The Translator

by Leila Aboulela

  ‘It’s not really the custom,’ Waleed said, ‘for a widow to live with her in-laws. It’s as if you’re giving the signal to everyone that you don’t want to get married again.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter… I don’t really care what signal people get.’

  He looked sad all of a sudden and when he spoke his voice was softer, childlike, her baby brother of long ago. ‘I’m sorry, Sammar. I’m sorry that I’m your only family left and I can’t take you and Amir in…’

  The thought of her and Amir living with Waleed and his wife in their new flat was ridiculous enough to make her want to laugh out loud. But she controlled herself and in the silence caught some of Waleed’s change of mood. His words ‘I’m your only family left’, and an awareness of their long-dead parents, a longing for them and what they could have offered.

  ‘I’ve been sitting here,’ she finally said to tease him, ‘thinking you want to get rid of me and send me back to Aberdeen. Instead you want me and Amir right here with you, so that your wife will go mad and return to her father’s house.’

  He frowned and became his own irritated self, ‘Of course you have to go back to your job in Aberdeen…’

  She tousled his hair and gave him a hug. The neon light above their head buzzed, glowed and came on. Some of the streetlights blinked. ‘Hey,’ yelled the children and rushed indoors to the light of the sitting room.

  The computer was on the dining table, swathed in plastic covers. The printer, similarly covered, was on the nearby sideboard. Sammar pulled out the dining chair that faced the monitor and sat down. The end of the power cut brought with it noisiness; the loud television, the purr of the air cooler, and from the bathroom she could hear the toilet filling up with water.

  ‘So how do I get this computer to work?’ she asked Waleed, who was telling the children that he didn’t have any cartoon videos.

  ‘I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to resign.’ He came over to her and frowned…

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re really hard-headed, you’re not going to take my advice, are you?’

  When she shook her head he shrugged and began to unveil his precious computer, lifting up the layers of plastic covers that protected it from dust. Everything was precious in Khartoum, even ink and paper, because it was all imported, so hard to replace.

  It was not difficult to write the letter, she had handwritten it at home and just needed to type it then print it out. She needed two copies, the same wording but one addressed to Personnel, another to her head of Department. That was the normal procedure for resigning. She wrote ‘family obligations’ as the reason she could not leave Khartoum and come back to Aberdeen.

  Waleed hovered around her as she wrote. ‘I’ll do the printing,’ he said when she finished and shooed her out of the way.

  The letters slid out of the printer, smoothly, one after the other. ‘Isles,’ said Waleed as he lifted the second letter, ‘Professor R. Isles, an unusual name.’

  ‘Yes, he’s the head of department.’ For months, weeks she had not said his name, not once. Not heard it once, nor said it once, even in a whisper, to herself. Now to Waleed she said, her voice too bright, ‘Guess what the R stands for.’

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ronald Reagan?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I give up,’ he said, dusting the computer screen with a cloth that he took out of a plastic pouch. ‘I’m not dying to know.’

  ‘Rae,’ she mumbled, mispronouncing his name. She wiped her hand on her skirt.

  ‘Rye, rai’ ?’ said Waleed putting the cover back over the machine.

  She smiled. Rai’ was opinion in Arabic. ‘Yes,’ she said looking away. ‘He had lots of opinions.’

  18

  She sent the letters and told herself that she was not waiting, not expecting anything but an acknowledgement of her resignation, a formal response to her ‘Dear Professor Isles…’, something that one of the secretaries would type up for him, put a copy in his filing cabinet labelled ‘Administration’.

  In Khartoum, no postmen walked the streets, no letters were delivered to people’s homes. Her aunt rented out a post-office box, owned a key that creaked opened a little metal door like a locker. Inside, the family’s post would be found, lying on a film of dust. Sammar turned the key of the post-office box and found nothing.

  In Egypt when she had spent day after day interpreting interviews in Cairo, Alexandria and the south, she had waited for a message from him, some word. He knew where she was, he knew how to get in touch with her. She needed him to say, I didn’t mean it when I said get away from me, I didn’t mean it. That was what she wanted in those tense days. Different hotels, everyone she was working with enjoying the location, appreciative of Egypt, going out to see all the sights, and she sick inside, not sure of anything except that she must work, work hard, stay numb, not cry. Three weeks’ comforting herself, tomorrow he will get in touch with me, he knows where I am, tomorrow. She worked, she ate, she stayed in the same hotel with people who came from the same world he came from, worked in the same field. His competitors who wrote for the same journals he wrote for, went to the same conferences but in her eyes they were different than him, indistinct and cheerful compared to him. He could have been here, one of them, part of this programme. ‘They took someone else,’ he had said to her in the Winter Gardens, ‘someone with more palatable views.’ She had not understood what he meant by more palatable views.

  He will get in touch with me, he will not leave me like this, she thought in Alexandria and in the southern province of Souhaig, and she thought wrong. She hoped and she worked hard pushing Arabic into English, English into Arabic, staying up late with hotel smells, typing out all the interviews. She looked as weary as the young men she put the questions to everyday, thin and disillusioned, their fingers gripping cigarettes, bravado and dreams. She put to them questions made up by others, then turned their answers into English words… ‘I worked as a helper in a beauty salon, the usual things, sweeping hair from off the floor, washing towels…’ ‘My brother served time and when he came out. . .’, ‘My father worked in Baghdad and lost his job when the war broke out…’, ‘We live ten, one room…’ When they spoke they addressed her. Only one of them looked her straight in the eye, baiting, different than the others, ‘I was in America,’ he said, ‘Massachussetts. I was there so I know what I’m talking about. Western men worship money and women. Some of them see the world through dollar bills, some of them see the world through the thighs of a woman.’ He spoke like that but she remained numb, numb about everything, silent when the others later, over lunch, could speak of nothing else. She smiled stupidly when she was told, ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that. Most unpleasant.’ She remained numb until she reached Khartoum, walked into her aunt’s house and saw Tarig’s picture on the wall.

  She turned the key of the post-office box and found a reply from the Personnel Department. She owed the University one month’s salary because she had not served her notice. She turned the key of the post-office box and found nothing, not even the formal reply she expected from him. She turned the key of the post-office box and found a letter from Yasmin. She had given birth to a baby girl, she was on maternity leave now, no longer going to work. There was no mention of Rae in the letter. There was the excitement of the baby and ‘You are doing the right thing, Sammar, staying with your family, not coming back… we too would like to leave Britain…’

  She turned the key of the post-office box and found nothing. She turned the key of the post-office box and knew she would find nothing. She gave the key back to Hanan, saying, ‘I’m not expecting any more mail.’ Even if he wrote what she wanted him to write, ‘I didn’t mean it when I said, get away from me’, what would be the use? They could not have a future together, it would not be enough.

  Her future was here where she belonged. She belonged with her son and strangers who smiled when she came into a room. She s
hould not delude herself and with time she would forget. The sun and dust would erode her feelings for him. She must give away the bottle of perfume he had given her. She must pull his words out of her head like seaweed and throw them away.

  Here. Her life was here.

  Starting a new job, getting used to teaching, linking faces to names. Picking Amir and Dalia up from school. Housework, in the evening a social life, everyone indoors by the eleven o’clock curfew. Visitors or calling on people to offer condolences when death came, congratulations when a baby came. Welcome to the one who arrived from abroad, goodbye to the one who was going away. And bed-ridden people who spoke in faint voices, the smell of sick rooms.

  Here. Her life was here.

  Life was the dust storms that approached rosy brown from the sky, the rush to slam shut windows and doors, the wind whistling through bushes and trees. Brief mad storms and then the sand, thick sand covering everything, whirls of soft sand on the tiles to scoop up and throw away. To beat out of curtains, cushions, pillows, to dust away from the surface of all that was still. Sand eternally between the grooves of things, in folds of skin, the leaves of the children’s books. And life was the rain that came at dawn with lightening, fat drops on the dust, the sun defeated for a day. Just a day, a softening, a picture of the past, the empty square covered in silver, laid out with the colour of the moon. Someone to talk to…

  Remember Hanan, one day you and I walking in our school uniforms to get milk from the store. There was no school because of the rain. We went in the morning, found it closed and came back. But we stayed with our uniforms on all day.

  Remember Sammar, how Tarig used to ride his bicycle through the puddles on purpose, every puddle from here to Airport Road.

  Remember Hanan, the day we went to the Blue Nile cinema and it started to rain on top of our heads and Tarig just sat there watching the screen.

  Remember the day, remember the time. Remember Tarig. Hassan looked like him, his uncle who had never seen him. Only Hassan not Hussein, they were not identical twins. Even Amir did not look like his father as much as Hassan did. Isn’t that strange? she said to Hanan, as they folded the washing together, so much washing, hills of clean clothes to sort out and smooth into neat piles.

  Week after week. Stroking Hassan’s hair, watering the garden, removing seeds from slices of watermelon. Watching Hanan’s baby grow, the first day he ate beans, the first day he tasted mangoes and how his nappy looked after that. The door bell and rushing from indoors, down the steps of the porch to drag open the black metal gate. Miranda for guests, ice cubes, a dish of sweets to pass around. ‘Water,’ some would say. ‘Just get me a glass of water, Sammar, nothing else.’ She fell in love with Amir again. She carried him around the house, like Hanan carried her baby. They played a game, they pretended Amir was a baby again and she had to carry him. Only in this game could he be sweet and clinging. At all other times, he was aloof, independent, never afraid. He neither remembered nor missed his father. He had lived quite content without his mother. There was something unendearing about her son: a strength, an inner privacy she knew nothing about, shut out by guilt and her years away. Only in this game of baby and mother were they close. Carrying him around the house, not minding that he was heavy. Do you know, baby, that you were born in a cold country and you wore white wool. Baby, do you want to go outside to the garden? Look, this is a tree, this is the grass. What’s that? in his pretend baby voice, pointing up. What’s that? An airplane. It takes people away, far away from here.

  The new job. Different people, classes held in different locations. Some of the ‘Erasing Illiteracy’ classes were in the evening at the university. Palm trees and a campus shabby with crumbling walls, undergraduate students not so well dressed or healthy looking as the ones she used to see in Aberdeen. Like all the other evening classes, her class took a break for the sunset prayers. They would leave the room where the fan whirled overhead blowing sheets of paper off the desks, and step into the heat of outside. She never knew who spread out the palm-fibre mats on the grass. They were always there when she came out. Beige and a little rough on the forehead and the palms. When she stood her shoulders brushed against the women at each side of her, straight lines, then bending down together but not precisely at the same time, not slick, not synchronised, but rippled and the rustle of clothes until their foreheads rested on the mats. Under the sky, the grass underneath, it was a different feeling from praying indoors, a different glow. She remembered having to hide in Aberdeen, being alone. She remembered wanting him to pray like she prayed, hoping for it. The memory made her say, Lord, keep sadness away from me.

  She kept busy so that there would not be pauses in the day to dwell. She tired herself so that there would not be dreams at night. Toilet training the twins, watching videos with everyone: thrilling American films, loud Egyptian soaps. Taking her aunt to the doctor, listening to her aunt on the way back, ‘My son would have been a great doctor like him…’

  Listening to Nahla for hours at a time, Nahla angry because her wedding must be indefinitely postponed, the reasons – a catalogue of problems – her fiance’s work, his lack of work, his frustrated desire to get a job abroad, the fact that they had nowhere to live, the fact that his father was loaded and yet too mean to help out.

  She was rarely alone. Almost never alone. At night her aunt would turn over, sit up, pour herself a glass of water from the thermos she kept under her bed. Amir would mumble in his sleep, kick off the covers, dream children’s dreams. First thing in the morning, Dalia would come down, trailing ribbons and comb, a smudged tube of Wellaform. ‘Braid my hair, hurry, I’ll be late for school.’

  The Wellaform made Dalia’s hair gleam and stuck on Sammar’s fingers. She wiped them on her own hair and covered it before Dalia’s father came down to bid his mother-in-law good morning, on his way to work. He worked in his family’s ice factory. Every morning he said the same thing, ‘Do you need anything?’ and every morning her aunt replied, ‘Only your well-being.’ Though at any other time of the day she would want him to do this and that, bring this and that, sending messages through Hanan. Sometimes, if there was time, he had coffee with her aunt, Sammar stirring the sugar, offering biscuits. Most often the morning was a rush and he did not have time to sit down. He would hold Dalia by the hand, pretty in her school uniform and braids, greet his mother-in-law and say, ‘Do you need anything, Aunt?’

  What was life like? Deprivation and abundance, side by side like a miracle. Surrender to them both. Poverty and sunshine, poverty and jewels in the sky. Drought and the gushing Nile. Disease and clean hearts. Stories from neighbours, relations.

  A twenty-year-old smitten with polio, look at him now overweight and ungainly, walking with a crutch.

  On the operating table, before they knocked me out with the anaesthetic, I saw flies buzzing above my head…

  No this and no that. No water. In this land where the Nile flooded, no water. No water to have a shower with, flush the toilets with, cook, drink. Driving in the car across town to fill big Jerry cans with water from someone else’s garden tap. Tipping buckets of water down the toilet, scooping water from a pail to bathe.

  Tempers were short during a water cut. Even shorter than during a power cut. When the water came back, it spluttered and spat out of the taps, dark brown with sediment, poisonous black. Gradually it would lighten. Even then they had to filter it before they drank it or cooked with it. A challenge just to live from day to day, a struggle just to get by. But there were jokes. Jokes about the cuts, rationing and the government. Laughter on hot evenings in the garden, her aunt smiling like in the past, grasshoppers and frogs as loud as the children.

  And everyday Amir in his school uniform, white shirt streaked with sweat and dust, scruffy shoes. ‘Why did you lose your pencil?’… ‘No, you’re not allowed to buy candy floss from the man at the gate. It’s full of germs.’

  This was her life. Fighting malaria, penicillin powder on the children’s cuts. The
curfew at eleven. Immersing herself, losing herself so that there would not be pauses in the day to dwell, no time for fantasies at night.

  19

  But she dreamt of him. Dreams in which he brushed past her, would not look at her, would not speak to her. Dreams in which he was busy talking to others. When she sought his attention he frowned and it was a cold look that she received, no fondness. She would wake after such dreams with raw eyes, mumbling and clumsy, dropping things, mislaying things. When asked what was wrong with her, she would say that it was the time of month.

  No news of him, his name. In Yasmin’s letters, the words slanting and large: her baby daughter doesn’t sleep through the night, her baby is teething, a photo of the baby, no mention of Rae. When she answered Yasmin’s letters she disciplined herself not to ask about him, not to ask for news or even a casual reference like the remarks she used to hear in Aberdeen all around her in abundance, from Diane, from the coffee-scented secretaries, from his Ph.D. students, the man from Sierra Leone. What she wanted to know: how was he, how was his health, did he have any new Ph.D. students, where did he publish the paper he and Fareed were working on, who translated for him now? This she asked Yasmin, this she finally allowed herself but without using his name, without writing it down. ‘Did they find anyone to take my place?’ she wrote. But Yasmin was on extended maternity leave, in another world with her baby girl, not keen to go back to work, not very interested. She wrote, ‘No, I don’t think the department has anyone translating for them at the moment, I’m not sure.’ And Sammar found herself nostalgic for her old job, the work itself, moulding Arabic into English, trying to be transparent like a pane of glass not obscuring the meaning of any word. She missed the cramped room with the hum of the computer. She missed Diane, the smell of her cheese and onion crisps, her innocence when she said, ‘Rae’s class was really good today. One bloke asked this question about…’