She said, ‘Allah is the one who heals.’ She wanted him to look beyond the causes to the First, the Real.
‘When I was young,’ he told her, ‘there were books that did not impress me much. Picture books of Angels with blue eyes and wings, naive animals in pairs boarding a ship, too many fluffy clouds.’
When she was young there were the words of the Qur’an, no pictures of Angels. Words to learn by heart and recite in treacherous streets where rabid dogs barked too close. ‘Say: I take refuge in the Lord of daybreak…’,’Say: I take refuge in the Lord of humans…’ And at night too, inside the terrifying dreams of childhood, she had said the verses to push away what was clinging and cruel.
He said, ‘That is real, nothing trivialised, diminished to the status of fairy-tales.’ And he looked disappointed when he said that, distracted by thoughts he would only condense for her. ‘History diminished to the status of fairy-tales,’ he said. Covered with illusions, grid-lines, rules.
She said that she had imagined freedom in this part of the world, not rules, not restrictions. But she tried to understand, to take in this new picture he was describing. A sketch of the Scottish church and state. Calvinism, a dour and oppressive brand of Christianity. An upbringing so different from hers. Things he was told. He must not be sullen, he must not be cheeky, he must not be contradictory. He must not complain of boredom, only bores get bored. The value of pretending that all was well when it wasn’t. Such pretence was an art, a form of courage. Don’t think too much. Lighten up, you are too intense.
She said, ‘I never knew that to be intense was something bad.’
‘You are lucky,’ he said and smiled as if he loved her. Encouragement to speak. Again the stray dogs, the threat of rabies, cholera, bilharzia. Lepers like in films, and a day in May when the whole school was inoculated against meningitis, the injections shot out of a pistol, girls fainting in the sun. A time when she belonged to a particular place, before she knew the feeling this has nothing to do with me, these shops, these people have nothing to do with me, this sky is not for me. Times when she was silent but never detached: watching her aunt rub the luxury of Nivea on her legs, the white cream disappearing into her skin, over the sketch of bluish veins, over her ankles, the polish of her nails. Her aunt’s face so serious: this was something important, necessary, not a game. ‘Can I put cream on too?’ But she must wash her legs first, otherwise the cream would all get mixed up with the dust. In the garden, Tarig was drinking from the hosepipe so when it was her turn she drank too. The water was warm, not cold like the water from the fridge, not smelling of food. She could drink and drink this water and never feel full. Wash her feet, her legs up to her knees. The water splashed on the mud of the flower beds, made a path into the garden. Tarig climbed the low wall, balanced. ‘I fixed your bicycle,’ he said. There was the sound of the water, a distant car, a few birds. There was the voice of the cook, sitting in the shade of the guava tree reading the Qur’an, his shoulders swaying back and forth with the words.
‘Loneliness is Europe’s malaria,’ Rae said. ‘No one can really be immune. This is not so hygienic a place, don’t be taken in by the idols it makes of itself. You might even come to feel sorry for it, just a little, not too much, for there is no injustice in this decay. I am anxious,’ he said, ‘that when you go back home you will realise that I am much cruder than you, that I am not as you think me to be.’
My last Friday.
He showed her the card that his daughter sent him when he was in hospital. ‘Get Well Soon, Dad’, the card said and it had a picture of a bandaged bear. Sammar found the wording strange without ‘I wish’ or ‘I pray’, it was an order, and she wondered if the child was taught to believe that her father’s health was in his hands, under his command. But she did not share her thoughts and instead admired the school photograph that Mhairi had sent with the card. Her uniform was a tartan kilt, a matching jumper and tie. She stood out from among the rest of her class because she was his daughter and looked a little like him.
‘Whom does she resemble more, you or her mother?’ Sammar asked. But he was not keen to follow this line of conversation.
Of the reasons for the break-up of his marriage, she could only guess. If she asked him directly, she knew she would not be fulfilled with the concise, measured answer he would give. So on her own she looked inside, lifted up the veils that blocked her vision. One veiclass="underline" he could not make anyone unhappy: another veiclass="underline" to leave him that woman must have a low IQ. Finally in the deep she caught sight of the truth: his stubbornness and a wife with a successful career who earned more money as a bureaucrat with the UN than he did as a professor in a provincial university. A woman who grew tired of travelling back and forth from Geneva to Edinburgh to see her daughter in boarding school, then to see him in Aberdeen. He would not go with her to Geneva. Geneva, he said, was too neat and for him there were only three places in the world: Scotland, North Africa, the Middle East. That woman, after a snide remark too many, The UN is a sham and everyone knows it, after a quarrel too many, I spent five miserable years with you in stinking Cairo, sat down alone one day with a coffee and a cigarette, and asked herself, ‘What exactly do I need him for?’
My last Saturday. My last Sunday…
He phoned her but they could not speak for long. On the landing people came and went, banged the door. A girl with long greasy hairy stood behind Sammar and wanted to use the payphone too. Sammar wished she did not live in a place like that, she wished that she could be settled with a telephone in a kitchen that was her own. She could talk and at the same time wipe the crumbs off the table, turn the cooker off.
‘I must go,’ she whispered, but he would not let her go, he went on talking and she did not want to miss a single word. ‘I have to go.’ Behind her the girl with long hair, huffed and blew with impatience, ‘Are you going to be all day? Are you going to be all day?’ The girl had no mercy.
It was not the same as when she and Rae had talked a month ago, during the Christmas holidays, when Sammar had the building all to herself. Even at night, they could not talk. The stairs at night-time were dangerous highways, now and again the sounds of thumps and heaving, shouts, snatches of songs. Someone vomited on the bottom stairs, curry and beer, on the same place where Sammar had put her cushion and sat speaking to Rae.
My last Monday.
What she heard from everyone except him: Lucky you, to get away from all this dreadful weather we’ve been having lately. You must be so happy you are going to see your son again. How many years since you’ve been backs’ Four years? That is a long time.
My last Tuesday.
At that early time of the morning, the Senior Common Room was quiet. Apart from Sammar and Rae, there were two men and a lady with curly blonde hair who had slid their mugs of coffee down the metal rail to the cashier and sat under the No Smoking sign. In this room Sammar liked the tall windows that looked out over the other university buildings, the way the grass curved upwards to the road, the white dome of Engineering shaped like a mosque. Would she remember these things? The way Rae tore open a packet of sugar, would she remember that in a place where there were no packets of sugar? Or his jacket, would she remember its colour in a place where people had no need of wool or jackets? The future whined for her attention. Picture the interviews in Egypt, young men smoking one cigarette after the other. Picture sun and dusty roads, shops not so well stocked, shabby cars and shabby clothes, undecorated rooms. Picture them all, soon they will be…