by Jo Glanville
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.
When Tawfeeq arrived (and he did not say ‘Hi’ to me, he just looked at my nose) the old English national anthem, ‘God Save the King’, performed by a military band, was playing on the soundtrack of Heat and Dust. A short track between sitar melodies and extracts from Schubert, we rarely noticed it.
‘What are you doing?’ Tawfeeq had screamed. ‘Do you not know that they are rounding up the British? … Wh
at are you doing? Sitting here listening to English music, reading books? Eh?’
‘What do you mean they are rounding up the British?’
‘They will. There’s a rumour … What passport do you have? Are you going to be British or what? Have you thought about these things? Huh? There’s an invasion, Nabil, an invasion!’ He held the creases of his shorts as he sat heavily on the sofa pulling out a hanky and some worry beads. He then started patting his forehead, turning the beads with his thumb and sighing all at the same time.
‘Would you like a drink, Tawfeeq?’ Dad went to the small supply of smuggled liquor in his cupboard.
‘A whisky. Yes. No. No. Actually I think not. Not during these times. No. No. What if they stop me? What if they smell it? An invasion! How were we to know there was to be an invasion?’
‘Well, I don’t think anyone really thought that it would happen, but you know last night when the Jeddah talks collapsed, I must say I did think they might.’
‘You knew! You knew! And you did not tell me! You even had your daughter with you and you did not care!’
‘That’s not quite how it was,’ Dad started rebuilding the wall of canned drinks again in front of the alcohol in the cupboard. ‘What papers do you have anyway?’
‘Egyptian, French …’ Tawfeeq held up his hands despairingly. I did not know what to make of this. What nationality did we want to be? Who was whose enemy? Who were we?
‘You know I am not even sure what papers I have,’ Dad waved at the air as if not knowing how to refer to his wife now. ‘Her mother put them away, where did she say? She is always filing things, you know. Classify, classify. Let me have a look.’
Dad went upstairs leaving me with Tawfeeq.
‘Dominique,’ Tawfeeq wrenched out of himself, to himself. ‘Dominique … all alone in Paris, not knowing. Just waiting … waiting.’ He looked like he was going to cry in a howling kind of a way.
I thought of Dominique making exquisite sponge cream balls and serving them on paper doilies with child-sized silver forks. Dominique who believed in the predictions of Nostradamus, fates held in star constellations, and who could never sleep when there was a full moon. She had spent seven years living in Tawfeeq’s village in the Egyptian Delta and could tell shocking stories of malarial deaths after describing how a soufflé should be cared for like a child. And she cared for her child as though she were a soufflé. Their daughter had emerged from her care puffy and soft-centred with weepy eyes and white feet contorted by synthetic sandals.
Tawfeeq and Dominique doted on each other with the neediness of toddlers and their relationship seemed to jar something in my parents for I had never seen Dad and Mama return home from an evening with the Sa’eeds in anything less than a maniacal fury with each other.
Tawfeeq and I watched the humidity slide down the windows, the night reflecting the room back at us. It must have been over fifty degrees and I wondered how invasions could happen so fast and who was keeping the air conditioning on. Did they fight in the Ministry of Electricity? ‘We will only keep the electricity on if Kuwait is free!’ No, they could not do that, it would kill us all. Even the cockroaches are too spoilt to survive the climate now.
Tawfeeq was bearing no traces of his reputation for dirty jokes with unidentifiable punch lines and for photographing topless women on French beaches.
‘Pepsi, ammo?’
‘Yes, yes, with just a little chocolate biscuit if you have one.’
Dad arrived with a file of papers, stored in a see-through plastic bag like DNA samples, a small white sticker in the corner had my mother’s handwriting on it, Identity Documentation Nabil and a five-digit code.
‘Found it as soon as I managed to get that filing cabinet open! Excellent classification systems, your mother. Excellent!’
It was the first nice thing he had said about her since she had left.
My father had studied under my mother in Hungary when he was training to be a dentist and she was a professor of biochemistry. They did not admit to falling in love, but they must have done so because they had married and he had taken her back to Syria, then Jordan, then London, where they both studied some more, gave birth to me, worked hard until they finally ended up in Kuwait. ‘A quick fix that got stuck,’ was how my father put it.
Most of this is in his papers. A small broken up Refugee Card, ‘United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’ on the top, with a picture of Dad as a child in Syria. He looks sweet. I have the eyebrows but unfortunately not the cheekbones. An old Jordanian passport, dated 1969, out of date in 1979. A couple of older British passports and his current one. A batch of student visas for Hungary covered in the bureaucratic stamps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
‘You need that.’ Tawfeeq points at the outdated Jordanian passport.
‘It’s expired,’ says Dad, ‘totally out of date.’
‘What about her?’
‘Just British, and Hungarian, ah, yes, and the Hungarian passport records her with her mother’s maiden name.’ Dad shrugs in front of Tawfeeq’s look of horror. ‘It was easier at the time.’
‘You can’t travel out of here with a Romanian, sorry Hungarian, with such a different name to you. They’ll think she’s your whore! Sorry. Sorry, Nabil. No offence. Sorry, no offence. But, you know what I mean.’ But I cry easily so I went to the bathroom until I was done.
Dad was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom after Tawfeeq had left, ‘You must ignore Tawfeeq. He is very upset. And he’s a bit of a silly man at the best of times.’ And he did something weird for him, he put his arms around me and tried to give me a hug.
I find another entry for a couple of days later. It is the last one.
05.08.90 11:24 Dad at the hospital since approx 9:30. More cars on the road than yesterday.
05.08.90 13:23 Sh.’s lawn brown. All flowers dead next door.
05.08.90 15:23 Bustanji watering lawn with a watering can. Waleed waiting in the car.
The brown grass in the neighbouring gardens gave me the creeps. They did not use Bustanji and their gardener had left. In just three days without water their lawn had dried into rust shavings. It reminded me of the abridged John Wyndham books they fed us in junior school and the other ones about ‘the Day After’ (the Flood, the Plague, the Atomic War). Nightmare-inducing. Horrible.
Bustanji caught me smoking on the upstairs balcony when Dad was out but had just smiled and waved through the eucalyptus, pointing at something, his finger on his lips. A tiny fist-sized bird, red as lipstick, long billed and chirpy. It must have been passing through, migratory. It would not have been staying.
That evening we set off to see Dad’s family across town in Salmiyah. His car lurched along like it was being sweated out in the humidity, pouring perspiration down its sides like a fat man on a treadmill.
The flyovers put us at roof level with Hawalli, a Palestinian area where Abu Waleed lived. There were still some remains of the black flags strung up to mourn the dead of the Beirut camp massacres of ’82. Dark cloth flew shredded on the rooftops, gripped by antennae and caught on washing lines like shards of food between the teeth.
‘What did Bustanji mean about leaving those places?’
‘Abu Waleed? He was a fedayeen fighter since he was a kid. So he left Jordan when there were the problems for us with the Jordanians and then he had to leave Beirut… Lebanon, when the PLO got kicked out.’
‘And then he came here?’
‘No, no, he went with them to Tunis, you know, with Arafat and the leadership, for a while and then, then I am actually not that sure what happened there, but it can’t have worked out as he ended up here. Same way all of us do, but a bit harder I suppose.’
‘Where is Umm Waleed?’
‘She died in Beirut. I don’t know the details.’
The shops were all shut when we reached Salmiyah, the metal shutters bolted onto the ground, tight-lipped. I had been there only a week or so previously,
to investigate the shops named on the Sheikha’s bags. I had not been disappointed. Lady Elegant sold quality lingerie from Paris, adorned with red rabbit fur across the crotch, basques looped between the legs with a satin strand, chiffon pouches for the breasts. Fashion Date had a more colourful selection. I did not want to go inside because a crowd was gathering: Bitch! Hey Bitch! We can see you. Bitch! The black abaya-clad ladies had glided in and out like medieval princesses. So, Sheikha was not alone.
The Hungry Bunny hamburger joint was all dark, no cheeky bunnies or glowing lights. I had popped in there too during the same investigative trip, to find out what it was all about, as the TV adverts had made me laugh so much. Inside there had been two men in long white dish dasha eating French fries on chrome barstools underlit by pink panels. And again, I thought I could sense it in the look I got, Hey Bitch! What are you doing in here on your own, huh, Bitch?
Traumatised-looking ginger and white cats were guarding ballooned bags of rubbish outside the flats where Dad’s family lived and everything smelt overripe. Our knock was followed by my aunt’s voice arguing with her husband to open the door. Then we felt them bundling us in like security guards hoisting celebrities into cars. All Dad’s family were there. They all lived close together in homes that replicated each other’s. The interiors all had at least the following objects in common: a picture of an Italian urchin with big eyes, a black and white picture of my grandfather wearing a fez making a political speech in Haifa, a crocheted tissue-box holder and a mother-of-pearl Dome of the Rock.
