The Road from Damascus (31 page)

When she prays, she looks at the prayer mat and what is implied in it like ripples reaching its surface: first the wooden floor, then brick and plaster, and the local history of the room below (Sami’s), and pipes and sewers at ground level, next ratlands, archaeologists’ London, and soil and rock, and then through layers to the inner earth, the molten core. She looks at the physical world and considers how it balances on a needle of time. How it is swallowed and folded into packets of nothing, zapped, as soon as God closes His eye. It is real but unreal in the face of God. It emanates from God but God is beyond it. She says ‘allahu akbar’ as she bends, kneels, and prostrates. Allahu akbar. God is greater.

Each moment God creates anew. The Sufi Suhrawardi called God ‘the Maker Who transfers existences from non-existence to existence’. Muntaha notices existence forming every time she puts her foot forward. This is why she is soft-footed and open-mouthed. She feels the sacred. Her actions, therefore, aren’t only her own.

In the days following Sami’s departure she performed the tasks that presented themselves. She met a solicitor to execute her father’s will: a straightforward business. Marwan had arranged everything according to the letter of Sunni inheritance law. That is, Hasna took an eighth of his wealth, and the rest was split two to one between Ammar and Muntaha. In the event of Muntaha divorcing, Ammar would become financially responsible for her. Sons inherit twice the share of daughters because sons must provide for their families, while a woman’s money remains her own. Islam works when men are noble. In other cases, however, the regulations seem questionable. Once he’d finished his dead father’s money, Sami lived off his wife. And off the state.

Marwan’s wealth was the house where Hasna and Ammar continued to live, its future undecided. There was also a modest sum of money deposited in an Islamic bank, and a box of gold which Marwan, with his Arab mistrust of institutions and paper money, had kept locked in a bedroom cupboard. Muntaha’s share came to a few thousand, enough to buy a small car if she’d wanted such a thing, or to go on a couple of exotic holidays.

She disposed of Marwan’s stuff in one busy afternoon. She brought one suit jacket to live in her wardrobe along with her dresses and Sami’s unclaimed garments. The jacket smelled deeply of her father, though less so every day. His clothes didn’t fit anybody they knew, so the other things, trousers, shirts and vests, she packaged in black bin liners and delivered via Ammar’s taxi cab to the same charity shops in Kilburn they’d originally come from.

There were also, dusty on a shelf behind Hasna’s Iraqi memorabilia, photographs of life in Baghdad, including portraits of Marwan when he used to smile and stand straight; of Muntaha’s beautiful mother; Ammar as black and white child from a foreign land, Sunday supplement-type studies of him amid palm trees or against flat scrub backdrops; and uncles and aunts whose faces Muntaha had forgotten, who stirred emotions she couldn’t properly recognize.

There was an album of drawings done by her and Ammar before they could write, happy dinosaurs and multicoloured goats depicted with the expressive primitivism of the very young. She took the photographs and the drawings and stashed them in the heart zone of her bedroom. Her own private bedroom now. She considered Ammar too clumsy to care for them. He’d already taken the Islamic pamphlets, and Marwan’s prayer rug.

She took a few pieces of cutlery that gleamed something of the past, and one or two plates and cups. Ammar kept his father’s out-of-date and in-other-ways invalid Iraqi passport, symbolic of the only journey done with it. And then there was nothing else of Marwan. Having distributed his remains thus, Muntaha experienced a satisfying sense of completion. She felt as she did when she finished a long novel, or as an artist feels when he’s put the final detail to a canvas – paradoxically, because instead of achieving and synthesizing she had divided and disintegrated something that had previously been one.

A condolence letter came from her uncle Nidal. He invited her to visit Iraq, and she thought perhaps she would. Perhaps she’d request a year off work and try to do something useful, teaching English to Iraqi children, for example, or collecting schoolbooks to donate. They needed them. They even had a pencil shortage. Pencils were on the sanctions list because graphite was classed as ‘dual use’. Meaning it could just as easily be used to manufacture a weapon of mass destruction as to copy notes from a blackboard. And meanwhile, because of the American depleted uranium, cancer rates and birth deformities had increased by hundreds of per cent. Just to imagine the country she had come from was to weep. It made her private grief irrelevant, and so it was comforting to imagine it as often as she could. She should do her bit, she thought. She should spend her inheritance on this.

At school between meetings she contemplated some sort of a memorial for her father. Writing something maybe. For the local paper, perhaps, or the school bulletin. At a staff-room desk she noted sentences and scrubbed them out again, trying to find a way of making him representative of all the city’s migrant lives. She went so far as to plan a project for her history class called ‘History Starts At Home’, intending to use Marwan as model text. Photos, maps and narrative. ‘Marwan al-Haj was born in Iraq and died in England.’ ‘Marwan al-Haj came to England to build a better life.’ ‘Marwan al-Haj knew the libraries of both Baghdad and London.’ But it didn’t capture anything of her father. Written down like that, Marwan was nothing special. Everybody migrates. Everybody changes and disperses. And life is too complex, too large, to encapsulate. Nothing can be summed up, least of all a human spirit.

So Marwan slowly became defined as a personal memory, or more precisely as a collection of images and sensations which summoned something of him for a candle-flickering instant, and this memory joined the mental objects of her world as one of a series of signs in a glorious book, signs which were resonant if not symbolic of an inexpressible, ungraspable realm.

Ammar kept his inexpert eye on her. Her college friends came round, and she saw friends at the mosque. At school she confided in Gabor a little, between meetings, and he pieced things together. He understood that Sami had gone, and imagined what he didn’t understand. He saw himself as a support for her. They ate at the same table in the canteen, and sometimes went for coffee after school. Things were looking up for him. He had an exhibition planned in a fashionable gallery, and at the same time, Muntaha became available. When he asked her to come to eat at his flat she said she’d be more comfortable if he came to her. On Saturday afternoon, she said.

Gabor brought flowers, arriving early.

Just as he put his hand up to the bell, Ammar burst from the door. His hand collided with Ammar’s nose. Or Ammar’s nose smacked into Gabor’s palm. It happened very fast. Ammar was already angry when he came out, before the collision.

‘God. Are you all right?’ Gabor asked. He’d stepped back, but now went towards Muntaha’s half-felled brother, put his hand to the hand with which Ammar was cradling his nose.

‘Fucking Jews,’ said Ammar.

He pushed Gabor away.

‘And you expect us to lie down and let you do whatever you please.’

Ammar clenched his fists. His eyes watered. He spat, fiercely, at the pavement. A puff of summer detritus rose from the place of impact. A tail of spittle hanging to his lower lip.

‘You’ve misunderstood.’ Gabor was working out that the Jew comment specified him. That Ammar had him implicated in a collective drama, larger than this doorstep coincidence. ‘No, you’ve got it wrong. I didn’t mean to hit you. I was going to ring the bell. I was looking for…’

Ammar hit him, hard, in the head. So fast Gabor didn’t see his arm move. Just the ghost of something to his left.

Yes, it hurt. Gabor wobbled. A flash of general pain and greater surprise made his body want to fall, to stop. Then he steadied himself and touched the side of his face. It was roaring red. Still numb, but heat came through his fingertips. He watched Ammar.

‘Now turn the other cheek,’ he taunted. ‘That’s right, turn the other cheek.’

‘What do you mean?’

Gabor felt blood swelling at his temple. Is there a weak point in the skull there? He pictured a skull, with its fragile curve down to the eye socket. Was his brain all right?

‘You’re a Christian, aren’t you? That’s what they pretend to do. Turn the cheek, boy.’

‘Didn’t you just call me a Jew?’

‘Whatever the fuck you are.’

‘I’m not a Christian.’

Gabor found himself flushed with fighting hormone. Throat dry and mouth unresponsive, it wasn’t easy to speak. He negotiated an agreement with himself not to do anything regrettable. Here was Muntaha’s little brother, at Muntaha’s front door, in the grip of a crisis which had little to do with Gabor. He was much smaller than Gabor. If Gabor hit him he’d do him real damage. All the same, butterflies were zooming about his intestines. Imam Ali said the strongest man is he who can fight against himself. Hard to be so strong. Gabor forgot his aching head. His body wanted to strike.

‘I’m not a Christian,’ he said again, through bloodless lips.

‘Whatever the fuck, then. Whatever the fuck you are.’

Gabor thought of saying he was a Muslim, in the true linguistic sense of ‘one who submits’. He’d been preparing to tell Muntaha that anyway. ‘One who accepts’ is better, one who accepts reality, because in Islam God is the Real, the True. But Ammar was there frothing at him, dribbling saliva, reddening as shame replaced anger, trying to make himself angry again. A dangerous spinning man on a dangerous spinning earth. He wouldn’t want to hear it.

‘I’m an agnostic,’ Gabor said.

And that was also true. Gabor was a not-knower whose prejudice was to wonder how anyone could be otherwise. When you consider that our sense of reality depends on the structure of our brains, that the matter we assume to be real and solid around us is ultimately points of light in empty space, when you consider big bang theory and superstrings and chaos, and the varieties of religious experience, the people who see ghosts and the people who don’t, when you consider these things, then certainty doesn’t seem to be a logical response.

‘I’m an agnostic,’ he said. ‘Not a Christian or a Jew.’

He was pleased to see Ammar, who hadn’t expected theology, bewildered by this. His brows descended, his nose flattened. Meanwhile, blood flow was returning to Gabor’s face.

The door opened, first slowly, then fast. Muntaha lurched out, still tying her hijab.

‘What’s going on?’

It was a shriek. She shrieked next in Arabic. She stopped and looked at Gabor, pointed at him, and demanded something of her brother. He answered in Arabic, shrugging and shaking his hands. Then she hit him, slapping him with open palms on the crown of his head. Most rewarding for Gabor, who stepped back and decorously turned towards the street. Three sniggering boys on bicycles across the tarmac who’d stopped to watch. When their eyes followed Ammar down the pavement Gabor turned again.

‘My God,’ she said, in a passion. ‘Are you all right?’ That had been Gabor’s response when he saw that Ammar was hurt. Gabor, now very grateful for his injury.

She steered him into the hallway and raised her large hand to his cheek. She touched him, which both stung and didn’t. He thought her fingers stroked his hairline as she removed them. The hint of a caress. He felt something of the adrenalin flush he felt before, so he loosened, weakened. Saw her in his imagination as a spirit woman, a Sufi Sophia, eastern like his grandfather. The opposite of his materialist parents.

She led him to a ground-floor bathroom. The hallway made of wood and roses, a tempting smell of onions and clean red meat from the kitchen. But when she closed the door behind him he was in Sami’s territory, dark and claustrophobic, the walls tightly packed with cartoons cut from Arabic newspapers, a lot of maps and guns, men with globes for heads. Gabor washed his own head in cold water before inspecting it in the mirror. Nothing serious. The skin raw but unbroken. A bruise already gathering colour. He padded his hair dry with a perfumed towel.

When he came out he found her silhouetted against the kitchen window’s blue. He remembered the flowers which he must have dropped when Ammar hit him, so he creaked over the floorboards and let himself on to the pavement where they still lay, blue like the sky against stained grey. They’d been trodden on once, but not maliciously. He picked them up, rustled them into shape somewhat, and returned to the house.

With the door open the hallway was a suspension of sun motes, and they played over Muntaha, her skin, the fabric of her clothes. Her lips were parted and moist, her lubricated eyeballs shining unalloyed white, and their blacks glistening. A third of her face retreating coyly into shadow. A few strands of satin hair escaping the hijab. For Gabor, time was suspended, a gateway to the ancient world ajar. The past present. No time, so no weight, no obligation. No husbands or rules or social codes. They could kiss.

‘I’m so embarrassed,’ she said, studying his bruise. Tm ashamed of him. He’s going to get himself into real trouble soon. He’s off the rails, really off the rails. I don’t know what to do about him. I’ve thought about getting him to live here with me where I can keep my eye on him. His problem is, he isn’t really old enough to have no parents.’

She interrupted herself when he lifted the flowers for her to see.

‘Flowers,’ she said. ‘That’s nice of you. They’ll look good on the table.’

Gabor watched her step into the kitchen and crouch at a floor–level cupboard to find a vase. She blasted some tap water into it, added a spoon of sugar, then scissored off the flowers’ lower stems and put them into place one by one. She moved past him with the vase and through a brown door. He followed.

‘This is Sami’s study,’ she said, ‘but I’ve made a few changes. This table, for instance, I’ve brought in here for when I have guests. What you have to remember about Ammar…’ – she continued as if the table and Ammar were two facets of one conversation – ‘… is that he’s a motherless child. He was only six when he lost his mother. And his motherland too. Six is old enough to be very socially aware, so to be pulled out of your country suddenly like that is very disturbing, even for a child who has a mother to comfort him. I don’t think he’s got over it yet. I mean, part of him is still six years old waiting for his mother to come back. He was smoking cigarettes and worse when he was fourteen, and he could drive when he was fifteen, but that’s not the same as being a grown-up. In fact, those are compensations for being a little boy still. It’s a shame. He’d make a lovely grown-up, he really would.’