Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

It had been a special evening, like a celebration of sorts, perhaps an unspoken agreement that it would be my last. Oz lit the fire and we sat on the cushions on the floor. I looked up at Shamil’s sword and down at the flames and I felt confident about my work, that I was on the right track, that I was worthy of my chosen subject. If I could get four papers on Shamil published in prestigious journals, I would have a bigger chance of promotion. I was saving too for a trip to Dagestan, to climb the Caucasus. ‘Come with me,’ I urged them both. The invitation tripped out spontaneously, so unlike me. I could tell by their eyes, by the way they exchanged glances that the idea piqued their interest.

Oz stood up and fetched his laptop. ‘Yes, let’s go this month, over the Christmas holidays. I’ll bet we can find cheap last-minute flights.’

‘It would be better to go in the spring,’ said Malak. ‘Early when the swallows fly back. There would be snow on the highlands, but the lowlands would be clear.’

‘Easter then,’ I said, my voice different with happiness. This would be my ultimate journey, my pilgrimage and they would lead me to Shamil, to knowing him better, to seeing the world through his eyes.

Oz, laptop on his crossed knees, was doing the research. He read out, ‘Tindi is a small picturesque aoul with a historic minaret, in the south-western mountains close to the Georgian and Chechen borders.’

‘That’s our place then,’ I said.

He kept on reading, ‘According to Wikivoyage, travel to Dagestan is extremely dangerous and strongly discouraged. And here’s the latest headlines: Russian security forces clash with militants in Dagestan, nine killed.’

This dampened us for the time being. I was and had always been a coward. Malak said there were plenty more ways to spend a holiday than courting danger. Only Oz, all bravado, still seemed keen. ‘You can’t believe everything you read,’ he argued. ‘Besides, we’re not tourists.’

‘What are you, Ossie?’ his mother smiled.

‘I won’t look out of place.’

‘You only have to open your mouth,’ she said. ‘Besides, your fancy trainers will give you away.’

He scowled at her. ‘I’ll get new ones from Primark.’

She laughed. ‘What a comedown!’

He was, I had noticed, proud of his clothes. But then many students nowadays were. They surprised me with their Uggs and Hunter wellies; their leather jackets and mobile accessories. The markets had them by the throat; they might be in debt, they were surely struggling, but they needed what generations before them had easily done without.

Perhaps if I wasn’t there they would have argued about his allowance. Instead Malak started to speak about her parents and grandparents; all those descendants of Shamil that history didn’t record. Stories that Oz hadn’t heard. It was a pleasure to watch a mother hand over strands of the family narrative to her son. She was talking to him as much as to me. ‘Our side of the family,’ she said, ‘followed the fatwa that with the collapse of Muslim rule in the Caucasus they should emigrate to the Ottoman Empire. Others stayed on and were deported by Stalin, and those who stayed struggled throughout Soviet rule. The mosques were shut down, it was forbidden to read or write Arabic and practising Islam had to be done in secret. Only the very tough could resist; most ordinary people lapsed. When I hear Muslims in the West complaining, I have no sympathy for them …’

Oz interrupted her, ‘Come on …’

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘We have the freedom to practise and teach and bring up our children in our own faith. Can you imagine, Oz, what it is like when generation after generation grows up with all their Islamic teachings muddled up and pushed to the far side of memory? Snatches of verses here and there, a vague idea of Ramadan, no solid scholarship to back them, none of the blessing that comes from reciting the Qur’an. It is the biggest loss to become religiously illiterate, to be left without a choice. This is why my side of the family packed up and left. To spare themselves all this.’

I was surprised by her deeply held convictions. Too often she came across as malleable. Oz seemed surprised too but in a different direction. ‘You always said that your parents weren’t religious.’

‘They weren’t in the sense that you would understand it. My mother didn’t wear hijab, for example. But their faith mattered to them. I was the one who was the rebel. I ran away from home because I wanted to become an actor. I broke their hearts because I had grand ambitions.’

I would have liked her to say more but Oz stalled her with his question, ‘But they forgave you, didn’t they?’

‘Of course.’ She smiled at him. A smile I would always remember because of all that it held. ‘Parents will always forgive their children, no matter what.’

It mattered to him that she said that. I wondered what he had done wrong or what he considered to be wrong or what he believed would hurt her. I envied them the ease between them. I could not reconcile the idea of forgiveness with my own parents. With my mother who left my father for Tony. The sensibilities of 1980s Khartoum were mine against my will. That world where men owned the streets and women pretended to be shy even when they weren’t. That time and place where sparks flared up at the slightest provocation; where words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘disgrace’ undid lives. Over the years I had tried to rid myself of such baggage but never fully succeeded. I understood my father’s feelings of shame and, later, my own failed romantic attachments seemed like an apt punishment, because although I went through the motions, these casual relationships never felt right.

Nor could I reconcile the idea of forgiveness for my father whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade. He visited me once when I was in university. He came, he said, all the way from Khartoum especially to see me. I kept telling him I was busy with exams and I only met up with him twice. The first time he was waiting for me outside the library and I was ashamed to be seen with him around the campus. He was wearing flimsy clothes in one of the coldest springs, his English was rudimentary and I had, by then, almost forgotten my Arabic. So ironically my mother’s language became our only way to communicate. We must have looked weird. On the grounds of a Scottish university, an African father and a mixed-race daughter, dodging the rain and speaking Russian. I told him that my graduation was next week but I did not even ask about my grandmother or my old friends. There was only the resentment at his presence, the impatience to get rid of him. ‘I will attend your graduation ceremony,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ I replied. ‘The seating is limited and I only have tickets for Mum and Tony.’

The second and last time we met he took me to lunch and I ate in silence, barely answering his questions. And yet on that occasion I was more relaxed; I even smiled at one of his jokes and noticed the new white in his hair. When he warmed up, he called my mother a whore and Tony a racist. ‘A thief,’ my father spat out, spittle flying from his mouth, who stole her away from him, as if she didn’t have a will of her own. As if she and I didn’t spend afternoons in Tony’s villa, me in the swimming pool hugging a Tweety inflatable ring, the chlorine jamming my nose and the two of them upstairs, behind a locked door with the air-conditioner humming. But I wouldn’t defend the indefensible; I tucked into my meatballs and left him to rant.

‘I should not have let you go with them,’ he repeated. ‘All my friends advised me to keep you but I didn’t listen.’

I sounded grown-up when I replied, ‘It’s been good for me to come here.’ I sounded confident, as if I had moved on and the past hardly mattered to me at all. I was doing well in my studies and this impressed him. He had little to offer me if I chose to return with him. Sudan was in a state of economic collapse, the civil war against the south was raging. He had, as expected, failed in every business venture he started — he had neither the necessary political connections nor the dogged perseverance — his was another brilliant mind burned out by a dysfunctional post-colonial state. The house he was building was still incomplete, his only car a wreck, his debts mounting. I was much better where I was. At the end of the lunch, which didn’t include dessert, my father gave me money. Five twenty-pound notes in a grubby envelope. Tony had stopped supporting me since I turned eighteen and I worked part-time in the student union shop, so I hesitated a little but then I took his gift.