The Translator

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The Translator Page 3

by Leila Aboulela


  ‘What are you going to be like in a few months’ time?’ she teased her, and they were laughing when Rae opened the front door and walked with them down the steps.

  Outside, Sammar stepped into a hallucination in which the world had swung around. Home had come here. Its dimly lit streets, its sky and the feel of home had come here and balanced just for her. She saw the sky cloudless with too many stars, imagined the night warm, warmer than indoors. She smelled dust and heard the barking of stray dogs among the street’s rubble and pot-holes. A bicycle bell tinkled, frogs croaked, the muezzin coughed into the microphone and began the azan for the Isha prayer. But this was Scotland and the reality left her dulled, unsure of herself. This had happened before but not for so long, not so deeply. Sometimes the shadows in a dark room would remind her of the power cuts at home or she would mistake the gurgle of the central-heating pipes for a distant azan. But she had never stepped into a vision before, home had never come here before. It took time to take in the perfect neatness of the buildings and the gleaming road. It took time for the heating in Yasmin’s car to clear the mist of their breath on the window panes.

  They drove through streets bright with lamplight, full of cars. Young people strolled along Union Street as if they did not feel the cold. Saturday night, another world.

  ‘Rae is different,’ Sammar said. Her voice made it sound like a question.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He’s sort of familiar, like people from back home.’

  ‘He’s an orientalist. It’s an occupational hazard.’

  Sammar did not like the word orientalist. Orientalists were bad people who distorted the image of the Arabs and Islam. Something from school history or literature, she could not remember. Maybe modern orientalists were different. Her eyesight was becoming blurred. She felt tired, deflated. The headlights of the cars were too bright, round savage circles crossed by swords.

  ‘Do you think he could one day convert?’ Mirages shimmered on the asphalt.

  Yasmin snorted. ‘That would be professional suicide.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because no one will take him seriously after that. What would he be? Another ex-hippy gone off to join some weird cult. Worse than a weird cult, the religion of terrorists and fanatics. That’s how it would be seen. He’s got enough critics as it is: those who think he is too liberal, those who would even accuse him of being a traitor just by telling the truth about another culture.’

  ‘A traitor to what?’

  ‘To the West. You know, the idea that West is best.’

  ‘But you can never tell about people,’ said Sammar. ‘Look at this uncle of his…’

  ‘Are you hoping he would convert so you could marry him?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I was just wondering.’ She breathed in and out as if it was an effort. Her eyes ached, her nose ached. ‘I was just wondering because he knows so much about Islam…’

  ‘This annoys him.’

  ‘What annoys him?’

  ‘That Muslims expect him to convert just because he knows so much about Islam.’

  They had reached Sammar’s place by then. She could hardly open her eyes to put the key in the lock, light was a source of suffering. And a headache, pain greater than childbirth. Inside, she wanted to hit her head against something to dislodge what was inside. Sleep, which came so easily in this hospital room, in layers and hours, would not come now. The silence, the absence of pain would not come. Ya Allah, Ya Arham El-Rahimeen. When sleep finally came it was desperate unconsciousness. She woke up clear, weightless, full of calm. She thought she must have had something between a migraine and a fit.

  3

  Others walked in the Winter Gardens now. Mid-morning and families were calling out to each other, strolling among the flowers and green plants. A boy ran past Sammar and Rae, holding a red packet of crisps, the arms of his jacket tied round his waist. Her son would be the same age now as this boy. No longer curved like a baby, no longer learning how to talk. A schoolboy. Mahasen had written to her and said, schools here are not what they used to be, you must come and take him back, it would be better for him. Her aunt’s letter arrived when the city was covered in fog (even the postman still made his rounds unperturbed in the dark). A year later and Sammar was still paralysed, unresponsive to her son. Froth, ugly froth.

  She could not forget what her aunt had said to her, that night when they quarrelled about Ahmad Ali Yasseen, an old family friend. Nine months have not yet passed, you want to get married again… and to whom? A semi-illiterate with two wives and children your age. I’ll never give permission for something like this. From what sort of clay have you been made of? Explain to me. Explain what you think you’re going to do… Throughout her childhood, ‘Am Ahmad had come to visit from the south. A roll of dust behind his Toyota van, crates of mangoes, straps of sugar cane. He laughed happiness.

  Sammar always remembered him as laughing, except the time he cried for Tarig, his stomach shaking underneath his white jellabia the same way it did when he laughed. Doctor. He called Tarig ‘doctor’ even when Tarig was sixteen and waiting for his exam results.

  Tarig, Rae had asked about Tarig. There was Ethiopian blood in his family, in the copper hint to his skin, the shape of his nose. Studying for exams, so many exams to become a doctor. Tarig doodling music on his notes. They came to Aberdeen for more exams. Part One, Part Two. Exams that never ended. Cultureshocked they were alone together for the first time. No Mahasen, no Hanan. No one in this new city but them. They had dreamed of this, talked of this. Yet like the elderly who remember the distant past more clearly than the events of the previous day, Sammar lived with a young Tarig inside her head.

  ‘When he was fourteen,’ she said to Rae, ‘Tarig broke his leg. He fell off a ladder while he was trying to hang up a poster in his room. The ladder fell too. It made a terrible bang which woke Mahasen from her afternoon nap. She came rushing into the room and beat him with her slipper for being careless and for waking her up. I was laughing at him, I couldn’t help it. I covered my mouth knowing it was wrong to laugh when grown-ups were angry. But I couldn’t stop myself. He looked so funny tangled up with the ladder, fending off Mahasen’s slipper. It was a good thing she did not see me laughing or else she would have turned on me too.’

  In the Winter Gardens, Sammar started to laugh. ‘I always laugh,’ she said, ‘when people fall down, I can’t help myself.’ And Rae laughed and said, ‘Not a very refined sense of humour.’

  She said, ‘No, not very,’ and went on. ‘His father had to take him to Germany for an operation – the doctors had to put metal pins in his calf. The day they came back, the house was full of people and all the lights were on. From Germany, they brought with them boxes and boxes of lovely chocolates. Mahasen saved them for the important guests and everyone else got Mackintosh toffees, a tin that was past its sell-by date. They sold them like that, imported at the Duty Free Shop, the chocolates ashy-grey, the toffees stuck to their wrapping.

  ‘Tarig came back different, like he was suddenly older, even though he had been away only for a month. His leg was in plaster and he had crutches which Hanan and I took turns to hop with around the house. I wrote my name in Arabic and in English on the white plaster.’

  It had been easy to talk when they were young. Things changed when they outgrew sparklers and bikes. Or even, she sometimes thought, things changed from the time he broke his leg. If Hanan was with them they could talk, the three of them, about films they had seen or who Tarig had met in the petrol queue. But if Hanan left them alone, to make Tang or answer the telephone there would be an awkward silence between them. Silly talk, while they heard her stir the orange powder in the glasses, bang the ice tray in the kitchen sink. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ When his sister came back they would look guilty as if they had done something wrong.

  Shyness pestered them for years. It was scratchy like wool. It made them want Hanan to be with them so they could talk and want
ed her away from them so they could be alone. Tarig sent her notes at school with his best friend’s sister, overriding Hanan, although she was in the same class. The treachery dazzled more than the words he wrote. Flimsy papers that weighed in her hand like rocks. She tore them and scattered the tiny pieces in different places, afraid that someone would find them. She liked to talk to him on the phone, it was safe on the phone. On the phone, they swapped recurrent nightmares and happy dreams. He said, ‘I want to tell you something but I’m too shy.’

  She imagined that what she wanted from life was simple, nothing grand, just to continue and live in the same place, be another Mahasen when she grew up. Have babies, get fat, sit with one leg crossed over the other and complain to life-long friends about the horrific rise in prices, the hours Tarig had to spend at the clinic. But continuity, it seemed, was in itself ambitious. Tarig was plucked from this world without warning, without being ill, like a little facial hair is pulled out by tweezers.

  ‘You must tell me about this,’ she said to Rae, holding up her folder. ‘Are all the rumours about you true?’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘You and the terrorists or is it all top secret?’

  He laughed and put his finger on the blue folder. ‘You tell me first what you thought of it.’

  ‘It’s sad,’ she said.

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘There is something pathetic about the spelling mistakes, the stains on the paper, in spite of the bravado. There are truths but they are detached, not tied to reality…’

  ‘They are all like that.’

  ‘You get a sense of people overwhelmed,’ she went on, ‘overwhelmed by thinking that nothing should be what it is now.’

  ‘They are shooting themselves in the foot. There is no recourse in the Sharia for what they’re doing, however much they try and justify themselves.’

  ‘When are you going to meet them?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t get the job, they took someone else, someone with more palatable views, no doubt.’

  ‘I am sorry about that.’ She wished she had not joked about it before.

  ‘I am sorry too. A winter in Egypt seemed to me like a good idea.’ He looked at the windows. Beyond the Winter Gardens, Sammar saw a world dim with inevitable rain, metallic blue, dull green. Lawns empty of people, covered with dead leaves.

  ‘But really it would have been good for the department. We have to prove ourselves useful to industry or the government to keep the funding coming in.’

  She looked at the slabs on the ground, hexagonals by lines of pebbles. Tidy, rubbish free. Was it Tarig who always shaped designs in the dust with his feet? Or was it she? Shifted twigs, dented bottle tops, kicked around a pebble that stood out from among the rest because of its striking shape, its different colour. And to avoid Tarig’s eyes, she had pulled little oblong leaves from their stems, tied the stems in knot after knot. Rolled the petals of jasmines between her fingers till they became pulp.

  ‘I was thinking of you.’ Rae said. ‘This is why I wanted you to translate this. They need a translator. I would be happy to recommend you. It would be a short contract, no more than a month. Then maybe from Cairo you could go home to Khartoum for a visit. How far is it from Cairo?’

  ‘Two and a half hours by plane.’ She looked at him warily, there was now a distance between them, a new coolness. ‘You imagine that I can interview terrorists?’ Her voice sounded a little sarcastic, grudging.

  ‘The place will be swarming with security. You needn’t worry about that. Anyway, a lot of them would not have taken part in terrorist activities. And you’re translating, not interviewing, someone else will be asking the questions. I think you’ll do fine.

  ‘These anti-terrorist programmes,’ he said, ‘I see them as part of a hype to cover up the real problems of unemployment and inefficient government. I’ve spoken to members of these extremist groups before and you will see that if you speak to them, they have no realistic policies, no clear idea of how to implement what they vaguely call “Islamic economics”, or an “Islamic” state. They are protest movements, and they do have plenty to protest about. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the mediocrity of the ruling party which has no mass support and which are in the main client states to the West. These groups appeal to people’s anger, anger against class divisions, but do people really believe them to be a viable alternative? I don’t think so.

  ‘I’ll get off my soap-box now,’ he said and laughed. His laugh turned into a cough. ‘I’m sorry to go on about this. Consider it though. I think it would be a good chance for you to go home, see your family.’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  But he did not understand. ‘It’s natural to be afraid of a new job.’

  When she did not answer, he said, ‘There are other rooms in these gardens, do you want to see them?’

  They walked away from the cacti through greenery, among tropical plants with large leaves, pink flowers. Miniature waterfalls and streams where little girls teased the swimming fish. And all around them the sound of the birds and running water. Water rushing in the pipes that ran along the ceiling to keep the air humid or was it already pouring with rain outside?

  In the farthest corner, in a stagnant pond, near the toilets and the fire exit, a comical mechanised frog rose and fell. It broke the surface of the scum and rose, jaws wide open, to spit out the water it existed in. Down again it sank, heaved, only to obey and rise again. The boy with the jacket around his waist was there, kneeling by the side of the pond. He had a friend with him and they appeared to be greatly amused by the frog. The boy pulled a piece of gum out of his mouth, long and silvery, he made a loop of it and put the other end into his mouth. It dangled long, nearly touching the ground where he knelt. The actions that make mothers scold, ‘Put that gum back in your mouth. Don’t play with it.’ She had said to Mahasen, ‘I want to get married again, I need a focus in my life,’ and her aunt’s reply was, Your son is your focus. But she had left him behind, come here and her focus became the hospital room, watching from the window people doing what she couldn’t do. Four years’ convalescing. If she went home now, she would bring Amir back with her, if he would agree to come. She would not escape from him again.

  Glass corridors led on to other rooms where there were tree barks, plants for sale in flower pots, giant mushrooms shaped out of stone. Back in the desert room, their bench was empty, the light welcomed her. No electric frog, no foliage, just the coarse, sparse aridity that was familiar to her from long ago.

  The sound of running water was the rain against the glass. It was like the rain of her dream, her first dream of the present, the first time this grey landscape had found a place in her sleeping mind. Four years and her soul had dived into the past, nothing in the present could touch it. ‘But if you go home,’ Rae said, ‘you would find it hard to come back and I would not have a translator any more.’ She learnt, then, the meaning of his kindness. That he knew she was heavy with other loyalties, full to the brim with distant places, voices in a language that was not his own.

  4

  Christmas Day and everything was closed, shops, work, and the bus did not pass underneath the window of her flat. No snow, the pavements black with rain. A brief day, cold silver sandwiched between two nights. Empty streets, as if people were indoors asleep or the whole day was an extended dawn of a morning that would not start until the New Year. But Sammar knew that this was not true. Somewhere hidden away was the culmination of the serious shopping of the past weeks, trees, turkeys, families sitting on settees. Like in the pictures she had seen in magazines. Private people, she thought, made private by the cold. Celebrating indoors and the streets, instead of looking festive, look bleak without people.

  She could hear the television from the flat downstairs. Lesley’s flat on the ground floor. The elderly lady turned it up because she could not hear so well now. Through the floorboards came applause and music, unique television sounds – the only thing not on holiday
today. They kept Sammar company as the sounds of Lesley’s comings and goings usually did, more so than the other tenants. The front door opening and shutting, Lesley shaking out her umbrella on the mat. She was a war widow, living alone, robust small frame, unblemished white hair, friendly and alert.

  Sammar had addressed her as Aunt once out of politeness, in the early days when she had come smarting and feverish from Khartoum, without Tarig, without Amir, only the grudge against her aunt. But otherwise a soft heart, too soft, sickly soft, so that when the elderly woman had replied, taken aback, ‘I’m not your aunt,’ all surprise in her tired hazel eyes, ‘Call me Lesley,’ Sammar cried from the landing to the first floor, silly, easy tears. Surface tears like the ones chopping onions produce, even though she had not been able to cry over her son’s head when she held him goodbye.

  At three o’clock, when the day began to darken, she put the lights off so she could still look out of the window and not be seen. She drew loops through the condensation that clung to the glass panes, pushed with her finger drops that dribbled to the sill below. Could she trance herself to hear the azan? The sunset azan, almost as special as the dawn, when the muezzin added the words Prayer is better than sleep. She was fasting today, making up for days missed in Ramadan. It was easy to fast from the dawn at seven in the morning to the sunset at half-past three. Tarig would have joked about that. ‘Cheating,’ he would have said. ‘Too easy, it doesn’t count.’ She remembered him fasting Ramadan when he was twelve and still going swimming, riding his bicycle in the burning heat of the afternoon, defiant and a little crazy, wanting to prove he was strong. But they had all been like that, even the girls. Are you fasting? A cool Yeah, or just a nod, deliberately casual, like it was not a big thing. Though later in the month they would copy their mothers, my head aches, I can’t bear it. I have lost weight, I can hardly eat at night.

 

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