Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

He walked around the room as he spoke, moving whiteboards against the walls, straightening chairs. He went into the kitchen and emerged with a broom.

‘You want to start clearing up now?’ Rashid asked. ‘Right now? I thought you were going to find out about Jamal? Don’t you think we should leave?’ The stink of the place seemed to be coating itself around the sides of Rashid’s mouth.

‘Sure. Yes. I just wanted to show you that this is all very superficial. We can clear it up in no time. See? We did a full backup only last month. Of course it’ll be a bit harder getting that data for Lisa, but not a total disaster. And the computers are just money. We’ll get the funding, see? Nothing to worry about, minor setback, that’s all.’

Khalil was brushing splintered glass into a small heap in the corner of the room, making the broom stop along the edges of a tile so that the lines of grouting delineated the pile of glass. Rashid put his hand around Khalil’s back.

‘Let’s go now. Let’s leave it for now. We’ll clear this up tomorrow. Iman will come and we’ll organise some volunteers. And gloves. We need gloves. You’re right, a lot of it is superficial. A bit of paint and it’ll be fine. But right now it really stinks.’ Rashid coughed.

‘I know. I know.’ Khalil kicked at a broken CD case on the floor.

‘Just leave it for now, OK? Let’s go and see Sabri and find out how we can sort things out for Jamal at least.’

Half of Khalil’s face was covered with the bent palm of his hand, in a gesture that was partly down to stress, partly to block the smell. The eyes that looked up at Rashid from over the hand expressed more affection than Rashid had felt in a very long time.

Two pairs of feet stuck out of one of the larger tents in the wasteland around the Mujahed home. The man’s feet still had shoes on, shoes that had been transformed into morose moulds of over-stretched leather, and the woman’s feet were knubbly and wide. The woman was wearing men’s socks with panels of pale leg flesh visible above them. The two pairs of feet were locked around each other’s ankles.

Lisa! Rashid ached at the tenderness of the connected feet. Lisa! Lisa!

‘Watch it.’ Khalil pulled Rashid back as he nearly walked into one of the zigzag metal joists that had been left sticking up out of the ground.

The group of fighters were by the gate of Rashid’s house. The tall man from the café who Rashid liked to think looked like him, their apparent leader, had managed to overtake the fat fighter with the pocked face and thick moustache who had told most of the jokes. They were approaching the Mujahed building purposefully as though they were about to claim ownership of it. They should take it, Rashid thought wildly . I’m leaving. They can have the house, and Mama, and Sabri.

Rashid was trying to decide whether they should have Iman as well (he could never quite decide whose camp she was in) when Khalil said, ‘They’ve got Iman too.’ Rashid looked behind the group and saw her straggling along, following the path of the fighters. She was hanging back, trailing a fair way behind them. As they came closer to her, Rashid noticed that she looked abject and spooked. She did not seem to see Khalil and Rashid when they arrived, or at least if she saw them, she did not appear to recognise them at all.

Two fighters moved around the back of the building, another banged on their neighbour Abu Omar’s door. On seeing Khalil and Rashid, the leader threw back his arm, Stay next to the wall! Rashid did so, briefly, before stepping forwards to see Abu Omar open the door with the look of a man watching his life belongings being washed away in a flood. His shoulders and back fell a little. He didn’t ask anything. The large fighter with the moustache pulled Abu Omar out of the doorway. It was completely unnecessary; he would have come out anyway.

Abu Omar turned his head towards the inside of his apartment where a tricycle stood in the corridor and members of his family were visible at the door’s edge. He took in his breath and blinked at this group of visitors. On seeing Rashid, he opened his hands to the sky as if to let fly some explanation that he had held captive between them.

‘You, Khaled Mustafa Hiya,’ the leader read out Abu Omar’s full name from the document that had been handed to him, ‘are found to have collaborated with the enemy.’

Iman had moved around to stand closer to Khalil and Rashid, and Rashid suddenly felt her clutch at him. He dropped one of the torn bags of vegetables he had picked up for his mother and courgettes rolled on to the ground by his feet. Abu Omar opened his mouth and spoke to the air like a fish out of water. He still wore that morning’s pressed trousers but his shirt had gone and his vest was stringy; it could not make the distance over the mound of belly. A sad lip of fat pouted over his belt.

There was a raising of guns and the sound of metal being guided into place. Iman’s nails broke through Rashid’s skin. The fighter with the heavy moustache was up against Abu Omar, so close that they must have smelt each other’s breath. Their leader stepped forwards. ‘Not here. Bring him with us.’ The other fighter pushed hard into Abu Omar before pulling away so that their captive’s hands could be tied up with rope as the indictment was nailed to the doorframe.

The leader turned to his audience. ‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi, from the Patriotic Guard,’ he was saying, holding out his hand, when the door to Abu Omar’s apartment opened and the smallest boy rushed out towards his grandfather. He was met with a row of guns lined up at his head.

‘Jiddo!’ the boy cried out at the back of the figure who was not turning to face him. ‘Jiddo!’ Grandpa.

Rashid shoved past Abu Omar and pushed the boy back into his family – they had formed a wall of cheap cloth and soft flesh at the doorway of the apartment – and closed the door on them.

‘What has he done?’ Rashid asked the leader. ‘Mr Ayyoubi, what has he done?’

‘More than enough. I am not entitled to say more than that at this stage but we have evidence—’

‘Evidence!’ Iman spat.

‘Evidence that he has played a significant role in attacks on our resistance.’ Ziyyad glanced superciliously at Iman. ‘Attacks on our resistance and on us.’ He looked away now at the tents and up at their apartment above.

‘And his family?’ Rashid continued. ‘What will happen to them?’

‘If he was senior enough,’ Ziyyad said, ‘which we believe that he was, then the chances are that they will take the family in.’ He nodded in the direction of the border.

‘They? You don’t mean the Is—’ Rashid looked at Ziyyad again and towards the fence. ‘Seriously?’

‘Again, we would like to stress that we are sorry for the disturbance. Tsharafna. It was an honour to have met.’

‘ Tsharafna. An honour,’ Rashid and Khalil murmured, caught out by the man’s formality.

‘And now you must excuse me.’ Ziyyad gestured to his men. He waited for Iman to raise her face so that he could nod in her direction before he bowed his head and lead his men and their captive away.

There was no sound behind the door to Abu Omar’s flat. Rashid imagined them still standing behind it in a row as though waiting to either be photographed or shot, and then behind them, on their coffee table, he saw the tissues rustling in the breeze from the overhead fan next to the crystal bowls that held the multi-coloured sugar almonds for guests.

It had made up for the rest of Sabri’s day to see the fighters finally arrive across the wasteland. Every afternoon for several days now, Sabri had wheeled himself into the living room hoping to witness their approach. Bureaucracy! Bureaucracy! Even in these matters of internal security, the Authority was slow. ‘Do not underestimate the appearance of the leader, Ziyyad Ayyoubi,’ they had told Sabri when he had called the day before to ask why the hell it was taking them so long. ‘He’s more than he seems.’ And there he was, Ziyyad Ayyoubi, son of the martyred intellectuals of the revolution, the hope of the people, tramping over the wasteland behind his men, with what looked like Iman in tow for some reason. Iman? The leader did not look up to much . And then from the other direction came Rashid and that Khalil Helou friend of his, as if this was a spectacle they had all paid to come and watch. Roll up! thought Sabri, Roll up for the de-ratting that is about to take place!