Homecomings

Yvette Rocheron

Description

Zaida, an imaginative teenager, wants to bring her divorced parents back together.It's November 2008, and a family squabble over their daughter's holiday escalates into a nightmare, involving the detention of English and Syrian family members by Assad's intelligence forces.In Syria, the Al-Sayeds have no qualms about prolonging Zaida's holiday; they cherish the 12 year-old who looks like the girl they lost in an Lebanese refugee camp. Zaida's father has returned home to a family business closely interlocked with the regime, and with Zaida in his beautiful Damascus house he rediscovers the joyful art of fatherhood.In Leaford, Virginia Franklin waits anxiously for news from her daughter. Was it the right thing to let her go? Alternating between a family-run acupuncture clinic in Britain and Syria before the civil war, the book fuses themes of parental love, cultural transmission, forgiveness, trust and betrayal.

Sujets

• Damascus

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599676
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

HOME
COMINGS
Yvette
Rocheron
Copyright © 2019 Yvette Rocheron

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1838599 676

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Mustapha and his son
In memory of peace
Contents
– 1 –
Damascus
October 2008

– 2 –
The Clinic

– 3 –
Leaford

– 4 –
Damascus

– 5 –
Tugs of Love

– 6 –
Troubled

– 7 –
Damascus

– 8 –
Waiting

– 9 –
Fish in a Bowl

– 10 –
Damascus

– 11 –
Old Flirts

– 12 –
Damascus

– 13 –
Self-healing

– 14 –
Meeting the Al-Sayeds

– 15 –
Touring Syria

– 16 –
By Themselves

– 17 –
Aleppo’s Citadel

– 18 –
Opening Gambits

– 19 –
The Deal

– 20 –
On The Road

– 21 –
Flights

Epilogue
For Those Who Like Tidy Ends
– 1 –
Damascus
October 2008
Khalid Al-Sayed puts the phone down on his desk and, irritated, walks into the inner courtyard, feet bare, indifferent to the cold floor inlaid with extravagant strips of marble to match the best of Levantine rugs. In the last few days, whenever he rings his father, the line to Hama is full of interference or echoes of their own voices. Ironically, the antiquated technology is reassuring as he remembers a sarcasm which clung to the 12-year-old boy, then a refugee from the massacre which destroyed their Hama home: the British and Hafez Al-Assad’s men couldn’t have been fairer, his father joked – they shared the job equally, watching and criminalising us Sunnis. This is why, maybe, his father felt the move to Leaford as a safe homecoming.
Khalid smiles ruefully: his family is no longer subject to state-of-the-art bugging but he is still trying hard to forget the two years spent in that Lebanese camp infested with rats and spies.
And now, coming back to Syria more than 20 years later, it is taking him longer than he expected to adapt to the hustle and bustle of his birthplace. How many times had the Al-Sayeds built a home only to leave it, nomads again? Father, twice. Himself, twice. May Zaida be spared such a destiny!
Since the divorce, he’s had little opportunity for fatherhood – a few weekends in Britain acting the funfair dad, buying tickets for dodgems and Aladdin shows; keeping on the good side of Virginia for Zaida’s sake. Until now there has been nothing to replace the normal family life which providence, or his ex, denied him.
Yesterday Zaida went to stay with her grandfather in Hama. Already he is missing her.
A gust of cold air. The servants should have switched off the rattling air conditioner high up on the wall. Khalid sucks in his cheeks, chilled, unsettled. He is through with being at the Franklins’ beck and call. After the separation, Walter and Gwen opened their home to mother and child, forgiving Virginia’s double ineptitude: first falling pregnant so young and then marrying him, a student at Leaford University.
It is their turn to miss the child for a while. There will be little room to manoeuvre, and there will be a terrible fuss, but both families can shield Zaida from the fallout. She is so excited, so avid for anything Syrian – food, stories, clothes, family history, you name it. As she grows into her mixed heritage the choice will be hers. His duty now is to give her the resources of her Syrian self.
The budgies again! He can’t get used to them fussing above the door leading down to the servants’ basement. Zaida enjoyed looking after them to the delight of their owner, his housekeeper. Mariyam Ajemian, an ageing Armenian woman from Aleppo, hangs the cage together with a rusting Byzantine cross the size of a fist but fortunately without the tortured body. Such knick-knacks undermine Khalid’s décor, free of curios and personal souvenirs, but, as he told Zaida, Mariyam’s faith must be accepted. It doesn’t do to challenge the devotion of excellent cooks. So he muses while dislodging with a toothpick gritty sesame seeds left by his sister’s halva. The best. Nobody makes halva like Halima. Despite Mariyam, he isn’t putting on weight. ‘A wife’s cuisine,’ Halima likes to annoy him, ‘will get rid of your gangly looks!’ He shakes his head. He’s not a man who swaps wives like hookers. At any mention of Zaida staying, sister and cook exchange knowing glances, as if a man can’t look after a girl.
He pops in a large date, fleshy and moist. Zaida has inherited his build and his love of aromatic food. She doesn’t let herself starve like so many sad girls of her age. Mariyam showed her how to make gooey gh’raybeh and Allepian almond cookies. The two had fun speaking gibberish over the stove. She loves grilled lamb, stuffed vegetables, pomegranate juice and mint lemonade; homely food that he took for granted as a child until England, where his mother cooked only dull smelly foreign food. ‘Why smelly?’ Zaida asked. ‘Fish and chips, fried onions? Boiled potatoes with no herbs! I’m telling you, we children craved for mezzes laced with rosewater and spicy lamb balls.’
He made the migrant story light and short, sparing the child and also himself the harrowing truths. It would have been too distressing to explain how his mother’s grief over Seema’s suicide became palpable in lumpy dishes and, later, in her refusal to go out, and finally lung cancer. How could he drop explosives onto a child? Ignore the tragedies. Talk about the survivors. The two youngest, fresh from Koranic classes in Leaford, acquired veils, husbands and a passion for Indian and Pakistani food. Her Aunt Halima followed Grandad Abdul back to Hama where she married happily into a Sunni family.
This is a truncated family story. Plenty of time to fill it in. He has such faith in Zaida: uncorrupted, provocative, easy to be with. Dressed up with elaborate kerchiefs and full make-up, the girl now looks much older than her years. A Barbie doll for Halima. He mustn’t let his sister spoil her with old-fashioned girlish ways. He wants to be a modern dad. But how? Just a moment ago, he was caught out. Zaida, petulant on the phone, furious with her grandfather’s refusal to let her go out to the Mak’Ha Internet Café with her male cousins. ‘You see, Hama’s an orthodox town,’ he found himself insisting. ‘A dodgy bar full of men eyeing you up is no place for you!’ In Syria a man’s honour is to protect women. Her presence is interrogating him already. How to be a modern dad?
He still finds it hard to believe she has made it to Syria. How did she manage to persuade her mother? She wouldn’t explain it. She threw her head backwards in Virginia’s gesture of denial, then said darkly, ‘ Iaa Afham you, daddy.’ She doesn’t understand him! Because he doesn’t sweeten her mother up? He shrugs. The girl has strong principles and a zest for life. She also won Mariyam Ajemian’s heart by visiting not only the Ummayyad Mosque but also the holy chapel of St Anania: Christos be praised. ‘It’s close to heaven,’ Mariyam approved. Closer than the Big Mosque? He winked.
Of course, she’ll stay as long as she wants; they have so much to do and share. Her three-week visa will run out but a renewal will raise no problem. No doubt Virginia expects him to remain as reasonable and meek as ever, but why toe her line now he’s back with his own folks? Many times she mocked him as a weak man under tribal pressure to return, but this time the joke will be on her.
They are having a great time. When they toured New Damascus, Zaida dismissed it, like him, as any dreary new city catering to the rich, though this one was safeguarded by uniforms armed to the teeth. She loved exploring the old city, intrigued by the paper notices of the dead posted by Christians with little black crosses at street corners close to Bab Sharki. Why trust walls to spread news better than newspapers? He didn’t point out the dismal list of disappeared people pasted in full view of the mosque. Inside the old city gates, where traders have outlived ruler after ruler, there are enough memories of protest to provide the agents of order with jobs for life – a never-ending story he or Abdul will tell her one day. When she’s older. She is staying.
He slouches down a few steps to get a carafe of icy water from his latest purchase, an American style fridge-freezer, all steel and shine, ‘bigger than a coffin,’ Mariyam tutted, crossing herself for good measure as she swept her black skirts away from danger. ‘Superstition,’ he mutters under his breath, changing his mind in favour of a beer.
Back in the yard, he sits straight on the edge of the shell-shaped fountain, smart in a white short-sleeved shirt and blue tie, looking like any other aspiring businessman except for features that make him less banal – unruly jet-black hair curling around his ears, owlish eyebrows and a deep terraco