Read Online Sabra Zoo by Mischa Hiller - Free Book Online Page A

plastic bag. Inside were little square bars, each in a white cellophane wrapping. John took one out and held it up between his fingers.
    â€˜Red Cross survival bars: one of these a day will satisfy all your daily nutrient requirements,’ he said in a cheesy American voice, like in a TV advert. The joint came back to him. ‘Wherever there is war, famine or disease, all you need is one of these to forget your woes. Poverty doesn’t matter any more with the Red Cross nutrient bar, designed to counter even the most deprived diet. Unable to prepare a meal due to bombing and shelling? Then the Red Cross nutrient bar is the answer.’ He recovered his normal voice, ‘Anyway laddie, make sure you have one of these for breakfast every day.’
    Samir was constructing a new joint by rolling the tobacco out of a Marlboro without breaking the paper, mixing it with hashish and funnelling it back into the empty casing.
    â€˜How long have you known Samir?’ Eli asked me. She was sitting back in the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her.
    â€˜A few months,’ I told her. ‘He saved me from a wild dog.’
    Samir laughed more loudly than usual. ‘A wild dog on a football pitch,’ he said in a constricted voice, trying to keep the smoke in his lungs.
    â€˜A football pitch full of cars,’ I said, giggling – I wasn’t sure how I could be smoking the joint at the same time as Samir.
    â€˜It was the middle of the night,’ said Samir, starting to giggle as well.
    â€˜ OK . I’m curious,’ said Liv.
    I competed with Samir to see who could stop giggling first. John put Nina Simone on. I was deciding how to tell the story without giving too much away; a part of my brain still retained some caution.
    â€˜Well, to cut a long story short – I was on the football pitch in Fakhani, this was some time in July. It was the middle of the night but there was a full moon.’ I took a drink of Stolichnaya, now mixed with long-life orange juice for health reasons. ‘A lot of people had parked their cars on the pitch. They thought it was safer than leaving them in the streets under the apartment blocks, you know, to stop the rubble falling on them. Anyway, most people seemed to have left them there when they moved to safer areas.’
    â€˜But what were you doing there?’ asked Liv.
    â€˜Siphoning petrol from the parked cars. Generators were the only source of electricity and we’d run out of fuel.’ The Lebanese Gold and Stolichnaya had weakened my inhibition and I struggled to avoid telling them why we needed to run generators in Fakhani in the middle of the war. A part of me wanted to tell them everything, to be completely open. Najwa would have killed me.
    â€˜Anyway, a pack of abandoned dogs was roaming around the stadium, maybe ten of them, you know, looking for scraps to eat. I could see them circling as I tried to suck petrol from the tanks. Then the shelling starts. One of the shells falls quite close, on the pitch, and I can hear the dogs howling, like they’re scared.’ I sipped my drink, passed the joint to Eli.
    â€˜I see one of the dogs approaching. It’s limping. It’s lost one of its legs in the explosion so it’s confused and in pain. It thinks I caused its injury so it starts barking at me, baring its teeth, frothing at the mouth. But I can’t go anywhere because of the shelling. I’m pinned against the cars.’ I paused and Samir took up the story.
    â€˜I was working in Fakhani, waiting in my car on the street.’ Probably waiting for my father, I thought. ‘When the bombs came down I went inside to the pitch, because I thought it would be safer in there, I don’t like to be inside a building in case it falls down on your head. I saw Ivan hiding by a car with a can of petrol and the dog with three legs coming towards him. It looked crazy, this dog.’
    â€˜What did you do?’ asked