The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘When knowledge is distributed it increases. When wealth is distributed it decreases.’

  ‘Excellent! Who said that?’ And it was excellent. She could speak in quotes. Arab, and educated, and eloquent. She reflected him.

  ‘Imam Ali.’

  Sami frowned. ‘Are you Shii?’ Here was the drawback of an Arab woman, the shackle-weight of history.

  Muntaha halted. ‘Don’t you like the Shia?’

  ‘I’m not sectarian. I don’t think much of the whole religion thing.’

  ‘Neither do I. I’m not Shii, anyway. My mother was.’

  Sami noted the death of her mother. He stopped frowning. So religion was dealt with, out of the way. He noted too, once again, her beautiful free-flowing hair: black as… moonless darkness… black as emotional disarray.

  They arrived at the exit. Huge grey columns reached above them with all the mocking solidity of London. Fat grey pigeons stumbled in the low grey sky. It smelled of rain, beer and petrol fumes.

  Now they shook hands. Both had large, strong hands with long fingers. Muntaha’s hands were large, out of proportion to her body.

  ‘Fursa saeeda. Happy chance,’ she said, translating the Arabic literally, comically.

  ‘Pleased to meet you too. I really am.’

  He really was. But Sami also felt disabled by happiness, as if it was a trap, a drunkenness necessary to make him fall. Muntaha’s happiness, on the other hand, was unalloyed.

  ‘I am Sami Traifi.’

  ‘And I am Muntaha al-Haj.’

  ‘Do you study, Muntaha?’

  ‘I’m going to study history. And then be a teacher. What about you?’

  ‘I study too. Arabic literature. I’m starting my doctorate.’

  Then they exchanged phone numbers. She nodded goodbye and moved off with Iraqi intentness until she merged with the crowd and the cars beyond the railings, leaving a tingling in Sami’s groin and a more impactful churning in his intestine, rising to his chest and throat. The beginning of addiction. The memory of her warmed him like the memory of fire.

  This was who she would end up with. Sami chose Muntaha. And she chose him. He was good with her family. Polite. He was also clever and funny, which seemed to please her father as well as her friends, although her father’s target virtues in a son-in-law were steady religion and morality, not cleverness and wit. And Sami befriended her brother, Ammar, who needed befriending.

  So he was a decent man. A good choice. They had a civil marriage and a honeymoon in Scotland, wilder, quieter, more hidden than she’d ever been. Clouds of midges danced in the thick wet air. Trees creaked on heavy hillsides. Fertile darknesses, greens, blues and browns in the ponderous northern dusk, drained into one. A lightening moon in the sky full enough to be a lamp. The land feeling old to her, and them too, as if they’d been together for years. And after that she loved their long conversations, their gentleness to each other, their sex. Sami looking after her, bringing her breakfast in bed, preparing coffee for her when she came home from work. She loved that he was an educated man, and that he talked to her about his ideas. All his enthusiasm, all his passion. His hopes for the future, for them together.

  3

  Sami Hurries Home

  Ten years later Sami still had good intentions – new ones from Syria concerning Muntaha and complexity – but these became complicated even before the plane touched the ground. High up and unattached he’d been calm, light and balanced, but as the descent began he panicked. He felt fate. He felt the force of gravity. A headache curled its claw around his skull.

  He sped up: his breathing and heartbeat and the flickering of his eyes. He popped two more painkillers from their wrapping into his mouth. He jigged his legs and clicked his tongue. He snorted and swallowed against the cabin pressure. And with the first flashing of wheels on English earth he was already on his feet, reaching for the luggage locker, scowling back at the frowns of the nearby stewardess. He wobbled and tutted and bounced and said ‘fuck’. Portly, circle-bald Syrian men and their hijabbed wives tutted in response, covering their children’s ears.

  The plane decelerated to a point of silent decision. Everybody stood up and shuffled in the aisle, closer and closer in the unexpanding space. Sami, ignoring the laws of physics, tried dodging and weaving in the crush. Faster and faster. He felt speed give him buoyancy. Speed battling gravity.

  He spilled with ejaculatory force from plane to walkway, from tube to tube, increasing his velocity as human density thinned. Trampolining the conveyor belts, rushing past the multilingual warnings to refugees, striding through the appropriate channels, still faster. In such aimless, frenetic speed, in the daydreaming allowed by fuzzy lack of focus, he discovered the illusion of potency, of freedom.

  He spied a toilet. Banging through a cubicle door he unshouldered his bag, unzipped, and released a flow of analgesic-laden urine. Before he’d properly finished he gave himself a superficial body search, hands fluttering over chest and hips and arse, the pocket areas, and swiped from somewhere a packet of Lucky Strikes, and a lighter. He shook, zipped, lit, inhaled. A sour cumulus of smoke bloomed and glowered about him. His nostrils clogged. He felt the London wheeze catch in his lungs, the wrong chemicals tickle his stomach. And a yellowish smile spread over his face. Home again.

  He submitted to the gaze of passport control, feeling as unaccountably guilty as any normal citizen does in the presence of the law.

  ‘Where are you coming from today?’

  Sami breathed deeply, slowly.

  ‘Syria.’

  A moment of full eye contact.

  ‘Nice trip?’

  ‘I’m glad to be back,’ said Sami.

  And he surged onward. The process was efficient, but he was maddened by impatience nevertheless. He saw himself progressing through the airport like a worm through waterlogged soil, eating it steadily and steadily pushing it out. His aim was to arrive in his own life as quickly as possible, his normal London life, to escape from that other life claiming him.

  He fed a card into a cash machine. Muntaha had put five hundred into his account. He withdrew half, then headed for the express train, calculating how long it would take to reach home. In the train, on the tube, walking. Time lost on platforms. An hour and a half, two hours. And then… And then he’d stop. He’d come to rest. Have time to think and remember. The other, foreign life waiting for him at home, travelling faster than he could. He had to slow down.

  Also, he told himself, being home was excuse for celebration.

  At the Arrivals bar he treated himself to a triple whiskey. Jameson’s. Mustafa’s drink. He held the glass up to his dead father. ‘Cheers,’ he said aloud, and felt tough and nihilistic. It was nothing sentimental, drinking with the dead, but a gesture consigning this world and its living inhabitants to hell.

  Two minutes later he was engaged in debate with himself. He wanted another. Should he give in? Desire nearly mistook itself for need, for more whiskey and more smoke to chase it. But Sami was a man of half principles, and these won out.

  He dialled Muntaha.

  She answered after one ring.

  ‘Habibi!’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I always know. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Heathrow.’ He glanced uncertainly at his bag. Brown leather, compact, with a long shoulder sling. ‘I’m still waiting in the baggage hall. They say there’ll be a delay.’

  ‘You checked your bag in? I thought you were going to travel light.’

  ‘I was, but it got heavier. You know, presents.’

  ‘All right, then. I’m waiting for you.’

  Her voice trilled. She was genuinely happy about his return.

  ‘I’ll be there soon, Moony. I’ll see you soon.’

  At this stage, despite his lie, he still believed he would head straight to her. To her breasts and arms and thighs and hair. But first, to protect his lie, he needed to bulk out his luggage. In the morning he’d deliberately for
gotten the jumpers, pyjamas and boxes of sweets intended by various relatives as presents for Muntaha. He’d left them under the bed in Uncle Mazen’s spare room on the grounds that they were too burdensome. If he’d known then what his lie would be he’d have brought them. Bad planning. In the concourse commercial area he touched and rejected distinctively English chocolate bars, toys and bathroom products. About twenty books in the Middle East section with titles suggesting kidnap and domestic violence, fully veiled women on the covers. Men’s magazines. London A to Z. None of it looked like presents from Syria. But there was a fluffy white toy dog. In Muslim countries dogs aren’t considered cute or fluffy. But it looked like a present, and it made his bag bulge. He bought an Arabic newspaper too. He’d already paid and walked away when he remembered that this paper, independent and London-based, was banned in Syria. Muntaha wouldn’t know that.

  Down some steps. Through one tube, and into another. It would be a while yet before he breathed open air. Not fresh air, not clean, just open. Down in the distribution system air rushed and stopped through channels and valves. Stop and go. Travellers marched or slouched to platforms, waited for the roar and the shunting of doors, and entered the train as obedient as haemoglobin. Sami sat down, bag bulging on a leg which he began to jig, fast and faster. The train shot smoothly into London’s heart.

  A screen unfolded from the ceiling. A voice, more avuncular than chirpy, welcomed the passenger to an exclusive in-journey news bulletin. The busy, important passenger. And the helping hand of the voice. ‘Keeping you in the picture,’ it said. ‘Making sense of it all.’

  Sami pushed the bag off his leg and took out the newspaper. He surveyed the front page. More teenage deaths in Nablus and Jenin. Houses demolished in Gaza. Families made refugees for the third or fourth time. More useless keys. A photograph of a peasant woman carrying rocks in her gathered skirts to resupply the frontline youths.

  He repacked the paper into his bag. The ache in his head had slipped to his shoulders and the hollow between his shoulders. Hunched, shrunken, he resolved vainly to straighten himself.

  Through the window grey bubble structures flashed by. Fenced and rounded things which were perhaps gas works, Sami didn’t know. Art deco buildings stranded by sixties development. Brownish low-rise blocks of flats and empty expanses of park. Box-shaped shopping centres. Vast concrete storage spaces for cars waiting to be used up. Everything passing quickly under a flat grey light. A succession of film stills.

  Nearing Paddington, however, as the train slowed down, he saw the city unclothed, its private parts. He saw the backs of houses, and railings, and grime-coloured brick. Slipped roof tiles and barbed wire. The loneliness of potted plants.

  He stood, and hastened down the corridor, and back again. Passengers flinched as he approached and subsided into their worries as he retreated. Moving along the carriage in this way he created a ripple. Fear, relief, fear – like a strobe. Scrambling, rushing, thudding against seats. Hurtling from Syria towards more Syria, from cell to inescapable cell. The distance from the airport to his front door was all the freedom he had. He used the space, the speed. Stopping was like bars slamming down.

  The train itself stopped, not with a shudder but a hi-tech hiss. People slipped diagonally and unmeeting from the doors, and rapidly vanished.

  On the tube, the real tube hurtling into tunnels, he worried the passengers as he’d done before. They watched their knees or read the adverts. Anything but contact.

  Spat out on to the final, most familiar platform of his journey home, Sami paused by a no-smoking sign to light a cigarette. Not much further to dash, not much more time until his life-redeeming trip would have to be described and accounted for. The gains and the losses. The new academic idea. His dribbling Uncle Faris, if he would tell her about that. He stood and smoked where modernity receded and dusk encroached, in the eye of a transport police camera, under an archaic station clock. Roofed-in and tower-shadowed but open to the air at last, to the smell of London. What did it smell of? Of his childhood, and the ineluctable present.

  He knew he was in a state. Hardly surprising, he told himself, what with the change of air, being cooped up in a plane, the rest of it. Hardly surprising. But he was surprised to find tears springing from his eyes. Even a great hiccup of grief rushing from chest to throat. His father. His Uncle Faris. He stood for a minute startled in the headlights of his emotion.

  He transmuted grief to anger – ah! that’s better! – and rubbed his face. Then strode, furiously, from the tube station, hand luggage swinging from his shoulder, and turned in the opposite direction to home. Hurrying down the Harrow Road, fast and faster.

  He arrived at a barber’s shop. With a thrill of clandestinity, and the cheering sense of getting things done, he surveyed this way and that. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Satisfied that nobody authoritative was in sight, he pressed an unlabelled intercom button.

  A full minute passed. The defunct launderette at his side was plastered with words. Icons, flyers, alerts, calls to arms. There was the difference between Damascus and London: all the extra information. But was any of it wanted?

  Crackling and breathing emerged from the intercom, and a slow voice: ‘Ye-es? Hello?’

  Sami gave the code. ‘Beam me down, Scotty.’

  ‘What? What you say?’

  He flushed cold red. Had the code changed in the month he’d been away? It made him ridiculous if it had, there in the gathering dark inaccurately whispering a Star Trek line to the middle-aged and elderly Trinidadians below.

  He repeated himself. And this time it worked.

  ‘Yes, man. Come down.’

  He leaned through the buzzed door and into a cramped stairwell, a few brown carpet fibres remaining on each splintered, rotten step, the walls green-dull and the ceiling stained with coughing. A comforting environment.

  At the bottom he rounded a corner to find Harry the Barber –short, white-whiskered, spry – rising from a blue trade chair to greet him.

  ‘Sami! Where you been? Got a tan!’

  Sami grinned, and raised a finger to acknowledge his audience of men, some paying close attention, some already reabsorbed in dominoes or newspapers.

  ‘What, just from the airport?’ Harry pointing his head at Sami’s bag.

  ‘Straight from the airport.’

  Harry chuckled. ‘Getting your priorities right, I see. Now what is the priority, herb or a trim?’

  ‘Herb, please, Harry. And if you have any Rizla I’ll build one right now.’

  ‘Aha. The herb holds precedence. The trim later.’ He rummaged in a drawer before handing over a packet and some loose papers. ‘You’ll have a drink too.’ Splashing silky liquid into a tumbler. ‘Sit down, boy, sit down. Make yourself comfortable.’

  So Sami sat and raised the glass. Harry and a few others returned his salute. Sami drank, and the sweetness and the heat melted one more piece of ice in his heart. There was warm liquid oozing there now, liquid at the centre of him. The muscles in his shoulders and neck eased as he sniffed and crumbled the fresh weed, and he became mesmerized by the building of the spliff, this fetish transcending the real, offering light, colour, depth, resonance.

  He always felt comforted by the company of older men. Men drinking rum or ginger beer receding down a long table into blue smoke, pipes or cigars between their teeth, clothed in the remnants of the day’s formal dress: waistcoats and rolled-up shirtsleeves, old-style hats, loosened cravats. Respectable old blokes. No skullcaps or African robes here, not for this generation. They had cricket and church and English names long before they reached England. It was only when they arrived in the Mother Country they learnt how alien they really were, how black their faces, how strange their speech.

  ‘It was back home, then? The old country?’

  ‘To Syria, yeah.’

  He sparked up. The deep green crackle brought memories of parkland, cut grass, sunbeams.

  ‘Must’ve been good, then. Better than over here?’


  ‘That’s right,’ he lied. ‘Much, much better. Plenty of sunshine.’

  He breathed slow and soft through pursed lips as if blowing feathers away or keeping a balloon buoyant. Spliff spread from his throat to his lungs and up through the nerve cable into his brain.

  ‘Yeah,’ he continued, pursuing common ground in the longing for light. ‘Plenty of sunshine over there. And the fruit tastes better where the sun shines.’

  ‘Ah, yes indeed. You don’t need to tell me. Nothing like a Trinidad mango.’

  And this brought forth a chorus of nostalgia from the men nearest.

  ‘Guava!’

  ‘Pineapple!’

  ‘Papaya!’

  ‘Plantain!’

  What was Sami going to contribute? Lemon? Olive? Fig? He remembered the Damascene wind that whipped up every sunset, warping the sound of the prayer, making him sneeze. How he burst into paradoxical sweat as darkness fell and the temperature dropped.

  But he’d come home. He strained to perceive present information. He thought there should be calypso playing, but what bled from a small speaker behind the chatter sounded like Capital Radio, showy unaccented talk cutting into commercial music.

  He could feel thought bubbles rising and bursting and dispersing in frenzied series. ‘Must pay,’ he thought. ‘Must remember to pay.’ He unpocketed a note and offered it to Harry.

  ‘I’m going. I haven’t been home yet.’

  Harry winked. ‘Minister of the Interior won’t be happy if you’re late. I’ll see you, man. Come back for the trim.’

  Back outside, with heartblood still thawing, Sami calculated lost time. Forty minutes in Heathrow after the phone call. Forty-five on train and tube. Thirty more on the street and underneath it. Makes about two hours.

  He was suddenly hungry.

  Along the Harrow Road – tensed up again, hurrying after burst-bubble thoughts – and through the open entrance of the Tennessee Bird Bar. (Or the Louisiana Chicken Shack, or the Mississippi Fry House, perhaps the Memphis Wing Palace. They’re all there.) Behind the counter a nocturnal, paper-faced creature blinked into perpetual neon day. Sami placed and at once received his order: battery chicken in batter, a potato and grease ensemble, a syrup and caffeine mix.