Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

True, many villages, fearing reprisals from the Russians and their allies, would not take them in. Yet in others they were made welcome. In Tattakh a bull was slaughtered for the travellers and Fatima gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Muhammad-Sheffi. But they could not settle there. Shamil had to search for a more permanent home, a place where he could, insh’Allah, gather more fighters and rebuild.

At times he felt like a discarded rag, denied not only military success but the blessing of martyrdom. Perhaps he had not done enough and his fate was to fight on, his duty to do more. What did he possess? Where were the men who would fight with him again? In years to come, children like Ghazi would grow up and lead his armies. Women would give birth to new heroes. Now, though, it was a time to heal, an inward time for prayer and seclusion. He was surviving on the love of the Almighty, fuelled by the urge to win back Jamaleldin, shaded by the martyrs of Akhulgo.

It was weeks later, after all the fighting had died down and the Russians abandoned Akhulgo, that Shamil was able to go back in search of Djawarat. He walked around asking one survivor after the other until he came to an elderly man whose rheumy eyes had witnessed. The man’s voice barely rose above a whisper. ‘Your son crawled over his mother’s body until he too perished and was carried away by the water.’ The man pushed himself up to totter on spindly legs and pointed out where Djawarat had fallen. As he came nearer, Shamil recognised her clothes under the rocks and silt deposited by the flooding river. He knelt next to her and lifted up the stones that were crushing her. He cleared away the pebbles. He cleaned the mud away from what he was realising was a miracle. Yes, there was no rigor mortis for the martyr, no putrefaction or decomposition. In this way they are rewarded. Shamil had come across this phenomenon in some of the fallen bodies of his men. But Djawarat was his first woman martyr. It was usually during childbirth that women attained martyrdom. And yet, here was his own wife, on a battlefield. As honoured as the sincerest of warriors. She had not wanted to die; she had wanted to see her baby grow up. He lifted Djawarat and her body was as supple as he remembered it. He wiped her face and her skin felt alive under his fingers. His warm, heavy breath on her hair, ears and eyelashes. She was living, living with Allah, though Shamil knew she was dead. Even her lips, resting evenly on her teeth, were soft with moisture.

There is something about waking up in a room that one has not seen by daylight. It comes sharply into its own, mocking first impressions. This one was untidy, a work-in-progress and I guessed that I was the first to use it. It looked almost like a store room; several boxes were stacked on top of each other, an exercise bike was facing the wall, a large painting lay face down on the floor. A faint sound of machinery came from downstairs, a steady thud. I tugged open the curtains. The sun reflected on the snow and hurt my eyes. The path and garden were even more packed than yesterday, in confident clumps several feet high. My Civic was completely covered, which meant that it had snowed again during the night. It made me wonder whether I would be able to leave anytime soon. Far to my right the hills were a sweep of white and then below, the river was clean and flowing rapidly. A movement close by caught my eyes; powdery flakes drifting from a black and white tree. A strip of white on the black branch. My eyesight blurred and I moved away before an aura fully developed. I could not cope with a full-blown migraine now, not when I was away from my flat.

I had thought that if I discovered what made me anxious, I would be able to find a cure. But all I could do was learn to control it. The symptoms started when I was young. At a fancy-dress party, I kicked and screamed at a child with the head of a wolf and the body of a seven-year-old-boy. I knew that the wolf’s head was fake. I myself was wearing a Red Indian wig with two thick braids pleasantly heavy on my chest. I was not even unduly frightened of wolves. Whether stalking the three little pigs or behind bars at the zoo, they were thrilling and worthy of respect but they did not make me ill. It was the disproportion of the wolf’s head to the child’s body, the shock of the half-human, half-beast, the lack of fusion between the two. There was no merging. It was a clobbering together, abnormal and clumsy, the head of one species and the body of the other. Later, a picture of a centaur in a library book and I vomited over the pages. Then as a teenager, a scene in a horror film of a dog with a man’s head made me faint. The video was the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — the product of an innocent time when aliens from space were more threatening than Muslims from al-Qaeda.

The explanation became clearer as I grew older. I was seeing in these awkward composites my own liminal self. The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage. My Arab father who gave me up to Europe without a fight. I was the freak. I had been told so and I had been taught so and I had chewed on this verdict to the extent that, no matter what, I could never purge myself of it entirely. My intellect could rebel and I was well-read on the historical roots and taboos against miscegenation (the word itself hardly ever used now), but revulsion and self-loathing still slithered through my body in minute doses. The disease was in me despite the counselling and knowing better. Natasha Hussein would always be with me. I could glimpse her in the black-white contrast of a winter branch that was covered on one side with snow.

The machine noise and the thudding turned out, on investigation, to be Malak on a treadmill. I stood and watched her. She was wearing a black training suit and there was an olive bandana around her hair. She jogged for two minutes, then walked for one with the machine up on an incline. I had never visited a gym and so the procedure was intriguing. We talked about the snow, how it was even worse than yesterday, how the television had reported that a few had died, some were in hospital and commuters stuck in their cars for hours. I told Malak that I had called work but it was hard to get anyone at the department to pick up the phone. I had tried again with no luck to get a taxi to come and pick me up. Malak told me I was welcome to stay and sounded like she meant it. I had thought of walking to the nearest village but I didn’t really want to leave. Besides, I argued with myself, I had my laptop with me and could get quite a bit of work done here. It was an opportunity to see what Malak had among her family’s belongings that could shed more light on Shamil.

Over breakfast Oz asked me about my old name. Natasha Hussein explained my frizzy hair and the flat disc of my face, my skin that was darker than one parent’s and lighter than the other. ‘My mother is … was Georgian,’ I told Oz, ‘and my father is Sudanese.’

‘Is that where you were born?’

‘Yes, Khartoum. After the divorce my mother married a Scottish man and we came to Britain. They actually got married in Tbilisi — that’s where we went, Mum and I, after leaving Khartoum. We stayed in Georgia a few months. In between. It was boring until Tony came. He adopted me and gave me his name. We lived in London for a few years then moved to Aberdeen.’ It was an effort formulating this summary, explaining myself. I preferred the distant past, centuries that were over and done with, ghosts that posed no direct threat. History could be milked for this cause or that. We observed it always with hindsight, projecting onto it our modern convictions and anxieties. When I was doing my Highers, the subject became my passion, a world that kept me awake at night; that claimed me, without conditions, as a citizen. I could lose myself in it and forget to visit my mother. I could memorise the dates of battles and the details of treaties so that I could blot out my father, so that I could be without a childhood self. The taunt ‘swot’ was the only one that never bothered me.