Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  As is only to be imagined, I cried too as I read this letter, especially the part where they were all weeping like lunatics. I joined them. Then I cried again when I got to that part about how brave it was to persevere. When I thought of their circumstances, I thought of myself as pampered and lucky, and expected that that was what they thought as well. I also thought I was brave to persevere, that there wasn’t really very much choice but to do so, and how nice it was to find out that that is what they thought too. When Grace came home from work, I passed her the letter and waited for her to start snivelling, and sure enough, when she got to the weeping in unison part she started too, and I had no choice but to join in again. Oh, it was such a joyful letter!

  I hadn’t told Amin anything about Grace, although I had told her everything about them.

  It has taken me longer to get to Grace than I had anticipated. I had not meant to go on at such length about those early days in England. After all, what was there to say that has not been said by so many others who had come before me. I had meant to explain how it was that I started writing the story of Amin and Jamila. And why it was that when I started thinking about it, I found myself forced to imagine how Jamila’s grandmother Rehana and the Englishman Pearce might have met, how they might have come together at a time when their worlds were so divided, so far apart. But once I began writing about arriving here, it seemed I could not stop myself saying many other things. I could not stop myself living that time again, and tasting the bitterness and disappointment of it even after all these years. It is my egotism – when I start talking about myself I ramble on endlessly, silencing everyone else and demanding attention. That was what Grace used to say, and she said it was one of the things that drove her away. That and many other things, but that is one story I plan to leave well alone.

  It took many years for Grace to leave, and for most of that time our lives together were more than tolerable. At times we were happy and fulfilled, and we helped each other mature and find reprieve from our memories and inadequacies. But in the end the antagonisms became absurd and venomous, and she said she would go while she still had a desire for life and the possibility of finding love again. I tried to dissuade her, of course, but once she began talking like this she could not stop, and the more she said, the easier it became to say more. One day she loaded up the car and drove away to her new life (and came back later for the things she could not take away all at once). I lived on in the quiet street on the edge of town, within walking distance of the university, and did not need a car.

  I was exhausted by the time she left, and thought I would feel nothing but relief at her going, finally. But instead I felt more lonely and heart-broken than I ever had in my life. After she left, I realised that I had tuned into her way of doing things, her way of thinking things, that I had fitted something of my mental life to hers. Suddenly, in her absence, I could not keep pace with my own life. I wrote to Amin in my wretchedness. We still wrote to each other, but infrequently by then. Usually I had nothing dramatic to say, and the details of my life were too banal and too complicated to know where to begin talking about them to someone who did not share it. He wrote when he had news, but his news was often sad, and I think it made him sad to write it. When I told him about Grace, he wrote back at once, and in his commiseration he mentioned his own pain at the loss of Jamila all those twenty years before. It was then that I began to think about writing the story of Amin and Jamila. I had come to understand over the years that Amin’s affair with Jamila could not have been as I thought of it when I first heard about it. I had thought then that he was the dashing young man who had carried out a daring seduction, but I did so because I could only imagine love as a cliché. When I understood more, in my years with Grace, I began to have a sense of the tragedy of Amin’s life, and perhaps Jamila’s too, although I hardly knew anything about her. But I knew Amin, and remembered the night of his discovery and the silence of those last days before my departure, and his silence about her since then. In time, the absence of her name and of any lamenta ion of his separation from her seemed uncanny, increasingly present in their absence. In letter after letter I teased him about getting married, and he made jokes about enjoying being a bachelor. So when he mentioned Jamila after Grace left, for the first time after all the years since I had left home, comparing my wretchedness to his, it made me understand something more of what he had given up. I had time then to reflect on so many things I had neglected, so I thought I would try and write about what had happened between them.

  One day, in the midst of writing about them, I had a telegram from Amin to say our mother had died. They did not have a telephone in the house, but I rang the local party branch and left a message, which was our way of communicating urgently. I called again later and they told me that they had passed the message on and Amin was thankful that I had received the news. I sat quietly alone in my house in the quiet street on the edge of town, and mourned my mother whom I had not seen for the last twenty-two years. When I contemplate myself and what I have become, I think of those battles my mother and my father fought to live and love as they wished. I think of their plans and anxieties for our futures, of my own labours with uncongenial material, of all that planning and striving to arrive at this life of small apathy that I could have arrived at with no effort. Irony is the unforgiving register which gives everything back to us.

  A few weeks after the telegram I had another letter from Amin (I was beginning to fear his letters), telling me about his blindness for the first time. He was completely blind in one eye, and the sight in the other was beginning to go. It was the same infection that had blinded Ma, but there was no medicine or hospital there to cure him as there hadn’t been to cure her. I wrote and said come over here. I’ll take a loan on the house and we’ll get you seen to privately. They can do anything here. Why didn’t you tell me before? Come, don’t be stupid. Don’t waste what is left of your life. But he said it was too late, the infection could not be cut out any more. That’s what the doctor he went to see in Dar es Salaam said. And he could not leave Ba on his own. To tell you the truth, he said, I don’t think I care about being able to see, not any more. Over these last few years I have found that in the country of the blind, one eye is more than enough trouble. More important than these old men’s grumbles about declining bodies is Farida’s news. Last year she published a collectionof her poems in Mombasa. She brought a copy over when she came for Ma’s funeral. Who’d have thought Farida would end up a poet? She’s been writing for years, you know, only she smiles and jokes so much that people think she’s a fool. But she isn’t, I found that out a long time ago. Anyway, the book has won a lot of praise, and she has even read some of the poems on the radio. She has been invited to a cultural event in Rome, and she’ll post you a copy from there. I don’t know why she wants to post it from there rather than from Mombasa, but she does. It’s her first time in Europe and perhaps posting it from there will make her feel closer to you. I have something small to send you which I will also give to her. For now I send you my love and good wishes.

  A few weeks later a parcel came from Rome, with a copy of Farida’s book of poems, Kijulikano That Which is Known. There was a packet in the parcel, wrapped in rough brown paper and tied with string. My name was written on it in Amin’s hand. There was no note with Farida’s parcel, and no inscription in the book, only the book itself. Farida was not much of a letter writer, and never replied to a single one of my letters over the years, despite repeated promises conveyed to me through Amin, to say that she would write as soon as she had completed this chore or that task. There was a photograph of her on the back cover. It looked like a passport photograph, a picture of someone who had just walked in off the streets and asked the photographer to please not make a fuss and hurry and take the photo. She was on her way to the hospital to see an ailing aunt, perhaps, and did not want to miss too much of the visiting time. She still had her buibui on, the veil pulled back off her face for the purposes of the photog
raph, but ready to be pulled back in place when she stepped out into the street again. She wore spectacles now, dark plastic above and metal-rimmed below. She also wore a large smile, as if she had been caught unawares by something the photographer had said, or perhaps she was smiling at her husband Abbas who had accompanied her, and who was standing there out of the picture. As I looked at the photograph of the smiling middle-aged woman, I realised that this was an image of someone I hardly knew anymore.

  Her book had this dedication:

  To my father and my mother who taught me to care. To Amin who is good and to Rashid who never left us. To Abbas with all my love.

  Never left us. Trust a poet to come up with a sentimental lie. He left us, all right, but I appreciated the kindness behind the words. When I read the poems I was surprised, of course. They were exceptionally moving, thoughtful and intimate in ways I had not expected, and so intelligent and unforgiving in their observation. Many of them were about the small lives I was so familiar with. They were witty and ironic about the life of a woman, and I guessed that the title itself was an intertextual reference to one of Shaaban Roberts’ collections. One of the poems was about Amin and Jamila, although it did not name any names. It brought tears to my eyes. Yes, I was surprised. I imagine it would always be surprising to read something written by a brother or a sister, someone you had known so closely from childhood. But Amin was right, I had always thought of Farida as a bit silly – there were all those failed exams and those unrelenting smiles – and if not unintelligent, then at least as someone made silly by her goodwill. It had been years since I had had any need to reassess my thought of her, but those poems made me realise how mistaken I was. I wrote to her with my most sincere congratulations, and kept quiet about my surprise.

  I read the poems several times, the one about Amin and Jamila most often of all. It made me wish I had the courage and skill to write with such truthfulness and humility. I also read the poems repeatedly to delay opening Amin’s packet. I could tell from the feel of it that it contained a book, and felt a slight dread that it was a book he had written in. It made me unexpectedly nervous to imagine what Amin would have written in his own account.

  8 Amin

  AM I ONE? I am the pool in which she mingles with me. I have never known a time of such lack and such longing, as if I would die of thirst or lunacy if I did not hold her and lie with her. Yet I don’t die and I don’t hold her. But I have never known very much, and perhaps all love is like this sooner or later. Something blind and immovable is lodged in me, its teeth sunk in some tender part I cannot locate or reach. I can feel its malice. This desperate misery passes, is passing, when at first I did not even have the strength to lift my voice or use words to explain it to myself. I have loved unwisely, but it has not been an oppression on me. I have been fortunate in my foolishness. I will never abandon her. I will see her every day for as long as I can, for as long as the years allow me a memory of her. Praise the beauty of the day in the night that follows it, and my night will be long and her beauty endless.

  She frightens them. They fear that she will make me into a comedy, and people will laugh at all of us. People laugh at everything, I told them. Think of her reputation, Ma said. Think of your good name, he said. You’re nothing without a name.

  They didn’t think like that when they were fighting their own battles together those years ago. Now they have some eminence and respect from neighbours and sundry, and I was carelessly about to turn myself and them into figures of fun. People will laugh at us. They will laugh hardest at her, I said.

  Those people don’t care about being laughed at, Ma said. They are hardened to it. Her grandmother was a dirty woman who lived a life of sin with an Englishman. Her mother and that family in their big house are so high and mighty because of their wealth. We regard everyone as equal except in their piety, as al-Biruni has said. That was him. He can always turn a weighty quotation from a long-ago century if there is need. Then he quivers there with the assurance his morbid words fill him with. She lives on her own in a flat with its own front door. She has been seen in a politician’s car. She has no sense of shame. For all I know, letting me into her flat is the most shameful thing she has ever done.

  It’s weeks now. When I come home every day my mother studies my face, to see if I have seen her, to see if I mind not having seen her. Neither of them speak about her, out of embarrassment maybe. Out of fear of another encounter like that night. The threats, the bullying, the tears. The tears were mine, and when they saw them they must have known that they had won. Let us not speak of this matter again, he said, as he always did when he felt the moment had come to show his superior form of mercy. I know how they found out. Uncle Ali brought home a rumour. There are always rumours, and he probably brought this morsel home like that, something to chortle over. That dog, do you know what people are saying he’s up to? Aunt Halima probably frowned, and then sent word for Farida to come and visit. It was Farida who told me. Aunt Halima pressed, using her full, rich range of expletives, and threatened to tell Ma anyway. So Farida told her that if she did, it would be like killing me, because Ma would tell Ba and they would make me stop or make me disobey them. Farida thought that because Aunt Halima had kept her secret about Abbas, she would keep my secret too. But Aunt Halima thought Jamila so hateful, a whore she called her, that she hurried to tell Ma straight away, with Farida hurrying beside her begging and pleading until the last moment. Farida blamed herself.

  I could not see her. I was too ashamed. Farida went to to see her, to explain and o beg forgiveness. I could not see her. She would think I did no love her enough, but I do. Or that I was too faint-hearted to fight for her, and perhaps that is true. I could not disobey them, not after all these years.

  I crave to touch her. I did not know what that word meant until I craved her touch. I ponder craving in the dark, and dream of wastelands littered with bits of bone and rocks and dead insects. The ground is hard as metal and I wake with aching feet even though I have been on my back all night. I dream of a bed littered with dead cicadas and I hear a sound like the sighing of the wind through casuarina trees. It is the saddest sound I have ever heard, apart from the words I imagine her using to describe her disappointment with me. A cry wakes me in the middle of the night. The sheets are moist with sweat, and my body feels to my touch as if it had been lying under a pool of red pulsing light. I list these symptoms like a patient or like a mad science student. What science would that be? The science of how to obey.

  I expect him to wake because of my sleeplessness. I expect him to stir, at least, from my involuntary groans and sighs as I fidget to rest a sore hip or shoulder. I cannot get up. They would hear me and think that I am going out to see her. When I wake from a nightmare I lie for a while and listen, in case I had disturbed him. I wait to see if I had said anything that he would repeat to me. But nothing disturbs him, it seems. He breathes lightly and sleeps like a guiltless boy, a smile on his face, dreaming of England. He is already far away from here. Even when his eyes are open, you can see that they are looking at something far away. I almost wish he would wake and force me to speak about her. He watches me. He wants to know but he won’t understand yet. When he speaks of her, he makes admiring jokes and I leave it at that. If he repeats something I said in my sleep, I’ll tell him that a person cannot be held responsible for what he says at night because he might have been asleep when he said it, and was not himself speaking. Or something in the dark might have captured it and twisted it, and made it into something else. I praise her in the night. How did they all come to hate her so much? I am so hateful.

  She told me her story. She had only a slight memory of her grandmother. She saw her once when she was four years old, a corpulent lady with piercing eyes who smiled and said little. Her brothers remembered more and talked about her often when they were younger. She was the story in their family, the one who had caused all the trouble. For a long time the stories were mixed up, one layer on top of another, some laye
rs missing, so later, when she wanted to know the story in full, she could not get to where it all started and where it finished.

  His name was Pearce, and one day he stumbled out of the wilderness and into the arms of her grandmother Rehana. No, not like that, she said, she was only joking when she said into the arms of her grandmother. He had been lost in the interior for a few days, robbed and abandoned by his Somali guides. When they brought him to the house, it was her grandmother Rehana who had given the Englishman his first sip of a drink for days. She must have put something in it, because he was besotted with her from the moment he opened his eyes. It was her grandmother, Malika herself, who told her this. She was the wife of her grandfather Hassanali. She outlasted the others, and was still alive until she was fifteen or sixteen, old enough to ask questions about such things. She never met her grandfather Hassanali. Her grandmother Malika’s voice always caught when she spoke his name. He must have died before she was born. I am reluctant to use her name. It feels like an audacity.