The Road from Damascus (43 page)

His hands, busy as bees, denuded the walls of books. Sandbags removed from a shelter.

‘My favourites are here,’ he said, tapping Piles 2 and 3. ‘Survival narratives. Not particularly the academic analyses. Just the raw stories, told by the survivors themselves. War stories. Camp massacres. Sabra and Shatila. Rwanda. People lost in the desert, or shipwrecked, or fallen down crevasses.’

His eyes shone. His Adam’s apple worked.

‘I suppose there’ll be some good ones from New York soon. The stories Hollywood doesn’t get its hands on first.’

Tom took himself back to the labour, swiping heavy volumes, swinging them to their fate. His unbuttoned cuffs fluttered. His forearms flexed. His elbows sharp.

‘Reading those,’ he said, ‘pumps the adrenalin. Operates the glands. I think that’s why I got waylaid writing books and researching. I’ve had an addiction to the excitement. To the feeling real. Visiting the militiamen in the American forests, interviewing a fighter from Grozny, a man who started thinking rubble was the way home should be. That’s been my buzz: just thinking about the challenges a human being might have to face. It wakes you up. It’s like being in the mountains, with your senses all working. Feeling like an animal, on your instincts. Feeling healthy. Feeling properly alive.’

Out of the window and below was the year’s new intake, trusting, fizzy-optimistic, sparkling with the sense of new beginnings. Pitifully vulnerable. And inside again, to Sami’s slowed and pensive eyes Tom was a blur. The man most aware of what was approaching was moving too fast for the rest, for all the slow beasts. Sami felt like a member of the herd. A bison when Europeans cropped America. An Aborigine when smallpox cropped Australia. Waiting for doom. His closeness to Tom meant at least he knew the doom was coming.

‘But I don’t need to read them any more. From now on it’s the genuine article. Not metasurvival, but survival. You want a pile?’

‘What?’

‘One of these piles is for you.’

He indicated Pile 7. Something rag-eared on top concerning Sufi responses to Mongol massacres in the medieval Middle East. Pile 7 a leaning tower of Pisa in comparison with the Petronas Towers of Piles 4 and 5, the Chicago-scape of 1, 2 and 3. (Pile 6, to be fair, was as Old World low-rise as 7). Seven or eight lurching books. Was that reasonable compensation? Sami considering himself tragically abandoned once again. His shaikh rejecting him before he’d advanced through the stations of the spirit, so now he would be a mere beggar, not a knower. Merely a shabby, failed faqir. But he got on top of his sentiment quickly. His personal dramas, the paternal-familial if not the philosophical, had burnt themselves out. And his resentment dimmed further with another glance through the porthole, another reminder of the innocents out there, laughing, posing, like him a decade ago, unbruised by the world. Thin shells of bone sheltering inner matter from whatever was coming first, bus-bombs or missiles or tidal waves or plagues. Those with something to lose to the outside, at least, those that didn’t have an enemy already growing inside, some new millennium brain fungus or alien spore ready to burst. Their shouting poked its way in, sound bent by the window angles, the calls of boys and girls wanting to mate, to demonstrate strength and fitness in the time allowed.

‘A question, Tom, before you go.’

Tom dropped discs into a brown cloth sack and pulled its string mouth shut before grunting his readiness.

Sami asked, ‘Are you a believer?’

Tom Field squinting, disapproving. Tugging the string of the sack over his head.

‘Everyone’s a believer. Don’t believe anyone who says he isn’t. You can’t breathe without belief. In gravity, for instance. How can you step off the floor without believing you’ll come back again? You can’t.’

‘Ah,’ said Sami. ‘No. I meant…’

‘You mean God, whatever that means.’

Sami nodded, wrinkling his chin in embarrassment. These aren’t questions to ask in society. Tom was crumpling papers and mounting them in pyramid formation on to a tray.

‘Let’s simplify. You want to know what I think to help you know what you should think. Am I right? Well, that won’t work. Either you’re a born believer, meaning you subscribe to a cultural belief like you subscribe to gravity, or you decide for yourself. The latter, in your case. Decide for yourself. It’s a matter of choice.’

‘Choice?’

‘Yep. And whatever you choose to believe, there’s a good chance you’ll be wrong.’

He fished a match from the hidden pool of his pelvis, struck it on his palm it seemed like, and in the last act of his tactical retreat lit the papers. They caught angrily. With solemn caveman instinct they watched together the pyre flare and die. Carbonate rising. Carbonate. Tick. Tick.

‘Like I said, we all believe in something. It helps to know what it is. Know yourself, in the famous formulation. Meaning, know what it is you believe.’

Sami sighed audibly.

‘More help? All right. Belief is good when it increases knowledge. It’s bad when it doesn’t. If it develops what we can call spirit, or awareness, it’s good. If it smothers it, it’s bad. If it helps you to survive, it’s good. The ex-professor of survivalism tells you this. Asks you. Will it help you to survive, or will it make you an easier target? That’s the way to judge these days. Self-preservation. And now, my friend, I have no more time.’

Tom made a farewell reconnaissance of the smoky room, ready now to abandon position.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘A lesson from the concentration camps. Those who survive are not necessarily the physically strongest, but those who see purpose in their suffering.’

‘Purpose?’ asked Sami. ‘Things are too confusing to work out purpose. Everyone interprets, and it seems arrogant to imagine one interpretation’s more correct than another.’

‘There’s your answer, then. Yet you could be mixing up your categories. What a believer does is to find the world significant. You don’t have to know what the significance is. A believer says God is the Knower. Isn’t that right? Your field, not mine.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well then.’ Tom turned to the bare desk and withdrew from its innards a surviving pencil and piece of paper. ‘But wait,’ he warned, although Sami wasn’t going anywhere. He scribbled, and presented the paper. ‘Here. Read it.’

Sami read it.

‘Have you learnt it by heart?’

‘By heart? No.’

‘Well, do so.’

Sami did so. The name of a mountain and the nearest village.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘So give it here.’

Tom crumpled it, placed it above the sparse ashes of the tray. Struck a match and lit it. It floated and danced, free of gravity.

‘You never know,’ Tom said in response to Sami’s doubting smirk.

Once they’d watched the information burn, Tom said, ‘And one more thing.’

‘Another?

‘A brief thing.’ He paused for effect before delivery. ‘Relax.’

‘You’re telling me to relax? You?’

‘Why not?’

‘Look at you. You’re getting out. You’re running. Panicking.’

‘Panicking? That’s what I’m not doing. I’m acting. I know exactly why. Beyond that, I’m perfectly relaxed.’

In the door frame he made his parting speech, a set of recommendations.

‘Be as intelligent as you can when dealing with human beings. Take evasive action when you need to, like I’m doing now. But after that, relax. There’s still big nature out there. It’s big and you can’t understand it. So what? War and politics is all part of it. Just relax. Do what you can. Then surrender to it.’

Sami took the first bus that passed. East through the thickness of the city. He paid no attention to outside. As the vehicle thrummed androckedhe saw concentration camps, refugee camps, torture cells. Insect people leaping from collapsing towers. He considered annihilation. Then his own aching uniqueness. His unbearably lonely sense of being special. The man who put this in him is dead. Dead and buried organic matter. Carbon on its way to being fossil fuel.

But none of this knowledge hurt him. He descended and walked, without too much heat, balancing terror with lightness. He opened his eyes to outside. Smartly dressed Bengalis hustling and bustling, making money, unembarrassed. A community on the up. Also businessmen from the City checking restaurant windows. Women in suits or jilbabs or tracksuits. The grind and the warmth of human activity. Just relax, thought Sami. He’d turned into Brick Lane, land of blood and beer. The tall brick chimney, a red reminder of imperial pride, behind him. To his right the mosque. Formerly synagogue. Formerly Methodist chapel. Formerly Huguenot church.

Just relax. If he could suspend disbelief. Just for a moment. Then he can review the experience. He won’t lose himself. He promises. Here we are.

Splashes cold water on his feet, forearms, head. Then there’s a corridor before a narrow doorway into the prayer hall. A very English building. Hooks for coats and scarves. Wood panelling. The hall wasn’t built to look at Mecca. The direction for prayer diagonal, not fitting the rectangle of the room, so he stands facing a corner. Someone snoring on the carpet. Another man kneeling, clicking beads. Sami sidesteps the thought of his Uncle Faris. Sidesteps Mustafa and Marwan, and the female body, and the Intifada, and the Arab nation. For only a glimmer he sidesteps the idea of himself. Sami Traifi, inhaling abstraction, inhaling void. He touches thumbs to earlobes. Folds hands on solar plexus.

‘Bismillah ur-Rahman ur-Raheem,’ he starts. Immediately he’s crowded by idle memories, and by his voice, the proof of himself. Breathes a while longer, inhaling abstraction. Starts, ‘All praise is due to God alone, the Sustainer of all the worlds.’ Shudders and stops. When he isn’t following a leader he remembers fragments only. Breathes some more. Just relax. Notices here that he’s broken into two separate pieces: the piece that advises the other piece to relax. The two pieces in fact not two selves but two functions of the words. Speaker and speakee. The order to relax has made him briefly disappear. He speaks from below or above his reason. The Opening Prayer, and another verse.

He hears himself saying the words internally and asks himself, what do I feel? The question is also words. He hears two sets of words, then. Two selves speaking and one listening. And now another, marvelling at this thought. He splinters. Mirrors looking into mirrors. Photons reflected.

As many bits of him as stars. And a sky containing the stars. He has only a hint of it. Something overarching and complete.

He bows, stands, prostrates, kneels. Stands. Folds hands. He concentrates on the words.

Repeats this verse until there are only words. And afterwards kneels for five minutes, returning to himself. It has made him calm and peaceful. It has opened something spacious in him.

∗

He stood outside, enjoying the tickle of moving air on his face. The mosque was a blending block of brown brick with white paint on the window sills. High on a wall was an optimistic sundial and engraved above it ‘Umbra Sumus’. We Are Shadows. His eyes craned to street level. Despite its veneer this part of London recalled the imperial-industrial age. It grimly chugged and steamed. Within its narrowness, skulls, mouths and words. Clicking carbon heads. Hanging above them, an immense sentence, being arranged and rearranged. On the street, feet. Pedestrians. And between pedestrians, shades cast by absent Lascars, by Yemenis, Somalis, Malays. The very first Bengalis. If he could stand on the street like rock, like the sundial, he’d see the history of Muslim settlement, the shifting, accumulating sands of his praying, murmuring brothers and sisters. If he weren’t trapped in time he’d sense a brotherhood even larger than that, with all the others offloaded at the docks, Russians, Chinese, Irish and Jews. And with the rural English arriving by land, coming to the slaughter. Brotherhood.

The miasmic sky opened above his head to reveal a spot of blue. The world was significant. He allowed significance to massage its way in. Then decided he might eat some curry. Until time gripped him more firmly than ever. Gripped him and jerked him by the beard.

He felt the touch of two hands from behind him, between his shoulders and the nape of his neck. He thought it must be an acquaintance playing that frequent but unfunny trick. Expected sweaty clumsy fingers to wrap his eyes next, and a voice to ask, ‘Guess Who?’ So he prepared himself to be graciously amused, and primed his ears to identify the coming voice, to get on top of the situation. But no voice came, except his own voice spluttering, ‘What?’ and a sudden whirl as of one of the scarier fairground machines and hard arms bending his arms behind his back and pressure on his scalp and the flinching glance of a grey-skinned passer-by and his own sense of guilt breaking in his mouth as he was bundled into the back of a car. Sticky seats. All too fast for him to know he was surprised. There were plastic cuffs on his wrists, and a face in front of his, close-up, wearing a gummy grin.

‘Hi!’ it said. ‘I’m Jeff.’

Shortly afterwards he was in a police station, once again. But unaccountably, for this time he’d been behaving. Acting grownup. No drugs or long sleeplessness. No Bikini Girl or centaur hallucinations. He gave his mother’s name for next of kin, copied out her number from the list on his mobile. How things had changed.

He was taken to what he presumed from TV experience to be an interrogation room, and was sat on a chair across a table from two more. For twenty minutes on the wall clock he was left alone. He thought of Uncle Faris, picturing the TV flicker of light on his prematurely old, unresponding face, and in the intervals when the picture faded he snatched at Qur’anic half-lines as they danced, just out of reach, behind curtains of forgetfulness. He resolved to buy a good Qur’an, the heavy black bilingual Qur’an that Muntaha liked, when he got out. He formulated it to himself like that, when I get out, as if he would be inside for a significant time.