved his papers away and brought out some clean writing paper. The door to Rashid’s room opened and let out some music, that black female singer whose voice swept around aimlessly like a strip of lace on the end of a stick. The door to the bathroom opened and the pneumatic thump of the water heater banged against the wall. Sabri sharpened a pencil and his mother placed the glass cups back on the tray and stacked up the saucers. The bathroom door opened and closed again, then the door to Rashid’s room did the same. Rashid turned his music off before he left his room so that his steps down the hallway and the slam of the front door behind him were clear. They were alone now. It was time to go back to what had once been.

  ‘The Doctor,’ Sabri’s mother started, referring to her old leader, ‘he was very upset by what they were saying.’

  ‘This is 1971?’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-two, June.’

  Sabri’s mother sat back on the chair in front of the desk. She pulled off her headscarf and folded it several times into a neat little square. Sabri had not intended to work on his mother’s chapter that morning; he had wanted to get on with the section on the first Intifada but he could not depend on his mother
to be in the mood whenever he was. She spoke for over an hour and ended with the phrase, ‘Capitalist dogs’. He knew she had finished as she ran her fingernail between her front teeth and her hand went up to a loose curl to put it back in place.

  Sabri pushed back his chair and massaged the lump on his middle finger that appeared when he wrote for a long time. The past had softened his mother. ‘Rashid will be going to London,’ he started.

  ‘I know,’ she replied.

  He waited; he gathered his forces about him, poising himself to ask her.

  ‘I’d like him to go down to the Public Records Office for me,’ Sabri said. His mother lifted one hand up slightly in a gesture that he could not interpret, although he knew she understood what he was asking of her. ‘The documents are going to be released at the beginning of next year,’ he continued. ‘It would really help the book to be able to include them.’ His mother shrugged slightly. ‘If I knew of anyone else, you know that I would ask them, but I don’t know anyone in London.’ He had hoped he would not have to ask so much.

  She stood up and looked out of the window. ‘He bought a car,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ Sabri waited before going back to his topic.

  ‘It could be in the press. I’d like it to be in the book.’ It was as close to a plea as he was prepared to get.

  ‘Yes.’ She was not convinced. One of her thumbs pushed up at the knuckle of the other thumb as though it was a bottle cap that she was trying to pop open. But there was little else he could say. In her upheld profile and her sucked-in nostrils he was sure he saw something close to a wave of nausea pass through her.

  ‘Biseer,’ she said. It happens.

  Biseer. It amounted to the granting of permission, didn’t it? But her eyes had been unusually skittish and he would not ask again. Ambiguity was preferable. Rashid’s scholarship now took on a greater significance. Bilaks, on the contrary, it was great that Rashid was going. And the timing was perfect.

  He put away the documents concerning his mother and arrayed the first Intifada material around him. This was history of an uprising that he had lived through. He was this history right from the beginning. His proximity to the subject matter was what made it unsettling. He had known many of the key figures whom he was now trying to write about. Some of them had been heroes to him; some he had despised. But how he had viewed them at the time was an easier question in terms of objectivity, compared to the other problem, which was how he viewed them now, in the light of what they had become.

  But Lana was everywhere that morning. She would not leave him. His past with her kept coming back to him in these random flashes of memory where he could see himself, as an unwitting protagonist in an art-house movie of spliced film.

  That morning just the sight of one of the Declarations by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising had brought up a clip of memory, just one or two images of Ramallah at night during the first Intifada, right at the beginning in 1988 when, as he had described it, the battle for control of the shops between Occupied and Occupier had just begun. Repeatedly his memory showed them both bent over the clasps of the shutters fixed to the ground, where she was working on the lock of the shop next to his. He had had the tool bag with him and every clunk of its contents had chilled them to the spine. ‘Goddamn it,’ he had heard her mutter. ‘They broke the clasp as well, the bastards. I’ll need a drill to fix it.’ Not so pretty, he had thought, glancing at her in the streetlight.

  That was the entirety of it. It was just a snippet on the cutting-room floor in his brain. He tried to move the scene forwards logically, questioning whether they had managed to mend the lock and wondering what else she had said or done, and whether there were other shops that they had gone to that night. He had also tried moving it backwards – querying how they had arrived there and whether she walked in front of him or was there already when he arrived. But memory is mean and gave him no more than he already had. They broke the clasp as well, the bastards. Again and again. I’ll need a drill to fix it.

  He had started the paragraph on this era of history which he had contributed to making:

  The Palestinian strikes and consumer boycott that started in 1988 aimed to jeopardise Israel’s economy by the loss of its most important market, the Occupied Territories. In Ramallah, the battle over store closures raged for weeks. This was a battle for political control, between Occupier and Occupied. When the Unified National Leadership of the Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) ordered shops to stay open for three hours in the morning only and to close in the afternoon, the Israeli army would demand alternative times. Israeli soldiers would use crowbars to break locks in order to prevent stores and businesses from closing. In response, locksmiths and volunteers were organised to repair them at night.

  He had not known who she was at the time. He was not allowed to, so that under questioning they could say they worked alone. Not so pretty, he had thought. He was wrong about that. She had been exquisite, but even the memory of that was going. The more he thought of her face, the more it faded; sometimes he had to rush up on a fragment of memory to catch it unawares and then he could see her face as it was. For a moment he’d catch it and then his chest would stop, his breathing would increase and he’d find himself wiping down the leather surface of his desk with his hand, examining the granules of coffee in the base of his cup and having to push himself out of where he’d gone to with a mental kick.

  He did not remember a drill. How had they fixed it?

  He had been at university in the West Bank at the time and the next time he had seen her had been in the student café. He had not recognised her at all. She had been wearing uncompromisingly red stilettos that had made his friends laugh. They all knew that she came from one of the notable Jerusalem families so they had had the standard bitch about the city’s bourgeoisie. But her shoes had clicked out an irreverence that Sabri had found exciting.

  It was not until he overheard her talking in a corridor and caught her voice that he had made the connection with the girl curled over the shutter lock. He was so astonished that she was her and that they were the same woman. He had wanted to grab her arm and laugh about it. He had lunged towards her and she had looked up from her coterie of companions and without a single muscle in her face moving, she had conveyed to him that he must not, absolutely must not, do so. But he had known and she had known and they both knew that the other knew from then on.

  He started letting the relationship he was in at the time slip after that, after the look, the recognition with Lana. The girl he had been going out with had not taken it well at all. There were tears and scenes and he had had to avoid certain places because she would be there remonstrating with him. It was all so silly. She should have been able to tell that he had already left. That he had moved on elsewhere.

  But oh God, help him! What had happened to his body after that? Something forceful had ballooned in his chest. The more he saw Lana, the more it swelled. It was a skin stretched under his. He would awake in the morning so hard that it almost buckled him over. That was on the interior but his exterior: his face, his hair, his hands, and his voice, these could no longer be relied on either. He seemed to have discovered their true forms. They could horrify him. The break on the bridge in his nose from a fight in secondary school made his eyes squint. His hair was too coarse; his skin (however many times he washed it) had a murky pallor to it that could be confused for dirtiness and his voice around her had developed the panting undertone and the flurried laugh of a poof. His mind had been interfered with too; his sentences collided into each other, the sense of them piling up over each other into an incongruous mess.

  He had found out the following about her: she studied history, her tutors thought very highly of her, her English was excellent, she was privately educated and she spoke German too. She was also Christian, but he did not see that as being much of a problem. He could see that she had a large group of friends, but there was not one specific boyfriend (the word alone made him sick)
hanging around her as far as he could tell. Sabri came to notice other things about her too: that she was normally the one leading a debate, that however big the group sitting with her was, she would be the one to talk after everyone else and that they always urged her to speak. In her appliqué bag she carried flyers that she pinned neatly to the noticeboards in the hall, carefully moving aside those posters that they overlapped with. The notices were typed on a word processor and just said: ‘NO. They are NOT the answer.’

  One of Sabri’s friends had told him that she was to run against him in the student elections. He mentioned it casually, in the same tone that they had commented on her shoes, after carefully discussing what the religious parties were saying and the other candidates put forward by the Leadership. ‘But which party is she running for?’ Sabri had asked.

  ‘She’s running as an independent,’ his friend had replied and they found that hilarious too. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ they had said to all his questions. ‘She is not your worry.’ But by then, she was.

  He had been completely taken.

  He was not able to get high enough to see most of Abu Omar’s garden when he pushed himself up by the window. He could only make out the far corners of it. But in one of these, Abu Omar’s middle grandson, Wael, had taken to playing at this time of day. He said he was playing, but Sabri recognised that you could not really say such a thing about a boy as old as Wael now was. Sabri was sure that the boy went to that corner just so that Sabri could see him. He seemed to be constructing a sort of rat trap out of fencing this morning, manipulating some old wiring he had found and placing strips of fruit peel inside it. He had some kind of guillotine for a door. Ingenious, Sabri thought with satisfaction at the engineering of it. Sabri liked the boy’s love of bedevilling everything and everyone; the kid exasperated his family. The boy looked up, gave Sabri a dismissive glance, then looked away. Sabri pretended to write in one of the notebooks that he had poised for the moment that the boy would do this and watched the boy bending the meshing a little more, before going back to his desk.