The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘What,’ she asks, ‘are you suggesting?’

  Clipped vowels and plosives. He knows he’s overstepped a boundary. Backtracks.

  ‘Nothing. I’m suggesting nothing. Just advice. Just warning you.’

  ‘Warning?’

  ‘Warning you. You’re innocent, I know it. I meant him, not you.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Forget about him. Stick with Sami. He’s a brother. You’re safe with him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be talking to anybody I wasn’t safe with. I respect myself. I don’t need to be warned, little brother.’

  Two teenage girls have stopped to spectate. They chew gum in synchrony, chins bucked upward, insolently close.

  ‘Yeah… yeah.’ Ammar dissolving into small hard pieces. Pebble-dash. Shingle. ‘Just, you know, Sami’s, you know, a brother.’

  ‘A Muslim brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He brightens. ‘A brother.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that, Muntaha. He’s never said he isn’t a Muslim.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what he’s said.’

  But Ammar snarls and windmills his arms as if she’s going to describe her orgasms. Nasty dirty incestuous stuff. Her bras and knickers abandoned on her bed. Opening the bathroom door on her. Her female smell. He doesn’t want to know.

  ‘No, but if you think you can judge people so easy…’

  ‘It’s between a man and Allah.’

  ‘Let me speak.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘And I don’t want to hear you. You’re still a boy. A little brother is all you are.’

  Ammar flinches.

  ‘And what’s this “they”?’ She continues the onslaught. Words born through the hot vibration of her lips, blood ringing around her eye sockets, eyeballs burning. ‘All this kuffar stuff? What’s that about? People are individuals, not shapes to fit your categories. Not shapes you slot through holes in some fucking baby game.’

  Muntaha swearing. He’s misstepped badly.

  He attempts to firm up. Makes the gesture, at least. There isn’t much more in his repertoire.

  ‘Watch what they do, not what they say. Watch what they do in the world. They have this nice cop nasty cop thing, but it’s all bollocks. The result is the same. They started it. I’m just responding. Believe the propaganda and you end up defenceless.’

  ‘You were talking about Gabor. He’s one of my colleagues. He’s a teacher.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever. But they all stand together at the end of the day.’

  The spectating girls lose interest. They shuffle towards the newsagent’s for better distraction. Brother and sister remain, enwombed in private drama.

  ‘Ammar, you’re insane. You need to have your head checked.’

  ‘And we need to stand together too, is what I’m saying. Muslim with Muslim, that’s all.’

  ‘Slow down.’ Speaking into his face, she exaggerates the shapes of the words. ‘This isn’t politics. You were talking about one of my colleagues.’

  ‘They divided us, you see.’ He continues blindly, for the sake of his pride, down this doomed leaden road of contradiction. ‘They invented sects and parties among us. Divide and rule, you see.’

  ‘Who did?’

  With softened nose fallen towards the ground and a voice sunk into monotone, he continues. ‘The English, the Jews, the Christians, America.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with…’

  ‘You know, created these traitors among us, the Shia, Communists.’

  Abruptly, she pities him. At the moment when he merits her anger most. She speaks quietly, sorrowfully.

  ‘Your mother was Shii. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  At last he is quiet. His eyelids flutter. He is overcome by a glottis-tangled cough. Is he starting to cry?

  ‘You can’t talk to me like that,’ he says.

  She waits.

  ‘I’m the head of the household,’ he says.

  A strangled hiccup in his throat.

  ‘Then behave like a grown-up.’

  The drying up of his speech reveals barren cracked silence beneath. It’s awkward. Muntaha wants to move things on before she sees insects crawling out. Millipedes from their sand dens. Clicking exoskeletons. Shiny black pulsing things.

  ‘I don’t know what you put into each other’s heads in that mosque. You were better off into Public Enemy. It made a lot more sense.’

  His head hangs below gaunt shoulders, unresponding.

  ‘I mean, the Jews invented the Shia? It’s ridiculous. You should read some history books.’

  Which does the trick. ‘So you believe what they write in their books?’ he says. ‘Sister, they’re taking you for a ride.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Relief breezes through her. ‘You read more than one book and make your own mind up. If you don’t want to read their books, improve your Arabic and read ours. For God’s sake.’

  ‘A sister,’ he says, ‘requires proper guidance.’ And he’s speechifying again. About sisters ideological, not actual.

  She disconnects, like leaving a meditation. There’s the street around her: its stark lack of sisterhood. Everyone by themselves, doing the Anglo thing of avoiding contact, whatever their religion. And departing again, she remembers Baghdad. Was that her there? If time hasn’t cheated her, and she knows it has, the city of her childhood was like a storybook village, traffic and dust and heat notwithstanding. The neighbours there were sisters to her mother, at least she called them sister when they met. Muntaha used to be sent around to the neighbouring flats with pots of rice when her mother made a big meal. The women were aunties to her. The market men were brothers and uncles.

  Ammar has realized that he has no audience. He glances at the Nissan.

  ‘So what did you want?’ Muntaha asks him.

  ‘Oh fuck, nothing.’

  ‘You just came to say your piece about Gabor.’

  Wordlessly, he concedes it.

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Muntaha says. ‘And I’m not doing anything anyway.’

  He nods. There’s a condom smeared on the pavement between them.

  ‘You were listening to the news, and you had a little emotional rush from the news, so you decided to drive by and give me a speech about kuffar.’

  He nods again. Glances at the Nissan, which is playing Egyptian dance music.

  ‘Well don’t let it all drive you mad, all right? There’s enough madness.’

  He bunches his lower lip forward and scratches at wispy beard. His voice is level. ‘You want to go somewhere to pray Asr?’

  ‘No, habibi, I don’t. You don’t make me calm.’

  ‘All right then.’ He affects a nonchalant gait as he steps around the car. Swings the door open.

  ‘Be calm,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you.’

  ‘Insha’allah.’ He scallops into the cockpit, fires the engine, pulls away fast.

  She’s left all alone in the busy city. Orphaned, but connected by fate to her genetic simile. Whether she likes it or not.

  23

  Muntaha’s Prayers

  Muntaha’s prayers are much more peaceful than those of the men in her life.

  When she prays, her heart is a shining mirror reflecting the light of God. She can almost say that only God is present. She is aware of Him only. Her consciousness continues, but Muntaha, the daughter of Marwan and Mouna, is nearly absent. Aiming at absence. She is the flame of love blown out by the Beloved. She is the reed and He the breath, He the music too. He the cause and the consequence and she obliterated in between.

  God is closer to her than her jugular vein. I am inside God, she thinks. God is inside me.

  When she prays, she enacts a drama of scale. She is worshipping the absolute Light, in the centre of it, conscious of herself at the midpoint of extension into inner and outer space. Out there the larger volumes, the stars and galaxies, and out there in reverse the smaller sizes,
atoms, electrons, and particles yet more abstract.

  When she prays, she looks at the prayer mat and what is implied in it like ripples reaching its surface: first the wooden floor, then brick and plaster, and the local history of the room below (Sami’s), and pipes and sewers at ground level, next ratlands, archaeologists’ London, and soil and rock, and then through layers to the inner earth, the molten core. She looks at the physical world and considers how it balances on a needle of time. How it is swallowed and folded into packets of nothing, zapped, as soon as God closes His eye. It is real but unreal in the face of God. It emanates from God but God is beyond it. She says ‘allahu akbar’ as she bends, kneels, and prostrates. Allahu akbar. God is greater.

  Each moment God creates anew. The Sufi Suhrawardi called God ‘the Maker Who transfers existences from non-existence to existence’. Muntaha notices existence forming every time she puts her foot forward. This is why she is soft-footed and open-mouthed. She feels the sacred. Her actions, therefore, aren’t only her own.

  In the days following Sami’s departure she performed the tasks that presented themselves. She met a solicitor to execute her father’s will: a straightforward business. Marwan had arranged everything according to the letter of Sunni inheritance law. That is, Hasna took an eighth of his wealth, and the rest was split two to one between Ammar and Muntaha. In the event of Muntaha divorcing, Ammar would become financially responsible for her. Sons inherit twice the share of daughters because sons must provide for their families, while a woman’s money remains her own. Islam works when men are noble. In other cases, however, the regulations seem questionable. Once he’d finished his dead father’s money, Sami lived off his wife. And off the state.

  Marwan’s wealth was the house where Hasna and Ammar continued to live, its future undecided. There was also a modest sum of money deposited in an Islamic bank, and a box of gold which Marwan, with his Arab mistrust of institutions and paper money, had kept locked in a bedroom cupboard. Muntaha’s share came to a few thousand, enough to buy a small car if she’d wanted such a thing, or to go on a couple of exotic holidays.

  She disposed of Marwan’s stuff in one busy afternoon. She brought one suit jacket to live in her wardrobe along with her dresses and Sami’s unclaimed garments. The jacket smelled deeply of her father, though less so every day. His clothes didn’t fit anybody they knew, so the other things, trousers, shirts and vests, she packaged in black bin liners and delivered via Ammar’s taxi cab to the same charity shops in Kilburn they’d originally come from.

  There were also, dusty on a shelf behind Hasna’s Iraqi memorabilia, photographs of life in Baghdad, including portraits of Marwan when he used to smile and stand straight; of Muntaha’s beautiful mother; Ammar as black and white child from a foreign land, Sunday supplement-type studies of him amid palm trees or against flat scrub backdrops; and uncles and aunts whose faces Muntaha had forgotten, who stirred emotions she couldn’t properly recognize.

  There was an album of drawings done by her and Ammar before they could write, happy dinosaurs and multicoloured goats depicted with the expressive primitivism of the very young. She took the photographs and the drawings and stashed them in the heart zone of her bedroom. Her own private bedroom now. She considered Ammar too clumsy to care for them. He’d already taken the Islamic pamphlets, and Marwan’s prayer rug.

  She took a few pieces of cutlery that gleamed something of the past, and one or two plates and cups. Ammar kept his father’s out-of-date and in-other-ways invalid Iraqi passport, symbolic of the only journey done with it. And then there was nothing else of Marwan. Having distributed his remains thus, Muntaha experienced a satisfying sense of completion. She felt as she did when she finished a long novel, or as an artist feels when he’s put the final detail to a canvas – paradoxically, because instead of achieving and synthesizing she had divided and disintegrated something that had previously been one.

  A condolence letter came from her uncle Nidal. He invited her to visit Iraq, and she thought perhaps she would. Perhaps she’d request a year off work and try to do something useful, teaching English to Iraqi children, for example, or collecting schoolbooks to donate. They needed them. They even had a pencil shortage. Pencils were on the sanctions list because graphite was classed as ‘dual use’. Meaning it could just as easily be used to manufacture a weapon of mass destruction as to copy notes from a blackboard. And meanwhile, because of the American depleted uranium, cancer rates and birth deformities had increased by hundreds of per cent. Just to imagine the country she had come from was to weep. It made her private grief irrelevant, and so it was comforting to imagine it as often as she could. She should do her bit, she thought. She should spend her inheritance on this.

  At school between meetings she contemplated some sort of a memorial for her father. Writing something maybe. For the local paper, perhaps, or the school bulletin. At a staff-room desk she noted sentences and scrubbed them out again, trying to find a way of making him representative of all the city’s migrant lives. She went so far as to plan a project for her history class called ‘History Starts At Home’, intending to use Marwan as model text. Photos, maps and narrative. ‘Marwan al-Haj was born in Iraq and died in England.’ ‘Marwan al-Haj came to England to build a better life.’ ‘Marwan al-Haj knew the libraries of both Baghdad and London.’ But it didn’t capture anything of her father. Written down like that, Marwan was nothing special. Everybody migrates. Everybody changes and disperses. And life is too complex, too large, to encapsulate. Nothing can be summed up, least of all a human spirit.

  So Marwan slowly became defined as a personal memory, or more precisely as a collection of images and sensations which summoned something of him for a candle-flickering instant, and this memory joined the mental objects of her world as one of a series of signs in a glorious book, signs which were resonant if not symbolic of an inexpressible, ungraspable realm.

  Ammar kept his inexpert eye on her. Her college friends came round, and she saw friends at the mosque. At school she confided in Gabor a little, between meetings, and he pieced things together. He understood that Sami had gone, and imagined what he didn’t understand. He saw himself as a support for her. They ate at the same table in the canteen, and sometimes went for coffee after school. Things were looking up for him. He had an exhibition planned in a fashionable gallery, and at the same time, Muntaha became available. When he asked her to come to eat at his flat she said she’d be more comfortable if he came to her. On Saturday afternoon, she said.

  Gabor brought flowers, arriving early.

  Just as he put his hand up to the bell, Ammar burst from the door. His hand collided with Ammar’s nose. Or Ammar’s nose smacked into Gabor’s palm. It happened very fast. Ammar was already angry when he came out, before the collision.

  ‘God. Are you all right?’ Gabor asked. He’d stepped back, but now went towards Muntaha’s half-felled brother, put his hand to the hand with which Ammar was cradling his nose.

  ‘Fucking Jews,’ said Ammar.

  He pushed Gabor away.

  ‘And you expect us to lie down and let you do whatever you please.’

  Ammar clenched his fists. His eyes watered. He spat, fiercely, at the pavement. A puff of summer detritus rose from the place of impact. A tail of spittle hanging to his lower lip.

  ‘You’ve misunderstood.’ Gabor was working out that the Jew comment specified him. That Ammar had him implicated in a collective drama, larger than this doorstep coincidence. ‘No, you’ve got it wrong. I didn’t mean to hit you. I was going to ring the bell. I was looking for…’

  Ammar hit him, hard, in the head. So fast Gabor didn’t see his arm move. Just the ghost of something to his left.

  Yes, it hurt. Gabor wobbled. A flash of general pain and greater surprise made his body want to fall, to stop. Then he steadied himself and touched the side of his face. It was roaring red. Still numb, but heat came through his fingertips. He watched Ammar.

  ‘Now turn the other cheek,’ he tau
nted. ‘That’s right, turn the other cheek.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Gabor felt blood swelling at his temple. Is there a weak point in the skull there? He pictured a skull, with its fragile curve down to the eye socket. Was his brain all right?

  ‘You’re a Christian, aren’t you? That’s what they pretend to do. Turn the cheek, boy.’

  ‘Didn’t you just call me a Jew?’

  ‘Whatever the fuck you are.’

  ‘I’m not a Christian.’

  Gabor found himself flushed with fighting hormone. Throat dry and mouth unresponsive, it wasn’t easy to speak. He negotiated an agreement with himself not to do anything regrettable. Here was Muntaha’s little brother, at Muntaha’s front door, in the grip of a crisis which had little to do with Gabor. He was much smaller than Gabor. If Gabor hit him he’d do him real damage. All the same, butterflies were zooming about his intestines. Imam Ali said the strongest man is he who can fight against himself. Hard to be so strong. Gabor forgot his aching head. His body wanted to strike.

  ‘I’m not a Christian,’ he said again, through bloodless lips.

  ‘Whatever the fuck, then. Whatever the fuck you are.’

  Gabor thought of saying he was a Muslim, in the true linguistic sense of ‘one who submits’. He’d been preparing to tell Muntaha that anyway. ‘One who accepts’ is better, one who accepts reality, because in Islam God is the Real, the True. But Ammar was there frothing at him, dribbling saliva, reddening as shame replaced anger, trying to make himself angry again. A dangerous spinning man on a dangerous spinning earth. He wouldn’t want to hear it.

  ‘I’m an agnostic,’ Gabor said.

  And that was also true. Gabor was a not-knower whose prejudice was to wonder how anyone could be otherwise. When you consider that our sense of reality depends on the structure of our brains, that the matter we assume to be real and solid around us is ultimately points of light in empty space, when you consider big bang theory and superstrings and chaos, and the varieties of religious experience, the people who see ghosts and the people who don’t, when you consider these things, then certainty doesn’t seem to be a logical response.