The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘I’ve already made a new start,’ said Marwan, his eyes on the windscreen.

  The car pulled out into the noise of the street – children wailing, mothers screaming at children, a cart man crying his wares, television sets, pop music on tinny radios, patriotic songs, the clank-clank of the gas-bottle man. Tattered flags flapped in the breeze. An old man stood in the road rubbing his back and groaning. A harsh indifferent sun glared, fixing details in memory, embellishing them with meanings to be retrieved later, meanings which they perhaps did not deserve.

  8

  The Immigrant

  Marwan had been a minor poet. Very minor. And very poet – in attitude, lifestyle and aspiration. There were lots of poets in those days – lots of young people, lots of words, and plenty of cash.

  Iraq was the only Arab country with both oil wealth and a large urban population, the only Arab country where something constructive could be done with the wealth. Money flowed into the sandbanks of the two rivers and the future sprouted. You could see through Baghdad’s crumbling shrines and markets and under the surface of recent slums to a coming metropolis as greenly luxuriant as Haroon ar-Rasheed’s. The hospitals and universities were already as good as those in Europe, and cleaner, newer, more gleaming. Parties characterized the city as mosques had done in the past. A cigarette-smoke and perfume miasma spawned vegetal words, verdant ropes and webs of words, of… renaissance, progress, unity. Everything seemed to matter, every word.

  Verses were currency as much as commodity. A well-aimed panegyric would buy you a job, a villa, a car. Verses came easily to Marwan, but he was an ethical investor who avoided direct toadying. He was able in good conscience to praise more generally, and the bulk of his poetry consisted of such innocuous fare: short laudatory hymns to the city, the nation, to brotherhood and other abstractions. He lovingly ornamented the present and future, and also conjured the dusty provincial town he’d grown out of, representative of the primitive past.

  He sat on the editorial committee of Revolution in Words, a state-sponsored literary review for a coterie readership. The editors played their roles as seriously as method actors through flashing afternoons of theory and whiskey which ended in table-thumping to punctuate socio-poetic points, and then laughter. They belonged to a class which had liberated itself from rural inhibitions. They were open about their girlfriends and boyfriends, their atheism, their experiments with hasheesh and opium. Wild love and intoxication, they said, defined Baghdad in its Golden Age, and would again in the age of black gold.

  Mouna was one of this group, Marwan’s girlfriend before she became his wife, his wild lover, his accomplice in experiment. The object of erotic verses.

  Marwan, secular and romantic, believed he was a model citizen of the new Iraq. He made no mistakes in his writing or living, not that he was aware of, not until he made the mistake he must have made in order to be arrested. He thought on this when he had time between Tuesdays in prison, and afterwards, and decided his blunder had most probably been to copy and circulate the wrong poetry. Of course nothing directly political, nothing he expected would cause offence, but he’d copied poems by disappeared Communists, translated Iranians, sectarians. He’d used the Revolution in Words photocopier and distributed the poems to friends and visitors who accepted them out of politeness and who in most cases never read them; Marwan standing up when they were sitting, waving his hands the while, becoming overexcited, babbling too loudly about modernism and radical diction and liberating the unconscious and God knows what else. For such noble activity he’d murdered his wife and lost his country. If he could feel anything he’d feel shame. For his absurdity. But then, the copied poems may not have been the mistake. Someone may have made a false report about him and, in that case, his arrest had been a mistake. And he asked himself, could Mouna’s death have been caused by a mistake? Could the death of his own soul and the orphaning of his children and the end of consequence and depth in the world which left only silhouettes where there had been well-dimensioned people and houses, could all this be mistaken, or was there a reason for it he couldn’t perceive? A logic which determined events? A set of rules?

  In Amman, from a rented house on a rocky hill, Marwan wrote to Jim Clark for help. As poet and editor he’d had such international acquaintances. Jim Clark: former cultural attaché at the British embassy in Baghdad, Arabist and Arabophile, who’d arranged bilingual poetry evenings in the British Council garden and translated Marwan’s poems for London magazines. Marwan posted the letter and waited for a reply.

  He sat on a mattress in his bare accommodation. Without the furniture of books and words his life was as empty as the house. Better like that, he thought. Free of illusions. Simpler. Uncluttered. On Friday he walked to the nearest mosque and half listened to the sermon like the other men, cross–legged and nodding on the tired carpet. He prayed the congregational prayer for the first time in twenty years. Stood and bowed and prostrated and knelt in conformity with the crowd. He bought fruit in the street outside and carried it back. During the week he stayed in the house. He didn’t read. He didn’t pray.

  The following Friday, and the next, he returned to the same mosque. He took pleasure in the uniform movement of the praying men, and hurried away from their extended hands and questioning glances as the mass splintered afterwards. He didn’t wish to know them as individuals. As individuals they would be sharp as shrapnel.

  In three weeks Jim Clark arrived, sweeping sweat out of grizzled eyebrows with the back of a heavy hand. He attended to Marwan’s every gesture with the grim sympathy he judged due. Marwan –exile, torture victim, persecuted artist – was unable to play his roles properly, or to reciprocate Jim’s friendship. But he did what needed to be done; was taken to doctors who noted and recorded his limp, his twisted spine, his sudden bald patches, and to British officials who regarded him with the same focused attention as Jim, dispensing with paperwork, patting him cautiously on the shoulder, afraid he would break.

  Jim, tree-tall next to Marwan’s withered shrub, explained that political asylum had already been applied for. A formality. In the meantime, here were three visas, and plane tickets. Marwan could pay him back later. It was the least he could do.

  ‘Call yourself lucky,’ said Jim, flinching from the inappropriate adjective. ‘I expect half the country would like to get out.’

  ‘They would,’ said Marwan, ‘and they wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know.’Jim puzzled over it. ‘It’s our fault of course. It usually is. Us and our American friends. He’s our man, you see. Keeping the Communists down yesterday, knocking the Iranians about today. He can do no wrong. It’s a sorry state of affairs.’

  Ammar wheeled around the adults on the mattress with a peal of high laughter. A screech of brightness. Muntaha followed with a water pistol. Jim was talking about the poetry Marwan would write in London. Marwan gazed at Jim, and at the abstractions like steam clouding his face. And he thought: If I’d died at thirty I might have died happy. My eyes might have entered paradise open, still searching for something. I might have had the smell of paradise in my nostrils as I died.

  The next day they arrived in London.

  It astounded Marwan. Stately-solid, autonomous, indifferent, history bowed before it. He tried to compare. More prosperous than Baghdad but harsher, tidier but more desolate, it revealed Baghdad as a ramshackle shapeshifter, built in haste for a shuddering moment, all its wiring and dirt showing. London, in contrast, was sculpted and seamed like a fortress, for permanence, with its rolling acres of pavement and wall and its tunnels underground channelling sewage, rats and trains, everything functional enclosed coffin-tight and buried again in stone. With its big stone houses, its blocks and rows and crescents, its entire streets carved from the same rock, its red zones and its white zones, its brickwork, the tremendous trunks of its trees, the city could withstand anything. Even its dwarfed and cowed inhabitants, who seemed to be there by accident. Was that it? Baghdad was an accident that ha
ppened to its people, but the people here were an accident happening to London. Crawling over its face like unwelcome insects. Getting in the way. Including him now, Marwan and his children accidents too.

  Could people be merely accidents? Was it humility or arrogance to think so?

  Everything was tied down in its proper place. The streets had names. No discrepancy between the written and spoken names. Even the dogs, labelled around the neck, had names and addresses. Squirrels, less timid in their residence than Iraqi human beings, lived unharassed in the trees which burst from the pavement at regular intervals.

  He didn’t sneer, not even at the combed and collared dogs. There was nothing wrong with order. Order meant safety. Order kept people within limits.

  And there were people, he gradually understood, who belonged in the city more than accidentally but as part of its fabric, people made of stone flesh and cold stone blood. Of every colour and class, arriving from everywhere, for every reason and none, and staying when they came in the shadows until they moved invisibly into death, and even the shadows were fixed, and the air hanging between the buildings, the exhalation of lungs and engines, the cloud and the metal sky in permanent residence, fixed in situ for ever and ever and ever.

  Unrelenting, eternal London. A piece of the earth’s crust reared up and separated from the rest of the planet. A stone mountain.

  Wonder soon hardened into resentment. He cast bitter glances at the imperial centre, at Buckingham Palace and Whitehall, the great museums and opera houses, at banks, theatres, department stores. Why don’t we live like this? he asked the emptiness. Do we not qualify? Are we a different species? Are we not human beings? Or are we human beings and these the gods?

  But he was giving up metaphysics. He developed a sense of perspective. Weaned himself away from symbols and observed the world by its letter and surface. He attended to his hours as assistant librarian in the Arabic department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (Jim had guided him into the job). He paid the rent for the small house Jim had found in West London. He attended the local mosque. He bowed like the others – the Turks, Indians, Nigerians – prayed as he’d been taught as a boy, before abstraction set in. His prayer was not meditation but a habit establishing itself, a practice and a rhythm, the string attaching him to his place in the city.

  There were other sides to London Marwan discovered only as time passed. After a leaden wintertime he found less reason to be jealous of it. He noticed shabbiness, hollowness, randomness. How the lives hurtled into collision, unplanned, each scouring the other’s surface. A sandpaper world. People tied individually to the city but not to each other. He wasn’t the only one to avoid meeting eyes in the street; the natives too were foreign to each other. He watched the aggressive youths, beer cans in knuckly hands, navels exposed, sometimes pierced, and remembered with shame his own extended youth in Iraq. And for that association among others he didn’t miss it. Any happiness there had been illusory, mistaking hell for heaven. For the world is made of the same material, London or Baghdad, it makes no difference.

  One humid evening walking from the tube station Marwan passed a blood-sticky body hugging the kerb. Matted filthy beard and tangled long hair. Passed it and half turned his head, his peeled eyes. Nobody else was stopping. So with the now characteristic hard-set, turned-down expression about his mouth he went back and crouched, holding his breath to keep his lungs unsoiled, and slowly rolled the corpse face-up. And the corpse came to life, spitting froth from its lips. Marwan sprang back upright. ‘Fuck you,’ groaned the corpse. Marwan walked on quickly.

  He stayed inside when he could. But inside was no relief. The little rooms were dark and damp. Varieties of mould tattooed the walls. He had that mushroomy sour smell always in his nostrils. The windows didn’t open unless you unscrewed anti-burglar locks, and the air outside was anyway gusty and cold, and tasted of beer and traffic. Gusts like the squalling tears of a derelict. When the wind rushed along the street the windows rattled. In the winter, ice formed on the inside of the panes.

  Marwan’s room, downstairs, guarding the entrance hall, also served as dining room and living room. In the daytime his bed became a couch. No pictures or books. He had the TV which revealed further little rooms and compartmentalized English people gossiping and whingeing within them. Through the window he heard the immanence and distance of the world outside.

  The children were upstairs out of harm’s way. A room for the girl and a room for the boy. They cut pictures from magazines and stuck them to the walls to reflect what they imagined inside themselves. They were allowed to jump around and make noise. Marwan was not an unkind father. He questioned them about their schoolwork and the friends he never saw. He worried about them and warned them away from danger, but never beat them or raised his voice. He did his best. He played his part.

  He would pray at home and at work as well as in the mosque, measuring out the day by the allotted times. He performed fifty press-ups and fifty sit-ups in the gloom of each morning. He memorized sections of the Qur’an as an exercise to maintain his mental health. With a sort of quiet pleasure he felt age descending upon him.

  Once on the tube he intervened in an argument between a man and a woman. They cursed in one of the stranger accents. Irish? Scottish? Subdued swearing burst into shouts, and then shoving and flailing hands. As slaps became punches Marwan found himself standing, stretching an arm between them. ‘Madam, how may I help you?’ He heard his croaky foreign voice and his diction suited to the British Council garden or to Shakespeare seminars thirty stale years old. Bleating ridiculously, ‘Madam, madam…’ until the couple interrupted themselves and looked at him with shocked disgust.

  ‘Piss off, you old Paki fucker,’ the woman said, and pushed against his face with a wet hand, a fingernail scratching blood from the corner of his eye.

  Marwan leaked tears back to the house, locked the door, and shielded himself from Muntaha’s concern.

  Thereafter, in the English phrase, he kept himself to himself. Didn’t presume to interfere in anything beyond himself. He began reading again, but not poetry. He read the pamphlets he picked up at the mosque or in Islamic bookshops concerning the laws of God established and fixed by the Righteous Predecessors. The laws by which God made Himself known in the lives of His servants. These were straightforward, plain texts. Facts you could be sure of. No mistakes or accidents. Nothing elitist or vague.

  The pamphlets provided another reason not to miss Iraq, which they said was the realm of unbelief as much as London. No country could call itself Muslim if it refused to submit to God’s laws. And no individual. Marwan remembered his soul-bloated former self mocking the laws, how in his foolishness and arrogance he’d assumed men to be angels. Worse, he’d attributed to men qualities owned only by God, such as interpretive control over life, such as absolute independence. I seek forgiveness from God, he repeated. Forgive me my faults. Forgive me my faults.

  It was clear to him that the laws offered a solution to the agonies of the grimy city and its brawling populace. That the laws could tie the people together with the twine of common humanity and shared purpose, could tame them with humility and restrain them within proper limits. Strict punishments and the prohibition of drugs and alcohol could establish peace and safety. Modesty and honour in sexual matters could allow men to regard their fellows as brothers rather than competitors. Then the city could be clean. Not sandpaper, but harmony and balance. Five times a day it would pause its commerce and bow as one body to its Creator.

  But that wasn’t his business.

  He ordered his own life and left the people to their fate. If it was God’s will to guide them, they would be guided. But he still felt a kind of pity as he walked at a distance behind them, striving for invisibility. He raised his eyes under lowered lids as the Londoners flitted or staggered from pub to betting shop, those most commonly in the poor areas, or wandered blankfaced and numb in shopping centres, or stood nervous at cashpoints, guarded, locked into
themselves. Marwan followed them breathing quick and shallow, worrying his prayer beads, either seeking forgiveness on their behalf or protecting himself from repeating their sin. Istughfurullah, he muttered. Istughfurullah, I seek forgiveness from God, I seek forgiveness.

  Computerization and cutbacks, meanwhile, made Marwan redundant. He wasn’t sorry to lose his job, for two reasons. First, he found himself incompatible with the bookish, youthful environment of the university. The undergraduates – noisy, brash children – he could bear. But the ever drawn-out youth of the graduate students and unkempt professors he could not. Their academic froth of visions and revisions, their satisfaction with unreality, they mirrored too much his younger self. Not a mirror he wished to look into any longer. And secondly, this: in his former academic life, back there, he’d been a student and, more or less, a teacher. Student and teacher of nothing much, but at least those, an agent with knowledge as his supposed object. He’d been made a fool of only by himself and God. Until his imprisonment. Whereas here, he himself was an object of study. In this respect undergraduates were worse. They peered thoughtfully over the tops of books into the middle distance, not into space but at him, the Arab. Sometimes they would ask for his point of view on a particular issue, not because they respected his opinion but from a desire to hear an Arab voice, any Arab voice. It spiced up their day. Saved them a trip to the Edgware Road. Just standing nearby could authenticate things for them. Breathing the air he’d breathed was like treading the Mesopotamian soil, like waking in a goat-hair tent. An undergraduate once asked him, with admirable honesty, ‘Mr al-Haj, what’s it like, being an Arab?’ He didn’t say: It’s not like anything. I know nothing. He was never more than formal with them, although they were often too friendly with him, these sons and daughters of a cold uncourteous people, introducing their sexual partners as if he was interested, or badgering him into group photographs with their large arms around his shoulder. In some way he couldn’t define and therefore couldn’t repulse they recorded him, fixed him, pinned him down. He expected at any moment to be dissected.