‘That’s better for her. Qatar is good, she can get a good job there.’ Mahasen said vehemently. She wanted everyone to get wonderful jobs, make good money, rise up in the world.
‘I have a friend in Qatar,’ said Sammar, ‘a Pakistani woman I knew in Aberdeen. Her husband works in oil and he got transferred there. She likes it very much.’ Yasmin was in Doha now, with her daughter and Nazim. Yasmin was not even in the same country as Rae anymore. Sammar could no longer write and ask her for news of him. When the option had been open to her, she hadn’t, but now it still counted as a loss and she thought, ‘I have no link with him now, in terms of people. Who do I know who knows him? Diane? Fareed? Neither of them can I ever have the courage to write to.’
But there were other links, a dream, an awareness that would suddenly come and stay with her. One day in the garden with the children, her feet bare and wearing another of Hanan’s unwanted dresses, she had stood admiring the mud of the flower beds, under the jasmine bushes, the way it was smooth and dimpled. She had pressed her toe into the mud, made a little depression, and then she had knelt down and touched the mud with her fingers. It was like dough or plasticine and yet her fingers stayed clean when she looked at them. Clean, heavy mud. He was like that, heavy inside, not like other people. It was there with him when he came into a room and when he paused in the middle of saying something, paused before he answered a question she had asked.
Another time, opening the fridge to get her aunt a glass of water. The sudden chill when she opened the fridge door on a day that was too hot; the blue cold, frost and it was Aberdeen where he was, his jacket and walking in grey against the direction of the wind. White seagulls and a pale sea, until her aunt behind her shouted, ‘What are you doing standing like an idiot with the door of the fridge wide open. Everything will melt.’
It was like that at first, the moment in the garden and the moment in front of the fridge, vivid, sudden. But the more she prayed for him, the more these moments came until they were there all the time, not only thoughts, not only memories but an awareness that stayed.
Waleed talked to her aunt and the moon was still unchallenged by the lights of the city below. Here was a gift for her, clearer than water, clearer than the sky…
Rae saying, ‘I dreamt of you, the same dream. I am climbing stairs, steep stone steps, stairways that are damp and narrow. At the top I open a door and you are there.’
‘Am I happy to see you?’
‘You are… very much. You give me a glass of milk to drink.’
‘Milk, how childish of me!’
‘But when I drink it something happens. It can only happen in a dream… Pearls come out of my mouth, they fall in my hand. I hold them out and show them to you.’
21
December. A cool wind blowing, carrying dust, and everyone’s skin was chapped. She thought, ‘I love this time of year,’ and looked out of the car window at the trees that lined Nile Avenue: thick trunks and behind them the gushing Blue Nile. She looked, she took off her sunglasses and looked until her heart hurt.
Nahla was driving. They had gone to the video shop and then Nahla had picked up her wedding cards from the printers. The cards were on Sammar’s lap, stiff white envelopes in packets.
‘Why are you quiet today?’ asked Nahla.
‘Just looking around. Do you think you will miss Khartoum when you go to Qatar?’ At the end of December Nahla was going to get married and go away, move to Doha where Yasmin was, with her daughter and Nazim. If she ever could afford it, Sammar would go and visit them both.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nahla. ‘Not at first, maybe later. Now we just want to get away, we’ve been delayed so much.’
‘Insha’ Allah everything will go alright this time.’
‘Sometimes I’m afraid,’ said Nahla, changing gears, ‘sometimes I think someone’s going to die either from my family or his. Some senile uncle or grandmother or aunt is going to drop dead any minute and ruin everything.’
Sammar laughed. ‘Just say insha’ Allah something like that won’t happen.’ There was a boat on the river, its sails beige and brown, there were farmers on the opposite bank, bent over with hoes. The sun hit the moving water and made its surface light, but underneath it was blue after blue.
Last December in another place, there was no sun. Christmas, and Rae was in Edinburgh with his ex-wife’s parents, presents wrapped up for Mhairi. Did he still do the same things? Drive around Scotland listening to Bob Marley, Ambush in the night, all guns aiming at me… Did he mark students’ essays, watch CNN and VH-1, read lots of books. Sometimes say, ‘I’m an old-fashioned socialist,’ sometimes say, ‘… behind the Western propaganda of Islamic fundamentalism’. A year in his world might be shorter than in hers, not so many changes. Here new laws were passed, prices went up, the old died easy and children grew and changed. Did he still use the same Ventolin inhaler? Did he teach his students that the difference between Western liberalism and Islam was that the centre of one was freedom and the other justice? She didn’t know what he was doing, this moment, this day but it didn’t matter, he was near like in the dream. A dream of night on the porch, no moonlight and she was a child playing, square tiles, hopscotch. Many people were on the porch, adults standing talking in the dark and he was one of them. She saw him and it did not surprise her that he was here in this continent, in this country, on her aunt’s porch. She was content to play, her hands on the wooden rails, skipping down the steps, the lines of the tiles. She lost sight of him and forgot him like children forget, her mind on the steps until he put his hand on her shoulder and when she looked up, he smiled and said, ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find you in the dark?’ She did not say anything, she became perfect and smooth like water from the garden hose.
What kept her going day after day: he would become a Muslim before he died. It was not too much to want, not too much to pray for. They would meet in Paradise and nothing would go wrong there, nothing at all.
Yesterday she and Mahasen had gone to visit Tarig’s grave. Driving out of the city to where there were no buildings blocking the wind. Travelling and finding flat ground, sand, knowing Tarig was there. Greeting him and all the others. Her aunt sat down on the ground, not moving, the Qur’an unopened on her lap. They found dirty things on the graves, things that the wind had carried through the barbed-wire fence. Orange peel, an empty cigarette carton, the remnant of a nest. A Miranda bottle top, indented and blurred. It grazed Sammar’s hand when she picked it up. She started to clear the ground, on her hands and knees reaching out, careful, she must not step over the people lying underneath. ‘We should get that keeper fired, he should be doing this,’ she said to her aunt but got no answer. She was afraid of finding worse than the rubbish she was now collecting: the signs of stray dogs. The keeper’s job was to keep stray dogs out, keep the cemetery clean, protect the graves from thieves. But he was not, thought Sammar, as a keeper of graves should be. He did not have clean white hair, a prayer mat, a melodious voice which recited the Qur’an. Instead he was young and gangly with broken teeth and a smell of hashish. Now as she gathered the rubbish, he stood leaning on the wall of his room, leering at her from far away. It made her angry and she went up to him and said, ‘If I find dog-shit, you will have to start looking for another job.’ He whined some excuse and skulked into the darkness of his room. She shouted after him, ‘I am not joking, you know.’ She felt safe with all the graves around her, all the truth. Cleaning up: a greasy newspaper page with the familiar face of a politician, a razor blade, some leaves. When she finished, she washed from the tap near the keeper’s room, made wudu again. She sat next to her aunt, put her arms around her, kissed her cheek. Then she took from her the Qur’an and started to read, word after word, verse after verse, page after page.