Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

The city was larger than I remembered it to be. It stretched out, amorphous and repetitive with the supreme heat of the sun hanging down like a low ceiling. I started to sweat and lost focus. My thighs rubbed against each other; gritty sand entered my sandals and chaffed against my skin. But I did not want to give up and return. I needed to see the alphabet railing, that façade that entered my childhood and changed me. Crossing one street after the other, I was unfit and my memory was playing tricks on me. I should be there by now.

Suddenly I found myself in front of the Russian Embassy. Its flat exterior, large, solid and unwelcoming. It was exactly as it had been when I was young except for the change in the name board. It was as if time hadn’t passed and I was back holding my mother’s hand; she had come to renew our passports. The Russian official looked down at me, not with the open curiosity I usually triggered in Georgia but with a knowing look, a thin sneer, veiled disgust. Then my mother’s sudden impatience, the pressure of her hand on my arm yanking me outside. She carried me all the way to the car even though I was big enough to walk; she kissed me and hugged me and I wasn’t sure what it was that made her feel so sorry for me, but I was happy to be the centre of her attention.

I stopped to ask directions. My rudimentary Arabic made the girl snigger; I tried English and she shrugged. She had no idea what I was talking about. I was the only woman in the street with my head uncovered. An army truck lumbered past full of uniformed soldiers. I turned the corner and there was a pickup truck with a gun aiming at the traffic. It was as if another civil war was about to erupt. My T-shirt was soaked with sweat, my head pounded from the sun, my eyes watered. I acknowledged that I was lost and the most dignified thing to do was to retrace my steps, have a shower and wait for my hosts. I was sure that my feet were covered in blisters.

Late afternoon, before sunset, Grusha and I walked into my father’s house. When I had lived here, there was nothing around it but dust and a few scattered villas. Now the whole area was built up, the gardens mature, the newish streets already eaten away by potholes. In my memory the work on the house was still incomplete, it was without adequate flooring, without paint on the walls. Now it was completely unrecognisable. From the outside it looked brand new, ostentatious even. Floor-to-ceiling windows tinted blue, a modern façade and a tiled, spacious porch.

In the shade, a young boy was lounging in a large garden chair, an electronic tablet in his hand. To my surprise, he stood up when he saw us and held out his hand. True, he did all this with reluctance and apathy but still it was an impressive show of politeness. I liked him immediately. ‘This is Mekki,’ Grusha said and the pleasure I felt was thick and visceral. I looked at his forehead that was like mine, his eyes that were not, his skin that was darker. But I knew, instinctively, before he even spoke that his mind was like my mind and that we were both, mentally, introspectively, like our father.

‘I am your sister, Natasha,’ I said, in English because if this was one of the happiest sentences I ever said in my life, I wanted to say it in a language I was comfortable in.

His eyes widened and he was no longer bored, no longer wanting to get back to his game. He said, ‘My sister Natasha.’ His accent was heavy and his smile was one to treasure. This was love at first sight and I wanted to hug him.

He put his tablet on the chair and asked, ‘Do you live in Russia?’

‘No, in Scotland.’

‘Scotland,’ he repeated.

It didn’t seem to matter what he said or what I said. Just this connection was enough. ‘You must come and visit me,’ I said. ‘You would have a great time. I promise you.’

He listened to me describe the sights he would see, the snow, the castles, ski slopes and football matches. Suddenly I was desperately selling the idea of a visit. He listened, his eyes shining and dimming, a few nods, a few smiles. I kept on speaking until Grusha said, ‘Let us go inside to pay respects to Safia and then you two can talk later.’

Indoors the furniture was grotesque, huge and gilded. The house seemed to be full of women. Apparently the men’s period of condolence had come to an end and now my stepmother was only receiving women visitors. She was younger than I thought she would be. Mid-forties perhaps, striking-looking, even though she was wearing a plain white tobe. Her complexion was rough but here were the slanting attractive eyes Mekki had inherited. ‘I’ve never really got on with her,’ Grusha had said on the way. ‘But she is a very capable woman.’

I greeted my stepmother, still hazy from meeting Mekki, already wanting to be with him again. When Grusha introduced me, Safia launched into a monologue, soft at first but then her voice rose. I could not understand what she was saying. The Arabic words bounced off me. I strained to distinguish them from one another, to pin them down to a meaning. I understood the phrase, ‘her mother’ and concluded that, perhaps, she was not talking to me directly but performing for her friends. They were taken aback, I could tell. She was sounding more and more hostile. A few elderly ladies started to intervene. She ignored them. One of them led me and Grusha out to another, adjoining room. ‘Safia is upset,’ she explained. ‘She doesn’t know what she is saying.’

Grusha and I sat in that other, smaller room. There was a large television set and a pair of men’s glasses. My father’s. There were shelves of books, some in Russian. Who would read them now? There was a walking stick leaning against the door; it was made from warm, high-quality wood. Grusha looked distressed and I assumed it was because she understood everything Safia had said. I wanted to ask her, but my father’s room overwhelmed me. Newspapers folded up, a box of cigars, a bottle of cologne. A large print of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Zulu Girl was hanging on the wall. I remembered gazing at this print when I was young. I was a fan of Madonna then and the Zulu Girl did not fit into my idea of beauty. Perhaps if I had stayed I would have matured more fully. Perhaps my father could have taught me a thing or two. The room had a bed in one corner with no cover, just a pillow and a sheet. He must have stretched there and watched television.

I stood up to look at the bookshelf more closely. Here was the very same paperback of Love Story I remembered my mother reading, with Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw on the cover. Here was a box with my Bambi puzzle. We had left these things behind knowing we were going to find better replacements. How had he felt, all alone, seeing what reminded him of us? I picked up a copy of Hadji Murat — he had read it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, especially to discuss Tolstoy’s depiction of Shamil. I flipped the pages and found that my father had underlined certain lines and words. Perhaps he read it at a time when he was trying to improve his Russian. I turned to see Safia standing at the door. Another torrent of words but this time the gestures were clear enough: ‘Get out of my house.’

In the car Grusha repeated, in Russian, the gist of Safia’s outburst. This and what she explained about my father’s material circumstances at the time of his death clarified the picture.

My father struck lucky in the last years of his life. He worked with a Chinese petroleum company during the oil boom (likely to come to an end if the South, where most of the oil was, decided to secede in next month’s referendum) and he made quick, good money. With it, he revamped the house that I remembered as being half-built with dirt-cheap materials. It used to be in the middle of nowhere, and was now, as I had witnessed, in a popular desirable suburb. Given that my father had passed away, this perfectly decent estate would be divided, as Yasha later explained, according to Sharia law, in descending order of proportions between Mekki, myself and Safia.