The Road from Damascus (11 page)

Marwan’s room, downstairs, guarding the entrance hall, also served as dining room and living room. In the daytime his bed became a couch. No pictures or books. He had the TV which revealed further little rooms and compartmentalized English people gossiping and whingeing within them. Through the window he heard the immanence and distance of the world outside.

The children were upstairs out of harm’s way. A room for the girl and a room for the boy. They cut pictures from magazines and stuck them to the walls to reflect what they imagined inside themselves. They were allowed to jump around and make noise. Marwan was not an unkind father. He questioned them about their schoolwork and the friends he never saw. He worried about them and warned them away from danger, but never beat them or raised his voice. He did his best. He played his part.

He would pray at home and at work as well as in the mosque, measuring out the day by the allotted times. He performed fifty press-ups and fifty sit-ups in the gloom of each morning. He memorized sections of the Qur’an as an exercise to maintain his mental health. With a sort of quiet pleasure he felt age descending upon him.

Once on the tube he intervened in an argument between a man and a woman. They cursed in one of the stranger accents. Irish? Scottish? Subdued swearing burst into shouts, and then shoving and flailing hands. As slaps became punches Marwan found himself standing, stretching an arm between them. ‘Madam, how may I help you?’ He heard his croaky foreign voice and his diction suited to the British Council garden or to Shakespeare seminars thirty stale years old. Bleating ridiculously, ‘Madam, madam…’ until the couple interrupted themselves and looked at him with shocked disgust.

‘Piss off, you old Paki fucker,’ the woman said, and pushed against his face with a wet hand, a fingernail scratching blood from the corner of his eye.

Marwan leaked tears back to the house, locked the door, and shielded himself from Muntaha’s concern.

Thereafter, in the English phrase,
he kept himself to himself.
Didn’t presume to interfere in anything beyond himself. He began reading again, but not poetry. He read the pamphlets he picked up at the mosque or in Islamic bookshops concerning the laws of God established and fixed by the Righteous Predecessors. The laws by which God made Himself known in the lives of His servants. These were straightforward, plain texts. Facts you could be sure of. No mistakes or accidents. Nothing elitist or vague.

The pamphlets provided another reason not to miss Iraq, which they said was the realm of unbelief as much as London. No country could call itself Muslim if it refused to submit to God’s laws. And no individual. Marwan remembered his soul-bloated former self mocking the laws, how in his foolishness and arrogance he’d assumed men to be angels. Worse, he’d attributed to men qualities owned only by God, such as interpretive control over life, such as absolute independence.
I seek forgiveness from God
, he repeated.
Forgive me my faults. Forgive me my faults.

It was clear to him that the laws offered a solution to the agonies of the grimy city and its brawling populace. That the laws could tie the people together with the twine of common humanity and shared purpose, could tame them with humility and restrain them within proper limits. Strict punishments and the prohibition of drugs and alcohol could establish peace and safety. Modesty and honour in sexual matters could allow men to regard their fellows as brothers rather than competitors. Then the city could be clean. Not sandpaper, but harmony and balance. Five times a day it would pause its commerce and bow as one body to its Creator.

But that wasn’t his business.

He ordered his own life and left the people to their fate. If it was God’s will to guide them, they would be guided. But he still felt a kind of pity as he walked at a distance behind them, striving for invisibility. He raised his eyes under lowered lids as the Londoners flitted or staggered from pub to betting shop, those most commonly in the poor areas, or wandered blankfaced and numb in shopping centres, or stood nervous at cashpoints, guarded, locked into themselves. Marwan followed them breathing quick and shallow, worrying his prayer beads, either seeking forgiveness on their behalf or protecting himself from repeating their sin.
Istughfurullah
, he muttered.
Istughfurullah, I seek forgiveness from God, I seek forgiveness.

Computerization and cutbacks, meanwhile, made Marwan redundant. He wasn’t sorry to lose his job, for two reasons. First, he found himself incompatible with the bookish, youthful environment of the university. The undergraduates – noisy, brash children – he could bear. But the ever drawn-out youth of the graduate students and unkempt professors he could not. Their academic froth of visions and revisions, their satisfaction with unreality, they mirrored too much his younger self. Not a mirror he wished to look into any longer. And secondly, this: in his former academic life, back there, he’d been a student and, more or less, a teacher. Student and teacher of nothing much, but at least those, an agent with knowledge as his supposed object. He’d been made a fool of only by himself and God. Until his imprisonment. Whereas here, he himself was an object of study. In this respect undergraduates were worse. They peered thoughtfully over the tops of books into the middle distance, not into space but at him, the Arab. Sometimes they would ask for his point of view on a particular issue, not because they respected his opinion but from a desire to hear an Arab voice, any Arab voice. It spiced up their day. Saved them a trip to the Edgware Road. Just standing nearby could authenticate things for them. Breathing the air he’d breathed was like treading the Mesopotamian soil, like waking in a goat-hair tent. An undergraduate once asked him, with admirable honesty, ‘Mr al-Haj, what’s it like, being an Arab?’ He didn’t say:
It’s not like anything. I know nothing.
He was never more than formal with them, although they were often too friendly with him, these sons and daughters of a cold uncourteous people, introducing their sexual partners as if he was interested, or badgering him into group photographs with their large arms around his shoulder. In some way he couldn’t define and therefore couldn’t repulse they recorded him, fixed him, pinned him down. He expected at any moment to be dissected.

So it was a relief to be freed from this. His health was degenerating too. As loyal as a sheepdog – a dog in English is a fine and trusty animal –Jim Clark arrived to organize another transition. Shaggy, stumble-footed, he led Marwan between hospitals and government bureaus to confirm again the official existence of his bad back and persistent limp, plus now the laboured beating of his heart. Jim did the talking, ponderously, with significant nods and movements of the eyes.

Marwan’s retirement present was a cup overflowing with empty time. What would he do with the yards and folds of it? He interested himself in the children’s homework and exam revision. He expanded his daily routines, walking to the mosque for every prayer and spending twenty minutes after each glorifying God on his prayer beads. He did press-ups in the afternoons as well as the mornings. He reread his collection of pamphlets, finding comfort in the repetition. He memorized more of the Qur’an. Still there was time.

He explored further afield, on wide-ranging circuits of Arab London. To the Syrian grocer’s on the Uxbridge Road where he bought olives and salted balls of cheese. To Moroccan stalls on the Golborne Road where he drank steaming bowls of harira against the weather and listened to the gruff, almost incomprehensible Franco-Arabic of the market men. To cafés on the Edgware Road or upstairs rooms in Kilburn where he smoked a narghile – his one occasional vice – between voluble Egyptians and Lebanese. He stepped around plotters, journalists and other exiles, and closed his eyes to the vulgar young Gulf tourists.

He walked alone, uncherished, but the city softened to him by degrees. He expanded his acquaintance. Before long he had hand-shaking knowledge of more than two dozen men. Shopkeepers, security guards, eternal students and tourists who’d lost their way home, a poet, businessmen, embassy staff, waiters and managers of restaurants. He knew their names and origins, the storied versions at least. He presented himself as a mild critic of his country’s regime, but a patriot, who’d settled in London for the sake of a good job (perhaps he exaggerated its importance), and who was now waiting for his children to finish their education before returning home. Most of them talked of going home, even the Palestinians from disappeared villages.

They bought each other lunches or glasses of tea or pipes to smoke through bawdy or fantastical narrations of Haifa or Beirut, Cairo or Riyadh, or of London itself, what scandals they had heard or seen or imagined. They talked a lot of politics, but seldom involved themselves in the opinions they gave, cloaking every thought in so many layers of irony or parody that even the speaker of a statement rarely felt sure of its intention. They preserved the survivalist suspicion they had brought with them. There was a lot of laughter in these meetings, and the steam of vain words again, but Marwan allowed himself the indulgence. He wasn’t engaged to words this time. That was the difference. He didn’t have faith in them any more.

On warmer days he would walk on to Hyde Park or Regent’s Park or Queen’s Park, worrying his beads to excuse himself from the cafe‘’s frivolity or from the corruption of the streets. On these days women were more than usually naked and lovers more than ever intent on flaunting the drunkenness of the body. He would choose an unoccupied bench and flick non-committally, inviolate, through a pan-Arab newspaper until he fell into a doze punctuated by cloud-interrupted sun. Then he would awake from kinder parallel worlds into a brief bitterness, sour and cramped, before he remembered himself, stood up, and limped towards the nearest mosque.

It was in the Regent’s Park mosque, after Friday prayers, that marriage was proposed to him. He was kneeling far beneath the dome as the congregation picked its way past those still stationary in prayer or meditation when the face of Abu Hassan, a huge and craggy Baghdadi, loomed close. Eyes burnt from deep sockets in Abu Hassan’s bone-white cheeks. Tufts of brownish hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. He wore a grey suit and an open-collar pinstriped shirt for the mosque, but Marwan saw him always as he usually encountered him, with a triple-extra-large Union Jack T-shirt pulled shiny tight across his barrel chest. Such was the uniform Abu Hassan had selected for the staff of his Queensway shop, which sold royal regalia, novelties and tourist goods. In among the plastic patriotism that made his living, the policeman’s hats and postcards of mohicaned punks, Princess Di dolls and rubber caricatures of the prime minister, he looked like a toy himself, with his simple movements and uneven proportions, like a bear-sized, vastly overgrown child. Like many people that big he was an unexpectedly gentle man, happiest at home with his little wife and his shipwrecked sister, Hasna. It was for Hasna that he clutched Marwan’s arm in the mosque and announced, ‘My brother, marriage is half of religion.’

Hasna’s first husband had been an officer and party member who at the close of an illustrious career of casual barbarity had committed the folly of idealism. He had intervened to avert an entirely irrelevant act of murder or torture. As a result, he was exiled from home, property and reputation. In sullen recognition of her duty Hasna had obliged herself to go with him, to London because her brother was there, leaving her adult children behind. It was hard for her to forgive her husband, so she didn’t. She put her energy into building a shrine to Iraq in the tiny flat they bought, representing her sacrifice in an iconography of lost bliss, in photographs of family and in traditional craftwork items she’d never been interested in before. She bemoaned her reduced circumstances and ignored her husband until, with admirable promptness, he was thrown down dead on the linoleum kitchen floor by a tremendous shaking of the heart. Then she kept the shrine for religious purposes only, and moved into her brother’s house.

Marwan seemed to her a steady, uncontroversial man who would spring her no surprises, and she was largely right. He made few claims on her. She found him regular in his habits and respectful, if also uncommunicative and on occasion suddenly harsh. His children were polite although secretive and wayward, and at least half English, particularly the snake-eyed boy who refused to speak his own language. She moved Ammar into the living room and took for her and her husband, purged of its supernatural posters, the bedroom he’d occupied. She did her best with the dank little house which was not much more than stairs, corridors and cupboards. She double-glazed the rattling windows. She painted the living walls, but the paint never really dried. She overstocked the kitchen with food, and invited guests at least once a week.

Marwan remembered to thank God for his blessings. Hasna was a handsome woman, large and white, round-eyed, round-faced, round-bellied. Her breasts were rich and heavy circles. She contained as much femininity as he could bear. He felt properly human when he was imam for the prayer at home, with his wife praying behind him, as if his body carried weight and consequence.

Sometimes at night or in the deserted hours of the morning when the children were at school and habit made him think himself alone she found him weeping without noise or reason. It was only because she saw him that he realized he did it. In such ways she made him more lucid. He was thankful for the light, this shrivelled man who did his duty and tried to do his best. Ammar barely noticed him. And in his daughter he provoked only a dull ember of love, half extinguished but burning still. Light in the warmth of a glowing heart.

Muntaha loved her father, but she was embarrassed by him.

Like all teenagers, she wanted to fit in. The usual desire to belong increases in proportion to the feeling that you don’t, and she, with her stumbling sing-song accent and instinctive politeness to teachers, knew she didn’t. But it was more than that. Beyond adolescent narcissism, teenagers want the world to fit together better than it does. Their childhood assumptions of jigsaw accuracy in the world’s interconnections have given way to anxiety. They realize there are pieces missing, that the edges are jagged. Muntaha considered her world especially awkward, and for this she had a good excuse. She’d arrived when she was twelve, straight into school at an age when coolness and conformity are the big issues. She had to work it all out very quickly.