The Kindness of Enemies

by Leila Aboulela

  ‘Anna, Princess of Georgia.’ He looked at her when he said her name. The rest of his speech was translated. ‘I have captured you for a specific reason. Usually I employ prisoners to build or repair roads or to work in the quarry but you are valuable.’

  Though she knew that he had more to say, she spoke up. ‘I have been dragged here against my will. I lost my daughter.’ She paused but the translator did not translate. So the imam could understand her. He was deliberately choosing not to use her language.

  She continued, ‘I have done nothing to deserve this. I ask you to return me to my home. I do not belong here.’

  ‘My son Jamaleldin was innocent too when the Russians captured him. He was eight years old. You are a mother, you have a young son. Tell me, is it right, is it fair to pull a child away from his parents?’

  She hesitated before she replied. It would not be right to criticise the tsar and at the same time use him as a threat against her captives. Her ambivalence towards Russia must never show. She had said to David, ‘I am Georgian, not Russian.’ But here, in this stone world, in this war, with this enemy she was as Russian as she could ever be.

  He lowered his voice. ‘Answer my question.’

  She was conscious of the brush of silk on her cheekbones and nose. ‘No, it is not right to hurt any child in any way.’

  He bowed his head in agreement. ‘For years, I searched among my prisoners for someone of importance. Prince Orbeliani was my captive for six months but he was not weighty enough. I could only exchange him for some of my men. But you, Anna, Princess of Georgia, are distinguished. You are valuable. This is my hope.’

  After his words were translated, he seemed to reconsider. ‘Not my hope, my conviction that you would be valuable enough to the tsar. You will be exchanged for my son Jamaleldin.’

  Would the tsar exchange his godson for a woman and a child? Maybe, maybe not. Her voice was a pitch higher. ‘If the tsar doesn’t accept? What will happen then?’ It was as if she had asked an embarrassing question. The lips of the translator twitched. One of the guards looked at her, his eyes bold as if he could see through her veil.

  Shamil sounded distant when he replied, ‘Our customs and laws will prevail.’

  She shifted in her chair. It was wooden and crude. She had not sat in a chair since they had left Tsinondali.

  ‘I have waited fourteen years,’ Shamil was saying. ‘You are the granddaughter of the King of Georgia. You are a fit person to write to the Russian sultan. Let him return to me my son Jamaleldin from St Petersburg and I will free you on the hour. I am giving you my word and I am a man true to my promise.’

  ‘The tsar will not give up Jamaleldin easily. He is his protégé and his favourite.’

  ‘And I am his father. He is my flesh and blood. Wouldn’t you do the same for your son?’

  She did not have an answer. Not for him. Lydia’s blood was on his hands.

  He said, ‘You will now sit and write a letter to the tsar begging for your release. Tell him Shamil demands his son and tell him my people also demand a ransom. The details of the ransom will follow. Write to your husband too, Prince David, that if my demands are met I will return you pure as the lilies, sheltered from all eyes like the gazelles of the desert.’

  She wanted to laugh at his lilies and gazelles. But if she started to laugh, she would cry.

  ‘There is another matter that you need to know of,’ he continued. ‘I abhor trickery. I can forgive anything except deception.’ His voice rose as if he was giving a sermon. ‘Deceit is an offence against Allah and his servant Shamil. The first time I find you plotting to escape I shall have you killed. To cut off heads is my right as imam.’

  If he expected to frighten her, she was unmoved. ‘You need not threaten me. My rank and upbringing forbid me to lie. I have no intention of tricking you.’

  ‘Then what is this?’ Shamil opened his palm and his steward handed him a letter. ‘I have letters addressed to you which I have had translated. But this letter is neither in Russian, nor Georgian, nor Tartar. What is this script? Are you trying to trick me?’

  ‘No, I am not. Show it to me.’ She stood up and pushed aside her face veil. The script was clearer now. And without the black silk barrier, Shamil seemed closer, his eyes lighter, all his features more in focus. She reached out for the letter.

  He could see her face now and later she would wonder if his expression changed in any way. But he tore the letter in shreds. ‘It is a coded message and you will not be seeing it.’

  Her eyes fell on a fragment on the floor. ‘This is not a coded message. This is French, a foreign language. It is written to my son’s governess by her mother in France. How dare you destroy it! Madame Drancy is another of your innocent victims. This letter is addressed to her. It is not yours to dispose of.’

  ‘Understand my rules, Princess of Georgia.’ He still remained seated but he did not look up at her. ‘You will neither send nor receive anything which my interpreters cannot translate for me.’

  The translator gestured for her to return to her chair. But it was too late, she was too angry to sit. ‘I cannot be held responsible for what others send me. As for your staff, they are surely limited in linguistic ability if they cannot tell the difference between French and a secret language!’

  In the pause that followed, it occurred to her that she had now provoked his anger, now she had gone too far. He rose and they stood facing each other. She was conscious of his height and his mass, his aura of mountains and war. When he spoke, he spoke in her own language, the interpreter made redundant. ‘You will be given the letters after I have read them. Conduct yourself well, Princess, and you shall have nothing to fear.’

  3. WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1854

  Jamaleldin’s face remained hot as he wrote his dispatches, as he walked to the stables and as he patrolled this city that bristled in Russia’s grip. He was stationed in Warsaw, with the Vladimirski Lancers. In the mornings when he faced the mirror to shave, his face felt especially hot, and when he let his mind wander, his hand went slack and the razor cut his chin. Yet, to be honest, he was not completely surprised by the news of the kidnapping. He was like a child who had committed a misdemeanour and after a longer than average reprieve was finally caught. It was bound to happen. His father reaching out to claim him, the method brutal, their names linked and on everyone’s tongue. It was bound to happen, and now this was the chosen hour.

  Jamaleldin walked into the officers’ mess and headed towards the dining table. He avoided the group who were bunched avidly over the latest newspaper from home. Thankfully, there were not many of his friends left. Most of his regiment had been despatched to the South Crimean front. Once again, as was the case in the Caucasus, his request for active service was denied and he was now part of this token force that had been left behind to assert Russia’s hold over Poland. Jamaleldin sat facing the opposite direction from the group of officers and ordered a steak from the waiter. He could hear a game of billiards in the adjoining room, the click of the balls against each other, the occasional high cry of success. When his dish came, he whispered bismillah like his mother, Fatima, had taught him years ago. Most of the time he forgot to say it, but these days the past was easily accessible, the Caucasus clearly visualised. In his dreams, his father’s men surrounded him. Imran, Abdullah, Zachariah, Younis. They beckoned and shouted in a language he could no longer understand. His teeth mashed the food as if eating was a duty.

  Here was the companionship he wanted to avoid. Two strolled over and joined him. They recounted the previous night’s adventures and how Pavel, another officer, had lost a huge amount of money at the gambling table. He was now bereft not only of his month’s allowance but of his watch, his silver cufflinks and his mare, a beauty they had been admiring all summer. And where was Pavel now? He was still asleep in his cot, not yet recovered from his hangover. ‘Will he remember that he has gambled away Sultana?’ This was said with a laugh. Jamaleldin smiled as he swallowed. Not much of a
response was expected from him. Appreciation for this latest gossip, a suggestion to send seltzer water and lime as a remedy to the unfortunate Pavel, or at the most a jovial dash over to Pavel’s quarters to throw cold water on his face and witness his first agonising wakeful moments? Instead as Jamaleldin was cutting another piece of steak, the old solemn words fell out of his mouth, the kind of sentences he had made a career out of holding back. The world is a carcass and the one who goes after it is a dog. This was what Sheikh Jamal el-Din had taught his disciples and this was what Shamil repeated night and day.

  ‘What language is that?’ Good-natured curiosity, a trusting smile.

  Jamaleldin knew he should dismiss the question and change the subject. It was the best way for the slip to be forgotten. But something had changed and he was less in control. Or something had changed and he had less to lose. He said, ‘The Avar language. It means “The world is a carcass and the one who goes after it is a dog.” ’

  Bafflement in the eyes of the two officers and the expected drawing back. Jamaleldin’s face was now hot and tipped towards his plate. He could feel them exchange looks and yearned towards them. He yearned towards the steady ground under their feet and their one-dimensional vision. He wanted to be them and he was tired of this wanting. Unease – that feeling of panic before it sharpened and rose, before it ballooned and caught in his throat. A slight nausea as he lifted another piece of steak to his mouth and chewed. He had slipped up because his ears were straining for the tsar’s summons.

  ‘See you at the ball tonight,’ one of the officers said as they drifted away to give him the wide berth he deserved.

  Yes, he would be at the ballroom tonight. He would dive into all that Warsaw could offer, a city more elegant, closer to Western Europe. The railway line ran to Paris and the theatres staged all the latest plays from Germany. Quick, time was running out. His days in Warsaw were numbered. The summons would come soon and he would be in a troika heading back to Petersburg. So he should waltz tonight. Here it was danced in a faster manner; a livelier twirl was the norm. His arms around a girl, spinning her out of control. A girl who didn’t resemble Daria, a girl who was just a waist, her face a blur, her name quickly forgotten. He still had Daria Semyonovich’s letters and he reread them once in a while. But it was as if he was playing the role of the jilted lover – in reality his heart was distracted, his thoughts about her starting to curl bitter. After the tsar had refused them permission to marry, Daria’s mother forbade her daughter to meet Jamaleldin or write to him. And Daria, a good daughter, had acquiesced. Out of clumsiness or misery, Jamaleldin had refused to give her back her letters. There was no dramatic scene of farewell between them; there should have been. Tomorrow he would tear her letters and throw the pieces in the Vistula. And tonight, which might be the last night of freedom, he would indulge himself without pleasure.

  There was a mosque in Cracow but he did not visit it. There was a Tartar colony in Vilno but he had learnt early on that success was correlated to the distance he must keep away. He was on his own. His passions, his thoughts were so often held in check because language (which one?) could not come to his aid. And he did not, above all, trust his own loyalties. They trusted him, though; in one magnanimous sweep they were inclusive and tolerant, but that was not from any merit in him. It was because of their own convictions of superiority, their own sweet arrogance.

  In Poland’s courts, petitions were heard only in Russian. Interpreters were not provided for the prisoners. Polish youth were conscripted into the Russian army, revolutionary dissent was squashed and every independent institution was systematically weakened. This was why the Poles smiled at the news coming in from the Crimea. They took deep breaths of the wind that was blowing in favour of England, France, Turkey and their allies. There were even rumours of Austrian troops marching into St Petersburg and talk of the tsar’s abdication. In the slums of Moscow and the vodka cellars of St Petersburg they were saying that he had failed the country. It touched Jamaleldin that his patron was weakening. It altered the chemistry of the situation. The tsar was ailing and, from high up in the mountains, Shamil was calling him back.

  He pushed his plate away. If he was truly courageous he would join the others bent over the newspaper. Instead he listened to the sound of the billiard balls and he drained his glass of water. How thirsty he had been all this time without knowing it! The news was not only in the Russian papers; Europe’s too were shouting.

  Princess of the Blood Royal prisoner of barbaric tribesmen.

  Savagery in Russian Territory – French citizen abducted for ransom.

  Only the Turkish newspapers put forward a reason: Shamil Imam, Viceroy of Georgia, has made a successful sortie into territories seized by the infidel invaders and is holding a Christian family as hostages against the return of his son Jamaleldin, torn from him by the infidels and brought up in the Christian faith since 1839.

  V

  When the Sugarcane Grows

  1. SCOTLAND, DECEMBER 2010

  A few minutes into the lecture, I ran out of words. I stalled. I left the subject I was teaching and stood staring. Gaynor Stead was sitting in my class. She should not be in this room because this was a second-year class and she was repeating third year. It was really her, not a lookalike. No one else had that dopey look or that shaggy hairstyle. But, it flashed through my mind and made my shoulders weak, perhaps I was the one who had walked into the wrong room, I was the one who was going over revision questions on the Crimean War instead of the Bolshevik Revolution. I searched the faces of the students for some indication. They seemed undisturbed at my presence, yawning this early in the morning, pushing away damp fringes from their eyes, hunched as usual over laptops and notes. The room smelt of cheap shower gel, a mix of deodorants and styling mousse. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ I said. I took my bag and left the room. I stood in the corridor, I checked my timetable, I checked the room number and completely reassured of my sanity, I walked back in. Laughter gurgled in my throat now. Gaynor Stead must have surpassed the breadth of her own stupidity. She was now sitting in classes she was not required to take, listening to a course she had (disingenuously, erroneously, miraculously) been awarded a pass for at one resit or the other.

  As the students filed out at the end of the class I was tempted to stop her. But I did not trust myself. Could I be civil after she had falsely accused me of breaking her finger? She, on her part, did not acknowledge me in any way. I gathered my lecture notes and with them I saw a pro-life leaflet that didn’t belong to me, a picture of a foetus in sad blue tones. One of the students must have put it there either when I was out of the room or earlier when filing in. Perhaps it was Gaynor out to intimidate me. Perhaps that was why she was here. To target me. But this was a ludicrous idea. How on earth would she know? I was being paranoid, too easily rattled.

  Surgical instruments used in the abortion process. I put the leaflet away and for the first time felt the urge to escape. But where to? To go back to Malak and see the vacuum Oz left behind? To fly to Sudan and sit at my father’s deathbed? Instead I went into town because I needed to be surrounded by people, by normal life.

  I needed tea and cake, not proper food, and I found a shop that specialised in cupcakes. All kinds of them were set out, with different coloured icing and flavours: lemon, chocolate and raspberry. My mother, to make life in Khartoum less austere, had at one time started her own cake business. She baked at home and then delivered by car but it was not easy. There was a sugar shortage; cooking gas was difficult to get – she had to sit in the petrol queue for hours in order to refuel. I helped her as much as I could. In the kitchen, answering the phone for orders and going with her in the car to deliver. We had to be nice to all the customers. This was difficult when they cancelled orders after my mother had started baking or they delayed bringing back the containers in which we had delivered the cakes. When we passed by to pick them up, they would spend ages searching their kitchen and end up saying, ‘Oh, we must have lent th
at tray out.’ Then my mother would raise her voice to harangue them and they would take offence, punishing us by withdrawing their custom.

  My mother knew how to make only three cakes: chocolate, which was popular; pineapple upside down which needed tinned pineapples – and these, being imported, were not always available at the grocers; and a honey one that was inferior to the one her friend Grusha Babiker specialised in. It upset my mother that Grusha would not share her recipe. Even though Grusha had none of our income woes, she insisted on keeping her recipe a secret. I remember my mother talking to Grusha on the phone and then crying afterwards. But she could have been crying about something else and not what Grusha had said. She could have been crying about the time a good batch of baking had used up all the gas before she got round to cooking my father’s lunch. He came home to find the table set but with bread and cheese as the meal. He banged the table so hard that some of the plates shattered to the ground. Then he walked out of the house and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember his return. Most likely he came back late, after I went to bed.

  My mother had trained as a physiotherapist. She met my father when he tore his rotator cuff playing volleyball. He was in the university team, conspicuous because he was black, he would say. Conspicuous because he was handsome, she would insist. He was shy undressing in front of her. Women, where he came from, did not treat men, did not touch their naked shoulder. My mother found his shyness endearing, his inhibitions intriguing. Their courtship was not smooth. He blew hot and cold but she pursued him. ‘I was smitten,’ she later said. ‘I didn’t think.’ He did, though. He thought that she would come to her senses. He depended on this and eased himself into the relationship, allowing her to treat his shoulder and type up his thesis. There were romantic photos of that time, cigarettes in their hands, smiles, hers always broader and more optimistic. In the wedding photo, a civil ceremony in Georgia, an almost bewildered look in my father’s eyes, as if time and circumstances had caught up with him. As if what he had judged to be inexorably shifting and amorphous had unexpectedly crystallised.