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Authors: Robin Yassin-Kassab

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BOOK: The Road from Damascus
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‘The Qur’an,’ said the cousin. ‘The Noble Qur’an. The Perspicacious Book. That’s what.’

‘Aha,’ said Sami, creasing a new page, and writing:
The Qur’an as poetic text.
‘Please go on.’ But his cousin sat down again sideways on, face back to the Intifada, making tutting and clucking noises. Why the anger?

From the gloom of the house Sami heard a cough. Something was stirring also in the inner chambers of his memory.

‘Who’s there, aunt? I should greet them.’

‘Never mind, nephew. Leave him alone. Will you drink more coffee?’

‘Please, don’t treat me as a guest.’

And suddenly inexplicably dizzy, and with an English petulance, he stood up, Fadya rising with him, the cousins too, all watching him narrow-eyed, heads inclined. He watched them back. And stepped towards the inner door.

Sami saw Fadya nod at her sons with weighty significance. Then she looked at him, her too, with malice. And a palms-up shrug.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. My house is yours.’

On the other side of the door: a square airless room, no TV, no shelves, no pictures, and another door, into further gloom. In the middle of the room, on a chair, doing nothing, facing nowhere, a man. There was a secret here which Sami alone had not penetrated.

Sami advanced. ‘Hello, uncle,’ he said, stretching out a hand. In Arabic every older man is called uncle. Uncle looked up. His white-flecked mouth, salt-and-pepper beard, wispy salt-and-pepper hair, salt-and-pepper skin gleaming a little in the TV light from behind Sami. Not returning Sami’s greeting. Not bothering to wipe away the sweat which dripped from his head into blinking fish eyes. Just worrying prayer beads – click, click – in a relentless chain of cause and effect.

This was the skeleton in the backroom, then: a loonish relative. This was what they were ashamed of. With an inward smile, and a wrinkling of the nose against the hot mustiness, Sami returned to the others.

‘So tell me, aunt. Who is this?’

‘You want to know who this is?’

‘Yes. Tell me his story.’

Fadya’s eyebrows were raised high. ‘You’ve come here to learn. So I’ll teach you something. Just listen. Don’t write in your notebook. I’ll tell you the story of a man in this country. Let’s call him Faris Kallas.’

Kallas is Sami’s mother’s name, his aunt’s name. But he’d never heard of a relative called Faris.

‘Faris is a student, twenty years old, hasn’t even begun his life yet. He studies at the university. What else? He wants to be an engineer. He wants to get married, have children. He wants to build a house. Don’t we all want the same things?’

This assumption of Fadya’s, that everybody knows what they want, marked her foreignness to Sami.

‘It happened in the eighties, when you were happy with your father in London. It was chaos then. But Faris went to his university lectures, always interrupted by mukhabarat coming in and reading out the names of people whose names were never spoken again. When people disappeared their families didn’t dare enquire about them, didn’t mention them. The mukhabarat could do magic, you see. When they read names the owners of the names ceased to exist. God only says “Be!” and it is. With the mukhabarat it’s the other way round. They cancel by speaking.

‘So when any sensible man would keep a sweet smile on his face and his mouth shut, this Faris decided to join the Brothers. He didn’t do anything, mind you. No plots or bombs. Just said yes when another student asked him if he wanted to join the organization. They said they’d fight corruption and the Communists who’d surrendered our land to Israel, and this donkey Faris agrees with them and lets them write down his name.

‘After three months of earnestly doing nothing but go to engineering lectures, Faris is informed on. Someone tells someone that he’s a Brother. Then they came to his home. They walked in and got him, beat him in the kitchen in front of his parents and sisters until they couldn’t see his face for blood, and then put him in their car.

‘They drove him somewhere in the city. He doesn’t know where because there was a hood over his head. His blood stuck the hood to his skin as it dried, but loosened again with slaps and kicks when he arrived. In a cell smaller than this room, and forty others in there with him. No food, no water.

‘Then they took him to Tadmor, in the desert. You’ll have visited the ruins, the tourist sites, not the prison with the words over the entrance arch: “Who enters here is lost; Who leaves is born again.” First they made him write his name, his family’s names, and his address. Then they burnt the paper and stamped on his hand. Because he had no name or family or address any more, nothing to write down. They slapped him and spoke to him politely. “Please step this way, Mr Nobody.”

‘He was kept alone in a cell too small to stand up in. They gave him rice with stones in it and dirty water. After sleeping he could think properly, which meant he wasn’t able to sleep again. The fear was worse than the pain. He thought he was going to die.

‘They tortured him for a time and left him for a time. Then tortured him again. It became a normal routine, so he no longer feared death. He feared life instead. A routine, except a routine requires ordered time. In there, there’s no time. They live in darkness. No suns or moons. And what was left of him outside was darkness too. His family stepped around his shadow in the house. They couldn’t forget him and neither could they assume he would come back.

‘Later, after years perhaps, time returned to Faris. Ways of telling the time. He had yoghurt for breakfast, rice for lunch, a potato for dinner. Once a month he was shaved. But when they shaved him they slashed his ears and nose and lips with the razor. Why do that? What’s the point of it? Why?’

Sami spread his arms in innocent incomprehension. don’t know. Why are you asking me?’

‘Why do you think I ask you, nephew? Why do you think?’

Sami was open-mouthed, almost tearful, too warm.

‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘What you don’t know you’re innocent of. And if you don’t know the answer to the question, then neither do we. What was the point of any of it? What was the point of ripping women’s hijabs off in the street? What was the point of murdering tens of thousands in Hama?’

In other circumstances Sami would attempt a partial answer, about Hama at least. His father had explained it to him. The Brothers murdered plenty of Alawis and Party members in Hama before the government responded. The response had been harsh, certainly, but the alternative was also harsh. The Brothers in control of the cities and the Party in control of the army. It would never have ended. But this was no time for historical debate.

‘If there were men they left alive,’ continued Fadya, ‘that’s because they’d killed the man inside them. Before they released Faris they asked him about his politics. Politics is men’s business, so he had nothing to say. He had no opinions, no desires. That’s why his family didn’t recognize him when he walked in. Twenty-two years had passed. His father was dead. His mother ill. His sisters married. Your mother had left the country before they took him. There was almost nobody there to recognize him. Only his little brother. And he didn’t recognize him. He remembered a man, not a ghost.

‘That’s what we call lucky here. We thank God, anyway. Many men never came out. Some came out but found everyone dead. Some found their homes but the key wouldn’t fit the door. There were strangers inside.’

It reminded Sami of Palestinian families in the refugee camps, and their useless keys sometimes brought out of a cabinet to show to a guest, sometimes hooked on a nail in the reception room, thicker and heavier than keys of today. The image extended. Entire countries, and pasts: houses without keys. Houses no longer homes.

‘And what should he do?’ Fadya continuing. ‘He couldn’t marry. He couldn’t work. He cries and has bad dreams. Look at him.’

But the door had closed, and Sami had seen enough.

‘You mean to say, aunt, that the man in the next room is my mother’s brother? Faris?’

Fadya nodded twice.

‘I didn’t know about this. I’ve never heard of an uncle called Faris. My mother didn’t tell me. I wish she’d told me. She should have.’

Sami didn’t talk to his mother, not any more, because she hadn’t talked to his father, even when he was dying, and because she’d betrayed his father’s secularism by wearing a hijab. She’d stayed in London after her husband died. Lived alone, and worked in the man’s world of a halal butcher’s shop. And now she’d humiliated her son. She must have known he’d visit her family in Syria one day – and she’d let him grow up without telling him this essential piece of family information, about her brother.

The cousin who’d mentioned the Qur’an spoke again, this time very quietly and without defiance, as if only to himself.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat?’

And the other cousin asked, almost wistfully, ‘Who betrayed him?’

‘Well, there’s a question indeed,’ responded Fadya. ‘Faris told only close family members he’d joined the Brothers. Not including his little brother, who was too young. Of course we didn’t speak in front of children. There was the danger they might repeat what they heard. So it was only us who knew.’

Everyone’s eyes rested expectantly on Sami.

‘So?’ he asked.

Aunt and cousins waited, eyes unmoving.

Sami stood, shouldered his bag, took two steps towards the inner door. Manners as well as curiosity suggested he should make his new uncle’s better acquaintance. But something stopped him. And then a flush of anger followed that impulse as if to clothe its too obvious nakedness. What did he want with broken Islamists? And Sami was too old to be discovering new relatives.

That’s the way he left. Seeing himself out, without any eastern courtesy. It was too much information of the wrong sort, this Faris story. Nothing that would help his thesis or his fraying life in London. Sami endeavoured not to let it set him off course. And in the wind and the muffled city sound and the blanket of warmth it was easy not to think, easy to forget.

But before awakening with a bolt into the next day’s voice-cluttered dawn – his last dawn in Syria – Sami dreamt an uncomfortable dream. Of a galloping and a heartshaking. An acceleration of hooves. Sami beginning to run, slapping into boughs, becoming entangled in newly sprouted undergrowth, his feet disobedient. Unable to push the panic from his brain into his body, into action. Horse saliva showered his neck. He could feel its breath. He opened his mouth to scream.

Yet in place of the scream he heard a mighty crash, and its aftermath, a backdraught of air. He wheeled around to see the dead horse, which was not at all cartoonish. An ordinary, dead, brown-flanked, sweating horse, with only one difference from the normal model: this horse wore the face of Sami’s dead father. Mustafa Traifi’s face, elongated to fit the equine muzzle. Hence the bolt of awakening.

Sami had never before been visited by his father in nightmare form. All his dreams of him had been burnished memories, night nostalgia of the kind that occasionally provoked wholesome tears. There was nothing wrong in the father-son relationship, nothing except the fact that the father was dead, had been dead for sixteen years, was dead, embalmed and mummified. Mustafa Traifi, porcelain sepulchre. Mustafa Traifi, enshrined in Sami’s head. The only member of Sami’s family who Sami had no problems with. None at all. Mustafa Traifi who’d shown his son the stars, taught him his history, protected him from womanly superstition, planned for him a career – all this before the boy’s sixteenth birthday, before turning still and cold in snowy North London, leaving Sami alone on this dried ember of a world.

So nothing wrong in the father-son relationship. Not until now. Bubbles were rising – marsh gas, deadly methane – from the trowelled-up earth of Sami’s brain. What could it mean?

It took him all the hot morning, until Uncle Mazen dropped him at the airport, to regain his frozen-hearted cool. Sitting in a grey area of the departure lounge, against the evidence, wishfully thinking, he pieced together his thesis theory. And beyond that, the pride and peace of mind his achievement would provide him, the improvement in his marriage, the future of professional success, respect, wealth.

And then in this transition between worlds the hashish of his thoughts momentarily released him, and he lucidly conceded that things were complex, that nothing was simple. There were paths other than the one his father had trodden. Other, but not necessarily mistaken. Paths taken, for instance, by his wife, or by his mother. Other, valid paths. He conceded it just for a few moments. It would take a summertime for the realization to sink into his core, corrosively, like salt into snow.

2
A Mirror for Sami
 

To avoid hostile airspace the plane looped east and north over sudden desert before turning west, above dry brown hills and valleys like scar tissue, and green mountains, and then to where the shining sea and the sky spat photons at each other. The gnaw of the engines, and the carbon spreading behind them into the fizzing, popping sky. Sami watched until the dazzle hurt his head, too narrow to contain it, and called for wine and paracetamol, slammed shut the plastic blind, and set to thinking. Arrowing westwards like his father before him, faster than the sun to where the day was younger, he thought of the past. Of the wife he was returning to.

What had he first noticed about her? That her laughter was like the scattering of birds? That her eyes burnt their target in soft fire? Or was it just that she seemed preordained, that she measured up to something he was waiting for?

Summer 1991. The British Museum. Life stretching before him like a creature to be conquered.

He’d had previous girlfriends, if girlfriend is the word. Perhaps ‘willing victim’ is more suitable. Not that he was fierce. It was a mutual victimizing, and as innocent as looking in a mirror: he was prey too of the grainy sensation-hungry English girls he found clustered in dance halls or in the student-union bar, drawn so easily, by their own momentum, into his careful net of difference.

BOOK: The Road from Damascus
11.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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