Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘A boy, maybe ten or eleven. They were killed in front of him. He went a bit nuts for a while.’ Jibril took out the butt of a cigar from the black and gold dented metal cigar case that he carried in his top pocket. He was proud of that case. A king had given it to him. He lit the butt. ‘What did you call him? A henchman?’

‘He was in charge of the arrest of Abu Omar.’

‘And?’ Jibril asked. ‘And? So what?’

‘I hate these arrests. Killing our own people. What evidence do they have? What trials are held? Why don’t we have trials for these “informers”, these “collaborators” instead of torturing them and shooting them on a whim?’

People were streaming between the cars in the narrow road that they had driven into. A lopsided bus had cranked open its doors and workers in blue boiler suits with stencilled numbers sprayed on to their backs were jumping out of it, swinging multi-layered tin canisters, T-shirts wrapped around their heads, ragged checked scarves tied to their necks.

‘It’s not a whim; there are trials and they always have evidence, information.’

‘What? From other informers?’

‘Sometimes it is, and sometimes mistakes are made. But sometimes we’re right and we get the bastards. It’s a war. We can’t fight a war without information and if our information is stolen, our people betrayed, we are suffering for nothing.’

We are suffering, are we? thought Iman, looking at the prancing horse embossed on her father’s chest.

‘And someone like Abu Omar,’ Jibril continued, ‘well, there’s just no way they could arrest him without hard evidence. They’re too well connected his family, the Hiyas. No, that rat must’ve been up to something. No doubt about it.’

If she had known that he was Mona Zahlan and Khaled Ayyoubi’s son – it should not have made a difference, but it did. She tried to remember again what had been said, what she had worn, how he was, the sickly pallor, the stepping away from the puddle to make room for her, how he had looked at her, what she had said, but it was all terrible. Her chest filled piteously with the shame of that day: the awful desperation of it.

And for nothing.

Again.

Jibril drove them into a car park underneath a white apartment block with a green trim around its windows. All eight floors were uplit by bulbs of high wattage hidden behind a line of artificial vegetation.

‘Here we are. Home.’ Jibril spoke with satisfaction as though he were presenting Iman with a valuable gift. ‘Home,’ he said again, pushing for an appropriate response.

The glass lift on the side of the building took them up just over three floors then came to an abrupt stop. The city, that had been lowering itself beneath them, went out too. Only the cars were alight, chasing after each other in the new mayhem of the blackout, sniffing playfully at each other’s bottoms.

Iman looked at her father under the seedy glow of the emergency light. ‘A power cut?’ she asked. Jibril hit on the alarm button which rang dutifully, like a school bell. ‘What is it?’ Iman asked again.

‘Yes, yes, just a power cut. System gets overloaded. Grid’s not big enough. They’re working on it. They don’t normally last long. The whole place has just grown so fast, so furiously. It’s unprecedented in human history, this construction, this development. It’s not surprising that it sometimes hits upon problems, that sometimes it…’

‘Has a meltdown?’

‘Has glitches,’ said Jibril, staring out at the race track below them, willing the tray of electronic circuitry that was the city to relight, for the crystal buildings to glow, the antennas to blink, for the up-lighters to illuminate his building. They didn’t. He looked at the floor. ‘We might as well sit down,’ he said, pushing the suitcase against the door. ‘Could be here for a bit.’

It was starting to get hot. They sat next to each other on the suitcase, their arms sucking at each other’s sweat.

‘Suzi’ll take you out tomorrow. To get fixed up and everything,’ Jibril said after a while.

‘Who’s Suzi? And get fixed up how, for what?’

‘Suzi’s a friend. It’s Sousan actually, and you know, she’ll do women’s things with you, shopping and all that. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Sousan? Where’s she from?’

‘Like us, but from Lebanon. From the camps actually, but don’t let her know I told you that. She doesn’t like talking about it.’

‘What’s that?’ Iman asked as Jibril placed the rectangular object he had been carrying down by his feet. It was wrapped in the thick plastic bag that said BUY! BUY! BUY! FLY! FLY! FLY!

‘Oh,’ he cleared out his nose, ‘just a DVD player.’

‘Small,’ said Iman after a while.

‘Oh, it’s much smaller than that. That’s just the packaging. It’s very neat. Very compact. Seven inches and weighs less than 1.2 kilos. It’s just the box makes it appear bigger. I never know what to do with all these boxes. You want to keep them in case you move; you want to throw them in case you don’t. Boxes, boxes. Seem to have rooms full of the things.’

There was more traffic now below them and it was getting slow and frustrated.

‘Where’s everyone going during a blackout?’ Iman asked.

‘They’re not going anywhere. They’re just escaping their houses, driving around in their cars so that they can use the air conditioning. If they’re going anywhere it’ll be to the petrol station to try to fill up.’ Jibril pointed to a mass of traffic stuffed into a station across the road.

‘And after his parents died, then what?’

‘What the boy, Ziyyad? He went into one of the fighting forces, you know, the youth ones – the Lion Cubs and what have you. I forget the names now. Fought throughout the war in Lebanon. Held a good position, of course, a sort of officer role over those camp boys.’

‘Why of course? What did he do?’

‘He didn’t have to do anything. His parents were assassinated, weren’t they? Ibn Shaheed, the son of martyrs and all that. When do the sons of martyrs have to do anything? But to give credit to the chap he seems to achieved a lot.’ Her father hit at the lift alarm with his fist.

‘Rashid got a scholarship,’ Iman said.

‘Yes, yes.’ Her father hit at the alarm again. Brring! ‘Damn it!’ he said, kicking at the glass wall. ‘Damn it!’

The city flashed on below them, hesitatingly at first and then it was resolutely on, blindingly so. The lift dropped several inches before it lurched itself up again to the seventh floor.

‘What’s that?’ Iman asked about the scurrying noise and the tinkle of bracelets as they came into the apartment.

‘Must be the girl,’ Jibril spoke absently as the apartment began to start itself up again and a blast of air and dust came out of the vents.

A butterfly constructed of webbed cane and gilt hung behind the sofa in the sitting room, clattering in the draft from the air conditioning. Rounded stones were gathered together across the floor. Huge bowls supported significant quantities of sand and shells on the coffee table.

‘Eh?’ said Jibril, as though he had just had a fine meal presented to him. ‘Eh?’ he said again, hinting heavily that he was also presenting something to Iman. The sound of running water from a small fountain in the corner of the room made Iman need the bathroom. ‘Suzi designed it for me. You’ll meet tomorrow, eh? Tomorrow she’ll come.’ He continued to smile but Jibril found that the living room did not seem so pleasing now that his daughter was looking at it.

Iman’s room had the hostile smell of new paint. In the corner a tall pile of cardboard boxes teetered on to a shorter stack. The insides were covered in print: bullet points itemising the features of their former contents: 32’ flat screen, rotatable blades, spare batteries, stereo speakers, adjustable headset.