The Road from Damascus (15 page)

‘Think again. We’ve already reached that point. Demand is outstripping supply. Wells run dry. So you’ll have to contemplate the coming world without oil. Meaning a world without cars or planes, without plastic. Think what is made of or wrapped in plastic. Think! Think of no electricity. Think what one night without electricity would be in this city. Consider the murders, the raping, the terror.’

Needle points of sweat have appeared amid his stubble, on his trained arms. The day is hot, and it is a delicate task in the most temperate times to keep a body’s temperature stable. To still his heart’s drumming Tom meditates upon his sandalled feet. He breathes slowly, audibly, a sweet warm stream. When he speaks next he is collected, his words weighted. He won’t look at Sami, who looks, awestruck, at him.

‘Which element of the oil collapse will hit us first? The shortage, or the global warming? I would say both at once, striking from either side. Lights dimming and nations submerged. And don’t imagine that our hidden rulers are waiting passively for the hour to come. That’s not how they work. Something is planned. Something decisive. That oil war in ’91, that was just the beginning. So when the next stage starts, when the pieces fall into place, there’ll be no quarter for misfits, no quarter at all. This is my warning, Sami. This is what I can say.’

And there wasn’t much that Sami could say in reply. The hijab would be Muntaha’s salvation or her undoing. One of the two. He thanked Tom for this paradox and took his leave, the guide watching after him as he went, his hunched posture and uneasy gait. When he left the building Tom saw him below through his porthole, a body among bodies.

Sami walked towards the SOAS building, swinging his arms monkeywise to loosen the spasm in his shoulders, knots there like rocks, like gnarled roots. He was headed for his supervisor’s office, thinking what he would tell him about Syria and wondering how convincing it would sound. He remembered the sound of the previous night’s excuses to Muntaha. How his hand luggage had looked like hand luggage. Then he thought better of the meeting, and turned for home.

There was time for a spliff before Muntaha returned. Musing on the two distinct bands of coiled smoke – a thin blue and a more substantial grey (one was transformed tobacco and the other the weed; he’d never been able to ascertain which was which) – he saw them as the human beings and the earth incinerated together in the pyre of Armageddon. The elect – but he wasn’t sure how this worked out, how much his imaginings owed to Islam or Christianity, or to popular culture – the elect would be hovering cool and unruffled somewhere in this scene, above the flames or within them, incombustible. And would the elect be bearded, or wearing hijabs as fire screens? Or not? Would the beards be the first material to ignite, crackling like the seed and stick of his spliff? In any case, he felt more relaxed about the hijab now he understood it as a response to contemporary events. Perhaps he’d been wrong in the morning. He
knew
, in fact, that he’d been wrong. Perhaps it was him who lagged behind the times, lagged behind Muntaha, who he saw since his visit to Tom as a creature of struggle and identity, making a choice at least.

This was what he tried to express to her half an hour later over chilled orange juice (she’d come from the tube via Freezerland: fish fingers, bagged peas, frosted broccoli stalks spilled over the kitchen table towards him, and also, he noted, mince from the halal butcher). The citrus freshening him up, he felt not dazed but enlightened by his smoke. He bubbled with affection. He found himself capable, even, of an apology, which she received with grace.

‘I knew it would be a shock for you,’ she said, ‘but you’ll get used to it. And you’re not the only one. It feels strange to me too, I don’t recognize myself in mirrors, I almost forget to put it on before I go out. But I’m happy with it. I’m happy with myself in it.’

‘Well, good. That’s the main thing.’

‘Thank you, Sami. Thank you, habibi.’

She skipped around the table to bestow a string of kisses. He inclined to her neck and nuzzled there in the slender softness, as slender and as soft as a decade previously. Her sigh, her trembling, permitted him, so he directed her to the stairs, helping her with a hand between her legs, pushing her up.

Afterwards she showered while he lay, dead to thought, on the bed. She came back dripping reflected light, towelled herself unselfconsciously before him. She revolved as she worked, turning from the orange window through degrees of her own shade. Turning on the axis of her mystery. Sami, wordless, closed his eyes. When he looked again she beamed at him, her glowing planet of a face ringed in the sea-blue garment she had pulled over her head. He grinned without mirth.

‘You’re not going out like that.’

‘No.’

She faced into shadow to start her prayer. Standing with head bowed, eclipsed, hands crossed over hidden breasts, silent, still, intense. Sami could hear a car stereo, waves of traffic, birdsong. The innocence of the world. She leaned forward, fingers he imagined webbed on her knees, raised herself erect again so far her back arched inward, and sank slowly to the floor, prostrated.

Mental activity crept back like a sullen rat. What he would tell his supervisor would be the failure of the city to end superstition, the failure of modernity. He remembered how many more Damascene women wore hijabs than on his last visit, the gathered brown pollution cloud over the city, the rattling plane as it attained height, the closeness of the entubed air. And here, how carbon in the atmosphere made dusky London softer. It was jungle music out in the street, children fighting in a muddy garden. A ball banged off brick. Signs on the tube walls. He wondered where his tube pass was.

Muntaha stood, pulled off her prayer cloak, naked, everything springing into place.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘It’s the Asr prayer. Just in time.’

He couldn’t prevent himself. ‘Is all this necessary?’

She wore her tolerant expression. He saw her ribs move as she sighed.

‘Not strictly, no. What’s necessary is modesty. Everything in its time and place, including the body. I know the arguments.’ She sat on her side of the bed, putting on underwear. ‘The Qur’anic ambiguity. That the Arabs always covered their heads but the women before Islam kept their breasts uncovered. I know the best veil is in the eyes of men. I know what Fatema Mernissi says.’

‘Qabbani says…’

‘I know what Qabbani says too. But the hijab is what Muslim women wear. And I want to wear it as well. It’s as simple as that.’

At risk of losing his composure, Sami restrained his voice.

‘I thought, Moony, I thought that we stood for something else.’

She said, ‘We don’t stand for anything, Sami. Don’t be silly.’

Rebuked, quietened, Sami sat beside her on the train. This the first journey he’d made with Muntaha and the hijab. He supposed she must look prim in it, prudent and stern with the motherly calm she’d assumed since he’d voiced, once again, his agitation. He shouldn’t have done that, not before a journey on the tube, not before a public showing.

There were four viewers to see them in the carriage. Firstly an old Jew in toned-down Polish clothing, black hat and coat but no ringlets, no fur, reading the
Jewish Chronicle.
A well-established – if still religious – suburban sort of Jew. Next a long, thinly featured black woman, with fingernails occupied in wave-frizzed hair, also at home, also at ease. And then a fatigued pair of suited natives shooting out unembarrassed glances, mumbling to each other news of the fat, round world, him and Muntaha now part of it. Sami supposed they must look like a proper Muslim couple, what with the hijab, Muslims out on dark business, their trauma children and a string of austere relatives left behind in an unfurnished overcrowded room. Four or five children already, that’s what it probably looked like. These two Muslims at large.

Sami was thirty-one years old. He reflected on this. In his mind’s eager eye he looked twenty, at a stretch twenty-two. Twenty-two next to Muntaha – Muntaha aged, in reality, twenty-eight, and in a hijab. Did he look younger than her, then? Unlikely. Her skin was unravaged, her eyes fresh, while his bore the marks of nicotine, alcohol, insomnia, oversleep. Un-Islamic capillary damage. He hoped that was apparent, the un-Islamic part.

It was less difficult in the street, because darkness hid them. They avoided conversation; this, her carefulness, a reminder of his instability, his unsuitability. A fragile fellow, Sami, swiftly provoked, a little unhinged.

There was more rebuke waiting. Aunt Hasna, Muntaha’s stepmother, stoutly imposing as she opened the door, uttered the correct welcome for a returning itinerant: ‘Thank God for your safety.’ She stood aside for Muntaha to slip into the corridor, but blocked the way for Sami, glaring at his boots until, cold-faced, he removed them. Muntaha looked back to observe: Hasna in charge of her house, like a real Arab woman. Unsmiling beneath a spreading nose Hasna made a quick nod, to register victory, and allowed him to pass.

For all its lamp-lit islands the al-Haj sitting room remained sombre. A bulky flatscreen TV glowing in one corner. There in front of it, reduced into an armchair, teary and dribbled-mouthed, was Marwan. His wasted limbs sticking out of him like drought-struck branches. Cropped grey hair like the doomed stubble of last winter’s sparse rains waiting to be uprooted by the wind. Lips and skin the same colour. His body packed, inexpertly, into grey gellabiya and dressing gown, the shape filled by his chest seeming disproportionately large. Sami, in a rush of dizziness, was reminded of a hotter, dryer, but equally gloomy room, in Damascus.

Taking the air in sips as if it were unpleasant medicine, Marwan wheezed in Sami’s direction, ‘Welcome, welcome,’ and frowned at the effort this cost him.

‘How are you, uncle?’ Sami advanced to lift and squeeze a brittle hand. ‘Well, insha’allah?’

Marwan made a sluggish blink, cast brief warmth on his daughter, and settled back to the TV. It looked like the news. Sami released his hand.

Muntaha removed the hijab and shook out her hair. Aunt Hasna kept her hijab on, for she wasn’t Muntaha’s mother and so theoretically, very theoretically, Sami could marry her. She could be halal for him, according to sharia, and so he was haram for her. Strands of dyed hair escaped at her sturdy neck.

‘Your father’s no better,’ she said. ‘His strength isn’t returning yet.’

The room smelled like burst tomatoes and simmered minced meat. Hasna sat on stocky, boneless ankles and spooned the food into her husband. She’d grown in these last years with the padding and thickening of extended domesticity.

She had grown in power too. Her importance had ballooned with the size of the exile community. No shame now in a London life: all the best people were here. (‘Hasna, it’s unlivable at home,’ her ladies told her. ‘The situation, it can’t be expressed.’) In addition, she’d had immediate cause for pride when her doctor son, her youngest, arrived from Iraq. A practical help, her bright son Salim, coming to check on Marwan every other day. Speaking with real Iraqi courtesy and a real Iraqi accent. Not like these British children. Doctor Salim. She’d be able to marry him to the finest class, to some ‘daughter of a family’ as they said at home. Several of her old acquaintance – well-bred Baghdadi ladies – had recently made the migration, and several had daughters or nieces of the highest quality.

These ladies bore witness to the old days, the old glitzy social life. Hasna took the wives of generals, professors, surgeons to Bayswater restaurants, and as an act of charity she always paid. This is how she profited from sanctions.

She’d entrenched herself in the al-Haj home, her family photos mounted on the walls. As the space became hers, as the bus ride to her old flat became tiresome, her Iraqi memorabilia had moved in too. Karbala tiles propped against window sills. In the hallway, a wooden chest inlaid with mirrors, bearing a Kirkuk ceramic urn. A copper brazier on a copper table at the bottom of the stairs.

Down these stairs and into the sitting room sloped Ammar. As he entered, Hasna left, carrying spoon and bowl. Ammar skinny, vulpine or weaselish according to the light, shaven-headed in a skullcap, with drooping, wispy beard and a hard-set expression. Obedient to one interpretation of the Prophet’s sunnah, his upper lip was plucked bare. He wore a baggy, long-sleeved shirt. Printed in green letters on black background:
Islam: The Only True Religion.
He surveyed the room darkly.

‘As-salaamu alaikum,’ he intoned.

‘Wa-alaikum as-salaam,’ his sister responded, with raised eyebrows and smiling eyes.

‘Yeah, cheers,’ said Sami. ‘How are you doing, Ammar?’

‘How was the homeland?’ asked Ammar, with only a touch of irony.

‘The homeland?’ Sami in satirical mood. ‘The homeland? I wasn’t visiting a bantustan.’

‘Whatever, brother. We’ll talk later.’ They embraced, then Ammar arranged himself cross-legged, straight-backed, in the line of the television. An Intifada documentary. Muntaha spoke softly to her father from a stool at his side. Sami lounged on the sofa. Ammar increased the volume.

The documentary focused on the bombing of the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv at the start of the previous month. Twenty-one Israelis killed. Tony Blair expressed personal sorrow at the deaths of people who looked and behaved like his own sons. Not so much sorrow over more numerous Palestinian deaths. Palestinians were people who didn’t go to nightclubs. People who threw stones at jeeps in the open spaces of their refugee camps. People who didn’t look like little Blairs.

Sami couldn’t feel very sorry about the Israelis, but he wondered about the bombers.

‘How can they do it?’ he said. ‘How can they go like that to their deaths?’

Ammar’s head swivelled around.

‘You’re thinking like an Englishman. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. These brothers will be granted jannah. They’re the most honoured of our community.’

Muntaha frowned at the screen. She asked it, ‘How would you react if your country was stolen?’