Gabor taught physics and art to Bengali children. He ate in restaurants his mother would consider dirty. He walked the streets Vronsky had walked. He prayed for light before he created pictures.
And now, like Cedd the builder, he’d contracted a disease from the east. A disease called Muntaha. Swerve-bodied Muntaha, her nose broad at the bridge, eyes as tall as they were wide. Gabor returned tense from Marwan’s ta’ziya and went straight to his painting.
A large canvas was already strapped up to his workboard. In its centre he marked out an empty square with a ruler. This represented the empty cube of the Ka’aba in Mecca.
Then he took off his shoes and placed them neatly behind the door, as the Muslims do. He’d have a shoe rack put there, to remind him. He removed shirt and trousers, folded them slowly, carried them like an offering on flat arms towards the cupboard that was his bedroom. The room he was painting in was a long bare-walled rectangle that had first been built, in the days of the city’s tangible wares, to store textiles. Cotton brought from India and Egypt, milled in the north, exported back to the colonies. Now it was stacked with wooden boxes and computer monitors. Canvases completed or in progress. Potted plants on rough shelves. Jars and tubes of paint.
There was a rack of books near the entrance to the bedroom: Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Paul Klee’s journals, novels by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, stories by Gogol and Chekhov, the scientific and philosophical studies of Einstein and Max Planck. Also the heavy dark Qur’an Muntaha had given him, and a collection of ahadeeth, the traditions of the Prophet, which he’d bought in a Finsbury Park bookshop. Between the books and his canvases there was a salvaged coarse–grain desk, and on it the framed black and white photograph of his grandfather.
Gabor pulled the four low windows open to their fullest extent, to ventilate the paint fumes, perhaps for a breeze. The night, to his ears, was silent.
He surrounded his ka’aba with a swirl of pilgrims moving anticlockwise, like all the orbits in nature. He felt this was significant –one of the correspondences or artful patterns to be found at all levels – electrons around a nucleus, planets around suns, galaxies on their axes, all anticlockwise, like Muslims circumambulating the empty House. On holiday in Istanbul he’d seen the Mevlevi dervishes doing it in their sema, spinning, arms outstretched, one palm facing the heavens and another to the earth.
Gabor had faith in his art, real holy faith. For him, art was something primeval, something shamanic. He was engaged in the same sacralization of matter that had made men decorate cave walls, mummify corpses, fashion icons, and replenish the land’s significance with earthworks.
He used thick strokes, and then a knife to highlight the colours with borders. Greens, reds and blues. He was trying for a rainbow effect, but a splintered rainbow, with leakages and leaps to defy tonal classification – a London residential mishmash instead of New York ghettoes. The viewer could read that in if they wished – racial mixing, miscegenation.
With a thin hard brush he stubbed dots of darkness, for heads or souls, on to the swirl. He wiped his fingers on his underwear. Next, he superimposed Bohr’s famous atom symbol on to the pilgrims, brushing three broad oval orbits around the ka’aba nucleus. As he worked he repeated the first four ayat of the Qur’anic Surat al-Fajr, which he was learning for Muntaha.
Consider the daybreak, and the ten nights!
Consider the multiple and the One!
Consider the night as it runs its course!
The ‘ten nights’ referring to the final third of Ramadan, the month in which the Prophet, before he became a prophet, withdrew to caves in the Meccan mountains for fasting, meditation and prayer, the time when he first met the angel, when the revelation descended. He recited in Arabic, again and again, with rhythm and rhyme.
wal-fajr
wa layaalin ‘ashr
wash-shaf’i wal-watr
wal-layli idhaa yasr…
She would be impressed. He’d recite it to her when he showed her this painting.
He put down the brush. What now? He thought of Mr al-Haj in the grave. He thought of Mr al-Haj’s daughter. He named the picture ‘For Muntaha’, and as he did so he felt a pat on his shoulder, and also a stirring in his groin. Grandfather Vronsky exhaled lustily behind his back. Light shone briefly on to the white centre of his painted ka’aba.
Is something going to happen here? Gabor wondered. I mean, where was her husband today? Why the embarrassment when I asked for him?
He ate a slobber of pickled fish from the fridge, brushed his teeth, and slept a deep, unbroken sleep.
20
Evolutionary Loss
Sami blinked at the ghost of himself until he could name his surroundings. Then he solidified fast: a hungry, numbed and dirty organism, bruised where his ribs had pressed the bench. He sat up and found he was alone in the cell. Knowledge leaked slowly from body into mind. For instance, he’d been asleep a long time. He’d been taking drugs, which were now flushed on to his surface. He needed to wash before he did anything else.
He was in the same neon eternity of trapped air he’d fallen asleep in, but the smell of the man he’d called uncle had almost completely dispersed. Whether it was night or day he didn’t know.
He made a mental gesture of searching for his jacket, but before his arm or eyes moved he remembered its loss in the party house. Then he remembered other losses too, like the academic life, abandoned after his meeting with Dr Schimmer, and the marital moral high ground, which he may on previous occasions have occupied rhetorically, irretrievably tangled up back there in Bikini Girl’s knickers and teeth. He’d lost too his childish ability to speak to his dead father, this most intimate of his comforts. His innocence was gone. The angry fidgeting state he’d been in up to then seemed to him like innocence.
Surprisingly, after all that loss, he felt bright and free. He’d have liked to sit a while and enjoy the sensation, but his body had its own priority. His bladder was excruciatingly swollen. As soon as he noticed it he began to sweat.
He called through the bars, embarrassed by his voice.
‘Erm, officer, excuse me, I need…’
When he heard steps approach he wondered how to apologize. Wondered at last how much trouble he was in. At the same time he clenched his buttocks and counted to the time he’d be pissing. One to seven and back down to one.
As four reached three a policeman beeped his bars open. A new policeman, short and square.
‘Had a good sleep, then? Your friend’s here for you.’
‘Yes, I need, officer, to go to the toilet.’
Which friend? So he could leave?
Dribbles of light reached through an airvent in the toilet. Daytime, then. He must have slept all night and half of the day before. He pissed a river, and then, slack-bladdered, set about washing head, face, neck and arms in the miniature sink, until the policeman struck the door with worried urgency.
‘Out now, or I take you out.’
He emerged shrugging and apologizing. The policeman walked him through to the front office, which in the cold illumination of sobriety was drab and angular. It smelled of chipboard, paint and boredom. Sami saw his friend. Tom Field, professor of survivalism, Sami’s source of wisdom, the man who’d nearly reconciled him to Muntaha’s hijab. Looking very natural in contrast to his background, wearing organic fibres and exuding human passions, Tom stood among the seats of the waiting area. His face was leathery, burnt in the sun, and expressionless save his eyes, which glared at Sami. Pseudonymous, anonymous Tom: the last person he should have brought to a police station.
There was some bureaucracy to get through, and a tired warning not to do it again. Then a statement of the obvious to accompany a nod towards Tom: ‘Here’s your mate come to take you home.’
Tom hadn’t spoken yet. He pointed to the front entrance. Sami thanked the police for their trouble in the same way he’d once thanked a teacher for slapping him, and followed the survivalist. He’d put himself
in the role of naughty child. Well then, bear it. Take the admonishment.
Tom led the way to an anonymous car and let himself in the passenger side. A woman sat in the driving seat. Sami got into the back, behind Tom. The woman twisted to grin at Sami.
‘I’m GR,’ she said.
‘Sami,’ said Sami, then turned to his mentor. ‘Tom, I’m sorry to get you down here. They wanted someone’s name.’
Tom, glaring through the windscreen, replied staccato.
‘Yeah, but not mine. I’ll help you out in all kinds of ways, but not like this. My name written down in a police station. On someone’s computer. That is what I do not want. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, Tom.’
‘That is what I do not want. I do everything I can to cover my tracks, to keep anonymous, and you give the Tom Field name to the state machinery. You’ve set me back, Sami. You’ve got in the way.’
The tendons writhed in the back of Tom’s neck. The sound of car engine. Torsos through the windows. They moved through light and shade into the densest section of the city.
In the cheeriest of voices, Sami spoke again.
‘So, GR, that’s an unusual name.’
‘Yep,’ said the driver. ‘Signifying Global Resister.’
She wore a one-piece camouflage suit. Brown and green jungle camouflage. Not much use for the urban environment.
‘And what are you resisting?’
‘The whole thing. Capitalism. Imperialism. Globalization. The way we’re being driven to Armageddon.’
She had nine-tenths of her attention on the road. This reassured Sami.
‘I see,’ he said.
Light brown hair was pulled up and tied on top of her head. Her neck smooth and unblemished. The hairs glistened sunlight blonde where they left the skin. Sami judged her to be in her late twenties, at least a decade younger than Tom. He knew nothing of Tom’s private life.
‘So you think Armageddon’s coming. A war. The end of the world.’
It sounded silly when he said it, so he laughed once.
‘Things’ll get a lot worse
They lurched around a skip cooped off from the traffic by mesh, like the holy of holies screened from the mob in an orthodox church. The skip was radioactive green. A worker perched on its edge eating from a Pret A Manger bag, listening to a walkman.
GR had stopped talking to concentrate. Now she picked up again: ‘… then there’ll be a revolution.’
The shadows of office buildings blotted them out.
‘A revolution,’ said Sami politely, glancing again at Tom’s rigid neck, his tight-packed scalp. ‘I thought revolutions were old-fashioned.’
‘Marx is a lot more relevant now than he was in 1917. You know when Marx said the conditions would be right for revolution?’
‘No. When?’
‘Only when the entire world is connected up to the same economic system. That’s when. One global system. Sound familiar?’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘Know what Marx said capitalism would inevitably lead to?’
‘Revolution?’
‘Apart from that.’
‘No. What?’
‘He said it would inevitably lead to the commodification of two things. Of nature and the human soul.’ She pronounced each carefully. ‘Nature, and the human soul.’
‘Yes,’ said Sami.
‘See any signs of that around you?’
He saw her nodding in the mirror, smilingly serious. There was a madman on the pavement. Sami couldn’t see his face, but could tell the madness from the ardour of his arms. A pigeon lit choking on the bonnet of the black cab to Sami’s right, then swam into the air again. The city was coughing at him.
‘Could we stop somewhere to get water? When it’s convenient.’
GR reached under her seat without losing grip on the wheel. She handed back a leather bottle. A muscular arm where it emerged from the camouflage. Was she Tom’s lover?
‘It’s filtered,’ she said.
Not a bottle but a water sack. Sami liked that. He felt like a Phoenician swigging at it, or some other kind of ancient Semite. But then he understood the thought to be Mustafa-inspired, and allowed it to die.
‘Filtered at a home base. That one’s not a commodity.’
Sami drank and drank, wondering what a home base was.
‘So, yeah, the revolution will come,’ GR continued. ‘It’s inevitable. There are ups and downs, sure. Things’ll get worse before they get better. But they will get better. Radically better.’
In the mirror Sami watched her eyes, flecked with orange, shining with quiet rapture. Somewhat less than nine-tenths of her attention on the road.
‘Evolution is a proven scientific mechanism. Life develops to higher stages. In the present situation, revolution is the only way to break through upwards. Evolution is progress, and progress must happen.’
Sami took the water sack from his lips, held it on his lap, panting.
‘Do you believe in progress?’ he managed.
‘Progress is inevitable. Otherwise there’s no meaning to the human experience. But Tom Field and I disagree about this.’
She called him Tom Field. Both first name and last, like a code.
Sami watched Tom’s unyielding ears and the stubborn stalks of hair. Save the internal agitations hinted at on the surface, it could have been sculpture. A backward bust. A work entitled: Anger Enwrapped.
‘Tom,’ Sami pleaded, ‘I’m sorry, all right? I’ve learnt a lesson. It’s been a learning experience.’
The Tom Field face whipped round like a sheet of metal in a storm.
‘I hope it was worth it,’ he said, with energy.
‘Yes,’ reflected Sami. ‘Yes, it was.’ He paused for longer than was relevant. ‘I learnt that I am flesh and blood. We, I mean, are flesh and blood. We’re made of matter, no more nor less.’
GR raised her forehead in satisfaction. These were necessary evolutionary stages: from woolly spirit to materialism, thence to dialectics and revolutionary action. Tom, however, squirmed impatiently.
‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘We aren’t matter. We channel matter. Matter irrigates us.’
Sami, blissful because Tom was talking to him now, asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we consume and excrete matter, we take it in and break it down. But matter isn’t us. Matter seems to become us for a while, but it’s always in flux. No cell in your body is the same cell as when you were a boy. On a smaller level, the particles that make you are always flashing in and out of existence. You aren’t matter, you organize it. You’re an organizing principle. The flesh and blood is produced by you, a temporary pattern you’ve made. It isn’t you.’
Sami understood Tom’s words a little differently, through his own filter. I am the by-product of a body, he thought. I am a changing breath, a transient unity of synapse flow. He heard a ringing in his head, caused by estrangement. Such knowledge resists comprehension. Does an ant also fail to understand that it is an ant?
He returned to simpler matters.
‘Anyway, Tom, I’m sorry. I was in a bad way. I’d been up all night. I was coked up, drunk, stoned. I was going through a crisis. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’
‘I know that,’ said Tom. ‘I know it. I’m making allowances for your circumstances. Wouldn’t have come for you otherwise.’
‘What circumstances? Did Schimmer tell you?’
‘Yes, Dr Schimmer called. Your wife was looking for you.’
‘My wife? Why? I didn’t think Schimmer would call around to announce it. Didn’t think it was that important.’
Tom wrinkled his eyes.
‘He wasn’t announcing. He was trying to find you, on your wife’s behalf.’
‘So he called her? Because I’ve given up the doctorate? She wants me to anyway.’
‘You’ve given up your doctorate?’
‘What else are we talking about?’
Now Tom’s eyes opened
wide.
‘We’re talking, Sami, about your father-in-law’s death.’
GR steered towards the inevitable. Two cycle couriers sped past meanwhile, metallic and aerodynamically sculpted, adapted to their medium by wave-shaped helmets and snarling teeth. A woman in a suit waved across the road, shouting something silent through the traffic. Pollutants rose into the cooking sky. A shaft of light pierced the window next to Sami. He bowed his head into it.
‘I’m sorry, Sami,’ said Tom. ‘I presumed you knew.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ But there had been that message from Ammar on his mobile, in the pub among the Freemasons, the message he’d ignored. He flattened his palms on his groin and found that his mobile too was gone. Another loss.
‘Yes, yes, I knew. I did really.’
Tom with forearm on the ledge of the seat, breath surging through his nostrils, watched Sami. In contemporary English there are no formulas for this kind of thing.
Sami raised his head.
‘You’d better take me home.’
‘That’s where we’re taking you. Remind me of the address.’
Sami gave it. After that there was no conversation, except for enquiries concerning the least clogged route. Sami, eyes down, touched his thumbs together, experiencing not so much butterflies in the stomach as a raging holy dread as to what he would find at home.
Marwan was dead, that was another father lost. But worse, Sami by his absence and betrayal had abdicated all pretence to husbandhood. So how did that feel? Not too unpleasant. As ever, the sense of drama lightened things for him. Bad news is always good news so long as it’s dramatically bad. So long as there’s otherness, newness, difference. Then everything can be borne.
That was the attraction of intoxicants for him, the pulse-stopping drama of difference they thrust him into. To be different from himself. For this second to be different to the last. For nothing to be settled or normal or real. He was aware of the possibility that his need for difference arose from misunderstanding what was real, or from a partial understanding, from a blindness. Perhaps reality seen properly would not be so dull.
The Road from Damascus Page 20