The Road from Damascus (20 page)

‘And what of judgment?’ Gabor asked.

‘I believe in it, in the principle of it. Islam says we have an angel on each shoulder, one to record good deeds and one to record the bad. Everything we do is written down, and at the end we see it all, good or bad. I don’t know how it happens. Are those real angels with wings, or metaphors for our conscience? I don’t know, but I believe in them.’

Gabor’s head was all ear. He absorbed her words, her clear ringing voice, stored her for remembering. His powerful heart was blotting paper. Soaked her all up, her skipping flowery smell, the thick tock of her shoes on the pavement, the bobbing of her face parallel to his chin.

‘The idea of the record,’ he said, ‘corresponds to a lot of NDE accounts. Near-Death Experiences. A lot of people who die and come back say they’ve seen their lives played out in front of them. But that could be endorphins in the stressed brain. It’s not hard science.’

‘Whatever happens,’ said Muntaha, ‘something happens. I’m sure of it. I don’t need the Qur’an to tell me. Something must happen afterwards, otherwise… otherwise it would just be absurd. And in some way there’s justice in what happens.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Hoping so, believing so, that’s all Islam is. To have faith in the unseen. In mysteries known only to God. God not as a person as He is in Christianity, but as the Absolute. If we believe there’s justice from an absolute perspective, and believe this perspective really exists, even if we can’t see it or understand it, then we can surrender to it, and we’ll be at peace.’

The sun was sinking leisurely into a smooth deep sea of crimson. It was excess of pollutants that made the anticipation of dusk so beautiful, but it was beautiful nevertheless. Gabor’s head floated in the sky.

‘This is a true story,’ he said. ‘My mother told me, and she isn’t a mystical type at all. Quite the opposite. Much too down to earth for her own good. Anyway. She had a friend whose husband was dying, and she was sitting with her in the hospital. In a waiting room. There was a vase of flowers on the table in front of them. They were sitting there talking when suddenly the flowers spun round the table. I mean the whole vase moved around in a circle. By itself. It can’t have been a hallucination because they both saw it. And like I said, you’d have to pump my mother up with a load of drugs before she’d have a hallucination. They looked at each other, and a moment later a nurse came in to say the man, the husband, had died. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s what my mother saw. My mother who’s a staunch atheist. Who doesn’t believe in anything she can’t see. You can’t imagine a more empirical person.’

Muntaha smiled up at him. ‘It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all.’

He smiled back. He saw the flowers whirling on the hospital table, the colours merging into one. She breathed. He breathed.

They arrived again at the tube station entrance. Winds and odours gurgled up from its throat.

‘Do you want to go home?’ she asked.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I should go back.’

‘Then I should go home. This has been an inspiring conversation.’

‘It has. I needed it. It’s good to talk about these things.’

Gabor looked into her dark eyes. ‘If I can do anything. If you want to come round, or I’ll come to you. Somebody to talk to. Anything at all.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

They shook hands. Her large hand inside his.

‘Well, then.’

‘Thanks for coming, Gabor. It’s nice of you.’

She walked back to her father’s house noticing flying insects and leaves and the red light reflected in people’s faces. All these were signs, meaningful and important. Signs of what exactly she couldn’t tell. But she didn’t need to tell. Signs speak for themselves.

Back she marched to the plodding niceties of the mourning ritual. Back to an outraged Hasna who had lost now two husbands to weakness of the heart, whose eyes (already making plans for redecoration) would escape around the room to her friends wobbling on white plastic chairs – repeating ‘God be merciful’ and ‘may the years be added to yours’ – and to the fierce young wives of Ammar’s friends, who didn’t know the traditions and so didn’t know what to say.

Muntaha, filled up with oxygen, briskly galloped the stairs. Another twenty minutes is all it took, expressing gratitude, saying goodbye. It was easy to get away. She had the sorry excuse of a husband to go to.

Then she was on her way, by tube, on automatic pilot. Street, train, street, with weariness at last, the tug of her breasts and the pull of her back, sucked through a darkening tunnel to the pinprick of darkness that was home. No husband in it. She closed the front door, reducing the city’s volume, then shut it out further, closing also her bedroom door. She let skirt and shirt fall to the floor, and then unhooked her bra. Stepped out of her knickers. Stood motionless under the shower. Afterwards she buried herself in her prayer robe and prayed the Maghreb prayer, too tired to follow the words but also too tired to wander into other thoughts, so her prayer was warm and wholehearted. With little of Muntaha present there was more space for God. God’s presence closer than the veins in her neck. She felt surrounded and absorbed by God; although it can’t be said that ‘she felt’, because she was asleep to herself and didn’t feel anything.

She rocked back on her heels and found the sensation of herself again, somewhere between the hips and under the heart and fizzing up her spine to spill from her eyes and ears.

She considered herself: a bereaved daughter. Who wouldn’t see her father again. She summoned pictures, first of him dead and then of him living. As she moved backwards into shadowy girlhood he became a memory of an odour, clean and rich underneath all the other smells, omnipresent. Or a physical memory like being enclosed in huge rough arms big enough to encompass school and streets and the river and even the wind. These were the constants in her life, in Baghdad or in London: streets harsh and various, an elderly grey river, an aggressive wind. And her father who’d brought her. Her Baba. How small he’d been in the coffin, the strength of all her origins compacted into that short folded-up package of corpse. It didn’t fit together, his size and his mortality, his eternity and his shrivelled stopping. It couldn’t be properly reconciled.

She listened to catch his presence still, nose pointed, ears pricked, but couldn’t tell if he was there, or if only she was there, or only God, or if she and her father were only speckles of God anyway, and she soon found tears dripping from her mouth into the prayer robe, and her nose sludged solid, and she covered her face with her fingers. She wept. She heaved and sniffed and moaned. But after five minutes, looking through her fingers’ grid, she said out loud, ‘This isn’t real,’ and with that, dried up, took off the prayer robe, switched off the light, lay naked on the bed. She wiped her face on a pillow and stretched out until she touched the wall. She was perfectly happy.

Then she remembered Sami. ‘The wanker,’ she told herself in proper solid English. ‘The fucking worm. The stupid fucking piece of shit.’ She swung her feet to the hairy rug and stood up. Switched on the light. Stepped to the phone on the chest of drawers.

She remembered Gabor. The other time today she’d been perfectly happy was when she’d been walking with him. How long since she’d last had a conversation like that? When she spoke he listened. Then he said something interesting. And she would reply. It wasn’t much to ask for.

There were two messages on the answerphone. One from the headmaster, supportive and serious. The other from Sami. ‘Yeah, Moony,’ it said. ‘I’m busy, so I won’t be back. I need to be alone.’

Greta fucking Garbo. Where the fuck was he?

As Marwan sank from view Sami had been waging his own battle with time. Trying to make it stop, he avoided thought and activity. He avoided change. He tried to stabilize his temperature, and watched the weather, which was stuck in a loop. Not like London weather, it was neither hot nor cold.

He packed the hours up into bland portions: TV programmes and newspaper articles, internet chat sessions concerning nothing at all, walks towards the tube station and back again, passages spent loitering in supermarkets and video rental outlets. Told himself in justification that he was getting back in touch with the culture. He also shaved as often as thrice daily, removing skin only, plucked at his eyebrows with Muntaha’s tweezers, smoked spliffs, took over-the-counter pills.

He rented disaster movies and lounged stiff-necked on the marital bed to watch them. The two classics of the genre,
The Poseidon Adventure
(1972) and
The Towering Inferno
(1974). Plus
The Swarm
(1978), in which foreign killer bees threaten Houston, Texas. Against his carefully maintained boredom, against the undramatic but naggingly tragic undertow of reality, he deployed the kick of the fake-real. Flames, blood and redeeming heroism in ninety-minute packets, triggering adrenalin emission – not enough to move him off the bed – and pulses of novelty, just enough, keeping him active but stable, ticking over like the economy.

He watched his anti-Arab favourites. They lived in his collection for their incorrectness, both for academic and visceral reasons. They gave him an apocalyptic buzz of victimized self-righteousness.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), in which a scimitar-wielding, Nazi-collaborating savage emerges from a snake-charming, veils-and-dust backdrop to challenge Indiana Jones. The hero waits, allows the wild man to perform. Then – bang! – dispatches him with a casual pistol shot. Humiliation hits Sami in the gut. Wonderful. Builds another spliff.
True Lies
(1994), casting Schwarzenegger versus the psychotic Abu Aziz of the Crimson Jihad organization. Real-life Arabs acting in this one. Then coming up to date,
The Siege
(1998), in which shots of a mosque and men at prayer are juxtaposed with explosions.

Good viewing for the end of work hours. He tried taunting Muntaha when she came back from school (‘Here comes the Mullah! Respect to the hijab posse! Make way for the believers!’ and suchlike), but she wouldn’t be provoked. Wore the tolerant expression as she brushed his crumbs and ash from the sheets. So nothing happened. Nothing moved on.

It was all procrastination and he knew it. The meeting with his supervisor was the logjam ahead against which events congested and refused to flow. The more obvious logjam. So in the end, after ten days of this, having picked at his books like scabs, having scribbled his Great Idea in spiderish and unconnected half-lines, he’d arranged and then attended the meeting. And now in its aftermath, in that same moment when Muntaha was unfurling on her father’s couch in the proximity of death, Sami was ensconced in a central pub, at a corner of the bar, slurping lager and cigarettes in unsteady bursts. Descending into an underworld of drunkenness and self-pity.

Angular Dr Schimmer, in his plastic office, nodding his head with a chicken’s abrupt inflexibility, had listened to his mumblings. It hadn’t taken long for Sami to finish, so he recapped, paraphrased, spoke more slowly. But Schimmer arrested him with an upheld palm: ‘To the point, Mr Traifi. For this is, aa, repetition.’

‘Yes,’ said Sami. ‘Well, that’s the bones of it.’

‘The bones. Indeed the bones. Now let us, aa, deconstruct.’

So the idea was dissected, unemotionally, with Schimmer’s world-class scalpel.

‘There are, Mr Traifi, the following, aa, incongruities. To be rationalized. To be, aa, reconciled. Or else the dialectic you propose is, aa, problematized. For instance, the court poetry and the patronage. For instance, poetic contests in urban centres. And the, aa, standardization of Quraishi dialect as the pure language, aa, achieved by the grammarians in urban seminaries.’

Sami would have been well advised to take notes, no doubt, except his fingers were slippery, his concentration gone.

‘Furthermore, Mr Traifi, poetry in the, aa, nationalist phase. It centres on imagery of land, I think. And there is a certain nostalgia for pre-urban life, is there not?’

Schimmer seemed not to understand that this was Sami’s self-imposed last chance. If it had to be denied, it should be done more respectfully. There should be more weight, more ritual.

‘Can you, aa, defend your thesis?’

Sami could not. He knew he could not. What was the point in dishonesty?

‘Now this perhaps is the problem with grand schemes. With the, aa, big ideas. Better to be modest.’

Sami was on the threshold of clear sight, but a hot film clouded his vision. He took refuge in stereotype. Schimmer became a jackbooted Kraut. Jerry. The Hun. German academic justice goose-stepped into action, and with that Teutonic rhythm Sami’s indulged indoor thoughts were shunted off to the death camps. The powers failed to come to his aid. His father was dead.

‘As it stands, Mr Traifi, we have only the, aa, the germ of an idea. We need a body, a body of thought for this germ to inhabit. The germ will not stand alone.’

There it was. The concept dismantled so as to be better reconstructed, except there was nothing left to reconstruct. Deconstruction was the end point.

‘Small is beautiful, Mr Traifi, as Schumacher declares. Now your father, for instance, in the, aa,
The Secular Arab Consciousness
, his mastery of the, aa, minutiae…’

And there was Mustafa Traifi, the flaking standard, the sepulchre. You couldn’t find
The Secular Arab Consciousness
in bookshops. It was known only to Schimmer’s coterie. And if that was the case, what was the point of it? And if it had no point, neither did anything else, not as far as Sami was concerned. It was around
The Secular Arab Consciousness
that he had tried and failed to build his adult life.

‘I’ve tried the minutiae, Dr Schimmer, as you know. I’ve tried analysing details, words in isolation.’

‘Ya, but always the big idea looming behind. Always you have wanted to map the details on the big idea.’

‘I’ve looked at details in Qabbani and the Sufi poets and Darweesh and Arab rap. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much to say when you concentrate on details. Not enough for a book.’