The Things I Would Tell You

by Sabrina Mahfouz

  She watched his hands during the meal. He was half qualified as a vet and you could tell that by the way he ate, particularly with the lamb, a careful removal of fat, a separation of tendon from muscle, the occasional curious manipulation to check on the mechanics of the joints. The unqualified half of him, which had abridged the first, was manual worker, an outdoor profession that boiled a sore blush into his cheeks and branded a dark tan down from the line where the T-shirt ended. After the food and the one glass of wine, he asked her what had happened in the other place she sometimes spoke of,

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he had said, his eyelashes, despite his wash, still slightly crusted by the sweat of the day, ‘take me there.’

  ‘There was a young guard,’ she started, wanting to make it new, but not too unchartered to be clumsy. She could lose him with one erroneous detail, ‘on the Eastern side, he had an allergy to a flower, a little similar to the yellow flower that grew on the land of the Hamza family at the base of their hills.’ She’d messed up already, by making references that were too close to them, to problems that surrounded them,

  ‘I know the one,’ he said, letting her off, and she continued,

  ‘He’d always been short for his age until he was thirteen when he shot up and became tall like a reed, but he was too attached to his mother, hating the porridge she made him every morning, but loving everything else about her.’

  ‘Why should I know about the soldiers on that side?’ He said, ‘On the East, why should I care for them?’

  ‘Because without recognising their humanity we have no chance that they will recognise ours.’

  ‘You don’t know what they’re like,’ he snapped now; his look was like a kick, a reproach that she refused to be cowered by, ‘This morning, the sons of bitches–’ he swore again, ‘those–‘

  ‘He didn’t want to be posted to the watchtowers, but he had no choice and he came when already many who tried to cross from East to West had been shot. One morning he saw a girl, about the same age as his cousin from Leipzig, with a similar long, dark plait, run until she was mown down. She lay in no man’s land fallen over one arm, crumpled, as the boy she was with turned back once then tried to run zigzagging to the other side before he was shot too and–

  ‘Tell me how they got rid of it. I need to hear about that. Tell me that.’

  ‘People from across the whole city, old men and women, boys, girls, they all came to take it down. Their wall was sprayed with graffiti, it was not as tall as ours, but it was strong, made of cement as well, it was there so long that no one believed it would go. They grew up under it, families were separated by it, people died trying to cross it and yet they came the people of that city, they came and broke at it with sledgehammers and pickaxes and anything they could find.’

  ‘I know how to use a pickaxe.’ He grazed the callouses on his palm over across her cheek. But she was seeing it herself now. ‘It was the people first, before they brought in the heavy equipment, the cranes and diggers that dismantled it more methodically.’

  She walked behind him and pulled back the curtain that hid the wall. It started one metre from their house, rose eight metres into the sky and ran on for ever. Nothing weathered the wall; it stood pristine. It was free of graffiti at this point, for here it had been constructed in a private garden and they had managed to keep the local boys out. They did not want to be screamed at with messages that they already knew.

  ‘Look,’ she continued at the view which gave them nothing to see. ‘When they take it down, we will see beyond to our land, which they will have to give us compensation for, for the time that we have not been able to benefit from it, for the way it has stopped you being able to continue your studies.’

  ‘Compensation,’ he mocked.

  ‘It may take a while, we will have to be patient, they will need to set up bodies, requiring administrators, specialist knowledge will be sought internationally.’ He was behind her now, sweetly acid with wine, languorous with fatigue; he leant on to her so that she was pushed up against the kitchen cabinet, bent forward.

  ‘Show me what we’ll see when it is gone.’

  ‘We must remember that we lost three lemon trees and two mature apricot trees, we can record that on the claim form. The land will be bare and messy for some time, but it will recover, once you are back with it, it will feel the difference. You won’t have much time because your practice will be very successful, but I will help, our children will too–’ He had turned her around now and pushed her back so that she was seated on the work surface of the kitchen. He separated her legs so that he could lean between them, before he brought her forward again.

  ‘And we will see the Hamzas’ hills in the distance?’

  ‘We will see again the Hamzas’ land in the distance and the mountains of Jerusalem behind.’

  The next morning he woke before she was able to get up to make the coffee. ‘Don’t get up for me,’ he said, tracing along the line of her earlobe, ‘but take me back won’t you, tonight?’

  ‘Berlin?’

  ‘Berlin.’

  By the time she woke up, he had cleared the plates, brushed away the sand from the hallway and put the tissue box that he hid his ID and permits under, back in its place.

  Selma Dabbagh

  Last Assignment to Jenin

  If asked when I knew the direction events were going to take, I would say I never knew. I say that to myself now. There are some directions that are not imaginable.

  He said our lives may be entirely restricted, but our imaginations are free. He said free as stars. He believed orbits were necessary for freedom. Without orbits, choice would be oppressive. ‘You can’t just spin,’ I’d said.

  Watch me! he’d replied, his face circling mine, up close.

  Imagination is not limitless. It mainly takes us to good, safe places. I did not anticipate his departure, or his loss. Even at the point when he grabbed my arm and the undercarriage was upon us, there was disbelief.

  Or hope, if you prefer.

  Once I reached the edges of the camp, the realisation as to quite how screwed up everything was had come to me in an inarticulate, visceral way. It had started pounding through me. Once there, it had become clear that I could go no further.

  I’d called him from an alleyway and, by doing so, I had pulled him into the mess I’d thrown myself into. Before my call, he’d been safe and he could have stayed that way. The alleyway was a dead-end about a metre wide with iron doors on either side which were bolted from the inside at three different heights. I had tried everything with those doors, but the inanimate inhabitants behind them stayed mute. If they had responded, I would not have called him.

  I knew he was in the area. I had ways of always knowing where he was. In the seven and a half weeks before that evening, I’d started to dial his number more times than I care to admit to. But in that alleyway, I’d gone through with it.

  I’d called him. He’d answered. We spoke.

  After I called, the sense of having fucked up my life and now being about to do the same to his, swelled so huge in me that I felt that it, that feeling of fuckedupness alone, would burst down the sides of the alleyway: the feeling, not the enemy, you understand; a logical way to think when the enemy has, for so long, been the feeling.

  It was a recent development to be able to see the hills from where I stood. The buildings opposite were freshly demolished providing me with an alley-framed vista of the rocks that were absorbing the sun. A chiffony veil of dusk caught on the hills and everything about the view said: For This. For this land we fight and die for ever.

  It flaunted its bluey-green earth, its pinky-orange sky, and the line between the two swam as the crushed colours spread between each other. Here, said the land, presenting me with yet another scandalously beautiful evening about to fall dark.

  It is transience that gives rise to beauty, not the object itself. The ownership of the thing is irrelevant. This, at least, was what I had been trying to persuade mysel
f in recent months. But even a thought like that made me want him, for he placed views into context, turned ideas into philosophies.

  I wanted him. I wanted him. I wanted him always. It spiralled in my head like a snail shell of childish handwriting: I want you back, now. Come back to me and so on. It was tedious and below me but it insisted on crawling into my ear whenever I was still, so I kept myself busy. This is what my friends told me to do when they were tired of me calling late at night.

  It is common, I understand, when dumped, to dwell on your possible errors and personal flaws. I tried to accept this, but it was hard. I was bombarded by self-mockery: while driving, working, conducting a conversation. Waiting to pass through the turnstile at the Qalandia checkpoint, I’d once, at the memory of involuntarily passing wind during the sexual act, found myself hitting at my forehead in shame,

  ‘Maalik? What’s wrong with you?’ the women queuing in front of me had asked, ‘Aren’t you used to the wait?’ Although this self-abuse was a perpetual torment, it was nothing compared to the thoughts of how good it had been. The memory of his arm behind my waist pulling me down onto him - that alone could floor me for what felt like weeks. I started to shrivel as though drawn inwardly, my skin pulled tight over awkward bones. The mere sight of the words ‘Kiss me!’ scrawled over a wall’s political graffiti could cause me to spend an afternoon behind my bed with my nails embedded into to my scalp.

  I have no memory of eating during that period. I do recall picking the skin off some soaked chickpeas that my mother had left out in preparation for some maftool, but I don’t remember actually consuming them.

  Why the hell was it that I was in Jenin on that day, at that time? I would ask that too. I could answer that it was my job to go to places like that. This is the answer if I want to portray that the forces were greater than me, but it would not be an honest response. The truthful answer is that I had wanted the situation, its desperation; its extremity.

  I understood it. It spoke to me.

  That Jenin attack was the first of its kind, the worst of its kind. Its viciousness was stunning, even to us. Now such events are more common, but, at the time, that onslaught conveyed such a hurt that I felt I was alone in being capable of comprehending it.

  Yes, yes, it was all about him. I thought that horror, diving into that external horror could turn off my own internal one.

  On the phone I’d given him directions: I’m across the road from where the small mosque and the garage with the green tiles were, I had said.

  – Were? He had asked.

  – Were. I had confirmed. Then my battery had gone.

  I called him. He answered. We spoke and then I stood. I even smoked. This was unorthodox for me. Hatem, the other fieldworker had left his cigarettes in my bag. I’m not a standingin-an-alleyway kind of a smoker, it should be understood. I sit when I smoke, with coffee or a glass of wine and I always make sure that the ashtray is clean before I light up.

  I had hoped smoking might distract me from the tanks and bulldozers moaning and slipping in the valley below, but I could think only of drones and night vision as I made a little orange star in front of my face with the cigarette of the fieldworker who got away.

  I could not have stayed in the last witnesses’ house. I’d made my excuses (lies) about people and transport and had left, by which time the streets were empty and the only cars remaining in the streets were those that had already been shelled.

  That level of fear is like being in a pressurised container - it’s the only way to describe it: a vacuum is created that winds you huh! until the lid is released, balance is restored, you are able to breathe again and then baf! you are winded once more. What I had not expected though was the sense of elation that runs alongside the fear, in a prattling endorphin-bolstered rush. Perhaps it is to do with oxygen manipulation.

  The bulldozers and tanks comforted each other in the valley below – we’re going up there soon, but we shouldn’t worry, there are so many of us and we’re together, with all the world behind us.

  And ahead of them, behind me, were bodies, in the corners of rooms curled over themselves in front of televisions. Soft, waiting bodies in collapsible concrete cubes.

  Maybe we had a lone gunman, possibly two. Okay, a handful. Some guys who knew how to booby-trap tiles. A couple of fellows who were dab hands with incendiary devices.

  A God.

  Ours against yours, okay?

  On the phone he said – you know they are planning to attack again tonight?

  As though I didn’t know anything.

  But I’d had to leave that last house. I couldn’t stay there, not with all those ghosts. They were sucking up all the air. ‘An jad you’ve got to take me seriously with this one. The little buggers had been seeking me out for weeks. At home, they would come tiptoeing across the stone floor in the half-light of morning. When the first girl came, I’d thought she might be bringing me messages from him. But that was not their purpose. They were polite children who used speech with care, ‘Look Auntie,’ that first ghost girl had said, twirling in the greyish air, pointing at the part of her head that was no longer there, ‘Look Auntie, half of it has gone. The soldiers blew it away.’

  The ghosts had been more enthusiastic than normal in that last house: pulling at my trousers, willing me to talk to them, peering up at me from under my questionnaire. They chattered irrepressibly: a band of translucent, despairing monkeys on speed.

  A fieldworker is essentially a form-filler in a flak jacket. My organisation doesn’t support the wearing of flak jackets although our funders argue that we should sport this protective attire. My organisation’s position is that the wearing of militarystyle outfits places a distance between us and the witnesses that we interview. I subscribe to my organisation’s position and I do not wear a flak jacket.

  Everyone said that I was good at my job. I was thorough and conscientious. Where my skills were lacking was in putting myself (and therefore also my witnesses) at ease. I admit I was a little hung up about being a ‘middle-class’ Jerusalemite. My bare head was also offensive to many of the families I visited, (on principle I would never cover it up). As a result of these ‘barriers to communication’, as the workshop trainers put it, I frequently adopted an imperious front with my witnesses: I expected them to serve me coffee, to turn on their fans, to offer me their best chair, not to interrupt my questions, or challenge my worth. At the same time, I felt humbled and useless in their presence. I was frequently possessed by the thought that they knew the details of my failed sexual relationships and that they therefore understood why I was an unmarried, childless woman in my mid-thirties. To stop them pitying me, I bossed them around. It was better, at least, to be hated.

  At the last witnesses’ house I had barked out question six without even thinking – ‘Were the children warned before they were shot?’ I’d asked Umm Hassan who had seen the whole incident from the downstairs window. The question had the effect of making the family look towards the door, as though an oddly dressed stranger had just walked in.

  One of Umm Hassan’s sons stepped in to disperse the white noise that my question had created, ‘As my mother explained to you over the telephone, the soldiers were telling the children to pull down the wall that had been damaged, to move the bricks, and the children were crying because they were scared of the guns that were being pointed at them.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, scribbling at my form although the information didn’t fit the box. Had a little ghost girl not been at my feet showing me her scratched and bloody palms, I may well have started winding up the interview then. There was a terrible smell of death in that room. If you don’t know what death smells like, I can explain. It’s like lumps of rancid, urban snot in your nostrils. It is not the kind of thing that can be dislodged by a tissue or a change of scene. Once you’ve smelt it, it will always be with you. It may abate before it recurs, but it’s always there. It could come back to you in the most expensive restaurant in Geneva. Umm Hassan�
�s family had been trying to counter it with bleach, air fresheners and disinfectant. The toxically cleansed surfaces of the room were still wet, the air was trying to pass itself off as Lily of the Valley, but all we could smell was death.

  ‘They were trying to pick up the bricks and carry them, but the children were small and they were panting… they couldn’t get enough breath…’

  ‘Huh, huh, huh,’ said Umm Hassan, her shoulders moving up and down, her chest contracting like a dog sweating on its side in the sun.

  ‘Yes,’ the son continued, ‘they were breathing like that and the soldiers were aiming their guns at them, watching them run up and down, carrying the bricks and stones… telling them that they would be shot if they did not do it. But–’

  Umm Hassan was staring at a spot on the wall above the chipped veneer sideboard with a gilt-decorated tray on it. Her son watched her revisit a scene that was being recalled and replayed for my benefit.