The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  The Road From Damascus

  The Road From Damascus

  ROBIN YASSIN-KASSAB

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Robin Yassin-Kassab, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The permissions on p. 350 constitute an extension of this copyright page

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

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  978-0-14-191851-8

  For Rana Zaitoon

  It is only when you know the Higher Factor that you will know the true situation of the present religions and of unbelief itself. And unbelief itself is a religion with its own form of belief.

  Ahmad Yasavi

  Atheism indicates strength of mind, but only up to a certain point.

  Pensée 157, Pascal

  Contents

  1. The Other Path

  2. A Mirror for Sami

  3. Sami Hurries Home

  4. Sami’s Thesis

  5. Reunion

  6. Relics

  7. Marwan al-Haj

  8. The Immigrant

  9. Muntaha

  10. Hijab

  11. Tom Field

  12. A Family Visit

  13. Death Number Two

  14. Vronsky

  15. Gabor at the Ta’ziya

  16. Sami Overheats

  17. Death Number One

  18. A Great Leap

  19. Enlightenment

  20. Evolutionary Loss

  21. It Soon Come

  22. Brother and Sister

  23. Muntaha’s Prayers

  24. Following the Heart

  25. Fast

  26. Pyramid Power

  27. To Be Touched

  28. Devils

  29. Reclaim the Streets

  30. Historical Events

  31. Escape

  32. Late

  33. Awe

  1

  The Other Path

  Uncle Mazen drove Sami into the city as far as the parliament building, then shrugged and peered out through the windscreen. ‘The car wouldn’t make it up there,’ he said, pointing an ear at the mountainside. ‘There aren’t any roads anyway. Just steps. Perhaps you can walk.’

  Sami disembarked and straightened on the pavement. A man of average height, somewhat hunched, with a pale complexion, a sensitive, moving face, black eyes flashing with an intensity called beautiful by those that love him, and thick and curling hair, also black, grown longer than in his youth to distract from climbing baldness. Still handsome. But a body ageing quickly, increasingly swell-bellied. Thirty-one years old.

  And feeling foreign now, unsteady in the heat, among balloon salesmen, bootblacks, cassette stalls, exhaust fumes. Sami searching for breath in the smothered heart of Damascus, home of his ancestors, the former city of streams and orchards the Prophet had refused to enter, not wishing to commit the sin of believing himself in Paradise. But Sami, unconcerned with Paradise, for better or worse, had entered. Damascus was supposed to offer him answers.

  He’d been here for a month, in order to (he listed): reconnect with his roots; remember who he was; find an idea. And the tourist stuff too: to bathe in the wellsprings of the original city, the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. A city that had briefly ruled the world. Wherejasmine and honeyed tobacco scented the evening air. Where Ibn Arabi wrote his last mystical poetry, where Nizar Qabbani wrote ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’.

  Years ago Sami thought he would write a doctoral thesis on Qabbani. Not thought; assumed. It had seemed inevitable, and it had never happened. Nothing remained of whatever that idea had been. So he was here to find a new idea, gather material – and then return home, write the thesis, become Dr Sami Traifi. As a proper academic, like his father before him, he’d be able to get it all back on course, his place in the world, his marriage, his mother. So he believed. A new idea, a turned leaf. It was time, it was perhaps his last chance, to leave childish things behind.

  In front of him the mountain was sandy red and imposing, shiny with whitewashed shacks and satellite dishes. One of those buildings, his maternal aunt Fadya’s house, was his destination. To his right as he walked there was the rubble of destroyed four-storey Ottoman homes: tangled wood and plaster and a back wall still intact with a mosaic of dead rooms printed on its surface. You could make out the hitherto private squares of paint, entire inescapable universes for their inhabitants, now brought borderless into promiscuous intimacy. On one patch there was some religious calligraphy. On another, what looked like family photographs. Though the demolition was some days old, white dust motes swirled thickly. History refusing gravity.

  Just about all the women Sami could see were wearing the hijab, many more than on his last visit. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like supernaturalism, nor backwardness in general. And in this country a return to religion meant a return to sect. It was just under the surface, just under the smiling face of this hospitable people, the secret loathing of the other path. They don’t respect each other, Sami thought. They fear the strong and despise the weak. This cacophonous country: each individual playing from his own score, ignoring the others. But it was his country too. His father’s country.

  Struggling upwards against the descending swell of well-wrapped ladies, across Corncob Square with its melancholic bronze president, Sami imagined roadblocks, men with armbands and guns and armed identities. That’s what it could be like, very easily. The wrong identity would end you at the intersection. Dead for wearing a cross. Dead for wearing a hijab. Dead for Ali’s sword swinging from your car mirror. It had nearly happened in the eighties when the Muslim Brothers took over the city of Hama, and the government had stopped it, rightly. In the face of the Brothers’ fanaticism the government stood unwaveringly firm. Sami’s father, Mustafa, safe in London, had explained it to him. Beards disappeared. Surely a good thing. The headscarf tide was reversed. Hair breathed freely. What rational person would disagree with that?

  And as he bobbed past coffee merchants, past careening taxis and minibuses, past a line of shawarma furnaces flaring the afternoon into more sur
real heat, he asked himself what his father would think if he could see this determinedly Muslim population, hairy and hijabbed not twenty years after the Hama events. What would his father say? It would represent the very end of the world he’d hoped for.

  Back in London, Sami’s own wife was threatening to wear the hijab, which somehow seemed to represent the end of everything Sami had hoped for too.

  The road stopped as Uncle Mazen had said it would. Up here mucky children replaced traffic, children loud as traffic, smudge-eyed, tangle-haired, brandishing bleeping plastic weaponry. There was the occasional fruitless mulberry tree. The ground was dust, mud where something had spilt. In the winter it would all be mud. Mud and dust alternating, flesh and bone, life and death.

  He breathed outside Fadya’s wooden door, then swung the knocker. Fadya opened up with a show of surprise and welcomed him, thanked God for his safety, told him he had illumined her house. Her family crowded around him, everybody kissing solemnly and shaking hands. Fadya welcomed him again. Her hair was collected under a white scarf which she didn’t remove, despite her blood relationship to Sami, even after the door was shut. His two cousins asked him dutifully for his news, and asked him to make himself at home, following the formulas. Then they sat on the floor in front of the TV, their large backs to him, their lined and stubbled faces immobile.

  When Fadya brought Turkish coffee with sweets and joined him on the sofa, Sami’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted from the glare outside, so he saw in black and white, with patches of blindness, as through a photographic negative. The room was windowless and dark, lit dimly by the Intifada on the TV screen. Boys throwing rocks and flaming bottles at armoured cars, the cars shrugging it off, dispensing the occasional efficient bullet.

  Through the door to the darker interior of the house Sami sensed something shuffling.

  He unslung his shoulder bag and brought out a notebook. He had a page of questions already prepared for this interview. Fadya and sons would provide the responses of ordinary people, ordinary Syrian Arabs, to Sami’s poetic enquiries. Doctoral material.

  ‘Aunt,’ he began. ‘Let me ask you a question. What kind of poetry do you like?’

  Fadya aimed at him the eyes of someone used to staring through storms. She staged a smile. They watched each other, stalled. And then a cousin stood up and faced Sami, with blue chin raised, slight moustache quivering.

  ‘I’ll tell you, cousin, which poetry is important to us. Probably not to you, but to us.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sami. But why the defiance? Sami hadn’t had anything to do with these boys since playtime in the distant past.

  ‘The Qur’an,’ said the cousin. ‘The Noble Qur’an. The Perspicacious Book. That’s what.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Sami, creasing a new page, and writing: The Qur’an as poetic text. ‘Please go on.’ But his cousin sat down again sideways on, face back to the Intifada, making tutting and clucking noises. Why the anger?

  From the gloom of the house Sami heard a cough. Something was stirring also in the inner chambers of his memory.

  ‘Who’s there, aunt? I should greet them.’

  ‘Never mind, nephew. Leave him alone. Will you drink more coffee?’

  ‘Please, don’t treat me as a guest.’

  And suddenly inexplicably dizzy, and with an English petulance, he stood up, Fadya rising with him, the cousins too, all watching him narrow-eyed, heads inclined. He watched them back. And stepped towards the inner door.

  Sami saw Fadya nod at her sons with weighty significance. Then she looked at him, her too, with malice. And a palms-up shrug.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. My house is yours.’

  On the other side of the door: a square airless room, no TV, no shelves, no pictures, and another door, into further gloom. In the middle of the room, on a chair, doing nothing, facing nowhere, a man. There was a secret here which Sami alone had not penetrated.

  Sami advanced. ‘Hello, uncle,’ he said, stretching out a hand. In Arabic every older man is called uncle. Uncle looked up. His white-flecked mouth, salt-and-pepper beard, wispy salt-and-pepper hair, salt-and-pepper skin gleaming a little in the TV light from behind Sami. Not returning Sami’s greeting. Not bothering to wipe away the sweat which dripped from his head into blinking fish eyes. Just worrying prayer beads – click, click – in a relentless chain of cause and effect.

  This was the skeleton in the backroom, then: a loonish relative. This was what they were ashamed of. With an inward smile, and a wrinkling of the nose against the hot mustiness, Sami returned to the others.

  ‘So tell me, aunt. Who is this?’

  ‘You want to know who this is?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me his story.’

  Fadya’s eyebrows were raised high. ‘You’ve come here to learn. So I’ll teach you something. Just listen. Don’t write in your notebook. I’ll tell you the story of a man in this country. Let’s call him Faris Kallas.’

  Kallas is Sami’s mother’s name, his aunt’s name. But he’d never heard of a relative called Faris.

  ‘Faris is a student, twenty years old, hasn’t even begun his life yet. He studies at the university. What else? He wants to be an engineer. He wants to get married, have children. He wants to build a house. Don’t we all want the same things?’

  This assumption of Fadya’s, that everybody knows what they want, marked her foreignness to Sami.

  ‘It happened in the eighties, when you were happy with your father in London. It was chaos then. But Faris went to his university lectures, always interrupted by mukhabarat coming in and reading out the names of people whose names were never spoken again. When people disappeared their families didn’t dare enquire about them, didn’t mention them. The mukhabarat could do magic, you see. When they read names the owners of the names ceased to exist. God only says “Be!” and it is. With the mukhabarat it’s the other way round. They cancel by speaking.

  ‘So when any sensible man would keep a sweet smile on his face and his mouth shut, this Faris decided to join the Brothers. He didn’t do anything, mind you. No plots or bombs. Just said yes when another student asked him if he wanted to join the organization. They said they’d fight corruption and the Communists who’d surrendered our land to Israel, and this donkey Faris agrees with them and lets them write down his name.

  ‘After three months of earnestly doing nothing but go to engineering lectures, Faris is informed on. Someone tells someone that he’s a Brother. Then they came to his home. They walked in and got him, beat him in the kitchen in front of his parents and sisters until they couldn’t see his face for blood, and then put him in their car.

  ‘They drove him somewhere in the city. He doesn’t know where because there was a hood over his head. His blood stuck the hood to his skin as it dried, but loosened again with slaps and kicks when he arrived. In a cell smaller than this room, and forty others in there with him. No food, no water.

  ‘Then they took him to Tadmor, in the desert. You’ll have visited the ruins, the tourist sites, not the prison with the words over the entrance arch: “Who enters here is lost; Who leaves is born again.” First they made him write his name, his family’s names, and his address. Then they burnt the paper and stamped on his hand. Because he had no name or family or address any more, nothing to write down. They slapped him and spoke to him politely. “Please step this way, Mr Nobody.”

  ‘He was kept alone in a cell too small to stand up in. They gave him rice with stones in it and dirty water. After sleeping he could think properly, which meant he wasn’t able to sleep again. The fear was worse than the pain. He thought he was going to die.

  ‘They tortured him for a time and left him for a time. Then tortured him again. It became a normal routine, so he no longer feared death. He feared life instead. A routine, except a routine requires ordered time. In there, there’s no time. They live in darkness. No suns or moons. And what was left of him outside was darkness too. His family stepped around his shadow in the house. They couldn’t
forget him and neither could they assume he would come back.

  ‘Later, after years perhaps, time returned to Faris. Ways of telling the time. He had yoghurt for breakfast, rice for lunch, a potato for dinner. Once a month he was shaved. But when they shaved him they slashed his ears and nose and lips with the razor. Why do that? What’s the point of it? Why?’

  Sami spread his arms in innocent incomprehension. don’t know. Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Why do you think I ask you, nephew? Why do you think?’

  Sami was open-mouthed, almost tearful, too warm.

  ‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘What you don’t know you’re innocent of. And if you don’t know the answer to the question, then neither do we. What was the point of any of it? What was the point of ripping women’s hijabs off in the street? What was the point of murdering tens of thousands in Hama?’

  In other circumstances Sami would attempt a partial answer, about Hama at least. His father had explained it to him. The Brothers murdered plenty of Alawis and Party members in Hama before the government responded. The response had been harsh, certainly, but the alternative was also harsh. The Brothers in control of the cities and the Party in control of the army. It would never have ended. But this was no time for historical debate.

  ‘If there were men they left alive,’ continued Fadya, ‘that’s because they’d killed the man inside them. Before they released Faris they asked him about his politics. Politics is men’s business, so he had nothing to say. He had no opinions, no desires. That’s why his family didn’t recognize him when he walked in. Twenty-two years had passed. His father was dead. His mother ill. His sisters married. Your mother had left the country before they took him. There was almost nobody there to recognize him. Only his little brother. And he didn’t recognize him. He remembered a man, not a ghost.

  ‘That’s what we call lucky here. We thank God, anyway. Many men never came out. Some came out but found everyone dead. Some found their homes but the key wouldn’t fit the door. There were strangers inside.’