Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  ‘. . . this is the next best thing for Americans.’

  *

  Allahu Akbar. The altar-cry of the Beard with the knife. God is Great. One can say God is Great while opening a throat – and presume to know the nature of God. Does it not instead end all argument?

  So I shut myself away in my room at the Y and read the Qur’an, surah after surah, night after night. A month of reading passes, a month of shuddering pipes and voices outside in the corridor at all hours, my fingers stained by nicotine and printer’s ink, so many surahs coming away so easily beneath my thumb. I find passage after passage, underlining them. Opening my Pickthall every time with the promise of finding even more to corroborate what I’d experienced.

  I read to accumulate evidence against them. When I go out I take my Pickthall with me. I sit in a booth at a diner and read, or spill Starbuck’s on it as I rest on a park-bench, memorising passages, mumbling them to myself till I’ve got them off.

  ‘. . . whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.’

  The verses burn their way into my brain.

  ‘. . . slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship, and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.’

  ‘What’s happening, brother?’

  I look up from the bench I’ve settled into in Washington Square these last afternoons, as around me men in long coats pass small Alfoil packages to students and receive greenbacks in return, their eyes never meeting, these people glancing off each other, and me no threat to any of it. A black man stands in front of me, his jeans hanging loose off his hips. His hair is beaded, his short beard shaved low and sharp on his cheeks, a glittering cross swaying across his chest.

  ‘Hey brother,’ he says. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  ‘Slay the idolaters,’ I answer.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Are you a Christian?’ I ask, pointing to his cross, knowing of course.

  ‘Are you a religious nut?’

  ‘Make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite the necks and smite of them each finger.’

  ‘Fucking religious nut,’ he says, turning away.

  ‘No, no.’ I reach for his arm. ‘Hang on. That’s one thing I’m not . . . that’s the last thing. No, no . . . all I’m doing is quoting the religious fanatics . . . smite their necks. That’s what the fanatics say.’

  ‘What’s it supposed to mean then?’

  ‘Cut off their heads, cut off their fingers.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s from in here. The Muslims’ holy book, their Holy Qur’an. That’s what this book is. Allah is kind and merciful they say, but did you hear that? Cut off their heads. Their God wants them to cut off our heads.’

  ‘That’s shit, man.’

  ‘It’s in here.’

  I point at the passage, and shove the book towards him. I watch eagerly as he reads, his whole head moving from side to side. He finishes the paragraph, then flicks forward some pages, reads, and flicks forward some more, his brow creased, before closing it and handing it back.

  ‘That’s like reading fucking Shakespeare, that is, brother,’ he says eventually. ‘Smite of them each a finger? Who knows what that shit’s supposed to mean.’

  *

  The waitresses, their hair in buns and their hands hardened by dishwater, whisper to each other when two veiled women sit down in a booth and order milkshakes.

  ‘Primitive, isn’t it?’ I say to them when the doorbell tinkles and the Muslims leave.

  ‘Glad I wasn’t born one of them,’ the younger waitress replies, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘If they get their way, they’ll make you one,’ I say.

  And when she cocks an eyebrow, I know I have her.

  Like this I start conversations on the slightest pretext, sometimes for no reason at all. Some people are already haters and we feed each other. Others are ignorant of Muslims and terrorists, and I set myself to educate them. But sometimes it irritates me that people could be apathetic, that they can’t see all the pieces coming together. The kidnapping in Tehran, those fifty-two Americans holed up in their consulate for years when I was a kid, held captive by terrorists. The honour killings and the veils and the clitorectomies. The harems and the seventy-two virgins waiting in paradise for their martyrs. The novelist with the fatwa on his head. The entire stuffed-up Middle East.

  *

  I’d shaken God off when I began holding rock in my hand, began moving through the bush like a tracker, stoop-shouldered, my senses closer to the ground than the air. Left God behind as I sought out thin fissures in great seams of rock, as I cut slabs of sandstone out of mother rock, shouldering it away to work on in the backyard. And then, when I began to stay out there, in the bush, carving figures into the rock-faces themselves – God disappeared entirely then. All those Hail Marys, all those ecstatic saints, those feast days. Gone. Not a grain of evidence God was ever there.

  But God returned in Africa, and now there is no escaping. Allahu Akbar.

  *

  I lie in bed and read, the counterweights too. That there is no compulsion in religion. That he who kills a man who hasn’t killed another is guilty of having killed all mankind. It’s a Qur’anic dance! – verses setting themselves up against each other, two warring selves accommodated, jihadist and peacemaker. I spin off, and away, dizzy, the ceiling blank above me. There is no God but Allah. There is no God at all.

  Everything is contested, everything. There is a counter to all things.

  Even in my sleep I reel:

  They are criminals. They are freedom fighters.

  They are murderers. They are soldiers of God.

  They are evil. They are guaranteed a place in heaven.

  They are Muslims. They do not speak for Islam. Their deeds are abhorrent to true Muslims. Muslims condemn what they have done.

  They say they are Muslims. They are mistaken. They are not true Muslims.

  They are Islamists then. That word is an invention of the West.

  I read the counterweights – and do not believe them.

  When I open my eyes the room whirls. There is the sound of guitars through the wall and voices singing No Woman, No Cry and Buffalo Soldier and Redemption Song, moving through the Bob Marley songbook. But the tunes are dead in my ear: I am on a bus to Western Sahara, shivering in the dark.

  I get up giddy, and walk down the corridor to the communal bathroom where I sit in a cubicle with my head in my hands. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward. The bathroom door swings open and I hear the voices of cleaners, and the sound of their metal buckets clattering against the tiled floor. There is splashing water and mop-swish, then banging on the cubicle door.

  ‘Is someone in there?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I answer.

  ‘You gonna be long?’

  ‘Probably.’

  There is a grunt and the mop moves on.

  Graffiti covers the cubicle walls. Names and phone numbers, drawings of body parts, the names of things people do to each other. There are slogans too, No War and Death to Capitalism competing with America: Love it or leave it on the toilet door. So, how much of it was politics? How much had Jack and Sophe become prizes, trophies for the Beards?

  While Sophe and I were stepping down through the desert towards Jack, there were communiqués delivered to governments and statements issued to newspapers in Paris and Algiers. I know that now. That the Beards had returned home from Afghanistan, and gathered round their imams, and stockpiled their cachets of arms
, and sought power through politics and were rebuffed, and were rebuffed again – that they warned foreigners to get out and set deadlines and that on the other side was apocalypse. Allahu Akbar!

  Allahu Akbar! Death to America! No Freedom Without Justice. Give Peace a Chance. Not In Our Name. Mere marketing, absurd in its simplicity. Is that what Sophe and Jack are reduced to? The priest and the American. The Christian and the aid worker. Is that it? Symbols from which all that was real and true and difficult have already leeched away, the eternal torment of a few distant relatives all that remains.

  ‘You done yet, mister?’

  The sound of his fist on the door splits my head.

  ‘Friend or foe?’ I say to him, opening the door.

  My face is burning.

  ‘What?’

  ‘So what are you? Idolater or Muslim? One or the other?’

  ‘Mister, I’m just here to clean. You done?’

  But I don’t let him go.

  ‘You’ve got to choose. You’re either one of us or one of them.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking.’

  ‘They’re everywhere.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to drink here, mister. What room are you in, mister?’

  SIX

  I give up on New York after I’m kicked out of the hostel, six months of scratching away, nothing to show. I move on, a week here, a year there, into a whole continent’s buffeting winds. My ragged self, so light, so much lost and stolen by the Beards.

  Dish-hand, breakfast cook, mower of lawns, and fixer of gutters; fruit-picker and landscaper and hole-digger and production line worker – I crawl along the surface of things, desperate not to blow away or fall through. It is enough to keep me going. I have seen a neck bared and opened.

  There are things I avoid now, so deep I barely know they’re there. I look away when passing butcher-shop windows, or barbers. I’ve taken to using electric razors. My hair grows long. Could my own hand trim it, or sharpen pencils, or slice bread?

  *

  All the while carrying her in the inside pocket of my great coat, wrapping her in a jumper at night when I sleep rough, as my pillow. Careful she’s safe during the day if I’m working in a field, or that my locker is secure when I’m on a factory floor. I’m alert to anyone getting too close, am ready to shield her.

  I write to Em sometime in my second year, hung-over, angry, turning on them all, the words bursting onto the page in fits, a ferocity time will not suppress.

  Jack wanted it, Em. He WANTED it! He brought it on himself, Em. It’s ALL HIS FAULT. He WILLED it to happen. If he hadn’t prayed his little heart out to die like that, none of this would have happened. You know what he wanted? ‘Lord, I pray that I die covered with wounds and blood, killed violently and painfully. I desire this today, Lord.’ I saw it, Em. THAT’s what he wanted. Jack’s responsible, Em. Tell that to my father. That Jack CURSED us – stop bloody well thinking he could do no wrong. But you know what? The worst thing? He took someone else with him. HE’s responsible for Sophe. I didn’t tell her parents that, but I should have. Tell my father that. His golden bloody son.

  *

  The girls in our country town had their books of saints: virgin after virgin who preferred death to defilement by God’s enemies, who greeted death joyfully and yearned for its perfection. It was no different for me at The Springs – at least before the fire, before Mum died. Isn’t every boy at some point willing to die for what he believes? How strange it seems now. I was purer then. I yearned to be tested, that year before our mother died, longed for a chance to prove myself to God, before God. It was a simple choice. But then faith began to blur into adolescence, and stretch out formidably, long and confusing.

  *

  Em doesn’t bite, is just pleased to receive the contact after so long. Will I come back home? she asks. We’ll look after you, she says. This is where you belong. Everything will be OK. Of course not. There can never be contentment, I will never be the same again, and if I am to live like this then Sophe’s country is good enough, big enough, after Africa.

  We write. I’ve shed so much in my American purgatory I could just as easily shed my wicked stepmother. But I don’t. I’ve come to think it’s something of a miracle. I don’t resent her.

  Usually she writes news of The Springs, the businesses that have closed and the new ones come to town, the local elections, the dirt roads being sealed, where the police put their speed traps, the latest scheme to do up the Spa. She writes about a conwoman who’s arrived from the south with visitations from Mary and plans for a six-thousand-seat basilica in town. How she and her followers carry a giant crucifix up Table Top for a dawn service each Sunday.

  Sometimes Em includes happenings at the hospital – a new type of needle they’re trying, the outbreak of a virulent winter flu, patients she’s come to know, their courage. But mostly she just describes her days. She writes what time the sun rises, how cold it is in the kitchen in the morning when she puts on the kettle, what the quote of the day is from the wisdom calendar beside the phone, how many oranges she’s picked, the colour of the previous day’s sunset, whether there’s been a frost, if it has rained overnight, or how much water is left in the tank. I picture the thermometer, see the rain gauge on the front fence, imagine the palings my father painted warping in the sun.

  My replies are mostly short geographical pieces: that I am in this or that city and can receive mail at a certain address. A few times, when my mood darkens, I spew out my ideas about Muslims. I keep Sophe to myself after that first letter, in turn too precious or too dangerous. Only once does Em respond to my philosophy on Islam. We got a letter, she says, from Tamanrasset. It was in Arabic. It might be the only Arabic letter ever to arrive at The Springs! Your father and I thought about taking it to the police, but decided in the end to ask a family of refugees at the hospital (their teenage daughter contracted appendicitis, and her family was always up there visiting – her mother and I got on, even though she didn’t speak English). Their son is in grade 11 at school and translated it. This is what it said, Bas:

  Monsieur,

  It is disgraceful, it is truly shameful. The teachings of Islam are clear about the sacredness of life, love of one’s neighbour, hospitality towards strangers, whatever their religion. These are the true teachings of Islam, which sadly have been trampled upon by this handful of fanatics who every day ruin our reputation as a welcoming and hospitable people. We pray you will accept this message of fraternity and friendship.

  Yours truly,

  An Algerian family,

  just like so many others affected by this event.

  There is no signature, no Mohammed, or Hussein, or Ibrahim. Rather it ends like that, with those words. An Algerian family. It might well help Em, I think, a nice letter like that. But she’s never been bloodied by Allahu Akbar. And her reconciliation instinct blinds her to truth.

  *

  Eventually, though, there is the letter about my father that I retrieve from the Washington poste-restante where I find myself washed up at the end of the millennial summer, my seventh in America. I sit on the hard post-office steps, the sound of the city surrounding me, and open it.

  29 August 2000

  Dear Bas,

  Your father died on the 3rd of July following a stroke. He is buried in the cemetery beside your mother and your brother. It was a fine funeral. I’m sending you a photo of the grave, just in case. I intend to sell the quarry. If you have any objections, please let me know within the month.

  Yours

  Em

  SEVEN

  There are angels carved into the limestone of the cathedral on the highest of Washington’s hills. The Archangel Michael with bared chest and sword high in the south transept. A host of angels amongst the gargoyles on the central tower, their eyes closed and their palms pressed together in p
rayer. There are forty-four voussoir angels – I count them before crossing myself and entering – in the cathedral’s south portal, and too many to count on the high altar.

  I choose a pew away from a tour group with their bulbs flashing in the high chamber. I cannot bring myself to kneel, but sit instead with my face in my hands. My father. My brother. The family quarry that could have been sold years ago, should have been. I see my father futilely hanging onto it, year after year. So much reduced to so little. To a transaction. My blameless father. I cannot pray, but wish, fervently, I could weep.

  As I leave the cathedral I see a small wooden hut across the road under the shade of an old cypress. The tree and the shed look almost forlorn beside the cathedral towers. Through a window I see a ghostly figure standing at a bench, his legs splayed, his shoulders set, a cap pulled low on his forehead. The dust is so thick on the inside of the pane it is difficult to make out clearly what he is doing. But as I watch the movement of his arms and sense their power, see the stillness of his head, I know. Pressing my nose against the glass to examine the other end of the room, I make out a series of bas-relief carvings arranged on joists. There is a wall of hanging tools, and I peer closer to identify them: the mallets and hammers and callipers and rasps and squares and levels.

  ‘Eh!’

  I step back from the window in surprise, like a thief caught in some act he doesn’t yet understand himself.

  The carver is a short man in his early sixties, his neck and shoulders thick with muscle, chips of stone lodged in the hairs of his forearms. The plain short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers are faded with dust and wear. He stands there inspecting me, his forehead high and his eyes steady behind dark-rimmed glasses.

  ‘You look for someone?’

  I have a dozen responses to that sort of question by now, answers that usually allay the fears of shopkeepers or landowners or mothers with prams, but my mind has seized up. The old stone-carver has me transfixed.

  ‘You got no tongue?’