Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  He walked deeper into the darkness, away from the music and the lights, bearing gradually towards the road that ran along the edge of the playing fields. He wondered if they had been seen. He thought he heard a whisper in the darkness. There were always furtive movements and flurried courtships on the edges of the Idd fair, observed with sidelong glances and tolerant smiles (unless an elder brother was about), on the expectation that nothing really improper would take place. When he found the road he turned back on himself, as if he was returning from a stroll along the beach by the golf-course, or perhaps he was taking a sweetly solitary walk under the avenue of casuarinas. A soft wind blew through the feathery foliage, and every few steps a kernel exp oded under his sandals.

  He smiled to himself at these deceptions, at his pretence of being on an innocent walk away from the bustle of Idd, but at the back of his mind was a foreboding that this was how things were going to have to be. It was not a place which tolerated that such relations should take place openly, and an unblinking and unrelenting scrutiny made the furtive and anxious strategems of lovers into a sordid comedy. There was someone always looking on and adding fragment to someone else’s fragment, until sooner or later everything was found out. For Amin the ridicule and the shame of discovery were muted by exhilaration, but he none the less felt a slight tremor of aversion, a tiny swell of nausea for the deceptions that would be necessary.

  He walked away from the fair, on the road past the white-painted Karimjee Jevanjee hospital, named after the Ismaili philanthropist who had given so generously towards its construction. The ward-lights were turned down low at that time of night, yet the gleaming squares of light illuminated the flame trees which made an avenue along the road. The hospital itself was like a softly lit ship moving silently under a lightless new moon. The road was empty and mute, lit by street lamps that were far apart and glowed yellow like oil lamps. On the right and opposite the hospital was the museum, built by John Sinclair, the colonial Master-builder in these parts, to commemorate the 1918 Armistice. It was called Beit-el-Amani, the House of Peace. Its cupolas, now only a white flush in the gloomy light, were modest models of the domed roofscape of the Hagya Sofya in Istanbul.

  Amin walked past the disused cemetery opposite the hospital, silent now when during the day its shade would be crowded with traders selling fruit and snacks to the patients and their families. The Residency’s iron gates were shut, and even at that hour of the night, a policeman stood in his guard-box inside. Behind those gates, and in a fantasy Moorish palace, also built by John Sinclair, resided the power of the land, the captain of the ship himself, the British Resident, Sir Henry Potter K.C.M.G., who on ceremonial occa ons came gliding out in his black Humber, his white topee mounted with white plumes which rose through the open sun-roof like a feathery fountain. In times gone by, the topee would perhaps have been worn by a man on a horse, so the feathers would have swayed and nodded with the rider’s movement as the horse ambled gracefully, but efficiency had replaced play-acting grandeur, and the sleek, silent Humber was a more appropriate symbol of the taciturn methods of the modern empire. Amin had once seen the Residency building from the sea when sailing with a friend, and he had felt like a naughty child stealing a look into a forbidden room.

  Opposite the Residency were the Victoria Gardens, where in those days so close to independence, the new Legislative Assembly met. Sultan Barghash, another great nineteenth-century builder, who built roads and fountains and sewers and palaces, constructed the pavilion and the walled gardens so that the women of his household could stroll and take their discreet ease away from the gaze of the curious. He had his gardeners fill it with shrubs and sweet-smelling bushes and flowing water, and what he could not grow for them he left to their imagination. He grew plants and trees from different parts of the world, many of them gifts from the British consul of that time, a Victorian gentleman through and through who shared the Sultan’s horticultural mania even though he mildly deplored the perverse luxury in the use the plants were put to. A later sultan, in a burst of gratitude to imperial agents who had expedited his ascendancy over a rival, named it after the immortal queen and gave it as a gift to the people. Amin walked past the courthouse, another Sinclair building with its replica oriental dome. Its clock was ticking loudly in that silent hour. On his right was another cemetery. The town was full of small cemeteries, at crossroads, in the lee of mosques, in walled yards, multitudes of the dead crowded up against their descendants.

  Amin walked slowly towards the waterfront, relishing the silence of the dimly lit streets. He loved the town’s silences, which were different in surprising ways. He loved to describe to himself the silent roar of the sea, or the humming silence of the narrow lanes. In some of the squares in the middle of the old town, he sometimes heard a silent echo of a woman’s distant laughter. He met no one, although some cars drove past, perhaps on the way home from the fair or from visiting friends for Idd, yet despite the emptiness he felt in the midst of people. He heard murmurs and laughter through open windows, and some front doors were still open and unattended, as if their owners felt no fear of intruders. There were still people walking on the waterfront, and lights still on in the family quarters of the sultan’s palace. The tide was going out gently, reluctantly, and the sea slapped on the waterfront wall with squelchy smacks. Out in the water were a crowd of lighters at anchor, and at the quayside, the ferry was tied up for the next day’s crossing to Dar es Salaam or Mombasa. He walked past the Customs House where Uncle Habib worked, and where someone was sleeping on the steps, his face turned towards the sea. The Harbour-master’s house had its upstairs jalousies open and its lights fully on, and from its veranda came the sound of laughing English voices and the smell of cigars. He took the road past the Ithnaasheri Dispensary and hurried past the site of the old demolished power station. He had a memory of its demolition, but some of the housings for the turbines and screws were still there, and during the rains filled with greasy soupy water that was iridescent in the sunlight. On such a moonless night (the merest sliver of a new moon had long since sunk below the curve of the sky), the pools looked pitch-black, like the black tern of the House of Usher. When he was younger, he used to think the pools were inhabited by oily, snaky creatures, and even though he knew better now than to think that anything could live in that poisonous soup, some dread still remained as he hurried past. The lights of the Sultana Cinema ticket office were switched off but the lobby lights were dimly on, a late show. He stopped to see what was on the late show on Monday night next, and then headed for home.

  That was his explanation, a late show with friends. His mother did not like it. Why ot the evening show? Because it’s the going out late that makes it n, he said. Why go out late on a Monday, when you have college the next day? she said. I’ve done all my work, and we’re only going on a school visit the next day, he said. I’ll be home by eleven. His father did not say anything, but Amin could see he did not like it either – a deepening frown and a spark in the eyes. Perhaps they guessed that he was meeting someone, but they could not hope to stop him doing that sooner or later, so he guessed that they grumbled and looked reluctant because they could not help it, but they could not think of a reason to forbid him going out.

  On Monday night at nine, trembling and apprehensive as might be expected, Amin pushed gently at the door of Jamila’s flat and felt it yield. She was standing just inside, and as soon as he entered she closed the door and latched it. The room was in darkness, a cave, but a dim light was on further inside, and in that light he saw her smile. She made a hushing noise, then took his hand and led him towards the light. It was the guest bedroom: a bed, an armchair, a drawer chest with a mirror in a gilt-edged frame. She led him to the bed and sat down beside him, and even in that dim night-light, he could see that the smile and glow in her face was happiness. He realised that he too was grinning at his limit.

  ‘You came,’ she said, her voice vulnerable and teasing.

  He croaked something i
n return and then leaned forward for her. It was the first time that Amin was doing this, and he put himself in Jamila’s hands without resistance at first. He could not believe the sensations of pleasure and pain and release, and after a while he was lost in the restrained frenzy of love-making, unanchored to anything except her touch and her voice.

  Afterwards they lay talking, and Amin felt brave and happy, as if he had proved himself in some demanding act. She lay close to him, touching him and marvelling at his youth and perfection, while he stroked her and breathed the perfume of her body. The night-light was still on, and after all the time they had been in the room, he could see everything clearly. He saw now there was a heavily curtained window in one of the inside walls.

  ‘It opens into the living room,’ she whispered. ‘There are no outside windows in this room. I thought we wouldn’t be overheard. I couldn’t sleep in here, not alone. It feels like a tomb.’

  ‘Why don’t we use your bedroom?’ he asked, wondering if that was asking for too much.

  ‘It has a window which opens into the courtyard,’ she said. Someone might hear us.’

  Even in her own flat they had to be furtive. The thought brought a small spasm of nausea at the danger. ‘That was like a miracle,’ he said to clear his mind of the belittling thought, and he heard her laugh. ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because I feel happy, and because it’s your first time, isn’t it? I thought it was,’ she said, and touched him. ‘And because you’re beautiful. When I saw you striding across the road to me that afternoon, I wanted you. I really wanted you. That’s why I wrote you that note. I could not stop myself. I thought I would lose you. Will you come again?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he suggested, which made her laugh again so suddenly that she clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound.

  ‘No no, not tomorrow. We have to be careful, habibi, otherwise . . . Another day, later in the week maybe. Come on Friday. Will you?’ she asked, stroking him.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, on Friday. Otherwise what?’

  ‘Otherwise they will make us stop,’ she said. ‘They will say ugly things and they will make us stop. You’re so young, still at school, and I am a divorced woman in my twenties.’

  ‘I’m in college, and I’m nearly twenty,’ Amin said. ‘There can’t be many years between us, and even if there were, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met, and if I had been your husband I would never have divorced you.’

  ‘My love, we have to be careful, otherwise they will make us stop,’ she said, smiling and hushing him. ‘Now you must go, so you’re not late back from your late show.’

  Amin slipped out without, he thought, even making a ripple in the air. He walked home like someone remade, beautiful and loved. That was how it began, in February of that year before independence, soon before the arrival of the long rains. Once a week, then more often, earlier and earlier in the evening, for months after that, Amin went to Jamila’s flat. They whispered and made love and stifled their laughter, and when the time came for him to leave they clung to each other like desperate fools. She gave him a ring mounted with a ruby so that he would have something to remind him of her while they were apart, and sometimes she slipped a note in his shirt pocket, telling him how the thought of him, and how the smell and feel of him filled her life. He told her that his body was bruised and aching with love. When he was not with her he was afraid of losing her, afraid of words that would take her away. Then when he was with her he thought of nothing but her body and her breath and how his life was complete. He felt as if he could take on anything or anybody.

  Some afternoon Jamila came to see Farida, to sit and talk or to have a new garment measured, because she felt she had to see her beloved even if she had only last seen him the night before. She did not say anything in front of Farida, but she could not always suppress her smiles. Farida pretended not to see anything, but the look of pleasure in her eyes gave her away. She loved their secret love. And sometimes Amin went into the Municipal Building, making an enquiry at one counter or another, wandering from office to office, chatting with anyone he knew that he saw in there, until he ended up in the employment office and caught sight of her.

  It was a struggle to keep up with the college work, which now seemed even more arduously undemanding, because he could not always force his thoughts from her, and he always wanted to see her and be with her. He hid from people so he could think about her and plan how they could be together in years to come. She had told him stories of her life, and he knew now that he could not simply say to his parents that this is the woman I love and wish to live with. There was the mzungu grandfather and the years her grandmother lived in flagrant sin. Even if that ancestral lapse could be forgiven, which was not certain, there was her divorce, her age, and the rumours of affairs. Sometimes Amin thought she hinted at these, but he dared not ask. He did not want to know, not yet. He knew now what perhaps Farida had always known, that when it comes to love, parents always believe the worst, and enforce their authority with virulent righteousness and blackmail.

  When he went to visit her, it was always after dark and always at a time they arranged. He walked there, took his time, varied his route as much as he could. He stopped to talk to an acquaintance or sit in a café for a while over a cup of tea, or lingered to listen to an argument about a football match, a young man indulging the undemanding pursuits of his town. He took care that her street was empty before he pushed the door which she left unlocked and very slightly ajar. If there was anyone in sight he walked past and came back at the same time the next day. When they were together they lay under the night-light in the guest bedroom, the furthest room from the street. When they spoke, they whispered, and stifled their laughter and made love with stealthy intensity. Yet for all that, they could not keep their affair secret. Someone might have seen through his elaborate subterfuges, or overheard a passionate sigh. Someone might have seen him from an upstairs window, or watched his unmistakable entrance from the darkness of an alleyway, but someone must have seen him and must have spoken about it to someone else. Then fragment was added to fragment to make discovery inevitable.

  PART III

  7 Rashid

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, but I didn’t. He slept a heartbeat away from me, and I should have heard its altered tempo in all those months. I should have sensed that his sleep was broken by dreams and fantasies, and that on some nights his breathing was deeper from emotional exhaustion and satisfied passion. I should have smelled the difference in him. I should have seen that something was happening to him, something assured or even triumphant in his manner, but I didn’t. What I saw I did not understand, and I heard and sensed and smelled nothing, or nothing that I recognised, or only did so later, long after their discovery, when fragments of memory rose to the surface like putrid matter.

  By their discovery I do not mean that they were caught in the act of love. I don’t think that happened. Our elders suppressed so much, kept so much hidden from us, some of them matters of such ordinariness and banality that at times I wonder why they needed to go to such lengths. Was it to save us from having to cope with the ugliness of the world? Was it habitual secretiveness which by then served no other purpose than to keep young people as ignorant as possible for as long as possible, so that they were obedient and tractable? Sometimes I am shocked to discover how much I did not understand of the events I lived through. I am sure that they couldn’t have suppressed that they were caught in the act of love, though. I don’t know exactly how they were discovered, but I don’t think it was like that, otherwise there would hav been public drama and gleeful stories and maybe some bruises. Perhaps they weren’t even discovered, but exposed themselves with small acts of recklessness out of a feeling of invincibility, out of a sense that the cleanness of their feelings would keep them safe from the mean censure of the people around them. I would not have been capable of understanding something like that at that time, of understanding that feeling of the rightness of lov
e. I was too full of my own triumph, my success at my examinations and my scholarship award to study at the University of London. This was towards the end of July in 1963, just a month before my departure, and there was no space in my mind for something as subtle as someone else’s feelings, so consumed was it by egotistical fantasies. All I knew was that I had achieved what so many wished for me, and what I desired for myself. I thought I had given happiness to everybody by my success. I felt loved and heroic, and basked every day in the admiration of my family and my friends. I have no means to describe the deep poison that runs through the experience of flight and homelessness, but I didn’t know that then either. How could I have known? How could I have had even an inkling?

  On the evening of the exposure, I was lying on my bed reading. It was probably a detective novel or a historical romance if I remember rightly my tastes of that time. We read whatever came our way without self-consciousness or shame: girls’ comics, Anna Karenina, Hemingway, encyclopaedias, like beasts of iron digestion, like Melville’s ostrich, pecking at flint and grubs and succulent rare herbs without discrimination. It was close to supper, which we usually ate after the isha prayers, soon after eight, when our father came home. Every day, unless he was unwell (and he was almost never that unwell then), our father spent the late afternoon and early evening at the café, sipping coffee, talking with friends, browsing through the newspaper, listening to the radio, greeting passers-by, keeping an eye on the world. If he did not go, someone came to ask after him, in case he had been taken ill or there had been a mishap at home. When the muadhin called the isha, he went to the mosque, said the maghrib prayer on his own, because he would have missed it while chatting at the café, and then waited for the imam to lead the isha prayer.