Homecomings Read online

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  COMINGS

  Yvette

  Rocheron

  Copyright © 2019 Yvette Rocheron

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire, LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1838599 676

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To Mustapha and his son

  In memory of peace

  Contents

  – 1 –

  Damascus

  October 2008

  – 2 –

  The Clinic

  – 3 –

  Leaford

  – 4 –

  Damascus

  – 5 –

  Tugs of Love

  – 6 –

  Troubled

  – 7 –

  Damascus

  – 8 –

  Waiting

  – 9 –

  Fish in a Bowl

  – 10 –

  Damascus

  – 11 –

  Old Flirts

  – 12 –

  Damascus

  – 13 –

  Self-healing

  – 14 –

  Meeting the Al-Sayeds

  – 15 –

  Touring Syria

  – 16 –

  By Themselves

  – 17 –

  Aleppo’s Citadel

  – 18 –

  Opening Gambits

  – 19 –

  The Deal

  – 20 –

  On The Road

  – 21 –

  Flights

  Epilogue

  For Those Who Like Tidy Ends

  – 1 –

  Damascus

  October 2008

  Khalid Al-Sayed puts the phone down on his desk and, irritated, walks into the inner courtyard, feet bare, indifferent to the cold floor inlaid with extravagant strips of marble to match the best of Levantine rugs. In the last few days, whenever he rings his father, the line to Hama is full of interference or echoes of their own voices. Ironically, the antiquated technology is reassuring as he remembers a sarcasm which clung to the 12-year-old boy, then a refugee from the massacre which destroyed their Hama home: the British and Hafez Al-Assad’s men couldn’t have been fairer, his father joked – they shared the job equally, watching and criminalising us Sunnis. This is why, maybe, his father felt the move to Leaford as a safe homecoming.

  Khalid smiles ruefully: his family is no longer subject to state-of-the-art bugging but he is still trying hard to forget the two years spent in that Lebanese camp infested with rats and spies.

  And now, coming back to Syria more than 20 years later, it is taking him longer than he expected to adapt to the hustle and bustle of his birthplace. How many times had the Al-Sayeds built a home only to leave it, nomads again? Father, twice. Himself, twice. May Zaida be spared such a destiny!

  Since the divorce, he’s had little opportunity for fatherhood – a few weekends in Britain acting the funfair dad, buying tickets for dodgems and Aladdin shows; keeping on the good side of Virginia for Zaida’s sake. Until now there has been nothing to replace the normal family life which providence, or his ex, denied him.

  Yesterday Zaida went to stay with her grandfather in Hama. Already he is missing her.

  A gust of cold air. The servants should have switched off the rattling air conditioner high up on the wall. Khalid sucks in his cheeks, chilled, unsettled. He is through with being at the Franklins’ beck and call. After the separation, Walter and Gwen opened their home to mother and child, forgiving Virginia’s double ineptitude: first falling pregnant so young and then marrying him, a student at Leaford University.

  It is their turn to miss the child for a while. There will be little room to manoeuvre, and there will be a terrible fuss, but both families can shield Zaida from the fallout. She is so excited, so avid for anything Syrian – food, stories, clothes, family history, you name it. As she grows into her mixed heritage the choice will be hers. His duty now is to give her the resources of her Syrian self.

  The budgies again! He can’t get used to them fussing above the door leading down to the servants’ basement. Zaida enjoyed looking after them to the delight of their owner, his housekeeper. Mariyam Ajemian, an ageing Armenian woman from Aleppo, hangs the cage together with a rusting Byzantine cross the size of a fist but fortunately without the tortured body. Such knick-knacks undermine Khalid’s décor, free of curios and personal souvenirs, but, as he told Zaida, Mariyam’s faith must be accepted. It doesn’t do to challenge the devotion of excellent cooks. So he muses while dislodging with a toothpick gritty sesame seeds left by his sister’s halva. The best. Nobody makes halva like Halima. Despite Mariyam, he isn’t putting on weight. ‘A wife’s cuisine,’ Halima likes to annoy him, ‘will get rid of your gangly looks!’ He shakes his head. He’s not a man who swaps wives like hookers. At any mention of Zaida staying, sister and cook exchange knowing glances, as if a man can’t look after a girl.

  He pops in a large date, fleshy and moist. Zaida has inherited his build and his love of aromatic food. She doesn’t let herself starve like so many sad girls of her age. Mariyam showed her how to make gooey gh’raybeh and Allepian almond cookies. The two had fun speaking gibberish over the stove. She loves grilled lamb, stuffed vegetables, pomegranate juice and mint lemonade; homely food that he took for granted as a child until England, where his mother cooked only dull smelly foreign food. ‘Why smelly?’ Zaida asked. ‘Fish and chips, fried onions? Boiled potatoes with no herbs! I’m telling you, we children craved for mezzes laced with rosewater and spicy lamb balls.’

  He made the migrant story light and short, sparing the child and also himself the harrowing truths. It would have been too distressing to explain how his mother’s grief over Seema’s suicide became palpable in lumpy dishes and, later, in her refusal to go out, and finally lung cancer. How could he drop explosives onto a child? Ignore the tragedies. Talk about the survivors. The two youngest, fresh from Koranic classes in Leaford, acquired veils, husbands and a passion for Indian and Pakistani food. Her Aunt Halima followed Grandad Abdul back to Hama where she married happily into a Sunni family.

  This is a truncated family story. Plenty of time to fill it in. He has such faith in Zaida: uncorrupted, provocative, easy to be with. Dressed up with elaborate kerchiefs and full make-up, the girl now looks much older than her years. A Barbie doll for Halima. He mustn’t let his sister spoil her with old-fashioned girlish ways. He wants to be a modern dad. But how? Just a moment ago, he was caught out. Zaida, petulant on the phone, furious with her grandfather’s refusal to let her go out to the Mak’Ha Internet Café with h
er male cousins. ‘You see, Hama’s an orthodox town,’ he found himself insisting. ‘A dodgy bar full of men eyeing you up is no place for you!’ In Syria a man’s honour is to protect women. Her presence is interrogating him already. How to be a modern dad?

  He still finds it hard to believe she has made it to Syria. How did she manage to persuade her mother? She wouldn’t explain it. She threw her head backwards in Virginia’s gesture of denial, then said darkly, ‘Iaa Afham you, daddy.’ She doesn’t understand him! Because he doesn’t sweeten her mother up? He shrugs. The girl has strong principles and a zest for life. She also won Mariyam Ajemian’s heart by visiting not only the Ummayyad Mosque but also the holy chapel of St Anania: Christos be praised. ‘It’s close to heaven,’ Mariyam approved. Closer than the Big Mosque? He winked.

  Of course, she’ll stay as long as she wants; they have so much to do and share. Her three-week visa will run out but a renewal will raise no problem. No doubt Virginia expects him to remain as reasonable and meek as ever, but why toe her line now he’s back with his own folks? Many times she mocked him as a weak man under tribal pressure to return, but this time the joke will be on her.

  They are having a great time. When they toured New Damascus, Zaida dismissed it, like him, as any dreary new city catering to the rich, though this one was safeguarded by uniforms armed to the teeth. She loved exploring the old city, intrigued by the paper notices of the dead posted by Christians with little black crosses at street corners close to Bab Sharki. Why trust walls to spread news better than newspapers? He didn’t point out the dismal list of disappeared people pasted in full view of the mosque. Inside the old city gates, where traders have outlived ruler after ruler, there are enough memories of protest to provide the agents of order with jobs for life – a never-ending story he or Abdul will tell her one day. When she’s older. She is staying.

  He slouches down a few steps to get a carafe of icy water from his latest purchase, an American style fridge-freezer, all steel and shine, ‘bigger than a coffin,’ Mariyam tutted, crossing herself for good measure as she swept her black skirts away from danger. ‘Superstition,’ he mutters under his breath, changing his mind in favour of a beer.

  Back in the yard, he sits straight on the edge of the shell-shaped fountain, smart in a white short-sleeved shirt and blue tie, looking like any other aspiring businessman except for features that make him less banal – unruly jet-black hair curling around his ears, owlish eyebrows and a deep terracotta complexion.

  He cocks his head, listening to furious squabbling over a football coming from the back alley. The harried look gives way to a grin, happy to be on his own until the early evening meal: lamb with a red cherry sauce, another Aleppo speciality which Mariyam lavishes with herbs.

  At the muezzin’s call, a quietness as doleful as an English mist fills the house while boys, water-sellers and sock-pedlars pack up their wares. He ought to dismiss the chauffeur on time for the communal prayer and then savour the opportunity to hear himself think, relieved of office staff and agitated relatives.

  His uncles chant in clannish unison that he is spending too much time on his own. To their minds he is soft, an ignorant Brit, wet behind the ears about human rights. He is too open, too trusting – on the internet, at business meetings and official soirées. They deride him for refusing kickbacks, a sure sign of his lack of common sense. But still, he’s one of them and they will fix things up for him. Their condescension gets on his nerves. In Britain, he was respected as a lawyer and a man with brains.

  Yes, he is beginning to tire of constantly watching his back. Professional people are treated like children here; whatever their trade, they have to play by the rules. Worse still for Sunnis in Hama. The Al-Sayeds still find it difficult to obtain passports in spite of promises made in London when they were discussing arrangements to return. It is so humiliating having to fork out bribes to lackeys every time you want to go abroad.

  However, he does not resent his relatives having chosen for him this discreet, well-hewn stone house. Latticed windows looking onto the Christian quarter, hidden in a side street behind modestly high walls on three sides and cheek-by-jowl with knife shops on the other. Zaida loves the place. Conveniently, Abdul hired the servants from the previous owner, an exuberant Shia whose main political affectation was to employ people from different religions: Mariyam, the Christian cook, and Walid Hadidi, an Alawite Shia who has chauffeured for him this last year on a part-time basis. Why change sensible arrangements?

  He is startled by a clap of wind rattling the shabby sheets of cloth stretched above the courtyard three storeys high by a system of ropes and pulleys. He enjoyed explaining to Zaida how the wobbly roof works, remembering his own excitement when he was first allowed to open up the sky at his father’s house. Before the walls were full of bullet holes. It is too early to open the roof. Pouting, he scratches his scalp, dimly aware that despite one or two extra pounds, he has not lost the hungry looks endearing him to Muslim and Christian matrons keen to match him with a virgin.

  A rich man, although not as rich as Zaida assumes, he is not short of marriage proposals. He gulps down the beer, impatient with the bitterness clinging to him. He used to have a loving wife. He looks around, sensing his solitude, suddenly missing the talk that nurtures a marriage of equals. Virginia. He had been devoted to her. Good luck to Virginia and her parents. They have taken good care of his daughter. But now, for as long as she wants, it is his turn. The Sharia Court would vindicate him!

  Long ago little Zaida – gusty and quick, light and movement – had struck gold in her Syrian family. The djins burst out from Abdul’s stories, real to the fascinated child. Her grandfather, incorrigible and doting, encouraged her to think that he travelled in the Middle East to track down the few remaining flying carpets, immune to rot and mice. The adolescent continues to be transfixed by tales of any kind, joking that the Arabs should put Death Knights on their magic carpets and send them against the Americans. ‘Stop it,’ he’d said. ‘War-speak is too ugly for my girl.’

  It is only now, in this house, that he will gradually grasp the essence of his daughter. This is her Syrian home. Secretive, lofty and, like the souk, mixing the old and the new. Not so grand as to invite misfortune but comfortable enough to foil the heat. Cool back rooms with high painted ceilings and flagstone floors. Zaida clapped at the wide screen installed in the smallest sitting room. They enjoyed viewing together, although there was nothing much she could watch apart from a soap about a Cairo dynasty. Straining to understand, her face creased like a silk purse.

  He had to hide his feelings more than once. The second evening she stuck a dozen incense cones in the niches made by jutting stones in the walls, skipping around the fountain in a display of gaiety and grace. The way she held the matches, absorbed by spurts of flame and wistful at their demise, brought Virginia back to him: the night they moved to their first home in Leaford. ‘Anxious and light-headed,’ she said, and he watched her pacing the rooms gingerly like a fennec exploring a rival’s territory; then he clapped as she rushed to set up fairy candles; dozens of small kisses around their bed.

  Khalid slaps the handset back onto the Bakelite telephone someone brought back from France in the 1950s because of its additional mother-in-law earpiece. Damn that Mustapha Al-Dari! How dare the minister, an obnoxious Alawite, call him in at one day’s notice to review this pipeline business at the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources. ‘In the national interest we require solid advice before negotiating our contracts with international oil enterprises ... independent, irreproachable advice … Like yours. I’m told you’ve got a good nose for a Brit. ’ Really? He can see the bullying through the flattery. Solid advice indeed! Does that lead eventually to a personally profitable deal for the minister? He imagines Farouq, his favourite cousin, sneering at the summons: ‘Grow up quick or you’ll dance to their tune.’ Will they play foul? Will it be all kisses and smiles, clapping each other
on the back, smirking at the other buggers who aren’t as clever or ruthless? In London, you have champagne and peerages laid out on the table: seeing the cards you have been dealt, you celebrate with a £10,000 bill at the Savoy. Here you make your moves in a mirage of tea and water, hoping for something far more precious than honour and money – your safety, maybe, or the lifting of travel restrictions.

  Perspiring at the thought of the forthcoming manoeuvres, he wipes the palms of his hands on his trousers, raw with cunning. If Zaida is staying, that’s another reason for him to get something for himself. But how? He could be forced to do business with Uncle Omar, devious enough as a Sunni to become a Ba’athist town councillor waving the banner of modernity in Hama – the old tricks of ruse and greed.

  In a falsetto voice, he bows to the phone: ‘Yes, Minister, our family is committed to supporting your sound and ambitious strategy. Yes, Syria’s sole interest lies in laying down new gas and oil pipelines from Iraq and Eastern Syria to the port of Lattakia. By the way, are you finding serious investors?’ He stops, deep in thought. With the occupation, Iraqi production has declined sharply and low oil prices have less to do with sound business or state-controlled markets than the Americans’ evil presence in the region. Mustapha Al-Dari will like that line, hoping to drop it into the President’s ear. And now that Bashar Al-Assad has nailed his flag to the free market, the minister will play new investors against each other – Russian, Indian and Chinese – and all against the Americans. A win-win situation for backhanders. And for the Al-Sayeds? Self-mocking again: ‘Sure, Minister, it is my job to write the contracts. But, with respect, corruption gives Syria a terrible name.’