‘Well, good. That’s the main thing.’
‘Thank you, Sami. Thank you, habibi.’
She skipped around the table to bestow a string of kisses. He inclined to her neck and nuzzled there in the slender softness, as slender and as soft as a decade previously. Her sigh, her trembling, permitted him, so he directed her to the stairs, helping her with a hand between her legs, pushing her up.
Afterwards she showered while he lay, dead to thought, on the bed. She came back dripping reflected light, towelled herself unselfconsciously before him. She revolved as she worked, turning from the orange window through degrees of her own shade. Turning on the axis of her mystery. Sami, wordless, closed his eyes. When he looked again she beamed at him, her glowing planet of a face ringed in the sea-blue garment she had pulled over her head. He grinned without mirth.
‘You’re not going out like that.’
‘No.’
She faced into shadow to start her prayer. Standing with head bowed, eclipsed, hands crossed over hidden breasts, silent, still, intense. Sami could hear a car stereo, waves of traffic, birdsong. The innocence of the world. She leaned forward, fingers he imagined webbed on her knees, raised herself erect again so far her back arched inward, and sank slowly to the floor, prostrated.
Mental activity crept back like a sullen rat. What he would tell his supervisor would be the failure of the city to end superstition, the failure of modernity. He remembered how many more Damascene women wore hijabs than on his last visit, the gathered brown pollution cloud over the city, the rattling plane as it attained height, the closeness of the entubed air. And here, how carbon in the atmosphere made dusky London softer. It was jungle music out in the street, children fighting in a muddy garden. A ball banged off brick. Signs on the tube walls. He wondered where his tube pass was.
Muntaha stood, pulled off her prayer cloak, naked, everything springing into place.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s the Asr prayer. Just in time.’
He couldn’t prevent himself. ‘Is all this necessary?’
She wore her tolerant expression. He saw her ribs move as she sighed.
‘Not strictly, no. What’s necessary is modesty. Everything in its time and place, including the body. I know the arguments.’ She sat on her side of the bed, putting on underwear. ‘The Qur’anic ambiguity. That the Arabs always covered their heads but the women before Islam kept their breasts uncovered. I know the best veil is in the eyes of men. I know what Fatema Mernissi says.’
‘Qabbani says…’
‘I know what Qabbani says too. But the hijab is what Muslim women wear. And I want to wear it as well. It’s as simple as that.’
At risk of losing his composure, Sami restrained his voice.
‘I thought, Moony, I thought that we stood for something else.’
She said, ‘We don’t stand for anything, Sami. Don’t be silly.’
12
A Family Visit
Rebuked, quietened, Sami sat beside her on the train. This the first journey he’d made with Muntaha and the hijab. He supposed she must look prim in it, prudent and stern with the motherly calm she’d assumed since he’d voiced, once again, his agitation. He shouldn’t have done that, not before a journey on the tube, not before a public showing.
There were four viewers to see them in the carriage. Firstly an old Jew in toned-down Polish clothing, black hat and coat but no ringlets, no fur, reading the Jewish Chronicle. A well-established – if still religious – suburban sort of Jew. Next a long, thinly featured black woman, with fingernails occupied in wave-frizzed hair, also at home, also at ease. And then a fatigued pair of suited natives shooting out unembarrassed glances, mumbling to each other news of the fat, round world, him and Muntaha now part of it. Sami supposed they must look like a proper Muslim couple, what with the hijab, Muslims out on dark business, their trauma children and a string of austere relatives left behind in an unfurnished overcrowded room. Four or five children already, that’s what it probably looked like. These two Muslims at large.
Sami was thirty-one years old. He reflected on this. In his mind’s eager eye he looked twenty, at a stretch twenty-two. Twenty-two next to Muntaha – Muntaha aged, in reality, twenty-eight, and in a hijab. Did he look younger than her, then? Unlikely. Her skin was unravaged, her eyes fresh, while his bore the marks of nicotine, alcohol, insomnia, oversleep. Un-Islamic capillary damage. He hoped that was apparent, the un-Islamic part.
It was less difficult in the street, because darkness hid them. They avoided conversation; this, her carefulness, a reminder of his instability, his unsuitability. A fragile fellow, Sami, swiftly provoked, a little unhinged.
There was more rebuke waiting. Aunt Hasna, Muntaha’s stepmother, stoutly imposing as she opened the door, uttered the correct welcome for a returning itinerant: ‘Thank God for your safety.’ She stood aside for Muntaha to slip into the corridor, but blocked the way for Sami, glaring at his boots until, cold-faced, he removed them. Muntaha looked back to observe: Hasna in charge of her house, like a real Arab woman. Unsmiling beneath a spreading nose Hasna made a quick nod, to register victory, and allowed him to pass.
For all its lamp-lit islands the al-Haj sitting room remained sombre. A bulky flatscreen TV glowing in one corner. There in front of it, reduced into an armchair, teary and dribbled-mouthed, was Marwan. His wasted limbs sticking out of him like drought-struck branches. Cropped grey hair like the doomed stubble of last winter’s sparse rains waiting to be uprooted by the wind. Lips and skin the same colour. His body packed, inexpertly, into grey gellabiya and dressing gown, the shape filled by his chest seeming disproportionately large. Sami, in a rush of dizziness, was reminded of a hotter, dryer, but equally gloomy room, in Damascus.
Taking the air in sips as if it were unpleasant medicine, Marwan wheezed in Sami’s direction, ‘Welcome, welcome,’ and frowned at the effort this cost him.
‘How are you, uncle?’ Sami advanced to lift and squeeze a brittle hand. ‘Well, insha’allah?’
Marwan made a sluggish blink, cast brief warmth on his daughter, and settled back to the TV. It looked like the news. Sami released his hand.
Muntaha removed the hijab and shook out her hair. Aunt Hasna kept her hijab on, for she wasn’t Muntaha’s mother and so theoretically, very theoretically, Sami could marry her. She could be halal for him, according to sharia, and so he was haram for her. Strands of dyed hair escaped at her sturdy neck.
‘Your father’s no better,’ she said. ‘His strength isn’t returning yet.’
The room smelled like burst tomatoes and simmered minced meat. Hasna sat on stocky, boneless ankles and spooned the food into her husband. She’d grown in these last years with the padding and thickening of extended domesticity.
She had grown in power too. Her importance had ballooned with the size of the exile community. No shame now in a London life: all the best people were here. (‘Hasna, it’s unlivable at home,’ her ladies told her. ‘The situation, it can’t be expressed.’) In addition, she’d had immediate cause for pride when her doctor son, her youngest, arrived from Iraq. A practical help, her bright son Salim, coming to check on Marwan every other day. Speaking with real Iraqi courtesy and a real Iraqi accent. Not like these British children. Doctor Salim. She’d be able to marry him to the finest class, to some ‘daughter of a family’ as they said at home. Several of her old acquaintance – well-bred Baghdadi ladies – had recently made the migration, and several had daughters or nieces of the highest quality.
These ladies bore witness to the old days, the old glitzy social life. Hasna took the wives of generals, professors, surgeons to Bayswater restaurants, and as an act of charity she always paid. This is how she profited from sanctions.
She’d entrenched herself in the al-Haj home, her family photos mounted on the walls. As the space became hers, as the bus ride to her old flat became tiresome, her Iraqi memorabilia had moved in too. Karbala tiles propped against window sills. In t
he hallway, a wooden chest inlaid with mirrors, bearing a Kirkuk ceramic urn. A copper brazier on a copper table at the bottom of the stairs.
Down these stairs and into the sitting room sloped Ammar. As he entered, Hasna left, carrying spoon and bowl. Ammar skinny, vulpine or weaselish according to the light, shaven-headed in a skullcap, with drooping, wispy beard and a hard-set expression. Obedient to one interpretation of the Prophet’s sunnah, his upper lip was plucked bare. He wore a baggy, long-sleeved shirt. Printed in green letters on black background: Islam: The Only True Religion. He surveyed the room darkly.
‘As-salaamu alaikum,’ he intoned.
‘Wa-alaikum as-salaam,’ his sister responded, with raised eyebrows and smiling eyes.
‘Yeah, cheers,’ said Sami. ‘How are you doing, Ammar?’
‘How was the homeland?’ asked Ammar, with only a touch of irony.
‘The homeland?’ Sami in satirical mood. ‘The homeland? I wasn’t visiting a bantustan.’
‘Whatever, brother. We’ll talk later.’ They embraced, then Ammar arranged himself cross-legged, straight-backed, in the line of the television. An Intifada documentary. Muntaha spoke softly to her father from a stool at his side. Sami lounged on the sofa. Ammar increased the volume.
The documentary focused on the bombing of the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv at the start of the previous month. Twenty-one Israelis killed. Tony Blair expressed personal sorrow at the deaths of people who looked and behaved like his own sons. Not so much sorrow over more numerous Palestinian deaths. Palestinians were people who didn’t go to nightclubs. People who threw stones at jeeps in the open spaces of their refugee camps. People who didn’t look like little Blairs.
Sami couldn’t feel very sorry about the Israelis, but he wondered about the bombers.
‘How can they do it?’ he said. ‘How can they go like that to their deaths?’
Ammar’s head swivelled around.
‘You’re thinking like an Englishman. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. These brothers will be granted jannah. They’re the most honoured of our community.’
Muntaha frowned at the screen. She asked it, ‘How would you react if your country was stolen?’
‘I mean,’ Sami continued, ‘how can they be calm enough to choose their moment? How can they be fired up and cool at once? It’s not like dying in battle.’
Muntaha said, ‘I suppose believing makes you strong enough to do anything. And they’re used to self-control. At roadblocks, checkpoints, crossings.’
Ammar, a finger raised, feigned a quietness wholly alien to him: ‘The Last Day will not occur until you fight the Jews and defeat them. Then the trees will call out, “O slave of Allah, a Jew is behind me.” All except the ghardaq tree.’ Addressing the reported words of the Prophet to nobody in particular, his gaze filmed over. ‘You know what the ghardaq tree is? The Jews do. They’re planting it all over Palestine.’
Sami was a little amused – and slightly comforted – to hear Muntaha speak in the tone she used in the mornings, or in his agitated evenings.
‘Don’t you think, habibi Ammar, that the hadeeth may have a symbolic meaning?’
Ammar vexed. ‘Symbol of what?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘Sister, be very careful. You’re about to say the hadeeth isn’t true.’
‘I’m saying it may be true, but not literally.’
‘True is true. I thought your Islam was growing.’
She answered slowly, calling him Amoora and habibi. But just as Sami felt himself satisfied with his subtle wife in conflict with the simpleton, felt himself on the same side as her, she left with Ammar for Ammar’s room, to pray.
Sami said ‘fuck’ inside his head.
Marwan lifted a stick arm towards the TV. ‘What will be their response to this, the dogs, the pimps?’
Sami shuffled over, taking the vacated stool. ‘They’re killing us anyway, uncle.’
Marwan turned to Sami, and seemed to resent the exertion. He resented Sami disturbing his private ruminations. In truth, there was a great deal he resented in this boy. His snivelling self-worth, for instance. His uncalled-for vanity. His vision of himself as above God’s law. I seek refuge in God from Satan, Marwan thought. From the whisperer of trivialities. From the boy’s refusal to submit himself to system. And what was this boy who refused to work? Who’d pranced around the university for over a decade, and probably would for ever after, until death seized him by the forelock and shook the stupidity out of him. Who was always too young to have children, to take responsibility. There was no wisdom in him, no sobriety. He was a boy, a mere boy.
‘Why,’ Marwan coughed, ‘do you not join your wife in prayer?’
‘Not my thing, you know, uncle.’
Marwan thought: Belief is a duty. It isn’t a choice. It isn’t something you pick up in the market because you like the colour or you have enough coins in your pocket.
He’d expected more from a son-in-law, but he supposed he had no right to. He should have done more for the girl, guided her better. She’d married in a registry office, not a word of religion mentioned. Marwan hadn’t presumed to interfere. And what an apt punishment this Sami Traifi was, this failed Syrian, this fake Englishman, neither fish nor fowl, its head full of froth – what a terrifying reminder of Marwan’s early self, floundering in the hollow words of men. He was conscious of the shame of it still, as keenly as if he’d repented of it only that minute. It prompted further leaking of the eyes. My God, he thought, supplicating, let this just punishment expiate my sins and save me from the fire on the Day of Standing. Have mercy on me, unworthy slave that I am.
Now he looked at Sami with the expression of someone emerging from the sea. Labouring at the task of injecting oxygen into sluggish, pulpy blood, blue-faced, he opened his mouth, waited for the impulse of language.
‘I will die,’ he said. ‘I want to see my grandchildren first.’
Sami squirmed on the stool, then contrived to chuckle.
‘Don’t say it, uncle. You’ll be with us a long time yet.’
Even now, could the boy not talk like a man?
‘We all will die. You will die too. And what will be left of you?’
Marwan trembling, betrayed once again by his body. This short lifelong struggle to balance an oily bubble of selfhood atop this body, a bubble of consciousness, of pure idea. To balance it steadily so it wouldn’t pop. Inevitably a losing battle. Who can hold the sea back? Who can still the wind?
And Sami, horrified, seeing blood on his betraying hands, not answering, or perhaps making sounds – ‘O no, uncle, but hmm, but yes’ – didn’t know what he could do to satisfy them, these people, this old Arab. To bring children into this ending world? And what else? To fall into the role of patriarch? To grow a beard? (Always, with Sami, issues returned to hijabs and beards.)
At that moment Muntaha returned, and gloomy Ammar behind her, like night chasing her daytime, and she saw her father’s flared nostrils and fury.
‘Baba, what is it?’ she cried.
‘Uncle is a little upset,’ said Sami, surging to his feet.
‘Pimps,’ spluttered Marwan. ‘Sons of pimps and dogs and whores.’
As Sami left the room he heard Ammar’s attempt to soothe: ‘The Jews, Baba, I know. Don’t worry. Justice is coming. Don’t worry yourself. God is greater than them.’
At the stairwell Sami passed Hasna’s solid, flat-mouthed face, inexpressive but ever judgmental.
‘Bathroom,’ he mumbled, banging up the stairs.
Spreading Rizlas and grass on the cistern, he skinned up. His hands worked against his spreading bulge of belly. Already he was assuming the shape of his uncles – squat, solid, barrellish. Thick-blooded Levantine market men. Cancer had rescued his father from that, just in time. The shirt adhered to his sweaty back. He spat into the toilet bowl. This wasn’t going well at all. He’d been behaving, for fuck’s sake. He’d been doing his bit, for Moony, and nothing
worked out, and everything went wrong.
There was no toilet roll in which to fold the signs of his spliff, only a bottle of water set on the linoleum floor, so he hoovered up the stray tobacco and seeds with his mouth, and swallowed.
He stood on the front step to smoke, watching the fierce, foolish street, empty of sense and divinity. A dog barking. A distant siren. Boozed-up men loping from the pubs. It was chucking-out time. Cars trailing exhaust. Carbonates accumulating, spiralling upwards to the point of critical mass when the catastrophe would begin. More traffic, and raucous voices left hanging on the air, and more pollution, ticking, ticking, grains of sand through the waist of an hourglass. So there was, perhaps, divinity somewhere, at least in the shape of judgment, waiting to fall. Sami heard his heart beating deeper and deeper till it shook all his body and drowned the traffic noise.
He hadn’t heard the door swing but here was Ammar at his side, taller than him, gathering himself for a declaration.
‘Still smoking the herb, I see.’
Sami looked at the spliff and didn’t bother replying. It was clear enough.
‘That’s bad shit, man. It’ll do you no good.’
‘Bad shit, is it?’ Sami cocked an eyebrow, lifted the side of his mouth.
‘Yeah, I know what you want to say. But those days are well over for me. I’ve repented of it. I’ve sorted myself out. Allah is forgiving.’
‘Anyway,’ said Sami, and took a long drag.
‘Yeah, anyway. I knew you’d be smoking. But I didn’t come out about that. I came to congratulate you.’
‘Congratulate me?’
‘Yeah. Congratulations, brother. Mabrook.’
‘Congratulations?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you.’ Ammar extended a steady hand. Sami observed it, bewildered.
‘Congratulations for what?’
‘For Moony, brother. For her becoming muhajjiba. It’s been a long time for her to do it. You must be proud.’
‘I must be proud?’
‘Fuck, man. Why do you keep repeating everything?’
The Road from Damascus Page 12