by Claire Hajaj
Rafan shook his head. ‘You’re so naïve, you English. Who wants peace? Let me tell you a truth. The goal of fighting is to keep fighting. Once you win, you get less money and more responsibilities.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what the Jews are finding out now.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Jude retorted. ‘Last night you told us you escaped from a massacre – who could possibly want more bloodshed like that?’
He pushed his glasses back on. ‘Peace may be sweet, dear Jude. But other things will always be sweeter. That’s why I say I admire you. When you pick peace, you pick the losing side.’
Rafan’s clothes, several black duffel bags of them, were delivered two weeks later by a narrow-faced man driving a brown pickup.
Salim helped him load the bags into the disused maid’s quarters at the back of the villa. Jude watched from the back door, her skin prickling.
Afterwards, Rafan came sauntering into the kitchen with a satisfied smile. He pinched Sophie’s cheek, took a glass of water from the filter and yawned, saying he needed a nap. ‘A long day, beauty.’ Then he vanished into the dark of his bedroom.
Salim said he was going to buy some cans and yeast; Rafan had fired him up about the idea of brewing homemade wine in the storage room. ‘I can’t believe you let these bedouin whoremongers tell you what to drink,’ he’d scoffed.
As Jude waved the car out of the drive, the song of the muezzin came rolling in behind it across the darkening wasteland. Once it had been an alien sound, a painful reminder of her loneliness. But her ears had changed with the passage of time; now its sadness spoke to her of familiar things, and resonated with her own losses. It was a drift from hate to love so gentle she could not say when she’d crossed the line between.
Sophie appeared at her side. ‘He sounds cross today, doesn’t he?’ Her daughter at twelve was nearly as tall as Jude, a slim shadow against the falling dusk.
‘Who? Your father?’ Salim had been on edge since the morning; the trip to the supermarket was probably another ruse to avoid them.
‘No, not Daddy. The mosque.’ One hand pulled through her long hair, a habit carried out of her childhood.
Jude touched the twisting fingers and asked, ‘What’s bothering you, pet?’
Sophie rubbed her foot on the ground. ‘Nothing. Only – Uncle Rafan… do you like him?’
Jude’s chest tightened. ‘Why? Did he say something to you?’
‘No. He’s okay. He’s funny. I mean… not funny ha-ha.’ Sophie looked out into the desert, thoughtful. ‘He looks like Daddy but he isn’t like him at all.’
Jude pulled her daughter towards her, feeling the strong smoothness of Sophie’s skin. ‘I could say the same about you and Daddy,’ she said. Sophie’s brown tones were the mirror of her father’s. She had his look but only Marc had inherited the restless heat of his nature. Her daughter’s colours conjured different things for Jude – cool earth and dark lakes, and Rebecca’s sturdy pine trees.
‘Daddy’s been unhappy since Uncle Rafan came,’ Sophie said, resting against her mother’s shoulder. So intuitive, my daughter. The confusion in Salim’s mind had been more visible than ever that morning, from the defiant hunch of his shoulders as he hoisted Rafan’s bags onto his back.
Suddenly, Sophie hugged her arm. ‘Hey, it’s Friday night, you know.’
‘You want to light the candles?’
‘If you’d like. Daddy won’t be back for a while.’
‘Get Marc then,’ Jude said, through the familiar rush of guilt and pleasure. ‘I’ll meet you in there.’
As Jude pulled the menorah out of the dressing room drawer, her fingers fumbled. When she’d first shown the children how to pray, how to light the Sabbath and Hanukkah candles, it was meant to be just once. She’d told herself: I have to pass on the knowledge. But they’d enjoyed it. And it had touched her, those whispered prayers and hidden lights while the muezzin rang through the air outside, so much more than the grand festivities in the open daylight of her childhood.
But that evening, her prayers came hard. In the light of the struck match she could see their distraction. Marc’s eyes were tracing the ceiling, and she found herself wanting to shake him into the present. This is how his father feels sometimes. But even Sophie’s face was thoughtful, her mind elsewhere.
When Jude finished the song and lifted her hands from her face, she heard Sophie say, ‘That thing about the place in Lebanon? Where Uncle Rafan said the Jews helped kill all those people? It’s true, you know. I heard about it at school. They really did do that.’ Marc’s gaze swung round towards her and Jude felt the cold bite of shame.
‘I know.’ Her throat was full. She sensed Sophie looking at her, and Marc too, searching for an explanation. But there was none to give.
‘No wonder he hates them,’ she heard Sophie whisper to her brother. Hates us, Jude wanted to say. But in the semi-darkness she felt the back of her neck prickle, as if unfriendly eyes were on them, an invisible witness judging every word.
‘What’s your brother really doing here?’ she asked Salim later, lying in bed. ‘Hiding from Israeli assassins,’ he said, rolling over and pretending to fall asleep. She lay there in the warm darkness listening to the unhappy rhythm of his breathing and trying to calm the buzzing of her mind.
The next morning she took Marc to his rehearsals. He was waiting in the car, dressed in the long, blue leotard he would wear on stage in just a month’s time. A pair of wire wings lay on the seat next to him. He gave her his most gleeful smile as she opened the car door, saying, ‘Come on, Mum, the star can’t be late.’
‘Who says you’re a star, you cheeky monkey,’ she said, feeling love reach deep into her heart. She stretched over the seat to touch his face.
‘Mr Trevellian says I am,’ he said, very seriously. ‘There’s no one better than me, not even in the year above. He says I have strength and flexibility. That’s why they gave me Puck, even though the older boys wanted it.’
‘I know, pet. I’m very proud of you.’
After the tree catastrophe all those years ago, Marc’s enthusiasm for life had dimmed to a dull glow. Jude had worried for a time that this strange, fragile child might not recover.
It was the Theatrical Society’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that saved him. It had young dancers, a tumbling Puck and a talking donkey. Marc had sat in enthralled silence for the whole two hours and had to be prised from his seat after the house lights came up. The next day at primary school he’d marched to the teacher to demand enrolment in the next production. Jude had received a sympathetic phone call saying no child under twelve was allowed to perform: but after Marc mastered his profound disappointment and grasped the concept of waiting, he once again had something to live for. For six years, he’d punished his body in relentless after-school gymnastics and dance training while Sophie was at Brownies, to be ready for his chance.
And at last it had come. The Society had made the serendipitous decision to restage A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the 1982 October production, after Marc’s twelfth birthday. Marc would finally play Puck on stage this year. My son is about to find out what it’s like to realize a dream.
They pulled up outside the dance school, a long, whitewashed building surrounded by old palms and watered by a deep well. Jude always felt strangely soothed under the gentle shadow of those palms, dappling the world with swashes of green and white. And the milk-and-biscuit smell of the wooden halls reminded her of Bede’s Grammar and those first bittersweet steps out of childhood.
The hall was a scrum of other children and parents. Marc vanished quickly into the crowd, and Jude heard someone shout her name. A tall woman approached her, beads of sweat dappling a brown chignon with grey hairs threaded through it like wires. She held two glasses above her head, as children scurried around her.
‘Hey, Miss Jude. Want some lemonade? It’s cold as all hell.’
Jude took the glass and smiled. Helen was one of the few American Embassy wives who didn’t think it bene
ath her to mix without a diplomatic passport. Her daughter was in Jude’s class at school. ‘I could never get her to read a damn thing and now she’s giving me Dickens over breakfast,’ she’d said to Jude one parents’ evening. ‘I would kiss you, but imagine the scandal!’
Today Helen’s eyes narrowed as she looked down at her, and Jude flinched under the scrutiny.
‘Now, none of that, honey. What’s up? Man or money?’
Jude shrugged. ‘I’m okay. Sal’s… okay. But his brother just arrived out of the blue from Beirut, to stay with us. And I get the feeling he’s in a lot of trouble.’
‘How so?’
‘I don’t know exactly.’ All of her suspicions came surging onto the tip of her tongue under Helen’s attentive eye. ‘He’s from Beirut, I think involved in the war somehow. He’s…’ she suddenly stopped, biting down her words. Helen’s husband was the big, jovial Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy. ‘Look at him,’ Salim had whispered the first time they met at the Club. ‘Way too old for that job. CIA for sure.’
Helen sipped her drink. ‘Divine,’ she said. Jude took a swallow; the false sweetness of the lemon left a strange taste in her mouth. ‘That’s the thing about Arabs, honey,’ Helen went on, wiping her forehead. ‘Family here, family there. People can’t get away from them. If I had to live with my family I swear I’d go crazy. Well, crazier. No disrespect to your man, but just tell him it’s not on, if you don’t like it.’
If only it were that simple. ‘I’m going to.’ Jude put her drink down on the table. ‘I am. But I just have to find the right way. Sal feels like he owes his brother somehow. But we come first with him, I know it.’
‘Just say the word if you need a hand. We’re pretty good at getting rid of unwanted pests, you know.’
Suddenly, Marc rounded the corner, breathless and red-faced. ‘Mum!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I left one shoe behind, on my bed.’
‘Can’t you dance barefoot today?’
‘No way.’ Marc’s voice was pained. ‘The floor’s all uneven – some places you stick, some places you slip. We have to go back.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Jude said, half-laughing, half-scolding. ‘I’ll throw a party when you learn how to drive yourself. Just go into the rehearsal, and I’ll go back for the shoe. Go on!’
She reached over and squeezed Helen’s hand. ‘I’ll speak to you later, Helen. Thanks for the talk.’
‘Any time, honey. Remember what I said.’
She took the dirt road back – harder on the car but a shorter round trip. Leaving the car with the engine turning over outside the gate, she rushed into the house through the kitchen door, and into Marc’s bedroom. The beige dancing slipper was there, curled up on the pillow like a dead mouse. She put it in the back pocket of her trousers, and was walking towards the front door when she heard Rafan in the family room. He said the word Jude.
She stopped dead, holding her breath. Was he talking to me? But then she heard Salim reply, and she inched closer to listen.
‘Jude hates what happened in Shatila as much as I do. As much as you do. She would never tell the children anything else,’ she heard her husband say.
Rafan’s voice followed. ‘You’re blind and she’s blind. What do you know about Shatila anyway – either of you? They stood guard over the camp until even the children were dead. Do you know what three thousand dead people smell like, Salim?’ There was a brief silence, and Jude imagined how Salim would see it in his mind – the bodies of Marc and Sophie lying red on the ground, while a man of stone with a Star of David on his gun stood with his back to them, shutting out the world.
‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ Salim said, in English again. ‘I have a family now. I have children. I can’t come to Lebanon, even if I wanted to.’
‘There’s no need to come to Lebanon. There are things to be done everywhere. Even here.’ Rafan used the word mumkin, meaning all things are possible. ‘Where do you think our brothers get their money?’ She heard another sound, a metallic clinking, and Salim said fiercely, ‘Where did you get that?’
‘From your bedroom, big brother. It’s hers. She lights it when you’re not here, to pray to the children in Hebrew. Sophie told me by mistake.’
Ice crept down her spine and her heart seemed to freeze. My menorah? As she groped for how and when he’d found it, a memory washed through her of the last Shabbas night with Sophie and Marc, and the feeling of being watched.
A creak of a chair startled her into movement. Turning on the soft carpet, she tiptoed as fast as she dared into the kitchen and ran down the garden to the running car, panic at her heels. She slammed the door and pushed the car into gear, kicking up dust until she was safely around the corner. Running like a rat. She remembered Rebecca’s letter, the rats hiding in the cellar, afraid of the axes, barely human. Slamming her foot on the brake, she pulled up. Where is my courage? Jude leaned her head forward on the steering wheel, and wept.
That night at dinner, the storm broke. I’ve done nothing wrong, she kept reminding herself. I will not hide.
Rafan turned up for the evening meal, as excruciatingly friendly as ever. She loathed him – his insolence, his cynicism, his infectious falseness. And what was worse, she could not escape the sickening knowledge that she was partly to blame for him. The Jews had helped to forge this dark soul flying into her kitchen on the wings of bloody slaughter.
Salim came to the table late, his eyes shadowed and sad. They ate in silence for a while. At last, Marc turned to Jude and said, ‘Mr Trevellian told me that there are dance schools in England where I can learn properly. Could I go to one next year? He said he was going to talk to you about it.’
Jude looked over at Salim, who in turn had raised his head to look at his son.
‘So you want to live in England, Marc?’ he said quietly. Marc nodded, blindly unwary in his excitement. ‘I want to be a professional dancer.’ Rafan laughed and said, ‘Good for you, little man. Speak up for what you want.’
Salim said, ‘Did your mother suggest this to you? I know she loves dancing.’ His eyes were wet, but his face was pinched in a way they had all learned to dread – the strain of the volcano before the eruption.
Marc caught the tone, and fell silent for a moment. Then, boldly, he said, ‘Well, why not? We can’t stay here forever.’
Salim’s eyes widened. ‘Really? Is that what you talk about, when you’re saying your Jewish prayers? How to get away from here, and from your people and your father too?’
Jude’s eyes met his, defiant blue against the deep black. ‘You know that’s not true. How could you even think it?’
‘How can I think it?’ He flushed. ‘I ask you to give the children Arabic lessons. Now they’re twelve, nearly adults, and they can hardly speak a word. You fill them with stories of England, even though this is their home. And you teach them Jewish prayers? My children, with my name?’ His voice choked, and through the blur of her own emotions Jude saw her husband struggling under the weight of pain.
Marc sat with his mouth open; Jude tried to speak but Sophie jumped ahead of her. ‘I asked to light the candles, Daddy,’ she said. ‘It was just for fun.’ Jude marvelled at her daughter’s courage; she was fearless in the face of anger, like an ocean soaking up a storm.
‘You?’ Salim was incredulous. ‘I don’t believe you, Sophie. What’s fun about this? What were you thinking?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Marc shouted, jumping to his feet. ‘That’s not how it was. It’s not just about your side of things.’
‘No, Marc,’ Jude said, pulling him back. ‘I should have told you, Sal. But they have the right to learn something about my culture too.’
‘Not if it means they turn against me,’ he said, his face white. ‘Not if it makes them more Jew than Arab. You’ve made them into foreigners, into Zionists – like you.’
Marc yelled back, ‘Why are you so horrible all the time? You’re the one turning us against
you. You don’t care about us, about anything except the stupid Arabic lessons!’
Jude gasped as Salim leapt to his feet and slapped Marc across the face. His hand left a red welt on the white cheek already losing its baby softness to the harder person underneath.
The boy put his hand up in shock. Jude saw Sophie raise hers in echoed pain. And then, into the silence, Marc spat, ‘I hate you,’ before running out of the kitchen and slamming his bedroom door.
Salim had pointed his finger at Jude and said, ‘No more dancing for him. He has to learn a lesson.’ Then the two brothers went out. She watched them from the back window, carrying Rafan’s bulky black bags from his room and hoisting them into the boot of the family car before screeching out of the drive without explanations.
She left Sophie with the dishes and found Marc in his room doing handstands against the wall. It was still covered with the story of Mowgli – the parentless boy who learned to leap like a monkey and hunt like a tiger.
Upside down, his face was bright purple. She saw tears on his forehead, nearly dried.
‘I can’t do anything right for him,’ he croaked, his arms shaking to hold him up. ‘He hates me and I hate him.’
‘It only feels like that,’ she said. ‘Love and hate feel very similar sometimes.’
Marc glanced dubiously at her. He swung his legs down and sat up flushed.
‘He never asks me anything any more, except to tell me that I’m not good enough at something.’
‘Your father had a very hard life. So many people let him down. He’s wrong to behave this way, but that doesn’t mean you should hate him.’
She saw Marc’s unconvinced face, and took his chin in her hand. ‘You two are just like each other. You both only see your side of things. When he comes back, I’m going to talk to him.’ Marc’s pale blue eyes filled with tears, and she ached to see the need there. He nodded quietly.
When she left his room, she went to the telephone and dialled Tony’s number. They spoke infrequently, because it was expensive and the lines were bad. The last time she’d seen him, the summer before on a holiday to England, his wife had been expecting their third child – and Tony had acquired a belly plus a partnership in his father’s firm.
