Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

‘How come you haven’t been answering your mobile?’

‘Long story.’ I told him instead about the robbery and that diverted him.

‘Drugs related,’ he said. ‘This time of year, everyone is short of cash. Where are you going to stay until your roof gets fixed? You can’t stay all that time in a hotel. I suppose you can come here part of the time.’ His voice trailed off as if he wasn’t sure if this was an invitation he wanted to issue.

To commute from Aberdeen every day would be hectic. But perhaps I could do it for part of the week. I swallowed and asked, ‘What’s the news from Sudan that you needed to tell me?’

‘Your father’s in hospital. He’s got kidney failure.’

When I was doing my PhD and out of work, I had asked my father for money but he never sent any. When my mother was ill, I wrote him several letters but never got a reply. When she died, he didn’t bother to offer his condolences — and that for a Sudanese could not be a casual omission. He had another wife now, he had a son. They were his real family, while my mother and I were the old mistake he wanted to forget. The blood rushed to my head. ‘Well, I won’t donate him my kidney if that’s why he called you.’

Tony sighed. The elderly closing ranks against the younger generation. He would want me to be reasonable; he would expect me to take appropriate action. ‘There is a possibility they would fly him to Jordan for a transplant but it might be too late.’

‘How did you find out? Did he call you himself?’

‘No. It was Grusha Babiker who did.’

Grusha used to be my mother’s best friend in Khartoum and they had stayed in touch. She too was a Russian married to a Sudanese. Her son, Yasha (real name Yassir) was my first boyfriend. They crowded around me now, these names and faces from the past — my reproachful father, Grusha who succeeded where my mother failed and Yasha who probably didn’t use his nickname any more. He became a successful lawyer, I had heard; he became more Sudanese as the years passed. Perhaps we half and halfs should always make a choice, one nationality instead of the other, one language instead of the other. We should nourish one identity and starve the other so that it would atrophy and drop off. Then we could relax and become like everyone else, we could snuggle up to the majority and fit in.

Tony said, ‘Natasha, you need to speak to Grusha. She will tell you more about your father. He really isn’t well at all. I gave her your number. She said she would call you.’

But I did not have my phone so I would not get that call. Dear Aunt Grusha. You were my role model all those years ago. Physics lecturer at Khartoum University, the only woman in the faculty. You dressed like Thatcher and went to war against the Sudanese dust so that your house could be impeccable. I missed the only cake she knew how to bake, her signature honey sponge on every birthday table and event in which she was asked to bring a dish. I missed her Arabic with its Russian accent, her deep gold hair, her son who held me when I cried about my parents’ divorce.

Tony started to talk about next month’s Southern Sudanese referendum. He was always even more up-to-date than I was. Predictably he slipped into talking about his time there. He was another Tony then, suntanned and exuberant, not the unremarkable pensioner pottering in his garden or walking in Duthie Park. I remembered him in a Hawaiian shirt, open at the neck, hairy chest and a silver medallion, drink in hand, dancing with an Ethiopian beauty (the last girlfriend he had before my mother). He was on top of his game was how he described it. There were expatriates who hated Sudan for the obvious reasons — the heat, the incompetence, the shortages, the boredom; and for other reasons — the political uncertainty, the racism against the Southern Sudanese and the way grudges were held for the pettiest of reasons. There were also those who understood and loved it or more likely the other way round, loved it first and then understood it. For it was too proud a place to explain itself without that first admission of love. Tony unravelled the Khartoum code. ‘It’s all about mixing with people,’ was how he put it. Initially arriving as an engineer with a multinational company, he stayed on past his term and ventured on his own. There were rumours that he was in the arms trade, that he was a spy, that he was a smuggler. Whichever was true, he made good money out of it and it was his house with its own swimming pool, his latest Mercedes, his frequent trips abroad that first attracted my mother.

I ate the stodgy lasagne I had ordered and drank enough to shed a few sentimental tears over Yasha. It had been twenty years since I last saw him. I wanted to dream of sitting on his lap like I used to. How we would both be dusty because a sandstorm was blowing, how our pores would be open, our skin damp, my scalp wet, the back of his shirt in patches and we wouldn’t feel there was anything wrong with that. It was as if we bypassed the stage of making a good impression; there was never a need for pretence between us, never a need to seduce. There were no edges between us, no sparks, we flowed, we fused, so that one day glancing at our reflection in the mirror we looked like Siamese twins joined at the waist. I even hesitated to draw away from him then, thinking irrationally that my skin would tear. But the moment passed and time proved that we had taken each other for granted and that I, at least, was unable to replace him. He was too diffident to assume that he was the love of my life. And I was short-sighted — I thought there would be other more exciting alternatives. I thought I deserved better than the obvious family friend.

A few years ago Yasha’s life was hit by tragedy. His wife and five-year-old daughter died in a plane crash, a domestic flight from Port Sudan to Khartoum. Compelled by the understanding that condolences were the most important of Sudanese social obligations, I phoned Aunt Grusha. ‘Yasha is in a world of his own,’ she said, her own voice thick with sorrow. ‘I thought I would stay with him for a few days because he’s still not back at work. He keeps himself locked up in his room; I might as well go back to my own house.’ She insisted though that he would want to speak to me. She knocked on his door and I heard her whisper, ‘Natasha Hussein, calling from Scotland.’ It felt strange to hear my old name, to realise that no matter what, they would only know me as such. It was a long time before Yasha picked up but he was only able to garble, ‘Natasha …? Thanks …’ I could have called him again after a week or a few days. Instead I dropped off his radar.

Tonight I nursed my memories. Random images of his Afro comb, his tennis racket, his Bee Gees cassettes. How when he was seven he came over to play, stayed the whole day and then went back home and complained to Grusha that we hadn’t fed him enough. I remember Grusha indignant and my mother embarrassed. Now the memory made me smile but at the time harsh Russian words were exchanged all round. When Yasha was fifteen he would take his father’s car without permission and we would sneak off for drives. He would have one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting on the open window. We would talk our own mix of Russian, Arabic and the English we learnt at school. He was the same species as me — I could sprint through the added contradictions of what I knew and what I had inherited and he would keep up the pace, he would know the terrain; he could do Sudan through Russian eyes and Russia through Khartoum eyes. Tonight I wanted to reach, through sleep, to the comfort of how we used to be. Instead I open a drawer and I am appalled to find a baby, a naked baby I put away in the drawer and forgot about.

The baby is dead, it must be dead. Is it dead? I can’t find out, I can’t lift it out of the drawer. I can’t look at it properly. I must close the drawer. I must close the drawer and move away and pretend that I never opened it in the first place.