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Authors: Robin Yassin-Kassab

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BOOK: The Road from Damascus
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So when Sami declared a year off for the world travel and the poems, Muntaha, having observed things slide the hill from bad to worse, and hoping he would find direction on the way, was supportive. Plus, it was no loss to her to have the house free of smoke and noise. She was engaged now in the practical business of an East End school, teaching history and geography to children replete with these same qualities, marking homework when it came, managing decidedly unspoilt students and, in equal need of guidance, their world-spoilt parents. So off Sami set, chewing his lips, to south and east. One of the reverse refugees, fleeing the leisure to discover himself.

Apart from Morocco (plenty of spliff), he avoided the Arabs. There were vodka and Gypsy festivals in Bulgaria. Efes beer and raki in Turkey. He inched through Anatolia from bar to harsher bar. In the contested borderlands he ascended a mountain whose summit was a burial mound littered with vast stone heads, sculptures of god-kings, and on the way down had his foot run over by a car swerving to give him a lift. It did him no harm, except to add to the accumulation of harm in his spirit.

Back in London, he smoked, he drank, he avoided things. He gazed moon-faced at Muntaha. He received her comforting embraces, but was not comforted. In an iconoclastic fit he hurled Qabbani books at his study wall. He never looked up at the stars. He limped around the university campus like a wounded animal, his back hunched up and his neck tied in memory knots of pain. He flicked through old notes as you might flick at a mouth ulcer with your tongue. He smoked some more.

By now his early sets of notes couldn’t be found. Someone may have carried them out with the rubbish. They may have been burnt to join the other carbonates in the sky. It made little difference. And by now too, Sami’s money had run out. Half of his inheritance from Mustafa sunk into the mortgage, the rest into the vortex of his daily needs. He lived off his wife’s labour.

Of his doctorate, he’d produced nothing. Dr Schimmer should have given up on him, but instead agreed to start him again, registering him as new, for his father’s sake.

‘Perhaps you will settle down to the work now? Perhaps, like your father, you will produce, aa, greatness? Perhaps it’s in the blood, yes?’

To prompt the sensation of turning over a new leaf, Sami took a long trip to Paris. A sabbatical, he said. He planned to study second-generation North African rap in French. It seemed complex enough, important enough, to necessitate nine months in a flat in the 18th arrondissement learning street French and smoking Algerian hash. Every few weeks he ate a lump for the ten-hour bus and ferry ride to his benefactress in London. Happy times, unfamiliarity breeding respect. Then back to Parisian Babylon to congregate with clandestine Maghrebis, those homeless and paperless, fallen between borders. By this stage, Sami felt he belonged with victims.

In April 2000, however, Hizbullah drove the Israeli occupation out of Lebanon. It was the first Arab victory in living memory. Could the age of defeat have an end? There was a hint of that possibility in the air.

In September confrontations with the occupation spread across Palestine. Teenagers challenged tanks – new-born children of the stones absorbing live ammunition in their bodies. After three or four days of escalating demonstrations it was obvious they weren’t going to stop. The second Intifada had erupted like a poisonous boil, and so, for Sami, had an unexpected moment of bliss. He was still young enough for wasted years not to matter much, and to be young in that morning of the rejuvenated Arabs was very heaven. On wings, he alighted again in London, and with passionate but chilly fury began a new book of notes, on Mahmoud Darwish and the poetry of immediate engagement, on Qabbani’s Jerusalem poems, on the Palestinian revolution. He loved his wife. Saw no need to smoke. For Muntaha, the real Sami had come home.

Alas, the uprising provided a false dawn. Sami produced political enthusiasm rather than scholarship, transcribing each morning the emotions provoked in him by the previous day’s body count. Merely that. When he recognized it, there were no longer any delusions to accommodate him. It was a decade since he’d graduated, and what had he actually said in that time? What wisdom would he bequeath to the coming generation? Sami had meant to add his distinctive stone to a particular cairn on the mountain of knowledge, but he held no stone, could find none to fit his palm. The father whose inheritance he’d squandered towered above. Our Father Who Art. In the high places, at the sacrificial sites. On Sinai. In Muhammad’s mountain cave of meditation.

The mountains crowded and loomed and threatened to shake with the shaking earth and crush him. He was blinded, unable to distinguish between the Straight Path and all the intercrossing goat trails. Or between fathers and gods. Between reason and religion.

There was still Syria. It’s a misfortune of our age that we have returned to roots to find solutions. The roots are shallow, and mythical; we all come from everywhere at once, and we are floating creatures. Sami as much as anyone was inheritor of the great postmodern diversion. So it was with the sense of a last chance that he planned a summer month in Syria. His reasons for going: to reconnect with his roots, remember who he was, find an idea. In that causal order.

When he got there he realized there were roots he didn’t want to dig up.

As children we sense mystery but expect all to be explained. As adolescents we sense mystery but understand it as an extension to the glories of the self. There’s time later for universal questions, we think, but right now I’m busy preening. As adults we sense mystery but have become by then accustomed to it. It’s the solid ground beneath us, easy not to notice. And there’s no longer any time. We’re busy, so we put it from our minds.

That’s how it’s meant to be in the society we’ve built. Busyness keeps our noses out of mystery. But Sami, being a failed academic and international layabout, living on his wife’s honest earnings, wasn’t busy. Whatever he was accustomed to was falling away beneath his feet.

5
Reunion
 

The door opened almost immediately. Muntaha’s head appeared round its side, the heartshape of her face and her long eyes. Her pupils expanding with human warmth, despite justified disappointment, into the nearly black of her irises. Her dark skin shadowed in the streetlight. Her hair like a curtain, like a veil, promising revelation.

‘You’re back, then. Why did it take you so long?’

‘Oh you know how the tube is, I don’t need to tell you. And I don’t know how long I had to wait for my luggage. Much more than an hour.’

She nodded sadly and stepped back to let him in. The hall was clean after his absence. It smelled of flowers, coffee and perfume. Sami unshouldered the bag and put it on the floor. They both examined it. It looked like hand luggage.

‘Come on, then,’ said Muntaha, drawing a line.

He walked into her extended arms and lowered his nose into her hair. She pressed against him. She and Sami in each other’s arms. She was wearing a man’s blue gellabiya, loose for the London heat. Sami clutched at it in handfuls. They held each other tight, fitting together well.

Muntaha disengaged.

‘You’ve had a drink on the way home.’

Sami, in hot turmoil, didn’t know what to say. All the melted ice was splashing about inside him. Still melting. He concentrated on not crying. But should he cry to win her sympathy? It was an opportunity, after all. He hadn’t been able to cry since they met. Since before that, since his father’s death. And now he had these burning tears to struggle with. In the end, like a man, but not much of one, he again transformed his confusion to anger.

‘I’m not a child,’ he said. I’ll do what I like.’

‘I know that,’ she said quietly. ‘But I thought you might have wanted to say hello first. To leave your bag. Then you could have gone for a drink if you’d wanted.’

‘But I didn’t want to say hello first.’

‘Apparently not.’

‘I mean I did… but it happened differently.’

There was a long silence during which Muntaha studied the wall behind Sami’s head, contemplating anticlimax. She’d been hopeful for his Syria trip. She’d even – whisper it – prayed for his success there. And here he was returned, also considering anticlimax. Sami saw his brain exhale a little puff of illusion and then deflate into itself, sunken, crinkly, grey. The same swirl of light and dark greys that made up London. If illusion was sustainable anywhere, it wasn’t in this city. Meanwhile he felt her eyes on his face, peering through and underneath him to something that didn’t exist.

His bladder, it struck him now, was much fuller than his brain. ‘Anyway,’ he said, dragging sawdust-stained shoes over the floorboards. He locked the toilet door behind him. The house was divided into spheres of influence, and the toilet was in his. Large enough to rotate in if you kept your arms to your sides. Dark red, and decorated with political cartoons from the same Arabic paper he’d bought in the airport. There was a small deep handbasin, a mirror he flinched from, a low toilet bowl. He pissed long and thickstream, dizzy in the enclosed space. Knowing he was in the wrong, he tried to feel more drunk. Why was it him always in the wrong? It wasn’t fair.

When he emerged Muntaha was in the kitchen. The kitchen and bedroom and upstairs bathroom belonged to her. And since he’d been away she’d reclaimed the hall and stairway. The kitchen had a wooden surface and washed-out blues and greens for walls, furniture and plates. There were salty, bitter odours, like on a beach.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I had a bad time in Syria.’

She softened immediately. ‘What happened, habibi? Tell me.’

‘I wish I hadn’t gone.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘No,’ he frowned. ‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean nothing? Tell me.’

‘We’ll talk about it later.’

That was Sami, opening doors only to slam them shut again. Muntaha shrugged and moved to the open window. Darkness hid the neighbours’ patch of garden.

‘I love London in the summer,’ she said. ‘It smells so warm. So full of colour. Everybody relaxes. Everybody smiles.’

Struck dumb by her optimism, Sami rubbed an aching shoulder. And in a sudden white flash there were tears in his eyes. Muntaha was still sniffing at the window, and he turned from her, breathing the tears away as you would control nausea, getting on top of it, calming down.

Then he asked, ‘Do you want to see your presents?’

Crouching in the hall he unzipped his bag and brought out the newspaper. He held it, wondering what to do.

‘That’s not a present, Sami.’ Muntaha was amused.

‘No.’ He tossed it to the floor, and then the fluffy white dog burst out of the bag. He threw this to his wife.

‘A present from the family.’

She threw it back, laughing. ‘It has a Heathrow price tag on it.’

‘All right. Fair enough.’ He smiled. Her laughter made everything good. ‘They did get you presents. You know, Arab stuff. Clothes and sweets and stuff. But I’d have needed another bag to bring it all.’

‘And you only brought hand luggage.’

‘Exactly.’

She looked at him. He looked at the floorboards.

‘You’re silly, Sami. If you didn’t want to come back straight away you could have just said so.’

‘Silly.’ Now she knew the word. Previously they argued when ever he’d used it against her. She used to translate it into Arabic, where it had more offensive significance.

He groped to the bottom of the bag, and handed over a thin brown paper package.

‘The postcards! Thank you.’

She’d requested these to use in the classroom, for projects on foreign countries. There were pictures of mosques, castles, water-wheels, mountains, women in embroidered dresses, old city doors, water sellers and other self-consciously traditional street life. Tourist Syria.

Sami stood up, unfurling a heavy necklace. This was the best moment of his day. It may have been the best moment of the whole summer. He stepped to his wife, swept her hair up, and arranged the cord around her neck, fastening the clasp on the nape, touching the downy skin with his long fingers, shaking lapis and silver pieces into place over the top slope of her breasts. Her slender neck and her swelling breasts.

‘That’s what I wanted,’ she said, turning her warm face to his. ‘Something chosen and given with love.’

She kissed him. Her lips on his.

Sami felt sexual desire. More precisely, he felt a will to live – a power that was entirely other than him – pulling strings through his body towards her. He also felt anger, moving in another direction, moving upwards with the rush of melting ice. And he felt failure, a sense of smallness, crashing downwards, from his skull deep down into a plunge pool of despair. He was a battleground of forces.

Disordered, he retreated from her through a brown door. Instead of a sitting room they had a study, and that was his. His smell was preserved in there among crowded bookshelves, generalized English mustiness, humid curtains, the fibres and spices of rugs and favoured clothes, and other ancient ritual objects, his relics. Furniture inherited from his father, memories his mother hadn’t wanted. A low desk and a dwarf-sized upholstered Moroccan chair to go with it. A wood and leather camel stool. And a red felt burst-spring sofa, into which Sami sank.

The room stank of nostalgia.

Muntaha walked in with a mug of tea. She set it carefully on the floor next to his booted feet. Early in the marriage she’d tried to make him leave his shoes at the door, to recognize a distinction between outer and inner, as the Arabs do. In vain. After some months of low-volume dispute she’d stopped trying.

‘Baba’s ill again,’ she said, seating herself on the camel stool.

The room darkened.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sami said. ‘Is he in hospital?’

‘Not this time. Hasna’s looking after him. And they send a nurse to visit him every day. I’ve been going there after school. You should come tomorrow.’

‘Yeah. Tomorrow. Good idea.’

‘He had another heart attack. A small one, but he looks so old. He can hardly breathe. Just moving around the house is a big deal for him.’

BOOK: The Road from Damascus
2.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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