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EVA SALLIS was born in Bendigo in 1964. She has a PhD in comparative literature, Arabic and English. She is a Visiting Research Fellow in English at the University of Adelaide.
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ALSO BY EVA SALLIS fiction Hiam (1998) The City of Sealions (2002) nonfiction Sheherazade through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the 1001 Nights (1999) co-edited Painted Words (1999) Forked Tongues (2002)
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MAHJAR A NOVEL
Eva Sallis
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First published in 2003 Copyright © Eva Sallis 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.
Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Sallis, E.K. (Eva K.). Mahjar: a novel. ISBN 1 74114 071 4. 1. Immigrants—Australia—Fiction. I. Title. A823.3 Set in 10.5/17.5pt Stempel Schneidler by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Ramez Salha who wanted to write his stories but could never take writing seriously enough
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Contents PART I The Kangaroo
5
Zein’s Way
10
Munira’s Bad Day Out The Tiger
14
26
The Deferred Death of Fuad The Gazelle
30
37
PART II The Hafli
53
Ibtisam had Four Sons Muwashshah Music
63 85
102
The Jackal
108
PART III Flight The Sea
123 130
The Cows Lions
141 152
Acknowledgments
167
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The Arabic word mahjar refers collectively to all the lands of Arab, most often Lebanese, migration. It has overtones of separation, renunciation, estrangement and abandonment but, for the Lebanese particularly, it is a place-word redolent with pride in achievement as well as distance from homeland. Australia is one of the lands of the mahjar.
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PART I
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Geha, who was at that time King, was on the roof of his castle, surveying his lands. His washing was fluttering in the breeze on a line. Suddenly a strong gust ripped his shirt from the line and tossed it over the parapet. Geha shuddered and said. ‘ Praise be to God that I was not wearing it!’
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The Kangaroo
A
min and Zein invited Walid
and Haifa to go for a trip to Berri. They had relatives in the Riverland and all were excited at the adventure such an unprecedented trip would be. ‘Just for fun!’ they said to each other. ‘Just for a drive! What a surprise we will give everyone. Why didn’t we think of it before?’ It would be like going up to the village in the mountains. It would be all family, a real get-together. Both Haifa and Zein dressed carefully for the trip and the arrival. They set off in high spirits in a suitable country car, a white Valiant borrowed from Uncle Mahmoud. Zein and Haifa sat in the back; Amin and Walid in the
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front. Haifa wore a hat and Zein wore the latest Candy Frost lipstick. They consulted the map carefully, surprised to find there was only one road so getting lost was impossible. Who would have thought you could just go there, on these lovely, civilised new roads, seeing the Australian countryside as you went. Zein wound down the window and let the breeze blow her hair about. No wonder the Riverland relatives had been urging them to come up. It was so easy. Not even snipers to worry about and no roadblocks. The heat of the day intensified and the landscape became too much to look at and comment on. At a sign from Haifa, Zein wound the window up. Haifa pulled out the cards and dealt and they played a ragged game of tarneeb, couple against couple, made more difficult by Amin having to concentrate on the road and keep eye contact with Zein through the rear-vision mirror. They entered mallee country, noticing briefly that there were now straggly grey trees everywhere, dappled in white light, then returning to the game. Suddenly Amin said, ‘Look, look! Oh Lord!’ and they all looked up. A red kangaroo was bounding down the centre of the highway towards them. It didn’t deviate from the white lines, just bounded hypnotically, its powerful
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toes planting regularly about every third or fourth strip. Amin slowed the car right down, waiting for the animal to sheer off to the side and bound away into the bush. It got larger and larger, and then, at the very last minute, it swerved as if suddenly magnetised straight into the roo bar of the car. Its red form filled the windscreen; everyone screamed, leant back and pushed their feet hard to the floor. There was a slow, almost elegant impact. The kangaroo disappeared and the car slid sideways down the road, on and on. The tarneeb cards flew around the cabin like wheeling seagulls. Everyone sat still, staring at the slowly crazing windshield as if at the movies in a particularly tense scene. The car stopped. The sun beat down, the mallee trees shook in the breeze, a bird flew by. Everyone breathed out in unison and relaxed their taut bodies. ‘Praise be …’ Haifa began. She stopped. The car had begun to shake. It was as if something had the car in its teeth and was throttling it. The Valiant gave little irregular shudders and then sharp lopsided jerks. Haifa began to wail in a high voice just as something outside began to roar in heavy gasps. Zein stared ahead, white as a wedding dress, her short hair rising. The kangaroo suddenly stood up, shaking the car heavily as it rose. It stood a good two metres above the
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bonnet and leered through a bloody eye at them, bleeding mouth open, showing enormous yellow rat teeth. Walid, Amin, Haifa and Zein screamed and slammed back rigid in their seats. The kangaroo raised its fists and began beating wildly at the bonnet. They could feel it kicking and tearing at the radiator. Amin gasped, ‘The poor thing. Oh my God. I have to do something!’ Haifa shrieked, ‘Stop it from destroying the car! Quick! Quick!’ Amin bashed the driver’s door open with his shoulder and got out. No one could quite explain what happened next, it all happened so quickly. Amin walked up to the distressed animal, hands outstretched placatingly, although what he was going to do, no one was quite sure. The kangaroo turned to face him, rose up high above his head and grabbed him from behind the neck with a huge black fist, sinking black claws into his nape. It wrenched his body around into a headlock, threw its head back and, with its nose pointed to the sun and roaring, began to jump about, tearing its hind legs against the body in its embrace. Amin disappeared from sight behind the bonnet. Then, before anyone quite registered what was happening, Zein was outside,
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hauling her patent leather stilettos off her feet. She rushed up to the animal, brandishing the shoes above her head and screaming. She thwacked it across the head with one heel and then the other. Zein and the kangaroo fought. The kangaroo dropped Amin and faced the shoes. Zein balanced lightly on her stockinged feet and had to spring at the tall beast with her feet together, for her pencil skirt could not be rucked above her knees. She held the shoes by the toes and beat the kangaroo to death. The car was spattered with blood, and Amin, standing by with his shirt shredded, looked on in shock. He staggered over to the driver’s door and sat down. Zein screamed with each blow, ‘Kill my husband? Kill him? God is GREAT!’ When she finished she crisply vomited onto the road and then climbed shakily back into the car. ‘What sort of animal was that?’ she asked, her chest heaving. Her clothes were speckled, her stockings torn and the shoes broken and bloody. ‘A kangaroo,’ Amin whispered. There was a silence. Everyone stared ahead, the car ticking slightly in the heat.
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Z e i n ’s Wa y
Z
ein was undaunted. Why not
try to fit in and be friends, to look Australian? She started dressing with less flamboyance and more English style. She pioneered shopping in David Jones and John Martins. She wore trousers occasionally. She broke ranks and went to an Australian hairdresser. She mimicked the English walk and chatted at bus stops, practising her English talk. But her accent gave her away and sometimes it was more fun to go on an outing and feel that all around her people were mistaking her for an Australian born. She watched the way other women stood waiting in queues for meat, waiting in the surgery, waiting at the bus stop. She stood too with her ankles together
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and her gloved hands joined at the front over her handbag. She wore less makeup around her eyes and changed her lipstick from a heavy red to a frosty pale lilac. She smiled when she was served and nodded thankyou, or murmured it, trying to say thankyew, not thunkiyoo. She commented on the weather. ‘Beeyewtiful weather today!’ She loved it when they said, ‘My word!’ or ‘Ya bedda believe it!’ or ‘A real bewdy that’s f’sure!’ It was a pity when they just said, ‘Yep.’ Rayya teased her to her face and ridiculed her behind her back. ‘Ya Zein! Would you like some of my kohl? You must have forgotten yours! Here, let me do your lipstick. You have come out without any!’ ‘Ya Zein. What a plain dress! You look so much better if you raise your bust.’ Rayya pushed the backs of her hands up under her own spectacular bosom, making her creamy breasts appear like peaches from the top of her Beirut Parisienne dress. But Zein was unruffled. ‘Why not try to fit in?’ she said. ‘We live here now.’ Rayya said later to Munira, ‘If you mix with the mud, some is bound to stick,’ and they both sighed.
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But Zein always said when anyone queried her choices, ‘You dress your way, and I will dress mine!’ One day Zein was at the bus stop. She was feeling particularly good. ‘Gonna beya scorcha!’ the butcher had said. She had no idea what he meant but was flattered that he assumed she would understand. She had dressed in a tailored grey David Jones dress and carried a pink handbag and wore pink shoes. A seam ran up the back of her calves. She stood and watched the men grab a newspaper as they got on the bus, tossing a halfpenny into the crate. Then she saw a woman do the same. Her bus came and, feeling bold, she grabbed a newspaper, tossed the warm ha’penny and stepped up into the bus, her heart pumping hot pleasure through her body. She sat down, crossed her legs and surreptitiously watched as the commuters unfolded, opened and shook out their papers. She did the same. The man next to her did the same. Everybody was reading their newspapers on the bus together on this lovely Australian morning, the beautiful weather shining down upon them. She sensed the man next to her move slightly. She sensed him looking at her. She slowly crumpled one corner of her paper down to look at him. He caught her eye and suddenly tapped her paper with his forefinger.
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‘Your paper is upside down.’ She looked at him for a moment and then tossed her head back, squaring her shoulders. She shook the paper firmly. ‘You read your way, and I will read mine!’
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Munira’s Bad Day Out
M
unira’s day started badly.
She had a car accident driving her daughter to school and was very shaken up. The car was a write-off. She had telephoned her husband and cried. She telephoned the police and cried. She got home flustered, having cried in front of the tow truck man, and then she had to telephone Rayya and Ibtisam to tell them that the lunch she had organised was off. Rayya wouldn’t hear of it. ‘An accident! Ya Rabb! Oh Lord! Habibti, are you all right? The car? Oh we can take my car. I know I don’t have a licence but you do. Ziad can drive me to your place and we’ll go from there. I know Ziad is twelve but he’s an excellent driver if I put two cushions,
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you know the ones from the canopy, on the seat. Honey, you need the distraction. We will cheer you up. Honey, I’ll see you in a minute.’ Rayya hung up. Clearly she badly wanted to go out to lunch. Munira sat down exhausted. She had a little cry. Then she rushed into the bedroom, changed into her newest and most invigorating clothes, and put on some lipstick and eyeshadow, trailing a long kohl line under her eye to hide herself under Egyptian fashion. She heard the car edging up the drive in unproficient surges and, remembering that on an uphill Ziad would be able to see only sky with or without cushions, she grabbed her handbag and rushed out, waving her hands in distress. ‘Park on the road! On the road!’ She wasn’t sure how she would get a strange car off her drive, especially in reverse. Ziad’s tiny grinning face popped up, peering at her out of the windshield of their brand-new Holden HD Premier. He was standing on the brake and couldn’t take a hand off the wheel to wave. Rayya’s flushed face grinned a much larger version of the same expression at her, tinged with triumph. Ziad rolled the car backwards through a series of his mother’s screams, lurching finally to rest on the road. Munira could feel a headache blossoming.
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Rayya kissed her happily, exclaiming all the while in dolour, ‘You poor thing! Il-Hamdillah you are OK. Thanks be to God. I had to see for myself. I came straightaway. How are you? You look wonderful! Quick, honey, we will drop Ziad home, then pick Ibtisam up!’ Munira edged herself into the driver’s seat, the courage granted by her tailored red pants-suit draining out of her as she faced a strange automatic. They floated slowly down the road. Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim in the Name of God the Compassionate the Merciful oh please make it be OK. Munira touched the red handbag on her lap for security. She had not forgotten it. That was the main thing. They crept at twenty miles per hour to Rayya’s and then to Ibtisam’s. Munira didn’t have to tell Ibtisam the story, because Rayya told her in one uninterrupted flood, adding all the details Munira had not yet told Rayya herself. She gave a surprisingly accurate version. ‘With a big crash he rushed across the intersection when she didn’t see him and what could she do the poor darling but run into him he didn’t look at all one of the crazies and all the lights were red and the car is
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completely broken but il-hamdillah Munira is unhurt he was hippy high on drugs!’ ‘Ya Rabb! Ya Rabb! Al-Hamdu Lillah you are OK! Leave it to the insurance. God willing, they will fix it. Let your husband deal with it.’ They headed off towards the Feathers Restaurant, murmuring and commiserating. It was all quite soothing and Munira was beginning to drive at thirty mph. But just as her headache started to subside, a prickling horror spread over her from the base of her spine to the tips of her hair. Had she put any money in the red handbag? A horn blared and tyres screeched behind her. Her concentration shattered, her eyes unseeing. The car vacillated on the road as Ibtisam and Rayya cried out, ‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim’ in unison. ‘Ya Munira!’ Rayya shrieked. ‘Do you want to kill us?’ Then without changing pitch she screamed, ‘Uncle Sam! Sam Mansour lives here! Stop! Let’s see if Aida is in!’ Munira didn’t know what to say but her mind was racing. How will I pay for them? The shame! How will I pay for lunch? Munira pulled into Uncle Sam’s drive. Aida wasn’t in. Sam said curiously, ‘Where are you going?’
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‘To the Feathers for a lunch.’ ‘I have nothing to do today. I might join you!’ he said happily. ‘Oh you are welcome!’ Munira said, her smooth voice floating over her inward horror. Uncle Sam came out to the car. How-are-yous and how’s-the-familys were exchanged. He turned to Munira. ‘Ya Munira I couldn’t,’ he said bashfully. ‘It is a ladies’ lunch.’ Munira laughed, her voice floating somewhere above her head, gracious and nonchalant, ‘Then you will be a rose amongst the trees.’ Rayya and Ibtisam opened the door and waved him in. He gave in quickly. Munira’s scalp crawled. Uncle Sam loved his food. At least Aida ate like a bird. As they settled around the table at the hotel Munira’s mind was racing. She read the menu, maintaining a light conversation with Ibtisam. ‘Honest to God, ya Ibtisam, I nearly died!’ ‘Habibti, you are taking it so well. If it had been me I would have died.’ Rayya said, ‘Died! Ya Rabb! Lord! Il-Hamdillah I was prewarned by a premonition or I would have died the moment Munira told me!’
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Munira looked at her as if not seeing her. ‘What will you have, darling?’ she asked solicitously, feeling her fingers sweat into the fine card of the menu. They directed their attention to the food, impressed with Munira’s ability to focus on the ordinary things after such an experience. Munira chose the cheapest item on the menu that could satisfy her guests that she was indeed eating with them: a small Caesar salad. She listened with dread as the others ordered. Ibtisam ordered filet mignon with vegetables, Rayya ordered porterhouse steak, and Sam ordered half a cow. While they were waiting Sam got up and went to the toilet. Ibtisam went to the ladies. Munira hissed, ‘Ya Rayya, do you have any money on you? The accident, and I didn’t check and I don’t know what to do and of course I will pay you back as soon as we get home!’ Rayya’s eyes widened. Munira blushed deeply but was driven on by desperation. Her gaze didn’t waver. Rayya looked distressed. ‘Munira darling, you know I never carry any money with me unless I have to! I don’t have a penny on me. Look!’ and before Munira could stop her she eviscerated a handbag containing only lipstick and
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hankies. Sam was coming back and Munira pushed the handbag off the table. They ate. Munira mimed the pleasure of a drawnout, satisfying lunch. The end drew near and dread filled her heart as they edged the last mouthfuls onto their forks. Everything seemed to wind down to the impossible precision of a slow-ticking nightmare. Uncle Sam leant back. ‘Oh Lord!’ he said, bliss on his face. ‘Ya Latif! That steak! The best I have ever tasted! This is the stuff of Paradise of the seventh Garden! You know, I cannot let such an experience pass without checking it carefully for flaws. I am going to have seconds! Munira, you look hungry. And you are so skinny! Doesn’t this food torture you? You must join me!’ Munira protested. She was full as full could be. She had eaten mountains. She could not fit in another morsel to save her life. ‘Rayya? Ibtisam? Come on, keep me company. I couldn’t eat in front of you!’ They ordered. Rayya ordered a salad after Munira kicked her under the table. Munira had to order some bread to keep them company. She performed through the second level of hell. What happens in restaurants when you cannot pay?
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She couldn’t bear to think, but she wondered if after the shame of discovery she would ever be the same. Her face was on fire and then drenched in sweat, and then clammy and pale. She was amazed they did not see her torment. Her voice floated on, a cooling zephyr, blinding them with its grace to the writhing soul from which it emerged. Sam praised God at the end of his research. Truly, he said, this cook is from heaven, this cow is from heaven, and this restaurant is not of this earth. But the true test would be the sweets. They ordered. Sam ordered for Munira, rebuffing all attempts she made to snatch the menu in a jolly way from his teasing hands. Crêpes Suzette. The flaming dish was set before her and she ate the molten liquor of the next layer of torment. She couldn’t taste it. Her performance was impeccable. Her laughter rang out like tinkling water, refreshing, cool, channelled through the architecture of pleasure and light-heartedness. Uncle Sam made jokes about being surrounded by the houris of heaven and sipping the pure wine of the blessed. Ibtisam and Rayya laughed and clapped in delight, sipping sorbets and fruit glacés. The fragments of exquisite deserts evaporated from the plates. Munira could see that it was the most
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beautiful lunch. She could see as though she were hearing about it rather than tasting it. The Feathers had been such a success. Such a good choice. A bitter taste filled her mouth. Sam leant back. ‘I don’t believe it! I just don’t believe it! First the main course, then the dessert! How do they do it? Have you ever seen the like? I must have seconds. The experience cannot be wasted!’ Munira kicked Rayya hard under the table, mentally swearing an evil oath at her mother. ‘Yaooh! I couldn’t!’ Rayya said as if in pain. ‘I am so full!’ ‘Yallah, Ibtisam. Don’t be shy!’ So Ibtisam kept him company. Uncle Sam told anecdotes while they waited. Two bedouin were in the desert waiting for nightfall. One sighed longingly, ‘Aiyeh, the halawiyat of Damascus!’ ‘What are they like?’ the other asked. ‘Sweet! So sweet! As if they were of paradise. Sweet! ‘Tell me more!’ ‘The honey! The sugar! The syrup! The essences! Ya Latif.’
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‘You are so fortunate! When did you taste them?’ ‘I didn’t. I have never been to Damascus. But my grandfather’s camel driver has, and he saw someone eating them.’ The second round of sweets was served. The end was very near and Munira’s adrenaline was running. Rayya looked at her much the way the blessed look at the damned: curious, compassionate, aloof. Munira asked for the bill. She sat speaking slightly too fast, breathing slightly too fast, waiting with her heart thumping sickly in her chest. She thought of the criminal waiting, hearing the dogs draw near. She thought of fainting, or announcing that she was pregnant, or finding something terrible in a coffee. The bill was handed to her and, clutching her handbag, she sailed off with it to the ladies. As soon as the door was closed she looked. There, itemised, were the pleasures and delicacies of the day. There at the bottom in fine handwriting was the total. She looked up into the mirror. She freshened her lipstick, sculpted her hair and scrutinised herself. She was pale and stern looking, the dark eyes shining and burning. She looked proud and desperate; vivacious
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youth and coquettish glances had left her. She looked superb. Her pants-suit showed a red rounded thigh under the tailored jacket. Her breasts were high on her chest, beautiful red globes delineated by the fingerline of the fine-stitched seam. It dived to her Scarlett O’Hara waist. The lipstick and the fabric were a perfect match. Her flaming red hair stood up in burnished waves, a mane flowing artistically back from her white brow, fold upon fold of richly interwoven colour. Piquant curls at her temples were intact. She was no longer sweating, no longer afraid. Somewhere within she had the courage to face the shame, ignominy and horror. She didn’t care what she said or did. It was time. She paused. Out of a listless curiosity and a perverse desire to postpone execution for one sweet moment now that she accepted it, she emptied her handbag out on the marble to see just how much money she did have. Her red handbag had been the number one for some time. It had accompanied her everywhere. It bore no resemblance to Rayya’s: it was no one-day hankie-andlipstick wonder. It had caverns containing longforgotten buried hoards. The shillings and pence trickled out, water on a parched land. She counted them. Down to the last halfpenny, she had just enough.
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‘Ya Munira, remember the Feathers? Aiyeh, the halawiyat! Paradise! We should do it again one day!’ But Munira never went there again.
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The Tiger
W
hen I ask my Uncle Sam to tell
me about his Jiddu and Jaddati, this is the story he tells. My grandmother’s hair began to turn white the day it got spattered with tiger pus. That’s what my grandfather told me. Jaddati Amira went down to the creek a mile or more away from the village to get water and to wash her hair. When her jar was full and her long black hair was splayed out on her shoulders, she suddenly heard a noise, opened her eyes and looked straight into the face of a tiger. Of course there were tigers in Palestine back then. Still are, one or two.
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She froze. She just stared and the tiger stared back. Possibly her hair began to turn from black to white right then. From the surprise. I don’t know for certain. After a long time her heart began beating again and she looked the tiger over, just moving her eyeballs, nothing else. The tiger made a little mewing sound and she stopped even her eyeballs. But she had noticed that it was carrying one paw in the air and that a sharp stake was stuck into the pad of its foot. The tiger rumbled in its throat but didn’t move. My grandmother’s breathing started again. First in puffs that a tiger would not see, and then bolder. Then she just reached out her hand slowly, like this, and took his paw in it. Imagine, my grandmother there shaking hands with a tiger by the river in the sunlight. With her hair uncovered for anyone to see! My grandmother turned her face away, reached out her other hand and pressed her thumbs with all her might either side of the wooden stake, squeezing the hot pad tight under the point. The tiger raised his face and roared but she didn’t stop. She was sure he was going to eat her when she was finished anyway. That’s what my grandfather told me. The stake suddenly shot out of the tiger’s foot and flew over my grandmother’s shoulder on a trail of
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tiger blood and pus. The pus spattered her face and hair. That is surely when it began to turn white. From the fright. My grandmother was shaking all over. The tiger howled and howled, and fell forward, half on top of her and half bowing at her feet. Then, it opened its mouth right in her face. She glimpsed the long yellow teeth and the red tongue and felt its hot breath as she closed her eyes tightly. Very gently, it licked the pus off her face. Then it turned and ran away. My grandmother ran home and told my grandfather. Her hair was wild and spattered and she was really frightened when she saw how frightened my grandfather was. After that my grandmother met the tiger several times. He would guard her at the stream when she went to get water, and he would walk back to the outskirts of the village with her. Her arm would be around his neck, like this. At the edge of the pine forest he would turn and run away to wait for her another day. Eventually my grandfather shot the tiger. He was too afraid. He told me that he was also jealous. That day my grandmother threw every word she had at him and her hair turned white completely. From the anger and grief.
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My grandfather hugged me tight. He always loved me best, just as I love you. That day, the day of the story of my grandmother Amira and the tiger, he said he loved me even though I too had stripes.
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The Deferred Death of Fuad
H
aifa stared at Lamia. She
pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Her fingertips were numb, insentient enough to belong to someone else. Where Lamia stood she could see a familiar young man, Fuad her brother, looking exactly as she had last seen him thirteen years ago. Her own voice came to her ears as if muffled by fog. ‘What did you say? Fuad answered with Lamia’s whispering voice. ‘I said “the late Fuad, God have mercy on him”.’ ‘Fuad. Fuad! Fuad is not
DEAD,
Lamia!’ Haifa was
screaming, because somehow she knew that Lamia would not say such a thing.
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Lamia was white as a sheet. Was Haifa mad? Had they really not told her that her brother was killed so many years ago? How? Lamia’s mind moved slowly. She recalled that Haifa had never worn black. Her memory picked out a multitude of variations of the brilliant form of her friend, bright as a butterfly or a tropical fish, the pearls on a string of parties through the years. What was Walid thinking of, that he didn’t tell her? ‘When?’ Haifa whispered. ‘The year you arrived,’ Lamia said, sobbing. Haifa turned and ran. Animal sounds poured from her throat and shrouded her. Out in the garden she saw him. ‘Fuad!’ She could see that he had not changed one bit. She had written to him after the Eid, as she did every year. He never answered: he had never bothered to write a letter in his life. The lies! Lies they had all told her when she asked! Fuad laughed. ‘As of now, I am officially taller than you,’ he said, patting the top of his own head with one hand, and hers with the other. Walid was clawing at her through the cloudy air of the garden, shaking her.
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‘What is wrong? Darling, what is it?’ She felt suddenly ill. She stood motionless, concentrating on her stomach. Then she looked at Walid calmly, appraisingly. His face was dead white. He looked like a corpse except for his eyes, which were pleading and tortured. He knew. ‘Fuad is dead,’ she said coldly, feeling herself being sucked away from Walid, pulled by the hair at the back of her scalp. She turned and walked inside. In the bathroom Fuad was standing in the bathtub, smiling, debonair, his feet wet, looking much more fresh and lively than her frantic and frozen Walid, motionless at the door. ‘We won,’ Fuad said. ‘We thrashed them and their mothers and fathers.’ She smiled at her brother and went into her bedroom. Walid watched nervously as she dragged a stool up to the cupboard, stood on it and reached for the white box containing her wedding dress. He hovered, helpless, as she lifted it down and opened the box, lifting away the tissue paper as a mother lifts a coffin shroud. She held the dress up, held it against her. Its shape obscured her own; fine-figured white, twodimensional. The dress had a crossover beaded bodice,
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low shoulders. Haifa’s shoulders could be seen, dim and rounded above it, as she stood still in the centre of the room. Then she sat on the bed, pulled out pinking shears from her second drawer and cut the satin skirt and beaded bodice into small pieces. The grind and snip of the shears, the whisper of the material in her hands, and the flutter of beads on the carpet were the only sounds that snagged the roar of the current in her head. Then she sat silent. She was thinking about all the beautiful clothes she had worn in the thirteen years of her marriage. She was thinking about how she was the life and soul of every party. She was thinking about her hats, feathers, flowers, laces, frills, hot colours and beautiful flesh. Fuad sat down next to her, his school tie rakishly loosened, smelling of dust and cardamom. ‘Don’t marry Walid,’ he said sadly, gripping her forearm. ‘Don’t! Marry someone from here, so we can still go to school together. Then I’ll be able to live with you when I’m a doctor.’
‘Haifa is having a nervous breakdown! I am sending her home. Yes I know there is a war but she needs her people now and I don’t know what to do! Please take
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care of her. You must help her to understand why I didn’t tell her. I knew she wouldn’t be able to take it!’
She stepped off the plane. Fuad’s brothers and Fuad’s other sisters, Fuad’s aunties, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces were there to meet her. It was as if she were a stranger, someone who could recognise, identify if necessary, all the members of Haifa and Fuad’s family. They wore hats. They wore red and green and purple. Their lips were cerise, pink, red, plum. They wore army uniforms and business suits and jeans. They laughed and smiled and were too happy to see her. Their happiness battered her, and their smiles cut. They tried to be sombre for her for a moment but could not maintain it. She was the only one wearing black. Their crying was long over and hers had not yet begun. They crept up the mountain in a three-car convoy, with Fuad’s uncle’s hand on the horn. They were slowed by tanks and roadblocks and seemingly interminable snarls in the traffic. She saw broken tree trunks and pock-marked walls. Craters. The whistling and distant tapping of the war trying to get in. But she felt nothing.
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The school she and Fuad had loved was still untouched. She glanced at her watch, dizzy. It was almost time to pick him up from the gate. In the house they all rushed to the window to see whose funeral was passing by. Don’t you see that it is Fuad’s? her heart cried out. Auntie Malika sat with her on the bed and a Lebanon emptied of Fuad wafted through the window. He was nowhere. A faded photograph on the shrapnelchipped wall of the living room said he was long dead. ‘How can they have loved my brother so little?’ ‘Darling, grief is like a soap. Together, you rub it and rub it and every day it becomes smaller until it is a little leaf in the dish.’ ‘Thirteen years. Thirteen years! I have been married for thirteen years.’ ‘Darling, you were so far away, cut off from us. Estranged. What could we do? What could anyone do? We were not there to grieve with you, and you, a bride …’ Haifa was silent, thinking of knives and scissors and shears. Her family were thirteen years estranged from her and thirteen years ahead of her. They could never meet again.
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Walid met her at the airport, white and thin, and with tears standing clearly in his eyes. This will have to do, she thought as the tears leapt from her own. She embraced him.
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The Gazelle
W
hen Rima was very little, her
father told her she was a gazelle. First he said her sister Marie was an Arab princess. Rima wrapped her arms around his knees, jumped up and down beseechingly, and asked, ‘What am I?’ Her father grabbed both her ears and turned her this way, then that way, his head on one side. Then he thought about it, staring at her all the while. She stood very still so that whatever she was would shine through. Then he said, ‘You are a gazelle.’ Once upon a time in a land far far away, there was a little lost gazelle. She was so cute, so elegant and fine, that she was a pre-wrapped little lion dinner, something that worried her quite
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a bit. She just had to find her Mama and Baba. One thing about little gazelles is they are super speedy. She could run faster than any lion, which is why lions had to be sneaky and hide behind parking meters and Stobie poles, or dress up as horses and things. This little gazelle knew all about that, but in theory, not in practice, and she wanted to keep it that way. That was not to be. The first lion she met was hiding behind a tricycle. She could see his golden fur through the bars and, if that wasn’t enough, his tail was sticking out with its tassel waving in the breeze. ‘I can see you as clear as the sunrise,’ the gazelle shouted as she ran away. ‘Daughter of a thousand dogs and damn and blast it,’ the lion said, and slunk away. The second lion was much more difficult to spot. He was hiding behind a rubbish bin, completely out of sight. The only thing that saved the little gazelle was her natural sensitivity to smells. She kept her distance from the rubbish bin, knowing that her parents wouldn’t go near it either. As she walked past at a distance, she noticed that the rubbish bin had whiskers sticking out either side, and without waiting she ran away, more quickly this time. ‘Dash it all,’ the lion said, and climbed into the rubbish to see what scraps he could get.
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The third lion was smarter than his brothers. He put an apron on, went into the kitchen and cooked the little gazelle’s most favourite dish, crème caramel. As the smell of vanilla and toffee wafted through the air, the little gazelle lifted her head and closed her eyes in delight. She was far from the house, but she ran as fast as she could, which was as fast as an arrow. But that lion had completely forgotten that crème caramel was also Mama and Baba’s favourite food. They too smelt the wonderful aroma, and came running like the wind, faster than bullets. All that lion could do was say politely, ‘Ahlan wa Sahlan, tafaddalou,’ and sit down to a nice dinner of crème caramel with the gazelles. Which proves how even the silliest stories can put little children to sleep with smiles on their faces.
Rima asked for a pet gazelle. On her seventh birthday she got a pet rabbit with big black eyes and was taken to the zoo to see the kangaroos. She got a book in Arabic that Uncle Antoine had found in the very last bookshop in Damascus, after exhausting the shops in Beirut, Amman and Yarmouk. …
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In the distant past in a land far away a prince went out hunting with his hounds and his hawk. All day he caught nothing, but near evening, when he had given up hope and his hounds were tired, they roused a wounded young gazelle, who was easy to capture. She had a great gash on one leg, and the prince was disappointed that she was imperfect. He was about to kill her, for his household needed meat, when he looked into her face and saw that she regarded him with a fearless, almost human look, which seemed to ask something of him quite calmly, even though she was at the point of death. He was very surprised. He thought to himself that, so fearless, she would make a lovely ornament in his new garden if he nursed her to health. He was suddenly happy with his day. He slung her over his horse’s withers and rode back to his palace, humming to himself. Time passed and the prince decided it was time he married. A princess of a neighbouring kingdom attracted his attention for her beauty and wealth, and he sent a messenger with a camel laden with gifts to invite her to visit. She arrived with her brothers and an entourage of ten slaves and ten slave girls. In the night the princess heard singing from the garden, a strange windy voice singing of the desert sands and the open night sky. ‘What was that singing I heard?’ she asked.
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‘That was my pet gazelle,’ the prince responded. ‘Would you like to see her?’ ‘You keep a gazelle captive?’ she cried, and called her entourage together and departed without another word. The prince was stunned. When his next bride to be, a wealthier and far more beautiful princess, arrived to try out his palace, she came with her household, an entourage of fifty slaves and fifty slave girls. As a precaution, the prince put the gazelle in the dungeons, just for the fortnight. He cared for her in secret, carrying to the dungeons her favourite tender shoots and fresh spring water, grooming her and begging her not to indulge in her nightly singing. The stones of the dungeon sang for her, whispering right up to the princess’s chamber that a gazelle lay in the darkness far below, locked away from the sands, the wind and the stars. The princess awoke and called her entourage together. ‘I don’t like your palace,’ she said coldly to the prince. ‘It has a gazelle imprisoned somewhere.’ And without listening to his reply, she left in a cloud of dust. The prince was devastated. He went down to the dungeon and took his gazelle back up to the garden. He laid her jewel-encrusted collar about her neck and kissed her. She grazed, looking towards him now and then with the
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same beseeching, fearless glance she had used when he first found her. I’ll have to kill her, he thought to himself, before I can ever get a bride. A passing princess with huge dark eyes and a soft windy voice knocked at his palace gate and asked to stay the night, for she and her slave girl were exhausted from the road. The prince welcomed them courteously, and despite the meagre, even inappropriate entourage, and their relatively poor appearance, he found himself bewitched by the princess’s dark eyes, and he longed to see the face under her veil. At dusk he remembered the gazelle and raced to the garden, called her to him and promptly cut her throat. Gazelle meat was a delicacy, so he asked his cook to prepare the best cuts and to cook his best dishes, and returned to his chambers to ready himself to impress the strange princess. ‘What meat is this?’ the princess asked. ‘Veal,’ he answered, suddenly worried. The princess took one bite, cried out and fell down in a faint. Her slave girl screamed and fell to her knees beside her mistress, sobbing. ‘O you fool! This is the daughter of the King of the Emerald Isles. Her mother was a jinniya, beloved of the gazelles. Her younger sister was changed into a gazelle,
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and they were cursed that one day the one would eat the other and die! But if the gazelle sister were to be released, she would have assumed her natural form. Six princes captured and wounded her, but none released her. You are the seventh!’ In three days the Princess of the Emerald Isles died. The slave girl rode away in fury, and within a week the armies of the Emerald Isles came and laid waste the prince’s lands and palace, and turned him out into the desert to wander in remorse the rest of his days. Which shows how stories can reconcile you to what you can’t have.
Rima drew leggy gazelles on her schoolbooks and sad black gazelles’ eyes all over her diaries. Gazelles were charmingly tragic, something that is hard for a ten-yearold girl to emulate. Gazelles were noble, timid, wild. In stories they were an image of freedom, and of the untrammelled spirit. They were also feminine, vulnerable, fragile. Always beautiful. Rima tossed her head, sorrowful at being forced against her nature to wash the dishes; stared out of
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the window in silent longing for her freedom; broke away from the house and ran through the vegetable garden in the moonlight, heading for her destiny in the Arabian desert. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Marie asked. Rima didn’t answer. She just turned her tormented eyes to the middle distance and clip-clopped gracefully to her bedroom.
Gazelle, fed up with constant harassment by Lion, complained to the highest court of the land, the Parliament of Beasts and Birds. She was asked to put her case in brief, so she said: ‘Lion, as King of the Beasts, has too much power and has become arrogant. Lion sees me as food, and is much stronger than me. Lion harries me whenever he can, without warning, and uses much cunning in doing so. So Lion is King only for himself, and not for all the beasts. If Lion were King for all the Beasts, he would have to consider the wellbeing of gazelles.’ Gazelle had posed a tricky problem for the court. The animals and birds found that many animals had similar complaints about the King of the Beasts, who was indeed
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arrogant in all his dealings, and merciless to those he considered to be food. After one month, the Parliament gathered together to give their answer. Lion, asked by the Parliament to defend himself, began: ‘I have heard many complaints about the provisions of God for all creatures. I can only say that I am not King because I made myself so. I am not arrogant by choice (although I do enjoy it). These things are my nature.’ And Lion stepped down. Then the Hoopoe stepped forward to deliver the verdict: ‘Gazelle has her speed and beauty, that at times avail her naught. Lion has his strength and intelligence, that make him a threat to Man, and for which he will be killed. Gazelle must resign herself to God’s provision and God’s wisdom, and accept the gifts that are her nature until the pre-ordained day of her death.’ Which is just the kind of story a father shouldn’t tell his thirteen-year-old daughter. When her father called her his gazelle, she snorted and shouted at him. Her family soon learned not to mention the word unless they wanted Rima to bang noisily through the house, shadowing everything with a black glower. She spent one happy day imitating Marie, with two hours on her hair, wearing several different outfits (all of them Marie’s) and letting
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her sister give her an American makeover. The thought of doing the same thing the next day was insupportable. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She spent three miserable years punishing everyone for it.
When Rima was nineteen, halfway through her medical degree, her parents took her to Palestine to find her a husband. They found one almost the day they arrived. The parents and the young people met all together, straight-backed in a formal lounge room with gold velvet upholstery. Rima eyed the beautiful young man up and down. She couldn’t see anything seriously wrong with him. He was clean, curly-haired, and wore a nice expensive crucifix. The only thing she didn’t like was his moustache, but that could be shaved off. She just wasn’t sure. She spoke courteously to him, raising her parents’ hopes; then began to show how clever she was, dashing them. Later she asked them, ‘What did he say about me?’ ‘He said you were a gazelle.’ And that was the end of that. No story to tell.
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Rima began to sit next to Mohammad in her Pharmacology class. She liked almost everything about him. Firstly, he would always have to be her secret. He had long black hair and a silver earring, and he was Muslim. Secondly, he was a smart-arse, an endearing trait that also set her the challenge to outsmart him. She liked his voice, his straight nose, and his affectionate gleam when she jabbed or punched him. She liked the direct way he said things. She liked his world, his Australian friends and his leb-thrash band. She liked the way they both lied to their parents and the way when they compared lies the similarities were uncanny. She liked how, when he telephoned, she would be engaged, calling him. She liked his kisses, his eager tongue and she liked his hands sliding under her waistband and over her buttocks. One day, Mohammad said, ‘I love you. Can I fuck you?’ Rima was silent, thinking quickly. ‘What do I remind you of?’ she asked, and then held her breath. Mohammad nibbled her ear in silence, and then sat back. He thought for a while. Then he said: ‘A gazelle once killed a lion. No, sit down, it’s true.
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I saw it on David Attenborough. She was ambushed by a lioness, who leapt out of the long grass, hit her hard from the side and knocked her sprawling. By the time she regained her footing the lion, of course, was upon her. The gazelle leapt twice into the air, as if to see once and for all if gazelles could fly. Each time the lioness twisted and swiped powerfully under her, just missing the fatal strike. Gazelles cannot fly, although to some they seem to live more in the air than on earth. The gazelle finally faced the lion. You have to imagine that sweet, black-eyed mask that is a gazelle’s face trying to look fierce. Well, she put on her fiercest look and leapt at the lion the third time. The end looked inevitable. The brave gazelle is, for all her beauty, lion food, and this lioness no doubt had family to feed. The gazelle reared up, tucked in good and tight as a goat, chin to her neck, and forelegs pulled in up high; then, as the lioness rushed at her, she came plunging down and stabbed her foreleg deep into the eye of the lioness. The lioness reeled back, coiling and uncoiling on the ground. You should have seen it. The gazelle stood still, shaking. And then the lion just died, and the gazelle walked away.’ And that was enough, which proves just how seductive stories can be.
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PART II
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Geha didn’t hear his neighbour Ali approach and
didn’t have time to hide. ‘Geha,’ Ali said. ‘I have to plough my field, and you know I am a poor man, and you are a generous man. Could I borrow your donkey for today?’ Geha hated lending Ali anything. His donkey would come home sweaty, thirsty and unfed. ‘My dear neighbour,’ he said quickly. ‘I would lend you my donkey, but I have lent him to my brother-inlaw, and I don’t know when he will finish with him.’ Just then the donkey brayed loudly from the byre. ‘But Geha, your donkey is here!’ ‘And who are you going to believe, me or my donkey?’
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The Hafli
A
bd al-Rahman arrived at the
party with his lawyer Sahar in her sleek black BMW. He had stared out of the black comfort of the car, only half listening to her telling him that, although this was Australia, things were quaintly traditional, controlled by gossip and tyrannised by memory; that he would cause a stir just by arriving with her. The sunset lingered on the rooftops and glinted still in the blue shadows among trees. What a pointy city! Such an agitated architecture, eager and uncertain. So Western! Big windows, but shuttered or filmed over. From the car, the suburb seemed to slide by, utterly soundless. It was clean and beautiful, the stuff of dreams. The red, green and silver roofs, each different. He wanted a roof like that.
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He had seen few people. Sometimes a couple dressed in shorts, walking a dog on a lead. No children. None at all. What strange gardens, all out the front, empty except for roses, other flowers he didn’t recognise, shapely trees and carpets of orange-lit grass. Public gardens, gestures, but with small fences. We are not afraid, these gardens said, but don’t enter. They made him uneasy, and he realised that he didn’t know what sort of people would live like this. Such dark, inward-looking houses, once you entered them. ‘… Australians are the same, really.’ Sahar said just then, and he was jolted.
Zein and Amin’s house was a little Lebanon, something Zein told everyone the moment they entered. ‘You’ve arrived! Ahlaan! Ahlaaan!’ she shrieked. ‘Step ashore!’ Upstairs Christians and Druzes chatted over the railing, hurling the few French phrases they could dig up back and forth, looking down on the atrium in which East and West Beirut, Christian and Muslim, met and mingled. A gilt-edged photo of an ancient cedar hung on the keystone of the entrance arch, announcing
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unnecessarily to the Lebanese that Zein and Amin’s house was their house, regardless of religion, and vaunting their origin to everyone else. Framed portraits of long-dead socialist patriots hung above doorways. Zein’s little memento of the village of Zahle, a tiled fountain, tinkled at the centre of the atrium, lit up by fairy lights trailed around the concrete thighs and bosom of its rustic girl water-pourer. People milled and greeted, leaning back with arms outstretched at the sight of each relative or friend, and then sailing forward to land kisses on each cheek thrice, asking, How are you, how is the family? In good health? Praise be to God. Me? Yes, in my best state! Ibtisam and Haifa, arms linked, greeted Abd alRahman warmly. But as he moved away their eyes followed him as they leant in close to each other, their lips moving. Sam, Farhan and Amin chatted, standing unusually erect, shoulders squared, as they always did at parties. They liked to overhear their wives whisper, ‘Pillars of the community!’ The long-time refugees were there, those who had lost Palestine, those who had lost Palestinians. Abd al-Rahman was the most recent refugee and the only Iraqi. ‘Welcome to exile,’ Farhan said to him, nastily,
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and was haughty to the point of social disgrace. Sahar quickly steered Abd al-Rahman away. ‘Haram, poor Farhan,’ she murmered into his ear but without sympathy. ‘Many people here are very Australian about the new refugees.’ ‘Le petit Liban!’ Zein sang at him from the other side, and grabbed Abd al-Rahman’s arm with no restraint, tearing him from Sahar, jiggling and shimmying her huge body, to drag him off into Beirut. He had never been to Beirut. The hafli was soon in full swing. The younger generation shouted foul Arabic insults affectionately at each other, parodying their parents on a bad day. Marie and Rima flirted with Salah, trying to excite and shock their elders. Munira and Rayya arrived late, carrying platters of waraq al-inab and mutabbal, tabouli and manaqish al–zaater. They sailed in like richly laden ships into harbour, the heady smells of fresh mint, burnt thyme, and the spiced chickpeas and eggplant filling the entrance and kitchen. The two friends shrieked their greetings to each cluster of friends and relatives they ploughed through, leaving twin plum and ruby-red slashes on the cheeks of the adolescents and children. Munira’s youngest son slouched and shrugged in their wake, rolling eyes at his cousins.
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There were almost no young men and women at the party. Just children, adolescents and their parents— the older exiles, emigrants and refugees, and those they still controlled. The middle generation, the young married and divorced couples, were missing; a silent hole in the hearts of their parents and secret role models for their younger bothers and sisters.
There was something completely familiar about it all, and that made it more disorienting. Abd al-Rahman could not relax. He felt his skin prickle with discomfort and an upwelling of misery. People around him danced, twirling their stiff raised hands as they held imaginary sticks or scarves. He was only thirty-six, an engineer, a widower. There was no word for a father whose child was dead. Why was there no word, like orphan, like widower, for what he was?
Sam recited Imru al-Qays’ ‘Muallaqa’ as he always did, and they would have felt something was lacking if he didn’t. Sam had once had 100 000 lines of poetry
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memorised, but now, no matter how hard he tried, he could only remember Imru al-Qays. Stop and weep for the memory of the departed, it began, but then was so vigorous and heroic as it progressed, that he enjoyed being in exile and the fact that he might as well shed tears for himself. Then Rima, who was twenty-two and virtually a doctor, did something that hadn’t been done before. She recited a muwashshah, an Andalusian love poem in both classical and colloquial Arabic, written in the tenth century, born of another clash of cultures. Everyone listened politely but without the profound stirring the pure and instantly recognised cadences of the great poet had evoked, and Rima’s voice faded at the end and her face flushed red. To cheer her up, Salah put a tape on the stereo and began a raucous song. His mother Ibtisam turned on him, clipped him over the ear and sent him to eject it. Rima laughed. The women settled out at the edge, chattering and clanking dishes; the teenagers gravitated to the outside verandah, under the floodlit trunk of a lemon-scented gum; and the men pulled up chairs in the centre of the living room. Amin put a CD of Fayrouz’s Rajioun on the stereo and some people sang along and others blew
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their noses. We will return. The bittersweet voice wound through the room. The clanging from the kitchen fell silent as the momentum of the hafli stilled and then slowly began spinning into the past. We will return. Some women gathered in closer on the periphery and the teenagers, sneering and smelling of cigarettes, filtered back into the room. The small children found laps and wove back into the centre of the circle.
Abd al-Rahman was reeling. These were the pleasures of exile, the happy tears and complacent grief that could one day be his. Levantine Arabic and the crisp and sibilant sounds of English filled his ears. He felt numb. All lament was remote and sweet, as removed as the dream of Australia. Then he saw his daughter Siham on a white gypsum floor, playing a Kleenex box like a drum, as if she were right in front of him. His heart burned and his scalp shrank against his skull. He stood up, thinking to take leave of his hospitable hosts, or at least to get outside. He couldn’t breathe. He stumbled out onto the verandah into a cloud of smoke hanging around three girls and four boys, all of whom straightened politely and exchanged glances
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as he leant over the balustrade and stared out. The Western cityscape glittered to the black velvet coast. ‘You OK, Professor?’ a tall boy said to him in clumsy broken Arabic. ‘OK, OK,’ Abd al-Rahman said in English, but suddenly couldn’t remember any more English words. He stared out at the city. For a moment it seemed as though he could reach out and touch it. Then it sped from him and settled into a middle and far distance, fixed and twinkling. Siham’s drum-beat, the erratic patter of a child’s hands on shallow cardboard, rustled and ratta-tatted in his ear. He thought he might vomit. He stood up and faced around, his back to the dizzying spangle. The girls had gone and the four boys stood ranged in a semicircle in front of him, silhouetted in the glow from the French doors. They said nothing. The curtains had dropped back into place and no one could see out. He felt the rough wood of the balustrade under his palms, and slowly, dimly, he felt himself begin to sweat. The boys’ eyes glimmered in the swelling darkness. Why didn’t they speak? They all looked familiar, homely, and he felt his heart thumping. The arched brows, fine, sculpted faces. The silence between them stiffened, thickened until it had gone beyond any possible exchange and into a meaningless, terrifying
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emptiness. It became part of the darkness that seemed to roil into the space between them. Siham would not leave him. She pounded the Kleenex box, battering it out of shape, then looked up at him and began to cry. He could not break, not now. Who were these strange boys? The strangeness of one with long hair. No moustaches. American haircuts. But achingly familiar. And yet he could not remember a single one of them from the round of introductions inside. Perhaps they really were strangers, who could run off into the night. He wanted to lift his arms but felt a pain pinning them to the wood, as if he had already been assaulted. The boys hadn’t moved. He thought he was going to pass out. His chest was screaming with the pain that had driven him out of the light and into their realm. His jaw was aching, as if punched. They hadn’t moved. Why was he afraid of four boys? Why didn’t they speak? Then, just as he felt himself slipping down, felt his body moving without his will, they all moved too. He thought he might scream from the terror of their approach, but pain punched him back into speechless, breathless silence. They moved in to catch him, and as their arms, screams and exclamations crashed in around him, the light flooded from the house, blinding him in whiteness. Warm arms of smelly, real boys wrapped
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about him, catching, lifting, crying out in English in panicked, shocked voices. Arabic fluttered in the background, distressed and helpless. English bounced back and forth between his boys and the men and women who rushed slowly out of the house to the verandah. He had the warmth of sweaty human skin against his ankles, and arms wrapped about his groin and chest. The long-haired boy held his head and stroked his brow as they carried him in. Then the boy leant in close and murmured in strange sweet Arabic into Abd al-Rahman’s ear, ‘Gently, Uncle, gently, all shall be well.’ Abd al-Rahman could smell aftershave. He smiled. He hoped they would never let him go. He wanted to laugh from happiness when Zein cuffed two boys and wedged her warm breasts up against his body too.
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Ibtisam had Four Sons
I
btisam had four sons: Sami,
Salman, Sa’eed and Salah. Her husband Sa’d had insisted they all have the same initial so that once grown up they could sign for each other, as loving brothers should; and, God forbid, if one of them had trouble with the law, identifying and catching him would be tricky. Ibtisam and Sa’d also had a daughter, Nadine. Ibtisam and her four sons were much discussed in the community. For one thing, Ibtisam’s cooking was the best you ever tasted. Of Ibtisam’s boys, Sami, the oldest, married an Australian publicly and then divorced in secret. The second, Salman, eloped with and married an Australian in secret.
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The third, Sa’eed, was not, she knew in her heart of hearts, interested in girls at all, and that was a secret even to herself. Salah, the youngest, agreed to an engagement with every one of the daughters presented to him by their sly and eager mothers and, after some embarrassing scenes of rivalry and disappointment, quickly lost all credibility with them and gained a reputation for being a shaitan, but sweet. Their daughters found him very attractive, as he suddenly became safe to flirt with. Nadine ran away to Budapest with Daniel when she was seventeen. For a long while they pretended she was hidden away at home studying hard and was also very shy, then they said she had a Scholarship. Every month, when they sent her money, they begged her to leave the dirty life and come home. Sami’s ex, Deborah, Salman’s wife, Kathy, and Daniel, Nadine’s boyfriend, had a lot to answer for in the Shaheen family. Ibtisam had seen disastrous mixed marriages. When Fadi married Julie, his parents went from being rotund, healthy, happy people to being thin as sticks, skinny as skinny-roos. For two months they faded and then had to be hospitalised, and then for two years they wept. Then Julie gave birth to twins and steadily their flesh returned to them.
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Her own son Sami had left his wife after just one year. Shameful. That girl must have been horrible to him for such a thing to happen. In some ways, however, it was handy that at least one of her sons had been married with all the community (wiping their eyes in their hankies) as witnesses. Rumours wriggled and wormed their way through the community’s foundations. ‘I saw Sami at a restaurant, with a blonde Ustraaliya.’ ‘How can you say that! She is his wife. She dyed her hair!’ ‘I saw Salman in his car and that Kathy was with him!’ ‘That was Sami’s wife, a lovely daughter-in-law!’ ‘I saw Sa’eed with his friends …’ ‘That was Sami’s wife’s brothers!’ ‘I saw Salah (that shaitan) with …’ ‘Sami’s wife …’ ‘… kissing!’ ‘Don’t lie!’ Sami’s wife was long gone but Salman’s wife, who was rather typical-looking for an Australian, quickly got a reputation as the ubiquitous partner of all four boys and, besides, there had been several rumours
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that Sami’s marriage was in strife, for the community didn’t know that he had divorced. Had they known that Salman was married, there would have been the same rumours about his marriage, as strife-torn mixed marriages were a given. Everyone knew that Ibtisam was lying, and knew that she, like all of them, was trying to make the best of a bad situation and trying to protect her boys from the Australian, so they respected her while they goaded her. Ibtisam had one answer to all probing. ‘Habibti, when Salman marries, you’ll be the first to know!’ ‘Darling, when Sa’eed marries, you’ll be the first to be invited!’ ‘Dearest, when Salah marries, you’ll know, from me, before anyone else.’ Then Sami began living with a girl who looked quite unlike his former wife and not much like Salman’s wife. After two years of very complicated rumours, he began visiting his mother and members of the community with her, determined to be truthful and open about things, but keeping secret that they were unmarried. ‘Oh Sami, your wife is marvellous,’ they said to him insincerely.
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‘How long have you been married, Sami?’ Auntie Rayya gazed at him intently. ‘Two years, Auntie.’ ‘Oh I must have misheard. Your mother said twelve!’ ‘You were at my wedding to my first wife, Auntie. Deb and I divorced years ago.’ Auntie Rayya opened her eyes wide. ‘But I thought her name was Kathy!’ ‘That’s Salman’s wife, Auntie.’ ‘Salman married your ex-wife!!?’ ‘No …’ But it was too late. Auntie Rayya was shaking his forearm in undisguised glee and could not hear a word he said. She ran off with more news of Kathy than she had been able to manufacture for some time. The chatter in the room swelled and the aunties and uncles livened up with a sense of tragedy and drama. Salman was getting some funny looks, mostly of condolence. ‘Salman, my darling, my eyes, how long have you been married?’ ‘I was just about to ask you the same thing, Auntie!’ Salman exclaimed and gave Salah a look. Salah sailed by and took Auntie Rayya with him. Salah was
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the youngest and the most beautiful Shaheen boy, and was, of course, unmarried. He was a favourite with the aunties. He chatted nonstop in Auntie Rayya’s ear: ‘Oh Auntie, Auntie, is it possible that I am stoned? Oh Auntie, wouldn’t you like a joint with me, out the back without Uncle knowing a thing? Oh Auntie, would you like to meet both my girlfriends?’ Rayya shook her head in bewilderment, then slapped him over the ears indulgently. He was such a shaitan. But the aunties and uncles were dangerous. Aunties notched up failed relationships the way bounty hunters notch their carbines, practising first in their own families. Most of them played the false friend to a potential son or daughter-in-law with such finesse that, when it all exploded in tears and accusations, the mothers appeared blameless and could, with as much seemly affection as was necessary, ease the unwanted out of the family without earning a word of reproach. Skilled fathers could play the Arab patriarch for the allsuspecting,
yet
strangely
gullible
girlfriend
or
boyfriend, and drive them out with a tidal wave of repellent traditions. The Australian halves of couples thus parted would reminisce for years that it was not to be because the father was against it and you know—Arabs. Sa’d had tried the patriarch performance once.
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It was a disaster. He had waved the breadknife halfheartedly at Daniel and his daughter’s boyfriend hadn’t noticed that it was relevant to the discussion. They had ended up working together on the carbie of Daniel’s hotted-up Charger. Sa’d could not forgive Daniel for Nadine or the breadknife. The breadknife made him silent on the subject. Ibtisam could not bring herself to compete with the aunties and preferred to see her boys happy and to please the community as well. As time passed, however, this was becoming difficult. The boys were off being men, but she was feeling increasingly cornered in the community. ‘It is the mother they’ll blame, no matter what,’ she sighed. Her family was being wound up like a toy, set like an explosive.
Ibtisam was in the kitchen stuffing kousa. Salman, her second born, was with her, coring out the taut globes. He was a good boy, Salman. Not as handsome as his brothers, if she was honest with herself, but that was mainly because he was always so serious and tired. She sighed. He worked too hard. She found herself thinking
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what a good husband he would be and then remembered guiltily that he was married. She sighed again. He came here to help her with kousa. She obviously didn’t make him kousa. Then she remembered that he didn’t eat kousa, Salah and Sami and Nadine did. Salman was telling her something about Kathy but she wasn’t listening. She looked out of the window. A rough girl in a short black skirt and black tanktop with a baby clothed in lilac on her hip was standing at the bottom of the drive, looking up at the blank windows. Anybody could drive by. Sa’d would be home soon. With a wriggle, a small fear loosened itself from her stomach and wound up to her hair. What if this had something to do with them? The girl stood still as stone for long minutes. Ibtisam was lost in a cocoon of silence, staring down. The fear wouldn’t go away. She turned to Salman, who had been speaking all the while, but could not bring herself to ask him to send her off. What if he knew her? What if he had married two of them and spurned one? What if she should be protecting him? Salman began stuffing the pine nuts, rice and tomato mix into the small hole at the neck of the kousa. ‘… and the doctor said she would have to stay in hospital for the last three months.’
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‘God forbid, darling,’ she said distractedly. She spun back to the window. The girl was gone and she exhaled. Salman had split a kousa by stuffing it too full and too roughly. She kissed his forehead and elbowed him out of her space at the bench. She could not sleep that night. The image of the girl on the drive was like a sign. Something terrible was about to happen. What if it was Deborah, back again? The next morning she rose early and put the coffee on. She glanced out of the window to catch an eyeful of the day and had to grip the sink top to steady herself. The girl was there again, in the same spot, the avenging angel with a baby on her hip and a bunch of red roses in her other hand. ‘I seek refuge from Satan! Go! Go from here!’ Ibtisam screamed softly into the empty sparkling kitchen. When she looked out the window again, miraculously, the girl was not there. There was a knock on the door. For a moment she thought it would be just a visitor, or a hawker, or maybe Sa’d had locked himself out while gardening. She called out, ‘Sa’d!
SA’D!’
But
then her voice faded. She heard Sa’d unlocking the door from the inside, opening it, then a silence, some scuffling, silence
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again. Sa’d’s steps on the stairs, but were they followed by the slow, unusual creak and whisper of someone else’s? Sa’d came into the kitchen carrying a baby and Ibtisam wished she could faint and float away just for a few minutes to gather herself together. Sa’d’s face was frightful: a mixture of terror and joy. ‘Nadine’s back,’ he said, and for the first time in her life Ibtisam did faint; fully, blankly, blissfully. She felt her great bulk drop away from her and fall and fall, heavily at first, then in a light and endless glide. When she woke, a few seconds later, it seemed like hours and she felt as if she had known for months that Nadine was coming back from her studies and that the fine form of her beautiful daughter would be bending over her like this, kissing her, and that she would be just as happy as this and that the light would come back into the house and make it sparkle like a diamond ring in the community. Nadine had a ring through her eyebrow, a shaved head, a tattoo of a parrot on her bare shoulder, and was much too skinny. Ibtisam stood up and hugged her daughter long and hard, breathing in the old smell of her daughter’s scalp that no living in Budapest could erase. Tears ran down her cheeks. Sa’d was crying with her and squeezing the
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baby with each squeeze Ibtisam inflicted on Nadine. Nadine was crying too, looking suddenly like a little girl dressed up in leather and boots. Ibtisam grabbed the roses, sniffing them through her tears. ‘Look! They are so perfect they could be plastic. Except that they have a smell!’ ‘Mum, Mum,’ Nadine was saying, ‘this is Sebastian.’ And suddenly Ibtisam’s first grandchild lay heavy, sticky with life, in her arms. Her heart felt as if it would burst and fat tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed onto the baby’s downy head.
Nadine’s return home was not to be what Ibtisam planned in those first few minutes. She refused to live with them and shouted and swore a lot. First she lived with Sami, then Salman, but because Kathy was in hospital, she moved to live with Sa’eed and Salah, but they were disturbed by Sebastian and she moved out to live on her own. She came to see Ibtisam and Sa’d nearly every day and, before she left, yelled at them. Ibtisam’s head was bursting with dismay. What would people say? Her disappointment at not being able to make Nadine grow her hair and then show her off
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brought a lump to her throat. Then there were the shocking things Nadine was saying. Nadine said that they locked her up when she was a girl and threw away the key. Nadine said they sucked out her brains and forced her to wear dresses. Nadine said they drove Sa’eed to homosexuality and that Daniel leaving her was their fault. Nadine said they treated Deborah, Daniel and Kathy like rubbish. Nadine said that Ibtisam and Sa’d did not love their children, did not help them, did not listen to them and did not know them. How could Nadine have gone mad in just three years? A terrible pain settled in Ibtisam’s stomach, and Sa’d stopped speaking altogether, he was so sad. Ibtisam rocked herself to sleep curled around the pain. People had gone mad in less time than three years. She remembered with a sad cold feeling what she had thought when she saw the ragged girl in black on the drive. What if Nadine was on drugs? What was a mother to do? Much as she longed to see Nadine every day, she could not bear the words. Holding Sebastian tight, she told Nadine to her face that she was mad.
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Anyone at all would know that it was all lies. They had given their blood for their children. Every last drop. Ibtisam decided to discuss it with Sami, her oldest son. She asked him to come up and help her with the waraq al-inab. They stood side by side, packing the vine leaves, wrapping them like presents and stacking them until they looked like fat green pupae in the pot. Their hands moved in unison. Ibtisam eyed her tall firstborn surreptitiously. He was so handsome, so clean-cut. She loved him to be seen, to be talked about, and to bask in the envy of others. ‘What do you remember from your childhood?’ she asked him slyly. ‘You and Dad did your best.’ She was pleased but it was like smelling a dish, not tasting. ‘What is something you remember, tell me a story of your childhood.’ Sami folded the small packages of spices, rice and tomato more slowly. ‘Do you remember when I crashed the car just after I got my licence? It was a long time ago now. You and Dad were so angry because you thought I had risked Salah’s life. You didn’t speak to me for two months. It
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was at the time when Sa’eed broke his leg in the department store, remember? Well, I wasn’t actually there. Salah was driving. He was thirteen. Sa’eed was in the car. He broke his leg in the accident. They gave the police my name and licence so that it wouldn’t get back to you.’ He was distracted and his leaf scrolls were becoming too loose. Ibtisam kept picking his out of the pot and redoing them. Her hands shook a little. ‘They rang me before they rang the ambulance. I was driving in the dark out to the accident, wondering what I would see. Salah sounded very bad on the phone. I was angry with everything. As I came up the winding road, I could see blue and yellow and red flashing lights splashing up the trunks of the trees and I remember thinking: this is the story of my life. Always. There was so much blood in the car. There were emergency services people all around but I remember thinking that everything rested on me. It was as if I would be the one with the wettex in the morning, trying to mop everything up. But, you know, Salah grew up OK in the end. At least he has a licence now. I made him get that.’ It was not quite what Ibtisam had been hoping for. She tried to be proud of her oldest for looking after
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his brothers but there had been something bitter and lonely in Sami’s voice. She was a little shocked at the secrecy of it all. He had said that they had done their best and she tried to focus on that. They had cooked up a whole vat of the khakicoloured parcels. That night, when she went to the hafli dressed in her glittering blue with Sa’d in a blue suit on her arm, she carried a huge platter of them. But all night she could not eat them. She knew they were her usual quality but something sad had been wrapped up in them. The following week she had a birth celebration to attend. She wanted to bring the best sweets, and particularly the mighli, an aromatic rice pudding, the celebration dish for new life. Salman loved cooking sweets with her but when she asked him to come up for the weekend, he refused. He had too much on his plate with Kathy. He actually said that. ‘Blonde hair isn’t everything,’ she said to herself, hurt and angry, and dialled Sa’eed and Salah’s number. Sa’eed’s specialty wasn’t the sweets and the day started badly, because the first thing he said was, ‘Don’t be hard on Salman. He has too much on his plate with Kathy. You need to be understanding.’
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‘We are understanding. We have her in this house! But he shouldn’t neglect his mother and father.’ Sa’eed was silent. They pounded nuts and spices and stirred without talking. Then Nadine dropped in like a thunderstorm, slammed all the doors in the house, and left Sebastian with them. The silence was broken by Sebastian’s soft cooing and cackles of laughter and Ibtisam melted. ‘What did you do yesterday, hayati my life?’ Sa’eed paused. ‘I visited an old friend and made him dinner. I made your mloukhiya and tabouli. You remember Lorrie. He loved your cooking.’ Ibtisam remembered Lorrie. His mother, ya haram, the poor thing. ‘You don’t see him often, Sa’eed?’ ‘He just got back from overseas,’ Sa’eed said quietly. ‘He is my best friend, Mum.’ ‘Your brothers will always be your best friends,’ Ibtisam said quickly. She stirred, staring into the thickening broth of the aniseed-smelling rice. She suddenly remembered as if it were yesterday. The lean and beautiful boy, eating her food and consulting her on everything.
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Lorenzo, Sa’eed and Salman all borrowed her ball gowns once, for a fancy-dress party. Sa’eed and Salman had looked beautiful but Lorenzo had looked like Sophia Loren. ‘Lorenzo, he is as beautiful as a Marilyn Monroe. I wish Nadine’s lashes were as long as his!’ Lorenzo had laughed. She had forgotten him completely. Forgotten the whole sad story. It was so long ago. His father had locked him up and Lorrie had hanged himself. Sa’eed had cut him down and revived him. She had not seen him or thought about him since. She had talked a lot about Sa’eed’s bravery but Sa’eed had been quiet, like his father. Yes, Sa’eed was the quiet one. ‘You should invite him up,’ she heard herself saying, a lump in her throat. After Sa’eed’s visit, the party was flat. Ibtisam couldn’t eat at all and had to say and seem to feel all the right things. Her pleasure in the praise of people was ruined. And the community, accepting that, whether she admitted it or not, Salman too was married, had him in their sights and were also slippery with questions about Sa’eed. Someone had seen Sa’eed and Nadine with Sebastian but had not recognised Nadine. She felt grey and old.
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She wanted to see Salah, her youngest, the darling of her heart. He always cheered her up. Salah was the most like her, of all the boys. He loved those around him to be happy. He was such a charming baby. The smiles! No wonder all the girls were in love with him. No wonder he had girlfriends. With a boy like that, what can you do? Salah was the only one who would know just what to say to make her smile again. What with Nadine yelling at them, Sa’d and Sa’eed silent, and everything else, the older boys should be more comforting. She cried a little to Salah as they stripped the red meat away from a leg of lamb, cut off the fat and sinew and pounded the meat ready to mix with the birghul and spices for the kibbi. They were making it for dinner, just for them, all but Salman, who said he couldn’t come. ‘Nadine is so angry and we have done only our best. Even Sami said so. Who has it all been for except the children? They will all say I have been a bad mother, and now my children are saying it too!’ ‘Oh Mum! You’ve always been there for us. Remember when Salman skipped school for a whole week and you found out because his teacher didn’t believe the ridiculous note he wrote for himself?’
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Ibtisam smiled wanly through her tears. ‘Do you remember what you said?’ Salah drew himself up and inhaled, staring archly across the table to Ibtisam and flinging an imaginary mink over his shoulder. ‘“Are you calling my son a liar, Mister Diesel?”’ Ibtisam mouthed Are you calling my son a liar with him, very pleased. Salah was encouraged. ‘And Mum, what about when I went and laid donuts on the school oval? You dealt with the police alright, and then you dealt with me!’ Ibtisam smiled broadly. ‘There they were at the door, asking for the driver of registration number such and such, that a serious offence had been committed in said vehicle, namely the laying of donuts at midnight on the St Peters lawns, and they were seeking the whereabouts of one S Shaheen to whom the car was registered and you went white, stepped forward and said, “It was me, officer. I like making donuts.”’ Ibtisam laughed delightedly. ‘And then you let me have it!’ Salah said proudly. ‘You were a legend, Mum.’ Ibtisam was happier but, the more she thought about it, the more these didn’t seem to be quite the stories she wanted to hear. They finished the kibbi
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companionably but her sadness settled slowly back on her as if it was dust beaten briefly into the air off an old sofa. Then Salah’s mobile rang. He walked out of the kitchen, talking in a low voice. When he came back in, he had tears in his eyes. Ibtisam took one look at his pale and serious face and felt as if her heart stopped and a bomb exploded slowly in her belly. Before he said anything she knew that this was it. ‘That was Salman. I have to go. The baby was born an hour or two ago but he died almost straightaway. Salman is in a state.’
Ibtisam felt herself crumbling. She sat down on her bed and stared out of the window. Why didn’t anyone tell her that Kathy was pregnant? The poor girl. Poor Salman. A wave of grief washed over her for all lost babies the world over. Kathy’s face floated up in her mind’s eye. It was a glance back, hopeful, flinching slightly, a look she had always hated on the girl. She had none of her old feelings. The poor girl. The poor girl. It was as if all her clothes prickled. She had a shower but nothing helped. She put on her white linen, some lipstick and a hat, and went to the hospital.
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… The barouche was alone in the corner of the ward. There was a bunch of Dutch irises in a glass vase and, on the windowsill, a bowl of oranges, apples and mandarins, all small and speckled and obviously from someone’s garden. Kathy was haggard, her body making a series of sharp hillocks under the stretched white blanket. Her youth is gone, Ibtisam thought, with something like shock. A calm stranger stared at her out of the girl’s lovely blue eyes. There was no smile and no flinch. Ibtisam began to weep, looking at her. Kathy’s hair was greying, more like sand than gold. ‘What do you want?’ Kathy asked coldly. Ibtisam wept openly. She took off her hat and scrubbed her lips with a tissue. She did not know her children but, looking at Kathy, she knew this woman. The girl had been before her, open, vulnerable, for thirteen years. This closed, bereft woman, remote, calm and bitter, looking at her without retraction, had the look of Ibtisam’s own mother. Kathy’s voice was tired but hot, with a brittle crust to it. ‘The community …’ ‘To hell with the community,’ Ibtisam whispered,
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her voice cracking and her eyes squeezed shut. She wrapped her arms around Kathy’s stiff shoulders. Ibtisam went home and cried. Then she rang Auntie Rayya. She needed somebody to talk to and she didn’t want to upset the boys.
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Muwashshah
H
ussein always knew what his
parents were doing. He had an intelligence network. The sisters, cousins and the children young enough to be dragged off to a hafli knew the Austral number off by heart. The Austral crowd would thin, sometimes at eleven, sometimes at two, when all the Leb boys went home. Their parents, with cries of don’t be a stranger—we have to have you over soon—I won’t set foot in your house until you set foot in mine—no hafli like it—the roast? Oh my God! took their lengthy leave from whatever function or party they were attending and stepped carefully into their Marquises and Kingswoods and Valiants. Their sons downed their last, slapped hands, hugged and kissed
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their friends, handed over the money or J bags, took a final drag and piled into the Datsuns and Cortinas and buses. As their parents leant back, loosened stays and belts, exclaimed over the tragedies and sighed over the stuffing, their sons checked their watches, tidied their pockets and swore at the traffic or the bus driver’s mother. And as their parents pulled into the drive, the sons stashed their illegals, washed off their aftershave and their girlfriends’ perfumes, washed out their mouths with Listerine, leapt into bed, pulled the covers over their heads and breathed, deep and even. It was a regular Friday night phenomenon. Emilio behind the bar knew the deal, even though he laughed. ‘Habib! It’s your spies!’ Emilio called all the Leb boys Habib, and they all called him Emile. Just be honest, just stand up to them, Just grow up, Don’t I matter enough to you? Successive girlfriends railed and broken-hearted habibs grew more doe-eyed and attractive and took up kickboxing to let off steam. Hussein had, as yet, no solution. How would breaking his parents’ hearts help? How would reducing your mother to two weeks of tears and twenty kilos lighter or heavier and giving your father a heart attack help? How could you look after your parents by rubbing
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their face in what they feared most? Mum, Dad, I do drugs, alcohol and girls. I don’t work in a car yard with Ziad, we deal marijuana which he grows with the tomatoes at Uncle Salim’s. Mum, Dad, I want to marry her, in about ten years. Not to mention the misery of watching how badly they would behave around an Australian girlfriend. Not to mention the humiliation, disruption, inconvenience of being packed off to Lebanon. And going along in order to make them feel better, even though Salah Shaheen would take over his business. Anything to make them feel better. Anything to heal the hurt of the past and the impending losses to come. Anything. Except stay at home and be a good Leb boy. That was impossible. Anything to try to lead a normal life. The only people who understood were other Lebanese boys and girls, and they all knew that with Rayya for a mother, things were, if anything, more fraught, because they all knew that Rayya was the one who would never get over it. ‘I lie to them for our sakes, for your sake!’ Hussein tried, but his girlfriend Billie gave him a withering look and did up her top button. ‘You habibs have no pride,’ she said.
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Hussein went to kickboxing. It was a Tuesday, usually a problem-free day, a day he officially worked nine to five. Rayya was crying when Hussein got home. As he stepped through the front door, her sobs increased. He slipped past the kitchen just as she cried out, ‘My son’s a delinquent’, as if shouting her fears out loud would appease the terrible future and what it might hold. Rayya didn’t really believe it. She knew that Hussein was the most decent son in the whole community, the envy of everyone who had real delinquents, but she didn’t think there was any harm in showing him what impact it would have if he did anything delinquent and she knew about it. Hussein was worried for a moment. He had been a little careless. Could she have found his stash? His magazines? Condoms? He ticked each off as he checked his room—hollowed book untouched; Lamborghini poster still crooked; plastic dahlias in familiar poses. Rayya was sobbing, now, in exhausted wails. His confidence returned and he strode in, put his arms around her huge bulk, gently wiped her eyes and kissed her. He looked her directly in the eye and smiled. ‘Don’t, Mum, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he said in his deep, firm voice, just the way she liked it. She smiled through her tears. What a man her son
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was! She wrapped her arms around his neck again and began to weep softly in relief. She had been really upset, having worked herself up into the state she probably would experience should her son become a delinquent. Such a man, her baby boy! Hussein helped her to a chair and patted her orange-blonde hair. ‘I’ll make you kousa tonight,’ she whispered, leaning towards his ear. Hussein sighed. But just then, her nose level with his neck, Rayya stiffened and her body wobbled and teetered. The hair rose on Hussein’s nape and he stiffened too. He had forgotten to shower after kickboxing. He was soaked in sweat, aftershave and Billie’s perfume. Rayya sniffed, breathed deeply, sniffed again. Then she threw her head up and shrieked in horrible unstoppable grief: ‘AIDS! My son’s got AIDS!!’ She filled every room with her terror, howling, ‘Lost, oh Lord,
AIDS!’
She finally cast herself onto her
bed. A long shudder passed through her body and then she was pumping inarticulate sobs into her pillow. Hussein followed her helplessly. Rayya got like this sometimes. Worked up to a frenzy, she would have to retire and stay quiet, crying softly for a couple of days.
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Rayya’s nightmares preyed on her in the shadows of her bedroom. She caved in at these times, no longer the defender of her besieged family. All the strange and terrible and ordinary things that could take her boys away crowded in, whispering in the corners and rising up like visions. This was her shadow world, populated with worse things than obscure diseases. In her bed, sobbing quietly, Rayya had visions of the things she could never admit. Her family saw the two days as an uninteresting mystery and left her alone to her fears. And so Rayya was alone with the nightmare possibility of losing her boys. She saw Ziad refusing to come home, months going by without her knowing what he was eating and how he was. Her heart twisted unbearably as she imagined seeing him, bearded, when last time he had been clean shaven. And then she saw him on the street with the shuffling, shifty gait of a drug dealer, clawing at the arms of passers-by, smelling unclean. Then she saw his face as he pretended not to see her and she blacked out. She woke to find Hussein sitting in a dingy flat late at night waiting for his wife to stop whoring and come home to look after the crying baby. His wife who dressed like a tramp and who had turned Hussein away from his mother and father and brother and from his
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tradition. His wife who had turned her sweet Hussein into a dirty liar. And then she saw Hussein weeping, broken and drunken on the same dirty kitchen floor, his wife having left him and taken his baby with her, and she saw him reach for his pistol and Rayya’s heart burst with the blackness of his grief and her loss. The only thing that helped was the tablets. Ya Haram, the poor thing, other mothers whispered. It was an accepted fact that Rayya’s life had been hard, although even Hussein was unsure of the details. ‘Have you done anything wrong?’ Rafiq asked his son roughly, gripping Hussein by the shoulder and shaking him. Hussein thought a moment. Your wrong or mine? ‘No,’ he answered truthfully. ‘Get her some flowers then,’ Rafiq said gruffly, boxing Hussein’s ears as a preventive measure. After two days Rafiq told Rayya calmly that Hussein didn’t have
AIDS
but Rayya had forgotten that that was what
she had said. It was exhausting looking after his mother but Hussein had principles. If Billie wanted to meet his parents, she could get to know them first. Billie got to know Rayya sooner than he had planned. He got home early to please his mother, now
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and then. After the last attack, he tried to be soothing in his comings and goings. He got home before dark a day or so later, with the flowers. From the front gate he could hear that Rayya was on the phone, her voice raised. As the front door opened inwards, the words rushed out at him—‘Australian whore prostitute slut! Where did you get my son’s name?
NEVER
call this
house again!’ And she slammed the receiver down. Hussein sighed. Rayya turned to him, saw the flowers and smiled triumphantly. ‘Who was that, Mum?’ ‘Some whore with the wrong number.’ ‘What was her name?’ ‘Prostitute. Surname Slut. And she pretended to be a boy!’ ‘You shouldn’t talk to my friends like that, Mum.’ Hussein felt exhausted and he knew he sounded weak and lame. ‘Friends!!
NEVER
tease me like that, habibi!’ Rayya
smiled broadly, grabbed the flowers and hugged him. If she won the battle of words and gestures, she felt she was winning the war. Hussein, she knew, would never really do anything wrong and that gave her confidence. …
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Billie dropped him. ‘You’re a nice guy, Hussein, a sweetie, and one hell of a good fuck. I like you. But it’s not going to work.’ Hussein had been going out with Billie for six months, long enough for him to lose all sense of her being skip. Long enough for his heart to leap, his blood surging with happy electricity, when she was in the room. Long enough to believe that he really would marry her in a decade or so. Long enough for Ziad to tell him he was an idiot. And Hussein forgot that he didn’t like skips and met all of her friends, who were, when he got to know them, ordinary and interesting people, mostly university students. Hussein was already working in the imaginary car yard but began to dream of becoming a student. A real one. Ziad had taken Hussein in after Hussein’s failed job interview at the real car yard. Hussein had sat through the interview with the distracting thought that the owner was one of the five skip boys, one of whom was called Chris, who beat him unconscious behind the shelter sheds when he first started high school, and so ended his brief career as the first Leb in St Peters College. He was suddenly convinced that the guy interviewing him was pretending not to know him but was simply
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keeping him there with the formal civilities of an interview until his skip mates could gather outside. In the park. At Ziad’s address, which was on the application form. At the Department of Social Security office, where they had his home address. What was clear was that Chris Whitworth did not like him and did not like the evasive answers Hussein began to give. Hussein’s heart beat violently and he felt cold with sweat. When Hussein got out of that tiny airless office, after Chris stood stiffly without responding to Hussein’s extended hand, he went straight to the DSS and cancelled his unemployment benefits in order to make himself less traceable to Chris and his mates. ‘Congratulations!’ his case manager said dismissively, ticking a box on Hussein’s file. Ziad took pity on him and gave him an allowance for dealing to his friends and to the Austral crowd, much to Salah’s annoyance. And Ziad answered his phone, ‘Happy Used Cars’ from then on. Hussein dragged himself, utterly miserable, to Ziad’s office, a small inner-city flat his brother rented, even though he mostly slept at home to keep Rafiq and Rayya happy. Hussein knew that Ziad would see him as a failure—unable to hold down a small dealership,
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keep his girlfriend or please his mother and father—but he was determined to quit anyway. He just wanted to smoke and cry and do nothing, and dealing was too sociable and he would be too likely to meet Billie and her next boyfriend. Hussein went along with Rayya and Rafiq to the next hafli because he had nothing better to do and he was still avoiding the Austral crowd. Rayya dressed with unusual care, a tear of happiness in her eye. She was flushed, even beautiful. Hussein helped her dress, watching her arc the lipstick over her striking lips, making the winged shape of a gangster’s moustache. He could feel his heart stretching to breaking point sometimes, watching his mother. Her wedding photo was above the mirror. In it a slim, fiery Rayya, with something both frank and uncertain in her gaze, smiled those same sharp and beautiful lips at the camera. Rafiq next to her looked unhappy. Hussein knew that he was the only bit of that slim girl’s future to have halfway measured up and he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up forever. Rayya swallowed some pills to keep herself happy and confident at the party, and smiled savagely, dashingly, out of her yellow taffeta. She was ready.
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He was surprised to find Salah at the hafli, also in jeans with his shirt hanging out. They looked at each other knowingly. ‘Hussein! How tha fuck are ya! Heard you and Billie split.’ Hussein slapped Salah’s palm and hugged him without answering. In any case, Salah wasn’t waiting. Salah had a compilation tape of Rage Against the Machine, Bodycount, Geto Boys and Cypress Hill, which he slipped into his walkman. Salah also said he had a mobile phone and immediately forgot to let Hussein listen to the song he was raving about. The phone sat like a revolver in his leather jacket. Salah pulled it out diffidently then let Hussein have a look. The Austral was speed dial code 1. Then Salah gave him a funny look. ‘Billie’s a tiptop chick. You gonna get back together?’ Hussein was uncomfortable. Salah was such a chick magnet. Salah was also his best friend. His heart felt as though it was being squeezed in a fist. An image of Billie in a singlet rose in his mind. Sassy and tough. In her own bedroom of her own flat. Long fingers on guitar strings. Her own guitar, bought with money she earned waitressing.
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‘Maybe,’ he said, miserably. Salah eyed him closely, then smiled. ‘You told her that?’ Then Salah laughed and put his arm around Hussein’s waist. ‘Aussie sheilas, man, they’re all the same. Slightest thing, they split and try the next guy.’ ‘I don’t think Billie will go out with a Leb again,’ Hussein said quietly. ‘Really?’ Salah turned to look at him, as if to read more from his expression. ‘She met my mum.’ Salah’s eyes popped out with glee and horror, and he clapped his hand over his mouth as he doubled up, slapping his thigh repeatedly. Hussein realised then that his friend was stoned. ‘Oh Hussein, you poor, poor boy! Outside, now!’ and he tapped the top pocket where he always carried a J bag. Rayya and Ibtisam, having both brought marriageable sons to the party, were charged with happiness and competing loudly to be the centre of attention. Rayya had not felt so happy in a long time. Everything was coming right. Hussein, despite his clothes, was so attractive, so adorable in his ways! If he would just marry, then maybe all the long nightmare of her life, her
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marriage and this country would vanish. She grabbed his arm as he passed. ‘Honey, Hussein looks after even the flowers in his room! No dust!’ Rayya said to Uncle Sam and Auntie Aida, who were trying unsuccessfully to get some of their own bragging into the conversation. Salah’s face lit up in instant comprehension and Hussein knew he had to move his stash. Rayya slipped into her bed across the room from Rafiq, who was already snoring in his. She smiled, took her tablets for her calcium, her blood pressure, her ulcer, her depression, her panic attacks and her insomnia, and sank into her happiest half-awake, halfasleep dream. This dream was always the one, or the other, or both. The first was Ziad’s wedding to a beauty from the finest family in Lebanon, with Hussein dressed in a white suit with a red carnation in his lapel for his older brother’s marriage. Ziad, erect and manly, having waited until he was a successful businessman, owner of the car yard, the envy of all those who had spawned prostitutes and delinquents. And the bride! In such a dress! Slim, with a PhD, a dancer, who could sing, and with jet black hair and green eyes, a virginal virgin, who
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had never had a sexy thought, never touched a man, not like the virgins here who use their mouths instead. And how she’d boss her, get her running, teach her cooking, teach her what Ziad liked! They’d go green and purple with jealousy—and let them. None of them had a son like Ziad. Ziad with all his funny little indiscretions and run-ins with the law forgotten. Ziad her darling. In the other dream, Hussein married, with Ziad’s children as pageboys. Hussein, grown tall and straight and decent like his brother, would spurn all the lovesick Adelaide virgins and go to Lebanon and find the finest sweetest, most beautiful girl in all the world. Mum, will this one be OK? This one? Rayya would just raise her eyebrows and look to the side, but when it was the right one Rayya would smile and he would weep with relief, for that would be the one he had really loved in the first place. Then Rayya slipped into deep sleep, still tinged with gold by her dream, her heart beating to the comforting throb coming from Hussein’s room. No, no, no, Mommaaaaa … Hussein stayed up late with his door locked, smoking, listening to Bodycount and writing poetry. He never forgot a line of a song he loved. He never forgot a debt or a deal. No one would catch him writing down
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the address and list of the take of every break-in in a brag book as Ziad had once done. Hussein only wrote his poetry so he could sort out the metrical scheme and rhythm. Then he memorised it and carried it away with him. His last poem was about how you couldn’t memorise marijuana and just carry it in your brain, how there was a wall in the head between the lower delinquent drives and the higher mind and how no amount of TCP could pierce it, even though it tried, it tried. Another of his poems was about Billie and how beautiful her breasts were in the moonlight. His poem tonight was about Rayya and how she opposed his marriage to a gazelle and ended up with the dead body of her son in her arms. It was a good poem with a tight, taut refrain and an echoing sadness in the last syllable from the first line to the last. It was half in English, half in colloquial Arabic. Wouldn’t really work as a poem, since neither Arabs nor Aussies would appreciate it. Burn momma burn momma burn momma, burn bitch … Would work as a song. You could do anything with other languages in a song. Wallah. Salah should start a band. He lay back, sad yet replete, staring at the low white ceiling in his bedroom. Then he pulled out the magazine from behind the Lamborghini. He’d write a book one day about a noble drug
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smuggler who braved the evils of the law and of tradition, who could compose poems in real Arabic, who showered his loving, lovely, secret, sassy wife with rich presents, and who always looked after his mother and father (who lived and died without ever knowing how it was that their son took care of them).
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Music
Z
ein was tough, and known to
be tough. Her courage, audacity, energy and warmth had over the years brought her into the hub of the older community. This meant she had to be tough some of the time and could cruise on her reputation at others, which was, on the whole, a good thing. But it also meant that, in the eyes of the community, she could not be seen to break, or they would break too—dissolve, squabble, drift away from each other in their isolation and longing. If Zein, the strongest woman in the community, broke, who would withstand the pain that tugged at them daily? Zein was the first to hold a real wedding when her son married an Australian. Half the community
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boycotted, and the other half sat grim-faced, even crying, at the white tables filled with uneaten food. Zein held her head high and sailed through the whispers, holding Amin up with her, and Zein kissed her new daughter-in-law with enough seemly affection to raise the whispers to murmurs but to shame the community into congratulations and kisses too. Zein carried herself impeccably, and kept Amin ramrod straight at her side, even though she felt like curling up in bed and having a good cry. At first it was a nightmare evening but Zein in the end was rewarded with something. Whenever she felt that she was bleeding to death through a hole in the family made by her daughter-in-law, she also saw, and sometimes forced herself to see, a thin white filament stretched between her son and his wife, and then she heard music. She was given a moment in which she knew without doubt that God had blessed her. She was sitting at the head of the first table, her stomach stiff against the pink silk of her dress, distended with gas and wracked by griping pains. It was almost impossible to keep her face smiling, not wincing. Amin by her side was silent. The mask of parental pride that was stamped over the wash of inner shame gave him an unusual pallor and a sunken look. Zein knew he was
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angry that she had insisted on a wedding rather than a discreet event. The bride’s parents and people all hung to the other side of the room and were the subject of some savaging in Arabic. They were behaving badly, haughty and dismissive with the Arabs, drunken and loud with each other. They were clearly unhappy too, something Zein was utterly shocked by, but stored up: her amazement that they despised her son made her fleetingly like her daughter-in-law but raised her irritation. She dimly perceived that this was a messy, hard marriage on both sides. She tried to give her stomach more room by leaning back and was suddenly furious. Until now she had not really blamed her son, but really, Abbas! Her rage grew. She got up and circled, to ease her anger and her tortured middle. She smiled and chatted to Ibtisam and Sa’d, Haifa and Walid, who had all staunchly attended, bringing a tear of gratitude to Amin’s eye. Then she distinctly heard the word ‘sandnigger’ from the other side of the room, and her fury drove her to the toilet. Really! Abbas, how could you do this to us? Why try for something so difficult, so divisive, why enter a family in which you were despised, when this could have been a celebration, in which she and Amin almost died for joy and her son set himself up to be helped and beloved by all, in which two families
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came together to cook, to learn, to argue, to tell stories, to help with the babies? Why? She pictured the couple out there in the room. They were stiff with each other, and stiff, formal, even with her. Tall effigies of a bride and groom. She flushed and some uncharitable thoughts passed through her mind. She stood at the mirror gathering her strength. Out in the hall, it almost looked like a real wedding. Then she overheard the word ‘sharmuta’ from somewhere and almost turned to find out who it was who said it, but then felt too tired. It was not like Abbas, not at all, to do something like this. Why did he do it? Why did she? She looked across to the young couple. The bride, her son’s wife, was a plain girl. Brown hair, brown eyes. Too skinny. She was pale and tense, obviously not enjoying her wedding at all. Abbas was strung taut, going through this because he too was tough. Zein felt her rage die away and settle to a sadness. Life was going to be so hard. They were going to hold everyone at arm’s length and do it all alone, as if they were the first humans on earth, cast out of the garden. They were going to punish everyone here, Arab and
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Australian, by seizing their independence. She could see them in a small flat, made pleasant and clean with their efforts, small ornaments, sunlight and the air, but not with the gifts and help of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles. They were, sooner or later, going to struggle together with a wailing baby, rushing by taxi to the doctor, and paying a babysitter once or twice a year when they went to a movie. She saw Abbas laying concrete all by himself, no team of relatives joking, teasing and arguing over the job around him. They were, she saw with sudden sad prescience, going to shut her and Amin out. They each knew their own half of the room, not the other, but from Zein’s vantage point, she could see there was little difference in the aggression and hostility in the air. And Abbas knew that she, Zein, and his father were putting on an act. They were going to cook, work, build a house and raise children alone, and who could blame them? Why did they both choose something this hard? Zein felt like weeping, suddenly, not for herself now, but for her son and, in a shadowy way, for that plain tense girl by his side. And would Abbas ever really understand a foreigner? Be understood? Did anyone ever understand their partner? Why make it immeasurably harder?
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At that moment Abbas leant towards Janet and pulled at a thread in her bodice. She looked down at his hand as the thread lengthened and lengthened between them. Zein feared that the thread would unravel some part of the dress and the beautiful satin would fall open, fall away. Janet raised a white hand on which the heavy ring looked uncomfortable, and she touched the sinews along the back of his hand, spreading her long fingers over it and just touching the white thread with her little finger. It was a sensual, wondering touch, as mysterious as the thread. And then Zein feared that the thread would break. She felt herself to be at some boundary she had to know and had to cross, watching, but if the cotton snapped, if it snapped too soon! The thread was nearly half a foot long, and Abbas had stopped; in that moment Zein had a vision of Janet playing his hand like a lute. She couldn’t see Abbas’s face, but just then Janet looked up at him and Zein saw a girl she had never before seen. Flushed, glowing, giving. And Zein saw the curve of her son’s chest, and the electric happiness he gave her back as a secret, strengthening gift. Zein was suddenly clear-headed. She clapped her hands, signalled to the band to step it up, and turned to Amin, shrugging off the sight of his stiff shoulders. ‘Let’s dance,’ she said. ‘This is a WEDDING!’
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The Jackal
F
arhan lived alone. He hated
Australia and the Australians. He said that this country was God’s biggest prison and that he would return to Jerusalem one day. It was just talk. Farhan’s family were long gone and he had nothing to return to. Farhan told this story. In those days I lived in a household of women—my grandmother, my mother, my wife, my sister and my daughter. It was too much sometimes. I was the axe and the grinder between them and they fought over me all the time. I took myself off, now and then, to the mountain above our village, to watch time pass and to dream of a son. This one time, I was at my favourite
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spot—a bare hill above the forest with the village out of sight below. Women’s voices floated up on the breeze only rarely. I placed my rifle under my pack, lay back under three gaunt snawbar trees and stared at the sky. It was warm but faithless weather, so I spread my jacket over my chest and toasted under it. I must have fallen asleep in the sun. I woke suddenly, aware from the hairs on my neck that I was not alone. When very young, I had learnt to wake without a flicker and to ease my eyes open a chink. My mother and later my wife never knew when I was awake. I liked to watch them. They would look at me affectionately and this was my secret glimpse of the real world under our daily lives. They always shouted at me as soon as they saw my eyes open. I looked around through the fringe of my lashes, taking in the grass, the massively slanted shadows and the deepening light. Then I saw her, sitting right by me, still as a stone. A jackal. She was looking me full in the face, her ears up. Her evil mask somehow made her both visible and invisible. Her presence, stillness and suspicion jolted me. I wasn’t sure whether I was on the familiar hill above my village at all. My heart raced for a moment. As I had so many times, I pretended sleep and watched, but
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I expected no soft glance, no muttered endearments, I can tell you! I never liked jackals. They are sneaky, cowardly and attack the weak and the young. They scream like dogs when hurt. When hunting together they can be dangerous even to young children, although this is rare. They usually have the God-given fear of us. They eat carrion too. In those days they hung around the rubbish piles at the edge of the village, slinking, sly and unfriendly. And there were a lot of them around. I and my brothers threw stones at them when we were small. I even shot one once and was very proud. They have a strange manner, for all that. They narrow their yellow eyes and stare out of that still, pointed face as if they know about life and death and are just the watchers, the waiters. I really hated them. As a little boy I saw them up close in my dreams and was afraid. I dreamt of a jackal the night before my father was killed by the Christians. My first thought was to wait a bit and then kick her in her cheeky face. Give her the fear of God. That she really thought she could approach me! But I had never been so close to a living jackal before and I was interested to see what she would do, what she would
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look like when she stopped being so suspicious. Curiosity got a hold of my heart. We both waited, it seemed an age, and I almost felt that I would sleep again, with her imprinted on my mind, and then would wake and it would be a dream. Then, suddenly, she stood up and silently walked right up to me, looking me over, up and down, as if measuring me. It was all I could do to keep my breathing even and unseen. I could smell her then, a thick, musky stink with the smell of death in it, and I wondered again whether she was really a jackal. She walked around me slowly and silently and then settled by my left foot and waited. I was just getting bored and going to boot her one when she leant forward gracefully and bit my foot a little bit, then jumped back and watched me closely. I kept very still. She came up and grabbed my foot in her teeth and shook, biting as hard as she could. I was prepared and kept my foot loose and floppy. She trotted once round me one way, once round me the other, and then grabbed my foot by the boot and began tugging furiously, without any caution. She pulled at me, bracing all four legs. She pulled at me by tucking my foot over her shoulder and having a go at just running away with me, but my great body did not budge. She went into a frenzy. She ran round me one
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way, ran round me the other, looking for something to drag me from, but could only settle on the boot again. My hands were tucked well out of reach, under my belt and under my jacket. As she struggled and wrestled with my body and the idea of dragging me off, I got a good look at her. She had an elegance I had not expected, or ever noticed in jackals before. She was quite golden, with long fine legs and feathery hair over her back. Her ears were large and finely formed, and her eyes were like polished amber and kohl rimmed. She was shiny, but lean, and I could see the row of dugs hanging at her belly. She stopped tugging at me and stopped still again, thinking. Then she dug next to my leg and covered my feet in a fine sprinkling of sand, leaves and earth and, wild-eyed, raced off to the edge of the hill and out of my sight. I could hear her calling in high repeated barks. I thought she was grieving, but she was suddenly at my side again and, seconds later, two other jackals appeared. One ran up to her and greeted her with great affection, and I knew that he was her husband when I saw her lick him back distractedly but order him to tug at me. He was big, with more black in his hair than she. The third looked younger, but adult too, and was courteous to both the others. And then there were jackals everywhere. About ten more appeared in my field of vision,
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with some little ones. The whole family grabbed hold of my boots and trouser cuffs and, you would not believe it, inch by inch, dragged me off the hill, down the slope under the pine trees and into the forest. They tugged and rested and changed positions, all bickering together but working as a family. I became engrossed in watching them and discovering their ways. How similar they were to my own family! The father was the biggest in body and at first glance you would think he was the leader. He was noisy, too, encouraging the others and playing with them now and then to keep their spirits up, but I could see that he was a little bit lazy, that he worked to impress his mate, not to secure me for the long hard winter ahead. His mate, the beautiful golden jackal who had found me, was the leader, and all the others loved but were a little afraid of her. I could see it clearly, and it brought a tear to my eye, I can tell you. Then there were the younger, silly ones—their youth their weakness! How they would tug, each convinced that he alone was the greatest hero of the clan, and then how they would fight another who seemed to be tugging better! Progress was slow with such fighting. And no one bit the little ones hard, except perhaps the weaker younger dogs who were not quite so little, and progress was even more slow with babies rolling around
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under foot and the youngest having to be suckled. I began to notice how they looked at each other, how they spoke softly with one another, and how the weaker deferred to the stronger and how often the stronger took more of the load. One jackal always followed behind, and from the sound, I guessed that she was erasing the broad trail dragging my body was making through the forest floor. I was impressed with her foresight. They didn’t want this plenty to be whittled away with other families or the Christians or the Druze knowing about it. She wanted to protect her own. The light began to dim towards early evening and we were, by then, deep in the forest in a part I was sure I knew standing up but which was completely unfamiliar to me lying down with my eyes half shut. They had managed to drag me a very long way. And I was a strong, heavy man in those days, well fed by my women. I wondered what they would do with me. What could they do? There were a lot of them, but they were still just jackals. I felt a little sorry for them that all this work was going to be wasted. I nearly sat up and shouted at them then and there to save them more trouble, but I was suddenly overcome with the desire to catch one of them. I set my eyes on a young cub who, as the forest became
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thicker, seemed more and more beautiful to me. And you may not believe me, but jackals are beautiful, like gazelles. I am surprised the poets never noticed them. My jackal was so playful, I almost burst out laughing and ruined everything. My jackal Jamila would run up behind the golden mother and jump on her back, then run away before she could be bitten. I pictured my daughter playing with her, jumping and laughing and scampering, and I knew I had to have her. I prepared my hands under my jacket, ready to pounce. The jackals were exhausted and our laborious path through the forest had slowed. Suddenly we stopped and I could hear the forest sounds again. The jackals had been talking together and then came up to me. They had no idea that I was anything but freshly killed and they had no caution. One sat on my chest. The others then began to dig a big hole to my right side and I realised that, of course, they would bury me. I thought I better get up soon. Now that the pulling was over it was getting harder to keep still. One jackal with very golden eyes and a mean look kept snuffling up under my clothes and trying to get a little morsel to eat. I was ready to give up, having been bitten three times, and a little worried now about whether they could in fact overpower me and bury me alive. The diggings had quickly become a large
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hole, a trench the length of my body. But just then Jamila came rolling up against my side, chasing the tail of an uncle who was moving to pull me towards the hole. I tensed, slowly slowly, and prepared my hands under the jacket. I still had a jackal on my chest. Then I leapt with all the speed and strength I could find, throwing the adult, who shrieked in terror, off my chest. The jackals sprang sideways and upwards as if they had been blown up, screaming in silly yapping voices and streaking off into the forest with their hair standing on end. I had Jamila’s tiny body bundled, struggling and panting, in the jacket and, laughing, I climbed out of the forest to the hill, collected my gun and pack, and strode home for dinner. What a tale to tell! Jamila became very tame and I soon forgot her. My daughter took her everywhere on a rope, and at other times we tied her to the fig tree because my neighbour Hamdi worried about Jamila and the chickens, Jamila and the lambs, Jamila and diseases. About this time the jackals increased around the village, and then, one night, Abu Mahmoud’s second son, who was only five, disappeared, and I remembered the way they dragged me and hid the trail. We killed all the jackals and they became rare in our area. Jamila stayed, playful and sleek under the fig tree, and my daughter began school.
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It was fig season and my wife yelled at me to unburden the tree. She was, finally, pregnant with my son and could not do it for herself. Jamila eyed me and, when I was close, wagged her tail and wriggled with delight. She really was very beautiful, just like her mother; and she had fine manners, not like a dog. I patted her golden sides. On a whim, I decided to take her with me to herd the goats. The poor thing, she had been tied for a while. I took her on the rope past Hamdi’s and then, once out of the village, I let her loose. You know, she had no loyalty. I saw her stiffen. She turned and looked at me. Suddenly, she looked like the watcher, not Jamila. She turned and trotted away without looking back, then began to run in a straight line for the forest and the mountains. I raised my rifle. What would she do, all alone?
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PART III
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Geha’s nephew came to him one day weeping. ‘Uncle, the time has really come,’ he said. ‘I am faced with the choice of death or exile. What do the poets and philosophers say about this?’ Geha shook his head sadly. ‘ Don’t trust the poets and philosophers, my son.’ ‘You are experienced in all the ways of men,’ wept his nephew. ‘What do you advise, Uncle? Which is better, death or exile?’ ‘Well,’ Geha said, thoughtfully, ‘I have only had experience of one of them, and that is true of everyone I know. I think you should leave this land at once and seek a wise man who is experienced in both.’
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Flight
T
he shell of a downed American
bomber rested on its side in the yellow earth of the empty mound just a couple of houses away from Akram’s best friend Yusuf’s place. After Akram’s parents were killed, he moved in with Yusuf’s family, and the two boys went down to the bomber whenever they could. Every weekend they climbed into the crushed cockpit and flew the plane high into the sky in great wheeling spirals, in aerobatic displays, competing with the kites. They stared at their quarter far below, laughing at how tiny and insignificant it had become. The bombsite where Akram’s home had been was just a tiny hole, like a gap in a row of teeth, and the streets were thin wriggly threads
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between the clumps of houses joining his place to Yusuf’s. On their first flight, they concentrated on getting the controls right and getting the engine sounding as it should, and were exhilarated just by the sky itself. But on the second, they were charmed by the effect they had on the people far below. They waved to Uncle Hamid and Auntie Halima, laughing, and when Hamid yelled at them to get out of it and get back home and help Yusuf’s mother, they couldn’t hear him over the engine noise. They could just see his mouth moving far in the distance. They looked at each other and laughed. Iman, Yusuf’s younger sister, ran out of their house, looking tiny, and just waved to them in great excitement and Akram decided then and there that he would marry her when he grew up. Eventually Uncle Hamid was able to get them down out of the sky by running up the mound towards the plane with a big stick. Akram was usually pilot because Yusuf was very nice to him these days. Yusuf was co-pilot, gunner and instructor, which made up for it. They became proficient at take-offs and landings, at aerobatics and at buzzing friends and giving them the scare of their lives. It was time for more.
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‘Perfect day for it,’ Akram said, scanning the sky to the west, and Yusuf nodded, knowing that before long he would find out what ‘it’ was. They gunned the engines and zoomed up into the sky as usual, but this time Akram veered purposefully right and headed with resolve towards Jordanian airspace. He communicated cryptically with Jordanian air traffic control, received the goahead and flew at high altitude over the border to Israel. ‘Bomb Sharon!’ Yusuf shouted excitedly over the engine noise. But neither of them knew exactly where the Knesset or Mossad HQ were. ‘It moves about. In a different building each day,’ Akram said, and that put an end to that. To the discerning eyes of Iraq’s two finest, Jewish settlements stood out from the air. They were orderly. The roofs were all the same colour and they had green gardens with fountains wasting the water, while all around the Palestinian dwellings were higgledy piggledy, many colours and shapes, and the gardens were dead and parched. They bombed the crap out of the settlements and then flew back home, evading the helicopter gunships in brilliant swooshes and dodging the F16s with a skill that drew gasps of admiration from the Israelis themselves. Their names were added to the list of Israel’s most wanted.
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It was a good day. The plane had been there for about a year and, for a while, had worn slogans and rested as a lopsided, broken-winged war memorial, somehow cheering to everyone even with the savage sound of F16s overhead. But as life got harder in their quarter, the plane itself was slowly eaten. Every week it shrank. Bits of metal were sawn off and sold. In what seemed no time, the two broken wings were gone, and the downed plane’s breastbone was eaten away. All the wires and bits of glass had vanished. In the cockpit they had to sling a wheat sack between some struts to make a seat. Each flight was harder, dogged by mechanical problems and sudden scary engine cut-outs and out-of-control spirals to a few metres above ground when Akram’s frantic tinkerings would bring the welcome roar out of an unpromising splutter. Then their school closed because Sheikh Hasan had to look after his family just like everybody else, and they went out flying every day. One day, the plane was completely gone. Yusuf and Akram had to build a plane on the mound out of bits of wood, flying what looked like a cross into the blue sky, waving to everyone below, and dropping pebbles as tiny bombs. Every day they had to dismantle
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it again, or the wings and fuselage would have disappeared just as the original bomber had. They could not get to Israel now without mishap, and only evaded the fighter planes hunting them by accidental near crashes and Allah being with them. Then one day they arrived at the mound with nothing. Their sticks had been burnt for firewood and Yusuf’s mother had grabbed her broom off them as they sneaked out of the door, screaming at them and then bursting into tears. Akram drew a large plane in the sand. It took him an hour and a half, with Yusuf reminding him that there were struts here, flaps there, buttons on the console here and there, and checking everything everywhere as officiously and seriously as he could. Yusuf scratched Made in al-Iraq in the side, and they grinned at each other. They dug two little seats and wet the earth in front of them to make the pilot’s and copilot’s operation stations. Yusuf filled its virgin tanks with fuel and then ran to get his sister while Akram guarded the plane, his hand resting lovingly on the clean, smooth lines of its perfect wing. It was a perfect plane, completely undamaged, as yet unflown. Straight from the factory. He got in, carefully. ‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,’ he said softly, and
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started it up. The engine was a flawless roar, instantaneous. It had none of those worrying little burbles and choking sounds that gave you a scare in midflight. It had none of those little moments that made you slap the dash, or kiss it, or tap it sharply at a special spot, or pray out loud. He knew its engines would never cut out and drop them in a sickening exciting free-fall towards the ground. It was perfect. Yusuf came running up the mound with Iman, tugging her by the hand. ‘Where’s the plane, Yusuf? Where’s the plane?’ Iman was calling. ‘Here,’ said Yusuf, ‘but you have to squeeze into this little space behind the seats, because there are only two and we’re the pilots.’ Iman stepped in carefully and crouched down, her eyes shining. She had brought the food, which was going to get them into a lot of trouble. She had some stale bread with herbs on it, some cold cooked rice and some sheep’s fat in a plastic bag. Akram didn’t look at her. He was the pilot and would go without food if he had to. He punched buttons, checked the console and, as Yusuf fastened his harness, began to taxi off. The take-off was incredible and they all slammed back into their seats.
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‘We forgot bombs!’ Yusuf shouted suddenly over Akram’s roar, jumping up to get out. Akram pulled him back into his seat. ‘We don’t need bombs this time,’ Akram cut the engines quickly to say and then continued. They soared up into the blue, past the smoke, past the kites, past the crows. It was an impossibly long time before Akram levelled out, higher than they had ever flown before. Their quarter disappeared below them and Baghdad itself was lost to them. All they could see was celestial blue and a white herd of sun-drenched clouds passing under them. Akram didn’t speak until at his chosen altitude, then he double-checked the instrument panel, sat back, cut the engines and looked at them both conspiratorially as he glided. ‘The satellites can still see us,’ Yusuf said. Akram pressed a button on the dash that he had drawn after Yusuf left. ‘Not any more!’ They all stared at each other in delight. ‘Where are we going?’ Iman shouted joyously. ‘Australia!’ Akram said, and it flooded his chest with happiness to see their mouths fall open. And away they flew.
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The Sea
A
bd al-Rahman was beyond
exhaustion. His body shook in the airconditioned room. An Indonesian official who knew a few words of Arabic wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and motioned kindly to the plastic seat, then excused himself with open hands to go to the others. Nothing seemed real. Abd al-Rahman looked as if through a film at the faces around him in the room, recognising no one. So few! He closed his eyes and imagined turning, dreamily, to feel for Zahra at his side, to reach for struggling Siham on her lap, a movement that would dispel this impossible room with its lost faces. He opened his eyes again. He knew absolutely that Zahra and Siham would not be there.
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He remembered suddenly that when he first met Zahra he had mistaken her for a dead person. His chest burned and suddenly he was weeping in front of all the people. She was gone. He had not had time to finish fighting with her and to begin simply loving her.
Abd al-Rahman saw a bundle of black cloth sodden in the water with trapped air raising it in small slick humps out of the green sea. He saw a hand, suddenly, poke stiffly out of the water and then disappear and realised with horror that it was a woman, face down in the water. He pulled off his sandals with a sick lurch in his stomach. What if it was a body, old, putrid? Worse, what if it was seconds too late and he tried to revive her without success? What if her relatives had drowned her, forcing a young head under? He waded out but at that moment the shapeless bundle leapt up and he uttered a small scream. Her slick head rose, hijab plastered from brow to breast and her black balto billowing wide around her, and then she turned lurid green goggles his way. She barely registered him standing there in the shallows, then dived again, floating away as a shapeless weighted bundle of black cloth.
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Zahra was not like other women. He knew that from the moment he saw her wet, cloth-covered head rise from the water. She stopped snorkelling after she married him, even though his engineering contracts had taken him to Egypt and they lived at that time in Sharm al-Shaykh on the Red Sea coast. He didn’t prohibit it but, privately embarrassed by how foolish she looked, teased her mercilessly about it. He had been so young and self-conscious. He had never asked her what she saw. After such teasing, she would never have told him. And he was so young and stupid then, that if she had told him something wonderful, he would have been jealous, so she was wise to keep her secrets from him.
He had the power to keep her in the house, to insist that she wore even gloves on the street, to recall her from university. He could demand her service. He could demand her body. In the moment these things gave him a heightened pleasure, but it was fleeting and he was, when she complied, ashamed. He wanted a fight. She never fought but she always won. She withheld what felt to him like everything he yearned for, but he could not have said what it was. She could
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withhold herself even as he grasped her body and reached as deeply into it as was humanly possible. She could withhold the world and have him live in the shadowlands of his own resentment and pettiness. She could cut him down with one sentence. ‘You, Abd al-Rahman, are like the little boy who sets a chicken alight because he needs to cry.’
Zahra was his adversary, his other half. Siham was his joy, the arrow between them. He watched Zahra’s amusement at Siham’s preference for him, at her crazy, excessive adoration of him. He felt praised by that amusement, basked in it. He imagined Siham’s passion and demonstrative love to be the expression of everything Zahra felt for him but never showed, either to him or Siham, and he felt Zahra’s warmth towards him carried from her to him in Siham’s importunate hands. Men trust their wives after the arrival of children, his mother had said and he realised that this meant something deeper than he had imagined. Siham was Zahra’s emissary. And as father of Siham, Abd alRahman thought of himself as a man his wife could like, even love.
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Their worst fight started with the littlest thing. Zahra wanted Siham to finish her cereal and Abd al-Rahman, when Zahra wasn’t looking, grinned at Siham, hid the plate behind the sofa and wiped her delighted little face, all as though she had finished. They had often fought over his indulging Siham. He thought she should run wild, do anything she wanted, mainly because he loved her pleasure, but also he thought she should be playful, not like her mother. Zahra smacked Siham frequently, partly, he was sure, to annoy him. Zahra wanted Siham to be good, to have discipline and restraint. She never said so, but Abd al-Rahman knew from her pursed lips at Siham’s shrieks. When Siham jumped or ran, Zahra would clutch her by the arm and force her to walk quietly by her mother’s side. Zahra found the cereal and immediately put Siham back in the high-chair, strapped her in despite the child’s writhing, and looked coldly, challengingly at Abd al-Rahman. Siham didn’t stop screaming until she fell asleep. He could never fully reconstruct what happened over the next three days. It was a twilight of twisted,
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unbalanced misery and rage. After three days they stepped over the threshold between wounding each other and into the dark realm of wounding a marriage. He could remember clearly her white face when she said, ‘You, Abd al-Rahman, would fuck your mother if you thought you could find yourself in her cunt.’ And he did remember that he divorced her. And took Siham from her until the obligatory time had passed and he could remarry her.
His last touch of her was squeezing her hand on the lurching deck, in the moment that people fell against each other, clutching at the timbers, and others cried out in horror as three children fell over the side into the water. He had looked at Zahra’s white face, her eyes huge and dark, and wondered what he, Abd al-Rahman, could give to reassure her. He squeezed her hand. It had begun to rain and the deck was slippery. He could hear children sobbing in terror below. Then suddenly there was a bucking shudder underfoot, and water rushed about his knees. And then there was no boat, only a ravenous sucking sound and seething water
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filled with tumbled people, ripping them all from each other. There was screaming, screaming everywhere. He was in the water, his body twirled by unseen forces, roiling up from beneath him. Siham had been on his hip, her arms twined about his neck, trading her warm fearful whimpers for his murmured reassurances. He could still feel where her arms had been, burned into his neck, despite the cold water. She had to be near! He felt for her, floundered for her, churning the water beneath him with his arms. He gulped mouthfuls of fuel and vomited as he sank, snatching at wet empty cloth in the heavy cold. ‘Siham, Zahra!’ he shouted hoarsely, thinking, even here, she will not turn to me. He began sobbing in terror, feeling the terrible vision of the sea like an impenetrable heaviness on his eyes. He sank, held his breath in the cold pressure of the water, feeling frantically for them, and then he didn’t know which way was up. When his head broke the surface, he was shrieking her name. Siham had to be with her. The rain spattered the fuel and water about his face and for a while he could see nothing. There must have been hundreds of men, women and children floating or flailing about. A man near Abd al-Rahman, sobbing with the effort, held two baby boys high on his shoulders, but one of them was already dead, a milky fluid running from his nose and mouth. Abd al-
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Rahman could hear prayers but could not spare his breath for more than Zahra’s name. He hadn’t known he could still swim but, threshing, he stayed afloat. He moved slowly from clump to clump, more and more frantic as darkness fell and the cold gripped him from below. His throat was burning, and each drowned child he found brought a heavy darkness over his eyes. A man in a life jacket drifted by him in the twilight and clutched at him briefly, babbling for forgiveness, then suddenly released him and floated away. Abd al-Rahman could hear his voice in the darkness, sobbing out strange words and phrases with no meaning. He grabbed at women in the dark, hearing their gasps, their gurgles, screaming breathlessly for Zahra. Then, exhausted, he held onto one woman, even though he knew she was dead and knew she was not Zahra. He held her body lightly, not wanting to demean her, and then, when he could, he released her and held onto a large piece of wood. The sea around him slowly stilled and the mounds of cloth drifted away in the darkness, or sank. Dawn found him still in a flotilla of junk and bodies, his eyes peeled open and crusted with salt. He could see one or two survivors, all men. Zahra and Siham were gone.
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In the dawn light a half-naked woman floated by him, her fuel-soaked clothes draped over her head and her bloated belly half covered by a stained wet shift. He would have averted his gaze but near her hand floated a baby, white-blue with fine white ribs and a sunken belly, but as tiny as red Siham had been at her birth. Over the baby’s belly ran a shocking thick blue cord. His eye followed it down into the water where it trailed whitish skeins of flesh in the currents, then travelled unwillingly to where it reappeared as a blue coil over the woman’s naked thigh and disappeared between her legs. He suddenly didn’t care whether he lived or died. He stared, gasping, shaking his head crazily from side to side, shaking his hand on the water’s surface to try to unsee this. He couldn’t turn away. He shuddered as they bobbed together with him, and then he managed to scrape his eyes closed.
Zahra didn’t cry out in childbirth. He stood outside the room. His mother had said, ‘She will cry out, my son, a woman does. She will scream. She will abuse you. I screamed abuse upon your father. Take it as an honour.’
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But she didn’t cry out. Later, holding his darling Siham, disarmed by the wonder of such sudden fatherhood, he looked into Zahra’s eyes. He remembered being shocked by how ancient they seemed in her young face. He felt foolish with his excitement and questions. ‘Why didn’t you cry out, darling?’ he asked, unable to stop himself. ‘I wouldn’t have minded.’ He had wanted to hear what an unguarded woman, what Zahra in pain, would accuse, would abuse him with. What secrets he would find revealed in birth. He had even felt that his part, father, eavesdropper, had been somehow denied him. He had wanted to hear Siham’s coming from that remote world inside a woman’s body to this, his world. She said, ‘I knew it was not real pain.’ He had let himself misunderstand her.
He began to weep. He opened his eyes, reached out and clasped the dead woman’s hand firmly and drew her and the baby to him. He was whispering his mother’s name, and Zahra’s, over and over. He pulled her sodden Afghan chador down over her body,
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covering that terrible cord, and he lifted the cold baby and laid it face down to her chest. He could feel the will of God stern and calm all about him, pressing down on his hands and face and on all the mess in the sea. The weight was just enough, or the moment had come. The woman and her child sank and quickly disappeared. His last sight of them in the blue water was her pale, broad, pockmarked face and the tiny glimmer of silver flesh like a small fish seemingly living at her chest. Something in him stilled and he felt himself farewell Zahra and his baby in the way one feels oneself faint, everything draining from his body, downwards. He laid his cheek to the wood and stared at the wreckage in the shining sea. He could wait in these slowly warming waters forever. He knew it would all hurt too much to bear later, but now he felt a blissful nothing, as if his life had reached all horror and glory and could encompass no more.
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The Cows
When we had few guns left and no water/My boys threw stones and bricks and empty bottles/The soldiers took them into the mountains/Held them down with their arms outstretched/And hammered their arms with white boulders/Until the bones were broken
… I thought nothing of killing then, if I had to. But this one time I will remember, always. We hid in the mountains, all of us, in caves so close to the road that we were sure they would hear us. We could almost touch the soldiers’ boots as they stood and smoked and
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we could hear every word they said. It was dry, summertime, and I found myself worrying about little things, the little things. I didn’t want the soldier whose legs were in front of me to drop his cigarette butt in case it started a forest fire. If they killed all of us there would be no one to fight it and snawbar trees don’t recover from fire.
I was small, smaller than the other boys. I was as afraid as I was small, so my father sent me out to herd the sheep alone to strengthen me up. There’s no one else to herd the sheep, he said, and you are seven. When I was seven, I herded the sheep and goats and I shot snakes and birds. I was a man at seven. I remember swishing a big stick at the sheep but stopping if they turned to look at me which, fortunately, they didn’t do often. I hummed too, swishing and humming to stop myself thinking. I was afraid of the sheep at first but was reassured when they seemed afraid of me. Once they all turned and stared at me and I was terrified but they were staring at the hyena
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behind me. I went as cold and stiff as a tree but with my fingers trembling like the leaves in the wind. I was very afraid of hyenas, with very good reason. They eat children. After that day I was fond of the sheep because their stare, a big wide many-eyed stare, had scared the hyena and he didn’t eat me. I was also worried by jackals. I had heard that they could drag a full grown man away and bury him, gathering in a pack too big to be resisted.
… He dropped his butt and ground it into the earth and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Yet they were hunting us, exterminating us. We were less than dogs to them— vermin. We had always known but it was too clear that night. We thought we would be a pile of bodies with slit throats and bullets in the head by morning. And indignities inflicted on our bodies, you know what I mean. The tension was terrible, that first hour, and I could hear tiny noises, tiny noises, coming from us. No group of living bodies is ever completely silent. The women and children we pressed to the back of the shallow caves and the babies—the babies we strangled.
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We lost all our babies in that one night. The cry of a baby is unmistakable. Our village was saved then, but it is all gone now. Some of us are here, some in Argentina, some in New York. Losing a child is terrible. But killing one’s own child, killing one’s own.
I was scared of cows too. We had three cows between us and Ammu Farid’s family and Amti Nou-Nou, who had five children to raise alone, the poor thing, and they would stand with their hindquarters facing me, trying to slice my throat open with their swishing tails. That’s what cows do to hyenas. Cows are bigger than hyenas. We always had three cows. None of them disappeared. Many children in our village disappeared and my uncle always said it was the hyenas. Those Hyenas! he would shout, with tears in his eyes, and my father would say Shut-up which is a bad word my father would never usually say. I am scared of snakes and never want to go to al-Iraq. Our snakes can kill people but their snakes eat whole villages. The
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poor people living in the desert in Iraq! No trees for shade, no herbs, no chameleons (I’m not scared of chameleons—nobody is, except my mother, and maybe she’s only scared they’ll make a mess), just sand and giant adders and vipers. I was pretty sorry for the American soldiers who invaded Iraq. They did not know what they were getting themselves into.
… They wanted revenge. They had kidnapped eightytwo girls of our area. Some were little children, eleven or twelve, some younger. We lived in fear and hope, because we found no bodies. Eighty-two! Think of it. Some families had lost three children, some more, and the little boys went around hollow-eyed from searching for their sisters and from their nightmares. They kept our eyes, our hearts, for five months and then sent most of them back to us. We could hardly recognise our daughters. They all had big bellies. It was terrible to look at them. We hugged them tight and tried not to see what was in their eyes.
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I was very afraid of the mountain mist. My father was too. I would wake up in the morning, and the valley would be invisible under a rolling cloud. We were high up but, pretty soon, the cloud would come running in sheets up the mountain, through the trees, racing up until all about our house was foggy white and the snawbar trees looked like grey boulders, and then the fog would come streaming into the kitchen and droplets would form along the sills and in the curtains and my father would pace up and down, saying, It’ll be in the fog. It will be in a fog like this. And he would put the semiautomatic behind the kitchen door and the kalashnikov in the upstairs room under the window and give the cows the pistols and then he’d pace, with the rifle laid across the sink. I carried a BB gun slung across my back when I went herding the sheep but I never shot it when I was by myself. I was a bit scared of guns and my hands shook. I always missed. My father said I was the most frightening kind of marksman, because no one would know if I meant business or not. I knew I didn’t mean business but it was good that no one could tell.
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Especially if I accidentally shot them when they were threatening my mother and sister. Then I’d be a hero. One completely sunny morning our house was bulldozed with the cows in it. The kalashnikov went off as the top storey crashed down onto the bottom storey and the soldiers thought someone was shooting at them and they shot my father. We didn’t even realise they had killed more than the cows. I and my sister laughed when the kalashnikov went off, because it made them jump down from the bulldozer and run. Then they shot at our house and the kalashnikov kept shooting back and then it stopped. Blood from the cows was coming out of the rubble and trailing down the drive. I was leaping up and down on a rock, yelling, Why did he kill the cows, the cows? But my father wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t remember when he had stopped shouting. We found him after a while. He had slipped a long way down the slope into the shade of the trees and his kamis had been scraped up over his head from the slide. It was completely red. The soldiers laughed, because his legs were bare and he had slippers on and his underpants were dirty.
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I laughed too, the way I laughed when my mother dropped the pot of chickpeas, because I wanted something funny to happen because I felt so bad about the house and the cows. Then my mother screamed and I began to cry. Then I went dizzy and began to throw rocks at the bulldozer and at the soldiers but I missed and my sister held my arms down. Then my mother, who screamed at a chameleon, rushed at a soldier and shot the pistol at him. Another soldier tripped her and kicked her in the face.
… What life could our daughters have? What life could we have with them? What life was left? We killed our daughters, our children, the second night after their return. They would know that they could not destroy us that way. Then we killed as many of them as we could find, because grief gave us strength. I think we killed more than two hundred—men, women and children.
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My sister had blood running down her leg and the soldiers laughed. Hey, we’ve got a real grownup bitch in here. Been fucked by her father, fucked by her uncles, fucked by her friends and fucked by her enemies. Suad tried to hide the blood with her skirt and my mother screamed something at them. Spread her legs and you won’t need rags next month, they said and laughed. My mother was very fierce and the soldiers hardly ever took Suad out of our cell, even though they often took other girls. Once they came in and the soldier who played soccer with me was with them. He had called me Habib then, although, even though that is a sweet name, it is not my name. He wouldn’t look at me and I wanted to call to him, to remind him that it was me, Habib, but I didn’t know his name. They took my mother and Suad was very upset. They are worse than an animal they want our land our lives our dignity and our selfrespect our honour but they won’t get our souls. But I am afraid for mine.
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… They didn’t try again for some years. Still, sometimes, if little children wandered too far alone at the border, we would find them alive, but with their anus cut open, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a sharp stone. One little girl was cut from her vagina to her anus, and her insides hung down. Terrible. And we knew that they were still thinking this way, always this way. And we had to hit back hard, every time, with whatever we could. We destroyed ourselves so they could not have us, in the end. Are you surprised that we are such quiet, sad people here? I have nothing to say that should be in words.
They promised us safety and that is what killed us/They took the men and boys one July afternoon/When we saw them again they were a mountain of bones/Big and small skulls frail finger bones/Rubble/Undone and scattered/The brothers and fathers and sons all/Mixed with one another, indistinguishable/A broken alphabet, but speaking/A language murmuring beneath all languages
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I am afraid, Ummi. I am afraid.
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Lions
A
hmad was having a bad
morning. He was surrounded by three very unfriendly soldiers. He wished he’d lied about his address and then broken away in the momentary confusion when someone else’s mother opened the door and disowned him. The short soldier rapped on the door, holding him by the ear, and, when it opened a chink, asked his mother for Ali. ‘What do you want with Ali?’ Ahmad’s mother was cold and angry. She didn’t look at Ahmad but she did step out, grab his wrist and hold on. Ahmad knew that if it came to a tug of war, she would win. ‘He has been teaching his brother to throw stones.’ ‘He has not.’
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‘He has. This little shit said as much.’ And the soldier yanked Ahmad’s ear hard and let it go. ‘We want to see Ali.’ The short soldier released the safety catch on his M4A1 and kicked the door open. And when they found Ali, they broke the dining table and left noisily. What could they do? Ali was only five, and had remarkable eyes of black fire and very winning ways. Ahmad was forbidden from going outside. He knew it wasn’t Ali’s fault but could not stop himself from tormenting his little brother, feeling resentful. Ali looked up at him through the fringe of his lashes and followed Ahmad around, waiting for him to do something fun, and that made it worse. By nightfall Ahmad had forgiven Ali for his fortitude and had melted. He took his brother by the hand to the rooftop and together they watched the tracer bullets and listened for helicopter gunships. There was a strange glow reaching up into the night sky behind them. The range of hills was silhouetted and the huddled olive trees had faint haloes. Ahmad waved expansively. ‘Aieh, there, far beyond the hills, the City of Lions.’ Ali’s face beamed with such light that Ahmad
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himself believed instantly and totally in the City of Lions. ‘Yes, the City of Lions. In it there are lions everywhere and they don’t eat people at all.’ ‘Can we go there?’ Ali breathed. ‘Ye-es. Maybe. No. If you were older, we could, but you are such a baby.’ Ahmad sighed, only half feigning disappointment. He would have liked to go. Just slip away. A journey, certainly, but worth it. Maybe he could go alone. Ali slipped off the ledge, holding his breath, gripping Ahmad with the heat of his shining eyes. He released his breath in a stream of words that were drowned by a helicopter gunship rattling up from behind the hill, strafing the outer houses with spotlights. Both boys ignored it, standing face to face on the rooftop. ‘You are,’ Ahmad shouted. ‘You’d get exhausted and I’d have to carry you, and then I’d get exhausted and still we wouldn’t be there. It is a long long way. We’d die.’ ‘I’ll bring food and water. For both of us.’ And Ahmad could see it. A little refreshing stop, a rest under a tree, with zaater and dates and jild al-faras. ‘We’d need jild al-faras.’ Ali gave a crisp little nod, as if to say hearing is obeying. There was a pause.
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‘But Baba would kill us,’ Ahmad said suddenly. ‘We’d have to go that way.’ And he waved over the forbidden fields in the foothills. When Sabri Jarrah was blown up, bits of him rained all over the village. And Ali, who noticed things, always said that every rust mark was corrosion made by spots or splashes of Sabri’s blood. ‘Mama would yell and cry the whole time.’ ‘But the lions don’t eat people. It’s a completely safe city!’ Ali protested. ‘Isn’t it?’ ‘Oh, completely safe. They’d certainly not mind us being there, it’s just the getting there.’ Ali sighed. ‘Tell me more about the City of Lions,’ he said dreamily. ‘The lions live in marble palaces built with goldcoloured stones. There are trees, and fountains, and baby lions play on green grass.’ Both boys lay back on the rooftop, staring out at the stars, dimmer tonight than usual. ‘In the City of Lions, you can find chameleons everywhere. And cherries.’ ‘Cherries?’ ‘Yes, on the trees, all around. The lions don’t eat them. They just leave them for visitors.’ Ali sat up and stared at his brother. ‘How do you know about it, Ahmad, who told you, Ahmad? Ahmad?’
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‘I’ve been there. That’s how I know the way.’ Ahmad said crossly. ‘Do you have to ask stupid questions?’ There was a silence. ‘I’ve got a cherry pip,’ Ahmad said suddenly, and placed a small pebble in Ali’s hand. ‘We’ll go, together.’ Ali’s voice was charged with conviction. ‘At 5 a.m., so we can spend an hour there and then make it back.’ At 3 a.m. a helicopter gunship blasted a hole right through the house and into the hill behind it, destroying the wall and Jiddu’s photo and obliterating the broken dining table altogether. Ahmad and Ali were woken roughly by their mother and father, their mother yelling angrily. They were bundled up in blankets and carried together, their tousled heads moving jerkily as sleep slowly sank away from their bodies. They were rushed into the basement, where several neighbours huddled, one man with a bloodied arm. The house stayed firm, but the Hamdis, to the left on the slope slightly above them, were not so lucky and, with a roar that sounded like a waterfall to Ahmad, their wounded house crumpled and fell, slipping, unrecognisable, down the slope. The adults all
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ran out to help rescue the animals and retrieve what they could. Auntie Nouhad stayed to mind the seven kids in the basement, and when Ahmad tried to ask her something she slapped him as hard as she could and said, ‘No, you can’t go outside.’ Ahmad was stunned. She hadn’t even waited to hear. Although he was just going to ask if he could go outside. He sulked, nursing his burning cheek. Ali had fallen asleep on the floor, curled like a tiny puppy. Ahmad sat next to him and strained to hear what was going on above. Ahmad dozed off, bewildered by the screaming and crying of the women. It was still dark when he was woken by Ali tugging his arm. ‘Let’s go.’ Ahmad looked around. Auntie Nouhad was gone and the other children were asleep. His little brother stood in front of him, carrying two Tang orange juice bottles half full of water slung over his neck with a string, and a small bulging knapsack on his back. Ali’s eyes were black pools of both joy and seriousness and Ahmad’s objections hardly rose in his heart. He knew the way. They would go, and they’d be careful, so no one would have anything to worry about. He followed Ali’s sturdy little silhouette out of the basement
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through an earth cutting that had been a staircase, and looked around. Except for the two holes in their house, and the Hamdis’ house, everything looked nearly normal in the neighbourhood. Clusters of adults stood here and there, and Ahmad knew they had to be quick if they were going to avoid being noticed. He was suddenly shot through with excitement. ‘This way,’ he said, grabbing Ali’s hand and ducking low. They hugged the walls of the houses, hidden in shadows, heading for the untouchable overgrown fields and the tangled, forgotten olive grove. ‘You’ve been before, so you lead,’ Ali whispered when they reached the neglected farmlands. ‘I’ll step exactly where you put your feet, and that way we won’t be blown up.’ Ahmad nodded dreamily, and without hesitation stepped out into the minefield. The sun was rising behind them, and had anyone been looking that way, they would have been clearly seen making their strange crossing. Ahmad took a jagged path, stopping each step as if to think then choose—either a small step, or a large step, or a wide left, a straight, or right step. Sometimes he paused, as if remembering, and then stepped with a certainty that convinced him he really knew the way. Ali’s crisp little steps, following immediately every
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move he made, reassured him, for Ali had no doubts whatsoever. They reached the other side, the beginning of the hillsides proper. Ahmad was elated with his success and set off up the hill towards the west with happy climbing strides. ‘Tell me about what it’s like in the City of Lions.’ ‘You can hear beautiful music, rising from hidden courtyards. In the public gardens there are birds of all colours, tame because no one ever kills them. You could have a songbird ride on your shoulder, fly off and return to sing for you. And everywhere the lions roam, roaring around corners now and then.’ ‘I’ve seen a stone lion.’ ‘There are stone lions too, in the City of Lions, but better than anywhere else in the world. At the gates, and in the gardens, and so realistic you think for a moment that they are real, except they are grey.’ ‘But you said the stones are golden.’ ‘Yes, they are, but not the ones they make lions out of. Marble is never golden, silly.’ ‘But the marble palaces …’ ‘Are marble on the interior.’ They passed the bleached bones of a jackal in long grass near the top of the hill, where the wind tossed the dry grasses against each other with a sighing sound.
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The City of Lions was nowhere to be seen from that first hill. Ahead of them stretched the rocky valleys in which the morning mist was pooled and then more hills. Ahmad headed to the left to follow the curved breast of the hill, rather than disappear into the hidden valley below. Ahmad had counted three hilltops and there was yet another rising in front of them. Ali trudged in stubborn steps, his head bowed. Ahmad turned and took the brace of Tang bottles off his neck and slung them around his own. Ali didn’t look up, just went on slowly up the stony hillside. Below them, flocks of sheep and goats mingled with boulders but the shepherds could not be seen. They must have been there, hidden from the sun in some hollow. Further down, groups of soldiers fanned through the foothills, looking for something. Ahmad hoped that he and Ali were invisible, hidden by the boulders and the undulations of the unsheltered hillside. The sun beat down on their bare heads and bent backs and Ahmad could see the sweat on Ali’s neck shining. He increased his pace and grabbed the knapsack off Ali’s back, then drifted back to his old rhythm. ‘Stop just over the hill,’ he said. Ali stopped immediately and swayed slightly, his
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legs looking shaky. Then he suddenly sat down and began to cry. Ahmad pulled him up and tried to piggyback him but was too tired himself. ‘It’s lunchtime anyway,’ Ahmad said, and sat down next to him. He had no idea what time it really was. The sun had stayed straight above for a long while. Ali looked up at him, tears sliding down his cheeks as he smiled. ‘Eat some jild al-faras!’ he whispered conspiratorially and scrabbled for the knapsack. In the knapsack there was a new packet of the apricot leather, two loaves of bread, a hunk of cheese and a red ball. ‘What’s this?’ Ahmad asked, holding up the ball. ‘A present for the baby lions—to play on the grass. We can’t visit them without bringing a present.’ ‘True. Good.’ Ahmad tore off some apricot and handed the packet to Ali. Ali tore at the apricot leather in silence. Then he suddenly growled and, giggling, gnawed at a piece through a gurgling throaty growl. Ahmad did the same, until they were both lying on their bellies, paws pinning their apricot prey. Ali looked up. ‘Do the lions talk?’ ‘No, they don’t have to. They just look at you wisely, and you can stroke them.’ Ahmad stroked Ali in
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long lionising strokes and Ali stiffened all his muscles. ‘I see,’ he said, and it was clear from his serene, faraway expression that he did. Ahmad felt left out and grabbed the water bottles and began pouring the water from one to the other. Then they both lay back and stared at the sky a while. The sun had begun to move again and Ali stood up. ‘Come on, we’ll never make it back if we don’t keep going.’ They settled into a rhythm, each thinking his own thoughts. Their water slowly dwindled as they drank in silence through the hot afternoon, barely stopping. Ahmad could keep going only if Ali did, and only if Ali asked no questions. He had begun to imagine how much trouble he would be in for taking Ali through the forbidden fields. How much trouble he would be in for taking Ali over the hill. How much trouble he would be in for taking Ali over endless hills in search of the city. A wave of horror swept over him but he shut it out. The City of Lions had to be real. He had seen in Ali’s eyes that it was the most sensible, most likely of cities. He stared at Ali’s dusty sandals just ahead of him and tried not to let his mind drift towards the city or towards home. He just focused on Ali’s rhythmical
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padding steps as they trailed up a slope in deep shadow. A tank was skewed in that shadow, deserted, its gun slumped sideways, pointing at nothing in particular in the grasses and rocks. They could both smell something dead lying nearby and Ali held his nose and pressed on harder up the slope. Ahmad followed. The evening was upon them as they crept to the top of the last hill. They helped themselves to the top with their hands. The wind whispered in their ears, scratching tiny sounds from the gold-tinged rocks with the grass stalks and tossing their sweat-stiffened hair against their heads. Then the land fell away in a steep treeless slope that straightened to an open plain far below. Both boys stood still, silent, staring down at the glimmering city. The ocean, spread to the horizon, was a sheet of gold, and the city’s minarets and spires, steeples and towers were lustrous with patterns of gold and deep blue shadows. Distant glass and mirrored surfaces winked with liquid light. Roads shone like tiny ribbons between the tower blocks and offices. Even the trees of the faraway parks, glowing orange, were discernible, so clear was the air. Ali sighed deep and full, as if breathing in as much of it as he could.
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‘There it is,’ Ahmad said, his heart swelling painfully in his chest. There it was, more beautiful than he had imagined, more grand, bigger. He had known, from the very beginning. He felt Ali’s hand in his, pulling him away. ‘We have to go,’ Ali said. ‘It’s too late now to go down and they’ll be worried.’
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Acknowledgments
‘Flight’ was published in Heat Series 2 2002; ‘The Kangaroo’ was published in Heat Series 2, 2001; an earlier version of ‘Munira’s Bad Day Out’ was published in Heat 9, 1998; and earlier versions of ‘The Tiger’, ‘Zein’s Way’ and ‘The Deferred Death of Fuad’ were published in Joussour, August 1999. Without Roger Sallis this book could not have been written. Many other people contributed in different ways to the making of this book. They are: Amal AbouHamden; Fayrouz Ajaka; Annette Barlow; Gillian Bovoro; Abbas El-Zein; Rose Creswell; Hawraa Hammani; Richard Hornung; Sue Hosking; Annette Hughes; Ivor Indyk; Khalid Melhi; Walid Mutawakkil;
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Raghid Nahhas; Minerva Nasser-Eddine; Abdallah Osman; Tarek Rasheed; Nizar Rasheed; Ousama Rasheed; the late Nabila Rasheed; Muneer Safa; Hind Salha; Nadine Salha; Muneera Sallis; the late Ramez Sallis; Souzin Sallis; Ramsay Sallis; Rafael Sallis; Sumra Sallis; Arwa Shamhan; Tom Shapcott; Julia Stiles; Philip Waldron; Teresita White; Claudio Zollo. An Australia Council Literature Fund Grant assisted development of this novel and research in Lebanon in 2001. Research in the Middle East was also assisted by the University of Adelaide in 1996, ARTS SA in 1999, Mariana Hardwick in 2000 and Muneera Sallis in 2001.
