Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

I stayed in Khartoum much longer than planned. Throughout the New Year and the run-up to the referendum, which resulted in South Sudan gaining its independence. Safia had hired a lawyer and taken me to court to prove that I was no longer a Muslim and as such deserved to be cut off from my father’s inheritance. My first instinct on hearing this was to brush it off and assume that I would be well out of the country before proceedings started. It did not strike me as important enough to postpone my return. When I casually mentioned it to Yasha, though, his reaction made me reconsider.

‘Why are you laughing?’ he said. ‘This is serious.’

We were in his flat. I was spending more and more time there so that I could access the internet. Evening after evening we sat opposite one another; I with my laptop and he spread out on a recliner, with his. Sometimes we worked and sometimes we watched films or I wrote emails to Malak. His flat had modern furniture compared to his mother’s downstairs. It was more comfortable too. He had no qualms about using the air-conditioner even when opening the window and putting on the ceiling fan would have been tolerable, if a little balmy. Soon I discovered that after eating the healthy dinner Grusha cooked, he would order takeaways and keep eating late into the night. He drank Pepsi instead of water. No wonder.

‘I am laughing,’ I said. ‘Because Safia’s charge sounds deliciously medieval.’

‘You have to fight this, Natasha.’ He was wearing a white shirt. It flattered him as did the gritty, end-of-the-day look.

I shook my head.

He picked up his phone. ‘Do you want rice pudding or crème caramel?’

This was the start of the post-dinner bingeing that I had recently been pulled into. He would order more food — kebab, pizza or shawerma — but I stuck primly to dessert. Grusha’s cooking was delicious and healthy. The kind of soups I missed: fresh vegetables and tender chicken or lamb. The ingredients were less packaged here, not beaten into submission by supermarket requirements. Often the vegetables were misshapen, twinned and oddly stuck together but their scent was pronounced, their taste more distinct. There was no reason to keep on eating after such a dinner. But this had become Yasha’s habit.

‘Crème caramel,’ I said.

‘Anything else?’

‘No.’ I had to resist the abandonment he was proposing. He put through the order. A large pizza that he would eat all by himself, two kebab sandwiches, pastry for dessert. Sometimes the shops would not deliver and we would have to go there ourselves and pick the food up. I liked these late-night drives, kept secret from Grusha, who would definitely disapprove. Yasha had taken me into his confidence, shared with me his nocturnal guzzling. I never had the heart to lecture him on watching his weight, let alone reducing it. I did worry that he was jeopardising his health but I did not want to embarrass him.

We would drive through poorly lit streets and past the airport. Once we saw a car explode, just like that, orange flames rising up. An excited group gathered. For a long time afterwards, the loud pop of the tyres numbed my ears.

‘Safia can’t go around making such accusations. It’s immoral.’ One of the buttons of his shirt had come undone. ‘And it’s obvious that her motive is greed.’

‘I don’t want anything.’ It was too much drama to be pulled into. But my father’s copy of Hadji Murad — I would like to have that. Surely it meant nothing to Safia; I doubted she could read Russian. ‘My brother deserves it all.’ I had been regularly meeting Mekki. Every time felt special, almost too good to be true.

‘I am opposed to this apostasy law but if it won’t be amended, then the message needs to go out loud and clear that it is virtually impossible to enforce. Safia’s position is weak. You will win and afterwards we can turn around and sue her for slander.’

I noted the ‘we’ in his sentence. It was because he was a lawyer. He wanted to help me in his professional capacity.

Instinctively I switched from Russian to English. ‘So let me get this straight. I am to go to court and prove that I am a Muslim? I haven’t got a leg to stand on. Nothing. I am not even sure if I am. What is this, the inquisition?’

He had been shaking his head as I was talking. Now he said, also in English, ‘That’s exactly it. You shouldn’t have to prove that you’re a Muslim — you are one by birth, by default. You have a right, a human right, to be a bad Muslim, a lapsed Muslim, a secular Muslim, whatever. She though, doesn’t have any right to excommunicate you, especially when she has something to gain out of it. Believe me, we can get this thrown out of court in a matter of minutes.’ He smiled as if this was a case he wanted to sink his teeth into.

‘Yasha, this is going to mess up my plans.’

He waved his hand in dismissal and changed back into Russian. ‘One week. Trust me. Just delay your return by a week.’ He paused and looked at me as if he was noticing something about me for the first time. ‘You’re the only one, apart from my mother, who still calls me Yasha.’

‘It’s because, Yassir,’ I emphasised his real name, ‘I’ve been away for twenty years. I’m stuck in a time warp.’

‘Well get you out of it.’

I was beginning to like his use of ‘we’. I guessed that he had carried it over from Arabic but still there was a grandness about it and a welcome.

The case ended up taking a lot longer than a week. To start with I had to prove that I was my father’s daughter. I had to prove that Natasha Wilson was Natasha Hussein. This required that I obtain my adoption papers from the UK, get them authenticated by the Foreign Office and the Sudanese Embassy in London. To my relief and surprise, Tony, all the way from Aberdeen, was helpful throughout this process. He ‘rose to the occasion’ as Grusha said and facilitated most of this paperwork.

Week in, week out I waited in Khartoum. Borrowing Grusha’s or Yasha’s car I would pick up Mekki from school or near his house. He snuck out to meet me behind his mother’s back. Lucky for me, he was at the age when he was allowed greater freedom and felt the need to exercise it. Having his own mobile phone also made the logistics much easier. ‘Where would you like to go today?’ I would ask when he climbed in next to me, his expression deliberately casual, though once or twice he did look over his shoulder to see if anyone was looking.

He would say, ‘Take me to Ozone,’ or Solitaire, or Tangerine, or Time Out. These were neither amusement arcades nor cinemas nor playgrounds. Instead they were stylish coffee shops and restaurants where we would sit in pleasant, often outdoor surroundings and afterwards I would pay a hefty bill. An eye-opener for me that nowadays a twelve-year-old’s treat was a latte. ‘Are you allowed coffee?’ I once asked but he said, ‘I’m a man,’ and so I shut up. Most of the time my brother and I spent together was in silence. He studiously dug into his treats and sat back in his chair quite pleased with himself. I, too, once I got over my British need for small talk, relaxed and enjoyed being where I was, looking at him, listening to snatches of the conversations around me. His similarity to me continued to be a novelty; his resemblance to my father would startle me every now and again.

I showed him a photo of my classic Skoda. ‘It’s a convertible,’ I explained. I pointed out the details I particularly liked, the dashboard, the gear stick mounted on the steering column, ‘Felicia’ written in lower-case cursive. I wanted him to learn.