Dreams of Water

Salah, as I write this, my mother sleeps with a happiness I dare not dispel with my doubts. How, I imagine you saying, do you expect me to believe the inventions of a woman torn by grief? How should I read between the words of this story? How can I see, in the birth of an eight-year-old boy, the soul of a man killed at that very moment, moving from one body to another, skin to new skin, time suspended in that movement, transmigration, layers of memory embedded in a young heart and love transported too, as if by magic, burning, passionate and never-ending?

Aneesa decides to buy Salah a pair of gloves for his birthday, something to go with the suede jacket Samir bought him and which he seems to love so much. She goes to a department store in town and finds a pair in tan leather that she knows would look good against the light brown of the jacket. The shop assistant wraps the gloves in two sheets of white tissue paper before placing them in a bag.

When Aneesa hands Salah the gift as they stand waiting for the bus, he looks surprised.

‘I know your birthday isn’t for a few days yet, but I couldn’t wait,’ she says.

Salah clings to the bag and looks away, in the direction of the traffic.

‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

He opens the bag and pulls out the tissue paper. Looking down at his hands as he attempts to undo the package, trembling, delicate hands with long, tapered fingers, Aneesa feels a rush of tenderness. She takes the parcel from Salah and helps him put the gloves on.

‘Do you like them?’

‘They’re beautiful. Thank you.’

‘They’re lined on the inside so your hands will stay warm.’

He puts his hands together, interlacing his fingers, and smiles.

Once on the upper deck of the bus, Salah takes off the gloves and places them on his lap, giving them a gentle pat.

‘They’re very soft,’ he says.

The bus lurches forward. Then they both look straight ahead, through the window and towards their approaching destination.

The first time my mother saw him, Ramzi was bouncing a ball in the orphanage playground. It was a cold day in winter and there were other children standing in a loose circle around him. She was overcome with a strong sense of recognition as she watched him toss his head back and smile at his audience. Waddad saw him glance at her and then turn away again. When she approached, she noticed tiny beads of sweat on his forehead where his black hair stuck in wet strips. He had brown eyes and fair skin and was only slightly shorter than she was.

She asked him his name and then told him hers. Are you a teacher? Ramzi asked, the ball hugged tightly to his chest. No, she replied. Ramzi looked shyly up at her, and Waddad heard the children behind her giggle.

Maybe it was his hair, the way it fell in a swirl from the top of his head and over his ears and forehead. He was also the right shape, small and intense, as though every part of his body radiated a singular energy. But most of all, it was the way he looked at her with easy recognition, his mouth breaking into a wide half-grin, half-grimace that had been so characteristic of her own son.

She was beginning to like his name too. Ramzi. She said it out loud to herself at night and felt sure she could become accustomed to it. She was equally certain of her growing affection for the boy, for his disarming, hesitant manner.

When Waddad asked the directress of the orphanage about him, she was told he had been brought in by his mother very recently, a woman with several children whose husband had abandoned her and who had been left to care for them on her own.

Talking with Ramzi on her regular visits, Waddad thought she recognized bewilderment at what had happened to him in his manner, but he was too proud to speak of it to her. Once they were closer, when he trusted her more, Waddad decided she would tell him of their story, of the starry meeting of their souls.

I am aghast, Salah, at my mother’s easy fall into dreaming. I had thought her stronger than this, but perhaps I did not realize the magnitude of her grief. I miss you, our conversations and comforting silences. I miss the slant of tree branches heavy with leaves above our heads as we walked, and the empty air, not quite expectant, but quietly stirring because it was ours alone.

Yours, Aneesa

‘He had a girlfriend once, you know,’ Salah explains. ‘They lived here together for about a year.’ He hands Aneesa a wooden spoon and tells her to stir the brown mixture on the stove slowly. ‘Don’t stop, otherwise it will stick to the bottom of the pan.’

Aneesa stirs the powdered rice and water again and again and sniffs at the fragrant spices that waft up towards her.

‘Cinnamon and cardamom, right?’ she calls to Salah as he disappears into the larder. They are in the kitchen making mughli. Salah brings out almonds and walnuts which he then soaks in warm water in separate bowls.

‘We’ll need shredded coconut as well once the mughli has set,’ he says.

‘How long will it take?’

‘Oh, it should be ready in a couple of hours for after dinner.’

Aneesa is reminded of the times she spent watching her mother preparing meals as a child.

‘So it didn’t work out?’ she asks.

‘Sorry?’

‘Samir and his friend.’

Salah shakes his head.

‘He phoned us one day and said she had left. We never found out what happened.’

Aneesa lifts the spoon out of the pot and stares down at the mixture. She wonders what Samir’s girlfriend looked like but is too embarrassed to ask.

‘Keep stirring.’

‘My mother tried very hard to teach me how to cook,’ Aneesa says.

‘I only started doing it after Huda died, and now Samir enjoys having a hot meal when he gets home from work.’

She pushes her lips tightly together before asking Salah a question.

‘Are you happy living here with him?’

Salah stops what he is doing and looks at her.

‘I suppose we need each other so much more now,’ he says, shrugging his shoulders. He puts a hand into one of the bowls, takes out a handful of almonds and begins to peel them. He has folded his shirt cuffs back so that Aneesa can see his thin forearms and the blue veins on the inside of his wrists.

‘I wonder what my mother is doing now,’ she says.

‘Will he be up there?’ Aneesa asks her mother.

‘Who?’

‘Will the boy be at the orphanage tomorrow?’

‘Yes, yes,’ replies Waddad, her voice slightly breathless. ‘It’s a school day. Ramzi will be there. I suppose we should aim to get there around lunchtime.’ She reaches up, pulls Aneesa down to her and plants a kiss on her cheek. ‘I’ll call and let them know we’re coming.’

Once at the orphanage, the two women walk through the main building and into a small courtyard. Young trees and rose bushes are planted at regular intervals throughout the garden and a white plastic table and chairs stand under a trellis covered with a wilting vine in one part of the courtyard. They walk on a stone pathway that leads to another section of the old building and through an arched doorway on to an open terrace that overlooks the village.

‘We’ll wait here for him,’ says Waddad.

Ramzi comes out to meet them dressed in a new pair of denims and a blue shirt. His hair is slicked back off his forehead and his face looks like it has been scrubbed very hard.

‘This is my daughter Aneesa,’ Waddad says.

Ramzi nods and Aneesa takes his hand.

‘Hello, Ramzi.’

They stand in an awkward silence before Waddad hustles them away.

‘Come on, habibi,’ she says, putting an arm around the boy. ‘Let’s show Aneesa around. It’s her first visit here.’

He reminds her so much of Bassam as a boy that Aneesa is taken aback. His colouring, the fine down at the top of his hairline, his small frame and the energy that appears stored within it, all of these remind her of her brother. She wants to hold him for a moment, to gather him together, the pieces that have been missing for so long and which she has so badly missed. Instead, she follows him around the orphanage, virtually speechless while her mother chatters in the background, wondering if she will ever again with her mind’s eye see Bassam as he had really been.

On one of their excursions, Salah and Aneesa venture down to the river where the city becomes a series of bridges that hang over the dark, muddy water that runs beneath it. They get off the bus and walk at a leisurely pace along the banks of the river, stopping occasionally to look down into it or to sit on the wooden benches placed at even intervals along the pavement. It is a work day and except for a few tourists out sightseeing, there are very few people around them.

This is where London appears truly magnificent, Aneesa thinks. Everything – the roads and bridges and the old buildings, some grimy still and others almost pristine – seems large and beyond her reach. There are no intimate corners here in which one can hide; the river, deep and real and redolent of so much history, is very nearly overwhelming. She feels immeasurably small in its presence.

She takes Salah’s arm and stops to look at the scene before them.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Salah says. ‘I never tire of coming here. It reminds me of how unimportant my own concerns can sometimes be.’

‘It’s a little frightening, though,’ she says.

Salah shakes his head and moves closer to the ledge to look out on to the water.

‘See how fast it moves?’ he asks. ‘No single drop of water flows over the same place twice.’

Yes, Aneesa thinks, but it must be very cold and dirty; moving towards everywhere but here. She shudders.

‘So, what are you so afraid of, Aneesa?’

They move on, Aneesa letting go of Salah’s arm to wrap her scarf more tightly around her neck.

‘You know, habibti, sometimes I think these are the very things that give me comfort,’ Salah says, gesturing at the places and people around them. ‘The thought that everything will continue to change no matter how hard I try to stop it from doing so. That I will grow steadily older, though different and better defined, and that because of this there will always be newness in me too.’ He pauses. ‘Coming to this city has made me understand many things that I had not been aware of before. It’s made me think of myself in a different way.’

Aneesa nods.

‘That’s happened to me too. But what about all the things we left behind when we left home?’

‘They’re still here.’ Salah taps at his chest. ‘I see them in a different light now.’ He stops and looks at her. ‘You must feel the same way too?’

‘I can’t forget everything that’s happened,’ she replies. ‘Bassam, my father and what’s happened to our country. I can never put those things behind me.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Salah says, shaking his head. ‘It’s not a question of forgetting.’

‘What is it then, Salah? What do you think I am meant to do?’

He runs a trembling hand over his hair and smiles.

‘Just be happy, my dear. Do just that.’

There is something beautiful about the neighbourhood in winter, Aneesa thinks as she treads carefully through the rain-soaked streets of her childhood, cars splashing through water that streams past gutters, dark, murky, and often smelly. There is something apologetic about it too, long-ago haunts that speak to her in melancholy whispers, and a muffled tenderness in the way the wind strokes her face.

She tries, as she walks, to hold on to her solitude, to feel unfettered again, but there is too much belonging here after all, blatant and unforgiving, reminders of the person she has always been, of the ties that go far beyond what she knows for certain, and into an unsuspecting future.

Today, Bassam and her father are foremost in Aneesa’s thoughts. They are part of a general unease that will not leave her, though she tries callously to shake them off, images of their faces, dear and familiar, like lights within her recalcitrant mind. Aneesa, Bassam calls to her as she goes past their once favourite bookshop, do you remember it? Habibti, says Father, his voice filled with gentleness, hold on to my hand as we cross the street, that’s a good girl now.

In a car park round the corner from her block of flats, she stops to watch children at play. Some are kicking a football about, others have set up a makeshift ramp to fly off with their bicycles and skateboards. A young boy she has seen here before is sitting on the bonnet of an expensive-looking car. He is watching his playmates intently, stillness amidst a sea of movement. For a moment, Aneesa thinks that were she to reach out across the road, through the car park and to that car in the corner, she could touch the boy on his shoulder and he would turn at last to look at her.

Making her way home again, Aneesa remembers what her mother said to her only last night.

‘You talk to yourself. I hear you late at night when you cannot sleep and again in the mornings as you move around the house. It is a sign of an unsettled mind, my darling.’

We live and falter, Aneesa decides, in recollection and regret, in the throes of endlessness and the reluctant grace of muted goodbyes. I am hopeless at all of this, at making things work, she says out loud to the indifferent gods and to her fragile, wavering self.

The bar is small and filled with smoke and people. Aneesa follows behind Bassam as he pushes his way through the crowd to a counter at the far end of the room by a large glass door. Outside are the darkened shop windows of the small shopping mall in which the bar is located.

‘This is Chris,’ Bassam says in English, pushing Aneesa towards a man who is sitting at the counter with a glass in his hand.

The man nods at Aneesa.

‘What can I get you?’ Bassam asks his friend.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Chris says.

He has dark, coarse hair and pale skin and is wearing round wire-rimmed glasses.

‘I’ll get us something to drink,’ Bassam says and moves to the bar.

Someone jostles Aneesa to one side so that she has to reach out and steady herself against the edge of the counter.

‘You must be Bassam’s little sister,’ Chris says.

He looks bored and indifferent and Aneesa decides she does not like him. She straightens herself up and looks round for Bassam but does not find him.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t bite.’

‘I didn’t think you would,’ Aneesa says quickly and regrets the apologetic tone in her voice.

‘I’m just kidding,’ Chris says with a sudden smile.

Aneesa moves closer to him and leans against the counter.

‘What are you doing in Beirut?’

‘I’m a journalist.’

Aneesa has never been abroad and this man suddenly seems very exotic to her.

‘Bassam has never spoken about you before,’ she says.

‘Oh? We only met recently. He’s helping me with a piece I’m writing about the war for the newspaper I work for.’

‘But what does Bassam have to do with the war?’

Chris clears his throat and looks at her more closely.

‘Hasn’t your brother told you what he’s been up to lately?’ he asks with a nervous laugh.

Bassam returns with a soft drink for Aneesa and two bottles of beer.

‘Pepsi?’ He grins at her.

He looks just as he did when he was a young boy, his hair mussed up a little and his shoulders hunched slightly forward. Aneesa feels a rush of tenderness for her brother and turns to frown at Chris.

‘What’s going on, Chris?’ Bassam looks from one to the other. ‘What have you been saying to upset my sister?’

‘Nothing. It’s just uncomfortably crowded in here for me,’ Aneesa reaches for her drink. ‘Pepsi, no ice, right?’

This is how I imagine it happened, Salah. Ramzi and Waddad sit at one of the large tables by the window in the orphanage dining room. It is early evening and the mist is rising from the valley, moving up through the pine trees and wrapping itself around the building. The damp is palpable.

Are you warm enough? Waddad asks.

Ramzi pulls at the sleeves of the new jumper she has given him and smiles.

They have been sitting there for some time after finishing their meal. It is a few weeks into their relationship and Waddad thinks this is a good opportunity to tell the boy about Bassam. She pats Ramzi’s arm, leans closer to him and begins.

They came to the apartment on a winter morning. There was a loud banging at the door and someone called out Bassam’s name. When I opened it, a group of men pushed their way into the hall and asked for him.

Ramzi nods his dark head and then holds it perfectly still, as if anxious to hear the rest.

He used to wake up looking astonished, as if he never expected to feel so alive first thing in the morning. That always made me feel good, that look of surprise on his face, she says.

Ramzi fidgets in his chair and she hurries on.

As they led him away, one of the men told me he would be back in a couple of hours, that there was just a small matter that needed to be cleared up. They even let him go back to his room and get changed beforehand.

I keep thinking, though … I keep wondering why, when Bassam saw them and realized what was happening, why he didn’t escape through the bedroom window. It would have been so easy to slip down to the neighbours and run.

She lifts her head and looks around the room. The other children are being unusually quiet over their meal.

I suppose … Ramzi begins.

Waddad feels her body tense up. Ramzi’s eyes wander and for a moment she thinks he will not continue.

I suppose Bassam was concerned about you, he finally says, his voice rising as he speaks.

Waddad suddenly understands what he is trying to say.

Worried they might hurt me? she asks the little boy in the seat beside her. That’s why you didn’t try to escape, isn’t it?

It is a few moments before Waddad allows herself to weep and even then, even as the tears fall down her face and on to her limp hands lying palms up on the table before her, she does not make a sound.

Don’t cry, Ramzi pleads. Please don’t cry.

The second time Aneesa goes up to the orphanage, she is on her own. She asks for Ramzi and is told by the porter that the children are still in their classrooms.

‘I’ll just wait over there,’ she says, gesturing to the inner courtyard.

‘I’ll let his teacher know you’re here.’

She walks over to the plastic table by the young pine trees, wipes the dust off one of the chairs with the sleeve of her jumper and sits down with her legs outstretched. The vine on the trellis above is mostly brown and dry, but Aneesa notices small green shoots here and there. She looks up, squinting in the thin ray of sunlight that penetrates the courtyard and makes shadows of the wiry vine and of the tree branches.

Moments later, the children emerge from their classrooms yelling in unison. Aneesa looks around and sees Ramzi coming towards her, a ball under his arm. She moves an empty chair nearer to her own and he sits down. For a moment, they are entirely engulfed by the noise around them, and can say nothing to each other. Ramzi’s head is bent down and he is holding the ball close to his chest. His trainers, Aneesa notices, are white and very new. Another present from Waddad. She hears Ramzi take a deep breath.

‘Would you like to come and watch me play?’ he asks her. ‘I’m very good.’ Then he looks up and smiles at her for the first time.

It is mid-afternoon and Aneesa and Samir are alone together for the first time. They sit in a coffee shop on one side of a long wooden bench, elbows almost touching. Aneesa hangs her head and looks down at her hands encircling a large mug of coffee.

‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me here,’ Samir begins. ‘I wanted to talk to you about my father.’

She looks up at him.

‘Salah?’

‘He seems to value your friendship a great deal.’

‘I know.’

Samir clears his throat.

‘You know I brought him away from Beirut just after my mother passed away. Too many memories there for him.’

‘You grew up there too, didn’t you?’

‘I left a long time ago. This is where I live now.’

Aneesa nods. She is beginning to lose interest in the conversation.

‘Do you think my father is happy here?’ Samir continues.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you asked him that yourself?’

He looks slightly flustered.

‘I just thought you might have discussed it with him,’ he says. ‘You seem so close.’

‘We are. He is my best friend here.’

Samir lets out a harsh laugh.

‘A young woman like you? Surely you have plenty of friends of your own generation.’

She shrugs and takes a gulp of the hot coffee. Then she turns her face away, and gazes through the glass shopfront to the busy street beyond.

‘He seems to be growing more and more attached to you. Are you aware of that?’

‘But I feel the same way about him.’

Samir shakes his head.

‘He is an old man, Aneesa. My father is an old man and he has been through so much. He’s very vulnerable and I don’t want him hurt. Anyway, I’m not sure you really know him.’

She looks intently at Samir and waits for him to continue.

‘Maybe I don’t know him too well any more, either. He seems very different from when I was a child. Something has changed and I cannot work out quite what it is. Do you find that strange?’

Aneesa shakes her head.

‘You’re looking at him with different eyes, I suppose,’ she says gently.

Samir smiles and his face is suddenly smooth and bright.

‘The first time I went back home I visited the old hotel in the mountains that my parents took me to every summer. In the late afternoons, just before dusk, they would come downstairs after their nap to sit on the terrace. It was spacious and cobblestoned and there were large clay pots filled with geraniums between the tables. We’d sip on lemonade for a few minutes and I would clamber down from my chair and walk over to the edge of the terrace to look out at the world.’

He turns away so she can only see his profile.

‘But things had changed,’ he continues, shaking his head a little. ‘It wasn’t so much the building itself, but the exterior grounds. They had installed a canopy in white and yellow stripes with curtains that opened out on to the view. At first, I couldn’t quite work out what was wrong, until I realized, looking out at the setting sun, a brilliant haze of red spreading slowly over the sky, that there was a line of young pine trees in view, just below the edge of the terrace.’ He looks at her again. ‘I was very upset,’ he laughs. ‘Someone had taken the trouble to plant much-needed trees on the side of the mountain and I was angry because it made everything look different.’

Aneesa sees a small boy in a short-sleeved shirt tucked into starched white trousers. He stands alone, his dark hair combed back off his anxious face, and behind him, a man and woman are silent and waiting too.

She reaches up to place a hand on Samir’s arm but he has already shaken off the memory.

‘I’ll have to get back to the office now,’ he says.

Aneesa draws her hand away and places it in her lap. Samir stands up abruptly so that the remaining coffee in his mug spills over on to the counter. She covers his hand with her own as he tries to reach for a napkin.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll clean it up. You go on, I’m going to sit here for a bit and finish my coffee.’

She clutches a handful of paper napkins to her chest and watches as he walks away.

Let me tell you about the boy who would be my brother, Salah.

Ramzi sleeps on the bed closest to the window, where the sunlight comes through to wake him and, in spring, the scent of wildflowers. His clothes go into one half of a cupboard placed between his bed and the bed of the next boy down. The warm jacket Waddad bought him hangs neatly next to the two pairs of trousers he brought with him from home and his new trainers and best shoes are directly underneath on the cupboard floor. Shirts and sweaters go on a shelf and his socks and underwear are in the upper drawer.