“Where then? Who took him, Yuse?”
He didn’t answer, but there was purpose in his stride.
“Yuse, where did Uncle really go?”
“I don’t know.”
Back at the house, Yusef disappeared into the back and I pointlessly made some tea. May was rocking very slightly in her chair and she took a cup. Yusef emerged and he had changed. He was wearing a dark keffiyeh, secured with a single-cord agal, a bulging leather jerkin, and his calves were tucked into leggings above sturdy ankle boots. He was pulling on fingerless sheepskin gloves.
“Where are you going?” Even I was growing tired of my questions.
“To look for Asi.” He was commendably patient, I’ll give him that. He pulled what looked like a heavy torch out from a kitchen cabinet.
He bent and kissed May’s forehead. There was a sharp rasp, more of a push, on the door and a shout. Yusef called out what I recognised as “OK, coming”. Then he turned to me. “Is it OK for you to wait here with May? We won’t be long. But if you need to go, that’s fine.”
“We?”
Yusef opened the door. There were four men outside. Three were in the background, young, one dressed like Yusef, two others wearing short bishts, the black woollen cloaks. At the door was the other father we’d visited, still in his sandals, dressed as I’d last seen him. One of the young men was shuffling under his bisht as if he had a lining caught and as I peered out into the dark, it fell open. I saw his right arm flanked with the shiny shaft of a semi-automatic weapon. I turned to Yusef, no longer the compliant visitor, the innocent abroad. I was young but I suddenly felt very much like his boss.
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” I said through closed teeth, hoping those outside couldn’t hear, hoping also to keep a separation between Yusef in the light and warmth inside and those in the dark outside. He didn’t say a word, to me or them, but just walked out and down the hill, the three young men following, the other father lingering for a moment. This man smiled briefly in at both of us, nodded and walked slowly back up through the alley towards his home.
I closed the door and looked down at the old lady. She was looking hard at me through rheumy eyes. I went to take her cup, perhaps to fetch more tea, but she held my forearm with a hard little hand and pulled me towards her. She smiled now, in reassurance. She pointed up with her other hand at the rounded, ochre face of the poster Madonna on the wall beside her then, releasing me, clasped her hands together and sat up straight in a childish pastiche of prayer.
I paused, not knowing what to do. But I knelt beside her, on one knee, and put my fingers together, in the pointy spire we’d been shown at school, and started to whisper, just blowing articulated air through my teeth and watching the old woman. I was saying nothing, it was the wordless whispers of the kind that children fake, pretending to tell secrets. But, through my fingers, she looked quiet, and her tears dried.
It was almost dawn when Yusef returned. I think I must have dozed in the leatherette armchair, because May was looking kindly at me, in that motherly way that old women have when they’ve watched someone younger asleep. Yusef walked in alone and went straight through to the back, where I heard the clank of the latrine bucket and running water. He re-emerged without keffiyeh and jerkin.
I said nothing and didn’t get up from the chair. I realised I was cold, distant. I hadn’t planned to be.
“You OK?” asked Yusef. “Did Mother behave?”
I sat up. “Where’s Asi?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head and I suddenly felt sorry again, not just for him and for Asi, but also guilty that I had been superior, judgemental. “But we’ve done all we can.”
There was a long pause and I looked at May. She was smiling calmly. “Well, let’s keep hoping and praying,” I said and went to heat up some bread.
I don’t know what time it was that Uncle appeared with the boy at the foot of the alley. The sun was high, late morning, I guess. Yusef had slept for a couple of hours and was now moving about the house doing odds and ends, cleaning. His body was looser than it had been before. He murmured that it had been Shia, maybe Druze, bully-boys who had taken Asi, but he was no longer haunted and the atmosphere of prepared bereavement had dispersed.
I had drunk too much coffee and felt sick and had gone out front to sit on the car seat and stare back at any children who stared at me. When I spotted them, Uncle was walking in a sweeping slow-step to keep pace with Asi, his arm across his shoulder, the boy walking with a showy limp, clasping his knee with his left palm. I called “Yuse!” just once and stood back from the stable door, allowing the light in from outside and for the boy and his great-uncle to stand in it. May threw her hands up in her chair and ululated a chant, and Yusef strode from the kitchen and knelt to hug his son, who stood spare-limbed and doll-like, as children do who don’t know how to respond to adult emotion.
Uncle stood grinning and lit a cheroot. “Where is Nadim? You looked after him?” Yusef was talking close to Asi’s face.
“Home,” said Asi. “He needs a new football. They took it.”
Yusef stood and patted the boy’s backside sharply to propel him to the kitchen to wash the cuts on his knee and shin. We followed in an act of welcome and I dabbed his leg with wet loo roll. Then we walked outside again and took the proffered cigarettes from Uncle.
But it was Yusef who
