The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  It took her a long time to cross the city, by bus, by tube, on foot. The world solidified by degrees, and as it did so her calm eroded, giving way not to grief but anxiety. She’d awarded herself points for her reaction thus far. She worried now that sorrow would strike her when she saw the body. Surely this calmness had been only a defence mechanism. And facing the house they’d lived in, the house they’d come to as refugees, the house which entombed his corpse, she was afraid. Fears like dark fish broke suddenly on the surface. She didn’t know if she’d be able to enter.

  But when she did enter and, ignoring Hasna’s lamentation and Ammar’s wounded glare, ran to the sitting room, to the centre of the horror, she found him strong and still and given weight by death. The same thing that had blown unreality over the day now held its breath, and she and Marwan were held motionless inside.

  He was already washed, dressed in his death shroud and laid in the box that English law insisted on. In death he was a younger and more handsome man. He seemed what he should have been, given different conditions. This man of the open-cast slight smile and upward-tilted head had been absent at least since they’d come to London. ‘O Baba,’ she murmured, nodding. Her loss was an old loss. That’s how she judged, watching, remembering.

  She touched his hand, flinching at first, summoning herself to touch again. How strange to touch flesh which is not flesh, skin become leather, unyielding and soapish. Cold. She absorbed this.

  Meekly, as if exploring something carnal, and in fact delving into the ultimate carnality, with all the wonder of girlhood, she let herself touch his short beard. She brushed his forehead with her lips. Stillness held in the room, which was cool and bright as it had never been before. So it seemed to her.

  ‘As-salaamu alaikum,’ she whispered. She was awestruck, contained by a lovely inertia, actually thrilled to be here observing this in the transfigured room. Slowly she recited the fatiha, then wiped her face with her hands as if with perfume. She grinned, unable to do otherwise. The inhuman human object, his corpse, man and earth at once (is this, she wondered, where the Christians found the God-man idea, in corpses?), the absurdity of it, the incomprehensibility, the unexpected reassurance it provided; all of this made her grin. Inside herself she recited:

  Out of this have We created you, and into it shall We return you, and out of it shall We bring you forth once again.

  And she thanked God without forcing herself to, not missing her father at all but loving him, and forgiving him for any fault, and filled unaccountably with happiness.

  Ammar had also shed years, in form at least. He hadn’t leapt forward to claim his best potential, not like his father’s corpse, but had gone back, grown down. He’d lost the Islamist’s poise and fervour and was again in his rangy adolescence, hungry, wired-up, hood-eyed. He blundered about the house in sullen anger, shoving furniture against walls, falling over his feet, carrying deckchairs upstairs for the women’s ta’ziya.

  Hasna, meanwhile, scuttled from the kitchen, where she made useless cups of tea, to the living room, shifting her view from the corpse to the wall clock. She stared at it with black reproach. Time was against her. In Iraq he’d be in the ground by now, in accordance with tradition. It was already half dark, already too late to do it today. In Iraq he’d have been trotted via the mosque to the cemetery hours ago. He’d have been prayed over and buried; the first visitors would have arrived. To be going through this in a foreign country was a cruelty and a wickedness she didn’t deserve.

  Thank God for her dutiful son. Salim came to stand by her. He occupied the phone, talking to doctors, the council cemetery department, taking notes. Hasna hovered busily nearby. But nothing could be done until the doctor brought a form. Something had to be signed. You had to seek permission from the English to be put in the ground. Not even from the English, not even that, but from the Hindu doctor. Dr Krishna. A worshipper of cattle. What did a Hindu know about dying? Hindus who burnt bodies like people in the slums burnt rubbish. This Hindu who still didn’t come, too busy administering sedative potions to hypochondriacs, shaking hands with carriers of syphilis and AIDS, dispensing drugs to street criminals (she knew the bones of this from Salim and fleshed them out with details), this Hindu taking his overpaid time even as the long northern dusk settled heavier about the roof, as tradition was ignored. This Hindu, this reincarnation man expecting to find her husband’s soul in a cockroach under the sink, or in a rat or a pigeon, or in the tree near the bus stop. It was all too much. It was a trial and a tribulation.

  Ammar and Hasna bumped against one another at the foot of the stairs, mumbling, watching the floor. Salim and Muntaha in collusion suggested jobs to keep them busy. There was hoovering and dusting to be done, meat and coffee to be bought. Salim explained that at home grief was treated by activity. That was why everything was done in a rush, and by crowds of people. Here, though, in the absence of relatives, there was an excess of melancholy time to fill.

  Dr Krishna eventually arrived, harassed and apologetic, to fill in the form. After conferring with Salim he prescribed a sedative for Hasna. Grudgingly she climbed the stairs for bed, and Ammar left for his mosque. Salim went to his flat, promising to return in the morning. Muntaha called her mother’s brother in Baghdad, and her father’s people, villagers she couldn’t remember. And then, after the Aisha prayer, she lay down on the couch parallel to her father. She’d tried calling Sami too, but at home the answerphone was connected, and his mobile was switched off.

  14

  Vronsky

  When Gabor thinks of who he is he skips his personal history. Avoids his parents too. Avoids as much of muddy contemporary England as he can and focuses instead on his Russian grandfather, Vronsky, and Saint Petersburg the city of his origin, city of orchestras and novelists, and the woman Gabor imagines Vronsky must have lost there. There must have been a woman – his grandfather was such a handsome man. Vronsky’s Anna, or Ivanka or Sofia. Yes, Sofia – the name incarnating the eternal feminine, Greek for ‘divine wisdom’, Sofia which sounds like Sufi. A black-haired, high-cheeked, very Asian Russian. Perhaps a Georgian or an Armenian. Looking almost as eastern as Muntaha. So Gabor supposes. And Vronsky losing her as Marwan lost his Mouna.

  But Vronsky never told his grandson much, and empirically speaking, there isn’t a lot to work on. One lesson of quantum physics is this: it isn’t so easy to separate the observed from the observer. What you’re looking for, how you look, determines what you see.

  What is certain is that Vronsky left Russia as the First World War morphed into revolution. While the soldiers who had dissolved his unit debated the extermination of the officer class, Vronsky, an officer, ran away in the dark. Dressed in a peasant’s smock, eyes open and ears pinned back on his leonine skull, he waited and moved. Procrastination by means of movement. Village to village. In the end hunger pushed him westwards, little by little, until he had gone too far.

  Gabor sees his ancestor trekking through interminable blue-black forests, through one-cart villages. Stealing from rabbit traps. Digging up fields in return for soup and a place in the barn. Sleeping well under dripping hedges, on pillows of moss and rock. Walled by the shadows of mountains at night, or on open terrain from horizon to horizon, brain and heart in his crumbling boots. Coming east to west, like the parents of the children in Gabor’s class. Like Muntaha.

  Vronsky ended up in London, in a sludge-streeted East End quarter where the Jews could remember Russia (Talmudic schools and pogroms rather than country estates and the opera), where he could read Russian newspapers and slip with maimed ex-servicemen into soup kitchens set up by the evangelical missions. His neighbours included offloaded Lascars – Yemenis, Somalis, Malays, Bengalis – and Irish and Chinese, and fallen Russians like himself.

  He learnt English from the newspapers and from a leather-bound volume of Shakespeare. Most pertinently to his new environment, he noticed the newspapers worrying about the arrested development of the Jews. These, opined the Daily Mail, were more
tribe than nation, an archaism in the machine world, suffering a morbid and occult religiosity. The way they treated their women, subservient inarticulate wigged shapes that they were, was abominable. The Jews had untrackable organizations, unknown numbers, a lust for subversion. The way they dressed was a clear rejection of the host civilization. They spurned British law and established their own religious courts. A colony within the capital of the mother country: they turned things upside down. That the Jews were disloyal was obvious; the greater danger was their international dimension. The colony – the hive, the nest – sent and received insect signals far overseas. Untraceable, cabbalistic signals.

  To the same theme, remnants of the British Brothers’ League marched past the Brick Lane synagogue. Set up a soapbox in the marketplace, their leader speechmaking amid a ring of supporters, their ‘England for the English!’ signs blotting out the un-English horde.

  ‘Has the Aliens Act,’ he asked, ‘with the passage of fourteen years, made these squalid streets more British? Indeed it has not! The establishment is in denial. We do not reject genuine refugees, no, but alien Bolshevik and Anarchist values! We reject the Shylocks and Fagins who abuse our hospitality, our sometimes naïve generosity. The destitute foreigners who plague us. The motley multitude. Our stand is a question of principle, of civilization entrenching itself in the face of barbarism. Let them go to their national home in the biblical land of Palestine. Let them return to the desert from whence they issue. Mr Balfour has proposed this. Mr Balfour who alerted us to these people, a people apart, who only intermarry among themselves, these who, in Mr Balfour’s sensible expression, are not to the advantage of the civilization of this country. Yes, shout, Bolsheviks! And attend the reckoning! We know these hecklers are financed by the Jewish money kings. Decent men of England, stand your ground!’

  Black-coated, with his natural religion and his Tolstoyan beard, too heavy and meaningful for the climate, Vronsky fitted into the clatter and conflict of this brick-walled democracy as badly and as happily as everyone else. The photograph on Gabor’s desk, Vronsky’s 1920s photograph, beams happiness. A framed portrait in black and white of the man in his virile prime. The high, lumped forehead, the hunter’s slanted eyes, the smile. Something in his surroundings pleased him as much as the orchestral city he’d fled. Did he hear an East End harmony behind the noise? Did he notice unity, tawheed, beneath diversity?

  He certainly noticed Lily. A Jewess, orphaned by dysentery. Orphaned, like Muntaha now. Too disconnected and defiant to stay inside her community, and Vronsky wooed and won her. The Daily Mail said one thing, but Shakespeare said another. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Vronsky thought she was good, very good. He came home early for dumplings, smothered Thames fish, lessons in her soon-to-be-dying language, sing-songs and sex. In form, in moving, thought Vronsky, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel!

  Gabor’s grandmother was a Semite, like Muntaha. And his grandfather, Gabor notes, was her saviour.

  After the next war Lily bore a son called Richard, a name Vronsky considered Englishness itself. On the boy’s birth certificate he wrote Vronk as a surname. Lily complained, tugging at his sleeve as he calligraphed, Vronk sounds so silly, old man. Vronsky nodded and ignored her. Remove the sky and you remove Russia, he thought. Richard Vronk. A real Englishman.

  Richard was a timid, blank-faced thing. The compromise of Lily’s swelling roundness and Vronsky’s rugged lines was an uncontoured rectangle, a bland, in-between, utilitarian face. He had a mouth fit for eating with, a nose fit for smelling, eyes enough to see what needed to be seen. He fulfilled his functions and left passion to his foreign parents. He studied quietly, school, university, finally a PhD in nuclear engineering. He aimed for a well-ordered suburb, but overshot and landed in Bradwell-on-Sea, because the nuclear plant was there. After a couple of years of work he married Angyalka, another engineer, the daughter of Hungarian refugees. Stubbornly unexceptional children of exceptional parents, they lived together smoothly without churning up the depths.

  Their son was given a Hungarian name, after his maternal grandfather. This was Gabor. Gabor Vronk.

  His Bradwell-on-Sea childhood is not worth remembering. Only snatches of it seem to have something to do with him. He remembers instead walks in the East End with his ancient and indecipherable grandfather. Vronsky cheering on the underdog, whoever it was, and remembering Russian women. Remembering Sofia. Probably. It was a toothless mix of Russian, Yiddish and English that he spoke, plus a dash of senility. Gabor had to imagine it into shape. And what you’re looking for, and how you look, determines what you see.

  Grandfather Vronsky, ghostly deceased, but still in some way with him today. Certainly in his blood. Same genes: the height, the bulky head, the darkening brow. He is accompanied by him, or perhaps inhabited by him. Vronsky chuckling over his shoulder as he paints or shaves, or breathing somewhere in the room in the slow minutes before sleep. Old Vronsky’s characteristic cough when nobody else is about, a cough full of laughter, right inside his ear. Vronsky’s rich, clean, experienced smell. There when Gabor looks for him, and sometimes when he doesn’t.

  Most of us have seen our dead at night. We even fear them observing our shameful moments. And then we smile at our folly, the tricks we play on ourselves. But Gabor is sure his case is different. He’s sure there’s no psychology behind his visions, no regurgitated memories, no frustrated guilt or longing. No reason at all, other than that the presence is real and true, and that a profound identity exists between it and him, to meet it now in wisps of smoke.

  15

  Gabor at the Ta’ziya

  Gabor crouched cross-legged on the floor of Marwan al-Haj’s former residence, his head lowered respectfully, chewing on meat. He’d come, for Muntaha’s sake, to join the mourning.

  He sat in the furthest corner of the room, with Ammar diagonally opposite. It was Ammar who’d let him in from the street, clasping his offered hand in bonier, darker hands, and pressing a little more earnestly than Gabor was used to –but Gabor liked that warmth. He liked too the forceful ‘as-salaamu alaikum’, to which he responded with a well-pronounced ‘wa-alaikum as-salaam’. He’d been practising the phrase.

  He removed his shoes and joined them to the crush of male and female footwear in the hallway, and straightened himself. Ammar was watching.

  ‘What mosque you from, brother?’

  ‘Oh, from no mosque. I’m not actually a Muslim. Just a friend.’

  Ammar’s head clicked backwards to an English distance. ‘One of Sami’s friends?’

  ‘No. A friend of Muntaha’s. I’m Gabor Vronk. I teach at the same school.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Peace, then. I’m the brother.’

  Gabor sought to regain ground. ‘You must be Ammar.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Muntaha’s told me a lot about you.’

  Ammar, brushing the words off with quick nods, had turned towards the stairwell. ‘Yeah. Follow me.’

  Through a door rightwards into a hushed atmosphere. Men sitting on the floor like students in the night-time when they should be writing their essays, but these men were straight-backed, not lounging. Ammar announced him – Gaaboor Vrronk – buzzing it on his lower lip, wrinkling his nose and rolling his head as if chasing a pesky insect. The men stood up all at once and waited to be introduced.

  ‘This…’ – a short bestubbled man in suit trousers and white, buttoned-up, tieless shirt – ‘… is Mr Veysel, one of my father’s friends.’

  Mr Veysel saluted, touched Gabor’s hand, touched his own chest.

  ‘And this is Mr Nader.’

  Mr Nader shook Gabor’s hand energetically, and smiled.

  ‘Mr Nader is a Palestinian brother.’ Ammar frowned significantly, so that Gabor searched in his own demeanour for a fault. He wished to explain his sympathy. That he was Russian. Eastern.

  ‘I see,’ he said instead. ‘I see.’

  Nader grinned a
pologetically.

  ‘This…’ – Ammar moving to a man of more than Gabor’s height – ‘… is Abu Hassan, our uncle. I mean our stepmother’s brother.’

  Abu Hassan, strength rising up his back into a slight hunch, and sideways, to domed shoulders of terrible solidity, made a slow, deep nod.

  ‘This is Mr Jim Clark. He helped us when we came to London.’

  Jim Clark, bushy eyebrows under a shock of woolly white hair, shook an English shake. Then, clockwise, a young Pakistani Briton (so Gabor guessed from the sculpted haircut and cream shalwar kameez), introduced as Brother Sajjad from Ammar’s mosque. And another young brother, a white one, shaven-headed, redly bearded, also in shalwar kameez.

  ‘I’m Mujahid, brother,’ he said, in an eager Ulster accent, making the j’ of his adopted name a ‘ch’. At higher volume: ‘As-salaamu alaikum!’

  ‘No,’ said Ammar. ‘Not a brother. Not a Muslim.’

  Mujahid’s hand dropped. Ammar stood behind, preoccupied. Abu Hassan sent him a pale glance of warning.

  The mourners sank to the floor, Gabor in the space made between Abu Hassan and Jim Clark.

  ‘My condolences.’ He addressed the room. ‘I understand Mr al-Haj was a very good man.’

  There was a murmur of approval. Abu Hassan said, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

  The formal unity of the gathering relaxed and men fell back into groups. The Pakistani and the convert huddled close, whispering. Abu Hassan and Nader exchanged brief comments in Arabic and in accented English for the benefit of Mr Veysel, who Gabor supposed was Turkish, or Iranian. Ammar poured coffee into tiny cups and distributed them with his long, moist fingers. Not Turkish coffee but something stronger, something sharp and spicy. In the centre between them was a wide metal tray piled with rice and meat, which Abu Hassan shovelled now on to a plate for Gabor.