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NADA AWAR JARRAR

Dreams of Water

Dedication

For Aida and Aref andfor Amou Ahmad

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Keep Reading

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Standing in the back garden of her parents’ mountain home, Aneesa, at four, hears the angels, a chorus of sweet voices that tell her to dance for them. She twirls around beds of roses, down a dirt road and into the breeze, humming to herself. When Waddad calls to her, Aneesa stops beneath the shade of a pine tree and takes a deep breath before running indoors.

‘Time for lunch,’ her mother says. ‘Let’s wash your hands before you sit down.’

Aneesa stands up on the stool in front of the sink and puts her hands under the tap. Waddad pulls her sleeves up, turns the water on and lathers soap on to her own hands before grabbing Aneesa’s and kneading them with cool suds.

‘When I call my children in to eat, they wash their hands on their own,’ Aneesa says, looking up at Waddad.

‘Haven’t I told you not to put your dolls in water? You’ll ruin them.’

‘They are my children, mama, not my dolls.’

Waddad wipes Aneesa’s hands dry and gently pushes her towards her seat.

‘Always talking about children that are not there.’ Waddad sounds cross as Aneesa sits down to eat.

Later that day, Waddad takes Aneesa by the hand and they walk down to the village. The sun is strong and wisps of Aneesa’s long dark hair stick to her forehead.

‘Where are we going, mama?’

‘We’re going to talk to the sheikh,’ Waddad replies in a firm tone.

They arrive at a house in a side street just before the main souq and go carefully down some stone steps on its side. The door of a basement room is open. An old man sits on the floor, his back propped up by large pillows against the wall behind him, his legs crossed neatly in front of him. He is dressed entirely in dark blue and has a grey-black beard that lies rigid on his chest like a small, coarse broom. He looks intently at Waddad as she speaks. When he opens his mouth to speak, the beard moves up and down with his words.

‘The child has spoken of a past life,’ he says.

Waddad pushes her hands down on Aneesa’s shoulders, the scent of fear emanating from her skin.

‘But what am I to do? Her father does not believe in these things and he will be furious if he hears her talking about it again.’

The old man shakes his head so that the white headdress slips forward over his forehead. Then he passes a hand over the length of his face. When he removes it, the stiff beard looks narrower and less impressive.

‘She may never speak of it again,’ he says.

He shrugs his shoulders and leans forward until his face is very close to Aneesa’s. She looks into his bright blue eyes and sniffs at the scent of olive-oil soap coming from his skin. When Aneesa reaches out to touch the beard, she hears her mother gasp and call out her name. She puts her hand down. The sheikh smiles and moves back to rest against the pillows once again.

Father is helping Bassam with his homework. The two of them are sitting at the dining table with books and paper and pencils before them. Aneesa can feel anxiety in the air but is not sure if it is hers or theirs.

‘Aneesa,’ her father calls out. ‘Get me a cup of coffee, will you?’

Aneesa looks up at her father and begins to say something but he stops her.

‘Go on, habibti,’ he says. ‘Not too much sugar now.’

Aneesa glances quickly at Bassam and feels her heart sink. He is leaning an elbow on the table and holding his head up with his hand. He looks bored and clearly uninterested in his work. Father will be so angry with him, she thinks. Where has Mother gone?

In the kitchen, Aneesa brings water to the boil in the pot and adds half a teaspoon of sugar, then she puts in the finely ground coffee and stirs gently, taking the pot off the burner just as the mixture begins to come to the boil and then putting it back on again until the coffee is thick and frothy at the edges. She hears her father’s raised voice from the dining room.

‘Bassam, you’re not concentrating. I asked you a question and I want you to think about the answer before you say anything.’

Bassam murmurs something in reply but she cannot tell what he is saying. Aneesa pours the coffee into a cup.

‘What?’ Father asks tersely.

Moments later, Aneesa hears her father shout out loud. When she steps into the dining room with the coffee, he is no longer there but Bassam is still in his chair. His head is bent low and he has one hand over his ear. When he looks up at her and removes his hand, Aneesa sees that his face has gone very red. She remains perfectly still as Bassam stands up and slowly walks out of the room.

Aneesa stands on a chair by the kitchen table holding a large loaf of flat bread in her hands. She sees her child self carefully fold the loaf into quarters and then try to put it inside a plastic bag before it unfolds again.

‘Are you all right, Aneesa?’ Father comes up behind her.

She looks up at him, his round face, bulbous nose and greying hair, and waits for him to smile.

‘Shall I help you with that?’ he asks.

She nods and watches him hold the folded loaf with one big hand, put it into the bag and then tie the handles of the bag together to make a tight bundle.

‘Where are you going with the bread, habibti?’

Aneesa steps off the chair.

‘I’m taking it to my children. They’re hungry.’

He puts his arm around her shoulders and they walk out of the kitchen.

‘Take me there, baba,’ Aneesa pleads. ‘I can hear them calling to me. Take me in the car.’

Later that night, as she lies in her bed in the dark, Aneesa hears her parents arguing in the next room. She knows that no matter how loud their voices, they cannot drive away the sound of weeping children that fills her ears.

Waddad spoons a mixture of rice, tomato and parsley on to half-cooked vine leaves that she has placed flat on the kitchen table. Her hair is tied back and her face shines with perspiration. Once each leaf is filled, she rolls it into a small tube and places it in a saucepan. Little Aneesa stands on a chair and peers inside to look at the cigar shapes lined up tightly against one another. She sniffs at the tangy, uncooked smell of the stuffed leaves and feels her mouth water.

‘I like the old man best,’ Aneesa says.

‘What old man, dear?’ Waddad’s head is bent low and she is not looking at her daughter.

‘The one with the beard. I want to see him again.’

‘Shhh,’ Waddad whispers. ‘You know your father doesn’t want us to talk of such things.’

‘He’s out in the garden. He can’t hear us.’

‘What do you want to see the old man for, anyway?’ Aneesa reaches inside the saucepan, takes out a stuffed vine leaf and pops it into her mouth. The rice makes crunching noises between her teeth as she chews.

‘That’ll give you stomachache,’ Waddad warns.

Bassam follows Father around in the garden carrying a heavy bucket filled with wilted roses. Father examines the bushes closely and expertly snaps off the heads of the flowers at the top of the stem before Bassam rushes to pick them up and put them in the bucket. They are not speaking but Aneesa can tell her brother is itching to be elsewhere. She walks up to them and takes baba’s hand.

‘Ah, Aneesa,’ he says with a gentle voice.

Bassam tries to hand her the bucket.

‘Your sister can’t carry that, Bassam. It’s much too heavy.’

‘I’ll go and empty this,’ Bassam says sulkily. ‘It’s too full, even for me. I’ll be right back.’ But Aneesa knows he will not be coming back.

There are times when she imagines she can see her brother in the distance. He is walking down their street, hands in pockets, head bent low. He cannot be more than fifteen years old; his hair is sticking upwards at the crown of his head and in the fragile curve of his long neck, Aneesa sees hints of their childhood. She waves to him but he ignores her. When he finally stops, there are two of him, one standing behind the other, arms wrapped tightly around his twin. They are on a beach in moonlight and she hears them whispering to one another above the sound of waves lapping at their feet.

Somewhere between the village spring and the wilderness, beyond the fragrant fig tree by the grocery shop, Aneesa stands in the single sunny spot in the square. Her eyes are squeezed shut so that blazes of orange line the backs of her eyelids. She raises both arms, palms towards the light, and takes a deep breath. A gentle humming unfolds behind her forehead and her mouth stretches in a smile.

‘Aneesa.’

She opens her eyes and turns around. As Waddad approaches through the light and shadow, Aneesa feels a movement in her chest.

‘Come on. The sheikh is waiting for us.’

He is sitting outside this time, on a low stool by the front door. His slippers are covered in dust and the front of his baggy navy-blue sherwal hangs in folds between his thin legs. A young woman in a black dress and the customary long white mandeel brings out two chairs before walking back into the house.

Aneesa shifts forward in her chair so that her feet touch the ground.

The old man lifts a hand to shade his eyes from the sun, puts it down again and looks at her.

‘How old are you now?’ he asks.

‘She’s six,’ Waddad replies.

The old man grunts loudly and Aneesa leans towards him, placing both hands on her knees.

‘Our house was made of stone like this one.’ She points to the wall behind the sheikh. ‘But it was very small and the ground was uneven. The mattress tilted to one side when we slept and the soles of my children’s feet were always black with dirt.’

‘What else?’ asks the sheikh.

‘That’s all I remember,’ she says, shaking her head.

Waddad shifts in her chair but remains silent.

The sheikh shuffles his old feet and a cloud of dust rises up around them. Aneesa feels suddenly weightless and realizes that she has been holding her breath. When she lets go, the air comes out in a loud sputter. She holds a hand up to her mouth and hangs her head before looking up again a moment later.

The young woman in the veil is leaning over Aneesa with a tray in her hands. Aneesa takes a glass of lemonade and says thank you. The old man and Waddad are quiet. Aneesa sips at her drink and sees time close around the three of them in a kind of circle.

They are in the mountains and Aneesa, Waddad and Bassam are in the garden at the front of the house. It is summer and the pine trees around them and in the valley below give out the sticky scents of sap and strong sunlight. Waddad is sitting on the stone bench in the centre of the garden with a tray in her lap on which there are two bowls; one is filled with raw minced meat mixed with bulghur and the other with fried pine nuts and pieces of cooked minced meat for stuffing. Aneesa is standing beside her and Bassam is kicking a football aimlessly on the small patch of lawn around the bench. Aneesa wishes he would either stop or let her join in.

‘I want to play too,’ she says.

‘Stop whining,’ Bassam retorts and then kicks the ball past her and into a tree trunk just behind Waddad.

‘Bassam,’ Waddad says in a warning voice.

‘She’s always bothering me, mama. Make her stop.’

Aneesa lunges after her brother but he slips away and turns around and grins at her. She reaches for the ball, lifts it above her head and aims at him. He moves quickly to one side and the ball misses him.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Waddad says absently. ‘Come and learn how to do this.’

Waddad is making small, stuffed kibbeh which she will later fry for lunch. She rolls a handful of raw meat and bulghur into a ball with one hand which she pierces with the index finger of the other. Then she fills the hole with the stuffing and closes it up at both ends into two neat points, creating an oval shape that bulges out in the middle.

Bassam sits down beside her and watches carefully.

‘I bet I could do that,’ he says with a chuckle.

‘Your hands are dirty.’

‘I mean if my hands were clean.’

Waddad looks up at him and smiles before returning to her work.

‘Mmmm,’ she murmurs.

Aneesa bends down to pick up the ball and holds it closely to her chest as she watches them. She sniffs loudly and begins to move towards the bench but her mother and brother do not look up at her. She stops and looks at them again, this time more carefully. They are both very intent on the task before them: Bassam, focusing so completely on his mother’s hands that he seems to be equally involved in its success, and Waddad, her shoulders slightly hunched up with the delicate effort, revelling in the attention. They are perfect together, she thinks, and is surprised at the clarity in this discovery. She lets go of the ball and feels a shiver go through her body. I am growing up, Aneesa murmurs to herself and lifts her hands to her hips. These are all the things I can see.

Part One

The first time Aneesa sees Salah she is waiting at the bus stop near her home. He sits beside her on the plastic perch attached to the bus shelter and immediately the scent of fresh lemon fills her nostrils. His woollen jacket is zipped halfway up so that the denim shirt he is wearing underneath it shows through, and his hair, longish and beautifully white, is brushed back from his forehead.

‘Hello,’ Aneesa hears herself saying.

‘Oh!’

‘I startled you,’ she continues. ‘I’m sorry.’

Salah looks flustered.

‘No, not at all. I was just lost in my thoughts for a moment.’

She nods and turns to look at the traffic moving towards them. Moments pass before she speaks again.

‘Do you think that if we stare hard enough the bus will finally appear?’ Aneesa laughs.

Salah, my dear.

My other life seems far away now that I am back, but not you and not our beautiful adventures together. Those things and you I miss terribly. It’s not that I’m having difficulty getting accustomed to life at home – there is something of that, though it does not occupy my thoughts very much – it’s the ease with which I have slipped back into being here. Lebanon is like a second skin that does not leave me even as I wish it away. It is the here and now of everything I feel and do.

I imagine you, walking down the busy streets of this city in your long brown suede jacket, and when I go past the block of flats you once lived in, I wish I could run upstairs, ring the bell and find you there. We would make tea biscuits, I think, to remind ourselves of our once-Western lives.

In the back of my mind are thoughts of how we met, both of us in the throes of aloneness, almost content with its settled rhythms, yet feeling the desolation that inevitably comes with it. Is that how we became such fast friends?

Did we not find, Salah, besides the solitude, a relief in each other’s company that usually comes with a much longer acquaintance? Our mountain people would say we were only two old souls recognizing one another after a long absence.

Waddad is in the kitchen stirring a pot of Arabic coffee over the stove. The smell is strong and pleasing. Aneesa watches as she lifts the dark, thick liquid with the spoon and lets it fall back into the pot. She bends over her mother and plants a kiss on her cheek.

‘Good morning, mama.’

‘Good morning, habibti. Sit down and I’ll pour the coffee.’

Waddad’s hair curls daintily around her long face and her eyebrows are faint lines above watery grey eyes. She is dressed in dark blue jeans and a white T-shirt and looks like a twelve-year-old boy, clean and sweet-smelling first thing in the morning. Aneesa can hardly believe that this is the middle-aged woman she left behind all those years ago.

The two women sip their coffee noisily and with enjoyment, the scent of cardamom seeds rising from the steaming cups.

‘I think I’ve found your brother,’ Waddad says moments later.

‘What?’

Waddad stands up and turns away to place her cup in the sink. She turns the tap on and reaches for the washing-up sponge.

‘What are you talking about, mama?’ Aneesa jumps up from her seat. ‘Where is he? What’s going on?’

‘Things changed so much for me after you left,’ Waddad continues over the sound of the running water. ‘I had to manage the search on my own. It took a long time, but it’s finally happened.’

Aneesa walks up to Waddad, places her hands on the older woman’s shoulders and gently turns her round so they are facing one another. Soapsuds trickle down on the floor between them.

‘Mother, what do you mean? Where have you found him? Why haven’t you said anything about this to me before? For heaven’s sake, tell me what’s going on.’

Waddad smiles and continues as though she has not been interrupted.

‘He’s at the orphanage in the mountains. I’ve been going there on a regular basis for a few weeks now. We’ve become friends.’ She wriggles out of Aneesa’s grasp and turns to the washing up again. ‘His name is Ramzi and he is eight years old. He was born only a few days after your brother disappeared. It all fits in.’

Aneesa does not understand at first, then she realizes exactly what her mother is saying.

‘What have you done, mama? What have you done?’

Waddad rinses her hands and turns to her daughter once again.

‘Aneesa, it’s time we accepted the fact that your brother is gone. We have to get on with our lives.’

‘But what about the letters we received from him while he was being held captive?’

Waddad lifts a hand to Aneesa’s face.

‘No more letters, Aneesa. No more. Please.’

As an adolescent, Bassam had not grown very tall and had developed a weedy frame that made him bend slightly forwards when he walked so that he seemed almost defenceless. Aneesa used to walk up to him and poke him in the back to make him straighten up. She remembers the feel of the hollow in his thin back.

‘I’ll take you to see Ramzi one day if you like,’ Waddad continues. ‘But you have to promise.’

‘Promise what, mama?’

There is a pause before she replies.

‘Just that you’ll see the truth as I do.’

Away from home, Aneesa dreams exhilarating dreams of her brother. They are moving together towards a sense of effortlessness.

‘Whenever you’re ready, Aneesa,’ Bassam finally says after what seems a long time in flight.

She is holding on to his arm and watches as he lifts off pieces of the surrounding landscape and moulds them into a vibrant picture of faces and places they have known together.

‘That’s beautiful,’ she tells him before waking up sweating in her bed.

She saw a psychic after she left home, in the hope that he would tell her something about the truth behind her brother’s disappearance.

The man sat in a faded velvet armchair: a thin, arrogant man with long fair hair brushed back off his forehead. Aneesa took an immediate dislike to him.

‘You have perhaps a father or brother who was killed?’ the man asked soon after she had sat down.

She tried not to look too surprised.

‘My brother, in the civil war in Lebanon. He was kidnapped and we never saw him again.’

‘He’s with us now,’ the man continued. ‘He wants to let you know that he doesn’t regret what he did.’

‘He’s dead?’

The man said nothing.

‘What does he look like?’ Aneesa blurted out.

‘Is that a trick question?’ The man gave a harsh laugh. She shook her head.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, lifting his hand to his head. ‘He’s got a large scar on his forehead. He says they killed him three days after he was taken away.’ Then he reached over and placed his hand over hers. ‘He wants you to stop worrying about him. Tell your mother too.’

She closed her eyes and sat in silence for the rest of the session, strangely comforted by the unlovable man in the armchair opposite.

Did I ever tell you, Salah, what happened after my father died? We no longer went up to the village in the mountains. I told my mother that I missed the smells there and the slanting sunlight that passed over rocks and gorse bush and ruffled them like the wind. I knew Father’s spirit was waiting for me there. He’s in the garden, mama, I said, pruning the rose bushes like he used to. I saw him in a dream. This is our only home now, she said, making a sweeping gesture with her arms that encompassed the flat, the streets below, Beirut and perhaps even the sea. You’re too old, Aneesa, to make up stories, even if you do miss your father. Forget the mountains and the village. And I did, growing up into never looking back, drifting into a kind of living.

Soon after Bassam’s disappearance, I arrived home one day to find my mother sitting on my brother’s bed surrounded by papers. She had found them in the back of his cupboard, hundreds of political leaflets and lists of names that she did not recognize. She asked me if I had known anything about them. I told her Bassam had mentioned his political involvement but did not elaborate much. I don’t want to put your life in danger as well, Bassam had said to me.

My mother stood up, grasped me by the arms and shook me hard. You never bothered to tell me about it, you silly girl, she said, her voice rising. You never took the trouble to tell me. Then she burst into tears.

There are times when I wish I had told you all this when we were together but I was afraid of spoiling the quiet joy we felt in our friendship, of harming it with unrelenting sadness.

Perhaps there were many things you would have liked to tell me too, Salah, but never did. Whenever we were together we seemed to speak more of everyday things, steering a long way from the vagaries of our troubled minds. I remember sitting on the floor in the drawing room of your house on that very cold night when snow covered the streets of the city, a fire in the huge stone fireplace, talking of Lebanon. I rubbed the palm of my hand on the carpet beneath me and looked down at the blue, beige and soft white images of birds and deer in its weave. I told you there were times when I liked it in this city with its pockets of green, and the loneliness and peace it brought me. Trouble seems such a long way away, I said. When I told you the story of my brother’s abduction, you asked if that was why I had left in the first place. I nodded and you paused before saying: I’m glad you came here, Aneesa. I mean, I’m glad I met you.

It is mid-morning and Aneesa and her mother have had another argument about Bassam. It is raining hard outside and Aneesa decides to walk along the Beirut Corniche. Big drops of rain splash heavily on to the uneven pavement and on the crests of the mounting waves. She adjusts the hood of her jacket and digs her hands into her pockets.

There are stone benches at regular intervals, each shaped like a flat, squat S, and at the end of the pavement a blue iron balustrade that is bent and broken in places overlooking the sea. There are also tall palm trees planted in a long line on one side of the pavement with what look like burlap bags covering their underside, high up where the remaining leaves flutter in the wind. And if she turns her head to look across the street, beyond the central reservation where flowery shrubs lie almost flush against the deep, dark earth, she sees a number of high-rise buildings that had not been there before she left.

Along the water’s edge, fishermen stand in their plastic slippers on rocks covered in seaweed, their lines rising and falling with the movement of the sea. How many fish do they have to catch to make the effort worthwhile, Aneesa wonders?

A man on crutches walks up to her and stops to extend a box filled with coloured packets of chewing gum. She gives him some money and moves on. The poor have always been here. That is familiar, as is the smell of the sea, a murky, damp smell that is welcome after all the years away.

She reaches the end of the Corniche where the pavement becomes wider and curves around a bend in the road, and stops for a moment to watch as men make their way into a mosque across the street. They pass through a small gate, take their shoes off and enter at the front door to perform the noon prayer. Up ahead, between where she is standing and the buildings diagonally opposite, there is a wide two-way avenue crowded with beeping cars and pedestrians with umbrellas over their heads. Some of the trees planted in the central strip are high enough so that she cannot see through to the other side, but she can hear everything, life and her own heart, humming together.

These are the hours of her undoing, long and sleepless, solitary. She shades her eyes and reaches for the bedside lamp. When she lifts herself off the bed, her body shadowing the dim light, she lets out a sigh and shakes her head. Her dreams, gathering all her fears together in one great deluge until there seems to be no means of overcoming them, were once again of water, the images behind her eyes thick and overwhelming, her pulse quickening and then suddenly stopping in the base of her throat.

She tiptoes into the living room in bare feet, switches on the overhead light and stands still for a moment.

‘Aneesa,’ Waddad calls out from her bedroom. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, mama. Go back to sleep now.’

Her mother coughs into the night.

‘Don’t stay up too late then, dear.’

Aneesa steps out on to the balcony. Beirut in early autumn: the nights are getting cooler though the air remains humid. She wraps her arms around her body and looks down on to the street where there is absolute quiet. She feels a sudden longing for permanence and certainty, for the hardiness she has seen in large oak trees in the West, unwavering and placid too. For a moment, as a breeze comes in from the sea, she wishes she could fly back with it to anywhere but here.

Months after her return, she is still unused to the feeling of always being in familiar places, indoors and out, as if enveloped in something almost transparent that moves with her, a constant companion. These streets, she thinks when she wanders through them, are a part of me, how familiar are the smells that emanate from them, fragrant and sour, the sun that shines or does not on their pavements, and when the rain falls I, umbrella in hand, mince my way through the water, through the cold.

The first letter arrived not long after Bassam’s car was found abandoned and empty in a car park not far from the airport. My mother saw the white envelope addressed to her on the doorstep when she opened the front door to put out the rubbish. She brought the envelope inside, and sat down heavily on her favourite kitchen chair before handing it to me. Open it, she said.

I tore open the envelope with trembling hands, pulled the letter out and began to read.

‘My darling mother. I cannot imagine how difficult it has been for you and Aneesa these past few weeks and I am sorry for it.’

I looked up at my mother and she nodded for me to continue.

I have already begun negotiating with my captors for my release. It’s a long process, mama, so it might be a while before I see you and my darling sister again. I do not know which part of the country we’re in but please don’t worry about me. I am well and getting plenty of food. I have even made friends with one of the guards here and he has agreed to take this letter for me. I cannot say much more and don’t know when I’ll be able to write again. I love you both very much.

I reached out and placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder. Bassam is alive, mama, I said.

She took the letter from me and put it back into the envelope. Then she stood up and began to pace across the kitchen floor.

He may have been alive when he wrote this but how do we know what’s happened to him since? my mother asked. The only way we’ll know that he’s still alive is if we see him again. And with that, she turned abruptly to the sink and began to wash the breakfast dishes.

When we were children, I used to place my hand on my brother’s forehead as he slept and try to will him to dream of a stronger, hero-like self, of the man he would be, until he woke up and pushed my hand away. Aneesa, what are you doing here in the middle of the night? Let me sleep now.

That moment in my mother’s kitchen, suddenly realizing that Bassam’s living and dying, both, were endless, our fears and hopes entangled between them, I shuddered.

Another letter, I murmured to my mother’s back. Another letter?

They drive south along the coast and then turn up into the hills east of Beirut. When they are halfway there, Aneesa stops the car and steps out to look at the view. The sun is shining, the sea is bright and blue, and the air is so much cleaner up here that she feels she is breathing freely for the first time since her return. She gets back into the car and realizes how much she has missed the mountains.

When they arrive at their destination, Waddad and Aneesa stand at the terrace’s edge and look down to the valley, into the distance. There are pine trees and gorse bushes and a soft haze in the air. Behind them are mountains of grey rock and fine, violet-coloured earth.

‘Shall we go into the shrine now, mama?’

‘We’ll have to put these on.’

Waddad opens her handbag and takes out two long white veils. Aneesa shakes out a mandeel, jerking it up suddenly so that it will not touch the floor. The delicate spun cotton flutters outwards. She places it on her head, throws its folds over one shoulder and takes a deep breath.