The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel by Leila Aboulela Page A

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.
    Oz passed me the peanut butter. He put more bread in the toaster. ‘Do you have family in Khartoum?’
    ‘My father is still there. He remarried and has a son. My father,’ I expanded, knowing Oz would be interested, ‘is Muslim in name only, unless he’s lately changed. He didn’t care about religion. He was a member of the Communist party and they gave him a scholarship to Russia where he met my mother and faith was not an issue for them. So I wasn’t brought up Muslim even though we lived in a Muslim country. But I was aware of Islam around me. You can’t miss it in Sudan. My grandmother prayed. When she came to stay with us, I would taunt her and push her as she prayed just because I knew she wouldn’t leave her prayers and punish me. She used to swipe at me, though, while she was praying.’ I mimicked my skinny grandmother flailing her arms.
    Oz laughed. ‘That’s so mean.’ He sounded like a schoolboy.
    ‘During Ramadan,’ I said, now that I was on a roll with memories, ‘none of us used to fast, not even my father, but instead of eating lunch at the usual time before siesta we would eat around sunset. My father insisted on it. He liked the special drinks and foods of Ramadan. You’ve never lived in a Muslim country, have you? Culture and religion are so entwined that sometimes people can’t tell the difference. At sunset, the special Ramadan cannon would go off. It was a relic of Turco-Egyptian rule. I would hear that one bang as I was playing in the street. The other children were fasting and we would each go to our own homes. Sometimes I fasted like them just so as not to be different, but it annoyed my mother.’ Those were the years when I had hope of fitting in. Then awkwardness became my home.
    ‘Do you think if you stayed with us here, you would change?’ He stirred more sugar into his coffee, splashed a drop of milk on the table.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘If, just to say, the snow lasted for days and days. If you couldn’t leave, would you come closer to faith, just by being with the two of us?’
    I knew that I should resent his suggestion. Its echoes of compulsion and submission. ‘No matter how long the snow lasts, it will melt and I will leave. Then