Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

Near the end of the meal Tony said, ‘Yesterday I went to my solicitor and changed my will. I had to because of how everything is different now. I’ve left the house to the two lads with Naomi as their executor in case they are not yet of age before my time comes. If I don’t overstay my welcome and spend left, right and centre, there will be a bit of cash left over for you.’

The house had been in his name, never my mother’s. I swallowed, thinking that the former playboy of Khartoum would indeed find himself spending left, right and centre, especially if Kornelia started to make demands.

‘Thank you, Tony, for all you have done for me,’ I said flatly, wishing that he would not want to be thanked. But he did. I saw it in the way he put down his knife and fork and sat back. I managed a few more sentences, a more genuine show of gratitude. Something was slipping away from me, an opportunity I had never acknowledged as such.

The next morning Tony went swimming at his gym and I read the Sunday papers. It was there, why shouldn’t it be, pared down, words standing up thin on the page like spikes. A twenty-one-year-old man is being held at a high-security area of Glasgow’s Govan police station after officers raided a property near Brechin on Thursday. His arrest is understood to be related to downloading radical Islamist material.

He should not have been downloading material. He was looking into weapons used for jihad. That’s what he told me.

After lunch, Tony suggested we visit the Garden of Remembrance in Hazelhead. We walked around but the atmosphere was heavy, toxic. We did not stay long. ‘I don’t think I will come again,’ he said when we got back into the car. And I felt the same way. He dropped me back at the house and stayed away most of the afternoon. It felt strange without my mother, as if the house was full of her and drained of her at the same time. It struck me for the first time as strange that we always went to Naomi’s for Christmas dinner. Why didn’t they come to us? It must have been a throwback to Tony’s time in Khartoum. He would come for a short holiday and spend it at Naomi’s house in Fraserburgh. Even after he married Mum and after they moved to Aberdeen, he kept the same habit. Perhaps Mum wasn’t confident of pulling off a British Christmas dinner. Perhaps she didn’t mind falling into his regular routine.

Naomi didn’t drop by as promised and I was disappointed. I had always liked her because she was not presumptuous. She had a talent for accepting others as they were, on their own terms. Tony must have been like that in Khartoum — no wonder he was popular. When I went into the kitchen to make dinner, I overheard him talking to Naomi on the phone. I burnt the onions hearing him mention in the same breath Kornelia and Christmas in Fraserburgh.

‘I don’t want her to be there,’ I said when he put the phone down. ‘This is the first Christmas without Mum. It’s not right.’

I had misjudged. His anger was swift, as if it had been building up all weekend. His voice rose sharp as a slap and everything he said was the truth, no exaggerations, no lies. ‘Listen, you can’t suddenly turn up and tell me what to do. I call you and you don’t pick up, you don’t get back to me. Where were you when your mother was in hospital, when she needed you, when I needed you? She was dying, for God’s sake, and you just went on with your selfish life. I had to practically beg you to come up for the funeral. So now back off and let me do what I like.’

Early the next morning, I let myself out quietly and pushed my key through the letter box. My car was full of those things of my mother’s I had decided to keep. When I stopped for petrol, the clock in the shop showed 5.50 a.m. I bought a new SIM card, a buttery and the new edition of Classic Car. I was going to visit Malak on the way. This was how I got through the night, thinking of her and her house and how good I had felt staying with her and Oz, like I was worth something and we were ringed by wider spaces, the past, the future, the Caucasus, the Grampians, my memories of Khartoum. It should not have ended, not in the way that it did. I had not been able to speak to her since the police took our phones. Now I wanted more news of Oz. And she always got up early to pray so I would not be disturbing her.

It was a little after dawn when I parked in front of her house. Without the snow, the fields and the house itself looked bleak. She came out of the front door or at least it seemed to be her. Her appearance was noticeably different. Hair straight as a helmet, pencil skirt, leather jacket, boots reaching her knees. It was as if she was dressed for a part — what part, I wasn’t sure.

‘I thought you were the taxi,’ she said and explained that she was going to Glasgow for a few days.

I persuaded her to cancel the taxi booking and that I would give her a lift to the station. We went back indoors so that she could use the phone. I was grateful for those moments inside the house, to wander around and recharge myself. I was looking at the empty space on the wall where the sword had been, when she joined me. ‘My great grandfather said that he got it back from the Russians. This is the sword Shamil wanted to fight with until it was shattered into pieces. The fact that it is whole represents the sacrifice he made. The other day when Oz was playing with it in the snow, he wasn’t respecting it enough. He has — as I have — a heritage which is moral and thoughtful and merciful. Did he honour it? Or did he choose to go along with those who claim they’re acting in the name of Islam and at the same time don’t follow the principles of submission and restraint?’

I was taken aback. ‘You don’t believe he’s guilty, do you?’ Maybe she knew more than I did.

She tensed a little. ‘He’s involved. But I can’t be sure. It’s all moved online these days. You can do it all on a laptop — run a website, fundraise, send money abroad, post this and that. Search for whatever needs searching for. He’s ruined his life; how will he ever get out of this?’

She was not asking me a question. She went on, ‘Or I think “that little squirt ruined my life”. Because I forget he is old, I forget that to the world he is a man. I keep going back to when he was little, when he was nine, fifteen. My memory mixes all these versions of him together. And I feel the same anger that I felt for him when he muddied his brand new trainers or went out without locking the front door. Then I shake myself, this isn’t a prank … I keep going back over things he said, the way I brought him up. I don’t believe it. Except that I remember one time. There was something on the radio about a suicide bomber and he said “cool”.’ She looked down to the ground.

I could imagine him breathing the word without smiling, without intending to shock. ‘So what did you say to him?’ I asked.

‘I let it pass. We do that sometimes, we mums, we pretend not to hear.’

That stung. We mums. As if I would never find out, as if I would never be part of that group.

‘We bury our heads in the sand,’ she continued. ‘Because we are busy or we can’t be bothered to start an argument or because we can’t keep tabs on every little thing. And they do pass, these fads and moods. They go through phases. He went through a phase, I remember, of believing all these conspiracy theories about 9/11 — that it wasn’t Muslims that did it. I argued with him then, I talked him out of it, or at least I thought I did.’

I too had my misgivings about Oz. No situation at any given time is entirely new; the constraints and conversations are different, the fears are different, but still today is a ripple of former times, a version of what has been passed down. Supposing Oz was neither completely guilty nor completely innocent. Suppose he had done something wrong but that something might not be what he was arrested for, might not be what he would be punished for. And at the end of the day we would all accept what was happening. We would all have a rationale for it, a way of putting it into perspective.