Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘What about Abu Omar?’ Iman was looking at her brother as she helped her mother with the sheet.

‘The man enabled them to take my family. And my legs. We know now that it was his information—’ Sabri said.

‘You knew this and you didn’t tell me?’ Iman was looking at Ziyyad.

‘I wanted to, but we didn’t get the chance,’ Ziyyad started again.

‘You shouldn’t talk,’ their mother said. ‘Be still. I have some of Sabri’s painkillers. They’ll knock you out.’

Sabri felt uncomfortable when others rushed around him. Iman had gone out to get rid of any traces of blood leading up to the house. They had drawn the curtains, removed Ziyyad’s blood-soaked jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, put his gun in a corner by the door and then brought in sponges with hot soapy water and syringes for the painkillers.

‘I can do those,’ Sabri said, taking the drugs and unwrapping a syringe from its paper, easing it full from the bottle (how pleasurable the whole process was, just to think of the release of it filled him with such desire it verged on the erotic). ‘Do you know who it was?’ he said to Ziyyad. ‘Who shot you?’

‘I’m pretty certain he was from my party, I could almost swear it, but he was some distance away, which is why they didn’t get me as well as they wanted to.’

Ziyyad adjusted in his seat with difficulty. Iman standing at his side was trying to dampen his forehead with a flannel. Their mother left the room to get some bandages. Ziyyad clamped Iman’s hand tight, so much so that her fingers were bunched over each other. He was squeezing her hand so hard that Sabri half-expected his sister to scream, but instead she seemed to become invigorated by the pressure. Her face had taken on an expression that Sabri was not familiar with seeing in her and it made him look away. He turned back to Ziyyad.

‘Do you know why they were trying to get you?’ Sabri asked as their mother came back into the room. The injection was ready but if he were to administer it, the man might get knocked out completely. It was better to know before the man was completely gone who was out to get him.

‘I think… no, I know, that the other side – the Israelis – want rid of me, that’s for sure. It’s been the case for a long time. This is not the first time they’ve tried. The difference is that before,’ he was wincing at Sabri now, ‘my party would protect me.’

Their mother indicated that Iman should help lean Ziyyad forwards. Once the shirt was removed she cleaned around the wound with cotton wool.

‘Look, see, one of them missed. It’s just a scratch. But there’s a bullet still in there, lodged against the hipbone. It’s not very dangerous but we need to get it out.’ Their mother pressed close to the wound with the heel of her hand to slow the bleeding. ‘You should not have jumped over that wall; you’ve lost too much blood for such a wound.’

Ziyyad tightened his lips; his face was shiny and jaundiced under the overhead light. Sabri put the syringe in its kidney-shaped tray and wheeled over. Iman came around for a better look. Ziyyad continued to stare above their heads to the curtain rail that had come loose from the wall. The dusk call to prayer could be heard outside and a small cluster of birds fluttered up from their perches on the bougainvillea, chirping.

‘Anyone know where Rashid has got to?’ their mother asked.

‘I should’ve thought it through,’ Ziyyad said. ‘I really didn’t think they’d go this far, but I’d been upsetting them, one way or another. I won a popular vote within the party on a couple of things and then – maybe this is what did it – I started saying that we had to run a cleaner shop, that there should be greater financial accountability. I was not trying to discredit anyone, you understand. I just wanted to point out that our opponents were getting so much mileage out of these allegations of corruption.’

‘That would have done it,’ their mother said vehemently. ‘Can’t stand between them and their money.’

‘I’m sorry to have come here, Auntie. I am sorry to bring this into your house. I didn’t know where I could go. I left my car on the main street and I was going to take it, then I thought that they might have tampered with it or something. Wired it up…’ He strained again. His left hand hung over the side of the chair, slightly bloodied, at a distance from him. ‘Would you mind?’ he asked, looking at Iman indicating for her to wash it.

‘I’ve been meaning to apologise to all of you, and especially to Rashid, because I heard that his arrest in London was meant for me.’

‘Nonsense,’ their mother said. ‘Rubbish. He got himself into his own mess.’

Sabri caught Iman tracing the tip of her finger along the scratches from the bougainvillea thorns that had come up like rows of red machine stitching on Zayyid’s arm. What exactly had happened with these two in London?

‘No. I believe it was a tip-off from someone in my party. I’m sure that was the whole reason they sent me to London. It probably explains why the Israelis were so ready to grant me an exit visa. They just messed up and got Rashid instead.’

‘You do look quite alike,’ Sabri said.

‘Rashid’s thinner,’ their mother said, ‘but I can see some resemblance. Here, take this,’ she said handing him some mint tea after stirring several spoons of sugar into it, ‘then it’s time for the painkillers.’

Sabri gave the injection with care, but also with jealousy for the release that it brought.

‘He’s scared of blood,’ Iman whispered after Ziyyad passed out in the chair. ‘Phobic. And of crowds.’

‘Nonsense,’ retorted their mother. ‘A man like him, never.’

Things always took longer than expected – most people accepted that – but Khalil had obviously decided he could not wait and was already running off somewhere when Rashid arrived. By the time Rashid reached the wall of the house, Khalil was out of shouting distance, intent on getting away. Khalil’s red tracksuit bottoms (he wore these when he wished to look shaabi , like a simple man, one of the people) were moving off towards the sea. The tracksuit bottoms put Rashid off the idea of chasing him. Rashid had just reached his front door when a message bleeped, telling him that Ahmed Mahmoudi was now ready to meet, and so he retraced his steps back towards the town.

But something was going on. He knew that when he turned around; the smell of it came to him. The sense of it had been in his body since the sound of the gunshots, but it was clearer now. Something had happened. Such knowledge communicated itself imperceptibly, but absolutely. He felt he had lost this special Palestinian capability when he was outside in London, but within hours of being back, it had come back too, this ability to know that something had happened, was going to happen, was in the offing. This was both past and future. He looked towards where the gunshots had come from. The pigeons had settled back into their cages. The sun was streaking the sky with red as it set. A drone buzzed overhead, to the north. Otherwise, he could not see anything. There was nothing visible.

But something was definitely up.

Ahmed Mahmoudi was not there. Rashid sat for a while under the playground sign with its faded lettering, Brotherhood Park . He walked up and down the row of shuttered shops and considered the parked cars in front of him; they were in the same place as before, none of them had moved. It wasn’t surprising; only the leaders, fighters and ambulance drivers had petrol.

He looked for the ginger cat along the wall and then continued his search in the deserted playground but found only geckos and a heavy-faced tom with a bent tail. The street was quiet and, crouching in the wild grass of the playground, he thought he could see the carrot boy bent low behind the cars, but then he was gone. There was no sign of the cat. Mahmoudi was not there and the sky was being zipped up with drones.