After hours of questions, Abu Riad leaned forward and aimed a smoke pillar at him, making him cough.
‘Your so-called information is useless. And do you know what that makes you? Useless.’
Sweat broke out around Sami’s collar, curling the hair at the back of his neck. Abu Riad studied him with his chin tilted up and his nostrils flaring, as though something about Sami annoyed him but was at the same time too insignificant to waste time on – a mosquito, a pebble in his shoe.
‘I have orders to let you go but we’re not done with each other yet.’
Abu Riad lit another cigarette and leaned back.
‘You have a week. Make sure you’re less useless next time.’
Orders to let you go. That was all Sami heard.
A stack of papers was brought out. Going through it and reading it was out of the question but he skimmed a few random lines. By signing it, he would be confessing to having been a terrorist and working against his country, and making a promise never again to do anything aimed at undermining the government. Sami signed it immediately.
38
HE DRIED HIS hands on his trousers and was led out, blinking in the sunlight. Abu Riad had given him one last chance. Not out of kindness, that much was clear. No, they let him go hoping he had more information to give, or that he would talk to his friends and convince more of them to hand themselves over. Abu Riad wanted to see him in a week’s time for another interrogation. One week. That was the time he had to plan his escape and leave the country.
Sami’s contact drove him from the secret police headquarters to the neighbourhood where his grandmother Fatima lived and Samira had played as a young girl. It was like landing in a new world. Cars driving along unspoilt streets, people with clean clothes and faces. He saw students with school books in their arms. Women with bags of food. An old man walking his dog.
As the anxiety started to leave him, Sami fell asleep, leaning on the car window. He woke up when the car braked. A checkpoint at the end of the road.
‘Let’s go this way instead,’ his contact mumbled and made a sharp turn.
* * *
—
The first thing Sami noticed was the tree. In his grandmother’s garden, on a patch of green grass, stood a gnarled orange tree heavy with fruit. A similar tree had grown in the courtyard of his childhood home – before Nabil added an extra floor and before their house was hit by a missile. Samira had been sad about losing the orange tree, about chopping down something that was alive and bearing fruit.
Oranges were brought to Europe by the Moors long ago, his paternal grandfather had told him during one of their walks to the market. Sami remembered how Grandpa Faris’s hands had already been full of fruit and vegetables and so he had been the one to hand over the money to the vendor. They bought five pounds of the sweetest kind and shared the sticky segments. He associated the taste of oranges with all things sweet: from the candied peel to the juice drizzled on to cakes and other pastries. The Spanish kept the Persian word for the fruit, Grandpa Faris continued.
‘Your grandmother was my media naranja. My orange half, my soulmate.’
Sami climbed out of the car and felt an intense longing for something he couldn’t define. Maybe his childhood, when it had been possible to go to the market without keeping a watchful eye on the sky. When it had been possible to lie on a stone bench and look for signs in the cloud formations. When there was time to grieve for a chopped-down orange tree.
The smell of overripe fruit was almost suffocating. Why did they let the fruit rot? There must be people who could pick and eat them. You could make preserves and jam and marmalade, squeeze them for juice…
‘We have more than we need,’ a woman’s hoarse voice said behind him.
Sami turned to see his maternal grandmother, dressed in a black robe and hijab, and beaming at the sight of her long-gone grandson.
‘Oh, Sami.’
She embraced him with the force and caution of someone who believed they had lost a dear object for ever and then found it again.
‘You are here! You’re really here.’
She laid her dry hands on his face and the tears began to fall in small streams down her wrinkled cheeks.
‘Now let’s go in before someone sees you.’
* * *
—
Sami could already see how different his and his grandmother’s lives had been for the past few years. During the siege, they had suffered food shortages, power cuts and fighting too, but they had still been able to go about their lives. Sami supported his grandmother’s arm, or maybe he was leaning on it, and they slowly moved towards the front steps.
‘You have no idea how many times I’ve prayed for you and…Oh, Sami, your little brother…I’m so sorry.’
It was as if time had stood still in his grandmother’s house. The same flowery curtains in the kitchen, the same furniture in the same places. Fatima made his bed with clean sheets and put out a big bath towel. Sami breathed in the smell of clean fabric with not a trace of ashes or dust. In the shower, he turned the heat up until the steam rose and his skin almost burned; brown streaks pooled around the drain. Serves you right, jinn.
The scent of the soap mingled with the smell of the food his grandmother had cooked, kibbeh labanieh. How did people eat again? He raised the spoon to his lips and filled his mouth with the oily yoghurt sauce, which tasted so heavenly he wanted to stick his head in the pot and drink himself full. But the moment the food touched his throat, he gagged. His body had grown used to feeling full on nothing but dreams of food – on imagining its smell, taste and appearance – and the real experience was overwhelming.
Was that how people did it? Chewed and swallowed and let it all out in a different form? It couldn’t be human, this eating business. Just like it couldn’t be human to sleep through an entire night without waking up to the sound of imminent death.
When darkness fell, he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked out at the orange tree, where the fruits were glowing like stars.
* * *
—
The next morning, his parents came to the house. He saw them from the upstairs window and found he couldn’t move at first. Samira was supporting Nabil, who slowly set one foot before the other. Halfway up the path he paused and laid a hand on his chest, and the simple gesture caused the pain to rise in Sami’s own breast. When they knocked on the door he finally hurried to open it.
My son, our beloved. Ya rohi. He didn’t perceive all that they were saying, only felt the warmth flowing towards him.
His mum and dad embraced him at the same time, enveloping him with their arms and bodies. When he felt their wet cheeks against his, Sami didn’t know if it was he who was crying or his parents, or all of them at once.