Thirteen Months of Sunrise Read online

  About the Author

  Born in 1979, Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese author, journalist and activist. She has published two novels in Arabic – Green Flash (2006) and Son of the Sun (2013) and her short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press, 2016), the first ever anthology of Sudanese short fiction in translation. She has also worked as a culture editor for Al-Thaqafi magazine, a columnist for Ad-Adwaa newspaper and presenter of the ‘Silicon Valley’ cultural programme on Sudanese TV. Thirteen Months of Sunrise is her debut collection.

  First published in Great Britain by Comma Press, 2019.

  www.commapress.co.uk

  First published in Arabic by Dar Azmina, 2009.

  Copyright © Rania Mamoun, 2019.

  English translation copyright © Elisabeth Jaquette, 2019.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral rights of Rania Mamoun to be identified as the

  author of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-10 1910974390

  ISBN-13 978-1-91097-439-1

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from

  English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ programme. The book was also supported by the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

  For my father Ali,

  my brother Wada’a,

  and my friend Ibtihal, with whom I postponed a phone call,

  one I never made.

  I love you.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Thirteen Months of Sunrise

  Passing

  Edges

  A Week of Love

  In the Muck of the Soul

  Doors

  A Woman Asleep on Her Bundle

  Cities and Other Cities

  One-Room Sorrows

  Stray Steps

  About the Translator

  Thirteen Months of Sunrise

  Thirteen is not a superstitious or unlucky number, it’s the number of months in a year in Ethiopia.

  But that’s another story.

  I was very frustrated by the time he arrived. The computer in front of me had frozen and a customer needed help. It was morning and I was still half-asleep.

  I assumed he was Sudanese when I saw him, or, more accurately, I didn’t assume anything. It wouldn’t have been unusual to meet a Sudanese man in my country. Isn’t it normal for Sudanese people to live in Sudan? I don’t know why I didn’t ask myself where he was from when he spoke to me in English. Maybe my mind was elsewhere.

  I fixed the problem with the computer and was in a better mood. I overheard him grumbling about a floppy disk.

  ‘You’re not worth the trouble’, he muttered to it.

  ‘You’re better off using a CD or a flash drive,’ I told him. ‘They’re safer. You really shouldn’t trust floppy disks nowadays.’

  ‘Yes, I won’t again.’

  ‘Do you have a copy of what was on the disk?’

  ‘Yes, but just a print version. I’d hoped to edit it.’

  ‘Eritrean or Ethiopian?’ I asked.

  ‘Ethiopian,’ he said with pride.

  Before we met, I hadn’t really known the difference between Ethiopia and Eritrea. I didn’t know why I preferred the idea of Eritrea and its capital, Asmara, to Ethiopia and Addis Ababa. Even though I’d never visited either country, I felt that Eritrean rhythms spoke to my soul somehow and the same with Asmara. I liked both countries, generally speaking, and had harboured a great love for Abyssinia ever since I was small. We lived next door to an ‘Abyssinian’ bookshop, a word we used to refer to all Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants and visitors to Sudan.

  The bookshop occupied the whole building and hosted community events and gatherings when I was young. In front of it was a vacant lot where teenagers played football. It was lined with houses that had little gardens in front, each ringed with barbed wire, wooden posts, or mats. They often held celebrations in that open area by erecting a stage, setting out lots of chairs, and pitching a large tent over the top.

  I loved how the Abysinnians danced, the intense way they moved their shoulders and neck with the beat. I still do. I often stared at the dancers on stage, gazing at the women’s beautiful clothes, white with colourful embroidery, with my hands full of popcorn and mouth agape.

  We didn’t understand anything they were saying or singing because they spoke and sang in Amharic, but even so, we delighted in the melodies, music, dancing, and joyous atmosphere.

  The Abyssinians were a vital part of the community with their gatherings, just like the other adults and children in the neighbourhood. We shared their delight in the festivities. For us, the parties were a chance to play and cause mischief; we’d stand on either side of the tent, batting at each other through the fabric. Anyone who wanted a seat had to fight for it, there was always chaos, commotion, and clamour. It was our chance to escape the adults’ supervision and revel in childhood freedom.

  ‘I really love Abyssinia,’ I told him.

  ‘We look the same, so we feel an affinity with each other. You’re wearing clothing similar to ours, by the way.’

  I was wearing an abaya and matching trousers made from handwoven fabric on the loom. It was white with brown threads running through it, and three red stripes embroidered on the cuff… it really did look like Abyssinian attire. In fact, I remember asking the tailor who made it to use red because it made the outfit look more Abyssinian.

  Perhaps the abaya I was wearing reminded him of home, perhaps that’s what drew him to me. When you’re homesick, you yearn for anything familiar: people, language, signs, anything. We feel differently towards these things than we do when we’re nestled in our own country’s embrace.

  A beautiful friendship took seed in those moments. He told me it pained him that he couldn’t easily communicate with other people, not without constantly explaining and clarifying, but with the two of us, conversation was easy. He found in me someone who understood him, and I found in him a window into Ethiopia, and oh how I loved it.

  He mispronounced my name for the first few days, calling me ‘Raina’ instead of ‘Rania,’ half-swallowing the ‘R’, while I called him ‘Kidane’.

  Back home, Kidane is a woman’s name, he told me, ‘Call me Kidana.’

  ‘For us, Kidana is a woman’s name,’ I told him, ‘because it ends in an “a”.’

  I would ask him about all sorts of things, from zaghny (an Ethiopian dish) and zaleekh (chilli), to politics and Eritrea’s conflicts with Ethiopia, born from Italian colonialism. He told me how, when Eritreans wanted their own currency in place of the Ethiopian birr, their former Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, deceived them by just changing the design.

  He compared everything, great and small, to what it was like in his country, and he often said that he never imagined that he might sit, chat, laugh, and enjoy a beautiful friendship with a Sudanese woman. We joked and drank tea, 7Up, and tamarind juice, which he said, with its brown colour, looked like an alcoholic drink they have back home.

  He asked me to accompany him to buy some Sudanese music, so we went to Studio Adeel and Zein. I picked out a cassette tape featuring some of the greatest Sudanese singers for him, as well as one of the flautist Hafiz Abdelrahman called Everlasting Days.

  ‘Think of me every time you listen to those tapes,’ I told him.

  ‘I’ll fall in love with you if I do that.’

  ‘No. You mustn’t fall in love with me.’

/>   ‘I love you now, in my own way.’

  ‘I love you, too, in my own way.’

  Little Mohamed, who was twelve years old and worked at the café on weekends, always stared curiously at us when we were together, trying to get closer to us.

  ‘He’s Sudanese?’ he asked me one day.

  ‘Kind of,’ I replied.

  ‘Then why doesn't he speak Arabic… was he in America or something?’

  I laughed, and told Kidane what the boy said. Kidane laughed too.

  ‘He’s Ethiopian,’ I said.

  ‘Y’mean Abyssinian.’

  ‘Yes, Abyssinian.’

  ‘So you’re Abyssinian, too,’ he said to me.

  I laughed again.

  ‘My mother is Abyssinian.’

  ‘Is that guy related to you?’

  ‘Yes, he’s my cousin.’

  After that Mohamed began to show off his knowledge of English, which didn’t seem to include more than ten words. Kidane became far more relaxed around him, and from then on they were friends.

  I wouldn’t claim I could speak English like a ‘Johnny,’ as we called the English, but through it we were able to understand each other.

  Kidane was able to communicate with the words he knew, as well as a generous human spirit. I didn’t need him to finish every sentence he began, and if I got a word wrong he never corrected or embarrassed me.

  Kidane was here to collect data on water for his Master’s thesis. He was researching the Nile basin and had been given a choice: travel to Sudan or Egypt. He chose the former. He was here to study the Gezira Scheme – the largest irrigation project on the continent of Africa – and was doing fieldwork at the scheme’s headquarters in Barakat, with farmers in the villages of Helwa and Bika, in the city of al-Hasaheisa, and at the Agricultural Research Authority in Wad Madani.

  ‘We drink the same water,’ he said to me once.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It flows through both of us.’

  The Blue Nile, which passes through Khartoum, originates at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. That’s what makes our bond so strong, I thought: we were nursed from the same source. The White Nile originates at Lake Victoria in Uganda and the two rivers – the unruly Blue Nile, and the wide, calm White Nile – meet in Khartoum, where their beauty glorifies the city. There they converge to form the great River Nile, which crosses Egypt to where it then flows into the Mediterranean Sea.

  It’s ‘tea’ in Amharic, and ‘teha’ in Tigrinya, he told me every time I ordered a cup of tea. He knew both languages: Amharic, which was spoken by the Amhara people, and Tigrinya, which was spoken by the Tigrayans. His father was Tigrayan and his mother was Amhara. He told me about the different tribes and ethnicities back home: Muslims from Harar, beautiful men and women who still live in cities surrounded by huge walls like ancient citadels; the Afar people, the Oromo, Somalis and those from the South, and the Anuak people, who intersected with part of the Dinka tribe in South Sudan.

  When I was little, a friend told me that she had a relative from Ethiopia, and he’d told her that their year had thirteen months.

  This tale stayed in the back of my mind, and once, when we were browsing an Ethiopian website, I asked him, what’s the story?

  ‘Each of our months has just thirty days, and all the extra days from months which have thirty-one days are combined to make the thirteenth month of the year,’ he told me. ‘Pagumen is the name of the thirteenth month, which has five or six days depending on whether it’s a leap year.’ How could Pagumen be a month when it had fewer days than a week? Ethiopia was a wonderous country!

  It’s the only nation in the world with a year unlike all the others – a year with an extra month, a composition all its own – and whenever I recalled this I would ask the person next to me: did you know that Ethiopia has thirteen months?

  ‘Is this place good for you?’ He asked as we were deciding where to sit.

  ‘It’s not the place that’s important, but the person you share it with. They can make it heaven or hell.’

  ‘In that case it’s definitely good for you!’

  We laughed a lot that day, and when he said ‘I feel at home in this country,’ I was filled with joy that I’d managed to ease his sharp loneliness. When he walked away, on that last day together, I felt as if a strong hand had clasped my heart and squeezed it tight, and I couldn’t look away until he’d disappeared from sight.

  It was evening, and in front of us was a wide, green field ringed by young trees. ‘Open spaces nourish the imagination,’ said my Ethiopian friend. Did I imagine something different about him that last evening? He was different, yes. Or at least that’s how I felt, because my feelings for him were different, feelings preceding the word goodbye. Maybe for forever. In my mind, I told him: take care of yourself… keep in touch… please, don’t forget what we shared.

  I felt the moment of farewell sweep over me, and the consequences that usually accompany those moments.

  ‘Will I see him again someday, somewhere?’ I asked someone nearby.

  Kidane Kiros was his name.

  Passing

  He visits me often, asking the same question in the same tone of sorrow.

  ‘Why don’t you become a doctor like you promised me?’

  ‘I’m not going to, I’m sorry,’ I tell him with regret.

  ‘I put my hopes in you, and thought you would make them come true,’ he says.

  I fall silent, unable to respond. Or perhaps it’s the disappointment flowing through his words that leaves me mute.

  *

  The cracks in the walls are stained with the scent of you, mixed with particles of dust. It seeps into me, the air in the room is flooded with it. I look around, trying to find the source. It fills me, engulfs me. I stretch out my hand to take it in my palm, for it to touch me, for me to touch you through it, to touch your tender palm, your face, your hand. I feel you close to me… so close. I feel you near me, within me, inside of me. If I reach out, I think, I might collide with you.

  Your scent opens channels of memory, it invades me without warning, like armies of ants stinging me fiercely, chaotically: on my eyes, my skin, in my pores, my blood, even my ears, as they pick up the vibrations of your voice drawing closer. I’m flooded with memories: I feel the warmth of your embrace; the warmth of the bed where as a child I slept beside you instead of Mother; you coming home from your errands, me sticking to you like glue. Mother tried to separate me from you, but I didn’t listen. ‘He’s going on a trip tomorrow,’ she’d tell me, and I’d say: ‘But he’ll come back.’

  Now that I’m grown, that you have left, that I have surrendered to a loss so hard to abide, I can’t give the same answer, or even be so sure.

  Your scent fills every inch of space. It pulls me out of a whirlpool of memory, tosses me into another, wider and deeper, and the feeling that you are close to me swells. You sip your tea from the big mug we kept – how you loved your tea – and then listen to the radio, lying on your back with one leg crossed over the other. You rifle through your satchel of memories, and call me over to read one. Sometimes your shadow deceives me, as you wash before prayer. I remember how happy you were when we moved to the house next to the mosque, where the call to prayer was so loud it beat in our hearts and shook our bodies, and you said, ‘Nothing makes me happier than being near the mosque, could we wish for a better neighbour?’

  *

  Today is the Eid. Everyone flits around joyously. From the mosque, the muezzin calls out:

  Allahuakbar. Allahuakbar. La ilahailla Allah. Allahuakbar we lillah al-hamd.

  God is great. God is great. There is no god but God. God is great, praise God.

  And the children repeat it after him. My nieces and nephews race in and out, delighted with their new clothes, Eid sweets never leaving their mouths. They rush up to me, all abuzz.

  ‘Where are our Eid presents?’ asks Eyad. ‘And don’t say you’ll hand them out later!’

  ‘We want them now, we’r
e going to the swings,’ says Bara’a.

  ‘How much’ll you give us?’ asks Ziad. ‘We always get lots for Eid. Please, we want lots of coins.’

  I’m nearly done tidying the house. I straighten the carpets, pull fresh sheets taut on the beds, and add more embers to the incense burner. The scent of sandalwood wafts up, crowning the festivities.

  I hear my sister calling out to Mother.

  ‘Mum… Mum… come look at Dad. What’s wrong with him? He doesn’t look well at all.’

  Mother comes. She feels his forehead. She asks him something, he doesn’t respond. She tells my sister to call our neighbour, the doctor.

  My sister has already bathed him today, dressed him in a new jellabiya, and daubed on his cologne. She tells him today is Eid, but he doesn’t seem to understand what she’s saying or even know what day it is. He’s completely out of it. You ask him something and he doesn’t respond, or even give the impression he hears you. When he looks at you, you can’t tell whether he sees you, or if he’s looking right through you. His eyes wander, lost in empty space.

  She brings him his favourite tea, takes him back to bed, and tucks him in.

  ‘Did he drink the tea?’ I ask her. ‘Did he throw it up?’

  ‘Yes, he drank it. But I don’t know whether he’ll keep it down or not.’