Dreams of Water (23 page)

Ramzi is sitting in the back seat between his mother and another passenger. It is sunny but cold outside and the car heater, which the driver turned on some time ago, is blowing hot air on to Ramzi's face. He looks out of the window. They have already crossed the border and are now on their way to his mother's village with Ramzi's suitcase and bicycle strapped to the roof of the taxi. Ramzi had asked the driver to put the bicycle in the boot before they set off but the man said it would not fit. Instead, he fetched a piece of rope that looked somewhat flimsy and tied it on top of the taxi.

‘Don't worry,' the driver had said. ‘It'll be fine up there.'

But Ramzi is still not convinced because he hears the bicycle rattling from time to time as they move and, anyway, what if it begins to rain and it gets all wet and rusty?

They have been on the road for many hours and Ramzi is tired. He turns to his mother.

‘How much longer will it be?' he asks her.

‘Not too long now,' she replies. ‘Sit still, Ramzi.'

‘But I'm thirsty.'

She reaches into the plastic bag at her feet and pulls out the bottle of water she filled at the last stop they
made. Ramzi has a drink and tries to hand the bottle back to his mother.

‘Offer it to the lady next to you,' she says. Then she takes the bottle from him and leans across to the woman passenger. ‘Please, have some.'

Ramzi looks out of the window again at the wide fields of violet-coloured earth and the occasional gorse bush on either side of the road. It's very different here. There is no sea; nor are there any real mountains, only low, rocky hills that stand next to each other looking very much alike.

His mother and the passenger are having a conversation.

‘He's my eldest,' he hears his mother saying. She pats him on the head and pushes a lock of hair back off his face.

‘How old is he?' the woman asks.

Ramzi looks away again. He begins to wonder what Aneesa is doing. It is Saturday and she had told him she might go over to the car park and tell his friends that he had had to go away for a while. They'll probably just go on playing and forget all about me, he thinks, and feels himself getting frustrated.

‘He left me with four children to care for on my own,' his mother tells the woman. ‘I had no choice but to send Ramzi away for a while and took the other children to my parents' place until I got myself sorted out. Now we'll all be together again.'

‘Tsk, tsk,' the woman says.

Ramzi tries to reach for the plastic bag.

‘What do you want?' his mother asks, pushing him back against his seat.

‘Can't we stop for a bit now,
mama
, and have a look around?'

‘We're just turning into the village where your grandparents live,' his mother says. ‘Look!' She points to the houses that appear on either side of the road. The terrain hasn't changed, but the one- and two-storey buildings soften the landscape a bit. Some of the houses are made of concrete and look grey and ugly; others are older and made of stone. Ramzi hopes his grandparents' house looks a little better than these so.

‘See, Ramzi. This is the entrance to the village. Jiddo and Sitto's place is further along, off the main road. Maybe you don't remember it any more. You were very young last time you were here.'

The car comes to a sudden stop.

‘I'll be turning off here,' the driver turns around to tell Ramzi's mother.

They get out and the driver takes the bicycle and suitcase off the roof of the car.

‘Can I ride it there?' Ramzi asks his mother.

‘I'll take the suitcase,' she says. ‘You go on ahead. It's the dirt road on the right.'

He likes the challenge of manoeuvring the bicycle, steering clear of the stones and ditches in the road and the houses on either side of it. Every once in a while he stops to look back and make sure that his mother is following him. They approach a clearing at the end of which Ramzi sees a concrete house with two trees just outside the front door. A man is sitting on a chair underneath one of the trees. As they get closer, the man gets up and starts to wave and Ramzi realizes it must be his grandfather whom he has not seen since he was very young. Ramzi stops and waves back.

‘Jiddo,' Ramzi calls out.

His grandfather says something but Ramzi cannot make it out. Soon, Ramzi's brothers and sister come out to meet them.

‘He's got a bike!' his sister calls out. ‘Look, he's got a bike.'

Ramzi stops and puts one foot on the ground, leaving the other on the pedal. He watches the younger ones approach, with his grandfather and his grandmother behind them. The children are kicking dust up with their feet and his grandparents are smiling. In the distance, there are more of the same hills he'd seen on the road over here. He'll be able to explore them later. Maybe the others will come with him. Ramzi gets off the bicycle.

‘I'll show you how to ride it,' he tells the younger children. ‘You can take turns. No one touches the bike unless I'm around, all right?'

Aneesa is leaning against the bonnet of a car in the car park where the children play. It is an old blue estate that she has seen parked in the same spot for months and she does not feel she is doing it any harm.

The children have begun to arrive in twos and threes, filling up an otherwise empty Sunday afternoon. Some of them have bicycles, others come carrying a ball or a skateboard, while still others, she notices, arrive empty-handed, perhaps hoping to be included in a game with the others or are perhaps, like her, only here to watch.

A girl appears. She is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and her hair is tied up in a high ponytail. Aneesa watches her approach a group of boys who seem to be organizing
a football game. The little girl talks rapidly to them, gesturing with her hands, her eyes darting from one to the other. Moments later, the group disperses into two teams with a goalie at either end. The little girl, Aneesa is pleased to see, is on one of the teams and seems even more keen on playing than the others, running after the ball with wild determination and shrieking loudly whenever she gets it.

When the gap between their abilities seemed suddenly to have grown wider, Bassam would only play with Aneesa if their parents insisted on it or if there were no children his own age for him to play with. Aneesa remembers approaching him one day as he paced listlessly around the garden and telling him he had to play with her. I'll tell
baba
if you don't, Bassam. You know he'll be very angry with you.

Yet even when he had to be cajoled into it so that at the slightest mishap he would show irritation with her, playing with Bassam had made her immeasurably happy. She is not sure now whether it was because, as a child, she had admired her brother so much, or whether she is merely magnifying these incidents in her mind because he is no longer there. Does she romanticize their time together too much? What, Aneesa wonders, would my memories of our childhood have been like if Bassam had not disappeared? It is not poignancy she is searching for – although she is aware that her relationship with her brother is in danger of sinking into it with time – but a solid understanding of what it meant to have him in her life, a certainty that he had been there and that they had once existed, here, together.

Someone kicks the ball underneath the blue car. The
children all look in her direction. Aneesa watches as the little girl runs to fetch it. She looks up at Aneesa. Her cheeks are red and there are signs of perspiration on her forehead. The girl goes down on her knees and gets under the car. Aneesa is worried the girl might hurt herself. She squats down to make sure the child is all right.

‘Did you find it?' Aneesa asks.

The girl's shoes make a scraping sound as she crawls out from underneath the car with the ball in her arms. They both stand up.

‘I was worried the car might collapse on you,' Aneesa says with a grin.

The girl's clothes are covered with dust. She looks at Aneesa and flips back her ponytail with a shake of her head. She is not smiling.

‘I'm all right,' she says before running back to her playmates.

Aneesa nods and stands there for a few moments. The game has resumed and the children are no longer taking any notice of her. She turns away and heads for home.

What is Ramzi doing now, she wonders, or for that matter Samir? For a moment, she imagines them together, perhaps standing side by side on the Corniche, gazing at the Raouche Rock, or somewhere sitting in the outdoors eating ice cream cones, Samir urging Ramzi to be careful and not dirty his clothes, the sun shining behind them and making their features indistinct and mysterious.

Salah had once told her that as he got older he had felt a growing awareness of his past, an understanding of what had really been and his own role in it. It is not dwelling on what is gone, Salah explained, but a kind of reinterpretation of it so that you can finally be free of
everything that once bound you and which will never come back again. Aneesa had tried to understand him but could not. The past is with me all the time, she told him, sometimes I think I am nothing else but who and what has come before me. How do you do it? But Salah had only smiled and run a hand over his hair, his fine, long fingers trembling a little.

Aneesa walks slowly until she reaches her block of flats. Clouds are beginning to form and the absence of sunlight seems to make the Sunday quiet more pronounced. She looks towards the water but can only see a thin sliver of it from this point, a far-off line of fluttering blue. She pulls the glass doors of the entrance open and summons the lift.

Waddad will have lunch ready once Aneesa gets upstairs. They will sit at the kitchen table and serve each other with obvious affection. They will eat and chat and once they are done, the clean dishes stacked dripping on the draining board to dry, the kitchen clock ticking behind them, Aneesa and Waddad will wander once again into their separate lives waiting for moments such as these to come their way again.

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Nada Awar Jarrar was born in Lebanon to an Australian mother and a Lebanese father. She has lived in London, Paris, Sydney and Washington DC and is currently based in Beirut where she lives with her husband Bassem and their daughter Zeina but, as a result of the outbreak of war in Lebanon, the family was forced to flee to the mountains in search of safety. Nada Awar Jarrar has been vocal in her condemnation of the killing of innocent civilians in this conflict, publishing a piece in
The Times
and contributing to an anthology of writing
Lebanon
,
Lebanon
, the profits of which went to Save The Children Lebanon. Her first novel,
Somewhere
,
Home
won the Commonwealth Best First Book award for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in 2004.

‘This beautifully written book is powerfully evocative of the human cost of war and the longing for love.'
Economist

‘The beauty of this novel lies in its images which are vivid and strange, sometimes even fantastical.'
Times Literary Supplement

‘The characters are surrounded by loss and memory … Jarrar presents their stories as fragments, shifting us backwards and forwards in time, stressing the precarious nature of life for those trying to escape physical and emotional distress.'
Metro

‘An absorbing novel which beautifully navigates the themes of love and loss.'
Easy Living Magazine

‘The prizewinning author of
Somewhere
,
Home
, returns with a moving tale of love, loss, exile and hope, written in lucid, spare prose.'
Sainsbury's Magazine

‘Nada Awar Jarrar's second novel arrives as beautifully and temptingly wrapped as a box of Lebanese sweets.'
Sharq Magazine