The Network - Jason Elliot [92]
‘I don’t want to impose,’ I say.
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘My cousin can be a real pain sometimes but his wife is a good friend of mine. They’re quite traditional. Religious. Can you handle that, Englishman? I’ll call them to say you’re coming.’
I am suspicious of him from the start. Jameela’s cousin is an Arab and his features are Mediterranean. His skin is fair. He is tall and lean and has an angular face with a sharp nose and chin. The most disturbing thing about him is his eyes, which are grey and lizard-like, and settle with a faint look of disdain wherever his head is turned, as if they are fixed in their sockets. His gestures are slowed by an affected piety.
It’s an untypical configuration. I know that in Sudan only family or the closest of friends are invited to the traditional family home. Something is different here. An accommodation has obviously been made for their foreign guest, and a table and chairs have been put together in the room, which is the equivalent of an English family deciding to eat on a carpet on the floor. They have also invited a Sudanese man and his wife who have lived abroad for a few years and whose family connection I never catch. I suspect that their presence is intended to be a bridge between the traditional environment and the strange ways of a foreigner, which is me. Jameela is family but thoroughly westernised in her ways, and is accepted like a foreign film on television.
Her cousin sits opposite me at the table with Jameela to one side. His wife, a young Sudanese woman with big soulful brown eyes, ferries the dishes to and from the kitchen, settling from time to time at the end of the table like a young deer drinking warily from a stream. Her eyes never meet those of her guests. They all speak in Arabic for most of the meal, until our host fixes on me and reveals that he does in fact speak nearly perfect English.
‘It is to be commended that you speak Arabic,’ he says to me with a sinister smile. ‘Insha’allah you will one day read the Holy Qu’ran.’ His teeth are perfect white.
Jameela rolls her eyes.
‘My cousin has said you were in Afghanistan.’
‘My work took me there for a while,’ I say.
‘You were not there at the time of the jihad?’
‘For a short visit. It’s a long time ago now.’
‘You are not a Muslim,’ he says, as if this disqualifies me from travel. ‘What did you do there?’
‘I did what my friends did. Just lived.’
‘Did you fight?’ he persists.
‘There was fighting. It was wartime.’
‘It is an honourable thing to participate in jihad. Did you participate?’
I don’t like where he’s trying to lead me. I don’t like his curiosity. I think of the grace and dignity of the old man at the shrine, who wouldn’t have dreamed of prying into the private life of a visitor. My host, it seems, links the idea of going to Afghanistan with fighting the jihad and nothing else. It’s impossible to explain to him that my sympathy for the Afghans at the time wasn’t anything to do with religion or its decrees, but simply because I liked the people I met.
‘I believe the Prophet – sala Allah alaeihu wa aleihu as-salaam – said that the greatest jihad is the struggle with one’s own personal weaknesses, and that the jihad against the worldly enemy is the lesser struggle – the jihad as-saghir.’
I glance at Jameela while my host’s head is turned, and she shoots me a look of fond disapproval. But her cousin isn’t impressed.
‘How do you know such a thing?’ He ignores the implication of the question. ‘Did you fight or not?’
‘I lived as my friends lived. So I lived with them, ate with them, fought with them, prayed with them.’
‘You prayed with them?’ His hands settle deliberately on the edge of the table, as if he’s about to get up.
‘Omar,’ says Jameela, ‘let him eat.’ The conversation is making us both feel uncomfortable.
‘Yes,’ I say, recalling those serene moments at dusk when the men would lay their weapons quietly aside and turn their minds to God before resuming their worldly preoccupations. ‘Sometimes. Not always. It would have been strange