Week in, week out I waited in Khartoum. Borrowing Grusha’s or Yasha’s car I would pick up Mekki from school or near his house. He snuck out to meet me behind his mother’s back. Lucky for me, he was at the age when he was allowed greater freedom and felt the need to exercise it. Having his own mobile phone also made the logistics much easier. ‘Where would you like to go today?’ I would ask when he climbed in next to me, his expression deliberately casual, though once or twice he did look over his shoulder to see if anyone was looking.
He would say, ‘Take me to Ozone,’ or Solitaire, or Tangerine, or Time Out. These were neither amusement arcades nor cinemas nor playgrounds. Instead they were stylish coffee shops and restaurants where we would sit in pleasant, often outdoor surroundings and afterwards I would pay a hefty bill. An eye-opener for me that nowadays a twelve-year-old’s treat was a latte. ‘Are you allowed coffee?’ I once asked but he said, ‘I’m a man,’ and so I shut up. Most of the time my brother and I spent together was in silence. He studiously dug into his treats and sat back in his chair quite pleased with himself. I, too, once I got over my British need for small talk, relaxed and enjoyed being where I was, looking at him, listening to snatches of the conversations around me. His similarity to me continued to be a novelty; his resemblance to my father would startle me every now and again.
I showed him a photo of my classic Skoda. ‘It’s a convertible,’ I explained. I pointed out the details I particularly liked, the dashboard, the gear stick mounted on the steering column, ‘Felicia’ written in lower-case cursive. I wanted him to learn.
He asked me about McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins and Dunkin Donuts. He had heard about them from his friends who travelled to Dubai or Cairo or KL. Sudan was under US sanctions and Mekki had never travelled abroad. ‘When you come and visit me, I’ll take you to all of these places,’ I promised and thought that my colleagues at the university would be amused at how American fast food could be a reason to visit Scotland.
Sometimes I irked him by being predictably adult. ‘Stop kicking the table.’ ‘No you can’t have another ice-cream.’ ‘Have you done your homework?’ Sometimes he unnerved me with his blunt questions. ‘How come you’re not married?’ ‘When are you leaving?’ or ‘Why does my mother hate you?’ These questions were tempered by his own frankness and gratuitous, though rare, confessions. A story of Safia’s quarrel with the gardener, how he once got caught cheating in the Arabic exam, how he lent money to his best friend, never got it back and they were now no longer friends. I liked it best when he spoke about our father. It brought about a slight fizz of envy for what seemed to have been their regular uncomplicated life.
Once, though, he spoke of him in reference to myself and the past. ‘He was angry for not keeping you in Khartoum.’ The structure of the sentence sounded as if he was repeating something his mother had said.
‘I was the one who wanted to leave. He shouldn’t have blamed himself.’ I would have said this to him in hospital if I had got here in time. Perhaps it would have made him feel better. He should not have felt guilty on my behalf. ‘I was sure I wanted to be with my mother. It would have been almost impossible for him to make me stay.’
‘Why?’ Mekki slurped the last of a chocolate milkshake.
‘Why what?’ I was thawed because almost everyone around me looked like me. I blended and the feeling was like warm, used bedsheets, lulling, almost boring.
‘Why didn’t you want to stay?’
‘I was afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
I breathed in. ‘Of never seeing my mother again.’ I was not sure if this was completely true, if this was the whole story. I remember her bribing me with the promise of a better school in Britain, brighter toys, bookshops. Sharpened pencils, a calculator, a microscope all to myself. I listened to her and believed her because of the alphabet letters on the wall of Tony’s house.
A movement caught Mekki’s eye and he turned around. Someone had tossed a heavy bag on a chair and it overturned. I was getting upset by his questions; a pressure was building in my chest. For the first time ever, I felt relieved that it was time to pay the bill and take him home. Then in the car, just as I was about to park, he said, ‘Teach me Russian. Starting from next time.’ What I had said earlier must have made an impression on him – the fact that my father and I always spoke together in Russian.
Yasha stayed away from the cafés and restaurants. His modus operandi was the takeaway, conforming to the Arab cliché that the obese were embarrassed to eat in public. I did not challenge him over this. Besides, my outings with Mekki sufficed. During the day when Grusha and Yasha were at work and I did not have access to a car, I worked on my papers. A number of times, I went by public transport to all the tourist locations – the museum, the camel market, the Mahdi’s tomb. These trips left me hot and strangely disappointed. Instead of enjoying what I judged to be well-kept secrets, jewels that the world had overlooked, I felt it unfair that the country remained behind an iron curtain, excluded from the interest of the global traveller.
‘Our government has a bad reputation,’ Yasha said. ‘All the world’s goodwill has now gone to the new South Sudan.’ He was working hard to protect the interests of the Southern Sudanese who had been living in the North all their lives. Overnight, they had been stripped of their Sudanese nationality and sent packing to the South. Those who could not afford the journey were stranded in limbo.
I liked listening to him rant about his work. This usually started as soon as he arrived home. I would be helping Grusha in the kitchen and he would walk in and stand near the fridge, his bulk filling up most of the space. It was a good thing that the maid left early, otherwise the four of us crowding the kitchen would have been impossible. Yasha would lean on the fridge, which made Grusha jittery as a kitchen chair had recently come crashing down under his weight and the fridge was more precious. He would start narrating his stories of the day – a new client he was defending, a case that got thrown out of court, a petition he was preparing. After dinner Grusha would go out to the veranda to have a cigarette while the two of us lingered at the table. Yasha would be saying something like, ‘It’s the principle that is at stake here,’ while I could see her chunky bare feet propped up on the patio’s low table, the glow of the cigarette in the dark. She reminded me of my mother.
He was positive about my appearance in court the next week, assuring me I had nothing to worry about. He sat with one hand over the chair next to him. The other one, which he had been eating with, hovered over the table unwashed. ‘Have you ever thought of moving back? Giving it a chance here?’
‘No I haven’t,’ I said. The stage was set for a romance. Every romantic attachment I had ever had ended, like my parents’ marriage, with rancour and bitterness. Only Yasha remained a friend.
After almost a month of trying, I finally heard from Malak. It turned out that she was not much of a writer; her emails, few and far between, were a couple of dashed lines or links (where I was merely copied among various recipients) to such things as headshot photographers she was recommending or obituaries of actors who had recently passed away. This time was a response to me telling her about Safia’s accusation.
Yes you are a Muslim – fight for it.
Don’t worry about Oz.
A day later I heard from him. He had changed his user name. Instead of SwordOfShamil, it was now Osama.Raja.
Hi Natasha,
I’m sorry I behaved poorly that day you came over. I wasn’t up to talking much and to tell you the truth, it was because what happened psyched me out. The cell felt as small as a cupboard and for the first two days there was always someone watching me and writing down what I did. Not that I could do much. I was afraid all the time. Even to stand up and pray, let alone ask which direction was the south-east. I couldn’t sleep and then after a few days of this, I started dreaming even though I wasn’t asleep. My mind played tricks on me. It was weird and disorienting. Then they started asking me que
stions and as I kept answering I felt that I was lying, even though I wasn’t. I kept thinking I must give them the right answer not the wrong answers when the simple truth was that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Now Malak keeps saying that ‘anything’ means anything suspicious, whatever got me into this trouble in the first place. She’s mad at me.
I didn’t go back to uni when the term started. I’m looking at moving – even changing my degree. Once I get started on filling application forms, I’ll put your name down as one of my referees if that’s okay with you?
Thanks for coming over that day. It made me remember that I liked your classes and your papers about Shamil. I’ve been reading them again. I started to think of myself as a student not a criminal.
Apparently I made the news. See …
I clicked on the link and found myself in a far-right website under the heading The Stain of Al-Qaeda has Reached Scotland. Even though he was not charged.
I must have sighed too loudly because Yasha looked up from the kofta sandwich he was eating. I told him about Oz, switching to English. He followed and replied in English.
‘That student of yours needs to man up. If he were in any part of the Arab world he would have been beaten, too. He would have come out of this with a broken rib or a broken nose. Or worse. Or not come out at all. He should count himself lucky.’
‘Well, he was born in Britain and so his expectations are based on that.’
Yasha snorted. He put down his sandwich and ambled to the fridge. At home he wore jellabiyas which made him look as regal as a giant. I suddenly felt discouraged from telling him about the police searching my office or Gaynor’s complaint against me. Such battles belonged wholeheartedly there.
Yasha and Grusha had an active social life. I was familiar with some of their friends, other cross-cultural families in which the mothers were Eastern European and the fathers Sudanese. I caught up with the news of those in my age group, how many children they had, who was in Dubai and who was in Moscow or Cape Town or Washington or not so far away in Port Sudan. I was shown wedding photos on mobile phones, heard descriptions of holidays spent and family reunions made. So this was the tribe I belonged to, here were my species. They knew my mother and my father, they had known me as a child and this gave them a confidence in their approach. It was hard not to relax with them, enjoying their company, practising that dance from Russian to English to the Arabic words I was now remembering or relearning or a little bit of both.
In three different languages I was told that Yasha and I were truly suited to each other. And weren’t you childhood sweethearts too? So what’s stopping you? His weight? Help him lose it, take him back to Scotland with you and put him through surgery. What other excuse? Your job? But don’t you want to be a mother? Surely you do and you can’t keep putting it off for ever.
How easily their words wormed their way through me! I was vulnerable, away from home and instead of resenting their interference in my private life, a sadness would wash over me, a sense that their words were too little, too late. I played a game of ‘what if?’ – what if my parents’ marriage had survived, what if Tony had never shown up? The sensory details around me evoked incomplete memories, half-formed scenes more serene and rosy than I would usually admit. Grusha showed me old photographs of a picnic on the bank of the river. I could not remember any such picnic. And yet here was the proof. My mother in wide seventies-style trousers, orange swirls fuzzy and almost psychedelic; my father’s hair like Jimi Hendrix’s. He was carrying me on his shoulder and my mother was looking up at me, smiling, reaching up one arm to hold my elbow as if helping me balance, a cigarette in her other hand. I could not remember being such a happy child.
Quite a portion of Khartoum’s social life revolved around weddings from which I was exempt due to my recent bereavement. I would stay behind while Grusha, dressed in her best and still resembling Hilary Clinton, got in her car and headed off. Sometimes Yasha accompanied her or went out with his own circle of friends. Grusha told me how for almost a year after his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, he kept to himself and shunned company. He stayed at home and ate his way through the pain. She seemed relieved that he was now adjusting.
It had taken me time to find Tony’s old house. Whenever I had the car, I would be on the lookout for the metal railing with the alphabet letters. One afternoon, I turned a corner and there it was, on a busy road that bore little resemblance to the one I remembered. But it was definitely the same house. Here, in front of it, my mother had parked and left me in the car to go inside and deliver a cake. Our lives were never the same again.
It was not enough for me to see it from the outside. I got out of the car and rang the bell. I waited and looked at the railing; it had not stood the test of time, it was rusty and the wall beneath it yellow-brown with dust and age. Cracked too, here and there. The letters themselves looked dated, cursive and pretentious. They had captivated me as a child and roused my ambitions. I peered through the gate; there were no parked cars and the house looked deserted, the garden overgrown and unkempt. I had started to turn away, when I heard sluggish footsteps. A tall man in a dirty jellabiya opened the door. He must be the resident watchman. I had not prepared what to say so I asked for Tony.
He shook his head and confirmed that no one was living in the house.
To gain access I lied that I wanted to look inside with a view to buying the house. He let me in. The path used to be strewn with attractive pebbles but most of them had worn away. I walked to the back and found the swimming pool. It was predictably smaller than I remembered and empty, with broken and missing tiles at the bottom and all along the sides. I remembered swimming here with a Tweety Bird inflatable ring while my mother was indoors. In room after room, there was only decay and filth, human excrement and the scurrying, scratching sound of rats. The light fittings and ceiling fans had been either removed or stolen. The bathrooms were stripped down to almost rubble. Upstairs in the master bedroom, the branches of a tree had pushed their way through the rectangular hole where the air-conditioner used to be. There was a horrible smell that turned out to be a recently dead pigeon. I lingered, absorbing it all, feeling it seep into me; it stirred in me an ache I could not at first understand. Only later did I recognise it as homesickness. A yearning for an identifiable place where I could belong.
Later, when I described the court session to Malak, I told her about the small beleaguered judge with crinkly white in his hair. He peered down his glasses at the papers in front of him. He cleared his throat now and again. I would have felt more confident in some kind of jacket, my shoulders straight, a tissue in my pocket. I would have preferred to stand in my sensible black shoes instead of these moist sandals.
‘Why did you change your name? Hussein is a good name, the name of the grandson of Muhammad, peace be upon him.’
‘Did you become a Christian when you were adopted?’
‘Are you or have you ever been married to a non-Muslim?’
‘Why do you know so little about the faith you were born into?’
Yasha had coached me on what to say. I went along as practised. The sound of the ceiling fan grew louder, the judge looking up at me over his glasses, down at the papers he was shuffling with his hand. The room and the whole building had a colonial feel to it. There were not many people about. I made a point of not searching for Safia. Was she here or not? I was afraid of her, now, because she was sure of herself, of what she was and what she was entitled to. But Yasha was backing me up and Malak was on my side.
‘You are an adult,’ the judge said after he ruled in my favour. ‘Your father made a mistake in not keeping you by his side, in not bringing you up as a Muslim – but he is gone now to meet his Lord and we must not speak ill of the dead. In fact it would seem that your father repented and admitted his mistake. We can only ask Allah, the Most Merciful, to forgive him. But as I said, you are a mature adult. It is your responsibility now to learn about your religion and to practise it as best as you can
. Do you have something to say?’
I said that I was not a good Muslim but I was not a bad person either. I said I had a brother that I wanted to keep in touch with. I said that I wanted to give up my share of the inheritance to him. Apart from my father’s Russian books and Russian keepsakes, I wanted nothing. I said that I did not come here today to fight over money or for the share of a house. I came so that I would not be an outcast, so that I would, even in a small way, faintly, marginally, tentatively, belong.
2. GEORGIA, SUMMER–AUTUMN 1859
It became a habit, whenever possible, to walk in the garden and stop at the greenhouse where she could look up at the mountains. Occasionally she would see plumes of smoke, imagine or actually hear a faraway sound of gunfire, but what was actually happening eluded her. There were only things David said and her imagination. A new policy towards the Caucasus, a new Russian leader, Field-Marshal Bariatinsky, who was brilliant and effective. For the first time in all these years, almost overnight, Shamil was losing one battle after another. Aoul after aoul fell to the Russians; the tribal chiefs who had fought by his side were now turning against him.
Anna held Ilia’s hand and walked at his pace. His other hand brushed the flowers and bushes along the path. Sometimes he wanted to stop and examine a pebble or a beetle crawling in the mud. The slowness of this walk suited her. It was her first time attempting a full round of the garden after her confinement last month. She still sensed the new lightness of giving birth to Tamar, shifting the weight from her stomach to the outside world, the pressure lifting from her pelvis and lower back. But she was still weak from losing too much blood; once in a while she felt her womb contracting. While the deliveries were quicker, these after-birth pains seemed to get more painful with each successive birth. She had missed Ilia these past few weeks, unable to focus on much other than the newborn and her own health, but he had made his misery and jealousy felt. Crying at times until he sweated and shook; regressing into baby habits he had given up many months ago. ‘Ilia is a good boy,’ she sang to him. ‘Ilia is Mama’s friend.’ She understood how overlooked he was feeling, how he had been demoted from that important spot of being the youngest in the family. And how special Tamar’s birth had been, a little girl again, resembling Lydia so much that it was as if time had looped back. David doted on her, and poor Ilia struggled to gain the attention he had until recently enjoyed.
The Kindness of Enemies Page 28