It was lilting, oriental music to Sami’s ears, Sami the apostate to atheism, traitor to his traitorous father.
The questioning resumed.
‘What is your position on the Arab-Israeli conflict?’
So would the English, sheeplike, believe the official version? That Hizbullah is the same as al-Qa’ida? Hamas and the Taliban one? Sami would see. And he’d do what he could. Self-preservation, Tom had said. Evasive action.
There was a significant rapping on the door. Jeff went to it quickly. His fingers remained curled around the door frame while he conferred with a uniformed man in the corridor.
‘Kate,’ he called. His voice up a note.
She frowned as she got up, without the drama of her earlier frowns. Sami had a view of her back slumping a little as she received information. She wheeled away from the door, losing rigidity, compensating with a pinching of the mouth, a hard stare at the floor. Then swished her head sideways to her body, and smiled.
‘Mr Traifi. I owe you an apology. It seems you are who you say you are. Not an extremist at all.’
‘No hard feelings, mate.’ Jeff, unsmiling now, made a jovial slap to Sami’s shoulder. ‘See it from our point of view. You were standing there, outside the mosque, in a suspicious manner. All perfectly innocent, of course, we know that now.’
‘And you have grown a rather thick beard recently, haven’t you?’ Kate chiding gently.
‘Imagine,’ said Jeff. ‘Imagine if under the questioning then you’d given us a lead. Something important. We could have saved lives.’
Sami stood up.
Jeff grasped his arm. ‘Why don’t you work for us?’
‘With us,’ corrected Kate.
‘Work with us. We need the help, I don’t mind admitting. We’re not prepared for the new scenario. Lack of resources, lack of legislated powers. It’ll take time to come through. We don’t have many contacts in your community.’
His community. Society splitting up into sects for safety, into fraternities, everybody sticking with their own kind. The day of Tom Field had arrived.
‘Whereas you, Mr Traifi, you could infiltrate. You look the part.’
‘In the mosques. The beard and all.’
They were following Sami through the door, down the corridor.
‘Think about it at least.’
‘Give us a call.’
There was his mother. Nur Kallas. Her hijab tight. He’d seen her last perhaps a year earlier, briefly, in the street with Muntaha. He hadn’t looked at her face then. Now he did, and it was creased and pale.
They shook hands.
‘Thanks for rescuing me.’
She nodded. Jeff, smiling and stooping, ushered them to the exit.
‘They thought you were an Islamist,’ said Nur when they were on the street. A soft single chuckle died in her throat. ‘It’s true you look like one these days. Your beard’s longer than your hair.’
It was the first time in a long while he’d heard his mother’s voice.
Sami said, ‘Do you know what they wanted at the end? They wanted me to be an informer. They wanted me to shop Islamists, to be mukhabarat.’
Nur raised her eyes to his. A hint of Faris to her, some family resemblance in the curve of the cheeks. They walked towards the tube.
Nur said, ‘You’re lucky, though. In Syria they’d have tortured you. We wouldn’t have seen you for years.’
32
Late
Someone on the tube was reading an evangelical thriller called The Late Great Planet Earth. On the cover, the globe was cracked open. Sami and Nur sat opposite, in silence, rocked by the movement of the train.
She hadn’t invited him home but they’d both known he was coming. They spoke about the circumstances of his arrest for a couple of minutes, Nur less outraged by it than he felt she should be, and then they submitted with awkward reserve to the journey, not saying anything, saving it up. A meditative nothing for fourteen stops.
They alighted, redundantly pointing the way to each other, and slowly walked a section of high street. Not too many people here owned cars so the corporations hadn’t yet won total victory. True, there was a hyperstore within bus distance, but local specificity survived. As well as KFC there was the Harrow Hen House, etcetera, and to look on the bright side, Mr Patties Soul Food Kitchen, the Lebanese grocer’s, the Sari Base. They turned right, past token front yards hemmed in by migratory traffic, but people out in them nonetheless, perched on brick walls, on bikes on the pavement, talking. Portuguese neighbouring Poles, Chinese neighbouring Algerians, and so on. Everyone mixed up. Flitting shadows.
The sight and sound of children made Nur speak, in English.
‘No children yet? You’re a man, Sami. You’re here to have children.’
‘You only had me.’
‘I’d have had more if your father had agreed. He was father to his book.’
A child would mean Sami was a link in a chain, would make Mustafa a grandfather (deceased), and Sami a father, not the inheritor. A child would make Sami an attribute, a descriptor, not a subject. Not the chief subject. Sex is the defeat of individuality and the victory of the species. But sex, though. Sami thought of Muntaha undressed. He was ready for that.
There was no eye contact with his mother. They’d spoken with false gruffness, a manly kind of Anglo-Saxon distance. From the side he noted her deterioration. Her skin was old-woman fabric now, and it was too late for any reconciliation that would take him back to the boy in her lap, wrapped in towels. It provoked anger in him, or the memory of anger, and he was quite open to himself and calm about it, observing all his emotional habits: his traditional loyalty to his father, his old hatred for the hijab. The hijab that marked her as a female and a decaying thing. A woman, not a girl. The bearer of a body.
She turned the key in the old door. The old house. Even the old smell, though she’d changed perfumes and foodstuffs in the intervening years. Everything heavy with sad nostalgia.
Nur unpinned the hijab. Her hair was dyed chestnut brown, as he remembered it from early childhood, but otherwise she was rumpled, dressed less formally than before, quite un-Syrian. It was too late for her to be what she had been.
Yet in the house some ancient habitude had an influence, relaxing them both. They spoke Arabic.
‘Those planes in New York,’ she said. ‘I dreamt it before it happened.’
Sami removed his shoes and followed her to the kitchen, where she was already preparing Turkish coffee.
‘I was in my family’s old home in Damascus, in Muhajireen. It was hot and it smelled like home. I was hanging washing on the terrace. I heard a crash and turned to the mountain. There were two towers burning. Exactly the same towers. I kept the image of them after I woke up.’
She arranged small cups and saucers on a tray.
‘It was two weeks before it happened. Strange, isn’t it? And what about this. I have a friend, a Lebanese, whose son’s an accountant. He works in the City for a company which has a New York branch, in the Trade Center, in the towers, and he was offered a transfer over there. Of course he wanted to go, and his family wanted him to go, but he’d fallen in love with a girl here in London, an English girl. All the family complaining, why give up this opportunity for a girl, but he wouldn’t listen. Two weeks later the girl left him and he cursed himself for not going. But look. The romance is over, but look how he was saved. It wasn’t his fate to die, not yet.’ She took a cigarette from a packet next to the sink. ‘Smoke if you want to.’
‘I’ve left it.’
She lit the cigarette, and peered through smoke to spoon powder into simmering water. She took two proper drags, then poured the coffee.
‘So you stopped your university work.’
‘Yeah.’ He didn’t want to talk about it. The fact was too much an admission of failure, of bad direction-taking and stubbornness. ‘How did you know?’
‘Muntaha told me. She always keeps in touch.’
Cardamom and
coffee steam and smoke rose between them.
‘I was going to call you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Sami carried the tray to the front room. They sat down, and Nur leaned forward to add sugar, stirring. Her hands and his were the same, the flatness of the fingernails, the thick knuckles. His hands were his inheritance from her. Also the ridge of his nose. These were the visible things, coded from twists of DNA.
‘We should talk,’ he said, ‘about Baba.’
‘What about him?’ Nur intently driving ash around an ashtray.
‘About him and your family. My uncles.’
‘Mustafa. God have mercy on him.’
‘God have mercy on him,’ repeated Sami.
‘Mustafa with my family was like a bull in a china shop, as the English say. He thought he had a duty to offend their values. He seemed to expect to be thanked for it. Respect is important in our society. Etiquette.’
‘Does that explain it?’
‘Explain what?’
‘The problems between you.’
Nur sipped coffee, and stubbed out her cigarette.
‘We didn’t agree about things, as you know.’
‘Tell me again. I want to hear it again. It’s different now.’
Nur looked towards the window.
‘Your father,’ she said, ‘had dreams concerning the Arabs. He thought it was only a matter of time until everyone would work in an office, productive eight-hour days, and go home in the evening to read novels, or go to the cinema to watch art films. He thought everyone would own a car and a house to fit a nuclear family, and that they’d all drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes. He thought that would make them better. He thought they wouldn’t need anything more than that.’ She snorted: ‘Well, the cigarettes part came true, just when they were giving up here.’ She pointed through single glazing to the street. ‘A lot of us believed it, enough to forget what we’d believed before. Long enough for it to be too late to go back.’
She lit another cigarette, pulling deep. ‘But his dreams were dreams. What he wanted, it’s not possible. There aren’t enough schools in the world. Not enough money. Too much history. Why should it happen, anyway? They wanted us to be powerful, like Europe. To an extent they had good intentions. But we aren’t Europe. And maybe we were happier the way we were, even if we were underdeveloped, so-called, even if we were easy to colonize, even superstitious and weak. They wanted progress, whatever the cost. Progress, so-called. But maybe it wasn’t a good idea, modernizing us. They made the country a prison to do it. A very modern prison.’
She veered from ‘he’ to ‘they’, from Mustafa to the Ba’ath Party. ‘He thought there’d be one nation. One Arab nation from the Ocean to the Gulf. What we have now is everything but. We have everything smaller and everything bigger. Little sects and ethnicities, little nationalisms, and big Islamism. But no Arab nation. If they hadn’t tried so hard to force us into it, maybe it would have happened. We’re Arabs, after all.’ She seemed to become stuck to her cigarette, her hand at her mouth, facing away from Sami, to the window. ‘Anyway. You didn’t see your father getting rich out of it. Most of the others were in it for money. Your father was an idealist.’
She stopped speaking and smoked noisily. Sami was embarrassed by her emotion, but he wanted to know.
He asked, ‘And what happened between you? There was something specific, wasn’t there? I remember when you two stopped talking. It happened suddenly.’
Nur was curling up, wrapping her arm around her waist as if there was pain inside which needed to be massaged. ‘Deeply wounded’ we say, talking about psychological trauma, and language speaking its wisdom through us. Because it’s physical too, emotional events leave physical scars. Nur winced as she smoked, exhaling grey cloud into her lap.
She said, ‘I think he thought, if his dream couldn’t come true, then neither could anyone else’s.’
Sami said, ‘I visited Aunt Fadya in Syria.’
‘I know. She told me.’
‘I met someone called Faris. My uncle. I’d forgotten him completely, but recently I’ve remembered. He came here, didn’t he, to London, when I was a boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘He wasn’t well when I saw him in Damascus. He seemed much older than his age.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, looking into the middle distance.
‘They seemed as if they were blaming me. Fadya and her sons. I couldn’t understand them.’
Nur said nothing.
‘They said, “I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat?” Staring at me, as if it was me. But I never knew anything about it. I was only a boy when he was arrested. I wasn’t even there. “I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris?” ‘
Nur, softly: ‘God knows what’s true and what isn’t.’
Sami said, ‘It was Baba, wasn’t it?’
Looking into the middle distance, she sighed.
‘It was him, wasn’t it? My father.’
‘Nobody should tell anybody that their father was a traitor.’
‘But I know. I worked it out. You just need to confirm it. Baba told the mukhabarat about Uncle Faris.’
She turned and faced him. Her eyes the colour of light honey.
‘Yes.’
‘Baba sent your brother to prison for twenty-two years. My father destroyed your brother.’
‘He probably didn’t want him there for twenty-two years. People get lost in those prisons. And your father died.’
‘But he told the mukhabarat.’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
Sami dipped his head in acknowledgment, and paused, and continued. ‘But he was living here in London.’
‘He visited there. He had Party friends. Even here, he had Party friends.’
Sami neither cold nor hot. Sami, at room temperature, only wanting information: ‘Why did he do it?’
‘An excess of loyalty,’ replied Nur. ‘Not necessarily because he was a bad man, although I, of course, interpreted it like that. Perhaps because he was good, according to his own definitions. Betrayal of one thing is usually loyalty to something else.’
They had another cupful of coffee each, and Nur smoked two more cigarettes. Then she went into her bedroom (still the small one, that had first been a guest room) to pray alone. Sami didn’t suggest he join her, but waited, tapping his teeth, asking himself how to communicate reconciliation. The right thing was probably to embrace her, but it felt too late, or perhaps too early, for that. He was still squeamish of bodies, except his untouched wife’s. Plus, he was suspicious of his own tricks, and wanted to keep drama at arm’s length.
When she returned from her prayer he caught, squeezed, and kissed her hand, taking refuge in culture, in this impersonal yet moving signal of filial respect and duty.
She said, ‘Thank you,’ wobble-voiced, nervously happy.
Sami was by the door, flushed, putting on shoes.
‘You should come to eat with us sometimes,’ he said.
‘Are you living at home?’
‘I will be. I’m moving back.’
‘Yes, I’ll come. If you want.’
‘Yes, I want,’ he said. ‘I understand now.’
The moment for eye contact had passed, so he looked at the wooden door, saying, ‘Muntaha likes you. She’ll be happy to see you.’
Nur said, ‘She’s a good woman, a good wife for you. If you want my advice, Sami, stop making a fuss about her hijab. She tells me all about it, your hijab arguments. Maybe it isn’t necessary, but it’s her business. Don’t make trouble over an abstraction. You should be loyal to people before ideas. Be flexible. Don’t force people to be what they aren’t.’
Sami parroted, ‘Maybe it isn’t necessary? The hijab?’
‘Allahu ‘aalim. God knows best.’
‘So why do you wear it?’
‘In protest, I suppose. And in hope. All you can do is hope. And try to be yourself, what you hope you may be. If belief isn�
�t always possible, hope is.’
33
Awe
Sami, with Muntaha headscarfed beside him, was driving a West London Cabs Nissan north and west through a carbonate-beautiful late afternoon, into a rural, pre-apocalyptic zone of varied green. They’d had a long day’s driving up the M6, talking pasts and futures, and listening to the radio: pirates on the FM dial on the way out of London, and while skirting Birmingham too. Otherwise classical music, and news.
George Bush, out of hiding and belatedly stepping into hero role, not saving but avenging, had told the New York firemen, ‘The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,’ which reminded Sami and Muntaha of the Prophet talking to the dead, saying, ‘Look, do you see now?’ Given that the people who knocked the buildings down were dead too, of self-administered punishment, burnt with their victims. But Bush was talking of this world, of coming shock and awe, and commentators excitedly discussed imminent explosions, in Afghanistan, perhaps Iraq, the son Bush wishing to outdo his father there.
The village whose name Tom Field had written for Sami was easy to find on the map. Then they had to ask the staid, slow villagers who squinted quizzically at their foreignness – English foreignness – for directions to the mountain.
They stopped where the road did, clambered over a stone wall, and grinned at each other in their confusion. City people out of their depth. There were bushes and trees and reeds and no evident pathways. But Tom met them within five minutes, emerging from the wilderness even before they summoned the courage to shout his name. They climbed in the lingering northern indeterminacy between day and night up to Tom’s house, which was in a hollow very close to the summit, on ground high enough to survive glacier-melt. It was also, Tom pointed out, fairly invisible from the air, sheltered by indigenous forest, by birch and ash, rowan and willow. Built of reclaimed wood and glass, as he explained, walking them around it. It had a bathtub, outside by the vegetable patch, on stilts, with space beneath for a woodfire to heat the water. Water had to be brought in buckets from a stream. Tom filtered it to drink.
The Road from Damascus Page 35