Gods and Soldiers (28 page)

Yassir asked a man sitting in front of his house, one knee against his chest, picking his toenails. Near him an elderly man was praying, using a newspaper as a mat. The man didn't seem to know but he gave Yassir several elaborate suggestions.

Yassir asked some people who were walking past but again they didn't know. This was taking a long time as everyone he asked seemed willing to engage him in conversation.

“It's your turn,” he said to Manaal when they saw a woman coming out of her house.

She went towards the woman and stood talking to her. Sunset was nearly over by then, the western sky, the houses, the dusty roads were all one colour, like the flare that burns off the rig, he thought. Manaal stood, a dark silhouette against red and brick. One hand reached out to hold her hair from blowing and her thin elbows made an angle with her head and neck from which the light came through. This is what I would paint, Yassir thought, if I knew how, I would paint Manaal like this, with her elbows sticking out against the setting sun.

When she came back she seemed pleased. “We're nearly there,” she said, “that woman knew them. First right, and it's the second house.”

As soon as they turned right, Manaal recognised the one-storey house with the blue gate. She got out before him and rang the bell.

 

Ronan K. was older than Yassir had imagined. He looked like a football coach, overweight yet light in his movements. The light from the lamp near the gate made him look slightly bald. He recognised Manaal, and as they stepped into a large bare courtyard while he closed the gate behind them, she launched into a long explanation of why they had come and how they had nearly got lost on the way.

The house inside had no tiles on the floors, its surface was of uneven textured stone, giving it the appearance that it was unfinished, still in the process of being built. Yet the furniture was arranged in an orderly way, and there were carpets on the floor. Birds rustled in a cage near the kitchen door. On one of the walls there was a painting of the back of a woman in a
tobe,
balancing a basket on her head.

“One of yours?” Yassir asked but Ronan said no, he did not like to hang his own paintings in the house.

“All of my work is on the roof,” he said and from the kitchen he got a tray with a plastic jug full of
kerkadeh
and ice and three glasses. Some of the ice splashed into the glasses as he began to pour, and a pool of redness gathered in the tray, sliding slowly around in large patterns.

“You have a room on the roof ?” Yassir asked.

“That's where I paint,” Ronan said. “I lock it though, we've had many
haramiah
in the area. Not that they would steal my paintings but it's better to be careful. I'm in there most nights though, the
kahrabah
permitting.”

Hearing the Arabic words for thieves and electricity made Yassir smile. He remembered Manaal copying the way Zahra's mother spoke. He wondered how well Ronan K. knew Arabic.

“My wife has the key. But she is right next door. The neighbour's daughter had a baby last week. There's a party of some kind there,” and he looked at Manaal as if for an explanation.

“A
simayah,
” she said.

“That's right,” said Ronan, “a
simayah.
Maybe you could go over and get the key from her? It's right next door.”

“Is it Amna and her people?” Manaal asked him. “I've seen them here before.”

“Yes, that's them.”

“Last time I was here, Amna walked in with chickens to put in your freezer. There wasn't enough room in theirs.”

“Chickens with their heads still on them and all the insides,” said Ronan. “Terrible ... This morning she brought over a leg of lamb,” and he gestured vaguely towards the kitchen.

“So who had the baby?” Manaal asked.

“Let's see if I can get this one right,” he said. “The sister of Amna's husband, who happens to be—just to get things complicated—married to the cousin of Amna's mother.”

They laughed because Ronan gave an exaggerated sigh as if he had done a lot of hard work.

“I thought you said it was the neighbours' daughter,” said Yassir.

“Well this Amna character,” he said and Manaal laughed and nodded at the word “character,” “she is living with her in-laws, so it is really the in-laws' house.”

Manaal got up to go and Ronan said, “I'll tell you what. Just throw the keys up to us on the roof. We'll wait for you in there. It will save time.”

The roof was dark and cool, its floor more uneven than that of the house had been. The ledge all around it was low, only knee-high. El-Ma'moura lay spread out before them, the half-built houses surrounded by scaffolding, the piles of sand and discarded bricks. Shadows of stray dogs made their way through the rubble. Domes of cardboard marked the places where the caretakers of the houses and their families lived. Their job was to guard the bags of cement, the toilets, the tiles that came for the new houses. Once the houses were built they would linger, drawing water from the pipes that splashed on the embryonic streets, until they were eventually sent away.

From the house next door came the sounds of children playing football, scuffling, names called out loud. A woman's voice shrieked from indoors. Yassir and Ronan sat on the ledge. He offered Yassir a cigarette and Yassir accepted though he hadn't smoked for several years. Ronan put his box of matches between them. It had a picture of a crocodile on it, mouth wide open, tail arched up in the air. Yassir had forgotten how good it felt to strike a match, flick grey ash away. It was one of the things he and Emma had done together—given up smoking.

“A long way from Aberdeen, or rather Aberdeen is a long way from here,” Ronan said.

“Have you been there before?”

“I know it well, my mother originally came from Elgin. They can be a bit parochial up there, don't you think?”

At the back of Yassir's mind questions formed themselves, rose out of a sense of habit, but dropped languidly as if there was no fuel to vocalise them. What was this man doing here, in a place where even the nights were hot and alcohol was forbidden? Where there was little comfort and little material gain? The painter sat on his roof and like the raised spots on the girl's face did not arouse in Yassir derision, only passive wonder.

“If you look this way,” Ronan said, “you can see the airport where the red and blue lights are. Sometimes I see the aeroplanes circling and landing. They pass right over me when they take off. I see the fat bellies of planes full of people going away.

“Last August we had so much rain. This whole area was flooded—we couldn't drive to the main road. The Nile rose and I could see it with my telescope—even though it is far from here.”

“How long have you been here?” Yassir asked.

“Fifteen years.”

“That's a long time.”

Giant wisps of white brushed the sky as if the smoke from their cigarettes had risen high, expanded and stood still. Stars were pushing their way into view, gathering around them the darkest dregs of night. On the roof, speaking Emma's language for the first time in two weeks, Yassir missed her, not with the light eagerness he had known on the rigs but with something else, something plain and unwanted: the grim awareness of distance. He knew why he had wanted her to come with him, not to “see,” but so that Africa would move her, startle her, touch her in some irreversible way.

 

Manaal threw up the keys, Ronan opened the locked room and put the light on. It was a single bulb which dangled from the ceiling, speckled with the still bodies of black insects. The room smelt of paint, a large fan stood in the corner. Conscious of his ignorance, Yassir was silent as Ronan, cigarette drooping from his mouth, showed him one painting after the other. “I like them,” he said and it was true. They were clear and uncluttered, the colours light, giving an impression of sunlight. Most were of village scenes, mud houses, one of children playing with a goat, one of a tree that had fallen into the river.

“Paper is my biggest problem,” said Ronan. “The brushes and paints last for quite some time. But if I know someone who is going abroad I always ask them for paper.”

“Is it special paper that you need?”

“Yes, thicker for water colours.”

“I like the one of the donkey in front of the mud house,” said Yassir.

“The Hilton don't seem to want mud houses.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“No, I just got this feeling.”

“That means I could get them at a discount?”

“Maybe . . . How many were you thinking of taking?”

Yassir chose three, one of them the children with the goat because he thought Samia might like that. He paid after some haggling. Downstairs the birds were asleep in their cage, there was no longer any ice in the jug of
kerkadeh.
Manaal was waiting for him by the gate. She had a handful of dates from next door which she offered to Ronan and Yassir. The dates were dry and cracked uncomfortably under Yassir's teeth before softening into sweetness. It was now time to leave. He shook hands with Ronan; the visit was a success; he had achieved what he came for.

Manaal slept in the car on the way home. Yassir drove through streets busier than the ones he had found in the afternoon. This was his last day in Khartoum. Tomorrow night a plane would take him to Paris, another plane to Glasgow, then the train to Aberdeen. Perhaps Ronan K. would be on his roof tomorrow night, watching Air France rise up over the new houses of El-Ma'moura.

The city was acknowledging his departure, recognising his need for a farewell. Headlamps of cars jerked in the badly lit streets, thin people in white floated like clouds. Voices, rumbling lorries, trucks leaning to one side snorting fumes. On a junction with a busier road, a small bus went past carrying a wedding party. It was lit inside, an orange light that caught the singing faces, the clapping hands. Ululations, the sound of a drum, lines from a song. Yassir drove on and gathered around him what he would take back with him, the things he could not deliver. Not the beads, not the paintings, but other things. Things devoid of the sense of their own worth. Manaal's silhouette against the rig's flare, against a sky dyed with
kerkadeh.
The scent of soap and shampoo in his car, a man picking his toenails, a page from a newspaper spread out as a mat. A voice that said, I see the planes circling at night, I see their lights . . . all the people going away. Manaal saying, you could have made it easier for her, you could have been more kind.

from
DISCOVERING HOME

 

 

 

I AM VISITING home, from South Africa. I take the dawn Nissan matatu from Nairobi to Nakuru, a two hour drive. It is 1995 and it has been three years since I saw my parents, my brother Jim, and my sister Chiqy. I have been working as a journalist in South Africa for the last three years.

The Kikuyu-grass by the side of the road is crying silver tears the colour of remembered light; Nairobi is a smoggy haze in the distance. Soon, the innocence that dresses itself in mist will be shoved aside by a confident sun, and the chase for money will reach its crescendo.

A man wearing a Yale University sweatshirt and tattered trousers staggers behind his enormous mkokoteni, stacked high with bags of potatoes moving so slowly it seems he will never get to his destination. He is transporting. No vehicle gives him room to move. The barrow is so full that it seems that some bags will fall off onto the road. Already, he is sweating. He smiles and waves at a friend on the side of the road, they chat briefly, laughing as if they had no care in the world. Then the mkokoteni man proceeds to move the impossible.