I take a service taxi from the Beka’a Valley to the south that same afternoon. After leaving the strange man and the mulberry tree, I feel somehow lighter, floating without any goal. I haven’t yet expiated my father’s death, far from it, but I’ve somehow silenced the insistence of the unknown. I’ve done all I can, now. I’ve been there, where he died, and found him somewhere else instead. My father’s right beside me, always has been. With his bloodied hands, his many contradictions, the pink flowers under his jacket. He’s part of me now, and he’s all mine. As I sit in the taxi my body is entirely relaxed for the first time since I came back to Beirut.
When I arrive at the compound where Sayed is held it’s already evening, the floodlights on and Israeli soldiers’ faces bathed in an eerie underwater glow. I had tried to phone first and arrange a time to see Sayed, but there was no answer. Now I beg to see him for five minutes at least. It’s not a visiting day and the hour is late. The soldiers confer with each other, call their superiors, shake their heads. I sit on the steps of the sentry box.
‘I’m not going until I see him. Please. I only need to say one thing.’
After two hours, and after the soldiers realise I’m not going to move, I’m allowed in to see Sayed.
‘Three minutes,’ the guard tells me. ‘I’ll be timing you.’
Sayed leans over and puts the back of his hand on my cheek. The coolness of his skin, its tiny black hairs against me, is unbearably intimate. I feel either I’ll hit him or embrace him. Yet I stay still, waiting for him to remove his hand. It feels to me as if with this casual gesture he’s marked me out as one of them. A Palestinian. I think of Chaim, and don’t want to take sides, not anymore.
‘You’re wet,’ he says.
‘Sweaty. It’s been a long wait.’
The guard nearest us steps forward.
‘No touching between detainees and visitors.’
Sayed grimaces and leans back into his chair. ‘Forgive me?’
‘For what?’
‘Being the one to tell you.’
‘Like you said, Sayed, it’s not our fault. Neither of us.’
There’s a silence neither of us wishes to fill. Sayed puffs out his cheeks in the way I’ve seen Inam do.
‘Which reminds me. Your article? You said on the phone you had it published.’
‘Yes, in The Globe. And here in Lebanon. The Star.’
I unfold the cuttings and let him read them. He leans over the table, his head nearly touching mine, and the Israeli guard moves forward again.
‘No touching.’
Sayed springs back.
‘If only.’
He catches my eye and I smile, not sure whether to be pleased or sad.
Chaim is back in Beirut again. To celebrate he suggests a daytrip to the ruins of the temple of Ba’al. We stop at Chtaura for lunch, eating with leisure under vine leaves, slow burble of irrigation channels at our feet. The waiter pours more wine. I put my hand over the glass.
‘No more for me. I’m already tipsy.’
I’m dazed with heat and alcohol. I finish my curd cheese, scooping it up with bread, pick at the last of the purslane salad. Shafts of light pierce through the leaves onto the white tablecloth, the white plates, Chaim’s greying hair turned blonder in the sun. I want to tell him what Rowda said, and about Sayed’s note, but don’t know how to go about it. In a strange way, I fear that either sentence once spoken will open a chasm between us that can’t be forded again. So I’m quiet, letting him finish the bottle of wine, take my hand and lead me to the car. Our driver is happy too, singing ballads under his breath as he drives. Along the highway huge posters of sheiks and mullahs, holy martyrs, contemporary, smiling, raise their hands in benediction at the buses and cars and trucks filled with women and children and farm animals. The closer we come to Ba’albek the bigger and shinier the posters become, the more beatific the smiles.
Close to the town the mountains begin to shimmer with an otherworldly light. The Beka’a Valley when we enter is hot and sticky. As we pull up at the ruins, crippled men thrust forward with trinkets, T-shirts, keffiyehs, cheap postcards in long concertinas trailing behind them in the dust. Some have fake Hellenistic and Roman finds they try to palm off as original: tarnished coins, fragments of mosaic, tiny busts of Aphrodite. Chaim stops to examine a terracotta perfume vial, atmospherically grimy, and a votive candle-holder redolent with its newly applied history. They are mostly Hezbollah fighters, wounded family men, home from battle to eke out their existence in the vegetable patches and fruit orchards the same way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did. When they’re well enough they will go south again to fight the Israelis on the border. I fend them off with shakes of the head and outstretched arms, stride through and up the steps to the temple compound, leaving Chaim to question and cajole, and in the end buy nothing. The men are friendly; I can hear them. They want talk more than a sale, but I’m tired from the trip and enjoying the solitude of the cavernous, weed-choked space between the huge temples too much. All around are fallen Corinthian columns and pediments, graceful statuary: a rounded arm, a breast, a carved pomegranate tinged red, still so insanely red after millennia. I bend to the ground and rub some pigment onto my palm.
Chaim joins me and we walk together through the ruins. The merchants have long since dropped behind. Before us the main temple of Jupiter appears rosy and pale gold in the afternoon light, dwarfing the surrounding landscape of concrete two-storey houses and shops, crazy aerials and cypresses. Away to the right, sitting in the shade, an old man with a twisted staff watches over his few goats grazing among the ruins. He waves at us in a slow greeting as we come closer. We climb up and into the entablature, careful of falling pediments and broken columns scattered at our feet. Chaim helps me over a fallen frieze. His hand stays in mine, tight. A carved Medusa’s head stares up at us.
‘She’s not much fun,’ he says.
‘Oh, but look at him.’
We bend down and look at another bas-relief that has fallen: a black-winged Eros with one leg thrust forward, his quiver full of redtipped arrows like tiny nipples. Chaim’s breath caresses my ear and I shiver.
‘Any response in the US to your article about Sayed Ali?’
‘Yeah, mostly negative. What did I expect? But I’m interviewing him again, for an opinion piece, trying to contextualise his predicament. I like him.’
‘Like him? In what way?’
‘Well, he didn’t do it, I’m sure.’
‘Hmm. How can you be so sure? And you haven’t answered my question.’ Chaim stops walking with me, turns around and blocks the narrow path. ‘Tell me, Anoush, who the hell in this conflict hasn’t been persecuted? If you talk to my mother or her friends they’ll tell you the persecution began long before they arrived in Israel.’
‘But he’s being persecuted now.’
‘And what of the kids in Israel who can’t go to school without an armoured guard? Aren’t they being persecuted? Now. What of the bits of blown-up people I’ve had to scrape off the pavement? The orphans and widows?’
‘Okay, okay, I get your point. We’re both on the same side here, Chaim.’
‘Are we?’ He fixes me with a cold stare. I’ve never seen him so angry.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And you and I both know there are no sides. We’re all persecuted. All victims, all the time. And sometimes perpetrators too.’
‘Well, I don’t see how your Palestinian friend is being persecuted. If he’s not guilty, he’ll go free.’
‘It doesn’t make him any less heroic, Chaim.’
‘I don’t see any of these guys as heroes. Just as I don’t see my Israeli friends in the army as heroes either. Come on. I’m sorry I shouted at you. Let’s not talk about him now.’
He pulls me into the shade of a column and bends down to kiss me on the neck. My body recoils almost in reproof but I keep myself passive, shoulderblades pressed hard against dry stone. I’m afraid of this overt act of intimacy in so fundamentalist a place, cautious in case we cause offence. Chaim seems excited by the danger. I notice the old man with the staff watching from far away.
The next day I see Sayed again. I don’t turn on my recorder when we’re talking, merely sit opposite and let him speak, not saying much until the guards say our time is up. He speaks freely and I wonder if he’ll pay for it later, whether the Israelis will punish him for his indiscretion. Or whether he’s suffered so much now he’s become unafraid, immune to more pain.
He speaks in Arabic of what is called Shabeh, being told to crawl on all fours like a dog each time he asks to go to the toilet. Of Qambaz, the Frog, being forced to squat until his thighs scream and his back is about to break. Of being bound to a child’s chair. Sunflower yellow. A kindergarten chair. Made to sit on it for days, then fainting, being revived. The constant headaches, the confusion. Of lying over a high stool backward, so that the small of his back is pressed onto the edge. Of being beaten with hoses on the face, the belly, the testicles, then shaken, shaken again; of relentless noise: shouts, demands, swearing, American pop music on loudspeakers. Music so sentimental, so romantic, it always makes him weep. Weeping along with the songs of love, those slow refrains of longing. He apologises to the guards for being so weak, so suggestible, then hates himself for it.
He speaks of hooding. Of it being the worst torture of all. The first time, he could hear another man through the hood – not one of his usual interrogators – whispering in Arabic, in a cultivated voice. Saying to the others: Hit him around the eyes, not in the eyes. Hit him in the soft parts, not on bone. Bone bruises.
I look at Sayed, my voice a croak.
‘Show me. Surely there must be one mark?’
He rolls up his shirt. I see nothing. Is he lying? Am I being duped? Yet I want to write about him, about every aspect of his suffering. What chance of a piece about Israeli torture techniques? I can at least try. Sayed makes me promise to come again next week, to come back every week.
I arrive home that evening in a downpour. I can’t stop thinking about him. The last time he was hooded, he said he could hear a child – a little girl – screaming. Was it a recording? An inmate’s daughter? Could it be Inam? He tried to put his hands over his ears but they were useless, limp as gloves. ‘We’ll make her scream louder,’ the Israelis said. They ripped off his hood and winked at him.
The gardenias on Chaim’s balcony have upturned their waxen petals to the rain, dilated cells drinking in the fragrance of wet soil. I can smell them as soon as I walk in the door.
‘I’m home.’
No answer. I fling off my sandals onto the mat, run to the bathroom, come out rubbing a towel through my hair. Walk to the living room, into the kitchen. Julius is curled up in the far corner, he cocks one ear up but doesn’t deign to rise and greet me. I kneel and run my fingers through his coat.
‘Hey you, not even a welcome wag of the tail?’
I drink a full glass of water, that chlorine-bland taste at the back of my tongue. He follows me down the hall to Chaim’s bedroom. The door is closed. I tap lightly, ease it open. Chaim is lying face down on the bed in the dark with the curtains drawn.
‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’
His voice is deadened by the pillow and the rain. ‘You’re not still seeing that terrorist, are you?’
‘I’ve told you he didn’t do it, Chaim. He’s not a terrorist.’
He’s huddled like a child, closed against me.
‘Wait a minute, you were the one who encouraged me to interview him in the first place.’
‘I didn’t know then that you’d be so fucking enamoured.’
I sit as heavily as I can on the side of the bed to disturb him, but he doesn’t move. I put my hand on his back.
‘Oh, please. You’re too old to be the jealous type.’
As I say the words, a flicker of guilt in my belly. He sits up then and stares at my face, taking in my smudged lipstick, damp hair standing up in spikes, my dress with the top two buttons undone.
‘Look at you. All dolled up to see him.’
I get up and walk to the other side of the room, then abruptly turn to him again.
‘What are you trying to do to me, Chaim? Do you really think I’m playing around?’
‘No.’
‘He’s in prison, for God’s sake. He’s being tortured.’
‘I don’t believe he’s telling the truth. I think he’s lying to you. Taking you for a ride.’
‘You’ve read my article. Seen the evidence of his innocence.’
‘Which evidence? It’s a triumph of wishful thinking. Total crap. Your editor must be as stupid as you are.’
I stalk out of the bedroom, pick up my bag in one hand and my sandals in the other, and stumble blindly out the door into the rain.
I wait by the phone in a room at the Mayflower, knowing he’ll call. I don’t leave my room at all that night, going to bed early and trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. Countless times I pick up the receiver, hold it to my ear, put it down again, banging it against the old-fashioned dial in the dark. I rise the next morning at dawn, shower for as long as I can, killing time. One ear cocked for the phone. I dress carefully in the same damp clothes as yesterday, anticipating the inevitable ring.
The phone shrills.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Sayed.’
‘Oh.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘No, no—it’s just—I was expecting another call. How did you know I was here?
I rang the number you gave me and some guy said you’re probably staying at the Mayflower. Sounded like a foreigner to me. Who is he? You haven’t told me about him.’
‘Sayed, please, I really can’t talk now.’
With those words, I know I’ve betrayed him for the first time.
‘Sayed, sorry, I’m sorry. The other call can wait. Are you okay?’
‘I’ll be quick,’ he whispers. ‘They’ve just told me my tribunal comes up in four weeks. Can you find me a good lawyer? I can’t use legal aid, I need an Arab–Israeli, someone who sympathises but can also represent me in Hebrew.’
‘How will you pay?’
‘I’m ashamed to ask, but I thought maybe—’
‘Of course I can try and help you. But I won’t be able to pay the full amount. I don’t think I have that sort of cash, without selling something back home.’
‘I know. I’ll ask my mother, some of the elders in the camp. Or Hezbollah. Believe me, if I’m represented by one of the army lawyers I’m done for. They’re moving me to Israel for the trial.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘You don’t have to do that—’
‘I want to do it. I believe you’re innocent.’
‘I—you don’t know how good that makes me feel. I—Anoush, I’ve been wanting to say something to you. But—I’m afraid to say it.’
I wait. A flush of excitement from belly to chest. Then I hear the click at the other end. One of the guards must have decided his time was up.
‘Fuck. Fuck it.’
I throw the phone to the ground, where it lands with a strangled ring. Scramble to my knees, retrieve it.
‘Hello?’
The line is dead.
Chaim doesn’t call. Sayed tries again the next morning, but is further constrained by who is listening.
I go to visit him every day, but am not allowed to see him. I worry, think my articles, my presence, my lack of discretion have jeopardised his chance of winning the case. I wait a week in the hotel, then another. I buy new toiletries and a few clothes, unable to bring myself to go back to Chaim’s apartment and claim my own. I feel my anger against him solidify until it settles like a stone in my stomach, the same stone of my father’s absence and my mother’s and grandmothers’ deaths. It irritates me by day until I can’t swallow food or water, bears down on me at night. I won’t call him, after what he said. And there’s nothing I can say to bridge the distance between us. He knows I’m at the Mayflower, knows I’m here alone. How can he get rid of me so easily? I know why. He can sense that I’m not really there for him, not fully his. I know how hard it must be for him. But my position hardens too until, after two weeks, it seems as if there’s no other option available to me but silence.
I go to see Bilqis and Inam, making light of my predicament. Talk about going back to America, finding permanent journalistic work, resuming a life; there’s nothing left for me here. Suddenly it’s all become too difficult. I even mention my mixed feelings for Sayed. I’m not sure what to say about my father and Issa Ali, refrain from telling Bilqis anything. How can I say it? Not yet. And it’s not as if Bilqis doesn’t already know, hasn’t known for years. I suspect Bilqis knows everything and that nothing can surprise her anymore. Inam’s there in the corner as well, always listening, and it’s not something that can be discussed in front of her.
Surprisingly, Bilqis seems most perturbed by my feelings for Sayed. I thought she would be happy. She seems unconcerned about Sayed being hurt, instead asks me about Chaim.
‘Is he good to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Does he care for you, do things for you, think of you when you aren’t there?’
‘Yes. Yes, yes.’
‘Does he drink? Does he beat you?’
‘No.’
‘Go with other women?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Then what is it?’
I pause.
‘He’s Israeli, that’s one thing. Sometimes I feel as if I’m such a hypocrite. Other times, I feel as if he and I are so close. Like one person. And then—there’s Sayed.’
Bilqis nods then, closes her eyes.
‘I understand. But you will not have a good life with Sayed. I know this. On the other hand, the Israeli is too old. Better to wait.’
I close my eyes as well, let them rest for a moment. Inam rustles paper and hums tunelessly in an undertone. When I eventually speak it’s in a whisper as quiet as Inam’s shuffle and murmur.
‘Bilqis. Why do you care so much about me, anyway?’
‘How could I not care for you? We are both tied together by the past. Both suffering for it.’
A small moan escapes me. Somehow I’m more embarrassed before Inam’s silent regard than Bilqis’s gaze.
‘I don’t think I love either of them. Or maybe I love them both.’
Bilqis tuts.
‘Love? What’s love? Who knows nowadays? In any case, you won’t feel it till you’ve had children.’
She invites me to stay. I offer to pay board but she shakes her head, puts her large spotted hand over mine.
‘You’re family now. Part of us. It’s the least I can do, after what my poor son did to your father.’
I lean forward, studying her. Everything seems small and pinpointed in this dark, dingy room, her face, this throbbing instance. She smiles – a sad, lopsided smile.
‘Family,’ she repeats. ‘Too much blood between us, good and bad.’
‘What? Did you know Sayed told me?’
‘Of course Sayed told you. And of course he told me what has happened between the two of you. The very first day he met you he said, Aunty, I think I’m falling in love with that Armenian girl. Do you think he doesn’t talk? That’s what got him into prison in the first place.’
I lean back again in disbelief.
‘And you still want me to stay here?’
Bilqis laughs.
‘It’s you that should be cautious, my girl, not us. My son – I think he hated your father, more than just a wartime battle. But I don’t think he would have wanted that hate to poison the next generation. He wasn’t a hateful man.’
‘I’m sorry – I can’t believe that. I can’t forgive him. I wish I could. I really wish that. But I can’t. And yet – I feel no animosity toward you. None.’
Bilqis pulls me into her arms. I lean onto her lap, smelling the strong, herbal scent of her clothes and skin and hair. In that moment my tears begin, huge all at once. I’m heaving, crying so hard I seem to be outside my body. I think of her, having the heart to be so open to me, not being vengeful, as her son and my father were. I think of D’Andrea and my forgiveness of him. I cry for a long while. After a time, Bilqis slowly draws away. I can see tiny points of light in her eyes, tears she won’t let fall. Inam is standing, watching us.
‘Come, come, enough of this,’ Bilqis says. ‘Let’s drink a glass of arak together.’
Her grip is a little less firm than it was a few weeks ago. One side of her torso shakes, causing her to spill drinks and rattle plates when she serves. I move to help.
‘Are you okay, Bilqis?’
‘Feeling my age. I’m sixty-seven this year, you know.’
‘Still young.’
‘Yes.’ Bilqis smiles at Inam. ‘Still strong enough, Allah willing, to raise this one here a little longer.’
Inam stays in the corner, doing her homework and pulling faces. When I hold out my arms she runs to me in a wild rush of dirty hair and legs.
The three of us establish a routine over the coming days and weeks. In the beginning I am constantly on edge about bumping into D’Andrea, but after a week or so I realise that, if I do see him, I’ll merely smile and greet him. I’ve forgiven what he said and did.
In the morning I encourage Bilqis to lie in bed late, behind a sheet she has strung up for privacy. She has periodic bouts of numbness in her neck and arms, making it difficult for her to get out of bed. I urge her to see the camp doctor, but she says it’s nothing, just old age. I make breakfast and Inam and I eat sitting on wooden crates outside the front of the hut in our nightgowns, watching labourers pile onto trucks bound each morning for the south of the border, to work in road gangs for the Israelis. The men wave and blow kisses, dressed in filthy blue gear, caps pulled low over their eyebrows. Inam smirks her delight at such flattery but I can see she’s old enough now to also be embarrassed. I feel myself wanting to protect her more and more: from strange men’s gazes, hardship, suffering, from pain. She leaves her crusts behind for the sparrows, shooing her grandmother’s hens away when they come too close, and licks fig jam from her thumb. I learn how tightly she likes her flatbread rolled, which sweet spreads to buy at the camp’s only shop.
Inam drinks instant coffee every morning with evaporated milk and four teaspoons of sugar. I’m in no position to discipline her. She makes it herself as soon as she gets out of bed, and a mug for me and her grandmother as well. I don’t have the heart to refuse but spill most of mine in the dirt when Inam isn’t looking. The hens seem jerkier than usual on the days I do this.
Rowda comes once a week. I’ve grown accustomed to her presence but this doesn’t stop me from resenting it more each time. I’m used to her faded-black jeans – tight but not too tight; that would be culturally insensitive – the cinched-in waist and shining buckle. Her rants about Israelis and white people and Western academics, the US conspiracy to keep the Arab world down. I agree with some of what she says but will never admit it, and my agreement doesn’t go so far as to condemn anyone who isn’t Arab, or black, or oppressed. And then there’s Chaim – and what he’s taught me about not hating, about questioning everything. So each time Rowda begins one of her rants I cut her off. If she speaks of Palestinian civilian deaths, I tell her of the latest bombing in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. If she speaks of the rights of a dispossessed people, I counter with the image of those tattered remnants, survivors of the Holocaust, who found the only place that would have them. It does no good, of course, but it makes me feel that little bit closer to Chaim, allows me to miss him less if I speak in his voice. Even though I’ve tried so hard to banish him from my thoughts, as he’s seemingly banished me in turn. It’s been three weeks and still no sign of him.
Inam doesn’t come home for lunch, as UNRWA provides stewed lamb, oranges and fresh milk for the refugee children at school. In the afternoon, I make her take off her school clothes to keep them clean. We wash her hair in a bucket every three days, trying to untangle knots as big as burrs. Inam moans about me hurting her, twists and wriggles; she’s not used to doing what she’s told. Bilqis reprimands her, yet more and more has become reduced to a painful whisper, slurring her words slightly, making quiet demands from the safety of her bed. Eventually we get to a point where Inam does it herself, and I don’t have to help anymore.
Finally, when Inam has combed her hair, scraped it back with her favourite hair tie and dressed in the discoloured Bob Marley T-shirt and baggy shorts she wears every day after school, the three of us stroll out of the camp and toward the mountains towering above the city. Bilqis ties a shawl around her shoulders, girding herself for the first time she’ll get out of bed all day. I hold hands with Bilqis, who walks with irritating slowness, and Inam demonstrates how she can twirl three times around her grandmother in the time Bilqis can only take one step. Sometimes we meet Amal at the crossroads and she ushers us into her hut, fussing about with tiny wooden stools and tea glasses. She’s particularly careful of me, patting my hand and smoothing my hair, offering walnut biscuits she’s bought fresh and warm from the sole pastry vendor who dares venture into the camp.
‘So, Anoush,’ she asks each time. ‘When is my poor boy to be freed?’
‘Patience. We need patience. Everything will be all right.’
And I think about my unsaid longing for Sayed, my hard lesson of patience for Chaim’s return. But do I really want either of them? I have to admit that I’m not sure. Chaim feels right for me in so many ways. And I miss him, more than I’ve missed anyone before. More than I’ve longed for Lilit, or my mother and father. Sayed is something else: the possibility of a new future, the ability to wipe the slate clean.
When we reach the edge of the camp, we turn back to cook dinner and Inam tells us lurid stories about the other children at school, between demonstrations of acrobatics in her long-legged grace.
Without meaning to, hardly realising, I feel I’m recreating my life with my grandmothers here, in yet another ghetto. Armenian quarter: Palestinian refugee camp. The boundaries blur, wash into each other as I sleep and wake and cook and eat, walk arm in arm with Inam to go shopping, buying meagre provisions and taking a second-hand skirt or singlet donated by the compassionate West. I’m truly at home here, I realise. I continue to miss Chaim, and the beauty and repose of his apartment, but here I feel needed, and strong.
I do exactly as I did until the age of sixteen: feeding and tending Lilit’s failing strength, turning over the old body, sponging it, massaging the clawed yellow feet, kissing the parchment forehead before nightfall. Reading aloud by the light of a lamp, curled in bed. The only difference now is that the reading and talking is in Arabic only, and the cadences of Armenian are merely a phrase I wake from after a dream.
I decide to take Inam with me to see Sayed. It might be easier that way. Might make it harder for us to distrust one another – or like one another too much. Might make it easier just to be friendly, neutral. Now I’ve been able to pay for Sayed’s lawyer with help from Amal, I feel more entwined with him, and I’m not sure I like the sensation.
I buy Inam a bag of striped sweets at the rest stop. We stroll across the highway to the sandy strip bordering the sea, the silver-nude sea that’s followed us south all the way from Beirut, a winking conspirator on our journey. Inam balances a large white box on her knees, bird’s nest pieces of baqlawa hand-chosen for her uncle.
When we arrive at the prison gate, there are two guards on duty that I’ve never seen before. With them, trained dogs with hyperactive movements. The men decide to hold us up, inventing excuses, telephoning superiors, being difficult. They’re bored, hot in the sentry box, ready for some quiet fun. They’re young, teenagers really. I feel sorry for them at first. Pretending to go and photocopy my press pass, the older one disappears. The other – younger, more handsome, brash – waves my passport and Inam’s soiled identity papers in the air. She has no passport, only a laissezpasser given out by the Lebanese government. The guard hands the papers back as if they’ve infected him and bends down so he’s level with Inam’s face. ‘What’s a little troublemaker like you doing with an American citizen?’
Inam grips my hand tighter. She stares straight ahead as if she’s gone blind. The other guard comes back with my press card, in time to catch his friend’s last remark.
‘And such a sexy American at that,’ he says.
I hold out my hand for the card. He makes as if to hand it over then, just as I reach out to take it, hides it behind his back.
‘Say please. No, not just please. A kiss. A kiss for a card.’ He addresses Inam. ‘That sounds fair, doesn’t it, little Palestinian?’
Inam continues to stare straight ahead at the wall of the sentry box, painted in the muted colours of the Israeli flag, her feet planted firmly on the ground like a little soldier herself.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ My voice wobbles. ‘Aren’t you sick of teasing and harassing women and children?’
I lunge at my card, grab it from the guard’s hands. I’m white-hot now, reckless. He steps forward, menacing.
‘You better watch your mouth. We have the authority to stop you from coming here, ever again.’
I turn on my heel, dragging Inam toward the prison. I’m shivering all over from fear and rage. I can hear the dogs barking, can feel Inam’s small hand shaking in mine. The other guard yells.
‘Don’t worry, Avram,’ he shouts to his friend, louder over the dogs, so I can hear. ‘She’s just a shiksa whore, a fucking Arab-loving whore!’
Inside the prison, we sit down to wait. I’m still flustered and Inam takes my hand, caressing it in gentle circles as if she’s the elder. A guard enters the waiting room and I half-rise, while Inam grasps my skirt in anticipation.
‘Detainee Sayed Ali will not see you today, Miss.’
‘I’m sorry? Why?’
‘He said he does not wish to see anyone today – and you in particular.’
‘Please. Can I speak to him for a moment? I’ve been coming for weeks and haven’t been allowed even a glimpse of him.’
The guard shakes his head, impassive.
‘Does he know his niece is here, at least?’
The guard nods, winking at Inam with a changed, boyish face.
‘Well, can we leave him this box of cakes then?’
Inam hands over the box with great ceremony. As she does, she looks from my face to the guard’s in appeal, as if we’ve made some mistake, as if either of us can make some swift remark or gesture to change her world. Nothing comes. Inam gives the baqlawa one last, longing glance. We stumble out of the prison into the bright, sunlit world.
‘Anoush, did they really tell him I was here? Of course he’ll see me if he knows.’
I turn around.
‘Didn’t you hear, you silly girl? I asked the guard! He must be sick. Or angry with me. I have no idea why. Don’t be difficult now, let’s just go.’
In the next instant I’m ashamed of speaking to Inam that way. But I can’t help myself, and even as I inwardly cringe I take her hand in a rough grasp and stride to the perimeter of the prison. I try not to let stupid tears run down my cheeks. Was the guard lying under orders, because of my altercation with the others at the gate? Has Sayed rejected me? Has he given thought to the past and decided it’s folly to campaign for his release? Is he just depressed? And what of his responsibility to Inam?
I run past the guards at the checkpoint, dragging Inam alongside. There’s nothing I can do right. Chaim’s gone. And now even Sayed has abandoned me. Was this how my father’s lover felt? I finally feel a sharp prod of sympathy for her; pregnant, vulnerable and alone, both protectors dead.