Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

My mother knew how to make only three cakes: chocolate, which was popular; pineapple upside down which needed tinned pineapples — and these, being imported, were not always available at the grocers; and a honey one that was inferior to the one her friend Grusha Babiker specialised in. It upset my mother that Grusha would not share her recipe. Even though Grusha had none of our income woes, she insisted on keeping her recipe a secret. I remember my mother talking to Grusha on the phone and then crying afterwards. But she could have been crying about something else and not what Grusha had said. She could have been crying about the time a good batch of baking had used up all the gas before she got round to cooking my father’s lunch. He came home to find the table set but with bread and cheese as the meal. He banged the table so hard that some of the plates shattered to the ground. Then he walked out of the house and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember his return. Most likely he came back late, after I went to bed.

My mother had trained as a physiotherapist. She met my father when he tore his rotator cuff playing volleyball. He was in the university team, conspicuous because he was black, he would say. Conspicuous because he was handsome, she would insist. He was shy undressing in front of her. Women, where he came from, did not treat men, did not touch their naked shoulder. My mother found his shyness endearing, his inhibitions intriguing. Their courtship was not smooth. He blew hot and cold but she pursued him. ‘I was smitten,’ she later said. ‘I didn’t think.’ He did, though. He thought that she would come to her senses. He depended on this and eased himself into the relationship, allowing her to treat his shoulder and type up his thesis. There were romantic photos of that time, cigarettes in their hands, smiles, hers always broader and more optimistic. In the wedding photo, a civil ceremony in Georgia, an almost bewildered look in my father’s eyes, as if time and circumstances had caught up with him. As if what he had judged to be inexorably shifting and amorphous had unexpectedly crystallised.

They arrived in Sudan together. He had omitted to tell his family of his marriage and presented them with a pregnant wife. The muted celebratory homecoming was adjusted to include a Sudanese wedding. My mother objected to being decked out as a Sudanese bride. She hated the henna, the sandalwood and the gold. She wouldn’t fit in. What did she imagine? What were her expectations? I know because she spoke about them; they remained vivid in her mind, for years, because they never materialised.

My father, despite his PhD from the Soviet Union, against all the odds of his generation, struggled to earn a living. This was the reason their marriage failed. Nothing else. Their quarrels were in tangent to this and so in the sporadic times of plenty, there were happy moments, humdrum silent days, stretches of peace. The three of us slept outdoors in the front yard, just below the high wall, my father dragging out the three beds and spraying water on the red bricks of the ground. Thinking I was fast asleep, they would go indoors to their bedroom and then later come out to lie down with their cigarettes and talk in low voices. I liked dozing to the sound of their voices, the pink glow of the cigarettes in the dark. They wouldn’t talk finances at that time of night; instead they spoke about films they’d seen or exchanged news of friends and neighbours. My father, for all his seriousness, enjoyed satire and rumours.

He made a mistake when he prohibited her from working as a physiotherapist. He should have defied convention but maybe the foreign marriage itself was his limit. It would shame me, he said to her, if you touched other men’s backs and shoulders and legs. He did not object to the cake business but my mother registered the curtailment of a vocation she loved. She held it against him, drawing it out in subsequent quarrels, making digs whenever she could. Ironically, when she married Tony and moved to Scotland, her Russian qualifications also hindered her ability to work. But by then, she cared less and felt too old to retrain. By then, even without a divorce settlement from my father, she was content with coffee mornings and shopping, and crucially, Tony was earning enough.

It was not through the cakes that my mother first met Tony. But he ordered a pineapple upside down so that he would see her again. I sat in the car while she rang the doorbell of his villa and went in. The reason I remembered that day was that his was the only villa in which the railing running over the front wall was shaped in letters from the English alphabet. It was as if the villa had at one time been a nursery. For a time I enjoyed looking at the letters while sitting in the front seat, then the back seat, then the driver’s seat until I got hot and bored. I hooted the horn and felt foolish when the few people walking down the street stared at me. At last I got out of the car and rang the bell. Instead of yelling at me, my mother came out animated and smiling. To placate me she bought me a Pasgianos from the corner store. The bottle was warm and I drank it all in one go.

Before the baking, when I should have been in nursery school but I wasn’t, my mother used to lie in bed during the day and read novels in order to improve her English. The bed was in the sitting room because we didn’t have proper furniture. It was something that annoyed her but my father said, so what, very few Sudanese had chairs and sofas in their sitting room, just string cots pushed against the wall. Aunty Grusha and Yasha had a dining table and everything in their house was neat and modern. But we were different; we were unlucky because my father was unlucky. He was on the wrong side of the government and the wrong side of the market. So my mother would lie down in that sunny sitting room, the fan spinning above us while I played on the floor with a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle was of a scene in Bambi and some of the pieces were missing. It didn’t matter to me, though, because I knew which pieces were missing and I worked around these absences. The sand of our cement floor poked up in between the greenery of a European forest but Bambi and his mother were whole.

Once I looked up from the puzzle and stared at the cover of the book my mother was reading. The large capital letters in green and orange nestling close together and the little picture at the bottom that was hidden by her fingers. I was happy that she was settled in one place. I could work on my puzzle and then look up to catch her turning a page or circling her ankle as it rested on top of her knee. Her toenails were the exact colour of Little Red Riding’s hood, another jigsaw I had. I liked the way my mother’s hair fell over the pillow. She had yellow shoulder-length hair, but near her neck the hair was darker. And her eyebrows too, which she plucked diligently, were darker. My own hair was different — it was like my father’s even though I was a girl and it should have been like hers; instead it was a mistake, a bush to touch and in photographs, a cloud. Like other white mothers with black daughters, my mother had no clue how to deal with it. It left her bewildered and helpless, it made her feel incompetent.

I was searching for the piece of Bambi’s eyes which was central to the whole jigsaw when I noticed a movement and saw that my mother had raised one knee and hugged it to herself. The dress she was wearing slipped and her thighs were white and smooth all the way to her grey underpants. Milky white, not like her face and arms, which were regularly touched by the sun. A pressure rose in my chest but also a glow as if I was wearing a golden necklace that weighed too much. Even though I was with her, even though I could move towards her for a cuddle and a kiss, I was not like her and might never be, I was in another place, lonely because she would never join me. I stood up and walked to the bed. With my whole hand, I pinched her inner thigh as hard as I could, until she cried out and dropped the book and scolded me — but she was laughing now and tickling me, tickling my stomach, feet and armpits until I was squealing. When I burst into tears, she thought that it was because I had laughed too much.