Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

They both had their backs turned; I could not see the expression on their faces. Yasha started the engine. ‘Not good,’ Grusha said at last. I did not want to know more. Not yet. It would come and already the effect was sinking in. I looked out of the window. More traffic than I remembered, a whole row of fast-food chains. Novel to be in a city that didn’t have a Starbucks.

Grusha’s house was how I remembered it to be. It was neat because Aunty Grusha always kept a mercilessly clean house. We sat in the living room. She said that my father had died the previous night. Mid-morning today he was buried.

I didn’t recognise this feeling of disappointment. The sheepishness of arriving too late. ‘I needn’t have come then.’

Yasha looked down at his hands. His bulk spread over the sofa, immense girth, each thigh as wide as a human being. He would not be able to travel in Economy. I remembered him in swimming trunks, the ripped muscles of his stomach, his thin neck. Now even his face was flattened, his features as if pushed through a slab of dough. It was sadly fascinating. That defeat could manifest itself in such a way brought tears to my eyes.

Grusha put her arm around me. ‘At first we didn’t know what to do — to catch you before you set out or to tell you in the middle of your travels. Then we decided it would be better if you heard the news from us in person rather than on the telephone.’

Yasha started to speak about my father’s last hours but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. I stared at his mouth, the route to his fatness; I heard his voice and it was not the voice of a young man but someone who was confident, experienced, almost jaded. Perhaps I would only rarely see him during my visit. He was a busy man and probably did not spend a lot of time with his mother even though they lived in the same house.

‘Your father was proud of you,’ Grusha said. ‘When you got your PhD, we never heard the end of it.’

It was hard to believe this but she would not lie. We sat in silence. I cried quietly, almost soundlessly. I had wanted to see him again. It was true. I had wanted to argue with him and listen to him rant. He had made me angry on the telephone but when the anger died I was left with the thrill of his honesty. ‘I just could not stand the sight of you.’ That was exactly what I remembered during the divorce, his hurt that made him repulsive and also frightening, his eyes that looked straight through me as if I didn’t exist, all the days and weeks when he didn’t speak to me, when he couldn’t speak to me, not even hello or good morning or do this or do that. My mother had betrayed him and I was her daughter and he had not been able to rise above that.

I started to feel hot. I peeled off my cardigan, pulled away the scarf looped around my neck. My newly bought dowdy skirt reached my ankles. It irritated me. If Grusha was wearing trousers, then why couldn’t I too, and why had that journalist, last year, been fined for wearing them? Or was Grusha exempt because she was Russian? This was one of the irksome things about being an outsider — one never knew the extent to which the rules could be bent. I wanted to initiate this conversation but it was not the right time.

Yasha said, ‘Tomorrow I could take you to the cemetery … if you like.’ My expression made him falter. To see that freshly dug grave, the still-moist earth piled over it. The idea did not appeal to me at all.

‘Tomorrow we will go to your father’s house so that you can pay your condolences,’ Grusha said firmly. ‘You must meet your brother. He is twelve, I think. Or eleven.’

I had a half-brother who I never thought about, didn’t know what he looked like. ‘What is his name?’

‘Mekki.’

‘Mekki. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to a child.’

Neither Grusha nor Yasha responded and I suddenly felt self-conscious. Maybe these were the sort of comments that reminded Yasha of his late daughter. Afterwards, I glanced around for a photo of her, on top of the piano, on the walls, but there were none. I was conscious of the house around me and how familiar it was. Little had been done to make it look modern but as Grusha explained, there was an added separate flat for Yasha upstairs. ‘It has its own entrance,’ she said. He must have moved in there after he lost his wife and daughter.

When I woke up the following morning, the house was empty. Grusha and Yasha had already gone to work. I set about connecting myself to the internet. Yasha’s upstairs flat, I had been told, had the stronger connection, but it did not feel right to try to gain access to it while he was out. After a few attempts, I found that the speed was not bad and after I checked my emails, I started to write to Malak asking how things were, telling her my news, but I lost the connection before I clicked Send. I waited, hoping it would come back but it didn’t. After a while I gave up and went in search of breakfast.

In the kitchen a maid was washing the dishes. I chatted to her for a while though my mind was on Malak and Oz. The maid was Ethiopian and had been working here for five years. ‘Shall I make you breakfast?’ she asked and looked surprised when I said that I would get it myself.

I sat on the veranda with my mug of tea. After the bitterest Scottish winter, the heat and the light felt defiantly foreign, excessive. The small garden was full of flowers and in it stood a large guava tree. I could hear beyond its walls, the sounds of people walking past, the rumble of traffic. All this had existed while I was away. Khartoum as a city, its people, those who had never known me and those who had forgotten me. My mother and I had simply dropped off the radar. After the scandal we had been talked about less and less until, with time, our absence came to be considered the most natural of outcomes. Childhood psychologists say that the first five years are the most formative. I had spent them all here. My mother and father young and in love, easy-going, hopeful. Our day-to-day life an extension of their Cold War romance, as promising as the prospects of an African engineer with a PhD from a Russian university. My father taking me to the river, getting on a boat, afterwards buying peanuts and candy floss; my mother visiting Grusha, the two of them complaining, in Russian, about the weather. My father, during a power cut, peeing in the garden instead of making his way indoors in the dark. My mother lifting her hair to rub an ice cube on the back of her neck. I would always carry this. All the other layers on top could not obliterate this core.

There was a heaviness in my chest when I thought of them. They hadn’t been good parents and I hadn’t been a good daughter to them. Still, regret was neither attractive nor dignified. My father had sounded pathetic on the phone, wild even. ‘I shouldn’t have let another man support my own flesh and blood,’ he had also said. ‘I made a mistake.’ And what happened when mistakes couldn’t be rectified? Where did one go? To what? To whom? From outside came the sound of a car screeching to a halt, horns and a few shouts. My skin felt more sensitive than usual, my eyes prone to tears; all was vivid and louder. I decided to go out for a walk.

The pavements were narrow and broken and sometimes there was no pavement at all. Toyota pickups zoomed past me. Motorcycles, vans and more four-wheel-drives. Tea ladies sitting in a row. A man stared at me, the whites of his eyes almost yellow. He was squatting in front of a mechanic’s yard doing nothing. Rubbish piled on the side of a street; broken chairs stacked on top of each other. Too much struck me as incongruous. A donkey stood in the middle of a dusty street corner with no purpose or owner in sight — I stopped and, like a tourist, took a picture of it with my phone. But I was not wandering aimlessly; I wanted to find Tony’s old house. I wanted to see the metal railing with the cut-out letters of the alphabet. If it was still there, if the garden wall hadn’t been changed, then I wanted to look at it again. It would be a long walk by my reckoning, but I had nothing else to do and would rather not get on the wrong transport.