The Road from Damascus (45 page)

Nur sipped coffee, and stubbed out her cigarette.

‘We didn’t agree about things, as you know.’

‘Tell me again. I want to hear it again. It’s different now.’

Nur looked towards the window.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘had dreams concerning the Arabs. He thought it was only a matter of time until everyone would work in an office, productive eight-hour days, and go home in the evening to read novels, or go to the cinema to watch art films. He thought everyone would own a car and a house to fit a nuclear family, and that they’d all drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes. He thought that would make them better. He thought they wouldn’t need anything more than that.’ She snorted: ‘Well, the cigarettes part came true, just when they were giving up here.’ She pointed through single glazing to the street. ‘A lot of us believed it, enough to forget what we’d believed before. Long enough for it to be too late to go back.’

She lit another cigarette, pulling deep. ‘But his dreams were dreams. What he wanted, it’s not possible. There aren’t enough schools in the world. Not enough money. Too much history. Why should it happen, anyway? They wanted us to be powerful, like Europe. To an extent they had good intentions. But we aren’t Europe. And maybe we were happier the way we were, even if we were underdeveloped, so-called, even if we were easy to colonize, even superstitious and weak. They wanted progress, whatever the cost. Progress, so-called. But maybe it wasn’t a good idea, modernizing us. They made the country a prison to do it. A very modern prison.’

She veered from ‘he’ to ‘they’, from Mustafa to the Ba’ath Party. ‘He thought there’d be one nation. One Arab nation from the Ocean to the Gulf. What we have now is everything but. We have everything smaller and everything bigger. Little sects and ethnicities, little nationalisms, and big Islamism. But no Arab nation. If they hadn’t tried so hard to force us into it, maybe it would have happened. We’re Arabs, after all.’ She seemed to become stuck to her cigarette, her hand at her mouth, facing away from Sami, to the window. ‘Anyway. You didn’t see your father getting rich out of it. Most of the others were in it for money. Your father was an idealist.’

She stopped speaking and smoked noisily. Sami was embarrassed by her emotion, but he wanted to know.

He asked, ‘And what happened between you? There was something specific, wasn’t there? I remember when you two stopped talking. It happened suddenly.’

Nur was curling up, wrapping her arm around her waist as if there was pain inside which needed to be massaged. ‘Deeply wounded’ we say, talking about psychological trauma, and language speaking its wisdom through us. Because it’s physical too, emotional events leave physical scars. Nur winced as she smoked, exhaling grey cloud into her lap.

She said, ‘I think he thought, if his dream couldn’t come true, then neither could anyone else’s.’

Sami said, ‘I visited Aunt Fadya in Syria.’

‘I know. She told me.’

‘I met someone called Faris. My uncle. I’d forgotten him completely, but recently I’ve remembered. He came here, didn’t he, to London, when I was a boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘He wasn’t well when I saw him in Damascus. He seemed much older than his age.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded, looking into the middle distance.

‘They seemed as if they were blaming me. Fadya and her sons. I couldn’t understand them.’

Nur said nothing.

‘They said, “I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris? I wonder who told the mukhabarat?” Staring at me, as if it was me. But I never knew anything about it. I was only a boy when he was arrested. I wasn’t even there. “I wonder who informed on Uncle Faris?” ‘

Nur, softly: ‘God knows what’s true and what isn’t.’

Sami said, ‘It was Baba, wasn’t it?’

Looking into the middle distance, she sighed.

‘It was him, wasn’t it? My father.’

‘Nobody should tell anybody that their father was a traitor.’

‘But I know. I worked it out. You just need to confirm it. Baba told the mukhabarat about Uncle Faris.’

She turned and faced him. Her eyes the colour of light honey.

‘Yes.’

‘Baba sent your brother to prison for twenty-two years. My father destroyed your brother.’

‘He probably didn’t want him there for twenty-two years. People get lost in those prisons. And your father died.’

‘But he told the mukhabarat.’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

Sami dipped his head in acknowledgment, and paused, and continued. ‘But he was living here in London.’

‘He visited there. He had Party friends. Even here, he had Party friends.’

Sami neither cold nor hot. Sami, at room temperature, only wanting information: ‘Why did he do it?’

‘An excess of loyalty,’ replied Nur. ‘Not necessarily because he was a bad man, although I, of course, interpreted it like that. Perhaps because he was good, according to his own definitions. Betrayal of one thing is usually loyalty to something else.’

They had another cupful of coffee each, and Nur smoked two more cigarettes. Then she went into her bedroom (still the small one, that had first been a guest room) to pray alone. Sami didn’t suggest he join her, but waited, tapping his teeth, asking himself how to communicate reconciliation. The right thing was probably to embrace her, but it felt too late, or perhaps too early, for that. He was still squeamish of bodies, except his untouched wife’s. Plus, he was suspicious of his own tricks, and wanted to keep drama at arm’s length.

When she returned from her prayer he caught, squeezed, and kissed her hand, taking refuge in culture, in this impersonal yet moving signal of filial respect and duty.

She said, ‘Thank you,’ wobble-voiced, nervously happy.

Sami was by the door, flushed, putting on shoes.

‘You should come to eat with us sometimes,’ he said.

‘Are you living at home?’

‘I will be. I’m moving back.’

‘Yes, I’ll come. If you want.’

‘Yes, I want,’ he said. ‘I understand now.’

The moment for eye contact had passed, so he looked at the wooden door, saying, ‘Muntaha likes you. She’ll be happy to see you.’

Nur said, ‘She’s a good woman, a good wife for you. If you want my advice, Sami, stop making a fuss about her hijab. She tells me all about it, your hijab arguments. Maybe it isn’t necessary, but it’s her business. Don’t make trouble over an abstraction. You should be loyal to people before ideas. Be flexible. Don’t force people to be what they aren’t.’

Sami parroted, ‘Maybe it isn’t necessary? The hijab?’

‘Allahu ‘aalim. God knows best.’

‘So why do you wear it?’

‘In protest, I suppose. And in hope. All you can do is hope. And try to be yourself, what you hope you may be. If belief isn’t always possible, hope is.’

Sami, with Muntaha headscarfed beside him, was driving a West London Cabs Nissan north and west through a carbonate-beautiful late afternoon, into a rural, pre-apocalyptic zone of varied green. They’d had a long day’s driving up the M6, talking pasts and futures, and listening to the radio: pirates on the FM dial on the way out of London, and while skirting Birmingham too. Otherwise classical music, and news.

George Bush, out of hiding and belatedly stepping into hero role, not saving but avenging, had told the New York firemen, ‘The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,’ which reminded Sami and Muntaha of the Prophet talking to the dead, saying, ‘Look, do you see now?’ Given that the people who knocked the buildings down were dead too, of self-administered punishment, burnt with their victims. But Bush was talking of this world, of coming shock and awe, and commentators excitedly discussed imminent explosions, in Afghanistan, perhaps Iraq, the son Bush wishing to outdo his father there.

The village whose name Tom Field had written for Sami was easy to find on the map. Then they had to ask the staid, slow villagers who squinted quizzically at their foreignness – English foreignness – for directions to the mountain.

They stopped where the road did, clambered over a stone wall, and grinned at each other in their confusion. City people out of their depth. There were bushes and trees and reeds and no evident pathways. But Tom met them within five minutes, emerging from the wilderness even before they summoned the courage to shout his name. They climbed in the lingering northern indeterminacy between day and night up to Tom’s house, which was in a hollow very close to the summit, on ground high enough to survive glacier-melt. It was also, Tom pointed out, fairly invisible from the air, sheltered by indigenous forest, by birch and ash, rowan and willow. Built of reclaimed wood and glass, as he explained, walking them around it. It had a bathtub, outside by the vegetable patch, on stilts, with space beneath for a woodfire to heat the water. Water had to be brought in buckets from a stream. Tom filtered it to drink.

‘I’ll need solar panels and so forth. More technology. I haven’t spent a winter here yet. We’ll see how it is.’

From a clearing he gestured downhill at the overgrown traces of an abandoned road, an illustration of the frailty of human endeavour from which he drew unbounded reassurance.

‘Wilderness, you see, we should count as our friend. That’s what I’m trying to do, partially. I admit I’m domesticated here. Ideally I’d be nomadic. But the world’s not large enough any more. And it’s too violent. More important to be hidden.’

He made them comfortable, served them filtered water and fed them palaeolithic food. As they ate he described the local barter system. Tom knew a glass blower, a weed grower, a cheese maker, a potter, a bowl lather, a knitter, a weaver, a candleshaper.

‘The problem is getting to them without a car. I have a bike, but it takes time. These people are in a thirty-mile radius. It makes you ask yourself if a journey’s really necessary.’

There was no sign of GRor any other companion-untilMuntaha found a box of female grooming and hygiene items near the plate-washing area. She wasn’t exactly snooping; there were none of the markers of private space that a house normally has.

Tom talking, in candlelight, against Sami’s suggestion that he might feel disconnected: ‘I’m at peace with disconnection. No ancestors up here, no past. Like the whole world soon. Give it fifty years. We’re at the end of a loop.’

And Sami, smiling: ‘There’s signs of a companion here, Tom. Not my business, but…’

‘There’s no survival in this world without reproduction.’

‘Children, then?’

‘That’s on the agenda, Sami. Serve the species, you know, serve the genes. We’ll see. For now, I’m mostly alone. And that’s good.’

But Tom talked on like a lonely man who’s captured rare company, like an ex-lecturer who misses the lecture theatre.

‘No clock here, you’ll notice. So there’s a rhythm of day and night, but no diary time, no squashing us into boxes, none of that kind of control. No phone either. But I think I knew you were coming. Didn’t take me long to find you, did it? It’s been suggested that hunter-gatherers had advanced telepathic powers. Perhaps that kind of thing is natural to us, and we’ve lost it as we developed technology. Perhaps we’ll all find out, I mean those who survive, when the technology burns out.

‘Bushmen can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. Some tribes see Venus in the daytime. I have the feeling that all this is possible. I do sense exercises up here, alone. To enhance smell and touch. I blindfold myself and walk the mountain.’

‘It’s attractive,’ said Sami. ‘An attractive sort of life.’

Muntaha laughed, ‘Have you got a mosque up here?’

‘The mountain’s my mosque.’

She regarded him playfully. ‘The mountain’s all right for you, Tom. But I’m an Arab. I need to keep warm in the wintertime. And there aren’t so many of us in this country, better for us to stick together.’

‘Where, in London? Under the bombs and the floods?’

‘I’ll worry about them when they happen. Right now I’m worried about finding Arab culinary ingredients. I need that Syrian shop on the Uxbridge Road, for a start.’

‘True,’ said Sami. ‘Where’s your olive tree? Also, not much jungle music up here.’

‘No jungle music,’ said Tom, ‘but plenty of jungle. Plenty of reality. Art may only be an attempt to remember what we’ve lost. But the Arab culinary ingredients – I see what you mean.’

And with that fortuitous prompting Muntaha revealed from her bag an array of foodstuffs: stuffed vine leaves, kibbe, tubs of hummus and matabal.

Sami and Muntaha slept the night in the separate bedroom. So separate they had to walk for five minutes in the dark, across moss and leaves, to reach it, a square wooden structure between trees, containing only a wooden bed and a feather mattress, and without even candles – but with glass panels in the ceiling so their night was lit by the stars, so their eyes became accustomed to the dark and to the tones of each other’s body in starlight. In the morning they lay on their backs and watched squirrels leap branch to branch. They breakfasted on berries and some kind of tea. Then Tom went mushroom gathering, and Sami and Muntaha set out to walk all day. They prayed together at lunchtime and in the middle afternoon. Out in nature, prayer felt easy to Sami. Out in nature, marvelling in it, Muntaha quoted her favourite hadeeth:

And remembering her mother’s lessons, she quoted Imam Ali:

Man is a wonderful creature; he sees through layers of fat, hears through bone, and speaks with a lump of flesh.

Sami nodded at the miracle of sight. He no longer experienced body-claustrophobia, but something like its opposite, a sense of openness and space. Now he claimed a doctrine of radical unknowing, and the beginnings of acceptance.

Our language is adequate for the detail of social relations, and for the objects made by us, or those for which there is an obvious human use. Language is primarily economic. However, for the economically useless, for the natural more-than-human, words are silly, shiny labels signifying only their own poverty. Words like star, sky, sea. Words like blue when applied to the sky, or to distant trees, or mountain rock (applied to the paintwork on a car it does fine). Silly labels tacked on mystery.