Qissat (7 page)

He was overcome by an intense thirst, by a powerful desire to go home and have a cold beer and maybe lie down on the grass under the trees in his well-cared-for garden.

He suddenly found himself contemplating all the things he felt he couldn’t bear to lose on account of this accursed prison. Even if he were to punish every person in this land, stop every one of them on this dangerous, snaking road called
Wadi al-Nar,
it would not satiate his thirst. For an electrifying instant he felt that he was only punishing himself, out here in this hostile wilderness. He had to escape from the dangerous assault of emotions he didn’t want to face. As his soldiers looked on in disbelief, he held out his arm and signalled to the cars to move. He didn’t waste a moment getting into his own vehicle, mobilising his men and clearing the way.

The road was open now. The line of cars pulsed forward in unison. A giant gear had shifted, allowing each of them to escape unscathed and return to his family.

Umm Hasan did not dare to think or feel until she was sure she was almost home, at her own doorstep.

It was only then that she allowed herself to begin to ponder the fact that her daughter Manal was growing up now and would surely be getting married in a few years’ time. It was entirely plausible that the girl could end up living in Ramallah, or perhaps some other city. When that happened, they would visit, together, the places that were now forbidden to them, and which they yearned to see.

They would eventually reach those other cities they dreamed of visiting.

There were still plenty of ways.

On the day itself it was all over before I had even woken up.

I had spent the previous day staring at the house across the road. It was crouched on the ground like a space station poised for launch. Dad had been in a mood with me and had just watched the news and talked a lot on the phone in Arabic about a meeting in Jeddah. I can feel that boredom now radiating from the pages of my sticker-adorned diary –
1990 Page-A-Day Diary.
An angry pen has dented the cover into a moronic teenage Braille. More than twice the age now that I was then, I can still feel it:
God damn the boredom of being stuck in Kuwait all summer.

The house ejected cars from its underground garage and delivered them onto the road like tapes from a Japanese video. The greased iron entrance slid along the concrete wall without a sound. But the object of my surveillance (coded as ‘Sh.’ for Sheikha) preferred to use the side gate. From the detective notes I had made I can see that Sh. had left and come back twice that day. Her
abaya
was always black. Her face was always covered. Her bags were always full of high-class shopping.

01.08.90 14:46 Sh. Reappears in brown Chevrolet Impala.
Dropped off.
01.08.90 16:24 Sh. Leaves in blue BMW.

My diary also records the movement of four Pakistani migrants and two Afghanis walking across the wasteland between the blocks of dust-clad housing. If the Afghanis were in fact Pakistanis or vice versa (it was hard to tell from a distance) I had made a note to show that the total was (6).

I had also spotted our gardener, Bustanji. Abu Waleed.

Bustanji did not sweat. Bustanji had leather skin. Bustanji had a head that squeezed out large and burnt from the band of white hair that remained. I liked Bustanji’s waistcoat with the cotton pellet buttons and white lining. Polyester fibres shone his back black through the leaves of the eucalyptus trees.

01.08.90 17:24 Bustanji watering plants at their base.

I can’t remember why we called him Bustanji (‘gardener’) even when we spoke English. Could it be because it emphasised his Arabness? I am sure Dad just loved the idea that he was putting earth back between the fingers of a fellow Palestinian.

It was my friend Nada who had told me with long, black, flying African arms (although she assured me that the Sudanese were Arabs, not Africans, and also that they were brown, not black) that there was far more going on in the space station house than I thought. I could tell that she had exaggerated the story, sure, but I didn’t care. I needed something to do. I sure as hell was not going to do any revision. Dad was treating me like a child sticking me in Kuwait all summer. Treat me like a kid and I’ll behave like a kid. No revision for you Baba dear even if I did screw up my exams.

When I touched my nose to twist the stud the scab would loosen itself from the stem. Ow.
Owww!
It had hurt so damn much getting it pierced.

Next to the Sheikha’s house was the Hajji shop where I bought cigarettes.

‘Don’t call it Hajji,’ says Nada, ‘that’s just what the English say.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s because they’ve done a pilgrimage. Then they come back and set up a shop.’

‘That’s rubbish. That’s just what the expats say and you English.’

‘Don’t call me English,’ I say.

‘Sorry, I forgot. Your Mum’s from where, Romania or is it Hungary?’

‘Whatever,’ I say.
‘Whatever.’

Hajji had bulging fingers like dog willies and he did not look at me when he gave me cigarettes from the shelf but kept his neck lolled back to watch the screen while feeling out for dusty notes from the wooden drawer. There were fewer rolling bodies in trenches by then. Hajji was from Iran but he could just as well have been from Iraq because they both filled their TV channels with pictures of young men blasted limbless or rigid with gas. Looped images of bodies with stretched bare tummies and grasping hands in raw earth holes. Marching songs and drum beats played over the footage accompanied by the eternal wail of women.

My bitch status was normally confirmed to me at least twice on the way back from Hajji’s shop and more than that if I stopped for a cigarette. Once, when Nada and I had tried to hide from the road, behind the wall of an apartment block, it had come from a woman in Arabic and was accompanied by a bucket of dirty water over our heads. Sometimes they were a joke, the lines coming out of the guys in the cars, ‘Hey baby, you wear hair gel?’ ‘Hey, baby you wanna come for a ride?’ Sometimes the door of the van slid open.
Fucktrucks
we called them at school. They said there was a bed inside, but I never looked. Head down. Walk on. ‘Hey sexy,’ weighed down with accent, sometimes the words were a blur of consonants, sometimes it was just a horn, but it was always there, as an undertone, as an overtone, ever since I was a kid, even if there was no skin showing at all, it was always there,
Bitch, hey Bitch, yeah Bitch, I can see you. Bitch.

On the day itself Dad had heard the radio cut out in the early hours when he was shaving and he later told me that it reminded him of what used to happen when there were coups, like the ones he had experienced in Syria. I thought it sounded cool to live in an age of coups. I had seen photos of Dad aged sixteen strutting around Damascus with his friends looking dandy in his fake Ray Bans.

Dad had then noticed that the phones were dead too. That was at about seven. He also saw the swarms of helicopters in the sky.

‘How did you know the phones were dead?’ I asked, because I was still thinking like a detective.

And he replied, ‘Because I tried to call your Mother.’ And I had not expected him to say that. I had not expected him to say that because I just did not think that they were going to ever speak again.

But when I had woken up, after all this had already happened, to find Dad sitting at the end of my bed looking agitated, I had, of course, assumed that he had found my cigarettes or the letter I had written to Nada and I remember thinking,
‘This is all I damn need right now.’
So I was a bit excited, if I am honest, when he told me that the Iraqis had invaded.

‘How?’ I ask and he raised his hands as though I was asking about a letter that got lost in the post or how a pay rise had been denied to him.

‘Why?’ I ask and he frowned and looked a bit mystified then said, ‘Arrogance?’ A bit like a question and left it at that.

‘What shall we do?’ I ask and he replied,

‘Just stay at home for a while.’

It is stamped with amateurism this diary of mine, this detective log book, as it scrapes on, cataloguing uneventful days, forgetting to tell the reader what has actually happened.

02.08.90 14:45 No one on the streets. Sh. not left the house.
02.08.90 14:54 Four helicopters in the sky at once.

There’s a photo of Nada and I stuck between the pages. We’re pouting painted lips at the camera and wearing matching baggy clothes with studded belts and my prettiness seems so fat-soluble next to hers. It looks as though it was on the verge of being dissolved away forever.

The invasion meant that Dad did not have to go to work. He seemed quite relieved. Mama had kept telling him that he worked too hard, that he put too much into it, that the hospital did not deserve him, that his employers were exploitative, that it was going to kill him in the end and so on and so forth until, predictably, that had turned into an argument too.

We had nothing to do, so Dad put on a record, the soundtrack to the film
Heat and Dust.
Dad loved India. I think he secretly liked something about English colonialism too. I sat with him as he sipped his afternoon tea and we looked out of the long mirrored windows and I remember wondering whether in three weeks’ time, when my nose healed, I should get an Indian-style hoop for my nose rather than the diamond stud.

02.08.90 17:24 Bustanji arrives to water the garden
.

My diary fails to record that between Bustanji’s visits, and they were only twenty-four hours apart (he was always on time), the Iraqis had invaded the country. Apparently they had blasted Kuwait City with helicopters and boats and completely taken over everything including airports and borders. A whole occupation had occurred, but I have no note of it, as when I heard the bangs I had not logged them, as I kept forgetting to look at my watch when they happened.

Dad got up. He did not seem to believe Bustanji would just reappear but then again he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t.

I went outside with Dad. The sun had made itself so hot it had lost itself in its own aura. It was all black fuzz for a couple of minutes and I could only see negative images. Bustanji’s son, Waleed, was standing behind his father, trying to find shade. He was so blond, far blonder than me, that he looked like a doll when the sun hit his cheekbones. He was all flushed. I remember him waiting with the keys to his cheap car in his hands, his shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, two yellow pubic-looking hairs curling over the top.

‘You should not be coming out here,’ Dad said, ‘we don’t know if it’s safe yet.’

‘I told him.’ Waleed looked so anxious, so exposed, ‘I told him, ya Doctor, we don’t know what will happen, but he insisted…’

Bustanji had green flecks in huge eyes that were always shocked in their sun-beaten skin. That day he was wearing his funny black pantaloon trousers, like an ancient Turk.

‘These plants won’t last two minutes without me in this heat, not two minutes.’ He stroked the dust off the leaves he was holding possessively between the fingers of his left hand.

‘We can water the plants,’ Dad was holding his hand above his eyes. ‘You should stay at home. You should not be travelling over here from Hawalli. You should be thinking about what to do. We may all need to leave. You never know.’

‘Leave? Leave what? The country? Forget this subject. Who would water the gardens? Where would we go? Not again, not again. How many times in one life? Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon … Where can we go anyway? Even if we wanted to? Where in God’s name? Where? Not again.’

‘I told him, Sir, Doctor,’ Waleed’s nose was sweating – little beads huddled together on the tip. He was unable to look at me and I thought that it was maybe because I hadn’t put anything over my vest before I went outside.

It was all dark for a while when we came inside as our eyes adjusted to the change. Dad looked out again at Bustanji bent over the earth in the grey-white light, Waleed trying to argue with his back. ‘He puts everything into that boy, everything,’ and Dad did not seem to be thinking when he did this, but he raised his hand and sort of patted my head, as though half with me, half with himself, but also half comforting, ‘and done a good job too.’

Looking at the diary now, I can see that even my handwriting was changing then, flipping styles mid-sentence, even mid-word. I was still playing around to see what fitted.

02.08.90 16:43 White Ford Pick-up going towards the Police station.
02.08.90 17:20 Caprice Classic moving down towards the highway (silver).
02.08.90 17:42 (Iraqi) Tanks (two) coming from the highway.

I presumed the tanks were Iraqi. I could not imagine that there was anyone else who was about to fight.

That evening I pulled out my maths books and closed the door so Dad would not catch me. I had always quite enjoyed algebra.

It was dark when the knocking started at the door, first with knuckles then with a flat hand or two. I could hear it upstairs. From the banisters I saw Dad place his book down on the coffee table and walk towards the door and I imagined soldiers – armed, sweating, bored and destructive. The picture of the dead South American student I had seen in a colour magazine as a child came back into my head. He had been shot in the back and was lying with his hair still shiny and trendy on the pavement. He was wearing jeans. ‘Look, Mama.’ I had held the photograph up to my mother who was talking to Grandma in their language. The jeans got to me. He had woken up that morning and put on his jeans not knowing he would die in them. The enormity of young death lay in the stitching on the back pockets. As Dad went to the door, my hand was feeling at my belt.

‘Na’am?’
says Dad. ‘Yes?’

‘Its Tawfeeq, Tawfeeq … Open the door, Nabil. Open the door.’

Tawfeeq Sa’eed was in a sweat. Huge dark circles hung under his eyes and his armpits. His salmon sports shirt tucked into his belted Bermudas had dust streaks across it. Had he perhaps thrown himself against the gate? Tawfeeq was my father’s friend although he and my father had nothing in common apart from the fact that they worked for the same hospital and had foreign wives.