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A Oneworld Book

This eBook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2014

First published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth by Oneworld Publications 2014

The moral right of Claire Hajaj to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 978-1-78074-494-0
ISBN 978-1-78074-495-7 (eBook)

eBook, text design and typesetting by Tetragon, London

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England

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For my family, near and far, with admiration and love.

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Darling Sophie,
I don’t expect you to forgive me and I don’t expect you to understand. You were always the good one from the very first. The peacemaker.
But it makes perfect sense to me, now that I’m here and seeing it, really seeing it, Sophie, after imagining it all these years. It’s just like the picture. White. White as a bone. There are trees behind the gate and dust everywhere like gold.
I should hate it, shouldn’t I? But it’s so beautiful out here on its own. Quiet as a dream. Like the home movies we made in the desert when we were children. You remember, with light but no sound, where we were all laughing and waving and he was behind the camera cheering us on. Those were the only times we weren’t pretending, when we were almost like a family.
You know the thing that hurts the most? All those bedtimes when Mum read to us – you know, once upon a time and now that’s the end of the story. Remember how we used to love that? Well, it was all a lie. Stories don’t have any beginnings and endings. They just go on and on. You, me, them, all the people before, just dancing to the same old bloody tune. And I’m tired, so fucking tired. But I can’t see how we’ll ever stop.
The worst thing is – maybe we really would have been happy in this house. Wouldn’t that be the joke? If the old fool was right after all, if this was truly where we belonged? All our best memories hanging on the wall. My first performance. You and me holding hands at the beach. Mum in her wedding dress. Even one of him, maybe playing football right here, in the dust with bare feet and the sea all around. All the things I could have loved about him, that I kept loving even after he threw me away.
I wish I could explain this better, Sophie. I want to find some way to make sense of it, so you can understand me without any word like we always used to. I know you’ll try because you love me, but sometimes that isn’t enough, is it?
But, you know, I have this idea that we’ll all be here together one day. The two tribes, hers and his. Wouldn’t that be the perfect ending? We could walk down this little track, right here, until we reach the sea. I can hear it over the hill just out of sight. It’s talking to me. I swear, it’s whispering in a hundred voices. I bet it could tell the truth of what happened here – if anyone was listening. But no one ever is. We’re all just stumbling around blind in this world. We look straight through each other like strangers, even the people in our own homes.
Remember I love you always.
Marc. Jaffa, December 1988

Even as he finished he knew he’d left too much unsaid. But time was running – the moments flooding together, an exquisite sensation of drowning. He was riding the flood now, carried towards his purpose by the brilliance of the reflecting sea, by the warmth of white stone under his hand as he slipped across the high wall, by the trembling arms of leaves and shadow helping him down into the silent garden.

At last his feet touched the earth. And he saw it – there, cut into the tree’s trunk, a child’s uneven letters curling into the bark. His fingers touched its faint lines. Salim. The circle of the m was half-finished, swallowed by the swelling wood. For a moment it confounded him; the long-forgotten script became a face, and in it a pair of eyes asking a question to which he had no answer. He laid one hand over them, blotting them out. Then, with a knife in the other, he dug his own signature underneath.

The glass in the kitchen door was made of water; it parted when his hand went through and he felt nothing. And then at last he saw the house open up to him, welcoming him inside.

By the time he returned to the kitchen with his empty bag he could hear them gathering beyond the gates, high and insistent as the whine of a bee. It was nearly time, and for an instant he felt the beat of fear. But then he reminded himself; his work was done and he was ready. And between him and those voices stood the whispering trees, the weight of earth and the guarding lattice of branches.

He could hear them as he closed his eyes, the distant song of voices drifting through the boughs like bubbles of the past, freed by the same wind that lifted the leaves, that carried the smell of oranges into the house.

It was laughter he heard through the trees, or something like it – the bright, high call of boys playing. And from somewhere behind him, deep behind the closed doors, a woman could have been singing.

Suddenly he was seized with a moment’s desire: to answer those voices, to stand up and throw open the door and be recognized. But then, in that instant, the light came roaring in. It came with a fury, passing through the door and over him, rushing on and on into the heart of the house. And it filled him with peace as it went, sweeping everything away before it like a returning tide.

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Each man’s life involves the life of all men, each tale is but the fragment of a tale.

Stephen Vizinczey

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