The Leash and the Ball by Rodaan Al Galidi

Author:Rodaan Al Galidi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2022-04-08T13:21:58+00:00

41

The very first time the cat tried to rub up against Abdulsalaam’s leg, he kicked her like Cristiano Ronaldo taking a penalty shot. Screeching, the cat flew through the air, hit the wall with a splat, and ran off with the most terrified, drawn-out meow I had ever heard. Not even the wholest whole milk could lure her back inside, and from then on she would come no closer to the house than the back fence.

Next door to us lived Inge van Duinhoven and her little dog Mario. A skinny, hairless, trembling Chihuahua. Inge was in her late sixties and had recently gotten a new hip, and since she wasn’t able to take the dog out for walks, she let him do his business on the sidewalk outside the front door.

“Say, Samir, why is the neighbor’s dog so tiny?” Abdulsalaam asked.

“That’s just how he is, he won’t get any bigger than that,” I replied.

“That dog is far away and up close at the same time. It makes me dizzy. So when he came up to me, I gave him a little kick. Not as hard as the cat. Nice and soft. Just to see how close he was.”

That same day Abdulsalaam resumed his show of ignorance by asking if such a small dog could bark.

Jafar Kalaf said Inge was a nice woman. However, I had the impression she was afraid of us, or maybe just afraid of the unknown. She would loosen up once she got to know us, I figured. But now Abdulsalaam had botched it up.

So, after Mario’s encounter with Abdulsalaam, I set out to restore neighborly contact with Inge van Duinhoven. When I saw Mario outside, I called him and he trotted over. I opened a can of dog food and he gobbled it up. I patted him on the head. Inge watched all this through her front window, but before I could greet her, she turned away. Still, she didn’t call the dog back inside.

Fortunately, it won’t take Mario years to get used to asylum seekers, I thought. Making friends with him is simply a matter of a few cans of food.

In Jafar Kalaf’s roomy house, Abdulsalaam began to feel something he had never experienced since coming to Netherlands: solitude. He went out into the yard, came back inside, went upstairs, came back downstairs. Sometimes he stopped halfway and I lost track of whether he was going up or down. So did he. Sometimes he said it was strange that there was no Reception here, or I would hear him talking in his sleep to an ASC staff member. This reinforced my theory that in his head he was still in the ASC, and that those seventeen years were still not over for him.

If Mario occasionally barked, even just one little yap, Abdulsalaam complained that he couldn’t sleep with all that racket. He then told the neighbor that the dog kept him up at night, and that in Yemen, dogs that barked too much were shot.

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