The Street Between Houses of God

The television behind the counter delivered its verdict in the flat, measured tones that the BBC reserves for catastrophe. Another vote passed. Another line crossed. The ticker scrolled across the bottom of the screen like a wound that would not close. Yusuf's Fine Grocers occupied the narrowest frontage on Arbour Street — wedged between the old synagogue to the east and St. Margaret's church to the west. For twenty years this had been the gentle joke of the neighbourhood: that you could buy your bread in the middle of an interfaith dialogue.

The rabbi no longer came in for tahini. Father Brennan crossed to the other pavement when he saw the shop lights on. Neighbours who had shared twenty Christmases and twenty Eids now shared only silence. Yusuf wiped the counter in slow circles, the way his wife used to when she was thinking. The bell above the door had not rung all afternoon — until now.

Sophie — the primary school teacher from number forty-two — stepped inside, her cream hijab darkened with rain. She was trying very hard not to cry, and failing. Someone had sprayed a slogan across the side of her car in red paint. The words were ugly, political, aimed at no one and everyone at once. She had parked outside the synagogue, so perhaps they thought she was Jewish. Or perhaps they knew she was Muslim and did not care about the irony.

Yusuf listened. He made her tea. And then he did something he had not done in months. He stepped outside and began to knock on doors — not with petitions or arguments, but with a simple invitation. Chai at the shop, seven o'clock, everyone welcome. Each knock felt heavier than the last, each pause at the threshold longer. But he kept walking, kept knocking, until every door on Arbour Street had heard him.

The first hour was unbearable. Rabbi Levine in one corner. Father Brennan in another. Sophie on the stool by the till, still red-eyed. Old Mrs. Okonkwo from the laundrette holding her cup as though it were the only warm thing left in London. No one spoke beyond the necessary courtesies. Then the rabbi set down his cup with a tremor in his hand and spoke of something none of them expected — his own fear. Not of anyone in the room, but of what was happening to him inside. Father Brennan nodded slowly, and his voice, when it came, carried the weight of weeks of silence.

Sophie wiped her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was steady for the first time that evening. The silence that followed was different from the silence that had preceded it. It was the silence of people seeing each other again after a long absence.

Yusuf refilled the cups and thought of a line from Imam Ali (AS) — that people are enemies of what they do not know. None of them had been enemies. They had simply stopped knowing each other. The gathering did not solve the war. It did not remove the paint from Sophie's car — though three of them went out the next morning with white spirit and rags to do precisely that. What it did was something smaller, and perhaps more necessary. It returned to a single street in East London the stubborn, fragile conviction that the people beside you are not the people on the screen. As the last guest left, Yusuf locked the door and stood in his quiet shop, between the synagogue and the church. He whispered Bismillah, and turned off the lights.