Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

It was true though, people still acted as though he was part of it. ‘This is Jibril Mujahed of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,’ his Western friends would say, as though they had a piranha in their fish tank, and he had no idea how they knew. The Arabs would just mouth ‘the Organisation’ at each other, ‘Jibril was with the Organisation ,’ they would say with a nod and that was enough.

Enough for some of them, particularly those who had been in Kuwait, to never stop banging on about the fraction of their salary that had been deducted every month to support the cause. ‘So, your children went to school in Switzerland, did they? And us? Kicked us out of our homes in Kuwait because of your leadership and then what? Left to rot; the education of our children disrupted. And you? Went to live in Paris, did you? So where’s our five per cent? Lost it in the casinos of Monaco, did you? While our families rot in the refugee camps? Bravo my friend, bravo!’ He never encouraged any of this talk about the Organisation. No, he never encouraged such discussions. There was nothing he could do, anyway. It was all in the past.

Not for the first time Jibril offered up a prayer of gratitude to this Gulf state that had taken him in despite his background and his papers, or lack thereof, and had allowed him to work. He thanked the glittering forest of duty-free shops around him, complete with their electronic moose heads singing Christmas carols, the three-floor high columns of mirrors, the polished four-wheel drives displayed high on velvet platforms. He even thanked the posterior of the cleaner squeezing out her mop. I’m so glad to be here. I’m so glad to be out of it. He had done his bit. No one could hold him to account for the Organisation’s mistakes. No one. He had wiped his hands of it long ago.

‘I’m waiting for my daughter,’ Jibril announced when it quietened down. ‘She’s coming from Gaza.’

‘I didn’t know that was possible,’ the Abu Wazir boy said.

‘Not directly, of course. She’s gone through the borders into Egypt and then been flown out. They held her up for days.’

In the middle distance an electronic tape of red dots was revolving around a screen informing Jibril and other potential customers about the discounts in the electronics store, particularly the substantial reductions on portable DVD players.

‘You’re sure that she got on the plane?’

‘Yes, yes. She got on, and she’s here. They’re just asking her a few questions. Nothing to worry about.’

Nothing that he knew he should be worried about, but of course it was possible that they had picked up on something. The message he had heard was that she, his mousy little daughter, his Iman, named after the belly-dancing star of all stars of the Cairo nights, was trying to get herself mixed up with some Islamic movement. Naturally, there were those who said that she would be backing the right horse there, if she wanted to side with what they thought was the winning team. That lot had been popping up everywhere: elections, coups, guerilla stunts. All action, that lot but not so great when it came to ideas or the bigger picture. Their time was up, Jibril felt and he was ready to celebrate it. He could not stand them himself, so dour and sanctimonious. He had never had any time for religion and saw no reason to change: God had hardly smiled on them this far; in fact he had verily shat upon them.

Problematic generation, Jibril thought, looking at the Abu Wazir boy and thinking of his daughter. They might at best be capable of revolt, but that in itself did not make them capable of revolution; they lacked the sophistication of ideology that was required for that. Silly girl. He would give her a good talking-to. That was all it would take.

More red dots. This time the text stopped and flashed several times before rolling along. Even the main Japanese brands had come down in price. Sixty per cent off the original price for DVDs. Flash. Flash. Sixty per cent!

‘Terrible,’ said the boy. ‘How old is she?’

‘Twenty-five,’ Jibril replied, although he had the feeling he had been saying that for a couple of years now.

‘Terrible,’ said the man again. ‘It appears that it is our destiny to get hassled in these places; airports, borders, checkpoints. That’s our unifying national destiny.’

‘Yes,’ Jibril agreed. ‘Yes, yes.’ His tongue was dried out from the coffee. He considered buying Iman a present: a shawl, some jewellery, a peaked cap with a designer name on it, a diamante pin, a stuffed camel, a box of dates. She would need so many things that he was not really sure where to start. He squeezed, rubbed and stroked many potential gifts and found out their prices, colours and sizes and had reached the cash till with armfuls of goods when he decided it best to leave it for Suzi to get things for his daughter. She could take Iman to the malls. Lots of time for sorting her out.

Happy with the thought of Suzi’s adoption of Iman’s upbringing (and feminisation; the girl really should be thinking of settling down), Jibril sauntered into the electronics section, where he remained, haggling over several seven- to eight-inch screens, until the fixer called to say that they were both through.

It was good to hug her father at the airport, to find his smell of cigar, sweet chewing gum, coffee, sweat and aftershave intact. Held by him she felt small, young, little, and found herself so affected by the embrace that she did not want to talk afterwards, fearing that she might not be able to, but instead would squeak or purr like a baby animal. The hug made her able to overlook (and even to quite like) his shoes, which were a disaster. Like a pimp, she could hear Rashid saying. He looks like a Cairo pimp.

But by the time they reached his car she was screaming at her father. She was yelling and cursing but none of it could be heard by anyone else except her, to whom it was deafening. The one-way flow of passengers out of the arrivals hall and the finality of the ten dollars and fifteen shekels in her pocket stopped any of it being said because it all prevented her from going anywhere else. I come here because he demands it of me. I’m held up and questioned for days and when I get here and I just ask is there time to go to the bathroom? I say I need to get something out of my suitcase and get changed. What time would that take? And he says, Oh no, no time for that. But yet he decides to take me to a café to fix me up with a waiter from some family he knows? A waiter? And working in that place? Has he never heard of the boycott?

Iman, her father and their car were guided into the five-lane traffic jam leading out of the airport in silence. How insensitive was her father exactly? Was it possible that he was quite that dumb? But there did seem to be something defensive in his movements (the way he kept touching his neck, for example) that showed that on some level at least he was picking up on her annoyance with him, or was she seeing things?

It was hard to tell what around her was real. She had seen a skyline of thirty- or forty-storey buildings, blunt blades pointing at the sky, but once she was closer it turned out that they were just outsized billboards. The skyscrapers on the road they were on were real. If she craned her neck upwards she could see their tips, flashing red and white. Some of the other buildings looked like they had been squashed by a giant thumb, to form pads for helicopters, smooth stepping stones for the gods. Where there was a gap between the towers of buildings, it was desert and in the desert a vertical grid of cranes grew up, their uplifted arms creating bulb-lit ladders to the sky. On the sides of the buildings fair-haired girls, hundreds upon hundreds of feet tall, giggled as they ate watermelons and clasped video cameras to their breasts.