Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

I must have sighed too loudly because Yasha looked up from the kofta sandwich he was eating. I told him about Oz, switching to English. He followed and replied in English.

‘That student of yours needs to man up. If he were in any part of the Arab world he would have been beaten, too. He would have come out of this with a broken rib or a broken nose. Or worse. Or not come out at all. He should count himself lucky.’

‘Well, he was born in Britain and so his expectations are based on that.’

Yasha snorted. He put down his sandwich and ambled to the fridge. At home he wore jellabiyas which made him look as regal as a giant. I suddenly felt discouraged from telling him about the police searching my office or Gaynor’s complaint against me. Such battles belonged wholeheartedly there.

Yasha and Grusha had an active social life. I was familiar with some of their friends, other cross-cultural families in which the mothers were Eastern European and the fathers Sudanese. I caught up with the news of those in my age group, how many children they had, who was in Dubai and who was in Moscow or Cape Town or Washington or not so far away in Port Sudan. I was shown wedding photos on mobile phones, heard descriptions of holidays spent and family reunions made. So this was the tribe I belonged to, here were my species. They knew my mother and my father, they had known me as a child and this gave them a confidence in their approach. It was hard not to relax with them, enjoying their company, practising that dance from Russian to English to the Arabic words I was now remembering or relearning or a little bit of both.

In three different languages I was told that Yasha and I were truly suited to each other. And weren’t you childhood sweethearts too? So what’s stopping you? His weight? Help him lose it, take him back to Scotland with you and put him through surgery. What other excuse? Your job? But don’t you want to be a mother? Surely you do and you can’t keep putting it off for ever.

How easily their words wormed their way through me! I was vulnerable, away from home and instead of resenting their interference in my private life, a sadness would wash over me, a sense that their words were too little, too late. I played a game of ‘what if?’ — what if my parents’ marriage had survived, what if Tony had never shown up? The sensory details around me evoked incomplete memories, half-formed scenes more serene and rosy than I would usually admit. Grusha showed me old photographs of a picnic on the bank of the river. I could not remember any such picnic. And yet here was the proof. My mother in wide seventies-style trousers, orange swirls fuzzy and almost psychedelic; my father’s hair like Jimi Hendrix’s. He was carrying me on his shoulder and my mother was looking up at me, smiling, reaching up one arm to hold my elbow as if helping me balance, a cigarette in her other hand. I could not remember being such a happy child.

Quite a portion of Khartoum’s social life revolved around weddings from which I was exempt due to my recent bereavement. I would stay behind while Grusha, dressed in her best and still resembling Hilary Clinton, got in her car and headed off. Sometimes Yasha accompanied her or went out with his own circle of friends. Grusha told me how for almost a year after his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, he kept to himself and shunned company. He stayed at home and ate his way through the pain. She seemed relieved that he was now adjusting.

It had taken me time to find Tony’s old house. Whenever I had the car, I would be on the lookout for the metal railing with the alphabet letters. One afternoon, I turned a corner and there it was, on a busy road that bore little resemblance to the one I remembered. But it was definitely the same house. Here, in front of it, my mother had parked and left me in the car to go inside and deliver a cake. Our lives were never the same again.

It was not enough for me to see it from the outside. I got out of the car and rang the bell. I waited and looked at the railing; it had not stood the test of time, it was rusty and the wall beneath it yellow-brown with dust and age. Cracked too, here and there. The letters themselves looked dated, cursive and pretentious. They had captivated me as a child and roused my ambitions. I peered through the gate; there were no parked cars and the house looked deserted, the garden overgrown and unkempt. I had started to turn away, when I heard sluggish footsteps. A tall man in a dirty jellabiya opened the door. He must be the resident watchman. I had not prepared what to say so I asked for Tony.

He shook his head and confirmed that no one was living in the house.

To gain access I lied that I wanted to look inside with a view to buying the house. He let me in. The path used to be strewn with attractive pebbles but most of them had worn away. I walked to the back and found the swimming pool. It was predictably smaller than I remembered and empty, with broken and missing tiles at the bottom and all along the sides. I remembered swimming here with a Tweety Bird inflatable ring while my mother was indoors. In room after room, there was only decay and filth, human excrement and the scurrying, scratching sound of rats. The light fittings and ceiling fans had been either removed or stolen. The bathrooms were stripped down to almost rubble. Upstairs in the master bedroom, the branches of a tree had pushed their way through the rectangular hole where the air-conditioner used to be. There was a horrible smell that turned out to be a recently dead pigeon. I lingered, absorbing it all, feeling it seep into me; it stirred in me an ache I could not at first understand. Only later did I recognise it as homesickness. A yearning for an identifiable place where I could belong.

Later, when I described the court session to Malak, I told her about the small beleaguered judge with crinkly white in his hair. He peered down his glasses at the papers in front of him. He cleared his throat now and again. I would have felt more confident in some kind of jacket, my shoulders straight, a tissue in my pocket. I would have preferred to stand in my sensible black shoes instead of these moist sandals.

‘Why did you change your name? Hussein is a good name, the name of the grandson of Muhammad, peace be upon him.’

‘Did you become a Christian when you were adopted?’

‘Are you or have you ever been married to a non-Muslim?’

‘Why do you know so little about the faith you were born into?’

Yasha had coached me on what to say. I went along as practised. The sound of the ceiling fan grew louder, the judge looking up at me over his glasses, down at the papers he was shuffling with his hand. The room and the whole building had a colonial feel to it. There were not many people about. I made a point of not searching for Safia. Was she here or not? I was afraid of her, now, because she was sure of herself, of what she was and what she was entitled to. But Yasha was backing me up and Malak was on my side.

‘You are an adult,’ the judge said after he ruled in my favour. ‘Your father made a mistake in not keeping you by his side, in not bringing you up as a Muslim — but he is gone now to meet his Lord and we must not speak ill of the dead. In fact it would seem that your father repented and admitted his mistake. We can only ask Allah, the Most Merciful, to forgive him. But as I said, you are a mature adult. It is your responsibility now to learn about your religion and to practise it as best as you can. Do you have something to say?’

I said that I was not a good Muslim but I was not a bad person either. I said I had a brother that I wanted to keep in touch with. I said that I wanted to give up my share of the inheritance to him. Apart from my father’s Russian books and Russian keepsakes, I wanted nothing. I said that I did not come here today to fight over money or for the share of a house. I came so that I would not be an outcast, so that I would, even in a small way, faintly, marginally, tentatively, belong.