I waited on the veranda. The rheumatic old woman had joined other patients there. The doctor came late in the afternoon. He examined my grandmother and said that he would arrange for her to be X-rayed when he came back. He explained that he was going away to Denmark for a few days, as personal physician to the Minister of Culture, who was going there to order a statue of the leader. I asked if his assistant could not have the X-rays done. He told me he had no assistant.
We took turns to watch her. My father relieved me late in the afternoon, and my mother spent the night at the hospital. She died the following day, while I was asleep on the veranda. It was the nurses who came to tell me. They asked me to remove the body because they needed the bed. I asked for a stretcher but they said they had none. I said I would have to go for help and a bier. They put Bi Mkubwa’s body in the sluice room at the end of the ward. There was no doctor to sign a death certificate. Without one we would not be able to bury her. I went for my father and he paid one of the nurses to sign the certificate. We took the body home in the back of a taxi, covered with old blankets.
I went to register her death at the Court, and obtained the chit to take to the cemetery. The grave-digger complained and I had to bribe him. We screened-off the yard and washed her body in the open, squeezing whatever would come out of her before embalming her with lavender. Zakiya came to help my mother prepare the house for visitors.
We buried her the next day. It was a sorry funeral-train that took her body to the cemetery, no more than half a dozen of us taking turns to carry her body to rest. My mother was the only one who cried, and she wept for the misery of those final years.
Life must go on, my father said and very soon resumed his old life. He did so with more discretion than before and with much less zest. The fire was dying out in him, and now he slipped in and out of the house, morose and apologetic. He never spoke to Zakiya.
She refused to listen to my entreaties. She told me of a room she had rented. She intended to move there at the end of the month. She did not need to spell out what the room would be used for. She told me about her boy-friend who would support her.
‘He has his own family. He will use you until he tires of you, and then pass you on to somebody else. Please be sensible,’ I pleaded.
‘I can look after myself,’ she said.
‘That room will end up being a brothel,’ I said, meaning to hurt her.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a bitter smile. ‘You can come and see me there if you want. Unless that will shame you too much.’
‘Of course I’ll come. But why do you have to do this? Why do you have to live like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ she screamed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
When my mother found out, she begged her not to go. She knelt in front of Zakiya, pleading with her while tears trailed down her face. I forced my mother away in the end, dragging her in my arms while she sobbed and wailed. Zakiya did not leave then, but I knew it would only be a matter of time. She saw herself in a way I could not fully understand. She played her role to the full, dressing the part and swinging her hips with all the abandon of a hardened young prostitute. Yet she was ashamed of what she had become. It tore my heart to shreds just to watch her as she strutted through the streets.
I told my mother that I would not go. That was on the day that the government finally released our results. I had done even better than I expected, well enough for direct entry into the University. We did not have the fees, and a government scholarship was as much out of the question as it had ever been.
‘There’s enough to do here,’ I said. She had taken to coming to my room every night and sitting with me. She did not say anything at first but looked at me with the old suspicion. I could not help laughing.
‘There’s nothing for you to do here,’ she said sharply. ‘What will you do in this place? Become like us?’
‘I am like you,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the teachers’ college. I’ll become a teacher. They’ll take me there, and you don’t have to pay fees. I can still live at home if Ba will not object.’
‘No, no,’ she said with a look of pain. ‘Go and do the things you want. Go away and do things, and live your life. Don’t stay here. We can look after ourselves. And don’t forget what you said about Salma, and how you said you will do all these things and come back for her. Don’t stay just for us. This place will kill you.’
I applied to the college and they accepted me almost at once. I was to start at the beginning of the next academic year, in January. Zakiya told me I was a fool, and my mother shook her head over me. ‘Who needs you here?’ she asked.
‘You need me,’ I said, grinning at the derision and contempt with which she asked her question. ‘You need my quiet strength.’
‘We’ve survived without it so far. You just leave us to struggle on. We don’t want your sacrifice.’ She slapped me on the arm to stop me smiling. ‘Do you hear? I’m not joking with you. Go and see what there is out there. Nobody needs you here. Who needs a teacher when we don’t even have enough schools for our children?’
‘What’s wrong with being a teacher? They’ll build the schools, and there’s always need for teachers.’
‘You’re not listening,’ she said, getting angry. ‘What will they teach you in this college? How to bully little children? Is that what you want?’
‘I don’t have to bully the children. Not all teachers do that. I could be useful, and I would be here . . . among my own people.’
She came back to the subject again and again, and Zakiya was always her willing ally. They never talked about this in front of my father. He seemed pleased that I would be staying, making jokes about using the stick on my future girl students.
‘What about Salma?’ my mother asked.
‘Yes, what about your betrothed?’ Zakiya asked.
‘What betrothed? How am I going to convince her father that I’m anything but contemptible? Perhaps it was nothing more than the excitement of being in Nairobi. Perhaps it was just a holiday romance.’
‘You are contemptible,’ Zakiya said.
‘Watch how you talk to your elder brother,’ my mother warned. ‘He could beat you with his stick.’
I had not expected them to be so insistent. It flattered me that they should care about what I would do, but it made it difficult to avoid the truth.
‘You’re just afraid,’ Zakiya said. She had just moved to her rented room and this was the first time I visited her. ‘All these years you’ve been talking about leaving, and now you don’t have the nerve.’
‘I don’t have the money.’
‘You’re just afraid,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘All right, I am afraid,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve always been afraid. I find the thought of travelling to another place about which I know nothing, and where I know nobody, terrifying. I always have found it terrifying. But in any case, I don’t even have the fare. What is the point of fretting about leaving when I don’t even have the money for the fare? What is it out there that is worth such risks?’
‘What has always been out there. It is still there, but you won’t find out sitting on your backside in this dumb place.’
I took to wandering my old haunts, and I began to feel the return of the old hopelessness. My trip to Nairobi began to seem like a distant memory. The letter to Salma constantly defeated me. I slept late into the morning and wandered the streets in the heat of the day. The discomfort of the sun was like a penance for the useless hours spent in bed. I spent hours watching flies crawling over my body, watching them suck the sweat from my arms and legs.
I went to the docks almost every day. Now I was no longer a child the Customs guards did not stop me at the gate as they used to. There were always others strolling the wharves, gazing into the sea. There was a kiosk opposite the disembarkation building where the strollers stopped for a cold drink or a cup of tea. The man who ran the kiosk knew my father, had known him from the days when he used to work in th
e docks, filling in forms for people who could not write. He was very friendly and loved talking about his days at sea. He told me about his son who had stowed away in a ship from Mombasa to Glasgow where he now lived. I knew the story, and stories of people who had been found and thrown overboard. He laughed when I told him that. ‘We found a stowaway on one ship I was on, and the captain made us throw him into the propellers. He was an Italian captain, out of Barawa. Another time we had this Afrikanda. We chased him all over the ship, and in the end he jumped overboard. We saw the sharks get him there in front of us.’
Some nights I dreamt of a crow I had seen as a child. Its claws had been cut off, and whenever it tried to land it landed on the raw stump of its legs. It blundered from tree to tree around the edge of our school playing-fields, pursued by a crowd of children hurling stones. Its end came as it flew across the fields towards the school buildings. It fell to the ground, its neck already limp with death. I dreamt that someone hid the crow under my pillow.
The first night I tried to sleep with the light on, my mother came into the room. She sat at the foot of the bed and waited for me to stop pretending that I was asleep. ‘Shall I switch the light off? Or are you becoming afraid of the dark too?’
‘Is Ba home?’ I asked.
‘Yes, he’s drunk,’ she said. ‘Somebody beat him tonight. He’s very quiet. I don’t know how that man will end up.’
‘I want to leave,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how . . .’
She waited for me to continue.
‘Ma, can’t you say something?’
‘What do you want me to say? You tell me how I can help you and I will. If you just want to talk, then I’m tired. One beaten man in this house is enough.’
‘I want to try and get work on a ship,’ I said. ‘Ba will know some people . . . He might be able to speak to somebody. He might know somebody from the docks, from when he worked there. He might ask somebody for me.’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘I’ll tell him.’
6
s.s. Alice
29 October 1968
Dear Salma,
It has taken me a long time to get to this, and now that I’m here I am no longer sure that this is the right beginning. This is the seventh start I have made now, each one worse than the last. Seven is a propitious number, so I know this effort will turn out well despite its poor beginning.
It’s three months now since I last saw you, since I left Nairobi in a blaze of glory. I expect that by now you are a student, and hardly have time to recall my flying visit to your railway-depot of a city. (That is not to be taken seriously: I expect you to recall every moment.)
I saw Mariam the day after I left you, and spoke with her at length. I already feel she is a good friend. She told me a lot about you. She promised that she would come and see you the next day, and I hope she did and brought you my love. I think of you every day. I promised I would write, and I intended to do so as soon as I got home. But I was a little overcome by events when I first arrived back. After that I just lost my nerve, although I could find a less painful way of describing it if I really tried. You were part of a vision of a fulfilled future, but I found so much misery here that I felt self-indulgent whenever I contemplated it. How could I even think about departure at such times? I thought of writing to greet you, just to make sure that you would not forget me, but even that seemed like a betrayal, like a kind of selfishness. How could I think like that? I don’t know. Perhaps because I saw nothing but the misery and defeat of my people. I saw nothing but a pointless clinging to old habits. My grandmother died and we hardly mourned her. It was as if she had not lived with us, but had come like a visitor and had now gone on with her journey. I sensed our resignation, and started to feel the beginnings of an old hopelessness overtaking me. I felt that I should stay and be of use. I could not write to you feeling like that.
Perhaps I should have stayed. I intended to, but I am now three weeks away from home, between Bombay and Madras. I am working on a ship, s.s. Alice, as a medical orderly. I could not resist the opportunity, and often I feel that I have run away.
We left Bombay this morning, thank God. It’s a nightmare city, crowded and noisy, full of the most incredible filth. Everyone seemed to be shouting or hustling, or begging. I must confess that I hardly left the port. The place frightened me. It is now late evening, and I am writing this on the top deck, under the lifeboat lights. We took on many passengers at Bombay, mostly bound for Singapore. Our cargo holds are full and will have no more capacity until we reach Singapore. Our stop at Madras is for the benefit of a few passengers who embarked at Mombasa.
This is a very dirty ship, adapted to carrying dirty wog passengers. One of its decks has been converted into a huge, dark barn, with endless rows of metal bunks hardly a yard apart. The bunks have no bedding on them, and some of the passengers sleep on the bare springs. They live and cook down there, spreading their bundles in the aisles, and lighting little Primus stoves to cook their rice and beans. It’s a grim place, always dark, even when the few light bulbs are on. It smells of copra and damp jute, as if at one time it had been used as a hold. Underneath this, you can smell and taste human squalor, and hear echoes of the groans of the Middle Passage. There are always people sprawled on the bunks. Plump matrons swathed in old saris who look bloated and damp like creatures out of their element. Thin, wiry men whose eyes gaze into the half-light with the dreamy abandon of despair. Children who squeeze themselves into small foetal shapes, and lie like sick lambs waiting for death. We go among them with our pails and sponges and talk to them about hygiene.
My boss is called Dr Martin. He is an Australian and very wild. He does not take notice of anybody, but likes to think of himself as kind. He drinks a lot, and talks of the passengers as if they were mystics. He treats the crew as if they were pigs. He is trying to convince me that I’m too intelligent to be one of them. I was suspicious of him at first. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. Now I think he means to be kind. He’s shown me a picture of his girl-friend, who is waiting for him in Sydney. She’s very good-looking.
I wish things were different. I wish I wasn’t so far away. He is right to treat the crew as if they were pigs. They call me Jerk, meaning that is what I do with myself. Sometimes they call me Wog or Nigger. They are all so conscious of being men, and all want to be thought of as hard. The Greeks are the worst of all. Chibuk, chibuk, as if that is all they do when they are not chewing vine leaves and raping demi-goddesses.
I won’t be back until the New Year, so I’ll keep writing to you even though you can’t reply. Perhaps when I get back I’ll come and see you, or you might be interested in a trip to the coast. I’ve got to last on this ship until then. I’m sorry about your father, and I hope that he is well. It was such a relief to be offered the job. I wasn’t going to have to fight my way down the Nile after all. Perhaps when we’re rich and famous we can cruise round the world, and I’ll know people in the ports where we might call. I might be able to introduce you to some fat ex-Emperor of somewhere who runs an opium den in Macao, or we might meet some stranded Lord Jim. This is the East, you know, and such things do happen.
I think a great deal about home and about my people, and about the way things were with them. I feel such pain about leaving that place. Who would have thought it? I never thought I would miss that land. Now I’m afraid that I might forget it all. Drama, more drama! I’m homesick. I even miss seeing the old man brothel-keeper who lives next door to us. Sometimes names escape me, even after such a short time. I try to recall the streets and the colours of the houses. I’m in exile, I tell myself. It makes it easier to bear this feeling because I can give it a name that does not shame me.
Is this turning out to be too long a letter? I hope it is not too dreary. Maybe I should take up poetry. If it has any use – poetry, I mean – it can only be to make us feel that our squalid little fears and perceptions are part of a more meaningful scheme of things. I fail in this too, and I think it is
a failure in generosity, a perverse need always to find fault, to look for failure and hunt it out with a kind of hard-nosed cruelty that masquerades as something noble. I spend my time in a state of shocked amazement at the way I have spent my brief life, all that endless malice, that incapacity to be warm. I spent so many years gathering resentments to myself, nurturing them on a brew that I manufactured out of the wrong done to me. Just living in that place made me feel guilty, unwanted, but as if the fault lay with me. It was that feeling of being found fault with that made me withdraw into silence.
I don’t know how much of what I’m saying is making sense to you. I’m not even sure that I want to tell you all this yet. It’s here now and I’m not going to change it. Perhaps it’s something to do with the sea. It is so indescribably desolate and hostile. When the sea is rough, our little craft bobs on billions of cubic miles of creation as if it were not even a fragment of existence. At other times the sea is so calm, so beautifully bright and glistening, so solid-seeming, and treacherous. I hanker for the feel of good, solid earth under my feet.
I dream about you. I think about you endlessly. I never knew it would be like this, so good and yet so painful. Tell me how I’m never out of your thoughts for long. I can’t wait to get back to you.
Much love,
Hassan
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of seven other novels: Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and The Last Gift. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.
Also available by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Admiring Silence
Memory of Departure Page 17