by Rob Spillman
This time Emma had asked, “What can you get from Khartoum for the house?” They were eating muesli and watching Mr. Motivator on GMTV. Mr. M. had a litre and a half of bottled mineral water in each hand. He was using them as weights while he squatted down and up, down and up, Knees over your toes. The labels on the bottles had been slyly removed.
“Nothing. There’s nothing there,” Yassir said.
“What do tourists get when they go there?”
“Tourists don’t go there,” he said. “It’s not a touristy place. The only foreigners there are working.” Once when Yassir was in University he had met a British journalist. The journalist was wearing shorts which looked comical because no one else wore shorts unless they were playing sports. He had chatted to Yassir and some of his friends.
“There must be something you can get,” Emma said. “Things carved in wood, baskets . . .”
“There’s a shop which sell ivory things. Elephants made of ivory and things like that.”
“No. Not ivory.”
“I could get you a handbag made of crocodile skin?”
“No, yuck.”
“Snake skin?”
“Stop it, I’m serious.”
“Ostrich feathers?”
“NO DEAD ANIMALS. Think of something else.”
“There’s a bead market. Someone once told me about that. I don’t know where it is though. I’ll have to find out.”
“If you get me beads I can have them made here into a necklace.” Emma liked necklaces but not bracelets or earrings. The golden necklace with her name in Arabic was from an ex-boyfriend, a mud-logger who had been working rotational from the oil-rigs in Oman.
“Change your mind and come with me. You can take the Malaria pills, Samia can take the syrup and it’s just a few vaccines . . .”
“A few jabs! Typhoid, yellow fever, cholera, TB! And Samia might get bitten by this sandfly Manaal told us about when she came here. She is only three. It’s not worth it—maybe when she’s older . . .”
“You’re not curious to see where I grew up?”
“I am interested a bit but—I don’t know—I’ve never heard anything good about that place.”
“This is just a two-week holiday, that’s all. My mother will get to see you and Samia, you’ll have a look around . . .” he said switching Mr. Motivator off.
“Paintings,” she said, “that’s what you should get. You can bring back paintings of all those things you think I should be curious about. Or just take lots of photographs and bring the beads.”
He bought the beads but did not take any photographs. He had shied away from that, as if unable to click a camera at his house, his old school, the cinemas that brought the sparkle of life abroad. So when Manaal said she knew this English painter, he was enthusiastic about the idea even though it was his last evening in Khartoum. Tomorrow his flight would leave for home. He hoped he would have with him some paintings for Emma. She would care about where each one went, on this wall or that. She cared about things more than he did. She even cared about Samia more than he did. Emma was in tune with the child’s every burp and whimper. In comparison to Emma, Yassir’s feelings for Samia were jammed up, unable to flow. Sometimes with the two of them he felt himself dispensable, he thought they could manage without him. They did just that when he was off-shore. They had a life together: playgroup, kindergym, Duthie Park. When Manaal came to Aberdeen she said many times, “Emma is so good with the child. She talks to her as if she is an adult.”
Yassir now wondered, as they drove down Airport Road, if Manaal had said such positive things to his mother. Or if she had only told of the first day of her visit to Aberdeen. The day she reached out to hold the sleeping child and Emma said, “No, I’d rather you didn’t. She’ll be frightened if she wakes up and finds a stranger holding her.” The expression on Manaal’s face had lingered throughout the whole visit as she cringed in Emma’s jumpers that were too loose, too big for her. Then, as if lost in the cold, his sister hibernated, slept and slept through the nights and large parts of the days. So that Emma began to say, she must be ill, there must be something wrong with her, some disease, why does she sleep so much, Yassir, why?
Possessive of Manaal, he had shrugged, Aberdeen’s fresh air, and not explained that his sister had always been like that, easily tired, that she reacted to life’s confusions by digging herself into sleep.
When they left the airport behind them and began to pass Riyadh, Manaal suddenly said that to make sure they get to the right house, she had better drop in on her friend Zahra. Zahra’s mother, a Bulgarian, was a good friend of Mrs. K. and they would know where the house was.
“I thought you knew where it is?”
“I do—but it’s better to be sure. It’s on our way anyway.”
“Isn’t it too early to go banging on people’s doors?”
“No, it’s nearly five. Anyway her parents are away—they’ve gone to Hajj.”
“Who? The Bulgarian woman? You’re joking.”
“No, wallahi.” Manaal seemed amused by his surprise. “Zahra’s mother prays and fasts Ramadan. We were teasing her the last time I went there, telling her that when she comes back from Hajj, she’ll start covering her hair and wearing long sleeves. And she said, ‘No never, your country is too hot; it’s an oven.’ ” Manaal did an impersonation of grammatically incorrect Arabic with a Bulgarian accent which made Yassir laugh. He thought of Zahra’s father, a man who was able to draw his foreign wife to Islam, and Yassir attributed to him qualities of strength and confidence.
The house, in front of which Manaal told him to stop, had a high wall around it. The tops of the trees, that grew inside, fell over the wall shading the pavement. Manaal banged on the metal door—there was no bell. She banged with her palms, and peered through the chink in the door to see if anyone was coming.
Yassir opened the car door to let in some air but there was hardly any breeze. There were tears in the plastic of Manaal’s seat from which bits of yellow foam protruded. There was a crack in the window, fine and long, like a map of the Nile, and one of the doors in the back was stuck and could never be opened. This car, he thought, would not pass its MOT in Aberdeen; it would not be deemed Road Worthy. What keeps it going here is baraka.
The car had seen finer days in his father’s lifetime. Then it was solid and tinged with prestige. Now more than anything else, its decay was proof of the passing away of time, the years of Yassir’s absence. He had suggested to his mother and Manaal that he should buy them a new one. Indeed this had been one of the topics of his stay—A new car—The house needs fixing—Parts of the garden wall are crumbling away—Why don’t you get out of this dump and move to a new house? But his mother and sister tended to put up with things. Like with Manaal recently losing her job. She had worked since graduation with a Danish aid agency, writing reports in their main office in Souk Two. When they had reduced their operations in the South, staff cuts followed. “Start looking for a new job,” he told her, “or have you got certain plans that I don’t know of yet?” She laughed and said, “When you leave I’ll start looking for a job and no, there are no certain plans. There is no one on the horizon yet.”
It was a joke between them. There is no one on the horizon yet. She wrote this at the bottom of letters, letters in Arabic that Emma could not read. Year after year. She was twenty-six now and could feel the words touched by the frizzle of anxiety. “Every university graduate is abroad, making money so that he can come back and marry a pretty girl like you,” he had said recently to her. “Really?” she replied with a sarcasm that was not characteristic of her.
From the door of Zahra’s house, Manaal looked at Yassir in the car and shrugged, then banged again with both hands. But she must have heard someone coming for she raised her hand to him and nodded.
The girl who opened the door had a towel wrapped around her hair like a turban. She kissed Manaal and he could hear, amidst their greetings, the words “shower” and “sorry.” Th
ey walked towards him, something he was not expecting and before he could get out of the car the girl leaned, and through the open window of the seat next to his, extended her hand. The car filled up with the smell of soap and shampoo; he thought his hand would later smell of her soap. She had the same colouring as his daughter Samia, the froth of cappuccino, dark-grey eyes, thick eyebrows. Her face was dotted with pink spots, round and raised like little sweets. He imagined those grey eyes soft with sadness when she examined her acne in the bathroom mirror, running her fingertips over the bumps.
With a twig and some pebbles, Zahra drew them a map of the painter’s house in the dust of the pavement. She sat on her heels rather primly, careful not to get dust on her jellabia. She marked the main road and where they should turn left. When you see a house with no garden walls, no fence, she said, that’s where you should turn left.
She stood up, dusted off her hands and, when Manaal got into the car, she waved to them until they turned and were out of sight. Yassir drove back on to the main road, from the dust to the asphalt. The asphalt road was raised and because it had no pavements, its sides were continually being eroded, eaten away. They looked jagged, crumbly. The afternoon was beginning to mellow; sunset was drawing near.
“I imagine that when Samia grows up she will look like your friend,” he said.
“Maybe, yes. I haven’t thought of it before,” Manaal said. “Did you like the earrings for Samia?”
He nodded. His mother had given him a pair of earrings for Samia. He had thanked her and not said that his daughter’s ears were not pierced.
“She’s beginning to accept the situation.” His voice had a tingle of bravado about it. He was talking about his mother and Manaal knew. She was looking out of the window. She turned to him and said, “She likes the photographs that you send. She shows them to everyone.”
Yassir had been sending photographs from Aberdeen. Photographs of Emma and Samia. Some were in the snow, some taken in the Winter Gardens at Duthie Park, some at home.
“So why doesn’t she tell me that? Instead of ‘What’s her name?’ or whatever she keeps saying?”
“You should have given her some idea very early on, you should have . . . consulted her.” Manaal spoke slowly, with caution, like she was afraid or just tired.
“And what would she have said if I had asked her? Tell me, what do you think she would have said?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“How can I?”
“She would have said no and then what?”
“I don’t know. I just know that it was wrong to suddenly write a letter and say ‘I got married’—in the past tense. Nobody does that.”
He didn’t answer her. He did not like the hurt in her voice, like it was her own hurt not their mother’s.
As if his silence disturbed her and she wanted the conversation to continue she said, “It wasn’t kind.”
“It was honest.”
“But it was hard. She was like someone ill when she read your letter. Defeated and ill . . .”
“She’ll come to accept it.”
“Of course she’ll come to accept it. That’s the whole point. It’s inevitable but you could have made it easier for her, that’s all.” Then in a lighter tone she said, “Do something theatrical. Get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness.”
They laughed at this together, somewhat deliberately to ease the tension. What he wanted to do was explain, speak about Emma and say, She welcomed me, I was on the periphery and she let me in. Do people get tortured to death in that dentist’s chair or was I going to be the first? he had asked Emma that day, and made her smile, when he stumbled out of pain and spoke to her with lips numb with procaine.
“It would have been good if Emma and Samia had come with you,” Manaal was saying.
“I wanted that too.”
“Why didn’t they?” She had asked that question before as had others. He gave different reasons to different people. Now in the car he felt that Manaal was asking deliberately, wanting him to tell her the truth. Could he say that from this part of the world Emma wanted malleable pieces, not the random whole? She desired frankincense from the Body Shop, tahina safe in a supermarket container.
“She has fears,” he said.
“What fears?”
“I don’t know. The sandfly, malaria . . . Some rubbish like that.” He felt embarrassed and disloyal.
They heard the sunset azan when they began to look for the house without a garden wall which Zahra had told them about. But there were many houses like that; people built their homes and ran out of money by the time it came to build the garden wall. So they turned left off the asphalt road anyway when they reached El-Ma’moura, hoping that Manaal would be able to recognise the street or the house.
“Nothing looks familiar to you?” he asked.
“But everything looks different than the last time I was here,” she said. “All those new houses, it’s confusing.”
There were no roads, just tracks made by previous cars, hardly any pavements. They drove through dust and stones. The houses in various stages of construction stood in straight lines. In some parts the houses formed a square around a large empty area, as if marking a place which would always be empty, where houses would not be allowed to be built.
“Maybe it’s this house,” Manaal said. He parked, they rang the bell, but it was the wrong house.
Back in the car they drove through the different tracks and decided to ask around. How many foreigners were living in this area anyway? People were bound to know them.
Yassir asked a man sitting in front of his house, one knee against his chest, picking his toenails. Near him an elderly man was praying, using a newspaper as a mat. The man didn’t seem to know but he gave Yassir several elaborate suggestions.
Yassir asked some people who were walking past but again they didn’t know. This was taking a long time as everyone he asked seemed willing to engage him in conversation.
“It’s your turn,” he said to Manaal when they saw a woman coming out of her house.
She went towards the woman and stood talking to her. Sunset was nearly over by then, the western sky, the houses, the dusty roads were all one colour, like the flare that burns off the rig, he thought. Manaal stood, a dark silhouette against red and brick. One hand reached out to hold her hair from blowing and her thin elbows made an angle with her head and neck from which the light came through. This is what I would paint, Yassir thought, if I knew how, I would paint Manaal like this, with her elbows sticking out against the setting sun.
When she came back she seemed pleased. “We’re nearly there,” she said, “that woman knew them. First right, and it’s the second house.”
As soon as they turned right, Manaal recognised the one-storey house with the blue gate. She got out before him and rang the bell.
Ronan K. was older than Yassir had imagined. He looked like a football coach, overweight yet light in his movements. The light from the lamp near the gate made him look slightly bald. He recognised Manaal, and as they stepped into a large bare courtyard while he closed the gate behind them, she launched into a long explanation of why they had come and how they had nearly got lost on the way.
The house inside had no tiles on the floors, its surface was of uneven textured stone, giving it the appearance that it was unfinished, still in the process of being built. Yet the furniture was arranged in an orderly way, and there were carpets on the floor. Birds rustled in a cage near the kitchen door. On one of the walls there was a painting of the back of a woman in a tobe, balancing a basket on her head.
“One of yours?” Yassir asked but Ronan said no, he did not like to hang his own paintings in the house.
“All of my work is on the roof,” he said and from the kitchen he got a tray with a plastic jug full of kerkadeh and ice and three glasses. Some of the ice splashed into the glasses as he began to pour, and a pool of redness gathered in the tray, sliding slowly aro
und in large patterns.
“You have a room on the roof ?” Yassir asked.
“That’s where I paint,” Ronan said. “I lock it though, we’ve had many haramiah in the area. Not that they would steal my paintings but it’s better to be careful. I’m in there most nights though, the kahrabah permitting.”
Hearing the Arabic words for thieves and electricity made Yassir smile. He remembered Manaal copying the way Zahra’s mother spoke. He wondered how well Ronan K. knew Arabic.
“My wife has the key. But she is right next door. The neighbour’s daughter had a baby last week. There’s a party of some kind there,” and he looked at Manaal as if for an explanation.
“A simayah,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Ronan, “a simayah. Maybe you could go over and get the key from her? It’s right next door.”
“Is it Amna and her people?” Manaal asked him. “I’ve seen them here before.”
“Yes, that’s them.”
“Last time I was here, Amna walked in with chickens to put in your freezer. There wasn’t enough room in theirs.”
“Chickens with their heads still on them and all the insides,” said Ronan. “Terrible ... This morning she brought over a leg of lamb,” and he gestured vaguely towards the kitchen.
“So who had the baby?” Manaal asked.
“Let’s see if I can get this one right,” he said. “The sister of Amna’s husband, who happens to be—just to get things complicated—married to the cousin of Amna’s mother.”
