Leila Aboulela - The Translator

In the afternoon she went to pray in the small university mosque, a room given over to the Muslim students. It was in another building, older and more beautiful than the modern building where her own department was. She found the room dark and empty. She switched on the lights, took off her shoes and felt eerily alone in the spacious room with its high ceiling. When it was crowded during term time, everyone just prayed on the carpet, but now she took one of the mats that were folded on a shelf and spread it out. It was blue, plusher than the one she had at home and with a picture of the Ka’ba under a navy sky. There was more reward praying in a group than praying alone. When she prayed with others, she found it easier to concentrate, her heart held steady by those who had faith like her. Now she stood alone under the high ceiling of the ancient college, began to say silently, All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful … and the certainty of the words brought unexpected tears, something deeper than happiness, all the splinters inside her coming together.

When she finished praying, she looked at the notices on the notice board: the prayer timetable, the dates of meetings of the inter-faith group, a talk on Jerusalem with a speaker coming up from St Andrews.

She walked back to her room through the wet gardens of the campus. Being outdoors in the fresh air was a break in the day, it was colder than it had been in the morning. On days when Diane was not in, Sammar prayed in the room, locking the door from inside. She had an old shawl which she kept in the drawer of her desk and used as a prayer mat. It had seemed strange for her when she first came to live here, all that privacy that surrounded praying. She was used to seeing people pray on pavements and on grass. She was used to praying in the middle of parties, in places where others chatted, slept or read. But she was aware now, after having lived in this city for many years she could understand, how surprised people would be were they to turn the corner of a building and find someone with their forehead, nose and palms touching the ground. She wondered how Rae would feel if he ever saw her praying. Would he feel alienated from her, the difference between them accentuated, underlined, or would it seem to him something that was within reach, something that he himself would want to do?

She switched the computer off and the room lost the steady humming sound that had filled it all day. Diane was at the library and the room without the computer was silent. Sammar was ready to go home and to pass by Rae’s office on the way but she continued sitting. Perhaps he would be different than he had been on the telephone, cooler, more formal, distracted by other things. Maybe the way he talked to her on the telephone was to do with the holidays. These dark mid-winter holidays when everything was closed, and the days were the shortest in the whole year. Days that fell away from normality, gave way to excess.

Diane pushed open the door and came in carrying two bars of Yorkie and a packet of crisps.

‘I just met Yasmin at the ref,’ she dropped her snacks on the desk.

‘She’s back then.’

‘She’s looking real big now,’ Diane sat down and turned in her swivel chair.

‘Really?’ smiled Sammar and then, ‘No, thank you’ to Diane’s offer of a Yorkie bar.

‘She said that Rae’s in hospital.’

The pain came into a specific place, the top of her stomach. ‘Why?’

Diane pulled open her packet of crisps. The smell of cheese and onions filled the room. ‘Apparently some nurse phoned from Foresterhill and said that he had this real bad asthma attack and they’re keeping him in because he’s also got bronchitis. So,’ went on Diane, ‘that sounds like a fine start to his New Year. I don’t know who’s going to take over his classes next week if he’s not back by then. Yasmin kind of thought that they wouldn’t keep him long.’

Sammar stared at the carpet, an indentation where the chair’s leg had stood. He had been coughing on the telephone, coughing and saying that he was feverish and she had not guessed that it was serious. If Diane had not said ‘that’s a fine start to his New Year’, had not filled the room with the smell of cheese and onions, perhaps then it would not hurt so much or there would not be anger mixed with the hurt. She wanted to say, ‘You have no manners, you are rude. When someone is taken ill, when there is bad news, there are certain things that must be said, a sympathetic word, a good wish for them. When that person is someone older than you, your professor, someone who helps you, then you should be doubly respectful. Not so callous, you are not a child to be so callous.’ She pressed her teeth together. ‘Don’t speak,’ she told herself, ‘you are not allowed to speak like that.’ She felt the blood gushing to her nose as if she was about to have a nose-bleed. She wanted it, the soft pluck noise, the sticky blood released from her nose.

‘I’ll go now,’ she said and put her coat on, picked up her bag. ‘Bye.’

‘See you.’

When she closed the door behind her, liquid dribbled from her nose, but it was clear as tears. Down the stairs, in the street, on the bus, she told herself that she was overreacting, that there was no need for this. He would be all right in a week or two. Bronchitis was not such a terrible thing. She shivered in the lit streets, in the bus that was too slow. The bus stopped too long at traffic lights, it patiently let people climb in and out. Ordinary life, an ordinary day. The passengers seemed to her to be superhuman, people walking around not lumbered with pain. She did not want to cry on the bus in front of them.

She pushed the key into the lock of the building. Loud music, heavy metal. Some of the tenants were back, the Christmas break over. A letter from her aunt, colourful African stamps damp with Europe’s rain. The post, sluggish during the holidays was now regular again. She put the letter unopened in her handbag, walked up the stairs. Her room was no longer a hospital room it had new curtains, a new bedspread. She must not cry. What was there to cry about? Talk to herself, ‘Don’t be silly.’ The music came down through the ceiling. Grating, angry. Why were they angry? She couldn’t understand. She must get away from the music. She knew where she was going to go. Talk to herself, ‘Stop crying, what is there to cry about? Your eyes will be red. He will see you and your eyes will be ugly and red.’

Foresterhill was a large complex of hospital buildings. It was interspersed by roads, cars and buses, car parks, bus stops, gardens and a children’s playground. There was the Medical School where Tarig had trained and sat exams, there was the Maternity Hospital where Sammar had Amir. There was Casualty where Tarig had died on a sunny day and she had sat waiting for someone to come from the mosque, while Amir roamed the corridors, touching everything, playing with the fire extinguisher, until she picked him up, shook him and hissed, ‘I wish it was you instead, you are so easily replaceable.’ But he had wriggled away from her, too young to understand, too good-natured to be disturbed by her anger. Only she was left with guilt, dirty like metal.

Sammar pushed her way to the hospital. It felt like that, even though she sat in the warm bus, not walking, not running, not exerting herself. She must not think of the last time she had come here. It had been different, it was daylight then, summer, and she had come wearing sandals, pushing Amir in his pushchair. Now she was coming by bus, alone, and it was winter darkness outside the bus, freezing cold. Why was she going to see Rae? If he was asleep would she just sit on a chair, listen to him snore? If he was very ill, would he not be irritated by her presence, that she was seeing him like that, intruding on something private? What if he looked at her in a surprised way, his eyes asking, what are you doing here?