by Claire Hajaj
They sped down the Rue de Phénicie with open windows, the night air screaming into the car. Salim felt either Leila or Dalia put a warm hand on his leg. Rafan’s friend wanted to gamble, and the girls were shrieking ‘Crazy Horse! Crazy Horse!’ as the lights sped by.
Salim remembered tumbling into a red room, dim with velvet and soft crystal chandeliers. The floor was spinning, it seemed, spinning in a blur of laughter and dark lace. He swayed in time with the pulse of it, stumbling into one of the black pillars beside him. Rafan was in one corner, talking to a blonde girl; his head bent close to her cheek, his hand slipping into hers.
The music reeled across the floor. Leila wanted to dance, and she pulled him into the crowd. Rafan had vanished. Salim leaned forward into Leila’s arms, closing his eyes and letting their bodies move together in the hot and close darkness.
He felt as if he could just drift away – away from himself, from memories of Jude, from the person he’d tried to become. The music changed, its beat harder than before, and Leila was pressed up against him. Now he was alone, on an untroubled sea and there were soft hands pulling him, pulling him gently out into the void.
He didn’t remember going to bed. When he woke, his head was filled with nails and straw. Light was already blazing in through drawn curtains.
He reached out his hand into the grey space, and hit something hard – a wall. On the other side of him, a person stirred. He looked around. She still had her knickers on, and his shirt. She reminded him of Margaret, lying there on her stomach. Her dark hair tumbled over her back and her nails stretched bloodily out over the sheets.
Voices sounded dimly outside the door. Pushing himself slowly to his feet, he winced with the forgotten pain of a hangover. He found his jeans on the floor, pulled them over his legs and staggered to his feet.
The bedroom door opened into a small living room – dark doors leading directly off it. The late afternoon sun came trickling down through a glass panel in the ceiling, dancing with the dust in the air.
At the central table, four men were sitting. Salim could smell hashish burning somewhere, over the acrid stink of cigarette ash. Rafan was in the same clothes he’d been wearing last night. His eyes were shadowed; they looked black under the faint, filtered skylight.
‘Salim, big brother.’ Rafan waved him over. ‘Come and say hello to the guys.’ Salim walked forward and nodded at the rest of the table. These men looked very different to the suave friend of last night. They were darker skinned, heavier, and they did not smile when they saw him. The one closest to him looked up; something was bulging from his belt, black like the butt of a handgun.
‘Keefak, keefak,’ he said to each politely, shaking their hands. How is this life? Their accents were familiar, a poorer version of his father’s. Their hands were calloused. Before they came here, they must have been fellahin, Salim thought. Farmers and street workers, now big men with guns.
‘So,’ he said, sitting down and taking the joint out of Rafan’s hand to fill his own lungs. ‘Are you from Palestine?’
‘We are, habibi,’ the man with the bulging belt said. Salim sensed that the greeting, my beloved friend, was both welcome and warning. ‘My brothers and I are down from Tripoli. Farouk here is visiting from Jordan, from Karameh.’ Salim nodded silently. The Jordanian border town was the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The big man called Farouk looked at him with pitted eyes. ‘You Al-Ishmaelis are from Jaffa, I hear. God bless you all. I came from there too, from Manshiyya. I worked in the fields, picking the fruit back then, with my father, may Allah bless his eyes.’
‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Salim said, automatically. This was a man his father might have employed. The ay’an put food in their mouths, but when the ay’an fled they were left with nothing to eat and no one to lead them. Now the ay’an were living comfortably in Europe and the fellahin were left here, taking the fight to the Jews.
‘God bless you,’ the man said again. ‘We have a base in Tripoli now, with our brothers in Fatah. I think our brothers in Jordan may be joining us soon, if the hammer falls there. Jordan is a traitor bitch. Hussein is the Jew’s bitch. We’ll fuck her like a dog.’ His voice was grim. Even Salim knew, from listening to the BBC Arabic Service, that wily King Hussein would one day throw all the Palestinians out again – starting with men like Farouk.
‘How did you come here, Farouk?’ Salim asked carefully. He felt like the stranger he’d once been in England, afraid to put a foot wrong. Rafan, he saw, was watching him carefully.
‘I came to the camps in Tripoli with my family during the Nakba. The Irgun drove their tanks through my house in Manshiyya. My wife died, my father died. My youngest son died here in the camps, from the blood in his guts. My oldest son is a soldier with me, may Allah protect him. That’s my story, the same as many.’ He paused to take a deep draw on the joint.
‘But you’re in London, Rafan tells us,’ he went on, coughing as the strong smoke came streaming out. ‘That’s a good place to be. Bullets can’t drive out the Zionists. We need educated men, big heads. There are men like that now. Arafat. Abbas. Young men, but clever. We need them in Europe too. What do you do in London?’
Rafan answered, ‘He’s planning to be a rich man, Farouk. Right, big brother? And marry a blonde girl with big tits.’
Salim ignored him and spoke directly to Farouk. ‘I studied economics. Now I need to get my first job. I’m not a big man like my brother here, but I haven’t forgotten the struggle.’ He put his hand over his heart and felt the empty beating there, the hollowness that said you did forget, you made yourself forget. Salim wanted no part of the struggle. It never seemed to end, but it never seemed to go anywhere either.
The men stopped talking when Leila came swaying out of the bedroom, kissed Rafan and started to make Turkish coffee. As the sun began to sink again and the room darkened, Salim saw Rafan and Farouk disappear into the bedroom together and come out ten minutes later. Farouk was carrying a duffel bag, black and scarred. There were hard outlines that looked like bricks bulging out of the leather. Hashish, or money maybe? A prickle of adrenaline crept like ice down his back. If this was the nature of the struggle, then what was Rafan? And what did this stranger-brother want from him?
Once the men had left, they changed their clothes and went out alone for dinner. Salim had little appetite. He pushed his food back and forth on his plate, trying to understand what he wanted to say. Eventually, Rafan kicked him under the table.
‘What did you expect, big brother?’ he said. ‘A student waving petitions? The Knights of the Round Table? You’ve been with the Angleezi too long. You forgot how to be a Palestinian.’
‘I am a Palestinian,’ Salim protested angrily. ‘How dare you judge me? It takes more than hashish and guns to make you a Palestinian. I was the only one that cared about our house, the only one who ever wanted to go back. You, Mama, Hassan – you couldn’t get away fast enough.’
‘You’re wrong, big brother,’ Rafan said. ‘You’re not Palestinians any more. None of you. So you have your British passport and your degree. Good for you. But I never wanted those things, Salim.’ He took a mouthful of kebab. ‘Hmm, it’s good. Try it.’ When Salim shook his head, Rafan went on.
‘What’s special about this place? I’ll tell you. Palestine is still alive here, in the camps and with men like Farouk. We have brothers in every other house, from Amman to Tripoli. The PLO is ready to come across the Jordanian border and run the south. The Shia will come on board. Those old chickens over there,’ he pointed towards the Christian Maronite sectors east of the city, ‘will just lie down. It’s coming, you’ll see.’ Salim sat there, transfixed. Rafan leaned over towards him.
‘Why don’t you get that clever head of yours to work with your own people?’ he said. ‘What else do you have to do in London?’
Jude. Her name leapt to his lips, but he pushed it away.
‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a stranger here.’
‘Because you’re my brother,’ Rafan said, and his green eyes were so compelling that Salim felt his heart lurch. ‘Who else do I have but you? All these years we were apart, can you say you were happy? Isn’t that why you came looking for me now? To get home to your family, where you belong?’
Salim felt a surge of something somewhere between hope and anger, a swift tide filling his chest. This is my brother, my real family. The idea of coming home, of undoing past wrongs – it was so sweet. A true home, not the house of cards he’d been building with Jude. ‘And what happens if we win?’ he said eventually, knowing what he hoped to hear. ‘What do you want in the end, Rafan? Are you saying we can go back?’
Rafan threw back his head and howled with laughter, like a dog out on the beach.
‘Ya Salim,’ he gasped. ‘Mama was right. You’re a fellah like Father. You’re obsessed with that pile of bricks and leaves.’ He wiped his eyes and his face twisted into a smile. ‘No, big brother, there’s no going back in our lifetime. But we bring them the bill for the past. And we can make them pay.’
That night, Rafan drove them to his mother’s apartment in Hamra. They walked past the guard at the front entrance into a marble lobby full of light. A lift took them up to the top floor, and opened to a long, dark corridor. Translucent lights studded the walls, sculpted in the shape of women’s sleeping faces. Salim felt his chest tighten at the sight of them, so serene and so very cold.
As Rafan opened the door, he heard music, faint but soothing – Fairouz, the new Lebanese obsession, singing a song by Umm Kulthum. Beirut’s distant nightlife shimmered in through the great arched windows in waves of red, blue and green. Two lamps lit up the room’s opposing corners, identical horses rearing up with glowing balls between their hooves. A dark Persian carpet muffled their footsteps.
‘Mama,’ Rafan called, throwing his keys down onto the lacquered table. ‘Mama, come on. Salim is here.’
She came out of her room wearing a flowing green dress, adjusting an earring. Her hair swept up in an auburn tower, plaited over her brow like a crown. As she came towards them, her perfume surrounded Salim like the scent of heated bronze.
‘Hi Mama,’ he said, amazed to find his eyes full of tears. It was a moment he’d rehearsed so many times in different shades of anger or forgiveness. But the tears shamed him, reducing him into the little boy left behind.
She walked over to him, put her white hand on one cheek and laid her lips against his other. She was not as tall as he remembered, and the light touch of her face felt powdery.
‘Salim,’ she said, stepping back to look at him, her green eyes dark as the sea. ‘You got tall, ya’eini. I knew you would.’
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said, trembling. ‘I missed you.’
She moved away from him, towards a desk in the corner, and lifted a cigarette out of a silver box. Rafan took a light over to her, and Salim watched her neck rise as she drew the smoke in. He could see the bones moving loosely under the skin. She got old, he thought in shock. Or was she always like this?
‘Some things are too complicated for boys to understand,’ she said, walking over to the glimmering window. ‘I know it was hard for you, but it was better that way. Now you’re a success in England. I have a man who looks after me properly. Everyone’s happy.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and said, ‘There’s beer in the kitchen, Rafan. Get some for your brother.’
Seating herself on the edge of the sofa, she patted the cushion beside her. Salim sat slowly down. ‘So tell me, ya’eini,’ she said, her voice edged with hoarseness, ‘what’s it like in London? You have a degree now, and a good job? I’m so proud of you. I knew you would be a big man.’
They sat there quietly together, while she smoked and gazed at a point over his head. He told her about London, the restaurants and theatres, and the new job he would start next month. Everything but Jude. He imagined Jude sitting there beside him, her pale light draining out into the pit of his mother’s expression.
After ten minutes the telephone rang. ‘I’m coming,’ she said into the mouthpiece. Rafan brought over a fur stole, and she pulled it around her shoulders. ‘We’ll talk more later, ya’eini,’ she said. Salim thought her eyes looked dead. He’d dreamed of an apology, of her arms around his neck and tears against his face. But as she kissed him goodbye and walked to the door, he found he no longer wanted her arms near him.
The night crawled by, and Salim lay sleepless on his brother’s bedroom floor. When morning came, he woke Rafan and said, ‘Let’s go out.’ The door to his mother’s room was open. She had not come home.
They drove south along the old Damascus road, before turning west to Shatila refugee camp. The camp outskirts had two barricades. The Lebanese Army held the first. Salim saw an older man in a plain suit watching as the soldier called them to a halt. ‘Deuxième Bureau,’ Rafan said, as they were waved through after showing papers and passports. ‘Military intelligence. Those bastards will be the first ones to go.’
Camp residents ran the second checkpoint. A man in a black and white checked keffiyeh flagged the car down. Rafan greeted him by name and asked after his father. Salim shook his hand through the window.
They drove through into a wall of noise and stench. An open sewer ran beside them, under the tangle of wires linking shack to shack and tenement to tenement. Washing dripped in the dirty air. An old man sat on the ground, a pile of old shoes beside him. One cheek was sunken into toothless gums and fluid from an infected eye ran down the other.
Children ran ahead of the car, cheering them along. He felt something stir inside him, watching them skip past them, yelling in the exuberance of young life. Fifteen years later, after the massacre that left dozens of small bodies red and limp on the ground here, he would think of those children again and wonder if they had vanished in the slaughter.
Abu Ziad, Rafan’s friend, was playing backgammon on a plastic chair outside a stall selling falafel. His belly spilled over his knees like the worry beads tumbling over his fist. Parcels stamped with the United Nations logo were being carried into a block behind them. A sticker on the door said Filastinuna, with a Palestinian flag sketched next to it.
They drank a short coffee while Abu Ziad bemoaned the Lebanese government and its Christian leadership. Palestinian Muslims couldn’t get work permits, he said, while their Christian brothers and the rich could easily buy a passport. ‘We are less than dogs to these Beirutis,’ he growled. ‘But one day dogs bite back.’ They talked about the corruption of the official camp supervisors, the slowness of the UN and the prospects for Fatah out of Tripoli. Salim was asked about life in London, and the possibility of the British rejoining the fight on Palestine’s side.
Before they left, Rafan handed Abu Ziad some money in an envelope. A contribution, he said, to his children’s charity. He was thanked and blessed, and the envelope disappeared into the old man’s pocket.
On their way out, Salim breathed the air deeply, wanting to taste the stench of the place fully, to carry it out with him. His life in London – the accountancy job waiting for him – what did it mean, compared to this sink of human misery? At that moment he felt dirty, guilty for courting the supercilious Angleezi and for cherishing his British passport. Rafan had it right – he did not deserve to call himself a Palestinian. He had not yet paid the price.
He looked towards Rafan. His brother was unusually silent. Salim saw his mouth was a thin line and his knuckles white on the wheel.
After a moment, Rafan said, ‘You know that this is where we lived first, when we left Nazareth?’
Salim was astonished. ‘In one of those houses?’
‘In worse.’
She left us for that pit? Salim could not fathom it. How could Rafan have survived here at just eight years old, with all his thousand fears?
‘But she’s Lebanese.’
‘She’s Lebanese but she came without papers. Israeli passports are no good here. Someone had to bring her in, to fix it for her. So we wa
ited here.’
‘Who fixed it? Her family?’
Rafan shrugged. ‘A running woman has no family. Someone. Some man.’
The telegram crushed in her palm. He remembered it, a yellow smudge against the dark sky above Nazareth. A name must have been hidden inside, a name worth leaving them for, worth waiting alone in a refugee camp while Salim wept for her, staring out northwards to the hills. I hope it made you happy, Mama. And yet last night she’d seemed alone still. Locked in a tower circled by marble and glass, like a captured queen from the old stories.
‘Why did she do it?’ He spoke aloud, and the sound surprised him. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘That’s what I told her,’ Rafan said, answering a different question. Behind the sunglasses his face was stone. ‘God knows. Maybe she felt she had some debt to pay.’
The very next day, after a night in Leila’s apartment, Rafan woke him up by shaking his shoulder. ‘Good news, big brother,’ he said, his unwashed face dark with bristle and his green eyes suavely gleaming again. Yesterday had been spat away with his toothpaste. ‘We’re on our way to Tripoli.’
Salim raised himself on his elbows, shaking off the fog of sleep. ‘Why Tripoli?’ But of course he already knew.
‘Farouk wants you to come. He wants you to meet some people.’
‘Brothers.’
Rafan shrugged. ‘Brothers. Friends. Interesting people. And you get to see Tripoli. Okay, it’s not as lively as here.’ Salim saw a flash of Leila’s dark hair and golden legs walking into the kitchen behind the open door. ‘But it’s worth seeing even so. Particularly for you.’
By the time Salim was dressed and in the kitchen, Leila’s Turkish coffee was bubbling on the stove. She poured him a cup and rubbed her eyes. ‘Have you ever been to Tripoli?’ he asked her, sitting down at the table and swirling the thick liquid in its chipped golden cup. She shook her head. ‘I’m not a Filastiniya,’ she said. ‘Although we support them here in West Beirut, not like the Christians.’ She waved her hands. ‘But those people Rafan sees – they’re something else. Tripoli is a crazy place, for crazy religious people.’
