Dreams of Water (19 page)

With the next clap of thunder, big drops of rain begin to fall. Aneesa pulls up the hood on her jacket and begins to run ahead with Samir in tow.

Samir has remembered something Salah once told him about Aneesa. It was before his father had fallen ill, when he had just found out that Aneesa wanted to return to Beirut.

‘Is it her mother?' Samir asked.

It was Sunday and they were out for a drive in the country, on roads that meandered through green fields and occasional forests.

‘She hasn't told me why,' replied Salah.

‘But you do know why,
baba
. You must.'

Salah looked out of the window and pointed to a farmhouse at the end of a field.

‘Seems very isolated out here, doesn't it?'

‘
Baba
, I'm just concerned about you. I know you'll miss Aneesa.'

‘Yes, I will.'

‘Then why do you think she's leaving?'

Salah sighed and looked down at his hands, palms down on his knees.

‘It's to do with her brother,' he finally said. ‘She wants to get things sorted out. I don't really know.'

‘But I thought she came here to start again,' Samir protested. ‘I thought she just wanted to get on with her life after the kidnapping.'

‘She didn't come here for a new life, Samir.' Salah's voice sounded impatient. ‘She came here to run away from it,' he continued. ‘She's only just realized that things like that do not leave you.'

Samir recalls the conversation and thinks of the experiences in his own life that will always stay with him, such as Salah's death and this lingering doubt that he might not have understood his father as he should have. He wonders too if in staying away from Lebanon for all those years, even after the war had ended, he had been running away too. It surprises him sometimes to realize how, in some ways, he and Aneesa were very similar.

Seeing Aneesa again, Samir has a new idea of her as a woman with purpose, not in the way his mother had been, focused and determined to the exclusion of everything else,
but as someone whose resolve cannot be questioned. He knows Aneesa watches him carefully and compares him, perhaps, to his father, but feels she has nonetheless noted something in him that he has wished for himself: the possibility that one day the gods will also lead him.

Aneesa and Ramzi are in the car park near the flat. They are waiting for the group of boys that Aneesa has seen play here on Saturday afternoons. Ramzi has brought his bicycle and he is riding it in ever-growing circles in the centre of the empty car park while Aneesa stands watching. She has been at a loss to find something for Ramzi to do when he comes to visit and is hoping that the boys will let Ramzi join them. But she is not sure how to go about arranging it. I have never had to deal with this sort of thing before, she thinks to herself.

Aneesa calls Ramzi over.

‘Look, I'll talk to the boys when they get here,' she tells him. ‘I'm sure they'll be fine about it.'

Ramzi is perched on the seat of the bicycle with one leg on one of the pedals and standing on the other. He shrugs and hops to steady himself. Aneesa waits for him to ride off again but he only looks at her. He has changed in the two years since she first saw him, taller and less delicate-looking, and no longer resembles Bassam so much. He seems, she suddenly realizes, much more real somehow; the small childish hand that grasps the bicycle's handles and the scruffy trainers with their laces half undone, these have become a dear and familiar sight.

‘Are you all right?' she asks.

Ramzi gets off the bicycle and wheels it towards her.

‘Waddad will be waiting for us,' he says. ‘Why don't we just go home?'

Aneesa notices a group of children approaching from the other side of the car park. She begins to lift a hand to wave at them but stops herself when she sees the alarmed look on Ramzi's face.

‘Listen,
habibi
,' Aneesa says, suddenly understanding. ‘I'm feeling a bit tired. Do you mind if I go home and leave you here? You can make your way back on your own, can't you?'

Ramzi beams at her and nods only briefly before jumping back on to his bicycle and riding towards the children. Aneesa stands there for a moment, looking at him, and is surprised at how pleased she is that he does not stop and look back.

It is the first time that Samir has come to Aneesa's home and he is intrigued at the thought of meeting her mother. But Waddad is not as he had pictured her. She is not a bent old woman nor is she particularly motherly in her manner. Instead, she is small and if not feisty, at the very least energetic, and she seems as interested in him as he is in her. They do not sit in the living room on the tired old sofas he noticed when he walked in, but are standing in the kitchen while Waddad fiddles with a pot over the stove and Aneesa tries to get her attention.

‘
Mama
, please sit down. I'll take care of it.'

They sit, Waddad and Samir, at the kitchen table, unsmiling and facing each other. There is nothing awkward in the way she looks at him.

‘I've been wondering about you ever since Aneesa told me you were here,' Waddad begins. ‘You see, she never talked about you before, only your father. God have mercy on his soul.'

She stops and waits for Samir to say something. He is younger and more vulnerable-looking than she had expected.

‘Aneesa meant a great deal to my father,' he says. ‘He was sorry when she left. We both were.'

Waddad nods and scratches her head. Her hair is grey and cut close to her head like a cap.

‘I thought she'd stay there for ever,' she says with a smile. ‘But then you can never tell with my daughter.'

Samir watches Aneesa as she lifts the lid of the pot, dips a teaspoon into the mixture inside and tastes it.

‘It's too salty, Mother,' Aneesa says.

Waddad turns around to look at her.

‘The stew,
mama
. You've put too much salt in it again.'

Waddad turns back to Samir and shakes her head.

‘She's teaching me how to cook now,' she says with a chuckle. ‘Why don't you stay and have lunch with us?'

There are many things that Samir thinks about when he is alone, things that console him, like the certainty of another day as morning breaks or the sight of the sea, flat and constant, from his balcony, but these are the comforts that loneliness recalls. Being with people once again, two women in a crowded kitchen filled with meals past and present, with words said out loud and late-night musings, he realizes how silent his days are: spaces between his heart and the surrounding air that he is unable to fill.

‘I would love to,' he finally says.

Aneesa joins them at the table feeling anxious. She knows her mother is curious to find out more from Samir and is afraid Waddad will say something to upset him.

‘Will you stay here, do you think?' Waddad asks. ‘In Beirut, I mean.'

‘He doesn't know yet,
mama
,' Aneesa says quickly. ‘He's got a lot to sort out first.'

‘I know. I meant after he's through with all that.'

Samir puts a hand on Aneesa's arm and feels some of her anxiety dissipate through his fingers.

‘I'm not sure yet what I will do. I have been going through the flat, my parents' things. It makes me happy at times and at others afraid.'

Waddad nods.

‘Everything reminds me of them, even strangers I meet in the street bring back memories of my mother and father, in their look or manner,' Samir continues. ‘They are with me here as they have never been before.'

Samir has placed his hands before him, clasped loosely together so that Aneesa can see the tablecloth through the spaces between the curves of his fingers and the hollow between his wrists. Her mother leans forward and looks up at him before she speaks.

‘But,
habibi
, that's exactly how you should be feeling.'

The shop is not far from the main shopping street. Aneesa glances at the window display – mannequins in men's clothing, shirts and trousers and leather jackets of an indefinable style – before walking inside. It has been such a long time since they last met that she is not certain she will recognize Khaled, an old friend of her brother's.

The man behind the counter is talking on a mobile phone. He looks up and smiles before ending his conversation and coming towards her. He is of medium height, wears thick glasses and his hairline is clearly receding so that his forehead seems unusually high.

‘Hello, Khaled,' Aneesa says.

The man approaches and looks intently at her.

‘Aneesa! What a nice surprise to see you here! How are you?' He embraces her and then stretches out his arms to gaze at her. ‘Don't tell me you've come back to this godforsaken place when the rest of us are trying to leave,' Khaled says, shaking his head. ‘Come and sit down, please.' He pulls out two chairs from behind the counter and places them in the middle of the shop.

‘I don't want to get in the way,' Aneesa says as he gestures for her to take a seat. ‘I just didn't know where else to find you and then remembered your father's shop.'

‘When did you get back?' Khaled asks.

‘It's been a while now. I'm staying with my mother. How about you? How is your family?'

‘The children are almost grown up now,' he says, shaking his head. ‘Twelve and thirteen years old and they're enrolled in the same school Bassam and I went to.'

Khaled had been Bassam's closest friend. They went to school and university together and Aneesa suspected had also been involved with the same political group during the war. She had never quite understood the friendship because the two of them were so different, Bassam an idealist and Khaled with his two feet firmly planted on the ground. But after her brother's disappearance, Aneesa had turned to Khaled for help. When she eventually went away, she had relied on him to deliver the letters to her mother.

‘Oh, Aneesa, it must be ages since we last spoke,' Khaled interrupts her thoughts. ‘How is your mother? I haven't been to see her in a while. It's my fault, I know.'

‘The shop has certainly changed,' she says, looking around her at the well-stocked shelves and rails.

‘Would you believe we used to do better during the war? Business is getting more difficult every year.'

The street door opens and a customer walks in. Khaled goes up to him.

‘Can I help you?'

The young man says he is looking for a pair of socks in pure cotton and Khaled helps him choose them. As he wraps the socks up and gives the young man his change, Khaled turns to Aneesa.

‘I'll just be a moment,' he says.

Khaled believes he knows why Aneesa has come to see him and is glad of having a moment or two with a customer to think about what he will say to her.

‘Did you ever find out anything new, Khaled, about Bassam, I mean?' Aneesa asks once the young man has left.

He shakes his head.

‘Don't you think I would have let you know if I had?'

‘But I wasn't here. I thought …'

‘No, but Waddad is. I certainly would have gone to her.'

‘But you must know something,' Aneesa protests. ‘You were his best friend.'

Khaled leans forward and puts an arm over her shoulders.

‘I told you everything I knew at the time, Aneesa,' he says gently. ‘We looked for him until there was no place else to look, you know that. But it was no use in the end.'

Aneesa gets up, pushing her chair back.

‘I keep going over it in my mind, Khaled, and it just doesn't make sense. He can't have disappeared so completely, as though he'd never existed.'

‘It doesn't have to make sense, Aneesa. Nothing about the war ever made any sense.

All those deaths, all that suffering, it was madness.'

‘You think he was killed?'

Khaled hangs his head and takes a deep breath. He has pictured in his mind so many times what might have happened to his friend. He knows enough of what went on during those terrible years to hope that Bassam had not suffered too much before he died.

‘You must think that too, Aneesa,' he says slowly.

‘I know he's no longer alive. I know that, Khaled. I just want to know what happened. How it happened. I thought you might be able to help me.'

He stands up and leans closer to her. He had almost forgotten about Bassam's disappearance in the few years since the end of the war and realizes there is something in him that resents being reminded of it now.

‘
Habibti
, we may never know what happened. You have to stop thinking about it, Aneesa, for your mother's sake if not your own.'

Aneesa fetches her handbag from the back of the chair where she left it and puts it over her shoulder.

‘In the mountains, they believe that those who die a violent death always return,' she says. ‘My mother takes comfort in that.'

‘Perhaps you can too,' Khaled says.

Aneesa shakes her head as she steps out.

Aneesa has never thought of her upbringing as different from the rest of her generation but there are things about this new Beirut that no longer seem right so that she sometimes feels out of place where she least expects to.

She loves Hamra Street, as she always did, its smallness that once seemed limitless, its tired poor who reach out for money from their seats on the pavement, the clothing boutiques that do not interest her and the sales-women who look her up and down; she even likes her awkwardness and the way she knows she no longer fits in among those who have experienced a different Lebanon: all these things make her take comfort.

But lately, walking to her favourite bookshop or sitting in a pavement café, Aneesa senses an unspecified dissatisfaction, a faltering malaise that cannot be shaken off and which she cannot be sure belongs to her alone.

Being with Salah had taught her a great deal, a kind of amazement at the details of everyday life that she seems now to have lost, the ability to view everything delicately as if any roughness even in thought would strip it of its true self.