I too was driven out by a cruel fate and forced to seek a new home. And through my suffering, I have learned how to comfort others who suffer likewise.
Virgil
The first time he saw her it was just a glimpse of gold, yellow hair and a long, bright chain ending in a star. The star had six points, and for one confused moment it reminded him of home.
Then the crowd in the room closed in, and Margaret took his arm, steering him into the corner for a kiss. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and sour lemons from the pink cocktail in her fist.
They leaned by the window, the rain battering the glass like tiny hands trying to claw their way inside. His mind felt light as a balloon. Nadia’s telegram was still curled up on his desk where it had been lying for three weeks. Hassan had sent another just that morning. Salim had dropped it in the bin.
Margaret stirred against his chest, and pushed herself away. Her eyes were circled with thick kohl and her mass of black hair was tied in a purple scarf. One long leg twined around his, her skirt riding up her thigh. Everyone wanted Margaret; she worked hard at it, chain smoking like a movie starlet, learning the guitar and casting off her farmyard accent for something more sullenly Soho. That first time in bed, her mouth had torn into his like a desperate animal. But now it was tight and petulant. Here it comes, he thought.
‘What the hell is up with you, Sal?’ Her foot tickled his, but the eyes were not friendly. ‘Smoked the wrong shit? I’d have more fun with a fish tonight.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, supremely indifferent. Why did he even like Margaret, apart from the obvious things? Margaret only liked him because he was tall, exotic and – above all – older. At twenty-five, he was a man to her pretty teenage doll. ‘I’m still thinking about my father.’ That put a stop to Margaret nine times out of ten these days. It’s hard to argue with a man whose father died less than two months ago, right in the middle of end of term exams.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Then you should have gone to his funeral.’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said, irritated by the effort of having to lie. ‘I told you.’
‘Yeah, well, you haven’t got exams now. So you could still go, if you don’t want to stay around here and be a full-time drag.’ Margaret disengaged her legs and looked around the sweaty room. She had the most amazing eyes. They could pierce the back of a man’s head and see through to the more interesting thing beyond him. Something out there is more promising than me, he thought. Go find it, why don’t you. As if in answer, Margaret pinched Salim’s arm with brittle fingers.
‘I’m getting a proper drink,’ she said pointedly, setting her pink punch down on the windowsill. ‘This sweet shit is giving me a headache.’
Salim watched the crowd swallow her like a tiger disappearing into the tall grass. This was Margaret’s kind of room – the dense smoke, the long-legged crowd, the music he’d never heard of sliding out of the turntable in the corner. This is the end, my only friend, the man sang. Of our elaborate plans, of everything that stands.
It had been the end of Abu Hassan, two weeks before Christmas. A stroke had taken him right in the chair where he used to sit and crack nuts all day. One minute the hand was at his mouth, and the next it lay by his side, flaccid and empty.
Abu Hassan’s death had been many years in coming. But any tears he’d cried had been for an imaginary dream of a father, not the man himself. The far more powerful feeling had been a deep reluctance to return for the funeral.
He had a good excuse. It was his final year of an economics degree at University College, London. Exams were upon him. He was the only Al-Ishmaeli ever to go to university, and Nadia and Tareq assured him repeatedly that his father was very proud. Although Salim doubted it, he was happy to let Hassan take the burden of going back to Nazareth. Tradition decreed that a burial must take place within twenty-four hours. In any event, neither son could get there in time to attend to their father’s body. It was left to Nadia, the oldest child, to usher her father out of the world with all the consideration he’d denied her while he was in it.
Salim stayed behind while Hassan performed the other family duties – and saw to the will. When Hassan mentioned this to Salim, he’d actually laughed out loud. ‘They teach you how to count at university, you know,’ he said. ‘The last time I checked, nothing divided by two is still nothing.’
Margaret had not come back. But Salim was happy to stand on his own, and watch the dance of strangers. He never looked out of place in London. He was made to be here, with his attractive, pale darkness, his long, slim body and his smile that people called easy, as if they knew anything about him. It was a revelation to Salim how ready English women were to throw themselves at a penniless Arab who could make them laugh, and make them cry too. They imagined he would be passionate, unknowable, charming and cruel, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. And he obliged on all counts. But all those arms around him never seemed able to creep inside him – and in the end he was left preferring his own company.
After a few minutes, he decided to go and look for the blonde girl. He walked through the crowd to the drinks table, but couldn’t see her. Margaret was there, though, deep in conversation with someone else. Salim walked once around the room and ended up back by the windowsill. This is ridiculous. I should just go home.
He saw the party host rushing by, a tall green hat falling over his eyes. Salim reached out to grab his wrist. ‘Hey, Mike.’
‘Sal, man! What’s up?’
‘I was looking for a girl.’
‘Aren’t we all? Where’s Margaret?’
‘Clawing someone else,’ Salim said. ‘This one was kind of small, long blonde hair, dressed like a nun.’
‘Jude? You flake, she’s right behind you.’ Salim blushed for the first time in years as he realized his mistake and the unnoticed girl at his elbow began to turn at the sound of her name.
‘Sorry, man,’ Mike said. ‘I’ll leave you cats to get to know each other. Bathroom calls,’ he said, tapping his nose.
She was small, he saw, and perhaps that’s why he had missed her. Her head would barely have grazed his chin. Her blonde hair was long but somehow boyish, cut in a fringe framing a serious face. She was white as a bird, and her slightly worried blue eyes called up a fleeting memory of Lili Yashuv with a scarf over her hair.
‘Am I really dressed like a nun?’ she asked. She sounded curious. Salim looked again at her gawky dress, and she put up her hands unconsciously, smoothing the front of it as if to protect herself from his judgement. The gesture stirred something unexpected inside him – a kind of mirrored sympathy.
‘A cute nun,’ he replied with a smile. ‘The kind about to break her vows.’ She grinned and shook her head.
‘This isn’t really my kind of party,’ she said, looking around the room and then at her feet. ‘I only came with my roommate. And I know Mike from class – he’s studying literature too. What about you?’
‘This isn’t my kind of party either,’ he said. She looked up, sceptical.
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘You came here with Margaret.’
‘Everyone came here with Margaret, I think.’ Salim grinned, trying to catch her eye. But she just looked at the ground again. Irritation bubbled up inside him. What do I have to do to make this girl look at me? ‘I went all over the place looking for you, you know. And you were hiding here all the time.’
‘I wasn’t hiding,’ the girl said, her blue eyes finally fixing on his, with a touch of defiance. ‘Maybe you didn’t really know who you were looking for.’
‘Maybe I didn’t,’ Salim agreed, seeing for the second time the gold chain with its six-pointed Star of David lying on her chest. He pointed to it. ‘So what’s the story with that?’ Her hand went up to it and he saw her fingers trace the edges as if it was something done many times. Years later he would wonder if it was that moment that caught him, if he had really been so jealous of a piece of jewellery and longed to be cherished in the same way.
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ she answered, before hesitating. ‘A Star of David. It’s…’
‘I know what it is,’ he said quickly, thinking not of Abu Hassan and the flight from Jaffa but of Elia and that afternoon they said they could never be friends. There was a pause and she looked startled. He sensed he’d made her anxious. But he couldn’t find the words to turn it into a joke.
‘So, where are you from?’ she asked him, finally. It was his turn to hesitate now.
‘London.’
‘Really?’ She smiled, and shook her head again.
‘What is it?’ he said, worried she had caught him in the lie.
‘It’s just… well, you look like one of my uncles.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, laughing. ‘I hope he’s a handsome uncle.’
‘No, not like that.’ Now she was laughing too. ‘You just remind me of him. You’re both very… very dark and intense.’
‘And where is this most excellent uncle?’
‘He lives abroad.’
‘Well, thank God for that.’ Salim held out his hand. ‘I’m Sal.’ She took it, and shook it earnestly up and down, like a child after receiving a medal.
‘I’m Jude,’ she replied. ‘I’m glad you finally tracked me down.’
‘Me too,’ he said, with a complete sincerity that matched her own.
It was only two days until they met again. Jude had agreed to a coffee in Bloomsbury, near to her classes. She was only in her first year of university, and London still felt terrifying. It operated on a different speed to Sunderland – a jerky, racing world full of noise and hurry. People thought the north was grey, but Jude used to sit under London’s endless winter sleet and dream of the sharp blues of Sunderland’s breeze-blown skies, the clouds chasing across the docks like seagulls.
When the man called Sal suggested that they see each other for coffee, Jude had not been sure what to think. At nearly nineteen, she’d never had a boyfriend. There’d been Stuart, a boy nearly as shy as she was, who used to talk to her at swimming practice and once went so far as to walk her home holding her hand. He did it again a week later, and she’d wondered if he might kiss her, but he was the perfect gentleman. In the end she became so irritated by that limp, moist palm in hers that she’d run home early to avoid him, feeling a wicked relief every step of the way.
She knew about love from the news; from stories about the war in Vietnam and the kissing protests in America. But it was no more real to her than a trip to the pictures. Even now, after five months in London, love seemed fake, painted-on – like the flowers she saw everywhere on people’s clothes and in their hair, floating through Chelsea and Soho in swirling patterns. There were no flowers around Jude’s student lodgings on Camden Lock. Only concrete and steel, bare cracks in the pavement and row upon row of windows dirtied by the smoky rain.
In Jude’s world, it was polite to be early. She sat in the corner of Virginia’s and pulled out a book. Outside, the silent drizzle of late February drifted down. The faint music in the café was nearly drowned by the keening of a harmonica outside. Buses surged past, dimly red through the cigarette smoke and fogged glass.
Sal. It was a name that told no story. Who was he, with those fierce eyes so like Uncle Max and that odd, gentle way of speaking? He had seemed even more a stranger at the party than her.
That, more than anything else, made Jude want to say yes to him, to see a real smile come to his face and wipe away the practised one. How does he smile for Margaret? She shook the thought away, and clutched Rebecca’s chain for courage. The gold felt like warm water in her hand.
When she looked up, he was standing in front of her. His awkward smile sent a thought flashing across her mind – he made a mistake, he doesn’t want to be here. Before she could speak, he’d pulled up a chair and sat down.
The daylight showed him paler than her memory, his hair seemed blacker and his eyes more serious. His face was soaked with rain and his thick overcoat and green scarf dripped onto the floor. Her instinct was to ask why he came without an umbrella, but she stopped herself. Just because, that’s why, as Dora used to say. Why was a habit Jude had trained herself out of, along with all the other Jews of the world.
There was a moment of silence and then he asked, ‘What are you reading?’
She held up the book for him and he squinted at the title. ‘The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky.’ His expression was a polite blank, and she stumbled on. ‘One of my course options is foreign literature. I’m doing Russian and French.’
‘Sounds good,’ he said, although she heard a note of uncertainty. ‘Why did you go for those two?’
She had to think for a moment, to find the true answer under the rationalizations she’d given her parents.
‘I had a holiday in France once,’ she said. ‘It was the first time I’d been abroad.’ She remembered the rich grey of the Seine as it glided along the Left Bank, the rough song of Parisian laughter, the smell of paint and the exhilarating emptiness of the sky. ‘I never saw anywhere like it before. I felt so alive there. They think in a different way to us, a freer way. I wanted to…’ She ran out of words to describe the longing she’d felt, and bit her lip in embarrassment. But then, to her amazement, he found the words for her.
‘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.
The bare-chested man in front of him was kissing his girlfriend when Jude came back, his face pushing wetly into hers. His wandering arm knocked into Jude as she pressed her body back into the line; his girlfriend stumbled as the couple lost their balance. ‘Watch out, man,’ he protested, and the girl rounded on Jude and Salim, her lips still shiny with saliva, hair tousled under a red bandana. ‘Hey, step off,’ she said, her voice loud enough to turn heads all around them. ‘What’s the fucking rush?’
Jude said, ‘I’m sorry,’ as she flushed, eyes dropping under the sudden scrutiny of the crowd. Salim was astonished. ‘Don’t apologize to them,’ he told her. ‘It was their fault.’
‘Yeah, right? Your girlfriend rammed us, man.’
‘You were rolling around like animals. She was just standing here.’
The girl laughed, tossing her hair back. ‘Get him, eh? Animals. What an arsehole.’ She stuck her tongue out at them, pink and round as a painted nail.
‘Check it out, babe.’ The bare-chested man had oily hair falling across his eyes, and a sneer over his goatee. ‘Paki and Square don’t like us.’
Salim felt the warmth of Jude’s shoulder pressing against the burn of the insult inside his chest. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, trying for disdain, but the BBC English felt suddenly clumsy on his tongue. ‘She’s better than a hundred of you idiots.’
‘Whatever. Fuck off, Mustapha.’
‘You fuck off.’ Jude had swung around and her face was red, the words bursting out without warning like steam from a pressure cooker. ‘How dare you use that name? How dare you? You’re not cool, you’re horrible, and you don’t know anything about us.’ She was standing between Salim and the couple, and for the first time he noticed the heaviness of her northern vowels. ‘Go on, fuck off!’ she shouted, as the bare-chested man took a step back, his sneer becoming an incredulous smile. Then she turned and ran out, Salim following in her wake, leaving the throng behind.
As the fresh night air hit them, she turned back to him, red spots on her cheeks fading back into white. He saw the apology surge to her lips again, and he said, ‘Don’t. Don’t say it.’ He reached out to her and she froze at the gesture, her arms hugging the trembling rise and fall of her chest. ‘Jude. You were amazing. A real fighter. Like a lion.’ Standing there under the white brilliance of the streetlamps she could have been a knight, one of the Christian kings from the Frères’ tales he’d loved, from the games they’d mocked him for playing. ‘Jude the Lionheart,’ he said without thinking. He saw her eyes soften, heard her laughter, and it came bubbling up inside him too as the sound released his heart.
They walked down Seven Sisters Road to Finsbury Park, leaving the roar of the road behind in the dark green and the silence of grass. Winter had left the park trees bare; Jude saw their empty arms reaching up to the blackness, their new buds just points of shadow on the boughs. London’s night walkers passed them by – some of them arm in arm, others with dogs, their faces neither old nor young but a universal blank in the half-light. It was the opposite of loneliness, Jude thought, as if they were all peaceful planets travelling on their own course, feeling the comforting tug of each other’s presence.
Salim’s arm was around her shoulders; he leaned on her as if she were his protector, as she’d leaned on Rebecca and maybe even Dora. His arm pressed her down but strength seemed to flow through it into her. Something had vanished between them, some fundamental human separateness. She was no longer just Jude; her body was filling up with a stranger that only Salim recognized.
A light filtered through the trees ahead, carrying reedy singing with it. Someone had made a campfire of dry twigs and a group of people had gathered around it, shadows flickering over their faces. Stopping just outside the circle, she began to recognize the song – and from the vibration of Salim’s chest she saw that he, too, was singing the words under his breath. If you should ever leave me, though life would still go on believe me, the world could show nothing to me, so what good would living do me? He broke off to look down at her and said, ‘Now this is more your kind of music, isn’t it?’
‘One of my favourites,’ she told him. The old Jude would have given a reason, but now she felt too full for explanations. The guitar player was harmonizing with two other newcomers; it was sweet – as good as the Beach Boys ever were, and the fire transported her out of London to somewhere warm and kind. He was still leaning into her, and she felt herself strengthening with his weight, as if finally pushing roots deep into the ground. The words of the chorus came into her mouth, reminding her of a phrase Rebecca loved to use – her grandmother’s answer to all of life’s mysteries. And she whispered it to herself along with all the other voices, God only knows, God only knows, clasping Salim’s hand as the sleeping wood breathed around them.
Hassan came back from Nazareth in May. The skies had cleared; warmth was trickling back into England over the wide Atlantic – a faint ghost of the heat filling the orchards of the southern Mediterranean.
Salim dreaded this early touch of summer – it meant final exams, the end of study and the start of difficult choices men must make if they want to eat.
But it was easy to drown his anxiety in Jude. They spent the spring walking along the marble-grey Thames under the blossoming trees of the south bank, the stories pouring out of them. They did not call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. They still were not lovers, no more than a kiss. They were innocents on a boat floating down a river, dipping their toes into unknown currents and gazing up together at the limitless sky.
At first she talked about Paris and Flaubert and Voltaire and he talked about the harvest season and the desert dances of the Nabi Ruben festivals. But then came the other stories: the tale of Kath and Peggy at the door and Elia and Mazen in Clock Tower Square, of the slam of the gates in Jaffa and the knives above the cellar in Kishinev, the empty room in Nazareth and the sirens in the street in Ryhope Road. Salim had never known anything like it – this sharing of souls, this unburdening of griefs and shames. He knew the Christians received absolution from God or their priests; once Hassan had dared him to sneak into a confession box – it was lined in red and smelt of sweat and humid wood. Let them keep their forgiving God. Jude was human and imperfect, but she understood him without judgement. And that was better than any kind of divine justice.
Eventually, Salim dragged himself down to see his brother. Hassan had become one of history’s simple soldiers, achieving exactly what he’d always promised, no more and no less. Now nearing thirty, he ran a profitable car repair shop in one of the capital’s outer suburbs. He’d married a big-breasted Palestinian girl who had immediately started producing children. Two were already in nursery, speaking more Arabic than English, and another one was on the way. Their house smelt of rosewater, allspice and salted nuts. They fasted at Ramadan, although Hassan refused to stop smoking, and sometimes talked about going to the local mosque. Their friends were all cut from the same cloth. But Shireen made an exception for her contingent of long-nailed, blonde girlfriends from the nearby salon – women Salim had heard Hassan complaining about and seen him flirting with.
He was grateful when Hassan asked to meet at his garage. It was where his brother was at his most cheerful, and least likely to give Salim a hard time. The smell of oil and grease was pleasantly relaxing after the relentless hardness of the lecture hall desk and the sharpness of ink on his fingers.
‘Abu Saeed!’ He called Hassan’s honorific out over the groan of the faulty engines. Hassan had, most predictably, named his eldest boy after his own father.
‘Abu Mushkila,’ a voice shouted back. Salim grinned despite himself. Hassan’s way to protest that Salim had not yet married at twenty-six was to call him father of trouble. Hassan always milked every available ounce of humour out of his own jokes, often far beyond the cow running dry.
‘Come over here, old man,’ Hassan shouted again, from his office behind the mass of cars, doors open and engine parts spread indecently over the ground. Salim stepped gingerly over them, wishing he’d changed the good shirt he wore to see Jude that morning. Hassan came out of the office door to meet him, and slapped him on the back with oily hands. ‘What the hell have you been doing for the last week? I expected you every day.’
‘Studying,’ said Salim, pretending to look at the red Beetle being dismantled over Hassan’s right shoulder. ‘I came as soon as I could, big brother.’
‘You study too much. Anyone would think you were bloody Einstein. You’ll end up with big brains and no balls like he did.’
‘Where do you get these ideas?’ Salim pushed his brother’s shoulder with a smile. ‘It’s my final year, I have to study. One day when I’m a rich accountant living in Mayfair I’ll send my Jaguar to you to fix, don’t worry.’
Hassan bellowed with laughter. ‘Okay, so I’ll wait for your bloody Jag. Now, let’s have a beer and I’ll tell you about the disaster in Nazareth.’
They cracked open a beer from the office fridge and Salim listened with half an ear as Hassan complained about everything from the Nazarene imam to the relatives. The only person who stirred his emotions in any way was Nadia. It’s not fair. We never gave you anything in life, and we left you with all the shit. He wondered what Nadia would make of Jude. How could she not like her? They were two gentle souls set in different shades.
Sharing a beer with Hassan always reminded Salim of his first day in London, on that mouldering brown sofa. He’d worked so hard since that day to fulfil his promise. Those first years he’d laboured like a fellah, Hassan’s garage by day and school at night, to qualify for university. He’d a head for numbers and a way with Englishmen that impressed them while reminding them they were the master race. When his passport application came through at last, he remembered walking home with it in a daze of triumph, the hard black book weighing in his pocket like a loaded gun.
‘So what’s up with you, ya habibi?’ Hassan was bored with Nazareth, and now wanted details of Salim’s love life. ‘Still seeing that crazy woman, that Margaret?’
‘Not any more.’ Salim wondered how to bring it up with his brother. ‘She found someone who didn’t mind getting his eyes scratched out every other day.’ Hassan laughed.
‘Too bad I’m married,’ he hooted. ‘I could do with my eyes scratching sometimes. And my arse too, if she’s not busy!’
‘Well, she’s all yours,’ Salim said. ‘I met someone else.’
‘Yes? Who, who?’
‘It’s nothing.’ Salim suddenly felt his palms getting sweaty. ‘She’s at university too. She studies literature. She reads Russian and French poems.’
‘W’Allah?’ Really? Hassan thought this was hilarious. ‘With her clothes off or with them on? Please tell me with her clothes off.’
‘It’s not like that. She’s a decent girl.’
Hassan nudged Salim in the ribs. ‘Oh, my poor brother’s too in love to use his dick. What’s he going to do?’
‘I’m not in love.’ Salim pushed himself off Hassan’s dusty desk. ‘It’s just… something. She’s a Yehuda, actually.’
Hassan’s eyes widened. ‘Wow, Abu Mushkila. You know how to cause a stir, eh? Thank God Baba is dead. He’d have your balls on a plate.’
Suddenly Salim was sick of Hassan. ‘Your mouth is as foul as your office, you know that? Clean this place up, for God’s sake.’ He spoke in English, and Hassan snorted.
‘Oh Mister Salim,’ he replied in the same tongue. ‘So sorry for offending you, sir. You think you’re too clean for my workshop then fuck off. You weren’t too good for it when you had nowhere else to go.’
‘Okay, I’m sorry.’ Salim felt the loving despair that was the hallmark of his relationship with Hassan. They called each other one blood, but their veins were strangers – Abu Hassan’s dark red against their mother’s royal blue. They reached out for each other but were foiled by a wall of confusion and mistranslation.
‘I’m trying to tell you that this one is different,’ he said. ‘She’s not a Zionist. She understands us. She understands me.’
Hassan looked at him dubiously. ‘You’ve always been looking for someone to understand you, Salim. But you don’t even understand yourself. Don’t shake your head, just listen to me. I have no problem with Jews. I had a Jewish girl too, a couple of times. But, please, screw them, don’t love them. No matter what you think, they can’t understand an Arab. It’s not in their nature.’
‘You don’t know her.’
Hassan hauled himself to his feet and got another beer out of the fridge.
‘You know what’s happening in Palestine now? The Jews want Syria and the Sinai too. They’ve been sending soldiers across the border. But Nasser is standing up to the fucking Knesset. He’ll close the Red Sea to them and cut the Israelis off from the oceans. No more trade for the Jews, eh? Then all hell is going to break loose, by God. This time the Catastrophe will come to them.’
Salim remembered how Hassan had clung to the radio after they left Jaffa, and how long and truly he believed in the great myth of Arab liberation by Arabs. But for all Hassan’s bluster about Palestine, he would never trade his cosy garage to live there. Salim was the only one who still dreamed about orange blossoms and the sea.
‘It’s just more talk,’ he said to Hassan. ‘They can’t do a thing for us. Our lives are here now. Your children will grow up here, not in the Sinai.’
‘For now,’ Hassan said, clapping him on the shoulder again. ‘But who knows? Anyway, so it’s not a good time to be bringing home a Jew, that’s all I’m saying.’ Salim nodded. It seemed the easiest way.
As they said their goodbyes, Hassan said, ‘Oh by the way – there’s something else for you. Nadia thought I shouldn’t give it to you, but she still thinks you’re a little crybaby.’
He pulled a folded envelope out of his back pocket, grubby from a month of heat and pressing. Salim knew what it was instantly. The postage mark was from Lebanon, a stamp of green cedars against a red field.
It sent a memory through him like a knife, of his mother standing on the balcony in Nazareth with her letter and her secrets. You died to me then, Mama. I mourned you years ago. Seeing evidence of her now, alive somewhere, was like watching a ghost rise.
Through the roaring of blood in his ears, he heard Hassan talking. ‘They heard about Baba’s passing. Rafan writes that he couldn’t come either – busy just like his clever brother Salim. But he sends his address and phone number and says you should pay him a visit. Plenty of girls in Beirut, you know. The sun is warmer there, and so are the women. Mama says hello too. For what it’s worth.’
A week later, Jude turned nineteen – and Tony boasted he’d cajoled Alex into hosting a birthday dinner for her. The southern Golds, as Alex called them, could usually only stomach one Jewish gathering per season.
‘I told him you could be getting up to no end of trouble in this big goy world, bring shame upon the family unless we reined you in,’ Tony said. ‘Besides, can you imagine your mama calling up and squalling that her schmendrik brother-in-law was ignoring her little tchatzkah and letting her run riot around town?’ His voice rose to a pitch of horror.
‘Dora would never call me a treasure,’ Jude grinned.
‘Aye aye. She knows you too well.’
The prospect of this birthday dinner cast the first shadow over her time with Sal. They had talked, briefly, about meeting each other’s families. But she could not imagine marching into Alex’s Regency home in Portland Place and introducing him as her… what? She didn’t even know what he was.
‘So he’s not your boyfriend?’ Ruth Michaels had asked her at the Jewish Society that day. Sal dropped her off on the way to see his brother, his lean arm over her shoulders and those dark eyes so alive and aware like a rich splash of colour on a dirty white page. He’d kissed her goodbye on the steps of the little flat in Manchester Square where the Jewish Society met. The place belonged to the chairperson, Ruth – a Jewish debutante who Tony insisted on calling Bec as he did with every Jew north of the river; he liked to claim, ‘I’ve never met a Hampstead Jew without being shidduched with his virgin daughter Rebecca.’
‘He’s a friend,’ she’d answered Ruth, and inside she’d thought with secret scorn: my best friend – better than you, better than any of you.
Salim returned from Hassan’s with his face full of unshed tears. She thought it must be because of his father, or because of talking about home. Or because of her. ‘Is it because I went to the Jewish Society meeting?’ she asked him, her chest tight with worry and remorse. She’d gone partly to see how he’d react. But he’d not even blinked – just kissed her goodbye saying, ‘Have a good time.’
Now he looked at her in astonishment, and said, ‘No, no. Not you. I had some unexpected news, but it’s nothing.’
Then he sat back down and took her hand in his, cold and rough after the day. ‘My Jude,’ he said, raising her hand to his eyes as if they hurt him. ‘My Jude,’ he said again. ‘I don’t care where you go, as long as you come back to me.’
How, then, was she going to break the news of the birthday party to which he was not invited? She waited until the last minute, on her birthday morning.
Blissfully unaware, he met her that morning in the coffee shop with a bunch of roses and a small box. The necklace inside was gold, broken by some curling letters that he said represented her name spelled out in Arabic. ‘Judith can mean God be praised,’ he said, ‘I looked it up. This is God be praised in Arabic, because it’s how I feel from knowing you.’
Jude was deeply moved – as he was, she could tell, by the flaws in his usually perfect English.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, holding it to her neck.
‘I know you love your grandmother’s chain. But I hope there’s a place for this one too.’
‘There is,’ she said, swamped by the backwash of emotions.
Then, while the tide was still in full flood, she said, ‘Sal, my uncle has invited me for a birthday dinner this evening. I can’t get out of it. It’s just the family.’
He looked taken aback, but then resigned. ‘And I guess I don’t qualify as family, right?’
‘You’re not missing anything, believe me,’ she said, grasping his hand. ‘Tomorrow we can go out together.’
‘Right, but…’ He took his hand out from under hers, and sat back in the chair. ‘How long does this go on for? Are we pretending to our families, or pretending to ourselves?’
‘What do you mean?’ Jude asked, even though she knew exactly.
‘You don’t tell your family you have an Arab boyfriend. I don’t tell mine I have a Jewish girlfriend. We don’t sleep with each other, to make it all true. Where does this go, in the end?’
Jude felt helpless. She could hear Rebecca scolding her. Be brave. Be a mensch. She raised her eyes to his in appeal and he straightened up in exasperation.
‘Okay, okay, you goose,’ he said. ‘Forget it for today. Go to your party and have a great birthday. I’m sure you’ll have so much fun without me.’ His voice was light but his smile was strained, and as Jude leaned over to kiss her reassurance, her eyes closed, shutting it out.
The party was a nightmare. Alex had not thought to ask any of Jude’s friends. Instead, it was a Pesach reprieve – silverware, candelabras and diamonds pinching the folds of ageing white necks.
The conversation veered away from Jude’s age, her studies and her father’s health within a matter of minutes. It then plunged straight into a spitting rant about the coming war with the Arab world.
‘What Mr Eshkol needs is a bomb, like Truman had,’ one said, his lips wobbling in indignation. ‘He’s putzing around on the phone with President Johnson and the United Nations,’ he continued, spitting over his left shoulder, ‘while the Arabs are talking about blood this and annihilation that, cutting off our shipping and shooting over our borders… if we had the bomb, believe me, it wouldn’t go this way.’
‘There goes Stanley,’ Alex smiled, his freckled scalp gleaming under thin silver hair. ‘Always wanting to put the bigger boot in.’
‘Oh come on, Alex.’ Stanley’s wife was deftly stabbing the other side of the chopped liver. ‘You know it’s the same old story. They couldn’t kill us in ’forty-eight. They tried again in ’fifty-six. Now they think Nasser is giving them another chance. When does it end?’
‘I don’t buy this rivers of blood business,’ Alex replied, raising a forkful of chicken breast to his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. ‘I mean, what are the Arab leaders going to say to the peasants? Okay, blood, blood – blood, but no beystsim, no balls.’ He winked at Jude. ‘They haven’t got the armies to wipe us out. It’s all banging on the table.’
‘Four Arab armies against Israel, and you don’t think it’s a threat? Not to mention the Arabs inside Israel, the fifth column. We’ll be fighting outside and inside unless we take the first step. We’ll never be safe without the Sinai and the West Bank, and the Arabs inside under control.’
Jude shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The Arabs inside. That was Sal. She thought of his sadness, the many things he’d told her and the silences that hid other stories he couldn’t bear to tell. What could these people possibly know about him?
She sat up and took a breath. ‘Maybe there are other things we could do instead to protect Israel,’ she said. ‘Like – if only the Arabs inside Israel were treated fairly, if there was real justice for them, maybe that would be something. It could help for making peace with the rest of the Arabs.’ Her voice came out louder than she expected.
The rest of the table looked at her – even Tony. Someone laughed. The woman whose name she couldn’t remember pointed her fork at Jude. Yellow pearls dangled from her drooping earlobes, as if her ears were melting and dripping down her shoulders.
‘Is this communism, young lady?’ she said. ‘Alex, your niece is a communist. It’s all free love and peace for you young people today, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not a communist,’ Jude retorted. ‘You don’t have to be a communist to believe in fairness. Not all Arabs want Israel to vanish. They were hurt too, they lost their homes and their families.’
‘You kids don’t know from Moses,’ Stanley boomed. ‘I’m very sorry for the poor bloody Arabs but they brought it on themselves. They had every chance for peace, again and again. Half the country, their own government – they could have had it all. Every time their leaders threw it back in our faces. We turned that desert into a garden, gave them proper water, hospitals, schools, roads! In return they shoot at innocent people, cut our trade off and threaten to annihilate us, to finish what the Nazis started. So tell me who’s being unfair now?’
‘They kicked the United Nations peace force out of the Sinai so that no one would be there to witness it,’ his wife said, her words tumbling smoothly out over his. ‘And when the Egyptians and their Nasser close the Red Sea to us, we’ll be bottled up like fish in a jar.’
‘It was our land to begin with,’ another elegant, eager voice said at the back of the room – a lawyer, Jude remembered. ‘Our ancestral land, a gift from God. At the end of the day the man who doesn’t believe in that can’t really call himself a Jew.’
Fury filled her, beyond anything she’d known since the moment she’d turned her back on Peggy’s front door. She knew they were wrong in her heart, from her time with Sal, from his human doubts against their diamond-hard certainties. But she couldn’t find the words to tell them exactly how they were wrong, and what the truth might be.
As the conversation spun beyond her again, she caught Tony’s eye at the end of the table. He gave her a reassuring smile but all she could think was you never said a word. You’re happy to be one of them. You’re clever but you’re not a mensch. And she gave him her sweetest smile back.
The BBC World Service woke Jude up on the morning of the fifth of June, to prove Alex’s friends exactly right about one thing at least. The Israelis would strike first. Egypt had an even ruder awakening, when the boys and girls of the Israeli Air Force flew their Dassault Mirages over the border and dropped tarmac-penetrating tonnage on the heads of sleeping Egyptian planes.
A few hours later, Jude heard that Jordan had shelled Israel and Israeli bombs were now falling on Jordanian airstrips. The Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem were rising. Israeli troops were poised on the border of the West Bank. Blood was being shed in the streets – Arab against Jew.
They’d only spoken twice since her birthday party, each conversation a hurried set of excuses, a mere shadow of the closeness she’d thought they had. But that day she stayed in her room and waited for him, her windows closed against the world outside.
The smells of the student halls crept through the cracks under her door – brown, dirty notes of burned toast, wet clothes and cheap beer filling her nostrils. She’d never noticed them before, but now they were hateful, the stink of the smallness of ordinary lives.
She waited – for Salim to come to her, to rage and shout like Stanley about the blood-hungry Jews and their murderous guns. And she tried to remember what they’d said at the party about having no choice, having tried for peace again and again, about Arabs bringing it on themselves.
He didn’t come that day, nor the next. She began to imagine that their time together had been a fantasy. Each evening, the corridor was full of footsteps and laughter, the shrieks of people on their way out to bars, to the pictures. The sounds turned into an ache inside her. She tried to call him; the telephone rang and rang, until she hung up. For the first time she tasted the sourness of jealousy burning in her stomach.
But on the fourth day of fighting he came.
Jude had arrived home from class, switched on the radio and prepared to shut out another day. Turning on the tap, she brought a handful of lukewarm water to her face, pressing her eyes and feeling the wasteful patter of drops onto the rug. The BBC’s monotone filtered through her wet fingers. Israeli soldiers were nearly victorious – they were rolling through Palestinian streets in the newly conquered West Bank and Gaza; the burning desert of the Egyptian Sinai was theirs, and the stony hills of the Syrian Golan.
She heard the words proactive self-defence – and then another voice, shouting over the first, said cynical expansionist policy. The World Service langour became a symphony of competing sounds, the wrongs suffered and the wrongs done. Who on earth could tell them apart?
There was banging behind her, urgent and fierce. Water splashed onto the floor as she turned, her hands dripping. Let it be him. Let it be him, or else I’ll let the water spill over onto the floor and it can wash all of this away.
The reckless bargain raced through her, as she ran to the door and dragged it open, the radio and the rushing water drowned into silence by the pounding in her ears. Salim’s eyes were red and his hands white from clenching the frame.
‘I wanted to come before,’ he said, his voice hoarse, as if he hadn’t used it in days. ‘Is this really possible? Are we mad?’
Yes was all she could think as she drew him in with her wet hands, so clumsy against the firmness of his arms. We’re all mad, everything is mad in this world. The sound of water became a song as she reached up to his face, pulling him downwards, kissing him. ‘Stay here tonight,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not our fault, any of it. You have to stay here with me, for as long as you want.’ And she felt the warmth pulsing through him as he pushed her backwards towards the bed.
They promised that they would tell their families on the same day.
Jude arranged to meet Tony for dinner at his north London flat, and Salim planned to call Hassan that evening.
‘Why don’t you go and see him?’ she asked. But he smiled at her and shook his head. ‘Never give an Arab bad news in a mechanic’s shop with wrenches to hand,’ he said.
Jude knew she was avoiding the issue too, in her own way. She couldn’t imagine how she might tell her parents. The very thought of it turned her stomach into a writhing mass. But Tony… Tony was another thing. He would surely understand. He would tell her how to make it all right.
She dressed in clothes Salim liked, to give her courage – tight blue bell-bottoms with a loose blouse and a beret on her blonde hair. On the bus to Camden she pressed her forehead to the window, watching the soft shades of people flicker by in the faint dusk of early summer, caught up in a world of carefree happiness beyond her reach.
Tony’s flat was a modest size for the son of a rich man. But everywhere she looked it whispered wealth. The bookshelf was heavy oak and the old leather bindings of the books said first edition rather than second-hand. There was art on the wall where students would put posters. A sleek turntable in the corner was playing Ella Fitzgerald.
Over dinner they talked about the family. Tony had recently taken a job at his father’s law offices. He showed Jude a picture of a young paralegal he was interested in, a Jewish intern from Switzerland. Her face beamed out of the image, all white teeth and rich brown hair.
She felt oddly deceived by Tony. He talked like a rebel but he’d slipped into his father’s life like a hand into a silken glove. You joined your father’s company, you’ll marry this Bec from Switzerland and you’ll move to Regent’s Park and set your table with crystal. And you’ll go to Shul and wear the yarmulke and host your own Passovers with that twinkle in your eye that says it’s all a joke to you. But it isn’t a joke. It’s you, it’s who you are and who you always have been.
At last they took their coffee over to the soft leather sofa, and Jude knew that the moment had come. So she told him, in halting words, what she had come to say.
It was easier than she’d imagined. He was an Israeli and a British citizen, nothing like the dangerous men of Uncle Max’s nightmares. He had many Jewish friends, in Israel and here. He was destined for great things, one of the best students in his class. He understood more about Jews than most English goyim ever could. He spoke Hebrew. And he loved her. He loved her more than anything, and she loved him.
Tony sat as still as stone in his chair, until she’d finished. After the first silence fell, he put his head to one side and looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Jude waited, her throat tightening.
Finally he asked, ‘So what about Jack and Dora? I take it you haven’t told them?’ She shook her head, looking down at her hands. He blew air out of his mouth in a slow whistle. ‘I’m not sure they’re going to go for all this Israeli citizen stuff,’ he told her, his voice measured and steady. ‘You know they think Max is one step above a savage anyway. What does middle-class England want with Israel?’ Judith felt a little block of hope slide out from underneath her.
‘So what do you suggest, then?’ she said, keeping her voice calm. ‘I have to tell them something.’
Tony shrugged. ‘Tell them he’s Jewish.’
‘I can’t tell them that!’ Jude was horrified.
‘Why not? He’s Israeli. He knows Hebrew. He’s a Semite. According to you, he’s virtually Moses.’
‘I can’t do that, Tony. They’d know. And he’d know, too. He’d think I was ashamed of him.’
‘Aren’t you? You come here like you’re coming to an execution. You want me to – what? Give you a blessing? I’m not a Rebbe, you know.’ He gave her a weak smile.
‘I wanted you to help me break the news to my parents. To…’ she hesitated. ‘To help me figure out what to do. I just want to help them understand him like I do. I know it’s going to be hard.’
‘Hard.’ Tony leaned back into the cushions and cupped his chin in his hands. ‘Darling Jude, you have no idea how hard this is going to be. Never mind Jack and Dora. It’s you I’m thinking about, little one. It’s going to be impossible, I promise you. You want my advice. Wait a while before you tell anyone else. Just wait, until you’re sure.’
‘Why should I wait?’ Jude was angry now, getting to her feet in agitation and walking to the other end of the sofa. Outside, the lights of darkening London shone dazzling in through the window. ‘I know I’m never going to marry a Jew, Tony. Never. I tried for Dad, for you all, but I never met a single person I even liked, never mind loved. Now I have, and he happens to be an Arab. Too bad for you, and Jack and Dora, but why shouldn’t it be good for me? Why shouldn’t he be as good for me as that Swiss girl of yours and her rich father?’
She saw Tony flinch. He stood up too, set his coffee down and walked over to the bookcase – the communist manifesto, as Alex liked to call it. A signed picture of Sunderland FC was framed above it, one of Tony’s most treasured possessions. Jude wanted to apologize, to rage at him. You’re supposed to be on my side. Tell me this is going to be okay. Help me make it good.
He took a breath. ‘I always hated Hebrew school too,’ he said. ‘You know, the droning Rebbes with their greasy yarmulkes going on about the destiny of the Jewish people. Whole weekends lost to Jewish destiny! When I could have been at the football.’ He gave an exaggerated shudder, and Jude smiled despite herself.
‘Most of that stuff seemed psychopathic to me, the kind of thing people would get locked up for if they did it in Newcastle. Do you remember the foundation story, not the Moses one – the first one?’
Jude felt lost. ‘Abraham?’
‘Him, yes. It’s one of the worst ones. Truly. I mean, first he marries an eighty-year-old woman and tells her she’s supposed to be a mother to a whole people. She frets herself into a frenzy because – surprise, surprise – she can’t conceive. So he has sex with a servant girl called Hagar and the two of them take the baby away from her. Then when the old woman finally has a kid of her own, what does he do? Tries to sacrifice it on the mountain, because he hears voices from God telling him to do it. What a great story! No wonder we’re so proud of it.’ He smiled again, but this time Jude had to force herself to laugh. That old guilt, the horror of rejecting daily bread everybody else finds so delicious, stirred in her stomach.
‘They sent her packing, that Arab girl who had the first boy. Ishmael they called him. Abraham’s original heir. Sarah was jealous and wanted all of God’s goodness for her little Isaac. So they tell us that Hagar and Ishmael went out into the desert. Just a girl and a kid, all alone in the heat, sent to their deaths by his papa like a used rag.
‘The Rebbes would tell you it was all part of God’s will, to make way for the chosen nation. And Ishmael had a nation of his own in the end, so no harm done, right? But I tell you, there isn’t an Arab on earth that doesn’t carry a little bit of Ishmael around with him. Who can blame them? They were always the ones to get kicked, first by God and then by everyone else. And they’ll never be finished kicking back.’
He turned around to face her, grey in the cold reflection of the window.
‘Bubbellah, I can see you love this one. And if you say he loves you too, I don’t doubt it. But believe me, he’ll never forgive you.’
‘Forgive me for what?’ she whispered.
He walked over to her and took her hand. ‘For being on the winning team, darling.’
Salim waited anxiously for Jude to get back that night. He cleaned the two rooms of his flat, made stacks of sandwiches and turned on the old television he’d traded from his neighbour in exchange for some bookkeeping. He flicked from channel to channel through the hiss of the broken aerial, his stomach closed. The room reeked of washing and damp wood. Was he more worried for her or for himself? They would give her a hard time, he knew it. It was always harder for women than for men.
Hassan had proved the truth of that. He’d called Salim a majnoon donkey, a born troublemaker, a man without pride in his people, a boy who forgot his own history. But at the back of his outraged insults was that calm certainty that all Arab men have, that their women could be tamed or dropped at will, and that any trouble they brought into a man’s life would soon blow over.
When Jude eventually came back, she sounded cheerful and told Salim that Tony would like to meet him one day. But her face was pale and she threw herself into his arms as if he was the only boat floating in an empty sea.
‘Was he angry?’ Salim asked. ‘Did he say he’d talk to your parents?’ At the back of his mind the question hovered: did he turn you against me? Did he make you change your mind?
‘He wasn’t angry,’ she said, hugging him. ‘He was surprised. He said it would be hard for us. But we know that.’
‘We know that,’ he agreed, kissing her forehead. She was so small to be so brave. ‘You’re worth everything that comes. You’re the most courageous person I know.’
‘A mensch.’ She had tears in her eyes, but she smiled up at him. ‘That’s what my grandmother would have said. A person has to be brave before they can be worthy. I know she would have loved you, Sal. She would have seen through all of it, seen who you really are.’
He believed her, he had faith in her, more faith than he realized was still left inside him. She’d stood up to her family for his sake. She saw him as worth the risk.
That summer he slaved to get the best possible mark in his finals. Jude would sit up with him late into the night, making little index cards to help him remember equations and theories. And when her head finally drooped in sleep he would lie beside her and watch her breathing, wondering at her choice. Her hair was the soft yellow of candlelight, and her skin felt like still water. He would do anything to justify her faith in him, to become the man she saw through those blue eyes. She knew he was made for better things. She knew what it was to dream of another, forbidden life.
He tried to soften the way for her. He took tea with the sour, fascinated Ruth Michaels of the Jewish Society and even attended the local synagogue. He’d put on the yarmulke and smiled at his neighbours, and anyone would have sworn he was a Jew. Even me. And in that lofty room, filled with the rustle of lambswool suits and the rich smell of embroidery, he could almost imagine it himself. That he, Salim Al-Ishmaeli, was not really an Arab, forever predestined to hold losing cards – but one of the chosen ones, the masters, who always seemed to come out on top of the game.
A week after finals, Salim took Jude back to Finsbury Park, ‘the scene of the crime’, as he called it. Summer had burst through the bareness he remembered; the dark green was now soft and the trees a remote rustling of leaves. He spread out a picnic of cheese sandwiches and early season strawberries on the lawn and she presented him with a bottle of champagne. When she brushed his hair from his forehead he could see the July sunlight shining through drops on her lips, and when she pushed her mouth onto his he could taste it, a mix of sour and sweet.
Two plastic cups later she told him again how proud she was of him, beautiful in her sincerity. He jumped on the moment. He’d been planning it for days, and had waited all morning for this opportunity to confront her.
Despite her promise, Jude had still not told her parents about them. To her family, he didn’t exist. Her pride in him was only a half-truth, a self-deception – otherwise why the secrecy? Her face fell as he spoke, the words tumbling out of him.
‘You’ll feel better after you tell them,’ he argued. ‘They deserve to know. What are you waiting for?’
He saw her blue eyes shift towards the trees, like birds startled into flight. ‘I will tell them, but it has to be the right time,’ she floundered, nonsensically defensive. ‘I need Tony to help me, and he’s been away in Geneva all summer.’ Then came the counter. ‘You haven’t even told your sister. Or your mother.’
‘My mother hasn’t seen me in more than ten years,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t care if I’m alive or dead. And my sister hasn’t seen me in nearly as long. They’re not part of my life now.’
‘You told me about that letter your brother sent you. From Lebanon. She does want to see you, you said. She wrote to you. Why don’t you go and see them? It might make you feel better.’ A child’s ploy, easy to see through but hard to deflect.
‘Why are we talking about my family and Lebanon? This is about your family in Sunderland, the people you don’t want to know you’re living with an Arab.’
‘For God’s sake, Sal.’
‘No, not for God’s sake. For our sake, Jude. Isn’t there something special here? Something worth the risk?’
‘Worth shouting from the rooftops,’ she said, but her face was troubled.
‘So? What are you afraid of?’ She shook her head, her hand coming up to touch his cheek. Nothing, the gesture said. But he felt a deep disquiet as he watched her hand fall from his face, retreating to pull at the two gold chains twisted around her neck.
Finally, Salim arranged a coffee with Hassan. It was his last attempt to manipulate her innate sense of fairness, to play on her strongly knotted strings of guilt.
In truth he had been almost as reluctant to get Jude and Hassan together as Jude was to make that long-dreaded phone call to Sunderland. Hassan was an unvarnished Arab, proud to be so, rejecting the English niceties Salim had been so keen to learn. How would he appear to a sheltered Jewish girl whose idea of foreign exoticism was the Parisian Left Bank?
They met at Hassan’s house on a Sunday afternoon. Hassan’s wife had cooked a greasy feast: cooked soft rolled cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice, chicken on a bed of oily potatoes, imitations of manquish pastries full of heavy English lamb, and a rich dessert of kanafi, buttered vermicelli swimming on top of a bed of sugared white cheese.
They sat on the old, brown twin sofas while Hassan smoked and Salim sipped his beer. Salim could see Jude looking around at the strangeness of the house. Like other Arabs, Hassan and Shireen preferred electricity to sunlight inside their living room. The curtains were partially drawn and the daylight gave way to the glare of cheap ceiling lights. A spicy, greasy smell came from the kitchen, mingling with the ashy haze of cigarettes. Bronze plates and wall hangings with hadiths from the Qur’an were placed around plastic flower arrangements. The desperate thought came – this is not her world.
Perhaps Hassan sensed his thoughts. Whether or not, he became increasingly irritable and irritating. First, he started berating Salim for not going back to the Middle East after graduating. ‘You have no gratitude,’ he scoffed. ‘Tareq and Nadia put you through university, and you can’t even give them five minutes. And what about Rafan? He says you never wrote back to him. Is that what brothers do?’
‘Is it what brothers do to be silent for ten years?’ Salim shot back, heat rising into his face. ‘After one letter you want me to go running to Lebanon. I’m too busy for this nonsense.’
Hassan poked his finger at Jude, a sneer on his face. He had been drinking, Salim saw. ‘This big man here, he never forgets an insult, believe me. He can’t let anything go. You’ll see. Not even with his own family. He’s too proud for us. I hope he doesn’t get too proud for his English family too.’
‘Leave her be, Hassan,’ Salim said, in Arabic. He could tell the effort of speaking in English all the time was affronting his brother, making him more provocative.
‘Why, then?’ Hassan said, refusing to switch from English. ‘She comes to my house, she’s a grown woman. Let her hear the truth, why not?’
‘Sal wants to go back to see his family,’ Jude said quickly. Her expression said, all too plainly, how could this man and mine be brothers? ‘But he has a new job starting in a few weeks. When he’s settled, maybe we’ll go together?’ The last words were framed as a question. He caught her eyes, and she smiled. Salim was startled. Did she think he was going to the Middle East with her?
‘You and he are going to Palestine together?’ Hassan said, his eyes widening. ‘Ya Salim, what have you been telling this girl? Doesn’t she watch the news?’
Salim felt like pebbles were rumbling under his feet, the beginning of the avalanche. ‘Stop it, Hassan.’
‘No,’ said Hassan, his voice rising. ‘You want to do this thing together, this peace and love thing? In England, okay. In Palestine there’s no peace, no love. If you go together, you won’t get flowers, you’ll get stones. How can Salim take a Jew back to his family? I’m sorry, but you’re crazy, both of you.’
He saw Jude go white, and set her half-tasted cup of Turkish coffee down on the glass table. Her mouth, usually so gentle, narrowed into a hard, thin line.
‘Sal and I both belong there,’ she said, her voice trembling with anger he’d rarely sensed in her. ‘We both have family there. Not everyone throws stones, only the people who want to fight more than they want anything else.’
‘You don’t belong there,’ Hassan said flatly. ‘The Zionists think God gave them my house, but it isn’t written in the Qur’an or any other book I know. Salim said you weren’t a Zionist but what does he know? I say, scratch a Jew and you get Ben-Gurion.’
Jude got to her feet. Salim saw that she was near tears and hating herself for it. He was on his feet too, saying, ‘Jude, come on, sit down,’ grasping her with one hand and Hassan with another.
‘I think we should go home now,’ she said, her voice cracking. Hassan threw his hands up in the air and said, in a more subdued voice, to Shireen, ‘Someone has to tell them, yani.’
Salim could have punched him, could have screamed retaliations at him, but it was too late. As he got Jude’s coat and tried to make light of it with small talk, he knew a deeper damage had already been done.
The journey from London’s suburban south-east to its busy north-west was achingly long and slow. At Piccadilly Circus, Jude’s patience ran out. She told Salim she was going back to her room in the student halls, and she would see him later. His protests were weak. They both wanted to be alone.
She walked through Soho as if she was dreaming, past dark avenues of sex shops and young faces with wildly coloured hair falling over thin shoulders. She pushed through a crowd of them as they laughed, breathing in clouds of smoke from the stub ends of their thin cigarettes and the fruity smell of beer splashing on her shoes. Different songs floated through the evening air in a faint dissonance, arms of sound grasping at her as she went by. It was late summer and the skies were still emptying like a glass of water, preparing for a pale and star-strewn darkness to set in.
She was still trembling, from the scorn she’d heard in Hassan’s voice and the hateful wave of anger she’d felt breaking over her. The scorching bitterness of the Turkish coffee lingered in her mouth, a strong, overpowering taste that mocked her weak palate. She remembered looking up at Hassan from the blackness of the cup and seeing the same colour in his eyes.
She should not blame Salim for his brother, and yet in that moment she felt angry with him – angry he was an Arab, angry he’d pursued her in the first place, furious with herself for becoming so entwined with him that she could not imagine letting go. Is this how our lives will be? Resentment from all sides, no place to call home?
She turned onto Warwick Street and walked past the Our Lady of Assumption Chapel, where one of her Polish Catholic classmates used to go for Mass.
It had amazed Judith when she learned that church doors are always unlocked. It spoke of a welcome she could not imagine in her own faith, a world of open arms where no one was an outsider. The heavy brown door of the chapel swung inwards at a touch, drawing Jude across a glowing threshold into the clasp of warmth and candlelight.
Inside, the room was filled with a cloying calm. Candles flickered in the half-light, and rosy-stained windows showed saints reaching out to figures robed in blue and gold. To Jude they looked strangely antiseptic; their impassive white faces gazed down on the penitents huddled in the red pews below.
She edged into one of the rows and sat on the worn cushion. What would Jack and Dora say if they could see her now, their precious daughter and only blood sitting before a statue of the Virgin Mary? Dora had always reserved a special disdain for Christ’s mother; she insisted that Jesus was a product of young Mary’s sleepwalking in a Roman military encampment and an unintended encounter with a foot soldier. ‘She used to walk in her sleep all the time,’ she’d told Jude during a dismissal of her friend Kath’s religious beliefs. ‘She was known for it.’
This Mary did indeed look sleepy, her eyes half-closed and a sad curl to her lips, nearer to a wince than a smile. The cowls over her head made Jude think of a woman in mourning, of hidden sorrows.
Jude felt those unshed tears come back to her eyes again – the traitor tears that always seemed to come when she wanted to scream instead of weep. Now she did not try to stop them flowing down her cheeks. Tell me what to do.
She pushed the thought up towards the ageless Mary in her blue shawl, her skin so white and clear, her hands reaching out to Jude with comfort. Around her the murmur of sorrow and thanksgiving filled the air. It grew around her like waves on the shore at sunset, after the storms of the day have passed.
She asked him to meet her at Virginia’s the next morning.
When she arrived he was already sitting there, his face downcast. Her heart went out to him, but she steeled herself.
‘How are you?’ he said as she sat down.
She nodded quickly, and said, ‘I’m okay.’ What a stupid answer. But he was too distracted to notice.
‘I’m sorry for yesterday,’ he said, a slight hint of belligerence in his voice. ‘You know it wasn’t my fault. There’s just no point in arguing with Hassan. You should have left it alone.’
She fingered Rebecca’s chain for courage.
‘But that’s just it, Sal,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘They won’t leave us alone. Our families will never accept us like this. I thought yours might, but I don’t think so any more.’
He bit his lip, and threw his hands up.
‘Jude, you have to understand Hassan. He’s an idiot, a peasant. Please, please don’t do anything because of him. We can fix all of that, in time.’
‘It’s not just Hassan,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s all of them. My family hears Arab and all they see is angry people killing Jews. And yours think I’m just another Israeli. I can only think of one way to prove them wrong.’
He looked dubious. ‘How?’
‘Do what Hassan says we can’t,’ she answered. ‘Take me home with you. To Israel. Palestine – you know what I mean. It’s the best way to show we don’t stand with one side or the other. We can stay with my uncle on his kibbutz and see how things work there. Then we can stay in Nazareth, with your sister. I want to see Jaffa and the place you grew up.’
‘We?’ He looked at her in such blank disbelief that she felt her certainties shudder. She’d been up half the night thinking about it, turning their lives around like a broken picture, trying to make the pieces fit.
‘We have to show them,’ she pleaded. ‘That Hassan and my uncles are all wrong.’ He has to understand. ‘I’ve had Israel rammed down my throat all my life. My parents wanted me to go, Max – everyone. But I never wanted to. It was meaningless to me. Until now. When you talked about your home, it changed how I felt. I want to see this place through your eyes. And if we can convince our families over there, no one here could argue – and all of this hiding would be done forever.’
She felt him pull his hand away from hers, the table suddenly cold beneath her fingers. ‘How could you even think this, Jude?’ The words came out like a slap. ‘I was driven out of my home. I never went back. Now you tell me that the first time I should go back, I should go with a Jew? To stay with Zionists? Are you mad?’
She was frozen to the spot, her palms cold with sweat. ‘Not with a Jew,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘With me.’
He pointed to the chain around her neck. ‘You can’t hide that thing there. You don’t even try. Here, together, maybe something’s possible. If we go back there, it’s just you and a Palestinian traitor.’ He pushed his chair back from the table.
‘Is that what you care about?’ she said. ‘What these people you’ve always laughed at think of you?’
‘They’re my people,’ he said, his black eyes furious. ‘You care more about your family’s approval, about this Jewish thing, than you do about me. You want to take me to your uncle’s kibbutz, to prove I’m a tame Arab. I see. Hassan was right. We don’t understand each other at all.’
As if in a dream she saw him stand up and begin to walk away. For a moment he slowed – the door was just in front of him, and a tiny, lost thought came to her: he will come back.
But then he walked on, and when he passed her in the window she might have been a stranger sitting there, still as a statue, just an empty blur beyond the dirty glass.
He felt as if his legs did the thinking for him that day, walking him away from the sight of her, pounding down a tunnelled vision of Soho’s gloomy streets, and driving him two weeks later to the very place he’d sworn never to go: the airport and a journey to reawaken the dead.
Even the letter he’d eventually opened and the telephone call with Rafan were foggy recollections. He’d wanted to bury the image of Jude in his mother’s touch, in the embrace of a brother who used to curl up next to him. As he read Rafan’s cheerful prose he pictured them both, waiting for him in a warmer world.
Rafan himself was all enthusiasm. ‘Just let me take care of everything, big brother.’ Down the hissing line his voice sounded deep and eager. ‘I promise, you’ll never want to leave.’
Salim replayed that voice many times during the five-hour flight, trying to read the man from his buried memories of the boy – the face he’d last seen smiling in a dark basement in Nazareth. How would they even recognize each other? It was a bitter idea. From take-off to touchdown at Beirut’s Aéroport International, he tried to wrestle his memories into submission, letting them go to make space for new ones. I will have a brother again. A mother again. That’s all that matters.
But when he saw the stranger waving from the humid arrivals hall, for a moment his disappointment was sharp as a knife in the ribs. ‘Big brother,’ the tall stranger said, moving towards him with open arms.
Everything about this Rafan was jarringly familiar, like a favourite tune in a different key. The green eyes were still wide and guileless. And the mouth turned up at the corners in the way that Salim remembered – the tantalizing secret smile. But above his silk shirt the full baby cheeks had thinned and shaped a face as striking as his mother’s. His jaw was dark with stubble and expensive sunglasses rested on his fair head.
He greeted Salim with an easy laugh. ‘My big brother,’ he said again, kissing him lightly on both cheeks. ‘I never thought I would see the day.’ His lips had become as full and smooth as a girl’s.
‘Rafan.’ Salim found his voice choked with an emotion he did not expect. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’ Why did it take so long for you to look for me? That was what he longed to ask.
‘Everything happens in its own time, big brother,’ Rafan said, his hand tight on Salim’s back. ‘Now you’re here, you’ll see. Come on, the car’s waiting.’
They headed towards Beirut’s white skyscrapers, listening to the radio in Rafan’s new Mercedes. The airport was a dwindling speck in the distance, vanishing in a blaze of light. Outside, the southern highway whipped by under dark blue skies. A woman was singing, a sound full of strange memories. I know that voice. Umm Kulthum, the mother of music, had been a legend since his mother was a girl. Once the whole Arab world had stopped to listen to her. Now – maybe there was no one left to hear.
The sadness of the song infected him too, as he leaned his forehead against the warm glass.
My heart, don’t ask where love has gone,
It was a citadel of my imagination that fell,
Pour me a drink, let’s drink to the ruins,
And tell the story for me, while I cry
Rafan was talking over the music; he rhapsodized about the warm seas, about Jounieh’s white beaches and champagne at the Saint-Georges Yacht Club. Salim let him talk. This was why he came, to wash the pale English dust off his body and float in carefree Arabian waters.
Tantalizing glimpses of the Mediterranean sparkled out of the window, looking left and west into the falling sun. Ahead of them, the glamorous curve of the city stretched out in a wide embrace.
Beirut! Warm sun and warmer women, Hassan had said. That suited him perfectly.
The scenery had changed to their right; Rafan had turned off the highway, and now the Mercedes was crawling past a dirty sprawl of low corrugated roofs, spreading out as far as Salim could see – a filthy brown rug at the white feet of the city. The refugee camps. Tens of thousands of Palestinians sheltered there, or so he’d read. More were coming every day, fleeing Israeli tanks in the West Bank. Salim imagined them closing their front doors for the last time, wondering what the future might hold. It was supposed to be just for a short while, he thought, remembering the slam of the gate in Jaffa. And then it turned into the rest of our lives.
It put a sharp edge on his mood; the view out of the windscreen darkened as Umm Kulthum wailed over the roar of the engine. Beirut’s tall skyline loomed ahead.
Rafan paid the camps no attention. ‘Change of plan, big brother,’ he said. ‘It’s too early for the house. I don’t know about you, but I fancy a drink.’ Salim found his accent strange, almost French, with husky, slithering syllables. ‘We’ll go to Hamra later. Now I want to show you the real Beirut.’
Hamra was the richest part of the city, the home of old Arabic money. When Salim first heard that Rafan was living there, he said, ‘How come?’ before remembering that he didn’t really want to know. Rafan’s grin had been audible even over the telephone. ‘Hey, big brother. What can I say? Mama did well for herself.’
Beirut had done well for itself too. The jammed road into town gradually unfolded into wide, white boulevards lined with palm trees, brilliantly green in the sunshine.
Everywhere, Salim heard the throaty, thrilling snarl of expensive cars and saw the flash of bronzed legs striding smoothly through the traffic. Around the Place des Martyrs, in between its circulating buses, parked sedans and brand new motorbikes, people moved to the pulse of life in all its fullness, on their way to meetings, to trysts, to coffee houses and shops. Salim’s eyes followed them. Going to dance, to play, to love.
Beyond the city centre, the Corniche swept the brothers out to the vast blue playground of the Med. New hotels were springing up on the Promenade, and fairgrounds on the beach. Out on the sea waterskiers floated back and forth as silent as a dream, sending white wisps of spray up into the air. A green-capped mountain rose above the shimmering haze. Below the road, on the long sands, Salim could see men and women rushing headlong into the sea together, their bodies warm and lithe in the heat. It reminded him of Tel Aviv, all those years ago – the same brown limbs, the same heedless dance.
They pulled up outside one of the smaller hotels. Salim followed Rafan out onto the patio overlooking the Corniche. They sat quietly, sipping their drinks under a picture of the Virgin Mary. Salim could see the notorious Hotel Saint-Georges on the tip of the bay, glowing roundly in its pink and white shell.
‘Look at that,’ Rafan said to him. ‘It’s just like a nipple begging to be sucked.’ Salim laughed. How could they be the same person, the little boy who wet the bed and this worldly man? Salim felt strangely elated by his brother’s transformation. He sat back in the chair and relaxed. The sun is warm and the women are warmer, he thought. Jude was cold. Here he could be himself.
‘The Frenchies built this place, you know. The Christians.’ Rafan gestured out to the Saint-Georges. ‘They’re the ones with the money round here. Muslims have never been smart with money, unless they had oil to play with.’
‘The Muslims seem to be doing okay too,’ Salim said, looking at his brother’s silk shirt and heavy gold watch. ‘Hassan told me this place was an Arab paradise.’
‘A fool’s paradise,’ Rafan said. ‘Although you might say they are one and the same thing. In Israel it’s the Jews over the Arabs. Here it’s the Christians over the Muslims, with the Druze stirring the pot. One day it will all boil over. But until then…’ He picked up his drink, raised it. ‘Sahtein,’ he said – good health.
‘The English think all Arabs are either emirs or beggars,’ Salim said, as the sour cocktail slipped down his throat and warmed his stomach. ‘They can’t get used to the idea that I’m just an accountant.’ Although he’d been a beggar when he’d arrived there. He would never forget that.
Rafan laughed. ‘I can’t get used to it either. Salim Al-Ishmaeli, counting English pounds? But I guess it’s better than being Tareq in Nazareth, counting up his master’s shekels.’
‘And what kind of money do you count, then?’ Rafan had never told Salim what he did for a living. He had a Lebanese passport through their mother, which allowed him to work or study – whichever he wanted. But Rafan didn’t dress like a student. Nor did he carry himself like a businessman.
His brother ran one neatly buffed fingernail over the rim of his glass.
‘There’s only one kind of currency worth counting, big brother,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think they deal it out at the bank.’ Behind his head, a waterskier sent a white plume up into the sky; Salim heard a tiny shriek of joy or fear come drifting across the water. He wondered again what he wanted from Rafan. An apology? An explanation? He looked at him, trying to see the boy who’d needed him so, the one fed on secrets and false hopes. The son their mother had chosen to keep.
‘Is that why Mama left?’ he asked suddenly, pushing his glass to one side. ‘Because our father’s money wasn’t enough for her? Come on, she must have told you. Was that it?’
Rafan leaned back in his seat. He stretched his arms behind his head and regarded his older brother.
‘You know, Salim, Mama always says the past is the past. Why do you want to sit here, in this nice place with your nice drink, and talk about all the sad shit we’ve been through? Does it really matter now?’
‘I have a right to know,’ Salim said, a spark of anger flaring inside him. ‘I looked after you every day for eight years, remember? All this time, and never a word. So why now? What made you write? Don’t tell me it was Baba’s death, because I know that’s bullshit.’
Rafan wagged his finger at Salim. ‘What you want to know, I can’t give you, Salim. I was only a kid. I don’t remember anything about that time, just a bed that stank and bad dreams.’ His eyes were impossible to read behind their amber glass, but his words stung nonetheless. After all that love and care, hadn’t Salim earned a place in Rafan’s memory?
Rafan leaned forward and slid Salim’s drink back in front of him. ‘But I can tell you what I learned after we came here, big brother. The Arabs in Palestine are living like rats. Tareq and Nadia were mice, our father was a rat and we were his little baby rats picking up crumbs from the Israeli table. Is that a way to live? Isn’t it better to be a free man among the Arabs than a fellah on a white master’s farm?’ He lifted his glasses onto his forehead and looked calmly at Salim, green eyes narrowed against the sun.
‘Free?’ Salim said. ‘I saw those camps. It looked like there were plenty of rats living there.’
Rafan shrugged his shoulders.
‘You can’t see everything there is to see from the roadside, big brother,’ he said. ‘It’s like in your English forests. The wolves may hide. But their teeth are still sharp and in the end they rule the other beasts.’
‘Wolves, rats,’ Salim laughed. ‘What are you trying to tell me? That you joined the PLO?’ The Palestine Liberation Organization had reached the English news recently. Once Salim had thought it was a joke, another faint-hearted Arab struggle. But Nadia had written to say that young people in the occupied West Bank were joining up after the latest war, and she worried what the future might bring for them.
Rafan laughed too, his mouth opening wide. ‘Ya Salim,’ he shook his head. ‘Life is too short for politics, old bean.’ He spoke in English now, and Salim had heard him conversing with the barman in French. But then his voice became serious. ‘I can’t explain it all now, big brother. You have to see for yourself. You should know that I never forgot you all these years, not for a minute. I’ve always wanted you to come here. Yes, to repay you. Whatever happened before, we are family still, the same blood. So come on, drink up. One day the dogs will eat us all.’
When the first glasses had been drained to their rattling ice cubes, and the second, and the third, the sun had dipped under the horizon. The sea turned a violent red and sucked at the shore.
They went into Hamra for dinner. Two smiling girls calling themselves Leila and Dalia joined them, and Rafan ordered for all of them: grilled steak, rich red tomatoes, hot bread and spicy peppers. Later, a young man arrived in a white suit and soft cream car to take them to a club downtown.
They sped down the Rue de Phénicie with open windows, the night air screaming into the car. Salim felt either Leila or Dalia put a warm hand on his leg. Rafan’s friend wanted to gamble, and the girls were shrieking ‘Crazy Horse! Crazy Horse!’ as the lights sped by.
Salim remembered tumbling into a red room, dim with velvet and soft crystal chandeliers. The floor was spinning, it seemed, spinning in a blur of laughter and dark lace. He swayed in time with the pulse of it, stumbling into one of the black pillars beside him. Rafan was in one corner, talking to a blonde girl; his head bent close to her cheek, his hand slipping into hers.
The music reeled across the floor. Leila wanted to dance, and she pulled him into the crowd. Rafan had vanished. Salim leaned forward into Leila’s arms, closing his eyes and letting their bodies move together in the hot and close darkness.
He felt as if he could just drift away – away from himself, from memories of Jude, from the person he’d tried to become. The music changed, its beat harder than before, and Leila was pressed up against him. Now he was alone, on an untroubled sea and there were soft hands pulling him, pulling him gently out into the void.
He didn’t remember going to bed. When he woke, his head was filled with nails and straw. Light was already blazing in through drawn curtains.
He reached out his hand into the grey space, and hit something hard – a wall. On the other side of him, a person stirred. He looked around. She still had her knickers on, and his shirt. She reminded him of Margaret, lying there on her stomach. Her dark hair tumbled over her back and her nails stretched bloodily out over the sheets.
Voices sounded dimly outside the door. Pushing himself slowly to his feet, he winced with the forgotten pain of a hangover. He found his jeans on the floor, pulled them over his legs and staggered to his feet.
The bedroom door opened into a small living room – dark doors leading directly off it. The late afternoon sun came trickling down through a glass panel in the ceiling, dancing with the dust in the air.
At the central table, four men were sitting. Salim could smell hashish burning somewhere, over the acrid stink of cigarette ash. Rafan was in the same clothes he’d been wearing last night. His eyes were shadowed; they looked black under the faint, filtered skylight.
‘Salim, big brother.’ Rafan waved him over. ‘Come and say hello to the guys.’ Salim walked forward and nodded at the rest of the table. These men looked very different to the suave friend of last night. They were darker skinned, heavier, and they did not smile when they saw him. The one closest to him looked up; something was bulging from his belt, black like the butt of a handgun.
‘Keefak, keefak,’ he said to each politely, shaking their hands. How is this life? Their accents were familiar, a poorer version of his father’s. Their hands were calloused. Before they came here, they must have been fellahin, Salim thought. Farmers and street workers, now big men with guns.
‘So,’ he said, sitting down and taking the joint out of Rafan’s hand to fill his own lungs. ‘Are you from Palestine?’
‘We are, habibi,’ the man with the bulging belt said. Salim sensed that the greeting, my beloved friend, was both welcome and warning. ‘My brothers and I are down from Tripoli. Farouk here is visiting from Jordan, from Karameh.’ Salim nodded silently. The Jordanian border town was the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The big man called Farouk looked at him with pitted eyes. ‘You Al-Ishmaelis are from Jaffa, I hear. God bless you all. I came from there too, from Manshiyya. I worked in the fields, picking the fruit back then, with my father, may Allah bless his eyes.’
‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Salim said, automatically. This was a man his father might have employed. The ay’an put food in their mouths, but when the ay’an fled they were left with nothing to eat and no one to lead them. Now the ay’an were living comfortably in Europe and the fellahin were left here, taking the fight to the Jews.
‘God bless you,’ the man said again. ‘We have a base in Tripoli now, with our brothers in Fatah. I think our brothers in Jordan may be joining us soon, if the hammer falls there. Jordan is a traitor bitch. Hussein is the Jew’s bitch. We’ll fuck her like a dog.’ His voice was grim. Even Salim knew, from listening to the BBC Arabic Service, that wily King Hussein would one day throw all the Palestinians out again – starting with men like Farouk.
‘How did you come here, Farouk?’ Salim asked carefully. He felt like the stranger he’d once been in England, afraid to put a foot wrong. Rafan, he saw, was watching him carefully.
‘I came to the camps in Tripoli with my family during the Nakba. The Irgun drove their tanks through my house in Manshiyya. My wife died, my father died. My youngest son died here in the camps, from the blood in his guts. My oldest son is a soldier with me, may Allah protect him. That’s my story, the same as many.’ He paused to take a deep draw on the joint.
‘But you’re in London, Rafan tells us,’ he went on, coughing as the strong smoke came streaming out. ‘That’s a good place to be. Bullets can’t drive out the Zionists. We need educated men, big heads. There are men like that now. Arafat. Abbas. Young men, but clever. We need them in Europe too. What do you do in London?’
Rafan answered, ‘He’s planning to be a rich man, Farouk. Right, big brother? And marry a blonde girl with big tits.’
Salim ignored him and spoke directly to Farouk. ‘I studied economics. Now I need to get my first job. I’m not a big man like my brother here, but I haven’t forgotten the struggle.’ He put his hand over his heart and felt the empty beating there, the hollowness that said you did forget, you made yourself forget. Salim wanted no part of the struggle. It never seemed to end, but it never seemed to go anywhere either.
The men stopped talking when Leila came swaying out of the bedroom, kissed Rafan and started to make Turkish coffee. As the sun began to sink again and the room darkened, Salim saw Rafan and Farouk disappear into the bedroom together and come out ten minutes later. Farouk was carrying a duffel bag, black and scarred. There were hard outlines that looked like bricks bulging out of the leather. Hashish, or money maybe? A prickle of adrenaline crept like ice down his back. If this was the nature of the struggle, then what was Rafan? And what did this stranger-brother want from him?
Once the men had left, they changed their clothes and went out alone for dinner. Salim had little appetite. He pushed his food back and forth on his plate, trying to understand what he wanted to say. Eventually, Rafan kicked him under the table.
‘What did you expect, big brother?’ he said. ‘A student waving petitions? The Knights of the Round Table? You’ve been with the Angleezi too long. You forgot how to be a Palestinian.’
‘I am a Palestinian,’ Salim protested angrily. ‘How dare you judge me? It takes more than hashish and guns to make you a Palestinian. I was the only one that cared about our house, the only one who ever wanted to go back. You, Mama, Hassan – you couldn’t get away fast enough.’
‘You’re wrong, big brother,’ Rafan said. ‘You’re not Palestinians any more. None of you. So you have your British passport and your degree. Good for you. But I never wanted those things, Salim.’ He took a mouthful of kebab. ‘Hmm, it’s good. Try it.’ When Salim shook his head, Rafan went on.
‘What’s special about this place? I’ll tell you. Palestine is still alive here, in the camps and with men like Farouk. We have brothers in every other house, from Amman to Tripoli. The PLO is ready to come across the Jordanian border and run the south. The Shia will come on board. Those old chickens over there,’ he pointed towards the Christian Maronite sectors east of the city, ‘will just lie down. It’s coming, you’ll see.’ Salim sat there, transfixed. Rafan leaned over towards him.
‘Why don’t you get that clever head of yours to work with your own people?’ he said. ‘What else do you have to do in London?’
Jude. Her name leapt to his lips, but he pushed it away.
‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a stranger here.’
‘Because you’re my brother,’ Rafan said, and his green eyes were so compelling that Salim felt his heart lurch. ‘Who else do I have but you? All these years we were apart, can you say you were happy? Isn’t that why you came looking for me now? To get home to your family, where you belong?’
Salim felt a surge of something somewhere between hope and anger, a swift tide filling his chest. This is my brother, my real family. The idea of coming home, of undoing past wrongs – it was so sweet. A true home, not the house of cards he’d been building with Jude. ‘And what happens if we win?’ he said eventually, knowing what he hoped to hear. ‘What do you want in the end, Rafan? Are you saying we can go back?’
Rafan threw back his head and howled with laughter, like a dog out on the beach.
‘Ya Salim,’ he gasped. ‘Mama was right. You’re a fellah like Father. You’re obsessed with that pile of bricks and leaves.’ He wiped his eyes and his face twisted into a smile. ‘No, big brother, there’s no going back in our lifetime. But we bring them the bill for the past. And we can make them pay.’
That night, Rafan drove them to his mother’s apartment in Hamra. They walked past the guard at the front entrance into a marble lobby full of light. A lift took them up to the top floor, and opened to a long, dark corridor. Translucent lights studded the walls, sculpted in the shape of women’s sleeping faces. Salim felt his chest tighten at the sight of them, so serene and so very cold.
As Rafan opened the door, he heard music, faint but soothing – Fairouz, the new Lebanese obsession, singing a song by Umm Kulthum. Beirut’s distant nightlife shimmered in through the great arched windows in waves of red, blue and green. Two lamps lit up the room’s opposing corners, identical horses rearing up with glowing balls between their hooves. A dark Persian carpet muffled their footsteps.
‘Mama,’ Rafan called, throwing his keys down onto the lacquered table. ‘Mama, come on. Salim is here.’
She came out of her room wearing a flowing green dress, adjusting an earring. Her hair swept up in an auburn tower, plaited over her brow like a crown. As she came towards them, her perfume surrounded Salim like the scent of heated bronze.
‘Hi Mama,’ he said, amazed to find his eyes full of tears. It was a moment he’d rehearsed so many times in different shades of anger or forgiveness. But the tears shamed him, reducing him into the little boy left behind.
She walked over to him, put her white hand on one cheek and laid her lips against his other. She was not as tall as he remembered, and the light touch of her face felt powdery.
‘Salim,’ she said, stepping back to look at him, her green eyes dark as the sea. ‘You got tall, ya’eini. I knew you would.’
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said, trembling. ‘I missed you.’
She moved away from him, towards a desk in the corner, and lifted a cigarette out of a silver box. Rafan took a light over to her, and Salim watched her neck rise as she drew the smoke in. He could see the bones moving loosely under the skin. She got old, he thought in shock. Or was she always like this?
‘Some things are too complicated for boys to understand,’ she said, walking over to the glimmering window. ‘I know it was hard for you, but it was better that way. Now you’re a success in England. I have a man who looks after me properly. Everyone’s happy.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and said, ‘There’s beer in the kitchen, Rafan. Get some for your brother.’
Seating herself on the edge of the sofa, she patted the cushion beside her. Salim sat slowly down. ‘So tell me, ya’eini,’ she said, her voice edged with hoarseness, ‘what’s it like in London? You have a degree now, and a good job? I’m so proud of you. I knew you would be a big man.’
They sat there quietly together, while she smoked and gazed at a point over his head. He told her about London, the restaurants and theatres, and the new job he would start next month. Everything but Jude. He imagined Jude sitting there beside him, her pale light draining out into the pit of his mother’s expression.
After ten minutes the telephone rang. ‘I’m coming,’ she said into the mouthpiece. Rafan brought over a fur stole, and she pulled it around her shoulders. ‘We’ll talk more later, ya’eini,’ she said. Salim thought her eyes looked dead. He’d dreamed of an apology, of her arms around his neck and tears against his face. But as she kissed him goodbye and walked to the door, he found he no longer wanted her arms near him.
The night crawled by, and Salim lay sleepless on his brother’s bedroom floor. When morning came, he woke Rafan and said, ‘Let’s go out.’ The door to his mother’s room was open. She had not come home.
They drove south along the old Damascus road, before turning west to Shatila refugee camp. The camp outskirts had two barricades. The Lebanese Army held the first. Salim saw an older man in a plain suit watching as the soldier called them to a halt. ‘Deuxième Bureau,’ Rafan said, as they were waved through after showing papers and passports. ‘Military intelligence. Those bastards will be the first ones to go.’
Camp residents ran the second checkpoint. A man in a black and white checked keffiyeh flagged the car down. Rafan greeted him by name and asked after his father. Salim shook his hand through the window.
They drove through into a wall of noise and stench. An open sewer ran beside them, under the tangle of wires linking shack to shack and tenement to tenement. Washing dripped in the dirty air. An old man sat on the ground, a pile of old shoes beside him. One cheek was sunken into toothless gums and fluid from an infected eye ran down the other.
Children ran ahead of the car, cheering them along. He felt something stir inside him, watching them skip past them, yelling in the exuberance of young life. Fifteen years later, after the massacre that left dozens of small bodies red and limp on the ground here, he would think of those children again and wonder if they had vanished in the slaughter.
Abu Ziad, Rafan’s friend, was playing backgammon on a plastic chair outside a stall selling falafel. His belly spilled over his knees like the worry beads tumbling over his fist. Parcels stamped with the United Nations logo were being carried into a block behind them. A sticker on the door said Filastinuna, with a Palestinian flag sketched next to it.
They drank a short coffee while Abu Ziad bemoaned the Lebanese government and its Christian leadership. Palestinian Muslims couldn’t get work permits, he said, while their Christian brothers and the rich could easily buy a passport. ‘We are less than dogs to these Beirutis,’ he growled. ‘But one day dogs bite back.’ They talked about the corruption of the official camp supervisors, the slowness of the UN and the prospects for Fatah out of Tripoli. Salim was asked about life in London, and the possibility of the British rejoining the fight on Palestine’s side.
Before they left, Rafan handed Abu Ziad some money in an envelope. A contribution, he said, to his children’s charity. He was thanked and blessed, and the envelope disappeared into the old man’s pocket.
On their way out, Salim breathed the air deeply, wanting to taste the stench of the place fully, to carry it out with him. His life in London – the accountancy job waiting for him – what did it mean, compared to this sink of human misery? At that moment he felt dirty, guilty for courting the supercilious Angleezi and for cherishing his British passport. Rafan had it right – he did not deserve to call himself a Palestinian. He had not yet paid the price.
He looked towards Rafan. His brother was unusually silent. Salim saw his mouth was a thin line and his knuckles white on the wheel.
After a moment, Rafan said, ‘You know that this is where we lived first, when we left Nazareth?’
Salim was astonished. ‘In one of those houses?’
‘In worse.’
She left us for that pit? Salim could not fathom it. How could Rafan have survived here at just eight years old, with all his thousand fears?
‘But she’s Lebanese.’
‘She’s Lebanese but she came without papers. Israeli passports are no good here. Someone had to bring her in, to fix it for her. So we waited here.’
‘Who fixed it? Her family?’
Rafan shrugged. ‘A running woman has no family. Someone. Some man.’
The telegram crushed in her palm. He remembered it, a yellow smudge against the dark sky above Nazareth. A name must have been hidden inside, a name worth leaving them for, worth waiting alone in a refugee camp while Salim wept for her, staring out northwards to the hills. I hope it made you happy, Mama. And yet last night she’d seemed alone still. Locked in a tower circled by marble and glass, like a captured queen from the old stories.
‘Why did she do it?’ He spoke aloud, and the sound surprised him. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘That’s what I told her,’ Rafan said, answering a different question. Behind the sunglasses his face was stone. ‘God knows. Maybe she felt she had some debt to pay.’
The very next day, after a night in Leila’s apartment, Rafan woke him up by shaking his shoulder. ‘Good news, big brother,’ he said, his unwashed face dark with bristle and his green eyes suavely gleaming again. Yesterday had been spat away with his toothpaste. ‘We’re on our way to Tripoli.’
Salim raised himself on his elbows, shaking off the fog of sleep. ‘Why Tripoli?’ But of course he already knew.
‘Farouk wants you to come. He wants you to meet some people.’
‘Brothers.’
Rafan shrugged. ‘Brothers. Friends. Interesting people. And you get to see Tripoli. Okay, it’s not as lively as here.’ Salim saw a flash of Leila’s dark hair and golden legs walking into the kitchen behind the open door. ‘But it’s worth seeing even so. Particularly for you.’
By the time Salim was dressed and in the kitchen, Leila’s Turkish coffee was bubbling on the stove. She poured him a cup and rubbed her eyes. ‘Have you ever been to Tripoli?’ he asked her, sitting down at the table and swirling the thick liquid in its chipped golden cup. She shook her head. ‘I’m not a Filastiniya,’ she said. ‘Although we support them here in West Beirut, not like the Christians.’ She waved her hands. ‘But those people Rafan sees – they’re something else. Tripoli is a crazy place, for crazy religious people.’
This is a crazy place, he thought, but stirred his coffee silently. The bubbles went round and round, popping like his thoughts – this one the camps, this one Rafan’s face as a child pale in sleep, this one his mother’s cold eyes, this one Jude, always Jude and her faith in his dreams.
When Rafan came in, he kissed Leila and whispered something in her ear. She looked at Salim, and went out of the kitchen. Rafan came to sit next to his brother and pulled out a cigarette.
‘You took me to meet Abu Ziad,’ Salim said to his brother. ‘And I already met Farouk. So, I guess they must have liked me. Or is it because I’m your brother?’
‘They liked you. What’s not to like? You’re smart, educated. You speak English like a native. You have an Angleezi passport. You could do great things for them.’
‘For us,’ Salim said softly. Rafan smiled. ‘For us, then. For our family.’
‘So this Tripoli business, is for what? To see my new offices?’
Rafan laughed again. ‘Something like that, yes. Just a conversation, for now.’ He leaned forward and handed Salim a cigarette. Salim took it in and felt the heat inside him. Rafan tilted that attractive face of his to one side, just like a hungry bird. He looked at Salim through narrow eyes.
‘Think about it, Salim. Why do you want to be an accountant? The Angleezi might give you a passport, but in the end they’ll spit on you just like all the other Arabs and Indians and Africans they’ve fucked. You’re too dark for their clubs.’
Salim pushed his coffee back across the table. ‘You know nothing about my life, little brother.’
‘I know enough to see you aren’t being true to yourself. Israel, England – it’s all the same. You’re just Arabs working for a white boss.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Salim said softly. All night he’d lain wrestling with it – two futures, one of them drawn by the brother sitting opposite him. But within, someone was whispering – this is not the boy you knew. The sweetness and the mischief were gone; somewhere between Nazareth and the camps and his mother’s penthouse, Rafan had become something else.
‘I had a life in England,’ he said. ‘I built it myself. Education, respect. Prospects.’ Love, too. He thought of Jude. She’d loved him, and perhaps still did. A clean love, offering everything and expecting nothing in return. ‘You’re asking me to give that up, to help you.’
‘You say you helped me when we were children, Salim,’ Rafan said, getting to his feet. ‘Now let me return the favour. Hassan is happy running his garage and humping his fat little wife. But Mama always said you had ambition. What we could do together – it’s more than just revenge.’ He tapped the table with one finger. ‘It’s up to you, big brother. All these years they kept us apart. Now you must decide where you belong – with them, or with me?’
He straightened up, and looked at his watch. ‘I have to go and finish some business,’ he said. ‘I’m coming back at six. If you’re with me, big brother, we’ll go together.’ He walked around the table, and Salim stood up as Rafan pulled him into a tight embrace. He heard the words brush against his ear: ‘I’ll see you later, Insha’Allah.’ And then his brother was gone down the dark hall, and Salim heard the slam of the door.
After Rafan left, Salim washed his face, pulled on his clothes, said goodbye to Leila and walked out of the building.
The drab little flat was hidden in a maze of old streets that coiled away from the glitz and dazzle of central Beirut. He walked with the sun pounding on his head, like a hammer. By the time he came to the open sea, the sun had tilted into the western skies.
He looked up along the northern coastline, where the sea and land vanished together in the haze. Out there, the modern world waited. He imagined the shore racing up to Turkey and Greece, reaching the Riviera coasts of Europe. Behind him, the sea would sweep past Beirut, Tyre and Israel to the great deserts of North Africa. They really were at the crossroads of the world.
Where do I go from here? To Tripoli and the brothers? Did that road lead back to Jaffa one day? But Rafan had laughed at that idea. His brother neither had a home nor wanted one. He moved through Beirut’s streets like sparks from a fire, consuming everything he came across.
Once Salim had thought home could only ever mean Jaffa. But when he closed his eyes he saw something unexpected: blue eyes, open arms and a sweet, frank face.
He pressed his hands over his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. The towering palm trees above him leaned out west, their green dates ripe for harvest and clustering thickly, and a trickle of sorrow ran through him. I never took in my harvest. I left the fruit on the bough, and it probably rotted and fell.
It was five o’clock. He hailed a taxi and drove to Hamra. His mother’s apartment building was sleepy in the late afternoon; even the concierge was nodding off at his desk.
As he rang the doorbell his chest felt light, his heart weightless. She answered, in her dressing gown. Her face was bare and dull in the sticky evening light, and her forehead wrinkled in surprise.
Salim kissed her cheek and walked inside. She followed him slowly and stood at the top of the stairs, as if hoping he might leave again.
He turned towards her and took a breath. ‘Mama, you never apologized to me. You left your son and never sent him a single word. Then I turn up here, and you don’t say you’re sorry. Nothing. Why? Do I mean so little to you?’
Her face hardened, and her chin went up in that old gesture of scorn. But he could see it now for what it was – guilt masquerading as defiance.
‘I have finished apologizing – even to you, my clever son,’ she said. ‘I learned long ago – we are all alone in this world and we don’t care about each other.’ She moved to stand in front of him and he saw the loose skin around her mouth and eyes. ‘Your father cared only for his pride. You cared only for the house. Rafan cares only for his games. The Jews for their flag, the Palestinians for their acres of dirt.’ She threw her hands up in the air and clenched her fists. ‘Should I be the only one? To care about the others, and sacrifice myself?’
In the background he could hear a turntable playing – a woman’s voice filling the hollow space, echoing into dissonance between the marble walls. He took his mother’s thin hand and held it hard when she tried to pull it away. ‘Did you ever love us at all?’ he asked. This time, there were no tears.
‘How could I not?’ she said. ‘But love brings nothing to people like us. Our roads are set and there’s no escape.’ He saw her eyes laced with age; they looked through him in fury, the present accusing the past. ‘I followed my road, and I don’t ask for forgiveness. Now you go follow yours, as you must. Please, ya’eini. Run now, and stop wishing for things that could never have been.’
Run now. Salim left her apartment before sunset and took a taxi back to Leila’s flat. He packed his clothes into a duffel bag and left Rafan a note. I’m sorry, but my road is not here.
The taxi to the airport took two hours and cost him the rest of his Lebanese pounds. He waited in the airport overnight for the first flight to London.
Arriving at Heathrow in the gentle light of a late summer’s afternoon, he took the fastest train he could find into the city. The chill of autumn was far away. All around him, people were sitting back in their seats after a long day’s work; he imagined them thinking of home and a sweet night to rest with their loves.
He reached her door as the sun was starting its earthward fall, dousing the evening air in thick, yellow light. His heart raced as he knocked. And when the door finally opened, he thought for a second his legs might give way.
Yet, faster than thought, her arms were around his neck and she was crying in his shoulder as he hugged her, held her to him so tightly and felt her heart through her shirt. She was saying, ‘Whatever you wanted, I should have given it to you. I should have been brave, I should have taken you home.’
‘No,’ he said, taking her beautiful face and kissing it over and over. ‘You’re my home,’ he said, through his own joyful tears. ‘You’re the only place I’m at peace.’
‘Our families.’ Her fists pressed against his chest, half clinging on, half pushing away. ‘Those things you said…’
‘I was wrong.’ His forehead was against hers, his senses full of the smell of her – her salt skin, her hair, the warmth of her breath. ‘Please. None of that matters any more. Nothing else matters, do you hear me? This is a miracle, what we’ve found.’
Her mouth was pressed to his, clumsily, and he spoke his promise to her lips. ‘Jude. My Jude. I’ll make you happy, I swear, my love. Whatever else comes, I swear it. I’ve come home now to you.’