Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Ramadhan is during the day. In the evening people eat well, then they sit with friends or family and natter into the early hours, or stroll to the waterfront until late, or go to the late-night show at the cinema or play endless games of cards. Others go prowling the streets for different kinds of games which they prefer to keep secret from everyone else. Everyone stays up late, even children, who play out under the street lights until all hours. That night Amin saw her walking at the waterfront with her family. As he walked past, she gave him a bright smile but did not speak. He walked on towards the end of the waterfront promenade, away from the lights. The moon was past full, he remembered that later, hanging like a bright lost world above the sea. The next day, unable to stop thinking about her or think about anything else except food, he went walking around town, walking aimlessly, he said to himself, but he soon found he was heading towards her house. For once she was coming out of the smaller door as he walked past. She stopped at the door and looked at him with surprise, and after a moment she said: ‘Amin, how are you?’ He replied and hurried past, expecting that she would now begin to think him a nuisance.

  That night he kept away from the waterfront, but the next night he could not. When he saw Jamila with her family, he kept his distance, watching her from afar, catching the flash of teeth and the sublime ordinariness of their gestures as they laughed and talked. Eventually he walked past them, but he pretended he had not seen them and went by without looking. There was no college now to distract him, no tedious bus journeys and undemanding assignments, only hot daylight hunger and a feeling of foreboding, a regular beat of terror that he could not suppress. He could not imagine saying anything to her, and could imagine only too well her horrified laughter if he were to do so. Yet he could not stop himself rehearsing what he would say to her, and there were times when he convinced himself that she wanted him to. It terrified him that he could be so obsessed. Sometimes he felt angry and capable of causing pain, and he did not understand why.

  He would force himself to keep away from her. That was what he decided. That evening at sunset he put on a kanzu and went to the mosque, and later, after breaking fast, he sat outside the house and chatted with people in the neighbourhood. The next day he walked down to the sea, to the beach nearby where the fishermen kept their boats, away from the waterfront promenade. These were people he had grown up with, among them their neighbours who lived in the big ruined house opposite to them. Amin sat among them in comfort, even though his hands were soft while theirs were cracked from handling fishing lines and nets, and their faces were hardened by the sun and the sea. They were people rich in assurance, desparadoes, who bantered with merciless ferocity all day long, and then put off to sea in their tiny boats as the sun began to soften. He sat with them for some time and took more than his share of mockery to earn his welcome, then went to the mosque again in the afternoon and afterwards read until sunset. That was how he decided to forget her, by staying in the vicinity, going to the mosque, reading, playing cards, talking. It didn’t work completely, because he thought of her when he was reading, and even when he was talking or listening, but he kept away from her.

  Rashid said something about his unusual piety, teasing him in front of the parents, and got a lecture for his pains. ‘You should be going to the mosque as well, you ungrateful boy,’ his mother told him. ‘Or do you think you are a mzungu already? You haven’t even left and you are getting ready to forget everything. You should be ashamed of yourself, laughing at him when you have obligations to fulfil yourself.’ His father had a few words to say too. The sermon, which was capable of many variations, went like this: ‘Ramadhan is the holiest month of the year, when the angel Jibril first revealed the Koran to the prophet. We fast to practice restraint, and to return ourselves to our deeds before God. It is a time for us to repent and to make good the derelict habits we have fallen into in the preceding months. One of the derelict habits you have fallen into, young man, is not going to the mosque, and you would do well to follow your brother’s example in this matter. And instead of playing cards all day, you should read a sura of the Koran every afternoon. Go and fetch your kanzu, and get yourself out of my sight.’ Later, when they were in their beds a few feet from each other, Amin thought Rashid was lying in the dark, listening to his breathing.

  Then Rashid asked: ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Amin said, discouraging.

  ‘All the praying. Have you done something bad?’

  ‘I’m praying for your scholarship. I don’t think you’ll get it any other way. And to pass the time, and get some exercise, you know, up and down, kneel, touch the ground, good for the back,’ Amin said. ‘Come on, give your poor brain a rest and go to sleep.’

  Late one evening, several days into this new regime, Farida said to him: ‘Jamila came for the dresses this afternoon. They turned out well. She was very pleased. That’s good, because she’ll bring more work after Idd. She asked after you. She said she hadn’t seen you for days.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’ he asked sharply.

  She made a face of shocked surprise: ‘All right, all right. I said you were fine. Should I have said something else?’

  The following evening he took off his kanzu and went for a stroll to the waterfront to look for her. Crowds of people walked in small groups by the sea, in the light of the dying moon, some of them holding hands. Street lamps reflected off the water, and lit up the road, empty of all car traffic at that time of the night. It was only nine in the evening, but there was nothing to drive to at that hour. Women walked in their own groups, and men walked in theirs, and sometimes called out greetings and ribaldries to each other. Most of them were young. Some of the Indian women were accompanied by a brother or an in-law, but otherwise no young man could bear to be seen walking with his sisters. Goan girls strolled unaccompanied, at ease with their glamour. They were Christian and had Portuguese names and worked in government posts, and so were almost European. Nobody dared to bother them, even with banter. Amin walked unhurriedly along the shadowy side of the road, away from the water. The lights in the sultan’s palace were on and the trees in the park at the top end of the waterfront were lit with coloured lights. The spray from the fountain sparkled in the lamps. He saw her strolling out of the crowd in the park, heading in his direction. With her were the two women he had seen her with before, and whom he thought were her family. He crossed to the waterfront side of the road. As he approached he saw her face begin to break into a smile, and he felt his own grin spreading. He stopped a few feet from them, and they stopped too, everyone smiling.

  ‘Amin, where have you been?’ Jamila said, unmistakably pleased. ‘I haven’t seen you for days. And where are your friends? Why are you on your own?’

  ‘Up there somewhere,’ he lied, pointing towards the Old Fort. ‘I’m just going to catch up with them.’

  The two women with Jamila, who were about the same age as her but who looked as if they were already mothers, glanced at each other and began to walk on. ‘You’re looking well,’ she said, and he felt her eyes browsing over his face. It felt like touching. ‘Have you finished that book yet? I’d like to read it when you do, don’t forget.’

  ‘I won’t forget,’ he said, but somehow the words came out more portentously than he meant them to, as if he was making a more solemn promise. He looked at her in some confusion, and from her smile he saw that she was amused. But it was not cruel amusement, and there was something in the intricacy of her glance that made him ache a little. The two women had stopped a few feet away, looking out to sea. One of them laughed and Amin turned o look, assuming that they were laughing at him. Perhaps Jamila had said something about the way he stared at her, and how he turned up everywhere. ‘Are they your sisters?’ he asked.

  ‘My sisters-in-law,’ she glanced towards them and began to move on. ‘I’ll see you later. Don’t hide yourself,’ she said and gave him a small wave.

  For the next two days he went back to his regime of th
e neighbourhood, the mosque and reading, but he was happy at the memory of the recent evening, pulling it out to look at it every few hours. Then on the third afternoon, on his way to the hospital to visit a friend who had been admitted for an emergency appendicectomy, he stopped in the Cathedral bookshop for a browse. He knew most of the books they had in there because they only sold schoolbooks, but he loved handling the new copies and reading a paragraph or two of familiar stories. The bookshop was run by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, but it did not make a fuss about its proselytising, and was careful not to offend its mostly non-Christian customers. Amin came out after a few minutes and strolled unhurriedly towards the main road. Suddenly he saw her across the road from him. She slowed down when he waved and waited for him to cross the road.

  ‘I’m going to the hospital to visit a friend,’ he said after the greetings. ‘He was rushed there for an operation yesterday. At least he doesn’t have to fast now.’ They stood under the shade of a neem tree for a few minutes and spoke about unmemorable things, but after he walked on, he was filled with a kind of heat at the way she looked at him. Her eyes were large with absorption, studying him as he spoke, lost in him, unguarded about what they revealed. He thought they revealed desire, for all that he knew about such things. He would have touched her if they were not standing by the main road in the middle of the afternoon.

  Afterwards his mind raced with excitement and terror. He didn’t know what to do now, or how to do it. The next day he went on a long cycle ride on his own, out into the country with a book, and on his way back sat on the beach near Sherif Musa, reading and marvelling and worrying about what he should do now. That evening, after they had broken fast and were drinking coffee – Rashid drinking on his feet, ready to rush off to that evening’s boisterousness, their father fidgeting his feet, ready for the big talk at the café, and their mother settling in her chair for a quick snooze after her efforts in the kitchen – Farida called him out to the yard to help with the clearing up. He followed her with a feeling of relief. Something was going to be said. He guessed it.

  ‘What’s going on? I want talk to you,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘She came again today, and she asked about you. What’s going on? You’re not doing something stupid, are you? Later tonight. I want to hear everything.’

  So later that night he told her how things were with him. It had been a hot, humid day, but now a strong cool breeze blew in from the sea. He had thought about what she might have said in the afternoon, and wondered about what had made Farida so fierce, but he decided he would not ask questions, would not hesitate. He would tell her about how he felt and wait to see what would happen. They sat on a mat in the yard, in the light of the moon now fast waning in the closing days of the month. It was a relief to talk and he did so at length, while she listened with few interruptions. Then when he was over the first flush of his outpouring, she told him that she had guessed, or at least had begun to fear about what he felt for her. ‘You have to be careful,’ she said softly, kindly, but also to keep her voice from being overheard. ‘You don’t know what she wants, you don’t know what she has in mind. She is a woman who knows the ways of the world. I’ve heard a rumour that she’s seeing someone, a politician. They’re the heroes now, and soon they’ll be the government. People like them want a woman like her for show.’

  ‘What do you mean, for show?’ Amin said, because Farida fell silent after that, waiting for him to prompt her.

  ‘I mean a beautiful, glamorous woman like her with that bit of scandal about her family,’ Farida said. ‘They want a woman like her to play with. Maybe that’s what you want too, to play. I hope not. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but it may not be a game you know how to play yet. Maybe it’s what she wants too, a kind of love game. But she is older, she knows about things. You could lose your way with someone like that.’

  ‘I thought you liked her,’ Amin said softly, sadly, not wanting to think of Jamila like that. He was relieved that Farida did not laugh or rant at him with platitudes and warnings, but he did not enjoy this suggestion that he was too naïve for Jamila’s worldly wiles.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t like her,’ Farida said, and then could not suppress a brief smile which glinted with a soft glow in the gloom. ‘You have to remember that people like her live in a different world from ours. That’s what Ma would say if she knew. They’re not our kind of people, that’s what she would say. They have a different idea about what is required of them and about what is . . . honourable. You have to be careful not to hurt yourself, and not to hurt them.’ She gestured with her chin towards the house.

  He said nothing to her, and after a moment she sighed and continued. ‘When she came today and she asked about you, she was exposing herself to insult and rejection. She was inviting me to act between you. At first she only asked after you, how you were, but then she asked if you had said anything to me that I wished to pass on. I could have taken offence and shamed her. I think she wants you, but I don’t know what she wants you for, so you have to be careful. The politician may be a rumour and nothing more. She was seen in his car, but he could have been giving her a lift, I suppose. There have been other stories, and she is older than you.’

  He was sweating and aching from the uncertainty, and from a fear of making a fool of himself. These were feelings he had come to know well in the last few weeks. ‘She can’t be much older than you,’ he said. ‘And you’re only two years older than me.’

  ‘She must be five or six years older than you,’ she said. Then still speaking gently, her voice down to the softest of whispers, she asked: ‘Do you love her?’ When he nodded, she burst into a huge, tired smile and touched his open hand. When she took her hand away there was a folded envelope on Amin’s palm. ‘She left that for you. After she asked after you, and I replied, she sat there in a terrible silence. I knew she was going to do something strange. She asked me if I would pass that on to you, and I said I would. I’m tired now, younger brother, and you have a lot to think about. Tell me about that tomorrow. Did I tell you I had one from Abbas today? It had a lovely poem for Idd.’

  He sat quietly for a few minutes after Farida left, taking everything in, turning the envelope over in his hand. It was unaddressed and sealed. He went inside and opened it quickly, unfolded the thin blue paper and read the one line written there with disbelieving eyes: I long for you, beloved It was like one of his fantasies. There were no salutations, no names, just that one line. He felt elated, he saw her, he imagined her. She smiled and reached to stroke his face. When she came into his arms, he felt a lightness in his body that was like panic.

  What would she want from him? What was she asking him to do?

  The first time they met alone was on the second night of Idd, after the end of Ramadhan. Farida passed the instructions to Amin. They met on the fringes of the Sikukuu fair, which was held for the four days of Idd on the playing-fields near the golf-course. In the afternoon, the fair belonged to the children. The stalls and kiosks and roundabouts were crowded with them in their new clothes and their precious pennies. They bought toys, and candy floss, and ice cream and took rides on the roundabouts, and some became rowdy and got slapped, and others were separated from their elder brothers and sisters and burst into tears of panic. Once it began to get dark, the children were required to get back home, as they are everywhere in the world. After dark, the adults began to arrive, although the pleasures on offer were, to all appearances, no different from those of the afternoon and hardly as exciting to them as they had been to the children: toy-stalls, candy floss and rides. The fair was lit with strings of fairy-lights and with powerful humming tilly lamps, but the lights were only around the kiosks and the rides and the cricket pavilion, which during Idd became an ice cream parlour. That left plenty of shadows a few casual steps from the melee, and pitch-dark beyond.

  She called his name softly as he approached, to guide him towards her, and a moment later he touched her outstretched han
ds. She kissed the palm of his right hand and said, Habibi. Then she gently pulled him down so they sat on the grass, so they did not throw the faintest shadow on the ground. She reached a hand out and touched his face as he had always imagined, then she pulled his face towards her and kissed him, opening her lips to let him feel her moistness. You’re beautiful, she whispered, her left arm around his back and pulling him down on the grass with her. He marvelled at the feel of her body under the touch of his hands. He had not anticipated its solidity and density, or the inexplicable sensation of stroking its shape. He had expected something lighter, he realised, because for him she had been someone abstract, a fantasy. They kissed and he breathed in her perfumed breath. They whispered each other’s names and called each other beloved, their bodies pressed against each other. After a few moments, which seemed like seconds to him but also seemed like for ever, she said she would have to go back. She had only come to hold him and tell him how beautiful he was, but she had better go back before she was missed. She had told her group that she was going to find popcorn, to get rid of the cloying taste of the ice cream. She should go back before they began to think of looking for her. Would he come and see her at her flat? They would have more time.

  When? he asked. Later tonight?

  She liked his urgency and kissed him for it, then she rose to her feet. He rose too and groped for her. They walked like that towards the light, touching and holding each other. She told him her nieces were staying in the flat with her that night, a treat for Idd. Would he come on Monday night? At nine exactly. Then she would leave the door unlocked so he would not have to knock. If the door was locked, he was to go away and wait to hear from her. At nine exactly. Now she would have to go. She smiled and then kissed him quickly. Be careful, beloved, she said.

  He stood in the shadows and watched her as she strolled casually, as if coming from nowhere in particular, towards the noise and the throngs. He felt no fear now, but a grinning confusion and incredulity. She thought him beautiful, when all the time he thought her beautiful beyond belief. She had kissed him with sobs of pleasure when he had expected her to be breathless with laughter. Her face was a multitude of details, the light in her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the smile that made him feel pain. Everything perishes, perhaps in an instant, a long moment and then gone, though only in procession into memory. He knew that those few moments would not perish from him while memory lasted: the taste of her mouth for the first time, her legs pressed against him, her hand on the back of his neck. In her embraces he had felt something like his own need, his own urgency. This must be what it feels like to love and to be loved in return, he thought, imagining, now that he knew, how terrible it would be to love and to be spurned, to crave to touch and to be denied.