The Network

10

No one who’s been to Khartoum can forget the place. You fly for hours over weird and lifeless corrugations of rock and desert until the land turns to the colour of mud. Then, descending towards the city, the sun flashes from a broad snake of water, and in the centre of a sprawling grid of roads and houses streaked with green lines of trees you see what looks like a crescent-shaped samosa, wrapped in the dirty braid of the Nile. This is Tuti island, where the Niles converge.

On the ground, the heat hits you like a wall, and suddenly your white face feels like a lonely beacon as you move among crowds of ebony-coloured faces. You feel the vastness of Africa, like a vibration that stretches back to the beginning of time. A reddish dust moves in snakish wisps above the surface of the tarmac and quickly settles into everything.

The entry stamp in my passport is a swirl of Arabic script, delivered with a flourish by an immigration officer who welcomes me to Sudan with a gleaming smile. I return the smile, and when his pen runs out of ink, I offer him mine.

‘Thank you, my friend.’ He beams and looks like he means it.

Changing money and collecting the car that’s waiting for me involves an hour of form-filling and official stamps. Then I pay a taxi driver to drive ahead of me to the district called Riyadh, and I follow him along a broad highway with chequered kerbstones, overlooked by giant advertisements which I try to decipher from the Arabic as I drive past. The taxi pulls over as we reach a grid of sand-covered streets lined with charmless modern villas, and the driver waves goodbye to me from his window.

I’m greeted by a housekeeper called Kamal, who guides my car into a small compound, carries my things indoors and prepares hot sweet tea, over which he alerts me gently to the danger of scorpions in my shoes in the mornings.

I shower and lie under the ceiling fan for a solid hour. Then out of curiosity I go by taxi to the centre of the city, a term the driver doesn’t understand, but suggests instead the presidential palace, which I remember lies near the water. He drops me near the palace, around which the city’s more interesting buildings lie, and for a couple of hours I walk along roads parallel to the banks of the Nile lined with fat palm trees. I’m adjusting to the heat, and savouring the scent of datura and frangipani blossom and others I can’t identify. And I’m taking pleasure in the innocent charm of strangers who say hello as they pass, then look back and ask my name and wave. Their friendliness reminds me of Kabul, where the visitor quickly gets used to the spontaneous smiles of passers-by, whose sincerity renders irrelevant all the bad things you hear about the place back home.

There are no mountains around Khartoum, but the city is blessed by the presence of the two Niles that converge there. The water is nearly half a mile wide and more powerful and serene than I imagined. I walk much further than planned. As evening falls I’m sapped by the heat and retreat to my room. I shower again and position myself back under the ceiling fan, wondering how long it will take me to get used to the heat, trying in vain not to think about the future and whether it is really written or not.

My meeting is at midday. I take a taxi halfway to the embassy and walk the rest, stopping to sample fruit juices at cupboard-sized shops along the sand-covered streets until I’m satisfied that no one is following me. I turn left from Sharia al-Baladiya between the Turkish and German embassies into a smaller street, and a little further on catch sight of the Union Jack fluttering on a rooftop. At the reception desk I introduce myself to an English-speaking Sudanese member of staff, asking as agreed for a Mr Halliday. He asks me to repeat the name, then speaks for a few moments on the phone while I sit wiping the sweat from my eyebrows.

There’s a door a few yards away to my left, which opens suddenly and takes me by surprise. I turn and see the head and shoulders of a man wearing a white shirt and tie studying me with a severe look of enquiry like a professor who’s been disturbed at his papers. The impression is strengthened by the thin circular gold frames of his glasses, behind which he blinks a few times before speaking.

‘Ah,’ he says, as if he’s making a mental calculation that seeing me has interfered with. ‘You’d better come with me.’

I follow him through the door, which he closes behind us, then shakes my hand.

‘Welcome to the Dark Continent. I’m afraid it is a bit hot,’ he says. He has an unctuous voice which sounds faintly comic to me, as if he’s trying out an impression of Noel Coward. He doesn’t introduce himself. I guess he’s no more than thirty, but he has the boffin-like mannerisms of a much older man, and looks as though he belongs on a university campus in the vicinity of some high, perhaps ivory, Gothic towers and carefully tended lawns. He’s tall and unnaturally thin and I can see the bones of his shoulders outlined under his shirt. We cross what looks like an interview room, where a photographic portrait of the Queen hangs above a wall of filing cabinets, and on the far side enter a smaller windowless room secured by an electronic lock. There’s the hum of an air-conditioning unit, and it’s mercifully cooler. We sit at a large wooden table.

‘Oh dear,’ says Halliday, or whatever his name really is, ‘I seem to have forgotten the map.’

‘I’ve got one, if it helps.’

I take the tourist map of the city from my small backpack and hand it to him.

‘Bravo. That’s actually the same one we use,’ he says with a comic expression of mischief. ‘Shall we have a look at where you’re going to walk the dog?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Walk the dog. The term applied to the chance meeting of an acquaintance, most often achieved while innocently exercising one’s pooch.’

‘Right,’ I say.

We open the map and he points to Jabal Awliya and the road that links it to the city. Halliday steadies his glasses and blinks as he sweeps back a mop of dark hair from his forehead.

‘The target vehicle will be returning on this road at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. It’s a white Daihatsu. Your helpers will be looking out for it at the halfway point and you’ll be waiting a little further along. In the event of a successful interception I won’t expect to hear from you, but if anything goes wrong I must ask you to return here and let me know.’

‘There isn’t much that can go wrong, is there?’ I ask.

A schoolteacherish look of disapproval comes over his face.

‘Oh but I think there is. Target vehicle changes route unexpectedly. Target vehicle has mechanical difficulty. Target vehicle fails to yield to persuasion. Target vehicle crashes. Pursuit vehicle fails to execute manoeuvre. Pursuit vehicle crashes. Target is seriously injured, summons civilian assistance, summons law enforcement; law enforcement vehicle stops at interception site before you do-’

‘I get it,’ I say. He’s from the health-and-safety generation.

‘I think you’ll find you can’t be too careful. Any of the above, and you drive on. We can’t have you getting into a local imbroglio.’

We talk over a few more details, and on the way out he collects a small bag of tokens, redeemable against drinks at the Pickwick Club in the embassy grounds.

‘Very exclusive,’ adds Halliday with a buffoonish wrinkle of his nose. ‘When you feel the need for a G amp; T. Just next door. Do be aware there are two listening devices pointing at the club enclosure from the eighteen-storey building opposite.’

‘I’m sure you’ve told the Hanslope Park people about them,’ I say. He hands me a small packet with the Firm’s specially designed tamper-proof seal on it, and I recognise the code card for my satphone.

‘There is one other thing,’ he says, by way of a reply. ‘The pool isn’t in use on Thursday nights and if you fall in you receive a lifetime ban.’

Seethrough called the local Sudanese helpers elves, but they don’t look like elves. The pair I meet the next morning are tall, lean and fit-looking men with serious faces. Their blue-black skin does not seem to sweat. They are in a pickup truck, which the locals call boxes, laden with what looks like the contents of somebody’s house, half-covered in canvas and lashed with an old nylon rope. Their vehicle pulls out ahead of me as I leave my compound, and then stops as the driver gets out, opens and closes the tailgate as if to check it’s properly closed and gets back in. It’s the agreed signal.

I follow them out of the city to the south, and we drive past the dilapidated suburbs for about half an hour before stopping in a sandy enclave of small warehouses, where we park in the shade. One of the men is in contact by two-way radio with the watcher vehicle a further quarter of a mile south, who confirms his position every fifteen minutes.

After an hour’s waiting there’s a sudden burst from the radio confirming the target is heading our way. The elves’ pickup moves to the edge of the road and gets ready to turn into the traffic, and I start the engine of my jeep but keep out of sight of the road for the moment. There’s only a small chance of it happening, but I don’t want the target to see our two vehicles together – mainly because the one ahead of me is going to deliberately run her off the road.

I can’t see her clearly as she passes. The pickup pulls out and settles two cars behind her. I follow after they’re several hundred yards ahead. We’ve gone about a mile when I make out the elves’ pickup veering out of the flow of traffic to overtake the target. They’re dangerously close to an oncoming car, but that’s the idea. They pull in suddenly and disappear from view again, but the move has worked, because to my right I see the target vehicle lurch onto the unsurfaced shoulder, sending up a cloud of dust before plunging into the sand beyond.

But it doesn’t stop. I’m reminded suddenly of H’s maxim no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and I feel a mixture of frustration and admiration for the driver, who’s kept control of the Daihatsu and is now circling away from the road at high speed. It looks as if she’s going to try and drive back onto the road. If she succeeds, we’ll have to come up with a new plan, and I hear myself cursing out loud as she manages the turn and begins to head back towards the road. But the offside wheels of her car are fighting the sand now, and throwing it up in little waves as she slows just before the circle is completed and ploughs to a stop before she reaches the road again. From a hundred yards away I see the driver get out and wave her arms angrily in the direction of the pickup, which has now disappeared. As I pull over she’s kicking at the front tyre in frustration, and it sounds like she’s swearing.

I get out and wave, and in reflex she pulls a white scarf, which has fallen onto her shoulders, back onto her head.

‘As-salaamu aleikum.’ It’s time to play the role of the helpful passer-by.

She returns the greeting peremptorily and looks up at me full of suspicion. She says something angrily in Arabic which I don’t catch, then rolls her eyes as if help from a white tourist is the last thing she wants.

I walk down from the shoulder of the road to where she stands beside her car, the wheels of which have sunk into the sand up to the axles.

‘I saw what happened. Can I help?’

‘No, thank you,’ she says, putting up her hands in a gesture of refusal. ‘Everything is OK. I don’t need help.’ She has a clear soft voice with a distinct French accent.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she says testily, ‘I’m sure. I’m a woman, but I’m sure. Thank you.’

She looks even more annoyed now. Her reaction has caught me by surprise. I had the impression from her photograph that she’d be meek and reserved, a timid Muslim woman who only speaks when she’s spoken to. I couldn’t be more wrong. She’s all fire and pride, conspicuously strong-willed and too stubborn to admit how angry she is. She’s also more beautiful than in the photograph, which is perhaps why I’m staring. Even without having seen her picture, I’m certain I would have this feeling that I already know her, as if we’ve met before. But we haven’t. I catch myself and look away, as if breaking free from the spell of a hypnotist.

‘I can help to pull you out,’ I say. It worked with the Uzbek girl.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I don’t need your help. I can take care of this.’ Then, half to herself but distinctly enough for me to hear, she mutters ‘Imbecile’ under her breath.

I say nothing. It’s a stand-off. She won’t accept help, and I’m too proud to be rebuffed. We look at each other for a few seconds. It’s the first time our eyes really meet. Her face is still but her scarf is moving slightly in the breeze. My mind’s racing with unexpected thoughts and I’m reluctant to take my eyes off her. I walk back to my car and fetch the tow rope. She’s still glowering at me as I return, but there’s a hint of curiosity in her eyes now.

‘En cas d’urgence.’ I put the tow rope on the bonnet of her car.

‘I don’t need that,’ she says.

‘I’d say you need it more than I do,’ I say. ‘In case you have trouble parking again. Nice to meet you.’

She opens her mouth to speak but then decides not to. I turn and walk back to my car. I have my pride too.

On the roof of the guest house I can sit unobserved and power up the satphone. It’s been modified by the operational support geeks back home to accept a memory card with randomised codes on it, which makes it the modern equivalent of a code book and one-time pad combined. Each word of my contact report for Seethrough has a corresponding code number which is then encrypted and sent in a burst that lowers the probability of recognition or intercept to virtually nil. The most challenging part of the operation is shielding the screen from sunlight so as to see the words as I select them: first contact hibiscus successful arranged new rv next week. It’s not perfectly accurate, but he’s not to know. I’m just hoping I can think of a way to meet Jameela again before the week is out.

The solution comes after I pay a visit to the UNICEF office in Street 47 and am given an armful of documents about the organisation’s activities in the Sudan. Among them is a list of upcoming events in Khartoum, which I scan down until Jameela’s name leaps out at me beneath the title Global Programme for Polio Eradication. In three days’ time she’s giving a briefing on the progress of an immunisation campaign in the Nuba mountains in the south of the country. Staff and NGO partners, it reads further down, are welcome.

When the time comes, I find a seat among an audience of about thirty people and remind myself that I’m supposed to have found my way there by accident because the woman I’ve come to see hasn’t even told me her name yet. Listening to her speak about the inter-agency appeal targeted at multi-sectoral activities, I’m reminded that the world of humanitarian aid is almost as afflicted by jargon as the army. But when it’s time for questions, I make sure I’m the first to raise my hand, introducing myself and my company in the process, to ask about the risk of anti-personnel mines to children in the region.

There’s a flicker of puzzlement on her features as she wonders where she’s seen me before then delivers a textbook answer. At the end of the session I linger by the door as the others file out, and am glad to see that while she’s talking to another of the participants her eyes turn in my direction several times. I don’t make any effort to hide my pleasure at seeing her again. She walks up to me, clutching her papers across her chest.

‘So, Mr Tavernier.’ She’s Frenchified my name. ‘Is it a coincidence that you are here, or are you spying on me?’ The charm in her restrained smile robs the suggestion of seriousness, but her manner is bold all the same.

‘It’s a coincidence.’ I return the smile. ‘Although I’m sure I would enjoy spying on you too. Unfortunately I’m in Khartoum only for a short time.’

She puts out her hand and introduces herself. She uses her maiden name. The surname bin Laden is not mentioned. ‘It’s nice to meet you again,’ she says. ‘I gave your rope to a village chief. He liked it very much. I have a few minutes before my next meeting. Would you like some tea?’

We walk to a small cafe in the gardens behind the building and sit in the shade under a canopy. She asks me about mine awareness in the Sudan and I tell her what I know: that the problem of mines and unexploded ordnance affects not only the central and southern areas where there’s been recent fighting, but also the Eritrean border east of Kassala, and places on the country’s other borders with Chad, Congo, Libya and Uganda.

She nods approvingly as if satisfied that I really do know about mines. I go on to explain my hopes for designing a mine awareness programme in collaboration with the UN. As I talk, I realise I’m having trouble taking my eyes off her and am hardly listening to my own words. She’s exceptionally beautiful. Her eyes are dark and calm. At moments they express a faintly imploring quality, magnified by her habit of tilting her head almost imperceptibly downwards as she looks at me, as if she’s hiding something she wants to tell me. Her face is narrower and her skin lighter than the Sudanese women I’ve seen, and her smooth rounded forehead and high hairline are unmistakably Ethiopian.

‘You have Tigray blood in you,’ I say impulsively, then regret it. It’s too personal a detail for our first meeting and she’s visibly taken aback, as if I’ve reached too suddenly into her world. I apologise, explaining that she reminds me of a friend’s wife, who was from Ethiopia. She was very beautiful, I add.

‘From my mother,’ she says, and her tone is both curious and guarded.

Yet the conversation survives, and remains unexpectedly personal as we speak of our parents and families. Her mother was born in Ethiopia to a Christian family and her father in Khartoum to a Muslim one. Their marriage was a rare combination but the difference in religion had not interfered with their happiness.

‘The Islam of the Sudan is not like anywhere else,’ she says. ‘Have you seen the stars in the desert yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You must, before you go. The stars are great teachers.’

I’m watching her closely as she speaks, observing her face as it traces over each different emotion that rises in her, and catching what I can of its beauty like the glimpse of a butterfly that settles and opens its wings in the sunlight before dancing away. Then suddenly I remember that my purpose in meeting this beautiful woman is to deceive her, and this hits me like the guilt of a murderer. For a moment my head sinks into my hands. I look up again and she’s staring at me with a look of concern.

‘Something is wrong?’

‘I have to go. I have to get in touch with my office.’

‘And I must go too,’ she says, looking at her watch.

The unexpected intimacy has robbed of us our sense of time. Now we both want to make light of it, as if it hasn’t happened, and neither of us really knows what to do next.

‘I hope we’ll meet again,’ I say.

She nods casually. ‘Insha’allah.’

But I just can’t leave it at that. ‘Perhaps… perhaps one day you’d be kind enough to be my guide. Or you could advise me where to go. It would be a pity to waste time. Life is so short.’

‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘We should not spend time on things which have no purpose.’ She says this in a way that charges the words with meaning, but I don’t know if it’s a warning or something else. Perhaps she doesn’t know herself.

‘I’d like to see the Souq Arabi. The wrestling in Omdurman. And there used to be a statue of General Gordon on his camel somewhere, but I think it went back to England.’

‘It is better that the English keep it.’

‘Yes, I know, but there’s a funny story about it. One day a little English boy goes with his grandmother to see it, and they stand under it and look up and the grandmother, whose father fought in the Sudan, says, “My boy, that is the great hero General Gordon, who fought the Mahdi in the Sudan.” So the little boy says, ‘‘Gosh, Grandma, that’s amazing. But why is there an old man sitting on his back?” ’

‘I would be happy to be your guide,’ she says. The full intensity of her dark gaze is on me, but she’s smiling now.

Two days later I hear the honk of Jameela’s Daihatsu outside the gate, and leap aboard with my little backpack feeling like a schoolboy on his first day of school. She drives us across the river to Omdurman, where the life of the city, although poorer than the centre of Khartoum to the south, becomes infinitely more colourful and intense.

We leave her car and wander through the spectacle of the open-air markets. The dust-laden streets are lined with mud-walled homes, and shared with camels and donkeys, and the air is heavy with the scent of spices and smoke. There are piles of fruits and vegetables I’ve never seen before, and everywhere there are tall and sometimes strikingly handsome men in long white jellabiyas. Their teeth flash in gleaming smiles. The women wear the brightly coloured tobe, a long swathe of loose fabric worn like an Indian sari, and there are just as many who are as tall and handsome as the men. We are offered food by a hundred strangers in turn, and after numerous refusals of raw diced camel’s liver with onion and hot shatta spice I succumb at last to a plate of foul and gallons of sweet tea. In a jewellery market I bargain hard for a tiny silver casket and joke with the owner of the stall about being British, to which he responds by pulling out a large dagger from behind the counter and brandishing it theatrically above my head.

We take an old ferry to Tuti island, an undeveloped enclave of peace in the chaos and bustle of the city, and we stroll by the Nile, where women are washing vegetables for market in the muddy water, and we sit in the shade of a lemon grove to share a watermelon and take turns brushing the flies off each other’s piece. A few laid-back locals try out their English on me, and chuckle at my half-remembered Arabic. Jameela is looking at me with a faint and affectionate smile.

‘You seem at home in such a poor country. It is rare. You are not a typical Englishman.’

‘I don’t know what a typical Englishman is.’

‘An Englishman does not show his feelings.’

‘Perhaps there are feelings I am not showing you.’

Then she says thoughtfully, as if she’s been wondering about it, ‘We should visit the tomb of the Mahdi.’

It’s the most revered site in the city and probably the whole of the Sudan. At the end of the nineteenth century the Mahdi, hated by the British but much loved in the Sudan as a saintly warrior, led his tribesmen to repeated victories against their imperial overlords in battles of stupendous bloodshed. The charismatic champion of Sudanese independence became the most celebrated Muslim leader in the world, and formulated a unique version of Islam which was distinctly upsetting to other Muslim powers of the day. He considered the Turkish rulers of neighbouring Egypt infidels, and claimed to be preparing the world for the second coming of Christ.

His most famous victory resulted in the slaughter and humiliation of the British and their Egyptian allies after the ten-month-long siege of Khartoum, where General Gordon waited hopefully and in vain for reinforcements from Egypt. Gordon’s command and life ended on the point of a Mahdist spear. The Mahdi himself is said to have respected Gordon greatly, but was mystified by his refusal to accept Islam, choosing instead a humiliating death. The Mahdi died of typhoid a year later, and a shrine was built over his body in Omdurman.

The Sudanese paid a heavy price for their defiance. Thirteen years later, under no-nonsense imperialist General Kitchener, an Anglo-Egyptian force returned to avenge Gordon’s death and reclaim the Sudan. They were heavily armed with the latest weapons. On the outskirts of Omdurman 50,000 tribesmen threw themselves at the British Maxim guns and were decimated by waves of dumdum bullets. The white jellabiyas of the slaughtered warriors were said to resemble a thick carpet of snow across the battlefield. Twenty thousand wounded were executed where they lay, and their bodies thrown into the Nile. Moored in the water beyond the town, British gunboats took range on the Mahdi’s shrine and reduced it to rubble with volleys of fifty-pound explosive shells, the cruise missiles of the era. Kitchener had the Mahdi’s body burned, but was discouraged by fellow officers from presenting the skull as an inkwell to Queen Victoria.

The silver dome of the tomb rises from a palm-filled enclosure like the nose of a rocket. Jameela greets the old guardian with affectionate respect, and calls him uncle. We walk barefoot around the custard-coloured walls of the octagonal shrine while the old man rubs the steel-grey stubble on his chin and recounts the more famous exploits of the Mahdi and his ill-fated warriors.

‘I said you were a Muslim brother from Britaniyyah,’ whispers Jameela mischieviously as we enter the shrine, savouring its cool stillness for a few minutes before emerging blinking into the sunlight.

The old man asks if we will be his guests, and insists on tea. He leads us past the accommodation for pilgrims and dervishes adjacent to the shrine, and we settle at a table under a tall acacia tree. By both tradition and law, he tells us, the grounds of the shrine are a place of sanctuary, an ancient version of diplomatic immunity. When it’s time to leave, he heaps blessings on our families, and we promise to return.

We drive back to the city as the sun is setting. The temperature has dropped to a comfortable thirty-five degrees celsius. It’s also Thursday evening, so I suggest we go to the Pickwick Club, where Halliday has put me on the guest list. We are shown straight in and head for the bar, close to the swimming pool. On the far wall Pickwick is written in lights. There’s a plastic parrot at the bar, and I’m reminded Halliday has told me that the club takes its name from the late embassy parrot, which is buried inside the wall.

After the intensity of life on the streets of Omdurman, we feel out of place among the clientele of mostly lonely and bored-looking foreigners, and I suggest we go somewhere more real. Jameela agrees gratefully. We walk to an Ethiopian restaurant. There are no knives and forks, so she takes my hand gently in hers and shows me how to fold the food into the traditional pancake-like bread called injera. It’s the first time we’ve touched since we shook hands, and this tiny act of closeness feels like a landmark to me, as if I’ve discovered the source of the Nile.

The pyramids are her suggestion. I’ve heard of the enigmatic site at Meroe, two hours north of Khartoum, but never imagined I might actually go there, much less in the company of a woman I’m struggling not to fall in love with. She lets me pick her up the next morning, and I’m shown into her home by her Sudanese housekeeper, who, judging from the twinkle in her eye when I appear, knows what’s afoot.

We drive north for about two hours on the road to Atbara. Seeing how quickly the complexity and prosperity of the city fall away, as if from the edge of a flat earth, I’m reminded of Kabul, where the surroundings beyond the capital return to almost prehistoric simplicity after only a few miles.

At a small settlement called Bagrawiya on the east bank of the Nile we turn off the main road and bounce along an unsurfaced track. It’s oppressively hot. Then the pyramids loom up, some pointed and others broken, reaching like ragged sets of teeth out of the orange sand. There’s about a hundred of them, much smaller than their Egyptian relatives and much less well known, fashioned from black stone nearly two and a half thousand years ago as tombs for the kings and queens of ancient Nubia. There is no one else there except a solitary local who wants us to ride his camel for an outrageous sum, and we send him guiltily away.

‘Quite a place,’ I say to Jameela, ‘for your ancestors to be buried.’

‘Do you know anything of the history?’ she asks.

‘Only that Meroe was the southern capital of the kingdom of the Kushites, who ruled Nubia for a thousand years, invaded Egypt and ruled as the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty. They traded with India and China, and their warrior queen Candace, riding a war elephant, confronted Alexander the Great himself, who withdrew rather than fight her magnificent warriors.’

‘You’re funny,’ she says.

‘I read it in the guidebook last night. I wanted to impress you. Did you know the gods were so jealous of the beauty of the queens of Nubia that they struck the tops of the pyramids with lightning to humble them?’

‘Good try.’ She smiles. ‘The tops were destroyed with dynamite by an Italian explorer in 1820. He was looking for gold. There wasn’t any.’

We walk among the ruins in wonder at the lost civilisation that created them, ducking into the coolness of the few tombs that are open. As we enter one of them, Jameela reaches behind her for my hand and guides me gently inside. On the walls we can make out carved stone panels with Egyptian-looking winged gods. I run my hands over them and turn my head towards Jameela to see an expression of worry on her face, which I haven’t seen before but which disappears as my eyes meet hers. Outside again, under the stone gateway to the entrance we lean against the walls, facing each other in the silence. I’m just looking at her, and she’s returning the look, because we have somehow reached the end of the words we want to say to each other. The sun is low and the golden light catches the perspiration on her upper chest, and for a moment it’s as if her dark skin is glowing.

I’m not sure what would have happened had the elderly guardian of the place not emerged from his nearby hut, and waved to us with a shout to let us know it was his time to clock off.

‘We should go,’ she says.

It’s hot in the car. We drive for a long while in silence, as if the spell of the place is still on us. We pass trucks piled precariously high with cargoes, as well as passengers clinging to sacks of food and supplies, who wave and smile at us above the billowing fumes and dust.

‘Sometimes,’ says Jameela suddenly, ‘I miss the sea. I want to swim in the sea. I want to go to a desert island and feel the sand instead of this dust, and feel the water instead of this heat.’

‘Then let’s go to the sea,’ I say.

‘It would take too long.’ She sighs. ‘Several days just to get there and back. It’s impossible to get to the islands in any case.’ She changes the subject. ‘Do you know anyone in Khartoum?’

‘Not yet,’ I tell her. ‘I haven’t done much socialising.’

‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I’m having dinner with a cousin and his family tomorrow. They’re nice people. You could come and impress them. With your knowledge of history, perhaps.’ She throws me an ironic smile.

‘I don’t want to impose,’ I say.

‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘My cousin can be a real pain sometimes but his wife is a good friend of mine. They’re quite traditional. Religious. Can you handle that, Englishman? I’ll call them to say you’re coming.’

I am suspicious of him from the start. Jameela’s cousin is an Arab and his features are Mediterranean. His skin is fair. He is tall and lean and has an angular face with a sharp nose and chin. The most disturbing thing about him is his eyes, which are grey and lizard-like, and settle with a faint look of disdain wherever his head is turned, as if they are fixed in their sockets. His gestures are slowed by an affected piety.

It’s an untypical configuration. I know that in Sudan only family or the closest of friends are invited to the traditional family home. Something is different here. An accommodation has obviously been made for their foreign guest, and a table and chairs have been put together in the room, which is the equivalent of an English family deciding to eat on a carpet on the floor. They have also invited a Sudanese man and his wife who have lived abroad for a few years and whose family connection I never catch. I suspect that their presence is intended to be a bridge between the traditional environment and the strange ways of a foreigner, which is me. Jameela is family but thoroughly westernised in her ways, and is accepted like a foreign film on television.

Her cousin sits opposite me at the table with Jameela to one side. His wife, a young Sudanese woman with big soulful brown eyes, ferries the dishes to and from the kitchen, settling from time to time at the end of the table like a young deer drinking warily from a stream. Her eyes never meet those of her guests. They all speak in Arabic for most of the meal, until our host fixes on me and reveals that he does in fact speak nearly perfect English.

‘It is to be commended that you speak Arabic,’ he says to me with a sinister smile. ‘Insha’allah you will one day read the Holy Qu’ran.’ His teeth are perfect white.

Jameela rolls her eyes.

‘My cousin has said you were in Afghanistan.’

‘My work took me there for a while,’ I say.

‘You were not there at the time of the jihad?’

‘For a short visit. It’s a long time ago now.’

‘You are not a Muslim,’ he says, as if this disqualifies me from travel. ‘What did you do there?’

‘I did what my friends did. Just lived.’

‘Did you fight?’ he persists.

‘There was fighting. It was wartime.’

‘It is an honourable thing to participate in jihad. Did you participate?’

I don’t like where he’s trying to lead me. I don’t like his curiosity. I think of the grace and dignity of the old man at the shrine, who wouldn’t have dreamed of prying into the private life of a visitor. My host, it seems, links the idea of going to Afghanistan with fighting the jihad and nothing else. It’s impossible to explain to him that my sympathy for the Afghans at the time wasn’t anything to do with religion or its decrees, but simply because I liked the people I met.

‘I believe the Prophet – sala Allah alaeihu wa aleihu as-salaam – said that the greatest jihad is the struggle with one’s own personal weaknesses, and that the jihad against the worldly enemy is the lesser struggle – the jihad as-saghir.’

I glance at Jameela while my host’s head is turned, and she shoots me a look of fond disapproval. But her cousin isn’t impressed.

‘How do you know such a thing?’ He ignores the implication of the question. ‘Did you fight or not?’

‘I lived as my friends lived. So I lived with them, ate with them, fought with them, prayed with them.’

‘You prayed with them?’ His hands settle deliberately on the edge of the table, as if he’s about to get up.

‘Omar,’ says Jameela, ‘let him eat.’ The conversation is making us both feel uncomfortable.

‘Yes,’ I say, recalling those serene moments at dusk when the men would lay their weapons quietly aside and turn their minds to God before resuming their worldly preoccupations. ‘Sometimes. Not always. It would have been strange not to.’

‘But you are not a Muslim?’

‘Omar,’ says Jameela, with a note of protest.

He looks at her then back at me as if to say, I’m talking; don’t interrupt me.

‘In wartime everyone prays in their own way. There it was a part of life.’

‘You did not feel…’ he looks up, searching for the word. Then he finds it, and his eyes fix on mine again with new intensity. ‘You did not feel like a hypocrite?’

‘Oh merde! That’s it, I’m leaving,’ says Jameela. She pushes her chair back abruptly and stands up. Her cousin looks up at her like a lizard, imperturbable, and then directs a strangled smile at her as if he’s found a hair in his food but is too polite to say.

‘It’s fine, Jameela,’ I tell her. ‘Your cousin is asking a legitimate question. He has his interpretation and others have theirs. That’s the basis of ijtehad. It’s what makes Islam interesting.’

‘How do you know such a thing?’ he asks again, almost angrily, as if his religion is a secret that no one else has the right to take an interest in.

‘He can’t talk to you like that. You’re his guest. This is not Islam.’ She utters the word with a sneer.

Omar ignores Jameela’s outburst as if it’s beneath him to respond to it.

‘The answer to your question is no, I did not feel like a hypocrite. God speaks many languages, not just Arabic.’

He sighs tolerantly, like a teacher who’s been let down by a promising pupil but sees that this isn’t the moment to pursue the issue.

‘I would be most interested to speak to you more about this subject. Perhaps you can come back and I will introduce you to some friends who would also be interested. We can make a small interview and you can also read some verses of the Holy Qur’an for the radio. There are many other things we can discuss.’

‘I would be happy to do that,’ I say. It’s a lie because I have no intention of allowing him to exploit me for his own style of propaganda. His version of religion is too political for me.

Later, after the conversation has changed direction, I wonder whether I’ve judged him too harshly. Perhaps he is just genuinely curious and has never been exposed to the notion that you can be interested in a different culture and religion without becoming a fanatic. But the atmosphere never quite recovers.

‘I’m so sorry,’ says Jameela when we’re back in the car. She’s more distressed than I am. ‘He can be such an idiot. Only religion matters to him and his friends. They’re so medieval, and they’re all like that.’ She calms down a little. ‘I was mixed up with them for a while.’ She starts the car and we pull away.

‘How mixed up? You’re scaring me.’

‘Family stuff,’ she says, as if it’s a chapter in her life she prefers to forget. ‘Ils sont tous des fanatiques.’ She looks at me. The smile has gone from her face. ‘I married one of them. Have you heard of Osama bin Laden?’

‘I think so,’ I say. ‘He’s becoming quite well known.’

‘I married one of his brothers. He was a good man.’ She pauses. ‘But he changed. Osama’s people changed him. Osama was a good man. He did good things for Sudan. But they changed him too. I used to see him and his people, and every time he was becoming more extreme.’

‘I don’t think I want to know about them,’ I say. ‘Watch the road.’

‘You have to understand,’ she says as a look of sadness crosses her features, ‘there’s a beautiful side to Islam and an ugly side. You’re a Christian. Christians have done cruel things. Evil things, I mean. But cruel people will always find cruel things to do. You don’t judge a whole civilisation on them. At the heart of Islam there’s a… a peace, an unimaginable peace and beauty. You find it in the simple people here, in their lives. Their gods are the sky, water and trees. Real Islam accepts all that. The Prophet was from the desert. He was a simple man who understood hardship.’

We drive in silence for a while. There’s something raw about this issue for Jameela, and it’s exactly the kind of discontent that a proper spy would try to exploit, deepening the grievance to obtain information. But there’s no need to try to bring it out. It bubbles up again a few minutes later.

‘You don’t deny your religion and civilisation because there are some fanatics who call themselves Christian? You don’t deny all the goodness and beauty because there is some ugliness. You don’t have to feel guilty because the Church ordered the crusades, or a massacre, or – I don’t know – a Hiroshima or a Srebrenica, or because your Christian leaders built concentration camps or enslaved millions of innocent people? But if a Muslim is involved in something unspeakable, in the West they always point out his religion. They talk about Muslims as if a single word could describe a billion people, as if the word was really useful.’

We pull up outside her home. The engine is still running, so I reach towards the ignition and turn off the engine. Jameela turns to me. She’s still upset. The issue has caused a division between us like an argument, and cast a shadow over the closeness I feel for her.

‘Do you know who the most extreme ones are?’ she’s asking. ‘They’re from Saudi, Egypt, Palestine. The ones who have the closest contact with the West. That’s where they learned their politics and their violence. And they’re always the ones you hear about. You never hear about the millions and millions of people who live quietly and tolerantly and peacefully and with the happiness that Islam brings to the heart of their lives.’

But I’m not really listening. I lean across, reach behind her head with my hand, and draw it gently towards my own. Then I kiss her on her lips.

‘I am in love with you,’ I say quietly. ‘And each time I say goodbye to you, it hurts.’

She looks at me in stunned silence. Her breath is uneven.

‘Go,’ she says. ‘Just go, please. Va t’en, je t’en prie.’