Ishmael's Oranges (16 page)

‘You wanted to take a piece of it away, so you'd never really have to leave.'

‘That's right.' She flushed in the warm surprise of feeling understood. ‘The French writers like Stendhal, they're so brave. They don't have limits like us. They make these characters
–
Fabricio or… or Candide
–
who get to be different people wherever they go, to live a thousand different lives.'

His eyebrows went up, in mock surprise. ‘A thousand lives? Would it take you a thousand lives to find one you were happy with?'

‘No,' she said, considering seriously. ‘But isn't it interesting to imagine who you could be, if you didn't mind giving up everything you are
now?'

‘It depends.'

‘On what?'

‘Is it a trade worth making? Suppose you gave everything up for something or someone, and then you found it wasn't really worth it after
all?'

Jude smiled and shrugged. ‘I don't know the answer. That's why I read the books, to see what happens at the end of the story.'

‘But these brothers of yours aren't French.' He pointed to the book still open in her
hand.

‘They're Russian. My grandmother was Russian too, originally.' Jude grasped the star around her neck, feeling its points worn to reassuring smoothness. She asked again the question that had been on her mind since she first met him. ‘Where is your family from?'

He looked up at her and down at the table again; his face seemed sad, almost shamed. ‘My name is Salim.' He said it casually, but it sounded like a confession. ‘Salim Al-Ishmaeli. We're an Arab family, not a Russian one, I'm afraid. Or a French one.' He raised his eyes to
hers.

Jude said, ‘That's okay,' automatically, but her heart started to race. The overwhelming urge inside her was to reassure him
–
of what? ‘My uncle lives in Israel.' That one escaped her too, the stupid, uncontainable words stumbling off her tongue.

‘I guessed it.' He nodded towards the gold star in her hand. ‘That's where I'm from too. It was Palestine, we called it back then.'

Jude sat in silence. She almost forgot she was at the table, part of the story, waiting to hear what would come next from his mouth. He was hunched over, his elbows and forearms on the table and his hands clasped together. At first she thought he might be in pain, but then he looked up with a wry smile. ‘You weren't expecting that one, were
you?'

‘No,' she said. She could not speak for fear of saying the wrong thing, of hearing Dora's voice come out of her mouth.
The bloody Arabs
. Eventually he threw his hands up and sat back in his chair.

‘What a goose you are. I had Jewish friends back there and I've made Jewish friends here too. We can get along, you know.'

Jude raised her coffee to her lips. It was weak and white and bland. She put it down and pushed it away from
her.

‘I never met any Arabs,' she said. ‘I just heard about them through Uncle Max. And to be honest, I thought you must hate
us.'

‘Who says I
must
do anything? You're a person. I'm a person. Why should I hate you before I get to know
you?'

‘I'm not worth hating,' she said. ‘I'm just a girl from Sunderland who had to be forced to go to Hebrew school.'

‘I guess you don't even know yourself. You're clever, and kind and honest. You're very pretty too, as it happens. Maybe you're absolutely worth hating.'

Jude put her book down on the table, and waited for her face to turn red. Blushing was the only thing that she and Gertie shared
–
their white faces transforming into the same beetroot colour at the slightest provocation. But the only warmth in her cheeks was from the raw wind, and now her heart beat more slowly.

‘Were you born there?' she asked.

‘In Jaffa, before the
war.'

Jude felt a sudden deep rush of sorrow. ‘I can't imagine,' she said quietly. ‘I never learned much about
it.'

Salim shrugged. ‘I was just a boy when we left Jaffa. Seven, maybe. I don't remember it so much. Afterwards we just got on with life.'

Jude saw his hands were clasping and unclasping, and he was running one finger over his pale knuckles like a child trying to rub off a dirty
mark.

‘Did your family come with you?' she asked.

‘No.' He looked up at her. ‘My mother left us years ago. She was one of those people in the stories you talked about. She wanted a different life. My father was an old man, and not that smart. He died a couple of months
ago.'

Jude nodded. She put her hand over his on the table, and he stopped moving. Suddenly she realized what she'd done. Her hand jerked away, as if from a flame, and she clenched her fist. His eyes flicked up to meet hers. ‘Why did you do that?'

‘I'm sorry.' She felt miserable
–
for him, for her clumsiness, for all the wrongs suffered and wrongs done. ‘I wanted to say I was sorry.'

His eyes held hers, and he didn't smile. ‘I wasn't asking why you held my hand,' he said. ‘I was asking why you let
go.'

Salim didn't understand why he'd left without making a plan to meet again. He'd just gone without a backwards glance, wrapping the sopping wet scarf around his
neck.

He knew through the pounding of his feet on the pavement that he was angry. Later he left a message for Margaret. That night he spent getting drunk and listening to her pluck the guitar, lying naked between his
legs.

They'd ended their coffee like guilty children caught kissing. She'd told him about the grandmother who fled the Russians and he had talked about the siege of Nazareth and the Jewish commander who'd refused to sack the city. They'd agreed that religion didn't matter, that they had a lot in common and some nonsense about peace that reminded Salim of the flower songs.

But it all meant nothing, he told himself. How could she ever understand him, this little English Jew? The words his father had shouted came back to him.
Abadan!
Never! The hand she'd placed on his was a lie. He knew that, even if she didn't.

A week later he bought
The Brothers Karamazov
from a shop on Charing Cross Road and after a brief, fumbling conversation with the bookshop owner, Stendhal's
Charterhouse of Parma
. He could make sense of neither. Books were a torment, unless full of numbers and formulae. And Hassan told him that his Arabic was now just as lamentable, no better than a child's.

He started walking past the coffee shop from his lectures in King's Cross every other day. Sometimes he'd see her inside, bundled up against the cold. She never looked
up.

At night, he remembered her blue eyes fixed on his in vague bewilderment. She'd peeled him like an orange with her guilelessness. He felt exposed and irritable. He called Nadia, pretending he wanted to hear all about her life, and tried to be soothed by the gentle, motherly voice crackling on the end of the
line.

In the end, he found her waiting for him outside Virginia's. He spotted her from a hundred yards away, her yellow hair beaded with cold drops of water twinkling in the pale sun. Bloomsbury traffic swirled madly around her in steely flashes of black, red and silver. Her coat was so big she seemed huddled inside it like a baby animal. He stopped next to her and grinned ruefully. She smiled too, wiping her red
nose.

‘So, how did you know?' he asked
her.

‘I saw you so many times,' she said, blinking into the low sun. ‘Maybe you thought you were so clever, but even the waitress saw you looking in and teased me about
it.'

He raised his hands to the skies, laughing as weeks of worry suddenly slid from his shoulders and crashed into tiny splinters on the icy pavement. ‘I should have told you I wanted to see you again,' he said. ‘I wasn't sure that you would be interested, and I didn't want to be disappointed.' The half-lie felt so easy and right to
tell.

‘I know it's complicated,' she said, blue eyes glassy in the light, ‘but I was hoping you wouldn't mind. That we could
try.'

He wondered if that was the first time she'd ever told a man how she felt about him, in that oblique way of hers. He remembered how her hands had held the Star of David, and took one of them in his
own.

It was the beginning of something unwritten, Salim thought later. After he walked her back to the lecture hall, on the point of saying goodbye, he stooped down to kiss her lips. As she turned her face up to his, he saw the sun blaze through the whiteness of her skin to the pulse of life inside her.
White as a canvas
, he thought.
White as a new page, a place to make a fresh start
.

For their first proper date he took her to the Finsbury Astoria to see the Walker Brothers. The tickets had been sitting in his wallet for weeks
–
intended as a present for Margaret, who hated the Walker Brothers but liked Cat Stevens and Hendrix, who were also on the bill. Margaret told him she'd shared digs with Cat Stevens's sister in Marylebone, and that she and Hendrix rolled their joints the same way, between the thumb and fourth finger.

Inviting Jude instead had seemed so smart. In the fever of excitement after her lips left his it had been so easy to play the cultured man, to offer to take her out to a concert. But as his front door slammed and he stepped out into the raw evening air he felt crippled by worry. He'd been too quick, too thoughtless; she wouldn't enjoy it, she'd see right through
him.

He couldn't begin to afford a taxi all the way from his tiny lodging in south London to Jude's student halls in Camden, and then even further north to Finsbury Park. But he refused to make her walk, like a
fellah
's woman. So he took the Tube to Camden Town and called a taxi from the telephone box just outside the station. When they pulled up outside Jude's building a few minutes later, he smoothed his hair back to dry his nervous palms.

Her door swung open the instant he knocked on it
–
and there she was, smiling up at him. Her hair was pulled into high yellow bunches, her face upturned above a long dress falling in light green circles. In the dimness of the narrow corridor, as people pushed past him and dormitory doors banged shut, she reminded him of a pale, hopeful flower on a slender stalk.

‘Hi,' he said, leaning in to give her a swift kiss. ‘You're very beautiful.' He saw her flush, and felt his own cheeks redden in sympathy. It was ridiculous; he wanted to shake himself.
You've been with a hundred women, idiot. What's the matter with you?

‘And you're very handsome,' she replied, taking his hand. ‘Dashing, my grandmother would have said.' He felt her fingers squeeze his, the lightest pressure, but it lifted the cloud of anxiety a few inches.

He opened the taxi door for her, and they made small talk for half an hour through the darkening north London traffic to Finsbury Park. When they pulled up outside the Astoria on Seven Sisters, the cabbie said, ‘A quid, mate,' and Salim handed it over with a careless smile. He'd saved the same amount for their journey back and that was the last of his monthly budget. For the next few days he'd be living on boiled
rice.

He hurried round to open Jude's door, and she looked up as she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Wow. Look at it.' His eyes followed hers. The Astoria rose up grey and enormous in front of him, on an island circled in pandemonium, a swirling centrifuge of horns and headlamps sending cars plunging back into the London night. Its notched brick façade was dark with smoke and dust, and red posters glared bright from its supporting pillars. His mind twisted and it was Jaffa's Al-Hambra cinema in front of him, or its ghost, its white walls and red flags turned grey and pitted. He took Jude's hand, blinking the picture
away.

Inside, a throng stood between them and the concert hall. He could hear drums beating over a human roar, and a guitar wailing in a way he'd never heard before. The air was humid with smoke, sweat and weed, the queue a tangle of bare legs and straggling hair. The man next to Salim had taken his shirt off; a peace symbol was tattooed on his back under the words
hell no we wont go
. A girl leaned against him, dark curls falling slick onto his shoulder.

Jude stood still as water beside him, while Salim waved his tickets at the doorman. The music inside had stopped, and a rising tide of shrieking had taken its place. The doors were barred shut, two burly men standing in front of them, arms folded.

‘There must be a problem or something,' Salim said, desperate. He looked down at Jude. ‘I guess this isn't really your kind of thing, is it?' She glanced away, as if the question embarrassed
her.

‘I had a friend who liked this kind of music.' Her hand rose to touch the chain hidden under her dress. ‘Back in Sunderland. It always reminds me of her. We liked to play it after school, and dance and things like that. We gave each other nicknames, like we were famous. My parents didn't approve.'

‘And so? What happened?'

She shrugged. ‘We're not friends any more. Sorry, Sal. Can you wait? I need the toilet.'

He watched her push through the sweating crowd towards the cloakroom. She looked so out of place that it moved him, a bittersweet echo of indefinable kinship.
We're not friends any more
. He found himself thinking of Elia and Mazen and even little Rafan, the brother who used to cling to his legs at night.
Maybe they feel sad about losing me too
. It felt strange to imagine someone else paying a price he'd thought was his alone to
bear.