The Translator Read online

Page 2


  This was the Mahasen who now frowned when mentioning Sammar’s name. ‘That idiot girl.’

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  ‘Euphorbia Herimentiana, Cereus Peruvianus, Hoya Carnosa.’ Rae read out loud the names of the cacti. Names that Sammar could not pronounce. ‘Cleistocactus Reae, planted by Silvana Suarez, Miss World 1979. Really?’ He made a face. It made Sammar smile. It was the second time she had seen him outside work and it still felt strange. New and happy like seeing a baby walk for the first time.

  The first time had been Saturday when she went to the public library with Yasmin. Yasmin was Rae’s secretary. A glass door connected her office with Rae’s so that when Sammar went to see him, she could see, while they talked, Yasmin furiously typing, her straight black hair hiding her face. Yasmin’s parents were from Pakistan but she was born and had lived all her life in different parts of Britain. She had a habit of making general statements starting with ‘we’, where ‘we’ meant the whole of the Third World and its people. So she would say, ‘We are not like them’, or ‘We have close family ties, not like them.’ There were two other department secretaries who worked in the same room as Yasmin: cheerful, coffee-scented ladies with greying hair and pleated skirts. When one of them once patted the curves of her stomach and bemoaned the fact that she could not stick long to any diet, Yasmin was quick to say, ‘Our children are dying of hunger while the rich count their calories!’

  Yasmin’s husband, Nazim, worked some of the time on the oilrigs off-shore. When he was away, she tended to meet Sammar at the weekends. Yasmin had a car and Sammar liked driving around, listening to the radio, seeing parts of the city she had not seen before. She wished she could have a car and escape the weather.

  That Saturday, they went to the library because Yasmin, now ten weeks pregnant, wanted to look at baby books. There were shelves of books about pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding. The library was warm, full of people, full of books. There were books on Caesarean birth, abortions, infertility and miscarriage. Sammar had miscarried once, a year after her son was born. She remembered the night, fateful and climactic, coming after days of anxiety, days of awareness that this pregnancy was not going right, something was wrong. She remembered Tarig being calm, warm and sure of what to do. She remembered him on his hands and knees mopping the bathroom floor, her womb that had fallen apart.

  There was gratitude between them. Gratitude cushioned the quarrels, petty and deep. It levelled the dips in affection. Sometimes this gratitude came to her in trances and in dreams. Dreams with neither settings nor narratives, just the feeling, distilled.

  ‘I can only take six books,’ Yasmin was saying. ‘If you had a card I could borrow on yours. That’s an idea. Let’s get you a card.’

  ‘No, some other time.’ She did not like doing things impulsively, without warning. She looked at the queues which stretched out from the desk, the librarians running pens over the barcodes on the books. They made her nervous. She tried to sound convincing. ‘You’ll never read more than six books in a month. Six is enough.’

  But Yasmin insisted, giving her a lecture on how a library card was a right. ‘You pay tax, don’t you?’ she said and told her how a Nigerian woman with three children had lived in Aberdeen for seven years before finding out that she was entitled to Child Benefit. ‘No one told her,’ Yasmin screeched in a whisper.

  Twelve books on pregnancy made their way to the counter. Yasmin did all the talking. Sammar felt like a helpless immigrant who didn’t know any English. She imagined the English words lifting away from her brain, evaporating, forming a light mist. It was one of the things that Mahasen had said to her the night of their quarrel, almost trembling with anger, fluent with righteousness. The night when Sammar had asked her permission to marry Ahmad Ali Yasseen. An educated girl like you, you know English… you can support yourself and your son, you don’t need marriage. What do you need it for? He started to talk to me about this and I silenced him. I shamed him, the old fool. ‘He’s religious,’ Sammar had choked the words, ‘he feels a duty towards widows…’ He can take his religiousness and build a mosque but keep away from us. In the past, widows needed protection, life is different now. She had wanted to say something in reply but the words stuck in her throat like dough.

  ‘Rae’s book,’ said Yasmin, just as they were leaving, ‘did you see it? I’m sure it’s here. Nobody reads these kind of things.’ With their twelve books they went back to the History section and searched, finally finding The Illusion of an Islamic Threat upstairs, classified under Politics. On the back Sammar read in italics what others said about it, Brings a new understanding to the turbulent situation in the Middle East… – Independent on Sunday. Isles sets out to prove that the threat of an Islamic take-over of the Middle-East is exaggerated… his arguments are bold, his insights provocative… – The Scotsman.

  They talked about him when they left the library, their voices carrying above the sound of the traffic and the cold wind. Sammar wanted to know about his ex-wives. The first, Yasmin said, was married now and living in Wales. She belonged to the distant past, Yasmin had never met her. The second, the mother of the daughter who was in boarding school in Edinburgh, worked for the World Health Organisation in Geneva. They used to live in Cults, a nice big house. Then he moved to a flat in town.

  Yasmin drove erratically, the books slid and parted in the back seat. She parked in a tree-lined street, in a part of town that was unfamiliar to Sammar. ‘This is where he lives,’ she said. ‘I’ve come here often with Nazim. It’s good that you’re with me, I can give him these faxes that came for him yesterday after he went home. He’s waiting to hear any moment now from the anti-terrorist programme. They’re going to take him on as a consultant.’

  ‘We can’t do that, it’s not right,’ said Sammar, ‘give them to him on Monday…’ But Yasmin was already unclasping her seat-belt, switching the heating off, pulling up the hand brake. ‘We’re together,’ she answered, ‘it’s not as if either of us is on her own.’

  ‘He might not be in anyway,’ Sammar went on. Yasmin was out of the car, Sammar still tied in by her seat-belt. It was getting dark, the clouds were plastered purple against the sky, the sun far away.

  When Rae opened the door, fur brushed against Sammar’s knees. It was a large black cat which made its way indoors with them. Sammar was wary of cats. When she was young stray cats had sneaked indoors and shocked her by jumping out of cupboards or from underneath the stairs. They were savage cats, their ribs visible against matted, dirty fur. Some had a black hole instead of an eye, some had stumpy legs, amputated tails. While she screamed, they ran back and forth in the room, desperately seeking an exit. It seemed to her that they clambered the walls, clawed the paint, cried furiously like she was crying, to get out of the trap they had voluntarily entered and back to the outdoor life they knew.

  Tarig had a story about stray cats, the ones that lived around the hospital. ‘Their favourite meal,’ he said, ‘comes every time a baby is born. They wait around the dustbins, one juicy placenta drops in, and you should see how they fight for it!’ He liked to tease her with gory hospital stories. Laugh at the expression on her face.

  Rae’s cat was slow and wellfed. She walked, glossy and serene, around the room while he greeted Yasmin and Sammar and showed them in. ‘What happened to your hair!’ was the first thing Yasmin said. His hair was cut so short that it stood up from his head like spikes. He laughed and patted his head, saying, ‘I guess the barber was over-zealous this time.’ He looked different from how he was at work. He was not wearing a tie and had not shaved. It seemed to Sammar that the flat was not very large. The room they sat in was attached to the kitchen. Large bay windows overlooked the road and on the other side of the room, over the kitchen sink, was another window with yellow blinds. There were books lined under the window and the weekend supplement spread out on the floor.

  The cat climbed up and sat on Sammar’s knees. She did not know what to do, she had not looked at a cat closely like this
before, not seen the yellow slits of its iris, the shine on its perfect black coat. She stroked it awkwardly and listened to Yasmin and Rae talking about the faxes, the weather outside, the headlines on the newspaper that Rae now picked up from the floor and folded away. ‘I loathe all this fuss about the Royals,’ Yasmin was saying. ‘Loathe’ was another of the words that Yasmin often used. ‘I loathe this shitty British weather.’

  Rae went to make tea. The cat left Sammar’s lap and she began to look around at the rugs on the wall, the copper plant pots on the floor. There was a photograph of Rae’s daughter on top of a shelf of books. She looked like she was around ten or eleven and was riding a horse. She wore boots and a cap with straps along her chin. Sammar imagined the child’s mother with that same long brown hair, courageous too, working for the WHO, an important job, doing good, helping people.

  She thought as she drank her tea that she was in a real home. She had not been in a real home for a long time. She lived in a room with nothing on the wall, nothing personal, no photographs, no books; just like a hospital room. She had given everything away, that week before taking Tarig home. She had stripped everything and given it away, never imagining she would come back, never imagining the quarrel with Mahasen. And when she did come back she had neither the heart nor the means to buy things. Pay the rent for the room and that was all. One plate, one spoon, a tin opener, two saucepans, a kettle, a mug. She didn’t care, didn’t mind. Four years ill in a hospital she had made for herself. Ill, diseased with passivity, time in which she sat doing nothing. The whirlpool of grief sucking time. Hours flitting away like minutes. Days in which the only thing she could rouse herself to do was pray the five prayers. They were the only challenge, the last touch with normality, without them she would have fallen, lost awareness of the shift of day into night.

  She tasted the tea Rae had made for her and listened to the only two people she really knew in this city. Yasmin, her face a little pinched in the early weeks of pregnancy, dark shadows under sleepy eyes. But that was natural, she would be big and healthy in a few months’ time, round in maternity clothes. And Rae – it was strange to see people she only knew from work in their own homes. He didn’t shave at weekends.

  One of the magazines that lay open on the floor had pictures of different world maps. It was an article on traditional maps and how they tended to show continents incorrectly in proportion to one another: Europe appeared larger than South America, North America larger than Africa, Greenland larger than China, when the opposite was true. In the latest, equal-area map, Africa was a massive elongated yellow, Britain a rosy insignificance. Somewhere in this vast yellow, near the blue that marked the flow of the Nile, was the life she had been exiled from.

  She knelt and sat on her heels to look more closely. The familiar names of towns, in black type against the yellow, moved her. Kassala, Darfur, Sennar. Kadugli, Karima, Wau. Inside her was their sheer dust and meagreness. Sunshine and poverty. Voices of those who endured because they asked so little of life. On the next page of the magazine there was an advertisement for educational materials. Schoolgirls in Somalia, smiling, arm in arm. Shortsleeved white shirts under a navy pinafore, white belts around their waists. She had dressed like that, been a face like that once. Hair carefully brushed, white socks and the white belt. She remembered walking with friends, her fingers hooked in their belts. Tugging. ‘Hurry, the canteen will run out of Bezianous.’ The bottles had little bumps all around, pretty curved bumps. The Bezianous was pink and sweet, never cold enough. Smooth the sand under your foot, pat it flat, very flat. Hold the empty bottle, don’t cheat and bend your knees, let it drop. If it stands, then what? Your wish will come true, or ‘he’ loves you too.

  When she looked up, Rae was watching her, a look in his eyes like kindness. Encouraged she said, ‘I used to wear a uniform like that in secondary school.’

  ‘They made us wear shorts,’ he said, ‘even in winter. It was awful, walking to school in the cold. I was glad when I got expelled.’

  ‘You got expelled from school?’ asked Yasmin. ‘What terrible thing did you get up to?’

  ‘I wrote an essay,’ he was laughing so that Sammar did not know whether he was joking or not. ‘I wrote an essay entitled Islam is better than Christianity.’

  Yasmin started to laugh. ‘Liar, I don’t believe you, you’re making this up.’

  ‘No, it’s true. This was in the fifties. They probably wanted to expel me anyway and this was the last straw.’

  ‘Why did you write something like that?’

  ‘I had an uncle who went to Egypt with the army in the Second World War. When he got there, he became interested in Sufism, converted to Islam, and left the army. You can imagine, he was considered a traitor, a defector. My grandmother told people that he was missing in action. She kept saying it until she believed it and everyone else in the family came to believe it too. Uncle David wrote to her, and to my mother too, explaining why he had done what he did.’

  Sammar closed the magazine. Rae sat back in his chair. He coughed and blew his nose in a large blue handkerchief. He looked as if this was a story he told often and liked to tell again. ‘I read this letter. It was, I think, the first time I came across the word “Islam” and understood what it meant. Of course I was aware that my uncle had done something scandalous and I was curious. Also I had this essay that I had to write for school. I wish that I still had David’s letter now, or even the essay. Because,’ and he paused, ‘I plagiarised whole paragraphs. The title though was mine. David never of course wrote that Islam was “better” than Christianity. He didn’t use that word. Instead he said things like it was a step on, in the way that Christianity followed Judaism. He said that the Prophet Muhammad was the last in a line of prophets that stretched from Adam, to Abraham through Moses and Jesus. They were all Muslims, Jesus was a Muslim, in a sense that he had surrendered to God. This did not go down very well in the letter nor in the essay.’

  Rae was laughing again.

  ‘And so what happened to your uncle?’ Sammar asked. ‘Did he ever come back?’

  ‘He couldn’t come back, even if he had wanted to. He would have been arrested. Defection, treason, these are serious charges. He kept writing for some years to my mother. He changed his name, married an Egyptian woman and had children. I had Egyptian cousins, relatives in Africa. I was very excited by that. I thought it was very romantic. But my mother never answered his letters, or maybe sent him nasty letters, in return, so he stopped writing. I went looking for him for five years, between 1976 and ‘81 when I was in Cairo teaching at the AUC, but I couldn’t find him. I wouldn’t mind going over to look for him again.’

  They were quiet when he finished speaking. Sammar felt that she and Yasmin had been in his flat for a long time. The afternoon in the library seemed distant, another day. The last drops of tea in her mug looked like honey. Then Yasmin started to talk of people’s intolerance and Sammar got up to wash the mugs in the kitchen. ‘It will only take a minute,’ she said to Rae when he told her to leave them, not to bother. But she took her time and looked around. A bottle of Safeway Olive Oil stood on the kitchen counter, an open packet of soluble aspirins, more photographs of the daughter, younger and smiling, were stuck to the door of the fridge. On the wall, there was a print of the Uleg-Beg Mosque in Samarkand, its exterior designed with the interlacing, intricate patterns of Islamic art. It was built in 1418, the caption read, and was both a masjid and a school that taught not only religious sciences but astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. Sammar rolled the blind up over the kitchen window and she could see in the dark a garden shed, lights in the other buildings, the auras of people’s lives. Warm water, lather that smelt of lemon, Rae’s voice.

  ‘… at times the courts here do show cultural sensitivity,’ he was saying, ‘and each case sets a precedent for others to follow. In one case a High Court judge awarded a divorced Asian woman damages, in thousands of pounds, against her husband. He had slandered her by suggesting she wa
s not a virgin at the time of her marriage. The grounds for the case were that the insult was very serious in her community.’

  ‘Yes, we prize virginity,’ Yasmin said, ‘and chastity. It’s hard to believe that a British judge and jury could understand that, let alone sympathise.’

  ‘People understand it but in the context of its own place, its own part of the world. Here though, it’s a different story. I would think that the consensus is “in Rome do as the Romans do”.’

  ‘Typical imperialist thinking.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘but these things take time to change. Not in our lifetime, I don’t think.’

  ‘In your lifetime,’ said Yasmin. ‘We’re young, aren’t we Sammar?’

  Sammar turned around. Her hands were wet with soap and she held them above the sink. ‘You’re younger than me,’ she said to Yasmin.

  ‘I’m going to be thirty next week,’ said Yasmin. ‘My birthday and Nazim will be away as usual.’

  ‘He’s still off-shore?’ asked Rae.

  ‘Off Shetland, freezing away, poor thing. But it is so peaceful without him.’

  ‘You say things you don’t mean, Yasmin,’ said Sammar. She turned off the taps and wiped the basin with the wash cloth. There were stains around the plug and in between the taps.

  ‘Chekhov wrote,’ said Rae, ‘that a woman pines when she is deprived of the company of a man and when deprived of the company of a woman, a man becomes stupid.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Yasmin. ‘I never pine.’

  Sammar looked around for a towel to wipe her hands. The towel she found hanging on the back of a chair had a picture of a dolphin on it. The cat was nowhere in sight. It had gone outside and it was time for them to leave too. ‘We should go, shouldn’t we?’ she said to Yasmin when she joined them, ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘I’m so tired I can’t move,’ Yasmin said and Sammar had to hold both her hands and pull her up.