The Road from Damascus (14 page)

‘Yes, I do have an issue,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid to admit it. I want to belong to my nation. That’s my issue. If you want to make a psychological thing of it, go ahead. I want to show myself that I’m not ashamed of who I am.’

‘What are you on about? What nation? You belong to the Arab nation. If you want me to explain it I will.’

‘Sami,’ she said, ‘I don’t need your lessons.’ And then she attacked. ‘It’s nothing to do with the Arabs. I’m British anyway. I’m a British Muslim. Please tell me what
your
issue is, that you can’t see what’s happening in front of you. Nobody talks about the Arabs any more. Don’t you realize that the Intifada you’re obsessed by is called the Aqsa Intifada? The catalyst was Sharon visiting a mosque. The Aqsa mosque, not a flag or a border.’

‘But it’s using the mosque as a flag. They mean a flag.’

‘If they mean a flag why don’t they use a flag? What mobilizes the people but Islam?’

And on it went, round and round, a spinning wheel of incomprehension. A wheel whose spokes, by centrifugal force, span out as far as childhood, as far as foreign lands. The entire spinning universe.

‘Sami, it’s a headscarf. It’s material to cover my hair. That’s all.’

‘It’s not the thing itself. It’s the principle.’

‘Exactly. All it is is principle.’

‘But what about
our
principles? What about loyalty to me? Can’t you support me? Can’t you stand by me? Can’t you back me up?’

‘Those are my words. That’s what I should say. I want you to be supportive.’

‘A bit of loyalty. That’s all I ask.’

For Sami now in the kitchen, considering the history of this marital dispute, still not speaking, watching her wrapped in the swirling cream hijab, watching her watching him, the hijab issue felt like a wheel spinning in the silence after a crash. The crash had already happened. Irreversible. To cover this silence he began to make snorts of disdain, pacing, grabbing chunks out of the suddenly thick kitchen air. He shook his head with great vigour and pushed out his chin Mussolini-style.

‘What the fuck?’ he demanded. ‘What the fuck is this?’

‘Habibi, please. I don’t have time for an argument.’

‘What the fuck? Not this. What have I married? What have I done?’

‘I don’t know what the problem is. Why should you be upset if I want to feel and look more like a Muslim woman?’

‘Why should I be upset? Because you look like your stepmother. You look like Aunt Hasna.’

Muntaha managed to smile. ‘No I don’t look like Hasna. I look like me.’

‘You look like my mother, for God’s sake.’

Muntaha breathed. ‘That’s a weird thing to say, Sami. And I don’t look like Nur. As if you know what she looks like these days. Go and talk to her if you want to know what your mother looks like. But I don’t look anything like her, and that’s a silly idea. I’ve told you already. I just want to look and feel more like a Muslim woman.’

Sami stopped pacing, as if he’d found what he’d been looking for. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is shit.’

‘What’s shit?’ She stopped herself. The Prophet said if you’re angry you should sit down. If you’re still angry you should lie down. The Prophet said in the case of anger you should wash your face. Muntaha looked at the clock. Then she tried again, in a concessionary, almost conspiratorial tone. ‘I’m not completely convinced of it either. Not one hundred per cent. Just let me try. We’ll talk about it this evening.’

‘Women shouldn’t have their dress code dictated to them.’

‘Well, exactly, habibi. Please listen to yourself.’

‘What will people think of me? They’ll think I make you wear it.’

‘What do I care about people?’

They confronted each other from opposite ends of the kitchen. Muntaha heated, Sami icy. Light spilled orange and yellow from the window to her hijab, illuminating blues and greens on its passage. Too much light in there for Sami’s taste. Their breath came in bursts. Sea blusters.

He said, ‘I didn’t think you were actually going to.’

‘Well, I am.’

‘All I’m saying,’ he said, at lower volume, ‘is that this is a step backwards. You don’t need to look like a Muslim woman. You don’t need any symbol like that. We’ve progressed beyond the hijab. Women should wear what they like.’

‘I’d like to wear the hijab.’

‘No. I mean, you shouldn’t feel you have to.’

‘I don’t feel I have to. I want to.’

‘But.’ And Sami felt great weariness, like a mariner fighting a week-long storm, and then a brisk overwash of indifference concerning the hijab, this symbol the Muslims and the anti-Muslims use to whip each other with. Nevertheless, he had a position to hold, a reputation, loyalty to a certain image. Otherwise, what did he have? ‘But,’ he said, ‘it’s shit. It’s just backward, and shit.’

‘So you want me to take it off?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

‘Sami Traifi,’ she said, ‘you aren’t a man. You’re a contradiction.’

And she turned on her heel, slipped on her shoes, and left the house before he thought of a response. He watched the closed front door. Then he returned to bed.

After lunching on breakfast cereal, Pot Noodle and spliff, Sami set out across the city.

It was a tough, harsh day, full of shards of light and broken noise, the air soupish and sweat-inducing. Sami noticed sweat wherever he looked, and he looked mostly at uncovered women. At the bulge of their breasts, the tracework of their nipples, at stubbly or willow-haired armpits, at moist midriffs. Glistening skin. Clean lines of sweat patterning it like wind-driven rain across a dusty windscreen. At clothes stuck puckered to backs and bellies, and caught in crevices. He nodded in approval.

But scattered in among these women, like shadows across the sun, were dark, occult, hidden females. From the top deck of the bus he saw Saudi wives and daughters rushing from taxis to continue their summers of shoplifting. Draped and masked like demons. Like antimatter. There were also women springing athletically along the pavement in sock-shaped hijabs which pulled their hair up and around into the form of a question mark, leaving the neck visible. Actually quite fashionable. Actually alluding to Rasta bonnets or hip hop bandanas. Then where Sami changed buses there were gum-chewing British Bengali girls in heavy brown or green jilbabs, projecting defiance and bursts of cockney. He noticed too earnest Levantine housewives or office workers, family women and providers, in neat pastel or flowery hijabs, and raincoats or business suits. Pallid white from fear of the sun, they flitted seriously about their affairs.

What were they symbols of? What did it all mean? Where would he fit Muntaha into this? And what did it mean for him, being the husband of such a sign? What was he now? What was he a symbol of?

These were the questions he took to Tom Field. Sami in search of wisdom.

Tom Field: an academic of a different stripe. A success, for a start. Several books published, one of which – on the militia movement – has popular appeal. You can find it in bookshops, this attempt to rescue the militias from their fanatic reputation. For not all, Tom argues, are right-wing lunatics, racists, religious nuts. Some are brother-loving associations of free men and women bright enough to sniff the inevitable on its way. They organize in logical response to the gargantuan organizations ranged against them. And beyond these, but tarred with the same brush, are unpinned-down individuals, self-defined and invisible, those who have had themselves wiped from the official records, freed of contracts, who have withdrawn within, into secret circles, away from the empire.

Tom sympathizes. No disjunction for him between real life and his research. This is why he has turned down TV appearances. He understands the usefulness of an unrecognizable face. Not only face. His name sounds suspiciously like a pseudonym. Ask him for an address or a driving licence and you’re liable to be disappointed: he’s not one to be plotted on charts or filed in databases. His ideal is anonymity. For Sami, who would love more than anything to be recognized, this is admirable, infatuatingly so.

Tom Field is a man of movement, evoking a density not seen since the early moments of the universe, energy bound in, straitened and tied down, but heavy with explosive potential. A furiously labouring physique of vigorous lines, tight, sparse, taut, with a dent graven deep in his small chin. Pulsing eyebrows, raggish hair which is purely functional, peppery beard sheathing wind-raw skin and erupting jowls, and grinding stubs of teeth, a muscular tongue.

In his book bunker, sipping at something free of genetic modification, far more natural than supermarket organic, perhaps cultivated by his own hand in a guarded pocket of air, in the last clean soil, he addresses Sami’s problem as a grandmaster addresses his board. With intensity. With yogic focus.

‘Let’s look at it two ways,’ he says, and as he speaks his Adam’s apple jumps and falls like Newton’s apple hitting a trampoline. ‘Way one: She wears this hijab. She changes her appearance. She confuses those who saw her before. She becomes representative of something else, something new for her but well established in the crowd outside. She buys into a new group. The Islamic group. She deepens her ties of belonging to it. She identifies with it. It defines her. So, in a definite way, she becomes more than herself. We are all more than ourselves, but few of us consciously so. And what does she achieve by this? She blends in. And this is a wise move. The blended individual ceases to be a definite target. There is spiritual continuity, and thus an increased chance of survival, in a group. And there is also the firm root of belief. Of religious belief, in the meaning-giving sense. This is of benefit too.

‘Think of this. In a hundred years’ time the population is going to be significantly less than it is now. Dramatically less. We could say decimated. Decimated may be an understatement. There’s going to be a cull, most likely the most thorough cull the human race has ever experienced. Big like the comet and the dinosaurs. Like the mass extinction at the close of the Permian period. Almost that big. For us at least, for what we consider the higher life forms – probably not for the cockroaches and the rats – but for us, we’re reaching the end. Now the question is’ – Tom stands up to jab a clawed hand at his little window, the only porthole in his Noah’s ark – ‘the question is, who’s going to still be here? Who, if any of us, is going to survive?’

Sami looks out and frowns obediently. Sees figures moving darkly on the concrete garden. Under the glassiness or haze of his recurrent headache, or of the hot and bothered ageing afternoon, students are clustering and separating like bacteria busy under a microscope, like particles in Brownian motion. Each one calibrated for just the right concentration of oxygen in the air, for a particular gravitational force, a narrow temperature range, each sixty-five percent water and evaporating steadily. Invisible steam rising above synapse-crammed heads. White shells colonized by flesh. Palpitating organs. Heart and brain. All fragile. In the main, oblivious. Each with a fixed number of years programmed on its body clock, which could nevertheless be interrupted – and at any moment – by superior technology or other blind intervention of the environment.

Tom is fanning his fingers back and forth as if inviting the bodies in from outside, offering them a place in the ark but knowing all the while, sadly, knowing human nature, that his invitation will go unheeded. His expression of inevitability shows this, the stoic pursing of the lips.

‘Not many of these will survive. The bright young things. The stagy revolutionaries. The followers of fashion. The ideology tourists. The postmodernists. The mass culturalists. It’s goodbye to all of them. They’re going down with the sinking ship. But, on the other hand, people with firm belief, with independent – or group-dependent – insight, with the ability to retreat: such people may have a chance.’

Sami, breathing through his mouth, nods. He follows ponderously. Muntaha’s hijab will save her from the apocalypse. He tries the thought out. But Tom has wound up again and started off.

‘That’s one perspective,’ he says, thyroid cartilage still bobbing in unrestrained rebellion. ‘But the other way of looking at it is this: your wife won’t blend in, not into the dominant strain, and so she won’t survive. The social body will reject her. The culture will spit her out. This multicultural culture, let me tell you, is apt to eat itself when the crisis grows. And it is growing. The signs are all around us. The return to religion, your wife’s issue, is itself a sign. And the new forms of religion, the fundamentalisms, the blood and soil movements, the BNP, Le Front National, the megachurches, Louis Farrakhan’s people. What else? The drugs culture. The subcultures. People feel it, even if they don’t understand what they feel. They’re looking for ways to keep themselves safe. You know, the hip hop people stick with hip hop people. The grunge people, the crusties, they stick with their own kind, their own values. Society is splitting up into sects, into fraternities, usually mutually hostile. So who trusts his own judgment now? All we can do, most of us, most of them, is choose which set of experts to submit to. And where is real power? I ask you that. It’s invisible for the most part, guarding itself. Transnational, above and behind the theatre of governments, living in gated communities, well tooled up. Preparing itself.’

Sami, at the foot of his shaikh, has crouched on the dead wood floor. He listens. The torrent moves through him.

‘All this is happening while things are still easy, here at least, though not so easy in other parts. In your lands, Sami, in the Middle East. In Africa. South America. But the trouble will reach us soon. You can take my word for it. You can mark my words.

‘Think about it. Logically. Economics. Capitalism has to grow, it can’t stop. Standing still is for it a disaster. It has to use more, manufacture more, sell more. And what happens then? Reality will set a limit. Resources are finite. The oil, my friend, think of the oil. You’ve heard that one day it’ll start to run out, one day, in the unthinkable future?’

Lightning flashes from his brow. His eyes are cups of blood.