Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  “Just thought I’d come to say hello. It’s late and quiet and . . . hear that loud snoring coming from that open door?”

  As I talk to Iqbal, my mind wanders off from Pierrefonds to the Plateau-Mont-Royal. This wandering off business is not to be controlled — I ride with it. The pills cause it. I don’t let it upset me. Part of my mind engages in memory lane chit-chat with Iqbal, another part of my mind lives my past life. As one proceeds into old age, one gets to enjoy this several-windowed view of past and present. Of course, it does not happen all the time, and it isn’t always nice. It is ugly to handle a split-up mind, even if it lasts only a few minutes between doses.

  “You’re right, that snoring sounds like planes leaving the tarmac.”

  It starts off as a feeling of elation, then there are two pictures, two worlds separated by an instant. Alzheimer’s world is being defeated, small second by small second. We want to remember. Until when do we want to remember? Do we choose what we want to remember or does it all just come inside? Actually, it’s more than two pictures at the same time.

  I’m in a high-rise apartment in Montreal; the large window gives a wide view of the mountain in the middle of the city with a gigantic, ugly, electric crucifix on top. Moslem background or no, putting up a crucifix on the last remnants of a volcano seems as crude as putting up a mosque in the centre of Berne, or putting Berne in the centre of Bamiko. Like having two or more languages in my mind, words stuck on red foxes that run in clockwise and not-so-clockwise circles. Then the wordfoxes stop, the pills are doing it, thank you science for relaxing the foxes. In a controlled fashion, I redirect my mind back toward the presence of Iqbal, who is now adjusting the small light beside his bed, which is identical to mine. In fact, we all have identical bedside lights. Maybe we’re all identical terrorists. One terrorist is just like another one.

  “Joseph, give me some water please.” I pour, from a glass jug with small bubbles in the water, a long draught like an air steward. I hand it to him. “Do you think that all those years of drinking water with ice in it harmed our collective livers?” What language did he ask me the question in? He has foxes as well.

  “Collective livers? Do you mean that we’ve been sharing one liver in our new home?” He’s in form tonight.

  “Tell me something, if Joseph, you did get me into the bombing stuff, how’d you convince me? And if you did, why and how did we end up in the same old folk’s home? Are you here to make sure that there won’t be any deathbed confessions? Why are we so familiar with conventional military words? Must it mean that the state sanctioned our efforts, or that the state needed highly cultured types to do their dirty work? Citizens who think their state won’t one day harm them should be gassed. Just a few inaccurate thoughts to keep the truth in order.”

  Iqbal has a much slighter frame than Anver and has the brown skin as per job requirement, and short white hair. He gets out of bed and walks to the moonlit window. I put my arms around his shoulders. The moonlight flows over his face as it did during one operation when rain was flowing down his face. He was wearing a suit with flip-flops. Flip-flops during an operation? Yes, it’s true. As we peer across to the small bay in the river, Iqbal looks at me. “Look at the trees, they look so silvery.”

  19

  Ha’sha’shin

  Day after day, as my skin ages, snow falls behind the newspapers that I am reading. Of course, there are no newspapers as such these days — what I’m reading are old newspapers that are placed here for decoration.

  Familiarity sets in with the old folks. Usha talks with me about an insurance policy — an insignificant matter, she assures me. She leaves to make phone calls. Night falls on the river, and things are black and blue and Canadian outside. The white days, like a retina, detached from Islamic time. Usha is sitting beside me while I watch the snow behind the newspaper. We hear loud snoring coming from down the hall. Usha looks at me and smiles.

  Sunlight deflected off the moon falls through the Venetian blinds, forming a ghostly blue interference pattern on the wall. Usha asks me about my maybe-Oriental eyes. I give genealogical explanations starting from the Palaeolithic era, which the Ha’sha’shin dominated.

  I’m walking along a hall — I think it’s the east-west hall. “Does anyone want any lemon flavoured mineral water?” Who just asked me that question? A busy nurse passes me as I walk along the hall. “Nurse, did you just ask me about mineral water?”

  In the morning, Iqbal and I have coffee and get more friendly, like we used to be. He’s so old he’s forgotten what he did. Iqbal is nearer the pearly gates than Anver. I have to stay here in case he or Usha blows our cover on a full moon night — full moons have an imaginative pull on the truth. Sometimes, due to failing memory, we have to become re-re-acquainted. I open with a question that would be considered normal under the circumstances.

  “What did I do to get here?” Iqbal asks.

  “Here? Where is here?” I ask him.

  Gently, I guide him away from the moonlight. “Would you like some hot weak coffee with milk?” Iqbal is wearing, as he sometimes chooses to, a black silk shalwar kameeze with a border octave of violet and blue. After a few minutes: “I would love some coffee, but we have to go to the small kitchen to get some, don’t we? I mean — I mean, now that lunch and breakfast are over. Let’s go, shall we?” We walk on the green drop cloth, smelling the fresh paint. I place a cup of hot weak coffee in front of him. He says he wants to piss. I hold a cup in front of my fly. He laughs.

  “That’s a good idea.”

  He hands me his cup, which I set down on the table. “We did some good things, didn’t we? They needed a response, didn’t they? Isn’t that right, Joseph?”

  “If that’s true, then that’s years ago, and besides, Iqbal, we’re friends now, don’t you think? Look would anybody but a good friend come to chat with you at 10:58 on a Tuesday morning, and make you coffee — weak under the circumstances — and offer you his only pissing pot? Now, tell me how I got you to end up here?”

  Iqbal stalls for a moment till the right story courses through his mind. They have been kind enough to take me for a walk. We left the mosque in London, or was it Mississauga at three in the morning. No one in the elevators, down to the underground parking lot and off to a small country house. “This was a great risk we took . . . a great risk bringing you out here,” one of the Mohammads told me. He didn’t travel with us on the ship.

  I’m once again sitting in my room reading my e-mail from August, early in the new century:

  My Dear:

  Leaves turn to bright red, orange, fall off carpeting over the grass; another day it snows.

  Along Avenue du Parc, park side. Stripped trees . . .

  Your call on my cell amid a virginal snowfall. Simple conversation. Routine. Lovers of a different kind, lovers nonetheless. We still share the same streets. I walked past your house near that park. No lights. Must have been sleeping.

  I live alone now. I’m used to living alone, or almost that. With an endless stream of mates in a safe house: year after year. A new face, new accent, this time what was it? An Australian from Queensland who received, with ugly regularity, envelopes with stars in a circle. Frosty autumn. Now, years move in blocks of decades. An Arab student. Project partners are a conception of time. Two Scottish linguists in a row. A geographer, a perfect idiot historian, more students, though, never an architect. Then, we interviewed an artist who moved in. Sallow complexion. Moronic ideas.

  About everything. But she knew how to make das bombs.

  Then some money came from somewhere, and I started to live alone in the same house, not far from yours. It all went very well, but I felt that something was missing.

  You’d only call once in a while. No eye contact. End of operations. That airport was just a stage between us. I understood. Didn’t want complications either. Then, very slowly, something strange happened. A flood of years living alone followed. Are they still good at cricket? You moved out of the country
for a while, then back here. I saw your apartment window on a cloud-covered night. Your shadow on a curtain, a blind not fully drawn. Perhaps I’ll quickly glimpse a long-fingered hand moving a cigarette to your mouth on 18th of July at 21:32. And, did you or did you not on the first of May at 22:49 cross the living room floor toward the window to water the plants?

  Then, it hit me: I was able to pinpoint what that emptiness in my life had been. I now could say what troubled me all these years of not having you in my life. It was not the lack of your physical presence that was difficult to deal with. I knew you were there. After all, we still share the same city, don’t we? This was enough to soothe me, because I could always walk past your house. That’s how I began to see things from outside your house. What was bothering me all those years? Guilt for having left you? Sorry, I left a few days after the airport life. Guilt for having vanished. No, that feeling is, in one’s later years, easy to control and repress to oblivion. Guess what it was? It was simply this: I had begun to miss the presence of a stranger in my apartment — the younger ones, learning to learn things from me.

  I’ll write again when I hear your voice on my cell.

  You are my beloved because you can see the enormous pity I evoke. I left the airport only to be in them all the time. Sometimes I want to move to Mars. Not sure there is much Islam on Mars.

  I am in a panic today. I close the computer and put it away. I walk hurriedly. I’ve seen the doctor; he says I’ve palpitation of the sagging testicles. I eat hurriedly. I can’t stop thinking about her, what life and happiness I could have had with her. Who am I thinking of? Why didn’t I stay with her? We could have aged together, learned each other’s habits; we could have been supportive of each other. I just don’t understand myself these days. Why do I shake? My health is fine, then why do I shake? All the doctors here know that I am in fine health, but I am alone, and what’s the cure for that? Pills? But pills always exist in a collectivity — they are always together in a clear plastic jar. I look at the blue pills near my bedside table. The blue pills resemble the white falling star streaks we see these days. I see about fifty every single night — not falling stars but old satellites falling out of orbit and heading earthward. Or perhaps it’s OT — orbital terrorism?

  20

  Toothbrush

  Awind causes the leaves to flap against each other, making sea sounds. Outside my window, two old people have discovered nature: after a lifetime of having discovered nothing at all — we were once bankers or terrorists — they are noisily discovering mushrooms directly beneath my window. Now, what would happen if I drop this potted African violet on their heads? What would it feel like on the noggin? That could be murder. Am I obligated to commit both statutory rape and murder in my golden years? What would a falling toothbrush do to their skulls? Yes, that would be considered an accident. Maybe I’ll send my chattering dentures down on their heads? But I was just cleaning my spring-loaded false teeth and they fell on Mrs. Garibaldie’s neck and now she has marks.

  In the dining room, I can look at nothing else: I focus on forks and knives slowly cutting food on plates and slowly rising to mouths. Sunlight sparkles off expensive jewellery and sinks into the folds of skin. The aged eat light. Maybe I should start a jewellery collection. A jewellery collection without the skin? I could start selling it all to help the aged poor who will never see the insides of homes — palaces — like this one.

  Computer-driven wheelchairs with silent electric motors move a mouth close to or farther away from a plate. I eat a grilled cheese sandwich with mango chutney; the latter is my own property. I have brought it from my room, and I am willing to share it with all you fucking idiots. But all these idiots are obsessed with anal fissures, which are really broken sphincters, haemorrhoids to infinity. A geezer said that he hated his broken arsehole so much that he wanted to fling everyone into OT.

  After a late lunch, I walk fast back to my room. Linda is there waiting for me.

  “What’s your fascination with that toothbrush?”

  “What makes you think I am fascinated with it — ah, yes, I am forgetting to tell you aspects of my life. Yesterday, when we were in her room, Tatjana held up a toothbrush and asked: ‘What’s this for? It looks so familiar, but I can’t remember what I used it for. Tell me. And please, please don’t tell any one I asked you. You saw me looking at it this morning?’”

  “It’s just that I noticed you looking at it for a long time.” She pauses. “Oh, so you’ve been visiting Tatjana again?”

  “Yes, I can’t get what I want from you so . . .”

  “Jealous I am.”

  Then my loyal nurse pauses before she asks the next question: “Was there much money involved?”

  I give her my let’s-talk-about-it-later look, but continue on a subject that interests her. “Shall we go for a walk? Yes, there was tons of money involved. This regime wanted it to look as though a wealthy chap like me organized the whole thing. They did not want to be blamed. And I held up my end of the deal — the Arabs — morons the lot — did not get any of the blame. There’s not much in the way of motivation, if that’s what you’re after. Yes, a bit of ideology, but it was money more than anything else. Now, where to for that walk?”

  We have left the confines of the home, and we’re now on a gravel path that takes us to a small main road. We climb a small hill. We look back at the home; the west wing, like a flat concrete tongue, dips into the river, while the east wing overlooks a green square lawn. Small trees have been planted by the river’s edge in case baby Moses appears.

  “Did you chat much with her? Tatjana. Doesn’t our home look like the Pentagon from up here?”

  “I don’t think she’s very talkative, at least not with me. The Pentagon has more sides.”

  “How much time do you give her? It’s not a question of sides. I get a Pentagon feeling when I look at it from up here,” I say.

  “Another century, maybe more,” she says, smiling.

  “Honestly, you think she’ll live that long? Maybe she’ll live forever.”

  I’m in the mood to impress Linda. I regurgitate something I recently read in netnews:

  “Japan is already one of the world’s greyest societies, with 16.7 per cent of its population older than sixty-five. Only Sweden, with 17.6 per cent, is greyer, and Japan is expected to take first place soon. One in four Japanese will be sixty-five or older, and by 2050 that will rise to one in three . . . See how well those memory pills are working? I can remember all that. Remember six months ago I was having problems? Triumphant state of mind I have had in these last few years.”

  “What last few years — want me out of a job? Those are frightening figures. How will I find anyone to marry if all the eligible bachelors are your age?”

  “Marry me.”

  “I may have to accept your offer one day.”

  We have reached the peak of the little hill outside the old folks home, which has two floors, the top floor has pink walls, the first floor where I live — not far from Tatjana, not far from where Usha lived — has white walls with large windows in front of reception. There is a fat nurse at reception.

  It is the 5th of July. We walk back to the home not saying much. A chirpy sentence here and there, nothing much. We walk past the reception. No, we did not walk past reception. Linda and I re-entered via the side door, I think. I remember kitchen noises and the smell of onions being fried. Jean was there. I said hello to him: so did she. So, we came in through the side door. Usha is coming back to me. Something is hurting me; it’s not my memory of her. I just talked to her. No, I was in love with her. No one saw us come in. Linda comes to my room: we’re having Earl Grey. Linda sees me vanish into myself. There’s nothing she can do. She touches my hand: suddenly I think of the owl outside Tatjana’s window. “I really wish she’ll live forever. Linda, did you notice fatso at reception when we came in?”

  “We came in through the side door?”

  Ah, the pleasure and sadness of Earl Grey. S
he stays on a bit longer. “Nice grey flannel pants I have on. Are they new?”

  Powerless to initiate any further conversation, I ask pathetically: “More tea?”

  21

  Gasoline, guilt

  My body is fine, so why do they treat me as though I were going to the pearly gates at four o’clock this afternoon? I don’t have any panic attacks. Why do I suffer from guilt? Guilt for having pulled Usha or Tatjana into doing things with us? Can I feel guilt for them? I made their lives meaningful. Otherwise, who else would have listened to them for hours? I gave meaning to these women by listening. These women know a listener: I’m a listener alright. Right, a listener until Linda gives me more pills. Linda leaves for a few minutes. I crumple up a piece of paper tight, as tightly as I can, and put it down on the desk beside me; then I turn up my hearing aid — the one I can wear in the shower without getting electrocuted — and I listen to every little stage of the paper trying to become an uncrumpled sheet again. When it first uncrumples, it sounds like what? Sounds like the sea, that’s what. Which sea? The lake outside?

  Here in Pierrefonds, it’s a bone-cracking Montreal winter day. In fact, so cold that it’s thrilling. Because it hits the lungs at once, I decide to go out for a walk. Something has changed: a month has just become another month or has a year suddenly become two, or maybe even three? I’m certain of one thing: that it is five o’clock, because the nurse comes to give me my five o’clock. At the end of my life, a major event of the day is seeing metallic multicoloured pills that eventually sail down my throat to the lower Atlantic within. This will keep my tract open.

  “Oh, which tract?” I ask Linda.

  “Just take it,” she says, joking. She is my only real friend here. All the others I mention are people I worked with. And I confess that I don’t want them to confess about it all due to depleting marbles. But need I say that again?