The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel (36 page)
1. K
HARTOUM
, J
ANUARY
–F
EBRUARY
2011
I stayed in Khartoum much longer than planned. Throughout the New Year and the run-up to the referendum, which resulted in South Sudan gaining its independence. Safia had hired a lawyer and taken me to court to prove that I was no longer a Muslim and as such deserved to be cut off from my father’s inheritance. My first instinct on hearing this was to brush it off and assume that I would be well out of the country before proceedings started. It did not strike me as important enough to postpone my return. When I casually mentioned it to Yasha, though, his reaction made me reconsider.
‘Why are you laughing?’ he said. ‘This is serious.’
We were in his flat. I was spending more and more time there so that I could access the internet. Evening after evening we sat opposite one another; I with my laptop and he spread out on a recliner, with his. Sometimes we worked and sometimes we watched films or I wrote emails to Malak. His flat had modern furniture compared to his mother’s downstairs. It was more comfortable too. He had no qualms about using the air-conditioner even when opening the window and putting on the ceiling fan would have been tolerable,
if a little balmy. Soon I discovered that after eating the healthy dinner Grusha cooked, he would order takeaways and keep eating late into the night. He drank Pepsi instead of water. No wonder.
‘I am laughing,’ I said. ‘Because Safia’s charge sounds deliciously medieval.’
‘You have to fight this, Natasha.’ He was wearing a white shirt. It flattered him as did the gritty, end-of-the-day look.
I shook my head.
He picked up his phone. ‘Do you want rice pudding or crème caramel?’
This was the start of the post-dinner bingeing that I had recently been pulled into. He would order more food – kebab, pizza or shawerma – but I stuck primly to dessert. Grusha’s cooking was delicious and healthy. The kind of soups I missed: fresh vegetables and tender chicken or lamb. The ingredients were less packaged here, not beaten into submission by supermarket requirements. Often the vegetables were misshapen, twinned and oddly stuck together but their scent was pronounced, their taste more distinct. There was no reason to keep on eating after such a dinner. But this had become Yasha’s habit.
‘Crème caramel,’ I said.
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’ I had to resist the abandonment he was proposing. He put through the order. A large pizza that he would eat all by himself, two kebab sandwiches, pastry for dessert. Sometimes the shops would not deliver and we would have to go there ourselves and pick the food up. I liked these late-night drives, kept secret from Grusha, who would definitely disapprove. Yasha had taken me into his confidence, shared with me his nocturnal guzzling. I never had the heart to lecture him on watching his weight, let alone reducing it. I did worry that he was jeopardising his health but I did not want to embarrass him.
We would drive through poorly lit streets and past the airport. Once we saw a car explode, just like that, orange flames rising up.
An excited group gathered. For a long time afterwards, the loud pop of the tyres numbed my ears.
‘Safia can’t go around making such accusations. It’s immoral.’ One of the buttons of his shirt had come undone. ‘And it’s obvious that her motive is greed.’
‘I don’t want anything.’ It was too much drama to be pulled into. But my father’s copy of
Hadji Murad
– I would like to have that. Surely it meant nothing to Safia; I doubted she could read Russian. ‘My brother deserves it all.’ I had been regularly meeting Mekki. Every time felt special, almost too good to be true.
‘I am opposed to this apostasy law but if it won’t be amended, then the message needs to go out loud and clear that it is virtually impossible to enforce. Safia’s position is weak. You will win and afterwards we can turn around and sue her for slander.’
I noted the ‘we’ in his sentence. It was because he was a lawyer. He wanted to help me in his professional capacity.
Instinctively I switched from Russian to English. ‘So let me get this straight. I am to go to court and prove that I am a Muslim? I haven’t got a leg to stand on. Nothing. I am not even sure if I am. What is this, the inquisition?’
He had been shaking his head as I was talking. Now he said, also in English, ‘That’s exactly it. You shouldn’t have to prove that you’re a Muslim – you are one by birth, by default. You have a right, a human right, to be a bad Muslim, a lapsed Muslim, a secular Muslim, whatever.
She
though, doesn’t have any right to excommunicate you, especially when she has something to gain out of it. Believe me, we can get this thrown out of court in a matter of minutes.’ He smiled as if this was a case he wanted to sink his teeth into.
‘Yasha, this is going to mess up my plans.’
He waved his hand in dismissal and changed back into Russian. ‘One week. Trust me. Just delay your return by a week.’ He paused and looked at me as if he was noticing something about me for the first time. ‘You’re the only one, apart from my mother, who still calls me Yasha.’
‘It’s because, Yassir,’ I emphasised his real name, ‘I’ve been away for twenty years. I’m stuck in a time warp.’
‘Well get you out of it.’
I was beginning to like his use of ‘we’. I guessed that he had carried it over from Arabic but still there was a grandness about it and a welcome.
The case ended up taking a lot longer than a week. To start with I had to prove that I was my father’s daughter. I had to prove that Natasha Wilson was Natasha Hussein. This required that I obtain my adoption papers from the UK, get them authenticated by the Foreign Office and the Sudanese Embassy in London. To my relief and surprise, Tony, all the way from Aberdeen, was helpful throughout this process. He ‘rose to the occasion’ as Grusha said and facilitated most of this paperwork.
Week in, week out I waited in Khartoum. Borrowing Grusha’s or Yasha’s car I would pick up Mekki from school or near his house. He snuck out to meet me behind his mother’s back. Lucky for me, he was at the age when he was allowed greater freedom and felt the need to exercise it. Having his own mobile phone also made the logistics much easier. ‘Where would you like to go today?’ I would ask when he climbed in next to me, his expression deliberately casual, though once or twice he did look over his shoulder to see if anyone was looking.
He would say, ‘Take me to Ozone,’ or Solitaire, or Tangerine, or Time Out. These were neither amusement arcades nor cinemas nor playgrounds. Instead they were stylish coffee shops and restaurants where we would sit in pleasant, often outdoor surroundings and afterwards I would pay a hefty bill. An eye-opener for me that nowadays a twelve-year-old’s treat was a latte. ‘Are you allowed coffee?’ I once asked but he said, ‘I’m a man,’ and so I shut up. Most of the time my brother and I spent together was in silence. He studiously dug into his treats and sat back in his chair quite
pleased with himself. I, too, once I got over my British need for small talk, relaxed and enjoyed being where I was, looking at him, listening to snatches of the conversations around me. His similarity to me continued to be a novelty; his resemblance to my father would startle me every now and again.
I showed him a photo of my classic Skoda. ‘It’s a convertible,’ I explained. I pointed out the details I particularly liked, the dashboard, the gear stick mounted on the steering column, ‘Felicia’ written in lower-case cursive. I wanted him to learn.
He asked me about McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins and Dunkin Donuts. He had heard about them from his friends who travelled to Dubai or Cairo or KL. Sudan was under US sanctions and Mekki had never travelled abroad. ‘When you come and visit me, I’ll take you to all of these places,’ I promised and thought that my colleagues at the university would be amused at how American fast food could be a reason to visit Scotland.
Sometimes I irked him by being predictably adult. ‘Stop kicking the table.’ ‘No you can’t have another ice-cream.’ ‘Have you done your homework?’ Sometimes he unnerved me with his blunt questions. ‘How come you’re not married?’ ‘When are you leaving?’ or ‘Why does my mother hate you?’ These questions were tempered by his own frankness and gratuitous, though rare, confessions. A story of Safia’s quarrel with the gardener, how he once got caught cheating in the Arabic exam, how he lent money to his best friend, never got it back and they were now no longer friends. I liked it best when he spoke about our father. It brought about a slight fizz of envy for what seemed to have been their regular uncomplicated life.
Once, though, he spoke of him in reference to myself and the past. ‘He was angry for not keeping you in Khartoum.’ The structure of the sentence sounded as if he was repeating something his mother had said.
‘I was the one who wanted to leave. He shouldn’t have blamed himself.’ I would have said this to him in hospital if I had got here in time. Perhaps it would have made him feel better. He should
not have felt guilty on my behalf. ‘I was sure I wanted to be with my mother. It would have been almost impossible for him to make me stay.’
‘Why?’ Mekki slurped the last of a chocolate milkshake.
‘Why what?’ I was thawed because almost everyone around me looked like me. I blended and the feeling was like warm, used bedsheets, lulling, almost boring.
‘Why didn’t you want to stay?’
‘I was afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
I breathed in. ‘Of never seeing my mother again.’ I was not sure if this was completely true, if this was the whole story. I remember her bribing me with the promise of a better school in Britain, brighter toys, bookshops. Sharpened pencils, a calculator, a microscope all to myself. I listened to her and believed her because of the alphabet letters on the wall of Tony’s house.
A movement caught Mekki’s eye and he turned around. Someone had tossed a heavy bag on a chair and it overturned. I was getting upset by his questions; a pressure was building in my chest. For the first time ever, I felt relieved that it was time to pay the bill and take him home. Then in the car, just as I was about to park, he said, ‘Teach me Russian. Starting from next time.’ What I had said earlier must have made an impression on him – the fact that my father and I always spoke together in Russian.
Yasha stayed away from the cafés and restaurants. His modus operandi was the takeaway, conforming to the Arab cliché that the obese were embarrassed to eat in public. I did not challenge him over this. Besides, my outings with Mekki sufficed. During the day when Grusha and Yasha were at work and I did not have access to a car, I worked on my papers. A number of times, I went by public transport to all the tourist locations – the museum, the camel
market, the Mahdi’s tomb. These trips left me hot and strangely disappointed. Instead of enjoying what I judged to be well-kept secrets, jewels that the world had overlooked, I felt it unfair that the country remained behind an iron curtain, excluded from the interest of the global traveller.
‘Our government has a bad reputation,’ Yasha said. ‘All the world’s goodwill has now gone to the new South Sudan.’ He was working hard to protect the interests of the Southern Sudanese who had been living in the North all their lives. Overnight, they had been stripped of their Sudanese nationality and sent packing to the South. Those who could not afford the journey were stranded in limbo.
I liked listening to him rant about his work. This usually started as soon as he arrived home. I would be helping Grusha in the kitchen and he would walk in and stand near the fridge, his bulk filling up most of the space. It was a good thing that the maid left early, otherwise the four of us crowding the kitchen would have been impossible. Yasha would lean on the fridge, which made Grusha jittery as a kitchen chair had recently come crashing down under his weight and the fridge was more precious. He would start narrating his stories of the day – a new client he was defending, a case that got thrown out of court, a petition he was preparing. After dinner Grusha would go out to the veranda to have a cigarette while the two of us lingered at the table. Yasha would be saying something like, ‘It’s the principle that is at stake here,’ while I could see her chunky bare feet propped up on the patio’s low table, the glow of the cigarette in the dark. She reminded me of my mother.
He was positive about my appearance in court the next week, assuring me I had nothing to worry about. He sat with one hand over the chair next to him. The other one, which he had been eating with, hovered over the table unwashed. ‘Have you ever thought of moving back? Giving it a chance here?’
‘No I haven’t,’ I said. The stage was set for a romance. Every romantic attachment I had ever had ended, like my parents’ marriage, with rancour and bitterness. Only Yasha remained a friend.
After almost a month of trying, I finally heard from Malak. It turned out that she was not much of a writer; her emails, few and far between, were a couple of dashed lines or links (where I was merely copied among various recipients) to such things as headshot photographers she was recommending or obituaries of actors who had recently passed away. This time was a response to me telling her about Safia’s accusation.
Yes you are a Muslim – fight for it.
Don’t worry about Oz.
A day later I heard from him. He had changed his user name. Instead of SwordOfShamil, it was now Osama.Raja.
Hi Natasha,
I’m sorry I behaved poorly that day you came over. I wasn’t up to talking much and to tell you the truth, it was because what happened psyched me out. The cell felt as small as a cupboard and for the first two days there was always someone watching me and writing down what I did. Not that I could do much. I was afraid all the time. Even to stand up and pray, let alone ask which direction was the south-east. I couldn’t sleep and then after a few days of this, I started dreaming even though I wasn’t asleep. My mind played tricks on me. It was weird and disorienting. Then they started asking me questions and as I kept answering I felt that I was lying, even though I wasn’t. I kept thinking I must give them the right answer not the wrong answers when the simple truth was that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Now Malak keeps saying that ‘anything’ means anything suspicious, whatever got me into this trouble in the first place. She’s mad at me.
