The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel (28 page)
‘You are out now,’ I said. ‘They’ve released you without charge. This is excellent.’ I tried to sound pleased or at least grateful. The room was getting darker.
He spoke without looking up and his voice was muffled. ‘I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.’
‘You’ve had a terrible experience. In time you will get over it. A few weeks’ rest and recuperation is what you need. You can even take the next semester off. Why not? Just start the new academic year fresh in September.’
He shook his head, threw the blanket on the floor and stood up. ‘I’m not going back there.’ He headed towards the kitchen. I heard him rummaging in the fridge then slamming shut the door of the microwave. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘At least he is starting to eat.’
I drew the curtains and switched on the lights. These were the shortest days of the year.
I went to the Sudanese Embassy to get a visa. My Sudanese passport had expired years ago and I never renewed it. I actually didn’t even know where it was. Lost over the years. In one move or the other. In it my name was Natasha Hussein. But on everything else – my British passport, my Russian passport, my driving licence, PhD – I had a different surname. In the spatial details of the embassy, in its hue, tones and pace my planned destination started to take shape. Men who spoke like my father, a woman in a tobe coming in to renew her passport, pictures of the Nile on the wall, younger versions of Tony waiting to collect their visas. A certain casualness, a slower tempo, a difference that made me, for the first time, excited to be travelling.
‘Your visa will take four to six weeks.’
I was taken aback. ‘But I need to go now. My father is seriously ill.’
‘Are you Sudanese?’
Why ask such a difficult question?
‘When was the last time you were there?’
‘Twenty years ago.’
I also, they said, needed a sponsor. On Cleveland Row, I called Grusha. She told me not to worry. She said that Yasha could pull a few strings for me at my end. I was to fill out the form and wait a few days in London.
In my hotel room I surfed for news of Oz’s release without charge. His arrest had been a news item; would his release also be one? There was nothing among the snow warnings, cancelled flights and delayed trains. I had been lucky to get here. Instead a news item from Sudan caught my eye, a video posted on YouTube of a woman being whipped by the police. She is unrestrained in her cries, pleading and shuffling on her knees, raising her arms uselessly to obstruct the blows. A small crowd watches. The scene is slow and saturated in humiliation, a world removed from valour or decency. The policeman is laughing at this vocal plaything rolling on the ground; the sun shines on his blue uniform and on the white of a nearby parked car. I don’t want to go there.
I spent the following day at the National Archives among the correspondence of the Foreign Office. Here was the response of the British ambassador in Turkey to the news of the kidnapping: ‘Shamil is a fanatic and a barbarian with whom it would be difficult for us … to entertain any credible or satisfactory relations.’ Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, certainly agreed, calling it an ‘atrocious and revolting outrage’. This was the end of British support for Shamil. His reputation, strong in the previous decades, was shattered. The admiration he had roused after Akhulgo turned to disgust. Did he guess this would happen? Did he care? Or was Jamaleldin more important to him? I might never know.
As I left the archives, I ‘heard’ my mother talk about shopping. She had loved London, loved Harrods. And now the city went on without her. Of course it did. The whole world had. On Oxford Street I joined the Christmas shoppers, looked at the window displays, wondering if I should buy new Sudan-friendly clothes, but I did not want to be stuck with them if my visa didn’t come through. Instead I bought gifts for Grusha and Yasha; I
bought a dressing gown for my father. I could post them if I ended up not going.
With time on my hands, I called Malak. She asked me to meet her tomorrow in the Starbucks near the BBC. She would be finished by six, she said. I got there before her and waited for quite a time. She came in looking tired and distracted after a whole day of recording. She said she was playing the part of a Jewish postmistress in 1940s Poland but did not give more details. ‘It was hard to leave Oz though he insisted he would be fine,’ she said, sitting back in the sofa, the mug huge in her hands. She was wearing layers of grey and blue, loosening the scarf around her neck, pulling strands of her hair behind her ears.
‘He needs a good rest,’ I said.
‘Yes. I lost my temper with him, though. I shouldn’t have but I did.’
‘What happened?’
‘He told me he wanted to leave and join his father in South Africa. Give up his studies, give up his whole life here. Just up and go!’
‘What’s he going to do there?’
‘He doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought about it.’
‘He’ll come to his senses. Give him time.’
‘He’s not thinking things through. As if the authorities won’t be watching him! He’s been given a police warning against accessing prohibited materials online. Why suddenly leave the country? That would raise their suspicions!’
We fell silent after that. I ate more of my cake.
Malak sighed. ‘I am the one being asked the questions now.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The money I send to my relatives in Chechnya.’ She put on an accent. ‘It better not be funding terrorism.’ She was more rattled about this than she was letting on. It was in the way she held her mug, the slight tremble of her lips before she bent her neck down to sip her latte.
And here I was with my laptop still held by the anti-terror squad, applying for a visa to a pariah state. We were both tainted.
Should we swap reassurances or bolster our defences? Quickly she had swapped roles. From the optimistic ‘activist mum campaigning for release of her son’ to the shadows of being under suspicion. Here she was saying, ‘I can see this unravelling. My dinner invitations drying up, even the offers of roles dwindling ever so slowly without knowing exactly why. Not much needs to be said, does it? One day you are okay, strong and acceptable and then, just like that, everyone turns their back. If I didn’t have my faith, I would go mad. If I didn’t believe that I was following my destiny, I would …’ She stopped abruptly.
‘I think you are being unduly pessimistic,’ I said, trying to convince myself.
‘But I never am,’ she laughed. ‘All my life I have been hugely optimistic. I have gone ahead with loads of energy, loads of goodwill. Until now. I am stumped. I stay up at night wondering about Oz’s future. Will he get through this? I don’t know what is going on in his head right now. Will he give up on uni? Will this brand him for life and be on his records? Will he lose his faith or his mind?’
‘He is young, he will get over it,’ I said with as much conviction as I could muster.
‘He had a narrow escape,’ her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But what about the others out there? The ones who are really guilty. What do I know about them? As long as the threat is there, there will always be suspects being pulled in.’
‘What would Shamil have done?’
She smiled and sat back. ‘I wonder.’ She took a sip of her drink. ‘He would have seen through these militants – that they “fulfil neither a contract nor a covenant. That they call to the truth but they are not its people”. He would have gone after the hate preachers who say to the young men of this day and age, “go out and make jihad”.’
Interesting that, from her point of view, the leader of one of the longest and most significant jihads in modern history would, if
he were alive today, be a supporter of the War on Terror. Unlike Shamil and his highlanders, radical Islamist organisations were inspired by Hegel and Marx, their inner workings ticked along the lines of Trotskyist parties in their suppression of dissent and critical opinion. No wonder that the founders of Political Islam, those revolutionary elite who turned their backs on tradition and worked towards a perfect society, never took Shamil as a role model. Al-Qaeda was a modern phenomenon, with no patience for Shamil’s traditional spirituality and utter contempt for the choices he made at the end of his career.
‘Oh yes,’ said Malak. ‘Shamil would have gone after these bigoted preachers. But I don’t have his credibility. No Muslim would listen to me. I got some hate mail when Oz’s case was mentioned in the newspaper and someone made the connection. “You slut,” he or she wrote. “Serves you right for taking off your clothes just to entertain the British public.” I don’t know what that’s about. I’ve never done a nude scene in my life!’
‘Eat,’ I said, pointing to the sandwich she had only nibbled at. Eating was a solution of sorts.
She smiled and sounded like her normal self again. ‘The only good thing out of all this is that I’ve lost my appetite.’
Malak invited me to go to a zikr with her. She said that she always attended this particular one when she was in London. It was performed by the same Sufi tariqat that Imam Shamil had belonged to. I agreed to join her for anthropological reasons. The confrontation with religious belief and practice faced every modern historical researcher. We, staunchly secular and sure of ourselves, plunged into politics and economics, ideology and warfare, power and pressures, then hit against the faith of the characters we were studying. The prayer book Anne Boleyn was reading during her last days in the Tower, Genghis Khan bowing in thanks to the sacred Burkhan Khaldun mountain and now, for me, Shamil’s Sufism. I had read
how the captives in Dargo heard the chants coming from Shamil’s apartments when such gatherings took place. To Madame Drancy (who put her fingers in her ears and cried out that she’d had enough) the zikr had sounded like a repetitive song in chorus, a chant of ‘la ilaha illa Allah’ accompanied by a movement that increased in rapidity until it reached a climax then stopped to restart again with a different phrase, ‘astaghfir Allah’ or peace and blessings on the Prophet Muhammad.
Malak’s modern zikr was held in a North London dance studio. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors, cushions on the sprung hardwood floor, a barre all the way round. We arrived early, before people started taking off their shoes at the door and walking in. She seemed to know nearly all of them and grew more animated with every greeting. The men were wearing turbans and loose trousers, the women in skirts with hijabs or, like Malak, in loose trousers and flowing tops. I was not the only one without anything on my head. ‘The man in the navy jumper over there,’ Malak whispered, ‘is an aristocrat, closely related to the queen.’ She pointed out a well- known photographer, an architect and an aromatherapist. Dumpy Asian housewives, extravagantly handsome Nigerian men, hippies and New Agers. I wondered what Shamil would make of this lot. His legacy reaching Britain in this way, tame but undisciplined, capacious and gently accessible.
A haphazard circle of sorts was formed. The sheikh leading the zikr (the German man Malak had identified as an architect) sat cross-legged at the head of the circle. His green turban rose high above his head and matched the waistcoat he was wearing. He held a long rosary in his hand. Stretched around him the men formed an inner circle, followed by another semi-circle. The women sat behind them. I kept shifting away, sliding my cushion back until I drifted further and further from Malak. The lights were dimmed and I could no longer see her. In front of me was a Pakistani woman, her rose dupatta soft in the dim light. The sheikh started with a ten-minute talk, the words of Grandsheikh, he said, and I wondered if he was
referring to Shamil’s mentor, Sheikh Jamal el-din or a more modern Grandsheikh. It was always a temptation to reach out to the past. To try to grasp what little of it remained.
‘Our ego is a wild horse. It is never satisfied. It wants more and more. Tame your ego and ride it. Don’t let it ride you.’ I tried to concentrate on the lesson but I could not get over the discomfort of sitting on the ground. He went on, his accent appealing, a soothing coolness in his delivery. ‘Our souls have unlimited capacity for knowledge and will ever be thirsting for more. As long as the soul is imprisoned by the senses of the physical body, our mind will hold it down. The mind is the guardian over the soul and keeps it passive, inactive. The situation will remain so until we transcend the boundaries of the mind and open ourselves up for the soul’s activity.’ My knees ached; pins and needles started to tingle in my feet. I shuffled to the back of the room so that at least my back was resting on the wall. When they started the actual zikr, I was far out of the circle.
A few of the men swayed from side to side. Most had their eyes closed. The rhythm of the chant was brisk; it rose, quickened and came to a faltering stop. Then the sheikh led with another phrase. I did not join in but I closed my eyes. My mind wandered to how unfit I was, inflexible. I should care more about my weight, my health in general. I had always been overweight and sedentary. My mother was a child gymnast and when she was older she enjoyed sports and cared about fitness. I ate to spite her, to distinguish myself, and then it became a habit.
Peace and blessings on the Prophet Muhammad.
I could walk out now if I wanted to. Out to the bitter cold. My breathing was slowing down. Perhaps I could try yoga. It could be my New Year’s resolution.
I felt heavy on the ground. Like I weighed a ton and I was taking up too much space. This enlargement was subtle and painless. It did not embarrass me. And I could see now that there was too much distance between myself and the outskirts of myself, between my core and the edges. Too much distance to travel on my own.
Not much fuel either, no elan. Where did I learn this word from? It was not Russian, but in Russian the same concept existed. With due respect, I would disagree with what I had just heard, though this forum hardly encouraged discussion. Hey Sheikh-Architect, over here, let me tell you that without my mind I do not exist. It is the only part of me I am proud of. It is me.