Dreams of Water (2 page)

‘Stop it, you two,' Waddad says absently. ‘Come and learn how to do this.'

Waddad is making small, stuffed
kibbeh
which she will later fry for lunch. She rolls a handful of raw meat and
bulghur
into a ball with one hand which she pierces with the index finger of the other. Then she fills the hole with the stuffing and closes it up at both ends into two neat points, creating an oval shape that bulges out in the middle.

Bassam sits down beside her and watches carefully.

‘I bet I could do that,' he says with a chuckle.

‘Your hands are dirty.'

‘I mean if my hands were clean.'

Waddad looks up at him and smiles before returning to her work.

‘Mmmm,' she murmurs.

Aneesa bends down to pick up the ball and holds it closely to her chest as she watches them. She sniffs loudly and begins to move towards the bench but her mother and brother do not look up at her. She stops and looks at them again, this time more carefully. They are both very intent on the task before them: Bassam, focusing so completely on his mother's hands that he seems to be equally involved in its success, and Waddad, her shoulders slightly hunched up with the delicate effort, revelling in the attention. They are perfect together, she thinks, and is surprised at the clarity in this discovery. She lets go of the ball and feels a shiver go through her body. I am growing up, Aneesa murmurs to herself and lifts her hands to her hips. These are all the things I can see.

T
he first time Aneesa sees Salah she is waiting at the bus stop near her home. He sits beside her on the plastic perch attached to the bus shelter and immediately the scent of fresh lemon fills her nostrils. His woollen jacket is zipped halfway up so that the denim shirt he is wearing underneath it shows through, and his hair, longish and beautifully white, is brushed back from his forehead.

‘Hello,' Aneesa hears herself saying.

‘Oh!'

‘I startled you,' she continues. ‘I'm sorry.'

Salah looks flustered.

‘No, not at all. I was just lost in my thoughts for a moment.'

She nods and turns to look at the traffic moving towards them. Moments pass before she speaks again.

‘Do you think that if we stare hard enough the bus will finally appear?' Aneesa laughs.

Salah, my dear
.

My other life seems far away now that I am back, but not you and not our beautiful adventures together. Those things and you I miss terribly. It's not that I'm having difficulty getting accustomed to life at home – there is something of that, though it does not occupy my thoughts very much – it's the ease with which I have slipped back into being here. Lebanon is like a second skin that does not leave me even as I wish it away. It is the here and now of everything I feel and do
.

I imagine you, walking down the busy streets of this city in your long brown suede jacket, and when I go past the block of flats you once lived in, I wish I could run upstairs, ring the bell and find you there. We would make tea biscuits, I think, to remind ourselves of our once-Western lives
.

In the back of my mind are thoughts of how we met, both of us in the throes of aloneness, almost content with its settled rhythms, yet feeling the desolation that inevitably comes with it. Is that how we became such fast friends
?

Did we not find, Salah, besides the solitude, a relief in each other's company that usually comes with a much longer acquaintance? Our mountain people would say we were only two old souls recognizing one another after a long absence
.

Waddad is in the kitchen stirring a pot of Arabic coffee over the stove. The smell is strong and pleasing. Aneesa watches as she lifts the dark, thick liquid with the spoon
and lets it fall back into the pot. She bends over her mother and plants a kiss on her cheek.

‘Good morning,
mama
.'

‘Good morning,
habibti
. Sit down and I'll pour the coffee.'

Waddad's hair curls daintily around her long face and her eyebrows are faint lines above watery grey eyes. She is dressed in dark blue jeans and a white T-shirt and looks like a twelve-year-old boy, clean and sweet-smelling first thing in the morning. Aneesa can hardly believe that this is the middle-aged woman she left behind all those years ago.

The two women sip their coffee noisily and with enjoyment, the scent of cardamom seeds rising from the steaming cups.

‘I think I've found your brother,' Waddad says moments later.

‘What?'

Waddad stands up and turns away to place her cup in the sink. She turns the tap on and reaches for the washing-up sponge.

‘What are you talking about,
mama
?' Aneesa jumps up from her seat. ‘Where is he? What's going on?'

‘Things changed so much for me after you left,' Waddad continues over the sound of the running water. ‘I had to manage the search on my own. It took a long time, but it's finally happened.'

Aneesa walks up to Waddad, places her hands on the older woman's shoulders and gently turns her round so they are facing one another. Soapsuds trickle down on the floor between them.

‘Mother, what do you mean? Where have you found him? Why haven't you said anything about this to me before? For heaven's sake, tell me what's going on.'

Waddad smiles and continues as though she has not been interrupted.

‘He's at the orphanage in the mountains. I've been going there on a regular basis for a few weeks now. We've become friends.' She wriggles out of Aneesa's grasp and turns to the washing up again. ‘His name is Ramzi and he is eight years old. He was born only a few days after your brother disappeared. It all fits in.'

Aneesa does not understand at first, then she realizes exactly what her mother is saying.

‘What have you done,
mama
? What have you done?'

Waddad rinses her hands and turns to her daughter once again.

‘Aneesa, it's time we accepted the fact that your brother is gone. We have to get on with our lives.'

‘But what about the letters we received from him while he was being held captive?'

Waddad lifts a hand to Aneesa's face.

‘No more letters, Aneesa. No more. Please.'

As an adolescent, Bassam had not grown very tall and had developed a weedy frame that made him bend slightly forwards when he walked so that he seemed almost defenceless. Aneesa used to walk up to him and poke him in the back to make him straighten up. She remembers the feel of the hollow in his thin back.

‘I'll take you to see Ramzi one day if you like,' Waddad continues. ‘But you have to promise.'

‘Promise what,
mama
?'

There is a pause before she replies.

‘Just that you'll see the truth as I do.'

Away from home, Aneesa dreams exhilarating dreams of her brother. They are moving together towards a sense of effortlessness.

‘Whenever you're ready, Aneesa,' Bassam finally says after what seems a long time in flight.

She is holding on to his arm and watches as he lifts off pieces of the surrounding landscape and moulds them into a vibrant picture of faces and places they have known together.

‘That's beautiful,' she tells him before waking up sweating in her bed.

She saw a psychic after she left home, in the hope that he would tell her something about the truth behind her brother's disappearance.

The man sat in a faded velvet armchair: a thin, arrogant man with long fair hair brushed back off his forehead. Aneesa took an immediate dislike to him.

‘You have perhaps a father or brother who was killed?' the man asked soon after she had sat down.

She tried not to look too surprised.

‘My brother, in the civil war in Lebanon. He was kidnapped and we never saw him again.'

‘He's with us now,' the man continued. ‘He wants to let you know that he doesn't regret what he did.'

‘He's dead?'

The man said nothing.

‘What does he look like?' Aneesa blurted out.

‘Is that a trick question?' The man gave a harsh laugh. She shook her head.

‘That's not what I meant.'

‘I'm sorry,' the man said, lifting his hand to his head. ‘He's got a large scar on his forehead. He says they killed him three days after he was taken away.' Then he reached
over and placed his hand over hers. ‘He wants you to stop worrying about him. Tell your mother too.'

She closed her eyes and sat in silence for the rest of the session, strangely comforted by the unlovable man in the armchair opposite.

Did I ever tell you, Salah, what happened after my father died? We no longer went up to the village in the mountains. I told my mother that I missed the smells there and the slanting sunlight that passed over rocks and gorse bush and ruffled them like the wind. I knew Father's spirit was waiting for me there. He's in the garden, mama, I said, pruning the rose bushes like he used to. I saw him in a dream. This is our only home now, she said, making a sweeping gesture with her arms that encompassed the flat, the streets below, Beirut and perhaps even the sea. You're too old, Aneesa, to make up stories, even if you do miss your father. Forget the mountains and the village. And I did, growing up into never looking back, drifting into a kind of living
.

Soon after Bassam's disappearance, I arrived home one day to find my mother sitting on my brother's bed surrounded by papers. She had found them in the back of his cupboard, hundreds of political leaflets and lists of names that she did not recognize. She asked me if I had known anything about them. I told her Bassam had mentioned his political involvement but did not elaborate much. I don't want to put your life in danger as well, Bassam had said to me
.

My mother stood up, grasped me by the arms and shook me hard. You never bothered to tell me about it,
you silly girl, she said, her voice rising. You never took the trouble to tell me. Then she burst into tears
.

There are times when I wish I had told you all this when we were together but I was afraid of spoiling the quiet joy we felt in our friendship, of harming it with unrelenting sadness
.

Perhaps there were many things you would have liked to tell me too, Salah, but never did. Whenever we were together we seemed to speak more of everyday things, steering a long way from the vagaries of our troubled minds. I remember sitting on the floor in the drawing room of your house on that very cold night when snow covered the streets of the city, a fire in the huge stone fireplace, talking of Lebanon. I rubbed the palm of my hand on the carpet beneath me and looked down at the blue, beige and soft white images of birds and deer in its weave. I told you there were times when I liked it in this city with its pockets of green, and the loneliness and peace it brought me. Trouble seems such a long way away, I said. When I told you the story of my brother's abduction, you asked if that was why I had left in the first place. I nodded and you paused before saying: I'm glad you came here, Aneesa. I mean, I'm glad I met you
.

It is mid-morning and Aneesa and her mother have had another argument about Bassam. It is raining hard outside and Aneesa decides to walk along the Beirut Corniche. Big drops of rain splash heavily on to the uneven pavement and on the crests of the mounting waves. She adjusts the hood of her jacket and digs her hands into her pockets.

There are stone benches at regular intervals, each shaped like a flat, squat S, and at the end of the pavement a blue iron balustrade that is bent and broken in places overlooking the sea. There are also tall palm trees planted in a long line on one side of the pavement with what look like burlap bags covering their underside, high up where the remaining leaves flutter in the wind. And if she turns her head to look across the street, beyond the central reservation where flowery shrubs lie almost flush against the deep, dark earth, she sees a number of high-rise buildings that had not been there before she left.

Along the water's edge, fishermen stand in their plastic slippers on rocks covered in seaweed, their lines rising and falling with the movement of the sea. How many fish do they have to catch to make the effort worthwhile, Aneesa wonders?

A man on crutches walks up to her and stops to extend a box filled with coloured packets of chewing gum. She gives him some money and moves on. The poor have always been here. That is familiar, as is the smell of the sea, a murky, damp smell that is welcome after all the years away.

She reaches the end of the Corniche where the pavement becomes wider and curves around a bend in the road, and stops for a moment to watch as men make their way into a mosque across the street. They pass through a small gate, take their shoes off and enter at the front door to perform the noon prayer. Up ahead, between where she is standing and the buildings diagonally opposite, there is a wide two-way avenue crowded with beeping cars and pedestrians with umbrellas over their heads. Some of the trees planted in the central strip are high enough so that
she cannot see through to the other side, but she can hear everything, life and her own heart, humming together.

These are the hours of her undoing, long and sleepless, solitary. She shades her eyes and reaches for the bedside lamp. When she lifts herself off the bed, her body shadowing the dim light, she lets out a sigh and shakes her head. Her dreams, gathering all her fears together in one great deluge until there seems to be no means of overcoming them, were once again of water, the images behind her eyes thick and overwhelming, her pulse quickening and then suddenly stopping in the base of her throat.

She tiptoes into the living room in bare feet, switches on the overhead light and stands still for a moment.

‘Aneesa,' Waddad calls out from her bedroom. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine,
mama
. Go back to sleep now.'