A Week in December Page 27

  He scrawled details of the trade on to a ticket and called out to Victoria. Back at her desk, it took her some moments to decipher Duffy’s writing before she carefully booked the trade and pressed ‘Send’.

  II

  In the summer of 2006, Salim asked Hassan if he would like to go on a study trip that the Muslim Youth Coalition had organised to visit Pakistan. He would meet like-minded people and do some ‘training’. Hassan was suspicious, and didn’t know how he could swing it past his parents; even they had not suggested he return ‘home’ to find a wife, but seemed content that he would marry someone English. He declined the offer, not without a qualm, and Salim accepted his refusal with equanimity.

  Six months later, Salim put a further request to him: to meet the Special Vanguard Force. ‘The others who are going have all trained in Pakistan or Somalia, but you’re such a clear thinker, Hass, that I want you to go anyway. You’re brainy. Don’t be alarmed. It’s nothing specific. We’re just looking for the leaders of tomorrow. People who understand the territorial challenge.’

  Salim gave his most Baloo the Bear-like grin. The Vanguard Force was the penultimate tread on the escalator and Hassan was intrigued by the way it carried an English not an Arabic name; attendance involved no flight to Karachi, no long journey to the hills, but a simple train trip of less than three hours to Bradford from King’s Cross. ‘Territorial’ was an interesting word, too.

  In a bare room above a bingo hall off Lumb Lane, Hassan heard the speech that, together with the British invasion of Iraq, made him believe he was ready to act for his beliefs. It came not from a cleric or rabble-rouser but from a junior welfare officer in the town council with a soft voice and a friendly look in his eyes. First they said a prayer, then, as his audience of twelve young men sat cross-legged, politely passing round fruit juice and biscuits, the man, who gave his name as Ali, set to work.

  ‘Brothers. May I begin by welcoming you. The Vanguard Force will not detain you long. You’ll go back to your homes the day after tomorrow. All of you bar one, I know, have already received some training overseas. The message I would like you to take home is this. That life is simple.’

  Hassan looked round and saw the surprise on the faces of the others. Presumably in Pakistan they had been lectured by frothing bigots and paramilitaries; they had not expected to encounter at this late stage someone who spoke in the cadences of a university lecturer.

  So often in the last three years Hassan had felt torn between the rhetoric of purity that came from the mosque and the subversive laughter that came from daily life in a self-mocking country. It was like an enfilade of machine-gun fire: on one side the passion and the grandeur of Islam with its insistent, emotional speakers, loud and inspiring in his ears; and on the other side, the crawling minutes of his every day in a country that could never take itself seriously. He logically believed, he spiritually believed, and he had a young man’s thirst for action; on the other hand, he was a Kilmarnock supporter.

  What inspired and comforted him that evening when Ali spoke was that the tensions disappeared. All seemed inevitably unified: Hassan could be a Toad-reading ‘unillusioned’ Briton who had taken the trouble to understand the truth of human life and was now prepared to act upon it. Ali made final sense of it all.

  ‘Do you ever imagine what an educated kafir thinks when he lies down to sleep?’ Ali asked. ‘Let me tell you. He wonders how it can be that of all creatures in the world, he alone, a man, is cursed with consciousness. He loves his children dearly. He yearns for the flesh of women – or of men. He’ll try to do well in his life tomorrow. He is not, in so many ways, a wicked man. But he faces this contradiction. He knows his story is futile, because the end is already written. He will die, and all his love will come to nothing. He will not be there to see his children live. It’s pure pain, it’s a tragedy for him. And his kafir books and plays explore almost nothing but this brutal contradiction.

  ‘You and I are free of it. God has set us free. When God declared himself to the Prophet and offered his “uncreated” word in the Koran, all doubt went out of human existence. If we submit ourselves to God’s will and live by his laws we will survive for ever in paradise. A place is promised to us by the one true God. There is no mystery, no contradiction. Everything has been explained.

  ‘However, there is one difficulty. Did you spot it? “If we submit ourselves to God”. Well, that’s not so very hard. “A place is promised to us by the one true God.” That isn’t hard at all! The difficulty is this: “If we live by his laws”. That is why you are here: to learn how hard that is – and yet, how possible, how straightforward in practice.

  ‘Islam is not a religion like Judaism or Christianity. It is the sublime, single and transcendent truth. To compare it to the other two religions is like comparing a decision to lower your hand to the immutable law of gravity. Both cause movement, but they are not to be seen on the same scale. Islam is the one truth, revealed by God himself to the Prophet. It pervades every second of your life. God is in your breath, your hand, your thoughts, in the flame in the grate, in the petal of the flower and in every atom of air. Islam is not a “religion” that means you go to the mosque twice a year and forget in between; it is all-pervasive – in every second of your life, in every cell of your body. It has freed mankind from the bondage of the earth, from suffering and poverty. It has freed us from the contradictions of being alive – with death awaiting. Because it has revealed the truth, it has freed us from death. Islam is living. Islam is Life. Or, to put it a better way, life is Islam.

  ‘How then do we live this life, and where? This is the challenge and the battle. At first, the Prophet was told to establish the proper Muslim community, which he did in Medina. Then God told him to spread the word – to free the world from fear and from all the bad practices of superstition and the false gods that enslaved people. This he was to do by the sword. Islam did not conquer people, it freed them. This was not “imperialism”; it was the gift of liberation. Through Africa, Persia and Asia the Muslim armies brought the good news that God was all-powerful and that from now on life had meaning.

  ‘Arabs, Persians, Indians, Africans and Asians joined together in freedom. Islam was not defined by race or nation or colour. It was never an Arabic civilisation, not for a single day. It was never a nationality, always a community of belief. Islam raises no man above another; it has no truck with kings, or tyrants, archbishops or dictators. But it recognises the spirit of the human as transcendent. Remember our poor kafir lying in bed, cursing his consciousness – cursing the fact that by giving him knowledge of his imminent death his god has made him lower than his dog? Islam, on the contrary, knows that humans are higher than all animals, blessed and liberated by Allah. We recognise only two sorts of people: true believers and the others. Either you live in harmony with God or you live in the unreformed world, the Jahiliyya.

  ‘Now the fight that never ends is this. Some empires, such as the Christians and the Zionists, were not like ours – free brotherhoods of the spirit, armed by eternal truth. They were narrow, racially bound nationalists who were interested not in the spiritual life on earth and the eternal life hereafter, but in power, territory and money.

  ‘While the Muslim empire flourished and gave to the world all it needed of science and art for a thousand years, it was driven from its physical locations by these worldly forces. We became a glorious spiritual entity, guardians of truth and freedom, but without a country or a geographical community that we could call our own. There was no place on earth in which sharia law was properly enacted; there was no place on earth that would have pleased the Prophet. Medina and Mecca now found themselves located in a country of corrupt and brutal kings, with licensed slavery. Baghdad, the seat of the caliphs, was no longer in a country the Prophet would have recognised.

  ‘The science and the art we gave the world was based on what God showed us. All things in the believer’s mind emanate from God because submission to His will means that our th
oughts work in harmony with His plan. The mercenary armies of the West stole our science and then detached it from its divine inspiration. Science from then on became not the work of God but the work of atheists bent on power for commercial or nationalist ends.

  ‘I want you to be very clear on this point. The fact that a country calls itself “Muslim” doesn’t mean that it is shaped in God’s will. A so-called “Muslim” country can be as jahili as an atheist or Western one. That is the burden, the grief of Islam – that the countries that use the name “Muslim” are in fact jahili. Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia ... All these offer examples of government profoundly offensive to Islam. Even Iran. We do not believe in “theocracy” more than any other “cracy”.

  ‘That is why the task of the Vanguard Force is a simple one. It is exactly the task that faced the Prophet when he set out from Mecca. We are here to liberate the world: to bring to human beings the wonderful news that their lives do have meaning, purpose, beauty and immortality. But whereas the Prophet began alone, we begin with more than a thousand million believers! So our task is simple: to set up a city, a country, then a world that is run according to the will of the Prophet, and of God.

  ‘Some of our forerunners have tried to do so in so-called “Muslim” states – in Egypt, for instance, where they met only repression and torture. The belief of the Vanguard Force is that we must begin at home, as the Prophet himself did, in his home in Arabia. God did not at first license the Prophet to use force. Once he had secured a base, however, further verses were revealed to him. Muslims were permitted to fight. Next, they were commanded to fight – to defend themselves against aggressors. And finally, when the time was right, the verses were revealed that ordered the spread of the truth through force of arms: they were commanded to fight all non-believers. The truth had to be brought by war to those who did not spontaneously welcome it.

  ‘And so we must begin again. What we do, like the first Muslims, is not “imperialism” or “terrorism” or any such thing. What we are doing is liberating the kafir in his bed from fear. We are proclaiming that life has meaning and is eternal. We are soldiers of the truth. We are the messengers of immortality.

  ‘When you return to your homes, your group leaders may assign you to another organisation: a practical one, the final step. Like Islam itself, it will not have a home. It may not even have a name. Do what they tell you. Trust me, they have access to the truth in the same way that you and I have access to it – through the uncreated and immortal word of God in the Koran, through the Sunna that tell us of the daily life of the Prophet and the Hadiths that describe the proper life. And remember what I said at first. It is so simple. There is no fear. The harshness of life has been taken away from us by the words of the true and only God.’

  Ali stood up, and he was laughing. He was a small man, handsome and elated. He raised his hands in the air. ‘Be light on your feet. Be happy!’

  III

  At about four o’clock, the black phone on John Veals’s desk rang. It was his secretary.

  ‘John. There’s a lady called Caroline Wilby for you. She’s from the Financial Services Authority.’

  ‘Hold her for a minute.’

  Veals stood up. Shit. Fuck. Shit. The blood seemed to have run out of his brain and he felt light-headed. He sat down again, heavily.

  His mind began to clear. Nothing wrong. He had done nothing wrong. He was at arm’s length from everything. All his deals were under – no, over the counter; O’Bagel would have processed them all properly. There was nothing they had done – let alone done wrong – that came within the remit of the FSA; it was all unregulated. As for the ARB rumour, he didn’t even know whether Ryman had done what he suggested in the chat rooms, whether he had spoken to the barman at Saggiorato’s – he knew nothing. And Darke would protect his source; that much had been sworn. Anyway, he’d just pointed Darke to an article in the FT about possible bank mergers, he hadn’t planted the idea. Right.

  ‘Put her on.’

  ‘Mr Veals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, hello. My name’s Caroline Wilby. I work for the FSA. I’m awfully sorry to trouble you, but I wondered if I might ask for your help.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry if it’s an awful imposition, but would it be possible for me to come and see you tomorrow? To ask your advice?’

  ‘I suppose so. I may be going to Zurich. You’d better come early. Eight?’

  ‘Eight? Gosh. Yes. OK. Fine. Shall I come to your office in Old Pye Street?’

  ‘Yes. Ask for me at the desk. They’ll send you up.’

  ‘Thank you so much. I do appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Caroline.’

  He hung up. Was this woman for real? Either she was playing a game, or she was barely out of school.

  Veals put his feet up on the desk and stared out of the window at the piebald brickwork of Westminster Cathedral. His previous feeling of wistfulness had turned a notch closer to regret.

  At the same time, Gabriel Northwood was sitting at his desk, watching an icy sleet fall on the lawns of the Inner Temple and remembering a summer Sunday morning in his cramped flat in Chelsea.

  Catalina was lying flat on her belly across his bed, in jeans, bare feet and bra – a characteristic combination. She said the position and the clothes helped her think. She had at first been shy about her long legs and the freckles on her back; it took her a while before she’d allow him to look at her and run his finger up and down her spine, then saturate his gaze on the shifts of colour in her skin: pink, gold, cream, coral ... He counted them off to her with his finger going over the parts in question. He’d almost forgotten the brown of her eyes, and how he’d expected blue with her pale hair. He stared at her when she lay beside him, making vague Mendelian speculations about recessive eye-colour genes.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.

  ‘Banking,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I never thought I’d fall in love with a banker.’

  ‘I only did it for five years. It wasn’t my life.’

  ‘You never told me why you stopped.’

  ‘It was so boring. No, that’s not the right word. It wasn’t always boring, but it was so pointless. So devoid of any intellectual interest.’ Catalina sat up on the bed. ‘I’m not saying you didn’t need to be clever or quick to make money. You did. But the actual process, the underlying thing that you were doing was without any philosophical content.’

  ‘So what was that underlying thing?’

  ‘Moving hypothetical sums of money from one of a thousand hypothetical homes into a different one. And then, the next day, fighting and scrapping with the same people over the same strip of turf.’

  She went on to give an account of her time in the bond department, waving her hands around to emphasise the circularity of it all. ‘But it wasn’t like that when I started,’ she said. ‘After I’d trained, I spent my first year with this Englishman called Alexander, who was wonderful. The office was in Paris and we were financing the restructuring of the railways in Eastern Europe. Alexander spoke German and Czech. He was very cultured. We used to go to the opera and things like that. You felt you were doing something worthwhile because without our bank they couldn’t have got it done – they’d still have no proper train system. Of course we charged a lot, but it was a job worth doing and they were pleased with what we did.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘People like Alexander were quite rare. Most bankers just saw the post-Communist countries as cash opportunities: children with no knowledge of the capitalist world that they could rip off mercilessly. And when I went back to Paris, they put me on the sell side. And that was like working in a souk in Tangier.’

  ‘It can’t have been that bad,’ said Gabriel. ‘I thought people killed to get these jobs.’

  ‘Well of course, they wore fancy suits and swanked about in first-class on aeroplanes and drop
ped the names of their great banks at dinner parties and hoped that people would be impressed. And it could be great fun. You know, when you suddenly sensed you’d made a hell of a lot, by making the right call. It was really exhilarating, like watching your horse romp home in a race. But it was really just gambling with other people’s money. “OPM” we used to call it. If you lost half a million, you just shrugged and said, “OPM”. And in the end I wanted something with a purpose.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gabriel. ‘So that’s when you decided to become a grocer.’

  Catalina laughed. ‘We liked to believe the Copenhagen Herring and Salami Company was a bit more than a grocery. It was import and export, it was quite big. I started it with a girl from the bank in Paris who was as fed up as I was.’

  ‘And was there a big market abroad for open sandwiches?’

  ‘Stop it. We sold mostly superior ham, you know, like Italian prosciutto, and very expensive salami. Pigs are Denmark’s big thing. Then some cured fish, though we could never really persuade people that herring was a delicacy. But our most successful export was feta cheese. We sold huge amounts to Iran and Iraq. And Greece.’

  ‘I thought Greece had more or less invented feta.’

  ‘They did, but they liked ours better. It was fantastic. The bit I liked best was our own shop in Frederiksburg, which in my mind was based on one of those delis in New York with the best food from everywhere. A lot of it was Italian. It was a showcase. Sometimes I’d even work behind the counter. I think it was a childhood ambition. You know what I really liked? The floor. We had this old wooden splintery floor. And then I got married.’

  When Catalina talked, she quite forgot where she was or what she was wearing; so all the time she was frowning and gesticulating about the shipping of Tuscan olives, Gabriel couldn’t help noticing that her bra had small pink flowers embroidered into the cups or that the colour of the handful of freckles over the bridge of her nose exactly matched that of her eyes, and those on either side of the straps on her shoulders. Although she was a married mother of two, there was something unregenerately childlike in her, something that made him feel by contrast inhibited and worn. Giving up banking, for instance: how impulsive was that? Would he ever have been bold enough to do it?