Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘Miss Iman,’ he stepped towards her, and she smiled awkwardly as though she had been caught out doing something wrong, skiving in exile possibly. She realised that when he was close to her he had the not unpleasant effect of making her feel small. She could not say his name back to him in return. Since they had first met she had found herself addressing so many explanations to a spirit of him that his name – Ziyyad Ayyoubi – had become both irrelevant and far too powerful at the same time. It seemed almost degrading to reduce the sense of him to something so limited and arbitrary.

They were noticeable standing there. Everything and everyone she felt, must have stopped to observe them, the solemnity of them, the profundity of them being in the same space. It was remarkable. It had happened. They had done it. They were there. Together.

They stood as though they were waiting for someone or expecting something. He was smiling as though she had brought him news of great importance that would affect them both.

‘I’m looking for my brother.’ She wanted to dislodge his expectation although she needed it at the same time.

‘I hoped you might be here.’

‘You haven’t seen him?’

‘Your brother? No, I haven’t. But someone mistook me for him. An English guy wearing black.’

‘I think I should look around the square again.’ It was too heavy between them. She was not even listening to what he was saying. Was he saying anything? Something was definitely being communicated to her. She was concentrating only on his movements and the way he said things.

‘Yes.’ He shrugged but otherwise didn’t move.

Perhaps she had got him wrong. He seemed scared of something now, moving back into the bushes and the trees, away from the thin traffic of people. She had imagined telling him that he was right and that she had made a mistake on that day and had been stupid. She had already apologised to Eva, she might as well apologise to him as well. Have a day of apologies. Get it all over with in one go. Perhaps she should thank him for pulling her back like that from the explosion. You saved my life. Ha! She had gone as far as to think of apologising for the way she had addressed him then and afterwards, but now he was there looking so daunted by her (he kept looking away to the side) she didn’t feel that he deserved the apology for some reason. She almost wanted to insult him or to tell him to sort himself out somehow, to make him more of what she had wanted him to be.

‘He was with me and then he was gone. I don’t know where.’ She looked up and down the street and into the square. He made to speak but stopped and gestured something to explain his inability to do so. ‘I need to look for my brother.’ She turned self-consciously. She had hardly taken a step when he grabbed out at her as though she was a wallet falling over the side of a boat.

‘I needed to see you. I was hoping you would be here, in London. I needed to see you. I wanted to explain about Abu Omar and to find out whether you knew… Has your brother said anything to you? Did he tell you the history?’

‘About Abu Omar? Why would Rashid know anything?’

‘No, not Rashid. Sabri.’

The low evening light passing between buildings was straight in her eyes. He became a fuzzy-edged form in front of it.

‘I’m looking for Rashid .’

‘I know, and you’ll find him. He must have gone off. Leave him for now. He’ll turn up.’

A couple walked past them laughing, the woman saying something with an air of contempt. Iman could not make out what it was.

‘What about Sabri?’

‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ When he smiled she could see he had a tooth missing on the right-hand side, towards the back. She could see now, gathered around his eyes and mouth and streaked across his forehead, evidence that he was much older than Rashid and herself. They could be as much as a generation apart, but the similarity to Rashid was definitely there. He looked down the street away from the square. ‘I don’t really want to stay here.’ He checked around him. ‘There’s a place that I’d like you to see. There are things that you need to know.’

Above them something had ruptured in the sky and lightning cracked behind them.

‘We could go to this place. This way.’ He started to guide her then he paused. ‘I need to explain a couple of things,’ he said, stopping so unexpectedly that a woman behind them rammed her pushchair into the back of his legs. ‘Watch it, will you?’

He guided her along until they were on a broad street with glass ball lamps, fluttering leaves and plane trees with mottled barks.

‘There it is.’ Ziyyad nodded towards a white hotel that sat huge and luminous on the darkening road, a bulk of iced bullion sprinkled with a thousand and one lights.

‘You want to go to that place? That hotel?’ Iman recognised its name from a novel she had read at school. It belonged to a world of feathered women and men with slicked-back hair who sliced up the Arab world with sharp pencils after dinner. ‘We can’t go in there.’ She stepped backwards as though pre-empting a push by one of the liveried doormen.

Ziyyad ignored her. He took Iman through the lobby, walking just as he did on the Gaza streets, and did not seem to notice the cloaks of scruffiness that fell over them as soon as they entered the hotel. Tacked on to the back of the building was the bar that he wanted her to see, a glass and wrought-iron structure with mirrored walls and chandeliers. Glass bottles replicated themselves in a glittering cabinet at the back of the bar.

‘Here,’ Ziyyad said proudly. ‘What do you think?’

Garish, thought Iman. It’s been made to look cheap when it isn’t.

‘How did you find this place?’ she asked.

‘They wanted me to stay here,’ he spoke as though it explained everything but when he looked at her he could see that it didn’t. ‘The Authority. They made a reservation here, but when I saw the place I knew I could not take it. I don’t want them to be able to say that I accepted any favours. Any privileges.’

They stood at the doorway to the bar. Across the lobby four men with balding heads and ill-fitting suits had just arrived. Ziyyad stared intently at them. He did not move until the men did.

‘I have enemies.’

‘We all do,’ Iman replied.

‘And they all pretend to be your friends.’

‘Not all of them.’

‘Maybe not. But mine are out to get me. Come.’ He tried to adopt a different persona, a new smile for a new place. The bar glittered at them, ostentatious and uncared for. The hotel was not theirs, but she did not know whose it was. It could, she supposed, be theirs for an evening if they wanted it to.

It wasn’t until they approached the table that she realised how closely they had been standing and walking together since they met on the side street. She hadn’t consciously intended to, but it was as if she was compelled to step into his steps, to keep the space around the two of them tight, contained. They sat at a table and it seemed extraordinary to her to do so with him. She half-expected the weirdness of it to be picked up by the other people in there, but the drunken businessmen ‘ I told him no more than three mill and he went ahead with six ,’ and disconsolate tourist families ‘ We can do the Aquarium after the show, or shall we just go back to Oxford Street?’ were unable to see it.

‘Your family are well?’ He finally broke into the silence.

‘My family? They’re fine.’ She almost said, and yours? and then couldn’t think of anything else as she realised how bad it would have been had she done so. ‘I saw the end of your talk,’ she said. ‘I arrived in the square as you ended.’