Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘Poor Hassanali,’ Malika said, unable to suppress a disloyal smile. ‘I thought his legs were going to give way under him. You could hear his teeth rattling all the way inside the house. When that horrible man started to threaten him with prison, I thought I would burst into tears. But Hassanali stood there, shaking and rattling his teeth, and repeating humbly what he had said before. Even the Englishman knew he was telling the truth. Then when you came out and told him to go . . .’ Malika put her palm over her mouth and ululated her celebration, and then clapped her hands with glee. ‘Why should we want to steal from his brother? What did he have that we would want? Do we look that poor? The man came here in rags, dying for all we knew, and we took him in out of kindness. Then the government man comes and says we stole his belongings from him. What was there to steal?’

  There was a book, small enough to fit in the pocket of a smock. Half of it was covered with writing, the rest was blank. Rehana had found it in his rags while she was sitting beside him, feeding him honey and water. She had put it in the pocket of her dress, and in the commotion of his removal had not found a moment to return it, although she felt the weight of it as the men were milling about. Later that afternoon, she had shut her door as if going for a rest after a long morning of shock and outrage, and had taken the book out. All morning it had bumped against her thighs every time she moved, but she had not taken it out of her dress pocket. She was not sure why she was secretive about the book, perhaps because she wanted to look at it herself first before someone snatched it away. Perhaps she was ashamed, afraid to seem petty and thieving, stealing a worthless book from a dying man. It was bound in soft leather which was sweat-stained and rough from handling. She opened it carefully and saw that the used pages were nearly full with writing. It was European writing, tightly-packed, some of it crossed out. Sometimes there were drawings of boxes and what she guessed were houses and trees. She couldn’t read the writing, although she could read. She was sure it was the writing of the man himself, rather than a copy of devotions or prayers. It was the work of months, she thought, written during his travels and his troubles. She brought the pages to her face and smelled leather and dust and the sun-baked scent of the man.

  ‘And then after that they didn’t even bring the mat back,’ Malika said, her face pouting again with exaggerated indignation. ‘Or the shuka. What need does that European have with our mat when he has perfumed rugs on his floors? He’s a thief, that’s all.’

  Rehana grinned at her performance, making her smile too. She often thought how lucky they were to have found Malika. How lucky Hassanali was, without a doubt, but Rehana felt lucky too, since she was doomed to live with her brother and his wife for the rest of her life. Until she knew for sure. Unless she wanted to marry again. She could have done a great deal worse than Malika. They all could have. Malika was so young and loving and joyful, and showed no impatience with her house-bound life. Yet. She was unhurried with her chores, and to Rehana it seemed she was always on the point of turning everything into play. It was irritating at times, childish, but sooner or later she made her smile and join in.

  ‘He’s not a thief,’ Rehana said. ‘He’s a conquerer.’

  ‘It was a good mat too,’ Malika said. ‘Our eating mat.’

  ‘Ha Malika, stop all that about the mat,’ said Rehana sharply, snarling with bared teeth as she bit through the thread again. Talk about something else, young one. This new mat is nicer anyway, lovely colours. And the government mzungu had walked over the other one with his boots, and then they’d taken the sick man away in it, so we would have had to change it anyway.’

  ‘He wasn’t sick, ju tired, and it’s still our mat,’ Malika said stubbornly, rising to her feet with her basket of spinach leaves. ‘They should have brought it back. And they should have brought your new shuka back.’

  ‘Shall we send Hassanali to demand them back from the mzungu?’ Rehana asked.

  ‘Can you see him there?’ Malika asked, laughing gaily and wobbling her knees as she mimed Hassanali’s terror. She was still chuckling as she walked to the water jar to wash the spinach. She swung her hips lazily as she walked, unaware or uncaring about how she looked. It made Rehana smile to herself as she watched. ‘Yes, mince away while it lasts,’ Rehana said softly.

  Her first thought was that it was him, her husband, that he had struggled back and Hassanali had found him and brought him home. Not because there was any resemblance or anything like that, the thought came too quickly for that. Hassanali had brought an exhausted traveller home and her first thought was that it was him. She had felt terror and anger, and the beginnings of elation, all in an instant. Now that she thought of that moment she remembered that she also thought of him, how he looked, his smile, the feel of the hair on his body, all in a rush. Then she saw that it wasn’t him, and drew back in relief and disgust. The disgust was with herself, for being unable to feel only rage and humiliation at the thought of him, for being unable to stifle her body’s desire for him, for the relief of having him back. Then she saw Hassanali standing in front of her, at a loss as always at what he had done, at what he had brought home, and she could not suppress her irritation with him. It was not his fault, but it also was. He had brought him home too, Azad. Rehana began on the last button, and did nothing to resist the swell of regret that passed through her at the memory of him.

  He told Hassanali that he came from the same town as their father, that he knew the family. That was what Hassanali reported to her when he came in after shutting the shop that evening. He said he may even have heard of their father while still in India, as the young man who went away to the black coast and never returned. Many o hers went like that, but most came back in the end to look for a wife. His name was Azad. He had come to Mombasa in the last musim on a ship from Calicut. Their captain made a good profit on the merchandise he brought with him, mostly supplies ordered and paid for in India, but he was new to the musim trade and was cautious on his first trip. He also brought some cloth and jaggery and trinkets which he sold to local merchants who intended to distribute them in the interior, but he had trouble finding enough to take back on the return trip. He did not have the slack in the margin of his profit to take any risks. Other ships’ captains had already made advance arrangements with suppliers, and had the reputations and connections to protect these arrangements. So the captain asked Azad to stay behind and act as his agent until his return the following year, to arrange for goods and merchandise to be ready for him when he came back. They were related in a way he explained but which Hassanali could not reproduce coherently, perhaps had not listened to very carefully. In any case, that was what Azad was doing, arranging with merchants to have goods ready for his captain and relatives. It was important, that relative part, because it meant he was obliged to be trustworthy in his dealings and his word was as good as his brother’s, the captain. Not that he knew very much about purchasing, but the captain trusted him, and he was doing his best. That was what he said, Hassanali reported, smiling, pleased to be able to speak kindly about him.

  Azad was in the town to agree a purchase of such and such a tonnage of simsim, because as everyone knew, this was one of the best areas for simsim. The rubber from the new European plantations was, of course, not available for purchase by people like them. That went straight into the government ships and was sent to Ulaya for their own use. But the simsim was there, and some tobacco and leather and aromatic gum, all good merchandise. While he was in town he heard about their father. To be honest, he had heard already while he was in Mombasa, because of course he used to live there, and some of the Gujarati merchants he dealt with there mentioned him. So he knew about their father even befo he came to the town, and when someone here mentioned Hassanali, he thought he would come and pay his respects.

  Hassanali reported all this with an excitement which surprised Rehana. She did not think India mattered that much to Hassanali, or at least she was surprised that it did. Their father, whose name was Zakariya, had a
lways said that he was a Muslim living among Muslims, and that was enough for him. Where he was born or came from was neither here nor there, they all lived in the house of God, dar-al-Islam, which stretched across mountains and forests and deserts and oceans, and where all were the same in submission to God. He had a gift for languages, their father, and spoke Kiswahili, Arabic and Gujarati fluently. His Kiswahili was quite perfect. It was not only that he could make himself understood in this language, but that he felt it, and made his way in it with an intimacy and assurance that was like an instinct, like walking, a skill so profoundly learned that it seemed natural. From his earliest days in Mombasa, when he worked in the warehouses in the port (he too came on the musim), he made friends with other young men in the town and ran about with them as if he knew nowhere else. People used to say that if you were to listen to him speak with your eyes shut, you would not take him for anything other than a born and bred Mvita, a man of Mombasa. He even knew and recited the defiant poems of Mombasa against the threat of the sultans of Zanzibar, who seemed to be forever wanting to take charge of even the smallest town and hamlet everywhere along the coast. Everyone loved that about him, that he had so fluently and joyfully embraced the people he lived among, that he swaggered with the other young people, went to weddings and funerals with them, could be sent on errands by his elders and accepted rebuke from the usual busybodies as if he was one of their own. Perhaps some of the Gujarati merchants thought him a renegade, but they were people who admired cunning, and some among them suspected that there was method in his going native, that he was up to something. The people who loved him were forever threatening to find him a wife so he would never wish to leave them, but there was no need to because he found one for himself, their mother Zubeyda.

  Rehana knew the stories of their courtship well, because they both talked about that time from their earliest days as parents. They made their meeting and marriage into a kind of myth, and no one dared or wanted to contest with them, not even Aunt Mariam, who generally did not hesitate to stamp on any foolishness. And later, after their Ba died so unexpectedly, and Rehana spent so much time with her mother in the three years that remained to her, she heard more intimate stories of the way they met and came to love each other. How he had seen her in the street and was attracted to her. She had not seen him because young women didn’t dare look at men when they walked for fear of their reputations. How he was passing her house one evening, having taken to prowling nearby for a chance sight of her, and heard her singing inside, and she was unawares, and her voice aroused such a feeling in him that he knew he was in love. How he became so obsessed with his secret love that it was no longer a secret, and everyone knew and smirked as he strolled past their house for the tenth time in a day. That was when she took the chance to take a good look at him, and because she liked what she saw, she in the end let him see that she was looking. How one day she smiled at him in the street, and a few days later he sent word through the imam of the Shimoni mosque to ask for her. How her mother worried because he was only a labourer in the docks and they did not know his family, and her father said he was a courteous young man and everyone praised him even though he was Indian. Her father valued courtesy as a blessing and saw its upkeep as a moral virtue. Then she said that she liked the way he looked and would have him, and so that was that. How shy he was at first, how he sang to her in a whisper, how he made her laugh.

  Well, it didn’t always seem like that to Rehana when they were both alive, but those were the stories their mother wanted to remember him by. In later years he became tetchy all too easily, and demanded to be obeyed in all things, and made them all anxious and timid in his presence. His hearing began to fail, and sometimes he had pains inside his ears, which made him irritable. But their mother loved him, they all loved him. He just had to smile and say something teasing and they melted before him. He just had to speak in a certain voice and they knew that there was a song or a joke on its way. When he died, just like that, gone quietly in the night, it was a cataclysm. The house felt different, larger and emptier. The air itself felt as if something had been emptied out of it. She missed his noises, his voice, his bulk, his presence, but after that she realised how much more she missed his stories. Some of them were familiar, stories other people told, with talking animals and beautiful sorceresses, except that he told them with his own variations and additions, standing up to perform the dramatic moments and clowning the jokes. Hapo zamani za kale. In the old days of antiquity. She loved to hear him say those words, and she loved the way he told the story of The Magic Horse, especially the moment when the young prince and his princess soar above the town on their ebony horse and head towards his father’s kingdom in Sana’a in Yemen. Some of the stories, she was sure, were his own invention, but he made them seem as if they were from the same store. When she was a child, he told her the story of Zubeyda, the wife of Harun Rashid, who sang beautifully and was famed for her generosity. She was a builder of mosques and roads and of water-cisterns, a benefactor in a dry land. ‘That is why I married your mother,’ he told Rehana when she was young, and because she was young she believed him. ‘I knew that her name was Zubeyda, and that she was very pretty, so when I heard her sing I thought it was the legendary one come back to life.’ Then one night the replenisher of graves came quietly for him and left them bereft and disconsolate in unfamiliar silences.

  No, he had never seemed troubled or interested in his Indianness, so completely absorbed was he by the daily details of family and his neighbours and his business. They had left Mombasa and moved north to this town by the time Rehana and later Hassan i were born, and so as far back as she could remember him, this shop and this town were his life, and he never left it again to go anywhere. He was finished with travelling, he used to say. No one should have to travel more than a few hundred miles in a lifetime, unless he or she were driven by malice or greed, and he had travelled his miles. When they were children, he liked having them play in the shop or somewhere nearby where he could see them. Whenever possible, if there were no women visitors in the house or a crowd waiting outside the shop, he liked to eat with Zubeyda and the children. It was later that Rehana understood the unusualness of this, for a father to want to be with his wife and children rather than sitting in the shade gossiping with the men. He did enough of that too. He put that bench outside the shop and grown-up people sat on it all day, filling their lives with talk and contention and endless stories, laughing and provoking each other like children. Their father loved the talk and the raised voices and the quick-witted mockery. They all did, the men. You could hear it in the playful violence of their derision and scorn, their gleeful teasing, but Rehana found the men intimidating and scrutinising, and noticed that her mother always turned left out of the yard door and never even looked in the direction of the bench.

  Twice, a long time ago when she was a child, Rehana went to Mombasa with their mother and Hassanali. Their father stayed behind, busy with his shop and the men who came to sit with him every day. She went to visit with grandparents and Aunt Mariam, and Uncle Hamadi, and though so distant, the memory of those journeys was as hard and bright as that morning’s sun. She remembered the passage on the dhow, the swell of the sea and the exhilarating chill of the spray as she clung to the side of the boat, her mother silent and nervous beside her. She remembered the walk from the port Baghani to her grandparents’ home, through narrow, shady streets that smelled of food and sweat and perfume, and hummed with voices and laughter and the noises of life. These were the streets women walked, the back streets away from the main roads and the shops, where backyard doors stood op and everyone they met recognised and greeted her mother. As they walked, both then and probably at other times, her mother in her joy to be back in her home spoke about things that made her not see the half-full gutters with their green and blue crusts, or the dilapidation of the houses. She told her whose fault it was that the house they were walking past was now a ruin, how it had been lost by its old owners to a
new landlord. Or whose son had grown up under its roof. She told her of childhood friends who had grown up in this house or that one, and had married and moved to Lamu or Unguja or even Ndazidja.

  But their father did not come on these trips, and never returned to the town that until his last days he spoke of with pleasure and happiness, the scene of many of his recollections. Mombasa was like a home-town to me, he often said. Later Rehana wondered whether something had happened to make him reluctant to return, an argument or a disgrace. Or whether it was disapproval of his marriage to a Mswahili among the Indian notables in Mombasa that made him stay away in disgust. She was much older herself when she wondered that, and knew something herself about disapproval. There were very few Indians in their town when she was young, most of them remnants of the Baluchi troops who had been brought here to guard the slaves on the plantations. That was until the mad Sultan Khalifa of Zanzibar sent an Englishman to run his plantations for him and he freed all the slaves. There were also a few Bohra traders, and she knew that some of them worked as agents for merchants in India and Zanzibar, like their visitor Azad said he was doing. She remembered as a child how sometimes these Indians came past the shop and how they treated their father disdainfully. She knew that they did so because he complained about the way they made remarks about their mother. Rehana herself never heard any of these remarks, but she could imagine they were to do with her mother not being Indian, and she heard him ranting about the children being called chotara. She did not know what the word meant, but she knew it was something ugly. She could see that in the way the Indian men looked at her when she was a child, disdaining. Later she understood that the word meant bastard, an improper child of an Indian man with an African woman.