The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘I’m an agnostic,’ he said. ‘Not a Christian or a Jew.’

  He was pleased to see Ammar, who hadn’t expected theology, bewildered by this. His brows descended, his nose flattened. Meanwhile, blood flow was returning to Gabor’s face.

  The door opened, first slowly, then fast. Muntaha lurched out, still tying her hijab.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  It was a shriek. She shrieked next in Arabic. She stopped and looked at Gabor, pointed at him, and demanded something of her brother. He answered in Arabic, shrugging and shaking his hands. Then she hit him, slapping him with open palms on the crown of his head. Most rewarding for Gabor, who stepped back and decorously turned towards the street. Three sniggering boys on bicycles across the tarmac who’d stopped to watch. When their eyes followed Ammar down the pavement Gabor turned again.

  ‘My God,’ she said, in a passion. ‘Are you all right?’ That had been Gabor’s response when he saw that Ammar was hurt. Gabor, now very grateful for his injury.

  She steered him into the hallway and raised her large hand to his cheek. She touched him, which both stung and didn’t. He thought her fingers stroked his hairline as she removed them. The hint of a caress. He felt something of the adrenalin flush he felt before, so he loosened, weakened. Saw her in his imagination as a spirit woman, a Sufi Sophia, eastern like his grandfather. The opposite of his materialist parents.

  She led him to a ground-floor bathroom. The hallway made of wood and roses, a tempting smell of onions and clean red meat from the kitchen. But when she closed the door behind him he was in Sami’s territory, dark and claustrophobic, the walls tightly packed with cartoons cut from Arabic newspapers, a lot of maps and guns, men with globes for heads. Gabor washed his own head in cold water before inspecting it in the mirror. Nothing serious. The skin raw but unbroken. A bruise already gathering colour. He padded his hair dry with a perfumed towel.

  When he came out he found her silhouetted against the kitchen window’s blue. He remembered the flowers which he must have dropped when Ammar hit him, so he creaked over the floorboards and let himself on to the pavement where they still lay, blue like the sky against stained grey. They’d been trodden on once, but not maliciously. He picked them up, rustled them into shape somewhat, and returned to the house.

  With the door open the hallway was a suspension of sun motes, and they played over Muntaha, her skin, the fabric of her clothes. Her lips were parted and moist, her lubricated eyeballs shining unalloyed white, and their blacks glistening. A third of her face retreating coyly into shadow. A few strands of satin hair escaping the hijab. For Gabor, time was suspended, a gateway to the ancient world ajar. The past present. No time, so no weight, no obligation. No husbands or rules or social codes. They could kiss.

  ‘I’m so embarrassed,’ she said, studying his bruise. Tm ashamed of him. He’s going to get himself into real trouble soon. He’s off the rails, really off the rails. I don’t know what to do about him. I’ve thought about getting him to live here with me where I can keep my eye on him. His problem is, he isn’t really old enough to have no parents.’

  She interrupted herself when he lifted the flowers for her to see.

  ‘Flowers,’ she said. ‘That’s nice of you. They’ll look good on the table.’

  Gabor watched her step into the kitchen and crouch at a floor–level cupboard to find a vase. She blasted some tap water into it, added a spoon of sugar, then scissored off the flowers’ lower stems and put them into place one by one. She moved past him with the vase and through a brown door. He followed.

  ‘This is Sami’s study,’ she said, ‘but I’ve made a few changes. This table, for instance, I’ve brought in here for when I have guests. What you have to remember about Ammar…’ – she continued as if the table and Ammar were two facets of one conversation – ‘… is that he’s a motherless child. He was only six when he lost his mother. And his motherland too. Six is old enough to be very socially aware, so to be pulled out of your country suddenly like that is very disturbing, even for a child who has a mother to comfort him. I don’t think he’s got over it yet. I mean, part of him is still six years old waiting for his mother to come back. He was smoking cigarettes and worse when he was fourteen, and he could drive when he was fifteen, but that’s not the same as being a grown-up. In fact, those are compensations for being a little boy still. It’s a shame. He’d make a lovely grown-up, he really would.’

  Gabor wondered if we must always be making excuses, if we can’t judge just a little more. But it would have looked insensitive to argue against sisterly sentiment. He let her get it off her chest.

  ‘He has all this undirected anger. I wish he’d, you know, channel it. Do something positive with it. He gets angry about Iraq and Palestine. I mean, all right, we all do. But what can we do about it? We must be able to do our little thing, whatever it is. That way the world might improve. Getting aimlessly angry isn’t going to help.’

  She talked herself back to the kitchen, leaving him alone in Sami’s former study. He took the opportunity to nose into its contents. In the desk drawer there was star stuff, curl-edged photographs, a miniature whiskey bottle, a book.

  Muntaha came back bearing loaves of flat bread and a dish of paste the same colour as her. ‘Matabal,’ she said, laying it on the table. ‘Aubergine and olive oil and tahina and yoghurt.’

  He’d pushed the drawer shut and turned to the bookshelves.

  ‘Looking at the books? Most of those are Sami’s. But you see those ones, those are mine. I’ve been clearing his notes from the shelves. He agreed. We spoke on the phone. He says he doesn’t want them any more.’

  On her half-shelf there were Sufi texts, books about Iraq, some magical realism, a few Arabic titles. Also the copy of Anna Karenina Gabor had given her a week before, still in its pristine, untouched state. And in Sami’s larger section, texts about Sufi texts, theories about theory.

  Eventually they sat on straight-backed chairs on either side of the table, with the cramming of Sami’s uncollected furniture not allowing much room for manoeuvre, his rank old sofa and obsolete camel stool pressing at their sides. Between them steamed a leg of lamb which had been marinated overnight in sour yoghurt and garlic. Succulent meat which Gabor carved and then forked on to the plates, and which disintegrated creamily in his mouth. They were discussing sharia law, starting with her father’s will and moving on to sexual misconduct. She was arguing that sharia is inherently flexible, much more tolerant than either Muslims or non-Muslims assume. Gabor half taking it in, being greatly disturbed, greatly exercised, by the leg of flesh in front of him and on his tongue, by an extending metonymy of legs, of shanks and thighs, and of the area where they meet. He understood why cartoon Victorians, fearing for a gentleman’s moral equilibrium, covered up female-suggestive piano and table legs. Except that covering draws your attention to what is covered. The imagination comes into play, and an imagined uncovering becomes the first stage of foreplay. Those covered nipples. The fabric of the bra meeting them, hard against soft. Then in the gap of the thighs, in the centre point, the wonder of the intermediate zone, part skin and part internal organ, that boundary of known and occult, both dry and moist, the texture of it. And what is its texture? Gabor wanted to know. Is it true that Arab women shave there, not shave but – so much more feminine – wax? Does she?

  His desire was a very practical sort of lust. A lust requiring fulfilment. The opposite sort of lust from Sami’s in the strip pub, although both men’s imagery of Muntaha have much in common. Gabor’s orientalism maps reasonably closely on to Sami’s more self-complicated version. Symbolic thinkers both, left behind in abstraction. While their perceptions freeze like brittle glass, and fall, and crash gently to the ground, Muntaha is one step ahead, poking a toe into the pre-perceived, into the primal raw mush of it.

  ‘It’s a hadeeth qudsi,’ she was saying, meanwhile. ‘Not from the Qur’an, but still the word of God reported by the Prophet. “My mercy is greater th
an my wrath.” And that’s the balance in sharia: mercy and wrath, severity and lenience, to the extent that the penalty can almost never be applied. So the punishment for zina, for adultery, is whipping for an unmarried person and death for a married person.’

  Gabor’s fork was stuck in the leg between them. Strands of leg between his teeth.

  ‘Pretty severe, yeah? But now look at the conditions that have to be met before the punishment can be applied. There have to be four witnesses to the adultery, which means witnesses to the actual act. You know, to the intercourse itself. And the four witnesses have to be reliable people, known for their honesty. Now who would commit adultery in front of four prayerful, honest witnesses? No one. And if an accuser can’t prove his charge, then he gets punished for slander. So the message is, if you suspect your neighbour of adultery, keep quiet about it because you can’t prove it, and speaking about it will damage the public peace. And Islam as a social system aims at social peace. How you get from that to the kind of laws they have in Pakistan is a different story.’

  She paused to chew some leg.

  ‘But the severity of the punishment remains. If you’re guilty of adultery you know the severity of the crime. It’s a sin, a serious sin. And God sees it all, every detail.’

  24

  Following the Heart

  Sami awoke from a dream of a rotting corpse, and the sweat in his nostrils was at first indistinguishable from that imagined stench. Against the surface of the regulation university wardrobe his eyes still saw maggots thriving in the corpse’s slurry eyes, the jaw cracking open to reveal a turd tongue, pus leaking from the ears.

  He shook himself and rose. Drank water from a shiny alloy tap, and instead of braving company on the route to the communal shower he splashed himself there in his armpits and groin, noting with distaste his beltline roll of fat. Then he stood at the in-slanting window, over a street recovering in the sun from student-blighted Friday night, and smoked a bitter cigarette. As he did so he produced a freshly toxic sheen of sweat to be blotted by the day’s T-shirt.

  In the internet café he learnt of further Israeli revenge attacks for a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizzeria. He downloaded a TV report for the third time. Through fuzzy BBC blood decorum you could still see defunct bodies scattered on the floor and against furniture. The correspondent was moping about it. You could see religious Jew volunteers picking up hunks of flesh and putting them in bags. Sami watched it through until the headshaking of Israeli spokesmen sent a spurt of venom into his stomach, on the strength of which he ventured forth, towards violence of more random genesis.

  He walked from weekend-quiet Euston to the wide markets of Camden. Up there a crescendo of car noise expanded within a larger crescendo of simulated excitement – music channelled through the glass doorways of leather shops and poster shops and body-piercing parlours, and also voices, of criers of wares and slogans, of different brands of youth yo-ing or oi-ing to each other on the pavements. Groups of young natives half-heartedly looking for war, and innocent blinking boys in football shirts, tourists from the outer suburbs disconcerted by the richer varieties of uniform here. People purchasing all manner of sophisticated identities, making all manner of consumer choices, and all believing they deserved them. Sami, who had just decided to shed his addictions, including shopping, hadn’t brought his card with him. He moved left on to the lock, and westwards on the towpath.

  Plenty of people, the summer permitting their privatized enjoyments, individuals and couples and groups preserving the ritual boundaries around themselves. Everyone on his own altar. Everyone in his own fantasy. Just enough cooperation to pretend the others weren’t there. Just enough suspension of disbelief.

  Sami cooperated, ignoring people. The backyard vegetation and the canal steamed deeply. Long low houseboats rocked easily on the green, self-contained with plant pots, mugs, curtained windows. He indulged sketchy fantasies of houseboat life and furniture, of peaceful isolation.

  ‘As-salaamu alaikum!’ A grinning skullcapped black man of Sami’s age had spied him for a brother, and passed on. An instant of fraternity, an exclusion boundary split open to absorb him. Sami wriggled out again.

  He considered how different to his illusions the world actually was. He’d thought he was holding the fort of secular humanism, but the fort had already fallen. In its rubble a marketplace of religion had set up, where people thrashed and struggled to attain uniqueness of belief. True, tradition had decayed so long it had crumbled into itself, its crumbs had been thoroughly mulched in the jaws of various modernisms. But like an imploding star, tradition hadn’t simply disappeared. Instead, the old material was sucked in and spat out into a new dimension, transformed into what would have looked like parodies to previous generations: the bump ’n’ grind pop stars tangled in Kabbala string, the London Sufi groups made up entirely of ageing white hippies, the smack-addicted trans-vestites chanting mantras, the counterculturalists battling the ego with LSD. The New Age spiritualities – a bit of this and a bit of that, to fit advertising: the world is as you want it to be, because you deserve it. And so on, everywhere you might care to look.

  Secularism had collapsed under the weight of the new beliefs. Instead of catching up with the empirical West, Third World religion became more strident, more nihilist. And the religion of the comfortable metropolitan natives was ever more Hellenized: physical, sexually liberal, requiring spectacle and heroism, requiring feats of strength and human drama, with the divine focus dispersed to allow for a variety of household gods. There were consumer cults, body cults, the Greek perfections of Schwarzkopf or Schwarzenegger, the kick-ass warrior aristocracy worshipped on exploding screens in arcades and living rooms. Empirical cults.

  It wasn’t as he’d thought as a boy, that all these religions would cancel each other out. Instead they existed in bubbles. As bubble hit bubble more bubbles were formed. It was clear to him now that secular humanism was a late nineteenth-century hiccup, an antiquated European gentleman’s daydream. And Mustafa’s daydream too, of course.

  Across hot canal vapours he saw the zoo’s nocturnal mammal house, and then, nosing through the fencing, oryx displaced from the Arabian Gulf. Next, on his right and above the towpath, an aviary dense with the chirps and squawks of competing species.

  Surrounded by these twittering potentialities Sami again confronted Mustafa’s death. How someone could fall off the edge of the world like that. It seemed like a joke, like some kind of trick played on him. Until recently he’d half believed his father was going to burst through a door one day with his cynical laugh – Ha! got you! you believed in death like these fools believe in God! And why shouldn’t he? Mustafa had never said goodbye.

  Another fact: Marwan’s death. Marwan dispersed. The corpse in the soggy ground and the spirit, the character, in the sky, in the air.

  Two facts. Two absences. Two sets of guilt and pain arriving from a void.

  Sami thought: the past is a nightmare determining the present, and the present is empty. And then: death is the constant and life an aberrant moment. Being here, being present, is an aberration.

  To his left, glistening sombrely in the sunlight, the false gold dome of the Regent’s Park mosque. Where prayers had been said over Marwan’s body, and over Mustafa’s body too, once he was unable to resist. Would Sami go in? He remembered the peculiar Englishness of it from his previous visit. Coats and scarves hung up on hooks, the smell of damp wool, wooden panelling on the walls. Snow through the windows against a red and yellow sky. He’d never seen a mosque with windows in an Arab country, where light is something to be escaped from.

  His foot waggled at the point of decision: right and up and across the bridge and into the community of believers, or left and onwards to the west, along the canal bank, towards his formative haunts. West, then.

  He continued to philosophize. Ascertaining physical facts. The matter that irrigated him, the incidental, time-bound stuff. But he, Sami the personality, the consciousness, Sami
the intangible which couldn’t be measured, he was a mere possibility. Like God.

  And here stretched out a sorry, partial pathway to belief. A via negativa. Sami the soul doesn’t exist, nor does God. If he’s going to believe in himself, he may as well believe in God. It seems only fair. Sami and God appear to be, in some sense, brothers.

  Sami addressed God: You don’t exist. And I don’t exist. You don’t exist and neither do I. We belong together, therefore.

  This bemused him pleasantly, for a short moment. A smile played to extinction on his dry lips.

  He left the canal and threaded through mid-rise towers until he was on the Edgware Road and heading south. Following the heart.

  And who said that first? Follow the heart. Some poet who failed the biology test. I mean, Sami murmured, what heart? Where to? The dumb organ, the notoriously convoluted chunk of gristle, all twists and turns, pointing in ten thousand directions or none at all. Uncle Marwan’s heart hadn’t led him anywhere special unless you count the mud. Follow the heart? If only we could do otherwise.

  In Sumer they followed the messages they read in the entrails of sacrificed animals. They read the liver, the liver being the seat of the soul.

  When Gilgamesh rejected her, fierce fateful Ishtar asked Anu for the means of vengeance. Her father Anu of the air. Anu of the sky. She raised her voice in insistence until Anu granted her the Bull of Heaven, although he knew the Bull would muddy the waters and parch the earth with drought. Ishtar sent the Bull to ravage the lands of men. But Gilgamesh with his friend the wild man, Enkidu, killed the Bull on Cedar Mountain. They scorned the gods. And so Ishtar sent disease to kill Enkidu. It ended in the killer’s death.

  Father killer, Sami murmured at himself. Denier of dying men’s wishes. My own little Enkidu, my wild man. What Mustafa had called him in the nightmare past.

  He strode past (striding now) a flyer for an evangelical meeting in Earl’s Court. More evidence, if more were needed, of the spirit rushing to adapt to new realities. Instead of churches and modest little English chapels it was conference centres, stadiums, concert halls: these the helipads on which the spirit today descends.