Selma Dabbagh - Out of It

‘The Doctor,’ Sabri’s mother started, referring to her old leader, ‘he was very upset by what they were saying.’

‘This is 1971?’

‘Nineteen seventy-two, June.’

Sabri’s mother sat back on the chair in front of the desk. She pulled off her headscarf and folded it several times into a neat little square. Sabri had not intended to work on his mother’s chapter that morning; he had wanted to get on with the section on the first Intifada but he could not depend on his mother to be in the mood whenever he was. She spoke for over an hour and ended with the phrase, ‘Capitalist dogs’. He knew she had finished as she ran her fingernail between her front teeth and her hand went up to a loose curl to put it back in place.

Sabri pushed back his chair and massaged the lump on his middle finger that appeared when he wrote for a long time. The past had softened his mother. ‘Rashid will be going to London,’ he started.

‘I know,’ she replied.

He waited; he gathered his forces about him, poising himself to ask her.

‘I’d like him to go down to the Public Records Office for me,’ Sabri said. His mother lifted one hand up slightly in a gesture that he could not interpret, although he knew she understood what he was asking of her. ‘The documents are going to be released at the beginning of next year,’ he continued. ‘It would really help the book to be able to include them.’ His mother shrugged slightly. ‘If I knew of anyone else, you know that I would ask them, but I don’t know anyone in London.’ He had hoped he would not have to ask so much.

She stood up and looked out of the window. ‘He bought a car,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Sabri waited before going back to his topic.

‘It could be in the press. I’d like it to be in the book.’ It was as close to a plea as he was prepared to get.

‘Yes.’ She was not convinced. One of her thumbs pushed up at the knuckle of the other thumb as though it was a bottle cap that she was trying to pop open. But there was little else he could say. In her upheld profile and her sucked-in nostrils he was sure he saw something close to a wave of nausea pass through her.

‘ Biseer ,’ she said. It happens.

Biseer. It amounted to the granting of permission, didn’t it? But her eyes had been unusually skittish and he would not ask again. Ambiguity was preferable. Rashid’s scholarship now took on a greater significance. Bilaks , on the contrary, it was great that Rashid was going. And the timing was perfect.

He put away the documents concerning his mother and arrayed the first Intifada material around him. This was history of an uprising that he had lived through. He was this history right from the beginning. His proximity to the subject matter was what made it unsettling. He had known many of the key figures whom he was now trying to write about. Some of them had been heroes to him; some he had despised. But how he had viewed them at the time was an easier question in terms of objectivity, compared to the other problem, which was how he viewed them now , in the light of what they had become.

But Lana was everywhere that morning. She would not leave him. His past with her kept coming back to him in these random flashes of memory where he could see himself, as an unwitting protagonist in an art-house movie of spliced film.

That morning just the sight of one of the Declarations by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising had brought up a clip of memory, just one or two images of Ramallah at night during the first Intifada, right at the beginning in 1988 when, as he had described it, the battle for control of the shops between Occupied and Occupier had just begun. Repeatedly his memory showed them both bent over the clasps of the shutters fixed to the ground, where she was working on the lock of the shop next to his. He had had the tool bag with him and every clunk of its contents had chilled them to the spine. ‘Goddamn it,’ he had heard her mutter. ‘They broke the clasp as well, the bastards. I’ll need a drill to fix it.’ Not so pretty, he had thought, glancing at her in the streetlight.

That was the entirety of it. It was just a snippet on the cutting-room floor in his brain. He tried to move the scene forwards logically, questioning whether they had managed to mend the lock and wondering what else she had said or done, and whether there were other shops that they had gone to that night. He had also tried moving it backwards – querying how they had arrived there and whether she walked in front of him or was there already when he arrived. But memory is mean and gave him no more than he already had. They broke the clasp as well, the bastards. Again and again. I’ll need a drill to fix it.

He had started the paragraph on this era of history which he had contributed to making:

The Palestinian strikes and consumer boycott that started in 1988 aimed to jeopardise Israel’s economy by the loss of its most important market, the Occupied Territories. In Ramallah, the battle over store closures raged for weeks. This was a battle for political control, between Occupier and Occupied. When the Unified National Leadership of the Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) ordered shops to stay open for three hours in the morning only and to close in the afternoon, the Israeli army would demand alternative times. Israeli soldiers would use crowbars to break locks in order to prevent stores and businesses from closing. In response, locksmiths and volunteers were organised to repair them at night.

He had not known who she was at the time. He was not allowed to, so that under questioning they could say they worked alone. Not so pretty , he had thought. He was wrong about that. She had been exquisite, but even the memory of that was going. The more he thought of her face, the more it faded; sometimes he had to rush up on a fragment of memory to catch it unawares and then he could see her face as it was. For a moment he’d catch it and then his chest would stop, his breathing would increase and he’d find himself wiping down the leather surface of his desk with his hand, examining the granules of coffee in the base of his cup and having to push himself out of where he’d gone to with a mental kick.

He did not remember a drill. How had they fixed it?

He had been at university in the West Bank at the time and the next time he had seen her had been in the student café. He had not recognised her at all. She had been wearing uncompromisingly red stilettos that had made his friends laugh. They all knew that she came from one of the notable Jerusalem families so they had had the standard bitch about the city’s bourgeoisie. But her shoes had clicked out an irreverence that Sabri had found exciting.

It was not until he overheard her talking in a corridor and caught her voice that he had made the connection with the girl curled over the shutter lock. He was so astonished that she was her and that they were the same woman. He had wanted to grab her arm and laugh about it. He had lunged towards her and she had looked up from her coterie of companions and without a single muscle in her face moving, she had conveyed to him that he must not, absolutely must not, do so. But he had known and she had known and they both knew that the other knew from then on.

He started letting the relationship he was in at the time slip after that, after the look, the recognition with Lana. The girl he had been going out with had not taken it well at all. There were tears and scenes and he had had to avoid certain places because she would be there remonstrating with him. It was all so silly. She should have been able to tell that he had already left. That he had moved on elsewhere.