‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he said, but her response was not clear; she had gone back into the cabinet. It sounded like, ‘Probably drunk.’
‘What?’
‘Your father, he was probably drunk. Men, they get old. They get drunk. They get sentimental. They wonder what they’ve done to their lives, to their families.’
She handed a glass jar to Rashid and pulled herself up holding the sink edge with one hand, a yellow cloth in the other. The idea of a tipsy, maudlin father phoning late at night appealed to Rashid. Maybe he had misunderstood the man.
‘I got the scholarship, Mama,’ he repeated.
‘Sabri helped you with the application, did he?’ She looked up at him now. Rashid knew she had heard him the first time.
‘He just checked it.’
‘You should never cheat anyone or anything.’
‘I didn’t cheat anyone; he just gave me some advice.’
‘You will get into such a mess if you start cheating and having things to hide,’ she said. ‘Such a mess.’
‘I never cheated; he just checked through it and made some points. We talked about it.’
She stared at him, motionless. The cotton neckline of her thoub was frayed to a soft fluff. Some of the embroidered cross-stitch had come loose. It had been her mother’s dress, the only thing of hers that she had, and she wore it out like a rag. She must be seeing herself in the blue curve of his lenses. Her face would be as distended as one of her aubergines, her pinched nose ballooning into something broad and squat, her eyes receding back into an endless forehead, her teeth bucked out, her mouth large.
‘Stupid, that Hajjar girl. The harm she’s done. Gone against her family’s loyalties, playing into this factional outlook that is going to get us into so much trouble we won’t know what’s happened, and backing such a misguided mission. A park. To go and bomb a park? What’s the point of that, I ask you? The sympathy our enemy will get for that one. Military targets only. We must stick to military targets. The only person she killed was herself.’ Rashid’s mother spat something nasty into the sink. ‘Idiot.’
‘She’s dead, Mama.’ Rashid watched Sabri’s tray being prepared, the olive oil and zaatar laid out, fresh mint stirred into the tea, sugar added.
‘Deserves to be dead. The twit. Look what they did last night, supposedly in return for that. The hospital! Bastards.’ She looked up and flinched at the sight of Rashid without his glasses. ‘I should give your brother his breakfast.’ She gave Rashid a small squeeze to his upper arm before she picked up Sabri’s tray and left the kitchen.
Chapter 6
Sabri’s body was good at ghosts. It conjured up body parts that weren’t there and made them itch. For example, his right ankle was prone to bites. These were normally, he surmised, two-day-old mosquito bites; there was still the pressure of the fresh bite but the skin had broken leaving a scab. There was often also a recurring itch behind his left knee, where phantom sweat had dribbled down and caught itself in a crease, forming a little mat of hair on the way down. The big toenail on that foot often felt ingrown. But that morning it had been a ghost of her body part that had come to him. It was her nose breathing out the prelude to a whisper in his ear, and when he woke up he stretched out his arm as he used to, to feel for her waist under the twisted wrap of nightdress but she had not been there and his knuckle had hit the wall instead.
During the night he had kept a record of the attack. He kept his notepad, binoculars and two sharpened pencils on the end of a shelf by the window in preparation for his eyewitness accounts. He timed strikes using a digital watch that he set against the bip, bip, bips of the BBC World Service. Last night was three pages of notes. The night before that had just been one.
Documenting destruction.
Chronicling chaos.
Point by strike by shot.
That was what he did and he liked to think he did it well.
His room had shelves all along the floor that went up higher than Sabri could reach. Each shelf was partly supported by the books underneath it. Many of the books lay horizontally, some diagonally. The sight of his books calmed him whenever he entered the room; they appeared to talk to each other like old men resting against cushions smoking argeela.
A photograph of Sabri’s wife, Lana, and their son, Naji, leant back on its curled edge against the books; there was something nonchalant about its attitude as though it had been taken only the day before and that there were many more to come. Frequently it slipped on to the pile of loose papers and medical prescriptions that were washed up together into a heap by the slow movements of the room.
Sabri also had a signed photograph of their former leader. This had been ceremoniously gifted to him by a delegation that came to the hospital after he had lost his legs. He handled this picture with a greater sense of purpose; from time to time, he would drop it on to the floor and roll his wheels over it. As a result of this special treatment, the face of the Great Leader of the Resistance had lost patches of its gloss and gained the appearance of someone who had opened a letter bomb.
Sabri was tired. That was the problem. He had been up until the bombs had stopped, which was not until around dawn, and he could not stay in bed any more after that dream, or whatever it was. He needed a bit more sleep. That was all. Fatigue sat fat and greasy on his eyelids. A bad night. Too bright a morning.
He could smell her that morning too. He was sure of it. Not always, but it had happened once when he lifted his head up from the page. He had just managed to capture it when Rashid had walked in. And then it had gone. He had tried to save that smell of her before. It was unique: a French perfume which came in a white bottle with pastel roses painted on it, a touch of coffee and cigarettes and her own sweat. He had found that smell on the neck of a shirt after she had gone. It was the shirt she had worn for that first evening together in a Jerusalem café and he had wrapped it up tightly in a plastic bag to save it. He kept the bagged-up shirt in his cupboard.
He had broken the back of his work. He was sure of it.
Sabri wrote longhand, listing points for additional research on two strips of paper; these were usually in a mixture of Arabic and English, in pencil. One was for book research, the other for Internet research. A tidier ruled card system denoted those areas that awaited archival research, mainly in London’s Public Records Office. He had written out the text longhand before typing it up, and now he was now doing rewrites. Not owning a printer, Iman had taken his work on a memory stick, a tiny thing no bigger than a finger, to an Internet café and printed it out for him in full.
His manuscript (the word still secretly thrilled him) had come back smelling of cigarettes and cockroach spray. It now sat on his table, bound up in treasury tags, fluttering with yellow reminder notes. He did not pay any particular attention to it when anyone else was in the room, but each night he squared its pages by bringing its bottom edge down against his desk. He enjoyed the satisfying clunk that it made against the wood, and the look of the strips of light and dark of the pages clustered together as seen from the side.
After he went to the bathroom with his mother to change his bag she came into his room and sat across the desk from him, smoking and sipping at her tea. They did not talk about the bombing, Rashid’s scholarship or Abu Omar’s car, and disregarded the silence that yawned and stretched around them.