Lewis On the Greenwich Line

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-908670-96-0
Verlag: Peirene Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

'I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It's written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.' - Hisham Matar, author of My Friends and The Return In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath's death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who've fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.

Shady Lewis, born 1978, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing centres on cultural and political intersections within and beyond the Arab world. He lives in London, where he has spent many years employed by the National Health Service and local authority housing departments, working with homeless people and patients with complex needs. He has published three novels in Arabic to date - The Lord's Ways (2018), On the Greenwich Line (2019), and A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (2021) - each of which engage with the social history of Coptic Christians and trajectories of migration from Egypt to the West, and a travel diary, Death Tourism, or a Comedy of Foreigners (2024). On the Greenwich Line has also been translated into German, French and Italian; the French translation was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix de la littérature arabe.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lewis, Shady

Weitere Mitwirkende

Halls, Katharine

Leseproben

1

He was a full twenty years younger than me. Other than that, I still didn’t know much about him. Indeed, a few days earlier I hadn’t even known he existed. It’s not unusual to be unaware of certain other people’s existence in the world; of most people’s, even. But the fact that I was now responsible for his body, so suddenly and out of the blue, was bound to cause me some anxiety. Death was going after people half my age, and without any preliminaries at all! Still, that in itself didn’t bother me more than listening uneasily to death counts on the morning news. I think what horrified me beyond all else was the way he’d died. How dismal to die like that, and at that age: in one’s room, quietly, lying on the bed, without even one person to witness what had happened. It wasn’t a death that seemed well suited to our times. For better or worse, we seem obliged to take death seriously these days, to consider it an unmitigated evil that can’t be justified or understood.

The poor guy might have died in slightly grander fashion. In a way that wouldn’t have been so hard on his loved ones. He could have met his end alongside a few other people; even if nothing had tied them together but their shared death, at least he would have had some company, which is not nothing. In fact it’s been very popular lately. Or he could have died in front of a few witnesses, so the details of his final moments, recounted again and again, could have brought some comfort to his family, or added just that bittersweetness necessary to keep his memory fresh and vivid for as long as possible. His death could have been preceded by some sort of suffering. Then it would have been seen as deliverance, bringing relief to those around him. At worst he could’ve been killed in a car accident or something like that. Even that sort of senseless cruelty is a thing of some consequence, and provokes a gasp and a hand clapped to the heart in those who hear about it, followed by a shake of the head at the absurdity of fate…

None of this would have made much difference to the deceased, it’s true. As far as we know, the dead don’t suffer from the cruelty of death anywhere near as much as the living. Those sorry souls are expected to gather up the severed parts of whatever’s been destroyed by the dead person’s departure and carry on living as if nothing at all has happened. It’s a miracle more impressive than birth and no less tragic than death itself.

I was an especially unlucky living person, who, by some twist of fate, had been given the arduous task of experiencing up close the death of a person entirely unknown to me. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself. One night, around midnight, I’d got a call from Ayman in Cairo; that was the start of everything. I could have refused outright to get involved. I could simply have said no, or wriggled out of it with one of the little lies I’d got into the habit of using since I’d come to live in London, but you can’t underestimate embarrassment and the things it’ll make you do.

It was the first and only time Ayman had come to me needing something; in fact, nobody from Cairo had asked me for a favour of any kind since I’d left. This was my first chance in ten years to prove that my being in London had some purpose or was of any use to anyone. It was a combination of hubris and shame, and it was bound to lead to disaster.

After a short opening gambit in which he assured me that I wasn’t obliged to help him, and that he’d understand completely if I said no, Ayman asked me to go the following morning to a hospital in East London, collect the dead body of a twenty-year-old man, and make arrangements for his burial. That was it. He didn’t give any further details.

‘It’s a direct request, and I need a one-word answer – yes or no.’

Ayman’s voice was firm, and I could see there was no point trying to sway him, but I did my best anyway.

‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘Can’t you tell me who it is first, what the situation is?’

As expected, all this achieved was an even firmer response. ‘If you can do us this favour, I’ll tell you what I know,’ he replied, ‘but if not, then there’s no point chewing your ear off. So? Yes or no?’

Ayman got the answer he wanted with no trouble at all; within thirty seconds of picking up the phone I’d agreed to do it. His winning card wasn’t the frosty note I could clearly hear in his voice. It wasn’t the closed question, either, with the minimal, condensed answer it required – a tyrannical simplicity no question had ever held before – that wrested my assent out of me.

It was my curiosity that did it. Ayman wouldn’t have told me the story of the deceased if I’d said no; I’m sure he’d have punished me rigorously and never mentioned the dead young man again. He knew curiosity was my weak point, and he exploited it ruthlessly.

Despite the intrigue of the request, the excitement fizzled out completely as soon as Ayman started to explain. Any thrill of enlightenment that went through me didn’t last more than a second or two. As usual, once the secret was spoken, all cause for curiosity evaporated. It didn’t surprise me: in general, I find that knowing things, for all that people get excited about it, is overrated and boring.

To tell you the truth, the story of the young man, Ghiyath, would have been more exciting if it had happened, say, ten years ago. Or if it hadn’t been so intensely repetitive. If it had ended with some unforeseen outcome or been crowned by a more heroic death. In fact the story was quite dull, and quite disappointing, to the point I can scarcely now remember more than its broad outlines. Ayman was acquainted with a Syrian family who’d moved into a small house next door to his mother’s home in their village. This might have been the most interesting detail in the whole story, because I couldn’t imagine how any Syrian had ended up in the village of al-Tayyibin in Upper Egypt, a place you’d struggle to find on a map to begin with.

Anyway. The family had fled Syria when the war there got worse. The fact they’d ended up in Egypt was proof they were either exceptionally unlucky or desperate. Meanwhile, their only adult son – Ghiyath – had stayed in Syria for the sole reason that he was locked up in one of the security regime’s prisons; which one, I can’t remember, not that it would add anything to the story. According to Ayman, Ghiyath and two cellmates had dug a tunnel a hundred miles long using plastic spoons, a tunnel that traversed the line dividing regime and opposition territory. Yet no sooner had he climbed out of the tunnel than one of the opposition factions arrested him for some reason or other (no surprises so far). For the three weeks he was detained in opposition territory, control shifted back and forth between twenty-two different factions (or twenty-three? I’m not sure). A sharia judge allied to one of the factions condemned him to death for reasons uncertain, but the judge himself was executed half an hour later. And so the late Ghiyath escaped certain death.

The story then gets tediously bogged down in labyrinthine details: how he survived forty-one air raids carried out by aeroplanes from twenty-one different countries; the regime’s barrel bomb assaults; gas attacks, both the coloured and colourless kinds, the kinds that have a powerful stench and the kinds that are odourless; and that’s without even mentioning the Katyusha rockets. By pure chance Ghiyath experienced this whole assortment of horrors while barely more than a child.

That he ended up in yet another security facility only adds a further layer of repetition to the narrative. Certainly the methods of torture used at the prison oblige us to recognize the singular talent and imagination that must have gone into inventing them, and to appreciate the zeal and commitment shown in their application. But in the end these things all achieve very similar results. Ghiyath dug himself another tunnel, longer than the first, to get him out of the country altogether; he dug alone, and without the help of any cutlery this time. But I think Ayman was probably exaggerating when he claimed Ghiyath had done all this with hands tied behind his back.

On his nineteenth birthday Ghiyath finally emerged out of the tunnel at the seashore, and swam from Beirut to Alexandria in a mere three days; apparently a friendly dolphin accompanied him on the journey and kept a vigilant watch the whole time. But unluckily for Ghiyath, that summer day wasn’t the most propitious time to arrive in Egypt, because for various convoluted and trivial reasons, Syrians had suddenly become unwelcome. But here he finally had a stroke of good luck in that the Egyptians put him on the first flight out of the country. The plane flew round in circles for a few days, looking for somewhere to drop him off – somewhere that would agree to take him – before finally landing in Ecuador. Why not?

Ten months went by. He travelled through four continents and fifty-seven countries on foot, sometimes alone and sometimes in company; stayed in forty-three camps; crossed two oceans, four seas and...