The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Were the world’s objects and his inner feelings signs of something greater? Was another reality glimmering through the surfaces of things? Should living be a struggle to read the universe like a book? If he fell into his mother’s way of seeing, this is what he would believe. He had the sensation of knowing something but not remembering it. And the visible became transfigured. Almost.

  His mother had taught him this:

  sa-noor-ihim ayaat-ina

  fi-1-afaaq wa fi-unfuss-ihim

  hatta yatabayan-lihum

  innahu al-haqq…

  Which meant: We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that It is Reality.

  He would catch himself humming it in incantation. Even that. In dark moments, the darkest, he asked himself why Mustafa was so determined not to appreciate the poetry. Everyone recognized the Qur’an as the peak and glory of Arabic poetry, even if it wasn’t the word of God. Everyone except Mustafa Traifi, Professor of Arabic Literature. What was he so scared of?

  Here Sami stopped himself. Stepped back from the abyss. Was he not a proper man? Was he not prepared for the twentieth century? Some adolescent males worry about homosexuality. Sami worried about religion, about being religious. No, he needed another identity.

  He sided with Mustafa. Religion was the long childhood of a people. If an ancient people still had the habit, it was no longer childishness but senility. When that people lived in London, among the healthy, among the sane, religion was humiliation.

  It made him bow his head, not before God but before man.

  ‘Syria’s a Muslim country, isn’t it?’ asked his teachers, or his friends’ parents.

  And he would answer, ‘It’s a Mediterranean country. Would you call the Mediterranean Muslim?’ or ‘It’s a mixture of everything, really,’ or better still, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.’

  His origin was nothing to be proud of, at least not before his student days, when he refigured Mustafa’s Arabism as his own. From a schoolyard perspective all origins except his had something going for them. Some credibility. White English through strength of numbers, and because it was the normal standard. Black was stronger still. It even made converts: many whites adopted black speech, tastes and hairstyles, as far as was possible for them, at least while in school. There was a mutual fascination between the whites and the blacks, watching and imitating each other, fighting and fucking each other, while the Muslims tiptoed in the gloomy spaces around the beds and dance floors where the drama was played out. The Muslims got in the way. They ruined the whiteness of the city, and the blackness too.

  The blacks who subverted and enriched England with reggae and hip hop, the Carnival, spliff smoke. It looked impressive in the playground.

  The Sikhs. The Sikhs had bhangra and, more recently, gangs. Nobody bothered messing about with the Sikhs any more.

  The Irish. They were funny and tough and pissed. They lived in pubs on the Kilburn Road. They had tattoos, and – what was it called? The gift of the gab.

  The Jews were not so enviable. His schoolmates didn’t emulate a Yiddish-coloured English to toughen themselves in the playground. Nor was the two-dreadlock haircut ever in vogue. There weren’t any Jews in Sami’s school, not that he was aware of. They lived further north. But the idea of the Jews was attractive. They had almost single-handedly invented everything that made the West the West and not the Middle East. Modernism, Psychology, Marxism, atomic bombs. They owned the culture as much as the English did. They were neither insiders nor outsiders. Unless they dressed the part you could scarcely tell them apart from the natives. Sami had heard people say this is what made them dangerous. It certainly made them sharp. They understood London, and Europe, from within, looking out with conquering European eyes. But they’d never feel comfortable. They’d never nod off. Never grow fat and aristocratic.

  But Muslims. In Britain Muslims meant Pakis, which meant crumbling mills and corner shops. Which meant anoraks and miserable accents and curry houses. Dismal northern towns where day never truly dawned. They had a proletarian role in the economy, and a bourgeois conservatism. Neither sexy nor strong. Badly dressed and poorly educated. Islam’s cobwebs in their eyelashes, and its mould on their tongues.

  ‘So you’re from a Muslim family?’

  ‘Perhaps originally. A long time ago. Not any more.’

  Sami wasn’t a Paki. But there were so few of what he was that it barely qualified as a community. This was before the Iraqis arrived. The visible Arabs were Gulf Arabs, tourists and princelings, obese, wealthy, stupid.

  ‘So you’re an Arab, then?’

  ‘I’m a kind of Arab, yeah. But not like the Arabs you see on TV.’

  The Arabs of his acquaintance were one or two of Mustafa’s friends from the university, ideological secular-nationalists like him, and their children. Nur’s friends, who smoked a lot, drank a lot of Turkish coffee, talked a lot, and prayed. Uncle Mazen from Damascus who visited in the summers ‘to taste the civilization’. Those of Nur’s family she was able to arrange visas for, who stayed for extended periods to make the price of the ticket worthwhile. Old Grampa Kallas, Haj Ahmad, who sat with long serious face topped by a red tarboosh, what the English called a fez, gazing through the living-room window at the English street. Once he was accompanied by Fadya, who didn’t wear a hijab then, and once by Nur’s much younger brother, Shihab. They huddled, the Kallas family, to complain about the coldness of the London people. Shihab clicked his prayer beads and studied school textbooks. Mustafa sighed too obviously in their presence, shrouded his face in a mask of wooden tolerance.

  There came a point when Nur’s family stopped visiting. Around the same time the relationship between Nur and Mustafa ended. They didn’t divorce or live in different houses, but the marriage was as dead as if it had never been. Mustafa no longer talked Islam down when she was nearby. She no longer spoke to him at all. She moved into the guest room. When Uncle Mazen visited he had to stay in a hotel. Nur cooked meals, washed clothes, she helped Sami with his homework when Mustafa wasn’t there. Silence spread between them, as grey and thick as Mustafa’s cigar smoke.

  Sami started seeing his mother wearing a hijab in the street. If Mustafa approached she would sullenly remove it, her hands working heavily, with the blank expression on her face of a teenager obeying absurd commands. Having her hair uncovered when Mustafa was there was one of the minimal duties, like cooking, like sleeping under the same roof, whose performance was required to keep them officially married.

  Nur offered little comfort when Mustafa was diagnosed with cancer. There were no smiles, no tears, no soft words. As soon as he was hospitalized she boxed up his books and music collection, threw away the bottles, distributed his clothes around charity shops and mosques. She visited the hospital daily, going through the motions, changing the flowers at his bedside, bringing newspapers he was too weak to read. But she still didn’t speak. Fifteen-year-old Sami couldn’t forgive her for this.

  Then Mustafa was gone. An atom dismantled. As dead as if he had never been.

  Sami cried only momentarily before he found his cold strength. Nur didn’t cry even that much. No, she seemed relieved. Their family, his childhood, was dissolved, and Nur, his ex-mother, was pleased about it. Sami couldn’t understand from what distances the hatred had surged up within her and broken through her surface. What Old World, Middle Eastern curse had possessed her at the same time as her hijab? What evil, unregarded star was responsible?

  7

  Marwan al-Haj

  Marwan al-Haj, Muntaha’s father, left his country for ever in June 1982. This was four years after the cultural blacklist, two years after the outbreak of war, and three months after his release from prison. Looking back, leaving home was for him a release from the absurdities and irrelevance of his early life.

  He had spent sixteen months in prison. Not a long sentence according to the standards of his homeland, but still long enough to repent being an
Iraqi, or an Arab. And long enough also for his slight, well-proportioned body to stop being a source of pleasure and pride and become instead his enemy. Through his body they had broken him. By splitting his lips and ears, smashing his nose, crushing his spine, and tugging out handfuls of his full hair, from scalp and pubis, they had taught him at once how physical he in fact was, despite his earlier disbelief, and also, or therefore, how expendable.

  Part of the lesson was cleanliness. Being next to godliness, this was a supreme virtue, essential for his development. They washed away all the illusions concerning an expansive soul that had hitherto rolled about within him like lemonade in the belly of an overstuffed spoilt child. Which made things simpler. They washed too the uneven concrete floor of both his cell and the pain room with his blood and urine, bucketloads, really sluiced the place shiny so that he thought of himself in the end as a large blood blister, a viscous membrane containing too much red, sweet, sickening liquid. A surface. Something savagely, uselessly, physical, better burnt and buried and unseen.

  They used his body as a door to his soul. They climbed in through it, keeping their boots on, found the soul and kicked it down to size. In quieter moments they reasoned with it gently, convincing it that if it did exist, it certainly had no right to. Then they hoovered it up, all except a grain, a peppercorn of hope. I will live, it said. I will see Mouna. She will make me better. We will start again.

  When they beat him he would gasp or belch God’s name. It meant nothing to him. It didn’t help him. He had been too long out of the habit of seeking help in religious quarters. He didn’t even intend to say it, but heard the sound on his animal breath: ullahullahullahullahu. ‘Maku Allah,’ the beaters said. ‘There is no God.’ They wrote it on the wall with his blood, using the wall as a blackboard and the blood as chalk.

  After the first timeless beatings time settled into order. They beat him one day a week, except for the week before they let him out. Sixty-eight Tuesdays (he thought they were Tuesdays). He had no secrets to spill. They never even asked him questions, except rhetorical ones. There was no point to it beyond his metaphysical education, to satisfy the demands of routine, and his beaters’ zeal.

  This zeal he had to admire. They set about their work with unflagging dedication. Sometimes he detected exhaustion in their eyes, but they kept on at it. They did it as effectively as possible, so he supposed, although he was no expert. And a lot of thought had gone into his torture. The chair in which his back was shortened, for instance, was a quite ingenious device. Made in Iraq by Iraqis too, not imported technology.

  Now he thought about it he realized how many people his being here depended on, what careful planning the whole complex system required. A network of informers, party men, officials, wardens, revolutionary guardsmen, police and soldiers. Taxi drivers were famous for listening, and the shopkeepers who opened early and closed late, and watchful tenants in every building. How many people? He estimated, from the suspects in his own neighbourhood, and the population of the country, he estimated hundreds of thousands. All of them with families. All of them with some poetry in the soul. But he’d learnt about the soul now. He knew what human beings really were.

  Out of prison, he found the city stunned by heat and war. He returned to his flat and sat on the sofa in a layer of dust, wondering vaguely what would happen next. Mouna and the children were not there. He waited for them, looking out of the window. The sky and the street were bleached by the sun. He heard amplified counting songs and patriotic anthems from the primary school at the corner. He heard the chattering of women in the stairwell and children’s laughter among cars. He heard policemen’s whistles and the crowing of cocks. He heard the prayer called five times a day.

  Old men from the nearby flats came one by one to greet him. The young men were away at war. The fathers and grandfathers spoke softly, closed the door behind them before they embraced him. He held them without warmth and thanked them for their presents of food and tobacco. Many of the neighbours didn’t come at all. He would have come, in their position, in his stupid days. But he wasn’t stupid any more, and so he understood. He had some bites of the food, rice and beans prepared in pity, and smoked the cigarettes, for something to do.

  On the third day his brother-in-law, Nidal, knocked on the door. Seeing him through the spy hole, his hollow cheeks and sharp jaw, Marwan’s hope exploded in him. ‘God is great!’ he cried, tugging him into the flat. Resurrected thought ran about inside him. Mouna would come back with the children. He’d keep himself out of trouble. Life would start again. He wept with huge movements of his chest, like an old, rusty engine heaving into motion, the tears dragged from him in bursts and blusters.

  Nidal stood back and watched with a helpless expression. He shook his head slowly from side to side. He raised and lowered his hands, and finally clasped them across his waist.

  ‘She is dead,’ he said. ‘God have mercy on her. They beat her on the night of your arrest. We took her to the hospital but it was no use. They beat her on the head and she bled inside. God have mercy on her. There is no might and no strength save in God.’

  Marwan stopped crying. It was hope not sorrow that made him weep. He blew his nose and washed his face while Nidal made tea. They drank the tea, and Nidal continued talking.

  ‘Muntaha and Ammar are with us. They’re fine. Of course they’re upset, but they’re fine. Muntaha’s still going to school. Ammar has become a bit nervous. He cries a lot. That’s understood. He doesn’t really know what has happened. He’ll be all right. Both of them will. You all will. We’ll bring them to you whenever you’re ready. Or they can stay with us. It’s up to you.’

  At the beginning of June a mukhabarat man rapped at the door. Marwan looked through the spy hole and the mukhabarat man looked defiantly back. Looking was his profession. His shoes shone in the absence of light. His trousers were so black they shone too. His polished leather jacket reflected the yellow ooze from the landing bulb. Marwan opened the door and stood with head bowed.

  ‘You are Marwan al-Haj.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to leave Iraq?’

  ‘No.’

  The mukhabarat man cleared his throat. He tried again.

  ‘Do you want to go away?’

  Marwan, unsure, whispered, ‘No.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it would be better if you went away.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Certainly it would. Here is your exit visa.’ He removed an envelope from a shimmering inner pocket and thrust it towards Marwan. ‘This is valid for one month only. Do not make trouble where you go. Wherever you go, we are there too. Go with peace.’ He spun with a squeak of the shoes and strutted to the stairs.

  Unheard, Marwan thanked the retreating back, and slid the door closed again, frowning, pensive. The future had been decided. He had no feelings about it either way.

  The next day, returning on foot from the Jordanian embassy, Marwan saw one of his former torturers at an intersection sandwich stand: a large man crammed into a small plastic chair on the pavement, legs in a diamond shape bowed outwards at the knees and converging at boyishly side–rolled feet, chest and shoulders bulging over a white plastic table, a water-coloured face, unlined and uncomplicated, sunk into the shoulders. He was looking into the traffic blankly, perhaps sadly. An ordinary man. Marwan stepped behind a tree and watched until a boy brought the torturer’s order. A tightly wrapped sandwich and a tall glass of red juice. Fruit cocktail. Customer acknowledged service with a weak smile and a slightly timid nod, but the boy was already at another table. Marwan, out of sight, watched the torturer eating – he ate slowly, with both hands – and asked himself what kind of revenge he’d like, if it was possible. His response was, none at all. He wasn’t even angry. He said a silent goodbye across the exhaust fumes and moving crowds, and went home.

  He sold the flat to Nidal for as much as could be mustered in a week. He took Muntaha and Ammar and two suitcases packed with their clothes and toys. Al
so some photographs, for the children’s sakes, not his, and the album of their drawings Mouna had collected. He didn’t take his books.

  The children eyed him cautiously, circled him whispering incantations against doppelgängers and possessing jinn. Muntaha was excessively correct with him, behaving with a politeness he hadn’t seen from her before, although at times she would forget and leap into his surprised, unready arms to nuzzle her face in his beard, or sidle up to him and slip her brittle hand in his. Ammar, much smaller, was governed by his sister. When she came close so did he, and then Marwan nodded to himself, ah yes, the children loved him. He felt the warmth of the memory of paternal love. He remembered how it had once brought tears to his gazing eyes, given him a sense of meaningless things like meaning and achievement. But he couldn’t feel these things again. Sometimes, when his children touched him, he flinched. That enveloped him in nebulous guilt, but he fought it off, knowing it to be illogical. Greater than love or other abstractions he had duty, and because of duty – to his children, his dead wife, to himself- he would do his best.

  On the day of departure, Nidal made himself busy with the suitcases, and keys and addresses on scraps of paper. A hot wind blew up the stairwell against them as they descended. Dust was yellowish and thick on the roofs of their mouths. In the tiled entranceway Nidal turned around, panting.

  ‘You should be happier than this,’ he said. ‘Good things will happen now. You’ll see. And think of us.’ A portrait of the president was pasted to the wall behind his head. ‘We’re staying here with this bastard.’

  Nidal shut them into the taxi and leaned in through the window, dispensing sweets, blowing kisses, fixing his brother-in-law with a significant stare.

  ‘Go with peace, Marwan. It will be a new start. God be with you.’