Once there was a time when she could do nothing. When she was held down by something heavy. Clogged up, dragging herself to pray, even her faith sluggish. Yet Allah had rewarded her even for these imperfect prayers. She had been protected from all the extremes. Pills, break-down, attempts at suicide. A barrier was put between her and things like that, the balance that Rae admired. For this admiration she would gather her courage and talk to him. She would make him happy, she could do so much for him.
She wanted to cook for him different things, and then stand in the kitchen and think, I should change my clothes, wash, for her hair and clothes would be smelling of food. Mhairi could come and live with them, she would not need to go to boarding school anymore, and he would like that, seeing his daughter everyday, not having to drive to Edinburgh. And Mhairi would like Amir, girls her age liked younger children. She would be kind to Mhairi, she would do everything for her, clean her room, sort her school clothes. She would treat her like a princess. When they went out shopping together she would buy her pretty things, soap that smelt of raspberries and ribbons of different widths for her hair.
14
The roads were blocked with cars that could barely move. The city’s roundabouts and traffic lights were useless in the snow. So many feet of snow, the radio had announced, for so many years there had not been such heavy snow. Chaos was a rare visitor to this orderly city. It was flustered now, tense and stubborn as it insisted on following its daily rhythm. Shops must open, people must get to work. That was sacred. If Sammar had searched for anything sacred to this city and not found it, here it was. On people’s faces as they pushed and scraped the snow off their cars, on the face of the bent elderly woman, miraculously still on her feet, beating the snow with her walking stick; she must get to the post office.
Over this chaos, the sun shone brighter than ever, dazzling on the white that covered the surface of things. There was sunshine like in Africa and the city slowed down, became inefficient, as if it were part of the Third World. From this came Sammar’s strength. She knew this. It was familiar to her, natural and curing to the soul. She walked, her fingers frozen in spite of woollen gloves, her feet numb in her shoes. The streets were long queues of cars, awkward buses and vans. The pavements were trampled snow and patches of slippery ice. It was useless to catch a bus. The buses were elephants today.
When she got to the university, the campus was quiet without the usual busy coming and going of students. Not many cars were in the car park and the few that were there were at awkward angles and distances from each other because the snow had covered the lines of the parking spaces. Some students were playing in the snow, throwing snowballs at each other. They wore hats and colourful scarves. They were laughing, not serious and blank as they usually looked. It seemed as if there were no classes running today or only a few. The university, unlike the business world, had surrendered to the exceptional day.
Sammar met Yasmin on the steps of the building. Yasmin was visibly pregnant in spite of the large coat she was wearing. She was on her way home rather than coming in.
‘There’s hardly anyone in today, there’s no point in me staying,’ she blew her nose. ‘I’m not too well. I can’t get rid of this cold.’
‘Is Rae here?’
Yasmin nodded, ‘He’s on the phone with some journalist from London… about the hijack.’
Sammar knew about the snow, not about a hijack. But it did not seem out of place. The whole day was different, lifted up out of the ordinary in every way.
‘A Libyan Airlines on its way to Amman,’ said Yasmin. ‘Haven’t you heard? It was on the news this morning.’
She had heard that there were power cuts in some parts of Aberdeen, the names of the schools that were closed, treacherous roads.
Yasmin said that the airplane was in Cyprus now. The hijackers wanted it refuelled but no one knew yet where they intended to go.
‘Fareed was with Rae a while ago. They called Tripoli. It seems to be about freeing political prisoners in Libya. Then Fareed went to teach. I don’t think more than half of his class turned up but he decided to go ahead anyway.’
Yasmin blew her nose again. It was cold standing on the steps of the building.
‘You had better go,’ said Sammar.
‘Yes, none of the others turned up.’ She meant the other secretaries.
‘The roads are really bad.’
‘It’s good Nazim isn’t off-shore,’ Yasmin said. ‘You’re lucky you’re going away. It’s tomorrow, isn’t it?’
‘If the trains run. They cancelled them today.’ Sammar stamped her feet to shake off the snow that was on her shoes.
‘The airport is open. They’ve cleared the runway. You can get a plane to London if the trains aren’t running.’
‘Yes, I suppose I can.’ There was no need to tell Yasmin that she did not want to go away, that she was not going away, that today everything was going to be different. But she could say insha’ Allah and not feel that she was lying. She said, ‘Insha’ Allah tomorrow. I’ve packed and everything.’
They said goodbye to each other. They said they were not going to meet for a long time.
Rae was still on the telephone when she went to his office. She was content to sit and hear his voice, know that he was here, smile at him once in a while. She sat on one of the brown armchairs that made up a seating arrangement separate from his desk. On the telephone, he was speaking the way he spoke to everyone except her: cooler, quicker. Sometimes he made notes, smiled at her. He did not look sad like yesterday when he was telling her about his uncle. She was pleased about that and proud that his opinion was being asked from London, where they must have many Middle-East experts of their own.
The politics of Libya and a lot of sun in the room, hitting the shelf of books, the filing cabinet. There were labels on the filing cabinet: Research, Administration, Teaching. Her work with him came under Research. What she translated made up part of the references for the papers he published in journals, presented in conferences.
‘So you didn’t go to Stirling?’ she said when he finished speaking on the telephone.
‘I’ll go in the afternoon, if the road’s clear.’
She was going to ask him if he would miss the funeral when the telephone rang again. It was a colleague this time, someone he was at ease with because he laughed when he spoke of the hijack, said he was up half the night hearing the news and yes, it was nearly as good as in the seventies but unlikely to compete with Entebbe.
There were pauses when he was listening and she was unaware of what the conversation was about. She could hear the students downstairs playing in the snow. Their laughter came through the window.
A few words from Rae, snatches, ‘We’re having our funding cut again’… ‘I didn’t know about that’… ‘Paris! Lucky man.’
When he finished, he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she thought of driving with him to Stirling in the afternoon. They would drive south and there would be snow piled at the side of the road. They would stop for petrol and from the shop he would get her mineral water and sweets. He left his desk and came to sit with her, leaned to kiss her but she moved her head away. His chin brushed against her scarf. They laughed a little, embarrassed now, a nervous laugh like breathing. But in the silence that followed, her resolve was strengthened. She said, ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘Ask me.’ He was more subdued than when he was speaking on the telephone.
‘I want to ask you to become a Muslim so we could…’
Her courage failed her. She could not look at him. She looked down at her gloves on her lap. If it could really happen, she could drive with him to Stirling to be alone with him, to be settled. The words tumbled out, ‘I want to talk to you about this all the time but it’s so hard. We talk of Islam when we talk of work and it’s different from the way I want to talk to you.’ She folded her gloves in her hands, unfolded them again.
When he didn’t say anything, she looked up. If what was
in his eyes was wariness, surprise, she would have felt the barriers between them, she would have withdrawn. But what she found was distress, enough to twist her with pity for him. Why, when she wanted to make him feel safe, when she wanted to look after him?
‘Is the shahadah what you want to talk to me about?’ His voice normal, the way he spoke to her.
‘Yes.’ She put her gloves back on.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No.’ So much sun was in the room, but the cold was inside her. She had come with it from outside.
‘There’s a portable heater in the cupboard in the hall; I can get it.’
She shook her head, ‘No, I’m alright.’
Somehow it was easier to talk after that, to say what she wanted to say, the way she wanted to say it. It was not difficult, confidence came.
She said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about the shahadah, what it means.’ She breathed in and went on, ‘It’s two things together, both beginning with the words, “I bear witness”. I bear witness, I testify, to something that is intangible, invisible, but I have knowledge of it in my heart. There is no god except Allah, nothing else is worthy of worship. That’s the first thing… Then the second thing… I bear witness that Muhammad is His messenger, a messenger not only to the Arabs who saw him and heard him, but to everyone, in every time.’
She thought, I have to explain things right, I have to be clear. She said, ‘There were messengers before, Moses and Jesus and others. Every messenger comes with proof about himself, a miracle suitable to his time. Something that his people would find deeply impressive, something that would make them listen to him. Though even with these miracles not everyone believes.
‘The Qur’an was the miracle that Muhammad, peace be upon him, was sent with. And it’s different from the miracles of the other Prophets because it’s still with us now… it’s still accessible. For the Arabs who first heard it, it was something new and strange, neither poetry nor prose, something they had never heard before. When the early verses of the Qur’an were recited, many people were crying from the words and how they sounded…’
He said, ‘Translations don’t do it justice. Much is lost…’
‘Yes, the meanings can be translated but not reproduced. And of course the miracle of it can’t be reproduced… But even then, hearing it from the Prophet, peace be upon him, not everyone believed. Not everyone accepted that the source and wording of what they were hearing came from Allah. The first believers were mostly women and slaves. I don’t know why, maybe they had softer hearts, I don’t know…’
‘Maybe in changing they did not have much to lose,’ he said. ‘It was the rulers of Makkah who were reluctant to give up their traditions and established ways for something new.’
She said, ‘They were very bad in Makkah to the early Muslims. Muhammad was known as Al-Amin, that was what everyone called him. It means the honest, the trustworthy, but when he said, “I am a messenger from Allah”, he was called liar, mad-man, poet. These are the doubts that people have… Allah tells us in the Qur’an, reminds us again and again, these verses are not the words of a poet, they are Divine revelation, certain truth.’
She paused and then said, ‘Everything in my religion comes from this. The words of the Qur’an which you told me the seventh-century Pope dismissed as heresy… Now tell me if you believe or not.’
She walked to the window. Flakes of snow drifted down from the roof, talcum powder, icing sugar. She saw the students whose voices she had been hearing. They were in the car park, two boys rolling a huge snowball grey with dirt from the ground. They laughed as they propped it against the door of one of the cars. She felt old looking at them; they were young and did not have many responsibilities. If Rae said no, what exile would he put himself in? If he said no, she would walk out on to the snow, an exile she would take with her wherever she went.
When she turned around he said, ‘I am not sure.’
She had expected yes or no. She would have known what to say if he had said yes. She would have known what to do if he had said no.
She sat down and because she was silent he repeated, ‘I’m not sure.’
She said, ‘Do you know what it means for us?’
‘I know. I’ve always known.’
‘I imagined we could get married today.’ Her voice startled and bruised her, like sandpaper, like sea-salt. ‘Now, and I could go with you to Stirling. I don’t want to go to Egypt.’
‘How could we get married now?’ The same distress in his voice.
‘I thought Fareed could marry us and it would not be difficult to get two witnesses.’ She had imagined students as witnesses. Even with the snow, they could still have found Muslim students. It was not how she had got married to Tarig, but it was how it used to be when people lived by Islam alone. Two witnesses, and a gift. A gift however simple or small. In the Prophet’s time, two chapters of the Qur’an were an acceptable gift from a man who had nothing to give his new wife but verses which he had memorised. Now in Muslim countries, it was gold and dollar bills, endless discussions about who should buy the video set and fridge-freezer.
There was a silence in the room. She thought, why isn’t he saying anything, why isn’t he talking to me? She thought, why am I numb, why am I not crying yet?
‘I thought you were homesick,’ he finally said, ‘and this anti-terrorist project would be a chance for you to go on to Khartoum, see your son. Maybe I made a mistake in suggesting it…’
‘It wasn’t a mistake. I was homesick for the place, how everything looked. But I don’t know what kind of sickness it would be, to be away from you.’
He said, ‘I know what my sickness would be…’
‘Don’t say no then, not sure is better than no, don’t ever say no.’
‘It’s not in me to be religious,’ he said. ‘I studied Islam for the politics of the Middle East. I did not study it for myself. I was not searching for something spiritual. Some people do. I had a friend who went to India and became a Buddhist. But I was not like that. I believed the best I could do, what I owed a place and people who had deep meaning for me, was to be objective, detached. In the middle of all the prejudice and hypocrisy, I wanted to be one of the few who was saying what was reasonable and right.’
‘It’s not enough,’ she pressed her hands together. ‘It’s not enough. It’s not enough for me.’
He leaned and put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.
She said, ‘Don’t you realise how much you hurt me saying objective and detached, like you are above all of this, above me, looking down…’
‘No, no it isn’t…’ His face had a deeper colour as if he had pressed it too hard against his hands.
‘It is. It is looking down, saying it has nothing to do with you, not for you. When you know very well that it’s for everyone. You know it’s not just for Arabs. You know the figures, you know more than me how much percentage are Chinese, Russians…’
‘I didn’t say it has nothing to do with me. I didn’t say that.’
‘You’re not reassuring me, you’re not saying anything to stop me being anxious.’ She was shivering. If she did not hold her teeth together they would start chattering.
‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘This room can get too cold.’
She nodded. All the sunshine in the room, the light laughter coming up through the window and no warmth.
‘I’ll go get the heater from the cupboard,’ he said.
His absence was harsh, abrupt. In his absence the room was bleak, filled with too many things: books, papers, a telephone that rang only for him. She sat where his students sat, on that same armchair, panicking about their exams, their financial difficulties, on the edge of dropping out. She imagined that he was reasonable with them, genuinely concerned. It occurred to her now that she had come here to his office to ask him to marry her and he had not said yes. He had not said yes, and yet here she still sat, clinging. She had no pride. If she had pride she would go away now. Inste
ad she was still sitting.
He came back pulling a large heater on wheels. It took time for him to untangle the wire, plug the socket in the wall. His movements were slow, a little clumsy, someone who did not spend much time doing things with his hands.
The rods on the heater glowed pink and orange. When he sat down he said, ‘Be patient with me, I don’t know what to do… All this fumbling and I never had so much empathy for anyone in my life.’
She did not understand the meaning of the word ‘empathy’. At times he did say words she could not understand, words she would ask him to explain. Sixties’ scene, Celtic, chock-a-block. But now she did not ask him the meaning of ‘empathy’. Today she could not ask. It sounded like ‘sympathy’, and, she thought, he feels sorry for me. To him I must have always looked helpless and forlorn.
Somehow she was able to speak, make the last attempt, ‘If you say the shahadah it would be enough. We could get married. If you just say the words…’
‘I have to be sure. I would despise myself if I wasn’t sure.’
‘But people get married that way. Here in Aberdeen there are people who got married like this…’
‘We’re not like that. You and I are different. For them it is a token gesture.’
She thought, it is clear now, it is so clear, he does not love me enough, I am not beautiful enough. I am not feminine enough coming here to ask him to marry me when I should have waited to be asked.
‘Why did you talk to me then? From the beginning, why did you start all this. You should have just left me alone. You had no right. If you were content in your religion…’
The Translator Page 12