Qissat (8 page)

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? … What 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.

Dad’s family were transfixed by him, ‘Are you going to the hotels with the British, they’re rounding them up you know?’

But Dad says ‘No. No. I came to say that we have decided to leave.’

‘Leave? But you can’t leave. These people… they gave us everything. We cannot leave them now.’ My uncle was still holding out his hands as though they were supporting a large globe, when his son seemed to almost lose it.

‘They gave us everything? We, we, the Palestinians, built this place for them, schools, hospitals, ministries, the whole lot. “They gave us everything?” How is that then?’

It’s quiet, then someone says:

‘We can’t leave. How would we leave?’ Then one of my cousins (who was still unmarried even though she was in her thirties: she had once told Mama that she was probably the oldest virgin in Kuwait) says to Dad:

‘
Ammo,
this is our home. We were born here. We have lived here all our life. This is our home,’ and starts to cry.

‘Where would you go to?’ another cousin asks.

‘We could go down to Saudi.’

‘No! You can’t. They’ve closed the border now. It’s too late.’

‘We’ll go to Jordan then, through Iraq.’ Dad’s face had the glow of a problem solver’s.

‘You left Palestine and you are leaving again now! You can’t do this!’ My cousin screamed and left the room.

Over dinner my aunt noticed my nose,

‘Eh! Like an Indian!’ she says.

‘Or a Bedu!’ says my uncle. And I remember how much I had liked that idea.

The country became stupefied by invasion. Tanks rolled up and down streets, helicopters patrolled, but it was quiet. There was a curfew, but to me it was hardly noticeable as I had barely left the house for weeks anyway, but Dad started worrying a bit about food, about water, about letting my mother know we were okay. He set a date for us to leave with Tawfeeq.

Tawfeeq came over the night before we left and asked Dad to take out all his papers again. He unclipped his Montblanc from his shirt pocket and flattened Dad’s old Jordanian passport with a manicured hand. He waved his pen a bit before allowing nib to touch passport. As he wrote his tongue stuck out like a gecko’s. He wrote in my name in Arabic on the page saying ‘Children’, asking for my grandfather’s then my great-grandfather’s names, going back to the time of the Napoleonic invasion of the coastal planes of Palestine. And when he had finished I looked at that majestic inscription and realised that it was me.

We took Tawfeeq’s Buick stuffed full of his Vuitton luggage and, as we drove around the corner in it I twisted around to see our house for the last time and my eye caught her moving behind the vent-shaped windows of her top floor. The Sheikha. The lights were on and her face was so close to the window, her hands pressed flat on it, that she was visible despite the tinting. She looked so much younger than I had thought she was and I found myself thinking for some reason that maybe she had been watching me as much as I had been watching her.

The traffic was jammed up for miles at the border crossing into Iraq. Car metal plated the road and glinted at the sun. As we approached the checkpoint Dad told me to take the stud out of my nose. I, of course, refused. No way. There was just no way. It was not healed yet and had hurt like hell getting it done. I could feel that we were going to have a fight sitting there waiting to get past the border guards, but he backed down. He was getting into a state about the checkpoint.

‘Borders, borders, borders,’ he mumbled messing about with his Jordanian passport as though by checking it, it would change. It would reissue itself or something.

‘Tawfeeq,’ my father started, ‘this passport is out of date, if they stop me, you should go ahead, and I guess we will go back. Can you call her mother for me?’ He handed Tawfeeq a piece of paper with phone numbers.

‘Nonsense,’ says Tawfeeq, pushing it back. Hell, I think. Maybe Dad is going to flip out now. Here and now.

The Iraqi border guard’s belt hung loose. The embossed falcon on his buckle was poised to alight. His gun was flung over his shoulder like a handbag. The small pistol on his belt was poppered into a painted leather pouch. He wore green khaki in a beige desert. Tawfeeq handed over the passports and we waited as the soldiers ambled off to the Perspex and wood checkpoint. And we waited. Dad got out of the car and walked a bit. His mouth looked funny, his lips were white. I watched him spit at a wall.