The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  Suited men and women hurried stiffly past, chins to collars, grunting against the weather. At a distance, a tourist couple chirped under a red umbrella. Sami keened in turpitude, sodden, guilt-racked, filthy, his elbows on the railing, cradling his head. Nothing remained of last night’s sense of mission. Like his Big Idea deconstructed: nothing. Under the veils he’d penetrated: nothing.

  What to do now? Go home and sleep, eat cornflakes, drink tea. But Muntaha would arrive from work, and then he’d have to lie, he’d have to avoid her eyes. And probably she wouldn’t have gone to work today, but somewhere else. Sami stopped the thought.

  He took the last note from his wallet and tubed it into a nostril. (The male tourist quickly snapped his picture. Some authentic London colour, better than those dated punk postcards.) Sami snorted, and gave the packet to the wind. At the same moment English earth was being sprinkled on Marwan. The angels of the grave commencing their interrogation.

  Sami absorbed the cocaine. It didn’t make much difference. Still nothing to do but go home. Face things.

  For the last time, he bolted. And, straight away colliding at the neck with a solid object, fell. And sitting on the pavement on the props of his arms, looked up into a policeman’s face. For it was a policeman’s arm into which he had collided.

  ‘You appear, sir,’ said the policeman, ‘to have a fiver stuck in your nose. Now why would that be?’

  Sami tried to shrug as the policeman plucked the note from his nostril.

  ‘There’s powder here.’ Unravelling it with distaste.

  Sami would have said, ‘What of it?’ if he’d been in a speaking mood. Eighty per cent of notes in circulation in the metropolitan area bear verifiable traces of cocaine. And Sami had finished his. Thus, arrest aborted.

  Alas, not so. Sami, walked off the bridge to an expectant squad car (photographed again by zoom lens and crowning the tourists’ day), was forced to remember, with his pocket contents laid out on the bonnet, that he hadn’t finished the weed. Which meant he didn’t have to face Muntaha just yet, but the inside of a cell.

  He was packed into the car, a protective hand shielding his head as it went under. Then seatbelted. With official process setting in and the officers’ formal, ironic language, Sami felt his safety was taken care of. Lurching on the back seat, bubbles rising from his feet and popping at the top of his skull, he was really quite pleased about it all, about the drama, the not being in control.

  At the station he gave Tom Field’s university address. Couldn’t remember his own, he said, couldn’t remember his next of kin. Muntaha was the wrong person to call after last night’s adventuring, a woman in a hijab. Who else was there? No one.

  ‘Take me where you must,’ he said, offering wrists for cuffing.

  The policeman he’d been handed to, a bland–faced, weary slab, looked heavenward for patience but found only neon and styrofoam tiles.

  ‘Joker,’ said the policeman. ‘Fucking joker.’

  Leaving Sami’s hands free, he pushed and pointed him down a grey corridor, around a corner.

  Here they met a smell. It hit Sami like something solid. He gasped. Clutched his solar plexus. Behind bars in front of him was the source of it: a huddle of clothed flesh – a tramp, a drunk –something perhaps dangerous, or perhaps not alive. Something, in any case, which stank.

  Sami’s sense of safety dissolved.

  ‘You’re not putting me in there with that?’

  The slab smirked. ‘To be honest, sir, I can’t see much difference between him and you.’

  The door opened electronically and Sami sidled in, keeping what distance he could from the stink. It was thick and heavy and full of horror. It prised open dark areas of his brain. Everything was coated in the smell, walls, bars, benches. Sami sat. He shivered. He looked at the heaving pile opposite. A coat, more cloth, and a body.

  Even with nose and lips squashed together against dirty knuckles, the drunk had a semi-familiar face. It was round and red. Inflamed skin and bloated cartilage. Greyish hair curling to the shoulders.

  The smell had become a taste. Sami had a mouthful. Yellow and harsh. Alcohol in it as well as stale sweat and urine.

  Man at a loss.

  Verily, man is bound to lose himself

  Unless he be of those who…

  He stopped the verse, stood up, and began to pace. Up and down, back and forth, through the medium of the smell. Dim light sheathed inside the ceiling. Up and down, back and forth, breath as shallow as he could make it. Then the drunk whimpered and growled, and Sami immediately sat back down. He tried not to breathe at all. Waited there for five minutes, ten, a quarter of an hour.

  For the first time in this summer’s story, Sami had come to rest. No more rolling, snorting, seeking or rushing. No more diversionary activity. No more awareness of the pains that shot through his back and neck and constricted his head. No more of those sensations that he usually employed as a hijab to drape around things-as-they-are.

  He’d stopped running. Easier just to sit, in this silence, in this stillness. He slipped behind his breath, but not into oblivion. His silence was warm, not icy. Warm with a warmth that didn’t disrupt the silence. A body temperature warmth, no more nor less. He felt he was on the verge of something. The lifting of a veil. The Greek word for it is apocalypse.

  But then the drunk awoke.

  ‘Ah! Me nephew!’

  And as quickly as he’d been recognized Sami recognized the roaring man from the strippers’ pub.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m not your nephew, though.’

  ‘Not me nephew?’ The accent almost Irish, but then not, so confused in the storm of urban accents that it contained features of all. ‘Well, perhaps not. Perhaps I am mistaken. But still a brother. We’re all relatives, you know. We all come from Adam.’

  Sami nodded assent. The roaring man continued.

  ‘Have you been living clean, lad? There’s the question. Too much dirt in the world, you see. Oh dear me, yes. Too much dirt, and you know what else? Too much Satan.’

  He sucked at air, made a ‘hoo hoo’ noise, wiggled his ears. With the clapping of his hands he was signalling either triumph or certain knowledge.

  ‘No one believes in Satan now, not till they see him. I’ve seen him. In the bottom of a glass. Reflected in a whore’s eyes. It isn’t all fun and games, you know. You’ll notice that when you see him.’

  Remarkably straight-backed, he moved on to commandments.

  ‘Stick to one woman. Reject liquor. Live clean. Stand in the way of Satan. Also beware of false prophets. Distinguish false from true visions. Stand in Satan’s way.’

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’ Sami asked, not unkindly.

  ‘Aha!’ raising a finger and an eyebrow as if Sami had delivered the crucial point. ‘Aha now! I’ll tell you! Satan! Listening to Satan! Should have listened to the priests.’ Shaking his head and grinning as if it was, after all, fun and games. ‘But no one will listen to the priests. Not in these days. Nor should they, those fucking hypocritical bastards. Dirty bastards. Would you listen to them? A bright boy like you? Of course you wouldn’t. Dirty bastards. Dirty fucking religion, the whole thing. Oh no, no, no…’

  For some moments he indulged in negation.

  ‘Oh no, I’d prefer Satan to that, to tell you God’s honest truth. None of that. We’d do better to start again. Time for a new religion. New everything. A new heaven and a new earth. Ha!’

  And he laughed hugely.

  ‘Uncle,’ said Sami. ‘You need to have a shower.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ uncle quietly said. ‘And I’ll do it directly, just as soon as this…’ – gesturing at the walls – ‘… hospitality comes to an end.’

  Sami stretched out on the bench. He looked up into grey light and the smell and uncle’s subdued whispering. He was more tired than uncomfortable. The air swam above him, and for an instant seemed to solidify. Sami heard the briefest clack of hooves. Mustafa Traifi’s face began to
form.

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ said Sami. Mustafa disappeared.

  There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t brush them away. What he did this time was face facts. Heard the echo of his own ‘fuck off’ in his ears. Words with no audience, for his father was really gone.

  Really gone. He brooded on that, the injustice of it. That he too was bones and meat and vibrating pulp within a peel. That the body was coming to its end, if not tomorrow then after a finite number of tomorrows that passed faster and faster, losing illusory substance as they passed.

  More than unjust. Terrifying. In any case, superstition wouldn’t help. Nothing was left of Mustafa Traifi, it was time to admit that. Time to stop behaving as if his father was still here. And time, therefore, to examine all the superstitions he’d built around his father’s ghost.

  The God fiction, for instance. He’d believed as passionately as he could that it was fiction because he’d thought it was manly and worthy of his father’s pride to believe so. And what did he believe now, now that his manliness no longer seemed a tangible aim, now that his father was gone? He searched for his belief, looking mutely into his own silence, and found none. Nothing solid there. He believed nothing either way.

  What if he were to believe, positively, in a God, in the unseen? To believe that death was not death but another kind of life? Would that be wrong? Would it be wrong to at least aspire to such a belief, to hope? Was hoping wrong? Faced with the injustice, the absurdity, the unthinkability, of death. For it is unthinkable, once you’ve noticed yourself living, to stop.

  No, not wrong. Perhaps not right either. But not wrong.

  You could even say that the weight of blindness falls on those who don’t stir to hope, so blind they are to the absurdity of death. The careless atheists, like him. The materialists who sneer at religious emotion. You could even say that it is they who are in denial.

  For Sami this was a great leap, across, out, into the abyss. Towards what? Would something be there to meet him? To stop him falling through the void?

  19

  Enlightenment

  Gabor could be defined in ethnic terms as Jewish or Hungarian – Hungarian is his largest genetic portion – but he thinks of himself as Russian, like his grandfather. Why? Because he considers Russia to be furthest away. Because Russia is the most distant from his mundane environment. Because Russia is most other to himself.

  Otherness. The realm of the spirit which art gestures towards.

  Gabor knows the spirit from certain numinous experiences of his childhood – certain signs and visions. He knows the world, if read properly, is a canvas of signs, hinting beyond itself. He knows the world when unread and meaning only itself, the material world, is as grey and damp as the Essex village he grew up in.

  His parents were that world. Therefore, he’d always liked what that world doesn’t. When he was at school he had Indian friends, because his parents didn’t want him playing with Indians. Why not? Because Indians were ‘superstitious people’. Now he goes out of his way to meet Indians, Africans, Arabs.

  His parents were hygiene freaks. He suspected they worried about the Indians’ dirty brown skin, although this was never articulated. Straightforward racism would be too low class and passionate for them. But they cleaned him extra hard when he returned from school, swabbed his fingers with medical alcohol before he was allowed to eat.

  His mother was anxious to scrub away the central European grime of her own name. Angyalka introduced herself as Angie until she decided it was too cockney. She was Angela after that. Gabor wondered why they’d named him as they had. Was he meant as some kind of totemic propitiation of the primitive gods? Was that the deal – if he was named for the past his parents could comfortably deny it, and get on with their present ambitions?

  Angela claimed to have forgotten both Hungarian and Hungary, although she’d lived there until she was ten. Her physique let her down – she was bonier and sharper featured than her neighbours – but in dress, accent and posture she was a typically nervy Anglo nouveau riche. She suffered something like the self-hatred of the working class, except her background wasn’t proletarian. Her parents had been educated people, he a journalist, she a musician. When they fled, in 1956, after he’d unwisely authored anti-Soviet editorials, they became proletarian in the strict Marxist sense of owning nothing but their labour. Being dispossessed immigrants in London made them scum. Angela saw scum everywhere. Gabor remembers her scouring the bath and sink and kitchen floor even when they were clean.

  His father was calmer and less ambitious. Richard was just scared of difference. Not of being different, because somehow he never was, despite growing up in a different home. He had not a word of Russian, not a smidgeon of Yiddish. Being the son of a Jewish mother makes him technically Jewish. You’d never guess. He looks English. Acts English. Has the stereotypical prejudices and ignorances of a sheltered Englishman. Put him in a bus with people of foreign origin and he flinches. Ask him his history and he screws up his pale cheeks in bewilderment. Jews? Russian exiles? Do such things exist?

  As resistance, Gabor loved the strange and exotic. In the village there was a fourteenth-century church, with an eighteenth-century tower attached. It didn’t quite do it for him, too close to home and to their foam-haired old lady neighbours. But out of the village, on a flat plain of tall white oxeye daisies and purple common mallow, was the seventh-century chapel of St Peter’s-on-the-Wall. In the shape of a normal house, but taller. Built by Saxons, by an extinct people. Gothic mists and salty North Sea gales outside. Inside, bare stone, bare benches. As minimalist as a desert mosque. There were inlets of light too high to see out of The outside sees in. Light sees in.

  A monk named Cedd, called from Lindisfarne by King Sigbert, prayed, fasted and blessed the land before he built on it. The chapel was constructed from the ruins of a Roman fort, in the style of Syrian churches. Cedd died in Yorkshire of plague, a disease from the east.

  Gabor squeezed his eyes half shut, imagined Cedd and the East Saxons through his lashes. Ghosts bubbling past him. Then one afternoon in his early teens, shortly after his grandfather’s death, he dreamt of Vronsky while asleep on the church floor. Vronsky handing him the powers of art and lust. The vision lasted for half a minute after he awoke and rubbed his brow. Vronsky handing him light.

  Beyond the chapel was the power station where Richard and Angela worked. A brutal rectangle against the green sky. A fact. A denial of transcendence. Their world.

  When his parents knew he’d been at the chapel they sniggered and smirked. ‘Been talking to God again have we?’ They nudged each other and rolled their eyes. It was a moment of closeness for them, until Angela thought of the Saxon dust on the chapel flagstones and snapped Gabor towards the bath.

  Everything about them was hyper-logical and counter-intuitive. Post-enlightenment people, they refused to believe in the soul because they couldn’t see or measure it. Their hearts were neither seats of passion nor mirrors of divinity, but mere complex muscles pumping blood. They represented science in opposition to Vronsky’s art, stability in place of his migration, surface instead of depth. Of course, it was inevitable that they would be like that. Human beings must rebel against their parents. It’s a mechanism that moves the world on. Gabor too rebelled.

  Despite himself, he was a gifted science student. The shame of it dissipated once he was able to dissociate the subject from his father and mother. Anyway, it was no longer their subject. In the brief space of a generation a sense of wonder had returned to science. The rigid boundaries between it and art had begun to dissolve. Science could be experienced as mystery. Outside school he read quantum physics, which was like reading Sufism. Appearances are illusions. Is the photon a wave or a particle? Our traditional categories break down when you look closely.

  Reading science, and being an adolescent, taught Gabor that his parents’ professions were evil. He leafleted the bemused villagers with anti-nuclear propaganda, and confronted his father.


  ‘That power station should be closed down. How can you work there? You’re poisoning your descendants.’

  Richard said, ‘Nuclear power’s a lot cleaner than fossil fuels.’

  ‘You don’t care, do you? Your grandchildren will be mutants and you don’t have the heart to care.’

  Perhaps it was an urge to rub his father’s nose in difference which made Gabor leap to this image. Mutants would be good. Dirty mutants best of all.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Richard chuckling complacently.

  ‘I reject this. I reject your crimes, both of you. You two and British Nuclear Fuels. At Sellafield the child cancer rate is way up. It’s probably happening here as well. You’re probably helping them to cover up the evidence. You’re monsters, both of you. No emotions. I don’t have anything to do with you. You’re not my kind of people.’

  ‘We’re your parents. You can’t escape your past, any more than a fossil can crawl out of its rock.’

  But fossils can be dug up and burnt. They can be liberated in the form of carbon dioxide. From rock to air, to the sky.

  ‘My ancestor is my grandfather. Why couldn’t you have been like him? He was a humanist and a spiritual man. He wouldn’t have poisoned the earth.’

  ‘You’re very romantic about your grandfather. You forget I knew him better than you. He wasn’t as you think. Not nearly so exciting. You’ve made up a fiction. You’re not looking at the real thing.’

  What did they know of reality? They saw only the absence of Vronsky’s body, while Gabor saw the man’s spirit. Felt it in the breeze, in the borderless sky. The sky transcending and ignoring facts. If it notices facts, it mocks their pretension.

  Gabor’s father said he wouldn’t escape his past. He had escaped, though. He had nothing to do with them now. Not with inflexible facts, and not with his parents. On one occasion they’d come down to sneer at his studio, at the ethnic mess of the streets outside. Only once.