Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  On Bon Voyage’s wall-mounted TV, two of the obedient moons, Io and Europa, orbit through odourless transit, penned in by glass and stainless steel. Europa hovers through security cameras concealed in upsidedown opaque bowls that look like the eyes of a dead cat. Joseph gets dizzy looking around at the world that Lord Heathrow, from the grave, makes.

  The black, green, and red tail fin of an Arab airline brings three barrel-bodied Moslem clerics. Gulls and cormorants with night vision look for food outside among the heaps of steel; one flaps its wings into a thermal column, hovering like a fighter jet. Rotating ads suggest that you take pictures in the Serengeti: see the last of the elephants, the last of the panthers, the last of the tigers. Injured passengers with broken legs or who can’t make the long trek to departure gates are transported in carts pulled by Clydesdales. A victorious Brazilian football team writhes through transit like a colourful snake in the broken Amazon, brown bodies rubbing against large green leaves, singing West African music transformed during the early Atlantic crossings into Brazilian pop classics. Team colours on bags and suitcases and Swatches in bright colours. Loud South American laughter spreads among the citizens. The team salsas by and is replaced by overweight aboriginal Canadians returning from a victorious anti-racism and diabetes conference in Geneva. LHR-Toronto-Whitehorse. Harrods bags made from the finest painted flex cardboard jostle through. More pinpoints of light become inaudible screeches on the tarmac. Shopping bags and stars. Moslem clerics. Soft-palmed Buddhists. Defensive Sikhs, reluctant to answer questions — because they, on purpose, understand only Panjabi. Then, suddenly, a specific pinpoint of light appears in the distance. The flipping announcement board indicates a PIA flight, which, due to weather, has been redirected to LHR not Manchester where it was supposed to go. The plane floats down into the English night with its cargo of future cooks for south Asian restaurants in Brick Lane, South Hall, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, and on the Isle of Jura. The evening clouds puff apart for the PIA flight that arrives on the nose from Islamabad at 19:37. Not late, but the wrong airport, and due only to a light Mancunian fog.

  A horde of twenty-one Sumo wrestlers in black suits heaves into view and passes by in human knots of three. One of the wrestlers is an African-American who is carrying a novel in his swollen hand. Four plump, ruddy middle-aged men in lederhosen read newspapers. The middle-aged men turn to look at Joseph. They are far from being Germanic. All these men in lederhosen are Japanese. They return to their Japanese papers. In Duty-Free, a gaggle of five fully covered Saudi women are buying perfume, alcohol, cartons of cigarettes. One accidentally brushes against a priest wearing a name tag: “Hello, I am Father Seenen. Catholic Convention of European Bishops, I-heart-symbol-Catholicism.” Joseph notices twelve Catholic priests in frocks. They are buying scotch and chocolates with a credit card. A large backlit poster states American Express Spoken Here, with an imprint of the card and a name — not Joe Doe as in the old days, but Sham Neeladaria — and an expiration date.

  From the café, Joseph notices her. Olive eyes set in Gothic East European skin: Gorgana Arabiyeva, who initially came to Europe via Padua or Venice, is wearing a tight, black mini-skirt and a grey leather jacket. Italy is the smugglers’ gateway to western Europe. Turkey is the staging post for the Middle East, Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia where there is nothing but sand, and catholic rule upon catholic rule on how to live, and, rules on why one should not give one’s self a breast examination, due to the risk of causing collateral sexual stimulation. She was on vacation and is going through the airport. She has a small suitcase beside her; she’s just arrived from Malta. Her fingernails are painted a metallic grey and he thinks to himself that tomorrow she’ll be wearing yellow gloves.

  The green leaves of a palm tree droop over Joseph as he moves on his bench. He walks over to a fast-food stand. He takes a croissant and hot coffee and slowly eats. When he finishes, he walks toward the toilets. A sandwich board sign outside states: “Please excuse the inconvenience, this toilet is being cleaned.”

  Gorgana looks less glamorous in a cleaner’s smock and yellow gloves. She enters the toilet with her mop and then stops awkwardly. “Excuse me sir,” she says addressing Joseph, who is standing at the sink with his torso bare. Silently, he looks at her through the mirror. He has his earphones on and his hairy armpits are lathered up. They stare at each other. Joseph, expressionless, removes his earphones. “Brahms. Do you like Brahms?”

  “I am sorry sir. I was closing the toilet for cleaning.”

  “It’s okay,” he replies. Gorgana nods and starts to walk out of the toilet.

  Gorgana is momentarily distracted as she tries to replace a bottle of cleaner on a closet shelf. Accidentally, a thick cobalt blue cleaning chemical falls, making a flat pool on the floor. Gorgana steps outside, leaving the door propped open.

  As Joseph walks past, his trolley makes a clicking sound because a piece of yellow packing tape is stuck to the right rear wheel. The sound is like a clock speeding up and slowing down. His hair is neatly combed. He passes through trolley noises, bits of conversations, dinging of cashier registers. He stops briefly and looks at the flight numbers, gates, boarding times, destinations, blinking, flashing, changing. He stares at the clock.

  In Hebrew followed by French, the announcer states: “Passengers for El Al flight 0916 are requested to go to gate J-6 for boarding.” Joseph moves past gates A-13, A-14, A-15 without turning his head. At gate A-16, he stops and stares at the boarding counter of Icelandair. A green light flashing; the sign reads “Icelandair. Reykjavik. 08:35. Now Boarding”. For a moment, Joseph is hypnotized by this sign.

  A wet voice that trips on teeth informs passengers:

  Flight 72 to Honolulu now boarding at gate

  B-48; Flight 0947 now boarding for Osaka.

  Will the following persons please come to the ticket counter: Vasu Makakungerbazi,

  Maeve Bligtonburgh, Pollycarp Dukaczewski,

  Julius Merodach, James Nguyen-Fitzgerald,

  James Aurignacia, Aziz al-Abub, Hussien

  Muhammad Fadallah, Sheikh Muhammad

  Hussein al-Mussawi, Sayyis Abub, Muhammad,

  Hussien Mussawi, Abdul el Guillotine, Mrs Tub

  Qwais Yannie, Oliver El Twist, Muhammad

  Aziz Muhammad, Sheikh Muhammad, Tony

  Malone, Kala Bazee, and Girja Muqudas

  Panee, El Outsider, and Safade Makudma.

  As he moves past flight gates B-5, B-7 et cetera, he sees the following: A school of veiled women loaded down with designer shopping bags. A tall, veiled woman stoops to pick up a package which has fallen out of her hand; he bends down to help her. She stares into his eyes; her eyes are surrounded by black cloth. Momentarily, he looks at her high-heeled sandaled foot with toenails painted silver-pink. He looks into her eyes. She stares back. Her shapely body is outlined by her devotion to Islam. He salaams the woman who, in a husky voice, wa’aleekum salaams. She continues smiling into his face. Rules are governed by geography: Jeddah is far away.

  Day 3, 26 Dhul Hijjah 1408

  This is an airport, not a Medina, Joseph thinks to himself. The strain of the wait is making it easy for him to imagine conversations in the whorling world of transit. He is now mildly paranoid. He imagines the following taking place deep inside the airport.

  Dark suits meet: chief of Airport Police and an Airport Security Assistant et al. The French are in Heathrow to help with Joseph. Interpol also. Someone standing in front of an array of security monitors states: “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is not a threat to us. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — it all started here, but will always remain French, messieurs. Clearly our times are more complex than the time of Zola and the rights of workhorses in mines. Modern liberalism, you see. We are highly tolerant, but there are laws for tolerance. You see?”

  The police chief responds: “Clearly: you suspect people of smuggling. Right here in this airport. Right here in Heathrow?”

  “We’re not very demanding: a few arrest
s, the pawns will do. The airport’s snakeheads.”

  The assistant says: “It’s always the pawns. And the fundamental problem persists.”

  “We are here working with you English to stop European airports from being used like this.”

  The Airport Security Assistant produces two passports and opens them up to a page and puts them in front of the Chief of Airport Police. He looks closely at the visa stamps.

  “Valid passports, valid visas. Not a trace . . . we can’t find these people anywhere. And, we have nothing on the Paki. We’re going to let the wog go. We’ll keep an eye on the cleaning woman. He chats with her. We have nothing on her either.”

  “Last time: where are you from?”

  Joseph hands him Lindy Goughagan’s card.

  They’ve caught him. A woman lawyer named Lindy Goughagan has flown in from County Cork to help free him from transit, and to free him from his lifelong membership on the cricket team. She, he imagines, wrote her doctorate on Cerebral Spinal Meningitis and something to do with refugees. She’s a human rights lawyer who is tall, slender with black bangs across her forehead. An immigration official, who looks like a doctor, walks past him. A defeated-looking Asian refugee held by the arm is being walked down the hall. Could the official be a nurse or a doctor? An immigration official bluntly addresses Joseph.

  “You’re in shit,” the official says as he walks out of the detention room.

  As the door opens, the previously seen Asian refugee is being carried back by the armpits by two beefy security personnel. The Asian’s body is flaccid, a yellow line of vomit runs down the front of his shirt. A balding, fat official walks in. He sifts through some of Joseph’s objects which have been dumped into a plastic tray next to the briefcase. He notices an academic handbook of irrigation methods and an advanced calculator. Why is an immigration official wearing a stethoscope around his neck? Abruptly, he asks in Arabic: “How long have you been here? Egyptian? Lebanese? The Chouf Mountains? The Khyber Pass? The Alps, maybe? You’re Hannibal? Back home you’d have talked by now.”

  Joseph is silent and thinks: Yes, back home, I’d have talked. The official points to a box of latex medical gloves on the table.

  “Get your pants off. The doctor’s going to examine you.”

  They leave him sitting. He falls into a mild sleep and is awoken when he hears one official ask another: “Where did he dig up a lawyer?”

  Minutes later, Goughagan enters the room. She’s in her forties, dressed in grey slacks and a dark blue jacket, and somehow, she looks familiar. Looking at the two immigration men, she states: “My client made no attempt to enter the United Kingdom. He has done nothing illegal.”

  “Madame Goughagan, before he became a citizen of our transit lounge, he was deported from Houston, four days ago.”

  The lawyer, who looks and seems like a doctor, says: “And so it’s the business of the Americans.”

  The taller official pushes some papers across the table saying: “Who knows, perhaps the pilot was sympathetic? He gave him his papers and your client, who knows? He put them in the toilet. And now, Madame Goughagan, he’s our problem. We intend to deport him.”

  “To where?” she asks.

  “Home.”

  “Where do you estimate that is?” Goughagan asks.

  The official says: “Slovakia. Where else?”

  “My client is stateless.”

  “Nice word, stateless. The word means nothing.”

  Goughagan ignores his digression, pushes the paper back towards them saying: “Ask the Slovaks. No record of this man in their records, actually, and they don’t want to take him. Under International Law, the UN is in charge of stateless people.”

  “The United Nations.”

  “Let me be clear: your examination of my client has been a violation.”

  The official, who hasn’t said anything till now, asks in a French accent: “So you want us to accept him in England, as a friend of the prime minister’s?”

  “He should be admitted into England as a refugee,” Goughagan says.

  “He’s not staying here,” the man with the French accent says.

  “He is not a threat. So until I have his papers straightened out, my client will wait in transit, which isn’t strictly England.”

  “This is an airport not a medina,” he replies.

  A uniformed security man asks: “Madame Goughagan, how long will this take?”

  “Not long. Not long at all.”

  The official with the stethoscope looped around his neck asks: “So you used to play cricket?” I think that the memory pills are helping, don’t you think so? Joseph, your health is good.”

  He laughs to himself. This is the imagination running on autopilot. This is the occupational risk of becoming a team captain.

  A screen reveals Gorgana’s hands sifting through Styrofoam cups and melted ice cream; wiping spilled drinks off the floor and a seat. The transit hall makes her look small. Un-evolving morning sunlight which looks grey in the video image, falls in transit. Gorgana reaches into rubbish bins and dumps the trash into the big sack on her trolley. She comes across a porn magazine. She briefly leafs through it before dumping it. She places a lost CD in her pocket. A colourful array of bottles and liquids jutting out like a city skyline rest on her cleaning trolley. After cleaning this section, Gorgana props a yellow plastic “Bathroom Cleaning” sign outside a toilet. The black and white monitor switches now to the internal scenes of the men’s room: snowy black and white images of her cleaning a toilet.

  Near LHR is a power plant, old deciduous trees, now anthracite, are being burnt to power the banks of security monitors inside the airport. The monitors send out images of life in Heathrow and life outside on the runways. A conspiracy of electronic images.

  Day 4, 27 Dhul Hijjah 1408

  Night. Joseph is watching the runway, hundreds of jumbo planes bounce up into the sky and drop down on the tarmac like wasps flying into a nest. The large planes leave beautiful trails across the early night sky. Over the span of a few seconds, he sees several sunsets, and several night falls; and the moon moves through its phases. He has memorized certain arrival and departure times: Cathay Pacific flight 447, arrival 21:22, gate C-34; Varig flight 1500 non-stop service to Rio, departure 22:00; All Concord passengers — pas de service pour le moment. PIA to Islamabad 18:57. Rapidly, a gibbous moon arcs into view lighting the airplanes as they land. Moonlight falls on the runways, all the planes, all the hangars.

  He looks down and sees his bare feet in black and white flip-flops. He wonders if terrorists wear flip-flops.

  He’s walking to a toilet near the gate for an Australian airline. As he nears the boarding gate, he hears accents that sound like sheep drowning in the lower cargo holds of a sinking ship. Nearby, he hears two Glaswegians with Amaryllian voices, farther away, he hears orchestral Basque. Outside, four Rolls Royce engines whine, pushing a defiant old jumbo out to runway C-47 and up into the elements.

  The events of the near future will change his life. Will he integrate into the English world of terrorists? Could it be his last day in transit? Not even the Icelandair 747 carrying two icebergs on its wings will pull him away from his goal. Will he think of icebergs again in his life? Will he ever see real icebergs? He pushes the white door open, walking into the world of the international airport toilet, where the urines of Ulan Bator and Madrid mix. A man in a blue suit, arched backwards, is pissing in a far urinal. He’s young, so his piss is audible, splattering out like a brook at springtime. From the small bag on his trolley he reaches into a black sports bag, pulling out a Ziploc bag. A diminished bar of blue Irish Spring falls out of his hand and into the hot water. He leans forward, and raises his left arm and rubs soap into his right armpit, being a man of balance, he repeats the action on the other side. With a glance into the mirror, he bends over the sink and washes the soap off. He washes his feet, one leg up at a time. He’s not a Moslem. He’s not anything. The blue suit walks out. Joseph cleans the
sink with paper towels. Again, he catches sight of himself in the mirror and asks himself: Where will I grow old? Where will I live? He pulls himself near the surface of the mirror. Eyes look into the mirror-illusion of eyes. Is the eye not an object in its own field? He notices black bits of facial hair resting in a spiral bed of soap suds in the sink. He turns on the cold water and with open palms washes his dead skin and hair into England.

  Joseph stops and stares at the fluttering announcements board. The name of his home town flutters up and holds for a few seconds, then flutters into Beziers.

  He can feel that the fat man with a round nose is going home to Cleveland. Most fat people who visit Europe are Americans.

  He is preoccupied with being detected. What will they ask? Where was he born? What’s he doing in transit for a few days? It isn’t normal to wait in transit? Can he tell them where he’s from? A place where a vivisection of the state took place in 1947? Or perhaps a liberation in 1971? Perhaps Marshal Tito, born on the 7th of May, was the head of his state. When he was younger, airplanes dropped chemicals on his uncles, who moved all the time. What, imprecisely, could he tell anyone questioning him?

  At the café where Joseph spends some time the TV volume is loud. The sound of church bells is loud. Joseph has to raise his voice to be heard. Pierre says: “The Pope’s in paradise.”

  “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

  They both look at a plume of black smoke rising from the Vatican. The CNN journalist states: “Black smoke means that the 120 sequestered cardinals have not yet elected a new Pope. The question burning in everyone’s mind in Anno Domini something something is: Will the cardinals elect the first gay Jamaican supreme pontiff of the universal church?”

  Pierre, the restaurateur, comments: “Good smoke,” switches channels to a documentary on the sex trade. The TV journalist states: “ . . . 300,000 women and young girls, smuggled through the Balkans and Turkey, work in the sex industry in Western Europe.” The TV channel is switched back to the black plume of smoke.