The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Then she was on her way, by tube, on automatic pilot. Street, train, street, with weariness at last, the tug of her breasts and the pull of her back, sucked through a darkening tunnel to the pinprick of darkness that was home. No husband in it. She closed the front door, reducing the city’s volume, then shut it out further, closing also her bedroom door. She let skirt and shirt fall to the floor, and then unhooked her bra. Stepped out of her knickers. Stood motionless under the shower. Afterwards she buried herself in her prayer robe and prayed the Maghreb prayer, too tired to follow the words but also too tired to wander into other thoughts, so her prayer was warm and wholehearted. With little of Muntaha present there was more space for God. God’s presence closer than the veins in her neck. She felt surrounded and absorbed by God; although it can’t be said that ‘she felt’, because she was asleep to herself and didn’t feel anything.

  She rocked back on her heels and found the sensation of herself again, somewhere between the hips and under the heart and fizzing up her spine to spill from her eyes and ears.

  She considered herself: a bereaved daughter. Who wouldn’t see her father again. She summoned pictures, first of him dead and then of him living. As she moved backwards into shadowy girlhood he became a memory of an odour, clean and rich underneath all the other smells, omnipresent. Or a physical memory like being enclosed in huge rough arms big enough to encompass school and streets and the river and even the wind. These were the constants in her life, in Baghdad or in London: streets harsh and various, an elderly grey river, an aggressive wind. And her father who’d brought her. Her Baba. How small he’d been in the coffin, the strength of all her origins compacted into that short folded-up package of corpse. It didn’t fit together, his size and his mortality, his eternity and his shrivelled stopping. It couldn’t be properly reconciled.

  She listened to catch his presence still, nose pointed, ears pricked, but couldn’t tell if he was there, or if only she was there, or only God, or if she and her father were only speckles of God anyway, and she soon found tears dripping from her mouth into the prayer robe, and her nose sludged solid, and she covered her face with her fingers. She wept. She heaved and sniffed and moaned. But after five minutes, looking through her fingers’ grid, she said out loud, ‘This isn’t real,’ and with that, dried up, took off the prayer robe, switched off the light, lay naked on the bed. She wiped her face on a pillow and stretched out until she touched the wall. She was perfectly happy.

  Then she remembered Sami. ‘The wanker,’ she told herself in proper solid English. ‘The fucking worm. The stupid fucking piece of shit.’ She swung her feet to the hairy rug and stood up. Switched on the light. Stepped to the phone on the chest of drawers.

  She remembered Gabor. The other time today she’d been perfectly happy was when she’d been walking with him. How long since she’d last had a conversation like that? When she spoke he listened. Then he said something interesting. And she would reply. It wasn’t much to ask for.

  There were two messages on the answerphone. One from the headmaster, supportive and serious. The other from Sami. ‘Yeah, Moony,’ it said. ‘I’m busy, so I won’t be back. I need to be alone.’

  Greta fucking Garbo. Where the fuck was he?

  16

  Sami Overheats

  As Marwan sank from view Sami had been waging his own battle with time. Trying to make it stop, he avoided thought and activity. He avoided change. He tried to stabilize his temperature, and watched the weather, which was stuck in a loop. Not like London weather, it was neither hot nor cold.

  He packed the hours up into bland portions: TV programmes and newspaper articles, internet chat sessions concerning nothing at all, walks towards the tube station and back again, passages spent loitering in supermarkets and video rental outlets. Told himself in justification that he was getting back in touch with the culture. He also shaved as often as thrice daily, removing skin only, plucked at his eyebrows with Muntaha’s tweezers, smoked spliffs, took over-the-counter pills.

  He rented disaster movies and lounged stiff-necked on the marital bed to watch them. The two classics of the genre, The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Plus The Swarm (1978), in which foreign killer bees threaten Houston, Texas. Against his carefully maintained boredom, against the undramatic but naggingly tragic undertow of reality, he deployed the kick of the fake-real. Flames, blood and redeeming heroism in ninety-minute packets, triggering adrenalin emission – not enough to move him off the bed – and pulses of novelty, just enough, keeping him active but stable, ticking over like the economy.

  He watched his anti-Arab favourites. They lived in his collection for their incorrectness, both for academic and visceral reasons. They gave him an apocalyptic buzz of victimized self-righteousness. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which a scimitar-wielding, Nazi-collaborating savage emerges from a snake-charming, veils-and-dust backdrop to challenge Indiana Jones. The hero waits, allows the wild man to perform. Then – bang! – dispatches him with a casual pistol shot. Humiliation hits Sami in the gut. Wonderful. Builds another spliff. True Lies (1994), casting Schwarzenegger versus the psychotic Abu Aziz of the Crimson Jihad organization. Real-life Arabs acting in this one. Then coming up to date, The Siege (1998), in which shots of a mosque and men at prayer are juxtaposed with explosions.

  Good viewing for the end of work hours. He tried taunting Muntaha when she came back from school (‘Here comes the Mullah! Respect to the hijab posse! Make way for the believers!’ and suchlike), but she wouldn’t be provoked. Wore the tolerant expression as she brushed his crumbs and ash from the sheets. So nothing happened. Nothing moved on.

  It was all procrastination and he knew it. The meeting with his supervisor was the logjam ahead against which events congested and refused to flow. The more obvious logjam. So in the end, after ten days of this, having picked at his books like scabs, having scribbled his Great Idea in spiderish and unconnected half-lines, he’d arranged and then attended the meeting. And now in its aftermath, in that same moment when Muntaha was unfurling on her father’s couch in the proximity of death, Sami was ensconced in a central pub, at a corner of the bar, slurping lager and cigarettes in unsteady bursts. Descending into an underworld of drunkenness and self-pity.

  Angular Dr Schimmer, in his plastic office, nodding his head with a chicken’s abrupt inflexibility, had listened to his mumblings. It hadn’t taken long for Sami to finish, so he recapped, paraphrased, spoke more slowly. But Schimmer arrested him with an upheld palm: ‘To the point, Mr Traifi. For this is, aa, repetition.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sami. ‘Well, that’s the bones of it.’

  ‘The bones. Indeed the bones. Now let us, aa, deconstruct.’

  So the idea was dissected, unemotionally, with Schimmer’s world-class scalpel.

  ‘There are, Mr Traifi, the following, aa, incongruities. To be rationalized. To be, aa, reconciled. Or else the dialectic you propose is, aa, problematized. For instance, the court poetry and the patronage. For instance, poetic contests in urban centres. And the, aa, standardization of Quraishi dialect as the pure language, aa, achieved by the grammarians in urban seminaries.’

  Sami would have been well advised to take notes, no doubt, except his fingers were slippery, his concentration gone.

  ‘Furthermore, Mr Traifi, poetry in the, aa, nationalist phase. It centres on imagery of land, I think. And there is a certain nostalgia for pre-urban life, is there not?’

  Schimmer seemed not to understand that this was Sami’s self-imposed last chance. If it had to be denied, it should be done more respectfully. There should be more weight, more ritual.

  ‘Can you, aa, defend your thesis?’

  Sami could not. He knew he could not. What was the point in dishonesty?

  ‘Now this perhaps is the problem with grand schemes. With the, aa, big ideas. Better to be modest.’

  Sami was on the threshold of clear sight, but a hot film clouded his vision. He took refuge in stereotype. Schimmer be
came a jackbooted Kraut. Jerry. The Hun. German academic justice goose-stepped into action, and with that Teutonic rhythm Sami’s indulged indoor thoughts were shunted off to the death camps. The powers failed to come to his aid. His father was dead.

  ‘As it stands, Mr Traifi, we have only the, aa, the germ of an idea. We need a body, a body of thought for this germ to inhabit. The germ will not stand alone.’

  There it was. The concept dismantled so as to be better reconstructed, except there was nothing left to reconstruct. Deconstruction was the end point.

  ‘Small is beautiful, Mr Traifi, as Schumacher declares. Now your father, for instance, in the, aa, The Secular Arab Consciousness, his mastery of the, aa, minutiae…’

  And there was Mustafa Traifi, the flaking standard, the sepulchre. You couldn’t find The Secular Arab Consciousness in bookshops. It was known only to Schimmer’s coterie. And if that was the case, what was the point of it? And if it had no point, neither did anything else, not as far as Sami was concerned. It was around The Secular Arab Consciousness that he had tried and failed to build his adult life.

  ‘I’ve tried the minutiae, Dr Schimmer, as you know. I’ve tried analysing details, words in isolation.’

  ‘Ya, but always the big idea looming behind. Always you have wanted to map the details on the big idea.’

  ‘I’ve looked at details in Qabbani and the Sufi poets and Darweesh and Arab rap. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much to say when you concentrate on details. Not enough for a book.’

  Schimmer’s head jerked in mock hilarity. ‘Not much to say! This is a rich field, as your father witnessed. It is, what we say, a sea of knowledge, aa, bahr ul-uloom.’

  Arabic in a German accent. To Sami, glaring at the frozen floor, it sounded like Hebrew. And why did Schimmer keep bringing Mustafa into it? By what right did this German talk about his father?

  Schimmer noted his student’s displeasure like a naturalist spotting a rare insect, and warmth flickered over his thin northern features, sparkling at the sharp nose.

  ‘Ach, Mr Traifi. You torture yourself too much, I fear. It has been a long time for you, this thesis, so many years and without, aa, progress. Now perhaps you should reconsider.’

  Sami could tell what was coming next.

  ‘Perhaps you go out into the world. Perhaps do something new. It may be that suits you best. You can always, aa, come back. We can arrange it, for the son of your father.’

  Sami leapt to his feet.

  ‘My advice, Mr Traifi, is only to look in front of your nose. Don’t, aa, fret yourself with big ideas. The details, Mr Traifi. Truth and beauty are in the details.’

  Sami walked to the plastic door.

  ‘Have a break from these big ideas, Mr Traifi. See the little things clearly. Enjoy your life.’

  ‘You’re right, Dr Schimmer,’ said Sami. ‘You are right.’

  So events were moving at last. At least that. The logjam was breached.

  From there down to here, he’d had several warming drinks. Desire sloshed inside him like meltwater over rapids and he reached for a next step. He had no idea what it could be, but it had to be something sizeable, something as big as a Schwarzenegger bicep, as unwieldy as a capsized ocean liner. A great leap. Something towering and infernal.

  Suited men were filling the pub. Suits expensive and sombre, in dark, unshowy tones. Every wearer meeting a common standard: upper middle class, middle-aged, of medium Anglo size or slightly larger, with steamed unreadable faces, conversing at medium volume. And all men. As if a detail of conformity doormen had arrived to police the entrance. Sami linked this obscurely with the Nazi Schimmer, who he sensed following him, sending in Aryan goons. (But how unfair he was to Schimmer in his bitter, wounded mood. Schimmer who was, in fact, an eccentric and sensitive scholar, a convert to Islam, a defender of diversity.)

  Suits trooping in. Sami the only dark tone in an assembly line of pastels. The only extreme. The only willing drunkard. The only atheist Muslim. The only one with no future or past. He found himself – searching drunkenly for an analogy – surrounded by an alien army in the realm of Middle Earth.

  In this case the old racist refrain held good: it really was difficult to tell them apart. Still more came, darkening the door, increasing the heat. Half had hair and half did not. Those with hair shared the same hair colour, midway between blond and brown. And the same haircut, sideparted, lank. They sat in rows on either side of rectangular tables. They clustered around circular tables. Gin and tonics on the surfaces, hands flat on knees. They queued against the bar, and their sound rose in a gnawing and humming.

  Then Sami understood where he was. Each man held the same model of briefcase. So not in Middle Earth but somewhere just as cultish, among beings as incestuous and secret as elves or dwarves. These were Freemasons. Rolled-up-trouserleg people. Bared breast people. In-house handshake people. Not people: a fraternity, a band of brothers. Its own species.

  Lost, bereft, impotent, Sami had stumbled into the halls of power. Freemasonry was the organization of ruling dynasties, chief policemen, top civil servants. An international network hustling behind the scenes since Solomon’s temple. The eye in the pyramid on the American dollar. This was significant. That he, a mess of feeling, pissed up, was in the middle of it. And placed here randomly? By coincidence only? Today of all days? He was at the centre of power, like antimatter. Like a black hole.

  Black holes sucked in light, so were unseen. And sure enough nobody saw him, not even the barman. The barman’s suit jacket was hung up on the wine rack. He made subtle signs of recognition to his customers. Sami rapped at the bar and called, ‘Oi! Oi, barman!’ to bring him over. He had mid-brown eyes, a say-nothing smirk. With Muntaha-like imperturbability he failed to notice Sami’s rudeness, listened mildly to his order: triple whiskey.

  All around the Freemasons were preparing, planning, taking control. Arranging for the last days. What to do? It couldn’t be long now, thought Sami with sudden chirpiness, until there would be essentials to be busy with. He caught a glimpse of his future. Black holes sucked in surrounding light, and pulling faster than light confounded all the laws of physics. Theories suggested new universes blossoming on the other side of black holes. Through wormholes, something like that. Negative universes.

  He sank the whiskey, banged the bar, held up a finger for more. If the master class here had organized itself, why, he could do his own organizing. Form his own group. He wasn’t quite deranged enough yet, he admitted that, not yet confident enough in his lunacy to give it shape and force.

  Sami felt hot. To slow down he decided to check the messages on his mobile.

  From Muntaha: ‘Where R U?’ Something from Ammar too. He saw it. But he didn’t want to read it. Now was not the time.

  Where was he? That’s right, he had an aim. Which brought with it a surge of energy. He would make an immediate start, to derange himself. To purify himself. A few minutes back he’d been considering a meal, even returning home. Mentally, he slapped his forehead. Stupid! That way lay sameness, and desperation. How easy it would be to fall back into that. No, something entirely different was called for. Something diverting. Here in the shape of the whiskey glass, for a start. Down in one, down deep, to close the gates on normality.

  His throat anaesthetized, it slipped into him. Ice inside melted with it. To the furnace of his stomach.

  The stool flounced away from his buttocks and he was staggering to the toilet, Freemasons bouncing gently off his shoulders. He seized on the cistern for stability, and made a tight little bundle there of the remaining grass. So much more important than just a spliff, this spliff. It was the plan. The answer.

  Invisible even to himself, he reappeared at the bar. A fresh drink awaited. Down it went, whiskey and meltwater. He clawed money from his pocket and dropped it, and then he was out on the street, crowded night colliding with his cheeks, feeding himself spliff and flame, injecting smoke into the organism, sensing it pull him forward.

/>   Time was rushing on. This is what he needed. Not thought, but action. He’d had a decade of thinking. What had it done for him? What did it threaten now to do? He clanked his eyelids shut and, hearing them open, was half a kilometre further on. Leaping across ten minutes in one bound. A superhero.

  Consciousness located him at intervals. The city red and brown. The oil economy rumbling on. Scorched red buses, black cabs, police vehicles. Laughter and music and food steam in envelopes (smouldering cheese, kebabs, Chinese). Scalding darkness and reflected light. Through the riotocracy at fantastic speed, crowds parting like the sea before him.

  He stopped with a click. Oh it was blissful how decisions were made, how the body functioned. That thumb undergoing evolutionary adaptation to the techno-environment. It switched on a mobile phone, summoned a name (Greek Chris), and dialled.

  ‘Emergency situation, Chris. I need one gram of coke and two bags of weed. Three bags of weed. Yes, I’ll pay. I’ll pay the transport fee.’

  He named a delivery point. Turned the mobile definitively off. Took his bearings. His mind, his body, was a bullet launching itself. It swivelled, locked on its northern target. It ran.

  He made the connection in a sultry King’s Cross pub. He’d extended his overdraft by way of a cashpoint on the way, and here between a fruit machine and a pensioner couple with nothing left to discuss he unpeeled blue notes and counted them thrice before yielding them triumphantly. As if they were proof of a wager won. Greek Chris stuffed the cash inside his shirt and winked. By magic there appeared on the polished plastic table a brimming, layered grey package. Sami snaffled it, cellophane damp on his palm, into a tight pocket.

  ‘I’ll have another one of these, squire.’ Greek Chris shook his curls at an empty glass beneath him. ‘Gin and tonic and lemon. Gentleman’s drink.’

  Sami at the bar. Two gins and two lagers. And another gin because he drank his while the barman oh so slowly, turning the glass like a key on a grinder, drew the lager.