The Road from Damascus (24 page)

He landed, spasmodic with cold and hunger, in a deserted car park. He was experiencing blank patches again, but these were only the predictable consequence of exhaustion. Sheltered in a brick right angle, he made a spliff with jerky hands. Smoking it calmed him into a hypnagogic state in which, as he would in bleak moments, he spoke to his dead father.

‘Despite whatever you’ve done,’ he muttered, ‘I don’t hold anything against you. Despite it all. Just leave me alone, then. I’m doing this for you. Steering clear of the Muslims. No need to worry. So leave me alone.’

And here, for a while, he slept. Pleasant dreams of a rational world. Clean laboratories. Neat-shaven scientists in white coats.

Until he was rocked awake by a brown hand. A concerned, skullcapped face peering into his.

‘Brother,’ it said. ‘Brother, wake up. Do you hear me? Are you ill, brother?’

Sami wept, ‘Oh. Oh fuck.’

The old man wore a bristly white beard.

‘Never mind, brother. Get up, please. Insha’allah you’ll be very well soon.’

Sami said, ‘I’m not your fucking brother.’

He climbed the wall until he was standing. And then for all the world as if he were a pure-blooded son of the islands, upstandingly English and true, he said, ‘Piss off. Piss off you old Paki fucker.’

Leaving his spurned saviour in the background (undoubtedly in consternation, rubbing a bald patch under the skullcap), Sami loped out under the rain. Through brown brick and concrete parkland. Then high-sided, denser streets, colour bulging from video outlets and sari stores. Curry houses turning his already turned, shrivelled stomach. Hooded men and hijabbed women. Sami heading for the river. He had a half-formed urge to submerge himself, to clean himself up. Searching for an end point, or a beginning, for some kind of baptism. Perhaps he’d make for the Millwall bend, where they drag most of the bodies out, and pull himself together there.

He got as far as Tower Bridge. The tower itself drizzle-stained ochre behind him, something built of stone, modestly, in the contemporary glass and metal riverscape. The dead and regenerated docks in front. Outstretched mud expanse rushing underneath.

Suited men and women hurried stiffly past, chins to collars, grunting against the weather. At a distance, a tourist couple chirped under a red umbrella. Sami keened in turpitude, sodden, guilt-racked, filthy, his elbows on the railing, cradling his head. Nothing remained of last night’s sense of mission. Like his Big Idea deconstructed: nothing. Under the veils he’d penetrated: nothing.

What to do now? Go home and sleep, eat cornflakes, drink tea. But Muntaha would arrive from work, and then he’d have to lie, he’d have to avoid her eyes. And probably she wouldn’t have gone to work today, but somewhere else. Sami stopped the thought.

He took the last note from his wallet and tubed it into a nostril. (The male tourist quickly snapped his picture. Some authentic London colour, better than those dated punk postcards.) Sami snorted, and gave the packet to the wind. At the same moment English earth was being sprinkled on Marwan. The angels of the grave commencing their interrogation.

Sami absorbed the cocaine. It didn’t make much difference. Still nothing to do but go home. Face things.

For the last time, he bolted. And, straight away colliding at the neck with a solid object, fell. And sitting on the pavement on the props of his arms, looked up into a policeman’s face. For it was a policeman’s arm into which he had collided.

‘You appear, sir,’ said the policeman, ‘to have a fiver stuck in your nose. Now why would that be?’

Sami tried to shrug as the policeman plucked the note from his nostril.

‘There’s powder here.’ Unravelling it with distaste.

Sami would have said, ‘What of it?’ if he’d been in a speaking mood. Eighty per cent of notes in circulation in the metropolitan area bear verifiable traces of cocaine. And Sami had finished his. Thus, arrest aborted.

Alas, not so. Sami, walked off the bridge to an expectant squad car (photographed again by zoom lens and crowning the tourists’ day), was forced to remember, with his pocket contents laid out on the bonnet, that he hadn’t finished the weed. Which meant he didn’t have to face Muntaha just yet, but the inside of a cell.

He was packed into the car, a protective hand shielding his head as it went under. Then seatbelted. With official process setting in and the officers’ formal, ironic language, Sami felt his safety was taken care of. Lurching on the back seat, bubbles rising from his feet and popping at the top of his skull, he was really quite pleased about it all, about the drama, the not being in control.

At the station he gave Tom Field’s university address. Couldn’t remember his own, he said, couldn’t remember his next of kin. Muntaha was the wrong person to call after last night’s adventuring, a woman in a hijab. Who else was there? No one.

‘Take me where you must,’ he said, offering wrists for cuffing.

The policeman he’d been handed to, a bland–faced, weary slab, looked heavenward for patience but found only neon and styrofoam tiles.

‘Joker,’ said the policeman. ‘Fucking joker.’

Leaving Sami’s hands free, he pushed and pointed him down a grey corridor, around a corner.

Here they met a smell. It hit Sami like something solid. He gasped. Clutched his solar plexus. Behind bars in front of him was the source of it: a huddle of clothed flesh – a tramp, a drunk –something perhaps dangerous, or perhaps not alive. Something, in any case, which stank.

Sami’s sense of safety dissolved.

‘You’re not putting me in there with that?’

The slab smirked. ‘To be honest, sir, I can’t see much difference between him and you.’

The door opened electronically and Sami sidled in, keeping what distance he could from the stink. It was thick and heavy and full of horror. It prised open dark areas of his brain. Everything was coated in the smell, walls, bars, benches. Sami sat. He shivered. He looked at the heaving pile opposite. A coat, more cloth, and a body.

Even with nose and lips squashed together against dirty knuckles, the drunk had a semi-familiar face. It was round and red. Inflamed skin and bloated cartilage. Greyish hair curling to the shoulders.

The smell had become a taste. Sami had a mouthful. Yellow and harsh. Alcohol in it as well as stale sweat and urine.

Man at a loss.

He stopped the verse, stood up, and began to pace. Up and down, back and forth, through the medium of the smell. Dim light sheathed inside the ceiling. Up and down, back and forth, breath as shallow as he could make it. Then the drunk whimpered and growled, and Sami immediately sat back down. He tried not to breathe at all. Waited there for five minutes, ten, a quarter of an hour.

For the first time in this summer’s story, Sami had come to rest. No more rolling, snorting, seeking or rushing. No more diversionary activity. No more awareness of the pains that shot through his back and neck and constricted his head. No more of those sensations that he usually employed as a hijab to drape around things-as-they-are.

He’d stopped running. Easier just to sit, in this silence, in this stillness. He slipped behind his breath, but not into oblivion. His silence was warm, not icy. Warm with a warmth that didn’t disrupt the silence. A body temperature warmth, no more nor less. He felt he was on the verge of something. The lifting of a veil. The Greek word for it is apocalypse.

But then the drunk awoke.

‘Ah! Me nephew!’

And as quickly as he’d been recognized Sami recognized the roaring man from the strippers’ pub.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m not your nephew, though.’

‘Not me nephew?’ The accent almost Irish, but then not, so confused in the storm of urban accents that it contained features of all. ‘Well, perhaps not. Perhaps I am mistaken. But still a brother. We’re all relatives, you know. We all come from Adam.’

Sami nodded assent. The roaring man continued.

‘Have you been living clean, lad? There’s the question. Too much dirt in the world, you see. Oh dear me, yes. Too much dirt, and you know what else? Too much Satan.’

He sucked at air, made a ‘hoo hoo’ noise, wiggled his ears. With the clapping of his hands he was signalling either triumph or certain knowledge.

‘No one believes in Satan now, not till they see him. I’ve seen him. In the bottom of a glass. Reflected in a whore’s eyes. It isn’t all fun and games, you know. You’ll notice that when you see him.’

Remarkably straight-backed, he moved on to commandments.

‘Stick to one woman. Reject liquor. Live clean. Stand in the way of Satan. Also beware of false prophets. Distinguish false from true visions. Stand in Satan’s way.’

‘What are you doing here, then?’ Sami asked, not unkindly.

‘Aha!’ raising a finger and an eyebrow as if Sami had delivered the crucial point. ‘Aha now! I’ll tell you! Satan! Listening to Satan! Should have listened to the priests.’ Shaking his head and grinning as if it was, after all, fun and games. ‘But no one will listen to the priests. Not in these days. Nor should they, those fucking hypocritical bastards. Dirty bastards. Would you listen to them? A bright boy like you? Of course you wouldn’t. Dirty bastards. Dirty fucking religion, the whole thing. Oh no, no, no…’

For some moments he indulged in negation.

‘Oh no, I’d prefer Satan to that, to tell you God’s honest truth. None of that. We’d do better to start again. Time for a new religion. New everything. A new heaven and a new earth. Ha!’

And he laughed hugely.

‘Uncle,’ said Sami. ‘You need to have a shower.’

‘You’re right there,’ uncle quietly said. ‘And I’ll do it directly, just as soon as this…’ – gesturing at the walls – ‘… hospitality comes to an end.’

Sami stretched out on the bench. He looked up into grey light and the smell and uncle’s subdued whispering. He was more tired than uncomfortable. The air swam above him, and for an instant seemed to solidify. Sami heard the briefest clack of hooves. Mustafa Traifi’s face began to form.

‘Oh fuck off,’ said Sami. Mustafa disappeared.

There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t brush them away. What he did this time was face facts. Heard the echo of his own ‘fuck off’ in his ears. Words with no audience, for his father was really gone.

Really gone. He brooded on that, the injustice of it. That he too was bones and meat and vibrating pulp within a peel. That the body was coming to its end, if not tomorrow then after a finite number of tomorrows that passed faster and faster, losing illusory substance as they passed.

More than unjust. Terrifying. In any case, superstition wouldn’t help. Nothing was left of Mustafa Traifi, it was time to admit that. Time to stop behaving as if his father was still here. And time, therefore, to examine all the superstitions he’d built around his father’s ghost.

The God fiction, for instance. He’d believed as passionately as he could that it was fiction because he’d thought it was manly and worthy of his father’s pride to believe so. And what did he believe now, now that his manliness no longer seemed a tangible aim, now that his father was gone? He searched for his belief, looking mutely into his own silence, and found none. Nothing solid there. He believed nothing either way.

What if he were to believe, positively, in a God, in the unseen? To believe that death was not death but another kind of life? Would that be wrong? Would it be wrong to at least aspire to such a belief, to hope? Was hoping wrong? Faced with the injustice, the absurdity, the unthinkability, of death. For it is unthinkable, once you’ve noticed yourself living, to stop.

No, not wrong. Perhaps not right either. But not wrong.

You could even say that the weight of blindness falls on those who don’t stir to hope, so blind they are to the absurdity of death. The careless atheists, like him. The materialists who sneer at religious emotion. You could even say that it is they who are in denial.

For Sami this was a great leap, across, out, into the abyss. Towards what? Would something be there to meet him? To stop him falling through the void?

Gabor could be defined in ethnic terms as Jewish or Hungarian – Hungarian is his largest genetic portion – but he thinks of himself as Russian, like his grandfather. Why? Because he considers Russia to be furthest away. Because Russia is the most distant from his mundane environment. Because Russia is most other to himself.

Otherness. The realm of the spirit which art gestures towards.

Gabor knows the spirit from certain numinous experiences of his childhood – certain signs and visions. He knows the world, if read properly, is a canvas of signs, hinting beyond itself. He knows the world when unread and meaning only itself, the material world, is as grey and damp as the Essex village he grew up in.

His parents were that world. Therefore, he’d always liked what that world doesn’t. When he was at school he had Indian friends, because his parents didn’t want him playing with Indians. Why not? Because Indians were ‘superstitious people’. Now he goes out of his way to meet Indians, Africans, Arabs.

His parents were hygiene freaks. He suspected they worried about the Indians’ dirty brown skin, although this was never articulated. Straightforward racism would be too low class and passionate for them. But they cleaned him extra hard when he returned from school, swabbed his fingers with medical alcohol before he was allowed to eat.

His mother was anxious to scrub away the central European grime of her own name. Angyalka introduced herself as Angie until she decided it was too cockney. She was Angela after that. Gabor wondered why they’d named him as they had. Was he meant as some kind of totemic propitiation of the primitive gods? Was that the deal – if he was named for the past his parents could comfortably deny it, and get on with their present ambitions?

Angela claimed to have forgotten both Hungarian and Hungary, although she’d lived there until she was ten. Her physique let her down – she was bonier and sharper featured than her neighbours – but in dress, accent and posture she was a typically nervy Anglo nouveau riche. She suffered something like the self-hatred of the working class, except her background wasn’t proletarian. Her parents had been educated people, he a journalist, she a musician. When they fled, in 1956, after he’d unwisely authored anti-Soviet editorials, they became proletarian in the strict Marxist sense of owning nothing but their labour. Being dispossessed immigrants in London made them scum. Angela saw scum everywhere. Gabor remembers her scouring the bath and sink and kitchen floor even when they were clean.