Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘How else are you going to talk to them? There’s no other way. Stop arguing about it. We’ll go tonight.’

The night before, Naji had slept and they had managed to be together in a way that had they had not been for such a long time, and well into the next day he could feel himself inside her. The night had wound itself around them throughout the day, tying them back to each other. He had not wanted it to break. He had not wanted to argue with her.

Sabri’s car had been parked outside the gate for so long that he was not sure it would start. They had spent a long time deciding what outfit Naji should wear, trying to imagine what would appeal to the soldiers at the checkpoints and had settled on a sailor suit that had been a present when he was born. They were still fussing as they started loading themselves into the car, about whether made-up powdered milk bottles could be reheated and where the spare nappies were. They kept asking each other whether Naji was going to be warm enough and going backwards and forwards on the question as to whether it was better for Naji to be in a car seat in the back or on Lana’s lap in the front. They had been hissing at each other as Naji had been asleep. Lana said it was more convincing for the baby to be with her. And so Sabri had tucked Naji in on his mother’s lap and had put the spare nappies by her feet, the water bottle by her side and the dummy (wrapped in plastic cling film) into the glove compartment. He had walked around in front of the car, irritated, until he looked up and saw his wife through the windscreen, her head bent down to their son, her hair falling forwards and had felt the old pride that they were his. His family.

They had just exchanged a final ‘All right?’ as he had put the key in the ignition when Naji, predisposed to diarrhoea, produced something of such vast and gaseous proportions that it woke him up into a state of bawling indignation. Sabri had looked at his watch.

‘I’ll do it upstairs, it’s easier,’ Lana said, opening the car door, leaning backwards to get out, making her way to the porch, jogging the bundle of baby and blanket with one arm as she searched in her back pocket for the door key with the other.

They had been a while. Seven minutes. Sabri had waited. The moon had been full that night, an orange disk strung between the buildings at the end of the road shining like a Ramadan fanoos . Sabri had seen the bedroom light go on. He had heard Naji’s wails from the window and had been able to make out the murmur of Lana’s comforting. The crying continued as the light went off and Naji had only stopped as they entered the stairwell. Sabri had seen them come back out on to the porch.

He must have turned the key in the ignition when they reached the gate. He was not sure. It was a guess. He did not know what had happened. He could not remember. Something white and definitive had blasted reality from him and then they were gone. The psychiatrist who visited Sabri in hospital afterwards said that it was surprising he remembered so much. But it was all untrustworthy. If asked what his last memories were before the explosion he would have said that they were of being with Lana and Naji on the staircase (he could clearly see them walking down the stairs: Naji in a beige blanket with a satin rabbit in a bow tie on the corner, his hair tufty with patches of baldness at the back where its softness had been rubbed off by sleep, a face blotchy from tears, his eyes trying to focus on the thick blue ceramic tiles outside the neighbour’s door. There was Lana too, her blow-dried hair stuck behind her ears, lipstick remaining only on the edges of her lips, her hand on Naji’s back). But for all its clarity, it was a scam, that memory. A fabrication. He could not have seen them on the stairs. He had never been on the stairs with them. He had been in the car.

To hell with memory. It was like feeling around in basket of apples only to be confronted by a snake.

The fighter had pulled Iman backwards just before the strike and she had landed in a slump on her bottom, like a girl in a mood. Then he had pulled her forwards and lifted her up on to her knees, off the ground and away from the crowd that had surged into where the strike had been. Once he had her on her feet, he led her, his forearm around her waist, to the entrance of a derelict building where they could be out of sight. She realised dimly that they were in the entrance to the old Andalus Hotel, the one with the roof terrace, but was not sure what the hell the building was doing there. He was wearing the same green jacket that he had worn that morning and the gun was still across his back, but he had gained a new intensity, a focus that seemed to be her. All pleasantness had gone. There was anger in the way he grabbed her arm and dragged her there, and the way he looked at her was filled with unblinking contempt. It was a reflex, and she hated herself minutes after experiencing it, but she had found herself smiling at him in an attempt to dispel his derision. Her smile angered him more. He hated her.

‘Who told you to follow him?’ he asked. ‘Who was it? Where did they find you?’

Her heart was still pounding up in her eyes, in her fingertips and the palms of her hands. There was dust and gravel in her mouth and grazed into her hands and knees. The gentlemanly courtesy of that morning had gone. She had smiled at him like a fool, asking him to forgive her. Look, her smile tried to say, I’m only a girl, but he had refused that absolutely. He hated her like an equal.

‘You have to tell me who it was.’ It was an attempt at a shout but his voice faltered. ‘Who contacted you?’ He had a sickly look about him and his lips were dry. He appeared to have forgotten that his hand was still clasped on to her upper arm.

‘Let go of me.’

He was not up to it. She could tell that, even with her burnt eyelashes and the blast of caked dust over her face, she was in a better state than he was. He was breathing hard, his chest lifting and falling in an exaggerated way like an asthmatic and his hands weren’t steady. She pulled herself away but he grabbed her back into the porch. Her feet crunched on broken glass. They were in the entrance to the hotel. Circles were punched out of the sides of the concrete porch, while the aluminium swing doors, their handles all wrapped up with chains, were criss-crossed with triangles, where only shards of the coloured glass remained.

‘I know what you were trying to do.’ His tongue was sticking to the top of his mouth and filling out into the space he needed for it to function. ‘I know that you were trying to make contact with that man, Mustafa Seif El Din.’ He was barely audible above the panic outside.

‘I was not trying to do anything.’ Her voice took its strength from the weakness in his. ‘And anyway, it’s none of your business what I do.’

‘But it is my business.’ He coughed at the dust.

She dropped her voice. ‘Let go of my arm. Let go of me. I’m not going to run off, but you can’t hold me like this. Stop it. Bikafee. Enough.’

She pulled herself back from him and he let go, but she didn’t step back. She had no desire to be seen from the road, standing there with a man she did not know and was not related to.

It was not possible that he knew about that girl, Manar, and about the conversation. Even if he had been in the café it was impossible that he could know anything – Manar had gone in the opposite direction to her when they had parted that morning.

His breathing was becoming more regular although his eyes were still bleary. He moved back into the corner of the porch stepping on a drink can. The strong smell of urine overrode all others, even the burnt-rubber air, the rush of dust and bodies outside. Six men carrying an orange stretcher lumbered down the street in a running march like a pantomime animal. Iman tried to salivate, to spit out the grit from her mouth.