The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  He read a newspaper article about the two hundred toxins found in human breast milk. Over-concentrations of fluoride and chlorine, the poisons of a benevolent state, and corporate pesticides, carbonates, lead. There was no escaping. Shampoo and soap contributed their own artificialities. The degenerate metal of the shower pipe, the water itself, was filth.

  Muslims wash before the five daily prayers, to be clean before God, to not offend their fellows, and also to consider their moral taints. Old-time desert logic. Logic reliant on water filtered and salted through the rocks of an unraped earth. How do you get clean now? How do you eat clean? For halal meat you wash and pray and calm the animal with recitation and tender strokes before ‘In the Name of God’ slicing the throat. You bleed the animal to drain out hormones. Assuming a world which doesn’t inject the hormones into muscle from the creature’s supervised birth. No such thing as clean slaughter in an industrial age. Too many consumers to fuel. Not enough profit to bloody your margin if you take your time passing out the commodity. Which makes the hygiene laws about as relevant to the internet generation as a Qur’anic education. To make hygiene relevant, Sami was in need of that desert which didn’t exist any more. The Arab desert before depleted uranium and plastic bags, before metal shafts thrust like fingers into the throat of the waste to bring up its black oil. He needed ancient, parched, sterile atmospheres, too dry even for ghosts.

  The child’s screaming worked at his thoughts, shaking his memories out of place and into sight – obscured screaming the rattling background theme to his mental life.

  Under scalding water one showertime Sami remembered a Faris. An uncle. This Faris had visited at least once in Sami’s boyhood, once among the more readily recalled visits of his mother’s family. Fadya, Shihab, old Haj Ahmad Kallas. And Faris. Handsome, neatly bearded, swaggering slightly. Sami remembered him sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea, telling jokes. Nothing like the loon in Fadya’s back room. But he’d come to London, he’d existed. So Nur hadn’t exactly kept the knowledge from him. It was Sami who’d forgotten, until now.

  Back in the room, towelling himself, he heard the high inhuman wailing of the mystery child, keening like seagulls. Let it wail, he told himself. Don’t be angry. He remembered his aunt’s anger as she told the story of Faris. He remembered the question his cousin had asked. I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat? They’d stared at him, waiting for him to respond. As if it had something to do with him.

  The child had ceased wailing. Its forgetfulness of suffering was vaster too.

  And what of sex? Our culture’s first advice to a man in Sami’s position (not much of a man, but perhaps becoming more manly), to a man alone, is: get over it. Get out on the pull. There’s a few more fish in the overfished sea, a few more birds staggering in the sick air. Liberated from the marriage bonds, Sami owned the gift of the new century. Namely, the freedom to choose, to unwrap, to possess. But promotion of yourself as a suitable partner, from what he could work out from a glance at the Zeitgeist, requires a promise of service. And after his decade of marital commitment – all right, sexual commitment; all right, a decade of failure or fear to stray – he wasn’t too sure of his ability there. Sex beyond habit – how was it done? He wasn’t about to trust the body’s instincts, any more than he could trust the heart.

  Back home, lying on his crumpled couch, legs buckled up, not fitting, he had masturbated half-heartedly, sometimes finishing, sometimes not. A sign of his passed youth that these days it took something exciting to excite him. But now in the student room he never started. Another discontinued pleasure. Another horror, the pulsing of the ducts, the alien production of clotted liquid.

  These were some of the reasons he lived autonomously of women. But the main reason was, he harboured hopes of returning to the much more hopefully liberated Muntaha. Muntaha with the doors of opportunity open. He wasn’t going to find better. That was obvious. For him, it was either a recognition of his place with her, if she closed her doors and let him, or some form or other of suicide.

  He spoke to her about twice a week. He’d made three full apologies, for his general selfishness and lack of direction as well as for his specific unfaithfulness. She’d neither forgiven him nor rubbed it in. She just paused to hear it and then raced on, in her own direction. Telling him her plans for a year in Iraq and charity work. Plans which didn’t seem to include him. She wasn’t in need of any of his education. Entirely self-sufficient.

  Many pre-dawn mornings Ammar banged the door, jerking Sami up against his sheets, in the subdued orange illumination that insinuated through the curtainless window, the glow of London’s night sky reflecting the student surveillance lights of the compound.

  Ammar strode in salaaming, Mujahid shuffling behind. They waited for Sami to shower, and while he dressed Ammar would make Islamo-affirmative commentary.

  ‘Sami depressed again. Subhanallah, this gifted brother here, with all the blessings Allah gives him, miserable and depressed. Look at yourself, brother. You’re a Muslim, you’re worth something.’

  Look at yourself. Something Brother Sami didn’t wish to do. Not at the physical surface anyway. He had considered smashing the mirror, but it was institutional property and fixed to the wall. He’d covered it instead with a shimmering green cloth Blu-tacked to its corners.

  The believers waited while Sami brushed teeth and tongue, Mujahid as silent as Sami, embarrassed. Sami flossed, wrinkling a long nose at the presumed chemicals on the thread. He washed them off his fingers. Then Ammar nudged Mujahid.

  ‘Time for Fajr prayer, brothers.’

  Mujahid wheezed the call, and Sami huddled up next to him, toe to toe, black beard to red, and followed the motions behind his brother-in-law. He did it because it was too early for debating. And he did it for brotherhood. As prayer, he told himself, it didn’t count.

  Some mornings Ammar drove them to sleeping suburbs in the north west (less state militia up here, he said), where he stopped to move Sami on to the driving seat. In Sami’s control the car shuddered around the crescents and cul-de-sacs, an oaf in the presence of more monied vehicles. There were detached brick houses overcrept with ivy, occasional shops and pubs imitating village architecture, with whitewash and gables and pretend Tudor beams. Arched windows and rose-trellised passageways. Professionally tended gardens. Bird baths. Churches moated by graveslabs and deep grass. Paperboys. Milk rounds. Things that were extinct further in.

  The car triggered burglar lights when it stalled. An early-riser frowning at them from the even pavement, dressed in expensive tracksuit and paunch. Ammar leaned from the window: ‘Yo, faithless, your time’s coming.’ Mujahid nodded, ready to be the enforcer. Sami felt like nodding too. Out here in the comfort zone he felt put upon, deprived. His vulnerability in the driving seat increased the anxiety. As a driver, Sami was not a gifted brother, his foot cramping with tension on the pedals, his lungs making shallow inhalations to avoid exhaust fumes – breath as juddery as the fuel fed into the engine – his fingers fluttering on the electricity of gear stick, indicator, wheel.

  Sami remembered how it was to feel good, talented, a creature of potential, writing clever essays at school, holding his own in precocious conversation with Mustafa’s colleagues. Talented through other eyes, usually his father’s. Others’ definitions had sufficed him. He remembered sharing whiskey in the hospital room. Jameson’s. His father liked Irish whiskey, said it was less complicit in empire. The kind of comment Sami took with religious seriousness then. The whiskey warmth in his gut made him tearful. Never liked whiskey really. But the compensation was being admitted to the warmth of manly intimacy, credited with the keys of adulthood. He was a prince, an inheritor. The president’s son.

  ‘Don’t worry, brother.’ (Ammar reassuring a shaking Sami, who’d accelerated through a red light nearly into the side of a truck.) ‘You’re safe with your brothers. Say bismillah, nothing can hurt you.’

  ‘If Allah had wanted to,’
Mujahid joined in from the back, ‘he’d have mashed us then.’

  ‘That’s right. We’re in His hands. Nothing happens but what’s meant to happen. Put your trust in Allah, feel no fear.’

  None of this seemed appropriate to Sami, stalled in the car somewhere beyond Finchley in the grey morning, but he couldn’t respond. There was an engine jam in his brain.

  ‘If Allah wanted to…’ said Mujahid, doing something very Irish with the last syllable of Allah. This was his favourite line. If Allah wanted to. This Islamo–hippy. Bush of a beard, flowing robes, jumping the ethno-barrier. Three decades previously he’d have been into flower power, not the power of the umma. If Allah had wanted. Like Allah was a giant fairy ready to swoop down and interfere with every little nugget of human history. For instance, during one of their in-chassis educational talks on the Sunni-Shia divide: ‘If Allah had wanted to, He’d have made Ali the successor to the Prophet. Peace be upon him. But He didn’t want to, so He didn’t.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ammar. ‘So they should shut up about it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sami broke his usual silence. ‘I don’t know anything about it. But it was politics, wasn’t it, after the Prophet? I suppose it’s justified to have a political opinion.’

  ‘If Allah had wanted

  Ammar cut his student off.

  ‘These Shia, they’re kuffar really. They split us up when we need unity. They do the devil’s work whether they know it or not. We have to purge these impurities, brother. Become one.’

  There it was again. Purge, purify, imprison, torture. I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris?

  Some mornings Ammar drove them west, for training. ‘While the Crusaders sleep,’ he said. The early roads still loose as flushed bowels, Ammar would indicate left before swiftly lurching right, or manoeuvre screeching U-turns.

  ‘This is how not to do it, yeah? Not when you’re driving the cab. This is how you lose a tracker.’

  ‘Someone tracking you?’

  ‘You never know, brother.’ Then, noting Sami’s swallowed-lips grin: ‘Nah, not now. But this is training.’

  In slow dawn on Wormwood Scrubs, with Ammar barking whispered orders, they stretched, did sit-ups, press-ups. Military crawls through morning-moist weeds.

  ‘We could do this nearer you.’ Ammar giving the impression of measuring words by the millimetre. ‘Regent’s Park. Hampstead Heath. But we’re safer on the Scrubs.’ And more cryptically: ‘We’ve got it… erm… pegged.’

  Pegged? Reference to tents? The pavilions of the first holy warriors? Sami let it go. There was dogshit everywhere, at this hour like icebergs hidden in a dark sea. They jogged a long circuit. Planes in the cloud above, traffic rumble occult on the horizons. Training finished with a race, which Ammar, spider legs clicking, always won. Mujahid second, with the tighter movements of a crustacean. Sami last, being early middle-aged. Blood tubes in his brain constricted above the ears, chest sputtering like the combustion engine, stealing oxygen, puking carbonate. Now his more urgent race began, to have them deliver him to the student room, and the shower. He had only minutes before the sweat sheen staled on him.

  He jogged to the car when they wanted to stroll. ‘Training’s never over,’ he said, successfully, to enthuse them. He wanted to get back fast, but they wanted to educate him.

  They quoted Qur’anic prophecies concerning cars: And (it is He who creates) horses and mules and asses for you to nde, as well as for (their) beauty: and He will yet create things of which (today) you have no knowledge (Qur’an 16.8).

  Between Westbourne Park and Marylebone they explained how light travels in a day the distance the moon travels in a thousand years, how the Qur’an contains this information. Statistics, equations he didn’t understand. By Marylebone, and the shops opening for business, he had a millennium’s worth of self-stink in his nostrils. New wax in his ears. The Qur’an says the earth is egg-shaped, that the mountains move like clouds, that stars and planets swim in their orbits. Sami swam in encrusting sweat, in brewing shit. The shower, please God, fast. The Qur’an gave hints to brain science, describing the cerebrum – the lying, rebellious forehead! – as the site of lies and aggression. Sami’s forehead yellowed, full of heat.

  But strangely enough, Sami felt at ease with these boys talking science. There was little otherworldly in it. It was his own dirt that made him panic. So to forget it, to keep it at bay, he steered the talk to more local issues.

  ‘How’s everything at home?’

  ‘Fine. Aunt Hasna’s upset. You heard about Salim.’

  Salim. Her good, obedient, Iraqi son. Doctor Salim.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s engaged to a Nigerian nurse.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘That’s right. Without his mother’s permission, of course. Which is not good, if you ask me. The ties of the womb and so on. Otherwise, good for him. She’s a sister. Hausa girl. Muhajjiba.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘My sister’s missing you.’

  ‘Did she say so?’

  ‘Not so much say so. But I see it, man. I know.’

  Mujahid sank in silence on the back seat. Silence all round. The lack of words seemed to stretch the minutes out. So Sami brought them back to their favourite topics.

  ‘What exactly are you training for?’

  ‘The last battle, brother.’

  ‘So it’s coming up, is it?’

  ‘Coming fast.’ Ammar bowing his forehead in satisfied assent at his own comment, as if he’d found a bonus in his pay packet.

  ‘Well, you know better than me on the Islamic thing. But at the time of the Mongols there were Muslims who thought the endtimes were around the corner.’

  ‘Irrelevant. Read the traditions of the Prophet and his companions. The signs are falling into place.’

  Their interest, like Mustafa’s, was ancient and modern, cutting out the centre of Islamic history.

  ‘Palestine, brother. Iraq. Crusader bases all over the Gulf, on holy soil. Vodka-addicted atheists raping our sisters in Chechnya. Brothers in Bosnia blockaded so they can’t defend themselves from kuffar. Hindus desecrating mosques in Kashmir. Oppression all over the umma. But we waking up now. Palestine’s the start of it. Soon there’ll be a world Intifada, and then this training will have a purpose. You too, Sami. There’ll be purpose for you.’

  ‘Is God not purpose enough? Not my place to ask, I suppose, but…’

  ‘God’s not here, is He? I mean His nation’s here, and His rulebook. His constitution. It’s our job to implement His law. To change this state of oppression.’

  Ammar, in the absence of God, must find the absolute elsewhere.

  ‘But if Allah had wanted…’ put in Sami, sly.

  ‘Shit, Sami.’ Ammar slipping. ‘Don’t play games. It’s a different issue. Action is what we need. Allah doesn’t change the state of a people until they change what’s in themselves. You not learning that yet? We need to be ready.’

  26

  Pyramid Power

  ‘Action is what we need.’ Ammar’s sentence reverberated in Sami’s idleness. His pride had already been swallowed, pushed fibrously through his cleaned-up system, and shat out into the bowl of past time. There was therefore no reason why he shouldn’t take the first job he could find. He was even learning to drive, which meant accepting his status as damned and helpless contributor to the Earth’s death – as carbonate merchant. Who was he to resist? The system was greater than him, and he was ready for any indignity, economically speaking. Anything to earn his daily bread. In one evening’s Standard, he read:

  Pyramid Power

  Marketing Professionals Urgently Required

  The Future Starts Here

  No Experience Necessary.

  He pitched his voice to self-sale and called the number. A machine answered, telling him success was waiting riverside at eight every morning. He rubbed his shoes with a cloth and scissored the edges of his beard. Ammar provided him with suit and press
ed shirt. He set his alarm for five, making time to shower and to progress across the city gently enough not to bring forth sweat.

  The address in his pocket named a two-storey building crammed beneath a railway arch. He arrived early and paced the pavement, practising smiles. Some booming vibration swam from upstairs to meet the traffic in fishy embrace. Young, brightly dressed people skipped E-happy through the door. It looked like a morning-after party. Sami even wondered if he’d misunderstood the advert. Had it been cryptic warehouse-rave code? ‘Future Starts Here’ sounded junglistic enough, and of course ‘Pyramid Power’. Rave, or New Age, or Masonic. But Marketing Professionals? How out of touch was he?

  At five minutes to the appointment he pushed the steel door open. A wooden door to his immediate right was handleless and marked with a no-entry X. Otherwise, a stairwell. He had to step through a triangular polystyrene frame to start climbing. An A4 printout reading ‘The Ascension’ was stapled to the apex. He ascended, approaching trance tones, a clickety beat, big booms. At the top, two more doors of unadorned, gouged wood, labelled ‘Initiated’ (to his right) and ‘Uninitiated’. Sami supposed he was uninitiated, and knocked. The door was opened.

  A blonde in business skirt and blouse said ‘welcome’ into his eyes. The South London accent didn’t match the greeting. She ushered him inward and pointed to an imitation-leather couch. A black girl perched there nervous as a deer, hands clasped around slim stockinged knees. The corners of her wide mouth twitched upwards. Sami smiled hello.

  ‘Welcome,’ repeated the blonde. ‘Be seated if you will. A few minutes only.’

  She swished into a back office.

  Sami sat, subsiding further than he’d expected into the couch’s numb reception. The rave sound was quietened, as if the room were soundproofed. His couch companion rolled involuntarily towards him, touched her hand on his thigh to steady herself, and grinned ‘oops!’ to make it friendly.