In the years to come, fate for Amelia twisted and held out a Welshman, a bungalow in Gwenyd, daughters and sons. She became an excellent cook like her mother and eventually ran her own catering business. Rae went back to student life, abandoned the plans to become a foreign journalist. Perhaps he had come to discover that under their wordly exterior was a narrowness, a lack of empathy for Morocco. He was too heavy for their globe-trotting world, too deep. It was the ideas and the words that he loved. Marxist, strategic. Guerrilla warfare, resistance. Nationalism. Revolution. Coup d’état.
Sammar sat with her head on her knees. She thought of that silent baby, a European buried in African sand. She said on the telephone, ‘How can you like a place, visit it again, study its culture and history when something horrible happened to you there?’
He was quiet.
When he spoke, he said, ‘Because it was healthy for me, like medicine. It made me less hard. And I learnt things I could not have learnt from books. Like you.’
She did not understand. ‘What, about me?’ she asked. And again he said, ‘You make me feel safe. I feel safe with you.’
7
Sammar walked to work wearing her new coat, conscious of how clean it was, how the wool was not faded or worn out. In the shop windows, she saw her reflection, the coat’s henna-red colour, the toggles instead of buttons. She felt like when she was young on the first day of the Eid, new dress, new socks, a new ribbon for her hair. At the pelican crossing when she was waiting for the lights to change, she took off her glove and put her hand in her pocket to feel the fresh silkiness of the lining. Green man, the sound of an alarm clock, and she crossed the road, putting her glove back on. It was too cold for bare fingers, January cold, even though the day was mild for this time of year and she had decided to walk instead of taking the bus as she usually did. A still day with a downcast sky, no sun. She had learnt early on, from the first year she had come with Tarig, that the winter sun of this city was colder than its winter rains. Many times before that lesson was learnt, she had seen the bright sun from the window, felt its warmth through the glass and gone out lightly dressed, only to shiver with incomprehension and suffer as every inadequately dressed African suffers in the alien British cold.
There was still the remains of a holiday atmosphere, the Christmas lights not yet taken down. No schoolchildren, no lollipop ladies, the term had not yet begun. Sammar knew that when she got to the university it would be quiet and dull with the students still away until next week. She would walk the corridors of the buildings meeting only other staff or the odd postgraduate student. The lecture rooms would be dark and silent, the library without its usual liveliness. She would meet Rae and he would not be as busy as he was during term time. She would ask him about his cold, his cough had sounded worse the last time they spoke. He would show her the University of Azhar thesis that he wanted her to start working on, she would give him the book on the Qudsi Hadiths, and there would still be time. Maybe they could talk like they had talked on the telephone, she saying what she had always wanted to say and he not surprised. Listening to her and then talking about places and people she could never have known, making her feel that she could understand them, that she was connected to his stories in some way. Maybe they could talk in his office like they had talked on the telephone. She had not counted the times he had called her over the holidays, nor measured their conversations in minutes and hours. She had stopped herself from doing that. And she had stopped herself from asking, why is he calling me, what is going to happen, what does all this mean?
The shops were beginning to open their doors. Sammar passed a newsagent, a sports shop, fishmonger, bakery. The grocer shop which sold halal meat was closed; it opened late in the day. Sometimes on her way home, she stopped there. While the Bengali owner of the shop cut up the chicken at the back, she would stand waiting near the counter, the small dingy space cramped with sacks of dried vegetables, tins from faraway places, around her the smell of spices and Asian film stars on the walls. She bought chili sauce and tins of beans, the ingredients written out in Arabic, packed in a warm place on another continent. A packet of mix for falafel, made in Alexandria.
She walked past a shoe shop, a shop selling wedding dresses and lingerie. Winter bargains, the January Sale, big red signs, half-price, 30 per cent off, Biggest Ever Sale. Yesterday, she had been one of the people in search of bargains. Yesterday had been a busy day. In the morning when she woke, she had looked with clear eyes at her room, the hospital room. She had seen the ugly curtains, the faded bedspread. She opened cupboard and drawers to find tired elastic, wornout nylon and scruffy shoes with eroded heels. She held these things in her hands, as if seeing them for the first time. Frayed wools, discoloured cottons, and even her scarves, the silks for her hair which she had always chosen with care were now dull and threadbare. Since Tarig died she had not bought anything new. She had not noticed time moving past, the years eroding the clothes Tarig had seen her in, wools he had touched, colours he had given his opinion on.
The kitchenette in the corner of the room held a small fridge, the electric ring, the table she used as a desk. There she saw the mouldy bread, cheese with fur and green, salad that had grown dark and heavy, past its sell-by date. Things did not have a smell in this part of the world. If she had been back home, she would not have been able to be neglectful for so long and the ants and the cockroaches would not have left her in peace. Here, an onion had grown a long green stalk. A chicken leg, three months old, sat in the fridge like rubber. Only the ancient cucumber oozed a puddle of toffee-like substance, but it still did not have a smell. For years, Sammar had eaten such food, hacking away at the good bits and not questioned what she was doing, as if there were a fog blocking her vision, a dreamy heaviness everywhere. Now she looked around the hospital room and said to herself, ‘I am not like this. I am better than this.’
Big black bags, putting things away, folding and putting things away in a bag. Like when Tarig died and she had stripped everything away, mistakenly thinking she was never coming back to Aberdeen. But now there was no grief, no burning in her head and chest, she worked calmly, decided what she wanted to keep and what she didn’t. It did not take long. It was easy. She then cleaned everything, the floors and the walls, the windows and the fridge, the cupboard, the drawers. She made everything smell of soap and opened the windows to rinse her life with the freezing rain. She pulled the curtain down and took the pillow and the blanket to the launderette.
It was strange to walk into the big department stores, their bright lights and the smell of perfume, crowds of people in search of bargains. She was pleased that the shops were crowded. Quiet shops where the attendants had the time to say ‘Can I help you?’ made her nervous. When she bought the coat, she had a choice between different styles and colours. One coat which suited her when she tried it on, had golden buttons, their colour and cool touch a reminder of her aunt. In the dressing room with the mirrors behind her and in front of her, too many reflections of herself, she missed her aunt, suddenly and painfully, wished that they were together, that she could hug her again, that they could be close again, friends, like in the years before Tarig died. But Sammar did not buy the coat with the golden buttons though she knew her aunt would have preferred it and her aunt’s taste in clothes had always been the ideal, the guidance. She bought the duffle coat with the toggles and the smooth brown stones instead of buttons. After she paid for it and left the shop, she lifted it out of the large plastic bag with the red letters SALE and put it on straightaway, tearing off the price tags, stuffing her old coat in its place.
‘You have lovely skin,’ said the bright lady behind the cosmetics counter. She had a lot of mascara on very few eyelashes. She tapped the jars and the bottles of lotions with her long fuchsia nails.
‘Oh… thank you.’
‘You won’t need these,’ the lady continued and her delicate hand hovered over lotions and creams in purple containers. ‘This one,’ and she picked up a b
ottle of yellow lotion. ‘Try it.’
Sammar tipped the bottle and rubbed a little of the lotion on the back of her hand.
‘Do you wear make-up?’
‘No… I used to…’
‘Because if you buy the moisturiser, the soap and the toner, you get a gift set with lipstick, blusher, eyeliner and eye shadow. It’s a special offer.’ The fuchsia nails pointed to a sign that stood on the counter: ‘Special Offer’ written in red and a picture of the gift set looking bigger than it was in real life.
Sammar had not worn make-up or perfume since Tarig died four years ago. Four months and ten days, was the sharia’s mourning period for a widow, the time that was for her alone, time that must pass before she could get married again, beautify herself again. Four months and ten days. Sammar thought, as she often thought, of the four months and ten days, such a specifically laid out time, not too short and not too long. She thought of how Allah’s sharia was kinder and more balanced than the rules people set up for themselves.
She bought new curtains for her room. When she hung them up, they changed the room, changed the light in it. It was now no longer a hospital room with the coloured plastic bags and packaging scattered on the floor, her new scarves laid out on the bed. Then, looking at the curtains, their bright pattern of orange, blue and brown, she realised that they were like the curtains Rae had described to her, the curtains that had been in his old house overlooking the Dee. She had unconsciously chosen these colours, the same colours he had talked about. His words were in her mind now, floating, not evaporating away. At night she dreamt no longer of the past but of the rain and grey colours of his city. She dreamt of the present. She dreamt of Lesley saying that the telephone in the hall did not work anymore. She dreamt that she, and not Amelia, was the one who was carrying the dead, disfigured baby. He was heavy inside her and she wanted to push him out. But her aunt was there in the dream saying, you are not due yet, it is still not time to give birth. Her aunt did not know that the baby was dead, only Sammar knew because Rae had told her. She wasn’t sad, she felt the baby’s heaviness dragging down and the pain was familiar, not frightening, not unpleasant. She knew that her aunt was wrong, that it was time now and she would not be able to stop herself from pushing the baby out.
The dreams were good for her, stinging like antiseptic. She gathered the courage to telephone a driving school, book a first lesson. The instructor, a large, lively woman with white hair, took her to an empty stretch of road near Hazelhead park. It came back to her, the driving she had been taught by ‘Am Ahmed, changing gears, the nice sound the hand-brake made when it was pulled. But when they went out onto a busier road, she panicked every time a car passed her in the opposite direction. She would cringe at the sight of the approaching car, turn the steering wheel to the left and instinctively go over the shahadah: I bear witness there is no god but Ailah… while the instructor reached to steady the steering wheel with her hand. When Rae telephoned that evening of her first lesson, she was in tears, ‘I’ve forgotten everything, I’ll never learn, I’ll never pass any driving test.’ He laughed at her and said, ‘Of course you’ll learn, it will all come back. Don’t say you’re stupid, you’re not stupid.’ He said encouraging things while her tears made the receiver slippery in her hand.
Sammar walked to work through familiar streets. She knew where the road changed from asphalt to cobbles. Even certain people’s faces had become familiar over time. Years ago, these same streets were a maze of culture shocks. Things that jarred – an earring on a man’s earlobe, a woman walking a dog big enough to swallow the infant she was at the same time pushing in a pram, the huge billboards on the roads: Wonderbra, cigarette ads that told people to smoke and not smoke at the same time, the Ministry of Sin nightclub housed in a former church. Now Sammar did not notice these things, did not gaze at them, alarmed, as she had done years before. Her eyes had grown numb over the years and she had found out, gradually, and felt reassured, that she was not alone, that not everyone believed what the billboards said, not everyone understood why that woman kept such a large ferocious dog in her home.
8
The campus was quiet as she had expected it to be, not so many cars parked in the car park, the department building empty of students. Sammar’s room was on the top floor, where a window looked straight up at the sky. She liked her room because of the sunlight that came from that window. She shared the room with Diane, one of Rae’s Ph.D. students. To Sammar’s surprise, the room was open, the lights were on and Diane was hunched over some photocopied sheets, surrounded by her usual accessories of pens, Diet Coke, Yorkie bars, a ham and pickle sandwich.
‘I thought you would be away; it’s nice to see you.’ Sammar hung her coat up on the hook behind the door. ‘What happened? Didn’t you go home?’ Home for Diane was Leeds.
‘I did but I came back last night.’ She held her face in her hand, looking up at Sammar.
‘You look tired.’
‘Too many late nights, too many parties.’ Diane smiled, took off her glasses, sniffed and put her head down on the desk. She had straight blonde hair and it fell now and slipped over the pages on the desk. Without her glasses she looked younger and less studious. Sammar was conscious of how young Diane was, nearly eight years her junior and so independent in comparison to how Sammar had been at that age. Independent and another source of culture shock that had mellowed over time. “… I bought my mum knickers for Christmas’, ‘… met him at the pub’,’… hardly anyone showed up for Rae’s lecture this morning, there was a big piss-up last night’, ‘… I definitely don’t want to have children. I am never going to get married’. Diane repeated that last sentence often, something that she felt strongly about. Had Sammar been back home and Diane one of her old friends, she would have replied, ‘Are you mad? You want to live celibate all your life!’ and they both would have started laughing. Here, she just said quietly to Diane, ‘Maybe you’ll change your mind and get married one day.’
‘Did you go anywhere?’ Diane now asked.
‘No,’ but Sammar felt that she had been away, far away to a place where she was content. She switched on the computer that was on her desk, pushed the button on the monitor and the screen flickered. The computer began its memory check. ‘I am going away early next month. I’m going to Cairo then I’ll go to Khartoum and bring my son back with me.’ Diane put on her glasses and looked at her with sleepy eyes. She yawned.
‘So is it a problem getting your son in, immigration and all that.’
‘No, he was born here. So was I.’
‘Really? I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t I ever mention it? My father was studying here at the time. That’s how I got a British passport. They’ve changed the law now. But back then, everyone who was born in Britain was eligible for a passport. So it’s no problem about bringing my son.’
Diane looked disappointed as if she had been expecting a hardluck story about the injustice of the Home Office.
If it had not been for the passport, Sammar would not have been here now. It was because coming back to live in Britain was feasible that she had got on the plane after quarrelling with her aunt, sold her gold bracelets for the one-way ticket. She had chosen Aberdeen for the tie with Tarig and because she had worked temporarily for the university and there was a chance that they could give her work again. She had been lucky. There was a demand for translating Arabic into English, not much competition. Her fate was etched out by a law that gave her a British passport, a point in time when the demand for people to translate Arabic into English was bigger than the supply. ‘No,’ she reminded herself, ‘that is not the real truth. My fate is etched out by Allah Almighty, if and who I will marry, what I eat, the work I find, my health, the day I will die are as He alone wants them to be.’ To think otherwise was to slip down, to feel the world narrowing, dreary and tight.
She scrolled through her files, clicked with the mouse the one that she wanted. Diane was talking about the last time she saw R
ae before she went to Leeds.
‘… not in the best of moods. I wanted to get some papers from him and he said, “You can find them in the library, I haven’t got them.” But I know he has them. Then all I got from him was a lecture on how the library does not close every single day of the holidays.’
Sammar smiled as Diane groaned and put her head down on the desk.
‘And he gave me this.’ She waved in front of Sammar a student essay with a yellow post-it note attached to it. Sammar read Rae’s handwriting on the little note, ‘Diane, fourteen is far too generous for such a poorly-referenced essay.’ Diane took the tutorials for one of Rae’s undergraduate classes and sometimes she had to mark the students’ work.
‘How much does he want you to give it then?’ said Sammar.
‘Eleven at the most.’ Diane starting taking out her sandwich from its packaging.
‘Well, eleven is a pass, isn’t it?’
‘I want to encourage her. Fourteen would have encouraged her but the bastard is just so finicky.’
‘Maybe she could rewrite it.’
‘She won’t do that, she’ll just take the eleven.’ Diane dropped the essay back on the far corner of her desk and eating her sandwich, bent her head down over her work.
Sammar was glad that Diane was back. She did not like being alone and it always pleased her when Diane mentioned Rae. It was like when Yasmin talked about him only that Diane was spontaneous and not suspicious, while Yasmin had recently begun to frown disapprovingly every time Sammar asked her about Rae, snapping, ‘Are you expecting him to become a Muslim so he could marry you?’ Sammar wondered if Yasmin was back from Manchester, where she had gone with Nazim to visit his parents. Later, on her way home, she would go to Rae, see if he was back, pass the secretaries’ office and see if Yasmin was also back.
The Translator Page 7