Free Qissat by Jo Glanville

trendy on the pavement. He was wearing jeans. ‘Look, Mama.’ I had held the photograph up to my mother who was talking to Grandma in their language. The jeans got to me. He had woken up that morning and put on his jeans not knowing he would die in them. The enormity of young death lay in the stitching on the back pockets. As Dad went to the door, my hand was feeling at my belt.
    ‘Na’am?’
says Dad. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Its Tawfeeq, Tawfeeq … Open the door, Nabil. Open the door.’
    Tawfeeq Sa’eed was in a sweat. Huge dark circles hung under his eyes and his armpits. His salmon sports shirt tucked into his belted Bermudas had dust streaks across it. Had he perhaps thrown himself against the gate? Tawfeeq was my father’s friend although he and my father had nothing in common apart from the fact that they worked for the same hospital and had foreign wives.
    When Tawfeeq arrived (and he did not say ‘Hi’ to me, he just looked at my nose) the old English national anthem, ‘God Save the King’, performed by a military band, was playing on the soundtrack of
Heat and Dust.
A short track between sitar melodies and extracts from Schubert, we rarely noticed it.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Tawfeeq had screamed. ‘Do you not know that they are rounding up the British? … What are you doing? Sitting here listening to English music, reading books? Eh?’
    ‘What do you mean they are rounding up the British?’
    ‘They will. There’s a rumour … What passport do you have? Are you going to be British or what? Have you thought about these things? Huh? There’s an invasion, Nabil, an invasion!’ He held the creases of his shorts as he sat heavily on the sofa pulling out a hanky and some worry beads. He then started patting his forehead, turning the beads with his thumb and sighing all at the same time.
    ‘Would you like a drink, Tawfeeq?’ Dad went to the small supply of smuggled liquor in his cupboard.
    ‘A whisky. Yes. No. No. Actually I think not. Not during these times. No. No. What if they stop me? What if they smell it? An invasion! How were we to know there was to be an invasion?’
    ‘Well, I don’t think anyone really thought that it would happen, but you know last night when the Jeddah talks collapsed, I must say I did think they might.’
    ‘You knew! You knew! And you did not tell me! You even had your daughter with you and you did not care!’
    ‘That’s not quite how it was,’ Dad started rebuilding the wall of canned drinks again in front of the alcohol in the cupboard. ‘What papers do you have anyway?’
    ‘Egyptian, French …’ Tawfeeq held up his hands despairingly. I did not know what to make of this. What nationality did we want to be? Who was whose enemy? Who were we?
    ‘You know I am not even sure what papers I have,’ Dad waved at the air as if not knowing how to refer to his wife now. ‘Her mother put them away, where did she say? She is always filing things, you know. Classify, classify. Let me have a look.’
    Dad went upstairs leaving me with Tawfeeq.
    ‘Dominique,’ Tawfeeq wrenched out of himself, to himself. ‘Dominique … all alone in Paris, not knowing. Just waiting … waiting.’ He looked like he was going to cry in a howling kind of a way.
    I thought of Dominique making exquisite sponge cream balls and serving them on paper doilies with child-sized silver forks. Dominique who believed in the predictions of Nostradamus, fates held in star constellations, and who could
never
sleep when there was a full moon. She had spent seven years living in Tawfeeq’s village in the Egyptian Delta and could tell shocking stories of malarial deaths after describing how a soufflé should be cared for like a child. And she cared for her child as though she were a soufflé. Their daughter had emerged from her care puffy and soft-centred with weepy eyes and white feet contorted by synthetic sandals.
    Tawfeeq and Dominique doted on each other with the neediness of toddlers and their