Yes, it’s worth it. Look, if Hama goes so does Damascus, and then it’s war without end, the cities against the army, the cities against the countryside. Of course it’s worth it. These people would take us back to the Stone Age. They would destroy us. The rot must be stopped. For the sake of the future, of progress. At any cost. At any cost.
Mustafa Traifi is dying. They’d sent him a bearded, turbaned Egyptian to offer stale words and verses. (Nur had written Muslim on his admission form.) The visit had been a confirmation of the death sentence, although confirmation wasn’t necessary. Mustafa felt his power draining. With some of his last reserves he sent the sad cleric away, down the long unwalkable corridors, away to the mosques and to the past that would outlive him. Pasts should die before you, but this past, this religion, cast itself as child rather than parent. It stood at the foot of his bed and watched him disappear.
This humiliating thing. The thing that wasn’t supposed to happen, not yet, not yet at all. Belief in an afterwards would make it easier, but there wasn’t time now to cultivate a belief. Belief is a habit which takes years to establish.
He has a button he can press to release more morphine into his drip solution. Another drop. He has a moment of emptiness before his thoughts return. The same thoughts generated by the same feelings: anger and fear. Anger is better than fear. There are illusions in anger. There is the momentary sensation of power. ‘I should have had longer,’ he roars to himself. ‘I will do such things.’ But anger is tiring, and more temporary than fear.
Another drop. He concentrates on breathing and becomes calmer. If the brain could die first it would be easier. It’s the superstition of the soul that terrifies him. The nonsense that he is a soul. If he understood himself to be an organism, a flesh machine, he would not presume to fear.
Decomposition fertilizes. Massacres provide food for archaeologists. Chaos is ultimately creative. That’s what he told the English professors. Of course it’s worth it. Whatever has to be done, even at personal cost, even if it involves sacrifice, even in your own family, it’s worth it.
Each winter the shepherd god dies, and the earth with him, but each spring he rises again. Women scream on the riverbanks where the Orontes curdles. Blood flows with petrol and molten plastic. Each spring he rises again. If not him, then what he represents. The nation or the future or progress or whatever it is he represents, Mustafa can’t remember now, he hurts so much, feels so much fear.
Blood has to be sacrificed. It’s not an easy thing to make the decision. To follow your convictions. Was it easy for Ibrahim?
A drop of morphine. How many more drops are there? His breath fails to replenish his lungs. He hears its sound, like himself running. Like himself as a boy scared and crying into his mother’s chest. That thought weakens him. He pants with rising panic. How much more breath? How many more exhalations?
His reputation will never be greater than it is today. He can accept it if he is stoical. Any achievement is small put next to the size of nothing. And all men find themselves here, in this kind of bed, facing this. All men are subject to the grip of time. All men have to labour through the business of dying. Alone.
It would be easy if he could do it now, this moment. If he could brace himself with a cynical smirk and rush at it, demonstrate to himself that his dignity could survive it. It’s the waiting that weakens, and the useless thoughts.
Now Um Kulsoom is playing in his head like it isn’t a head but a Syrian taxi cab, hung with shiny invocations, breasty pin-ups, tassels and slogans, othersuch jangling things. The voice of Arab nationalism. The voice of oriental romance. She’s singing about the days that are gone. The weak spot: the pathos of past time. When Mustafa remembers himself as an intense ambitious child, in the early days when he overswelled with feeling and released himself into a bounteous future, it brings him back to his painful failure to breathe. Meaning and self-love hurt. Soon there will be no meaning, and soon the loved one will die. The little innocent beloved. Little Mustafa among the olive trees. Mustafa dreaming secret games in fields of tobacco and aubergines. Mustafa by the kerosene stove in the old stone house. Mustafa going to buy fish with his father.
The years have weight. It seems a long time ago, yes, but his consciousness of it is as new as this moment. He sees his memory of the boy Mustafa. The boy is already dead, died long ago. Does he care so much about him? Is he still so attached?
He can do without the boy. He would willingly sacrifice ten years of Mustafa the boy’s life in return for a further ten of his, Mustafa the adult’s. What he would become. What he is now can die, all right then, if the becoming Mustafa can live.
If there were someone to do the deal with.
He would sacrifice every moment until this moment. He’d miss a few memories. Times with his son. Having his book praised. Some others. But the memories are part of this moment. He doesn’t own the past, can’t return there, only remembers. For a little while longer.
That the processing of reality would not stop. That consciousness would continue. Continuity of self isn’t necessary. Just consciousness.
If there were anyone to reason with.
How quickly a body becomes a corpse. It chills, hardens, becomes soapy to the touch. It smells sweetly of corruption. Back to the shit it came from, the angelic illusion over for good. Nur will have him buried straight away, in the way of hot lands, before the next sunset. As if he never was. As dead as the earth that covers him. Equal to the elements. What had been tripping airily above cancelled and brought down.
Two more drops. Mustafa sinks. He sees the mass graves of Hama. He sees the superstitious dead, the believers in eternity, sees them open their eyes and stare.
Sacrifice will not save him now. There is no redemption from death.
Mustafa opens his eyes after a time and sees his boy and his wife at the bedside. Nur leans greyly over him, the reproach of her. But Sami’s uncertain face shines with the light of innocent love.
The Road From Damascus
‘Baba,’ says Sami, the unshepherded boy. ‘Baba, it’s snowing outside. It’s lying in the road.’
And when with two more drops he wills his hand to move and Sami to bow his head, he finds the boy’s dark hair moist with melted flakes or the dew of dawn or sea foam.
Mustafa sinks with increasing velocity. When he sees again, Nur has gone. Sami’s face glistens. Mustafa feels himself pulled away. He should speak now.
‘When I close my eyes I’m in a hole. When I open them I’m here. There are two worlds. I can’t reconcile them.’
This isn’t what he means to say. But he holds on to the continuity of his voice. While it speaks, he still exists.
‘Everybody dies. Not so bad if we all do it. You know, the problem is there’s no solidarity. Better if we all did it together, at the same time, holding hands. But alone is unbearable. It’s unbearable. It brings out the worst superstitions.’
Words form in the dark liquids of his lungs. Not sure if he can hear them any more. What do words mean?
‘They hanged men ten at a time in Tadmor prison. They killed men and women and their babies all together in Hama. Tens of thousands. Don’t be sad about it. It was worth it. And those people were lucky. They died in solidarity. Don’t blame me. It’s a question of principle, Sami. You have to be loyal to your principles. Sacrifices have to be made.’
Has he stopped now? Which language is he using? It isn’t what he meant to say. He should find some wisdom for the boy, some comfort. But there is none. None of this is what he meant. None of it at all.
A Sufi proverb says: The approach of the angel of death is horrific; its arrival is bliss. For Sami, who was there at his father’s end, the angel’s approach was surprisingly chilly.
He’d been cooling for weeks as the process unfolded, as the waves of Mustafa’s grief broke in cold spray over him. In resentful imitation too of his mother’s frigidity.
A nurse tiptoed to the bed and nodded meaningfully at Sami, keeping her co
ol eyes on him long enough to ensure he understood. She pulled his father’s eyelids closed with a smooth, practised movement, then turned to Sami again and asked, ‘Where is your mother, dear?’
A tree of ice was flowering inside him. He felt crystals cramp around his heart. It was an exciting feeling, and also terrible. Concentrating on the sensation, he pointed to the corridor, then shuffled backwards towards it. He watched nurse and corpse while he retreated, in the same way that a pilgrim leaves a shrine, slowly probing with blind toes behind, always facing the sacred point.
At the foot of the Royal Free Hospital a layer of snow negated the ground. Flakes numbed his ears and nose and penetrated jumper and jeans. He’d left his jacket in the ward. He sped up across South End Green until breath forced high, inhuman sounds from his throat. Snow drizzled into his tearless eyes and glassy mouth. He burst on to the dead blank of Parliament Hill Fields.
Through exposure to stock narratives he had expected to be overwhelmed by a surge of pain, by screaming hysteria. But this didn’t happen. On the contrary, life revealed itself to be simpler, cleaner, than he had realized before. So was his heart. There was no tension, no desire, no yearning. Just the purity of ice.
He stepped forward slowly. He experienced the crush of snow beneath his trainers more as vibration than sound. The swirl in the white air was indistinct from the earth, and his breath indistinct from the inaudible wind. The surrounding city’s responses were silenced. There was no one else on the hillside with him, and then he too was absent, and instead of him there was emptiness. Timeless emptiness which didn’t stop.
Nur was grateful when her frozen son returned after four hours’ wandering, although she hadn’t really been worrying. Wanting to be alone was a normal reaction to death. She was grateful because he gave her something to be busy with. And, once returned, Sami joined the game, separating himself from the cold so that he felt it and began to tremble, so that he blushed in the hospital’s artificial heat. Allowed himself to be wrapped in blankets, and driven home, and fed, and put to bed. Attended his father’s funeral, and as time passed, school, and then university, and grew heated with sex, ambition and argument, keeping his eyes on the concrete earth. He lived amid hectic human heat. But he always knew that beneath the warm appearances of things lay a solid foundation of ice. He kept this knowledge with cold certainty inside him. Until this summer. Until now.
18
A Great Leap
In seventeenth-century England the verb ‘to leap’ was slang for to fuck. Hence the tendency of Shakespeare’s livelier characters to visit ‘leaping houses’. Following the death of Thomas Hobbes, whose last words were: ‘I’m about to take my last voyage; a great leap in the dark,’ a new copulatory phrase entered the language: ‘To go on Hobbes’ voyage.’ As in, ‘I think my luck holds. I should be going on Hobbes’ voyage ere sunrise.’
Sami had been leaping about in time. He’d evaded news of one death and, as usual, frozen out the reality of another. Drugged and stupid, he’d embarked on Hobbes’ voyage, but had been brusquely hauled back to land by a hallucinated leaping horse. By his father.
We find him stumbling in a world which had also given in to its desires. A chain-smoking, junk-guzzling, substance-abusing world. A sweating world, whose temperature control was hopelessly disabled.
The weather this morning had turned. It drizzled in wavelets and upward eddies. Sami wasn’t wearing his jacket any more and his shirt was grimed with the previous night’s pain. When he came to an eastern section of the canal he slunk down on to the towpath. As he tramped along – modest tower blocks rising grimly above the canal banks – there were worm shapes forming from the mist, and overgrown flies, and sullen reptiles making the black water turbulent. But his other-worldly intimations had reached their climax. He could shrug them off. ‘This isn’t real,’ he said, ‘none of it is real.’ All he had to do now was endure.
He rubbed more coke into his gums, and then he was so crazed by thirst and a desire for clarity that he kneeled, and bowed, and dipped his head into the canal. In among the who-knows-what, the mutant weeds and industrial acids, the human waste, the water not fit to drink when boiled, not fit even for twenty-first-century, hormone-boggled hermaphrodite fish. And here he was with his head in it. He sat against a lichenous wall and shivered, letting canal drops piss into his shirt and on to his belly.
Unfaithfulness hadn’t been a feature of his marriage. He was sure of Muntaha, and on his side, he’d never before wavered. Certainly he’d been tempted, particularly during his sojourn in Paris, because they were apart, because of the city’s reputation, because of the undoubted elegance of certain French women. Also because of Parisian North Africans – not just a street or two of Arabs like London before sanctions pushed the Iraqis out, but whole markets and high-rise suburbs of alienated noble-browed women. Rich hunting grounds. But he’d never wavered. He had pride then in what he thought he was doing, the research and all, an anthropologist high-mindedly not touching the natives. Muntaha would come over for weekends, or he would spend an occasional week back in London, for non-contemptuous carnal days stripped of familiarity, burnished by absence. And if he hadn’t seen her for months and years he’d still have remained faithful. They loved each other. He’d loved himself through her eyes. And what had also kept him pure was a proper sense of standards, the belief that cheating was just that: cheating. Something humiliating. A betrayal of himself as well as of her.
But his sense of standards, and so much else, seemed to have melted. Nothing was solid any more.
Now had he really, this morning, an hour or two ago? Could he have? True, he couldn’t rightly remember (and if he didn’t own the pleasure of memory he didn’t bear the weight of sin, surely? And surely it hadn’t been him who’d done it; he’d done it while he was – what? – attaining nothing) and true, there was a chance he hadn’t; he’d seen a centaur, after all, as clearly as he’d seen the girl under him. Were there centaurs in London? But looking the matter straight in the eye, no excuses, facing facts, well, yes, he had. He most probably had. He’d rutted lovelessly, not because it was in his destiny to do so, not because he’d encountered a beauty not to be denied, but just because he had.
Poor Sami felt very sick. Such guilt couldn’t be swallowed immediately, not in his nauseated state. So mistaking Muntaha for himself, he tried to blame her, reasoning that it must have been her fault, at least in part. Oh they’d had love all right, and no major crisis until latterly, until the religion thing. Her failing. Changing on him after all these years, wrapping herself up in a scarf, saying prayers, mumbling mumbo-jumbo. She was supposed to be a support. What he wanted was for her to see things as he saw them. A natural enough desire. Not much to ask. Only that his wife would continue in their secularist consensus, and not disrupt their life plan. But she was all set on disruption.
He stood up and scratched in his pockets and snuffled more powder from the bag. Then he was off again at speed, his nostrils propellers carrying him through murky skies, up from the canal and over blighted, rainy streets. When he came across a shop he entered, addressing the frightened woman behind the counter.
‘Do you have any ice?’
‘You what?’
‘Ice.’
‘Ice cream?’
He thought about it. His stomach told him no.
‘Just ice.’
She stared at him in horror. Sami Traifi, bloodshot, semi-dressed, canal-stained.
‘No,’ she said.
He bought a bottle of water and drained it on the pavement outside. And continued, zigzagging deeper into the city’s sad orient. At a coin phone he paused to speak to his answermachine. ‘I need to be alone.’ Left his Greta Garbo message as Marwan’s corpse was being driven to the mosque for noon prayers. And stumbled on, a hallucinated astronaut charting a succession of dead planets.
He landed, spasmodic with cold and hunger, in a deserted car park. He was experiencing blank patches again, but these were only the predict
able consequence of exhaustion. Sheltered in a brick right angle, he made a spliff with jerky hands. Smoking it calmed him into a hypnagogic state in which, as he would in bleak moments, he spoke to his dead father.
‘Despite whatever you’ve done,’ he muttered, ‘I don’t hold anything against you. Despite it all. Just leave me alone, then. I’m doing this for you. Steering clear of the Muslims. No need to worry. So leave me alone.’
And here, for a while, he slept. Pleasant dreams of a rational world. Clean laboratories. Neat-shaven scientists in white coats.
Until he was rocked awake by a brown hand. A concerned, skullcapped face peering into his.
‘Brother,’ it said. ‘Brother, wake up. Do you hear me? Are you ill, brother?’
Sami wept, ‘Oh. Oh fuck.’
The old man wore a bristly white beard.
‘Never mind, brother. Get up, please. Insha’allah you’ll be very well soon.’
Sami said, ‘I’m not your fucking brother.’
He climbed the wall until he was standing. And then for all the world as if he were a pure-blooded son of the islands, upstandingly English and true, he said, ‘Piss off. Piss off you old Paki fucker.’
Leaving his spurned saviour in the background (undoubtedly in consternation, rubbing a bald patch under the skullcap), Sami loped out under the rain. Through brown brick and concrete parkland. Then high-sided, denser streets, colour bulging from video outlets and sari stores. Curry houses turning his already turned, shrivelled stomach. Hooded men and hijabbed women. Sami heading for the river. He had a half-formed urge to submerge himself, to clean himself up. Searching for an end point, or a beginning, for some kind of baptism. Perhaps he’d make for the Millwall bend, where they drag most of the bodies out, and pull himself together there.
He got as far as Tower Bridge. The tower itself drizzle-stained ochre behind him, something built of stone, modestly, in the contemporary glass and metal riverscape. The dead and regenerated docks in front. Outstretched mud expanse rushing underneath.
The Road from Damascus Page 18