The Road from Damascus (7 page)

Sami grunted.

‘I don’t know if he’s going to survive this one. Allahu ’alim. God knows.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sami.

She looked at him. He shook himself.

‘I’ve brought him new prayer beads from Damascus.’

‘Thank you, Sami. He’ll like that.’

‘Wooden beads.’

‘That’s nice.’

A man in a gloomy room worrying prayer beads. Click, click. Cause and effect.

Sami ran out of things to say. He picked up the mug and breathed into it. Steam breathed back.

‘So tell me,’ said Muntaha. ‘Did you find an idea?’

She was referring to his doctorate. Sami had told her what he’d convinced himself, that his visit to Syria would crystallize his academic thoughts, that it was his talismanic last-chance cure, that the visit would produce what study and thought and time had failed to.

‘Sort of, yeah.’

‘Excellent! What is it?’

‘Something about the city’s defeat of the countryside versus the countryside’s defeat of the city.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You know. Rural–urban tensions. Social change. That kind of thing.’

‘Go on.’

‘What do you mean, go on?’

‘I mean explain it to me.’

He stretched. The muscles in his neck were curled and tight. His headache was returning. What he really needed was another spliff.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. This is what I mean. It always used to be that political power was centred in the big cities, in Damascus or Baghdad or Cairo or whatever. The sultan was in the city, the local governor at least. The army was in the city. But poetry came from the countryside. Linguistic standards set by the Beduin, by the desert. The urban rich sending their sons to live with the tribes, to learn proper Arabic.’

‘Yes.’

‘But now, after independence, since the revolutions, it’s the other way round. Political power is held by rural people, villagers who came from the mountains and plains. They staff the army. They’re the ruling class. And, paradoxically, for the first time, the city sets the standard for language. Radio and TV stations broadcast city language everywhere. Poetry deals with urban problems and uses urban imagery. That’s it.’

‘It’s a good idea.’

‘Thank you.’ Sami had cooled down during this exchange. He had his old frozen control back. And Muntaha liked him less.

‘But can I ask a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘Abu Nuwas and people like that. They lived in cities, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, but that’s only one kind of poetry.’

‘I see.’

‘Anyway, it’s more than that. I’ll show how rural people get changed. They arrive in the city and hear the revolutionary poets, the new music, and forget their old references. The Qur’an becomes irrelevant to them.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. There’s been some development. Reason has superseded religion. It’s defeatist to think otherwise.’

‘But that’s not what’s happened, is it? The Qur’an hasn’t become irrelevant. And is the Qur’an really rural? It was the product of two cities, wasn’t it? Mecca and Medina. And the countryside was never as religious as the cities.’

Sami’s shoulder twinged. Muntaha continued, innocently.

‘And isn’t modern poetry full of rural imagery? Olives, wheatfields, the moon, and so on.’

He radiated anguish.

‘Maybe. But the images are used differently now.’

‘I’m not trying to annoy you, habibi. I’m helping you to think it through.’

‘And since fucking when…’ – he couldn’t help himself – ‘… is the moon rural?’

Muntaha walked with compressed lips to the kitchen. He could hear her closing and locking the window. When she returned she was wearing her tolerant look, an expression which unfailingly maddened Sami because it reminded him he needed to be tolerated.

‘I don’t know why you’re getting yourself so wound up about it,’ she said. ‘Just do the work. You’ll write something good. Insha’allah. And if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world.’

He stared at her. ‘The end of the world. Maybe it is.’

‘Of course it isn’t. You could get a job. It might make you happier.’

‘What job?’

‘You could be a teacher. You could translate. You could work in a business. We know people who’d give you a job.’

‘West London Cabs,’ said Sami, full of sarcasm. When he wasn’t in his underground mosque, Muntaha’s little brother, Ammar, drove a cab.

‘Why not? It’s a job.’

‘There’s ambition for you.’

‘It’s a job. You could do something else if you don’t want to do that.’

‘And one day, if I played my cards right, if I reached the heights, I could branch out on my own. My own cab empire. Traifi Transport. From North Kensington to South Kensal Rise. The world at my feet.’

‘Don’t be so cynical. Or arrogant. It really doesn’t suit you. There are people who’d kill to have a decent job.’

‘I wasn’t born to work in a cab office.’

‘What were you born for, then?’

‘Not cabs.’

‘It was your example. And you weren’t born for any job. Nobody is. You do your best. That’s all.’

‘Very wise.’ Anger prickled his scalp. ‘Words of wisdom. Very fucking wise.’ He knew he was in the wrong.

‘Control yourself. Remember jihad against the nafs, struggle against the self. Cool down. Imam Ali said the strongest man is he who fights against himself.’

‘Jihad? You sound like Ammar.’

‘No, I don’t. His jihad means something different, as you know, Sami.’ Muntaha stood above him and sighed. She briefly tousled his hair. ‘I suppose you’re tired. That’s half an excuse. Be better in the morning.’

He heard her switch off the lights in the hallway and kitchen. He heard her on the stairs. She was undressing. She was washing. She was arranging herself on the bed. In the summer she slept naked.

He knelt to roll a spliff on the desk’s low surface. Before he lit it he sat back into the sofa and surveyed his room. His past. His childhood. All the local history implied by objects and odours. He’d have liked to burn it all. He’d have liked to say, like a savage finding enlightenment, the gods of this place are not my gods. To burn it all, and move on. But he wasn’t ready.

He heard a creaking from a bedroom floorboard. So she wasn’t on the bed yet. She was praying.

Sami had one collection of Mustafa relics in his head and another in his desk drawer. The desk–drawer collection was more satisfying. He could handle it when he liked, each item fully present to his touch, unlike his vapourish memories which burst on him at odd moments and disappeared again into the insect whirring of his thoughts. Anyway, as time progressed the internal pieces came more and more to resemble the external, so that he considered the external, the empirically verifiable, the trustworthy, to be the originals.

He opened the drawer and withdrew them one by one. The constellation map on card thinned to paper by age, Mustafa’s thick bold biro ticks across the patterns Sami had learnt to recognize. The Gilgamesh epic in Arabic, on the flyleaf of which Mustafa had written:
To my own little Enkidu, my wild man.
A signed first edition (there had been two: not bad for an academic work) of
The Secular Arab Consciousness
, losing weight as Sami rocked it in his hand. The miniature whiskey bottle, the one they’d shared in the hospital room, glinting with a little not-yet-extinct mystery. Then a wad of photographs – of him and Mustafa only, no mother, no uncles –curling at the edges, glossing into sepia forgetfulness. Sami held one away from himself to see it more clearly, and lowering it back to the drawer caught his own reflection in the window, as old as his father had been then. His mind filled with this image, and he lost Mustafa’s.

Before he died Mustafa had told his son to look for him in the sky. I’ll be up there,’ he said, pointing weakly at the hospital window. ‘Among the stars.’ At night the window was not transparent. It reflected back the light of the ward. And in any case it was London winter. When Sami and his mother walked from hospital to tube there was unbroken red cloud above them – coloured from this side, not from that. To look upwards would expose his throat to the air, and it was too cold. Sami dug his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders inside his jacket. Wrapped inside the city wrapped inside the sky.

Mustafa hadn’t intended it seriously. He was an atheist. For all of Sami’s life he’d told him the courageous thing was to look death in the face honestly, without inventing stories to console yourself. Men are atoms of nations. They are replaced, and the nation continues. Even the nation is replaced eventually, but humanity continues. Then humanity dies, but the universe continues. Perhaps the universe will die too, but we won’t know about it. We’ll have rotted long before. Don’t shirk reality.

When Mustafa talked about the sky he was evoking their shared past, not the future. And he was doing what Qabbani did: it was the self-ironizing consolation of poetry. It meant nothing concrete. Words are terrible liars.

So Sami never looked at the sky. He could do without the sentiment.

He had a composite memory of numberless instances of stargazing, from infancy to his teenage years, from the perspective of their London home and from British fields and mountainsides. Also from dry nights on trips to Syria. All these scenes collapsed into one, in which Sami stood enclosed by one of Mustafa’s arms, the other pointing conically upwards into darkness. Mustafa’s dark manly odour, cigar smoke, aftershave, and the greenish cold air. Little Sami surrounded by rough warmth and the giant shape of his father. Mustafa pointing at brief atoms of light.

The best nights were moonless. Otherwise they had to wait for the moon to fall. Then the sky would clarify and harden, losing some cheap romance but gaining detail and (so Sami imagined) intellectual force. Mustafa, joining the dots, found lines and arcs in the chaos.

Their favourite constellation was Orion, bright enough to distinguish from their urban doorstep. Sami followed Mustafa’s finger as it traced the warrior’s belt, bow, scabbard and upraised arm. He repeated the Arabic names of the stars. Al-Nitak. Al-Nilam. Mintaka. Shapes with meanings, histories.

‘This is a warrior you know already. His real name isn’t Orion, but Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh our great ancestor. It was us who named him first, in Sumer. You know the story.

‘And over here’ – swinging his arm rightwards and Sami’s small weight with it – ‘is the red eye of Taurus, the Bull of Heaven. You see Gilgamesh’s arm raised to strike him?’

Ishtar the love goddess convinced her father Anu, god of the sky, to send the bull to earth. The bull destroyed crops and slaughtered men. It unleashed havoc where there had been order. But Gilgamesh fought it, and restored peace.

‘There, Sami. Watch Gilgamesh’s arm. This is the moment he strikes. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, the wild man. They slew the bull on Cedar Mountain. It’s called Mount Lebanon today.’

Sami said his part. ‘Then Enkidu fell ill and died.’

‘Yes. Enkidu fell ill. That was his punishment for killing the bull. Ishtar’s revenge.’

Mustafa could map genetics and geography on to the sky. Sami half expected to find the map of Syria up there. He expected to find himself.

Mustafa used to say any Arab could feel pride simply by observing the stars. It was Arabs before Greeks who had navigated by their light. Arabs who had narrated the first sky stories. He said the Arab nation had brought writing and irrigation and myths and cities to the world. By the Arab nation he didn’t refer merely to its latest embodiment, the Muslim Arabs who had ridden out from the Hijaz. He meant all the Semitic peoples in their eternal consecutive march. Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Nabataeans. These were his Arabs.

He used to say the Arabs had no need of religion to make them great. He saw the Islamic period as a falling off from previous glory.

‘We’d always had gods,’ he would say, ‘but we didn’t surrender to them. We always knew they were our creations. We invented them and destroyed them at our pleasure. We used to make gods from date stones when we were bored.’

And then he told the story of the Arab whose camels strayed while he was praying to a stone idol. The Arab ran to gather his camels and then returned to address the idol in verse. What use are you to me? he asked. Keep in your place. I am flesh, and you are only rock.

‘What,’ asked Mustafa rhetorically, ‘has kept us backward for a thousand years? What makes us think we’re starting the fifteenth century, according to the moon, and not ending the sunny twentieth? What has subjected us, the fathers of civilization, to thickheaded Turks and Albanian slaves and bloody Frenchmen?’ The answer followed with an exasperated waving of hands. ‘All this false consciousness. All this focus on the unseen. All this superstition and bloody otherworldly stuff. It’s out of character for us. We should be a people of worldly power. We should be contributing to material culture, as we did before.’

His academic work focused on the ancient and the contemporary Arabs, cutting out the fourteen hundred years in between. He wrote about the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance (which he campaigned to rename), about the priests of the old religions and the desert poet-prophets, and then left them stumbling and sinking into a morass of Islam, averting his gaze in distaste until he caught sight of them climbing out from under it in the late colonial period.

‘It’s a crumbling edifice. It’s already nine-tenths gone. It only kept going so long because of our energy accumulated beforehand. Now it’s all over and we’re unmoored from tradition. Well, it’s a bloody good thing. We can wake up, take a step back, see who we really are. We can get back to the essentials of being Arabs.’

According to Mustafa, voices like Qabbani’s were leading the Arabs to a better future. If the Arabs felt a lack where there had been religion, then poetry, and freedom, could compensate. He used to talk about a ‘god-shaped hole’ (Salman Rushdie’s phrase). A wound remaining after the extraction. The chief concern of the responsible intellectual, he argued, was to heal this wound. ‘Man doesn’t live on bread alone,’ he said. ‘You need some hashish, some moon, to fill in the gap.’