The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  It reminded Sami of Palestinian families in the refugee camps, and their useless keys sometimes brought out of a cabinet to show to a guest, sometimes hooked on a nail in the reception room, thicker and heavier than keys of today. The image extended. Entire countries, and pasts: houses without keys. Houses no longer homes.

  ‘And what should he do?’ Fadya continuing. ‘He couldn’t marry. He couldn’t work. He cries and has bad dreams. Look at him.’

  But the door had closed, and Sami had seen enough.

  ‘You mean to say, aunt, that the man in the next room is my mother’s brother? Faris?’

  Fadya nodded twice.

  ‘I didn’t know about this. I’ve never heard of an uncle called Faris. My mother didn’t tell me. I wish she’d told me. She should have.’

  Sami didn’t talk to his mother, not any more, because she hadn’t talked to his father, even when he was dying, and because she’d betrayed his father’s secularism by wearing a hijab. She’d stayed in London after her husband died. Lived alone, and worked in the man’s world of a halal butcher’s shop. And now she’d humiliated her son. She must have known he’d visit her family in Syria one day – and she’d let him grow up without telling him this essential piece of family information, about her brother.

  The cousin who’d mentioned the Qur’an spoke again, this time very quietly and without defiance, as if only to himself.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat?’

  And the other cousin asked, almost wistfully, ‘Who betrayed him?’

  ‘Well, there’s a question indeed,’ responded Fadya. ‘Faris told only close family members he’d joined the Brothers. Not including his little brother, who was too young. Of course we didn’t speak in front of children. There was the danger they might repeat what they heard. So it was only us who knew.’

  Everyone’s eyes rested expectantly on Sami.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  Aunt and cousins waited, eyes unmoving.

  Sami stood, shouldered his bag, took two steps towards the inner door. Manners as well as curiosity suggested he should make his new uncle’s better acquaintance. But something stopped him. And then a flush of anger followed that impulse as if to clothe its too obvious nakedness. What did he want with broken Islamists? And Sami was too old to be discovering new relatives.

  That’s the way he left. Seeing himself out, without any eastern courtesy. It was too much information of the wrong sort, this Faris story. Nothing that would help his thesis or his fraying life in London. Sami endeavoured not to let it set him off course. And in the wind and the muffled city sound and the blanket of warmth it was easy not to think, easy to forget.

  But before awakening with a bolt into the next day’s voice-cluttered dawn – his last dawn in Syria – Sami dreamt an uncomfortable dream. Of a galloping and a heartshaking. An acceleration of hooves. Sami beginning to run, slapping into boughs, becoming entangled in newly sprouted undergrowth, his feet disobedient. Unable to push the panic from his brain into his body, into action. Horse saliva showered his neck. He could feel its breath. He opened his mouth to scream.

  Yet in place of the scream he heard a mighty crash, and its aftermath, a backdraught of air. He wheeled around to see the dead horse, which was not at all cartoonish. An ordinary, dead, brown-flanked, sweating horse, with only one difference from the normal model: this horse wore the face of Sami’s dead father. Mustafa Traifi’s face, elongated to fit the equine muzzle. Hence the bolt of awakening.

  Sami had never before been visited by his father in nightmare form. All his dreams of him had been burnished memories, night nostalgia of the kind that occasionally provoked wholesome tears. There was nothing wrong in the father-son relationship, nothing except the fact that the father was dead, had been dead for sixteen years, was dead, embalmed and mummified. Mustafa Traifi, porcelain sepulchre. Mustafa Traifi, enshrined in Sami’s head. The only member of Sami’s family who Sami had no problems with. None at all. Mustafa Traifi who’d shown his son the stars, taught him his history, protected him from womanly superstition, planned for him a career – all this before the boy’s sixteenth birthday, before turning still and cold in snowy North London, leaving Sami alone on this dried ember of a world.

  So nothing wrong in the father-son relationship. Not until now. Bubbles were rising – marsh gas, deadly methane – from the trowelled-up earth of Sami’s brain. What could it mean?

  It took him all the hot morning, until Uncle Mazen dropped him at the airport, to regain his frozen-hearted cool. Sitting in a grey area of the departure lounge, against the evidence, wishfully thinking, he pieced together his thesis theory. And beyond that, the pride and peace of mind his achievement would provide him, the improvement in his marriage, the future of professional success, respect, wealth.

  And then in this transition between worlds the hashish of his thoughts momentarily released him, and he lucidly conceded that things were complex, that nothing was simple. There were paths other than the one his father had trodden. Other, but not necessarily mistaken. Paths taken, for instance, by his wife, or by his mother. Other, valid paths. He conceded it just for a few moments. It would take a summertime for the realization to sink into his core, corrosively, like salt into snow.

  2

  A Mirror for Sami

  To avoid hostile airspace the plane looped east and north over sudden desert before turning west, above dry brown hills and valleys like scar tissue, and green mountains, and then to where the shining sea and the sky spat photons at each other. The gnaw of the engines, and the carbon spreading behind them into the fizzing, popping sky. Sami watched until the dazzle hurt his head, too narrow to contain it, and called for wine and paracetamol, slammed shut the plastic blind, and set to thinking. Arrowing westwards like his father before him, faster than the sun to where the day was younger, he thought of the past. Of the wife he was returning to.

  What had he first noticed about her? That her laughter was like the scattering of birds? That her eyes burnt their target in soft fire? Or was it just that she seemed preordained, that she measured up to something he was waiting for?

  Summer 1991. The British Museum. Life stretching before him like a creature to be conquered.

  He’d had previous girlfriends, if girlfriend is the word. Perhaps ‘willing victim’ is more suitable. Not that he was fierce. It was a mutual victimizing, and as innocent as looking in a mirror: he was prey too of the grainy sensation-hungry English girls he found clustered in dance halls or in the student-union bar, drawn so easily, by their own momentum, into his careful net of difference.

  And what was he hungry for? Sensations, certainly. He was twenty-one years old then. But also, more importantly, he hungered for confirmation of the difference he flaunted. Like a tiger that killed in order to be assured of the sharpness of its teeth, he sought the sensation of his own reality. He observed his image in the (frequently dilated) eyes of women. The girls too saw in reflection what they wanted to see of themselves.

  The image he saw in his conquests’ eyes was a definite, deliberated image, constructed of solid elements. These included, firstly, Arabism. He had come to terms with what he now described as his heritage by means of a transplanted nationalism in which the significance of signs had swivelled away from their original focus. He often sported a kuffiyeh, either the black and white check of the (first) Intifada or the red and white worn by Syrian labourers and farmers. A member of his class in Syria would never wear one. Wouldn’t be seen dead in one. But this wasn’t Syria. To distinguish himself from the students who wrapped kuffiyehs around their necks like braces against the whiplash of adulthood he wound his tightly around his head, actually in a Kurdish style. He wandered about the campus with it, above a firm expressionless face, as if wearing it were a question of asserting rights. He also wore it in the bar, and during lectures. He had a T-shirt of the Palestinian flag, and another which read Darkness Never Lasts in both languag
es. On top of these he wore a crinkly black plastic jacket with ACID written on the back. It communicated, he felt, a fine mix of hedonism and anti-imperialism.

  Recycling third-world meanings: again, there was nothing special about him here. From body tattoos to nose rings, his contemporaries were all at it. Striking poses, claiming allegiances. Sami’s allegiance, in memory of his father, in homage to himself, was to a sexy version of the Arab world.

  And Muntaha was an Arab. A proper Arab. Baghdad-born, she had an accent. The way she dressed, tidy and formal, declared her. So did the careful way she walked. Her movements and her speech were upright and courteous. She was every bit as Arab as the kuffiyeh he checked in the mirror before leaving his flat.

  How he’d loved mirrors in those days. A couple of years before then he’d accepted his face only reluctantly, and only after hours of precise mirror-bound analysis. If he compared his face with the English people’s, there was something overdramatic about it. A face that was trying too hard. There was too much crammed in, too much life. The features were too big, too expressive for his English-style emotions. They suited someone else. Someone foreign. That’s what schoolboy Sami felt. But with his maturity, in his university years, he came to amicable terms with his appearance. He was an Arab, was all. He contrasted well with the blandness of Englishmen. The English girls believed so, and he could see the evidence himself. His full, tasting, mobile lips. His passion-heavy eyebrows. His pale unblemished skin. His curls. He felt love for the face he’d been ashamed of before, and compensated with pouts and meditations which pulled him in to the centre of the reflection, into the dark dreamy eyes. They made him dream of his destiny. Of poetry.

  Poetry: the second element of Sami’s identity. He’d done his first degree in Arabic, and he’d known for years that, as his father had before him, he would write books about Arabic poetry. Modern stuff, not old. He kept sleek volumes visible on tables in his flat. He carried them with him to meetings in bars, the better to explain their importance. Poetry still mattered in Arab societies, he expounded. It was appropriated by pop singers. It had political relevance. And Sami had grown up on the simple, revolutionary language of Nizar Qabbani, language which smashed both literary and social conventions. This was particularly important. Its eroticism, secularism and defiance all contributed to the sexiness of Sami’s Arabism. And Mahmoud Darwish, national poet of Palestine, was a further source. Sami would gloweringly recite Darwish in Arabic to the bar girls:

  Record! I am an Arab

  And my identity card is number fifty thousand…

  I have a name without a title

  Patient in a country

  Where people are enraged…

  Beware…

  Of my hunger

  And my anger!

  Poetry wove a web of wonderful origins: jasmine-scented, fruit-laden, tasting of dusk. Even the despair in it seemed romantic. Despair which expressed a nobility of perspective.

  Add to these jazz or hip hop for embellishment and you had the theme tune to Sami Traifi. Black music, Arabism and poetry: these were what he considered himself to be made of.

  And Muntaha was a girl it was easy to read in poetic terms. To visualize her skin colour Sami had only to think of the crops of the earth. The colour of mature wheat on a Levantine afternoon. The darkest olive oil. Her skin which looked smooth as butter and felt smooth as milk. He had to speak like Qabbani to describe to himself what he meant. The feminine flow of her compact body, thickening like a trapped river towards her hips. And her voice, the disembodied projection of the body, the intermediate station between body and soul, soft, various and intelligent in its gentle penetration of his ear. There was also harshness in its depths. It spoke with incense breath. It sounded like the voice of home. All this was poetry. And that her name, Muntaha, meant The End. That it sounded like Moon.

  Poetry too in their meeting. Summer 1991. They were in one of the Mesopotamian rooms at the British Museum. Sami turned from an ancient diadem and glimpsed her, the kind of woman who would have worn such jewellery. Muntaha was caught in sunlight (was there a window in the room, was there a clear sky that day? He remembers the atoms dancing around her, the light and shade). Gazing at the Sumerian ram and tree, a gold and lapis offering stand to Dumuzi the shepherd god, she didn’t notice him. She was entirely still, like an exhibit herself. A Mesopotamian woman in communion with Mesopotamian art, about to launch herself from its past into Sami’s life.

  This was the sort of meaningful coincidence that the inexperienced believe is only found in fiction. People like Sami believe this. It seemed to him that there had once been meaning in the real world, when he was a child, before his father died. But to his adult brain meaning had become diffuse, scuttling out of sight behind curtains, draining through floorboards and through the cracks beneath doors. Meaning had left the earth with his childhood reflection and taken up residence in a realm of artificial images, where it was caught, concentrated so it could be tasted. As he read the final page of a novel and then sat still until the traffic outside or rain against the windowpane retrieved him. In poems, of course. In the fullness of his heart at the climax of a film. In the music which released a hormone flood into his bloodstream. Even an advert could make him alert and tearful. These triggers detonated his soul (though he would dispute this word) like a baton swung against a gong. Not God’s real world that made music of him but the worlds made by men. But here, in her Sumerian shapeliness, in her awe-struck eyes trembling before the ram, and in what followed when she looked at him and began to speak, was the shiver and the stern inner silence, the moment of clear vision prompted only by art.

  ‘Does this have a special meaning for you?’ she addressed him in Arabic, as if continuing a conversation.

  ‘It does. How do you know that?’

  ‘You were looking at it with such passion.’ Her accent confirmed she was Sumerian, Iraqi.

  ‘And so were you.’

  She smiled. ‘Tell me why it’s important.’

  ‘My father used to bring me here. This was his favourite exhibit. I suppose it makes me feel nostalgic. And why is it important to you?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s important or not. It depends on what you’re looking for. It’s beautiful, and very old.’

  ‘It comes from your land. You must be proud of it.’

  She laughed. Birds scattering from the tree. ‘I’m from Iraq, not Sumeria. We have different gods today. Gods with moustaches.’

  Sami laughed too.

  She had met his eye and begun walking with him as if introductions were unnecessary. He liked that, particularly from someone not born here. Tradition over there demanded introductions, and false modesty, and all kinds of pointless etiquette. Sami considered tradition a concrete and formidable enemy, and saw her immediately as Qabbani’s new woman, self-created from conflict with the East.

  He listened as they stepped from Sumeria to Babylon, from Babylon to Assyria. She spoke through pomegranate lips. He was already captivated, already entranced.

  ‘I learnt about all this at school in Iraq,’ she said, ‘but it was taught only to make a point. It doesn’t mean anything until you see it yourself. Of course I saw the museum there. They took us three or four times and marched us round. The teacher read nationalist poetry and made speeches about the people and the leader. I had to get away from her to feel what it meant.’

  He allowed her to talk.

  ‘It didn’t make me more proud to be Iraqi. It made me think how strange it is to be human. Believing in your gods, thinking you understand things, making beautiful statues, and then dying and waiting for people to guess who you were. The teacher said it showed the eternal nobility of the Arab nation. Maybe that’s right too. It can mean different things to different people. But you have to get away from other people’s ideas to know what it means to you.’

  For him, the real world held no surprises; it had to be turned into poetry first. She was saying the opposite. That it’s necessary to
escape from poetry to see the world in front of your nose.

  The world in front of her nose made Muntaha overbrim with excitement; that was clear from her breathing, from her expressions, her tone of voice. He presumed she was excited by him.

  They walked around the British Museum from Egypt to India to Mexico. They observed each other sideways. He noticed the luxury of her hair, and her beauty belatedly made him nervous. He moved heavy eyes, an anaesthetized tongue.

  Fighting the paralysis of this awe, Sami started to take the lead, showing her round, explaining things. This was a pattern that would continue through the coming decade. Here in the museum, spending too long on the wall plaques, he asked himself what he could teach her. Not much about the Arabs, he expected. But jazz and hip hop. Probably sex. He knew more about those than she did.

  He did most of the talking. She seemed to be encouraging him.

  ‘You know so much. Did your father teach you all this?’

  ‘I learnt a lot from him, and a lot after him.’

  She noted the implication of his father’s death, this most important fact about Sami.

  ‘I like knowledge,’ he said. ‘It puts you in charge of the world.’

  They’d stopped speaking Arabic once they left the Iraqi rooms. She’d been in London for all her teenage years, and was used to meeting people in English. To him, English felt more natural. And her voice was still more authentic in her second tongue, tripping a little, rolling too much. He decided never to correct her pronunciation.

  ‘How does it put you in charge?’ she asked, with more range of tone than a native woman. ‘I thought money did that.’

  ‘The world respects money, yeah. But knowledge lets you see straight. That’s the advantage.’

  ‘Knowledge illumines the mind,’ she said, ‘while wealth darkens it.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s a good way of putting it.’