Now a little past three and Sammar counted, twenty minutes to go. She had a sheet of paper from the mosque with the times of prayer for each day. December 25th, maghrib was 15:31. She would eat a date first, drink water, pray, and then she would eat the rice she had made earlier, the rest of the beans she had cooked yesterday. Then she could spend the evening working for she had a lot of work to finish, before she went away.
She was going away in February to Egypt, part of the antiterrorist programme. She had been to the interview in London and seen in the file that the interviewer held before him, her completed application form, photocopies of her degree, Rae’s signature on the letter of reference. And she had answered all the questions confidently, as if she were strong, as if she were not afraid. At the back of her mind, the motivation, I will see home again. The job was for three weeks in which experts were going to interview members of extremist groups in Egypt and she was going to be the interpreter. After the three weeks were over, she would fly the two hours home, to Khartoum, and she would bring Amir back with her. All this needed organising, planning a new phase in her life. But the energy came, the recovery in limbs and parts of the mind that had not been used for a long time.
She had lived four years as if home had been taken away from her in the same way Tarig had. To see home again. It was a chandelier on the ceiling of her life, circles of lights. To see again the streets where Tarig had ridden his bike, and she had walked every day after school to him and Hanan, walking towards the airport, with her back to where the sun would later set. To go to where everything happened, her aunt’s house; laughter on their wedding, fire when she brought Tarig’s body home. Shimmering things. Painting with ice on the liver-red tiles, fearing stray dogs, in weddings dreaming of her own future wedding, visiting fortunetellers who threw shells on the dust and never answered the questions she was there to ask.
The sound of the television fell to a quiet, even murmur. The Queen’s Speech. Sammar thought that Rae would be listening to it now in Edinburgh, with his family, after the Christmas lunch in a room of red and green, in a scene like the ones she had seen in the fat catalogues that were pushed through the letter box for free. It would mean something to him, what his Queen said or did not say, in comparison to previous years. Sammar felt separate from him, exiled while he was in his homeland, fasting while he was eating turkey and drinking wine. They lived in worlds divided by simple facts – religion, country of origin, race – data that fills forms. But he doesn’t drink anymore, she reminded herself. He had told her that and it had been another thing which made him less threatening. Another thing which made him not so different from her. From the beginning she had thought that he was not one of them, not modern like them, not impatient like them. He talked to her as if she had not lost anything, as if she were the same Sammar of a past time. Talked to her in that way not once, not twice, but every time. So that she had been tempted to ask, in the moments when the mind loops and ebbs, where do you know me from, why are you different from everyone else. Tempted to say, I am not strong enough for this. It had been too much visiting him that day with Yasmin. Even the day at the Winter Gardens she had gone home with the blindness coming on suddenly, blurring out bits of the granite buildings and the cars on the road.
But in February she was going home, and she could change her plans, stay there forever and he would become a memory of someone who had once been kind to her. She would remember his timetable, lectures, tutorials, the names of the Ph.D. students whose theses he supervised. An earnest man from Sierra Leone, a lady from Algeria struggling with English, two English students who wore large glasses and took the tutorials for some of his classes. Sammar liked talking to them. Over lunches and coffees in the noisy University self-service, she would move the conversation towards him. Smile as they praised him or made fun of the way he always said, ‘And why is that?’ The words of the students took on a lyrical quality, to be hived away, to be memorised for no reason.
At home among people she had known all her life, she would remember things she had come to know about him. The names of books lined up on the wall of his office, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, The Wretched of the Earth, Religion in the Third World, Culture and Imperialism, Radical Islam, Terrorism in Africa, Muslim Extremism in Egypt.
She knew the different ways that he talked. Guarded, very careful when she asked him where he got this document of Al-Nidaa. ‘I have friends.’ Smiling, almost smug, as he held the stained papers in his hand and said, ‘Researchers would kill for something as grass-roots as this!’ And his voice once on the radio, on a discussion-type programme, speaking with a nervousness and urgency that was not familiar to her, “… not the biggest threat facing the Western world. If we look at real terrorist damage, Muslim extremists have caused much less of it than the IRA, the Red Brigade, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Basque separatist ETA…’
A shift after the Winter Gardens. At the end of a long, full day when she knocked at the door of his office and he pushed back his chair. ‘You I always have time for, I can’t bear anyone else at this moment except you.’ Lecturing her, ‘A so-called developing country is characterised by three things: one, an export-based economy; two, an inadequate infrastructure; three, a history of colonial rule.’
She knew about his asthma. Intrinsic, not triggered by an allergy. He would take two puffs of Ventolin from a blue inhaler. Shaking it first, casually while talking about something else. It left a line of powder on his lips which he licked away. The rasping sound his chest made, when she listened closely enough. He looked tired at the end of the day. Tired and coughing as winter drew in with its germs, coughing and apologising. Excuse me, Sammar, Sorry, Sammar, until her own chest hurt.
A shift after the Winter Gardens. He asked her to have her lunch with him, in his office with the glass-panelled wall through which the coffee-scented secretaries scribbled Christmas cards and Yasmin, pregnancy visible now, stared at Sammar. He was quite proud of his lunch, carefully prepared. Tuna sandwich, malted bread, two apples, four oat-bran biscuits, a can of Irn-bru. In a cold rush of intimidation, Sammar thought, is this what he does every morning, prepares his lunchbox with care. Her sandwich, smeared only with butter, was wrapped up in the same clingfilm as the day before – she could barely manage to drag herself to work in the morning darkness. And, horror, it was true, there was a green furry spot on the edge of the bread she was holding in her hands. Stinging shame, mouldy sandwich. Clumsy exit, days of avoiding him, avoiding Yasmin. Only listening to his students praise him; lyrics from Sierra Leone, in Arabic from the Algerian lady.
She turned on the tap and the gush drowned the sound of Lesley’s TV. Of all the people in the building, Sammar saw Lesley the most. Lesley was the one who answered the telephone in the landing, a pay-phone shared by everyone except Lesley, who had her own portable telephone with answering machine (won as a prize from the Littlewoods catalogue). When Sammar and Lesley spoke they spoke of the weather or Lesley complained about the other tenants. The students who quarrelled and one of them called the police, ‘what a carry on’; and how the girl in 3b ended up in Casualty when she covered herself in cooking oil and lay in the sun of a heatwave July. Lesley was always busy, she went out in every kind of weather to play Bingo. In the months when Sammar had hauled her pain up and down the stairs, she would admire Lesley, so many years older than herself and more full of life. Living alone and filling up with her own self the empty space of a flat, a garden, a niche in life.
Thirty-five minutes past three and Sammar ate a date that tasted even sweeter because she was breaking a fast. Then she drank the water and felt herself to be simple, someone with a simple need, easily fulfilled, easily granted. The dates and the water made her heart feel big, with no hankering or tanginess or grief.
She rinsed her hands. Her wet face in the mirror was not different from the Sammar of the past, softer perhaps, blurred, the eyes dimmer than they had been. She rinsed her feet. Yesterday she had noticed her feet, noticed the
ir dryness and cared enough to buy a pumice stone. She had scraped the rough skin that had not been removed for years. She had also noticed her hair, put unsalted butter on it like she had done before, wrapped it in silver foil and felt the butter melt through her scalp before she shampooed it away. Her hair will become stronger that way, shiny after the years of neglect, the strands of white that Tarig had not seen.
Her prayer mat had tassels on the edges, a velvety feel, a smell that she liked. The only stability in life, unreliable life, taking turns the mind could not imagine. When she finished praying, she sat for the tasbeeh, her thumb counting on each segment of her fingers, three for each finger, fifteen for a hand, Astaghfir Allah, Astaghfir Allah, Astaghfir Allah,… I seek forgiveness from Allah… I seek forgiveness from Allah… I seek forgiveness… the twenty-ninth time, thirty, she heard the telephone in the landing ring, thirty-one, thirty-two, Lesley’s footsteps on the stairs, thirty-three, and what was left of her concentration scattered with the knock on the door.
His voice sounded complaining, the first greeting, her name and she felt herself tugged away from the day that had been unrolling upstairs. He said, ‘It’s Rae here,’ as he always did at work on the telephone. She was slow in replying, wondering why he was calling her on a holiday, from another city. He asked, ‘Were you asleep?’ and this made her laugh, warm towards him, he who was able to imagine a siesta in the darkness of a British Christmas afternoon.
‘I finally managed to get hold of that Azhar thesis I was telling you about,’ he said. She remembered him mentioning it, the topic was about justice and the ruler or the unjust ruler, she was not sure.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘It’s been difficult to get hold of?’
‘Slow. But I’m very pleased now.’ He did not sound pleased, though, his voice sounded strained. ‘We’ll meet when I get back. Maybe you could start translating the abstract and the title chapters, the introduction perhaps. You’re leaving soon, you won’t have much time.’
‘Six weeks,’ she said, ‘about six weeks.’
‘You’re counting the days?’
‘Sometimes. I think I will have time to do the introduction too, if it’s not very long.’
‘We’ll see when I get back and show it to you,’ he said. She expected him to end the conversation, say goodbye. She did not expect the silence that followed.
‘Are you enjoying the holiday?’ she asked.
‘No, not enjoying it. There is too much talk of food in this house. They are food connoisseurs here. They eat and at the same time talk of other meals, reminisce about dishes. Over breakfast they’re planning what they’ll cook for dinner, arguing about it.’
‘They,’ Sammar learned, were his ex-wife’s family. He was staying with them because his daughter, Mhairi, was there. She spent the school holidays in her grandparents home. Her mother was still in Geneva, where she worked with the WHO.
Culture-shock for Sammar. An old man in Edinburgh was allowing his daughter’s ex-husband under his roof. This must be civilised behaviour, an ‘amicable divorce’. Where she come from, the divorced spouse was one who ‘turned out to be a son of a dog’ or ‘she turned out to be mad’ and were treated as such. No one ‘stayed friends’, no one stayed on talking terms.
She asked about his daughter. He said that she was pretty and saturated today with Christmas presents. He said that every time he saw her, it took a day or two for her to speak to him beyond yes, no and don’t know, then she talked non-stop until she got on his nerves. He said that everyday so far, except today, they had escaped from the cordon bleu of the house to the glaring yellow of Burger King and a Kebab take-away shop. He said that he wanted Mhairi to grow up to be as subversive as him.
About his ex-wife’s parents and the food, Sammar said, ‘Maybe they want you to get back together again and so they are being extra hospitable.’
Nothing she said startled him. She was almost used to this now.
‘No, it’s not like that. They’re quite satisfied with the way things are.’ He went on in an even voice, ‘When you are climbing the WHO’s ladder of success, the last thing you need is a husband skulking around, criticising the UN, pointing out the hypocrisy of their policies.’
Sammar held the receiver tight and stared at the bicycles that were stored under the staircase, the ‘Don’t Forget Your Keys’ sign on the front door.
‘On the day before I came here,’ he said, ‘I was down in Personnel and I needed to photocopy something. The photocopier was in a small room that I had never been into before. It had old curtains in a large pattern of orange and brown. A kind of distinctive seventies’ look, out-dated now. They made me remember the house. We had curtains like these, bright orange, blue and brown. It was a good house – built in the late sixties, with a view over the Dee. The kitchen and lounge were upstairs and there were windows from floor to ceiling along the whole length of the room. All for the brilliant view. It would remind you of the Nile, Sammar, only the Nile is wider and its banks less complex. It reminded me of the Nile. We were just back from Egypt then. She had not liked it there much. She liked walking and Cairo is not a city for walks.
‘I remember when the house got sold, she came from Geneva to pack. I would come home from work and find her sitting on the floor smoking and sorting out things. Too many things. Books and records, old clothes. We never liked throwing things away, magazines, newspapers, they would just pile up. I taped the boxes and she divided everything up. She left me everything that was North African, everything Islamic.
‘We used to smoke together when we first met. Cigarettes and other things. It was the thing to do then. She smoked even through her pregnancy. I only stopped when my asthma got worst. But still the house was full of smoke, cigarette smoke and bad feelings.’
Sammar could see a house with orange curtains, a river view, rooms filled with beautiful objects, European and African things. Inside the house life was smoke and bad feelings.
‘At night,’ he said, ‘quarrels… I used to feel such peace when I went to work in the morning, talked to the students, soothed myself with a lecture on Foreign Policy Analysis. I stayed late, avoided going home. And the later I went home, the later the quarrelling started, the later it went on through the night. Sleep deprivation is torture. I used to doze off while driving. I fell asleep once, while she was talking, I just fell asleep, I felt like I was drugged. She shook me awake, saying “Listen, listen to me”… ,’ he started to cough. He coughed until Sammar’s heart hurt. The landing was cold. Through Lesley’s door she heard the piano music of a comedy show.
‘You’re ill?’ she said.
‘I’m coming down with something, yes.’
Sammar changed the receiver from one hand to another and wiped her palm against her jumper. She wanted him to keep talking, keep talking until her ears were flattened and bruised.
‘I’m sorry, I’m talking too much,’ he said.
‘No.’ She searched for something to say, something appropriate, sympathetic. He had talked to her suddenly so personally and all she had managed to say was ‘You’re ill?’
She began to speak about work. It made her feel more confident.
‘I found a translation of the Qudsi Hadiths. On alternate pages they have them in English and Arabic. There is also a good introduction on how they differ from the Qur’an.’
‘What do they say? How do they put it?’
She was not prepared for that and faltered a little, saying that the book was upstairs and she would have to get it and would his hosts not mind that he was on the telephone for so long.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ he said, ‘they’re very organized. Their bills come itemized. I’ve had to call overseas before, Egypt and Morocco and I settle it with them later.’ His voice sounded lighter than before.
She ran up the stairs that she had often taken a step at a time, dragging her grief. Now the staircase had a different aura, a different light and it was just her and Lesley alone in the whole build
ing. The other tenants were away for the holidays and the stairs belonged to her alone. Where was she now, which country? What year? She climbed the stairs into a hallucination in which the world had swung around. Home and the past had come here and balanced just for her. The stairs in a warm yellow light and sounds of a party, people talking and someone laughed. She was inside the laughter, wearing something new, carrying a tray, mindful of the children who swirled and dived around her knees. She offered glasses of something that was dark and sweet, and when someone refused, coaxed them until they changed their minds. Someone called her name, she had to hurry, look over her shoulder, locate the voice, shout back, I’m coming now.
She sat on the floor of the landing and read out, over the phone, the notes she had made from the book. ‘A definition given by the scholar al-Jurjani, “A Sacred Hadith is, as to its meaning, from Allah the Almighty; as to the wording, it is from the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him. It is that which Allah the Almighty has communicated to His Prophet through revelation or in dream and he, peace be upon him, has communicated it in his own words.
Thus the Qur’an is superior to it because, besides being revealed, it is Allah’s wording.” In a definition given by a later scholar al-Qari, “… Unlike the Holy Qur’an, Sacred Hadith are not acceptable for recitation in one’s prayers, they are not forbidden to be touched or read by one who is in a state of ritual impurity… and they are not characterized by the attribute of inimitability.” ‘
Rae said, ‘This is very clear, thank you. What about their subject matter? I would imagine they do not cover legislation…’
‘Yes, generally not. There is a section on their subject matter.’ She turned the pages of the book, ‘… they clarify the meanings of the Divinity… the style takes the form of usually direct expression… I’ll read you one of them. The Prophet, peace be upon him said, “Allah Almighty says: I am as My servant thinks I am. I am with him when he makes mention of Me. If he makes mention of Me to himself, I make mention of him to Myself; and if he makes mention of Me in an assembly, I make mention of him in a better assembly. And if he draws near to Me a hand’s span, I draw near to him an arm’s length; and if he draws near to Me an arm’s length, I draw near to him a fathom’s length. And if he comes to Me walking, I go to him at speed.”’
The Translator Page 4