Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

So, according to the guidelines, how should his response be classified? Did he tick this particular box or not? According to the guidelines, a student who was ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’ would have symptoms of regression, a hankering for an idealised past, a misguided belief in authenticity.

In the afternoon, Malak and I went for a walk leaving Oz shovelling snow in front of the house. The shining sun was no threat to the packed snow. We sank into it with our boots and messed up its neatness, beating down a path all the way to the main road. Paths, grass and asphalt were all one and the same. I breathed in the freshest air and put my gloved hands in my pockets. My mobile phone rang and it was my stepfather again. I ignored him. Nothing must break what felt like a spell. I vowed that tomorrow morning I would wake up at dawn to milk every minute of it. Here in this setting, with these two people, sleep was a waste of time.

‘Do you ever go back to Chechnya?’ I asked Malak.

She shook her head. ‘But I have cousins there and we keep in touch. During the war I was always worrying and calling them. I tried to help them as much as I could; I still send them money.’

The name of Shamil hovered over the recent Chechen rebel wars. The militant leader Shamil Basayev was responsible for the terrorist attacks on the North Ossetia school and the Moscow theatre hostages.

As if to dispel the negative images from her mind Malak said, ‘One of the most popular films in Chechnya in the 1990s was Braveheart. Hundreds of pirated videos were sold.’

Probably young Chechen men saw themselves as the William Wallaces of the Caucasus. I smiled and we spoke a little bit about the film. It was interesting to hear her opinions, an insider’s view of the film industry that I was not familiar with.

We came across another farmhouse; a neighbour shovelling snow. Malak stopped to chat. She sounded comfortable as she swapped updates about the weather and introduced me as a house guest. I gathered that she had only met this particular neighbour once before. She was still relatively new in the area. It made me wonder at her motives for leaving London. It was a brave step to take, to live in such isolation, to start anew. Though I appreciated the peace and fresh air, this lifestyle was not for me. I needed the anonymity of the city. Here I was conscious of being African in the Scottish countryside, of the need to justify my presence.

To avoid small talk with the neighbour I stepped back and took out my mobile to answer Tony’s calls. He probably needed reassurance that I would drive up with him to Fraserburgh for Christmas with Naomi. She was his daughter from his first marriage. It was an annual tradition to fill the car with presents and spend Christmas with her and her husband. They were a generous and good-natured couple, but this year for the first time, we would be visiting without my mum. The telephone rang in the house but it was the Polish cleaner, Kornelia, who picked up. I asked her to pass on a message explaining my predicament. That was how I made it sound, an inconvenience; a tiresome pause in my usual, busy life. Sometimes a lie makes more sense than the truth. Often the truth is irrelevant.

The sun started to set, still bright through the trees. We walked back to the house and stopped when we saw what Oz was doing. He had built five snowmen so crudely that they were almost columns. None of them were taller than him. He was holding the sword in his hand, the same one I had held yesterday and imagined to be Shamil’s. His coat was open, his scarf covered his mouth and his woollen cap was low over his eyebrows. His feet were deep in the snow and with the sword he was swinging away at the snowmen. One after the other — hacking, thrusting, lopping off their unformed heads. There was no passion in his expression, only concentration, as if he was practising, as if he was trying out new tricks.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ Malak walked towards him. ‘It’s hundreds of years old, you’ll ruin it.’

I had not seen her angry before. She moved to snatch it away from him so abruptly that for a minute I was afraid she was going to get hurt. He turned to her and because only his eyes were visible, the smile in them had a mesmerising, distant quality. He hid the sword behind his back and with the other hand pulled down the scarf so as to say, ‘Malak, don’t fuss. A little bit of snow won’t hurt it.’

It disappointed me that he would lack such appreciation. I thought he would value Shamil’s sword, cherish and respect it.

‘What would the neighbours think seeing you so violent?’ Malak sounded exasperated now. If he were still a child, she would have snatched the forbidden game from him, hauled him yelling and kicking back into the house.

‘They’ll think I’m a jihadist.’ His voice was deliberately loud, deliberately provocative. Then he changed his tone so that it was theatrical, bordering on comic. ‘They’ll think we’ve set up a jihadist training camp out in the countryside, aye, that’s what they’ll ken.’ He added the accent, a thread for her to catch on.

She softened and cuffed him on the shoulder. The three of us walked towards the house laughing. We stood at the door in the blue cold dusk, stamping our feet to get rid of the snow. But the next day when the men made their way to the house, it didn’t seem funny after all. They rang the bell, they came in and they asked not for Oz and not for Ossie. They said the other name.

Eight-year-old Jamaleldin, clambering with his friends, followed by his toddling brother, could see a cloud approaching. Then he was in a white mist, the highest snowy summits invisible, the neighbouring peaks and gullies fading to a blur of reddish browns and greens. He crouched down, waiting for clarity, for the sight of the Russian battalions stationed far below. The word Akhulgo meant ‘a meeting place in time of danger’ and now the Russians had laid it under siege. It was a natural fortress, high on one of the peaks of the Caucasus, six hundred feet above the river Andi-Koisu. The river looped around its base on three sides; only horses trained for such a twisted, vertical ascent could reach Shamil’s aoul. This made Jamaleldin feel safe. The Russians’ horses were not trained; if they ever came up here they would have to come on foot.

He turned and held his brother in his arms, leaving the older boys to collect more stones. Ghazi was still plump but he could talk fluently. ‘Don’t take me back to mother. I am old enough to fight too.’

Jamaleldin laughed. ‘A murid would have to carry you on his shoulder if you want to even toss a pebble.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ Ghazi wrenched himself free and scampered away.

Jamaleldin admired his daring. He himself was an able rider and a fair marksman. He could use a dagger and had ridden with his father in several raids but he was cautious by nature, reliant on practice rather than aggression. Watching Ghazi leap away from him, he could sense that his sturdy younger brother was of a different nature, living up to his Arabic name of ‘Conqueror’.

Jamaleldin had been named after his father’s teacher, Sheikh Jamal el-Din al Husayni, the gentle Sufi scholar who preferred books to war. Everyone knew that Sheikh Jamal el-Din was special because he was a friend of Allah. Whenever he prayed for something, it happened. Shamil’s strength came through him. That was how he had become Imam of Dagestan and was now leading the tribes of the Caucasus to fight the armies of the Russian tsar.

When Jamaleldin thought of his father, the feeling of pride made his chest big. Every cell in his body strained for his father’s approval. It was as if Shamil’s love was his nourishment and Shamil’s admonishments his understanding of Hell. It was incredible to Jamaleldin that some men disobeyed his father. The wars against the Russians went on and on and some of the tribal chiefs were weakening; they were trading with the Russians, paying taxes and even spying on Shamil himself. Jamaleldin wanted to trust everyone around him. Sometimes, though, he would notice a villager with shifty eyes, an elder with a haughty look and he would wonder if they were the hypocrites. If they were the traitors who had sold their souls to the White Tsar.