The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Their dad worked in a carpet store not too far away, and he was often around the house. He had been a van driver for the carpet store, but he was disabled in the war, wounded in an air raid, and he was not allowed to drive because his eyesight was bad. A thick scar ran like an underground tunnel just below his right eye. The store kept him on for odd jobs, sweeping, small repairs and generally helping out when he was required. When he went to work, he wore a suit and tie, an old herringbone suit that was the only one he possessed. Maryam did not know at the time that Dad’s job was probably a kindness by the store and that he probably received poor wages. That was something she worked out for herself when she thought about him later.

  At home, Dad was always fixing something, pottering he called it, and he smoked a pipe. They called her Mary and it was only much later that she learned that her name was Maryam. The eldest of Mum and Dad’s three girls was Maggie. Maggie’s name was always on Mum’s lips: fetch this, stop that, you’ll come to no good, that’s for sure. The other girl was Gill and she was not well. The children were allowed to sit in the living room while their parents listened to the radio after tea. Dad liked to have one or other of the girls sitting on his lap, and he stroked them and kissed them on the cheek and called them you little nig nog. At seven in the evening they were all sent to bed, even if the sun was shining. She did not remember being hit or being shouted at, although Maggie was, for answering back and for being nosy. She used to peep through keyholes and rummage in forbidden drawers. Mum said there was nothing worse than someone who was nosy. Nosy people caused all the trouble in the world.

  There was an outside flushing toilet just beside the back door. The toilet door did not fit the frame. There was a large gap at the top and bottom, and Maryam remembered times when there was a skin of ice in the toilet bowl first thing in the morning. The toilet had an animal smell, as if something else lived in there, and she was terrified of using it after dark. By the time she was five, the other children had been sent away. Mum explained that they had been adopted and now had families of their own. They belonged to someone. She asked five-year-old Maryam if she would like to stay with them for good. Maryam said she would. She did not really know what she was being asked. It had not occurred to her to wonder if there was anything different about the way she lived with Mum and Dad compared to the way anyone else lived. It had not occurred to her that she could be sent away from them.

  But when her mum and dad asked to keep her for good, they were not allowed to because they were too old. Her mum grumbled about that for days, describing to Maryam the stupidity of saying they were too old to adopt one child, a child they loved like their own, when they weren’t too old to bring up three as their fostered children. Dad said he was flabbergasted. He always said that when he thought something silly had happened. They even considered appealing, but when this idea came up, Maryam was taken away from them, because the social workers said the whole episode was upsetting the child. That was how she lost Mum and Dad. A man and a woman came for her in a car and took her away, and she had no idea because Mum was talking to her in her usual way as if nothing strange was happening.

  Maryam was fostered with another family. She did not remember very much about that family. She thought something bad happened there to the other child they were looking after, a boy older than her who looked hot and often trembled. Their house was cold too but it also smelled. The windows were never opened and the beds smelled bad. Her new father was a big man and when she got in his way he pushed her away hard. Once he threw his beer at her because she was crying. Her mother was thin and had long hair, and was always hurrying them and tugging them, and telling them they were the bane of her life. When she thought back over her childhood, it seemed as if she was there for a very short time, but when she counted carefully in later years she knew she must have been there for a good while because she started school when she was with them. Maybe she just did not want to remember.

  Her memory was very confused about this time. She stayed with other families but her recollections were vague. Sometimes she was hit, she remembered that, and once she was locked in a room on her own all night while the family went out. Maybe it was not all night and she just fell asleep on the floor in the end. When she woke up in the morning the door was unlocked. She cried all the time and kept asking for Mum and Dad, but she never found them again. She was sent to live with another family that had two proper children about the same age as her. The mother was dark and had asked for a dark child to foster, so they had given her Maryam, because by then her complexion was darkening more than ever. But Maryam would not stop crying for long – you are not a baby any more, her dark mother said – and she did not want to play with the proper children. She was in big school by this time and was being bullied constantly. One day she hit a girl who was tormenting her. The teacher had put a vase with flowers in water on their table for them to draw but the girl kept moving it and scribbling on Maryam’s paper and calling her smelly. Then the girl spat in her face, and Maryam snatched the vase and flowers and water from the girl’s hands and hurled it at her. It hit her in the face. The headmistress sent her to sit on her own in the school hall until her mother came to collect her. Her dark mother said she did not want her any more and she was fostered to another family that was going to put her right.

  Maryam could not please them. They had a daughter of their own who was a year older than Maryam. Her name was Vivien, and she kept an eye on Maryam and reported on her if she broke any of her parents’ many rules. The father was a teacher, and he gave Maryam reading tests and intelligence tests, and told her that she was backward for her age. He organised routines to improve her ability to learn and gave her practice tasks to do as homework. The daughter reported any infringements of this regime, after giving Maryam her own scolding first, pinching and slapping her for her stupidity. The mother taught her table manners and where to put her hands when she went to bed and how to wipe herself throughly so she did not leave soil marks in her knickers. In the end, the family could not really come to like her, even though she stayed with them for more than a year. They tried but could not put her right, so they sent her back.

  By this time Maryam was nine years old and had a good idea of her worthlessness. So when they found another family to take her, and her new mother called her Maryam and stroked her hair and said what a lovely little girl, she knew that she would have to do everything she could to be lovely, so that she would never stop liking her. She was given a small room of her own, and her new mother decorated it with pictures of animals and a crimson and gold butterfly mobile, which hung over her bed. She was a thin smiling woman with a laugh that seemed to bubble out of her. It made Maryam laugh just to hear her laugh. She was a nurse, and her new father was an electrician in the same hospital. It is a psychiatric hospital, do you know what that means? That was how she talked to her from the beginning. Nobody had talked to Maryam like that before, not that she remembered, expecting her to ask questions, to want to know about things. At least that was how Maryam wanted to remember her, as someone who spoke to her differently from the way anyone had spoken to her before, someone who expected her to be curious. Her name was Ferooz, she told Maryam, and she was from Mauritius. Her husband’s name was Vijay and he was from India. Ferooz got the atlas out and showed her where Mauritius was, and told her how it got its name and how no one used to live there, and who lived there now and what they did. She also showed her where India was, and pointed to the city where Vijay came from, or rather to the city nearest the village he came from. In any case, she showed her a map, and told her about places she had never heard of and gave her a glimpse of the world.

  She also told her many things about their lives. Vijay limped badly because his body had not healed properly after he was knocked over by a car when he was a child. Their families thoroughly disapproved of their marriage, because of religion. Her family were pious Muslims with a position to uphold in Mauritius, and forbade her to marry a Hindu. Vijay’s
family were ignorant villagers and could not bear to have anything to do with Muslims. Perhaps it would have helped if they had children, but they could not. Perhaps they had offended their families too much, and without their blessing could not deserve the gift of a child of their own. But now they had a lovely little girl and did not care about those horrible families. They would be a family themselves.

  That was Ferooz, and that was the story Maryam told her own children. She did not tell them everything, not about the things that went wrong and how later she lost Ferooz and Vijay so completely. There were some things she did not know how to talk about, not to her children, not yet. She ended that part of the story by telling them about their father. He was a sailor then, visiting Exeter to see a friend. After he met Maryam he got a job so he could be near her, but Ferooz and Vijay did not like him, so they ran away together. Yallah, let’s get out of here, that’s what he said. That was the story of their love. That was what she told them. They met and ran away together and he never went back to sea. They loved what he said: Yallah, let’s get out of here, and when they were children they sometimes said that to each other as a joke.

  Maryam tried to get in touch with Ferooz after Hanna came but she could not find her again. Her letters went unanswered, and once, when she found the courage to ring her number, she discovered that it was dead. She wished that she had not waited so long.

  They were beginning to get into a new little convalescing routine. Of course, they already had a routine, one that grew and changed over the years as their lives changed. That was the thing about growing old together, you shuffled and made space and learned to be comfortable with each other, if you were lucky. Maybe she did not really mean growing old together. She did not feel old, and did not think of Abbas as old, even though there were so many unmistakable ways in which he showed his age even before this illness. It was not their ages that made them comfortable with each other. It was more like being so used to living with someone that you did not need to speak about some things, and other things you never mentioned, out of kindness, out of what they provoked. She saw people coming to the hospital, couples who looked battered and worn out, so that it was impossible to tell which was the one who was ailing. Yet first this one hovers over the other, steadying her as she stumbles slightly over a bubbled-up floor tile, and then she waits patiently while he hesitates whether to go left or to go straight ahead, or whether to ask someone for assistance. Then she steps up, links arms with him, and somehow something is agreed and they set off again.

  She got up first in the morning as she had always done, went downstairs and made them tea. They drank their tea in bed, hardly exchanging a word, dozing for a few seconds now and then. She loved the ease of it, the unhurriedness now that it was just the two of them, and sometimes he promised that he would get up earlier and make tea for them the following week. Yes, she said, when you are feeling better. Then she got up, washed and hurried downstairs to make herself breakfast and get ready for work. That was how it always was with her, a moment’s ease followed by bustle and tumult, the story of her life, she just could not get the tempo to steady. She laid the table for him to have his breakfast later. Even when he was well, he only had a cup of tea before leaving for work, picking up an apple or a pear on his way out, the frugal habits of a lifetime. She knew that when he came down, he would put the breakfast things away and make himself a cup of tea. By the time she was ready to leave, he was out of bed, washed and dressed, and sitting in the living room with one of his books. In those days, after he began to get better, it was The Odyssey again, and that was how she left him, thinking that soon he would have to go back to work and that would be the end of his enforced holiday. Some mornings he went to the newsagent to get a paper, but he could not bear reading about what was happening in Iraq, so some mornings he did not and went for a short walk instead.

  Then late one Saturday morning, when she was in the kitchen unpacking the groceries she had just brought home from the supermarket, she heard a small noise in the living room, and had time to think to herself that he had dropped his book, before she heard him say in a muted voice, Oh yallah. She hurried to the living room, and found him sprawled in the chair panting for breath. His face was twisted in agony, and his whole body was leaning to one side and shaking uncontrollably. She did as she was instructed, wedged his teeth open with a spoon to check that he had not swallowed his tongue. Then she called the emergency number, laid him out on the floor so he could breathe properly, and was ready to give him mouth-to-mouth if he faltered. By the time the ambulance arrived he was unconscious but still breathing on his own. In the ambulance, Maryam was shaken by a panic whose name she knew well. He is going to die.

  Hanna and Jamal both came down the same day, and they all learned from the doctors that Abbas had suffered a stroke and that it would take a few days to assess the damage. In the meantime he was sedated to allow his body to recover some equilibrium, although he was probably out of immediate danger. They went in to see him together, and saw him lying shrunken in his bed, a thin brown man with tubes coming out of his nostrils and his arm, but breathing on his own. He is not going to die, Maryam thought firmly, He is not going to die. She wanted to say this to her children, but perhaps it had not occurred to them how close he had come. The doctor had been very reassuring in his report. Perhaps to the children Abbas looked even stranger than he did to her, because they had not seen him since he fell ill, and had seen neither him nor her for weeks and must have imagined them well and at ease in their absence. But perhaps she was being sentimental, assuming her children were more innocent than they were. They were probably not at all surprised to be standing around their father’s hospital bed despite her reassurances that he was getting better after his collapse. They knew quite well enough how old he was, and maybe had been secretly dreading that something terrible was yet to happen.

  The shock of their Ba’s illness made them solemn when they got home, but drew them closer together in a kind of mourning. They followed her to the kitchen while she prepared supper, talking about their Ba and remembering his antics. After a while, Jamal went into the living room to watch their ancient TV, as he called it.

  ‘Have you got a drink in the house?’ Hanna asked, looking into various kitchen cupboards. Maryam nodded towards the right cupboard and watched her daughter turn towards it with a resolute look. She really wanted that drink. Hanna was then twenty-eight years old, had been teaching for five years, and was about to give up her job to follow her boyfriend Nick to Brighton where he had just got his first job as a university teacher. Each time Maryam saw her, she seemed more assured: in her voice and in the movement of her eyes, in the way she dressed, as if complicated choices were involved in the way she looked as she did. Well, yes of course complicated choices were involved, but it was as if she was deliberately remaking herself from someone she did not like. Maryam thought her speech was also changing, leaving one voice behind and taking up another one, still warm (most of the time), but with an undertone of challenge and worldliness that had not been there before. It was the voice of a young Englishwoman making her way in the world. Is this what parents do, she wondered, study their children as they turn into men and women they learn to grow cautious of? And what do they think as they look at us? Do they think how difficult, how tedious, how she’s failed me? She had never had parents or family, not really, not so she could compare what she knew now with what she thought she knew before. And Abbas never mentioned (or almost never mentioned) his parents, so it was all guesswork for her, making things up on the hoof.

  ‘He’ll have to retire now, won’t he?’ Hanna said, and then took a sip of wine. ‘Will you be able to get all his paperwork in order or do you want help with that?’

  ‘Yes, yes, he’ll have to retire now,’ Maryam replied. If he lives. The questions were meant kindly, but Hanna had taken to speaking to her in this insisting way, as if she was likely to be forgetful. ‘We’ll have to wait for the doctor, but I should think they�
�ll say he must retire,’ Maryam said.

  ‘All right, tell me if you need help,’ Hanna said. She stepped forward and gave her mother a quick embrace. ‘Nick sends his love. He’s sorry he couldn’t come. He’s commuting to Brighton and it’s wearing him down, but we’re moving in a fortnight. He’s found a place to rent and I’ve got some supply teaching all set up. It’s going to be hectic for a while, but I can come if you need me.’

  ‘Yes, I will, but now I just want him to get better,’ Maryam said, and could not prevent her voice from quavering.

  The next day they went to see Abbas before Hanna returned to London, and afterwards Jamal stayed behind at the hospital while Maryam went to drop Hanna off at the station. He sat beside his father’s bed, looking at his face, tranquil and composed despite the tubes, and he smiled. He didn’t think he was going to die yet. He was breathing regularly, his eyes closed, silent and unreachable, as if he was in one of his distant places. But the ashy skin on his face, the wrinkled hands, the shallow rising and falling of his flaccid neck told him that he had been through pain, was going through pain. His father was often silent, and preferred solitude, so perhaps he was not in agony where he was. It was just a fancy, a bit of wishful thinking on his son’s part. Ma often said how alike they were in their love of silence, Jamal and Abbas, and perhaps they were, but Ba’s silences were sometimes dark and his solitariness had a feeling of menace, as if he had gone somewhere where it would not be pleasant to meet him. At those times, his face turned sour, turned down, frowning, his eyes glowing with a kind of ache or shame. When he spoke in that state, even when he spoke to Ma, his voice was harsh and his words were cruel. Jamal hated that, but most of all he hated that he spoke to Ma like that. It made him shudder with anxiety for what that voice would lead to, for the unhappiness he knew it must cause Ma. He sat beside his father’s bed, looking at his lean face, serene after suffering, and thought that he did not want to think about those dark silences and those growling words. He wanted to think about his other Ba, so that if he could feel his thoughts as he sat beside him, it would give him strength to fight off the assailant one more time.