Memory of Departure

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  My mother blamed me. I know she did. Said was blubbering and shaking like a little animal. My mother washed him and wept over him. She sang to him and stroked him as she put him to bed. I was the one who found him, that same evening. My mother had left a candle by his bed. When I went in, his shirt was on fire. On the floor beside him, a pile of clothes and newspapers was ablaze. He was lying down, struggling to get up, beating groggily at his chest. I shouted his name and he turned to me, fear leaping in his eyes.

  ‘Put it out! Put it out!’ he yelled.

  He screamed with all the force in his being. He screamed with a panic-stricken abandon, thrashing at the sheets. He struggled to get up but couldn’t. I ran forward, crying and shouting, trying to beat the fire out, but I only burnt my hands.

  ‘O Yallah! Yallah!’ he screamed.

  I begged him to put the fire out. I stood and watched him burn. His eyes were shut and he fell on the floor and his face was twisted and angry. I ran around him, hopping and calling, stupidly crying. He rolled over. His legs kicked the bed and the frame fell over him. And he burned. His legs were like torches ablaze at the thighs. His face was unfamiliar and white in places. The fire reached the upper part of his thighs. His chest was leaping fire.

  My mother was the first to come in. She stopped at the door and her hand went to her mouth. The scream tore through her fingers as if wrenched out of her. She ran in and started to beat the fire with her hands. She beat the fire with whatever came to hand. Someone came running in with a bucket of water. I can’t remember. He is dead. I was five. The room filled with people, shouting prayers and wailing. The room was awash with water, and scraps of charred newspaper floated in puddles. My mother was weeping hysterically in somebody’s arms. She turned round and pointed at me, screaming hysterically. I didn’t hear what she said.

  Why did they blame me who had never done him any harm? They all beat him. I was five. He was my friend, he was my brother. He was my only friend and my only brother. Why did they blame me?

  A man read over the grave, first the words of the Koran and then instructions on how a dead man should conduct himself in the grave. He instructed Said on the answers he should give when the angel came to question him.

  ‘And when he asks you your name, tell him you were called Said bin Omar, creature of God . . .’

  For all the wrong Said has done he will suffer long. For all the little arses he fucked, the angels will put red-hot chains through his mouth and out of his arsehole. That is God’s punishment.

  My father paid for a khitma to be held at the local mosque. It seemed like hundreds of people turned up to read the Koran for Said. Prayers were read and eulogies chanted for the dear departed. The halwa was served by professional servers, to ensure that the greedy in the congregation did not wipe out the platters before all the guests had had a helping. I had never had a close relative die before. People came to shake my hand, to share in our sorrow. It made me feel very proud of Said.

  Said’s spirit lived on among us for many months. We were not allowed to sing too loudly or quarrel too often. My father’s prayers became longer and his arm heavier. We were not allowed to go to the pictures or attend weddings or dances. My mother hardly spoke to anybody. My grandmother went to Tanga to visit relations. My father beat me often. He filled me with such terror that I was afraid to speak to him. Many more nights now he did not sleep at home.

  When he was younger, my father was a trouble-maker. When he came home at night, his walking stick was covered with blood and hair, and there was never a mark on him. He was a man in those days, a man as men are supposed to be. Some people say he was a dog then, which is not altogether an insult. There is a photograph of him, taken before I was born. He was standing in front of a studio backdrop of palms and beach. His eyes were leaping out of his face, daring the camera with a ferocious arrogance. His walking-stick rested lightly against his right thigh. His left arm leant against a tall flower table. He looked as if he was about to erupt into an uncontrollable rage.

  It was my mother who showed me the picture, and I waited silently for her to say something. She put the picture away without saying a word, without looking at me. I wanted to ask about those eyes boiling with rage. Now they are glazed with drink. I wanted to ask her, I always wanted to ask her why he was like that. Why was he so unhappy? Is it true what they say about him? Is it true that he used to kidnap little black children and sell them to the Arabs of Sur? They told me that at school. Is it true that they put him in prison because he ruptured a little boy?

  I could not believe that such things were true. Then his rages were so real, so fierce and devastating, that he seemed capable of any cruelty. His lips were fat and lined with cracks that sometimes bled in the dry heat. He looked taller than he really was. His arms were thick and lumpy with muscles. His close-cropped hair was flecked with grey. Said would have grown to be like him, and my father would have looked at him with pride. He hectored me about respect and obedience, when never in my life had I sought to challenge or thwart him. I lived in terror of him. Sometimes I cried as soon as I was in his presence. His cruelties were inflicted with such passion.

  Once, when I was ill, my mother spread my bedding on the floor beside her, in case I needed attention during the night. I was proud of my illness, and proud of my exalted position near her. So often she did not let me come near. Oh, she cared for me and fed me and picked lice out of my hair, but she did not let me come near. And I could never forget how she had stood screaming her loss, with her finger pointed at me. But on this night she stroked me and put me to sleep with a strange, sweet liquid which she said was good for me.

  When I woke up, my father was leaning against her bed. The door was open, and the hurricane lamp that was left burning in the hallway through the night, lit up part of the room. I could not see him clearly, and I wish I never had. The bed was behind the shadow of the door. He smelt drunk. He tried to hide his drinking from us because he was ashamed of it. I saw him holding my mother’s wrist and whispering. It was the first time I had seen him touch her like that. Suddenly he straightened, then leaned forward and hit her. He started whispering again, more loudly this time.

  ‘You’re trying to keep me out. Because of him! What good is he anyway? Oh my mother, why do you want to annoy me?’

  My mother tried to hush him, and I saw her hand reach out for his face. He brushed her hand away and leaned back.

  ‘Why do you have to bring him here?’ he asked in a voice I did not know, appealing to her. ‘You’re trying to keep me out . . . for that dirty little murderer. What do you take me for, you snivelling bitch?’

  He struck her again, and again, grunting heavily. And again. He struggled onto the bed and pulled away the kanga she was wearing around her. My mother did not struggle and did not speak. She groaned, it seemed involuntarily, every now and again. I shut my eyes tightly and I heard his body moving on top of her. I heard him groaning and muttering, his voice coming thick and muffled off the bed. My grandmother’s door opened. My father paused, head raised as if waiting for her approach. Then he chuckled.

  ‘Come and see, my old woman,’ he called. ‘Come and watch me killing her.’

  Then he began again, whispering and muttering, and fucking her. After a while there was silence. I heard him sobbing. I heard him lifting himself up, and through my tears I saw him leaning over me. Get out, he said. I struggled on all fours out of the room. My grandmother was standing outside in the hallway. I started to crawl towards her, feeling weak and feeble from the fever. Slowly she turned and went to her room and closed the door behind her. I heard the bolt gently slide home. I spent the night curled up outside my grandmother’s door.

  I could only feel terror and loathing for the world they had brought me into.

  My mother hid from me even more, but I stalked her, waited for her. Fleetingly, when her eyes strayed to mine, I caught a glimpse of her shame, and my heart broke for her. But I could not forget how she had stood with her finger of
blame.

  I watched the tide recede beyond the breakwater, and listened for the hiss of waves breaking against the stones. Hunger was making my equivocations by the sea more pathetic with every minute. What could be so wrong with the world when God awaited us all with his Hell and his Heaven and his legion of torturers?

  I had become a man without knowing what it was like to touch a woman with evil in my heart. Such talk of death when life had not started yet. I was told that God had said that to play with yourself was sinful, that your penis shrinks, and you use up all your manii so that later on you can’t make children. The doctor had said: You masturbate a lot, no? I had gone to see him about the pain in my chest. He was gratified by my look of guilty surprise. He told me that he had studied psychology, and offered to analyse me on the spot.

  ‘It’s not good for you,’ he said. ‘It takes all your strength away. It makes your bones weak. Listen, it sounds hollow. I’ll give you some pills. Tell your mother to give you a lot of meat to eat and milk to drink.’

  And an ostrich-feather canopy to shield you while you stroll in the heat of the day. I drew blood and wrote with it, drew a treaty with myself. But God made girls pretty and gave their bodies a pungent smell. I had a wash afterwards, from head to toe. None of the other boys bothered washing afterwards. They didn’t have a pain in the chest.

  I picked up my books and started off for home. The beach behind me was drying out in the sun, raising the stench of ages. In the old days, slaves who had refused conversion had gone to that beach to die. They had floated with the flotsam and dead leaves, weary of the fight, their black skins wrinkled with age, their hearts broken. My poor fathers and grandfathers, my poor mothers and grandmothers, chained to rings in a stone wall.

  I walked the familiar lanes and alleys, avoiding the main streets. In a clearing between houses I saw an old man squatting on the ground, scratching the scaly skin of his testicles as he concentrated on forcing out a lump of shit. He turned to look at his efforts, the thread of his amulet digging deep into the flabby muscles of his neck. He grinned when he saw me. He forced out a whistle of angry smell, his brow suffused with sweat in the sun. He stood up, straightening painfully, and walked to the nearest wall to urinate.

  By the Welfare Office, I ran up the steps, not daring to breathe the smell of old urine. I crossed the main road, empty in mid-afternoon, and turned into the alley by the Public Baths. There was a powerful smell of clogged drains and mould. Round the corner, an old man was dozing, perched on the cashbox of his fruit and vegetable shop. Rotting fruit, punctured and oozing, lay on the pavement. Wet streaks of sugary mango juice were extended by tyre marks in all directions.

  ‘Here you will only turn into a cabbage.’

  So my teacher told me, while I helped him register the winners on School Sports Day. Red card for the winner, blue card for second, green card for third. Why cabbage? He had studied in England, and on his return had rediscovered God and embraced him with unusual intensity. ‘What do you want to do with your life? Go away, make something of yourself. What about England? Godless country, but there are opportunities there. What do you want to be? A doctor?’

  Was it very cold? I would pass away lonely hours imagining myself a doctor in England. Walking down a long corridor, wearing a white coat and dark horn-rimmed spectacles, looking like Gregory Peck. All my patients are women and invariably need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  ‘What chance have you got if you stay here?’ my teacher asked me. ‘The best you’ll do will be a job in a bank, or become a teacher. Unless you have powerful relatives I don’t know about.

  ‘There is no dishonour in becoming a bank clerk. It is all rizki, the bounty of God, but it is not what the country needs. We need engineers, doctors, graduates. We don’t need philosophers and story-tellers but forestry officers, scientists and veterinary surgeons. Culture is for the rich. Culture is decadence. Look at Rome. Look at Persia. Look at Baghdad, look at Cairo. What did culture bring them but ruin?’

  He taught us English literature, and was often moved into long harangues on the destructive ignorance of European arrogance. ‘Chemistry, algebra, astronomy . . . all these were things that Muslims taught to the backward Europeans. But then the Muslims gave up the discipline of the desert. They wanted banquets and festivals and luxury. Their enemies soon destroyed them, because they knew in their barbarian hearts that culture is decadence. So don’t worry your head with this Shakespeare. A lot of people say he didn’t even exist anyway, or that if he did, he was an eastern sage whose work was translated into English. You know what these Europeans are like. This Jane Austen, I think she’s English, don’t you? Hoity-toity big red nose and a little mouth.’

  But this was in the days when the British were still our masters, and our teacher would clown his anxiety by running to the classroom door and peeping out, in case the Welshman who was our headmaster was walking down the corridor. Then he would come back and continue his harangue. Our poor teacher, he did not know it yet, but his days were numbered. The British were about to go, and the day of vengeance was drawing near.

  My mother was married to my father when she was sixteen. Her father was a lorry driver who also owned a shop in a small village near Jinja in Uganda. My father was in his twenties at the time and was known to be a troublemaker. My grandmother thought that a woman would cure him of his interest in anuses. The wife of an ivory trader who made frequent trips up-country told my grandmother of this girl who was a beauty comparable to a heroine of the Alfu Leila u Leila. The idea of a pretty, simple country girl for a daughter attracted my grandmother. After many repetitions of my mother’s praises, and after many significant pauses and arch glances under lowered eyebrows, the two women hatched their scheme.

  The idea did not immediately appeal to my father. He did not see any need for it. In the end he made no objection, nor did the girl’s father, although he knew that my father was a shiftless hooligan. He was afraid that left to her own for too long, my mother might turn to one of the up-country blacks for a lover.

  My mother was never consulted. She found herself betrothed to a good-looking man, and she adored him. She was a timid, ignorant country girl. When she travelled to the coast for her wedding, it was the first time she had ever left home.

  My father was unfaithful from the start. She knew of his unfaithfulness. She could smell it on him when he came home for her. At first she had cried and accepted it as the way of the world, and kept her shame to herself. Then he started to beat her because of her hurt silences. My grandmother told her that marriages were like that, but that things would work out in the end.

  He beat us too, and then my mother only looked stern, reluctant to challenge him in front of us. She did nothing but medicate our bruises and cuts, and moan and sing comfortingly to us, and stroke us with her gentle care. She did not teach us to hate him. We would have been better armed with hate.

  He beat me when I refused to go to the mosque. He said I had turned against my Creator. He picked up a sandal and threw it at me.

  ‘Come on, get out. The muadhin has called,’ he said.

  In the languor of the afternoon, in the gloom of the shade of the mango trees drifted his muted call. I stood outside the door and heard him mourn my waywardness.

  ‘What happens to these children? Fourteen years old and he’s tired of God already. He used to pray and attend meetings and study good books. Imam Musa told me he was born to be a scholar. Now look at him!’

  Nobody had told Imam Musa, but at twelve I also started some serious masturbating. God punished me for every stroke of my hand. In the end I gave up God and stopped listening to lying old scholars who could emphasise a point with one tensely outstretched forefinger while the other searched for a little boy’s anus. I started to play football instead.

  I don’t know how he knew I was standing there but he came out of the room as if expecting to find me. He stared at me for a moment, his face hardening with anger. I did not say anything. I had dried u
p: a wasted wadi, a grazing bison, a sitting duck for the thick-armed hunter.

  ‘Get out!’ he said, his voice deep and level, but his face vicious with anger. ‘Go to the mosque. Get going, khanith wahid!’

  That was in the last months while my sins were his, before I became a man. I began to regret that I had not gone. I could feel tears forming in my eyes. They always did, at every confrontation.

  ‘Now!’ he shouted, moving towards me.

  He came very near me, his eyes bulging out of his face, sweat glistening on his brow. His mouth was open. He’ll kill me, I thought.

  ‘What did you say?’ he shouted as if his lungs were bursting inside him.

  ‘I said no,’ I repeated.

  He looked surprised. He looked lost. From me and from Said. He shook his head. For me and for Said, and for all the beatings and the humiliations and the terror of all those years.

  ‘I swear I’ll break every bone in your body if you don’t go. Wallahi I’ll kill you,’ he said calming himself down and looking up briefly as he swore in the sight of God. ‘Go now.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ I said, moving slowly away from him.

  ‘May God forgive you,’ he said. ‘When you meet your Master on the Day of Judgment . . .’

  ‘I have no Master,’ I said.

  ‘In God’s name . . .’ he said, looking frightened.

  ‘There is no God,’ I said, getting cocky.

  He smiled and stared at me without speaking. He bolted the front door and then walked over towards me. I stood quite still. He slapped me on the face again and again, asking me if there was no God. I tried not to cry. I tried not to run. He was getting angrier with every blow. I cursed him and abused him silently, but then the pain became more than I could bear and I started to cry. He lost all restraint and hit me wherever he could reach. I screamed and yelled, louder and louder. Lord forgive me, Lord God that is the only God, God of all creatures. Make me see, make me see. God that has no father and no son, oh God my Master pity me that does not deserve your pity . . .