Qissat Read online

  She forgot about, or rather, decided to forget about, Abu Hasan. He wouldn’t report them to the authorities; she was sure of that. He would just have to be patient, for, as they say, God is with those who wait. And yet!

  She imagined her mother-in-law wandering through the neighbourhood, complaining through her rotting teeth about her daughter-in-law’s lack of judgment. But her mother-in-law was no longer in this world, and no other relatives dared to visit them now, because of the frequent settler attacks in the old city and the rounds of army fire that often followed.

  She was not pleased with the astronomical price quoted by the hotel receptionist. But what could she do? It was a small, humble hotel, and the man insisted that they pay for two rooms, although it was really just one double room with an extra bed. She undid the bundle of money she kept knotted in a handkerchief, and paid. She took the children to the park, where they played under the trees, and ran around a large fountain, which, although devoid of water, was painted blue inside. For lunch they enjoyed roasted chicken with assorted side orders.

  She took them to the souk, where she bought them colourful cotton shirts at bargain prices. They visited the new shopping centre with an escalator inside, and rode up and down it dozens of times. She bought them juice and shawarma meat sandwiches for supper. They saw streets thronged with people and stores crammed with customers, and in the evening they strolled among the lit streets full of restaurants and cafés. They took a hired car to the Muqata’a, to see the ruined remains of the President’s headquarters. Kept under house arrest within this compound for the past few years, he had lately looked gaunt and haggard on TV.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. Not because of the baby’s fever; he was just teething, and she had brought medicine for that. Not because she was afraid of the trouble Abu Hasan would give her; life was nothing but trouble anyway. The receptionist had just told her, for example, that minutes before their return, a military patrol had been throwing tear gas and sound bombs nearby, at Manara Circle. (She was too practical to worry about something like that. After all, they were here, safe indoors, and not at the Circle.) No, the fact was that the exorbitant sums she’d been forced to shell out, in this city full of enticements, now led her to contemplate the necessity of returning home as soon as possible, before she was completely broke.

  Pleasure and terror kept her awake that night.

  There was the pleasure of seeing bustling marketplaces and people going for an evening stroll without worrying about Israeli attacks. Here people did as they pleased, and nobody bothered them the way the settlers of Kiryat Arba provoked residents in the old city of Hebron.

  And there was the terror of going broke, when she counted the little money she had left. Now she also began to fear that their return trip wouldn’t be as easy as the way here had been. If just one of her children forgot his assumed name, they would be discovered.

  She kept tossing and turning, remembering the story of the sheep and how much it had frightened her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the prophet Abraham carrying his son to the altar to sacrifice him, then heard the divine command that transformed the sacrifice into a woolly white sheep. And every time she dozed off the sheep was transformed into an infant that resembled her own.

  She didn’t sleep that night.

  Not a wink!

  The next morning she left Manal in the room with the younger children, while she took Firdaus and Fadi to Maydan al-Sa’a Square, where they bought ka’ak bread with sesame seeds, boiled eggs, and little packets of the crushed herb zaatar. Back in the room, she used the electric pot to make tea. Then she dropped the bombshell: today we’re going home.

  She hurriedly gathered their scattered clothes and belongings, then settled the account with the receptionist, who couldn’t hide his amazement at the number of plastic bags her children carried.

  Once again Qalandia checkpoint.

  This time they had a long wait at the checkpoint before the security search. When they finally arrived at the cement block where the soldier stood, the line split in two: one side for Jerusalem residents, with blue ID cards, and the other for those who lived under the Palestinian Authority and had cards with green and orange covers. The checkpoint was not as crowded as it usually was on Fridays, when people were off work, so she was amazed when the soldier glanced nonchalantly at the ID and the children gathered about her, and waved them on.

  Once again that yellow Ford!

  It was just before Friday prayers. The driver who had brought them had mentioned that usually, after Friday prayers, youths would come out and throw stones at the Qalandia checkpoint as a form of protest, and that the soldiers in return fired tear gas and sound bombs, as well as quick volleys of live bullets. It was a dangerous game, but the youths would not back down from it. Umm Hasan kept praying that she and the children would be safely out of the way before it began.

  They had not gone far before the car was stopped once again, this time by a military convoy at Jab’a. Soldiers told the men to get out their ID cards, but left the women alone.

  After that came another checkpoint, then another. Each time they had to wait in a long line of cars under the scorching sun. The Israelis would start a security search, stop several cars, and then sit there and do nothing for a long while before resuming their searches.

  At the next checkpoint their yellow Ford sat immobilised among the stopped cars. It seemed that the soldiers were intent on checking not just ID cards but every cell of every hair on their skins. The passengers waited stoically.

  Nobody moved.

  They waited for ten minutes, twenty, maybe an hour. Not one car moved.

  Time was no more. Umm Hasan felt that the world had come to a standstill; that there was no hope of ever moving forward or turning back; there was only car after car, and buses, and vans beyond number.

  Since the beginning of their trip, she had been grappling with the idea that her own actions might lead indirectly to her children’s deaths. It was entirely possible that some horrible misfortune could befall them, all because of this trip to Ramallah. If her father had known about this foolish enterprise he would have regretted marrying her off and sending her to Hebron, for she had not been faithful in the charge of caring for her children. And she! How could she bear to go on living, if she were the cause of any harm that came to even one of them? Hadn’t Hebron been dangerous enough for her? The broken bottles thrown at houses, the rocks that hailed down on them in their own yards? The terror that one of them could be injured each time the soldiers started provoking the youths?

  God forbid! She exclaimed to herself, repeating the holy verses of Ayat al-Huda and Surat al-Kursi. She glanced at her children, who were about to finish the last drop of water in the bottle they had brought. One of them had a thin trickle of dried-up juice on his chin.

  Oh Lord, what could she do? Was it such a crime for a person to dream of spending a day or two in Ramallah?

  In the beginning the passengers had been nervously holding their breath. Gradually, now some of them began to shift their positions, fidgeting silently.

  An old woman let out some grunts and sighs but Umm Hasan stayed silent as the Sphinx. She was nursing the baby, when all of a sudden he burst out screaming as though stung by a scorpion. Patting him gently, she tried to calm him, but he seemed to be in pain and wouldn’t stop.

  The passengers endured this for a while without comment, until an unshaven old man finally remarked: ‘Lady, quiet him down.’

  She didn’t know what to say. With her free hand she rubbed the baby’s belly, but this only made him cry harder.

  In a moment the old man again stopped smoking to growl irritably: ‘For God’s sake, woman, make the kid stop!’

  Umm Hasan, again, didn’t respond, until the old man added spitefully: ‘Things are bad enough as it is!’

  That did it. ‘The child’s in pain,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Is that my fault?’

  Seeing a quarrel about to erupt, the ot
her passengers quickly intervened and calmed them down, fearful that a soldier would come and punish them all. The baby kept wailing. He seemed determined to draw everyone’s attention to his mother. And gradually the unpleasant smell of a dirty nappy spread throughout the car.

  The baby kept crying, and the cars didn’t move.

  Now a sharp pain began digging into her own insides. Her children were looking more and more terrified. Manal and the little ones seemed glued to the seat by their own sticky sweat. She could feel her heart pulsing in her temples.

  There was no sign that relief would ever come.

  The car was hellish in this heat. And the silence! A tense, pessimistic silence hovered like a flock of cawing crows above them all. And on top of all that, the crying that wouldn’t stop. The baby was whimpering now, exhausted by his crying, or perhaps being suffocated, like the rest of them, by the smell of his dirty nappy. The noxious smell and the sound of toxic gases rumbling in his stomach were beginning to seriously worry her.

  All eyes were on the guards who stood blocking the long road ahead of them for no apparent reason.

  Three or four soldiers wearing dark sunglasses stood near the military vehicle. Their captain seemed to be gazing off into the distance, as though he had nothing to do with what was happening.

  Those soldiers! That captain!

  They were the only ones who had control now. From every car the imploring eyes watched them silently.

  Those soldiers controlled everything around, right down to the gusts of dry air that scorched their skins.

  Umm Hasan felt her chest tightening and her nerves jangling. At last she simply couldn’t stand it any longer. She got up, baby in arms. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, to the passenger nearest the door. He stared as if she were crazy, as she opened the door and got out.

  The astounded passengers watched her without comment, as if she were an alien from a distant planet. The man she had argued with earlier eyed her suspiciously, while two schoolteachers gave her looks of encouragement.

  The soldiers watched Umm Hasan disapprovingly as she began walking towards them.

  ‘You!’ one of them shouted, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t care.

  She had lost all sense of time and place, even of her children in the car behind her.

  A ruddy-faced soldier glared at her with obvious hostility, gripping his gun as he turned towards her. She ignored him, heading straight for the man who seemed to have the highest rank. The rest of them looked on sarcastically. What was this woman with a scarf and a baby trying to do?

  Umm Hasan kept walking, as if she lived in a different world; as if she knew nothing about the danger of approaching these people, any one of whom could open fire at any moment on the pretext that she was a saboteur with a belt of explosives around her waist.

  The passengers gazed on in astonishment, wondering what her fate would be.

  Umm Hasan’s mind was blank. Her son’s breathing was irregular now, and his muted whimpers, along with the smell of diarrhoea emanating from his nappy had spread to every cell in her body, and were all that kept her going.

  And so, in spite of the soldier who spat in her face, ‘You! Where to?’ she went directly to the man who seemed to be the captain.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she said. ‘The baby’s sick. Let the cars go.’

  And then, without waiting for an answer, she turned and went back.

  The captain, for reasons his men could not have known or expected, stared after her, fascinated by her indifference to him as she turned her back and returned to the car she had come from. He didn’t quite understand what had happened – how this woman could come up to him with a baby in her arms and demand that he let the cars move. It seemed as though her voice echoed to him out of the cavernous depths of a deep ravine. He felt that it was unbearably hot. He became aware of himself, in this barren desert, with no life around him except in these hired cars carrying possible saboteurs, and ordinary passengers with their problems and their misery.

  He was overcome by an intense thirst, by a powerful desire to go home and have a cold beer and maybe lie down on the grass under the trees in his well-cared-for garden.

  He suddenly found himself contemplating all the things he felt he couldn’t bear to lose on account of this accursed prison. Even if he were to punish every person in this land, stop every one of them on this dangerous, snaking road called Wadi al-Nar, it would not satiate his thirst. For an electrifying instant he felt that he was only punishing himself, out here in this hostile wilderness. He had to escape from the dangerous assault of emotions he didn’t want to face. As his soldiers looked on in disbelief, he held out his arm and signalled to the cars to move. He didn’t waste a moment getting into his own vehicle, mobilising his men and clearing the way.

  The road was open now. The line of cars pulsed forward in unison. A giant gear had shifted, allowing each of them to escape unscathed and return to his family.

  Umm Hasan did not dare to think or feel until she was sure she was almost home, at her own doorstep.

  It was only then that she allowed herself to begin to ponder the fact that her daughter Manal was growing up now and would surely be getting married in a few years’ time. It was entirely plausible that the girl could end up living in Ramallah, or perhaps some other city. When that happened, they would visit, together, the places that were now forbidden to them, and which they yearned to see.

  They would eventually reach those other cities they dreamed of visiting.

  There were still plenty of ways.

  Translated by S. V. Atalla

  SELMA DABBAGH

  Me (the Bitch) and Bustanji

  On the day itself it was all over before I had even woken up.

  I had spent the previous day staring at the house across the road. It was crouched on the ground like a space station poised for launch. Dad had been in a mood with me and had just watched the news and talked a lot on the phone in Arabic about a meeting in Jeddah. I can feel that boredom now radiating from the pages of my sticker-adorned diary – 1990 Page-A-Day Diary. An angry pen has dented the cover into a moronic teenage Braille. More than twice the age now that I was then, I can still feel it: God damn the boredom of being stuck in Kuwait all summer.

  The house ejected cars from its underground garage and delivered them onto the road like tapes from a Japanese video. The greased iron entrance slid along the concrete wall without a sound. But the object of my surveillance (coded as ‘Sh.’ for Sheikha) preferred to use the side gate. From the detective notes I had made I can see that Sh. had left and come back twice that day. Her abaya was always black. Her face was always covered. Her bags were always full of high-class shopping.

  01.08.90 14:46 Sh. Reappears in brown Chevrolet Impala.

  Dropped off.

  01.08.90 16:24 Sh. Leaves in blue BMW.

  My diary also records the movement of four Pakistani migrants and two Afghanis walking across the wasteland between the blocks of dust-clad housing. If the Afghanis were in fact Pakistanis or vice versa (it was hard to tell from a distance) I had made a note to show that the total was (6).

  I had also spotted our gardener, Bustanji. Abu Waleed.

  Bustanji did not sweat. Bustanji had leather skin. Bustanji had a head that squeezed out large and burnt from the band of white hair that remained. I liked Bustanji’s waistcoat with the cotton pellet buttons and white lining. Polyester fibres shone his back black through the leaves of the eucalyptus trees.

  01.08.90 17:24 Bustanji watering plants at their base.

  I can’t remember why we called him Bustanji (‘gardener’) even when we spoke English. Could it be because it emphasised his Arabness? I am sure Dad just loved the idea that he was putting earth back between the fingers of a fellow Palestinian.

  It was my friend Nada who had told me with long, black, flying African arms (although she assured me that the Sudanese were Arabs, not Africans, and also that they were brown, not black) that there was far more going on in the s
pace station house than I thought. I could tell that she had exaggerated the story, sure, but I didn’t care. I needed something to do. I sure as hell was not going to do any revision. Dad was treating me like a child sticking me in Kuwait all summer. Treat me like a kid and I’ll behave like a kid. No revision for you Baba dear even if I did screw up my exams.

  When I touched my nose to twist the stud the scab would loosen itself from the stem. Ow. Owww! It had hurt so damn much getting it pierced.

  Next to the Sheikha’s house was the Hajji shop where I bought cigarettes.

  ‘Don’t call it Hajji,’ says Nada, ‘that’s just what the English say.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s because they’ve done a pilgrimage. Then they come back and set up a shop.’

  ‘That’s rubbish. That’s just what the expats say and you English.’

  ‘Don’t call me English,’ I say.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot. Your Mum’s from where, Romania or is it Hungary?’

  ‘Whatever,’ I say. ‘Whatever.’

  Hajji had bulging fingers like dog willies and he did not look at me when he gave me cigarettes from the shelf but kept his neck lolled back to watch the screen while feeling out for dusty notes from the wooden drawer. There were fewer rolling bodies in trenches by then. Hajji was from Iran but he could just as well have been from Iraq because they both filled their TV channels with pictures of young men blasted limbless or rigid with gas. Looped images of bodies with stretched bare tummies and grasping hands in raw earth holes. Marching songs and drum beats played over the footage accompanied by the eternal wail of women.

  My bitch status was normally confirmed to me at least twice on the way back from Hajji’s shop and more than that if I stopped for a cigarette. Once, when Nada and I had tried to hide from the road, behind the wall of an apartment block, it had come from a woman in Arabic and was accompanied by a bucket of dirty water over our heads. Sometimes they were a joke, the lines coming out of the guys in the cars, ‘Hey baby, you wear hair gel?’ ‘Hey, baby you wanna come for a ride?’ Sometimes the door of the van slid open. Fucktrucks we called them at school. They said there was a bed inside, but I never looked. Head down. Walk on. ‘Hey sexy,’ weighed down with accent, sometimes the words were a blur of consonants, sometimes it was just a horn, but it was always there, as an undertone, as an overtone, ever since I was a kid, even if there was no skin showing at all, it was always there, Bitch, hey Bitch, yeah Bitch, I can see you. Bitch.