The Road from Damascus (17 page)

There were other means of protection, such as the children growing their first beards who called her ‘sister’ since she’d started wearing the hijab. Boys that age should call her ‘aunty’ if they knew anything about Islamic manners. But this was respect of the street variety, pronounced without a t, with a sweeping movement of the hand, and she wasn’t about to surrender any ammunition. Wryly she called them ‘brother’ in return, signalled irony with her eyebrows, smiled a downward smile. So it seemed that her mockery of their respect concealed deep wells of true respect, which was exactly what they wanted: her theatre to reflect theirs, and both hinting at a purer realm beneath.

As a result of these strategies, she had no fear of playground knives. The Muslim posse would look out for her. Furthermore, she knew like any sensible policeman when not to get involved. The boys and girls so publicly smoking spliffs, for example, dangling loose-trousered legs over the school wall, giving each other blowbacks or pulling smoke expertly through cupped fingers – these wanted only to be confronted. Confrontation would make their day.

Her final source of strength, of this world, was Gabor Vronk, the man she patrolled the playground with. Gabor, her age but exuding the confidence of maturity, with his solid gaze, his firm face, his height, his muscles, his glowering brow, Gabor who considered himself Muntaha’s protector. He had presence, a forcefield of it, which intimidated and deterred. Around him, like electrons around a nucleus, children danced in perfect order. They were sucked into orbit as he strolled the yard, and then, at increased distance, they fell back into chaos.

As well as protector he was her devotee. They paced beside the mural which walled the premises – religious and ethnic community symbols overwebbed with gang motifs – through the brands and bling which assimilated the tribes, through evidence of the drugs culture, the common denominator. They patrolled and talked, swapping ancestor stories. Gabor told her of his Russian, Jewish and Hungarian roots. She told him, in heroic version, of Marwan’s flight from Baghdad, of Mouna’s murder, and about Ammar and their stepmother Hasna. Gabor listened more than he usually did. The dark depth of her voice impressed him. And during their patrols he developed a lively and passionate interest in tawheed, the Islamic doctrine of unity, the oneness of God and the fundamental oneness of the creation emanating from Him, the One Origin of all. Gabor was taken by the idea, which fitted his own interests, both scientific and artistic (he taught physics and art). He was taken by her, his black-eyed guide. The curve-voiced Iraqi who’d given him a Qur’an to quote, a big, beautiful, expensive copy, with copious footnotes.

Gabor was also an artist. He recognized beauty wherever he looked: in the molecular structure of grey concrete, in a woman’s wheatish complexion, in an exotic idea.

His art was often based on scientific concepts. Science and art. The material and the spiritual. He’d concluded that the borders between the two perspectives are entirely artificial.

Take the Big Bang. Here is what contemporary cosmologists say: Once upon a time there was nothing, no time, no space, nothing but an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense dot of everything. And then one day (but not actually
one day
because this was before days, and not
then
because this was before chronology, and not even
before
, because this was before
before)
the dot exploded. The explosion still continues. You and I are part of it. We look out at the stars moving further apart. We reflect upon ourselves, our beginnings and our ends.

And version two.

Gabor saw no contradiction. He told her so.

What Muntaha called tawheed sounded to him like basic relativity: properties are not only themselves, they are other things too. Time and space, for instance, are not the separate qualities they appear to be. Matter and energy are different manifestations of the same underlying substance. And, by extension of the principle, so too lightness and heaviness, light and dark, life and death. What manifests itself to our weighty, failing brains as diverse and multiple is, from an ultimate perspective, unified, singular, one. The great sameness from which all difference is born.

To apply one aspect of Einstein’s theory: bodies are slowed-down energy. Weight is slowness, tardiness. Lightness is speed, and ultimate lightness is the speed of light. A body that we call dead is only slowed down a little more than usual – sluggish blood congealed, ticking heart halted. And what of the soul, the Godstuff ? The Qur’an tells us the soul is from God, or of God, and also that God is Light. What travels at lightspeed is not limited in time. There is no beginning or end for it, no before or after.

Ten days had passed since Sami’s visit to his father-in-law. Marwan had been sleepless for those ten days.

Apart from the years of poetry when wine and love had kept him awake he’d always managed to sleep, in brisk, dreamless six-hour spurts, from ten or eleven until he rose for the Fajr prayer. So insomnia distressed him. He experienced his wakefulness almost as a dereliction of duty. There were unpleasant associations with his unsystemized early life, which like now in a different climate had been filled with empty time.

He didn’t know what to do with time. He’d have read the Qur’an, but it tired him, his eyes would not see. He could never be sure if he was in a state of purity, so difficult it had become to keep track of his dribblings and evacuations, and he coughed and spat involuntarily on the sacred verses. He’d have read his pamphlets on sharia but the very thing that had reassured him before – that he knew them word for word – made them tedious to him now. The dull rhythm of the sentences played like a repeated sequence on a hollow instrument, again and again, hectic and fast until it hurt. He began to suspect that these sentences too, as much as his versifying, had been a vanity, a waste of time. His life had passed quickly, and he still wasn’t old, not in years, yet these strings and loops of time, all this time, weighed upon him. It was an intolerable burden, and so much heavier now when he didn’t have the strength for it, when he couldn’t manage to break it up with sleep.

Worse, he knew the insomnia was a precursor of something. Not only death, which he hoped would bring reward, but some great labour looming. Whatever the thing was, he wasn’t sure he’d manage to do it. He had butterflies locked up in his disordered intestines, flushes of adrenalin, a weakness unrelated to his physical problems that reminded him of exam days at school and university, of waiting for the critics’ reception of his first published poems, of the first night he slept with Mouna. Memories he didn’t want but couldn’t help. Mouna laughing. Mouna painting the flat. Driving with Mouna on mountain roads, buying fruit from villagers who barely spoke Arabic. Mouna’s breathing and his as they made love. Waiting on the stairs, chain-smoking, outside the hospital room where Muntaha was born. His daughter dancing on the kitchen table on her birthday. Toasting Ammar’s birth with whiskey. How aged but small the baby had looked, never crying, too small for his big name. Fighting with Mouna at a party. Echoes and ripples. The untarmacked town of his childhood – palm trees, canals, flat-roofed brown houses – a beautiful place. His mother. The thoughts flitted past him like pictures, like bursts of light, more real than him. He would ask God’s forgiveness for them if this too did not seem to be a vanity.

He was always breathless, coughing up a lot of bitter liquid, his lungs sinking and his ribs straining. He’d lost bodily comfort and couldn’t find it again. Each position he shifted to was stiffer and more sore than the last.

Muntaha came every day. Ammar hung about him, ascending and descending the stairs in threes, praying in front of his chair so he could follow the recitation. Hasna tried to make him eat, and walked him to the toilet. His feet on the floor were just for show; really she carried him. They all saw the want in his eyes, seeking and uncomprehending, like a wounded animal.

But on his final night he slept. With much gesture and eye contact Ammar and Hasna transferred him to the sofa. He slept for ten hours and when he woke he seemed better, some force in him at last, the signs of blood working in his face. They were all smiles, Ammar, Hasna, even Marwan himself, ready for anything. Ammar helped him to his chair. When Hasna encouraged him to try some breakfast he straight away conceded. He’d have bread and cheese, an egg, some tea. She skipped on heavy feet to the kitchen and Ammar, believing the crisis to have passed, began putting his trainers on to walk to the mosque. Then they heard a noise like a high-pitched hiccup, a youthful, joking noise, and in the sitting room Marwan’s head was hanging, and his time had come to a stop.

Muntaha and Gabor, at this particular moment, were tramping over the stumps of the history and geography building (burnt down in the Easter break). The children were on their long summer break, chilling on the nearby estate, some doing gangland apprenticeships, or learning better discipline in the lands of their parents. The teachers still came in for meetings, and preparation, and more meetings.

‘If I were more conventionally religious,’ Gabor was saying, ‘I’d most likely become a Muslim too. This tawheed, this basic theme, it fits perfectly with modern science. No contradiction at all. The unity principle underlies all that we know about the evolution of life on the planet, all we know about the universe. In fact, it expresses my own thoughts, the conclusions I’ve arrived at. But I do my spiritual thinking differently.’

Muntaha, admiring his voice, became aware of her mobile phone trilling and vibrating. She unshouldered her bag to fish it out. The display read ‘Baba’, and she almost knew then, before she was told. So it was half redundantly that she answered. Ammar speaking. He told her in a sentence.

How did she take it? With a characteristic flush of warmth. The body felt it. Certainly that. She noticed the organism growing excited, weakening, trembling. She must have blinked a film of water, because Gabor and the background shimmered. And then something blew a breath of unreality over the day. The schoolyard, suddenly two-dimensional, quietened and shrank. The city beyond, the world itself, shrugged off both light and shade, became trivial, hollow, not entirely credible.

Gabor Vronk was watching her from whirlpool eyes.

‘You’ve had some bad news, Muntaha.’

‘Yes. My father has died.’

It was significant for Gabor that he was there with her. It was a moment they shared.

He accompanied her gravely to the staff room, along school corridors like hospital corridors to the nostrils, then to the arched exit, to the main gate. Not knowing what to do with his hands (he’d have hugged her if she hadn’t been in the hijab), he patted her mannishly on the back.

‘Whatever I can do,’ he said. A lazy African lake of meaning in his eyes.

It took her a long time to cross the city, by bus, by tube, on foot. The world solidified by degrees, and as it did so her calm eroded, giving way not to grief but anxiety. She’d awarded herself points for her reaction thus far. She worried now that sorrow would strike her when she saw the body. Surely this calmness had been only a defence mechanism. And facing the house they’d lived in, the house they’d come to as refugees, the house which entombed his corpse, she was afraid. Fears like dark fish broke suddenly on the surface. She didn’t know if she’d be able to enter.

But when she did enter and, ignoring Hasna’s lamentation and Ammar’s wounded glare, ran to the sitting room, to the centre of the horror, she found him strong and still and given weight by death. The same thing that had blown unreality over the day now held its breath, and she and Marwan were held motionless inside.

He was already washed, dressed in his death shroud and laid in the box that English law insisted on. In death he was a younger and more handsome man. He seemed what he should have been, given different conditions. This man of the open-cast slight smile and upward-tilted head had been absent at least since they’d come to London. ‘O Baba,’ she murmured, nodding. Her loss was an old loss. That’s how she judged, watching, remembering.

She touched his hand, flinching at first, summoning herself to touch again. How strange to touch flesh which is not flesh, skin become leather, unyielding and soapish. Cold. She absorbed this.

Meekly, as if exploring something carnal, and in fact delving into the ultimate carnality, with all the wonder of girlhood, she let herself touch his short beard. She brushed his forehead with her lips. Stillness held in the room, which was cool and bright as it had never been before. So it seemed to her.

‘As-salaamu alaikum,’ she whispered. She was awestruck, contained by a lovely inertia, actually thrilled to be here observing this in the transfigured room. Slowly she recited the fatiha, then wiped her face with her hands as if with perfume. She grinned, unable to do otherwise. The inhuman human object, his corpse, man and earth at once (is this, she wondered, where the Christians found the God-man idea, in corpses?), the absurdity of it, the incomprehensibility, the unexpected reassurance it provided; all of this made her grin. Inside herself she recited:

And she thanked God without forcing herself to, not missing her father at all but loving him, and forgiving him for any fault, and filled unaccountably with happiness.

Ammar had also shed years, in form at least. He hadn’t leapt forward to claim his best potential, not like his father’s corpse, but had gone back, grown down. He’d lost the Islamist’s poise and fervour and was again in his rangy adolescence, hungry, wired-up, hood-eyed. He blundered about the house in sullen anger, shoving furniture against walls, falling over his feet, carrying deckchairs upstairs for the women’s ta’ziya.