The Road from Damascus (25 page)

His father was calmer and less ambitious. Richard was just scared of difference. Not of being different, because somehow he never was, despite growing up in a different home. He had not a word of Russian, not a smidgeon of Yiddish. Being the son of a Jewish mother makes him technically Jewish. You’d never guess. He looks English. Acts English. Has the stereotypical prejudices and ignorances of a sheltered Englishman. Put him in a bus with people of foreign origin and he flinches. Ask him his history and he screws up his pale cheeks in bewilderment. Jews? Russian exiles? Do such things exist?

As resistance, Gabor loved the strange and exotic. In the village there was a fourteenth-century church, with an eighteenth-century tower attached. It didn’t quite do it for him, too close to home and to their foam-haired old lady neighbours. But out of the village, on a flat plain of tall white oxeye daisies and purple common mallow, was the seventh-century chapel of St Peter’s-on-the-Wall. In the shape of a normal house, but taller. Built by Saxons, by an extinct people. Gothic mists and salty North Sea gales outside. Inside, bare stone, bare benches. As minimalist as a desert mosque. There were inlets of light too high to see out of The outside sees in. Light sees in.

A monk named Cedd, called from Lindisfarne by King Sigbert, prayed, fasted and blessed the land before he built on it. The chapel was constructed from the ruins of a Roman fort, in the style of Syrian churches. Cedd died in Yorkshire of plague, a disease from the east.

Gabor squeezed his eyes half shut, imagined Cedd and the East Saxons through his lashes. Ghosts bubbling past him. Then one afternoon in his early teens, shortly after his grandfather’s death, he dreamt of Vronsky while asleep on the church floor. Vronsky handing him the powers of art and lust. The vision lasted for half a minute after he awoke and rubbed his brow. Vronsky handing him light.

Beyond the chapel was the power station where Richard and Angela worked. A brutal rectangle against the green sky. A fact. A denial of transcendence. Their world.

When his parents knew he’d been at the chapel they sniggered and smirked. ‘Been talking to God again have we?’ They nudged each other and rolled their eyes. It was a moment of closeness for them, until Angela thought of the Saxon dust on the chapel flagstones and snapped Gabor towards the bath.

Everything about them was hyper-logical and counter-intuitive. Post-enlightenment people, they refused to believe in the soul because they couldn’t see or measure it. Their hearts were neither seats of passion nor mirrors of divinity, but mere complex muscles pumping blood. They represented science in opposition to Vronsky’s art, stability in place of his migration, surface instead of depth. Of course, it was inevitable that they would be like that. Human beings must rebel against their parents. It’s a mechanism that moves the world on. Gabor too rebelled.

Despite himself, he was a gifted science student. The shame of it dissipated once he was able to dissociate the subject from his father and mother. Anyway, it was no longer their subject. In the brief space of a generation a sense of wonder had returned to science. The rigid boundaries between it and art had begun to dissolve. Science could be experienced as mystery. Outside school he read quantum physics, which was like reading Sufism. Appearances are illusions. Is the photon a wave or a particle? Our traditional categories break down when you look closely.

Reading science, and being an adolescent, taught Gabor that his parents’ professions were evil. He leafleted the bemused villagers with anti-nuclear propaganda, and confronted his father.

‘That power station should be closed down. How can you work there? You’re poisoning your descendants.’

Richard said, ‘Nuclear power’s a lot cleaner than fossil fuels.’

‘You don’t care, do you? Your grandchildren will be mutants and you don’t have the heart to care.’

Perhaps it was an urge to rub his father’s nose in difference which made Gabor leap to this image. Mutants would be good. Dirty mutants best of all.

‘Nonsense.’ Richard chuckling complacently.

‘I reject this. I reject your crimes, both of you. You two and British Nuclear Fuels. At Sellafield the child cancer rate is way up. It’s probably happening here as well. You’re probably helping them to cover up the evidence. You’re monsters, both of you. No emotions. I don’t have anything to do with you. You’re not my kind of people.’

‘We’re your parents. You can’t escape your past, any more than a fossil can crawl out of its rock.’

But fossils can be dug up and burnt. They can be liberated in the form of carbon dioxide. From rock to air, to the sky.

‘My ancestor is my grandfather. Why couldn’t you have been like him? He was a humanist and a spiritual man. He wouldn’t have poisoned the earth.’

‘You’re very romantic about your grandfather. You forget I knew him better than you. He wasn’t as you think. Not nearly so exciting. You’ve made up a fiction. You’re not looking at the real thing.’

What did they know of reality? They saw only the absence of Vronsky’s body, while Gabor saw the man’s spirit. Felt it in the breeze, in the borderless sky. The sky transcending and ignoring facts. If it notices facts, it mocks their pretension.

Gabor’s father said he wouldn’t escape his past. He had escaped, though. He had nothing to do with them now. Not with inflexible facts, and not with his parents. On one occasion they’d come down to sneer at his studio, at the ethnic mess of the streets outside. Only once.

Gabor taught physics and art to Bengali children. He ate in restaurants his mother would consider dirty. He walked the streets Vronsky had walked. He prayed for light before he created pictures.

And now, like Cedd the builder, he’d contracted a disease from the east. A disease called Muntaha. Swerve-bodied Muntaha, her nose broad at the bridge, eyes as tall as they were wide. Gabor returned tense from Marwan’s ta’ziya and went straight to his painting.

A large canvas was already strapped up to his workboard. In its centre he marked out an empty square with a ruler. This represented the empty cube of the Ka’aba in Mecca.

Then he took off his shoes and placed them neatly behind the door, as the Muslims do. He’d have a shoe rack put there, to remind him. He removed shirt and trousers, folded them slowly, carried them like an offering on flat arms towards the cupboard that was his bedroom. The room he was painting in was a long bare-walled rectangle that had first been built, in the days of the city’s tangible wares, to store textiles. Cotton brought from India and Egypt, milled in the north, exported back to the colonies. Now it was stacked with wooden boxes and computer monitors. Canvases completed or in progress. Potted plants on rough shelves. Jars and tubes of paint.

There was a rack of books near the entrance to the bedroom: Kandinsky’s
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
, Paul Klee’s journals, novels by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, stories by Gogol and Chekhov, the scientific and philosophical studies of Einstein and Max Planck. Also the heavy dark Qur’an Muntaha had given him, and a collection of ahadeeth, the traditions of the Prophet, which he’d bought in a Finsbury Park bookshop. Between the books and his canvases there was a salvaged coarse–grain desk, and on it the framed black and white photograph of his grandfather.

Gabor pulled the four low windows open to their fullest extent, to ventilate the paint fumes, perhaps for a breeze. The night, to his ears, was silent.

He surrounded his ka’aba with a swirl of pilgrims moving anticlockwise, like all the orbits in nature. He felt this was significant –one of the correspondences or artful patterns to be found at all levels – electrons around a nucleus, planets around suns, galaxies on their axes, all anticlockwise, like Muslims circumambulating the empty House. On holiday in Istanbul he’d seen the Mevlevi dervishes doing it in their sema, spinning, arms outstretched, one palm facing the heavens and another to the earth.

Gabor had faith in his art, real holy faith. For him, art was something primeval, something shamanic. He was engaged in the same sacralization of matter that had made men decorate cave walls, mummify corpses, fashion icons, and replenish the land’s significance with earthworks.

He used thick strokes, and then a knife to highlight the colours with borders. Greens, reds and blues. He was trying for a rainbow effect, but a splintered rainbow, with leakages and leaps to defy tonal classification – a London residential mishmash instead of New York ghettoes. The viewer could read that in if they wished – racial mixing, miscegenation.

With a thin hard brush he stubbed dots of darkness, for heads or souls, on to the swirl. He wiped his fingers on his underwear. Next, he superimposed Bohr’s famous atom symbol on to the pilgrims, brushing three broad oval orbits around the ka’aba nucleus. As he worked he repeated the first four ayat of the Qur’anic Surat al-Fajr, which he was learning for Muntaha.

The ‘ten nights’ referring to the final third of Ramadan, the month in which the Prophet, before he became a prophet, withdrew to caves in the Meccan mountains for fasting, meditation and prayer, the time when he first met the angel, when the revelation descended. He recited in Arabic, again and again, with rhythm and rhyme.

She would be impressed. He’d recite it to her when he showed her this painting.

He put down the brush. What now? He thought of Mr al-Haj in the grave. He thought of Mr al-Haj’s daughter. He named the picture ‘For Muntaha’, and as he did so he felt a pat on his shoulder, and also a stirring in his groin. Grandfather Vronsky exhaled lustily behind his back. Light shone briefly on to the white centre of his painted ka’aba.

Is something going to happen here? Gabor wondered. I mean, where was her husband today? Why the embarrassment when I asked for him?

He ate a slobber of pickled fish from the fridge, brushed his teeth, and slept a deep, unbroken sleep.

Sami blinked at the ghost of himself until he could name his surroundings. Then he solidified fast: a hungry, numbed and dirty organism, bruised where his ribs had pressed the bench. He sat up and found he was alone in the cell. Knowledge leaked slowly from body into mind. For instance, he’d been asleep a long time. He’d been taking drugs, which were now flushed on to his surface. He needed to wash before he did anything else.

He was in the same neon eternity of trapped air he’d fallen asleep in, but the smell of the man he’d called uncle had almost completely dispersed. Whether it was night or day he didn’t know.

He made a mental gesture of searching for his jacket, but before his arm or eyes moved he remembered its loss in the party house. Then he remembered other losses too, like the academic life, abandoned after his meeting with Dr Schimmer, and the marital moral high ground, which he may on previous occasions have occupied rhetorically, irretrievably tangled up back there in Bikini Girl’s knickers and teeth. He’d lost too his childish ability to speak to his dead father, this most intimate of his comforts. His innocence was gone. The angry fidgeting state he’d been in up to then seemed to him like innocence.

Surprisingly, after all that loss, he felt bright and free. He’d have liked to sit a while and enjoy the sensation, but his body had its own priority. His bladder was excruciatingly swollen. As soon as he noticed it he began to sweat.

He called through the bars, embarrassed by his voice.

‘Erm, officer, excuse me, I need…’

When he heard steps approach he wondered how to apologize. Wondered at last how much trouble he was in. At the same time he clenched his buttocks and counted to the time he’d be pissing. One to seven and back down to one.

As four reached three a policeman beeped his bars open. A new policeman, short and square.

‘Had a good sleep, then? Your friend’s here for you.’

‘Yes, I need, officer, to go to the toilet.’

Which friend? So he could leave?

Dribbles of light reached through an airvent in the toilet. Daytime, then. He must have slept all night and half of the day before. He pissed a river, and then, slack-bladdered, set about washing head, face, neck and arms in the miniature sink, until the policeman struck the door with worried urgency.

‘Out now, or I take you out.’

He emerged shrugging and apologizing. The policeman walked him through to the front office, which in the cold illumination of sobriety was drab and angular. It smelled of chipboard, paint and boredom. Sami saw his friend. Tom Field, professor of survivalism, Sami’s source of wisdom, the man who’d nearly reconciled him to Muntaha’s hijab. Looking very natural in contrast to his background, wearing organic fibres and exuding human passions, Tom stood among the seats of the waiting area. His face was leathery, burnt in the sun, and expressionless save his eyes, which glared at Sami. Pseudonymous, anonymous Tom: the last person he should have brought to a police station.

There was some bureaucracy to get through, and a tired warning not to do it again. Then a statement of the obvious to accompany a nod towards Tom: ‘Here’s your mate come to take you home.’

Tom hadn’t spoken yet. He pointed to the front entrance. Sami thanked the police for their trouble in the same way he’d once thanked a teacher for slapping him, and followed the survivalist. He’d put himself in the role of naughty child. Well then, bear it. Take the admonishment.

Tom led the way to an anonymous car and let himself in the passenger side. A woman sat in the driving seat. Sami got into the back, behind Tom. The woman twisted to grin at Sami.

‘I’m GR,’ she said.

‘Sami,’ said Sami, then turned to his mentor. ‘Tom, I’m sorry to get you down here. They wanted someone’s name.’