The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Out of the window and below was the year’s new intake, trusting, fizzy-optimistic, sparkling with the sense of new beginnings. Pitifully vulnerable. And inside again, to Sami’s slowed and pensive eyes Tom was a blur. The man most aware of what was approaching was moving too fast for the rest, for all the slow beasts. Sami felt like a member of the herd. A bison when Europeans cropped America. An Aborigine when smallpox cropped Australia. Waiting for doom. His closeness to Tom meant at least he knew the doom was coming.

  ‘But I don’t need to read them any more. From now on it’s the genuine article. Not metasurvival, but survival. You want a pile?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of these piles is for you.’

  He indicated Pile 7. Something rag-eared on top concerning Sufi responses to Mongol massacres in the medieval Middle East. Pile 7 a leaning tower of Pisa in comparison with the Petronas Towers of Piles 4 and 5, the Chicago-scape of 1, 2 and 3. (Pile 6, to be fair, was as Old World low-rise as 7). Seven or eight lurching books. Was that reasonable compensation? Sami considering himself tragically abandoned once again. His shaikh rejecting him before he’d advanced through the stations of the spirit, so now he would be a mere beggar, not a knower. Merely a shabby, failed faqir. But he got on top of his sentiment quickly. His personal dramas, the paternal-familial if not the philosophical, had burnt themselves out. And his resentment dimmed further with another glance through the porthole, another reminder of the innocents out there, laughing, posing, like him a decade ago, unbruised by the world. Thin shells of bone sheltering inner matter from whatever was coming first, bus-bombs or missiles or tidal waves or plagues. Those with something to lose to the outside, at least, those that didn’t have an enemy already growing inside, some new millennium brain fungus or alien spore ready to burst. Their shouting poked its way in, sound bent by the window angles, the calls of boys and girls wanting to mate, to demonstrate strength and fitness in the time allowed.

  ‘A question, Tom, before you go.’

  Tom dropped discs into a brown cloth sack and pulled its string mouth shut before grunting his readiness.

  Sami asked, ‘Are you a believer?’

  Tom Field squinting, disapproving. Tugging the string of the sack over his head.

  ‘Everyone’s a believer. Don’t believe anyone who says he isn’t. You can’t breathe without belief. In gravity, for instance. How can you step off the floor without believing you’ll come back again? You can’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sami. ‘No. I meant…’

  ‘You mean God, whatever that means.’

  Sami nodded, wrinkling his chin in embarrassment. These aren’t questions to ask in society. Tom was crumpling papers and mounting them in pyramid formation on to a tray.

  ‘Let’s simplify. You want to know what I think to help you know what you should think. Am I right? Well, that won’t work. Either you’re a born believer, meaning you subscribe to a cultural belief like you subscribe to gravity, or you decide for yourself. The latter, in your case. Decide for yourself. It’s a matter of choice.’

  ‘Choice?’

  ‘Yep. And whatever you choose to believe, there’s a good chance you’ll be wrong.’

  He fished a match from the hidden pool of his pelvis, struck it on his palm it seemed like, and in the last act of his tactical retreat lit the papers. They caught angrily. With solemn caveman instinct they watched together the pyre flare and die. Carbonate rising. Carbonate. Tick. Tick.

  ‘Like I said, we all believe in something. It helps to know what it is. Know yourself, in the famous formulation. Meaning, know what it is you believe.’

  Sami sighed audibly.

  ‘More help? All right. Belief is good when it increases knowledge. It’s bad when it doesn’t. If it develops what we can call spirit, or awareness, it’s good. If it smothers it, it’s bad. If it helps you to survive, it’s good. The ex-professor of survivalism tells you this. Asks you. Will it help you to survive, or will it make you an easier target? That’s the way to judge these days. Self-preservation. And now, my friend, I have no more time.’

  Tom made a farewell reconnaissance of the smoky room, ready now to abandon position.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘A lesson from the concentration camps. Those who survive are not necessarily the physically strongest, but those who see purpose in their suffering.’

  ‘Purpose?’ asked Sami. ‘Things are too confusing to work out purpose. Everyone interprets, and it seems arrogant to imagine one interpretation’s more correct than another.’

  ‘There’s your answer, then. Yet you could be mixing up your categories. What a believer does is to find the world significant. You don’t have to know what the significance is. A believer says God is the Knower. Isn’t that right? Your field, not mine.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well then.’ Tom turned to the bare desk and withdrew from its innards a surviving pencil and piece of paper. ‘But wait,’ he warned, although Sami wasn’t going anywhere. He scribbled, and presented the paper. ‘Here. Read it.’

  Sami read it.

  ‘Have you learnt it by heart?’

  ‘By heart? No.’

  ‘Well, do so.’

  Sami did so. The name of a mountain and the nearest village.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘So give it here.’

  Tom crumpled it, placed it above the sparse ashes of the tray. Struck a match and lit it. It floated and danced, free of gravity.

  ‘You never know,’ Tom said in response to Sami’s doubting smirk.

  Once they’d watched the information burn, Tom said, ‘And one more thing.’

  ‘Another?

  ‘A brief thing.’ He paused for effect before delivery. ‘Relax.’

  ‘You’re telling me to relax? You?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look at you. You’re getting out. You’re running. Panicking.’

  ‘Panicking? That’s what I’m not doing. I’m acting. I know exactly why. Beyond that, I’m perfectly relaxed.’

  In the door frame he made his parting speech, a set of recommendations.

  ‘Be as intelligent as you can when dealing with human beings. Take evasive action when you need to, like I’m doing now. But after that, relax. There’s still big nature out there. It’s big and you can’t understand it. So what? War and politics is all part of it. Just relax. Do what you can. Then surrender to it.’

  Sami took the first bus that passed. East through the thickness of the city. He paid no attention to outside. As the vehicle thrummed androckedhe saw concentration camps, refugee camps, torture cells. Insect people leaping from collapsing towers. He considered annihilation. Then his own aching uniqueness. His unbearably lonely sense of being special. The man who put this in him is dead. Dead and buried organic matter. Carbon on its way to being fossil fuel.

  But none of this knowledge hurt him. He descended and walked, without too much heat, balancing terror with lightness. He opened his eyes to outside. Smartly dressed Bengalis hustling and bustling, making money, unembarrassed. A community on the up. Also businessmen from the City checking restaurant windows. Women in suits or jilbabs or tracksuits. The grind and the warmth of human activity. Just relax, thought Sami. He’d turned into Brick Lane, land of blood and beer. The tall brick chimney, a red reminder of imperial pride, behind him. To his right the mosque. Formerly synagogue. Formerly Methodist chapel. Formerly Huguenot church.

  Just relax. If he could suspend disbelief. Just for a moment. Then he can review the experience. He won’t lose himself. He promises. Here we are.

  Splashes cold water on his feet, forearms, head. Then there’s a corridor before a narrow doorway into the prayer hall. A very English building. Hooks for coats and scarves. Wood panelling. The hall wasn’t built to look at Mecca. The direction for prayer diagonal, not fitting the rectangle of the room, so he stands facing a corner. Someone snoring on the carpet. Another man kneeling, clicking beads. Sami sidesteps the thought of h
is Uncle Faris. Sidesteps Mustafa and Marwan, and the female body, and the Intifada, and the Arab nation. For only a glimmer he sidesteps the idea of himself. Sami Traifi, inhaling abstraction, inhaling void. He touches thumbs to earlobes. Folds hands on solar plexus.

  ‘Bismillah ur-Rahman ur-Raheem,’ he starts. Immediately he’s crowded by idle memories, and by his voice, the proof of himself. Breathes a while longer, inhaling abstraction. Starts, ‘All praise is due to God alone, the Sustainer of all the worlds.’ Shudders and stops. When he isn’t following a leader he remembers fragments only. Breathes some more. Just relax. Notices here that he’s broken into two separate pieces: the piece that advises the other piece to relax. The two pieces in fact not two selves but two functions of the words. Speaker and speakee. The order to relax has made him briefly disappear. He speaks from below or above his reason. The Opening Prayer, and another verse.

  Consider the flight of time!

  Verily, man is bound to lose himself…

  He hears himself saying the words internally and asks himself, what do I feel? The question is also words. He hears two sets of words, then. Two selves speaking and one listening. And now another, marvelling at this thought. He splinters. Mirrors looking into mirrors. Photons reflected.

  As many bits of him as stars. And a sky containing the stars. He has only a hint of it. Something overarching and complete.

  He bows, stands, prostrates, kneels. Stands. Folds hands. He concentrates on the words.

  Say: He is the One God

  God the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of All That Exists.

  Repeats this verse until there are only words. And afterwards kneels for five minutes, returning to himself. It has made him calm and peaceful. It has opened something spacious in him.

  ∗

  He stood outside, enjoying the tickle of moving air on his face. The mosque was a blending block of brown brick with white paint on the window sills. High on a wall was an optimistic sundial and engraved above it ‘Umbra Sumus’. We Are Shadows. His eyes craned to street level. Despite its veneer this part of London recalled the imperial-industrial age. It grimly chugged and steamed. Within its narrowness, skulls, mouths and words. Clicking carbon heads. Hanging above them, an immense sentence, being arranged and rearranged. On the street, feet. Pedestrians. And between pedestrians, shades cast by absent Lascars, by Yemenis, Somalis, Malays. The very first Bengalis. If he could stand on the street like rock, like the sundial, he’d see the history of Muslim settlement, the shifting, accumulating sands of his praying, murmuring brothers and sisters. If he weren’t trapped in time he’d sense a brotherhood even larger than that, with all the others offloaded at the docks, Russians, Chinese, Irish and Jews. And with the rural English arriving by land, coming to the slaughter. Brotherhood.

  The miasmic sky opened above his head to reveal a spot of blue. The world was significant. He allowed significance to massage its way in. Then decided he might eat some curry. Until time gripped him more firmly than ever. Gripped him and jerked him by the beard.

  He felt the touch of two hands from behind him, between his shoulders and the nape of his neck. He thought it must be an acquaintance playing that frequent but unfunny trick. Expected sweaty clumsy fingers to wrap his eyes next, and a voice to ask, ‘Guess Who?’ So he prepared himself to be graciously amused, and primed his ears to identify the coming voice, to get on top of the situation. But no voice came, except his own voice spluttering, ‘What?’ and a sudden whirl as of one of the scarier fairground machines and hard arms bending his arms behind his back and pressure on his scalp and the flinching glance of a grey-skinned passer-by and his own sense of guilt breaking in his mouth as he was bundled into the back of a car. Sticky seats. All too fast for him to know he was surprised. There were plastic cuffs on his wrists, and a face in front of his, close-up, wearing a gummy grin.

  ‘Hi!’ it said. ‘I’m Jeff.’

  Shortly afterwards he was in a police station, once again. But unaccountably, for this time he’d been behaving. Acting grownup. No drugs or long sleeplessness. No Bikini Girl or centaur hallucinations. He gave his mother’s name for next of kin, copied out her number from the list on his mobile. How things had changed.

  He was taken to what he presumed from TV experience to be an interrogation room, and was sat on a chair across a table from two more. For twenty minutes on the wall clock he was left alone. He thought of Uncle Faris, picturing the TV flicker of light on his prematurely old, unresponding face, and in the intervals when the picture faded he snatched at Qur’anic half-lines as they danced, just out of reach, behind curtains of forgetfulness. He resolved to buy a good Qur’an, the heavy black bilingual Qur’an that Muntaha liked, when he got out. He formulated it to himself like that, when I get out, as if he would be inside for a significant time.

  In came his interrogators and sat opposite. On one chair the man called Jeff, whose fat hand for most of the numbly silent car journey had patted Sami’s knee, Jeff in jeans and blue rugby shirt, and glumly smiling. On the other chair, leaning at him, a slack-faced, brown-haired woman. It was their heavy-plotted seriousness which showed an interrogation was coming, and Sami thought, fair enough. All summer he’d been trying not to face interrogations, detention chambers, the rest of it, torture and terror, too Third World to fit this scene, but still. He was ready. The effort not to look at the truth could no longer be sustained.

  ‘Country of origin,’ the woman snapped.

  ‘Britain.’

  She repeated, ‘Country of origin?’

  ‘England. I was born here.’

  She slapped the table. Jeff scratched an ear and wanly smiled. ‘We mean originally,’ he said.

  ‘Syria. If you mean where my parents came from.’

  ‘Syria.’ The woman sneered at a notepad. ‘Isn’t that a Muslim country?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sami. ‘Yes, it is.’

  Of course it is. He visibly flinched from himself when he remembered his childhood answers to the question. It’s a Mediterranean country. Would you call the Mediterranean Muslim? What else? It’s a mixture of everything really. He cringed now at his previous denial as much as he’d cringed then at the imputation that he had something to do with Muslims. Why deny what’s in front of your nose?

  ‘Muslim country,’ the woman said, as if listing charges. ‘False name. Suspicious appearance and behaviour.’

  Sami frowned back at her.

  She was called Kate. Jeff revealed this when she asked Sami how he’d celebrated the burning towers. ‘Oh Kate,’ Jeff said, with dramatized tolerance and hurt, playing good cop.

  Why was Sami in this situation? The burden of the beard, he supposed. The burden of belonging. Just when he was sorting himself out the external world took a lurch for the worse. Yet another. Tom said those who survive are those who see purpose in their suffering. Not much suffering yet in this episode, granted, and no purpose in it that Sami could see. But significance, yes. It assuaged his guilt, the guilt that wasn’t his but Mustafa’s. He hadn’t betrayed Britain or the American ally, he was paying for older treasons.

  All relative. He paid not with his blood but by tolerating wilful stupidity. He even wore a tolerant expression (smiling inside to Muntaha) as they asked him, in staged off-the-cuff style, about routes to Kabul, or what he thought of the film Braveheart, didn’t it fire him up, all that violent resistance to occupation? At one stage they went into a stock routine, rapid-fire and repetitive, demanding his name, address and date of birth, Jeff grinning through it all and Kate determinedly snarling, but tripping themselves up, tangling their tongues on the questions as if only in the twenty minutes before they came in they had skimmed freshly downloaded Israeli disorientation techniques.

  Sami didn’t know if he’d been arrested or not.

  ‘Just having a little chat,’ said Jeff.

  ‘I think either I should get a lawyer, or I don’t need to talk to you.’

  Kate said, ‘You still get your lawyer, but it isn’t going to
be nice. Thousands of people have been killed. Times have changed.’

  ‘They have.’ Jeff sighed.

  ‘This is a matter of saving lives.’

  Sami considered what was coming now, after the planes, after the towers. The New York events were big. Not as big as the media thought, not in comparison with Beirut or Baghdad, but big. Big for the First World. The events were historically big, and the response would be too. In Britain he expected a two-pronged attack of, on the one hand, co-optation and Working Together rhetoric –nice cop – and on the other, some heavy security work by the cerebrally challenged, like these two, clearly unable to distinguish Wahhabi nihilists from the plain dull religious, or even from the vaguely, perhaps, spiritual, like Sami. And there’d be a predictable political attempt to paint everything Muslim and oppositional in the same bloody colour. Would that work? Depended on to what extent Marwan’s theory was true, the theory Muntaha had told him about: that the English are trusting and sheeplike, that they believe what they’re told. Marwan had never articulated the idea in Sami’s presence, although according to Muntaha it had been one of the old man’s favourite themes, and Sami supposed this was because Marwan was being polite, that he considered Sami to be a sheep. And perhaps Sami had been. Certainly trusting. If not in the news, then in Mustafa’s official version. Certainly deluded.

  Kate said, ‘We don’t believe you’re Sami Traifi. We’ve had him in, you see, Sami Traifi. The real one. He doesn’t have a beard. He takes drugs, drinks alcohol. He’s an innocent whose name you’ve adopted.’

  ‘We have his parents next door.’ Jeff apologetically spreading hands. ‘They say you’re not him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jeff. ‘I am. I’m sorry. It’s a shame. And so’s all this conflict between our peoples.’

  ‘You’ve got his father too?’

  This upset Kate, who waved a finger across the table. ‘You leave him alone. Leave Traifi and his family alone, you hear me? He’s the kind you kill, isn’t he? You consider him a traitor. An apostate.’