The Translator

by Leila Aboulela

  ‘What was I doing?’

  ‘Cooking.’

  She smiled, ‘Cooking what?’

  ‘Vegetables, I think.’

  She saw green peppers and aubergines. She spoke each word slowly, ‘And was I happy to see you?’

  ‘You were, very much and then you gave me a glass of milk to drink.’

  ‘Milk! How childish of me, I’m so sorry.’

  He laughed and said, ‘I drank it, I drank it all. I didn’t mind.’

  11

  She made soup for him. She cut up courgettes, celery and onions. Her feelings were in the soup. The froth that rose to the surface of the water when she boiled the chicken, the softened, shapeless tomatoes. Pasta shaped into the smallest stars. Spice that she had to search for, the name unknown in English, not in any of the Arabic-English dictionaries that she had. Habbahan, habbahan. She must walk around the supermarket, frantically searching for something she could not ask about, and she was a translator, she should know. Habbahan. Without it, the soup would not taste right, would not be complete. At last, she found the habbahan. It existed, it had a name: whole green cardamom.

  Cardamom pods. They must be split open, the seeds inside crushed into powder. It seemed unfair to her that he was all alone, ill alone, that he dragged himself to teach everyday and came back home to an unmade bed, unwashed cups and dishes, meals that he had to cook himself. In the department they said that he was turning into a workaholic. She said to him, they told you at the hospital to take time off work, why don’t you listen? He said that there were too many things that needed to be done.

  She put the soup in two plastic containers, carried them to work. She was waiting for him when he came out of the lecture theatre, coughing, his fingers covered in chalk. She saw the change in him, the way he turned his back on everything else, his students who were coming out, the next class that was going in. When he spoke to her it was as if there was no one around, no physical world, his voice different, she had come to realise, than when he talked to others, kind, less sharp. It took him a few minutes to understand what she was saying, what she was carrying, what she was giving to him. Then he said, ‘Oh Sammar,’ in a low voice, too much emotion. So that they were both, after that, unable to say ordinary things, the usual things, ‘thank you very much,’ ‘I hope you like it,’ ‘I will like it for sure’, ‘you can freeze it…’ She turned and made her way down corridors illuminated with fluorescent lights, crowded with students taller than her, their loose denims, rucksacks, soft hair that fell over young eyes.

  Two weeks. Two weeks and she would be far away on another continent. Sunshine, no need to put on the lights indoors. In two weeks’ time she would leave this city. She had booked her plane tickets from London, she must book her train ticket from Aberdeen. She had bought the things her aunt had asked for, she must start packing. She thought of going home, seeing home again, its colours again and in spite of years of yearning, all she had now was reluctance and some fear.

  12

  The past intruded when she wanted only the present. Wanted these two weeks before she left the city. The past came and lined up before her, demanding recognition. The time before she started working in Rae’s department. She worked in Languages and sometimes translated things for the Council: English to Arabic, leaflets about the health services, about classes in English. An incident from that time: a Libyan woman in hospital and Sammar was asked to go to Foresterhill and interpret for her. The woman didn’t know English and her husband who did was away off-shore. But Sammar refused to go, she could not face the hospital after Tarig. And she drowned her guilt about the Libyan woman in oceans of sleep. In her dreams she forgot that Tarig had died.

  Her head in the Languages department was a woman named Jennifer, who one day, unexpectedly and abruptly, called Sammar, asked her to sit down and said that she was not religious but respected people who were religious. That was during the Gulf War, when suddenly everyone became aware that Sammar was Muslim. Once a man shouted at her in King Street, Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein.

  Jennifer said, ‘My boyfriend is Nigerian,’ and paused as if that statement had a deeper meaning she wanted Sammar to grasp.

  Sammar sat and nodded politely. She felt like a child who had stayed up too late at night and was discovering that in the adult world there were things she could not understand. Jennifer talked away fresh and brisk, reassuring her of how broad-minded and tolerant she was, not like so many people. ‘For example,’ Jennifer said, ‘I have no problem at all with the way you dress.’

  When Sammar finally spoke, she managed, ‘Thank you,’ and went home and slept. She slept deeply and continuously until the next day.

  It was part of her remit to work for other departments if they needed her. This was how she met Rae when he sent her articles from Arab newspapers, the aftermath of the Gulf War. The first time she went to see him, he surprised her by being not rushed for time, not distracted by other things. She was used to busy people, a tightness in time. Instead, after discussing the newspaper articles, he told her about the time he lived in North Africa and asked her about her name, an unusual name. Lulled by his manner, she said, ‘There is a Lebanese ladies’ magazine called Sammar,’ and immediately thought, what a silly thing to say, what an inappropriate thing to say. But he didn’t look surprised or amused. He said quite seriously, ‘I have not come across this magazine.’

  People spoke about him: his students, his secretary, Yasmin. It was through him that Sammar met Yasmin. Yasmin who talked so fluently and knowingly about the Gulf War, immigration, ‘these people’. She told Sammar that Rae had been on television several times and on the radio during the war. She would come to work the following morning and the department’s answering machine would be jammed with messages, angry voices… You are a disgrace to our universities, we pay taxes… You don’t know what you’re talking about, fighter-planes aren’t enough for this war. We need to drop an atomic bomb once and for all… And after a radio programme, Is This War A Holy War?, You wog bastard, may I remind you that England is a Christian country, and it would be a good thing if you and all the rest of the odious wog bastards were to go back to the land of Allah. Since you bastards came to England this country has become the asshole of the West…

  Sammar remembered Yasmin telling her all this in the car one Saturday on the way to a DIY shop, Yasmin mimicking the man’s London accent.

  ‘Did Rae get upset?’ Sammar had asked.

  ‘No, he laughed.’

  And Sammar pictured the scene in the secretaries’ office, Yasmin replaying the tape first thing in the morning, Rae standing still wearing his jacket because he had just come in. Some of the blinds in the room would still be drawn, the department still sluggish, no footsteps of students, a few members of staff coming in to check their mail, mumbling greetings, lingering at the sound of the tape. Rae would have listened to the unclear voice on the tape, the message left for him, then laughed alone, for no one else would laugh, and wiped his face with his hand.

  Thirteen days to go.

  Her date of departure loomed ahead, solid as rock, impressive as a mountain. The days were numbered. They dwindled and by their nature could not increase. But they were not normal days, they expanded as if by magic, they stretched out like trees, and the hours passed like the hours of a child, they did not flicker or melt deceptively away. She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly, the days in chunk after chunk. Now every day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

  My last twelve days. My last ten days.

  He said it was her soup, her soup was the catalyst that made him recover. He was back working a full
day, he no longer coughed.

  She said, ‘Allah is the one who heals.’ She wanted him to look beyond the causes to the First, the Real.

  ‘When I was young,’ he told her, ‘there were books that did not impress me much. Picture books of Angels with blue eyes and wings, naive animals in pairs boarding a ship, too many fluffy clouds.’

  When she was young there were the words of the Qur’an, no pictures of Angels. Words to learn by heart and recite in treacherous streets where rabid dogs barked too close. ‘Say: I take refuge in the Lord of daybreak…’,’Say: I take refuge in the Lord of humans…’ And at night too, inside the terrifying dreams of childhood, she had said the verses to push away what was clinging and cruel.

  He said, ‘That is real, nothing trivialised, diminished to the status of fairy-tales.’ And he looked disappointed when he said that, distracted by thoughts he would only condense for her. ‘History diminished to the status of fairy-tales,’ he said. Covered with illusions, grid-lines, rules.

  She said that she had imagined freedom in this part of the world, not rules, not restrictions. But she tried to understand, to take in this new picture he was describing. A sketch of the Scottish church and state. Calvinism, a dour and oppressive brand of Christianity. An upbringing so different from hers. Things he was told. He must not be sullen, he must not be cheeky, he must not be contradictory. He must not complain of boredom, only bores get bored. The value of pretending that all was well when it wasn’t. Such pretence was an art, a form of courage. Don’t think too much. Lighten up, you are too intense.

  She said, ‘I never knew that to be intense was something bad.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ he said and smiled as if he loved her. Encouragement to speak. Again the stray dogs, the threat of rabies, cholera, bilharzia. Lepers like in films, and a day in May when the whole school was inoculated against meningitis, the injections shot out of a pistol, girls fainting in the sun. A time when she belonged to a particular place, before she knew the feeling this has nothing to do with me, these shops, these people have nothing to do with me, this sky is not for me. Times when she was silent but never detached: watching her aunt rub the luxury of Nivea on her legs, the white cream disappearing into her skin, over the sketch of bluish veins, over her ankles, the polish of her nails. Her aunt’s face so serious: this was something important, necessary, not a game. ‘Can I put cream on too?’ But she must wash her legs first, otherwise the cream would all get mixed up with the dust. In the garden, Tarig was drinking from the hosepipe so when it was her turn she drank too. The water was warm, not cold like the water from the fridge, not smelling of food. She could drink and drink this water and never feel full. Wash her feet, her legs up to her knees. The water splashed on the mud of the flower beds, made a path into the garden. Tarig climbed the low wall, balanced. ‘I fixed your bicycle,’ he said. There was the sound of the water, a distant car, a few birds. There was the voice of the cook, sitting in the shade of the guava tree reading the Qur’an, his shoulders swaying back and forth with the words.

  ‘Loneliness is Europe’s malaria,’ Rae said. ‘No one can really be immune. This is not so hygienic a place, don’t be taken in by the idols it makes of itself. You might even come to feel sorry for it, just a little, not too much, for there is no injustice in this decay. I am anxious,’ he said, ‘that when you go back home you will realise that I am much cruder than you, that I am not as you think me to be.’

  My last Friday.

  He showed her the card that his daughter sent him when he was in hospital. ‘Get Well Soon, Dad’, the card said and it had a picture of a bandaged bear. Sammar found the wording strange without ‘I wish’ or ‘I pray’, it was an order, and she wondered if the child was taught to believe that her father’s health was in his hands, under his command. But she did not share her thoughts and instead admired the school photograph that Mhairi had sent with the card. Her uniform was a tartan kilt, a matching jumper and tie. She stood out from among the rest of her class because she was his daughter and looked a little like him.

  ‘Whom does she resemble more, you or her mother?’ Sammar asked. But he was not keen to follow this line of conversation.

  Of the reasons for the break-up of his marriage, she could only guess. If she asked him directly, she knew she would not be fulfilled with the concise, measured answer he would give. So on her own she looked inside, lifted up the veils that blocked her vision. One veil: he could not make anyone unhappy: another veil: to leave him that woman must have a low IQ. Finally in the deep she caught sight of the truth: his stubbornness and a wife with a successful career who earned more money as a bureaucrat with the UN than he did as a professor in a provincial university. A woman who grew tired of travelling back and forth from Geneva to Edinburgh to see her daughter in boarding school, then to see him in Aberdeen. He would not go with her to Geneva. Geneva, he said, was too neat and for him there were only three places in the world: Scotland, North Africa, the Middle East. That woman, after a snide remark too many, The UN is a sham and everyone knows it, after a quarrel too many, I spent five miserable years with you in stinking Cairo, sat down alone one day with a coffee and a cigarette, and asked herself, ‘What exactly do I need him for?’

  My last Saturday. My last Sunday…

  He phoned her but they could not speak for long. On the landing people came and went, banged the door. A girl with long greasy hairy stood behind Sammar and wanted to use the payphone too. Sammar wished she did not live in a place like that, she wished that she could be settled with a telephone in a kitchen that was her own. She could talk and at the same time wipe the crumbs off the table, turn the cooker off.

  ‘I must go,’ she whispered, but he would not let her go, he went on talking and she did not want to miss a single word. ‘I have to go.’ Behind her the girl with long hair, huffed and blew with impatience, ‘Are you going to be all day? Are you going to be all day?’ The girl had no mercy.

  It was not the same as when she and Rae had talked a month ago, during the Christmas holidays, when Sammar had the building all to herself. Even at night, they could not talk. The stairs at night-time were dangerous highways, now and again the sounds of thumps and heaving, shouts, snatches of songs. Someone vomited on the bottom stairs, curry and beer, on the same place where Sammar had put her cushion and sat speaking to Rae.

  My last Monday.

  What she heard from everyone except him: Lucky you, to get away from all this dreadful weather we’ve been having lately. You must be so happy you are going to see your son again. How many years since you’ve been backs’ Four years? That is a long time.

  My last Tuesday.

  At that early time of the morning, the Senior Common Room was quiet. Apart from Sammar and Rae, there were two men and a lady with curly blonde hair who had slid their mugs of coffee down the metal rail to the cashier and sat under the No Smoking sign. In this room Sammar liked the tall windows that looked out over the other university buildings, the way the grass curved upwards to the road, the white dome of Engineering shaped like a mosque. Would she remember these things? The way Rae tore open a packet of sugar, would she remember that in a place where there were no packets of sugar? Or his jacket, would she remember its colour in a place where people had no need of wool or jackets? The future whined for her attention. Picture the interviews in Egypt, young men smoking one cigarette after the other. Picture sun and dusty roads, shops not so well stocked, shabby cars and shabby clothes, undecorated rooms. Picture them all, soon they will be…

  ‘You are already away from me,’ he said as if he could hear the future whining, as if he could see the future pulling at her hand. He watched her, he looked at her more than she looked at him. Cups of tea held her attention, smooth flawless plastic spoons.

  ‘No. No, I’m still here.’

  They were together at this uncomfortable time of the day to wring whatever time they could, what was left. In an hour they would be engulfed by work and the voices of people, they would be par
t of a bigger churning whole, projects for her to hurry up and finish before she left, classes for him and the visit of Dr Fareed Khalifa from Stirling. They were writing a paper together which meant hours of discussion.

  She said, ‘Yesterday when I spoke in Arabic to Fareed, I felt that home was close.’ Yesterday, she had met him in Rae’s office. He was short and energetic-looking with a beard and the habit of asking one question after the other. But she had not minded answering his questions, the curriculum vitae of her life. He had in turn told her about his wife who was a student, his three children who were in school. She had enjoyed talking in Arabic, words like insha’ Allah, fitting naturally in everything that was said, part of the sentences, the vision. How many times had she over the past days said in English ‘I’m leaving on Friday’, and the sentence normal and natural as it was to the people who heard it, had sounded in her ears incomplete, untruthful without insha’ Allah.

  ‘You were patient with all his questions,’ Rae said. ‘Most people aren’t.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you are secretive.’

  He laughed and said, ‘What makes you say that?’

  She said, ‘Something you said once. You and Yasmin were talking about how schoolgirls in France were not allowed to wear hijab. Do you remember? Yasmin was angry…’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  She remembered the November afternoon and feeling glad that Yasmin, who was giving her a lift home, was talking to Rae, not in any hurry to leave. Not in a hurry to go home because Nazim was off-shore and it had struck Sammar then that the three of them had no one expecting them at home, only voices that came out of radios and television sets.

  She talked about that day, finding a new past that was not shrouded in sleep. A recent past that could be pulled out, silk from a drawer, to admire and touch. ‘You said you liked hijab and I asked you why. It was the only thing I said the whole time…’