The Road from Damascus (13 page)

Iraq had been the most developed Arab country. After the war it was in the Stone Age again, worse than the Stone Age, the Depleted Uranium Age, children born deformed or dying of cancer, people wading through sewage to go to the market. Muntaha loses her sense of wonder when she thinks about Iraq in the decade since, or she experiences the wonder as horror. For Iraqis, for all Arabs, history started to run backwards in 1991. Contrary to the stuff about progress that we learn, explicitly or not, in British as well as Iraqi schools.

Maybe, then, it was the news as much as meeting her that challenged Sami. Both happened to him at once. Her, and the realization that the condition of being an Arab was impotence, which is certainly not the idea he’d inherited.

The war had its effect on Ammar too. He went from a lisping Anglo–boy into dungeons and dragons and maths to some kind of counterfeit gangster. Started saying ‘yo’ instead of hello and ‘negative, motherfucker’ instead of no. His age and where they lived had something to do with it, but it was mainly the war. And his father’s lack of response to the war. Marwan would shrug, say whatever happened was what God willed, that it was nothing to do with us.

The war disillusioned them, which gave them another reason to hold on to each other. It’s only by being disillusioned that you know you had illusions in the first place. In Muntaha’s case, she’d believed, she discovered then, that this was a free country they’d come to, that the newspapers told the truth, that the people made the decisions and only after careful thought. She didn’t know the people could be manipulated. But look what happened. Half of them didn’t know where Iraq was, and none of them understood the Iraq-Kuwait issue, but still they were ready to send their brothers to kill and die. They really seemed to think a lot of them would die. They thought it was 1939, not 1991. There were people on her street who put the
Sun’s
Support Our Boys poster in their windows. And half of her beautiful friends getting excited about tanks and planes and soldiers and what they could see on TV. How much like a game the world was for them.

Marwan said the Arabs are freer inside their heads than the English because the Arabs never believe what they’re told. That’s why Arab governments need police and guns and torture chambers. For the English, who are trusting and sheeplike, those things aren’t necessary.

Maybe that’s too harsh. The English don’t complain because they have less trouble, less reason to complain. Anyway, they dose themselves to get by with their lives, with TV and football and pubs and drugs. The desire for numbness suggests they know something’s wrong.

It was a dose of English numbness that Muntaha decided to take, numbness administered by Sami’s hands. To make herself properly English. Not so much doing the drugs as watching him do them, although she smoked spliffs once or twice to see what they were like – and they were all right, a bit fuzzy, a bit tickly, no more than that. He smoked and drank and took Ecstasy, and thought he was very cool indeed. She pretty much agreed with him. She was boundlessly tolerant, anyway. He took her into underground warehouses where the music was so loud she felt it squashing her ribs instead of hearing it with her ears, and where the people who’d been so uncommunicative in the queue outside stroked each other’s floppy hair, where no one danced in couples but there was plenty of groping in the strobe-light. It was in those places he took his little ochre pills, and then danced very well, and when they emerged in the daylight into birdsong and car-noise she used to feel, although she’d taken nothing, that the world was transfigured and strangely fresh. Not actually numb at all.

It was one of those mornings they first had sex, before they married, and she’s not in the least ashamed of it. She chose it. She chose him. She knew what she was doing.

It says in the Qur’an husbands and wives are like clothing for each other. A husband is an adornment and a protection and a comfort. And it often felt like that. But less and less lately, as his self-hatred came to a head. As he sank into unhappy lethargy her tolerance became less unbounded, more staged. Inevitably so: he wanted to punish himself for his failures so he made himself impossible to live with. Being too lazy to punish himself he hoped she would do it for him. At the same time, he wanted to be pampered, caressed and forgiven. Wanted to be treated like the children they hadn’t had, the children he clearly wasn’t ready for. He felt children would distract from his search for direction.

Given that his directions turned out to be dead ends he resented Muntaha finding her own. Her hijab upset him most of all. Who’d have thought a headscarf would cause so much fuss? It was the catalyst. She couldn’t understand what it represented for him.

Like the world, she had become more religious. She realized she fitted into a community, that she wanted to belong to this Muslim community. That there are things you shouldn’t be embarrassed by, things you should be proud of.

But more than that, it was the settling of her sense of wonder. She’d absorbed plenty of alienation, plenty of atheist ideas, breathed all the agnostic air around, but her default mode was still belief in God. That’s what she returns to. The Qur’an, and prayer, and the sense that God is next to her, closer than her jugular vein. She knows her sense may be wrong, but it feels right to her. Why should she struggle against herself to deny what she feels? If someone brings her proof that God is a fiction, then she’ll have to disabuse herself of the notion. But she doesn’t believe anyone can prove there’s no God, any more than she can prove there is.

She remembers the prayer of Rabia of Basra, an Iraqi woman, a Sufi, who prayed:

Muntaha worships like that. Maybe there are Muslims who believe because they’re afraid, or because they want what they don’t have, but not her. For her, belief is only the expression of wonder.

One way of asking the belief question is this: Are you going to respond warmly to the universe, or not? It’s a choice you make. Sami’s trying very hard to answer no, and she can understand that. It isn’t stupid to decide the universe is cold. The interstellar spaces, the emptiness of inner space, the animals eating each other. Cold is true. But you could equally be warm. Everybody’s warm towards something, their team or teddy bear or pint glass. Their authentic Iraqi lover. But you could feel warmly towards not just one piece, not only sentimentally and a little sarcastically, but towards all of it, towards all reality.

Muntaha read someone saying it would be impiety to believe in a God who created a world as bad as this one. But she thinks the writer is cheating. To be certain that the world is so bad he has to be already certain that there’s no God. He’s using retrospective logic, propaganda logic. He won’t say that the things which worry us so much, death and war and betrayal, that those things might make sense from a higher perspective. He denies the validity of that perspective because he can’t see it or measure it. Like an empirical scientist. But religion isn’t science.

It’s a choice, and not one you make consciously. You need to be attentive to know what you believe. Muntaha experiences God’s comings and goings. Because it goes too; it isn’t always there. Inside her, hot and cold alternate like the seasons. And she knows which she prefers. She aims for summer. She aims for light.

Sami was woken by Muntaha shaking a foot, making him rock from side to side in his sweat. A bad start. If he’d looked at the expression on her face, if he’d noticed that her grip on his heel was also tender, he might have responded differently. But he didn’t notice, and he hated to be woken by anybody. It made him feel vulnerable.

Predictably, he had a headache. From the spliff, the alcohol, the dehydrating aeroplane. The bad temper. His brain like an anemone in search of moisture was swelling against his skull. Photophobic, he clutched his brow. He moaned. He said ‘fuck’. This his version of
good morning, darling.
Muntaha shrugged shoulders and went down to the kitchen.

When the gurgle of coffee arrived upstairs he stirred again, with groans and curses. Hauled himself up and rattled around the morning-broken room. He went through the routine to make himself better. Poor suffering Sami. He pissed. He attempted weakly, vainly, to shit. He stood in the over-oxygenated shower jet. He underwent a self-administered head massage.

Downstairs his wife was preparing for a day of work. She’d already eaten, to musical accompaniment, an omelette and a piece of buttered toast. Brushed her teeth. Packed her bag: keys, tissues, water bottle, notebook, pocket Qur’an, purse. A photograph of Sami inside her purse. She’d drunk her first measure of coffee, and that was enough for her. It was kindness and a will for all to be well that made her wait to drink a second cup with her husband. She looked at the clock. Five more minutes and she’d be late. She checked her trousers, shirt and jacket. Everything in order. Her shoes were ready to be slipped on at the door. Only one more piece of clothing to put on, and she thought she’d better wait for Sami before she did so, to make him ready.

The clock again. She turned up the CD a notch, her Rachmaninov. She liked the broad otherworldly sweeps of it, the surges and swells. Perhaps it would hurry Sami up a bit.

A minute more, and into the kitchen he fell, full of drama. His first act was to fumble through the medicine box on top of the fridge. He could have found paracetamol in the bathroom upstairs if he’d wanted, but he preferred to find it here, in view. Deathly pale, breathing shallowly, eyes squeezed to bird-feet wrinkles. He swallowed the pills dry.

‘Headache? Poor thing.’

She put a long hand on his shoulder but he turned to the sink and hunched down to dip his head under the tap. Muntaha gave up waiting and moved to the window. As she closed and locked it (not trusting him for security) she looked at the neighbours’ garden. A patch of muddy grass. A black wall held together with ivy. Then she turned to the clock again.

‘So are you coming to see Baba tonight?’

‘Yeah.’ Sami standing, tap water drizzling from his hair on to his T-shirt.

‘I’ll be back by six. I’ll meet you here then. All right?’

‘All right.’

She cocked the cafetière.

‘Cup of coffee?’

‘Yeah. I will.’

Deep Italian coffee, not Turkish. Its thick smell and its heaviness anchored him to the floor. Necessary stability. He hooked his nose inside the mug, inhaling. Beyond the mug’s semicircle he saw the wooden kitchen surfaces and the blues and greens of walls, cupboards, the fridge. He could be on a ship’s deck. Rachmaninov came like waves. He felt seasick, but the coffee kept it under control.

‘Any more?’

‘There is.’ Muntaha poured. ‘Are you getting better?’

‘A bit better, thank you, yes.’

He tried a smile. The sides of his mouth moved. He told himself to be on his best behaviour. He too, in his own way, had a will for all to be well.

She switched off the music.

‘I have a surprise for you, Sami.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Now you might not like it.’

His eyebrows made a half-shrug.

‘So I want you to keep cool about it, all right? If you’re not happy we can talk.’

‘All right.’ Curiosity as much as the coffee was diminishing his headache.

The capillaries in Muntaha’s face and neck flared. With both hands she reached and picked something up from the surface behind her, and clumsily raised it towards her head. A patterned cloth.

Above newly narrowed eyes, a furrow appeared on Sami’s brow.

The mainly cream cloth swirled like Rachmaninov. She unfolded it over her hair, wrapping her chiselled ears. Crossed her throat with it, and brought it up on the other side, securing it with a pin.

‘I’ve decided,’ she said, quiet and firm, ‘to wear the hijab.’

Sami’s fingers unfurled from the coffee mug. His lips were loosely parted.

‘Don’t be angry. It’s something I want to do. You’ll get used to it.’

Now what was it he had decided? Things are complex. Nothing is simple. Be calm, therefore.

Muntaha glanced at the clock. ‘You know I’ve been praying, for a while now. And I fasted last Ramadan. These are things I used to think were silly, or I didn’t pay any attention to them, but once I try them I find they help me. I mean, I really enjoy them. I even wish I’d started before and not wasted so much time because, you know, the more you pray the better you are at it, the better able you are to concentrate. The more peaceful you feel and the greater the reward.’

She regarded him coaxingly. His face twitched with internal dispute.

‘So if praying and fasting work for me, perhaps this will too. It doesn’t mean I’m becoming conservative or something. We’ve talked about it before.’

Indeed they had, on several occasions. On each, as Muntaha had warmed to the idea of covering her hair, Sami had become increasingly desperate, the ground shifting beneath his feet so that before long he wasn’t dismissing the backwardness of religion in general but actually engaging in theological dispute. On the Qur’an’s terms. Where had his earth gone? He was all at sea.

He argued that the injunction to believing women ‘not to display their charms in public beyond what may decently be apparent thereof’ could be understood in relative terms. The text was deliberately vague, to fit a variety of social situations. The principle of modesty was more important than any specific garment. He argued that ‘let them draw their head-coverings over their bosoms’ stressed the necessity of covering bosoms, not heads. That the head-covering was an accidental specificity. That it just happened that the Arab women of the Hijaz had worn head-coverings, like the men, because of the sun.

He argued all this, and she agreed with him. But it didn’t stop her wanting to wear the hijab. The more he won the argument the more he lost.

‘Just what is your issue with this?’ he wanted to know. ‘Why this hijab obsession all of a sudden?’