The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  ‘Yo!’ Ammar turned urgently from the laptop. His lips were pushed forward as if he was sucking a bullet. ‘Japanese brethren! Respect!’

  The screen showed the second plane hitting the tower. An expansion of fire. A mass catching of breath. New Yorkers screaming for God.

  ‘But they’re not Muslims, are they, the Japanese,’ said Muntaha, in an academic tone.

  ‘Shit, religion isn’t the only thing, man. Point is…’

  The screen showed streets of rubble. The black and white tribes of New York uniformly ashen grey. Briefcase refugees streaked with dust-caked liquids – with blood or tears.

  ‘Point is, this the heart of America. This the belly of the beast. And it looks like Gaza, man. It looks like Baghdad. And that is something to restore a man’s pride.’

  Sami heard him. It was true, he noted an intestinal rush of excitement, something like worthiness and justification. He also felt the guilt Freud says a boy feels when his father dies, because the boy’s been beaming death wishes for so long.

  The screen showed a flabby, wobble-voiced American. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ he was saying. His hands circling. Gathering and pointing his intention into the camera. ‘All I know for sure is, we gotta nuke the entire goddamn Middle East for this. We gotta reply to this.’

  Ammar was up at the screen with a fist and plenty of saliva.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he snarled. ‘Fuck you.’

  Hasna, stunned since her son Salim’s engagement to the Nigerian girl but coming to life now with the events, inhaled sharply.

  ‘Language please,’ she said. ‘There are standards, whatever the occasion.’

  The occasion. Was it justified? Sami fulminated a while. America attacks Iraq. Puts military bases in almost every Arab country. Military bases in more than a hundred countries of the world. They attack Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, Sudan, Libya. Undermine popular governments and prop up hated dictatorships. Put the bullets in the guns which kill Palestinians. Export their films to everywhere, in every one of which they’re the heroes. As aid to poor farmers they give seeds which impoverish the soil, so it’ll only produce crops if treated by expensive American fertilizer. Which is a metaphor for their whole economic system. They control trade. They seed the earth with depleted uranium. They are the empire.

  The screen showed workers dropping from windows. Insects falling, some in spasms of terror, some unmoving. Paralysed or submitting? Protesting or ecstatic? Falling, in any case. As Muntaha will fall. As Ammar is falling – ageing – if he could see it speeded up. As Sami himself is falling. Marwan gone. Mouna gone. Mustafa gone.

  Death was happening inside the building too. Invisibly. Before the towers fell. Repetition of footage made it all one moment –planes hitting, people jumping, towers falling. Sami watched the walls being carbonized. Smoke going up. How this makes the time run out a little quicker. Although all planes are grounded, meaning less carbonate overall. But the wars there’ll be if Muslims did it. This chokes us quicker. A lot quicker.

  Ammar texting and speaking. ‘It serves them right. It’s payback time.’

  Muntaha said, ‘What about “My mercy is greater than My wrath”?’

  Ammar said, ‘What about fight them wherever you find them?’

  The screen showed the collapse of the towers. First one, then the other. The half hour between abbreviated, and the ten seconds of each crumpling extended beyond time. Such a beautiful demolition. To die all at once, Mustafa said on his deathbed, to die with solidarity, takes the sting from it. So maybe they’re lucky, like the dead of Hama.

  ‘It’s probably nothing to do with Muslims,’ said Muntaha. ‘Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the building in Oklahoma. They were convinced it was Muslims. Men of Middle Eastern appearance, they said. Remember that? He was blonde, McVeigh. Nothing like an Arab. Looked like a soldier.’

  Sami helped her. ‘He was a soldier. In the Gulf War. It was being a soldier that pissed him off with the American government.’

  ‘Language,’ said Hasna.

  ‘You see,’ said Ammar, in the act of discovery. ‘One of the signs of the Hour is there’ll be a fire from the Hijaz visible in Basra, and we thought it was the Kuwait oil wells in ’91. But it’s this. It equals this. Everyone in Basra will be watching this on TV.’

  Muntaha tutted. ‘The fire’s in New York, Ammar.’

  ‘Yeah, but, think about it. A TV station transmitting from the Hijaz, from Mecca or Madina, and watched in Basra. Yeah?’

  The towers collapsed and dust storms rose. The desert, vertical, claiming its place. Would America be destroyed in just one day? The temples of its power were burning, financial and military. The political still to come. Some reports said a fifth plane was unaccounted for. Sami decided it was heading for the White House.

  Muntaha rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll be a relief for you when the Hour comes, won’t it?’

  ‘Can’t stand in the way of reality, sister.’ A strong strain of Jamaica in Ammar’s voice. ‘Ya cyaan stand in the way of jihad.’

  ‘Jihad?’ Muntaha rose, half straight, twisting her body towards him, not giving up her chair. ‘Islamic rules say you can’t kill women or children. You can’t kill civilians. You have to fight on the battlefield, not in the middle of the city.’

  Ammar made his hands into scales, explanatory. ‘They attack our cities. We attack theirs.’

  ‘So call it politics, then. Or straightforward war. Don’t call it jihad.’ She sat down, addressed the screen again.

  Varieties of heat roiled and smouldered under Sami’s skin. He agreed with Muntaha and Ammar both. And the studio experts. And the Japanese Red Army. A hot prickle of fear, mainly beneath his scalp. What if it was Arabs? What kind of excuse would this give America? A studio expert was talking about Pearl Harbor.

  Muntaha held her face as Sami would have liked to, between her hands, and whispered, ‘God, I hope it wasn’t Arabs.’

  Ammar prayed, ‘Let it be the Muslims!’

  Hasna announced, in loud English, ‘It serves them right. But still, those people.’

  Sami rolled his head to inspect her. Her eyes dry and desperate, her skin pale as ceilings. Her body worn out by exile frustrations, the deaths of husbands, and shaken now by Salim’s bad marriage. A body receiving blows, slowly disintegrating. And all we are is body, as far as nature is concerned. Nature being all there is, here at least, in this empirical dimension. Our condition being that we rot when we’re not burning or falling from windows.

  ‘Celebrations in China!’ Ammar reported from the laptop. ‘Celebrations all over Latin America!’

  So will Sami defend it to his non-Arab acquaintance? If it was Arabs who did it, it’s all anyone is going to talk to him about. Ever again.

  Ammar speaking into his mobile: ‘That’s right! As many kuffar killed as brothers and sisters martyred in the Intifada!’

  Muntaha, from her chair. ‘What’s this kuffar? Kuffar means the ungrateful and arrogant. How do you know who they are?’

  ‘The unbelievers, sister.’

  ‘Christians and Jews aren’t kuffar. They’re People of the Book. Maybe even Hindus aren’t kuffar. There weren’t any in Arabia, so the Prophet didn’t talk about them. You can’t call just anyone you want a kafir. The kuffar are the pagan Arabs who rejected the Prophet.’

  ‘Shit, keep it simple. Kuffar is kuffar is kuffar. Just…’ – he waved at the TV – ‘… cheer up. Look at it. Cheer up.’

  She made a sound with her lips like a pressure cooker.

  ‘What you’re saying,’ said Ammar, ‘is we should just let them kill us and never strike back. Turn the other fucking cheek.’

  ‘Them?’ Muntaha pointing at the screen. ‘They aren’t the people killing us.’

  Her voice was high like the day she’d told Sami to leave. But this wasn’t nearly so serious. It wasn’t a real day. It was Eid or Christmas, a deathday or a birthday. Nothing had weight. More precisely, nothing that they did had weight, not
in comparison with the historical events on the screen.

  ‘Language,’ said Hasna.

  ‘Collateral damage,’ said Ammar conclusively.

  ‘That’s what they say when they kill Arabs.’

  ‘And why should we be better behaved than them?’

  Unexpectedly, Hasna asked, ‘What would your father have said?’

  A silence while everybody contemplated this, a question Hasna hadn’t really intended. Marwan, thought Sami. Marwan would have cursed a lot. He’d have called the Americans and the Arabs and the Jews pimps and dogs and sons of donkeys. He’d have wondered what the response would be. For a brief moment Sami found Hasna and Muntaha and Ammar’s eyes on him. Not on him, on his chair. Marwan’s chair.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ammar. ‘I was on the phone. He’s gone now.’

  He dialled, glowering down at the little keyboard. Muntaha, meanwhile, shuffled her chair towards Sami’s. She ignored the TV screen.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s jihad,’ she whispered.

  ‘What, then?’

  And they were immediately conspirators. Or bomb-shelter acquaintances, marking off territory around themselves. Us in here. Ammar and Hasna out there, a little nearer the exit.

  ‘Marriage is jihad.’

  They smiled into each other. She touched his hand.

  ‘I heard you were at the Rashid Iqbal talk. Didn’t see you on the news.’

  ‘That was an experience.’

  ‘So what did he say? Or was it fighting from the start?’

  Rashid Iqbal was one of the topics they used to argue about, Sami at least. Sami praising Iqbal as a post-Muslim genius, sacrilegiously placing Iqbal books on top of the Qur’an, bringing Iqbal into discussions of sport, weather, TV, irrelevantly, just for a wound to worry. Muntaha’s tactic had been to wear her tolerant expression.

  Sami told her, ‘He made a distinction between literature and religion, and preferred literature. As you’d expect.’

  ‘But why make a distinction? Whatever raises the spirit.’

  ‘He meant religion only allows one truth.’

  ‘One kind of religion. Depends how you read, doesn’t it? Same with novels. How does he expect people to read novels properly if they can’t read religious text? Also, fiction is fictional. Religion isn’t.’ Her words spun wistfully heavenward, and she twirled her hair. ‘I suppose religion’s somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.’

  ‘He seemed confused,’ conceded Sami.

  ‘Everybody is. Then what happened?’

  ‘Then everybody started shouting about everything at once. Nobody knew what was happening. Then people mashed the place up. BNP mostly, and the police. But I can’t judge properly. It was so much chaos. Then someone fired a shot. No idea who. Could have been anybody.’

  ‘Could have been anybody,’ she repeated. ‘So was it exciting to see him in the flesh? You’ve been reading him for years.’

  ‘Not really. Feet of clay, I suppose.’

  Their eyes trailed to the screen, which showed the second plane hitting the tower, and back to each other.

  ‘And did anybody hurt you?’ she asked.

  She touched his face. Tugged his beard gently. He couldn’t reply.

  ‘What’s this? Sami with a beard! Wonders never cease.’

  From now on the beard would be a magic charm for them, and a souvenir of this world-turning summer.

  He asked, ‘Will you have me if I have a beard?’

  ‘I’ll have you if you’re you.’ She paused. ‘But good you. Loyal, sorted out, not depressed. Not taking it out on me. Not so scared, if I may say so, Sami. Habibi.’

  She fixed him in such warm, unblinking focus that he sensed the abyss of himself – his ancestors falling infinitely away inside him –and his shallowness, just a skin’s thickness of conscious time between the deeps of past and future. But he kept his bearings. Muntaha was only as deep and shallow as he was. No more nor less than him. Very like him, yet not identical. Not a mirror. She was a woman. A human being. Obviously.

  While he was failing to respond to her conditions she reached over the chair arm for his hip. She extended a chaste hand into his pocket, and withdrew his mobile.

  ‘You need to talk to your mother,’ she said, typing and saving Nur’s number. ‘You need to be more responsible. Think about others.’

  He nodded obediently. ‘I was thinking about that anyway.’

  ‘Good. She’ll die one day.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  The screen showed the second tower collapsing.

  Sami said, ‘I understand what it means that you lost your mother in Iraq. But sometimes I feel you’ve lost her less than I’ve lost mine.’

  ‘Well there’s a paradox,’ she said, quizzically.

  ‘Something to do with you being a woman, I think.’

  The phone interrupted them. The land line. Muntaha rose to answer it. From her side of the conversation Sami worked out the caller was her mother’s brother in Baghdad, Nidal. He was asking what would happen now, expecting her to have inside knowledge because she was there, in the West, hearing what the Westerners say.

  Sami noticed the extra junk accumulated in the room since Marwan’s departure. A framed ‘To Battle!’ calligraphed on Celtic (and Islamic) green, purchased from Sinn Féin sympathizers on the Kilburn Road, was propped on the sideboard. A shiny stick-on ‘Allah’, in Arabic, placed over the tricolour. That would be Ammar’s contribution, juxtaposed incongruously with plastic flower and fruit arrangements, strawberry red and apple green, and burgeoning Iraqi memorabilia – vague terracotta reproductions of Sumerian statuary, black and red woven saddlebags, a naïve portrait of a Beduin with a falcon. That would be Hasna. Strange housemates, these two.

  Both sat staring at the screen, which showed New Yorkers trekking over a long bridge. Hasna’s jaw hung low, her mouth slightly open. Ammar, who’d taken his sister’s seat, finally silenced in contemplation of the event. For someone whose world-vision is predicated on humiliation, on personal powerlessness extended to an imagined community, the planes were redemptive, miraculous. They didn’t fit the mundane narrative. They were mysteries. For Ammar, a real sign, at last. Something concrete. Something you didn’t have to try hard to make significant. At last, God in the world.

  Sami watched his wife talking. Connected. Using her mother tongue. Her ‘lughat-al-umm’. In Arabic, ‘umm’ means mother, and also origin and basis. ‘Amma’, meaning to lead a prayer, derives from the same root, as does ‘umma’, meaning the nation or the Islamic community. For Muntaha, her people, her ancestors, didn’t mean trouble. She was as she was, accepting her past, hopeful for the future. Sami watched her and considered.

  Chilly dusk on the doorstep, Sami startled by his own laughter. Their hands rising like sparks to each other’s faces. Too fast. They stopped, caressing the breeze at shoulder level. The unfamiliar familiar.

  You can’t take anything for granted. Not a woman, nor an idea. Not a political situation. Not life or death. Nothing is simple. Everything is always changing, and always – if you pay enough attention – surprising.

  31

  Escape

  ‘What?’ asked Sami, gulping and blinking. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m getting out.’

  What Tom Field was doing was pulling books from his office shelves, twirling them before his knife-like nose, his furrowed brow, and allotting them to piles on the wooden floor. In front of each pile was an A4 sheet labelled with marker pen: Pile 1, Pile 2, up to Pile 7. Number codes for the recipients.

  He’d already signed a pre-prepared letter of resignation and announced to his doctoral students that university was a distraction they could no longer afford. Pulled out of a lecture programme (‘Surviving Collapse: Remnant Societies Post-Rome to Post-Industrial’) at the start of the new term, too late for rearrangement. He’d left no number or forwarding address. Burnt his bridges.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Tom, incredulous.
‘Why? Well, what do you think? Because it’s starting now, if you haven’t noticed. Stage whatever-it-is. The next stage. A much more pivotal and violent stage. Haven’t you noticed how hectic things have been, even before this… event?’

  The event didn’t yet have an agreed-upon name.

  ‘I said something big was planned. And there you have it, a couple of days ago. The catalyst. The trigger. Well then, watch it unfold. Enjoy the…’ – his flow broke and resumed as he stripped and stacked – ‘… the oil wars. Or not. As the case may be.’

  ‘You mean,’ started Sami, but couldn’t find an apt conspiracy to continue with. ‘What do you mean? Who planned it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not being simplistic. Could have been who they say it is. The Saudis they used in Afghanistan. Could be. Or maybe not. Too soon to say. Not really important, in any case. Not really relevant. It’s how they’ll exploit it that’s the point. And that isn’t difficult to predict.’

  His hands, busy as bees, denuded the walls of books. Sandbags removed from a shelter.

  ‘My favourites are here,’ he said, tapping Piles 2 and 3. ‘Survival narratives. Not particularly the academic analyses. Just the raw stories, told by the survivors themselves. War stories. Camp massacres. Sabra and Shatila. Rwanda. People lost in the desert, or shipwrecked, or fallen down crevasses.’

  His eyes shone. His Adam’s apple worked.

  ‘I suppose there’ll be some good ones from New York soon. The stories Hollywood doesn’t get its hands on first.’

  Tom took himself back to the labour, swiping heavy volumes, swinging them to their fate. His unbuttoned cuffs fluttered. His forearms flexed. His elbows sharp.

  ‘Reading those,’ he said, ‘pumps the adrenalin. Operates the glands. I think that’s why I got waylaid writing books and researching. I’ve had an addiction to the excitement. To the feeling real. Visiting the militiamen in the American forests, interviewing a fighter from Grozny, a man who started thinking rubble was the way home should be. That’s been my buzz: just thinking about the challenges a human being might have to face. It wakes you up. It’s like being in the mountains, with your senses all working. Feeling like an animal, on your instincts. Feeling healthy. Feeling properly alive.’