The Road from Damascus (34 page)

He fasted Muslim-style, dawn to dusk, no liquids or solids. He also tried a week-long juice fast, though he grew squeamish at the sibilance of the word itself. Juice. The wormy lip-puckering sound of it, as if he was squeezing juice as he spoke it. The thought of it, the carrot and parsley and marrow mulch spurting through intestinal tunnels – a kind of reverse colonie irrigation – made him wriggle. All those associated slow-vomit words did: ‘spill’ and ‘spew’, ‘purge’ and ‘purify’. Somehow they brought him to Syrian detention chambers. Hanging parties. The detergent of bombs. Liquidation: there was a word suitable for a juice fast, and for an eradicating regime. For anyone in a hurry to build a new, secular consciousness.

Around the clock he heard a child screaming, wishing it to shut the fuck up but then stopping himself because he knew the child’s universe of suffering was more vast than his would ever be again. It being a child. Him being an adult, conscious of the changing nature of emotional states. Conscious of flux. He didn’t know where the screams came from, what with the stale modernist architecture ricocheting sound waves in all directions. The child was a mystery, wailing at unknown injustices. Sami thought the area had been purged of families.

Sami, increasingly aware of basic facts. Of his body palpitating, processing, without his consent or control, twenty-four hours a day for all the days of his life, entirely indifferent to his ideological pursuits. Atheist, agnostic or Muslim, the body paid not the least attention, so busy it was producing aromas.

He smelled pinkish at the tip of his penis, a little closer to the core there, not quite skin. Where most Englishmen were protected, or where their attendant English penile biomatter was protected, by a flap. It was the best smell his body managed, but its curdling, pointless sweetness nauseated him nevertheless.

His fungal groin gradated through the tugs and tangles of wiry hair from balls to arse – his arse was undoubtedly the hairiest part of him – arse which was citrus-sour but more darkly tanged, something of a Balti in it, or something still more southern, still more tropical, a South East Asia of a smell, containing all the regional diseases. Yellow fever, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis. All these were latent at his lower entrance. Which made him wonder about inside proper. What equatorial vapours did he contain? What toxic inner worlds? (He’d got on closer terms with his arse since he’d started post-defecatory washing in the Muslim style, rather than just smearing it around with paper. Rather than rubbing the waste against his skin and curls, pushing atoms of it back into him, through the pores – how had he done that for all his life?)

He was a weary explorer through the body’s olfactory moss, wanting only to hack out of it, to slash and burn, to get home, to get to civilization and a warm bath. But a real warm bath, a literal shower, provided no exit. For we’re talking here about Sami in a clean state, as inoffensive odour-wise as it is possible for him to be. Unwashed, it’s a different story.

Sami unwashed. His unclean underarm aroma was brownish, greyish, ashland air, the wind of the grave, of the crematorium. There was the grey stuff secreted in his nostrils, London stuff to remind the citizens of their city’s sooty past and car-carbonate present. (He took to another Islamic habit, snuffing water into his nose up to the sinuses and then blowing, snorting it out.) There was his goaty piss and his shit rising to him like evacuated organs. On these days of scrubbed leaves and local fruit it came like abrupt moist bullets. Dirt attacking on two fronts, from inside as well as out. How could he cleanse the inside?

He showered morning and evening and whenever he returned from outside. He did head, hands and feet more frequently at the basin. He brushed his teeth five times a day. He brushed his heart-like cow-stubborn tongue. Towelled orange wax from his earholes. Washing was a race against time, and given the starting blocks of basic stink he was always at a disadvantage. His smell at zero point was a block of concrete tied to one foot, a rope tied tight around his knees.

He read a newspaper article about the two hundred toxins found in human breast milk. Over-concentrations of fluoride and chlorine, the poisons of a benevolent state, and corporate pesticides, carbonates, lead. There was no escaping. Shampoo and soap contributed their own artificialities. The degenerate metal of the shower pipe, the water itself, was filth.

Muslims wash before the five daily prayers, to be clean before God, to not offend their fellows, and also to consider their moral taints. Old-time desert logic. Logic reliant on water filtered and salted through the rocks of an unraped earth. How do you get clean now? How do you eat clean? For halal meat you wash and pray and calm the animal with recitation and tender strokes before ‘In the Name of God’ slicing the throat. You bleed the animal to drain out hormones. Assuming a world which doesn’t inject the hormones into muscle from the creature’s supervised birth. No such thing as clean slaughter in an industrial age. Too many consumers to fuel. Not enough profit to bloody your margin if you take your time passing out the commodity. Which makes the hygiene laws about as relevant to the internet generation as a Qur’anic education. To make hygiene relevant, Sami was in need of that desert which didn’t exist any more. The Arab desert before depleted uranium and plastic bags, before metal shafts thrust like fingers into the throat of the waste to bring up its black oil. He needed ancient, parched, sterile atmospheres, too dry even for ghosts.

The child’s screaming worked at his thoughts, shaking his memories out of place and into sight – obscured screaming the rattling background theme to his mental life.

Under scalding water one showertime Sami remembered a Faris. An uncle. This Faris had visited at least once in Sami’s boyhood, once among the more readily recalled visits of his mother’s family. Fadya, Shihab, old Haj Ahmad Kallas. And Faris. Handsome, neatly bearded, swaggering slightly. Sami remembered him sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea, telling jokes. Nothing like the loon in Fadya’s back room. But he’d come to London, he’d existed. So Nur hadn’t exactly kept the knowledge from him. It was Sami who’d forgotten, until now.

Back in the room, towelling himself, he heard the high inhuman wailing of the mystery child, keening like seagulls. Let it wail, he told himself. Don’t be angry. He remembered his aunt’s anger as she told the story of Faris. He remembered the question his cousin had asked.
I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat
? They’d stared at him, waiting for him to respond. As if it had something to do with him.

The child had ceased wailing. Its forgetfulness of suffering was vaster too.

And what of sex? Our culture’s first advice to a man in Sami’s position (not much of a man, but perhaps becoming more manly), to a man alone, is: get over it. Get out on the pull. There’s a few more fish in the overfished sea, a few more birds staggering in the sick air. Liberated from the marriage bonds, Sami owned the gift of the new century. Namely, the freedom to choose, to unwrap, to possess. But promotion of yourself as a suitable partner, from what he could work out from a glance at the Zeitgeist, requires a promise of service. And after his decade of marital commitment – all right, sexual commitment; all right, a decade of failure or fear to stray – he wasn’t too sure of his ability there. Sex beyond habit – how was it done? He wasn’t about to trust the body’s instincts, any more than he could trust the heart.

Back home, lying on his crumpled couch, legs buckled up, not fitting, he had masturbated half-heartedly, sometimes finishing, sometimes not. A sign of his passed youth that these days it took something exciting to excite him. But now in the student room he never started. Another discontinued pleasure. Another horror, the pulsing of the ducts, the alien production of clotted liquid.

These were some of the reasons he lived autonomously of women. But the main reason was, he harboured hopes of returning to the much more hopefully liberated Muntaha. Muntaha with the doors of opportunity open. He wasn’t going to find better. That was obvious. For him, it was either a recognition of his place with her, if she closed her doors and let him, or some form or other of suicide.

He spoke to her about twice a week. He’d made three full apologies, for his general selfishness and lack of direction as well as for his specific unfaithfulness. She’d neither forgiven him nor rubbed it in. She just paused to hear it and then raced on, in her own direction. Telling him her plans for a year in Iraq and charity work. Plans which didn’t seem to include him. She wasn’t in need of any of his education. Entirely self-sufficient.

Many pre-dawn mornings Ammar banged the door, jerking Sami up against his sheets, in the subdued orange illumination that insinuated through the curtainless window, the glow of London’s night sky reflecting the student surveillance lights of the compound.

Ammar strode in salaaming, Mujahid shuffling behind. They waited for Sami to shower, and while he dressed Ammar would make Islamo-affirmative commentary.

‘Sami depressed again. Subhanallah, this gifted brother here, with all the blessings Allah gives him, miserable and depressed. Look at yourself, brother. You’re a Muslim, you’re worth something.’

Look at yourself. Something Brother Sami didn’t wish to do. Not at the physical surface anyway. He had considered smashing the mirror, but it was institutional property and fixed to the wall. He’d covered it instead with a shimmering green cloth Blu-tacked to its corners.

The believers waited while Sami brushed teeth and tongue, Mujahid as silent as Sami, embarrassed. Sami flossed, wrinkling a long nose at the presumed chemicals on the thread. He washed them off his fingers. Then Ammar nudged Mujahid.

‘Time for Fajr prayer, brothers.’

Mujahid wheezed the call, and Sami huddled up next to him, toe to toe, black beard to red, and followed the motions behind his brother-in-law. He did it because it was too early for debating. And he did it for brotherhood. As prayer, he told himself, it didn’t count.

Some mornings Ammar drove them to sleeping suburbs in the north west (less state militia up here, he said), where he stopped to move Sami on to the driving seat. In Sami’s control the car shuddered around the crescents and cul-de-sacs, an oaf in the presence of more monied vehicles. There were detached brick houses overcrept with ivy, occasional shops and pubs imitating village architecture, with whitewash and gables and pretend Tudor beams. Arched windows and rose-trellised passageways. Professionally tended gardens. Bird baths. Churches moated by graveslabs and deep grass. Paperboys. Milk rounds. Things that were extinct further in.

The car triggered burglar lights when it stalled. An early-riser frowning at them from the even pavement, dressed in expensive tracksuit and paunch. Ammar leaned from the window: ‘Yo, faithless, your time’s coming.’ Mujahid nodded, ready to be the enforcer. Sami felt like nodding too. Out here in the comfort zone he felt put upon, deprived. His vulnerability in the driving seat increased the anxiety. As a driver, Sami was not a gifted brother, his foot cramping with tension on the pedals, his lungs making shallow inhalations to avoid exhaust fumes – breath as juddery as the fuel fed into the engine – his fingers fluttering on the electricity of gear stick, indicator, wheel.

Sami remembered how it was to feel good, talented, a creature of potential, writing clever essays at school, holding his own in precocious conversation with Mustafa’s colleagues. Talented through other eyes, usually his father’s. Others’ definitions had sufficed him. He remembered sharing whiskey in the hospital room. Jameson’s. His father liked Irish whiskey, said it was less complicit in empire. The kind of comment Sami took with religious seriousness then. The whiskey warmth in his gut made him tearful. Never liked whiskey really. But the compensation was being admitted to the warmth of manly intimacy, credited with the keys of adulthood. He was a prince, an inheritor. The president’s son.

‘Don’t worry, brother.’ (Ammar reassuring a shaking Sami, who’d accelerated through a red light nearly into the side of a truck.) ‘You’re safe with your brothers. Say bismillah, nothing can hurt you.’

‘If Allah had wanted to,’ Mujahid joined in from the back, ‘he’d have mashed us then.’

‘That’s right. We’re in His hands. Nothing happens but what’s meant to happen. Put your trust in Allah, feel no fear.’

None of this seemed appropriate to Sami, stalled in the car somewhere beyond Finchley in the grey morning, but he couldn’t respond. There was an engine jam in his brain.

‘If Allah wanted to…’ said Mujahid, doing something very Irish with the last syllable of Allah. This was his favourite line. If Allah wanted to. This Islamo–hippy. Bush of a beard, flowing robes, jumping the ethno-barrier. Three decades previously he’d have been into flower power, not the power of the umma. If Allah had wanted. Like Allah was a giant fairy ready to swoop down and interfere with every little nugget of human history. For instance, during one of their in-chassis educational talks on the Sunni-Shia divide: ‘If Allah had wanted to, He’d have made Ali the successor to the Prophet. Peace be upon him. But He didn’t want to, so He didn’t.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ammar. ‘So they should shut up about it.’

‘I don’t know.’ Sami broke his usual silence. ‘I don’t know anything about it. But it was politics, wasn’t it, after the Prophet? I suppose it’s justified to have a political opinion.’

‘If Allah had wanted

Ammar cut his student off.

‘These Shia, they’re kuffar really. They split us up when we need unity. They do the devil’s work whether they know it or not. We have to purge these impurities, brother. Become one.’

There it was again. Purge, purify, imprison, torture.
I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris
?

Some mornings Ammar drove them west, for training. ‘While the Crusaders sleep,’ he said. The early roads still loose as flushed bowels, Ammar would indicate left before swiftly lurching right, or manoeuvre screeching U-turns.

‘This is how not to do it, yeah? Not when you’re driving the cab. This is how you lose a tracker.’