Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

The newness and foreignness of this world around her sucked Iman in so much that for the first time she felt herself momentarily broken out of the chase that kept being rerun in her mind: her feet pounding down an alleyway after a man who was about to be killed, her body bent over. She covered her face at the thought that somebody else might have seen her (it was bad enough that the Ayyoubi man had).

‘Sometimes the traffic’s bad.’ Jibril looked out at the silky red banners fluttering down the centre of the road; Go to the Paradise Isle Where Life is Best, they enticed.He turned off his engine as did the other drivers. No one was going anywhere. Jibril peered between the cars. ‘It must be those construction workers rioting again.’ He fiddled around for news on the radio ‘…The rise of the Islamic party in the Gaza Strip has led to fighting between the Palestinian factions, but as our correspondent points out, this could also mark the end to the widespread corruption which has marred the rule of the current Authority, the former Outside Leadership…’

‘Corrupt? Who isn’t corrupt in this world? Even the bloody Norwegians are up to it. For that we get this miserable religious mob ruling us? Corrupt? Show me a clean government. What’s this latest American war about if not about corruption?’ Jibril snapped off the radio.

‘What construction workers?’ Iman asked.

‘Idiots,’ her father said. ‘Idiots. They’ll all get deported in the morning, the lot of them.’

Iman looked for the fresh faces of the giant-sized watermelon-eating girls among the passengers of the other cars, where middle-aged Western men stared hard at the stationary traffic, gripping their steering wheels as though they were about to be pulled away from them, women in black headscarves chewed gum with open mouths, East Asian women in the safari uniforms of the Chinese proletariat held toddlers in backseats, their foreheads slumped against the windows. An open-backed truck slotted into the space next to them, and two bearded men gesticulated to each other from either side of a suspended cardboard disc imprinted with the image of a Lebanese cleric.

Jibril turned his engine back on and the cars started nudging up around each other as though trapped in a dense jelly. ‘Don’t worry, habibti ,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there soon.’ He patted his daughter’s leg. Iman flinched. She had tried to wash out the worst of the blood from her trousers in the bathroom on the plane thinking that it would dry as soon as she arrived, because of the desert heat that she had heard so much about. But the jeans had become too wet and the airport had been freezing. The exposure to un-air-conditioned heat in the carpark had been brief and the outdoor air was perverse; dank and intimate, it wrapped itself about her, seeming to push at her temples and to exhale odours of sulphur and half-baked dough up her nose. It festered in her nose. Sweat released itself from her like pee and slid down her body between fabric and skin. Her jeans had only partially dried and Jibril had felt their dampness. ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘What happened? You spilt something?’

‘No, I… I tried to wash them: there was blood on them. I got my, my… I started bleeding at the border leaving Gaza and they would not let me get anything to sort it out. I was not allowed to go to the bathroom. That’s why I wanted to get changed at the airport, I…’

‘Animals!’ He banged down on the steering wheel. He jolted the car forwards into a space that had freed itself up to the right. ‘How can they do such a thing? How?’

‘I’ve heard worse. I’ve heard about girls who’ve been strip-searched, paraded and laughed at in their underwear, had their pads taken off them…’

‘They didn’t search you like that, did they?’ Jibril’s eyes were wild and demanded one answer only, which Iman gave.

‘No, not this time, but before, at the other crossing.’

‘Stop it! Khalas! Enough! I don’t want to know about these dogs. I don’t want to know—’

‘You’re angry with me, are you? Because of this? What could I have done? They would not let me touch any of my stuff. What was I supposed to do? Hold it in?’ The traffic was moving now and her father was trying to duck and swerve in and out of it, accelerating and braking in a way that threw her forwards against her seatbelt.

‘No, of course not. Damn it. Of course not. It’s just the situation. Yukhrub bait’hum, awlad ars, goddamn their houses, those sons of pimps. The situation. And what were you getting yourself into, anyway? In Gaza? What exactly were you trying to do? I got a message. Came from the new man, Ziyyad Ayyoubi. I got called into the Representative Office here, with a message about you. Did you know that? Not great, I can tell you, having one of those men coming to the flat.’

Suzi had been in her champagne negligée and they had been having a whisky; they had assumed it was the supermarket delivery boy bringing up some ice and Suzi had not bothered to put anything away, meaning that it was all still there when the official from the Representative Office had turned up in his flat, at midnight. The last thing Jibril wanted was to be brought back into the fold by that lot again.

‘What? That Ayyoubi – that henchman from the Authority – he actually tried to contact you?’

‘What are you saying? Why are you talking about him that way?’ The traffic was still all jammed up ahead. Blue police lights shimmered and multiplied in the mirrored walls of the high-rises. Jibril cut sharply across three lanes of traffic into a side street that they had almost passed, causing a burst of horns around them. ‘Who are you talking about? Ayyoubi’s exactly what we need. He’s very senior, very highly respected. Man of integrity.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe it was possible to be in the Authority and to have integrity at the same time,’ Iman sulked at him. ‘I thought that was why you left.’

Jibril stared at his daughter who returned his stare. Too much failed parenting was reflected back at Jibril in her look. He let the comment go. This time, anyway.

‘I knew his parents in Beirut, of course,’ Jibril said instead. ‘Wonderful, both of them. Attention-seeking, people would say, but I always say why not seek attention? If you can get it, take it. Bit snobby too, you know, in the way intellectuals are: Gramsci this, Fanon that, and I don’t know what.’

They had driven down a backstreet into a complex, functional part of town strung with wires and pipes; it was like finding oneself behind the back of an extremely large computer screen.

The way he had pulled her around and decided that she should leave. And then contacted her father? Who the hell did these people think they were? Who the hell did he think he was?

‘Where are they now then, his parents?’ Iman asked.

Their car was jammed in a single line of traffic between two rows of tilting cars parked up on the pavements. Jibril looked at Iman.

‘What do you mean, where are his parents? Don’t you know who his parents are? He’s the son of Mona Zahlan and Khaled Ayyoubi.’

‘Mona…?’ was all Iman could manage. Her skin felt brittle, her hands shaky and cold. She knew this couple. She had never met them; they had died before she was born but she had seen photographs of them with long hair and dark-rimmed glasses. She had read their articles. They were her key examples when talking about the policy to annihilate writers and intellectuals in the seventies and eighties. The fact that they were almost forgotten now had made her able to feel possessive of them. They were hers. They were the parents she had always wanted and should have had.

‘How old was he when it happened?’