The Road from Damascus
Page 36
‘I’ll need solar panels and so forth. More technology. I haven’t spent a winter here yet. We’ll see how it is.’
From a clearing he gestured downhill at the overgrown traces of an abandoned road, an illustration of the frailty of human endeavour from which he drew unbounded reassurance.
‘Wilderness, you see, we should count as our friend. That’s what I’m trying to do, partially. I admit I’m domesticated here. Ideally I’d be nomadic. But the world’s not large enough any more. And it’s too violent. More important to be hidden.’
He made them comfortable, served them filtered water and fed them palaeolithic food. As they ate he described the local barter system. Tom knew a glass blower, a weed grower, a cheese maker, a potter, a bowl lather, a knitter, a weaver, a candleshaper.
‘The problem is getting to them without a car. I have a bike, but it takes time. These people are in a thirty-mile radius. It makes you ask yourself if a journey’s really necessary.’
There was no sign of GRor any other companion-untilMuntaha found a box of female grooming and hygiene items near the plate-washing area. She wasn’t exactly snooping; there were none of the markers of private space that a house normally has.
Tom talking, in candlelight, against Sami’s suggestion that he might feel disconnected: ‘I’m at peace with disconnection. No ancestors up here, no past. Like the whole world soon. Give it fifty years. We’re at the end of a loop.’
And Sami, smiling: ‘There’s signs of a companion here, Tom. Not my business, but…’
‘There’s no survival in this world without reproduction.’
‘Children, then?’
‘That’s on the agenda, Sami. Serve the species, you know, serve the genes. We’ll see. For now, I’m mostly alone. And that’s good.’
But Tom talked on like a lonely man who’s captured rare company, like an ex-lecturer who misses the lecture theatre.
‘No clock here, you’ll notice. So there’s a rhythm of day and night, but no diary time, no squashing us into boxes, none of that kind of control. No phone either. But I think I knew you were coming. Didn’t take me long to find you, did it? It’s been suggested that hunter-gatherers had advanced telepathic powers. Perhaps that kind of thing is natural to us, and we’ve lost it as we developed technology. Perhaps we’ll all find out, I mean those who survive, when the technology burns out.
‘Bushmen can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. Some tribes see Venus in the daytime. I have the feeling that all this is possible. I do sense exercises up here, alone. To enhance smell and touch. I blindfold myself and walk the mountain.’
‘It’s attractive,’ said Sami. ‘An attractive sort of life.’
Muntaha laughed, ‘Have you got a mosque up here?’
‘The mountain’s my mosque.’
She regarded him playfully. ‘The mountain’s all right for you, Tom. But I’m an Arab. I need to keep warm in the wintertime. And there aren’t so many of us in this country, better for us to stick together.’
‘Where, in London? Under the bombs and the floods?’
‘I’ll worry about them when they happen. Right now I’m worried about finding Arab culinary ingredients. I need that Syrian shop on the Uxbridge Road, for a start.’
‘True,’ said Sami. ‘Where’s your olive tree? Also, not much jungle music up here.’
‘No jungle music,’ said Tom, ‘but plenty of jungle. Plenty of reality. Art may only be an attempt to remember what we’ve lost. But the Arab culinary ingredients – I see what you mean.’
And with that fortuitous prompting Muntaha revealed from her bag an array of foodstuffs: stuffed vine leaves, kibbe, tubs of hummus and matabal.
Sami and Muntaha slept the night in the separate bedroom. So separate they had to walk for five minutes in the dark, across moss and leaves, to reach it, a square wooden structure between trees, containing only a wooden bed and a feather mattress, and without even candles – but with glass panels in the ceiling so their night was lit by the stars, so their eyes became accustomed to the dark and to the tones of each other’s body in starlight. In the morning they lay on their backs and watched squirrels leap branch to branch. They breakfasted on berries and some kind of tea. Then Tom went mushroom gathering, and Sami and Muntaha set out to walk all day. They prayed together at lunchtime and in the middle afternoon. Out in nature, prayer felt easy to Sami. Out in nature, marvelling in it, Muntaha quoted her favourite hadeeth:
I was a Hidden Treasure which desired to be known
So I created the creation.
And remembering her mother’s lessons, she quoted Imam Ali:
Man is a wonderful creature; he sees through layers of fat, hears through bone, and speaks with a lump of flesh.
Sami nodded at the miracle of sight. He no longer experienced body-claustrophobia, but something like its opposite, a sense of openness and space. Now he claimed a doctrine of radical unknowing, and the beginnings of acceptance.
Our language is adequate for the detail of social relations, and for the objects made by us, or those for which there is an obvious human use. Language is primarily economic. However, for the economically useless, for the natural more-than-human, words are silly, shiny labels signifying only their own poverty. Words like star, sky, sea. Words like blue when applied to the sky, or to distant trees, or mountain rock (applied to the paintwork on a car it does fine). Silly labels tacked on mystery.
Imam Ali said: There is enough light for one who wants to see.
In another long dusk they washed with dust, prayed, nibbled sandwiches, held hands.
Stars became distinct in stages, as suggestions first, then as fixed ideas. Bright Venus, once called Ishtar. And the Pole star. The Plough. And Orion and Taurus, the constellations of Sami’s childhood, oscillating in a stretch of time which has no economic meaning. Mustafa said he’d be up there, among the stars, but didn’t specify which. Which constellation? Orion-Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh who’d rejected Ishtar’s advances, Gilgamesh the king who didn’t need gods. Or Taurus, the Bull of Heaven who ravaged the earth with drought? Bull in a china shop, Nur said.
Sami gazed on them. Fire and rock, the distance of time. Constellations to our eyes, telling the stories of culture. A little bit of science tells you how arbitrary the patterns are. Of course his father wasn’t up there. His father was far too small, like any of us. Sami felt fear and trembling. Felt the emptiness of a burning heart.
Truth and beauty are in the details. The details on the mountain were bacteria, heather, a fox, some starlings, tribes of rabbits. The rumour of a golden eagle, and a cloud of late midges descending to gobble on the human couple. Everything gobbling everything else, relentlessly teaching a very simple lesson: of the power of change. Nature’s plans don’t include us.
Or perhaps they do. Sami had developed a trembling, contingent faith, not necessarily expansive enough to house an eternal heaven, certainly not for Sami as he is. For what is he, now? Not much any more. Not Mustafa’s son, nor Marwan’s son-in-law. Not the child of corpse dust. Not an academic. Not a member of the eternal Arab nation.
So what, then? He’s Nur’s son. Muntaha’s husband. These are facts. But to define himself as other people’s attributes – it isn’t much. Even his name was given to him by other people. In the dead past. So what else?
He’s a bit more of a man now. Meaning, a moment of consciousness. Awe and dread.
For now, that’s all he can manage. Perhaps it’s enough.
Acknowledgments
All praise is due to the Maker Who transfers books from non-existence to existence.
Thanks to my wife for putting up with a writer in the house. Apologies to Ibrahim and Ayaat for all the times I snarled when they opened the door. Thanks to Bashaar for answering questions and to Hadya for telling me her dream. Thanks to my friends Adrian Barnes, Giles Coren, John Liechty and Tariq Yusuf for patient reading and suggestions. Thanks to Simon Prosser, Juliette Mitchell, and especially my agent, Camilla Hornb
y, for their expert advice. Thanks to Francesca Main for helping with practicalities.
The Qur’anic ‘We shall show them Our signs…’ in chapter 6 was translated by the author. Otherwise, all Qur’an quotations come from Muhammad Asad’s The Message of the Qur’an, which is in my opinion by far the best translation in English, and the only one I would recommend to English speakers. My thanks to The Book Foundation for permission to quote.
Thanks to Hadba, Zeinab and Omar Qabbani for permission to quote the poetry of their father, the great Nizar Qabbani.
The line ‘wordlessly sensed by the mind’ comes from the Nizar Qabbani poem ‘I Declare: There Is No Woman Like You’, translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from On Entenngthe Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani, published by Interlink Books.
Khalid Abdul Muhammad sampled by Public Enemy is quoted in chapter 21.
The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is quoted in chapter 2.
Thanks to Linton Kwesi Johnson for permission to quote from his poem ‘Time Come’, from Selected Poems, published by Penguin.