The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  He tried to persuade himself that he would cope with the meaning of all these thoughts when it was necessary. Why worry himself with suspicions when what he needed to do was to harden himself, to grow into a man and learn to plot? He had passed his examinations, had been allocated a school where he would begin teaching in the new school year and he would have a job for life. But he could not convince himself. He could not make his body uncoil from a tense knot of anticipation, could not look at his image in the mirror. He began to hear things in what his wife said and thought that she had been forced to marry him to hide her shame when she had known another. He was convinced that something vile had happened in this house. He dared not find the words for it. He was convinced that many other people knew about what had happened and were getting ready to have a good laugh at the skinny cuckold. The place he lived in was like that. They would laugh at him for the rest of his life, pointing him out as he walked past and tell the story of his stupidity. He believed this, and became afraid. After six months of marriage, his wife looked as if she would deliver any day. He was certain that there were many people in the town who were already counting. They had nothing better to do. So in early December 1959, when he was nineteen years old, he ran away from her and from his country and from everything and everyone he knew. That was the courageous and admirable thing he did. He ran away.

  He lay in the dark and felt the trickle of tears running out of the corners of his eyes. No good now, weeping like a baby after all that time. He must have made a noise because he heard Maryam stirring, and then she called out his name. Abbas. After a moment, he said to her: Mfenesini.

  Flight

  3

  Mfenesini, he said. She sat up in the dark and asked what that was. Then when he said it again and it still made no sense, she switched on the torch that she kept beside her camp bed, pointing it away from him. He too was sitting up in bed, looking towards her. In the middle of the night. She went over to him and put the bedside lamp on. He said the word for the third time. She thought he was rambling, just woken from a dream about that faraway place in Africa where he came from. ‘Mfenesini,’ he said for the fourth time, smiling. ‘My school . . . where I went to school. I told you before.’

  She gave him the notebook that she kept beside the bed, for him to write something down when he could not say it, and he wrote Mfenesini. He could not write for long, the muscles in his right arm and leg were still weak, but he could write a few words. He was talking more now and attended speech therapy four times a week, eager to get the words back. He walked to the health centre himself, for the exercise, timing himself each time. It was only a short distance away. When he was well it would have taken ten minutes, to the bottom of their street and left, straight down the road. Maryam walked with him the first two times, but then she had to do her voluntary afternoon at the Refugee Centre, so on the third time he went on his own and he was fine. He went on his own after that, taking his time. It was late summer and the weather was kind, and he walked slowly, using a stick to take the weight off his right leg. She watched him go sometimes, her brave Mr Boots. The doctor told him that the latest scan showed that the damage to the left side of his brain was not as bad as it had first seemed and he was making excellent progress with the aphasia. What he needed to do now was to build up his strength, attend all his therapy sessions and be cheerful. Fat chance about being cheerful, but he was obedient about therapy and exercises, and the words were coming back. It was not always easy to understand him, but the words were coming back, and his mind was clear. Each time he said more, his happiness brought tears to her eyes.

  She looked at the word he had written in the notebook and then spoke it, looking at him. He nodded, smiling. ‘This was the name of your school,’ she said, and he nodded again. ‘Where is that?’ she asked.

  When she asked him this where question before, he replied back home or something like that and then changed the subject. The monkey from Africa. This time he said Zanzibar without any hesitation. She gave him the notebook again and he wrote down the word. The word was not a surprise to her, for despite his caution, it had slipped out of him a few times. ‘Tell me about Zanzibar,’ she said, but he shook his head and began to weep. He cried so easily these days. She sat beside him on the bed, holding the notebook in her hand, and watched as his weeping turned into sobs. When his sobs subsided, and he had wiped his eyes and calmed himself, she went downstairs and brought back the atlas and made him show her where Zanzibar was. Then he began to talk, a little bit at a time, from a long time ago, before he came here. She sighed silently to herself, wishing that there had not been so many years of secret hesitations. Why did Zanzibar have to be such a secret? Whenever she had asked him where his home was, he said East Africa. Then he said he only went back once, when his ship docked in Mombasa for a few hours. There was no time to go ashore and all he had was a view of the town. So she guessed that home was Mombasa.

  The night was beginning to lighten, and she saw that he was tiring. He had probably been awake for hours, thinking about Mfenesini, so she said she would make them some tea. When she came back upstairs he was asleep.

  Later that night he told her more. She waited for him to start when he was ready, but when evening came and they were upstairs in the bedroom and he still had not returned to what he had started in the middle of the previous night, she prompted him. She did not trust her knowledge or her memory, so she made him write the difficult names down in the notebook or made him spell them. He told her that he grew up in the country, near Mfenesini, that place where he said he went to school. On the second night he only talked about that: his father, Othman the miser; his brothers Kassim and Yusuf Kimya; his mother, she was always just Ma; his sister Fawzia (write the names down). Then he told her about the day Kassim took him to the school in Mfenesini. It was called Mfenesini because a huge tree grew by the roadside, and its fruit is called fenesi. She tried to say the word, and he made her say it several times until she got it right. Fenesi. She liked saying that word, fenesi, it made her feel as if she had something hidden under her tongue. He described the fruit to her but she could not picture it. Like a rubbery green bag with sweet, soft sticky flesh inside, he said. He drew a picture, but she had never seen a fruit like that before. In the end she found out that fenesi was called jackfruit in English, because the next day she got a book from the library, one of those large botanical books with lots of pictures, and they went through it until they found the fruit. It was not an attractive fruit but it made both of them happy to find it. He did not know it was such a well-loved fruit, and that it was found in so many places in the world, although he had seen it in his travels here and there. When she read him what it said about it he was surprised, and really shocked to find out that it had been written about by historians and kings and philosophers. Our ugly stupid fenesi, he said, who would have thought there was all this science and poetry dedicated to it. Then after that she had to go back to the library and find more books about the jackfruit. They found out that the emperor Akbar did not like the fruit, and she never even knew there had been an emperor Akbar in the world or what he had done that was so grand. It was the Jesuit mission to China that first described it to Europeans. Did he know there was a Jesuit mission to China? It was all new to her. Yes he did, he said, but not much more than that. So then she had to go to the library and ask them to find him a book about the Jesuit mission. That was how he was when he found a story that interested him, off to the library to get them to find him more books. They knew him there.

  In the days that followed he told her more, and she took the notebook from him and wrote the names herself because the writing slowed him down. She made him check the spelling to make sure she had written the word right. That was at the beginning, when he first started to talk. Then later she had to be patient because sometimes he was not himself, pained by his memories or just distraught because she was there and he could be distraught with her. He became angry, fidgeting and gesticulating at her wh
en she wrote something down, accusing her of plotting against him, speaking in a language she did not understand. Utanifanyia fitna, he said. Can you spell that for me? she asked. After a moment, he did and she wrote the words down in the notebook. When he was deeper into what he was telling her, when he was neck-deep in his shame, he did not seem to mind whether she wrote anything down or not. He came out with things, and sometimes went backwards and forwards as if he could not stop. Or as if he was circling away from what lay ahead.

  One night he told her about the college and his happiness there. He described the buildings, the sea, walked her down the corridors and the long country lane that led to the main road. He wanted her to see it, to be there in the afternoon with him when they played football, to feel the breeze blowing from the sea. He hesitated and stuttered, struggling with words, but he did not seem to want to stop talking about that college. How could he keep quiet for so long with the memory of such happiness? But she did not ask him. From the beginning she had determined that she would not ask him anything that might seem like a challenge, in case he lost courage and stopped.

  They only talked at night at first, but after a few days, he began to talk in the afternoon, no longer able to contain his eagerness to tell. She saw his growing excitement in the telling, waiting for her to be available to him and only frustrated by his struggle with words. She bought him a small recording machine so he could speak into it when he wanted, even when she was not around. He looked at it in surprise and put it down beside his chair in the living room. Then one afternoon he began to talk about the girl on the terrace. She was surprised at first because he never talked about women he knew before, but then she thought it would be another one of the memories he was displaying to her, a flirtation, a teenage escapade. Quite quickly, his eyes and his voice told her that they were approaching the reason for his silence for all these years. It did not take him long. He did not hesitate except when his tongue failed him, and he did not digress or elaborate, not on this first telling. When he had finished telling her about the woman he married and abandoned when she was pregnant, they sat without speaking for a while. They were sitting in the back room, looking out on the garden, and through the open terrace door she could hear the blackbirds singing. She tried not to think of the word, but it forced itself into her mind. Bigamist. She felt suddenly weary about the complications that lay ahead. He sat in front of her, thin and tortured, staring at the floor.

  ‘You wait thirty years to tell me that you were already married when you married me,’ she said, gently. ‘That you are not really married to me.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Of course I’m married to you,’ he said, incredulous.

  ‘Not according to the law,’ she said, incredulous herself, thinking that perhaps it had never occurred to him that he was a bigamist.

  ‘What law?’ he said. ‘You’re my wife. What are you talking about?’

  After a while, she asked: ‘Will you tell the children?’ He looked helpless for a moment and then nodded. ‘Later,’ he said.

  It must have all been much more complicated than the way he told it but that is what he was keeping to himself for all those years, that he ran away and abandoned a wife and child. He did not mention her name but she would get him to say it. She would not allow him to go back into hiding again. Her mind produced an image, imprecise and vague, composed from a jumble of other images. It was the figure of a mother and child in an unfamiliar landscape, just a shadow or a silhouette of a woman and a child passing down a lane. She was not sure exactly why it caused her such pain. Will he tell the children? Should he tell the children? What will he tell them? Should they just keep quiet, for an easy life? The world is probably choking with bigamists.

  He would have been nineteen years old when he did that, abandoned his wife and unborn child. He never sent word to anyone afterwards, and never ever met anyone who knew him before. That was what he said. He did not have a photograph or a single scrap of anything that connected him to that place, he made sure of that, and she certainly had not seen anything like that in all their lives together. She tried to work it out for herself, to understand what could have made him so frightened, what exactly could have panicked him into doing such a thing. They went back to it several times. He told her her name, and her brothers’ names, who were not really her brothers and who were obsessed with their lusts. He told her how they mocked him and intimidated him. He no longer knew whether the marriage was a trap or not. He no longer knew what to believe. He did not know how he had managed to do it, to run away, but that was what he did.

  How could he have made himself believe that miserable old excuse that the child was not his? She did not say that to him because she did not want him to stop talking. Instead she asked: Why could he not speak about what had happened? Why could he not even speak to her after all these years of their lives?

  Could she not see why he could not? He was frightened of what he had done, and for so long there was no one to tell anyway.

  No one? she asked.

  He shrugged. By the time he met her he was well set in his ways, and thought of himself as someone who roamed the world without responsibility or connection. When he said to her that they should leave Exeter, he did not realise what he was doing. At that time, if he was in a place and he did not like what was going on, he just left. He could come and go as he pleased. When he said to her, let’s go, he was treating her as if she was like him, someone who could just leave. He did not think it would be for life, he thought it would be a pretty fling then they would get on with what they wanted to do. But after that he could not bear to lose her.

  She was trying to understand why he was so frightened.

  He laughed. She did not understand how tiny the place he came from was, how tiny their lives felt there. He was frightened of the world, that was what he was frightened of. Or maybe he was just fearful by nature. And he was acting shamefully, he knew that. There are things that are unacceptable to everyone, and that people will despise you for doing. He knew this was one of them, and that he would be despised by everyone for doing what he had done. And yet he had still done it, terrified as he was. Only afterwards he was ashamed. Only afterwards he learned to supress his terror and his shame and to live his life like a hooligan.

  She was also trying to understand the shame he felt for what he had done, what kind of shame it was that made him choose to live with that guilt in silence, when he could have told her and found some relief, as he had now in the end. Or he could have told all of them, and found some sympathy for his act of stupidity, as he surely would have done. How could he manage to keep silent? She was trying to understand that.

  They sat quietly for a while, and in that silence she felt the beginnings of nausea. She was getting tired of listening to him. His story was wearying something inside her, making her want to retreat from his pleading eyes. She was feeling worn out now, she said to him. Maybe later he can tell her how he ran away. She’d like to hear something about how that happened. Or was he tired of talking about this whole subject for now?

  He was tired of not talking about these things, of not saying so much, and she must be too, he said. She saw that his brow was running with sweat, and she passed her hand over it to wipe away the moisture. She saw that he too was exhausted, and she said they should leave it for now. Why don’t you cool off in the garden for a while and then we can continue later. He protested, his face beginning to pucker with rage, but she told him that he was just being stubborn. She rose to her feet as she spoke, making it clear that she was not interested in a discussion. She knew that he wanted to talk on but she did not want to hear any more, not just then. She did not want to listen to his voice, or hear about his grief. She wanted to hear nothing, no more words. He would not speak to her for days now, she knew.

  From the kitchen she heard him talking to himself, whispering. He did that sometimes and when she went near to hear what he was saying, he stopped. She thought he was talking in his own language but she
could not be sure. It could just be his own gibberish. He groaned at any time of day or night, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, hideous agonized groans, sometimes in the depths of the night, and could not be silenced for minutes on end. There were times when she stood in front of him while he sat in his chair in the living room, his eyes open and unseeing, groaning with an anguish like sobs, while tears ran down his face.

  ‘What is it, Abbas? What is it that hurts?’

  But he could not be reached when he was like that, and she held him and tried to rock him or shake him out of his trance. At times he allowed this and at other times he shook her off. Then he became abusive, calling her names: you moron, you whore. A lot of the time he sat by himself, doing nothing, looking out of the window, or reading a newspaper or doing the crossword. A few days ago she heard him rambling softly about Regents Park and Tutankhamun, chuckling and smiling, hectoring someone and whispering for minutes on end. She thought it was the medication confusing him.