The Translator

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by Leila Aboulela


  ‘Shut it, will you!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  He would not shut up. It took him years to learn the value of silence, the power of carefully chosen words. That summer his voice went on and on, a steady monotone as the van made its way through England, through the countryside of France, the sunshine of Spain. When it was his turn to drive, he talked less but it was not often his turn to drive. Chris liked to be the one driving, being a passenger bored him. Rae only shut up completely when he was reading or listening to his crackling transistor radio which was tuned to the World Service. He listened intently, oblivious to his surroundings. Things were happening around the world, historical events. He kept quiet also in the rare company of girls. Girls liked Steve, he had the looks, he played the guitar. Chris did stupid things when girls were around like kicking the tyres of the van, revving the engine when they gave two Parisian hitch-hikers a ride. For Chris life was a rubber band wound tight around him. He bickered with Rae all the way. And Rae goaded and teased him, gave him lectures from the back seat of the van, surrounded by the luggage, the radio, Steve’s guitar.

  ‘The Highlands were the first place the English colonised…’

  ‘Enough, Rae.’

  ‘… later India and Africa. They got Scottish men to pillage that place for the Empire. It was Scottish men who lost their lives…’

  ‘Shut up, will you.’

  ‘They were the foot soldiers. The ones the spears got first, the spears of the dervishes and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. Kipling called them that in a poem. Hey Music Boy! Did you hear of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies? Chris, you illiterate buffoon, you? I still insist on the notion that anyone who hasn’t read Fanon deserves to be shot…’

  Chris braked, yanked open the door of the van, got out and hauled a baffled at first and then resistant Rae on to the side of the road. The amateur weight-lifter found the resistance not difficult to overcome. It did not take long, in terms of time. The defeated Rae was left behind, by the side of the road. In the van Steve was laughing, making faces at him and gestures with his hands. To Algeciras, Rae limped the five miles, wiped the blood that trickled from his nose. He was without his precious World Service, without his books, his passport, his clothes. It was not funny. He found them waiting for him at the port. Silence was their apology. He hated them, he hated practical jokes. He could see the end coming soon, the end of this threesome. He slept in the back of the van, slept soundly while sunset and the boat floated over the Strait of Gibraltar.

  Night-time and the first sight of Africa’s shore. Lights along the harbour of Tangiers, around him the tune of another language, men unconcerned with his foreignness. The boat was full of Moroccan itinerant workers returning home from France and Spain, carrying sacks and plastic bags. Some with families had loaded old cars, smelly diesels, a battered red Mercedes covered in blue canvas. Singer sewing machines, irons, refrigerators, food blenders, transistor radios. They all looked in the same direction, at the lights and shadows of Tangiers under the low African sky. Rae stood with them, more in awe, more wretched than they. He felt stale and unclean, with his shirt torn and his hair covered in dust. His nose and chest burnt from the smell of the diesel. A pattern was set from that first time. In years to come every arrival to Africa was similarly accompanied by loss or pain, a blow to his pride. Baggage disappearing, nights spent in quarantine, stolen travellers’ cheques. As if from him the continent demanded a forfeit, a repayment of debts from the ghosts of the past.

  Of the years he spent in Morocco, he spoke to Sammar on the telephone from Stirling. He had by then left Edinburgh, left the house of his ex-wife’s parents, said goodbye to his daughter. Sammar felt the change in his voice. It was lighter, he was more at ease. In Stirling there were cousins and an old uncle to visit in a nursing home, the elder brother of the long-lost David. ‘Today,’ Rae said, ‘my uncle didn’t recognise me at all. Last year was better. Last year he thought I was David, and we talked a bit. I liked that.’

  In Stirling, there was Dr Fareed Khalifa, educationalist and UK resident for ten years. The two of them were invited by the debating society as speakers to oppose the proposition, ‘This House Fears the Threat of Radical Islam’.

  ‘I said to him, “Fareed, we’re going to lose, it’s almost predetermined. They’ve even got a bottle of champagne as the prize for the best floor speaker, so they’re not thinking it will be you. If the results are less than 80 per cent in favour of the House, then we’ve done well.” And Sammar, that man looked devastated. He said, “You are defeatist, it’s my faith that I am defending and I’ll defend it with all I’ve got.”

  Rae said, ‘I wasn’t too happy to be called defeatist.’

  She told him he was being realistic not defeatist.

  He said, ‘I’m trying not to be defeatist about this flu. Nights are the worst, sleeping makes me feverish and I can hardly breathe lying down. I should get back to my doctor in Aberdeen.’

  She said, shyly, and with pauses in the middle, ‘I would not mind… if you call me in the middle of the night… if you can’t sleep.’ She, who had for years hibernated, could now hardly sleep. His voice during the day and the day-dreams at night. Dreaming, dreaming and not sleeping.

  The first ring of the telephone through a dream of colours and people. She groped her way down the stairs, soft from sleep. Hoping the old woman would not wake up. It was two o’clock in the morning. Prayers to God Almighty that Lesley would not hear the ringing of the telephone, sleep deeply, soundly.

  ‘Your voice is so beautiful,’ he said. He was feverish and the words came out of him in a jumble. Words that went to her head became little jewels, coloured gems, precious stones to carry around.

  He said that he wanted to take her to places where she would forget and remember. Show her a bend in the Dee and she would see the Nile. Show her a house with a flat roof, a lighthouse that looked like a white minaret, castles where believers lived long ago, subservient to the climate. He said, ‘We could go for a drive when I get back to Aberdeen.’

  She was silent. Listening to the sounds of the night, his breathing. Once upon a time, in another part of the world, were the fears someone will see us together, alone together… a woman’s reputation is fragile as a match stick… a woman’s honour… Reputation was the idol people set up, what determined the giving, the holding back. A girl’s honour… your father will kill you… your brother will beat you up… you will go to school the next morning as the bolder girls inevitably did, with puffy red eyes, unusually subdued.

  But idols’ powers are not infinite. They cover a place, a particular community and a time. Sammar watched Reputation lose its muscle, its vigour, shrink and frizzle out in this remote corner of the world. When idols fall, the path to the truth is uncluttered, clear. Who saw her, knew her, was with her all the time wherever she went?

  She said, ‘You are right. I would like to see castles where believers lived long ago helpless and yet strong, a lighthouse tall as a minaret, a house with a flat roof like my aunt’s house. But it would be wrong. I’m sorry, very sorry.’

  She was afraid that he would be angry with her, impatient, bored. She bit her lips.

  He said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t say sorry. I wouldn’t want you to do anything you are uncomfortable with.’

  The next day he asked about her son. ‘You never told me your son’s name,’ he said.

  She said, ‘He is called Amir, and it means prince.’ She thought of the child, walking barefooted in the mud, throwing his toys down from the roof, like Tarig. She said to Rae, ‘I worry about bringing him here. He will find it difficult at first, the weather, and all the layers of clothes he must wear.’

  ‘Do you know how to drive?’ Rae asked.

  She did, long ago. ‘Am Ahmed taught her, taught them all, driving around the empty square, in the hot afternoons while Mahasen slept. The memory was vivid. Clouds of dust and jumpy starts.

  She laughed, ‘Driving there is not like driving here. Few rules and there are easy
ways of getting a licence, without a test at all.’

  He knew, he understood. He said, ‘It’s all a bit uptight here. It has to be because of the sheer number of cars, the speed.’

  Sammar thought of the way Tarig died. Cars. Speed and an elderly man blinded by the summer sun making a fatal mistake. She brooded a little. It never made sense. A gentle old man blinded by the sun, killing Tarig. An apologetic, tearful little man. The ifs were snakes, hissing, if Tarig had gone out a minute earlier, a minute later, if he had seen that old man driving towards him, if it had been a cloudy day like so many of this city’s cloudy days, like so many of this city’s cloudy days. The ifs were poisonous snakes, whispering. For years the ifs had tangled up her mind, tugged away at her faith, made her unable to walk up the stairs.

  Rae talked about driving lessons so that she would be able to drive her son around. He talked about driving schools and driving tests. His voice came from far away, she was slipping.

  ‘I had a son in Morocco,’ he said and paused. ‘Still-born… I think that is the right word.’

  He spoke and lifted her up to see places she hadn’t seen, people she would never meet. They took shape in her imagination, how they looked, how they spoke, the things Rae told her in detail, the things he left out.

  He stayed behind after Chris and Steve drove back in the van. Steve still wanting India, Chris wanting England, both unfulfilled. He found a job in a craft shop, owned by a local scholar and his French wife. The shop was named after her. She had fine taste and the shop did not have a tacky, touristy feel. The expatriate community brought their souvenirs and gifts from there: foreign journalists, Westernised Moroccans, French diplomats. The owner of the shop and his wife entertained their regular customers in the shop, while Rae dealt with the casual buyers, changed the bulbs on the display window. He listened to their conversations: Palestine, what Fanon said, what Sartre said… Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran!… Six days of war, six days!… Israel took Sinai, the West Bank…

  When he expressed interest, ventured an opinion, they welcomed him, listened. His employer nodding his head, puffing at his pipe, correcting him here and there on a factual error, getting him to temper his more extreme views. Surrounded by calligraphy, arabesque, what was intricately woven, what was embroidered on cloth, Rae learnt what he had not learnt in university nor in the debating society he had been so active in. Things more important than anger, more important than an argument cleverly expressed.

  Of all the customers that came to the shop, foreign journalists interested him the most. He admired their knowledgeable manners, their easy coming and goings. He followed them around from one hotel bar to another, from one party to another until they yawned and told him to go home. Home was a flat he shared with three Air Maroc pilots. They were away most of the time and he was left on his own to walk barefooted on the tiles, sit out on the balcony with his transistor radio. On the rare occasions when all three pilots were in town at the same time, the flat was crowded, the atmosphere like that of a party or a souk. They were his link with the people of the city. With them he visited the cafés, played dominos, smoked the hubble-bubble pipe. He went into mosques, learnt to take his shoes off, sit cross-legged on the floor. The pilots were happy to talk about their work, their country, their religion. They introduced him to cousins and friends, lunch at an aunt’s house, the wedding of a school-mate. When the pilots were away, the flat was full of Rae’s thoughts and the crackling of the BBC World Service. The silver antennae of the transistor stuck out at an angle that he had spent a long time getting just right.

  While the pilots were his link with the locals, his employers were the link with the international community. In small expatriate communities, social integration is as fast as the judgement passed on a newcomer. Those his age and older decided they did not like him much. He was cheeky and somewhat secretive. He did not have the straightforward charm they admired; he did not have the cool, self-determined look that they favoured. In some shadows, according to the ladies, he looked exactly like an Arab. Rae got along better with the young who had grown up in Morocco, a minority of privileged lives. He did what the young did not do: he read newspapers, he was learning Arabic. Wandering into mosques, living with Moroccans. This was subversive enough for the young ones. They liked him.

  Young Amelia was lovely in her Parisian clothes which the house-boy ironed. Amelia’s father was English and her mother was Spanish. Her mother was one of the best cooks around and it showed on her happy daughter. It made her look older than eighteen. ‘Amelia is like Marilyn Monroe – a size sixteen,’ said her proud mother to her friends, who much preferred the figures of Twiggy and Mary Quant. Amelia had not gone back to England to boarding school as her contemporaries had: she was too attached to her mother and her mother’s dishes. Morocco was her home, it was in her Spanish blood, her English spoken with a certain lilt – her attraction for Rae.

  Rae sat with Amelia as she sunbathed by the pool. Bikini from Paris. The setting had a colonial air about it, in the Arab waiters spotless in their white uniforms, in the cocktails served by the pool. Leaves fell into the water and a wretched-looking man with rolled up trousers, inferior in status to the waiters, removed the leaves with a long net. The man, the waiters and Rae were the only ones who were fully dressed. Rae wore khaki-green. Khaki-green and khaki-brown were his favourite colours, his image.

  In the presence of Amelia, Rae was dizzy from the sun, the perfect blue of the pool. A clear thought wound its way through his brain, he told Amelia about it. She narrowed her eyes, hazel eyes with green. The waiters. The thought was about the waiters. Their women were covered, seldom glimpsed, while they earned their living serving iced lemonade to pool-side beauties. In the evening they mixed cocktails, sliced lemons for the water-coloured gin, poured whisky, when alcohol was forbidden to them. That was why, Rae said to Amelia, they had shifty eyes, pathetic giggles, why they went home everyday and beat their children up.

  Part of Amelia’s charm was her parents muted disapproval of him. In an evening party by that same pool, a band played ‘Nights in White Satin’, and Rae danced with Amelia while her parents patiently glowered. He was in love, abroad, and she was half-Spanish, exotic. He had come all the way from Edinburgh especially for this. And why did Amelia love Rae? Because he spoke about strange things, because of smoking the hubble-bubble pipe. There was something Arab about this young Scottish man. Something Arab that Amelia had wanted for years. For she had grown up in the splendid villa of her parents, secretly and guiltily eyeing the house-boys, fancying the gardener from Fez.

  Rae and Amelia provided the international community with the spiciest piece of gossip of the year. In coffee parties, over telephones, even the men at work spoke of the sudden marriage, the foolish girl. The foolish girl became a sickly wife. Rae pondered morning sickness and could not make sense of it. He held Amelia’s hair away from her face as she vomited time and time again into the bathroom sink. Money worried Rae. His brain thought money, money, his heart hurt. He sat up late making calculations, adding and subtracting figures on smudged bits of paper. He got into debt and began to have nightmares about Moroccan prisons. The job at the shop had been adequate for him before, but not now. And what of him, his career. He had vague ideas of becoming a political analyst, a foreign journalist like the ones he met at the shop, travelling the world in search of war and revolution.

  Amelia did not take to the presence of the pilots in the flat. ‘They smell,’ she said and sobbed on Rae’s shoulders. One evening her mother came and there was a scene, her mother shouting at Rae in Spanish.

  In her sickness, Amelia could eat nothing but what her mother cooked. She left the flat days at a time to be looked after in her parents’ villa. Rae skulked around in the cafés and in the mosques. His pilot friends assured him he had done the honourable thing. He did not feel honourable, he felt he had messed up his life or that fate had messed up his life. But it was with good nature that he made cocoa for Amelia, tried
to make her smile. He was comfortable with domesticity, the feeling of not being alone, sharing the mundane, a bar of soap, the dust that crept into the room.

  They did not talk much about the baby. He came into the world with difficulty, a little blue, with no chin, strange-shaped eyes like crescents, a crooked spine. Amelia was not allowed to see him. She never did. Rae never forgot the weightless, mangled bundle, the hair that was thick and dark, the colour of his own hair. He had always thought that babies were born bald, he had not expected so much hair. The hair made him cry in front of Amelia’s parents, the doctor and the nurse.

  Grief pierced the continuity of his life, for a while burned away even the desire for the World Service. While Amelia recuperated in hospital, he sought, red-eyed, his pilot friends. Their company cooled him. They spoke to him but he could not listen, understand, was content with their voices alone. The things they said. That children who die will intercede for their parents. They will stand at the gates of Paradise and refuse to go in without their mother and father, cry out wanting them, and Allah will grant them their wish.

  In the hospital Amelia suffered from the shots they gave her to dry up her milk, from the stitches, from the feeling that all that pain was for nothing. She grieved for the figure she once had, for the happy life of swimming and parties. She blamed Rae, the physically unscathed Rae. Her mother blamed Rae. Everything about him was wrong. Her pretty daughter could have done much better than that. Much, much better. But it was not too late, reasoned the shrewd mother, in fact what had happened to the baby might not be such a bad thing after all. If she acted decisively she could put an end to this silly marriage. She enlisted the help of Rae’s employer. The wise scholar pondered and puffed at his pipe. He advised Rae to give up, to leave, to go home and continue with his studies. And Amelia said, ‘I don’t want you anymore.’

 

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