Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Frederick was at his desk in the mid-morning when he heard Pearce in the reception room next door to his study. The doors of all the rooms wer kept open on his orders, to circulate the air and keep the house cool in the morning. In the afternoons the shutters at the front of the house were closed and the veranda blinds were lowered to keep the sun out. Frederick attended to the details of his household punctiliously. He liked doing so, and even said the word to himself, over-stressing its sharp edges in self-parody. Punctiliously. He had a good idea what was purchased for the store, what was consumed, and how much slack to allow for pilfering. He wound the clocks himself once a week, and made sure that they all told the same time. He checked the specific gravity of the milk every now and then to make sure the Cambay dairyman had not watered it down too much. He liked his servants to know that he knew their duties precisely, that he was attentive to their ruses, and expected them to be considerate of his preferences. So he had warned Hamis to allow for one more guest for dinner in case Burton turned up, and he had heard Hamis going into Pearce’s room at eight o’clock in the morning with a cup of tea, as he had instructed him to.

  When he heard Pearce in the reception room, he set aside the report on the year’s customs duties that he was working on and went out to greet him. He found him standing on the veranda, leaning against one of the corner posts in a late morning patch of sunlight. He was wearing one of Frederick’s shirts and pairs of trousers, which were not the right size for him. The shirt was too large and the trousers were three or four inches too short. It gave him the look of a beachcomber, an educated idler, one of those R. L. Stevenson South Sea ruins, especially with the bare feet and the straggly beard on him. The thought made him smile, because there was something appropriate about it, something in Pearce’s posture which was not to do with the clothes, some looseness or poise, a kind of self-possession.

  ‘You shouldn’t be standing in the sun there, you know,’ Frederick said. ‘Not after your sunstroke or whatever it was you had out there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pearce said, moving away obediently. ‘Did I disturb you? Please don’t nterrupt your work.’

  ‘Happy to be disturbed,’ Frederick said, motioning Pearce towards the coolness inside. ‘I’m writing a report on commodities duties for the year, and comparing the figures to last year’s, the vital statistics of Empire but very dull going. I usually have a small respite at this time of the morning. Will you join me in a cup of coffee or some fruit? The coffee here is delicious, and Hamis lovingly roasts it and pounds it every day. It’s not a very delicate bean, but full of flavour.’

  ‘Yes, that’s very kind of you. It was the smell of coffee that brought me out,’ Pearce said.

  ‘Splendid. Hamis will be along in a short while. How are you feeling? You look much better, although I think you could probably do with some more of cook’s broth.’

  ‘I am much better,’ Pearce said, stroking his beard.

  ‘We’ll get Hamis to fetch the barber, shall we?’ Frederick said, smiling. ‘Or do you grow your beard wild?’

  ‘No, no. I let it grow when I started on the journey, to avoid the bother of shaving every day. Yes, I’ll have the barber, please.’

  Frederick waited. The moment was exactly right for Pearce to begin telling his story, but when he did not, Frederick smiled secretly to himself. He would prompt him, he decided. He was ready to hear about it all. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been able to locate your things,’ Frederick said. ‘I went back to the dukawallah fellow and asked him most firmly about it, but he is adamant. Do you remember what there was? We may still be able to force the truth out of him.’

  Pearce shook his head wearily. ‘There was nothing. My guides took what there was, everything. They had been debating whether to do it or not, I guessed that anyway. I got exhausted, not sleeping because of anxiety. Then the last night before they left me, I fell into a deep sleep and they took my gun. I heard them talking bickering among each other, and I woke up. One of them was sitting beside me with the gun pointing at my head. They made me lie with my face on the ground and they took off my shoes and my belt t they left me one skin of water and a bag of dried fruit. Oh, a a smock and a pair of sandals. I heard them go, arguing among themselves already. They had been disagreeing about whether to kill me or just to rob me. One of them wanted to do that, to kill me, to make sure, and the others talked him out of it. Perhaps they were still debating the wisdom of leaving me alive.’

  ‘Damned bandits,’ Frederick said. ‘I must say, you’re being rather cool about this business. I’d have been furious. Where did this happen exactly? Where were you headed?’

  Pearce shrugged. ‘This way. We were on our way here. After they left I headed due south. I left an expedition which was headed south-west, towards Uganda, you see. The three guides were to bring me to the east coast, but I suppose they didn’t want to come here for some reason, or preferred to be elsewhere. I couldn’t stand the killing any more.’

  ‘Killing!’ Frederick said shrilly.

  ‘A hunting expedition,’ Pearce said. ‘A rather grand one. Three English gentlemen, one with his own English servant, and a white hunter to look after the arrangements. The white hunter organised everything, the camels, the guides, the provisions, like an angry quartermaster most of the time.’

  Pearce paused for a moment, breathing deeply, gathering his strength. ‘Mr Tomlinson. He sat on his own in his tent in the evening scribbling furiously, writing up his journal for his memoir, no doubt. The gentlemen made such fun of him, relentlessly, driving him into a frenzy with their profligacy and complaints. I met one of the gentlemen in Aden. His name was Weatherill. I don’t know if you know him, he’d been in India. Quite wealthy.’

  Pearce paused again, running out of breath. When he resumed he spoke more slowly, pacing himself. ‘I’d been travelling in Abyssinia for four months and Weatherill was very interested to hear about that. He wanted to know if we were going in there now that Menelik had chased the Italians out. He’s a man of great curiosity despite his hunting and riding ways, a man of impressive intellectual energy. He wanted to talk about Rimbaud, and whether anyone in Abyssinia mentioned him. Then he invited me to join him on his expedition to Somalia. I couldn’t resist. I was feeling very well after my travels, you know how you do, perhaps slightly reckless. Weatherill invited me as his guest so there was no expense for me to bear. Only three months or so of my time. There was no urgent reason to rush back, and I had hardly travelled at all in Somalia. I really couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Has anybody ever read Rimbaud? Does anybody read him now? I think he’s now better known as a gun-runner than a poet,’ Frederick said. He was relieved by the fullness of Pearce’s account, and he felt his doubts of the previous evening evaporate. Just then Hamis arrived to deliver rice cake, fruit and coffee, and spread it on two small tables in front of them. While they waited for him, Frederick recited:

  A maid with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw;

  It was an Abyssinian maid

  And on her dulcimer she played.

  ‘There I was, warning you about Abyssinian levies when you probably count them as your blood brothers. What were you doing in Abyssinia, if I may ask?’ Frederick asked after Hamis left.

  Pearce took an interest in the rice cake, bending forward to study it with care, and then he shrugged. ‘Travelling, working on a book. I’m a historian, of a kind. A proper amateur actually. A bit of a linguist, a student linguist. I was based in Egypt for a year, in the education service. I promised myself I would travel in Abyssinia when it was time to move on. Abyssinia always interested me, even when I was a boy. I wanted to know something of how it looked, and what its language sounded like.’

  ‘An orientalist,’ Frederick said.

  Pearce smiled. ‘When I know more perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Please go on,’ Frederick said, intrigued by Pearce’s reticence about Abyssinia. Perhaps he was some kind of high-level spy, preparing a report on
Abyssinia for a senior official in the Foreign Office. Perhaps Weatherill was right to suspect that we were going in there. He did not fancy Abyssinia.

  ‘May I?’ Pearce asked and helped himself to a slice of rice cake. He chewed slowly, taking his time, nodding slightly with appreciation. ‘Delicious, such subtlety. I can taste cardamom and yeast. You can’t imagine how delicate that is after my fare for the last few weeks.’

  Frederick poured the coffee and waited until Pearce had a few sips. ‘Please go on,’ he repeated, leaning back and exaggerating his willingness to listen.

  ‘We took a dhow from Aden to Brava in December. It was days and days of beautiful sailing, the best part of the trip. The north-east monsoons had settled fine, and then we picked up the Somali current when we rounded the Horn. We were in Brava for a few days and set off towards Dif, a small army of animals and men, armed as if for a conquest. It took us four weeks, slaughtering our way across southern Somalia. It was unbearable destruction. We killed every day, sometimes as many as four or five lions in a day, and leopards and rhino and antelope. We all reeked of blood and guts. And slaughtered meat and drying hides. Flies settled on us as if we were carrion. We ate so much charred meat that the air was nauseous with our breath and our waste. When we got to Dif I told Weatherill that I could not continue. He was furious, and his friends were too. They had been in a cavalry regiment together and I suppose they thought my objections unmanly. Weatherill refused to let me turn back. It was too dangerous, he said, and he could not spare the men. By now the plan had changed and Weatherill and his gentlemen friends were headed for Uganda to shoot elephants. I remonstrated daily with Weatherill. He was not feeling too well himself but he was inclined to see me as more profoundly feeble than him. In the end I wore him down. We went on shooting and killing our way south-westwards until we approached the Tana. There Weatherill thought it would be safe enough to let me turn back, or at least head for the east coast. He asked the headman to select three men who would accompany me. By the time we reached the coast, they calculated, it would only be a couple of months before the monsoons changed to the south-wests and the men could get passage back to Brava, and I could go to the devil.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Frederick said. ‘The winds are due to change quite soon, I believe.’

  Pearce nodded. ‘The men who accompanied me did not like the task. I don’t know why exactly. I understand some Somali, a very, very tiny bit of Somali. I was learning on the journey, spending time with one of the men who gave me conversation for an hour or two every day. The men with me refused to understand when I spoke to them, and I saw early on that there was danger. I didn’t think they would abandon me or kill me, really. It was very unlikely, Weatherill told me. He knew who the men were, and he had hired them. Their sense of honour would not allow them to betray me. But there must have been something else, some danger they feared in this direction. Their reluctance to travel to the coast was greater than their sense of honour, because four days before I turned up in your marvellous town, they did abandon me.’

  ‘Somalis are the most incorrigible bandits,’ Frederick said. ‘My dear Pearce, they didn’t only abandon you. They robbed you and left you out there in the desert to die. You should count yourself lucky to be here.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Pearce said, smiling. ‘About being incorrigible bandits, I mean. There are people who will swear on the loyalty of a Somali. Weatherill almost did, on his word of honour or one of those sorts of declarations. Those poor young men let him down though. Maybe they will become notorious among their people for abandoning me. And it wasn’t really desert, you know.’

  ‘Pearce, my dear fellow, are you all right?’ Frederick asked, half rising from his seat, for he could see tears running out of Pearce’s eyes.

  ‘I thought they would kill me. That’s what I thought at first,’ Pearce said. ‘Then when they left me out there I thought someone on the way would kill me, or I would be attacked by a wild beast, or I would die of thirst and longing. Anything could have happened. That’s all, and I so much wanted to be alive. Yes, I’m all right. Yes, I do count myself lucky to be here. What you see in my face is joy.’

  ‘Don’t distress yourself any more, Pearce,’ Frederick said, pouring him another cup of coffee. ‘You must be incredibly weary.’

  ‘I am. My name is Martin. Please call me that. The people who found me, I must go and thank them,’ he said.

  ‘Martin it is,’ Frederick said, raising his own cup in a toast. ‘But first the barber then some lunch and some more rest. There’s no rush.’

  3 Rehana

  REHANA KNOTTED THE THREAD tight on the button of the dress she was making and then snapped it off with her teeth. She picked another button out of the metal thimble beside her on the mat and lined it up with the next button-hole, giving the exercise her full attention. She pushed the tip of the quill through the thick material, deep enough to puncture it, and then guided the thread-carrier through the loop in the button. She had done six already, this was the seventh and then there were two more after that. Malika was sitting with her feet stretched out on the same mat under the awning, picking bruised and dead leaves out of the spinach and humming what to Rehana sounded like a lullaby. Perhaps it was to express her longing for a child, but she did not seem to know many other kinds of songs. At least, Rehana had not heard her sing anything but lullabies and some qasidas during Maulid Nabi, the ones everyone knew.

  Rehana herself had no ear for remembering melodies, although when the women went wild at wedding celebrations she was as frenzied in her singing as everyone else. It was not really the words and the melody that mattered at those times, but the noise and the laughter and the dancing. No men were allowed to be present, although some young man was sure to peep over a wall or through a crack in the window planks. When the dancing began it was deliberately provocative, exaggerated swinging of hips and thrusting out of breasts, making fun of the lust that custom required women to suppress. But it became a pleasure to let the body move with moderate abandon. Everything was done with smiles and laughter, and the memory made Rehana smile. Perhaps some of the women took more pleasure in the hip-grinding than others, and sometimes afterwards she felt as if they had all been children on a romp, tolerated in their misbehaviour, allowed to be naughty out of the sight of men.

  ‘They didn’t even bring the mat back, did they? Or the cloth,’ Malika said, breaking off from her humming to prod Rehana’s and her own indignation and revive their sense of misuse all over again. Her lower lip curled in an ugly pout, but her eyes were bright, as if her sullenness was a kind of play. ‘It was the eating mat as well, and they came in and took it away with them. And they took the shuka! You went inside and you fetched a new cloth to put on him and cover his shame . . . and what did these people do? They burst into our house without greeting or anything, without one word of courtesy. Without even a salamalaikum or hodi. They burst in, took their man and off they went, mat and everything, looking neither here nor there. Not even one tiny polite word from them. That horrible Indian man, that baniani, barking like a mad dog in front of his master . . . and the man himself standing there, swollen like a ripe boil, his face red and running with sweat, with his dirty boots on the mat. Did you see those boots? Those boots could crack a bone if he kicked out at you, especially with those thighs on him, like the hind legs of a donkey . . . and the soles are probably made of metal and have poison smeared on them. They are killers, these people. He looked cruel, didn’t he? . . . when he came back later to threaten Hassanali, speaking all kinds of filth. That whip in his hand and the red, angry face and that swollen neck. Wallahi, don’t you think?’

  Rehana thought, my father was a baniani too, but she said nothing. Instead she made a low sound of assent, thinking that Malika was playing a role, after all, putting on that voice of indignation that women seemed unable to resist at any abuse. But it was true, the government European frightened them with his return, waving his whip impatiently at
Hassanali and snarling at him, turning all of them into criminals. Never mind his return, he frightened her the first time he came, bursting upon them like that as if he had caught them in wrong-doing. Hassanali had hurried past to open the yard door, in his terror only managing to say mzungu wa serikali amefika. The government European has arrived. Even as she rose to her feet, irresistibly panicked, Rehana felt herself resisting. What was there to be terrified about? They can have their corpse back. She had never seen one of them before, not the angry, red-faced kind that burst in on them. The sick man, somehow, had not struck her as mzungu, but was more like complication and confusion, a token of Hassanali’s ineptitude with life. The one with the boots and the whip was the snarling figure from the stories, the destroyer of nations. When the Bohra man shouted at them and accused them of robbing the sick mzungu, everyone called out all at the same time, explaining what had really happened and how Hassanali had called out Mamake Zaituni the healer and Yahya the Legbreaker and neither had found anything wrong with him. Don’t shout at the good man when he was only trying to help another poor son of Adam, they called out, don’t abuse him for no reason. Take your mzungu and get out of here, fidhuli we.

  The second time they came was in mid-afternoon, when Hassanali had not yet risen from his brief siesta. This time the European came with his servant, and the servant banged on the door and yelled out commands as if he was seeking admittance for a sultan. They had come to accuse them of robbing that ragged-looking living-death. The only thing they could have robbed him of was his soul, and who wanted to have anything to do with a mzungu’s soul. But the government man was even more angry than he had been in the morning, so much that she thought he would hit Hassanali, and at one point raised his whip above his head as if he was threatening a child. The servant pleaded with Hassanali, Mpe, mpe chochote. Humjui mambo yake mzungu huyu. Give him, give him something. You don’t know this man’s ways. Hassanali thought he was asking him for a bribe, and asked how much he wanted. We don’t have very much. The servant said, no no, give him the man’s property back, whatever it is. So Rehana had walked over to the washing platform where they had put his rags until the next day’s washing, picked them up and held the bundle out to the red-faced man. The servant stepped forward and took the bundle from her. That’s all there is, she said. Then she angrily waved them towards the door, go. Leave our house.