The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘Matter exists as spherical wave motions of space. The wave centre creates the illusion of a particle. Or, if you like, the illusion of separateness.’ He moved closer until he was breathing her. An Arab perfume. ‘In reality, everything is one. Matter and space and time are one. It’s Islamic, isn’t it? I could rename this one “tawheed”.’

  Tawheed, or unity. The foundation of Islamic thought. The concept that had made them friends.

  ‘Well, it’s very nice.’ It sounded like a concession. Then she added wistfully, ‘Sami would talk about the Bull of Heaven.’

  ‘Bull of Heaven?’

  ‘From the Gilgamesh epic. It was one of his and his father’s favourite stories.’

  ‘Sami’s obsessions!’ He chuckled too richly.

  ‘But it’s art. You can interpret art as you like, can’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so. Let’s move to the next one.’

  He took her arm, and met some resistance. She didn’t want contact in public, perhaps. Or perhaps not yet. Her elbow squirmed until he let it drop.

  Arabs, Gabor theorized, are either sensuous or violent, or both at once. You can see that from the news. Look at her brother, Ammar, who had called to apologize, two days after smacking him, when his bruise was still visible. Ammar described himself as having been ‘well out of order’. Gabor was magnanimous, assuming Muntaha had ordered the apology and would receive a report of the conversation. Ammar had surely got Gabor’s number from her. But as he talked on it sounded like his own idea. Very genuinely, very eagerly, he suggested Gabor hit him back, as a proportional punishment, an eye for an eye. When Gabor had thrice refused Ammar offered him fifty quid, a kind of blood money, he said. ‘Punishment should be proportional. Proportional punishment keeps the peace. I oppressed you, and oppression is worse than violence. So either you smack me back, or I pay. We’re Muslims. This is what we believe.’ Weird.

  The next picture was called ‘Tsunami’. It was huge, from the floor to the ceiling, a wave made of faces which disintegrated into unreadable letters or symbols which could be cuneiform or hieroglyphs. And plants and planets, masks and machines, fire, mountains and streams, all morphing into each other. Colours collapsing into white foam.

  ‘This is the same idea. Same theme. Tawheed again, very Islamic. Endless multiplicity arising from basic unity.’

  Waves are symbols of passion, of course. Gabor’s surged with phallic force. It should have taken her breath away.

  But she said, ‘Why don’t you let me think about them first?’

  So he remained silent. Silence can be powerful. He steered her to the next, called ‘Vision’. An eye with a galaxy in the pupil. The eye in fact modelled on her eyes, black in a black sea, but he didn’t tell her that, not yet. Gently does it, he thought.

  She cleared her throat, or it could have been a grunt of appreciation, or comprehension. Hard to tell.

  They moved to ‘Kitchen Table’, which depicts points of light in empty space – what any mundane object actually consists of at the subatomic level.

  ‘Now this one,’ he explained, ‘is about illusion. Solidity is unreal. Even the particle is unreal, as a solid particle. It’s something we want to see but which isn’t really there.’

  ‘It looks like another galaxy,’ she started. Gabor should have paused and listened to her, but he had too much momentum built up to stop.

  ‘What we see is illusion or, better put, interpretation, and we ourselves are illusions or interpretations, just blips of consciousness looking at themselves. Mirrors hung on the curtains of the real. That’s what we are.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But it reminds me of a hadeeth qudsi. You know, not from the Qur’an but still considered to be the word of God, not of the Prophet.’

  This was the point he’d wanted to arrive at. She was making connections, him to her.

  ‘ “I was a hidden treasure that desired to be known, so I created the creation.” ’

  He waited a respectful moment. ‘So we are God’s self-consciousness, is that what it’s saying?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed resentful of his formulizing. ‘Or not only that. He is greater than our imaginings.’

  On this her jaw closed and she clicked a heel on the tiles as if declaring her withdrawal from a team game. She was putting herself at a distance, and Gabor needed proximity. Proximity enough to measure her nipples between his fingers and thumbs, to weigh breasts and flanks, to annotate her curves and chart her, to claim her for science. To gather empirical proof of her.

  Would it happen, or would it not? He’d been sure of it, and now was radically unsure. Didn’t know where he stood or what the future would be. Like Grandfather Vronsky with his feet sinking into the heaving sea of Europe. But all was not lost. Uncertainty added intensity to the situation, an upgrade in excitement, as from West London to the grittier East. His groin tingled. He concentrated.

  Quiet and predatorial, he followed her to ‘Twins’. The picture showed two faces, one male one female, one black one white, spinning to opposite sides of the canvas from a central point of origin. He’d have said something about electrons paired with positrons, protons with anti-protons, about the work of scientist Paul Dirac. He’d already said that to a journalist, who took a lot of photos of ‘Twins’. But now he didn’t say a thing, only pointed to the caption: Limitless in His glory is He who has created opposites in whatever the earth produces, and in men’s own selves, and in that of which (as yet) they have no knowledge (Qur’an 36:36).

  Paired opposites, you see. Spiritual-scientific awe, you see. Gabor choosing the Qur’an as a source reference for his art, while Sami scorned it. Was this working on her?

  He followed her to ‘Atom’. Another vast canvas, with a grain in the centre, in a void, and specks orbiting at a distance.

  ‘It looks like a galaxy again,’ she said, as if to herself, ‘or a solar system. And it looks like Jackson Pollock, but more minimalist, less expressionist.’

  So she knew more about art than Gabor had presumed.

  They cornered with the wall and walked at her pace through the section labelled ‘Scale Studies’. The first exhibit, ‘Traffic’, involved three screens. One showed haemoglobin, slowed down, pulsing through capillaries. The next, commuters fed through the channels of the tube, speeded up, clotting like platelets at the turnstiles. And the third, headlamps flowing through a road system, on slow exposure so you see rivers of red and blue light.

  No comment from either of them, although she seemed interested. She watched each film twice, in order, as a traffic of guests wove around her. Gabor allowed the distance between them.

  ‘Microchip City’ was on three blocks: two repainted photographs of a magnified microchip, and between them an aerial shot of city blocks. The point being, they look the same. He nearly said so, but it seemed evident.

  ‘Mountain: Triptych’ contained a close-up photograph of piled earth at a roadside, a shot of a mountain face, and a satellite image of the rising Himalaya.

  He didn’t speak until they arrived at ‘Bubble Chamber Tracks’.

  ‘Bubble chambers are particle accelerators that physicists use to make protons collide. When that happens you get new particles, really tiny, just for a millionth of a second before they collapse. But it’s enough time to catch their tracks. They make beautiful patterns.’ He flapped his fingers at the images he’d made. ‘Only a little tweaking makes them roses and roots. Don’t you think they’re beautiful? They remind me of mosque art, arabesques, spiritual abstracts.’

  She didn’t answer the question. Fair enough, it had probably been rhetorical. At least she was looking hard. He waited for her to find the last of the series, a track which he’d developed into a calligraphic Allah, in Arabic. There, she saw it. No clear sign of recognition. No lingering over it. The calligraphy was obvious, but she didn’t comment. So neither did he. Didn’t want to patronize, or to say the wrong thing. She was an unknown particle herself. Gabor could understand her in the zone of
middle dimensions, which is what physicists call our human scale of perception, the size at which traditional physics predicts accurate results, where things make sense. But what was happening in her mind, at the quantum level, at the cosmic level? This he couldn’t map.

  Nearing the end, at ‘Dostoyevsky’s Brain’, Gabor was flipping like a hooked fish to regain the initiative. To make her talk before the final picture.

  ‘You know Dostoyevsky?’ he said.

  She nodded once.

  ‘Of course you do. He was an epileptic, and perhaps for that reason a visionary. Here…’ He touched the cross-section of brain on the canvas. (It was his picture. He had a right to touch it.) ‘Here are his temporal lobes glowing. He’s having a seizure, you see.’

  Muntaha briefly laughed.

  And so they reached the picture called ‘For Muntaha’, the ka’aba inside Bohr’s atom. Dedicated to her by name, a privilege granted to no one else, not to these buzzing media people or to any of his previous women, not to a relative, not even to the memory of dead Vronsky.

  ‘I painted this when I got back from your father’s ta’ziya. You remember the conversation we had that day?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Yes, and a full stop. She wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘You know what I recited while I was painting it?’

  ‘Recited?’

  ‘Recited.’

  ‘What?’

  He pulled himself up to his height, way above her, viewing the slope of her hijab to her spine, and the hair and cool hats of all his visitors, the sparkle of glasses, cameras flashing, people curling their heads to their phones like cats to caressing fingers, and he tried out what he’d practised so much:

  wal-fajr

  wa layaalin ‘ashr

  wash-shaf’i wal-watr

  wal-layli idhaa yasr…

  The multiple and the One. The night as it runs its course. Meaning, tonight. Meaning, now, at last. Out of many, one. One body. The beast with two backs. But her eyes faced the floor tiles. Gabor had a view of the hijab on the nape of her neck. Wasn’t she getting this? Hadn’t they been leading up to it all summer? The lake of meaning in his eyes, the glowering brow, the power and the presence: she wasn’t seeing this at all.

  Her strangeness struck him with a slicing shiver, in his groin and belly and also at the roots of his teeth. Her strangeness was erotic, and it was terrible.

  Gabor spoke honestly to himself. The thing about Arabs – they’re freakish. More like us than Africans are, or Chinese, so like us sometimes they’re almost interchangeable – but the thing an Arab face must have to distinguish it from a European is at least one element of freakishness, of disproportion. They’re like aliens wearing human masks. He feels affection for this: it’s what was Arab about his grandfather, Vronsky. And Muntaha – she’s rich in freakishness, her nose, mouth, in particular her eyes, big like baby eyes, and bigger top to bottom than side to side. A Disney dream of eyes. And her eyebrows like fur, like things borrowed from a black cat’s back. And the shape of her face not what we normally call heart-like but like an exaggerated sketch of a heart, cartoon again. If Gabor has exaggerated, it’s her Arab face that has made him do so.

  She still hadn’t raised her head. Action, then.

  ‘I’ve been here long enough,’ he said, louder. ‘Why don’t we walk over to my place?’

  ‘No. You talk to the others. I’ll look at the pictures a bit longer.’

  ‘It’s walking distance. You’ll see some pieces I’ve been working on recently.’

  ‘No. I should get home anyway.’

  ‘All right. Let’s walk. You’ll love the area. The restaurants we have round here.’ He was like an athlete who wouldn’t reach the finish line. ‘There’s Bengali, loads of Bengali. There’s Vietnamese, Mexican.’ Like a stand-up comedian running out of air. ‘Greek, Brazilian, and fusion of course…’

  ‘No, Gabor.’ She lifted her chin, confronted him with her nose. Her eyes directly on his.

  He picked at her upper arm. He held on to the flesh, harder than expected, which threatened to slip his grasp. Out of pity she didn’t dodge him.

  ‘No?’

  ‘You’ve been a good friend. You’re a lovely man. A good artist, a good teacher.’

  He let her arm alone. ‘These are compliments I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘But I think you misunderstand our relationship. I’m married.’

  He said, ‘Sami isn’t living at home.’

  Irritation flashed like windscreen wipers across her misshapen eyes. ‘What do you know about it?’ Then more kindly: ‘I’m married. Marriages have ups and downs. And…’

  ‘I could help,’ he said stupidly, dry-mouthed.

  What did he mean? Help with what? Help her put her marriage back together? Anyway, she hadn’t heard. He’d croaked, and she hadn’t paused to hear.

  He was speaking into her words, she continuing: ‘… even if I wasn’t married, I’m not interested in you like that, as a husband or boyfriend. I like you as a colleague. I thought you were interested in Islam. That’s all.’

  She blinked, and she turned to go.

  ‘I am,’ he said weakly.

  She said no. She was through the glass doors. Tens of trendy, chirpy profiles were directed at Gabor, scenting scandal.

  She said no, and so prevented the story from moving into the universal territory we can all relate to. She said no, choosing to remain in her particularity. In her own ethnic group, in her religio-cultural space, in what they call a ‘community’. She said no, and made the story a local one. Limited the story’s scope. Her choice, not Gabor’s.

  Gabor slipped out too quickly to attract attention. Walked home, checking his shoulder for the deracinated Muslims who might spill up from Brick Lane. Climbed stairs, and unlocked triple locks. Instead of leaving his shoes in the shoe rack he kicked them off next to the bed. The pointlessly clean sheets. He washed his mouth with tap water and lay down fully clothed.

  It was just him. Gabor and his imaginings.

  28

  Devils

  Sami stepped out. Just walking distance, to a London University venue where the famed Rashid Iqbal would be delivering a speech against religion. Rashid Iqbal: of Indian birth and British nationality, postmodernist, controversialist, author of Taboo Buster, Haris of the Harem, and I-Slam-Slim: Representing Islam, Aggression and the Human Image. Sami’s kind of thing, previously. In fact, Iqbal’s books were on Sami’s shelves, in the house where Muntaha lived.

  It was nostalgia for his previous certainties that brought Sami out, plus the opportunity to disrupt his routine of window-gazing, tight-knuckle driving lessons, and pseudo-subversive dawntime training. And perhaps even sociability. Tom Field would be in attendance, and Dr Schimmer.

  It was the holidays, but the most committed student groupuscules were there in the conference hall’s forecourt and corridors. Such activity was, for the militants, either a prelude to disillusion and drugs, or training too, for more serious, more right-wing lobbying later on. Blacksoc, Leftsoc, Beersoc, Gaysoc, Greensoc, and unformed youth picking among the stalls like it was an early freshers week. Asking, which soc is coolest, and which can I fix a CV for? Which does the best T-shirt? Which will most suitably define me?

  Miniature demonstrations had been organized in specific reaction to the visiting speaker, and they hectored the audience as it washed into the hall.

  There was a huddle of Hizb al-Hurriya girls flapping in jilbabs and niqabs on one side of a plastic, leaflet-strewn table, and skullcapped bearded boys on the other. The boys held banners whose meanings were obscure if you couldn’t supply the context:

  ‘Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq… And Now Our Faith Itself!’

  ‘Truth Is Distinct From Falsehood!’

  ‘War in the North!’ This a reference to ethnic disturbances in the old mill towns, white versus brown, and police versus brown, and Bengali versus Mirpuri, but understood here as Ignorance versus Islam, the original battle.


  On the other side of the queue, activists of the Radical Humanist Society, dressed as logically and badly as scientists, chewing on limp roll-ups, represented the pro-Iqbal perspective, bearing a banner of their own. ‘Outlaw Faith!’ it declared.

  There were also delegations of politicos whose positions were more obscure, such as Revolutionary Solidarity with Third World Peoples, and Class Fight, who were undecided – despite tens of emergency policy meetings – if the struggle against pipe-dream false consciousness should be prioritized, or alternatively, the necessity of winning over proletarian Asian energies, and who therefore changed their accents according to the colour of the nearest listener, and handed out safe pamphlets on the strike weapon or black rights.

  Middle-class whites of the Socialist Workers Party and Revolutionary Communist Party had come simply to show their relevance, entirely avoiding the Rashid Iqbal question in favour of spitting insider insults at each other. Like ‘Tankies!’ Or ‘Trots!’ Or ‘Big moustache boys!’ Or ‘Infantile Leftists!’

  Then, arranged in a secondary ripple of offence taken, at mocking distance from the primary stalls, were the reactions to the reactions. An Out-Rage! posse chanted ‘Mullahs Kill Queers!’ towards the Hurriya crew. The Jewish Students Against Muslim Nazis were also engaged in low-level taunting.

  Tom Field had hooked Sami’s elbow in a pincer grasp, hurrying him through the noise. With the other gnarled hand he flicked at the activists.

  ‘This, in their totality, from religious to secular, right to left, is what we call opposition. What we call, at this late stage, the hope for a brighter future.’ He made one cracked cackle. ‘Feeling optimistic?’

  One of the Hurriya brothers clocked Sami’s beard.

  ‘As-salaamu alaikum,’ he shot at him in level tone.

  ‘Wa-alaikum assalaam,’ Sami shot back. He was thinking of a cynical enough response to make to Tom, and realized too late he’d fallen into a trap.