by Jemma Wayne
In the hallway, amidst the work area her father has constructed as his home office, Kaseem is laying underneath a desk scrutinising a bunch of inter-tangled wires. “Not that one, not that one,” her father is saying over and over, directing Kaseem who is breathing deeply, Dara can tell, to disguise his impatience. Customers, Kaseem has told her before, always interfere. They think only of the outcome, trying to impose their narrow end game upon his delicate task without comprehending the benefits of getting there carefully, in the right order, with every leftover dispossessed wire accounted for and made good. She loves the way that he talks even of wiring – everything he does is with thoughtful, artistic diligence, as though the electrics of a computer are a beautiful philosophy of their own. His skilful fingers slide quickly between the knots and the computer on the desk pings abruptly to signal that it is alive, ready for work. “Okay, okay!” Dara’s father shouts, waving his hand at Kaseem to stop, anxious that with an ill-considered move he will undo his good work. Presuming Kaseem’s stupidity? No, Dara decides; her father is simply of an older generation, not computer-friendly, not aware how easy somebody with Kaseem’s youth and intelligence can make an apparently insurmountable undertaking seem.
“It works,” Dara says, emerging from the doorway and daring a glance at Kaseem who is now sitting up underneath the table, pulling down his t-shirt that with his manoeuvring has risen slightly up his chest.
“Yes. Finally. Kaseem here has worked his magic. We officially have Internet,” her father replies. “Now we just have to connect your mother’s office. And Kaseem says he can install that animation software for you. And we have a few other jobs before we’re done.”
“That sounds like it will take some time,” Dara smiles.
Her father frowns. “Is the drilling disturbing your study? Dara is taking exams this month,” he explains to Kaseem proudly. “She has been very busy. She has had to do a great deal of research. Every day she goes somewhere in the city doing, what did you say? Surveys? Questionnaires?”
Dara nods, remembering the ‘questionnaires’ she and Kaseem gave each other in the store room: Which part of my body is your favourite? Why did you first notice me? How many times have we kissed? “379,” he had answered, then kissed her again. “380, 381…”
“I barely heard the drilling,” she reassures her father, pecking him on the cheek before slipping past them downstairs. It takes all of her will power not to look back at Kaseem who she knows is equally carefully not looking at her.
For the next week Dara does not concentrate on her exams but listens to the noises that Kaseem makes in her house: the tapping of his slender fingers on the keys of the computer, the buzzing of wires, the increasingly extensive conversations he has with her father. She can tell that her hard-to-impress father is indeed impressed by him; he has always appreciated ambition and focus, and Kaseem has both. Dara’s brother too loiters near where Kaseem works and talks about football or music. One evening her mother invites him to stay to dinner. Kaseem is enchanting them all. But that is because their guards are down. Dara is not fooled into believing that she could ever tell them the truth, she is not so naïve as to think they could ever accept Kaseem as more than an exceptional worker but also as her lover, her one true love. She is not fooled, but still she hopes for it. And she draws. Kaseem being close makes her create with an even greater intensity and for the first time she is not wholly critical of the work she produces. She does not feel dwarfed by the juxtaposition of her abilities with those of the man who has influenced them. She is able, suddenly, to truly capture the light. She would like to have another go at the canopy outside the computer shop. She would like to ask Kaseem to stand again in the shadows there, appearing for her from amidst them.
One evening Dara’s brother flicks through the growing pile next to her desk and suggests that she send a selection to some small galleries or magazines. The next day he buys a bunch of appropriate publications and dumps them on her bed. She does not quite believe that there is any point, but sends off a few, just in case.
In between drawing, and small patches of study, she takes breaks to make herself a cup of tea or warm a pita, and she offers food to Kaseem, couched in niceties that seem appropriate and unrevealing. They find it more and more difficult not to smile at each other, not to launch into eager conversation. It becomes a game, almost. But Dara notices how gratified Kaseem seems when her father compliments him or cracks a joke, how proud and affirmed he is, and she fears that he is beginning to imagine himself within their sphere, that he will press her, soon, to tell her parents about them, and when she refuses, he will be crushed. The thought of this makes her smile less often, but Kaseem grows ever more daring. On his final day on the job she stands in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil while he leans casually against the doorframe. Her father is sitting at the table leafing through a pile of documents, reading each sheet carefully before placing it within a card-covered file. Dara pours her father his tea, adds the two sugars she knows he prefers, and places it on the table in front of him with two small pastries arranged like wings around the cup in the saucer.
“Would you like sugar, Kaseem?” she asks then, knowing he takes three, but enquiring for her father’s benefit as she fills another cup and prepares another assembly of sweet accompaniments.
“Yes, please. Three.”
Dara feels Kaseem watching her as she delicately stirs the liquid and makes a final adjustment to her display of pastries.
“It is a rare talent to make such small things so beautiful,” he says as he takes the saucer from her. “The whole world should be this way.”
Dara laughs and her father looks up.
“They are only pastries,” she says quickly, her stomach tightening, coiling, but Kaseem speaks again.
“Everything we do is an extension of ourselves.” He smiles. Winks.
Now Dara’s father puts down his papers. His tone is jovial, but his words are not. “Kaseem, am I paying you to stand around my home and drink tea?” he asks him.
Kaseem stands up straighter. The notion of a joke hangs in the air but he is unsure, off-guard.
Dara can only watch helplessly.
Kaseem shakes his head. “No. I’m very sorry. I’ll get back to it now.” Carefully, he places his un-drunk tea and un-disturbed sweets back on the kitchen counter. Her father watches. Dara opens her mouth to protest but does not know what to say and so in the end says nothing. Kaseem doesn’t look at her. He casts his dark eyes down to the floor beneath her feet and hastily retreats from the room.
Dara’s father glances at her but says nothing.
Dara says nothing.
From the next room there is the sound of a drill.
Hours later, Dara is back in her room, finally studying, sinking amidst her bed of books, when the door opens. Kaseem slips inside. He shuts the door behind him. Dara smiles conspiratorially but he does not speak. Instead he starts fumbling with his belt, unbuckling his jeans. Dara laughs and begins to stand up, but Kaseem grabs her shoulders and guides her forcefully back onto the bed. “Your father has gone out,” he whispers, pulling impatiently at her own tight denim.
“But-”
“Be quiet,” he tells her, and heaves her backwards, the spine of one of her books digging into her ribs, a newly completed canvas crumpling beneath her elbow. Kaseem yanks her top over her head and shoves her bra to one side, not bothering to undo it. He pulls her jeans and knickers to her knees and leaves them dangling there. Then he pushes himself inside her. His eyes are darker than ever. He grunts heavily. Dara attempts to adjust her position beneath him and strokes his chest to move him slightly to the side, but he seizes her wrist and pins it firmly to the bed, the book jabbing into her ribs again, over and over. She does not know what to do, what to say to him, how to act. The aggression scares her, but she feels a need to acquiesce, to apologise for her father, to atone for him, to assuage Kaseem’s humiliation. She doesn’t speak, but she feels tears welling silently
behind her eyes until abruptly Kaseem stands up and by her hair pulls Dara into sitting. Heavy droplets now trickle down her cheeks. She glances up but Kaseem tilts her face downwards and steers her head towards him. Her mouth is suddenly full and he coaxes it forwards and back until she submits to the urgent rhythm. Occasionally he jerks forward and she has an impulse to retch, but obediently she continues on and on, barely able to breathe until finally he pulls back, and pushes her down and falls on top of her again.
“A condom?” she manages to whisper. But Kaseem ignores her. And within seconds he is finished. And standing up. And pulling up his jeans and re-buckling his belt and moving towards the door. And altering everything. Before he leaves, he turns briefly, but he says nothing.
And Dara says nothing.
And in a few minutes, from the next room, there is once again the sound of the drill.
***
Now
15
With each day that passes Udi feels a glorious, impalpable dissolution of stress. In less than a month he is sleeping, sometimes without the need for a spliff. The summer is cool, fresh. Even on the hottest days there is a breeze that makes him feel a forwards momentum, no longer standing still, no longer treading sand. Attempting to remember his father’s advice he tries to Be British: resisting the pull of kosher delis in Golders Green where everybody speaks Hebrew; nodding at but not talking to people in the street; standing in line. He has even got used to no security guards. But he doesn’t want to shed his Israeli-ness altogether. In England, it is like having superpowers. Chutzpah, others call it. All Udi knows is that in the army he said yes and he did, but in life: rules, regulations, good manners – these are the qualities of the weak, the cringing, the disempowered. They don’t get a take-away nut stall set up in the restaurant and make it the sole biggest profit-driver. They don’t persuade a little old Lebanese man to exclusively stock them with the best hummus he has tasted since arriving in London. They don’t buy Ella a ring.
She has no idea. Now that her semester is finished she is coming to visit, a trial before she hopefully makes the move for real. But he has given away nothing. Their conversations over the past days have been practical – plane times and days he has off and what she should pack. Or tentative – where his brother has been sent, how involved he is in Operation Brother’s Keeper, what the chances are for three teenaged Israelis who are most likely already dead. Although look at Gilad Shalit, she keeps insisting, there is a chance.
It is strange to be away from Israel during a time of such national dismay. He can’t help imagining Ari somewhere in Hebron, going from house to house, searching, looking, watching, hopefully with somebody watching his back too. He can’t not think of the families of the teenagers who were kidnapped by Hamas while hitchhiking home, clinging to any hope they can. He can’t pretend he doesn’t know that amidst all of this, Avigail will be standing shrouded and supplicating on street corners. At least she no longer seems shaky. Her articles have been doing the rounds and are bolder than ever, audacious, full of criticism of the Hannibal Directive, full of shame for the revenge murder of the Palestinian teen, and the demolition of Palestinian homes, and the sweeping arrest of Palestinian men, full of words others won’t speak. Words he is not sure she should be speaking. But even without this to rile him he can’t not feel the seed of something, the promise of escalation, that reliable cycle of prodding and prodding and prodding, and then response, retaliation, catastrophe. Even the international news has a whiff of it.
But he is not there.
He has a restaurant to run and suppliers to change and cousins to repay. And a nut stall. And it is possible, he discovers. It is possible for him to detach, to block out, to live.
To live. The sense of satisfaction is unexpected and extraordinary. Ben and Jonny have allowed him complete managerial control and tell him often how impressed they are. They even said he can hire, and he has done so: a 25-year-old Egyptian named Tadaaki studying for an engineering degree at UCL. They met in a café where they both ordered Assam tea instead of English Breakfast, with baklava not biscuits, and then after briefly establishing their countries of origin, and warring histories, Tadaaki asked Udi where the hell he could find a good falafel because all of the ones he’d had in London tasted like shit. Now Tadaaki works evenings at the restaurant but they often meet there for lunch too, or an early breakfast before Udi opens up. Neither mind that the meat Udi serves is neither kosher nor halal. They finish every meal with tea and baklava. Tadaaki is the first person Udi tells about the ring.
It was a Saturday when he decided, four days before Ella was due to arrive. He was not working but woke early and went for a jog on Hampstead Heath. He does this often, or he cycles; he has brought with him that need to be active, to do, to not waste precious minutes. His mother would be pleased, though he does not like to think of her, pleased or otherwise. He does not like to think of his desertion. It has only recently occurred to Udi that even if he travels back to Israel every couple of years and his parents sometimes come here, even then he can probably count the number of times he will see them again before they are gone. In order to avoid addressing this fact he speaks to them as infrequently as possible. It is hard not sharing his success with those who would most cheer it, especially his mother, strange to have removed from her, along with his laundry, the daily inspection of his soul. It is like dressing without a mirror. But even without consultation he knows that his mother would be happy he is not sitting in his room lacking occupation and purpose. Besides, he loves the soft, un-crunchy grass underfoot, and the way the refreshing air laps around him when he is moving, bathing his lungs.
Despite the relative coolness of this particular Saturday he arrived home sweaty and in need of a shower. He does not wear shorts so for most of the way home from the park his long joggers had stuck to his skin. In his bedroom they were the first thing he peeled off before switching on the TV – to MTV, not news, even now – and removing his equally sodden t-shirt, kicking his trainers into the wardrobe. After turning on the shower he returned to the bedroom to pump up the volume of the music before getting in. It was then that his phone rang. Ella. He picked it up, easily, without thinking. Then smiled at this not thinking, this progression, this lack of need or desire to hide.
“Where were you so early?” she had said before hello. “I called you an hour ago. Don’t you sleep anymore?”
“Actually, I’m sleeping well, Ella. I’m sleeping well.” He could hear her smiling down the line at this. Understanding the magnitude of it. “But I was running,” he continued. “I went to the park.”
“Ah, it’s because you’re missing another activity,” she told him. Now he smiled and she heard it. “I am so excited to see you, Udi.”
“I am too.”
“I saw your mother yesterday.”
Naked, Udi sat on the bed. “Oh?”
“She gave me food for you.”
“Oh.”
“She asked me to tell you Ari is okay. Not to worry. And to call her so she can tell you this herself.”
Udi turned down the volume on the television. “I know. Of course Ari is okay.”
“Your mother said he has enough deodorant to last him a decade! It’s going a bit crazy here. The whole country is sending the soldiers care packages like this. And there was a bunch of anti-Arab graffiti down by the port, not that you can blame people, but- I just hope to God they find those teenagers soon.”
“So how is everyone?”
Ella had paused then and Udi could hear the slight consternation at his lack of interest. But he didn’t want to hear, to be drawn back in. He couldn’t. Usually she didn’t want to either. But she was there. And he was here. A voice sounded in the background on her end of the phone. Her mother. It made him think first of making out with Ella in her bedroom while her mother was downstairs cooking. And then it made him think of his own mother again. His own mother, and his father, and his somewhere soldier brother. “I have to go, Udi, Ima is cal
ling me.”
“Okay.” He had prepared to put down the phone then but hadn’t in case Ella had only paused as she still did sometimes, not meaning to say goodbye, waiting for him to offer something. This time it was she who offered him.
“Ari is fine, Udi. And so is Avigail. And so are your parents.”
“I know. Of course I know.”
“Your mother misses you, but she is pleased for you.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” Ella paused then, again.
“Okay.”
And again.
“I’ll see you in four days,” she’d said finally.
“I love you, Ella,” he’d told her.
Silence again.
***
At the other end of the line, Ella had sat in a humid room with the dead receiver in her hand wondering where Udi’s sudden proclamation had come from, ruminating over whether she should call him back to tell him that she loves him too, because of course she does, worrying that without such a response from her he may feel rejected or snubbed, and he may think again. Worrying. Worrying. Hoping.
***
The ring sparkles with promise in his hand. It is a small diamond mounted on a thin gold band. Two days ago Tadaaki and Ben had both accompanied him to Hatton Garden to choose it and the jeweller had offered them three equal seats while he brought out this ring for their equal examination. Udi hadn’t noticed it at first but since he has been in London, more and more, obscurity masked as egalitarianism is something he revels in. Nobody blinks at him here, nobody – or at Ben or at Tadaaki. A hundred different ethnicities and religions and cultures rub up against each other in the bustle of passion and apathy, and he is just another shade of brown. The same as his wealthy British cousin and his determined Egyptian friend. Emancipated. At last he has freedom to be just another, another undefined person in a city full of them. At last he has liberty to be not part of an occupying, dominant force, not a citizen of an ideological nation of whom good examples are required. And at last he has license to feel no responsibility, no duty to be restrained, to be neither better nor worse than the rest. At last. It feels wonderful, though he hadn’t even realised this was a thing for which he was longing.
