LEILA ABOULELA

Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. She grew up in Sudan, studying at the Khartoum American School and a Catholic missionary high school. Graduated from the University of Khartoum in 1985 with a degree in statistics, she earned M.Sc and M.Phil degrees at the London School of Economics. Aboulela was awarded the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for the story “The Museum” and published the story collection Coloured Lights in 2001. She is the author of three novels: Minaret (2005), The Translator (a New York Times Notable Book in 2006), and Lyrics Alley (fiction winner of the Scottish Book Awards in 2011). All of these novels were long-listed for the Orange Prize. Aboulela, who has lived in Abu Dhabi and Aberdeen, currently lives in Qatar.

The Museum

(1997)

At first Shadia was afraid to ask him for his notes. The earring made her afraid; the straight long hair that he tied up with a rubber band. She had never seen a man with an earring and such long hair. But then she had never known such cold, so much rain. His silver earring was the strangeness of the West, another culture shock. She stared at it during classes, her eyes straying from the white scribbles on the board. Most times she could hardly understand anything. Only the notation was familiar. But how did it all fit together? How did this formula lead to this? Her ignorance and the impending exams were horrors she wanted to escape. His long hair was a dull colour between yellow and brown. It reminded her of a doll she had when she was young. She had spent hours combing that doll’s hair, stroking it. She had longed for such straight hair. When she went to Paradise she would have hair like that. When she ran it would fly behind her; if she bent her head down it would fall over her like silk and sweep the flowers on the grass. She watched his ponytail move as he wrote and then looked up at the board. She pictured her doll, vivid suddenly, after years, and felt sick that she was daydreaming in class, not learning a thing.

The first days of term, when the classes started for the M.Sc. in Statistics, she was like someone tossed around by monstrous waves—battered, as she lost her way to the different lecture rooms, fumbled with the photocopying machine, could not find anything in the library. She could scarcely hear or eat or see. Her eyes bulged with fright, watered from the cold. The course required a certain background, a background she didn’t have. So she floundered, she and the other African students, the two Turkish girls, and the men from Brunei. Asafa, the short, round-faced Ethiopian, said, in his grave voice—as this collection from the Third World whispered their anxieties in grim Scottish corridors, the girls in nervous giggles—“Last year, last year a Nigerian on this very same course committed suicide. Cut his wrists.”

Us and them, she thought. The ones who would do well, the ones who would crawl and sweat and barely pass. Two predetermined groups. Asafa, generous and wise (he was the oldest), leaned over and whispered to Shadia: “The Spanish girl is good. Very good.” His eyes bulged redder than Shadia’s. He cushioned his fears every night in the university pub; she only cried. Their countries were next-door neighbours but he had never been to Sudan, and Shadia had never been to Ethiopia. “But we meet in Aberdeen!” she had shrieked when this information was exchanged, giggling furiously. Collective fear had its euphoria.

“That boy Bryan,” said Asafa, “is excellent.”

“The one with the earring?”

Asafa laughed and touched his own unadorned ear. “The earring doesn’t mean anything. He’ll get the Distinction. He was an undergraduate here; got First Class Honours. That gives him an advantage. He knows all the lecturers, he knows the system.”

So the idea occurred to her of asking Bryan for the notes of his graduate year. If she strengthened her background in stochastic processes and time series, she would be better able to cope with the new material they were bombarded with every day. She watched him to judge if he was approachable. Next to the courteous Malaysian students, he was devoid of manners. He mumbled and slouched and did not speak with respect to the lecturers. He spoke to them as if they were his equals. And he did silly things. When he wanted to throw a piece of paper in the bin, he squashed it into a ball and aimed it at the bin. If he missed, he muttered under his breath. She thought that he was immature. But he was the only one who was sailing through the course.

The glossy handbook for overseas students had explained about the “famous British reserve” and hinted that they should be grateful, things were worse further south, less “hospitable.” In the cafeteria, drinking coffee with Asafa and the others, the picture of “hospitable Scotland” was something different. Badr, the Malaysian, blinked and whispered, “Yesterday our windows got smashed; my wife today is afraid to go out.”

“Thieves?” asked Shadia, her eyes wider than anyone else’s.

“Racists,” said the Turkish girl, her lipstick chic, the word tripping out like silver, like ice.

Wisdom from Asafa, muted, before the collective silence: “These people think they own the world . . .” and around them the aura of the dead Nigerian student. They were ashamed of that brother they had never seen. He had weakened, caved in. In the cafeteria, Bryan never sat with them. They never sat with him. He sat alone, sometimes reading the local paper. When Shadia walked in front of him he didn’t smile. “These people are strange . . . One day they greet you, the next day they don’t . . .”

On Friday afternoon, as everyone was ready to leave the room after Linear Models, she gathered her courage and spoke to Bryan. He had spots on his chin and forehead, was taller than her, restless, as if he was in a hurry to go somewhere else. He put his calculator back in its case, his pen in his pocket. She asked him for his notes, and his blue eyes behind his glasses took on the blankest look she had ever seen in her life. What was all the surprise for? Did he think she was an insect? Was he surprised that she could speak?

A mumble for a reply, words strung together. So taken aback, he was. He pushed his chair back under the table with his foot.

“Pardon?”

He slowed down, separated each word. “Ah’ll have them for ye on Monday.”

“Thank you.” She spoke English better than he did! How pathetic. The whole of him was pathetic. He wore the same shirt every blessed day. Grey and white stripe.

 

* * *

On the weekends, Shadia never went out of the halls and, unless someone telephoned long-distance from home, she spoke to no one. There was time to remember Thursday nights in Khartoum: a wedding to go to with Fareed, driving in his red Mercedes. Or the club with her sisters. Sitting by the pool drinking lemonade with ice, the waiters all dressed in white. Sometimes people swam at night, dived in the water—dark like the sky above. Here, in this country’s weekend of Saturday and Sunday, Shadia washed her clothes and her hair. Her hair depressed her. The damp weather made it frizz up after she straightened it with hot tongs. So she had given up and now wore it in a bun all the time, tightly pulled back away from her face, the curls held down by pins and Vaseline Tonic. She didn’t like this style, her corrugated hair, and in the mirror her eyes looked too large. The mirror in the public bathroom, at the end of the corridor to her room, had printed on it: “This is the face of someone with HIV.” She had written about this mirror to her sister, something foreign and sensational like hail, and cars driving on the left. But she hadn’t written that the mirror made her feel as if she had left her looks behind in Khartoum.

On the weekends, she made a list of the money she had spent: the sterling enough to keep a family alive back home. Yet she might fail her exams after all that expense, go back home empty-handed without a degree. Guilt was cold like the fog of this city. It came from everywhere. One day she forgot to pray in the morning. She reached the bus stop and then realized that she hadn’t prayed. That morning folded out like the nightmare she sometimes had, of discovering that she had gone out into the street without any clothes.

In the evening, when she was staring at multidimensional scaling, the telephone in the hall rang. She ran to answer it. Fareed’s cheerful greeting: “Here, Shadia, Mama and the girls want to speak to you.” His mother’s endearments: “They say it’s so cold where you are . . .”

Shadia was engaged to Fareed. Fareed was a package that came with the 7UP franchise, the paper factory, the big house he was building, his sisters and widowed mother. Shadia was going to marry them all. She was going to be happy and make her mother happy. Her mother deserved happiness after the misfortunes of her life. A husband who left her for another woman. Six girls to bring up. People felt sorry for her mother. Six girls to educate and marry off. But your Lord is generous: each of the girls, it was often said, was lovelier than the other. They were clever too: dentist, pharmacist, architect, and all with the best of manners.

“We are just back from looking at the house.” Fareed’s turn again to talk. “It’s coming along fine, they’re putting the tiles down . . .”

“That’s good, that’s good,” her voice strange from not talking to anyone all day.

“The bathroom suites. If I get them all the same colour for us and the girls and Mama, I could get them on a discount. Blue, the girls are in favour of blue,” his voice echoed from one continent to another. Miles and miles.

“Blue is nice. Yes, better get them all the same colour.”

He was building a block of flats, not a house. The ground-floor flat for his mother and the girls until they married, the first floor for him and Shadia. When Shadia had first got engaged to Fareed, he was the son of a rich man. A man with the franchise for 7UP and the paper factory which had a monopoly in ladies’ sanitary towels. Fareed’s sisters never had to buy sanitary towels; their house was abundant with boxes of Pinky, fresh from the production line. But Fareed’s father died of an unexpected heart attack soon after the engagement party (five hundred guests at the Hilton). Now Shadia was going to marry the rich man himself. “You are a lucky, lucky girl,” her mother had said, and Shadia had rubbed soap in her eyes so that Fareed would think she was weeping about his father’s death.

There was no time to talk about her course on the telephone, no space for her anxieties. Fareed was not interested in her studies. He had said, “I am very broad-minded to allow you to study abroad. Other men would not have put up with this . . .” It was her mother who was keen for her to study, to get a postgraduate degree from Britain and then have a career after she got married. “This way,” her mother had said, “you will have your in-laws’ respect. They have money but you will have a degree. Don’t end up like me. I left my education to marry your father and now . . .” Many conversations ended with her mother bitter; with her mother saying, “No one suffers like I suffer,” and making Shadia droop. At night her mother sobbed in her sleep, noises that woke Shadia and her sisters.

No, on the long-distance line, there was no space for her worries. Talk about the Scottish weather. Picture Fareed, generously perspiring, his stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Often she had nagged him to lose weight, without success. His mother’s food was too good; his sisters were both overweight. On the long-distance line, listen to the Khartoum gossip as if listening to a radio play.

 

* * *

On Monday, without saying anything, Bryan slid two folders across the table towards her as if he did not want to come near her, did not want to talk to her. She wanted to say, “I won’t take them till you hand them to me politely.” But smarting, she said, “Thank you very much.” She had manners. She was well brought up.

Back in her room, at her desk, the clearest handwriting she had ever seen. Sparse on the pages, clean. Clear and rounded like a child’s, the tidiest notes. She cried over them, wept for no reason. She cried until she wetted one of the pages, smudged the ink, blurred one of the formulas. She dabbed at it with a tissue but the paper flaked and became transparent. Should she apologize about the stain, say that she was drinking water, say that it was rain? Or should she just keep quiet, hope he wouldn’t notice? She chided herself for all that concern. He wasn’t concerned about wearing the same shirt every day. She was giving him too much attention thinking about him. He was just an immature and closed-in sort of character. He probably came from a small town, his parents were probably poor, low-class. In Khartoum, she never mixed with people like that. Her mother liked her to be friends with people who were higher up. How else were she and her sisters going to marry well? She must study the notes and stop crying over this boy’s handwriting. His handwriting had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her at all.

Understanding after not understanding is fog lifting, pictures swinging into focus, missing pieces slotting into place. It is fragments gelling, a sound vivid whole, a basis to build on. His notes were the knowledge she needed, the gap filled. She struggled through them, not skimming them with the carelessness of incomprehension, but taking them in, making them a part of her, until in the depth of concentration, in the late hours of the nights, she lost awareness of time and place, and at last, when she slept she became epsilon and gamma, and she became a variable, making her way through discrete space from state “i” to state “j.”

 

* * *

It felt natural to talk to him. As if now that she had spent hours and days with his handwriting, she knew him in some way. She forgot the offence she had taken when he had slid his folders across the table to her, all the times he didn’t say hello.

In the computer room, at the end of the Statistical Packages class, she went to him and said: “Thanks for the notes. They are really good. I think I might not fail, after all. I might have a chance to pass.” Her eyes were dry from all the nights she had stayed up. She was tired and grateful.

He nodded and they spoke a little about the Poisson distribution, queuing theory. Everything was clear in his mind; his brain was a clear pane of glass where all the concepts were written out boldly and neatly. Today, he seemed more at ease talking to her, though he still shifted about from foot to foot, avoiding her eyes.

He said, “Do ye want to go for a coffee?”

She looked up at him. He was tall and she was not used to speaking to people with blue eyes. Then she made a mistake. Perhaps because she had been up late last night, she made that mistake. Perhaps there were other reasons for that mistake. The mistake of shifting from one level to another.

She said, “I don’t like your earring.”

The expression in his eyes, a focusing, no longer shifting away. He lifted his hand to his ear and tugged the earring off. His earlobe without the silver looked red and scarred.

She giggled because she was afraid, because he wasn’t smiling, wasn’t saying anything. She covered her mouth with her hand, then wiped her forehead and eyes. A mistake had been made and it was too late to go back. She plunged ahead, careless now, reckless. “I don’t like your long hair.”

He turned and walked away.

 

* * *

The next morning, Multivariate Analysis, and she came in late, dishevelled from running and the rain. The professor, whose name she wasn’t sure of (there were three who were Mc-something), smiled, unperturbed. All the lecturers were relaxed and urbane, in tweed jackets and polished shoes. Sometimes she wondered how the incoherent Bryan, if he did pursue an academic career, was going to transform himself into a professor like that. But it was none of her business.

Like most of the other students, she sat in the same seat in every class. Bryan sat a row ahead which was why she could always look at his hair. But he had cut it, there was no ponytail today! Just his neck and the collar of the grey and white striped shirt.

Notes to take down. In discriminant analysis, a linear combination of variables serves as the basis for assigning cases to groups.

She was made up of layers. Somewhere inside, deep inside, under the crust of vanity, in the untampered-with essence, she would glow and be in awe, and be humble and think, this is just for me, he cut his hair for me. But there were other layers, bolder, more to the surface. Giggling. Wanting to catch hold of a friend. Guess what? You wouldn’t believe what this idiot did!

Find a weighted average of variables . . . The weights are estimated so that they result in the best separation between the groups.

After the class he came over and said very seriously, without a smile, “Ah’ve cut my hair.”

A part of her hollered with laughter, sang: “You stupid boy, you stupid boy, I can see that, can’t I?”

She said, “It looks nice.” She said the wrong thing and her face felt hot and she made herself look away so that she would not know his reaction. It was true though, he did look nice; he looked decent now.

 

* * *

She should have said to Bryan, when they first held their coffee mugs in their hands and were searching for an empty table, “Let’s sit with Asafa and the others.” Mistakes follow mistakes. Across the cafeteria, the Turkish girl saw them together and raised her perfect eyebrows. Badr met Shadia’s eyes and quickly looked away. Shadia looked at Bryan and he was different, different without the earring and the ponytail, transformed in some way. If he would put lemon juice on his spots . . . but it was none of her business. Maybe the boys who smashed Badr’s windows looked like Bryan, but with fiercer eyes, no glasses. She must push him away from her. She must make him dislike her.

He asked her where she came from and when she replied, he said, “Where’s that?”

“Africa,” with sarcasm. “Do you know where that is?”

His nose and cheeks under the rims of his glasses went red. Good, she thought, good. He will leave me now in peace.

He said, “Ah know Sudan is in Africa, I meant where exactly in Africa.”

“Northeast, south of Egypt. Where are you from?”

“Peterhead. It’s north of here. By the sea.”

It was hard to believe that there was anything north of Aberdeen. It seemed to her that they were on the northernmost corner of the world. She knew better now than to imagine suntanning and sandy beaches for his “by the sea.” More likely dismal skies, pale, bad-tempered people shivering on the rocky shore.

“Your father works in Peterhead?”

“Aye, he does.”

She had grown up listening to the proper English of the BBC World Service only to come to Britain and find people saying “yes” like it was said back home in Arabic: “aye.”

“What does he do, your father?”

He looked surprised, his blue eyes surprised. “Ma dad’s a joiner.”

Fareed hired people like that to work on the house. Ordered them about.

“And your mother?” she asked.

He paused a little, stirred sugar in his coffee with a plastic spoon. “She’s a lollipop lady.”

Shadia smirked into her coffee, took a sip.

“My father,” she said proudly, “is a doctor, a specialist.” Her father was a gynaecologist. The woman who was now his wife had been one of his patients. Before that, Shadia’s friends had teased her about her father’s job, crude jokes that made her laugh. It was all so sordid now.

“And my mother,” she blew the truth up out of proportion, “comes from a very big family. A ruling family. If you British hadn’t colonized us, my mother would have been a princess now.”

“Ye walk like a princess,” he said.

What a gullible, silly boy! She wiped her forehead with her hand and said, “You mean I am conceited and proud?”

“No, Ah didnae mean that, no . . .” The packet of sugar he was tearing open tipped from his hand, its contents scattered over the table. “Ah shit . . . sorry . . .” He tried to scoop up the sugar and knocked against his coffee mug, spilling a little on the table.

She took out a tissue from her bag, reached over and mopped up the stain. It was easy to pick up all the bits of sugar with the damp tissue.

“Thanks,” he mumbled and they were silent. The cafeteria was busy: full of the humming, buzzing sound of people talking to each other, trays and dishes. In Khartoum, she avoided being alone with Fareed. She preferred it when they were with others: their families, their many mutual friends. If they were ever alone, she imagined that her mother or her sister was with them, could hear them, and she spoke to Fareed with that audience in mind.

Bryan was speaking to her, saying something about rowing on the River Dee. He went rowing on the weekends, he belonged to a rowing club.

To make herself pleasing to people was a skill Shadia was trained in. It was not difficult to please people. Agree with them, never dominate the conversation, be economical with the truth. Now, here was someone to whom all these rules needn’t apply.

She said to him, “The Nile is superior to the Dee. I saw your Dee, it is nothing, it is like a stream. There are two Niles, the Blue and the White, named after their colours. They come from the south, from two different places. They travel for miles over countries with different names, never knowing they will meet. I think they get tired of running alone, it is such a long way to the sea. They want to reach the sea so that they can rest, stop running. There is a bridge in Khartoum, and under this bridge the two Niles meet. If you stand on the bridge and look down you can see the two waters mixing together.”

“Do ye get homesick?” he asked. She felt tired now, all this talk of the river running to rest in the sea. She had never talked like this before. Luxury words, and this question he asked.

“Things I should miss I don’t miss. Instead I miss things I didn’t think I would miss. The azan, the Muslim call to prayer from the mosque. I don’t know if you know about it. I miss that. At dawn it used to wake me up. I would hear ‘prayer is better than sleep’ and just go back to sleep. I never got up to pray.” She looked down at her hands on the table. There was no relief in confessions, only his smile, young, and something like wonder in his eyes.

“We did Islam in school,” he said. “Ah went on a trip to Mecca.” He opened out his palms on the table.

“What!”

“In a book.”

“Oh.”

The coffee was finished. They should go now. She should go to the library before the next lecture and photocopy previous exam papers. Asafa, full of helpful advice, had shown her where to find them.

“What is your religion?” she asked.

“Dunno, nothing I suppose.”

“That’s terrible! That’s really terrible!” Her voice was too loud, concerned.

His face went red again and he tapped his spoon against the empty mug.

Waive all politeness, make him dislike her. Badr had said, even before his windows got smashed, that here in the West they hate Islam. Standing up to go, she said flippantly, “Why don’t you become a Muslim then?”

He shrugged. “Ah wouldnae mind travelling to Mecca, I was keen on that book.”

Her eyes filled with tears. They blurred his face when he stood up. In the West they hate Islam and he . . . She said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and walked away, but he followed her.

“Shadiya, Shadiya,” he pronounced her name wrongly, three syllables instead of two, “there’s this museum about Africa. I’ve never been before. If you’d care to go, tomorrow . . .”

 

* * *

No sleep for the guilty, no rest, she should have said no, I can’t go, no I have too much catching up to do. No sleep for the guilty, the memories come from another continent. Her father’s new wife, happier than her mother, fewer worries. When Shadia visits she offers fruit in a glass bowl, icy oranges and guavas, soothing in the heat. Shadia’s father hadn’t wanted a divorce, hadn’t wanted to leave them; he wanted two wives, not a divorce. But her mother had too much pride, she came from fading money, a family with a “name.” Of the new wife her mother says, bitch, whore, the dregs of the earth, a nobody.

Tomorrow she need not show up at the museum, even though she said that she would. She should have told Bryan she was engaged to be married, mentioned it casually. What did he expect from her? Europeans had different rules, reduced, abrupt customs. If Fareed knew about this . . . her secret thoughts like snakes . . . Perhaps she was like her father, a traitor. Her mother said that her father was devious. Sometimes Shadia was devious. With Fareed in the car, she would deliberately say, “I need to stop at the grocer, we need things at home.” At the grocer he would pay for all her shopping and she would say, “No, you shouldn’t do that, no, you are too generous, you are embarrassing me.” With the money she saved, she would buy a blouse for her mother, nail varnish for her mother, a magazine, imported apples.

 

* * *

It was strange to leave her desk, lock her room and go out on a Saturday. In the hall the telephone rang. It was Fareed. If he knew where she was going now . . . Guilt was like a hard-boiled egg stuck in her chest. A large cold egg.

“Shadia, I want you to buy some of the fixtures for the bathrooms. Taps and towel hangers. I’m going to send you a list of what I want exactly and the money . . .”

“I can’t, I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t? If you go into any large department store . . .”

“I can’t, I wouldn’t know where to put these things, how to send them.”

There was a rustle on the line and she could hear someone whispering, Fareed distracted a little. He would be at work this time in the day, glass bottles filling up with clear effervescent, the words 7UP written in English and Arabic, white against the dark green.

“You can get good things, things that aren’t available here. Gold would be good. It would match . . .”

Gold. Gold toilet seats!

“People are going to burn in hell for eating out of gold dishes, you want to sit on gold!”

He laughed. He was used to getting his own way, not easily threatened. “Are you joking with me?”

“No.”

In a quieter voice, “This call is costing . . .”

She knew, she knew. He shouldn’t have let her go away. She was not coping with the whole thing, she was not handling the stress. Like the Nigerian student.

“Shadia, gold-coloured, not gold. It’s smart.”

“Allah is going to punish us for this, it’s not right . . .”

“Since when have you become so religious!”

 

* * *

Bryan was waiting for her on the steps of the museum, familiar-looking against the strange grey of the city streets where cars had their headlamps on in the middle of the afternoon. He wore a different shirt, a navy-blue jacket. He said, not looking at her, “Ah was beginning to think you wouldnae turn up.”

There was no entry fee to the museum, no attendant handing out tickets. Bryan and Shadia walked on soft carpets; thick blue carpets that made Shadia want to take off her shoes. The first thing they saw was a Scottish man from Victorian times. He sat on a chair surrounded by possessions from Africa: overflowing trunks, an ancient map strewn on the floor of the glass cabinet. All the light in the room came from this and other glass cabinets and gleamed on the waxed floors. Shadia turned away; there was an ugliness in the lifelike wispiness of his hair, his determined expression, the way he sat. A hero who had gone away and come back, laden, ready to report.

Bryan began to conscientiously study every display cabinet, to read the posters on the wall. She followed him around and thought that he was studious, careful; that was why he did so well in his degree. She watched the intent expression on his face as he looked at everything. For her the posters were an effort to read, the information difficult to take in. It had been so long since she had read anything outside the requirements of the course. But she persevered, saying the words to herself, moving her lips . . . “During the 18th and 19th centuries, northeast Scotland made a disproportionate impact on the world at large by contributing so many skilled and committed individuals. In serving an empire they gave and received, changed others and were themselves changed and often returned home with tangible reminders of their experiences.”

The tangible reminders were there to see, preserved in spite of the years. Her eyes skimmed over the disconnected objects out of place and time. Iron and copper, little statues. Nothing was of her, nothing belonged to her life at home, what she missed. Here was Europe’s vision, the clichés about Africa: cold and old.

She had not expected the dim light and the hushed silence. Apart from Shadia and Bryan, there was only a man with a briefcase, a lady who took down notes, unless there were others out of sight on the second floor. Something electrical, the heating or the lights, gave out a humming sound like that of an air conditioner. It made Shadia feel as if they were in an aeroplane without windows, detached from the world outside.

“He looks like you, don’t you think?” she said to Bryan. They stood in front of a portrait of a soldier who died in the first year of the twentieth century. It was the colour of his eyes and his hair. But Bryan did not answer her, did not agree with her. He was preoccupied with reading the caption. When she looked at the portrait again, she saw that she was mistaken. That strength in the eyes, the purpose, was something Bryan didn’t have. They had strong faith in those days long ago.

Biographies of explorers who were educated in Edinburgh; they knew what to take to Africa: doctors, courage, Christianity, commerce, civilization. They knew what they wanted to bring back: cotton—watered by the Blue Nile, the Zambezi River. She walked after Bryan, felt his concentration, his interest in what was before him and thought, “In a photograph we would not look nice together.”

She touched the glass of a cabinet showing papyrus rolls, copper pots. She pressed her forehead and nose against the cool glass. If she could enter the cabinet, she would not make a good exhibit. She wasn’t right, she was too modern, too full of mathematics.

Only the carpet, its petroleum blue, pleased her. She had come to this museum expecting sunlight and photographs of the Nile, something to relieve her homesickness: a comfort, a message. But the messages were not for her, not for anyone like her. A letter from West Africa, 1762, an employee to his employer in Scotland. An employee trading European goods for African curiosities. It was difficult to make the natives understand my meaning, even by an interpreter, it being a thing so seldom asked of them, but they have all undertaken to bring something and laughed heartily at me and said, I was a good man to love their country so much . . .

Love my country so much. She should not be here, there was nothing for her here. She wanted to see minarets, boats fragile on the Nile, people. People like her father. The times she had sat in the waiting room of his clinic, among pregnant women, a pain in her heart because she was going to see him in a few minutes. His room, the air conditioner and the smell of his pipe, his white coat. When she hugged him, he smelled of Listerine mouthwash. He could never remember how old she was, what she was studying; six daughters, how could he keep track. In his confusion, there was freedom for her, games to play, a lot of teasing. She visited his clinic in secret, telling lies to her mother. She loved him more than she loved her mother. Her mother who did everything for her, tidied her room, sewed her clothes from Burda magazine. Shadia was twenty-five and her mother washed everything for her by hand, even her pants and bras.

“I know why they went away,” said Bryan. “I understand why they travelled.” At last he was talking. She had not seen him intense before. He spoke in a low voice. “They had to get away, to leave here . . .”

“To escape from the horrible weather . . .” She was making fun of him. She wanted to put him down. The imperialists who had humiliated her history were heroes in his eyes.

He looked at her. “To escape . . .” he repeated.

“They went to benefit themselves,” she said, “people go away because they benefit in some way.”

“I want to get away,” he said.

She remembered when he had opened his palms on the table and said, “I went on a trip to Mecca.” There had been pride in his voice.

“I should have gone somewhere else for the course,” he went on. “A new place, somewhere down south.”

He was on a plateau, not like her. She was fighting and struggling for a piece of paper that would say she was awarded an M.Sc. from a British university. For him, the course was a continuation.

“Come and see,” he said, and he held her arm. No one had touched her before, not since she had hugged her mother goodbye. Months now in this country and no one had touched her.

She pulled her arm away. She walked away, quickly up the stairs. Metal steps rattled under her feet. She ran up the stairs to the next floor. Guns, a row of guns aiming at her. They had been waiting to blow her away. Scottish arms of centuries ago, gunfire in service of the empire.

Silver muzzles, a dirty grey now. They must have shone prettily once, under a sun far away. If they blew her away now, where would she fly and fall? A window that looked out at the hostile sky. She shivered in spite of the wool she was wearing, layers of clothes. Hell is not only blazing fire, a part of it is freezing cold, torturous ice and snow. In Scotland’s winter you have a glimpse of this unseen world, feel the breath of it in your bones.

There was a bench and she sat down. There was no one here on this floor. She was alone with sketches of jungle animals, words on the wall. A diplomat away from home, in Ethiopia in 1903: Asafa’s country long before Asafa was born. It is difficult to imagine anything more satisfactory or better worth taking part in than a lion drive. We rode back to camp feeling very well indeed. Archie was quite right when he said that this was the first time since we have started that we have really been in Africa—the real Africa of jungle inhabited only by game, and plains where herds of antelope meet your eye in every direction.

“Shadiya, don’t cry.” He still pronounced her name wrongly because she had not told him how to say it properly.

He sat next to her on the bench, the blur of his navy jacket blocking the guns, the wall-length pattern of antelope herds. She should explain that she cried easily, there was no need for the alarm on his face. His awkward voice: “Why are ye crying?”

He didn’t know, he didn’t understand. He was all wrong, not a substitute . . .

“They are telling lies in this museum,” she said. “Don’t believe them. It’s all wrong. It’s not jungles and antelopes, it’s people. We have things like computers and cars. We have 7UP in Africa, and some people, a few people, have bathrooms with golden taps . . . I shouldn’t be here with you. You shouldn’t talk to me . . .”

He said, “Museums change, I can change . . .”

He didn’t know it was a steep path she had no strength for. He didn’t understand. Many things, years and landscapes, gulfs. If she had been strong she would have explained, and not tired of explaining. She would have patiently taught him another language, letters curved like the epsilon and gamma he knew from mathematics. She would have shown him that words could be read from right to left. If she had not been small in the museum, if she had been really strong, she would have made his trip to Mecca real, not only in a book.