The Road from Damascus (16 page)

‘I mean,’ Sami continued, ‘how can they be calm enough to choose their moment? How can they be fired up and cool at once? It’s not like dying in battle.’

Muntaha said, ‘I suppose believing makes you strong enough to do anything. And they’re used to self-control. At roadblocks, checkpoints, crossings.’

Ammar, a finger raised, feigned a quietness wholly alien to him: ‘The Last Day will not occur until you fight the Jews and defeat them. Then the trees will call out, “O slave of Allah, a Jew is behind me.” All except the ghardaq tree.’ Addressing the reported words of the Prophet to nobody in particular, his gaze filmed over. ‘You know what the ghardaq tree is? The Jews do. They’re planting it all over Palestine.’

Sami was a little amused – and slightly comforted – to hear Muntaha speak in the tone she used in the mornings, or in his agitated evenings.

‘Don’t you think, habibi Ammar, that the hadeeth may have a symbolic meaning?’

Ammar vexed. ‘Symbol of what?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Sister, be very careful. You’re about to say the hadeeth isn’t true.’

‘I’m saying it may be true, but not literally.’

‘True is true. I thought your Islam was growing.’

She answered slowly, calling him Amoora and habibi. But just as Sami felt himself satisfied with his subtle wife in conflict with the simpleton, felt himself on the same side as her, she left with Ammar for Ammar’s room, to pray.

Sami said ‘fuck’ inside his head.

Marwan lifted a stick arm towards the TV. ‘What will be their response to this, the dogs, the pimps?’

Sami shuffled over, taking the vacated stool. ‘They’re killing us anyway, uncle.’

Marwan turned to Sami, and seemed to resent the exertion. He resented Sami disturbing his private ruminations. In truth, there was a great deal he resented in this boy. His snivelling self-worth, for instance. His uncalled-for vanity. His vision of himself as above God’s law. I seek refuge in God from Satan, Marwan thought. From the whisperer of trivialities. From the boy’s refusal to submit himself to system. And what was this boy who refused to work? Who’d pranced around the university for over a decade, and probably would for ever after, until death seized him by the forelock and shook the stupidity out of him. Who was always too young to have children, to take responsibility. There was no wisdom in him, no sobriety. He was a boy, a mere boy.

‘Why,’ Marwan coughed, ‘do you not join your wife in prayer?’

‘Not my thing, you know, uncle.’

Marwan thought: Belief is a duty. It isn’t a choice. It isn’t something you pick up in the market because you like the colour or you have enough coins in your pocket.

He’d expected more from a son-in-law, but he supposed he had no right to. He should have done more for the girl, guided her better. She’d married in a registry office, not a word of religion mentioned. Marwan hadn’t presumed to interfere. And what an apt punishment this Sami Traifi was, this failed Syrian, this fake Englishman, neither fish nor fowl, its head full of froth – what a terrifying reminder of Marwan’s early self, floundering in the hollow words of men. He was conscious of the shame of it still, as keenly as if he’d repented of it only that minute. It prompted further leaking of the eyes. My God, he thought, supplicating, let this just punishment expiate my sins and save me from the fire on the Day of Standing. Have mercy on me, unworthy slave that I am.

Now he looked at Sami with the expression of someone emerging from the sea. Labouring at the task of injecting oxygen into sluggish, pulpy blood, blue-faced, he opened his mouth, waited for the impulse of language.

‘I will die,’ he said. ‘I want to see my grandchildren first.’

Sami squirmed on the stool, then contrived to chuckle.

‘Don’t say it, uncle. You’ll be with us a long time yet.’

Even now, could the boy not talk like a man?

‘We all will die. You will die too. And what will be left of you?’

Marwan trembling, betrayed once again by his body. This short lifelong struggle to balance an oily bubble of selfhood atop this body, a bubble of consciousness, of pure idea. To balance it steadily so it wouldn’t pop. Inevitably a losing battle. Who can hold the sea back? Who can still the wind?

And Sami, horrified, seeing blood on his betraying hands, not answering, or perhaps making sounds – ‘O no, uncle, but hmm, but yes’ – didn’t know what he could do to satisfy them, these people, this old Arab. To bring children into this ending world? And what else? To fall into the role of patriarch? To grow a beard? (Always, with Sami, issues returned to hijabs and beards.)

At that moment Muntaha returned, and gloomy Ammar behind her, like night chasing her daytime, and she saw her father’s flared nostrils and fury.

‘Baba, what is it?’ she cried.

‘Uncle is a little upset,’ said Sami, surging to his feet.

‘Pimps,’ spluttered Marwan. ‘Sons of pimps and dogs and whores.’

As Sami left the room he heard Ammar’s attempt to soothe: ‘The Jews, Baba, I know. Don’t worry. Justice is coming. Don’t worry yourself. God is greater than them.’

At the stairwell Sami passed Hasna’s solid, flat-mouthed face, inexpressive but ever judgmental.

‘Bathroom,’ he mumbled, banging up the stairs.

Spreading Rizlas and grass on the cistern, he skinned up. His hands worked against his spreading bulge of belly. Already he was assuming the shape of his uncles – squat, solid, barrellish. Thick-blooded Levantine market men. Cancer had rescued his father from that, just in time. The shirt adhered to his sweaty back. He spat into the toilet bowl. This wasn’t going well at all. He’d been behaving, for fuck’s sake. He’d been doing his bit, for Moony, and nothing worked out, and everything went wrong.

There was no toilet roll in which to fold the signs of his spliff, only a bottle of water set on the linoleum floor, so he hoovered up the stray tobacco and seeds with his mouth, and swallowed.

He stood on the front step to smoke, watching the fierce, foolish street, empty of sense and divinity. A dog barking. A distant siren. Boozed-up men loping from the pubs. It was chucking-out time. Cars trailing exhaust. Carbonates accumulating, spiralling upwards to the point of critical mass when the catastrophe would begin. More traffic, and raucous voices left hanging on the air, and more pollution, ticking, ticking, grains of sand through the waist of an hourglass. So there was, perhaps, divinity somewhere, at least in the shape of judgment, waiting to fall. Sami heard his heart beating deeper and deeper till it shook all his body and drowned the traffic noise.

He hadn’t heard the door swing but here was Ammar at his side, taller than him, gathering himself for a declaration.

‘Still smoking the herb, I see.’

Sami looked at the spliff and didn’t bother replying. It was clear enough.

‘That’s bad shit, man. It’ll do you no good.’

‘Bad shit, is it?’ Sami cocked an eyebrow, lifted the side of his mouth.

‘Yeah, I know what you want to say. But those days are well over for me. I’ve repented of it. I’ve sorted myself out. Allah is forgiving.’

‘Anyway,’ said Sami, and took a long drag.

‘Yeah, anyway. I knew you’d be smoking. But I didn’t come out about that. I came to congratulate you.’

‘Congratulate me?’

‘Yeah. Congratulations, brother. Mabrook.’

‘Congratulations?’

‘That’s what I’m telling you.’ Ammar extended a steady hand. Sami observed it, bewildered.

‘Congratulations for what?’

‘For Moony, brother. For her becoming muhajjiba. It’s been a long time for her to do it. You must be proud.’

‘I must be proud?’

‘Fuck, man. Why do you keep repeating everything?’

But Ammar realized he’d come out of character, and mumbled ‘istughfurullah’ under his breath.

‘Excuse me. Yeah, you should be proud. It’s a rare thing in this country, a modest woman. A woman with religion. A very rare thing. These Englishmen don’t care if their women walk around topless. These women, anyone can have them. Even our women in this country, they got the sickness too. That’s the tragedy.’

‘Our women?’

‘Look at them, just look at them. This is Babylon, man. No, I mean this is Jahiliya. The days of ignorance.’

Fortuitously, a couple of pub women were staggering on the other side of the road, supporting each other, laughing. Mini-skirted on the hot pavement.

‘Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘You should, Sami. You should. You’re a very lucky man. You’re blessed. You’ve got a diamond as a wife instead of a dog. A real lady. A diamond wrapped in silk.’

‘Yes,’ conceded Sami. ‘You’re probably right.’

He was talking to her brother after all. And she was a diamond, true. He remembered their lovemaking before the tube journey, her skin rosy in the evening light, the slack buoyancy of her breasts, and her tenderness. He breathed gently, forgetting the incident with Uncle Marwan. A meaningless incident, the product of an invalid’s irritability, a passing shadow. Marwan would have forgotten it too.

Sami’s brain was floating easier in its fluid at this close of day, and he listened to his brother-in-law with something approaching equanimity. Ammar was just a bit of an enthusiast, was all. Hip hop last year and radical Islam this. Sami felt fondly towards him.

‘I know you, Sami,’ he was saying. ‘You’re a Muslim underneath it all. You’ll find yourself. You’ll sort yourself out. It’s just – and don’t get vex now – it’s just it’s better if you sort it out soon. These days, you see…’

And he paused here, with significant eye contact.

‘These days are important days. You know what I’m saying, not any old days. The other side knows it, so we should know it too. Look who they’ve got for a president now: Born-Again Bush. You know who he represents. The Christian Zionists. The Crusaders. History speeding up, man. Tings coming to the end. That’s how to understand Palestine. They want the Jews back in Palestine so the Last Hour will come, which they think will be a benefit to them. Oh ho…’ – Ammar, greatly amused – ‘… oh yes. That’s what they think. But the point is, everything’s speeding up. When the major signs of the Hour come, they’ll follow one another fast. And the signs are coming, falling into place.’

Sami, suddenly disorientated, wants to go home. It’s been a long day.

‘All I’m saying, Sami, brother, is it’s time to wake up. Know what time it is. You’re an intelligent man. You can see it. In these times now, we need every Muslim awake.’

Sami stepped on his butt and went inside. Feeling suddenly very spliffed in the furiously sober house, guarding eyes which he felt to be bloodshot, he said goodbye to Uncle Marwan and Aunt Hasna as politely as he could manage. They watched him as if they knew something he didn’t, something out of deep history. Muntaha wrapped her head for outside. Then Marwan gave him a parting line.

‘I want to see them,’ he said, ‘before the end.’

Walking in the street, Muntaha asked: ‘What did Baba mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Palestine.’ He saw her from the corner of his eye, her hijab. ‘Has your brother not heard of the feminist movement?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The emancipation of women. The suffragettes. The modern world.’

‘What’s he been saying?’

‘He’s been congratulating me on your hijab.’

With a burning smile: ‘He’s excitable, Ammar. He’s young.’

‘He’s very fucking excitable. “Allahu Akbar, brother. Mabrook for the hijab. Allahu Akbar, brother. Mabrook for the jihad. Yeah man, a thousand mabrook. Big up the Muslim posse! Booyakka for the Islam crew!” ’

In his imagination mimicking his brother-in-law very accurately, Sami danced along hip hop-style, cutting the night with jerking hands. Muntaha failed to laugh.

‘He’s probably a bit confused as well. He came here at the wrong age. He isn’t comfortable with himself.’

‘Oh everyone came at the wrong age. No one is comfortable with themselves.’

Now it was Hasna’s turn.

‘“Oh these children. They don’t know what hot flushes were like back home. They’d have grown up better if they’d seen hot flushes in Baghdad.” ’

She snorted a little. Nearly a laugh.

‘The miserable menopausal bitch,’ said Sami.

‘Sami, calm down. What are you angry for?’

‘And then my uncle, my father-in-law.’

He affected an exaggerated Iraqi accent: ‘“The pimps, the dogs, the sons of pimps and dogs, God destroy them, the donkeys, God destroy their houses.” ’

Silence from Muntaha, her eyes forward, her skin taut.

‘What’s wrong?’

Further silence. A lake of silence.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Yes there is. What’s the matter?’

‘I said nothing.’

‘You’re not talking to me.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘No you’re fucking not. What have I done wrong?’

The silence. The hijab.

‘What the fucking hell have I done to you? Don’t be so fucking temperamental. Talk to me.’

‘Be quiet, Sami.’

‘Well fuck you.’

On the tube there was only the rattle of carriages, the flash of advertisements, the rustle of someone’s newspaper opposite. The lifestyle section. Muntaha glowing blackly in her heart. Two places away, Sami coldly fixed, infuriated to be wrong. Here was their lifestyle. The train shot into the dark.

And at home he built another spliff, superstrength to be dramatic. Interspersed tokes of brackish smoke with slugs of whiskey from the bottle. The yellow tang dulled by the smoke. When he came into the bedroom she was praying the Aisha prayer. He went to the bathroom and fumbled the shelves like a burglar, searching for pills, for toothpaste. He clattered and banged. Things fell to the floor. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

Muntaha could look forbidding when she wanted to. At school. The skills of a prizefighter first entering the ring, before the uncloaking, these were the skills required of a lady teacher. Sucking at her lower lip. Arms folded and legs apart. Eyes and skin and mouth tight. Communicating: Don’t Mess. Or trotting the tarmac yard, bobbing her head like the fighter, or like a fly girl, and also grinning. Too self-aware to take the pose seriously, although she could do it on the street without the grin. It was part of the theatre of everyday living, and it could make the difference between being attacked or not, whether in the playground or coming back from the shops.