Out of It (2 page)

It was now nearly dawn, and sitting down, Iman realised how depleted the women looked: dread had dulled them. Most of them had barely participated in the meeting. Many had just followed the movement of the planes overhead with their eyes. Others had slept. Only the chairwoman had not let up for a second.

Iman coiled up her hair to form a rest against the wall. What would Raed say about the Committee? She couldn’t stop thinking about him. Raed, who was so interested in what she had to say, who found a wryness in her that others missed, who had opinions on everything and every opinion seemed to intrinsically, magically concur with her own.

To escape from the Committee’s pettiness and the bombing’s complete lack of pettiness, Iman found herself retreating back to thoughts of Raed, to the sensation of the touch of his arm against hers. It had happened months ago now, in a flat in the Beach District. There had been a party and the sofa had been too small for the number of people on it and she had been pushed up against him. She had, of course, heard of him before and he was the older cousin of one of her students, but that had been the first time that they met. At one point he had pushed the side of his foot close against hers and left it there. She was sure of it. And then a look had followed the touch to show that it was not an accident. Just the thought of his look, his touch, even months later, could change her breathing pattern.

If it all became a bit too much, she went back to sitting on the sofa. Or she went further forward and thought of a kiss that had not happened yet, but one that would surely stop the world when it did.

It was emotional distortion by boredom. She could not even remember his features any more, they seemed to have become worn down by the number of times she had gone over them in her mind.

She needed to get over it.

But two weeks ago he had been injured and ended up in hospital and she did not know him well enough to visit and her brothers didn’t know him at all. She asked his cousin about him, but there was a limit as to how much information could be got out of a seven-year-old.
He’s good, Miss. He’s healing well, Miss. Do you like my picture, Miss?

What would he say of her participating in a group like this? Would he condone it or think it a waste of time? Her older brother, Sabri, thought it important, and she normally went through the conclusions and recommendations with him afterwards. She never bothered to discuss the Women’s Committee in any seriousness with Rashid.
No, Rashid, they’re not getting any better-looking in case you were going to ask.

When she had first moved to Gaza and joined the Committee, she (
Fool!
) had been so keen. She had brought home agendas, written out topics and underlined them:
Role Models or Empty Mascots? The Role of Women in the Front’s Hijacking Operations of the 1970s, Embracing the Other? Determining the Women’s Committee Policy towards the Islamic Resistance Movement.
She had made pages upon pages of notes. But in meeting after meeting, the same topics had divided the floor into the same factions and the same excuses had been given for the same inaction. But what can we do in this situation? With these circumstances?

Damn the circumstances.

The circumstances would never change if they didn’t do anything.

But do what? ‘We should,’ Raed had said, in such a simple way, as though describing how to play backgammon to a child, ‘fight them with what they fight us with. It is the only way. The religious movements understand this. We are being too soft, which is why we are not getting anywhere. Our strategy makes no sense.’

Making tea during a bombardment had made her feel like she was part of a meaningful movement. And that was where it was at. She was too soft was where it was at.

Iman noticed that Manar was watching her from across the room. Diligent, devout Manar. And what did that understanding smile mean coming from her? That slightly greasy face in that tightly bound headscarf.
What, Manar? Do you have something to say now?
Why don’t you say in then?

The chairwoman had started her summation. Iman leant over her knee and her hair fell in matted clusters down her back. Not one point, Iman realised, not one word, let alone one
idea
that Iman had said was in the conclusions.

The chairwoman declared the meeting over and left. As soon as the door shut behind her it was as though the room’s centrifugal force had been released and a panic spread through the women:
Where did they strike?
North? No, east from here. Of course, the south, they always do the south. They say they are using new planes, different bombs . . .

Within seconds the previously docile Committee members were all clamouring to leave, waking up the others, picking up bags, someone took the tray with empty glasses. Manar came forward to help Iman fold a rug.
Troubled girl
, Iman thought as she looked at Manar, hoping that by doing so she could dispel the hold that Manar seemed to exert over her, as she did on the rest of the Committee.

Manar joined Iman in rolling up the other, larger rug. Despite her overexaggerated humility, Manar definitely had airs. Iman had noticed that she did not, for example, even deign to read the agenda when it was circulated, instead she just waved, almost imperceptibly, to indicate that it could not be of interest to her although she found it charming that it was to others. What gave someone the confidence to feel that sense of entitlement and superiority? No one knew anything about this woman. She hardly spoke and yet since she had arrived at the Committee everyone seemed to have changed. No one joked about not fasting in Ramadan any more, instead many women said that they did, and rather than discussing that old topic of how the veil objectified women, they now spent their time having heated discussions about the oppression of women in the West.

Iman studied Manar: she didn’t have a bag and wore no make-up. The only sign that she cared about her appearance at all was her eyebrows that were badly plucked. There was a general beigeness to her, an asexual studenty casualness under her long floor-length dark coat that she had buttoned back up. With it on she was back to being an oval of plain features edged in black.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Manar said, indicating the door as they picked up a rug each.

Outside, the crackling amplifier had started the dawn call to prayer.
Prayer,
the muezzin cajoled,
is better than sleep. And sleep,
Iman thought,
is better than meetings.

‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ Iman asked.

‘I’ll do it later.’ Brown dust and crumbles of concrete from the rug stuck to Manar’s outfit. ‘I’ll help you with these first.’

They found the caretaker’s wife and returned the rugs in silence. Coming down the stairs, they didn’t speak to each other either and Iman felt a rush of foreboding come over her, like the realisation of a childish superstition. Today would be the day, Iman thought with a lurch of fear that felt like taking a step to nowhere in a dream, when something truly awful would happen to her family. It would occur to spite her for refusing to acknowledge the severity of the bombing. It would get her back for trying to shrug the whole thing off. They could have got them. They could have hit the house. Iman realised that her hands were stiff on the banister and that her teeth were clenched against each other in her mouth.

In the entrance hall the caretaker’s daughter was already mopping at the creamy floor tiles with a mop. The reassuring sound of water, mop hitting plastic bucket, water being spread across tiles, was echoing around the walls, up to the high ceilings. Iman took in the rectangular gilt clock, the enlarged photograph of the President and the boxed-in noticeboard displaying students’ results. These were all comforting – the girl would not be able to continue mopping the floor if Iman’s family had been hit in a strike, surely?

It was at the doorway that Manar turned to Iman. ‘It’s not what you came back for is it?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t come back for this.’ It was getting light outside and through the glass doors Iman could see the smoke. The girl with the mop no longer seemed particularly reassuring.

No shit
, Iman could hear Rashid saying.
You think someone would come back for this?
‘What do you mean?’ Iman asked.

‘You wanted a role.’ Manar chose her words studiously. ‘They are not giving you one are they?’

‘I have to find my own role.’

‘Exactly.’ Manar did not move, but nodded. ‘Exactly. But I think I could give you some help with that. There are people—’

‘What people?’ Iman asked.

Manar did not reply but closed her eyes slowly as though they had together chosen to listen to the swish and slop of the mop on tiles and dragging back of the sea on the sand.

‘Manar, maybe we can talk another time? I want to get home. I don’t know what’s happened to my family. And besides, you heard the chairwoman, she reached her conclusions and I am not part of them.’

‘You can do better than this. There are people who asked me to talk to you.’

‘Who can want to talk to me?’ Disquiet came over Iman together with a sense that she needed to listen to everything in order to be able to recall this conversation verbatim for Sabri who would be able to tell her what it all meant.

‘It’s OK Iman. I have been listening to what you say in there. You
are right about making a difference.’ The statement was delivered with significance, like a medal dropped around Iman’s neck. ‘You
were
right to come back to Palestine. You
do
have a role here.’

‘And what is my role?’ Iman’s bag rattled on her arm. Her house keys, a lighter and some children’s bangles that a girl she taught had given her knocked together, ‘Who are you talking about when you say “we”? I don’t get this “
we’
’.’

‘A group. A serious group.’ Manar replied. ‘We don’t
meet
, not like this. It is a question of being
contacted
. It just depends whether you are ready.’

‘Ready for what?’

‘To make a difference. To
really
impact the situation.’ Manar’s pretty ringless hand rested on Iman’s arm. ‘They think you are capable of it. Only you. Of all of the Committee, they asked me to speak to you, Iman Mujahed. They chose you.’

‘They
chose
me? Who did?’ Exam-result expectation flushed to Iman’s hands. She always did well in exams. Behind her water sloshed out of the bucket on to the floor.

‘Yes, they did and I am here to ask you. You need to think carefully about what you do and say, because once you have been contacted, then you cannot change your mind. Our group is, as I say,
serious
, and we have to be – how will you understand this? –strict. Yes, we have to be very
strict
.’ Her eyes challenged Iman. ‘With anyone who changes their mind. So if you decide to do something that will make a difference,’ she gestured in the direction of the room they had just been in, ‘rather than all this, you know,
talk,
then you need to let them know. That’s all.’

A jet struck through the sound barrier. The slam of it seemed to pull up the floor, shaking them and the contents of the room. It appeared to gloat that theirs was a world that rested only on a sheet.
Boom!
Iman’s ears split. Down the corridor someone – the caretaker’s wife possibly – yelled out for the mercy of God. The jet returned.
Boom!
Somewhere a pane of glass slid and smashed to the floor.

You see?
Manar’s lids said.
What did I tell you?

‘The question is, are you ready?’ Manar’s smile signified that the conversation was coming to an end. ‘We knew that you were,’ Manar continued, as though Iman had replied to her, ‘We just wanted to be certain.’ She nodded before she left, leaving Iman standing by the main entrance with nothing but the sound of the sea shooting on to the beach and the residue of a limp hand on her arm.

Chapter 3

The emails were like certificates of release in Rashid’s hand. He’d got as far as the door with them where he waivered, undecided as to who to tell and how to tell them. It wasn’t really the morning for it.

He looked back at the room that he was now destined to leave. Brown corn bent in the wind along the hem of his curtains. Half-drawn, the curtains let in the light, but kept out most of the view. Between them, in the middle distance, two smoke spirals were pulled and twisted by their own clouds. A darker stretch of smoke stemmed out of the hospital. Black clouds spumed across the sky.

Rashid went to the window for a closer inspection of it all. Was it possible that the building teetering on concrete legs across the wasteland had tilted further since the day before? He leant his head to one side. Maybe it was his vision that needed altering. Three cars crouched beneath the building in cloth covers. There were days when everything needed to be checked. The trees with the sea beyond them, were all
aadi,
normal. The cars were
aadi
, too. The tents with his neighbours in them were the same as ever. The odd thing – and it took a while to figure out what it was that he hadn’t identified yet – was not so much the smoke, nor was it the building, the sea, the trees or the cars, all of which had their place and were in their place, but those men. The men coming around the building were not
aadi
at all. Not at all. There were two of them. Two of them and they were armed.