The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  So it was a relief to be freed from this. His health was degenerating too. As loyal as a sheepdog – a dog in English is a fine and trusty animal –Jim Clark arrived to organize another transition. Shaggy, stumble-footed, he led Marwan between hospitals and government bureaus to confirm again the official existence of his bad back and persistent limp, plus now the laboured beating of his heart. Jim did the talking, ponderously, with significant nods and movements of the eyes.

  Marwan’s retirement present was a cup overflowing with empty time. What would he do with the yards and folds of it? He interested himself in the children’s homework and exam revision. He expanded his daily routines, walking to the mosque for every prayer and spending twenty minutes after each glorifying God on his prayer beads. He did press-ups in the afternoons as well as the mornings. He reread his collection of pamphlets, finding comfort in the repetition. He memorized more of the Qur’an. Still there was time.

  He explored further afield, on wide-ranging circuits of Arab London. To the Syrian grocer’s on the Uxbridge Road where he bought olives and salted balls of cheese. To Moroccan stalls on the Golborne Road where he drank steaming bowls of harira against the weather and listened to the gruff, almost incomprehensible Franco-Arabic of the market men. To cafés on the Edgware Road or upstairs rooms in Kilburn where he smoked a narghile – his one occasional vice – between voluble Egyptians and Lebanese. He stepped around plotters, journalists and other exiles, and closed his eyes to the vulgar young Gulf tourists.

  He walked alone, uncherished, but the city softened to him by degrees. He expanded his acquaintance. Before long he had hand-shaking knowledge of more than two dozen men. Shopkeepers, security guards, eternal students and tourists who’d lost their way home, a poet, businessmen, embassy staff, waiters and managers of restaurants. He knew their names and origins, the storied versions at least. He presented himself as a mild critic of his country’s regime, but a patriot, who’d settled in London for the sake of a good job (perhaps he exaggerated its importance), and who was now waiting for his children to finish their education before returning home. Most of them talked of going home, even the Palestinians from disappeared villages.

  They bought each other lunches or glasses of tea or pipes to smoke through bawdy or fantastical narrations of Haifa or Beirut, Cairo or Riyadh, or of London itself, what scandals they had heard or seen or imagined. They talked a lot of politics, but seldom involved themselves in the opinions they gave, cloaking every thought in so many layers of irony or parody that even the speaker of a statement rarely felt sure of its intention. They preserved the survivalist suspicion they had brought with them. There was a lot of laughter in these meetings, and the steam of vain words again, but Marwan allowed himself the indulgence. He wasn’t engaged to words this time. That was the difference. He didn’t have faith in them any more.

  On warmer days he would walk on to Hyde Park or Regent’s Park or Queen’s Park, worrying his beads to excuse himself from the cafe‘’s frivolity or from the corruption of the streets. On these days women were more than usually naked and lovers more than ever intent on flaunting the drunkenness of the body. He would choose an unoccupied bench and flick non-committally, inviolate, through a pan-Arab newspaper until he fell into a doze punctuated by cloud-interrupted sun. Then he would awake from kinder parallel worlds into a brief bitterness, sour and cramped, before he remembered himself, stood up, and limped towards the nearest mosque.

  It was in the Regent’s Park mosque, after Friday prayers, that marriage was proposed to him. He was kneeling far beneath the dome as the congregation picked its way past those still stationary in prayer or meditation when the face of Abu Hassan, a huge and craggy Baghdadi, loomed close. Eyes burnt from deep sockets in Abu Hassan’s bone-white cheeks. Tufts of brownish hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. He wore a grey suit and an open-collar pinstriped shirt for the mosque, but Marwan saw him always as he usually encountered him, with a triple-extra-large Union Jack T-shirt pulled shiny tight across his barrel chest. Such was the uniform Abu Hassan had selected for the staff of his Queensway shop, which sold royal regalia, novelties and tourist goods. In among the plastic patriotism that made his living, the policeman’s hats and postcards of mohicaned punks, Princess Di dolls and rubber caricatures of the prime minister, he looked like a toy himself, with his simple movements and uneven proportions, like a bear-sized, vastly overgrown child. Like many people that big he was an unexpectedly gentle man, happiest at home with his little wife and his shipwrecked sister, Hasna. It was for Hasna that he clutched Marwan’s arm in the mosque and announced, ‘My brother, marriage is half of religion.’

  Hasna’s first husband had been an officer and party member who at the close of an illustrious career of casual barbarity had committed the folly of idealism. He had intervened to avert an entirely irrelevant act of murder or torture. As a result, he was exiled from home, property and reputation. In sullen recognition of her duty Hasna had obliged herself to go with him, to London because her brother was there, leaving her adult children behind. It was hard for her to forgive her husband, so she didn’t. She put her energy into building a shrine to Iraq in the tiny flat they bought, representing her sacrifice in an iconography of lost bliss, in photographs of family and in traditional craftwork items she’d never been interested in before. She bemoaned her reduced circumstances and ignored her husband until, with admirable promptness, he was thrown down dead on the linoleum kitchen floor by a tremendous shaking of the heart. Then she kept the shrine for religious purposes only, and moved into her brother’s house.

  Marwan seemed to her a steady, uncontroversial man who would spring her no surprises, and she was largely right. He made few claims on her. She found him regular in his habits and respectful, if also uncommunicative and on occasion suddenly harsh. His children were polite although secretive and wayward, and at least half English, particularly the snake-eyed boy who refused to speak his own language. She moved Ammar into the living room and took for her and her husband, purged of its supernatural posters, the bedroom he’d occupied. She did her best with the dank little house which was not much more than stairs, corridors and cupboards. She double-glazed the rattling windows. She painted the living walls, but the paint never really dried. She overstocked the kitchen with food, and invited guests at least once a week.

  Marwan remembered to thank God for his blessings. Hasna was a handsome woman, large and white, round-eyed, round-faced, round-bellied. Her breasts were rich and heavy circles. She contained as much femininity as he could bear. He felt properly human when he was imam for the prayer at home, with his wife praying behind him, as if his body carried weight and consequence.

  Sometimes at night or in the deserted hours of the morning when the children were at school and habit made him think himself alone she found him weeping without noise or reason. It was only because she saw him that he realized he did it. In such ways she made him more lucid. He was thankful for the light, this shrivelled man who did his duty and tried to do his best. Ammar barely noticed him. And in his daughter he provoked only a dull ember of love, half extinguished but burning still. Light in the warmth of a glowing heart.

  9

  Muntaha

  Muntaha loved her father, but she was embarrassed by him.

  Like all teenagers, she wanted to fit in. The usual desire to belong increases in proportion to the feeling that you don’t, and she, with her stumbling sing-song accent and instinctive politeness to teachers, knew she didn’t. But it was more than that. Beyond adolescent narcissism, teenagers want the world to fit together better than it does. Their childhood assumptions of jigsaw accuracy in the world’s interconnections have given way to anxiety. They realize there are pieces missing, that the edges are jagged. Muntaha considered her world especially awkward, and for this she had a good excuse. She’d arrived when she was twelve, straight into school at an age when coolness and conformity are the big issues. She had to work it all out very quickly.

  Her f
ather didn’t fit her memory of him, so changed he was since his imprisonment and her mother’s death. And he certainly didn’t fit London. People looked at him in the street. It had nothing to do with his race. Muntaha is darker, like her mother was, and anyway there are enough dark people about for people not to notice. So that wasn’t the reason. It was the way he looked at others, and the way he moved, as if he was guilty of something. His limp more like a shuffle, he walked sideways, like a crab, and then twisted himself straight before stepping forward again. Muntaha knew how shameful it was to hold that against him. It wasn’t his fault. But it wasn’t a question of fault. It was a question of fitting, beyond morality.

  The way he dressed annoyed her. She tried to make him buy smart clothes, at least new clothes. He got his jumpers and jackets and trousers from Oxfam and Age Concern. Said it was vanity to spend money on clothes. She half agrees with him now, but then she was a teenage girl who understood clothes to signal qualities beneath the surface.

  He wasn’t part of the image she wanted for herself. Girls at school called him shifty. ‘There’s your shifty dad!’ they said, when he came to pick her up at the end of the day. She told him not to come; she’d walk back with her friends. For the same reason she never wanted to go shopping with him. On Saturdays when they went to the market in Kilburn she tried to walk three or four people behind him in the crowd, and frowned to show she was there under protest, just in case any of her friends saw her.

  At school she’d found a clique to fit into. Six or seven or eight of them at a time, very conscious of their exotic charms. Muntaha plus Nita, Lakshmi, Asma, Jenny, Randa, and then temporary members, Pakistanis, Indians, Jamaicans, Arabs – depending on who was beautiful that month. Beauty was the criterion, and being brown. Jenny was Irish, but very brunette. Blondes didn’t qualify.

  The other thing was, they didn’t have sex. They practised eyelash flutterings, bestowed smiles, stopped conversations almost as soon as they’d started them. Kept boys enthralled. But no sex. That way they attracted more interest than the girls who did it, than the ‘slags’. Boys competed to see who could make them give in first. In Muntaha’s case, nobody won. When it happened, with her husband, with Sami, she didn’t give in. She gave herself, very consciously.

  It wasn’t religion that made her guard her chastity. She wasn’t interested in religion then. She was conscious of what her father would feel like if he discovered she’d been sleeping with boys. It would have made him feel even smaller, even more of a failure. But that’s not what stopped her either. Her clique stopped her. Like most teenage decisions it was a group decision. They were chaste for the same reason other girls were trying to have sex and to let everyone know. Just to be cool. To fit together by being a bit different.

  She had to have extra English lessons for the first year. After that she was one of the best students in her class. She had the advantage of spending her free time reading. The TV was downstairs, in her father’s room, so she never watched it. She only went down to make cups of tea or for meals. She made the meals. Otherwise she sat on her bed for hours in the evenings reading Victorian novels. Dickens and Hardy. Wuthering Heights. Middlemarch. It meant she couldn’t join in conversations about Eastenders, but she soon had a bigger vocabulary than your average West London girl. There was a teacher who made a big deal of it. She put Muntaha in front of the class with her hands on her shoulders. ‘This Arabian girl speaks better English than the lot of you, so-called British children included.’ Called her Arabian, like a flying carpet. Even that didn’t dent her reasonable popularity.

  Her favourite teacher was the history teacher, Mr Sorrel. He was a self-declared member of what the tabloids were calling ‘the loony left’, and an overt social engineer. ‘My job as a teacher,’ he announced, ‘is to create a classless, multicultural society.’ And, more pertinently to history lessons: ‘If we stick to the curriculum you aren’t going to learn anything that’ll help you understand the news. Nothing that’ll help you understand how this country has shaped today’s world, for better and worse, mainly for worse. The curriculum won’t teach you about the Falklands, or the Middle East, or Ireland.’ Except he called the Falklands ‘Las Malvinas’. So they did Cyprus and Portugal and the Miners’ Strike, each student choosing a project. Muntaha did the 1920 Iraqi Revolution against the British. But after a term Mr Sorrel was told to stop. It was causing fights. Cyprus caused a fight. So did the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Knowing the world didn’t make it easier to live in.

  Those classes were what made her decide to study history as a subject at university. She was interested anyway, because she came from somewhere else, because she couldn’t take her present position for granted. She knew she came from ancient depths, like a fish emerging from dark water, knew it was her turn in the historical process to emerge now for an instant into distinction. The generations a stream rushing uphill, and then a waterfall crashing in silence, into caves. Everybody coming up looking around themselves at the world, and waiting for the hidden descent.

  The descent her mother had already made. The fact that Mouna had died in Iraq by thuggish mistake, that she’d never seen the streets Muntaha was living in, wouldn’t have been able to imagine them, added to the mystery. Muntaha was aglow with the strangeness of it. There was no dividing line between her personal circumstances and what was discussed in Mr Sorrel’s class. Beyond the beauty clique, she fitted, jaggedly, into historical narrative. She even dreamt about it. Nearing the top of the Up escalator, her brother, Ammar, pressing close a step behind, her weathered father with his head lowered in front. Everybody going up and falling down in fated order, but the view on the ascent looking different to each. And here she was with familiar foreign London as her view, free to examine any corner she chose.

  She met Sami for the first time in the British Museum. It’s a good memory. They spent an afternoon walking around the rooms together, and it was all very natural and informal. Accompanying a stranger, leapfrogging over conventional greetings to intimacy, in Iraq it would seem very untraditional, very ‘modern’. But the distinction is a false one. Nobody anywhere lives in smooth connection to the past. Only the shape of tradition remains, only folkloric stuff for tourists. Only oppression justifying itself as tradition. Muntaha has nothing against tradition – she even wishes it existed – but she understands its absence. Whereas Sami was impressed by her supposed victory over it, astounded that she’d become his girlfriend, as if she was doing something revolutionary. As if Iraqis don’t have relationships. Sami in his dreamworld.

  She didn’t need dreams or miracles. London was more than enough. And then him in it, walking close enough to produce electricity. He was very handsome, with the bluish pale skin some Syrians have when they keep out of the sun, and deep black eyes, and blue-black, curly hair. A face you could see his feelings roaming about in, it made no difference that he tried to hide them. His body well enough put together. And she could tell he liked her – he got nervous around her – which is always exciting. Muntaha infected by him.

  In the museum she allowed herself to be led. They didn’t touch, but later she remembered being taken by the hand. She trusted him as if by intuitive recognition of her fate. She let him do most of the talking, about the Egyptians and Assyrians and the various exhibits. It was clear he wanted to show off his knowledge, and she appreciated that. If a man wants to show off, that’s a good way to do it. And she probably liked him being so talkative because her idea of a man then was someone as depressingly silent as her father, who you could barely squeeze a word from. So when she already knew what he was telling her she kept quiet. She even pretended surprise, rounding her eyes and raising her eyebrows, to encourage him.

  He was thoughtful, obviously intelligent. They had a lot in common, a lot of shared references. But not so much as to be predictable. He was more English than her, without trying. He seemed to fit. He took the place for granted.

  He took himself for granted. He was brought up that way, which
was not necessarily a bad thing. It was fine until he stopped believing his own myth. His arrogance was tempered by a vulnerability linked to his father’s death. It was his father who’d filled him up with self-belief, so his dying when Sami was young undermined him and made him bearable. All kinds of trauma nestled in that event, all kinds of scar tissue. Sami didn’t talk to his mother. He still doesn’t. He blames her for not loving his father enough. A coldness descended when Muntaha tried to talk seriously about it. Sami became wintry, and she had to change the subject.

  After the museum she met him a couple of times with Ammar in tow. Ammar entering his hip hop stage, and Sami very proud that he could hold his own there and be an intellectual talking about that too. On the second occasion he gave her a lapis and silver necklace, lapis lazuli being the trademark of Sami’s gifts to her for reasons related to the Sumerians and their first meeting. But much more touching was the poem he’d copied in both shaky Arabic script and surer English translation, on a folded sheet of paper crammed into the lid of the jewellery box. Not his own poem, but one by Nizar Qabbani.

  Do not say my love was

  A ring or a bracelet.

  My love is a siege,

  Is the daring and headstrong

  Who, searching, sail out to their death.

  Do not say my love was

  A moon.

  My love is a burst of sparks.

  Who would be able to resist it? Not her.

  These symbols had great importance for him. There was one night early on when she, whispering with that sound-modesty imposed by the dark, called him ‘amri’, my moon, and he started quoting Qabbani’s ‘Bread, Hashish and Moon’ about the moon being a narcotic for the Arabs: