Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

Abruptly and from nowhere, Ahmed Mahmoudi announced his arrival with a whistle that emulated a bird’s warble. He stood at the corner of the road dressed in the style that he had developed long before Rashid had known – or known of – him: an open blazer against a T-shirt, pointed lace-ups in a light shade of tan, sunglasses on his nose, his head or around his neck. There was a likeable air of a Rio beach about his outfits, of music videos with people in white linen, glasses twinkling on jetties, of boats with blue wind in their sails and bikinis on their decks. But his voice, nasal and menacing, cut through this impression each and every time.

He was typing something into the keypad of his phone. ‘Who were you hiding from over there?’ Mahmoudi asked, indicating the playground with his nose. ‘Hiding or watching, which was it?’ He didn’t look up as he spoke.

Rashid thought about the foolishness of the cat hunt and weighed it up against the alternative assumptions.

‘I was looking for a cat, a gingerish cat,’ Rashid said, laughing slightly. Damn it. The man was as slimy as they came, his fingernails long enough to make a tapping sound against the metal phone cover as he communicated something long and complex to someone distant (or perhaps uncomfortably near?), tap, tap, tap.

‘It’s cats now, is it? Not girls, just cats.’ He looked up at Rashid, altering his face to show Rashid the undulating horizontal line of stain crossing his teeth. His smile cracked at the sore on the side of his mouth. ‘You should be careful – there’s a lot going on at the moment. You shouldn’t be wandering about, acting all suspicious.’

‘I heard gunshots earlier, near here.’ Inside his pocket, Rashid turned the notes over in his hand, he just needed a small tab of the stuff, the equivalent of an eighth; he should have enough money for that. He would make it last for as long as possible; then he would try and find someone else or he would be out of there. He would not use Mahmoudi again.

‘That would have been Ayyoubi.’

‘Ziyyad Ayyoubi? What, making an arrest or something?’ Rashid remembered the gun swaying on the slightly stooped back of the fighter, the tying up of Abu Omar’s hands.

‘No, no. It was to get Ayyoubi.’ Again, Rashid noticed the tidal wave of scum across his teeth and a slight tick around the dealer’s eyes. ‘Man’s got enemies,’ Mahmoudi said, anticipating Rashid’s unformulated question. He took out a see-through plastic bag filled with bizer and started cracking the seeds between his front teeth. He dangled them close to Rashid, who lifted his head, No. No thanks.

‘They killed him?’ Rashid asked, trying hard to act as though he couldn’t care less.

‘Here it is.’ Mahmoudi took out a wrap in cellophane from his inside pocket and held it against the palm of his hand with his thumb by his side. His other hand was still busy feeding his mouth bizer and in the movements of his mouth the rabid anxieties of Ahmed Mahmoudi became all too apparent.

Rashid repeated himself, trying to keep the almost personal sense of offence out of his voice. ‘They killed Ayyoubi?’

‘No, but they will. They got him, but he’s not dead; it should not be hard to track him down.’ In the distance, up by the boundary fence, some tank shells thudded on to the ground, a helicopter juddered low over them. ‘They’ll try again. Do his car or something. So you should watch yourself, because it’s parked just around here. What is it? Are you doubting what I say? It’s not as if he can leave this place now, is it? Of course they’ll get him. Listen, you want this or not?’

Mahmoudi moved his arm out straight from the shoulder to draw attention to his closed hand; Rashid reached over to take the wrap and swapped it over with the money.

‘See you when? Next week.’ Ahmed Mahmoudi turned his back slightly, placing the bizer back into his jacket pocket, and counted out the notes in the shadows. ‘You’ll probably need me by then, huh?’ Rashid could tell just by the feel of it that he had not been given the quantity that they had agreed on.

It was dark, with only the one streetlight working and the shadows were long and ill-defined. Rashid slipped the hash into his back pocket. Screw the wedding, he thought again, and anyway, if the bastards struck as heavily as they were expected to (there were even two gunships off the coast), well then, with any luck, the wedding would probably be cancelled anyway.

The television in the living room was never turned off, or even down. A broadcast continued: ‘…the Islamist groups who have taken over de facto control over this area of the Gaza Strip are vowing revenge following the incursion by tanks and bulldozers and the subsequent demolition of over sixty homes by the Israeli forces…’

‘Anarchy,’ said Sabri. ‘We’re getting torn apart. They’re getting exactly what they wanted.’

‘Divide and rule,’ Iman said in a voice softer than her usual one as she was still dabbing at the skin around Ziyyad’s bullet wound with disinfectant.

‘And how we let them!’ Sabri exclaimed. ‘There’s the shame of it. There have always been examples of it, of how we killed off our brightest and best because they cast others in a bad light, but not to this extent. Trying to get rid of a man like this, we can’t even remember who the enemy is any more.’

He went over to the shelves and started smoking. Not a regular smoker, when Sabri did smoke, he tended to make a great show of it, never leaving the thing alone, tap, tap, tapping the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, puffing smoke up to the ceiling in a great dramatic sigh.

‘Do you think you should smoke around him?’ Iman asked, gesturing at Ziyyad.

‘Eh?’ her brother replied. ‘Why not?’

‘Just like Baba,’ she giggled. ‘Eh? Eh?’ She was imitating him when the knocking started on the door. ‘Probably Rashid’s forgotten his key again,’ she said.

But it was not Rashid; it was Khalil and Eva. Sabri had managed to remember Eva’s name and had told Iman that it was Eva whom Khalil had met in London, but it was not until Iman saw Eva, her Eva, standing there that she came close to believing that she was there, in Gaza, in her house.

Meeting them at the door, Iman blocked them from moving further into the apartment. She had closed the double doors to the sitting room behind her. However, the lock had come loose and the double doors creaked apart behind Iman as she tried to explain to Khalil, in Arabic, why he should take Eva somewhere else.

‘What’s wrong with that man?’ Eva said, breaking Iman off. She was pointing behind her into the living room to where Ziyyad lay comatose and half-naked in front of the television.

‘Nothing. Nothing,’ Iman said.

‘But maybe I can help. I’m a medical student; you know that. Do you want me to take a look at him?’

‘Yes,’ Iman’s mother, who had come out of the kitchen to see their most recent guests, said. ‘Yes, we do. Don’t we, Iman?’ She took Eva over to the purple sink that stood in the corridor against wallpaper depicting beech trees in the spring. ‘I have been trying to find a doctor to come over but I was running out of ideas. The only man I could trust has left the country and the others? Well, you never know; there are so many who are willing to talk. He has a bullet inside him, you see. We need to get it out. Not deep, it got stuck against the hipbone. It’s shallow, but it can’t stay there.’ Iman’s mother guided Eva towards the basin in the corridor.

‘I see.’ Eva had tied her hair back tight with an elastic band behind her head. She was washing and washing her hands, soap and fingers running around after each other in the dark toothpaste-splattered basin. ‘You know I’m not a qualified doctor. I’m just a medical student.’