The Network - Jason Elliot [89]
‘Something is wrong?’
‘I have to go. I have to get in touch with my office.’
‘And I must go too,’ she says, looking at her watch.
The unexpected intimacy has robbed of us our sense of time. Now we both want to make light of it, as if it hasn’t happened, and neither of us really knows what to do next.
‘I hope we’ll meet again,’ I say.
She nods casually. ‘Insha’allah.’
But I just can’t leave it at that. ‘Perhaps … perhaps one day you’d be kind enough to be my guide. Or you could advise me where to go. It would be a pity to waste time. Life is so short.’
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘We should not spend time on things which have no purpose.’ She says this in a way that charges the words with meaning, but I don’t know if it’s a warning or something else. Perhaps she doesn’t know herself.
‘I’d like to see the Souq Arabi. The wrestling in Omdurman. And there used to be a statue of General Gordon on his camel somewhere, but I think it went back to England.’
‘It is better that the English keep it.’
‘Yes, I know, but there’s a funny story about it. One day a little English boy goes with his grandmother to see it, and they stand under it and look up and the grandmother, whose father fought in the Sudan, says, “My boy, that is the great hero General Gordon, who fought the Mahdi in the Sudan.” So the little boy says, ‘‘Gosh, Grandma, that’s amazing. But why is there an old man sitting on his back?” ’
‘I would be happy to be your guide,’ she says. The full intensity of her dark gaze is on me, but she’s smiling now.
Two days later I hear the honk of Jameela’s Daihatsu outside the gate, and leap aboard with my little backpack feeling like a schoolboy on his first day of school. She drives us across the river to Omdurman, where the life of the city, although poorer than the centre of Khartoum to the south, becomes infinitely more colourful and intense.
We leave her car and wander through the spectacle of the open-air markets. The dust-laden streets are lined with mud-walled homes, and shared with camels and donkeys, and the air is heavy with the scent of spices and smoke. There are piles of fruits and vegetables I’ve never seen before, and everywhere there are tall and sometimes strikingly handsome men in long white jellabiyas. Their teeth flash in gleaming smiles. The women wear the brightly coloured tobe, a long swathe of loose fabric worn like an Indian sari, and there are just as many who are as tall and handsome as the men. We are offered food by a hundred strangers in turn, and after numerous refusals of raw diced camel’s liver with onion and hot shatta spice I succumb at last to a plate of foul and gallons of sweet tea. In a jewellery market I bargain hard for a tiny silver casket and joke with the owner of the stall about being British, to which he responds by pulling out a large dagger from behind the counter and brandishing it theatrically above my head.
We take an old ferry to Tuti island, an undeveloped enclave of peace in the chaos and bustle of the city, and we stroll by the Nile, where women are washing vegetables for market in the muddy water, and we sit in the shade of a lemon grove to share a watermelon and take turns brushing the flies off each other’s piece. A few laid-back locals try out their English on me, and chuckle at my half-remembered Arabic. Jameela is looking at me with a faint and affectionate smile.
‘You seem at home in such a poor country. It is rare. You are not a typical Englishman.’
‘I don’t know what a typical Englishman is.’
‘An Englishman does not show his feelings.’
‘Perhaps there are feelings I am not showing you.’
Then she says thoughtfully, as if she’s been wondering about it, ‘We should visit the tomb of the Mahdi.’
It’s the most revered site in the city and probably the whole of the Sudan. At the end of the nineteenth century the Mahdi, hated by the British but much loved in the Sudan as a saintly warrior, led his tribesmen to repeated