The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  The mountains crowded and loomed and threatened to shake with the shaking earth and crush him. He was blinded, unable to distinguish between the Straight Path and all the intercrossing goat trails. Or between fathers and gods. Between reason and religion.

  There was still Syria. It’s a misfortune of our age that we have returned to roots to find solutions. The roots are shallow, and mythical; we all come from everywhere at once, and we are floating creatures. Sami as much as anyone was inheritor of the great postmodern diversion. So it was with the sense of a last chance that he planned a summer month in Syria. His reasons for going: to reconnect with his roots, remember who he was, find an idea. In that causal order.

  When he got there he realized there were roots he didn’t want to dig up.

  As children we sense mystery but expect all to be explained. As adolescents we sense mystery but understand it as an extension to the glories of the self. There’s time later for universal questions, we think, but right now I’m busy preening. As adults we sense mystery but have become by then accustomed to it. It’s the solid ground beneath us, easy not to notice. And there’s no longer any time. We’re busy, so we put it from our minds.

  That’s how it’s meant to be in the society we’ve built. Busyness keeps our noses out of mystery. But Sami, being a failed academic and international layabout, living on his wife’s honest earnings, wasn’t busy. Whatever he was accustomed to was falling away beneath his feet.

  5

  Reunion

  The door opened almost immediately. Muntaha’s head appeared round its side, the heartshape of her face and her long eyes. Her pupils expanding with human warmth, despite justified disappointment, into the nearly black of her irises. Her dark skin shadowed in the streetlight. Her hair like a curtain, like a veil, promising revelation.

  ‘You’re back, then. Why did it take you so long?’

  ‘Oh you know how the tube is, I don’t need to tell you. And I don’t know how long I had to wait for my luggage. Much more than an hour.’

  She nodded sadly and stepped back to let him in. The hall was clean after his absence. It smelled of flowers, coffee and perfume. Sami unshouldered the bag and put it on the floor. They both examined it. It looked like hand luggage.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Muntaha, drawing a line.

  He walked into her extended arms and lowered his nose into her hair. She pressed against him. She and Sami in each other’s arms. She was wearing a man’s blue gellabiya, loose for the London heat. Sami clutched at it in handfuls. They held each other tight, fitting together well.

  Muntaha disengaged.

  ‘You’ve had a drink on the way home.’

  Sami, in hot turmoil, didn’t know what to say. All the melted ice was splashing about inside him. Still melting. He concentrated on not crying. But should he cry to win her sympathy? It was an opportunity, after all. He hadn’t been able to cry since they met. Since before that, since his father’s death. And now he had these burning tears to struggle with. In the end, like a man, but not much of one, he again transformed his confusion to anger.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ he said. I’ll do what I like.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said quietly. ‘But I thought you might have wanted to say hello first. To leave your bag. Then you could have gone for a drink if you’d wanted.’

  ‘But I didn’t want to say hello first.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘I mean I did… but it happened differently.’

  There was a long silence during which Muntaha studied the wall behind Sami’s head, contemplating anticlimax. She’d been hopeful for his Syria trip. She’d even – whisper it – prayed for his success there. And here he was returned, also considering anticlimax. Sami saw his brain exhale a little puff of illusion and then deflate into itself, sunken, crinkly, grey. The same swirl of light and dark greys that made up London. If illusion was sustainable anywhere, it wasn’t in this city. Meanwhile he felt her eyes on his face, peering through and underneath him to something that didn’t exist.

  His bladder, it struck him now, was much fuller than his brain. ‘Anyway,’ he said, dragging sawdust-stained shoes over the floorboards. He locked the toilet door behind him. The house was divided into spheres of influence, and the toilet was in his. Large enough to rotate in if you kept your arms to your sides. Dark red, and decorated with political cartoons from the same Arabic paper he’d bought in the airport. There was a small deep handbasin, a mirror he flinched from, a low toilet bowl. He pissed long and thickstream, dizzy in the enclosed space. Knowing he was in the wrong, he tried to feel more drunk. Why was it him always in the wrong? It wasn’t fair.

  When he emerged Muntaha was in the kitchen. The kitchen and bedroom and upstairs bathroom belonged to her. And since he’d been away she’d reclaimed the hall and stairway. The kitchen had a wooden surface and washed-out blues and greens for walls, furniture and plates. There were salty, bitter odours, like on a beach.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I had a bad time in Syria.’

  She softened immediately. ‘What happened, habibi? Tell me.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t gone.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘No,’ he frowned. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean nothing? Tell me.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  That was Sami, opening doors only to slam them shut again. Muntaha shrugged and moved to the open window. Darkness hid the neighbours’ patch of garden.

  ‘I love London in the summer,’ she said. ‘It smells so warm. So full of colour. Everybody relaxes. Everybody smiles.’

  Struck dumb by her optimism, Sami rubbed an aching shoulder. And in a sudden white flash there were tears in his eyes. Muntaha was still sniffing at the window, and he turned from her, breathing the tears away as you would control nausea, getting on top of it, calming down.

  Then he asked, ‘Do you want to see your presents?’

  Crouching in the hall he unzipped his bag and brought out the newspaper. He held it, wondering what to do.

  ‘That’s not a present, Sami.’ Muntaha was amused.

  ‘No.’ He tossed it to the floor, and then the fluffy white dog burst out of the bag. He threw this to his wife.

  ‘A present from the family.’

  She threw it back, laughing. ‘It has a Heathrow price tag on it.’

  ‘All right. Fair enough.’ He smiled. Her laughter made everything good. ‘They did get you presents. You know, Arab stuff. Clothes and sweets and stuff. But I’d have needed another bag to bring it all.’

  ‘And you only brought hand luggage.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She looked at him. He looked at the floorboards.

  ‘You’re silly, Sami. If you didn’t want to come back straight away you could have just said so.’

  ‘Silly.’ Now she knew the word. Previously they argued when ever he’d used it against her. She used to translate it into Arabic, where it had more offensive significance.

  He groped to the bottom of the bag, and handed over a thin brown paper package.

  ‘The postcards! Thank you.’

  She’d requested these to use in the classroom, for projects on foreign countries. There were pictures of mosques, castles, water-wheels, mountains, women in embroidered dresses, old city doors, water sellers and other self-consciously traditional street life. Tourist Syria.

  Sami stood up, unfurling a heavy necklace. This was the best moment of his day. It may have been the best moment of the whole summer. He stepped to his wife, swept her hair up, and arranged the cord around her neck, fastening the clasp on the nape, touching the downy skin with his long fingers, shaking lapis and silver pieces into place over the top slope of her breasts. Her slender neck and her swelling breasts.

  ‘That’s what I wanted,’ she said, turning her warm face to his. ‘Something chosen and given with love.’

  She kissed him. Her lips on his.

  Sami felt sexual desire. More
precisely, he felt a will to live – a power that was entirely other than him – pulling strings through his body towards her. He also felt anger, moving in another direction, moving upwards with the rush of melting ice. And he felt failure, a sense of smallness, crashing downwards, from his skull deep down into a plunge pool of despair. He was a battleground of forces.

  Disordered, he retreated from her through a brown door. Instead of a sitting room they had a study, and that was his. His smell was preserved in there among crowded bookshelves, generalized English mustiness, humid curtains, the fibres and spices of rugs and favoured clothes, and other ancient ritual objects, his relics. Furniture inherited from his father, memories his mother hadn’t wanted. A low desk and a dwarf-sized upholstered Moroccan chair to go with it. A wood and leather camel stool. And a red felt burst-spring sofa, into which Sami sank.

  The room stank of nostalgia.

  Muntaha walked in with a mug of tea. She set it carefully on the floor next to his booted feet. Early in the marriage she’d tried to make him leave his shoes at the door, to recognize a distinction between outer and inner, as the Arabs do. In vain. After some months of low-volume dispute she’d stopped trying.

  ‘Baba’s ill again,’ she said, seating herself on the camel stool.

  The room darkened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sami said. ‘Is he in hospital?’

  ‘Not this time. Hasna’s looking after him. And they send a nurse to visit him every day. I’ve been going there after school. You should come tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah. Tomorrow. Good idea.’

  ‘He had another heart attack. A small one, but he looks so old. He can hardly breathe. Just moving around the house is a big deal for him.’

  Sami grunted.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s going to survive this one. Allahu ’alim. God knows.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sami.

  She looked at him. He shook himself.

  ‘I’ve brought him new prayer beads from Damascus.’

  ‘Thank you, Sami. He’ll like that.’

  ‘Wooden beads.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  A man in a gloomy room worrying prayer beads. Click, click. Cause and effect.

  Sami ran out of things to say. He picked up the mug and breathed into it. Steam breathed back.

  ‘So tell me,’ said Muntaha. ‘Did you find an idea?’

  She was referring to his doctorate. Sami had told her what he’d convinced himself, that his visit to Syria would crystallize his academic thoughts, that it was his talismanic last-chance cure, that the visit would produce what study and thought and time had failed to.

  ‘Sort of, yeah.’

  ‘Excellent! What is it?’

  ‘Something about the city’s defeat of the countryside versus the countryside’s defeat of the city.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You know. Rural–urban tensions. Social change. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What do you mean, go on?’

  ‘I mean explain it to me.’

  He stretched. The muscles in his neck were curled and tight. His headache was returning. What he really needed was another spliff.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. This is what I mean. It always used to be that political power was centred in the big cities, in Damascus or Baghdad or Cairo or whatever. The sultan was in the city, the local governor at least. The army was in the city. But poetry came from the countryside. Linguistic standards set by the Beduin, by the desert. The urban rich sending their sons to live with the tribes, to learn proper Arabic.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But now, after independence, since the revolutions, it’s the other way round. Political power is held by rural people, villagers who came from the mountains and plains. They staff the army. They’re the ruling class. And, paradoxically, for the first time, the city sets the standard for language. Radio and TV stations broadcast city language everywhere. Poetry deals with urban problems and uses urban imagery. That’s it.’

  ‘It’s a good idea.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sami had cooled down during this exchange. He had his old frozen control back. And Muntaha liked him less.

  ‘But can I ask a question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Abu Nuwas and people like that. They lived in cities, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s only one kind of poetry.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s more than that. I’ll show how rural people get changed. They arrive in the city and hear the revolutionary poets, the new music, and forget their old references. The Qur’an becomes irrelevant to them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. There’s been some development. Reason has superseded religion. It’s defeatist to think otherwise.’

  ‘But that’s not what’s happened, is it? The Qur’an hasn’t become irrelevant. And is the Qur’an really rural? It was the product of two cities, wasn’t it? Mecca and Medina. And the countryside was never as religious as the cities.’

  Sami’s shoulder twinged. Muntaha continued, innocently.

  ‘And isn’t modern poetry full of rural imagery? Olives, wheatfields, the moon, and so on.’

  He radiated anguish.

  ‘Maybe. But the images are used differently now.’

  ‘I’m not trying to annoy you, habibi. I’m helping you to think it through.’

  ‘And since fucking when…’ – he couldn’t help himself – ‘… is the moon rural?’

  Muntaha walked with compressed lips to the kitchen. He could hear her closing and locking the window. When she returned she was wearing her tolerant look, an expression which unfailingly maddened Sami because it reminded him he needed to be tolerated.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re getting yourself so wound up about it,’ she said. ‘Just do the work. You’ll write something good. Insha’allah. And if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world.’

  He stared at her. ‘The end of the world. Maybe it is.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. You could get a job. It might make you happier.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘You could be a teacher. You could translate. You could work in a business. We know people who’d give you a job.’

  ‘West London Cabs,’ said Sami, full of sarcasm. When he wasn’t in his underground mosque, Muntaha’s little brother, Ammar, drove a cab.

  ‘Why not? It’s a job.’

  ‘There’s ambition for you.’

  ‘It’s a job. You could do something else if you don’t want to do that.’

  ‘And one day, if I played my cards right, if I reached the heights, I could branch out on my own. My own cab empire. Traifi Transport. From North Kensington to South Kensal Rise. The world at my feet.’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical. Or arrogant. It really doesn’t suit you. There are people who’d kill to have a decent job.’

  ‘I wasn’t born to work in a cab office.’

  ‘What were you born for, then?’

  ‘Not cabs.’

  ‘It was your example. And you weren’t born for any job. Nobody is. You do your best. That’s all.’

  ‘Very wise.’ Anger prickled his scalp. ‘Words of wisdom. Very fucking wise.’ He knew he was in the wrong.

  ‘Control yourself. Remember jihad against the nafs, struggle against the self. Cool down. Imam Ali said the strongest man is he who fights against himself.’

  ‘Jihad? You sound like Ammar.’

  ‘No, I don’t. His jihad means something different, as you know, Sami.’ Muntaha stood above him and sighed. She briefly tousled his hair. ‘I suppose you’re tired. That’s half an excuse. Be better in the morning.’

  He heard her switch off the lights in the hallway and kitchen. He heard her on the stairs. She was undressing. She was washing. She was arranging herself on the bed. In the summer she slept naked.

  He knelt to roll a spliff on the desk’s low surface. Before he lit it he sat bac
k into the sofa and surveyed his room. His past. His childhood. All the local history implied by objects and odours. He’d have liked to burn it all. He’d have liked to say, like a savage finding enlightenment, the gods of this place are not my gods. To burn it all, and move on. But he wasn’t ready.

  He heard a creaking from a bedroom floorboard. So she wasn’t on the bed yet. She was praying.

  6

  Relics

  Sami had one collection of Mustafa relics in his head and another in his desk drawer. The desk–drawer collection was more satisfying. He could handle it when he liked, each item fully present to his touch, unlike his vapourish memories which burst on him at odd moments and disappeared again into the insect whirring of his thoughts. Anyway, as time progressed the internal pieces came more and more to resemble the external, so that he considered the external, the empirically verifiable, the trustworthy, to be the originals.

  He opened the drawer and withdrew them one by one. The constellation map on card thinned to paper by age, Mustafa’s thick bold biro ticks across the patterns Sami had learnt to recognize. The Gilgamesh epic in Arabic, on the flyleaf of which Mustafa had written: To my own little Enkidu, my wild man. A signed first edition (there had been two: not bad for an academic work) of The Secular Arab Consciousness, losing weight as Sami rocked it in his hand. The miniature whiskey bottle, the one they’d shared in the hospital room, glinting with a little not-yet-extinct mystery. Then a wad of photographs – of him and Mustafa only, no mother, no uncles –curling at the edges, glossing into sepia forgetfulness. Sami held one away from himself to see it more clearly, and lowering it back to the drawer caught his own reflection in the window, as old as his father had been then. His mind filled with this image, and he lost Mustafa’s.

  Before he died Mustafa had told his son to look for him in the sky. I’ll be up there,’ he said, pointing weakly at the hospital window. ‘Among the stars.’ At night the window was not transparent. It reflected back the light of the ward. And in any case it was London winter. When Sami and his mother walked from hospital to tube there was unbroken red cloud above them – coloured from this side, not from that. To look upwards would expose his throat to the air, and it was too cold. Sami dug his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders inside his jacket. Wrapped inside the city wrapped inside the sky.