The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab

Author:Robin Yassin-Kassab [Yassin-Kassab, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141918518
Publisher: ePenguin

16

Sami Overheats

As Marwan sank from view Sami had been waging his own battle with time. Trying to make it stop, he avoided thought and activity. He avoided change. He tried to stabilize his temperature, and watched the weather, which was stuck in a loop. Not like London weather, it was neither hot nor cold.

He packed the hours up into bland portions: TV programmes and newspaper articles, internet chat sessions concerning nothing at all, walks towards the tube station and back again, passages spent loitering in supermarkets and video rental outlets. Told himself in justification that he was getting back in touch with the culture. He also shaved as often as thrice daily, removing skin only, plucked at his eyebrows with Muntaha’s tweezers, smoked spliffs, took over-the-counter pills.

He rented disaster movies and lounged stiff-necked on the marital bed to watch them. The two classics of the genre, The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Plus The Swarm (1978), in which foreign killer bees threaten Houston, Texas. Against his carefully maintained boredom, against the undramatic but naggingly tragic undertow of reality, he deployed the kick of the fake-real. Flames, blood and redeeming heroism in ninety-minute packets, triggering adrenalin emission – not enough to move him off the bed – and pulses of novelty, just enough, keeping him active but stable, ticking over like the economy.

He watched his anti-Arab favourites. They lived in his collection for their incorrectness, both for academic and visceral reasons. They gave him an apocalyptic buzz of victimized self-righteousness. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which a scimitar-wielding, Nazi-collaborating savage emerges from a snake-charming, veils-and-dust backdrop to challenge Indiana Jones. The hero waits, allows the wild man to perform. Then – bang! – dispatches him with a casual pistol shot. Humiliation hits Sami in the gut. Wonderful. Builds another spliff. True Lies (1994), casting Schwarzenegger versus the psychotic Abu Aziz of the Crimson Jihad organization. Real-life Arabs acting in this one. Then coming up to date, The Siege (1998), in which shots of a mosque and men at prayer are juxtaposed with explosions.

Good viewing for the end of work hours. He tried taunting Muntaha when she came back from school (‘Here comes the Mullah! Respect to the hijab posse! Make way for the believers!’ and suchlike), but she wouldn’t be provoked. Wore the tolerant expression as she brushed his crumbs and ash from the sheets. So nothing happened. Nothing moved on.

It was all procrastination and he knew it. The meeting with his supervisor was the logjam ahead against which events congested and refused to flow. The more obvious logjam. So in the end, after ten days of this, having picked at his books like scabs, having scribbled his Great Idea in spiderish and unconnected half-lines, he’d arranged and then attended the meeting. And now in its aftermath, in that same moment when Muntaha was unfurling on her father’s couch in the proximity of death, Sami was ensconced in a central pub, at a corner of the bar, slurping lager and cigarettes in unsteady bursts.

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