Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

Infuriatingly, they had all disappeared just below him. If he were able to stand he would have been able to see them. He sat and waited for a while, not entirely sure what for, as it was unlikely that the punishment would be meted out right there and then, but he stayed there all the same, by the window. Alert, hearing the murmur of voices, a shout was it? The scream of a boy. Not the boy he hoped, not Wael, not the middle grandson. He stayed waiting, listening, hoping for a gunshot.

Got you! Ha!

The day had gone bad that morning an hour or so after his mother had left his room. The smell of Lana had come back to him again, teasing his nostrils with nostalgia. He had a shirt of hers that he had bundled into a plastic bag at the back of one of his cupboards and he had made a mess searching for it that afternoon. Piles of ironed shirts had cascaded down on him before he found it. The bag was dated now, Toys for Fun was advertised on it and that place had shut down years ago. The bag was not closed as tightly as he had remembered. Sabri had wheeled himself a little closer to the wall before he took out the shirt to sniff at it. It smelt of woven cotton and dust. A moth had eaten out two spots on the shirt’s front. He had put it back where it had been and looked out at the wispy smoke. He couldn’t find her in it. She had gone.

He had felt it happen. It happened often.

The ballast would slide across his decks causing him to list dangerously before he capsized completely and was down.

Goddamn the ghost smell that had been sent to tease him.

Afterwards, the lump of papers sat in the centre of his desk, pathetic. There was no point in it. No point at all. Now he could see that the thesis was flawed. The focus was wrong. All wrong. What he really needed to write about was us , not them. Not how they screwed us , but how we let ourselves be screwed by them . About how we were now about to screw ourselves . It was all contemptible and disgusting. No one had the guts, the balls, to admit it, to confess to it, except him. He, Sabri Mujahed, knew the truth. Our neighbours collaborated with them when they took our country in 1948. Our stinking feudal system allowed for that. Then our Arab brothers assisted (although they say that they countered, no, worse, that they fought against) in the takeover of our lands in 1967 and since then we have missed opportunity after opportunity. Pusillanimous diplomacy. Corrupt leadership. Can’t even fight. No discipline. A bunch of men wanting their own piece of the pie, yearning for cheap suits and desks with name plaques. No ability to work together, to fight together, to assist each other. It was one long history of betrayal. They screw us; we betray ourselves.

Sabri’s thoughts had continued along the same murderous trammels until the arrest of Abu Omar, and he was in a considerably better mood when Khalil and Rashid came into the living room than he had been in all day.

Khalil and Rashid hesitated at the door as Sabri was sitting with his amputated leg ends thrust out at them. The younger men wavered as though they had caught him naked. Sabri liked people (even his own family) to see him behind a desk or on the other side of the kitchen table, where he would slide down the sides of the wheelchair so that only his arms were visible and everyone could pretend that the chair was not there and that his legs were. He was getting a bit fat too, this last year, and tables and desks hid the rope of soft flesh around his midriff. Sabri gestured for them to sit down.

Khalil had never been in that room before and Sabri watched him take it in as he hovered around the pea-coloured velvet chairs. None of the large objects in the house held memories for their family. Fragments of personal recollection were attached only to the small things, the ones that could be thrown into suitcases and scurried away with as the family had, like escaping thieves or decamping gypsies, run from invasions, wars, upheavals, the cranking up of political heat, or the increased activities of professional assassins.

The small objects in the room were mainly souvenirs: an engraved wooden plate with the leaning tower of Pisa on it, the cuckoo clock that Iman had spent a summer saving up to buy in Geneva and which was still functioning to a rhythm of its own, and a tin replica of Big Ben together with its own static red bus that had been Rashid’s. There were also the embroidered cushions his mother had made, with the pictures of eighteenth-century white-bosomed French women in crinolines. The other furnishings had all belonged to Sabri’s aunt, anonymous furniture made in the Far East out of mashed wood and strong glue.

Sabri feigned disinterest as they told him about Abu Omar’s arrest and then appeared to only half-listen to the pink-skinned Khalil ( Naaim! Naaim! Such a soft, soft boy!) who explained, so plaintively, so touchingly about the feared fate of their comrade in arms, Jamal Baseet. Had it been another day, there would have been nothing Sabri would have liked better than to discuss prison with men who had not known it. He had some fond memories of his internment, of the camaraderie of the committees they formed, the lectures they gave. He even liked explaining torture methods to men who cringed. But it was not a day for reminiscing.

‘Try what you like,’ Sabri said. ‘Go get a lawyer if you wish, but they will have put him in preventive detention which means that a lawyer can do nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ Khalil said, laughing slightly, as though discovering that maybe at the heart of it all Sabri was just another fool.

‘Yes, a lawyer can do nothing, because they don’t have to show that your friend’s done anything. So what can a lawyer do except say, “He did nothing,” and maybe the judge will agree and say, “You are right. He did nothing,” and then how much further along would anyone be?’

Sabri rolled himself back to the television screen under the framed photographs of the grandfathers, their mother’s father smiling triumphantly as he sat outside the family house in Jaffa, their father’s father staring furiously at the camera. The television continued to broadcast the image of the overturned pushchair in the Israeli park.

‘Still not mentioning the hospital,’ Sabri said. ‘Shocking.’

‘I know,’ Khalil replied, unable to keep the impatience completely out of his voice. This offhand way that Sabri addressed him was all because of who his father was, because his father was a sell-out, a profiteer, a Class A prick. Khalil was sure of it. They never let you free of your parents. Even the leftists. No, especially the goddamn leftists, with their emphasis on equality of birth – disregarding poverty was one thing, but was one allowed to surmount having a political wanker for a father? No chance. These guys believed political wankery passed from generation to generation unaltered like an extra chromosome. ‘Could Jamal have been arrested because of his involvement with the Centre?’ Khalil asked with not a little pride.

‘That’s not the point. It’s of little relevance whether or not he’s done anything. It’s preventive detention so they just need to show that he could one day do something.’ Sabri, it appeared, was bored.

‘What about challenging the order on a technicality?’

‘The order is valid no matter how low-level the issuing authority. The burden of proof is on your friend Baseet to show that he is innocent.’

‘Innocent of what?’ asked Khalil.

‘Who knows?’ Sabri lifted his palms to the ceiling. ‘There is the rub. As he doesn’t have to be charged with anything, it is very difficult to show that he is innocent because no one knows what it is that he has to be innocent of.’ With that Sabri gave a smile that was particularly disagreeable. Idiot, Sabri thought looking at Khalil, setting up a Centre with glossy brochures and business cards and he doesn’t even know how preventive detention works. Twit.