The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  He moved south practising detachment – from evangelism, from his thirst and the stickiness of his T-shirt, from the meanings of argileh bars, Lebanese restaurants, Islamic banks, from Arab property dealers and from the quiet doorways down to noisy whoring spots. At the point where he felt fully liberated from particular responses the city agreed with him, losing its Arab specificity to enter a stretch of nondescript, post-human concrete and tunnels under the marble arch. His heart was as cold as the suddenly clammy absence of sun.

  So when he re-emerged into superficial heat at Speakers’ Corner he was hermetically insulated in his equanimity, so he thought, even from salaaming brothers. His eyes were set high and far, on to the trees and the scrubby lawns of the park.

  Seven or eight soapbox heads harangued their respective audiences. The same theme rehearsed in different accents: repent, convert, step on to the straight path. Repent before God or Gaia or the black race seeks revenge. Sami strode through with rigid gaze and intention, their words breaking weakly on his impassive ears.

  It was this phrase, spoken in an American accent, that stopped him short: ‘The destruction of Damascus.’

  He turned towards it.

  ‘The destruction of Damascus is a sign and a wonder soon to be witnessed.’

  A figure on a box bearing carefully intertwined Israeli and American flags, a thin figure, pale and loosely put together. Lost like an infant posed in its father’s clothing, in an overlarge Star of David T-shirt. A slight breeze flapped the flags against his face and obscured the volume of his sub-biblical, self-announcing diction.

  ‘… for I am here to tell you that evil can be defeated and eradicated. Not only that, but that the time is nigh. Isaiah seventeen verse one: “The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.” Damascus, the capital of the rogue Arab Muhammadan state of Syria, the enemy of Christ and Israel, is the oldest…’

  Sami’s brain completed the formula. The oldest continuously inhabited city on earth.

  ‘Damascus has never yet been a ruin, so this prophecy is still to come. And verily, it shall be us of this generation who shall witness this wonder.’

  He wasn’t loud or muscular enough to draw significant numbers. His ten or fifteen spectators made a limp and listless audience, committing themselves to only a few paragraphs before moving on to sample another loon.

  ‘For I am here, people of England, to tell you. I am here to announce the tribulation.’

  He picked the tail of a flag out of his eye.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yay, for the Jews have returned unto Zion. Ezekiel thirty-six verse twenty-four: “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.” So sayeth the Lord, and so it has come to pass. And, yay, the endtimes are nigh.’

  He took breath.

  ‘So I’m telling you all, this is the time to wake up and change your life around. I’m here to say, repent ye and join the faithful. Turn ye to Christ. For the time of the rapture approaches, when the true faithful shall be transported unto heaven. And for those remaining there shall be a tribulation and a purifying fire and a pestilence and a…’

  The apocalypse ended in a spluttering as the flags once more intervened. The preacher had raised an arm skyward at the mention of the rapture.

  ‘Then one hundred and forty-four thousand Jews, as it is prophesied, shall repent their error and accept the risen Christ. And the Antichrist shall rule from Babylon, and he shall make a covenant with Israel. Until such time as the final battle on the field at Armageddon. The remnant of the Christians with the converted Jews shall defeat Satan, and Christ in his glory shall return. For the unbelieving Jews and Muhammadans there shall be hellfire unending.’

  He added an afterthought.

  ‘And hellfire also for the United Nations world government and for Communists and the Chinese hordes.’

  The audience had changed half its composition, which made Sami one of the old guard. The preacher tried to catch his eye.

  ‘Now, brethren, I am here to rouse you with my wake-up call. People of England, it is decision time. Are you with Christ, brethren, or do you stand against him? Are you girded for Christ’s work? For at this time we must prepare Christ’s way by supporting Israel against the Muhammadans. The in-gathering of the Jews is our priority. Muhammadans and Communists shall stand against us, as it is prophesied. But Damascus, yay, shall be a ruinous heap. And the Lord God shall smite those who oppose him.’

  Sami extricated himself and walked off quickly, stabbing the ground with his feet. He was hot and thirsty and sunblind. His thoughts chained through clasps of anger – plenty of anger as he associated the preacher with the morning’s news – and fear, which displaced hunger as his dominant intestinal mood, and self-pity. His head steamed up with it as he stepped on to the grass, and on his inner screen he directed an angry fantasy, in which he identified himself with a Palestinian of the camps. A man grown up surrounded by death, shaped by death. Who has seen death take his father, his brother, his neighbours. Death operating out in the open, not veiled like here. Faces of the dead pasted on the walls. The streets named after those who have died in them. Neighbourhoods named after dead villages. Militias named in honour of the dead. Death everywhere in the ruinous heap of the camp, imprinting itself on everything.

  His gaze was down, stuttering over cracked turf and cans and crisp packets. Dehydration stopped him sweating but his face was burning. On the inner screen he was a man who defeats death by choosing it. Who conquers humiliation. Conquers the fear of death by walking towards it, cold-hearted. Cold in the heart like crushed snow on a blank hill.

  He remembered Muhammad ad-Dura, the boy who was first wounded then killed as his father screamed for the Israeli troops to cease their fire. Huddled under a useless wall. The humiliated father humiliated with the ultimate humiliation. Once the boy was dead, finally, after twenty minutes of it, the father dropped his head into the blood, his blood and his son’s drying blood, his dark eyes dulled, no longer registering pain or terror or anything at all once he’d failed to save his son. Killed in the crossfire, the English news said.

  So Sami saw himself in this early Intifada scene. He would give himself up to save the father, whose head would now be raised in a new kind of awe as he hears the triumphant cry of the leaping crowd as Sami rushes through, forgetful of himself, with only Palestinian stones in his fists, into the line of fire, a bullet meant for the child’s corpse thudding into him in a spatter and a gouging but he only coming faster because they haven’t yet hit his heart, the Israeli boy soldiers in awe also, aiming and firing but unable to deflect the perfect fury of this dying body, gaining velocity, raising its arms, expanding to the size of a nation, an earth. Mr ad-Dura brought to his feet, the cringing soldiers in defeat. And Sami in another realm embracing the boy while the earthly Sami, the corpse, sinks into its inescapable blood and bone.

  He jerks on over the baked grass. It’s not enough. So he blows up the Israeli soldiers and their Western weaponry in a fountain of metal and gore, and blows up the fucking American supporters of Zionism too, the preachers and moneymen who don’t have the excuse of the Holocaust for their derangement, with their humane God hypocrisy and their freedom and civilization hypocrisy and their double-standard racism hypocrisy and their weak Disney-Torah rhetoric and all their power.

  A bracing, crushing halt. A real hand closed around his throat.

  ‘Cunt,’ spat the owner of the hand. ‘Cunt. What you looking at.’

  A skinhead had caught him. Pub odours spurting from lipless mouth, shaven head glistening, a cross the blue of tears tattooed on the forehead, round eyes unblinking, puckered pink nipples sitting fatly on hairless chest. Two pierced women on the ground behind kneeling upright and aroused.

  The hand tightened, raising Sami’s chin, bruising glands and tonsils.

  ‘Cunt,’ it said again.

  ‘Nothing,’ S
ami tried to say, but his throat instead made a wet gurgle. Some sweat was squeezed out of him, as out of a stone. His eyes watered. Eventually he made a twisted, high-shouldered shrug.

  The crusher, the bearer of the cross, relinquished Sami, the cunt, with post-coital disdain, and turned to his flushed consorts with his palms flattened, bouncing a nodding grin to beckon applause.

  Sami heard it in their sniggering. Prayers for their Hellenic hero, their man of action. He staggered away towards the Serpentine, there not being anything else to do, swallowing painfully on the shame. He ignored whoever may have seen him, wished he could ignore himself. At a time like this you think you need a hug from your loved ones, but thank God, thought Sami, that his loved ones were dead, or rejected, or sick of him. Even himself is sick of him. And thank God for it. Sympathy would destroy him. Much better to swallow the pain alone. Humiliation is a worse enemy than loneliness.

  In the high sky, above trees and the lake, a carbonate-tinted cloud found shape like spreading blood, forming shoulders, breasts, hips, triangulated elbows: an Ishtar of the approaching evening.

  Sami in the burnt desolation of Hyde Park, in a wilderness of disconnection, trying to see inside his head a winter scene, a coolness and emptiness, but it’s far too late for that. He can’t recapture the purity of snow. What flickering visions he manages are of half-thawed city slush, browned by exhaust fumes, spattered by phlegm, yellowed where it’s been pissed on by dogs and drunks.

  25

  Fast

  Sami could take no pride in himself. This statement needs no further explanation, except to say that his body by itself was a humiliation. An empirically verifiable humiliation.

  According to the principle that an indulged and flabby body bespeaks an indulged and flabby spirit, Sami began to renounce his pleasures.

  Lager and whiskey had been the first to go. He fancied this left him unbloated, less bitter. And there was the added advantage of keeping him out of pubs, away from people.

  And he’d discontinued smoking spliffs. After that he was clearer-headed, but still felt he had weight – literal and metaphorical – to shed. Clarity needled and prickled him. There was a lot of time. A lot of distance to his vision. He went for hasty, pointless, broken walks. He fidgeted in the room. He pushed the plastic campus furniture about.

  Chewing on his cheeks, dust-chested, dirty-mouthed from the extra (compensatory) cigarettes, he frowned upon the plastic ashtrays. He kicked tobacco.

  It wasn’t enough. Noticing that the desire to smoke was almost the same voidish sensation as hunger, he set out to eliminate the most immediately gratifying foodstuffs. Cafés and restaurants, with their trapped crowds and trapped air, were now out of the question, and so, therefore, was Balti sauce, battery flesh, glutinous fast food of all varieties. He abjured the white substances – the processed breads, pastas and rices – only one remove (in a fast absorptive blam! of lazy intestine) from glucose.

  He worried about preservatives, flavourings and other E-numbers, about genetically modified foods. He worried about the smeary fingers of packing workers. He sought out produce that was organic, though the word reminded him of what he’d rather forget. He repudiated sugar and salt, which effort made him less sweet, less sour, and more neutral, closer to the middle path. He worried about origins too. He’d always made a point of avoiding Israeli avocados, but now it was environmentalism rather than nationalist politics that dictated his buying. The further a foodstuff was made to travel the more carbonate was belched into the air, and the more filth rained or wheezed back on to Sami. Through such filth he walked to markets for lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, radishes, marrows – the muddier the better. On his return he spent half an hour at the basin scouring them skinless. And English apples and pears. Occasionally, for luxury, some Mediterranean citrus, which made him guilty, polluted and ill – the thought of heavy vehicles swinging like blistered whales along grey motorways, through choking tunnels.

  He contemplated the eating of meat. The shovelling of chunks of one rotting body inside another. Meat which defiles the intestines for forty-eight hours after ingestion. Who has sniffed meat left standing for two days at body temperature? Who has then wondered why shit smells like shit? Anyway, the packaged shit on supermarket shelves is swollen with those chemicals which made Sami want to go organic. Even the halal shit sold by Sami’s mother, Nur, is machine-hacked from pilled-up steroid-sick neon-lit creatures. It’s called halal because there’s a voice on a cassette player coughing ‘In the Name of God’ between pulls on a fag, between machine swipes at the animal’s false-fatted neck. So Sami gave up meat. Which meant he needed less sleep.

  He cut down on sleep, from eight hours to seven, to six, to five. He felt less comfortable, less cushioned, but more awake. He understood how deceived he’d been in his presumed requirements. This inspired him to omit his evening meal. For two days he was hungry, or looking for a smoke. Then he adjusted to his new habit. He perceived a glimmer of power here: that he could organize the beast by setting its habits, that he could programme himself. He realized too how easy it was to deny himself things, now that he lived alone. So many of his previous needs had been demonstrations for Muntaha’s notice, muffled invitations to her to fill his gaps.

  Sami aimed for self-control. The body, he reasoned – and the self is what he meant – was a monster that could be weakened through lack of sustenance. A bit of self-applied Sufism. The less food, he reasoned, the less metabolism. The less farting and burping, the less inner churning. Not that it worked out like that. There was a particularly nasty gut exhalation that became impossible to ignore after six hours of non-ingestion. The Prophet said: By Him in whose Hands my soul is, the smell coming out from the mouth of a fasting person is better in the sight of God than the smell of musk. But Sami’s olfactory perceptions were less than divine.

  He fasted Muslim-style, dawn to dusk, no liquids or solids. He also tried a week-long juice fast, though he grew squeamish at the sibilance of the word itself. Juice. The wormy lip-puckering sound of it, as if he was squeezing juice as he spoke it. The thought of it, the carrot and parsley and marrow mulch spurting through intestinal tunnels – a kind of reverse colonie irrigation – made him wriggle. All those associated slow-vomit words did: ‘spill’ and ‘spew’, ‘purge’ and ‘purify’. Somehow they brought him to Syrian detention chambers. Hanging parties. The detergent of bombs. Liquidation: there was a word suitable for a juice fast, and for an eradicating regime. For anyone in a hurry to build a new, secular consciousness.

  Around the clock he heard a child screaming, wishing it to shut the fuck up but then stopping himself because he knew the child’s universe of suffering was more vast than his would ever be again. It being a child. Him being an adult, conscious of the changing nature of emotional states. Conscious of flux. He didn’t know where the screams came from, what with the stale modernist architecture ricocheting sound waves in all directions. The child was a mystery, wailing at unknown injustices. Sami thought the area had been purged of families.

  Sami, increasingly aware of basic facts. Of his body palpitating, processing, without his consent or control, twenty-four hours a day for all the days of his life, entirely indifferent to his ideological pursuits. Atheist, agnostic or Muslim, the body paid not the least attention, so busy it was producing aromas.

  He smelled pinkish at the tip of his penis, a little closer to the core there, not quite skin. Where most Englishmen were protected, or where their attendant English penile biomatter was protected, by a flap. It was the best smell his body managed, but its curdling, pointless sweetness nauseated him nevertheless.

  His fungal groin gradated through the tugs and tangles of wiry hair from balls to arse – his arse was undoubtedly the hairiest part of him – arse which was citrus-sour but more darkly tanged, something of a Balti in it, or something still more southern, still more tropical, a South East Asia of a smell, containing all the regional diseases. Yellow fever, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis. All th
ese were latent at his lower entrance. Which made him wonder about inside proper. What equatorial vapours did he contain? What toxic inner worlds? (He’d got on closer terms with his arse since he’d started post-defecatory washing in the Muslim style, rather than just smearing it around with paper. Rather than rubbing the waste against his skin and curls, pushing atoms of it back into him, through the pores – how had he done that for all his life?)

  He was a weary explorer through the body’s olfactory moss, wanting only to hack out of it, to slash and burn, to get home, to get to civilization and a warm bath. But a real warm bath, a literal shower, provided no exit. For we’re talking here about Sami in a clean state, as inoffensive odour-wise as it is possible for him to be. Unwashed, it’s a different story.

  Sami unwashed. His unclean underarm aroma was brownish, greyish, ashland air, the wind of the grave, of the crematorium. There was the grey stuff secreted in his nostrils, London stuff to remind the citizens of their city’s sooty past and car-carbonate present. (He took to another Islamic habit, snuffing water into his nose up to the sinuses and then blowing, snorting it out.) There was his goaty piss and his shit rising to him like evacuated organs. On these days of scrubbed leaves and local fruit it came like abrupt moist bullets. Dirt attacking on two fronts, from inside as well as out. How could he cleanse the inside?

  He showered morning and evening and whenever he returned from outside. He did head, hands and feet more frequently at the basin. He brushed his teeth five times a day. He brushed his heart-like cow-stubborn tongue. Towelled orange wax from his earholes. Washing was a race against time, and given the starting blocks of basic stink he was always at a disadvantage. His smell at zero point was a block of concrete tied to one foot, a rope tied tight around his knees.