Rae was slow in replying. ‘Would you have translated it in exactly the same way?’
‘For the first sentence, there is a footnote which says, another possible rendering of the Arabic is, I am as My servant expects Me to be. And I feel this is closer to the Arabic word which means expects, thinks, even speculates.’
‘In this society,’ he said, ‘in this secular society, the speculation is that God is out playing golf. With few exceptions and apart from those who are self-convinced atheists, the speculation is that God has put up this elaborate solar system and left it to run itself. It does not need Him to maintain it or sustain it in anyway. Mankind is self-sufficient…’
‘But why golf?’ she asked. ‘Why specifically golf?’ And he laughed for the first time that day.
5
On Boxing Day and the weekend that followed and on Hogmanay, before the streets filled again with cars and schoolchildren, before the other tenants came back from their holidays, Sammar waited by the landing armed against the cold: layers of wool, socks, a cushion to sit on, barrier against the floorboards. The awkward time was the ringing of the telephone, the harsh sound of it and knowing that the call was for her, knowing who it would be. The first sentences were awkward too. Her name. Hello. The weather: snowing in Edinburgh. Frosty in Aberdeen, freezing.
‘How are you?’
‘How are you? How is Mhairi?’
‘What are you taking for your cold?’
He said that he’d read in the papers that thousands went abroad that time of year, in search of skiing or the sun. The popular destinations were the ski slopes of France or Tenerife. He said, ‘This is the best time of year for Morocco, Libya, the Middle East.’ Rae remembered a train ride in the seventies, from Tangiers south, to Marrakesh. Rain and then the sun came out into the crowded train. A man with a large moustache offered him a cigarette and they talked about the raid on Entebbe. Rae remembered a time when he could breathe like other people, when there was more air in the world.
She said, ‘We have a winter in Sudan, a cold that stays on the skin, does not punch inside to the bones, is content to crack people’s skin, turn it into the colour of ash.’ She said that the cold hurt when she was young and remembered the pouring of glycerin, burning, being told, don’t lick it off, don’t lick it off your lips. Or tasteless Vaseline, in plastic tubs, with grains of sand, brown and coarse in the thick silver mess. Or Nivea cream, the blue tin of luxury that came with a German ad on TV.
He asked her, ‘Which is bluer: the Nile or Nivea tins?’
She said that colours made her sad. Yellow as she knew it and green as she knew it were not here, not bright, not vivid as they should be. She had stacked the differences; the weather, the culture, modernity, the language, the silence of the muezzin, then found that the colours of mud, sky and leaves, were different too.
He said, his voice changed by flu, ‘The Nile is bluer. Did you not look at it, did you instead watch Peyton Place on TV? I ask because in the West Bank, the children threw stones at the soldiers in the mornings and watched Dallas at night sitting together on the floor.’
She said, ‘At night we used to sleep outdoors. We used to pull our beds out at sunset, so that the sheets would be cool later. It was so hot that sheets taken out of a cupboard, spread out to lie on were too unpleasant, they had to be cooled first. Every night, I saw bats in the clouds and the grey blur of a bird. And around the moon was another light, always the same shape. In the distant past, Muslim doctors advised nervous people to look up at the sky. Forget the tight earth. Imagine that the sky, all of it, belonged to them alone. Crescent, low moon, more stars than the eyes looking up at them. But the sky was free, without any price, no one I knew spoke of it, no one competed for it. Instead, one by one those who could afford it began to sleep indoors in cool, air-conditioned rooms, away from the mosquitoes and the flies, away from the azan at dawn. Now when they build houses, when they build apartment blocks, they don’t build them with places for people to sleep outdoors. It is a thing of the past, something I remember from my past.’
He said, ‘This is the enemy, what is irreversible, what has already reached the farthest of places. There is no going back. They can bomb bus-loads of tourists, burn the American flag, but they are not shooting the enemy. It is already with them, inside them, what makes them resentful, defensive, what makes them no longer confident of their vision of the world.’
She thought about that, he made her think. The landing existed with the bicycles under the stairs and the winter sun seeping through the edges of the letter box. But all that was unreal, superseded. What was real was that she had been given permission to think and talk, and he would not be surprised by anything she said. As if he had given her a promise, never to be taken aback. Surprise was part of the city, the granite buildings, the buses that went down the narrowest of roads. There were shades of surprise: surprise-sneer, surprise-embarrassed, surprise-bemused, surprise-disapproving. She had to be silent. Use her teeth and lips to keep silent.
Now the rules were being broken. They broke when she said, in Rae’s flat, her fingers on the magazine, ‘I used to wear a uniform like that in school.’ The rules broke and burst her head in little bright pieces.
First African night. She spoke first, for like him she was born in this wintery kingdom. Like him Africa was arrived at and loved.
They came from London at night. A father with a successful degree, a mother who had given birth to her children abroad, a seven-year-old Sammar. It was her first time on an airplane, that was her excitement in the weeks before, not where she was going. Home was a vague place, a jumble of what her mother said. Home was a grey and white place like in the photographs of her cousins which arrived air mail. It was the airplane, the airplane, in the weeks before the flight. New clothes to wear on the airplane, a doll to keep her quiet, can she sit near the window? Can she open the window? A smooth oval window. The beauty of the tray the hostess brings, the perfect cups, the plates filled with different things, hot, cold, different colours. Sugar in a packet, a toothpick for her to unwrap and play with, poke the eyes of the doll. Then the smallest pillow to sleep on. Can we take the pillow with us? Why not? Why not?
There were many people waiting for them in the car park of Khartoum airport. People who made a fuss and spoke at the same time. A woman burst into tears, men hugged her father, children stared at Sammar. Her cousins, Hanan and Tarig. They curiously shook her hand. Ahmed Ali Yasseen was there. He picked her up and lifted her high above the cars and the other children. She was above them all. He said, ‘What did you get me from London?’ ‘Nothing,’ she shrugged and he laughed and everyone who heard her laughed too. And she did not understand what they found funny, she was just happy to be carried, lifted up. She was at that age when she was often told, you are too old to be carried, you are too heavy, you are a big girl now.
Their luggage disappeared into different cars. Sammar and her parents were separated too in different cars, going to the same place, her aunt’s house for dinner and to spend the night. Sammar rode with ‘Am Ahmed in his Toyota pick-up van. She sat with his wife, in the front seat and Tarig rode in the back. He kept standing up and being told off by ‘Am Ahmed, ‘Sit down properly boy, or I’ll bring you in front with me.’ But Tarig could never be still, it was in his nature to be always jumping about, attracting attention. Sammar thought he was silly. Later as the months went by she thought him brave, brave and silly mixed up together, doing forbidden things she did not have the courage to do, like playing with the razors they found in the dust or riding their bicycles on the busy, main roads.
Her aunt’s house was not far away, it was not a long drive. On the telephone Rae asked, ‘How far?’
‘Not far,’ she replied, and moved the receiver from one hand to the other, one ear to the other, ‘not far, like from Holburn Street to Old Aberdeen. And it was late at night so there was not much traffic. Khartoum is poorly lit at night. To someone not used to it, it would appear gloomy, w
arm and dull. When one of the street lights goes off, it’s a long time before it is fixed, weeks and months. But there is no fear in the dark. The streets are safe except for the stray dogs, and the open drains, holes in the pavements through which anyone can easily fall.’
‘Did you ever fall?’
‘No.’ She laughed and it was as if the landing was warm like the nights in Khartoum she had been describing.
In the car, she told Rae, ‘Am Ahmed’s wife smiled at her all the time. She had a gold tooth which Sammar tried to pull out and this made the woman laugh with her dimples and fat arms. She gave Sammar one of her gold bracelets instead. It was too big. Sammar pushed it up on to her arm, tried it on the other arm, dropped in on the floor and had to scramble down to pick it up.
Her aunt’s house was full of lights. Those first garden lights would blur with other lights, party lights in the years to come, wedding lights. The cars were parked on the driveway, and on the road outside. Sammar saw her parents with her baby brother Waleed, they were now not interested in her, absorbed in the relatives and friends they had not seen for years. And though reassured that they were near, she was not interested in them either. She was too aware of everyone and everything around her. The newness of the warm night, the shabby cars, and the big house that was before her. A lighted house in front of an empty square that was covered in darkness. A square that was large and mysterious; broken glass lay on its dust, dogs barked their way through the rubbish that was dumped there. Underneath the carport, as they walked inside, Sammar showed Hanan the bracelet, let her try it on. They compared the length of their arms, the size of their wrists. A beginning. In years to come they would compare their polished nails, the hair on their arms, the lines on their palms.
Her aunt, Mahasen, was the tall woman in the sun-coloured tobe, the woman who had not come to the airport. She was part of the house, part of its lights. The woman who walked across the grass with an outstretched hand saying, ‘My brother… ,’ and hugged Sammar’s father first. The woman examined baby Waleed and squealed, ‘He’s ugly, what kind of creation is this!’, and everyone laughed as she pinched his cheeks and kissed his forehead. Mahasen sat on one of the chairs in the garden and drew Sammar to her. Sammar took in the sudden perfume, the flowers embroidered on the sun-coloured tobe, its texture so close. Mahasen smoothed Sammar’s eyebrows with her thumb, touched her earlobes, her chin. ‘This is the one who pleases me,’ she said, with a laugh to her brother. And she stood up, so tall she was, so much embroidered and bright folds. ‘Come with me, Sammar.’
She held her aunt’s hand. Elegant hands that never washed dishes, never scrubbed floors. Inside the house, the floor was all speckled tiles, brown and black speckles, an imitation of marble. A huge expanse of hard, square tiles. Strange for Sammar. She was used to the unobtrusive carpets and wood of London’s flats. These tiles were for counting, for sliding across. Her aunt’s high-heeled sandals made a tapping noise on the tiles. Yellow sandals to match the tobe, red-brick toenails, heels that were regularly sloughed, daily massaged with cream. Her aunt’s bedroom had a large mirror, jars of lotions and creams. A transistor radio, a painting of gazelles, a huge bed with blue pillows. And on the side-table was what her aunt had brought her to see. A photograph of a girl feeding pigeons. The pigeons swarmed near her outstretched hands, one was perched on her frightened shoulder. The stone lion of Trafalger Square loomed above. ‘This is me!’ Sammar said. The first words she spoke in her aunt’s house.
‘That night,’ she said to Rae on the telephone, ‘that night like nearly every night, the grown-ups sat in the garden. When I got older I was allowed to sit with them, on seats with cool cushions and above us all the stars. Insects attacked the garden lights, those that got too close became black dots sticking to the hot glass. The garden was filled with sounds: laughter and loud narratives, the ceaseless croaking of frogs, the softer sounds of grasshoppers. And from the square, the stray dogs howled, a sound of faraway sadness.’
On that first night in Khartoum, she wandered around the garden with Hanan and Tarig, to the back of the house where there was no garden, inside the house, upstairs to the roof and its row of empty beds. Everywhere they went, Tarig did what Hanan and Sammar would not do. In the garden he took off his sandals and walked in the mud of the flower beds. He tore the leaves off the eucalyptus tree. There was a swing in the far corner of the garden. He swung on it standing up and when he was very high, he jumped off, effortlessly, without fear.
At the back of the house was the smell of flames and marinated lamb. The cook grilled kebabs on a coal fire. He wore ajellabia and his eyes were red. He sat on a small stool and fanned the flames with a newspaper. Tarig squatted next to him, and reached out for a piece of meat. The cook hit him with the newspaper over his head, ‘Get away, you’ll burn yourself.’ But Tarig laughed, ducked from another blow and grabbed a piece of meat, grey, still barely cooked. And he disgusted them all by chewing and chewing on the piece of meat and then spitting it away. ‘My brother is horrible,’ Hanan said to Sammar. ‘I hate him.’ Sammar was distracted by Tarig, her eyes fixed on him. She liked her cousin Hanan better.
On the roof, they looked down over the railings at their parents below. They were sitting in a large circle, they never looked up. Some of the men were smoking and their cigarettes made pretty little red lights that moved from side to side. On the roof the sky was bigger than the house and the square. The darkness was speckled with stars, speckled like the house’s tiles, except that the sky’s speckles were not still. Suddenly, a large grey shadow climbed through the transparent clouds, blinking red lights, a deep roar. ‘That’s your airplane,’ Tarig said, looking up. He had been leaning too far over the rail. Now he swung back, his hands clutching the top of the rail, his whole weight carried by his arms. ‘Our airplane?’ Sammar didn’t understand. ‘It’s the airplane you came on,’ he said, ‘it’s going back to London without you.’
On the telephone, Rae coughed, ‘Sorry. Excuse me Sammar.’ He put the receiver down to blow his nose, clear his throat, spit into a handkerchief. She could hear him.
They talked about her father and aunt, how fast things change in that part of the world. He asked her questions. ‘And why is that?’ he asked. After she answered he was silent, as if he was thinking about what she had said. She imagined him wiping his face with his hand.
They talked about Khartoum. Khartoum, where the Blue and the White Niles met under the bridge, under the sun, and across the bridge Umdurman, where saints were buried and something old and whole was in the air. Above the sand and the sound of the wind, everything held together, connected. He knew the details of her country’s history more than she did, the correct dates. They both knew the names… the Mahdi, Gordon, the Khalifa, Kitchener and Wingate.
‘There is a statue,’ said Rae, ‘of Gordon in Aberdeen. In Schoolhill. Have you see it?’
‘No.’ She did not see much, she walked around asleep.
‘You might like to look at it sometime.’ A plaque in stone, the words died in Khartoum 1885.
‘I didn’t know he was Scottish. They didn’t teach us that at school.’
‘It was the British…’
‘The Ingeleez…’ They laughed and the wind rattled the front door a little and passed.
He said that he had never been to Khartoum. There were plans once but they did not materialise. She said, ‘I wish you would see it. It’s beautiful…’ and paused, wanting to say more, to describe in words: simple, authentic, subservient to nature. Her voice was sad when she said, ‘But it is not considered beautiful…’
‘By who?’
‘People who know the world more than me.’
‘But I trust you,’ he said. ‘You make me feel safe. I feel safe when I talk to you.’ She picked up the word ‘safe’ and put it aside, to peel it later and wonder what it meant. Sitting on the floor of the landing, she thought that this was a miracle. Not only his voice, but that happiness could come here at the foot of the s
tairs, the same stairs that were, once, so difficult to climb, that led to her room of hibernation, the hospital room.
6
On New Year’s Day, on the weekend that followed, Sammar sat at the foot of the stairs, listening to Rae. On the telephone he talked about a first night in Morocco and images come to her of a place she had never been. A decade when she was a girl and he was an adult.
The plan was that the three of them would drive the van from Edinburgh down to France, Spain, then cross the Mediterranean at Algeciras by boat to Tangiers. Rae, Steve and Chris, early twenties in the late sixties, just through with university, ready for the dope trail, ready for the dark continent. Chris wanted to drift, to break away from what, he didn’t know. He lifted weights and hated himself. While driving he blew impatiently and ruffled the long fringe that fell over his eyes. Steve kept the peace, believed in friendship and love, was one of the few people that Chris didn’t hate. Steve wanted to go to India, North Africa was a compromise for him, a gracious accession to the wishes of the other two.
In the van Rae rambled on about The Republic and Das Kapital, about Livingstone, about Richard Burton, the African explorer and translator of the Arabian Nights. About a long-lost Uncle David he had in Egypt, African cousins. Names that he knew, as cities and towns passed by, Fidel Castro, Golda Meir, Haile Selassie, Franz Fanon and the anti-colonial struggle.
‘My hero Malcolm X, I heard that man speak at the LSE, I went down… the way he gripped the audience…’
The Translator Page 5