Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

Oz passed me the peanut butter. He put more bread in the toaster. ‘Do you have family in Khartoum?’

‘My father is still there. He remarried and has a son. My father,’ I expanded, knowing Oz would be interested, ‘is Muslim in name only, unless he’s lately changed. He didn’t care about religion. He was a member of the Communist party and they gave him a scholarship to Russia where he met my mother and faith was not an issue for them. So I wasn’t brought up Muslim even though we lived in a Muslim country. But I was aware of Islam around me. You can’t miss it in Sudan. My grandmother prayed. When she came to stay with us, I would taunt her and push her as she prayed just because I knew she wouldn’t leave her prayers and punish me. She used to swipe at me, though, while she was praying.’ I mimicked my skinny grandmother flailing her arms.

Oz laughed. ‘That’s so mean.’ He sounded like a schoolboy.

‘During Ramadan,’ I said, now that I was on a roll with memories, ‘none of us used to fast, not even my father, but instead of eating lunch at the usual time before siesta we would eat around sunset. My father insisted on it. He liked the special drinks and foods of Ramadan. You’ve never lived in a Muslim country, have you? Culture and religion are so entwined that sometimes people can’t tell the difference. At sunset, the special Ramadan cannon would go off. It was a relic of Turco-Egyptian rule. I would hear that one bang as I was playing in the street. The other children were fasting and we would each go to our own homes. Sometimes I fasted like them just so as not to be different, but it annoyed my mother.’ Those were the years when I had hope of fitting in. Then awkwardness became my home.

‘Do you think if you stayed with us here, you would change?’ He stirred more sugar into his coffee, splashed a drop of milk on the table.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If, just to say, the snow lasted for days and days. If you couldn’t leave, would you come closer to faith, just by being with the two of us?’

I knew that I should resent his suggestion. Its echoes of compulsion and submission. ‘No matter how long the snow lasts, it will melt and I will leave. Then I will go back to my own life and this will be a memory. Do you find yourself easily changing? Do you match the company you keep?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I guess I do or at least did. I would like to be braver. I would like, just as an example, to be assertive enough not to mind my name or not to care what others think about my mother’s job.’

‘What’s wrong with her job?’

He sat up straight and didn’t reply. I could hear Malak in the next room close. At last he said, ‘It is not others that are the problem. Their thoughts become my thoughts.’

‘You’re young,’ I said and that was not the right thing to say. He felt somewhat rebuked.

Malak came into the kitchen, her face shining with sweat. She refilled her water bottle from the tap. ‘Ossie, show Natasha the flag that was sent to Shamil from England,’ she said as she walked out again.

In the living room, he moved a tartan rug from the top of a trunk and knelt down to open it. I sat next to him on the floor and it had been years since I had done that. My knees creaked and I shifted my heaviness on the carpet. He showed me portraits of Shamil; sketches and paintings made by Russian journalists and artists who accompanied the troops. They were orientalist in ethos: one of him standing alone in prayer while behind him his men were on horseback, swords drawn, ready to charge. In others, he was a hawk-like figure, with brooding dark eyes. In a family album, someone had collected fragments of the comments written in the West about Shamil. Oz read them out loud and when Malak joined us, she supplied the appropriate accent and I was soon laughing.

A French accent for Alexander Dumas: ‘Shamil, the Titan, who struggles from his lair against the tsar.’

The MP in the House of Commons lauding Shamil’s stand as a check to tsarist designs in India: ‘… a really splendid type who stood up to tyrants … and deeply religious even if he did have several wives …’ The Caucasus blocked the route to Delhi and Shamil was their man.

‘Look,’ Malak said and took out a scrap of material preserved in a sealed glass case. Three scarlet stars stitched on a dull beige background that must have been white at the time. ‘This was part of a banner that was sent to Shamil as a token of support. Imagine a group of English ladies, a sewing circle, stitching away in a parlour. Wasn’t it good of them, Natasha?’

Oz shook his head. He was right to be sceptical. These tokens were not enough to save Shamil. All the newspaper articles that extolled Phoenix rising from the ashes of Akhulgo, all the calls in Parliament for an independent Dagestan, all the collections for the ‘poor, brave Caucasians’, the talk of training from Indian army officials on modern artillery methods, at the end only provided him with moral support.

‘These three stars on the flag,’ I said, ‘probably represent Georgia, Circassia and Dagestan even though Georgia had ceded to Russia.’

Oz showed me sheets of music enfolded in a romantic colourful cover of warriors with their swords and Arabian steeds. The title was The Shamil Schottische and Malak gave us a demonstration of the dance, a slower polka that really needed a partner, she said, but Oz would not oblige.

It was part of the magic of the day, to watch her dance and laugh, to listen to Oz teasing her. She was light on her feet, saying ‘The composer was English and to use Shamil’s name to market the tune must mean that he captured people’s imagination at the time.’ The sun shone on the sweep of her black hair, her jade earrings. The sight filled me with a sense of privilege, a gratitude I had not felt for a long time. Here we were, the three of us, fascinated by a common past — faithful to it, even. I at least to the history, they to an ancestor they were proud of. It was only in a specific period of Shamil’s career that he won British favour — the years after Akhulgo, the politics surrounding the Crimean War, up until Princess Anna Elinichna entered into the picture. It was precisely because of a Georgian princess that the British representative said, ‘Shamil is a fanatic and a barbarian with whom it would be difficult for us … to entertain any credible or satisfactory relations.’

In order to nurse the baby while sitting on her favourite armchair, Princess Anna had gone through considerable effort. Neither David nor her sisters could understand her insistence on taking this particular armchair from Tiflis all the way down to the Tsinondali estate. The chair had to be hoisted on top of an oxen-cart with the ikons and the silver samovar, covered in old sheets to protect them from the dust of the road. Even though the Chavchavadzes spent every summer in the country, this year the move had been spiked with doubts. The military governor had refused to sanction it, citing the increasing raids of the highlanders. However, Anna had insisted. It was too hot to stay in town and there was much that needed doing at Tsinondali; to give it up one summer would amount to neglect. Besides, it was only in the countryside that she felt at ease, able to wear her national costume and speak in her mother tongue, garden and supervise the estate. Luckily David had supported her. He was to be nearby throughout the summer commanding the local militia, a line of forts along the river that protected the lowlands from any invasion by the Caucasus highlanders. On a good day he could reach them by dinner, and at the slightest inkling of danger he would be the first to know. Still, though, their summer move raised frowns. There was gossip that Anna was headstrong and manipulative of her husband. Relatives hinted that they would not visit as often as they usually did and her sisters teased her about the armchair, which she would have to abandon in case of a hasty return to town.