The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘I don’t drink that piss,’ said Greek Chris.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That piss. I don’t drink it.’

  ‘What do you ask for it, then?’ asked Sami.

  ‘I don’t ask anything for it. I just don’t drink it.’

  ‘What?’

  Greek Chris scratched at incipient moustache.

  ‘Having a mad one are we?’

  ‘A mad one. Yeah. I am. Purifying myself.’ Sami’s nose twitched. A nerve jerked at his temple.

  ‘Right you are,’ said Greek Chris, and then he laid a stubby finger on the rim of the nearest pint glass. ‘This piss,’ he said. ‘What is called lager by the commonality. I don’t drink it.’

  ‘Oh I see!’ said Sami loud enough to rouse the sad-eyed old woman at the next table. She blinked in his direction. Her husband gazed dejectedly into his drink. The woman’s hair the colour of cigarette stains. Her face puffy but sunken, like bread out of the oven.

  ‘What a lovely fucking colour to dye your hair,’ said Sami in a kind of wonder. Then, quick as sparrows, he took Greek Chris’s lager and drank a third. ‘I’ll have it, then,’ he said. He stood up, patted his pocket, sat down again.

  ‘I think,’ said Greek Chris, leaning in, ‘you want to inspect the merchandise.’

  Sami said, ‘The merchandise. I do. I do.’

  ‘Off you go, then.’ Greek Chris, tonguing oily lips.

  Sami in the toilet. Again by magic, a newly rolled spliff tucked behind his ear, and a line of cocaine arranged on a cistern clean enough to lick. It was that kind of pub. King’s Cross certainly, but no sawdust on the floor. No TV football. No crowds. No whores permitted. In a Bengali neighbourhood. Staid and clean.

  He snorted and bolted back up. It was sultry, though. A well-nigh tropical night, sleaze leaking in from outside, through the aspirator: flesh, coconuts, wet perfume, brine. A ramshackle bar on the docks. He banged the saloon door behind him.

  No it wasn’t. It was north of King’s Cross.

  Across from his dealer, on a low upholstered stool, bouncing a leg on the ball of his foot.

  Greek Chris rubbed a curling eyebrow. ‘The ear,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said Sami. He had no idea what Chris meant.

  Greek Chris. Old sea salt. On shore leave after a long, long time. Searching for fights and rum and easy girls.

  ‘Good not to be cooped up, yeah?’ Sami said. ‘Get your feet on solid land at last.’

  Greek Chris frowned. ‘The ear,’ he said, tapping at his own. ‘The fucking doobie. This is not the place.’

  Sami’s hand hovered and fumbled about his head. It found the spliff. He examined it, a bit cross-eyed.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean.’

  Greek Chris hissed, ‘Keep it under the table.’

  Sami did as he was told. ‘It’s hot in here,’ he said.

  Greek Chris made a concessionary shrug. His shirt was V-necked, skin-coloured. His curls were fierce and spiky.

  ‘Warm summer for these climes,’ he said. ‘That’s the global warming.’

  Sami nodded, and slurped at lager.

  ‘Kicking off again, your lot,’ said Chris.

  ‘Football?’

  ‘Arabs. On the news tonight. Settlers shooting up children and that. Tanks and planes against blocks of flats. It doesn’t seem fair to me.’

  ‘No, that’s the Israelis,’ said Sami. ‘Anyway, I have a plan.’

  And he jabbered on. It was about internationalizing the conflict, cosmopolitanizing it, by means of a secret organization, and hijacking the ships in the docks right now, and burning universities and de-religiousizing everything and getting rid of names so no one could tell who was who.

  ‘I must tell you,’ he said. ‘It’s been getting rather too slow in here. I’ve been talking you see. Which doesn’t help. Slows things down. Last time I looked I was talking and now I’m still talking. You know what I mean?’

  ‘What’s keeping you?’ said Greek Chris, with a curl flick to the door.

  ‘I’ll finish my drink first,’ said Sami, but found he already had. All of them.

  Next, a warehouse, thoroughly overheated. Jumping amid short girls in bras. In the toilets a lot, and queuing for Lucozade. Reverse-coughing coke from the back of a strobe-lit hand. Racing himself, mainly victorious, around the Bacchanal’s perimeter.

  Then the leaping began again, Sami the Time Lord vanishing into empty space, into spectral cloud landscapes. In just one flash of the strobe. Maybe time stood still and he was everywhere at once. Alternative realities – that was what he wanted. Maybe he was going backwards, back so he could start again. Maybe the universe was shrinking to something more manageable.

  He chunked and blipped. The blanks were soft and silent, and each re-arrival came with a boom as the sound-system invaded his ears anew, and he arrived each time in a clearing, flailing his arms and floppy fingers to force outward the storm-tossed trees which were dancers, fortunately too chemical-happy and endorphin-rushed to mind.

  When he came out there was a crowd in the street and neon lights shining in the club’s entrance. False-tolerant bouncers consulting their watches. Sami was everybody’s friendly loon, pushing his way into freshets of people as they spilled out. The stars were ferocious above. He kept his eyes on the Earth.

  Then eastwards in somebody’s car, a tangle of limbs in there, Sami poorly balanced across knees, his head lower than his feet. The people he was with thought he was telling jokes. Everybody screeched.

  They entered a terraced house of small rooms, open plan because the doors had been removed, brimful of stuttering junglistic sound. A house which represented, in the absence of crisis politics, what the city took to be its underground. Conspirators without a conspiracy, nodding to the drum plot, shaking to the bass.

  Something pulsed in his shoulder and neck. He bent his head into it cat-like, purring, and touched flesh with his ear. Somebody’s hand. He looked into a familiar face. A slow-rippled pelagic fringe, hazed-up blood-logged eyes, perfect teeth twinkling.

  Matt had been a pretend student at the LSE while Sami was an altogether more dedicated poseur at London University. Where Sami considered himself full of meaning, Matt was entirely empty of it. Everything about him was ironic. He’d tried on ideas as teasingly as a stripper tries on garments – only to shrug them off again. He’d been through a mock-Maoist period. He’d spent a week of imitation Buddhist silence, with Valium, in his room. For the sake of anti-fashion he’d been a paid-up member of the Communist Party. His trademark speech was in happy-nihilist mode: ‘It’s over, man. It’s finished. Oho! Fucked! It’s all fucked.’ Meaning the government, civilization, all history, the destiny of man. He was a non-believer. A high priest of meaninglessness. Exactly the right person for Sami’s organization, whatever it was to be.

  It looked like Matt. It wore a shirt which read: FUCK ME. But Sami wouldn’t believe the evidence. Suspicious how this seeming Matt hadn’t aged. As if the years hadn’t happened to him. Not an ounce of fat added, or a wrinkle, or a hair removed from the fringe. Not a filling, not a stain on the enamel. No insect had trod here its withering trail. No toll taken by adrenalin, bile or smothered tears.

  Sami narrowed his eyes at the apparition. ‘What year is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s all relative. But, 2001, mate. A space odyssey.’

  The voice made of Sami a believer. He exploded volcanic joy.

  ‘It’s Matt!’

  Not hallucination but a coincidental twist of reality. Why, then, were there no signs of age? In the absence of signs, perhaps there was a greater sign, a message. How had his old friend sidestepped time? By investing in neither feeling nor belief. By being chaste of all commitment. To paraphrase Dr Schimmer, by having no big ideas. Matt surely hadn’t befuddled his nerves with romance. (That thought brought a dagger’s turn of guilt. Muntaha may be worrying, poor Moony.) All this passed with some flares of resentment through Sami’s brain as
he hugged his friend, bubbling also lava of fiery love.

  ‘Matt.’

  ‘Sami.’

  ‘Matt, would you care to have a tootle? Do a line?’

  Matt turned on his heel. On the back his shirt read: FUCKWIT.

  And off they danced to the bathroom. A proper green bathroom, with tub, basin, toilet, tiles, this being a proper house. Sami unpocketed the wrap; Matt removed his from a humid boot. He ejected an unbroken rectangle of speech.

  ‘You make two lines I’ll make two that’s one of each for both of us times two is four.’

  Then it was up in a burning chunk at the bridge of the nose and the flanges of the nose flaring and saliva white-water rafting down his throat, and Matt was attached to the mouth of a suddenly materialized bikini girl. Who brought her in?

  Matt roared, ‘You can kiss her too!’

  Sami, to be sociable, did so immediately, slurping on tight lip-sticky lips, intent and towering, nipping and biting; but then the dagger in his ribs made a thrust. What am I doing? So instead he fixed a hand on each breast, smaller and harder than the ones he was used to. The girl giggle-crumpled to the tiles. Matt slipped into the bathtub, laughing hugely, and rattled about, limbs scattered spiderish. Sami’s peeled head high above them.

  When the blank came it lasted into a sinking darkness. A blackness deep and cold. Longer than the night so far. Longer than half his life.

  Matt’s elbows proprietorially hinged on both walls of the bathtub, damp face composed, pale against pastel green.

  ‘What you need,’ he said, ‘is a spoon.’

  That hot light was an interruption. No more than a flicker. And then again Sami engulfed.

  His knees hurt. He could smell metal. An empty spoon pushing at nostril cartilage. The bones where his cheeks met his ears might crack. Bikini Girl’s pink hands fluttering about his arse. His knees hurt because he was kneeling on them, watching Matt regal in the bathtub.

  ‘So,’ Sami said, scrabbling for a grip. ‘What are you doing these days?’

  The dark was galloping, closing in. Its preceding dusk had netted him already. Hoof beats thudding louder. He stood to fend it off, embracing the green-shaded bulb. A blow swung at him: broadsword, ball and chain. He dodged, breathing fiercely.

  ‘Advertising,’ said Matt.

  He jumped again, but there was no darkness. On the contrary, there was light. From freezer to furnace. In the largest room (the living room) fifteen or twenty men circled an omphalos of sound, leaping, fingers pointing and waving.

  This generation…

  Overbrimming with energy. Becoming one soul.

  Shall witness the day…

  Horns blew and whistles screeched.

  That Babylon shall fall.

  Someone in the centre had a microphone. Names being big-upped. The massive saluted. Light streamed in flailing arcs and curves and arrows.

  Following one of these brought Sami back to Matt, apart from the crowd, shoulders forward, arms loose. The fringe limp over his eyebrows and his jaw raised like the jaw of a ruminating sheep.

  Sami approached.

  ‘I have to tell you. You are Matt, still as ever. But I, I am no longer Sami Traifi.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘I’m nothing.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘I am. I am attaining nothing.’

  Matt peered sideways, head cocked. ‘What are you in the meantime?’

  ‘Sami’s body perhaps.’

  Matt put a sticky arm around his neck, gummy fingers at his teeth. ‘Eat this.’

  Sami did so. Something sour and yellowish. An E or an X or an A or a K.

  A brief jump. A voice or the system slowed, or Sami’s ears, to a chant distorted: Ba-by-laan shaall faaaall.

  A bound through time. They were in the bathroom again, organizing spoons, lines, cash cards, notes. Sami knew the girl had been with them although she was decorously hidden now. He was slobbering sentences at Matt.

  ‘I want to recruit you. That’s why I came to find you. You’re my first recruit. I can’t yet say what for. Restricted information as of the present moment. Even to me, Matt, even to me. My first recruit.’

  ‘I’m number fucking one,’ said Matt.

  ‘It’s kicking off,’ Sami continued. ‘It’s a cull like the Jurassic or something. Signs of the Hour. Like Freemasons. Getting ourselves in a group. Preparing for it. That was just the start. Not a lot of these, let me tell you, are going to survive.’

  ‘The Black Survivors!’ shouted Matt, clammy white, in his Birmingham accent.

  A low-howling wind over flat lichenous moorland. The flapping of angry trees. Whispers susurrating through dark leaf-swamp, and too much fog to see – fathom deep, oily dark. A forest. Reddening.

  Sami recognized himself in this scene by his fear. His heart stalled. His tongue swollen. He was somewhere he’d been before. A familiar presence with him, keening in the wind.

  Back to glimmering light. The wind was his hasty breath. The light was hot and he was sweating. He was weeping. He had the Bikini Girl against a wall, grinding against her, hands pressing her bones. He licked her. She shivered and shook, bit his chin. Light flickering like a guttering candle.

  Do such stories have happy endings? Down back steps behind a sturdy grey terrace in the latter part of dawn, in among old-fashioned clatter bins and fag ends and bits of yellow grass and scratchy soil and probably, from the smell of it, dogshit, and the London odour of grease and used petrol and spilt beer, Sami’s elbows scraped and raw and his teeth bared in a snarl and his knees and groin aching, and his eye a microscope squashed against Bikini Girl’s purple eye and tangled yellow hair. Up close. The gargantuan sour grain of her skin. An ash-flecked twitching earlobe. Her wheezing breath. Yes, the beast with two backs. Sami inarticulate, at a loss, fucking a girl whose name he hasn’t asked.

  But can he be blamed for that? Sami would argue not. Not when at his back, above him, there is the heavy thud of hooves, an equine slobber, a flurry of dust (thick, red Syrian dust), and the beast rearing on its hind legs, flanks shivering and scattering blood. He doesn’t want to see the rider but Bikini Girl squirms underneath him, turning him so he has to look, and there is no rider, but something worse. The apocalypse horse is its own rider. It has a human face: the leering, fish-eyed face of Mustafa Traifi.

  ‘Baba,’ it says. ‘Sami, my boy. Look at me. Look at me.’

  Sami now on his feet, zipping and buttoning as he runs, too scared to scream. Up the steps through the house into the street and then down vortex pavements leading either into or out of the black hole’s centre. Outwards, he hoped. Into the viscous morning.

  17

  Death Number One

  What’s time to a corpse? From the moment of its death, time becomes a foreign territory, a land stranger and more distant with every minute, every decade, until soon there’s nobody left to put a face to the corpse’s name, to the name of the dust, and soon the letters of its name have sunk into the graveslab’s grain, and the stone itself is broken or buried or dug up. And the land which was once a graveyard is overgrown, or shifted, or levelled. And the planet itself is dead, by fire or ice, and nobody at all anywhere to know. No consciousness. As if nothing had ever been.

  Unless there is Grace watching and waiting for our helplessness.

  There is no permanence for a corpse, not even for corpse dust. Or corpse mud, in this country. All this graveyard sentiment. You may as well shoot a corpse into outer space. Into the stars.

  The Royal Free Hospital, February 1985. Mustafa Traifi is dreaming intermittent dreams of war. He sees the city of Hama from above and within. Sees the black basalt and white marble stripes. The mosque and the cathedral. The thin red earth. The tell of human remains, bones upon bones. The Orontes River rushing red with the blood of Tammuz, the blood of Dumuzi, the dying and rising shepherd god. The maidens weeping on the riverbanks.

  Life is precarious. This place is thirty kilometres from the
desert. The river, raised by waterwheels, feeds a capillary network of irrigation and sewage channels, and agricultural land in the city’s heart. Traffic is organized by the nuclei of marketplaces where there are householders and merchants and peasant women in red-embroidered dresses and tall men of the hinterland wearing cloaks and kuffiyehs, and mounds of wheat and corn, and olives and oranges from the hill orchards, and complaining oxen and fat-tailed sheep. Dust in the endless process of becoming mud and then again dust.

  It is not a bucolic scene. Mustafa is dreaming of February 1982, the time of the Muslim Brothers’ uprising and of the government’s response which he so passionately supported. His disembodied eye discerns barricades across the main streets and graffitied edicts on crumbling walls. Directives are called from minaret to minaret, drowning the alleyways. He can smell delight and horror: the smell of recently spilled blood. The city’s inhabitants withdraw into their cells, locking heavy wooden doors. Those still moving outside have the wild glint of certainty in their eyes.

  Tanks and trucks ring the city. Tented barracks where soldiers splash about in boredom, nerves and cheap tobacco. Buzz-fly warplanes fill the sky.

  It’s no longer possible to distinguish insurgents from loyal cells. They’ve penetrated everywhere. They hide in families, among women.

  Radical treatment. Excision. Then chemotherapy. There are side effects.

  The flicker of twenty-seven days and nights. It’s a huge noise, thundering, relentless, mechanical yet animal. The crazed purring of an astral cat. Its pulverizing effect on internal organs makes ears irrelevant. The first night’s run disables roads in and out, isolating the illness. Flowers of fire bloom upwards. Artillery remakes the environment, opening it up to the tanks and bulldozers. Rhythmic and persistent work. There go the mosque and the cathedral. There go the twisting covered alleyways. There go human bodies, bad and good cells, men and women, old and young. Bodies broken down, sewers cracked open, the bitter crackle of hair and skin.

  Is it worth it? That’s what the professors in London asked him, in 1982, when the stories were coming out. Twenty or thirty thousand dead, to save a government which is, after all, a dictatorship. Is it really worth it, Mustafa?