The Road from Damascus (44 page)

In came his interrogators and sat opposite. On one chair the man called Jeff, whose fat hand for most of the numbly silent car journey had patted Sami’s knee, Jeff in jeans and blue rugby shirt, and glumly smiling. On the other chair, leaning at him, a slack-faced, brown-haired woman. It was their heavy-plotted seriousness which showed an interrogation was coming, and Sami thought, fair enough. All summer he’d been trying not to face interrogations, detention chambers, the rest of it, torture and terror, too Third World to fit this scene, but still. He was ready. The effort not to look at the truth could no longer be sustained.

‘Country of origin,’ the woman snapped.

‘Britain.’

She repeated, ‘Country of origin?’

‘England. I was born here.’

She slapped the table. Jeff scratched an ear and wanly smiled. ‘We mean originally,’ he said.

‘Syria. If you mean where my parents came from.’

‘Syria.’ The woman sneered at a notepad. ‘Isn’t that a Muslim country?’

‘Yes,’ said Sami. ‘Yes, it is.’

Of course it is. He visibly flinched from himself when he remembered his childhood answers to the question.
It’s a Mediterranean country. Would you call the Mediterranean Muslim
? What else?
It’s a mixture of everything really.
He cringed now at his previous denial as much as he’d cringed then at the imputation that he had something to do with Muslims. Why deny what’s in front of your nose?

‘Muslim country,’ the woman said, as if listing charges. ‘False name. Suspicious appearance and behaviour.’

Sami frowned back at her.

She was called Kate. Jeff revealed this when she asked Sami how he’d celebrated the burning towers. ‘Oh Kate,’ Jeff said, with dramatized tolerance and hurt, playing good cop.

Why was Sami in this situation? The burden of the beard, he supposed. The burden of belonging. Just when he was sorting himself out the external world took a lurch for the worse. Yet another. Tom said those who survive are those who see purpose in their suffering. Not much suffering yet in this episode, granted, and no purpose in it that Sami could see. But significance, yes. It assuaged his guilt, the guilt that wasn’t his but Mustafa’s. He hadn’t betrayed Britain or the American ally, he was paying for older treasons.

All relative. He paid not with his blood but by tolerating wilful stupidity. He even wore a tolerant expression (smiling inside to Muntaha) as they asked him, in staged off-the-cuff style, about routes to Kabul, or what he thought of the film
Braveheart
, didn’t it fire him up, all that violent resistance to occupation? At one stage they went into a stock routine, rapid-fire and repetitive, demanding his name, address and date of birth, Jeff grinning through it all and Kate determinedly snarling, but tripping themselves up, tangling their tongues on the questions as if only in the twenty minutes before they came in they had skimmed freshly downloaded Israeli disorientation techniques.

Sami didn’t know if he’d been arrested or not.

‘Just having a little chat,’ said Jeff.

‘I think either I should get a lawyer, or I don’t need to talk to you.’

Kate said, ‘You still get your lawyer, but it isn’t going to be nice. Thousands of people have been killed. Times have changed.’

‘They have.’ Jeff sighed.

‘This is a matter of saving lives.’

Sami considered what was coming now, after the planes, after the towers. The New York events were big. Not as big as the media thought, not in comparison with Beirut or Baghdad, but big. Big for the First World. The events were historically big, and the response would be too. In Britain he expected a two-pronged attack of, on the one hand, co-optation and Working Together rhetoric –nice cop – and on the other, some heavy security work by the cerebrally challenged, like these two, clearly unable to distinguish Wahhabi nihilists from the plain dull religious, or even from the vaguely, perhaps, spiritual, like Sami. And there’d be a predictable political attempt to paint everything Muslim and oppositional in the same bloody colour. Would that work? Depended on to what extent Marwan’s theory was true, the theory Muntaha had told him about: that the English are trusting and sheeplike, that they believe what they’re told. Marwan had never articulated the idea in Sami’s presence, although according to Muntaha it had been one of the old man’s favourite themes, and Sami supposed this was because Marwan was being polite, that he considered Sami to be a sheep. And perhaps Sami had been. Certainly trusting. If not in the news, then in Mustafa’s official version. Certainly deluded.

Kate said, ‘We don’t believe you’re Sami Traifi. We’ve had him in, you see, Sami Traifi. The real one. He doesn’t have a beard. He takes drugs, drinks alcohol. He’s an innocent whose name you’ve adopted.’

‘We have his parents next door.’ Jeff apologetically spreading hands. ‘They say you’re not him.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jeff. ‘I am. I’m sorry. It’s a shame. And so’s all this conflict between our peoples.’

‘You’ve got his father too?’

This upset Kate, who waved a finger across the table. ‘You leave him alone. Leave Traifi and his family alone, you hear me? He’s the kind you kill, isn’t he? You consider him a traitor. An apostate.’

It was lilting, oriental music to Sami’s ears, Sami the apostate to atheism, traitor to his traitorous father.

The questioning resumed.

‘What is your position on the Arab-Israeli conflict?’

So would the English, sheeplike, believe the official version? That Hizbullah is the same as al-Qa’ida? Hamas and the Taliban one? Sami would see. And he’d do what he could. Self-preservation, Tom had said. Evasive action.

There was a significant rapping on the door. Jeff went to it quickly. His fingers remained curled around the door frame while he conferred with a uniformed man in the corridor.

‘Kate,’ he called. His voice up a note.

She frowned as she got up, without the drama of her earlier frowns. Sami had a view of her back slumping a little as she received information. She wheeled away from the door, losing rigidity, compensating with a pinching of the mouth, a hard stare at the floor. Then swished her head sideways to her body, and smiled.

‘Mr Traifi. I owe you an apology. It seems you are who you say you are. Not an extremist at all.’

‘No hard feelings, mate.’ Jeff, unsmiling now, made a jovial slap to Sami’s shoulder. ‘See it from our point of view. You were standing there, outside the mosque, in a suspicious manner. All perfectly innocent, of course, we know that now.’

‘And you have grown a rather thick beard recently, haven’t you?’ Kate chiding gently.

‘Imagine,’ said Jeff. ‘Imagine if under the questioning then you’d given us a lead. Something important. We could have saved lives.’

Sami stood up.

Jeff grasped his arm. ‘Why don’t you work for us?’

‘With us,’ corrected Kate.

‘Work with us. We need the help, I don’t mind admitting. We’re not prepared for the new scenario. Lack of resources, lack of legislated powers. It’ll take time to come through. We don’t have many contacts in your community.’

His community. Society splitting up into sects for safety, into fraternities, everybody sticking with their own kind. The day of Tom Field had arrived.

‘Whereas you, Mr Traifi, you could infiltrate. You look the part.’

‘In the mosques. The beard and all.’

They were following Sami through the door, down the corridor.

‘Think about it at least.’

‘Give us a call.’

There was his mother. Nur Kallas. Her hijab tight. He’d seen her last perhaps a year earlier, briefly, in the street with Muntaha. He hadn’t looked at her face then. Now he did, and it was creased and pale.

They shook hands.

‘Thanks for rescuing me.’

She nodded. Jeff, smiling and stooping, ushered them to the exit.

‘They thought you were an Islamist,’ said Nur when they were on the street. A soft single chuckle died in her throat. ‘It’s true you look like one these days. Your beard’s longer than your hair.’

It was the first time in a long while he’d heard his mother’s voice.

Sami said, ‘Do you know what they wanted at the end? They wanted me to be an informer. They wanted me to shop Islamists, to be mukhabarat.’

Nur raised her eyes to his. A hint of Faris to her, some family resemblance in the curve of the cheeks. They walked towards the tube.

Nur said, ‘You’re lucky, though. In Syria they’d have tortured you. We wouldn’t have seen you for years.’

Someone on the tube was reading an evangelical thriller called
The Late Great Planet Earth.
On the cover, the globe was cracked open. Sami and Nur sat opposite, in silence, rocked by the movement of the train.

She hadn’t invited him home but they’d both known he was coming. They spoke about the circumstances of his arrest for a couple of minutes, Nur less outraged by it than he felt she should be, and then they submitted with awkward reserve to the journey, not saying anything, saving it up. A meditative nothing for fourteen stops.

They alighted, redundantly pointing the way to each other, and slowly walked a section of high street. Not too many people here owned cars so the corporations hadn’t yet won total victory. True, there was a hyperstore within bus distance, but local specificity survived. As well as KFC there was the Harrow Hen House, etcetera, and to look on the bright side, Mr Patties Soul Food Kitchen, the Lebanese grocer’s, the Sari Base. They turned right, past token front yards hemmed in by migratory traffic, but people out in them nonetheless, perched on brick walls, on bikes on the pavement, talking. Portuguese neighbouring Poles, Chinese neighbouring Algerians, and so on. Everyone mixed up. Flitting shadows.

The sight and sound of children made Nur speak, in English.

‘No children yet? You’re a man, Sami. You’re here to have children.’

‘You only had me.’

‘I’d have had more if your father had agreed. He was father to his book.’

A child would mean Sami was a link in a chain, would make Mustafa a grandfather (deceased), and Sami a father, not the inheritor. A child would make Sami an attribute, a descriptor, not a subject. Not the chief subject. Sex is the defeat of individuality and the victory of the species. But sex, though. Sami thought of Muntaha undressed. He was ready for that.

There was no eye contact with his mother. They’d spoken with false gruffness, a manly kind of Anglo-Saxon distance. From the side he noted her deterioration. Her skin was old-woman fabric now, and it was too late for any reconciliation that would take him back to the boy in her lap, wrapped in towels. It provoked anger in him, or the memory of anger, and he was quite open to himself and calm about it, observing all his emotional habits: his traditional loyalty to his father, his old hatred for the hijab. The hijab that marked her as a female and a decaying thing. A woman, not a girl. The bearer of a body.

She turned the key in the old door. The old house. Even the old smell, though she’d changed perfumes and foodstuffs in the intervening years. Everything heavy with sad nostalgia.

Nur unpinned the hijab. Her hair was dyed chestnut brown, as he remembered it from early childhood, but otherwise she was rumpled, dressed less formally than before, quite un-Syrian. It was too late for her to be what she had been.

Yet in the house some ancient habitude had an influence, relaxing them both. They spoke Arabic.

‘Those planes in New York,’ she said. ‘I dreamt it before it happened.’

Sami removed his shoes and followed her to the kitchen, where she was already preparing Turkish coffee.

‘I was in my family’s old home in Damascus, in Muhajireen. It was hot and it smelled like home. I was hanging washing on the terrace. I heard a crash and turned to the mountain. There were two towers burning. Exactly the same towers. I kept the image of them after I woke up.’

She arranged small cups and saucers on a tray.

‘It was two weeks before it happened. Strange, isn’t it? And what about this. I have a friend, a Lebanese, whose son’s an accountant. He works in the City for a company which has a New York branch, in the Trade Center, in the towers, and he was offered a transfer over there. Of course he wanted to go, and his family wanted him to go, but he’d fallen in love with a girl here in London, an English girl. All the family complaining, why give up this opportunity for a girl, but he wouldn’t listen. Two weeks later the girl left him and he cursed himself for not going. But look. The romance is over, but look how he was saved. It wasn’t his fate to die, not yet.’ She took a cigarette from a packet next to the sink. ‘Smoke if you want to.’

‘I’ve left it.’

She lit the cigarette, and peered through smoke to spoon powder into simmering water. She took two proper drags, then poured the coffee.

‘So you stopped your university work.’

‘Yeah.’ He didn’t want to talk about it. The fact was too much an admission of failure, of bad direction-taking and stubbornness. ‘How did you know?’

‘Muntaha told me. She always keeps in touch.’

Cardamom and coffee steam and smoke rose between them.

‘I was going to call you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Sami carried the tray to the front room. They sat down, and Nur leaned forward to add sugar, stirring. Her hands and his were the same, the flatness of the fingernails, the thick knuckles. His hands were his inheritance from her. Also the ridge of his nose. These were the visible things, coded from twists of DNA.

‘We should talk,’ he said, ‘about Baba.’

‘What about him?’ Nur intently driving ash around an ashtray.

‘About him and your family. My uncles.’

‘Mustafa. God have mercy on him.’

‘God have mercy on him,’ repeated Sami.

‘Mustafa with my family was like a bull in a china shop, as the English say. He thought he had a duty to offend their values. He seemed to expect to be thanked for it. Respect is important in our society. Etiquette.’

‘Does that explain it?’

‘Explain what?’

‘The problems between you.’