The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  But Ammar realized he’d come out of character, and mumbled ‘istughfurullah’ under his breath.

  ‘Excuse me. Yeah, you should be proud. It’s a rare thing in this country, a modest woman. A woman with religion. A very rare thing. These Englishmen don’t care if their women walk around topless. These women, anyone can have them. Even our women in this country, they got the sickness too. That’s the tragedy.’

  ‘Our women?’

  ‘Look at them, just look at them. This is Babylon, man. No, I mean this is Jahiliya. The days of ignorance.’

  Fortuitously, a couple of pub women were staggering on the other side of the road, supporting each other, laughing. Mini-skirted on the hot pavement.

  ‘Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

  ‘You should, Sami. You should. You’re a very lucky man. You’re blessed. You’ve got a diamond as a wife instead of a dog. A real lady. A diamond wrapped in silk.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Sami. ‘You’re probably right.’

  He was talking to her brother after all. And she was a diamond, true. He remembered their lovemaking before the tube journey, her skin rosy in the evening light, the slack buoyancy of her breasts, and her tenderness. He breathed gently, forgetting the incident with Uncle Marwan. A meaningless incident, the product of an invalid’s irritability, a passing shadow. Marwan would have forgotten it too.

  Sami’s brain was floating easier in its fluid at this close of day, and he listened to his brother-in-law with something approaching equanimity. Ammar was just a bit of an enthusiast, was all. Hip hop last year and radical Islam this. Sami felt fondly towards him.

  ‘I know you, Sami,’ he was saying. ‘You’re a Muslim underneath it all. You’ll find yourself. You’ll sort yourself out. It’s just – and don’t get vex now – it’s just it’s better if you sort it out soon. These days, you see…’

  And he paused here, with significant eye contact.

  ‘These days are important days. You know what I’m saying, not any old days. The other side knows it, so we should know it too. Look who they’ve got for a president now: Born-Again Bush. You know who he represents. The Christian Zionists. The Crusaders. History speeding up, man. Tings coming to the end. That’s how to understand Palestine. They want the Jews back in Palestine so the Last Hour will come, which they think will be a benefit to them. Oh ho…’ – Ammar, greatly amused – ‘… oh yes. That’s what they think. But the point is, everything’s speeding up. When the major signs of the Hour come, they’ll follow one another fast. And the signs are coming, falling into place.’

  Sami, suddenly disorientated, wants to go home. It’s been a long day.

  ‘All I’m saying, Sami, brother, is it’s time to wake up. Know what time it is. You’re an intelligent man. You can see it. In these times now, we need every Muslim awake.’

  Sami stepped on his butt and went inside. Feeling suddenly very spliffed in the furiously sober house, guarding eyes which he felt to be bloodshot, he said goodbye to Uncle Marwan and Aunt Hasna as politely as he could manage. They watched him as if they knew something he didn’t, something out of deep history. Muntaha wrapped her head for outside. Then Marwan gave him a parting line.

  ‘I want to see them,’ he said, ‘before the end.’

  Walking in the street, Muntaha asked: ‘What did Baba mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Palestine.’ He saw her from the corner of his eye, her hijab. ‘Has your brother not heard of the feminist movement?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The emancipation of women. The suffragettes. The modern world.’

  ‘What’s he been saying?’

  ‘He’s been congratulating me on your hijab.’

  With a burning smile: ‘He’s excitable, Ammar. He’s young.’

  ‘He’s very fucking excitable. “Allahu Akbar, brother. Mabrook for the hijab. Allahu Akbar, brother. Mabrook for the jihad. Yeah man, a thousand mabrook. Big up the Muslim posse! Booyakka for the Islam crew!” ’

  In his imagination mimicking his brother-in-law very accurately, Sami danced along hip hop-style, cutting the night with jerking hands. Muntaha failed to laugh.

  ‘He’s probably a bit confused as well. He came here at the wrong age. He isn’t comfortable with himself.’

  ‘Oh everyone came at the wrong age. No one is comfortable with themselves.’

  Now it was Hasna’s turn.

  ‘“Oh these children. They don’t know what hot flushes were like back home. They’d have grown up better if they’d seen hot flushes in Baghdad.” ’

  She snorted a little. Nearly a laugh.

  ‘The miserable menopausal bitch,’ said Sami.

  ‘Sami, calm down. What are you angry for?’

  ‘And then my uncle, my father-in-law.’

  He affected an exaggerated Iraqi accent: ‘“The pimps, the dogs, the sons of pimps and dogs, God destroy them, the donkeys, God destroy their houses.” ’

  Silence from Muntaha, her eyes forward, her skin taut.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Further silence. A lake of silence.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yes there is. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I said nothing.’

  ‘You’re not talking to me.’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘No you’re fucking not. What have I done wrong?’

  The silence. The hijab.

  ‘What the fucking hell have I done to you? Don’t be so fucking temperamental. Talk to me.’

  ‘Be quiet, Sami.’

  ‘Well fuck you.’

  On the tube there was only the rattle of carriages, the flash of advertisements, the rustle of someone’s newspaper opposite. The lifestyle section. Muntaha glowing blackly in her heart. Two places away, Sami coldly fixed, infuriated to be wrong. Here was their lifestyle. The train shot into the dark.

  And at home he built another spliff, superstrength to be dramatic. Interspersed tokes of brackish smoke with slugs of whiskey from the bottle. The yellow tang dulled by the smoke. When he came into the bedroom she was praying the Aisha prayer. He went to the bathroom and fumbled the shelves like a burglar, searching for pills, for toothpaste. He clattered and banged. Things fell to the floor. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  13

  Death Number Two

  Muntaha could look forbidding when she wanted to. At school. The skills of a prizefighter first entering the ring, before the uncloaking, these were the skills required of a lady teacher. Sucking at her lower lip. Arms folded and legs apart. Eyes and skin and mouth tight. Communicating: Don’t Mess. Or trotting the tarmac yard, bobbing her head like the fighter, or like a fly girl, and also grinning. Too self-aware to take the pose seriously, although she could do it on the street without the grin. It was part of the theatre of everyday living, and it could make the difference between being attacked or not, whether in the playground or coming back from the shops.

  There were other means of protection, such as the children growing their first beards who called her ‘sister’ since she’d started wearing the hijab. Boys that age should call her ‘aunty’ if they knew anything about Islamic manners. But this was respect of the street variety, pronounced without a t, with a sweeping movement of the hand, and she wasn’t about to surrender any ammunition. Wryly she called them ‘brother’ in return, signalled irony with her eyebrows, smiled a downward smile. So it seemed that her mockery of their respect concealed deep wells of true respect, which was exactly what they wanted: her theatre to reflect theirs, and both hinting at a purer realm beneath.

  As a result of these strategies, she had no fear of playground knives. The Muslim posse would look out for her. Furthermore, she knew like any sensible policeman when not to get involved. The boys and girls so publicly smoking spliffs, for example, dangling loose-trousered legs over the school wall, giving each other blowbacks or pulling smoke expertly through cupped fingers –
these wanted only to be confronted. Confrontation would make their day.

  Her final source of strength, of this world, was Gabor Vronk, the man she patrolled the playground with. Gabor, her age but exuding the confidence of maturity, with his solid gaze, his firm face, his height, his muscles, his glowering brow, Gabor who considered himself Muntaha’s protector. He had presence, a forcefield of it, which intimidated and deterred. Around him, like electrons around a nucleus, children danced in perfect order. They were sucked into orbit as he strolled the yard, and then, at increased distance, they fell back into chaos.

  As well as protector he was her devotee. They paced beside the mural which walled the premises – religious and ethnic community symbols overwebbed with gang motifs – through the brands and bling which assimilated the tribes, through evidence of the drugs culture, the common denominator. They patrolled and talked, swapping ancestor stories. Gabor told her of his Russian, Jewish and Hungarian roots. She told him, in heroic version, of Marwan’s flight from Baghdad, of Mouna’s murder, and about Ammar and their stepmother Hasna. Gabor listened more than he usually did. The dark depth of her voice impressed him. And during their patrols he developed a lively and passionate interest in tawheed, the Islamic doctrine of unity, the oneness of God and the fundamental oneness of the creation emanating from Him, the One Origin of all. Gabor was taken by the idea, which fitted his own interests, both scientific and artistic (he taught physics and art). He was taken by her, his black-eyed guide. The curve-voiced Iraqi who’d given him a Qur’an to quote, a big, beautiful, expensive copy, with copious footnotes.

  Gabor was also an artist. He recognized beauty wherever he looked: in the molecular structure of grey concrete, in a woman’s wheatish complexion, in an exotic idea.

  His art was often based on scientific concepts. Science and art. The material and the spiritual. He’d concluded that the borders between the two perspectives are entirely artificial.

  Take the Big Bang. Here is what contemporary cosmologists say: Once upon a time there was nothing, no time, no space, nothing but an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense dot of everything. And then one day (but not actually one day because this was before days, and not then because this was before chronology, and not even before, because this was before before) the dot exploded. The explosion still continues. You and I are part of it. We look out at the stars moving further apart. We reflect upon ourselves, our beginnings and our ends.

  And version two.

  God was a Hidden Treasure who wanted to be known, so He created the creation (Hadeeth Qudsi).

  He says to it Be, and it is (Qur’an 19:35).

  Are, then, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were once one single entity, which We then parted asunder – and We made out of water every living thing (Qur’an 21:30).

  And it is We who have built the universe with power; and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it (Qur’an 51:47).

  Gabor saw no contradiction. He told her so.

  What Muntaha called tawheed sounded to him like basic relativity: properties are not only themselves, they are other things too. Time and space, for instance, are not the separate qualities they appear to be. Matter and energy are different manifestations of the same underlying substance. And, by extension of the principle, so too lightness and heaviness, light and dark, life and death. What manifests itself to our weighty, failing brains as diverse and multiple is, from an ultimate perspective, unified, singular, one. The great sameness from which all difference is born.

  To apply one aspect of Einstein’s theory: bodies are slowed-down energy. Weight is slowness, tardiness. Lightness is speed, and ultimate lightness is the speed of light. A body that we call dead is only slowed down a little more than usual – sluggish blood congealed, ticking heart halted. And what of the soul, the Godstuff ? The Qur’an tells us the soul is from God, or of God, and also that God is Light. What travels at lightspeed is not limited in time. There is no beginning or end for it, no before or after.

  Ten days had passed since Sami’s visit to his father-in-law. Marwan had been sleepless for those ten days.

  Apart from the years of poetry when wine and love had kept him awake he’d always managed to sleep, in brisk, dreamless six-hour spurts, from ten or eleven until he rose for the Fajr prayer. So insomnia distressed him. He experienced his wakefulness almost as a dereliction of duty. There were unpleasant associations with his unsystemized early life, which like now in a different climate had been filled with empty time.

  He didn’t know what to do with time. He’d have read the Qur’an, but it tired him, his eyes would not see. He could never be sure if he was in a state of purity, so difficult it had become to keep track of his dribblings and evacuations, and he coughed and spat involuntarily on the sacred verses. He’d have read his pamphlets on sharia but the very thing that had reassured him before – that he knew them word for word – made them tedious to him now. The dull rhythm of the sentences played like a repeated sequence on a hollow instrument, again and again, hectic and fast until it hurt. He began to suspect that these sentences too, as much as his versifying, had been a vanity, a waste of time. His life had passed quickly, and he still wasn’t old, not in years, yet these strings and loops of time, all this time, weighed upon him. It was an intolerable burden, and so much heavier now when he didn’t have the strength for it, when he couldn’t manage to break it up with sleep.

  Worse, he knew the insomnia was a precursor of something. Not only death, which he hoped would bring reward, but some great labour looming. Whatever the thing was, he wasn’t sure he’d manage to do it. He had butterflies locked up in his disordered intestines, flushes of adrenalin, a weakness unrelated to his physical problems that reminded him of exam days at school and university, of waiting for the critics’ reception of his first published poems, of the first night he slept with Mouna. Memories he didn’t want but couldn’t help. Mouna laughing. Mouna painting the flat. Driving with Mouna on mountain roads, buying fruit from villagers who barely spoke Arabic. Mouna’s breathing and his as they made love. Waiting on the stairs, chain-smoking, outside the hospital room where Muntaha was born. His daughter dancing on the kitchen table on her birthday. Toasting Ammar’s birth with whiskey. How aged but small the baby had looked, never crying, too small for his big name. Fighting with Mouna at a party. Echoes and ripples. The untarmacked town of his childhood – palm trees, canals, flat-roofed brown houses – a beautiful place. His mother. The thoughts flitted past him like pictures, like bursts of light, more real than him. He would ask God’s forgiveness for them if this too did not seem to be a vanity.

  He was always breathless, coughing up a lot of bitter liquid, his lungs sinking and his ribs straining. He’d lost bodily comfort and couldn’t find it again. Each position he shifted to was stiffer and more sore than the last.

  Muntaha came every day. Ammar hung about him, ascending and descending the stairs in threes, praying in front of his chair so he could follow the recitation. Hasna tried to make him eat, and walked him to the toilet. His feet on the floor were just for show; really she carried him. They all saw the want in his eyes, seeking and uncomprehending, like a wounded animal.

  But on his final night he slept. With much gesture and eye contact Ammar and Hasna transferred him to the sofa. He slept for ten hours and when he woke he seemed better, some force in him at last, the signs of blood working in his face. They were all smiles, Ammar, Hasna, even Marwan himself, ready for anything. Ammar helped him to his chair. When Hasna encouraged him to try some breakfast he straight away conceded. He’d have bread and cheese, an egg, some tea. She skipped on heavy feet to the kitchen and Ammar, believing the crisis to have passed, began putting his trainers on to walk to the mosque. Then they heard a noise like a high-pitched hiccup, a youthful, joking noise, and in the sitting room Marwan’s head was hanging, and his time had come to a stop.

  Muntaha and Gabor, at this particular moment, were tramping over the stumps
of the history and geography building (burnt down in the Easter break). The children were on their long summer break, chilling on the nearby estate, some doing gangland apprenticeships, or learning better discipline in the lands of their parents. The teachers still came in for meetings, and preparation, and more meetings.

  ‘If I were more conventionally religious,’ Gabor was saying, ‘I’d most likely become a Muslim too. This tawheed, this basic theme, it fits perfectly with modern science. No contradiction at all. The unity principle underlies all that we know about the evolution of life on the planet, all we know about the universe. In fact, it expresses my own thoughts, the conclusions I’ve arrived at. But I do my spiritual thinking differently.’

  Muntaha, admiring his voice, became aware of her mobile phone trilling and vibrating. She unshouldered her bag to fish it out. The display read ‘Baba’, and she almost knew then, before she was told. So it was half redundantly that she answered. Ammar speaking. He told her in a sentence.

  How did she take it? With a characteristic flush of warmth. The body felt it. Certainly that. She noticed the organism growing excited, weakening, trembling. She must have blinked a film of water, because Gabor and the background shimmered. And then something blew a breath of unreality over the day. The schoolyard, suddenly two-dimensional, quietened and shrank. The city beyond, the world itself, shrugged off both light and shade, became trivial, hollow, not entirely credible.

  Gabor Vronk was watching her from whirlpool eyes.

  ‘You’ve had some bad news, Muntaha.’

  ‘Yes. My father has died.’

  It was significant for Gabor that he was there with her. It was a moment they shared.

  He accompanied her gravely to the staff room, along school corridors like hospital corridors to the nostrils, then to the arched exit, to the main gate. Not knowing what to do with his hands (he’d have hugged her if she hadn’t been in the hijab), he patted her mannishly on the back.

  ‘Whatever I can do,’ he said. A lazy African lake of meaning in his eyes.