The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  He ate leaning against a low wall. A piss-fed hedge twisted up from behind it. Cars whizzed by trailing carbons and distorted sound. As he chomped he was conscious of his butter-churn stomach, the enzymes working.

  He rolled another spliff, licking the paper with stunned tongue. Green in the dark, the smoke plunged and divided in his lungs, coating the walls, dribbling through to pollute the blood. He could see all this. The smoke used merely to disappear within and become abstract. Not now. He was losing his ability to not notice.

  There was the danger of tears. Dear me, he felt tired. Dear me. So he strode homewards, finally homewards, the bag swinging against his back.

  Then his stride froze, as if he’d walked into a rope pulled taut.

  He was at the door of a pub called The Scud. Twinkling coloured light hinted from beyond the door, the chink of glass, a rumble of amplified music. Beeriness and mould. The Scud’s windows were covered by blackwashed chipboard. And chalked on the chipboard: Exotic Dancing 7–11.

  Sami, in need of distraction, seeking to extend the length of his leash. Sami, requiring just one last drink, shoved through the doorway and entered the pub.

  An expressionless black man just inside. Security, measuring him. After that, the clientele was blanket white. There were probably Poles and Albanians, certainly Irish. But it was undifferentiated to Sami. Low-slung jeans, football shirts, tattoos. The multicoloured neighbourhood hadn’t made it across the threshold of The Scud.

  He padded over sawdust to the bar. Men drooped all around it, using it to stay upright. Disconcertingly, there was a woman pouring the drinks, frail but brisk. Not much talking going on. The occasional forced laugh. Otherwise each man trapped inside himself. One more woman visible – very visible indeed through her lingerie – who dodged and wormed between the drinkers’ slablike hands, collecting coins in a pint glass. She winked and grinned and inclined her head, thighs trembling, straw hair limp on yellow shoulderblades.

  Sami ordered a pint of lager and carried it to a table snug between a stained wooden stage and a wall. He lit a Syrian Lucky Strike and smoked like the others, watching his cigarette closely. Pulled at the warm lager, like the others, watching the plastic glass. Puffed and swilled and puffed.

  This is where you’d expect commercial pop music, but it was in fact a calypso that banged from tinny speakers when the coin collector mounted the stage. Looking into the mid-distance, into the smoke, she began her routine. The enfeebled audience feigned indifference. As she shook and wobbled they surveyed the gloom behind her, open-mouthed in vague enquiry, searching for dart-boards, calendars, directions to the Gents. And so two minutes passed until the performance reached its resolution, the dancer discarding a final flimsy garment before lying on the stage and splaying her legs in joke abandon. This was irony: the veil between her body and the real.

  Among the men there was a listless straining for a better view, as if absent-mindedly, and a display of boredom, glassiness of the eyes and puffed-up lips. From his knobbly chair Sami had a perfect perspective on the intricately folded vaginal package. The flesh flower. The possibility of its yielding, being reshaped by him. He concentrated. No signs of arousal from his body whatsoever. Bodies are better clothed. The occult best left unknown.

  He scanned the pub’s brutal good cheer. A man in a suit, who’d just happened to stop by on his way home from the office, was stroking a cigarette machine. Others coughing into the sawdust. Others limply slapping each other’s shoulders and backs, straight-faced, cold. And nearest of all and therefore unseen until now, right across the table from Sami, a round, red, roaring man. Sweating through his burst-button shirt. Damp hair crawling over the collar. Far enough gone to be openly rapt by the performance. There was a wall of empty glasses in front of him, and a perspex box full of change, for more drinks, more bodies. But sensing Sami’s horrified gaze he turned his hot eyes and spongiform nose on him, and barked through salivating lips.

  ‘You’re me brother, you are!’

  Sami ignored him.

  ‘Not my brother. You’re a youngster, son, isn’t it? You’re my son, my long-lost, my real and genuine boy.’

  He started pawing at Sami’s arm across the table. Sami pressed against the back of his chair, the dirty wall.

  ‘I’m not your son.’

  ‘Not exactly, I’ll grant you that. Not precisely. You’re… you’re…’

  Did Sami believe in coincidence yet? The music of events?

  ‘… my nephew. My sister’s son. My sister’s little boy.’

  Sami found his feet, heaving the bag to his shoulder, and pushed to the door. His new uncle roaring above the stereo.

  ‘Oi! Come back, boy! That’s my nephew! Bring him back!’

  Sami scurried muttering along the canal. Clumsy now, he’d lost the excitement of the spliff. He knew the rushing was an attempt not to see what was in front of his nose. But what did he have to aim for except illusion? There were tears on his face again, and no poetry for miles. Unusually, most unlike him, he felt hot through and through.

  Three minutes later, panting, head spinning, he raised a hand to strike his front door.

  4

  Sami’s Thesis

  On the Saturday afternoons of Sami’s dead childhood his father would take him to the cinema. It was a ritual as educative, as acculturing, as a Friday mosque visit. It anticipated the shape of life to come.

  Each film followed a similar pattern. We find our hero in a mysterious, problematic world. Conscious of his weakness, he grows in strength and knowledge, winning love and admiration along the way, until he forces an explosive climax. Victory is his (and therefore ours). The death star is destroyed. The world set to rights. If it’s a good enough film all the kids in the audience applaud. Then there’s ice cream before the bus home.

  Little Sami waited for life to happen as a boy in a cinema awaits the start of a much-hyped film. The kind of film talked about in the playground. The kind whose spin-off picture cards you collect from packets of chewing gum, and whose action figures you ask for on your birthday. A really exciting, really important film.

  He looked forward to life enthusiastically. He’d go to university, probably the same university his father worked at. In the first year after graduating he’d travel around the world, learn to speak the major languages, have all manner of tropical adventures. Then he’d write some volumes of globe-shaking poetry. In awe of his soul, universities would offer him chairs. He’d choose one, and write about Arabic literature, and become famous for that too, like his father. But better than his father. Leaping forth from the giant’s shoulders, he’d go further. After that the future became fuzzy. Surely there’d be more good things, more achievement, stretching into the interminable distance. The thought of it made his small heart beat fast.

  This little Sami felt to the adult Sami like his dead, innocent child, buried in the blind years. Everything since that particular funeral, since adulthood, had been enveloped in an anticlimactic fog of mourning. Except for meeting Muntaha. Except for beginning his PhD. There had been hope until then. It was the start of the PhD that marked the transition.

  His doctorate made him as emotionally overworked as the worried and fretted spines of his academic books. A high frequency of Re and Post among the titles: Re-presenting, Re-interpreting, Rethinking, and Post-colonialism, Post-modernism, Post-structuralism. Never noticing the present moment, but doing the event again, after the event. A sigh for theory, his sometime love. The attraction of the Posts was their decentring not only of religion but also of the imperial West. Everything decentred and flattened into meaning-lessness. Sami liked it, but kept a contradictory corner of his consciousness – a small centre – for the Great Arab Nation narrative. A story told in Mustafa’s voice, with Qabbani’s words.

  His first PhD plan had been to show how poetry improved language and therefore the world. He set out to prove that Qabbani-isms had infiltrated and revolutionized everyday Arab speech. But it hadn’t quite worked
out. However much he trawled through newspapers and transcripts of TV shows, and advertisements, speeches and pop songs, reality wouldn’t quite submit to his vision. He’d even sat in on exile conversations on the Edgware Road with a surreptitious dictaphone. A particularly bad tactic. The discussion became bland and coded as soon as he switched it on. On the third occasion, somebody smashed the dictaphone. ‘Do you think I’m scared of you here?’ rattled this paranoid Egyptian, thick arms suggesting violence. ‘What more can you do to me? You want to hear what I think of them? Just ask me. Just ask.’

  His first supervisor sat him down and told him to pay attention to the texts themselves. Fate opened the page at the poem called ‘Declaration’, where Qabbani, in imitation of the declaration of faith, had written: I declare / There is no other woman. So Sami made notes on the sexualization of religious language. Piles of earnest notes. The supervisor pointed out a comparison with English Renaissance poets, who’d also described physical desire in terms of divine love. Sami read the poetry, and the prose, and the (post-psychoanalytical, post-feminist, new historicist) criticism. Using up a lot of paper, and more time.

  The supervisor went to work in America. He was replaced by a German expert on Sufism who drew Sami’s attention to Arabic poets who’d sexualized spirituality in previous centuries. Anti-Qabbanis, drooling for divinity, but in their own way subversive (more subversive, Dr Schimmer held). Certainly there appeared to be very many parallels between their God and Qabbani’s man-burning, man-drowning woman ‘wordlessly sensed by the mind’. The rapture of union. The lover-moth longing for the beloved flame.

  Sami listed Sufi symbols: wine, eyes, breasts, skin. A long time in libraries. Reams and trees of notes.

  Then Dr Schimmer instructed him to learn Farsi.

  The first fingers of panic were poking in Sami’s insides. Withstanding lectures on the Farsi programme, perusing medieval grammars, filling more files with notes.

  Another year before he made a stand. From high up, unstable atop stacked notes, he called down his complaint. He hadn’t intended his thesis to become bogged down in the stagnant waters of mysticism. All that soupy soul stuff, that Iranian heavy breathing, that he’d been brought up to despise.

  ‘No, No, Mr Traifi,’ intoned Schimmer (but Sami, merging Anglo-Arab prejudices, heard ‘Nein, Nein’). ‘When you study poetry you must be interested in the soul. And the Arabs, you know, didn’t make the spirit–reason duality until the, aa, incurable stage of their decadence. They had their greatest material success in their most religious period.’

  Outraged, disdainful, even briefly considering lodging a complaint against Schimmer’s racism, Sami strode out of the office. Slamming the door as if firing the first symbolic shot of a liberation war. He strode all the way to the library, where he barricaded himself behind impenetrable books. More notes produced, paper-thin, insubstantial. As firm a defence against Schimmer’s ideas as the Arab states’ armies had been against Zionist expansion.

  With tail between legs, and lowered gaze (his back and shoulders had begun their trouble), he crawled back to Schimmer. Back to mysticism after his Setback. From here on, he drifted. Then Qabbani died, after writing his last great, angry work, ‘When Will They Declare the Death of the Arabs?’

  Years by now had passed, and the world had changed since Sami made his academic plans. The blocks with which he’d built his personality – Arabism and poetry – had begun to rot. Which wasn’t only Sami’s fault. The whole world rotted. It heated up, grew smokier, more fetid. The Arab part in particular rotted faster than the rest. Arab culture and ambition shrivelled. Poets died and were not replaced. Religion grew in response.

  In truth, Sami was an academic only because his father had been. Professor Mustafa Traifi, renowned (to an unheard-of coterie) author of The Secular Arab Consciousness, the great formulator and compartmentalist of Sami’s youth. Sami following a map that had been drawn for him years before, but not arriving anywhere, floundering in libraries and lecture halls, failing to produce a doctoral thesis. Making him, in his own eyes, not much of a man –unsettled, out of place, unexplained. And he had the feeling that there was a core of truth and direction nearly visible yet decisively hidden, frustratingly, something only noticed in its absence, a purpose for him, somewhere out of reach. And he thought it was his failing, his lack of clear sight, that stopped him from grasping it. He began to despise himself, and his behaviour degenerated.

  He became argumentative. He whinged and whined. Muntaha dealt with it. She knew he was having trouble and supposed it was temporary. She wished she knew enough to help, but never did, despite her best efforts. This because Sami grew defensive whenever she spoke about his life and work.

  She persisted on memories of what she thought of as his true self: Sami preparing meals and conversations, or running his fingers through her hair on the tube, showing her off a little, the great value he had seemed to place on her. She persisted on the thought that his true self might yet re-emerge. But for that to happen, it was clear he needed more than just an idea for his thesis. He needed a spiritual change. But this was another area Sami wouldn’t discuss. However vaguely and carefully she addressed the issue, talking about perspective and attitude instead of prayer and fasting, he cut her off. He accused her of sounding like his mother, the mother he didn’t talk to. Muntaha knew better than to advise him to pray – Islam had been taboo since she’d begun to express sympathy with it. Another to add to the list of forced silences they now had: his work, her ideas. Her feelings. Important subjects.

  So when Sami declared a year off for the world travel and the poems, Muntaha, having observed things slide the hill from bad to worse, and hoping he would find direction on the way, was supportive. Plus, it was no loss to her to have the house free of smoke and noise. She was engaged now in the practical business of an East End school, teaching history and geography to children replete with these same qualities, marking homework when it came, managing decidedly unspoilt students and, in equal need of guidance, their world-spoilt parents. So off Sami set, chewing his lips, to south and east. One of the reverse refugees, fleeing the leisure to discover himself.

  Apart from Morocco (plenty of spliff), he avoided the Arabs. There were vodka and Gypsy festivals in Bulgaria. Efes beer and raki in Turkey. He inched through Anatolia from bar to harsher bar. In the contested borderlands he ascended a mountain whose summit was a burial mound littered with vast stone heads, sculptures of god-kings, and on the way down had his foot run over by a car swerving to give him a lift. It did him no harm, except to add to the accumulation of harm in his spirit.

  Back in London, he smoked, he drank, he avoided things. He gazed moon-faced at Muntaha. He received her comforting embraces, but was not comforted. In an iconoclastic fit he hurled Qabbani books at his study wall. He never looked up at the stars. He limped around the university campus like a wounded animal, his back hunched up and his neck tied in memory knots of pain. He flicked through old notes as you might flick at a mouth ulcer with your tongue. He smoked some more.

  By now his early sets of notes couldn’t be found. Someone may have carried them out with the rubbish. They may have been burnt to join the other carbonates in the sky. It made little difference. And by now too, Sami’s money had run out. Half of his inheritance from Mustafa sunk into the mortgage, the rest into the vortex of his daily needs. He lived off his wife’s labour.

  Of his doctorate, he’d produced nothing. Dr Schimmer should have given up on him, but instead agreed to start him again, registering him as new, for his father’s sake.

  ‘Perhaps you will settle down to the work now? Perhaps, like your father, you will produce, aa, greatness? Perhaps it’s in the blood, yes?’

  To prompt the sensation of turning over a new leaf, Sami took a long trip to Paris. A sabbatical, he said. He planned to study second-generation North African rap in French. It seemed complex enough, important enough, to necessitate nine months in a flat in the 18th arrondissement learning stree
t French and smoking Algerian hash. Every few weeks he ate a lump for the ten-hour bus and ferry ride to his benefactress in London. Happy times, unfamiliarity breeding respect. Then back to Parisian Babylon to congregate with clandestine Maghrebis, those homeless and paperless, fallen between borders. By this stage, Sami felt he belonged with victims.

  In April 2000, however, Hizbullah drove the Israeli occupation out of Lebanon. It was the first Arab victory in living memory. Could the age of defeat have an end? There was a hint of that possibility in the air.

  In September confrontations with the occupation spread across Palestine. Teenagers challenged tanks – new-born children of the stones absorbing live ammunition in their bodies. After three or four days of escalating demonstrations it was obvious they weren’t going to stop. The second Intifada had erupted like a poisonous boil, and so, for Sami, had an unexpected moment of bliss. He was still young enough for wasted years not to matter much, and to be young in that morning of the rejuvenated Arabs was very heaven. On wings, he alighted again in London, and with passionate but chilly fury began a new book of notes, on Mahmoud Darwish and the poetry of immediate engagement, on Qabbani’s Jerusalem poems, on the Palestinian revolution. He loved his wife. Saw no need to smoke. For Muntaha, the real Sami had come home.

  Alas, the uprising provided a false dawn. Sami produced political enthusiasm rather than scholarship, transcribing each morning the emotions provoked in him by the previous day’s body count. Merely that. When he recognized it, there were no longer any delusions to accommodate him. It was a decade since he’d graduated, and what had he actually said in that time? What wisdom would he bequeath to the coming generation? Sami had meant to add his distinctive stone to a particular cairn on the mountain of knowledge, but he held no stone, could find none to fit his palm. The father whose inheritance he’d squandered towered above. Our Father Who Art. In the high places, at the sacrificial sites. On Sinai. In Muhammad’s mountain cave of meditation.