Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

‘We came back yesterday,’ she explained. ‘I hired a car because he refused to take the train. He said he didn’t want to be around people. All the way in the car, he lay in the back seat. He wouldn’t speak to me. He said he wanted to sleep but I could tell he wasn’t asleep. I could tell he was just tense, staring in the dark. I put on the radio and he shouted at me to turn it off. Rudely. Not like himself at all. Then when we came back, he wouldn’t eat dinner. He wouldn’t shower. He just went to his room and stayed there. I knock, he doesn’t answer. But he is there. I hear him moving around. I eavesdropped.’ She ran her hand through her hair. She looked like she too hadn’t slept well.

‘You have to look after yourself,’ I said to her. ‘How can you take care of him, if you are in a state?’

She shook her head. ‘I need to take the rented car back into town. And the day after tomorrow I have to fly to London to record a radio play. How am I going to leave him like this?’

‘He’s had a bad experience. Give him time. Why don’t you grab yourself a bite to eat and I’ll stay here while you take the car back into town.’

‘Thank you, Natasha. I’ll pick up a few groceries for him too.’

I left her in the kitchen and went upstairs. I knocked on the door of his room. ‘Oz, it’s me, Natasha.’

There was no sound from inside. Perhaps he was asleep. I stood at the door not sure what to do next. Then I heard him moving, getting up from the bed, walking around. I knocked again. ‘Oz, I know you’re not feeling well. But do you think you’re up to coming downstairs and lying down on the sofa for a bit? I’ll wait for you downstairs. Your mum is just going into town for a bit.’

In the sitting room, I sat staring at the empty space on the wall where Shamil’s sword had been. The sun shone at an acute angle low in the sky. A flash of brilliance before the early darkness.

Oz came down in his pyjamas, wrapped in a blanket. Unshaven, his hair greasy, streaks of dark skin under his eyes. He sat on the sofa, drew his feet up underneath him and bunched up under the blanket. He lowered his head.

I told him about my father being ill and how I was going to Sudan. I spoke about the weather. He listened to me or at least to my voice. He emitted anger and some bewilderment.

When he finally spoke, he said, ‘I’m not going back to uni. If that’s why you’re here.’

It seemed an odd thing to say. I chose my words carefully. ‘There is no rush to go back to uni. You’ve missed the first week of the exams and I wouldn’t advise you to try and sit for the second week. What you would need to do is fill out an Extenuating Circumstances form —’

‘Extenuating circumstances!’ He looked straight at me for the first time and gave a forced laugh. ‘Oh yes, I was just pulled in for a whole ten days of fucking questions. One stupid question after another. They locked me up in a tiny room. I couldn’t even sleep. They were watching me every single minute of the day, writing things down, every little thing I said or did …’ He stopped abruptly and looked out of the window. A bird had flown past and made him nervous.

‘What sort of questions did they ask you?’

‘Don’t you start asking me questions! That’s what Malak was doing and I can’t stand it. One question after the other. What did they feed you? What did they say? What did you do to make them suspicious? I don’t want to answer any more questions. Enough.’ He put his head back on his bunched-up knees.

‘You are out now,’ I said. ‘They’ve released you without charge. This is excellent.’ I tried to sound pleased or at least grateful. The room was getting darker.

He spoke without looking up and his voice was muffled. ‘I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.’

‘You’ve had a terrible experience. In time you will get over it. A few weeks’ rest and recuperation is what you need. You can even take the next semester off. Why not? Just start the new academic year fresh in September.’

He shook his head, threw the blanket on the floor and stood up. ‘I’m not going back there.’ He headed towards the kitchen. I heard him rummaging in the fridge then slamming shut the door of the microwave. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘At least he is starting to eat.’

I drew the curtains and switched on the lights. These were the shortest days of the year.

I went to the Sudanese Embassy to get a visa. My Sudanese passport had expired years ago and I never renewed it. I actually didn’t even know where it was. Lost over the years. In one move or the other. In it my name was Natasha Hussein. But on everything else — my British passport, my Russian passport, my driving licence, PhD — I had a different surname. In the spatial details of the embassy, in its hue, tones and pace my planned destination started to take shape. Men who spoke like my father, a woman in a tobe coming in to renew her passport, pictures of the Nile on the wall, younger versions of Tony waiting to collect their visas. A certain casualness, a slower tempo, a difference that made me, for the first time, excited to be travelling.

‘Your visa will take four to six weeks.’

I was taken aback. ‘But I need to go now. My father is seriously ill.’

‘Are you Sudanese?’

Why ask such a difficult question?

‘When was the last time you were there?’

‘Twenty years ago.’

I also, they said, needed a sponsor. On Cleveland Row, I called Grusha. She told me not to worry. She said that Yasha could pull a few strings for me at my end. I was to fill out the form and wait a few days in London.

In my hotel room I surfed for news of Oz’s release without charge. His arrest had been a news item; would his release also be one? There was nothing among the snow warnings, cancelled flights and delayed trains. I had been lucky to get here. Instead a news item from Sudan caught my eye, a video posted on YouTube of a woman being whipped by the police. She is unrestrained in her cries, pleading and shuffling on her knees, raising her arms uselessly to obstruct the blows. A small crowd watches. The scene is slow and saturated in humiliation, a world removed from valour or decency. The policeman is laughing at this vocal plaything rolling on the ground; the sun shines on his blue uniform and on the white of a nearby parked car. I don’t want to go there.

I spent the following day at the National Archives among the correspondence of the Foreign Office. Here was the response of the British ambassador in Turkey to the news of the kidnapping: ‘Shamil is a fanatic and a barbarian with whom it would be difficult for us … to entertain any credible or satisfactory relations.’ Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, certainly agreed, calling it an ‘atrocious and revolting outrage’. This was the end of British support for Shamil. His reputation, strong in the previous decades, was shattered. The admiration he had roused after Akhulgo turned to disgust. Did he guess this would happen? Did he care? Or was Jamaleldin more important to him? I might never know.

As I left the archives, I ‘heard’ my mother talk about shopping. She had loved London, loved Harrods. And now the city went on without her. Of course it did. The whole world had. On Oxford Street I joined the Christmas shoppers, looked at the window displays, wondering if I should buy new Sudan-friendly clothes, but I did not want to be stuck with them if my visa didn’t come through. Instead I bought gifts for Grusha and Yasha; I bought a dressing gown for my father. I could post them if I ended up not going.

With time on my hands, I called Malak. She asked me to meet her tomorrow in the Starbucks near the BBC. She would be finished by six, she said. I got there before her and waited for quite a time. She came in looking tired and distracted after a whole day of recording. She said she was playing the part of a Jewish postmistress in 1940s Poland but did not give more details. ‘It was hard to leave Oz though he insisted he would be fine,’ she said, sitting back in the sofa, the mug huge in her hands. She was wearing layers of grey and blue, loosening the scarf around her neck, pulling strands of her hair behind her ears.