Olives (11 page)

The depth of
his knowledge surprised me. I hadn’t expected sensitivity from the
man, let alone lectures on theological history. Lynch kicked a
stone into the entrance of the excavated outline of the church and
it smacked off the low back wall and clattered along the mosaic
floor.

He pulled a
sour face. ‘Bunch of dirty fuckers, if you ask me.’

NINE

Aisha invited
me to dinner with friends from her salsa group. I had already
refused at least three invitations to go along to their dance
classes, much to her amusement. We agreed to meet up at my place
before joining the rest at a trendy bar in the posh Abdoun area.
The weather was cooling fast, so I lit the old stove in the
kitchen.

She arrived
wearing a fur-lined coat over a light brown knitted wool dress,
which clung to her down to just above her knees. She draped the
coat over a kitchen chair. Turning, she caught me looking at her
and smiled. I felt myself colouring.

‘
Sorry if
it’s too warm,’ I stammered. ‘Lars showed me how to use the stove.
I thought it was just decorative but it’s turned out to be a secret
Jordanian blast furnace.’

Aisha
laughed, holding her hands out in front of the roaring
glass-fronted stove.

‘
Red okay
with you?’

Her bangles
jingled as she nodded. ‘Perfect. Thanks.’

I poured a
glass of wine for us both before sitting, picking a chair opposite
her at the table. I needed a barrier.

I took a deep
breath and plunged in. ‘Aisha, I wanted to talk to you.’

Her smile
died, her eyes flickering between mine, trying to read my face.
‘Sure. What’s up? Is it about the court case?’

I hesitated,
unsure how I was going to approach this, but knowing I had to face
it for my own peace of mind. The meeting with Lynch had shaken me
and I’d spent the rest of the day worrying about Aisha and her
family’s connections. She had become a central part of my life in
Jordan and I had been a little shocked when it hit me Aisha was
creeping into my thoughts more than Anne.

Some heavy
clicking on Amazon over the past few weeks had resulted in a
growing collection of books of Middle East history, helping me to
learn enough to appreciate I would never truly learn enough.
Aisha’s history, her very self, formed part of the larger picture,
shaped by it and somehow completing it. I could no longer escape
the fact that I had to find some way of reconciling her story with
the things I was hearing about her family.

I sipped some
wine and watched her. Long, dark hair with highlights she’d had put
in at the weekend, brown eyes fixed on mine, her brow creased and
the last remnants of a smile dying on her full lips.

‘
I’m really
sorry about your cousin.’

She relaxed.
‘It’s okay, Paul. The funeral’s over, life’s back to normal for
everyone. You have to move on, you know.’ She laughed, a bitter
little laugh, flicked her hair back. ‘You even start to get used to
it after a while.’

‘
That’s what
I wanted to talk to you about.’

She tensed
again.

I looked at
my glass. ‘About your father and your brother.’

‘
Oh,’ she
said. I watched her shoulders hunch and her hands come together on
the table, a barrier. ‘Why does that matter?’

I ploughed
on. ‘Because other people are telling me about it and I wanted you
to tell me first.’

‘
It doesn’t
concern you, Paul. It’s...’

Go
on
, I thought.
Tell me it’s none of my
business
. She looked down at
her own wine glass. I saw her eyes were moist, the warm light from
the stove sparkling in them.

‘
It’s not
something I like to talk about very much.’

I tried to be
gentle but heard myself whining instead. ‘I wanted it to be open
between us.’

Paul Stokes,
bumbling prat. The man who takes his conversational gambits from
third rate soap opera scripts. If I had a low opinion of the human
race in general, at least I had the grace to put myself at the
bottom of the heap.

Aisha looked
away from me, reached into her bag for her cigarettes and lit one.
I got the ashtray I kept for visitors, grateful for the excuse of
movement to break the tension.

She talked to
the table, her voice low. ‘My father was born on a farm in
Palestine in 1946, outside a village called Qaffin. It’s the farm
we have today. My grandparents left during the troubles in 1948,
what we call the
Naqba
, the disaster.
You know this, right? The
Naqba
?’ I nodded.
‘When the Zionists threw my people from their land and declared
Israel a state. They had a saying, you know, “A land without a
people for a people without a land.” But it’s a lie.’

Aisha slowly
twisted her lighter between her thumb and forefinger. ‘My father
met my mother in the camps. He was just another urchin in the
streets there, but he was smart and started selling fruit on a
street corner, grew it into a business by employing other kids so
that eventually he could open a shop of sorts in the camp, made of
cinder blocks. He was a good businessman and soon opened a proper
store in Amman. He opened more of them. He started to trade with
the Syrians and the Iraqis before he left the Amman business in
Ibrahim’s hands and went to the Gulf in the seventies, to Kuwait,
with my mother. The Gulf had oil and needed food, steel, concrete,
cars. He did deals with family traders, earned a name for being
able to get things nobody else could get, ship things nobody else
could ship. Ibrahim found the supplies, my father sold them. My
parents moved back here after I was born.’

‘
And he met
Arafat in Kuwait.’

Aisha’s eyes
widened and she took a pull on her cigarette, staring at me, the
lighter twisting in her hand, the shaking tip of the cigarette
glowing momentarily as she inhaled. ‘Yes, he met Arafat in Kuwait.
Through Kaddoumi. And he supplied Arafat. My father believed in
Arafat. His family had lost everything, including my grandfather.
My father believed that we had to try and fight to return to our
country, to our land.’

‘
But Arafat
was a terrorist.’

She was
trembling. ‘No.
Abu
Ammar
was a unifier. There
was no Palestine, no Palestinian people, no Palestinian identity.
We lost everything, you see? Arafat brought us the dream that one
day we could go back to things we had lost, that one day we could
become a nation again. What could my father believe in other than
this? We are lucky, at least we still have some of our family land,
but only because we are on the border, only because we had an Arab
Israeli lawyer on our side. Back then, there was no hope for any
Palestinian other than Arafat offered.’

I was
watchfully silent. Aisha gestured with a wide sweep of her hand.
‘My people lost everything they had, living in camps with rusty
keys and English title deeds that meant nothing. The world stood by
and let it happen. Who else offered any hope to the Palestinians
except Arafat and the people around him? Who else was helping
us?’

Aisha ground
her cigarette viciously into the ashtray. ‘My father supported
Arafat in the early days, but he turned away from them after the
problems in Jordan. He stopped believing in Arafat’s way. Both he
and Ibrahim became closer to King Hussein, then the King threw the
PLO out of Jordan. We stayed here.’

‘
Why did they
leave Kuwait?’

Exasperated,
she spat out her answer. ‘Because I was born.’ She recovered
herself with a long silence, her voice shaky when she spoke again.
‘I was my father’s favourite. He was always very close to me. We
used to go on little adventures together, especially after I
learned to ride. He was an accomplished horseman. I remember once
we went riding with His Majesty. It was such a special day, the
horses groomed until they were shining and HM chatting with us
while we hacked along the
wadis
. He asked me
what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told him I wanted to be a
princess. Can you believe it? My father told the king I was already
a princess and they both laughed at me. My father was a very gentle
man.’

‘
But he was
with a Hamas man when he died,’ I blurted.

She recoiled
as my words shattered her reminiscence, catching my gaze for an
instant, her eyes flickering around the kitchen, casting around for
something from inside. I waited for her to calm and speak. She took
a deep, shuddering breath and spoke to the tabletop in a small
voice.

‘
Yes, Paul. My father was in a house in Gaza that belonged
to one of his old business contacts from the Gulf days. Another man
was visiting, an important man in Hamas. The Israelis attacked the
house with missiles. They killed my
baba
and took him
away from me forever.’

‘
Was he
involved with Hamas?’

I had spoken
as gently as I could but then I saw, to my horror, the splashes on
the tabletop. The tears brimming in Aisha’s eyes ran down her
cheeks as she looked up. Her chin was puckered, her words halting
as she fought for control of her breathing. ‘My father... was not a
terrorist. He was... not an evil man.’

She held onto
her lighter so tightly the blood drained from her fingers and her
hands shook. She dropped it, sniffed and wiped at her cheeks with
her fingertips.

‘
He was not
accused, tried or found guilty of a crime. He was in the wrong
place at the wrong time, just like the young mother in the shopping
mall when the bomb comes. He was killed by a state formed by
bombing and violence, founded by terrorists who threw my people off
their land by murdering them and driving them away with fear. By
the people that killed the villagers of Deir Yassin and hundreds of
Palestinian villages like it, the people that killed thousands when
they smashed into Gaza and poured phosphorous on it from the sky
like rain. There was no judge, there was no jury. He was murdered
in cold blood.’

Aisha delved
into her bag for a tissue and wiped her eyes, shaking her head as
she looked out of the kitchen window, away from me.

‘
I don’t want to think about this, Paul. I prefer not to
live with it in my mind every day. I have a life to live. As
Palestinians we have to put this behind us and
live
,
because we can’t afford to spend every single moment focusing on
the tragedy and death that is around us, inside
us.’

She drank
from her wine, her reddened eyes on mine over the fine rim of the
glass. Her mascara was smudged.

I broke the
long silence. ‘So is that why Hamad did what he did? To revenge
your father?’

Aisha glared
at me, placing the wineglass on the table with agonising slowness,
her eyes on me as she pushed her chair back. She turned to hook up
her coat. My chair rattled as I leaped to my feet. ‘Where are you
going?’

‘
I don’t need this. You don’t need Daoud lecturing you, but
I don’t need you questioning me, either. You just go ahead and
believe what you want to, listen to what you want to. I will not
be
interviewed
by you. I’m going home. Goodbye,
Paul.’

I was
incapable of movement, shocked by the realisation of my own immense
stupidity and crassness. I saw her chin pucker again as the light
caught the side of her face, but she didn’t look back as she closed
the door gently behind her. The kitchen was quiet, apart from the
soft background grumble of the wood burning in the stove and the
electronic tick of the wall clock. It ticked four times before
resolution rescued me from stasis and I ran out after her. I caught
her opening her car door, about to get in. I called across the road
to her as I stood at the bottom of the steps that led up from the
road to the garden: ‘Aisha.’

The tears
were streaming down her cheeks as she turned to me, shouting, her
face contorted and her voice echoing down the dark
street.

‘
Fuck off,
Paul. Fuck off and creep about in the garbage of someone else’s
life. Leave mine alone.’

I was still
standing there ten minutes later when a truck full of red-painted
gas bottles drove past, blaring an ice-cream van jingle out of the
speakers mounted on the cab. The gasmen waved at me, but I didn’t
wave back. I shivered in the cool of the evening. I blundered back
into the house. For the first time in years, I felt utterly alone.
I sat in the kitchen and drank my wine, listening to the tick of
the clock and replaying the conversation, twisting the knife in the
wound just so I could feel the pain of it.

A little
later, I drank hers too, matching my lips to the lipstick mark on
the glass. It tasted waxy.

TEN

I didn’t see
Aisha for the next three days. She sent messengers down from the
Secretary General’s office with arrangements for interviews or with
information I’d requested. The magazine was coming together and we
were preparing to send it to press by the end of the week – I just
had to get the final pages signed off by the Ministry. I took the
printouts up to Abdullah Zahlan, who liked them but suggested I
show them to Aisha for the Secretary General’s approval.