‘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.
He does not mind sharing the cupboard because it is the first time he has ever had a proper place to put his things in. But his own bed is what he enjoys most about being here: sleeping without younger brothers pulling at the covers or kicking him in the shins so that he was always waking up; and sitting cross-legged on the bed during the day, the covers pulled tight beneath him, his shoes off and his books spread across its smooth surface, a fluffy pillow behind him against which to rest his back.
The only time his mother has come to visit since she first brought him here, Ramzi showed her around the dormitory, pointing to his made-up bed and the neatly arranged clothes in the cupboard, and waited for her praise. But she only nodded and looked distractedly around her.
I wish they’d agreed to take one of your brothers as well, she said, shaking her head. They’re uncontrollable now that both you and your father are gone.
Ramzi has felt afraid ever since that she would be back with a younger brother for him to take care of, or that she might even decide to take Ramzi away with her to be the man of the house again, just as he had been when Father left home. But it’s not fear that puts him on his best behaviour; Ramzi knows that these things, eating and sleeping well, school and other children and the sojourns in the orphanage playground, all these are the closest he’ll ever get to an ordered life, and that is all he wants.
Salah, Salah, what my mother does not know is that I came back not to find Bassam but myself.
Salah is at the door with a large package under one arm. It is his first visit to Aneesa’s flat.
‘Come in,’ Aneesa says. ‘Come in. I’m sorry everything is such a mess.’
She has been packing and behind her he can see clothes and objects all over the floor and covering all available surfaces.
He steps inside and, before taking off his coat, hands her the package.
‘What is this?’
‘It’s for you to take home with you.’
She tears off the brown paper and stares at the painting.
‘This is the one you brought with you from Beirut, isn’t it?’
He nods.
‘I can’t take it from you, Salah.’
The painting has a narrow gilt frame. Beneath the glass, a wedge of beige cardboard in a rectangular shape surrounds a dark but indistinct figure whose edges trickle into the colours beyond it in bold upwards strokes of yellow, white and light brown. Through the blurriness of it, in the undetermined shapes that surround the figure in the painting, Aneesa sees a circle of wings: two, three or four, she cannot be sure,