The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel (32 page)
The boy was coming back from the hands of the enemy. Jamaleldin had been watched over all along, he had been protected all along. Shamil begged forgiveness for every flicker of doubt, for every moment of impatience, for every flirtation with despair. He cried until his beard became wet.
When he heard the men’s cheers, he rose and joined the naibs who had gathered in a wide circle. Shamil sat and waited for his son. At last, there he was, haloed, vulnerable, one of the most beautiful sights Shamil had ever seen. He must not rise and rush towards him. The son should come to the father. Jamaleldin drew near. Shamil saw his mother Fatima in him, saw his resemblance to his brothers. Jamaleldin’s face had matured but not changed. He stepped onto the carpet. He knelt and kissed his father’s hand. Jamaleldin must greet the others first, all the naibs and elders, Sheikh Jamal el-Din too, he must show his appreciation for the honour they were bestowing upon him by leaving their homes and coming here to welcome him.
At last Shamil took his son in his arms. To have his fill of holding him, to have his fill of looking at him. This was more than an earthly delight, this was a whiff of Paradise. Alhamdulilah, alhamdulilah. I thank Allah Almighty for protecting my son.
Grusha and Yasha were waiting for me at the airport. I saw them as soon as I rolled my suitcase outside the arrivals hall. Among the crowd they were the only white middle-aged woman and light-skinned son. Besides, they were watching me, searching my face, waiting for the click of recognition, ready to smile. Earlier, when the plane had started its descent, I had been able to make out in the fading light the Nile looping through the desert. By the time we got off the plane, though, it was pitch-dark and I was struck by the inadequacy of the lighting. Even inside the terminal, I was reminded of the flattering candlelight found in romantic restaurants. The exterior of the airport was also dimly lit. Grusha and Yasha did not look at all like I remembered them, so much so that I hesitated in greeting them. The Aunty Grusha in my head dressed like Thatcher. The one in front of me now looked like Hilary Clinton. I thought trousers were outlawed in Sudan? And Yasha, if this was Yasha and he must be, was trapped within layers and mounds of fat. They covered him like a suit of armour. My first boyfriend, nimble and lanky, had become obese.
He took my suitcase and Grusha took my arm. We made our way to their car, a four-wheel-drive that was surprisingly parked only a few steps away, right outside the arrivals gate. I watched Yasha squeeze into the front seat. Beads of sweat on his forehead, his belly pushed against the steering wheel. I looked away. Grusha had aged of course, a slackness in her chin and the way she heaved herself into the car next to Yasha. From the back seat I asked, ‘How is Papa?’
They both had their backs turned; I could not see the expression on their faces. Yasha started the engine. ‘Not good,’ Grusha said at last. I did not want to know more. Not yet. It would come and already the effect was sinking in. I looked out of the window. More traffic than I remembered, a whole row of fast-food chains. Novel to be in a city that didn’t have a Starbucks.
Grusha’s house was how I remembered it to be. It was neat because Aunty Grusha always kept a mercilessly clean house. We sat in the living room. She said that my father had died the previous night. Mid-morning today he was buried.
I didn’t recognise this feeling of disappointment. The sheepishness of arriving too late. ‘I needn’t have come then.’
Yasha looked down at his hands. His bulk spread over the sofa, immense girth, each thigh as wide as a human being. He would not be able to travel in Economy. I remembered him in swimming trunks, the ripped muscles of his stomach, his thin neck. Now even his face was flattened, his features as if pushed through a slab of dough. It was sadly fascinating. That defeat could manifest itself in such a way brought tears to my eyes.
Grusha put her arm around me. ‘At first we didn’t know what to do – to catch you before you set out or to tell you in the middle of your travels. Then we decided it would be better if you heard the news from us in person rather than on the telephone.’
Yasha started to speak about my father’s last hours but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. I stared at his mouth, the route to his fatness; I heard his voice and it was not the voice of a
young man but someone who was confident, experienced, almost jaded. Perhaps I would only rarely see him during my visit. He was a busy man and probably did not spend a lot of time with his mother even though they lived in the same house.
‘Your father was proud of you,’ Grusha said. ‘When you got your PhD, we never heard the end of it.’
It was hard to believe this but she would not lie. We sat in silence. I cried quietly, almost soundlessly. I had wanted to see him again. It was true. I had wanted to argue with him and listen to him rant. He had made me angry on the telephone but when the anger died I was left with the thrill of his honesty. ‘I just could not stand the sight of you.’ That was exactly what I remembered during the divorce, his hurt that made him repulsive and also frightening, his eyes that looked straight through me as if I didn’t exist, all the days and weeks when he didn’t speak to me, when he couldn’t speak to me, not even hello or good morning or do this or do that. My mother had betrayed him and I was her daughter and he had not been able to rise above that.
I started to feel hot. I peeled off my cardigan, pulled away the scarf looped around my neck. My newly bought dowdy skirt reached my ankles. It irritated me. If Grusha was wearing trousers, then why couldn’t I too, and why had that journalist, last year, been fined for wearing them? Or was Grusha exempt because she was Russian? This was one of the irksome things about being an outsider – one never knew the extent to which the rules could be bent. I wanted to initiate this conversation but it was not the right time.
Yasha said, ‘Tomorrow I could take you to the cemetery … if you like.’ My expression made him falter. To see that freshly dug grave, the still-moist earth piled over it. The idea did not appeal to me at all.
‘Tomorrow we will go to your father’s house so that you can pay your condolences,’ Grusha said firmly. ‘You must meet your brother. He is twelve, I think. Or eleven.’
I had a half-brother who I never thought about, didn’t know what he looked like. ‘What is his name?’
‘Mekki.’
‘Mekki. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to a child.’
Neither Grusha nor Yasha responded and I suddenly felt self-conscious. Maybe these were the sort of comments that reminded Yasha of his late daughter. Afterwards, I glanced around for a photo of her, on top of the piano, on the walls, but there were none. I was conscious of the house around me and how familiar it was. Little had been done to make it look modern but as Grusha explained, there was an added separate flat for Yasha upstairs. ‘It has its own entrance,’ she said. He must have moved in there after he lost his wife and daughter.
When I woke up the following morning, the house was empty. Grusha and Yasha had already gone to work. I set about connecting myself to the internet. Yasha’s upstairs flat, I had been told, had the stronger connection, but it did not feel right to try to gain access to it while he was out. After a few attempts, I found that the speed was not bad and after I checked my emails, I started to write to Malak asking how things were, telling her my news, but I lost the connection before I clicked Send. I waited, hoping it would come back but it didn’t. After a while I gave up and went in search of breakfast.
In the kitchen a maid was washing the dishes. I chatted to her for a while though my mind was on Malak and Oz. The maid was Ethiopian and had been working here for five years. ‘Shall I make you breakfast?’ she asked and looked surprised when I said that I would get it myself.
I sat on the veranda with my mug of tea. After the bitterest Scottish winter, the heat and the light felt defiantly foreign, excessive. The small garden was full of flowers and in it stood a large guava tree. I could hear beyond its walls, the sounds of people
walking past, the rumble of traffic. All this had existed while I was away. Khartoum as a city, its people, those who had never known me and those who had forgotten me. My mother and I had simply dropped off the radar. After the scandal we had been talked about less and less until, with time, our absence came to be considered the most natural of outcomes. Childhood psychologists say that the first five years are the most formative. I had spent them all here. My mother and father young and in love, easy-going, hopeful. Our day-to-day life an extension of their Cold War romance, as promising as the prospects of an African engineer with a PhD from a Russian university. My father taking me to the river, getting on a boat, afterwards buying peanuts and candy floss; my mother visiting Grusha, the two of them complaining, in Russian, about the weather. My father, during a power cut, peeing in the garden instead of making his way indoors in the dark. My mother lifting her hair to rub an ice cube on the back of her neck. I would always carry this. All the other layers on top could not obliterate this core.
There was a heaviness in my chest when I thought of them. They hadn’t been good parents and I hadn’t been a good daughter to them. Still, regret was neither attractive nor dignified. My father had sounded pathetic on the phone, wild even. ‘I shouldn’t have let another man support my own flesh and blood,’ he had also said. ‘I made a mistake.’ And what happened when mistakes couldn’t be rectified? Where did one go? To what? To whom? From outside came the sound of a car screeching to a halt, horns and a few shouts. My skin felt more sensitive than usual, my eyes prone to tears; all was vivid and louder. I decided to go out for a walk.
The pavements were narrow and broken and sometimes there was no pavement at all. Toyota pickups zoomed past me. Motorcycles, vans and more four-wheel-drives. Tea ladies sitting in a row. A man stared at me, the whites of his eyes almost yellow. He was squatting in front of a mechanic’s yard doing nothing. Rubbish piled on the side of a street; broken chairs stacked on top of each other. Too much struck me as incongruous. A donkey stood
in the middle of a dusty street corner with no purpose or owner in sight – I stopped and, like a tourist, took a picture of it with my phone. But I was not wandering aimlessly; I wanted to find Tony’s old house. I wanted to see the metal railing with the cut-out letters of the alphabet. If it was still there, if the garden wall hadn’t been changed, then I wanted to look at it again. It would be a long walk by my reckoning, but I had nothing else to do and would rather not get on the wrong transport.
The city was larger than I remembered it to be. It stretched out, amorphous and repetitive with the supreme heat of the sun hanging down like a low ceiling. I started to sweat and lost focus. My thighs rubbed against each other; gritty sand entered my sandals and chaffed against my skin. But I did not want to give up and return. I needed to see the alphabet railing, that façade that entered my childhood and changed me. Crossing one street after the other, I was unfit and my memory was playing tricks on me. I should be there by now.
Suddenly I found myself in front of the Russian Embassy. Its flat exterior, large, solid and unwelcoming. It was exactly as it had been when I was young except for the change in the name board. It was as if time hadn’t passed and I was back holding my mother’s hand; she had come to renew our passports. The Russian official looked down at me, not with the open curiosity I usually triggered in Georgia but with a knowing look, a thin sneer, veiled disgust. Then my mother’s sudden impatience, the pressure of her hand on my arm yanking me outside. She carried me all the way to the car even though I was big enough to walk; she kissed me and hugged me and I wasn’t sure what it was that made her feel so sorry for me, but I was happy to be the centre of her attention.
I stopped to ask directions. My rudimentary Arabic made the girl snigger; I tried English and she shrugged. She had no idea what I was talking about. I was the only woman in the street with my head uncovered. An army truck lumbered past full of uniformed soldiers. I turned the corner and there was a pickup truck with a gun aiming
at the traffic. It was as if another civil war was about to erupt. My T-shirt was soaked with sweat, my head pounded from the sun, my eyes watered. I acknowledged that I was lost and the most dignified thing to do was to retrace my steps, have a shower and wait for my hosts. I was sure that my feet were covered in blisters.
Late afternoon, before sunset, Grusha and I walked into my father’s house. When I had lived here, there was nothing around it but dust and a few scattered villas. Now the whole area was built up, the gardens mature, the newish streets already eaten away by potholes. In my memory the work on the house was still incomplete, it was without adequate flooring, without paint on the walls. Now it was completely unrecognisable. From the outside it looked brand new, ostentatious even. Floor-to-ceiling windows tinted blue, a modern façade and a tiled, spacious porch.
In the shade, a young boy was lounging in a large garden chair, an electronic tablet in his hand. To my surprise, he stood up when he saw us and held out his hand. True, he did all this with reluctance and apathy but still it was an impressive show of politeness. I liked him immediately. ‘This is Mekki,’ Grusha said and the pleasure I felt was thick and visceral. I looked at his forehead that was like mine, his eyes that were not, his skin that was darker. But I knew, instinctively, before he even spoke that his mind was like my mind and that we were both, mentally, introspectively, like our father.
‘I am your sister, Natasha,’ I said, in English because if this was one of the happiest sentences I ever said in my life, I wanted to say it in a language I was comfortable in.
His eyes widened and he was no longer bored, no longer wanting to get back to his game. He said, ‘My sister Natasha.’ His accent was heavy and his smile was one to treasure. This was love at first sight and I wanted to hug him.
