The Translator

16

She wore sunglasses now. They darkened the blue of the sky, the building that had sprung up in the once empty square in front of her aunt’s house. A cooperative which in working hours filled the road with noise and parked cars. Her glasses tinted the garden blue, its patches of dry yellow, the Disney characters on the children’s paddling pool. She had straightened up the sides of the pool and put it in the shade, filled it with water that gushed from the hosepipe hot. Two hours before sunset and the sun was a spot of blue heat, still too piercing for eyes that had seen fog and snow. Sammar sat on the porch near the old cactus plants in their clay pots, bougainvillea in dimpled mud. Children’s voices and laughter. The sight of them. They were in their underwear: Amir’s pants sagging with water, Dalia’s white, clinging and transparent, and the twins, Hassan and Hussein, in striped red and green. They had soaked the grass around the pool and it was now mud and slush, flat in the shade of the eucalyptus tree.

Behind Sammar the house was sleeping, hummed by fans and air coolers. Siesta before sunset and the time for praying and tea, going out or visitors parking their cars on the pavement outside. Her aunt’s house was a busy house, a lot of coming and going, snapping open the tops of Miranda bottles, boiling water for tea, special trays for guests, an elegant sugar bowl. Hanan lived on the top floor with her husband and four children. Sammar had known Dalia, who was the same age as Amir, but she had seen the two-year-old twins only in photographs. And of course the baby was new, asleep now with Mahasen downstairs. Sammar sat on the porch and there was no breeze, no moisture in the air, all was heat, dryness, desert dust. Her bones were content with that, supple again, young. They had forgotten how they used to be clenched. Her skin too had darkened from the sun, cleared and forgotten wool and gloves. She waited for everything else to forget: the inside of her and her eyes. Her eyes had let her down, they were not as strong as they had been in the past, not as strong as the eyes of those who had not travelled north. She must shield them with blue lenses and wait for them to forget like her bones had forgotten and her skin. She wanted to pick up life here again. People smile when I come into a room and this tree is for me, this scrawny garden, this sun. These children are all mine, the one I carried inside me and the ones I did not.

No one will tell me get out of here, get away, get away from me.

‘Sammar, Sammar’: it was the neighbour’s daughter calling from across the wall. Sammar walked across the porch, down the steps towards the car-port. There was a tap and a sink on the floor with a raised cement edge. Standing on it she could talk to Nahla who was standing on the arms of a chair. Two days ago, in this same position, Nahla had lost her balance and fallen. She was undeterred though and now shook hands with Sammar and kissed her over the wall.

‘If you fall again, you’ll break and be in bandages at the wedding.’ Nahla was getting married next month. She was beautiful, with dimples and dark-coloured veils that never slipped off her hair, rectangular gauze falling at each side of her face, balancing somehow without the aid of a pin or a broach.

‘I’m not going to fall off. Last time I had these stupid sandals on and they made me slip’.

‘What are you wearing now?’

‘I’m barefooted. Bring the children and come over.’

‘I can’t. They’re swimming.’

‘Where?’

‘I got them this paddling pool when I came. Aunt Mahasen wanted me to get roller blades for Amir but I got the pool instead. I’ve been here a month and only got round to filling it up for them today. Come and see them. They look nice.’

In a few minutes Nahla was admiring the paddling pool. She took off her sandals, lifted her skirt and waded in, adding to the children’s excitement. Amir leaned on the side and the water started spilling out.

‘Stop it, Amir. You’re getting rid of all the water.’ Nahla took hold of his arm and pulled him but he wriggled free, his ribs showing and his knees covered with scars from cuts and mosquito bites.

Sammar got the hose to add to the water in the pool. She sprayed Amir and Dalia and they squealed and ran out of the pool across the garden, the ribbon in Dalia’s hair wet and falling over her shoulders. Hassan got water on his face and he started to splutter and gasp, his hair wet curls covering his brow.

‘I’m sorry, my love.’ Sammar put the hose down and wiped his bewildered face. He wasn’t crying and soon went back to his game of filling a cup with water and pouring it over the side of the pool.

‘Sammar, come in, the water’s nice. I don’t feel so hot now.’

‘No, I’m too old.’ She smiled and turned to spray the dust off the jasmine bushes that lined the border of the garden.

‘You’re not old,’ said Nahla. ‘Haven’t you seen Hanan?’ Nahla puffed out her cheeks and did an exaggerated waddle from one side of the pool to the other.

Sammar laughed, looking to check that Dalia hadn’t noticed they were speaking about her mother. It was true though. Hanan did look matronly and walked as if she was still pregnant. ‘It’s just because of the baby,’ she said, putting down the hose to water the flower beds. ‘She’ll become slim soon especially now she is back to work.’ Hanan was a dentist.

‘She was like that even before the baby, you didn’t see her. No, you look years younger than her.’

Sammar took off her glasses. The sunlight was startling white, ruthless. She wiped water off the lenses with the hem of her blouse. Compliments on her looks hardened her inside. What was the use?

‘How’s your mother now?’ she asked. Nahla’s mother was ill with malaria. Yesterday Sammar and Mahasen had gone to visit her.

‘Al hamdulillah, she’s up today. Lots better. But I’m afraid all the preparations for the wedding will tire her,’ she kicked the water, made little waves. ‘Our luck isn’t very good.’

‘Why not?’

‘The Syrian club is booked on the day we want.’

‘Try another club.’

‘The Syrian is the best, so we might change the date.’ Nahla bent down and started playing with the twins’ cups and beakers, showing them how to pour from one to the other.

‘I haven’t been to a wedding for ages,’ said Sammar. ‘Yours will be the first.’

‘Didn’t you go to weddings in Scotland?’

‘No.’

Nahla looked at her with wide, kohl-rimmed eyes, ‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t know many people there. Sometimes I saw wedding couples outside churches having their photographs taken. They don’t get married like us at home. They get married in church or…’

‘Yes, I’ve seen them in films.’ Nahla didn’t seem interested in how people got married in other parts of the world, ‘I hope your aunt Mahasen will come to my wedding.’

‘I don’t know. Has she been going to weddings?’

‘No, not since Tarig,’ Nahla paused, ‘Allah, have mercy on him.’

‘Allah, have mercy on him,’ Sammar repeated. ‘Even if Aunt Mahasen doesn’t go to the party at the club she’ll come to the agid at your house.’

Nahla stepped out of the pool splashing her sandals with water. Pretty ankles, painted toenails, all the preparations for a bride. Sammar was like that once, years ago, years ago before Scotland, before Tarig died.

Here in this house, in this language and this place, were all the memories. All that had been taken away from her. A photograph of Tarig when she had walked into the house for the first time. Smiling, sitting back in a chair, at ease with everything. So young. So young and confident compared to her. He did not know her anymore. The young man in the photograph did not know the Sammar who had lived alone in Aberdeen. The photograph made her cry, tears coming from the fatigue of the journey, the strain of the past weeks in Egypt, the excitement of seeing Amir again, and he so cool, accepting her hugs and kisses as he would from the many visitors and relations who crossed his life. When she cried her aunt and Hanan started to cry. Hanan feeding the baby, sniffing into a tissue, Mahasen still and straight-backed, her tears falling without her face crumpling, without the indignity of sobbing. Only after they had cried together did the awkwardness of their meeting begin to break, the years she was away. Only then was it as if reaffirmed that she was who she was, Amir’s mother, Tarig’s widow coming home.

She walked Nahla to the gate, then it was time to get the children out of the pool, take them indoors, give them showers. The bathroom was so hot that she dripped with sweat while they dripped with water. Soap and squeals. ‘You put soap in my eyes!’, screams, guilt, Hassan’s blood-shot accusing eye, his slippery arm beating against her skirt, ‘Bad Sammar, ugly Sammar.’

Talcum powder and fresh clothes. ‘I’m not wearing this,’ Dalia folded her arms across her chest with all the authority of her mother.

‘Why not, it’s lovely. This is a lovely rabbit.’

‘It’s ugly.’

‘Amir, do you think it’s ugly?’

‘No.’

‘See, Amir thinks it’s lovely and Mama when she wakes up will think it’s lovely and Grandma Mahasen…’

‘I want to wear the red one.’

‘The red one is in the washing; it’s dirty.’

‘I want the red one.’

‘You can’t wear the red shirt. Wear the rabbit one and I’ll take you out with me and Amir this evening.’

‘Where are you going?’

Sammar pulled the rabbit T-shirt over Dalia’s head. There was no resistance. The child pushed her arms through the sleeves and looked at Sammar expectantly.

‘We’re going to Uncle Waleed’s house.’

Dalia frowned. She could not remember who Uncle Waleed was.

‘My brother,’ said Sammar. ‘Remember, they have a balcony with birds in a cage.’ She smoothed Dalia’s eyebrows, ruffled by water and the neck of the T-shirt. ‘Let’s get out of this heat,’ she said and pulled the bathroom door open, glad to get out of the stuffiness into the coolness of the hall.

The hall led to the sitting room, where the television and the big air cooler was. There was two beds along the wall and three old armchairs. There were stools for the children to sit on and a low circular coffee table made of light wood, which wobbled and swayed but still served as a dinner table, and for the homework Amir and Dalia did every afternoon. The house had another sitting room, the sallown as everyone called it. It was for formal guests, a lifeless room, not for everyday use. Sammar had received some of her friends there when they had come to welcome her back. She had sat with them conscious of a wedding photograph of her and Tarig, she as a bride looking ignorant and young. ‘Don’t you think it is better to take down that photograph from the sallown?’ she had asked her aunt and was answered with a look of suspicion, a quick no. And Mahasen must have complained to Hanan, for the next day Hanan said, ‘My mother still can’t get over it. Sammar, please, for Allah’s sake, don’t annoy her. He was her only son.’

Her only son. It was like that from the day she had brought Tarig home, carried in an airplane, in a box. Her only son. The words on everyone’s lips, said in disbelief, Mahasen’s son died, Mahasen’s son died. Her only son. He left an orphan. Poor orphan. My heart is breaking over this orphan boy. My heart is breaking over Mahasen, her only son. It was like that from the day Sammar brought Tarig home from Aberdeen and she the one who was carrying failure, her life ripped, totally changed, losing aim, losing focus, while Mahasen and Hanan went on as before and Amir could not miss the father he could not remember.

In the sitting room, her aunt was awake but the baby was still asleep on the bed between the wall and Mahasen’s back. In spite of the grief that had aged her aunt’s face, there was still an elegance about her, something refined in the way she sat and the way she talked. She was watching a video with the children. A cat chased a mouse on the screen, forever frustrated, forever unfulfilled. Sammar greeted her aunt and sat on one of the stools to comb Dalia’s hair. If she didn’t comb it and braid it now while it was wet, it would frizz up and be impossible to untangle. The wide-toothed comb was slippery in her hands. ‘Aw,’ said Dalia, her concentration still on the screen.

‘Sorry, pretty one. I’m nearly finished. Do you want two braids or one?’

‘Two.’

Mahasen said, ‘Two suits her better. Tighten them, last time you made them too loose and they didn’t last.’

Sammar nodded, parted Dalia’s hair in the middle and started to braid it. She could feel her aunt watching her. If she turned away now from Dalia’s hair and looked up at her aunt, she would meet her eyes, see the expression on them. Something like disappointment or disapproval, a kind of contempt. Many times when she met her aunt’s eyes she found that contempt when once, years ago, there was approval and love. ‘I love your mother more than I love you,’ she used to tease Tarig years ago. Another time, before the lines of defeat on Mahasen’s face, her faded eyes.

Sammar concentrated on Dalia’s hair and did not look up at her aunt. Even though the air cooler was blowing she still felt hot. She lifted her arm and with the sleeve of her blouse wiped the sweat that fell over her forehead.

‘Why are you so dishevelled today?’ Her aunt’s voice different than the chatter and music of the cartoon show.

‘I was with the children in the garden. They played with the pool. Nahla came over.’ Politeness required that she looked up. She lowered her eyes again.

‘Insha’ Allah they’re not going to have the wedding party in the house. Loud music and crowding the whole street.’

‘No, she told me they’re booking the Syrian club.’ She was going to add that Nahla was hoping Mahasen would attend, but decided against it.

‘I have no appetite for weddings or parties,’ her aunt said as if she could read her mind, ‘from the day they buried the deceased, I have no appetite for such things. Hanan goes, reluctantly, but it’s her duty to go. It’s expected of her.’

‘Yes,’ said Sammar. She did not like her aunt saying ‘the deceased’, never referring to Tarig by his name. It made him sound as if he was old when in reality he was young, forever young. Nor did she believe that Hanan went to parties ‘reluctantly’. But she kept silent as she finished Dalia’s hair and did not contradict her aunt, did not look up. Over the hum of the air cooler, over the music of the cartoon show, she heard from a distance the sunset azan. She had missed it in Aberdeen, felt its absence, sometimes fancied she heard it in the rumble of the central-heating pipes, in a sound coming from a neighbouring flat. It now came as a relief, the reminder that there was something bigger than all this, above everything. Allah akbar. Allah akbar…

She went to make wudu and had to tidy the bathroom first because the children had splashed the walls with water, thrown towels and wet clothes on the floor. In the bedroom she put on the ceiling fan and picked up the prayer mat that lay folded on her aunt’s bed. Sammar’s clothes and belongings were in a separate room which had locked cupboards and crates of Miranda, sacks of sugar and rice, but she slept in this room with her aunt and Amir. Electricity was too expensive to keep more than one air cooler going throughout the night. That was why they had to share the room, share the one air cooler. Sometimes there were power cuts during the night and the sudden silence of the air cooler would wake Sammar up. She would turn its switch to Off, because sometimes the surge of the power coming back was too strong and likely to damage the motor. Sometimes she fell asleep again in the remaining coolness of the room but minutes later the heat would wake her up. She would open all the windows but sometimes not even a breeze would enter the stifling room. Amir would toss and push the cover away from him, her aunt would sit up and lean against the wall, sighing curses at the government, the electricity company, life itself. And Sammar would get up and go outside, pace up and down the star-lit porch, unsteady from lack of sleep, stunned by the laden sky. In the past everyone had slept outdoors on the roof, wide-open space, a freshness even on the hottest nights. But Hanan had built her flat on the roof. ‘No one, Sammar,’ she said, ‘sleeps outdoors anymore.’ Because of mosquitoes bred by open drains and fumes of diesel rising during power cuts from bright houses that could afford generators.

After she prayed she went out to the garden. It was different without the children and she did not need her sunglasses now. She could have all the colours that she had missed in Aberdeen; yellow and brown, and everything else vivid. Flat land and a peaceful emptiness, space, no grey, no wind, no lines of granite. The sun had rimmed the houses down the road and left behind layers of pink and orange. In the east there was the confident blue of night, a flimsy moon, one, two, now three stars. Still the birds rushed to the trees, screeching, rustling the leaves, noisier than the children had been earlier on. On the other side of the road, the nightwatchman of the cooperative was serving his friends tea. They sat on the pavement on a large palm-fibre mat; prayer beads and laughter. Coals glowed, a kettle of water boiled and let off steam in the twilight. Her homesickness was cured, her eyes cooled by what she saw, the colours and how the sky was so much bigger than the world below, transparent. She heard the sound of a bell as the single, silly light of a bicycle lamp jerked down the pitted road. A cat cried out like a baby and everything without the wind had a smell; sand and jasmine bushes, torn eucalyptus leaves.

17

Her brother Waleed lived with his wife in a second-floor flat in one of the newer apartment blocks. They were newly married and both worked for the same architecture office. Sammar parked Hanan’s car under the dim yellow glow of a street lamp. The driving lessons she had taken in Aberdeen had come in useful after all, though at first the change to driving on the right was difficult. Amir and Dalia opened the car door and jumped out. ‘If we were in Scotland,’ she said to them as they crossed the road, ‘you would have had to sit in the back and wear seat-belts.’ What she said made no sense to them. They had never seen anyone wear a seat-belt; they could not imagine a place far away called Scotland.

The road they walked across was pitted with potholes, strewn with rubble from the new buildings. Bricks and scattering of cement were everywhere, the playthings of children who lived on the streets. There was a small canteen next to the building and some of the children were crowded near the entrance. They were in torn stained clothes, bare feet covered with dust up to their ankles. They wanted lollipops and gum, and were laughing and jostling each other, their teeth bright white in the poorly lit street. And though Sammar had come back from rain and a rich city of the First World, the meagerness of this place was familiar. Shabbiness as if the sun had burned away the lushness of life and left no room for luxuries or lies.

As soon as Waleed opened the door for them, the power failed. There was much confusion in the sudden dark with Amir jumping about in a state of great excitement, laughing and calling Dalia names because she was afraid. There was a fumble for candles and a torch, attempts to soothe Dalia, a joke about Sammar cutting off the electricity, bringing in the darkness with her.

Waleed led them through the flat and out to sit on the balcony. This pleased the children who started to pester the pigeons asleep inside a large crate caged with mesh. They stuck their fingers through the holes in the mesh, trying to reach the pigeons. All the neighbouring houses and roads were in darkness, proof of a major power cut and not a fault in the building. Only far away shone the lights of the airport, yellow and red. In the canteen below, someone lit a hurricane lamp and a shout in the street was answered by laughter. There was enough light from the moon and the stars for Sammar to see her brother clearly, the jellabia he was wearing, the large gap between his teeth when he smiled. He said that his wife had gone to her German lesson.

‘Why is she learning German?’ asked Sammar, her mind on the stars, that they were innumerable, some further away than others. How could this be the same sky as the one in Aberdeen?

‘Do you think I know?’ he said. ‘She wants to learn German, what can I say, don’t learn German?’

‘I thought she was doing computing in Souk Two.’ Everyone could look up at this sky, no admission fee, no money. In Scotland there were shops for everything, selling everything and no one could buy a sky like that.

‘She was, but there weren’t enough computers to go round and she didn’t get much chance on the machines. She got the notes and she can use the one we have here…’

‘Actually I want to use your computer today,’ Sammar said, ‘I need to write a letter, two really. But now there’s no electricity.’ She turned to Amir and Dalia, ‘Stop it you two, leave the birds alone.’ Amir banged the mesh with his palms. One of the pigeons stirred but did not wake up.

‘Insha’ Allah it will come back. Yesterday it was out at this time and back after fifteen minutes.’

‘That would be good.’ She wondered why she did not care so much about the power cut, why she was not annoyed with this obstacle. Usually she liked getting things over with once she had reached a decision. Perhaps it was because of the sky and the breeze, dewy and clear. Or the feeling all around of surrender. The stars had mocked the lights of the earth and won.

‘What were you doing before we came?’ she asked.

‘Watching a video.’ He scratched his head and yawned.

‘Remember in the past we used to go to the cinema a lot.’

‘No one goes to the cinema now.’ By ‘no one’ he meant his circle of friends and family.

‘It’s a shame.’

‘Things change. You want to go away and come back and find everything the same?’

She shrugged in the dark. There was always a tone in his voice that seemed to her harsh. But she knew he didn’t mean it. She was the one who had become too sensitive. She was the one who had been away for too long.

‘I want to get away from here,’ he suddenly said. ‘I’m fed up. I’m truly fed up.’

‘Of what?’ her voice was light as if she wanted to dilute his resentment.

‘Not going forward. Things just aren’t moving ahead.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘The Gulf or Saudi Arabia. The Gulf preferably.’

‘Go.’

He laughed, ‘Don’t be stupid. Everyone wants to go there and make themselves a bit of money; it’s not so easy.’ He was genuinely amused, shaking his head, looking into her eyes, ‘You have no idea, do you? You’re blank.’

She started to laugh too and looked up at the stars, ‘I’m blank.’

Dalia came and leaned close to her, whispered in her ears, ‘I want to pee.’

The bathroom was hot and airless. In the mirror over the sink, Sammar saw her face by candlelight. How long would it be before she started to look as she should look, a dried-out widow, a faded figure in the background?

‘I’ve finished,’ Dalia said. Sammar had to yank the toilet handle three times before it finally flushed. Dalia’s anxious face settled into a smile and Sammar noticed that the cistern did not fill up again with water. ‘It must be that when the electricity cuts, the pump that lifts the water up to this floor stops working. Let’s try the taps.’

Dalia twisted the tap. A few drops spluttered out noisily and then there was nothing.

‘They’ve got a pail…’ said Sammar. There was a pail full of water in the bathtub and a metal pitcher. She filled the pitcher with water and Dalia washed her hands in the sink, the white bar of soap large and awkward in her hand.

They walked back carefully through the darkness, Sammar carrying the candle, to the coolness of the balcony. In their absence Waleed had brought a tray of Pepsi bottles and glasses with ice, plates of peanuts and dates.

Amir and Dalia were soothed by the drinks, made silent by the peanuts. Sammar shook the ice in her glass. It was one of the things she had missed in Aberdeen, ice cubes in drinks, the feel of a cool drink in the heat.

‘So what do you think of this dark country of ours?’ Waleed asked putting his hands behind his head. He meant the power cut.

‘Beautiful.’

He laughed. His laugh was loud and contagious.

‘At last you’ve gone mad,’ he said in between his laughter.

She smiled and said slowly, ‘I swear by Allah Almighty, I see it more beautiful than anywhere else.’ Because she had mentioned Allah her heart glowed and because she spoke the truth.

‘I’ll give you a couple more weeks,’ he said, ‘you’ll take Amir and run back.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m not going to have a job to go back to. I’m here today to write my letter of resignation and send it off.’

‘Why are you going to do that?’ It was almost a yell. He sat forward in his chair, intense now, no longer laughing, ‘You must never do that. Do you think jobs are lying about waiting for people to pick them up? Do you think you’re going to find a job here?’

‘I’ll just have to try, Insha’ Allah I’ll find something.’ She flicked away some peanut husks that had fallen on her lap and wished she hadn’t told him. If his wife had been at home, he would have been more subdued, not so hyped-up. Now he went on and on.

‘What sort of work do you think you’re going to find?’

‘Maybe the “Erasing Illiteracy” programme…’

‘The pay will be nothing, nothing you could live on, you’ll just regret it. And you’ve never taught before…’

‘They’re desperate for people, they won’t fuss…’

‘Yes, they won’t fuss, but why, when you have a very good job already in Aberdeen, why give up a chance?’

‘I was supposed to be back at work last week. They’re probably wondering what happened to me.’

‘That’s not a reason to resign.’

She looked into her glass, melting ice, dark-golden Pepsi, ‘Living there wasn’t a great success.’

‘How couldn’t it be? You’re so fortunate. A good job, a civilised place. None of there power cuts and strikes and what not… What’s the matter with you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Just like that.’ There was guilt in her voice, a kind of stubbornness. She could see the irony of the situation. She had the option of a life abroad and wanted to stay, while he was keen to leave and couldn’t.

She said as if to explain, ‘Being exiled isn’t very nice.’

‘If you took Amir with you, you wouldn’t be lonely and it would be good for him. You don’t know how schools here have become.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to handle him on my own.’ She wished she could explain how desolate it would be, her and Amir alone in Aberdeen. The long winter evenings, the small room they would live in, just them, the two of them, face to face, claustrophobic.

‘That’s rubbish. Here you’re handling Amir and Hanan’s children. Didn’t Aunt Mahasen fire the maid as soon as you came back?’

Sammar laughed relieved at the turn in the conversation. Waleed smiled reluctantly. She said, ‘No one fired anyone. The woman left, she just disappeared a week after I came back. And Aunt Mahasen hasn’t been able to find anyone else.’

‘Oh really,’ he said with sarcasm, ‘Aunt Mahasen and Hanan put together couldn’t find anyone.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I truly don’t mind.’ The housework and Hanan’s children kept her busy, tired her out so that there was no time to dream at night.

‘How has she been with you?’ His voice was cautious now, the question tentative. If his wife had been at home he would not have asked.

‘Fine.’

‘You know that she kicked ‘Am Ahmed out of the house?’

Sammar shook her head, bit her lip. It was all her fault. He didn’t deserve that. She wondered how many people knew the whole story, almost a scandal. The elderly religious man, already married with two wives, setting his eyes on a young widow, her husband not yet a year in his grave. And the foolish girl did not turn him down straightaway. Instead she said she would consider it. An educated girl like her!

‘What happened?’ Her voice was quiet with reluctance, as if she didn’t really want to know.

Waleed shifted in his chair. ‘He came for a visit. I was there. It was the Eid, some time after you left. We were all just sitting there normally then Mahasen suddenly turned on him and shouted, don’t ever set foot in my house again; Tarig’s wife will never be yours… And on and on.’

‘Oh my Lord.’

‘Yes, it was unpleasant. We went and apologised to him later, me and Hanan. He was staying with his brother in Safia.’

‘Hanan never told me about this.’

‘There’s no need. The whole matter is finished. I think he doesn’t come to Khartoum so often now. Business isn’t what it used to be. I’ve lost touch with him. He was cordial enough with us when we went to apologise, but things can’t be the same again.’

‘He’s a good person,’ she said. He was a life-long family friend. When she was young, he used to lift her up to sit on top of his van, he used to give her sweets. She was never afraid of him.

‘What he did was an exaggeration.’ Waleed’s tone was dismissive.

She didn’t say anything and he went on, ‘I was just concerned with how Aunt Mahasen is with you. If you’re comfortable living with her. Especially if you’re insisting on not going back to Aberdeen.’

‘She never speaks about what happened. As for living with her, Amir and I both have a share in the house. It’s our right to be there.’ At one time the house was shared between Mahasen, Hanan and Tarig. After Tarig’s death Mahasen’s share increased, Hanan’s remained the same, Sammar inherited a share and to Amir went the biggest portion. The biggest in comparison to the others, but it was less than half of the house. None of them had the cash to buy the others out. If they sold the house and divided the money, it would not be enough for each of them to get a decent place elsewhere.

‘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 should 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…’

This was the exile from him then. Never hearing his name. Living in a place where no one knew him. And when weak from the dreams, needing to speak of him and not being able to. She wanted to say anything, however meaningless. At times with a friend, Nahla, even with Hanan, she would want to speak about him. A question from them would be the trigger, a question about her time in Scotland. A question followed by a pause in the conversation, the possibility of a turning point and then other words would fill up the space. She was afraid of the sound of her voice talking about him, the silliness of it and feeling ashamed. She knew that they would stop at him being a foreigner, their mind would close after that. Wide eyes, surprise, a foreigner? They would imagine him like someone in an American film. The kind of videos they watched: a bodyguard, a man who was really a robot with skin. She did not want them to imagine him like that. Their eyes rimmed with kohl, warm, wide, and she knowing what was in their minds, having to somehow defend him, stammer through the questions they would ask.

‘No, he’s different, not really…’

‘Half-foreign?’

‘No, he’s just different, not… impatient, not… cool.’

‘I still can’t believe it. A Christian?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s not religious, he doesn’t go to church. He’s not sure…’

‘Not sure?’

‘He believes in Allah but when I asked him if he accepts that Muhammad, peace be upon him is a Messenger, he said he wasn’t sure.’

‘You, Sammar, of all people? You’re not like modern girls who marry foreigners. You’re not the type.’

‘Anyway it didn’t work. It failed.’

‘But why did you let yourself get involved in the first place?’

Start to talk of him and she would have to answer all sorts of questions, become hot with shyness and what she couldn’t say, that she had tipped over, begged him: just say the shahadah, just say the words and it would be enough, we could get married then. It was not a story to be proud of. Perhaps Hanan would repeat it to her husband, something to amuse him after a hard day’s work. Perhaps Nahla would repeat it to her mother, a piece of gossip from next door. It was sensible to keep quiet, keep busy, forget. She talked to herself, she told herself that she did not know him. She did not understand the words ‘sixties’ scene’ or a Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh when he got married in a church and wore a kilt. How could she understand things like that, be connected to them? She gave herself lectures when the dreams came and weakened her. ‘I must start a new life, stop being sentimental, stop feeling sorry for myself. Everyone around me is deprived of something or another. Some people don’t even have running water in their homes. And all the babies that die and inflation tight around people’s throats. I am so lucky I can afford medicine for my son and Eid clothes, decent meals, even luxuries, useless things like renting videos. I should be thankful. If I was good, if my faith was strong, I would be grateful for what I have.’

But she still dreamt of him. Vivid dreams in which he brushed past her, close, close enough for her to smell him but he would not look at her, would not talk to her. In one dream she was as short as a child in a room full of adults and smoke. She was in this room to look for him and she was standing near a table that was large and high. On tiptoe she saw that the table was green, a solid rectangular green with no cutlery, no food or drinks. She reached with her hand and it was as if the table was a shallow box lined with green rough wool. On the other side of the table Rae was talking to a man she did not recognise, a man with glasses and straight black hair sliding over his eyes. The room was choked with people bigger than her, older than her. Their discontent buzzed through the room, through the smoke, and, like in the other dreams, Rae came towards her and then brushed past her, distracted, unaware of her because she was too young and too short for him.

Raw eyes in the morning, the way a dream affects the day ahead. The ceiling fan rotated slowly distributing the breeze that came from the window. The birds were strident outside. The way a dream threatens the day, sharpens a memory. Only a dream and it could induce nausea in her, a dry soreness behind her eyes.

She poured sour milk in her aunt’s tea and had to make another cup. She sent Amir to school without making him brush his teeth, left the fan running in the empty bedroom all morning. At work she felt that she didn’t care, it didn’t matter at all that her adult students could barely read and write. The illiteracy rate was 60 or 82 per cent depending on who was right, and today she had no energy or desire to reduce it.

‘What’s wrong with you? Are you tired?’ she was asked. ‘Sister, please raise your voice we can’t hear you.’ It was women’s classes in the morning: mothers, grandmothers, today instead of reading, a health lesson about breastfeeding. The reading syllabus was set by a government commission and because of the shortage of books, children’s school books were used. The same books from which Dalia and Amir were taught. I am a girl. I come from the village. I am a boy. I come from the village. This is a camel. These are dates. It was humiliating to learn from such books. She could feel it in their voices, a kind of edge, the men (who made up the majority in the evening classes) more so than the women, who would laugh it off, saying, ‘Now I can read my children’s school books.’ For this reason health topics and community education lessons were more successful. It was lucky for her that on the day she was least motivated, the topic was the popular one of feeding babies.

‘You left the fan on in the bedroom all morning,’ said her aunt, the now familiar contempt in her eyes, her voice a certain way, wanting war. They were her first words when Sammar, Amir and Dalia came home. Dalia sucking a lollipop given to her by a friend, Amir trailing his school bag, pretending not to be envious. Sammar took off her sunglasses, poured herself a glass of water from the fridge. She sat on one of the children’s stools in front of the blowing air cooler, put her glass of water on the coffee table. There was condensation on the glass because the water was cold.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She could not say that it was because of the dream. Everything going wrong because of the dream. She started to drink her glass of water. Nile water beautiful after thirst, alhamdulillah.

‘Electricity isn’t free,’ said Mahasen. She was sitting on one of the beds putting Hanan’s baby to sleep, patting him on the back as he lay on his side facing the wall. Hanan was still at work. She worked longer hours than Sammar, she was more productive, more efficient. The baby raised his head up and smiled at Sammar. She smiled back, mouthed his name silently. Mahasen patted him harder. ‘Come on, sleep!’ she said to him.

Sammar felt that her aunt wanted to say more, that there was more to come after the statement ‘Electricity isn’t free.’ She escaped, went to the bedroom to change, then called Amir to give him a shower so that he could be clean before he ate. He talked to her while she towelled and dressed him but she was not listening, her mind numb behind her dry eyes, the fear that she was somehow not going to able to complete the day, that it was too long, too much of a challenge. Even when she prayed she still felt a tightness inside, a sense of foreboding.

The main meal of the day served as usual and Hanan’s twins were brought down by their father, who went upstairs again. The children sat on the stools around the table. The clutter of plastic dishes, murmurs from her, ‘Say bismillah before you eat. Be good and finish your plate.’ They were sometimes lively, sometimes quiet. Today after the first few mouthfuls it was as if devils danced around the house, skipped on top of the furniture, goaded the children. Rice scattered everywhere, there were screeches, fights, rice grains in noses and ears. Amir pinched Dalia, stuck his tongue out at her. Dalia bit Amir, leaving saliva, chewed rice and ridges on his arm. He pulled her hair, yanked it and she screamed, a scream so loud that it seemed incredible to Sammar, as she pulled them apart, that such a noise could come out of someone Dalia’s size. Devils danced around the room making everything a blur in front of Sammar’s eyes. Millions of children babbling away, the rattle and the din of plastic plates and she in the middle of it, immersed, hypnotised. Dalia’s scream woke the baby, his arms grasped the air, his face scrunched with anger, his own kind of screaming. Mahasen picked him up and started to rock him in her arms. If he did not have a proper nap, he was grumpy the rest of the day.

‘Make them quiet,’ Mahasen shouted. ‘Do something, Sammar, instead of staring at them like an idiot.’

But the children were wild, stronger than her. They rotated around the room, shouting, kicking. They ran too fast. At last Hanan appeared at the door like a hero, solid and in control, dignified in her dentist’s working clothes. She smacked Dalia, picked up her screaming baby and herded her messy twins upstairs. She left Sammar with Dalia whimpering and cringing, and a dull calmness all around the room. As if nothing had happened, Amir arranged his toy cars on the floor, talked to them and pushed them carefully from the carpet to the tiles.

‘All this is because you are useless,’ said her aunt. ‘A few children and you don’t know how to handle them. I don’t know what happened to you. In the past you were lively and strong, now you’ve just become an idiot.’

She wanted to escape from her aunt but Dalia was clinging to her, sticky and limp. She wanted to escape into cleaning the room, sweeping up the rice that was scattered on the table and on the floor.

‘You don’t even have a proper job, a job that pays. How much have you been contributing to the house?’

‘Not much,’ her voice flat, obedient, answering how Mahasen wanted her to answer.

‘And content to wear others’ clothes, without any pride.’

That was true. She had been passed on a whole wardrobe of Hanan’s, clothes that were too tight for her after having the baby, didn’t fit anymore. And it was also true, that she had no pride. The clothes, when Hanan offered them, had made her happy. They were loose on her, long. Hanan had been nice, she had said, as Sammar tried each thing on, looking at herself in the full length mirror, turning this way and that, ‘Everything looks lovely on you, Sammar.’ Now her aunt was making it all dirty, wanting her to feel ashamed.

‘You should go back to England, work there and send us things.’

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘We buried the deceased and you went around saying, “It’s a good thing he left me with one child, not three or four, what would I have done with them?” A thing to say. It shows how low you are, with no manners, no respect for his memory. Now you have this one child and you don’t even want to take him to England and look out for his benefit.’

She wanted to wash the dishes, smell soap, the soothing fall of the water on spoons and plates, but she was pinned down by Dalia, her little sobs, her head on her lap. Someone must have repeated her words to Mahasen. She had never told Mahasen that she was glad she had only one child. And now all this could lead to the old quarrel about ‘Am Ahmed, bringing that up all over again…

‘I know what happened,’ her aunt went on, her voice and the steady roar of the air cooler. ‘I know why you came back. They fired you, didn’t they, because you didn’t do the work well? Don’t think I’m fooled by this story of you going to Waleed and sending off a resignation letter or the rubbish you said about being homesick for your country. Foreigners don’t stand for nonsense, I know. Their countries wouldn’t be so advanced if they did,’ she gestured vaguely at the unlit screen of the television, her source of knowledge about the world. ‘You were just no good and they told you to leave.’

‘No.’ She stared down at Dalia’s head on her lap, her hair sticking out of the braids.

‘You’re a liar.’

‘I’m not a liar.’ She smoothed Dalia’s hair, her hands cold, clumsy.

‘You’re a liar and you killed my son.’

She shook her head, not sure if her aunt meant what she said and it was not her muddled mind that was imagining it all. It was not a line from an Egyptian soap that her aunt was repeating. ‘You killed my son,’ Mahasen had actually spoken those words out loud. Now on her face there was a kind of triumph as if she had finally, from deep inside, pulled out what she had always wanted to say.

The denial stuck in Sammar’s throat.

‘You nagged him to buy that car,’ her aunt’s words were focused now, distinct. ‘You nagged him day and night and he sent for money.’

Sammar shook her head. She hadn’t known, she hadn’t known that he was short of money, that he had asked his mother. ‘He didn’t tell me,’ she said breathing through the fear, the fear that her mind would bend, surrender to this madness, accept the accusation, live forever with the guilt.

‘You nagged him for that car and that car killed him. He wrote and said, “Please, Mama, help me, Sammar’s getting on my nerves, saying it’s cold, it’s too cold to walk everywhere, let’s get a car.” Then I sent him the money.’

Tarig wrote to Mahasen, complaining… Sammar’s getting on my nerves… It sounded so much like him, the way he would speak, Sammar’s getting on my nerves. It jumped up at her in spite of the years, in spite of the gulf between their world and his. It sounded so much like him, the way he would speak. The way he spoke to his mother sometimes, as if there was some kind of conspiracy against him, threatening his career. He had been like that… Sammar tried to remember the time before they bought the car, she tried to remember nagging him. It was years ago. He hadn’t told her he was short of money, he hadn’t told her that he had written to Mahasen asking for money. She had thought he wanted a car as much as she did. And now he was not here for her to ask him. Her aunt’s words hung in the air, a banner of victory, they could not be contradicted or denied.

‘Dalia, get up,’ she eased the child’s head away from her lap. Dalia sat up and rubbed her eyes. Sammar began to clear the plates off the table and to sweep the rice off the floor. She could feel her aunt watching how inefficient she was, clumsy in her movements, slow. She felt cold, her bones cold and stiff, not moving smoothly, not moving with ease. She wanted a bed and a cover, sleep. She wanted to sleep like she used to sleep in Aberdeen, everything muffled up and grey, curling up, covering her face with the blanket, her breath warming the cocoon she had made for herself.

Amir pushed a tape into the video and cheerful music filled the room. Dalia sat cross-legged on the floor and watched Mary Poppins flying in the air. Mahasen lay down on the bed, propped up on her elbow watching the television. There was a peaceful expression on her face, as if she was drained now, fulfilled after her outburst.

Sammar’s fingers were steady as she washed the dishes. The water spluttered and gushed out of the tap. There were colours in the soap suds, pink, green. She rinsed the glasses and stood them face down to dry, moved her weight from one foot to another. Something to lean on, rest upon, be held up by. If she could believe that he loved her, that now he was aware of her… But she didn’t believe, could not make herself believe. It was not there inside her. Inside her was only a bright hardness. Months since she had seen him, months since she had left Aberdeen. He was far away. He had forgotten her, he was a foreigner and she was who she was. By now he must know another woman. It was so long since he had lived with his wife, one had to be realistic about these things. His world had different rules. Perhaps he was relieved when she left, all the messiness of it, the sticky complications. Another woman, more easily accessible, lighter. A woman with lighter eyes, a lighter heart, someone who didn’t care whether he believed in God or not.

When she finished washing the dishes, Sammar went and stood at the door to the sitting room. She watched Dalia squint a little in front of the television. Mahasen was sitting up on the bed rubbing cream on her hand and flexing her fingers to ease the joints. She wanted to say to her aunt that no one killed Tarig, it just happened, it was his day. She wanted to say that Allah gives life and takes it, and she had no feeling of guilt for wanting Tarig to buy a car. She was not to blame. If he had told her he was short of money, she would have understood and accepted. But he hadn’t told her. She wanted to say to her aunt, be careful when you speak of the dead because they are not here to defend themselves. Why tell me that he had complained about me, that he said I got on his nerves? He would not have wanted me to know this.

Mahasen looked up, ‘Did you finish?’

‘Yes.’

Mahasen looked down at her hands again, smoothed the white cream over her loose skin.

It was time for Sammar to talk now, say what she wanted to say.

‘When I say you should go back to England,’ said Mahasen, ‘it is for your own good and Amir’s. Not for my own good. Amir fills the house and you serve me…’

The house. Of course there must be a mention of the house. They shared ownership of this house…

‘It is better for us to be here,’ Sammar said. What she had intended to say when she came out of the kitchen effervesced. Her voice was sullen as a child, ‘I didn’t lose my job, they didn’t dismiss me, I left of my own accord.’

Mahasen sighed as if she did not believe her, as if she was humouring her. ‘Yes, alright,’ she said and turned to look at the television again.

The bedroom was not so hot. It was bearable with the ceiling fan and the shutters closed against the sun. The room smelt of her aunt, a smell of creams and cologne. Sammar sat up on the bed, leaned against the wall, hugged her knees and stared at the cracks on the ceiling. Some were angry and painful, some were delicate and faint: a European woman from long ago in a billowing dress, a cedar tree. She wished she could feel that Rae was close to her in spite of the angry words she had said to him, in spite of his get away, get away from me. She prayed that she could feel him close, not like in the dream, not distracted, not brushing past her. If she would dream a good dream about him. One good dream, reassuring her. He was so far away now that she could not imagine his voice, could not believe the things he had said to her. Another exile. Doubt, the exile of not being sure that anything existed between them, no tangible proof. The perfume he had given was in another room locked in a suitcase with all that she didn’t need: wool and tights, her duffle coat. All the clothes he had seen her in, locked away in the storeroom with sacks of lentils and rice.

She was weak today. Because of last night’s dream and she had annoyed her aunt. She couldn’t remember clearly what she had done to annoy her aunt, to trigger all that came out of her. The cracks on the ceiling. The fan? The children? The children running around like devils, making a terrible noise, then after Hanan came and went, her aunt said things… Her aunt blamed her for Tarig’s death. That was bizarre. She wished that Hanan had been present or Waleed then she would have felt sane and safe, maybe not so frightened. They would have defended her. Even if they were silent out of respect for her aunt, she would have felt that they were on her side. Rae was on her side. He had told her that in the hospital when she showed him her aunt’s letter, the address on the envelope, Aberdeen, England. He said, you’ve won me to your side in any quarrel you have with your aunt. That was what he had said. She could remember it now. She could remember. The hospital and how the glass door of the entrance was difficult to push. The way he looked when he saw her. She could remember now. Smile, gaze up at the lady in the hooped skirt and the branches of the cedar tree.

It was a joke. You’ve won me to your side, Sammar, in any quarrel you have with your aunt. It was a joke about the address and she had laughed. Someone in the post office had crossed out England with red ink. She had shown him the envelope and he had held it in his hand. There was a plaster at the back of his hand from the intravenous amoxilyn. He had thought she looked nice. She was wearing her new coat, henna-coloured and toggles instead of buttons. It was warm in the ward, too warm, and she had wanted to take the coat off but she had felt too shy. When he told her he loved her it was strange because no one had told her these words in English before. And it was not like in a film, it was just like the way he spoke, normal. If now she could have anything she wanted, she would want to look at photographs of him when he was young, black and white photographs and early coloured ones. His hair and the clothes he wore. She would like to look at his photographs and ask him questions. He would be more interested in her than in the photographs, answering her questions reluctantly, not so keen as she was to talk about the past. It was because of the way he looked at her that things came to a head, the awkwardness she felt, uneasy with everything. If they were not a man and a woman, if they were pure friends, if all that was between them was clear air, she would have been patient when she asked him if he believed and he replied, ‘I am not sure.’

There were people who drew others to Islam. People with deep faith, the type who slept little at night, had an energy in them. They did it for no personal gain, no worldly reason. They did it for Allah’s sake. She had heard stories of people changing: prisoners in Brixton, a German diplomat, an American with ancestors from Greece. Someone influencing someone, with no ego involved. And she, when she spoke to Rae, wanting this and that, full of it; wanting to drive with him to Stirling, to cook for him, to be settled, to be someone’s wife.

She had never, not once, prayed that he would become a Muslim for his own sake, for his own good. It had always been for herself, her need to get married again, not be alone. If she could rise above that, if she would clean her intentions. He had been kind to her and she had given him nothing in return. She would do it now from far away without him ever knowing. It would be her secret. If it took ten months or ten years or twenty or more.

20

This is my first Ramadan since I came back,’ she said, in answer to Waleed’s question.

‘Yes, you weren’t with us last year,’ said Mahasen as she reached for another piece of bread. Sammar had cut the loaves into small portions. Such thin loaves these days, shrinking while their price threatened to go up.

The three of them were eating in the garden. No electric lights competed with the moon, no garden lights. The candle Sammar had brought from inside was unnecessary and she blew it out.

It was the middle of the month of Ramadan and the moon was full. From tomorrow it would shrink and lose itself. When the new crescent appeared it would be the end of Ramadan. The end of fasting, visitors saying Eid Mubarak and new clothes for the children.

It was unusual to be alone with Waleed and Mahasen, without anyone else, without the children. Hanan and her family were with their in-laws and they had taken Amir with them. It was supposed to be only Sammar and Mahasen breaking the fast together but at the first words of the sunset azan, before they had time to eat any dates, the door bell rang. When Sammar dragged open the garden gate, it was Waleed. She had been so pleased to see him and surprised, that she hugged him and he said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘What’s the matter with you coming alone without your wife?’

‘She’s eating with her parents,’ he said and nothing more. Sammar didn’t ask him why he had not gone too, it became busy with the three of them breaking their fast, dates and kerkedeh, her aunt saying to Waleed, ‘If we knew you were coming we would have made grapefruit juice.’

After Sammar put the jug of kerkedeh back in the fridge and threw away the date stones, they prayed. They prayed together with Waleed leading and Sammar and Mahasen standing close, their arms and clothes touching. Mahasen’s movements were slow when she bent down, knelt down and put her forehead on the mat. Sammar felt Waleed deliberately pausing, slowing his pace so that Mahasen could keep up. When they finished praying there was a power cut. The sudden silence of the air cooler, the sudden loss of the lights, the fan slowing down. In the stillness and faint glow of sunset, Sammar counted on her fingers twenty-seven times, There is no god but Allah and I seek forgiveness from Allah for my wrongs and for believing men and believing women…

Her aunt’s voice was loud in the room, ‘Allah curse them and their day, is this a time for this?’ ‘Them’ was the electricity company and the government, the two inseparable to Mahasen. She went on, ‘They’ve made us hate life…’ The room without the air cooler was gradually getting warm but they could still see each other without the lights.

Waleed stood up and folded his prayer mat. ‘Aunt, the supplication of the one who is fasting is granted,’ he smiled. ‘The electricity company must be in a bad way by now.’

‘The whole neighborhood is cursing them,’ said Mahasen standing up.

Sammar took the mat from Waleed and picked up hers and her aunt’s off the floor. It seemed to her funny if the whole neighborhood was really cursing the company, all that energy rising up in the sunset air. Some people were so serious about power cuts. Like her aunt, getting angry to the core.

‘Let’s eat outside in the garden, Aunt,’ she said and Mahasen sighed and nodded in agreement. Since that bad day when Mahasen had said, ‘You killed my son,’ the relationship between them had strangely improved, mellowed. It was as if Mahasen had said the worst she could possibly say and there were no more accusations after that.

In the kitchen, by candlelight, Sammar heated the food, her shadow swinging huge against the walls. The kitchen was hot and airless without the fan and she could hear the cockroaches stir and dart across the floor. But once they were seated outside, cushions on the chairs, a tablecloth on the wobbly table and there was a breeze, the food tasted good and it felt better than indoors. Much better than a normal day eating indoors with the air cooler and all the lights.

‘Last Ramadan,’ said Mahasen, scooping up stew with her piece of bread, ‘not once did the electricity cut. Things are supposed to get better and they just get worse.’

Waleed did not speak much when he was eating. Grunts of agreement with his aunt and, ‘Pour me water, Sammar.’ He looked tired, she thought, not just the normal tiredness from fasting. He might have quarrelled with his wife and that was why he had not gone with her to her parents. Instead he was here with them today and Mahasen was being tactful, not asking questions, glad to see him. Mahasen could be surprisingly tactful when it suited her. Waleed’s presence livened her up. If it had been only her and Sammar, she would have been silent and withdrawn.

When they finished eating, Sammar carried the dishes to the kitchen and made tea. She put mint leaves in the pot, topped the sugar bowl with sugar. She put the candle on the tray to make her way back outside, walked from the kitchen to the hall to the sitting room, holding the tray with one hand and opening the door to the porch with another, closing it behind her so that stray cats would not creep in. On the porch there was the grey light of the moon on the pots of cactus plants and dark bougainvillea. She could blow out the candle now, walk down the steps of the porch to the voices of her aunt and Waleed.

The peace of sitting with them and not talking, not even listening while they talked. Waleed expansive now after the meal and with a glass of tea in his hand, making Mahasen smile. This good feeling was because of Ramadan, because of eating and drinking after fasting all day when the sun was too hot and it was thirst more than hunger, and not wanting to speak to anyone, economising words, saying what was only necessary, what was only enough to get by. A whole month free like that and looking up at the round moon, knowing that the month was half way through, two weeks and the focus would be gone. The closeness to the depth would be gone.

Tonight, like last night and every night until the end of Ramadan, she would wake up hours before dawn, pray once and again, read the Qur’an. This was the time of night when prayers were answered, this was the time of year…

‘Sammar, isn’t Nahla’s fiancé working for Abu Dhabi’s electricity company?’ asked her aunt.

‘Qatar, not Abu Dhabi. He’s in Doha now.’

‘So he managed to get a good job after all.’ There was admiration in Waleed’s voice, envy under control.

‘Yes, after fuss and quarrels and they had to postpone the wedding twice,’ said Mahasen. ‘That girl was supposed to get married months ago and now she’s still sitting.’

‘Working for Qatar’s national electricity company is a very good job,’ said Waleed. ‘How did he get it?’

‘Someone who knew someone,’ said Sammar.

‘Of course someone knew someone,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘but who?’

‘I don’t know. I could find out for you.’

‘I was just asking,’ he said dismissively and finished his glass of tea.

‘They’re not going to get married until December,’ said Sammar addressing her aunt. ‘Nahla told me yesterday. They have the visa to sort out and she has re-sits. She wants to graduate before she goes there.’

‘That’s better for her. Qatar is good, she can get a good job there.’ Mahasen said vehemently. She wanted everyone to get wonderful jobs, make good money, rise up in the world.

‘I have a friend in Qatar,’ said Sammar, ‘a Pakistani woman I knew in Aberdeen. Her husband works in oil and he got transferred there. She likes it very much.’ Yasmin was in Doha now, with her daughter and Nazim. Yasmin was not even in the same country as Rae anymore. Sammar could no longer write and ask her for news of him. When the option had been open to her, she hadn’t, but now it still counted as a loss and she thought, ‘I have no link with him now, in terms of people. Who do I know who knows him? Diane? Fareed? Neither of them can I ever have the courage to write to.’

But there were other links, a dream, an awareness that would suddenly come and stay with her. One day in the garden with the children, her feet bare and wearing another of Hanan’s unwanted dresses, she had stood admiring the mud of the flower beds, under the jasmine bushes, the way it was smooth and dimpled. She had pressed her toe into the mud, made a little depression, and then she had knelt down and touched the mud with her fingers. It was like dough or plasticine and yet her fingers stayed clean when she looked at them. Clean, heavy mud. He was like that, heavy inside, not like other people. It was there with him when he came into a room and when he paused in the middle of saying something, paused before he answered a question she had asked.

Another time, opening the fridge to get her aunt a glass of water. The sudden chill when she opened the fridge door on a day that was too hot; the blue cold, frost and it was Aberdeen where he was, his jacket and walking in grey against the direction of the wind. White seagulls and a pale sea, until her aunt behind her shouted, ‘What are you doing standing like an idiot with the door of the fridge wide open. Everything will melt.’

It was like that at first, the moment in the garden and the moment in front of the fridge, vivid, sudden. But the more she prayed for him, the more these moments came until they were there all the time, not only thoughts, not only memories but an awareness that stayed.

Waleed talked to her aunt and the moon was still unchallenged by the lights of the city below. Here was a gift for her, clearer than water, clearer than the sky…

Rae saying, ‘I dreamt of you, the same dream. I am climbing stairs, steep stone steps, stairways that are damp and narrow. At the top I open a door and you are there.’

‘Am I happy to see you?’

‘You are… very much. You give me a glass of milk to drink.’

‘Milk, how childish of me!’

‘But when I drink it something happens. It can only happen in a dream… Pearls come out of my mouth, they fall in my hand. I hold them out and show them to you.’

21

December. A cool wind blowing, carrying dust, and everyone’s skin was chapped. She thought, ‘I love this time of year,’ and looked out of the car window at the trees that lined Nile Avenue: thick trunks and behind them the gushing Blue Nile. She looked, she took off her sunglasses and looked until her heart hurt.

Nahla was driving. They had gone to the video shop and then Nahla had picked up her wedding cards from the printers. The cards were on Sammar’s lap, stiff white envelopes in packets.

‘Why are you quiet today?’ asked Nahla.

‘Just looking around. Do you think you will miss Khartoum when you go to Qatar?’ At the end of December Nahla was going to get married and go away, move to Doha where Yasmin was, with her daughter and Nazim. If she ever could afford it, Sammar would go and visit them both.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nahla. ‘Not at first, maybe later. Now we just want to get away, we’ve been delayed so much.’

‘Insha’ Allah everything will go alright this time.’

‘Sometimes I’m afraid,’ said Nahla, changing gears, ‘sometimes I think someone’s going to die either from my family or his. Some senile uncle or grandmother or aunt is going to drop dead any minute and ruin everything.’

Sammar laughed. ‘Just say insha’ Allah something like that won’t happen.’ There was a boat on the river, its sails beige and brown, there were farmers on the opposite bank, bent over with hoes. The sun hit the moving water and made its surface light, but underneath it was blue after blue.

Last December in another place, there was no sun. Christmas, and Rae was in Edinburgh with his ex-wife’s parents, presents wrapped up for Mhairi. Did he still do the same things? Drive around Scotland listening to Bob Marley, Ambush in the night, all guns aiming at me… Did he mark students’ essays, watch CNN and VH-1, read lots of books. Sometimes say, ‘I’m an old-fashioned socialist,’ sometimes say, ‘… behind the Western propaganda of Islamic fundamentalism’. A year in his world might be shorter than in hers, not so many changes. Here new laws were passed, prices went up, the old died easy and children grew and changed. Did he still use the same Ventolin inhaler? Did he teach his students that the difference between Western liberalism and Islam was that the centre of one was freedom and the other justice? She didn’t know what he was doing, this moment, this day but it didn’t matter, he was near like in the dream. A dream of night on the porch, no moonlight and she was a child playing, square tiles, hopscotch. Many people were on the porch, adults standing talking in the dark and he was one of them. She saw him and it did not surprise her that he was here in this continent, in this country, on her aunt’s porch. She was content to play, her hands on the wooden rails, skipping down the steps, the lines of the tiles. She lost sight of him and forgot him like children forget, her mind on the steps until he put his hand on her shoulder and when she looked up, he smiled and said, ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find you in the dark?’ She did not say anything, she became perfect and smooth like water from the garden hose.

What kept her going day after day: he would become a Muslim before he died. It was not too much to want, not too much to pray for. They would meet in Paradise and nothing would go wrong there, nothing at all.

Yesterday she and Mahasen had gone to visit Tarig’s grave. Driving out of the city to where there were no buildings blocking the wind. Travelling and finding flat ground, sand, knowing Tarig was there. Greeting him and all the others. Her aunt sat down on the ground, not moving, the Qur’an unopened on her lap. They found dirty things on the graves, things that the wind had carried through the barbed-wire fence. Orange peel, an empty cigarette carton, the remnant of a nest. A Miranda bottle top, indented and blurred. It grazed Sammar’s hand when she picked it up. She started to clear the ground, on her hands and knees reaching out, careful, she must not step over the people lying underneath. ‘We should get that keeper fired, he should be doing this,’ she said to her aunt but got no answer. She was afraid of finding worse than the rubbish she was now collecting: the signs of stray dogs. The keeper’s job was to keep stray dogs out, keep the cemetery clean, protect the graves from thieves. But he was not, thought Sammar, as a keeper of graves should be. He did not have clean white hair, a prayer mat, a melodious voice which recited the Qur’an. Instead he was young and gangly with broken teeth and a smell of hashish. Now as she gathered the rubbish, he stood leaning on the wall of his room, leering at her from far away. It made her angry and she went up to him and said, ‘If I find dog-shit, you will have to start looking for another job.’ He whined some excuse and skulked into the darkness of his room. She shouted after him, ‘I am not joking, you know.’ She felt safe with all the graves around her, all the truth. Cleaning up: a greasy newspaper page with the familiar face of a politician, a razor blade, some leaves. When she finished, she washed from the tap near the keeper’s room, made wudu again. She sat next to her aunt, put her arms around her, kissed her cheek. Then she took from her the Qur’an and started to read, word after word, verse after verse, page after page.

‘Come in for a while,’ she said, when Nahla stopped the car in front of the house.

‘No thanks, there’s no time.’

‘Come and show the cards to Aunt Mahasen.’

‘I’ll come in for a little while. But I might as well park the car at home.’

While Sammar waited in the street so that she and Nahla could go in together, she spoke to Rae. She told him about the poster she had seen in the video shop, an advertisement for an American film, the actors’ names written in Arabic and English. She told him how the film’s name was translated in Arabic. ‘Look Who’s Talking,’ she said, ‘became in Arabic, Me And Mama And Travolta’. He laughed and said, ‘That’s a much better name’. He laughed and she saw Hanan driving round the corner, Amir in the front seat, Dalia in the back. When they saw Sammar waiting at the door, they started to wave.

She pushed open the black metal door for them so that Hanan could drive into the shade of the car-port. The door was heavy and it dragged on the ground, making grooves.

Hanan parked the car, switched the engine off. Amir and Dalia jumped out and the sounds of greetings was mixed up with the sound of slamming doors. ‘There’s a letter for you,’ said Dalia and hope was a reflex, as silly as blinking.

Sammar reached for the envelope, the platinum face of the Queen, pearls around her neck. But she would know his handwriting. This was not his handwriting. She should not have hoped, this was not his handwriting.

Instead her name was written in Arabic, the envelope stamped in Stirling. Intrigue and the feel of paper tearing, the children’s voices, Nahla greeting Hanan.

The signature first. Fareed. Fareed Khalifa? Why would he write to her? The memory of meeting him in Aberdeen, Rae introducing them. Questions, he asked a lot of questions, he used to be a journalist and he was imprisoned by the Israelis. ‘They gave him a rough time,’ Rae had said, ‘they gave him a real rough time.’ Skim the lines of polite greetings, search and Rae’s name was there. At last after all the months of just wanting his name. Here it was, I am writing to you on behalf of my friend Rae Isles. Skim the lines down the page:… became a… about four months ago… at my house… how pleased I am that Allah had expanded his heart to this… Ramadan… your permission… if you accept…

Again, go over it again to catch every word, to really believe. The rush of this new knowledge, the feeling of being lifted up. She could even see herself, her head bent over the letter, her smile. Red flowers on her scarf falling on her shoulders. The navy cardigan, buttons undone, her folded sunglasses sticking out of the pocket. Her skirt touched the faded straps of her sandals, was creased at the back from sitting in the car. And the easy way she moved away from the children, away from Hanan and Nahla, away from the car-port to the garden. For she was being honoured now, she was being rewarded. All alone, a miracle for no one else to acknowledge but her. The sky had parted, a little crack, and something had pierced her life. Under the eucalyptus tree and the sound of the birds, kneel down… the clean Vicks smell of the leaves in the shade and on the grass.

22

Later that same day, she wondered where she could find privacy in the house, away from the clamouring children, the questioning women. They had not seen her look like that before: lit up, transformed. They were used to her being a ghost, walking about doing chores, her mind elsewhere, listless, not particularly driven. Now they asked her questions, but she would give nothing away, her dreamy smile, her secret… When to find privacy in this house… a time of day when she wouldn’t be needed, wouldn’t be missed. Where to go? Somewhere cool, dim and peaceful.

The television was her friend, the video of the talking baby came to her rescue. Everyone watched enthralled by the charm of Travolta, the beauty of the new mother, the wise words of the infant, translated in Arabic, white words across the bottom of the screen. Mahasen lay on the bed, propped up on one elbow, Hanan was on the opposite bed, a younger mirror image, her husband sat on the armchair with Hassan on his lap and the children were with their egg sandwiches scattered on the floor.

Sammar opened the door of the store room. The musty smell of a room not used, not aired, a smell of dust and rice. She switched the light on. A bulb dangled down from the ceiling, the dust that coated it gave the room a brownish, dull light. Among the large sacks of lentils and beans, among the huge cooking pots that were only needed in special occasions, was the suitcase where her winter clothes were folded up. Her duffle coat, her lined skirts, her gloves, all the clothes she had worn in Aberdeen, the clothes Rae had seen her in. There was dust on the suitcase, with her finger she could write her name through the dust in big loops. But she was here to write in response to Fareed’s letter. It was in her pocket now, she had carried it around all day. It was with her when Nahla showed the wedding cards to Mahasen, during lunch, while washing the dishes after lunch, struggling with Amir and his homework… It was her secret, she would put her hand in her pocket and feel it, she would take it out and read it at every chance. Every chance. Now it already looked worn out and crumpled: stained with kitchen water, egg from the children’s sandwiches, Amir’s fingerprints when he had tried to snatch it from her hands while she was helping him with his multiplication homework.

She sat down on the suitcase. Four months ago, that was what Fareed had written, Rae had become a Muslim, he had said the shahadah in Fareed’s house in Stirling. Why didn’t Rae tell her before, why wait four months? To be sure, to make sure that he wouldn’t go back on this. He was cautious like that. And now asking… It made her smile. She had an airmail letter pad with her, a ball-point pen, two envelopes. She was going to write two letters in two languages. They would say the same thing but not be a translation. She wrote to Fareed first: long and cordial paragraphs, greetings, hoping that his wife and children were well, in good health. When she finished, she folded up the papers, put them in an envelope, wrote out an address in Stirling.

She wrote to Rae. One transparent sheet of airmail paper, a few lines. On the envelope she wrote Aberdeen, Scotland.

Television music came into the room, the voices of Me And Mama And Travolta. She unzipped the suitcase and looked at her winter clothes. She unfolded wool and out came the smell of winter and European clouds. She put on her gloves and then took them off, saw her tights, for a year she hadn’t worn tights. Her henna-coloured duffle coat, its silky lining. She would wear it again when she went back to Aberdeen, the toggles instead of buttons… In one of the pockets, she found the bottle of perfume, oval shaped, amber coloured. She opened it and breathed in, forgot the dust and the smell of dried beans and rice. She ran her fingers over a scarf that was too warm for wearing in Khartoum, its pattern of brown leaves.

Tomorrow, early in the morning she would go to the post office. She would buy stamps. The stamps would be full of colours. A map of the Sudan or jungle animals: an elephant, a rhino, a hippopotamus. She would hold the letters in her hand and in the sunlight stand in front of the post box. Hesitate a little before dropping them in. Then live day after day, get involved in the preparations for Nahla’s wedding, and wait. Wait. She had written to Rae, Please come and see me. Please. Here is where I am…

23

Two weeks later when she dragged open the gate and saw him, they both laughed as if everything was funny. And she was not as shy as she thought she would be, not awkward. He looked older than she remembered and younger too. More white in his hair but looking young because he had travelled a long way and was not diminished or fatigued. He said, ‘I’ve spent all day searching for the house,’ and that was funny too. All day searching for the house, her house. All day looking for her and she was not hiding, not masking herself, she was wanting to be found. There were lots of questions for her to ask: what made him lose his way, where was he staying, but they all seemed not to matter, not to be urgent in any way. Just the present, the black metal gate under her hand, warm and streaked by sunlight, dragging it closed again. Their footsteps on the cement of the car-port, their clothes brushing the dust on Hanan’s car. They stepped over Amir’s bicycle, lying on the steps to the garden. She looked at him and the sun hurt her eyes because she had rushed at the sound of the bell, afraid everyone would wake up and she had forgotten her sunglasses inside.

This was not the usual time for the door bell to ring and bring in visitors. It was after lunch, when the shadow of everything was equal to its height, and she had left everyone asleep, even the children. ‘Sleep or else you won’t go to Nahla’s wedding tonight,’ she had threatened them and eventually they had fallen asleep.

She had to leave Rae and go indoors to fetch cushions for the garden chairs, a tablecloth. She had to move carefully so as not to wake anyone up. In the kitchen she hesitated, Pepsi or Miranda? Which would he like more, she should have asked, now she had to guess. Pepsi from the fridge. Ice cubes and she must not make a noise when twisting the ice tray over the sink. Standing in the kitchen with the tap running over the ice, thinking of the next step, a glass, a tray, carrying the ice outside… This was abundance after the meagre time, the scratchy, meager time.

In the garden it was easy to talk. Pour the Pepsi into the glass and watch it froth, tiny sprays over the table cloth, then how it effervesced. Talk of the wobbly table, of the cooperative across the road, of Diane’s now completed thesis.

Mhairi fell off her horse but she was alright, though she got a scare. He talked about his new students, where they came from, what they were working on. ‘I am writing a textbook,’ he said, ‘an introduction to the politics of North Africa. I’ve decided it’s time for me to write a textbook and not concentrate so much on analysing current affairs.’

He drank his Pepsi and the ice cubes started to melt, their edges smooth and light. ‘Is this what you do here,’ he said, ‘offer guests drinks as soon as they come in and not have anything yourself?’

She smiled and nodded, that was the custom, yes. ‘Which airplane did you come on?’

‘KLM. I changed planes in Amsterdam. Aberdeen, Amsterdam, then we landed in Cairo on the way, transit for about an hour. I got here at two in the morning.’ He smiled and looked at her, ‘You were asleep then.’

Two o’clock in the morning she was fast asleep, not hearing the plane that landed in the airport nearby. But later at dawn she had heard the azan and got up to pray. Another dawn, asking for forgiveness, saying there is no will or strength except from Allah, and not knowing, having no idea what the day ahead held out for her.

‘Was it alright at the airport?’ Sometimes foreigners were given a hard time, their baggage thoroughly and slowly searched, a lot of questions asked.

‘Fine, no problems. The conveyer belt wasn’t working so it took ages for the luggage to come out but it was okay at the end. It was the smoothest trip I have ever done… It must be because my intention is good.’

She smiled and they were quiet for a time. He held the glass in his right hand, as much ice now as Pepsi.

‘Why did you tell Fareed to write to me, why didn’t you write to me?’ She asked without complaint, without reproach. Fareed’s letter had been useful: formal, correct, what she needed. She had been able to show it to Waleed and Hanan and say to them, ‘You must speak to Mahasen, you must tell her because it would be easier for her if she hears from you.’

‘I wanted to do everything properly,’ Rae said. ‘I was afraid you were married. I would have deserved that…’

‘No. No, our next door neighbour is getting married.’ She still said silly things, unconnected things.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Nahla.’ It occurred to her that Nahla was a beautiful name. And it was beautiful that she lived next door and tonight was her wedding. The wide outdoor space of the Syrian club, noisy music and a light wind, everyone wearing cardigans over their best clothes. Rae could go too. She would introduce him to Waleed and everyone she knew.

‘And Nahla is your friend?’

‘Yes, though she is much younger than me. And she is going to Qatar where Yasmin is.’

‘Is Qatar a place you would like to visit?’

‘Someday yes.’

Beaming, that was how she was, all over him. She should reproach him for the past, discuss with him practical things. Where was her brain? Yellow grass and the trees untrimmed, a smell she knew, of jasmine and mud.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we should not prolong this torture.’

‘What torture?’

He laughed and wiped his face with his hand. Torture for her were the days when she heard a worldly, logical voice saying, someone like him will never become a Muslim. The voice measured the distance between them, it calculated the probability that he was with someone else, a woman with lighter eyes, a lighter heart…

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘if we get married this week, we could go away somewhere. There would be time because I don’t have to be back in Aberdeen until the middle of January. I was thinking of Aswan, have you been to Aswan?’

‘No.’ Her voice was a little subdued because she had remembered the bad voice.

‘I haven’t been there either,’ he said, watching her, the change of expression in her eyes. ‘The High Dam is near the town — Nasser’s big project. I’m told the south of Egypt is very much like here, in climate and terrain. It would be nice, what do you think?’

She smiled, ‘It would be nice.’

‘You could leave Amir with your aunt and then we can come back here and all go back together to Aberdeen.’

She nodded but it seemed to her complicated, going north and then coming back to Khartoum. ‘It would have been easier that day in Aberdeen, the day of the snow…,’ her voice trailed. It was the wrong thing to say. He would not want to talk about that day.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet, ‘In the Qur’an it says that pure women are for pure men… and I wasn’t clean enough for you then…’ He looked up towards the house and Sammar turned to look too. Dalia was walking down the steps of the porch, looking sleepy, her hair sticking out of her braids. She came and sat on the arm of Sammar’s chair and put her head on Sammar’s shoulder. She stared at Rae, too sleepy to be fully curious.

‘Are you still asleep?’ Sammar asked her, changing from explaining to Rae who Dalia was, into speaking Arabic. Dalia nodded and rubbed her nose.

‘Aren’t you going to shake hands?’

Dalia shook her head.

‘He knows Arabic,’ said Sammar. ‘You know Arabic, don’t you?’ she said to Rae.

‘A little, not very much,’ he said.

‘He can’t speak properly,’ Dalia whispered in Sammar’s ear and made her laugh.

‘He needs to practise more,’ she whispered back, ‘but you should be nice and say salamu alleikum.’

Dalia did, looking more awake, raising her hand a little.

‘Alleikum al-salaam,’ he replied. She smiled and sat up a little straighter. Her eyes caught sight of Amir’s bicycle, lying unwanted and available.

They watched her as she walked away from them, her housedress crumpled and too small, the zipper at the back a little undone. She rode the bicycle slowly, out of their view, round to the back of the house.

‘She will miss you,’ Rae said, something final in his voice. Clear to Sammar that she was really going to leave Khartoum and go back with him to Aberdeen. She was going to leave Dalia and not be close to her anymore, the day by day closeness, the eating, sleeping, closeness. She was going to take Amir away from his cousins, his grandmother, his house. She was going to take him to a place that was all grey, its noises muffled by clouds, a new school where they might not like him much, look at him in a surprised way. And she was going to leave this city, its dusty wind and smells.

‘If I was someone else, someone strong and independent I would tell you now, I don’t want to go back with you, I don’t want to leave my family, I love my country too much.’ Her voice was teasing and sad.

He did not look taken aback. ‘You’re not someone else,’ he said.

A fly dived silently over the tray and perched on the rim of the empty glass. Sammar leaned and waved it away.

‘It’s too late now,’ he said.

‘I know.’ She had been given the chance and she had not been able to substitute her country for him, anything for him.

‘Ours isn’t a religion of suffering,’ he said, ‘nor is it tied to a particular place.’ His words made her feel close to him, pulled in, closer than any time before because it was ‘ours’ now, not hers alone. And because he understood. Not a religion of pathos, not a religion of redemption through sacrifice.

He said, ‘I found out at the end, that it didn’t have anything to do with how much I’ve read or how many facts I’ve learned about Islam. Knowledge is necessary, that’s true. But faith, it comes direct from Allah.’

It was a miracle, she thought. Since getting Fareed’s letter she had been waking up in the middle of the night, smiling in the dark, stunned by what had happened, and finding herself unable to go back to sleep.

‘When you left,’ he said, ‘I thought if this isn’t enough incentive for me to convert, nothing is, and I felt sick, going around, here and there, no balance.’ Once, he said, he missed a flight to Paris. Another conference, another paper to present. He misread the gate number and he was late. He ran, out of breath, along corridors full of people coming back from holidays, cheerful suntans and children holding up big Mickey Mouse balloons. By the time he reached the correct gate, it was too late. He collapsed into a chair and took out his inhaler, to breathe, just to breathe and he watched his plane from the window, reversing and moving away.

‘It burned me up. All that running for nothing…’he laughed and put his face in his hands. When he looked up at her she was smiling at his description of the frantic corridors full of Mickey Mouse balloons.

Then the time he was ill, he said. Another asthma attack, gales in Aberdeen shaking the trees and him indoors unable to breathe. How long can a night be, how harsh without sleep? Sucking air that would not go in, not go inside. In this helpless state, in this humiliation, the need to pray. This was how it felt, neither lofty nor serene. Not a prayer for the good of humanity nor for success but just to breathe.

‘What I regret most,’ he said, ‘is that I used to write things like “Islam gives dignity to those who otherwise would not have dignity in their lives”, as if I didn’t need dignity myself.’

A fly hovered over the tray, buzzing. She waved it away.

He said, ‘I was a little taken aback. I didn’t think of myself as someone who would turn spiritual…’

‘I did. I used to feel that there was something inside you very heavy and still.’

‘The religious dimension that everyone has?’

‘Maybe.’ It had seemed to her as something asleep, fast asleep, not moving. Something she had wanted to come close to, stay near, breathing, until it woke.

He said, ‘At the end it was one step that I took, of wanting it for myself separate from the work, and then it all rushed to me. It felt like that.’

‘What does everyone in the department think about this,’ she asked. ‘Did you tell them?’

‘Yes… they think it’s mid-life crisis.’ He laughed a little and looked away at the cooperative across the road.

She frowned, worrying if in their eyes he had lost his credibility as a detached Middle-east observer. She told him that Yasmin once said, that if he converted it would be professional suicide.

‘I’ve already made a name for myself,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not worried.’

He was right, she shouldn’t worry, provision came from Allah, it would come from Allah, she shouldn’t worry.

She said, ‘I admire you so much…’ and looked down at the grass. When she looked up there was kindness in his eyes and his voice.

Dalia was circling the house with her bicycle, the clatter of wheels on the cement of the car-port. She looked at Sammar and Rae then she disappeared again behind the house.

‘There’s a rat in my hotel room,’ he said. This made her laugh in disbelief and horror and ask, because she had forgotten to ask, which hotel he was staying in?

He named one of the older, more faded hotels overlooking the Nile. Not the best of hotels but still, one that should not have rats running about. He had heard the rat at night, along the wall, near the cupboard.

‘That’s terrible,’ she said, apologetic. This was her country after all, he was her guest.

‘The shower doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘That is worse than the rat… I think.’

‘Did you complain?’

He nodded. ‘They promised to fix the shower. They gave me a pail and a pitcher in the meantime. But they didn’t seem worried about the rat.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. He had all her sympathy because he looked so resigned.

‘The view is great though,’ he said. ‘The room has a balcony and today at dawn the river… it was very picturesque.’

She imagined him standing on the balcony looking out at the Nile. The hotel was built by the British in colonial times. It once glittered and ruled. Now it was a crumbling sleepy place, tolerant of rats and with showers that didn’t work. But still the view was as before, something natural brimming over, the last stretch of the Blue Nile before it curved and met with the other river, changed colour and went north.

He talked about the view from the balcony, his first impressions of Khartoum. Last night: the dimly lit airport, the quietness. The taxi driver told him there was a curfew but taxis to and from the airport had passes. On the way to the hotel, they were stopped at a road block, an inspection point. The policeman wore a grey coat, had a gun slung over his shoulder. After an exchange of greeting, he took the pass from the driver, checked it by the headlights of the car. He did not ask Rae for any identification.

‘The streets are dark like you said they were,’ Rae said. ‘It comes as a surprise, this dependence on the moon and stars.’

He would not forget this city, he told her. He would remember it for life. There was something in its air, something bleak and delicate, heightened by the flat desert and the domineering sky. He asked her about Umdurman. Was it far from here?

She said, ‘Umdurman is more beautiful. Across the bridge, down the road from your hotel. Saints are buried in Umdurman.’

He said, ‘When I was young, my father had old maps. Ones on which Eritrea and Palestine existed. I liked looking at them. I used to see the name Umdurman, written near the blue line of the Nile. I would say Umdurman to myself, over and over again, liking the sound of it.’

They would go and visit Umdurman then, before they left. There were old houses to walk through, a camel market.

She said, ‘All the dust here… I’m worried that it’s bad for your chest.’

‘It’s not bothering me, my asthma is intrinsic. The dry weather is good for me. It’s very dry here I noticed, good for the bones.’

‘Old age?’ she smiled.

He laughed and said, ‘When I started praying my knees hurt, and I also thought “old age”, but they don’t hurt so much now…’

‘I missed all that, you learning to pray…’ The sounds of the garden, a car in the street far away.

‘It’s a lonely thing,’ he said, ‘you can’t avoid it.’

‘What?’

‘The spiritual path. Everyone is on his own in this.’

Dalia was trying to haul the bicycle up on to the porch. After some struggle she succeeded and they watched her cycle between the pots of cacti and bougainvillea, wheels smooth on the tiles of the porch.

~ ~ ~

Let’s play a game!’ I said. I wanted my eyes to shine and please him. ‘We’ll give each other thoughts,’ he said. ‘They would come out of us and then take shape and colour, become tangible gifts.’

‘Your turn first,’ he said. ‘What did you receive from me?’

I showed him three pieces of cloth. I unfolded silk the colour of deserts, mahogany wool, white cotton from a cloud. I said, ‘You gave me silk because of how I was created and you gave me wool to keep me warm.’

He said, ‘Wool because I want to protect you and cotton because you are clean.’

Then I looked at what he had received from me. The smoothest bowl, inside it a milky liquid, the scent of musk. ‘Is it perfume?’ I asked, as if I had given birth and now wanted to know if the child I carried for months was a boy or a girl.

‘No,’ he paused and spoke slowly, ‘it is something from you that will make me strong.’

When he named it he looked away as if he was shy. ‘Admiration,’ he said.