Nada Jarrar - Dreams of Water

‘That’ll give you stomachache,’ Waddad warns.

Bassam follows Father around in the garden carrying a heavy bucket filled with wilted roses. Father examines the bushes closely and expertly snaps off the heads of the flowers at the top of the stem before Bassam rushes to pick them up and put them in the bucket. They are not speaking but Aneesa can tell her brother is itching to be elsewhere. She walks up to them and takes baba ’s hand.

‘Ah, Aneesa,’ he says with a gentle voice.

Bassam tries to hand her the bucket.

‘Your sister can’t carry that, Bassam. It’s much too heavy.’

‘I’ll go and empty this,’ Bassam says sulkily. ‘It’s too full, even for me. I’ll be right back.’ But Aneesa knows he will not be coming back.

There are times when she imagines she can see her brother in the distance. He is walking down their street, hands in pockets, head bent low. He cannot be more than fifteen years old; his hair is sticking upwards at the crown of his head and in the fragile curve of his long neck, Aneesa sees hints of their childhood. She waves to him but he ignores her. When he finally stops, there are two of him, one standing behind the other, arms wrapped tightly around his twin. They are on a beach in moonlight and she hears them whispering to one another above the sound of waves lapping at their feet.

Somewhere between the village spring and the wilderness, beyond the fragrant fig tree by the grocery shop, Aneesa stands in the single sunny spot in the square. Her eyes are squeezed shut so that blazes of orange line the backs of her eyelids. She raises both arms, palms towards the light, and takes a deep breath. A gentle humming unfolds behind her forehead and her mouth stretches in a smile.

‘Aneesa.’

She opens her eyes and turns around. As Waddad approaches through the light and shadow, Aneesa feels a movement in her chest.

‘Come on. The sheikh is waiting for us.’

He is sitting outside this time, on a low stool by the front door. His slippers are covered in dust and the front of his baggy navy-blue sherwal hangs in folds between his thin legs. A young woman in a black dress and the customary long white mandeel brings out two chairs before walking back into the house.

Aneesa shifts forward in her chair so that her feet touch the ground.

The old man lifts a hand to shade his eyes from the sun, puts it down again and looks at her.

‘How old are you now?’ he asks.

‘She’s six,’ Waddad replies.

The old man grunts loudly and Aneesa leans towards him, placing both hands on her knees.

‘Our house was made of stone like this one.’ She points to the wall behind the sheikh. ‘But it was very small and the ground was uneven. The mattress tilted to one side when we slept and the soles of my children’s feet were always black with dirt.’

‘What else?’ asks the sheikh.

‘That’s all I remember,’ she says, shaking her head.

Waddad shifts in her chair but remains silent.

The sheikh shuffles his old feet and a cloud of dust rises up around them. Aneesa feels suddenly weightless and realizes that she has been holding her breath. When she lets go, the air comes out in a loud sputter. She holds a hand up to her mouth and hangs her head before looking up again a moment later.

The young woman in the veil is leaning over Aneesa with a tray in her hands. Aneesa takes a glass of lemonade and says thank you. The old man and Waddad are quiet. Aneesa sips at her drink and sees time close around the three of them in a kind of circle.

They are in the mountains and Aneesa, Waddad and Bassam are in the garden at the front of the house. It is summer and the pine trees around them and in the valley below give out the sticky scents of sap and strong sunlight. Waddad is sitting on the stone bench in the centre of the garden with a tray in her lap on which there are two bowls; one is filled with raw minced meat mixed with bulghur and the other with fried pine nuts and pieces of cooked minced meat for stuffing. Aneesa is standing beside her and Bassam is kicking a football aimlessly on the small patch of lawn around the bench. Aneesa wishes he would either stop or let her join in.

‘I want to play too,’ she says.

‘Stop whining,’ Bassam retorts and then kicks the ball past her and into a tree trunk just behind Waddad.

‘Bassam,’ Waddad says in a warning voice.

‘She’s always bothering me, mama . Make her stop.’

Aneesa lunges after her brother but he slips away and turns around and grins at her. She reaches for the ball, lifts it above her head and aims at him. He moves quickly to one side and the ball misses him.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Waddad says absently. ‘Come and learn how to do this.’

Waddad is making small, stuffed kibbeh which she will later fry for lunch. She rolls a handful of raw meat and bulghur into a ball with one hand which she pierces with the index finger of the other. Then she fills the hole with the stuffing and closes it up at both ends into two neat points, creating an oval shape that bulges out in the middle.

Bassam sits down beside her and watches carefully.

‘I bet I could do that,’ he says with a chuckle.

‘Your hands are dirty.’

‘I mean if my hands were clean.’

Waddad looks up at him and smiles before returning to her work.

‘Mmmm,’ she murmurs.

Aneesa bends down to pick up the ball and holds it closely to her chest as she watches them. She sniffs loudly and begins to move towards the bench but her mother and brother do not look up at her. She stops and looks at them again, this time more carefully. They are both very intent on the task before them: Bassam, focusing so completely on his mother’s hands that he seems to be equally involved in its success, and Waddad, her shoulders slightly hunched up with the delicate effort, revelling in the attention. They are perfect together, she thinks, and is surprised at the clarity in this discovery. She lets go of the ball and feels a shiver go through her body. I am growing up, Aneesa murmurs to herself and lifts her hands to her hips. These are all the things I can see.

The first time Aneesa sees Salah she is waiting at the bus stop near her home. He sits beside her on the plastic perch attached to the bus shelter and immediately the scent of fresh lemon fills her nostrils. His woollen jacket is zipped halfway up so that the denim shirt he is wearing underneath it shows through, and his hair, longish and beautifully white, is brushed back from his forehead.

‘Hello,’ Aneesa hears herself saying.

‘Oh!’

‘I startled you,’ she continues. ‘I’m sorry.’

Salah looks flustered.

‘No, not at all. I was just lost in my thoughts for a moment.’

She nods and turns to look at the traffic moving towards them. Moments pass before she speaks again.

‘Do you think that if we stare hard enough the bus will finally appear?’ Aneesa laughs.

Salah, my dear .

My other life seems far away now that I am back, but not you and not our beautiful adventures together. Those things and you I miss terribly. It’s not that I’m having difficulty getting accustomed to life at home – there is something of that, though it does not occupy my thoughts very much – it’s the ease with which I have slipped back into being here. Lebanon is like a second skin that does not leave me even as I wish it away. It is the here and now of everything I feel and do .

I imagine you, walking down the busy streets of this city in your long brown suede jacket, and when I go past the block of flats you once lived in, I wish I could run upstairs, ring the bell and find you there. We would make tea biscuits, I think, to remind ourselves of our once-Western lives .