The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Relying, for now in any case, on old habits, familiar drugs, he found solace in change. He didn’t bother preparing a defence with which to meet Muntaha, but sat quiet in the back seat as the car prowled West London, sat and felt a new leaf being turned over, enjoyed the cooling breeze as it flopped heavily, greenly down.

  His street. Their home. Sami exited the car. His legs shook. How long since he’d eaten? He approached his own unwelcoming front door as wobbly as a space traveller unaccustomed to local gravity. Took big careful steps across the pavement.

  Tom wished him luck. Sami thanked him, and apologized again.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Sami.’ GR seen in patches, winking through the window behind Tom. I’ll be in touch, when I’ve found some revolutionary action for you.’

  He let himself in.

  She was in the kitchen, wearing a nightdress. He heard her stand up and walk towards him. There was a kind of awful peace about her and, at first, a forgiving warmth. Her face was shrunken, making her eyes seem even bigger than usual, and blacker. An impressive vortex of rings surrounded them, which made Sami think of a near-death experience – darkness tunnelling in towards pricks of redeeming light – light enlivened, as she studied him, by developing horror.

  ‘You’re bitten,’ she said. ‘You’ve been having sex with someone.’

  Sami mumbled, ‘No, no,’ fingering his throat. He hadn’t yet had the luxury of a mirror view of himself. ‘No,’ he mumbled, ‘no, no…’ Not denying the accusation, just winning time. He spread his fingers, felt cool air between them. We have webbing there, remnants of webbing between each digit, because we have evolved from fish. We’ve gained nails, thumbs and fur, in return for gills, fins and scales.

  ‘Either you’ve been fighting or having sex. And you only fight with me. Look at me. Have you betrayed me?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Have you been out fucking someone?’ The bowstring of her voice taut, the volume rising with each word.

  Sami stood before her conscious of his size. Just irrigating liquid in flux, perhaps, but it felt solid to him, felt like bulk.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the day of my father’s death.’ Her olive-oil voice distorted by an act of terrible vandalism, and still rising. The string of a lute pulled so far back from the body of the instrument that it has to break.

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know about that. I mean, I only knew partially.’

  Muntaha watched him as if waiting for an answer, her eyes roaming about his face, which he knew to be just the same unresponsive face as usual, a face which doesn’t give answers. He wanted to tell her so: ‘It’s only my face, the same one as before, there isn’t any reason to it.’ It took a long time for her to realize this. Then she cast her eyes down, and relaxed. The air whistled out of her. She returned to the kitchen.

  He watched her move away. With her nightdress crumpled to her, her white arms sombre as moonlight, he glimpsed Muntaha as an old woman. There’s a future he was excluded from, a loss not yet lived but already determined. But he didn’t mourn. Newness was still exciting him. The stripping away of what he’d had whet his appetite for more denudation. A sense of anticipation, as if he was about to step into the steam of an old city hammam. About to get clean.

  He climbed the stairs. Collected his toothbrush, laid out some clothes on the bed. Smelled the tranquillity of her there but resisted the urge to push his nose into the sheets. By his side of the bed were the wooden prayer beads he’d brought back from Syria for Marwan but had forgotten to give to him. He glanced from the window on to mud and wall, and glimpsed then the unvarnished truth: that he had betrayed everybody, in various ways. Mustafa. Marwan. His mother, of course. Now Muntaha. Not just now, but for a decade. He’d let down Mustafa by failing as an academic, even as an atheist. For Marwan, the betrayal was not being a Muslim, or a father. For his mother, he was not a son. For his wife, not a man. The pattern of his relations with the world was to betray its trust. Everybody’s trust. Here the vision of the betrayed expanded to include Tom, whose name he’d given to the authorities, and Schimmer, whose efforts had been wasted, and Ammar, who he hadn’t guided rightly, and Bikini Girl, for something obscure, and deeper into obscurity, his broken uncle Faris, in Damascus. Why was Sami responsible for that? The question posed itself in bright clarity, and Sami at once forgot it. Forgetful Sami. Leaving everything unpacked, he descended.

  She was standing in the kitchen entrance, arms folded above her breasts. It looked to him that she needed somebody to give her a hug. He, of course, was not that somebody.

  ‘Would you say you’ve been a good husband to me?’ she asked, pouting slightly, brow knitted. Trying to work things out.

  ‘Well, no,’ Sami admitted. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  There was a motionless interlude during which he absorbed his wife’s appearance. Her dry dark lips reminding him of more intimate lips, if intimacy is in any way gradable once you’ve arrived at lips. No lips he’d wish to moisten more than these ones decorating her feeling face. Her tired skin taking the blows of death and loss. The night-time waterfall of her hair. Her sharp, intellectual angles. This was territory that he had denied himself. Pleasures he was exiled from. He took a last deep inhalation to keep with him. The sound of his breath stirred her.

  ‘You’d better leave,’ she said in a reasonable tone. ‘I can’t look at you now. You’d better go and sort yourself out. And me too, I’d better sort myself out.’

  Lost land dwindling behind barbed wire. Sami, carried away by cattle truck, saw his home shrink to nothing. The Palestinians took housekeys. Sami’s souvenir – her air, her odour – escaped slowly from his lungs.

  ‘I’m sorry, Muntaha.’

  ‘Don’t bother with that,’ she said. ‘There’s no point.’

  He turned into his study. What did he need to take? What was essential? He regarded his shelves. The prefixed and affixed academic warblings, the expensive isms which he’d previously taken as sacred text – impossible to apply, impossible to fully understand, but of higher-order value and thus to be grappled with – these were now abruptly irrelevant. A necrotic crust expanded rapidly from books to pictures to the Mustafa relics in the desk drawer. Unworthiness colonizing each cranny of the room, inch by inch. What an evil, secularizing spirit his eye contained. As he cast his gaze about, divinity vacated his holy objects. Spreading, corrupting atheism was in his eye, the real thing, not the rhetoric of it. The real, deadly, God-killing certainty of atheism. Even the furniture had the dust of the grave on it. His upholstered Moroccan chair. The camel stool. He didn’t need any of it.

  He was going to walk away, but sat down instead on his old red sofa. From its fibres and springs rose memories of the strategic retreats he’d made here, the staged absences in mid-fight, usually to smoke spliffs and count time on the clock rather than to fume. All quite calculated. But it hadn’t worked. He’d never won. She had scared him, not the other way round. How much like his mother she’d seemed during those arguments – wallfaced and heartless – he could die for all she cared. But in retrospect he questioned this version of her, the unlistening stubbornness. Was that the way she really was? Unbelief galloped backwards to infect his previous concepts. Strangely now, the hijab didn’t bother him. He flashed a picture of her wearing it on to his inner screen. No, that was fine. Now that he’d renounced ownership, she could do what she liked. He even admired her for it.

  Sami surveyed his domain once more as he stood up. It occurred to him that they’d never had a sitting room. Well, it would be good for her that he was going. She’d be able to use the space.

  He closed the brown door behind him. Upstairs he had a very brief shower, covering his penis as guiltily as a thief in case he was disturbed. Then he dressed, and packed his clothes in a bag. The same overnight bag he’d arrived with and lied about.

  As he stepped down the stairs, as they creaked against his weight, a miasmic updraught of novelty rose through his nostrils an
d earholes and into his sugar-parched brain, sparking momentary departure-related hallucinations. Of heroic Sami Traifi clicked into a rocket’s cockpit. His mission: to slip into the emptiness between the stars. With toes folding from the ball of one foot, the next foot swinging forward and down, he chuckled at himself. Layers of transparent plastic fixed between him and his loved ones (blonde American wife flutters a handkerchief, freckled sons nod bravely goodbye). Hitting the foot of the stairs, not turning his head left to see her in the kitchen, nor right to the study – and fires roaring beneath him. Yellow ash clouds blooming, a countdown, and then with a whoosh and distant applause he is propelled through blue into green and black, up into the bleak insubstantiality of space, up up up through it, sinking backwards, drowning upwards, nothing holding him, nothing to get a grip on, losing the past and his natural habitat, losing context, losing any stable definition of himself.

  ‘Bye,’ he called.

  There was no response.

  21

  It Soon Come

  Have you forgotten that once we were brought here we were robbed of our names, robbed of our language. We lost our religion, our culture, our God. And many of us, by the way we act, we even lost our minds.

  Khalid Abdul Muhammad sampled, and then with a ‘Here it is: Bammm!’ Chuck D in black, the serious, unstoppable, pile-driving voice, slamming the words home with a wheeling and battling arm. Pure anger. Skipping and hopping past him, the funny man Flavor Flav, in white, floppy at the waist, pulling faces to show off his gold incisors. Pointing to the swinging clock hung from his neck, big and round enough to hide his chest. Calling once again, ‘Gotta let dem know what time it is, boyyeeee.’ Nothing but entertainment. The backdrop to both: the Security of the First World patrolling the stage in light camouflage and red berets, doing a tiny-step shuffle and a military scowl. And at the sides of the stage, a big, big sound system. The speakers Carnival sized, but this was inside, the noise walled in and echoing upon itself.

  Sami was remembering this as he found his way to his (still, officially) brother-in-law’s underground mosque. He’d called Ammar the day before on his new bottom-of-the-range mobile phone to do the necessary condoling and apologizing. Ammar had been understanding. Don’t worry about it, brother, he’d said, and then he’d invited Sami to visit the mosque. Sami had guilt to appease, and nothing else to occupy his time, and even mosques didn’t frighten him since he’d stopped believing in Mustafa’s ghost. So here he was, feeling unwrapped and chilly, descending a blustery western hill.

  But back to the remembered concert hall. It was hot in there and wild, the screams and the whistles, the raised fists. The crowd swell moved you, mainly male, mainly black. Just standing still you were moving. Your body one cell of a bigger body. A London Leviathan stretching itself out to touch beyond London, and being touched right now by New York.

  By Public Enemy. PE in full effect, at the Electric Ballroom, Camden, late 1991. A younger, still innocently arrogant Sami bounced and whooped, and beside him, occasionally glancing at him with eyes of love and admiration, the boy Ammar. Both lives were looking up: Sami at the start of his Muntaha years, just beginning his doctorate, and Ammar on the cusp of purposeful (hip hop-oriented) adulthood, stepping forward into the big-beat urban night with his newfound big brother. Both felt the tickle of roots going down, of futures flowering, and in this heaving, sweating place that tickling was indistinguishable from the abdominal tickles the music made: the muscular scratching at the turntables, the sirens, the demented saxophones. The political frisson of the sound.

  It was sounds for the barricades, but in its layers and contradictions more complex than the Trotskyist or Green agitprop you could hear beyond the Ballroom, out there in the vegetable market or outside the tube of this fairly white, fairly straightforward inner suburb. PE’s brain-busting militancy was wrapped around a warm funkiness – something very sexy and very soft. It suited Ammar down to the ground (as Flav put it, it rocked his boots to da roots). It gave him access to his inner sweetness, his sensuality, and then led him to cut it off again with masochistic violence. Sweetness and violence. Violence and sweetness, spinning together, arm in arm. Their mutual embrace looked like home to Ammar. Because London at the end of the millennium was neither a time nor a place for just dancing, not only, not with slavery only half ended, and corporate empires ruling half the world, and your lost country half forgotten, and the people there half starving, and pictures of them on the TV that you only half recognize. Maybe half of you could dance, touch girls, smoke weed, but the other half must do something more darkly energetic.

  He turned to Sami with an eager-beaver snout and hands funnelled around his mouth, shouting. Sami couldn’t hear until the hands bumped into his ear, the lips squashed against his earlobe and jaw. Then he picked up the enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s good being here, innit. I mean in London. We get to see all this, yeah?’

  There was that in Ammar too, Muntaha’s capacity for unalloyed happiness.

  ‘It’s good. It’s good,’ Sami gestured in reply.

  Spotlight on Chuck D. He was telling the crowd about a game slavemasters used to play with pregnant black women. The thud and crash of the bass behind his baritone. The woman, he said, would be tied up naked, and the whites would place bets on the sex of the fetus. To settle it, the white men cut the baby out of her. Cutting her from breast to vagina, settling their bet in her black blood.

  The happily furious crowd booed and wailed.

  ‘Four hundred years!’ Chuck declaimed.

  The anger and the heat intensified.

  ‘Four hundred years of Jack’s bullshit!’

  Screaming. Coordinated grunting.

  ‘What we gonna do about it?’ asked Chuck, very rhetorically indeed.

  And as an answer, the spotlight on him faded, replaced by two beams shone on to the speakers at the extremes of the stage, and a member of the Security of the First World standing on each speaker, and in their upraised arms, Uzi sub-machine guns. Fake Uzis, but the point was made. The crowd leapt and roared approval. Ammar leapt and roared approval, almost weeping with excitement. Sami, however, raised his shoulders and looked towards his feet, which he couldn’t see for movement and shadows. Ammar grabbed at his arms, but Sami held them to his sides.

  ‘Join in!’ screeched Ammar. ‘Fight the power!’

  No, signalled Sami. And Ammar asked with his face, why not? And Sami, trying to shrink from the public noise, trying to detach from the common body, attached his lips to Ammar’s ear.

  ‘It’s a black thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a race thing.’

  They moved heads so Ammar could reply.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s our people. We’re black.’

  Ammar held up a rigid finger as if he was about to offer some proof. He turned to a neighbouring Negro. Sami changed position to lipread.

  ‘Yo, brother,’ asked Ammar, waving a hand back at Sami. ‘Are we black?’

  Sami remembering, coming to the foot of the hill. On his way to Ammar’s mosque. Feeling naked.

  A gym fanatic of a sun flexed rays towards the city. Tom’s speech on the changeability of matter had lingered with Sami. He was all flux. And the sun was all flux – all explosive transience – hot, and bright. Infecting the atmosphere. In climatic terms this was the calm before the storm. It promised flood, fire, and plagues of insects. But for now the city seemed healthier than he’d seen it in a long while, as if its illnesses hadbeen burnt away – healthy in comparison, he supposed, to himself. It would be wrong to describe Sami as less healthy than before (he hadn’t been drunk or spliffed since his arrest on Tower Bridge), but he had become more aware of his health, or lack of it. So we can say that his picture of himself was less healthy than before. In present circumstances, he trusted neither the seeming health of the city nor his own strength.

  These streets he walked through, strung out around different varieties of chickenshack, undertakers and keycutters, were embalmed by wind
and neutered pollen, and by glancing light, producing the healthful sheen in which he had minimal confidence.

  He remembered for a flowing moment the plumber, vaguely a family friend, who’d lived down the road of his childhood home, the plumber who’d kept him and his mother up to date with the progress of a brain tumour. He remembered the decay of this man into something less than plumber, and then his deceptive recovery. They’d visited him at home twice. On the second visit the plumber could speak again, drink without dribbling, and smile. He looked forward to returning to work. For the half-hour of the visit it seemed that the cancer was decaying and the plumber gaining health. But a week later the plumber was dead. Mustafa had used the episode to teach an anti-superstition lesson, which Sami remembered grimly. And then the memory was gone, blastomaed into the afternoon, leaving Sami with the glassy heat, the numbing haze.

  He was living in student accommodation near Euston. In a concrete and plastic block, with undergraduates above and below him and on either side. Dr Schimmer, pulling strings like an Arab, had found the room. Sami could stay there until late September. He paid a student’s token rent.

  He’d arranged further credit with his bank: the bank believed in him even if he didn’t. And he’d taken a tour of a Kilburn job centre. (He’d been walking in Kilburn when resolution swayed him.) Yes, the economy was booming, and there was a range of work available. Like labouring (but he didn’t own hard-top boots, and didn’t trust his strength); machine operating (he didn’t have the necessary qualifications); secretarial work (he couldn’t see it). There was one job advertised he thought he’d be able to do right away: public convenience cleaner’s assistant. He’d called to arrange an interview, but they said he was overqualified. What was his niche? he wondered. What lay between holding a bucket and driving forklift trucks? These were questions he’d never had to ask himself before. Anyway, he was trying. His new life had just begun. He was doing his best.