The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  She could not manage much of the fish but she ate all the asparagus, and drank some more wine. She tried the TV but could not get interested. She went upstairs and rummaged in her bedside drawer, rifling through her passport, looking through her bits of jewellery, and then decided to change the bed anyway. The clean sheets felt good, as they always did, and she wished she had had a bath before going to bed, but she did not feel like getting out of bed again. She tried to read but could not concentrate. The wine was making her sleepy, so she switched the light off and made herself comfortable.

  The hours passed but sleep did not come, instead episodes of her life ran through her mind and would not be denied despite her efforts. She thought of her life at home, of her childhood, of Nick, of what would become of her, and all these thoughts were accompanied by memories of embarrassments and by images of her incompetence and failure to act with resolution and kindness. Why had she waited so long? She should have known it would end like this. She struggled against this onset of what she thought of as her feebleness, her stupid uncertainty. By the early hours of the morning she was sobbing uncontrollably, deep in self-pitying anguish and hopelessness.

  When he came back she would tell him that she no longer wanted this stifling life they lived together. The affair was part of it, part of his arrogance, a conviction that he could lie to her and cheat on her without fear of discovery. She did not think she could even talk to anyone about what had happened. She hoped he would not ring, most of all she could not bear to talk to him. What should she say to him?

  Is this true? Well, of course it’s true. All right then, I’m leaving. Where am I going?

  Is this true? What do you think? All right then, get out. Fuck off, this is my house, you get out. How are these things done?

  Is this true? How could you think such a thing of me? Of course it’s not true. Let me explain.

  She woke up early on Sunday morning, and lay in bed with the door and the back-room curtains open so that the light from the window spread across the landing and into the room. Her panic had almost subsided, and in its place there was something that felt like the nervous tremors she had before setting out on a journey to a destination that was new to her and the thought of which intimidated her. None of her journeys had turned out to be as intimidating as she had imagined them, so perhaps this one would be the same.

  The seagulls were making an unbearable racket on the roof and forced her out of her mood. So she got up, made some tea, and began the long struggle to get through the day, waiting for him to return. She did not wait in impatience, she just could not concentrate and could not think of anything else to do. So she sat where she was, a book in her lap, waiting. Nick arrived just before five. She heard the taxi stop on the road and a moment later heard his key in the door. He came into the room and kissed her lightly on the lips, smiling. He was wearing a new jacket and was still carrying his overnight bag, and he looked smart and sophisticated, someone who had been out in the world. He put his bag down and took his jacket off, then he sat down in the chair opposite her.

  ‘Was it good?’ she asked him.

  He smiled more broadly. ‘It was very good,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I forgot my mobile and I just couldn’t get to a phone at a convenient time to call you.’

  She nodded. ‘I saw your mobile upstairs,’ she said. ‘I read Julia’s text.’

  Nick went upstairs and came back down with the phone open in his hand. They sat in silence for a while, each waiting for the other to speak. He sighed and then said: ‘I’m sorry. I hoped that I had switched it off, but obviously I didn’t. It wasn’t deliberate that you should find out like that.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Well, never mind. I thought that was what was going on,’ she said.

  She thought he was going to speak, explain, justify himself, but he leaned forward in the chair and put his head in his hands, and sat like that for a while. He looked up, she saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I love her,’ he said calmly. ‘It just happened. Neither of us could help ourselves. From the beginning.’

  She was waiting to hear those words, or something like them, and she thought when they came they would make her wince, but they didn’t. It must be because she had already felt the words in her flesh even before he spoke them. She felt exhausted, but there was also relief that they had got here at last, that now there was no turning back, no fudging explanations and pleas for understanding and reconciliation.

  They sat in the living room until it began to get dark, talking with increasing heat as they raked over their lives together. He said it wasn’t just Julia, that things had been going wrong for them, and he did not always feel that she cared for the things he cared for. She said he had become domineering, and only cared for himself. He said that she had become petty and small-thinking, pleasureless and worrying about utter banalities. He said she was envious that he was beginning to make a success, and she laughed at how correctly she had guessed his egotism. He went to the fridge to see if there was any wine, and he came back with a glass for her too. It was ridiculous, he said, the way she jumped and winced at every little thing he said, as if he was a great bully. That she made his parents so uncomfortable when they had come all the way to see them, just because Ralph said something about her father or some shit like that. Then in the end, quite obviously irritated with her, he said: ‘I feel sorry for people like you.’

  ‘What do you mean people like you?’ she asked, assuming he meant something about race.

  ‘I mean I feel sorry for people like you because you don’t know how to look after yourselves. Your father was a whingeing tyrant, bullying everyone with one misery or another, in the grip of a psychic crisis, so it seemed. But he only had diabetes, a thoroughly treatable disease, that’s all. Your mother was an abandoned baby and doesn’t know who she is. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to find out that kind of information. Why couldn’t she just pay an agency to check it out for her? Or why couldn’t you, or your brother, do it for her? She, and all of you, would have known within days. But no, it had to be another festering drama. And then it turns out your father is an absconder and a bigamist but he couldn’t just talk about this, the whole crowd of you in the grip of a hopeless melodrama, acting like immigrants.’

  Anna was almost drawn into offering a defence but she managed to suppress her words. She had thought all this herself. What he added to what she had thought herself about her family was scorn. It jolted her the way he said that word, immigrants, exactly as she would have said it, with the same degree of disdain.

  ‘And as for you,’ he said, and she winced and closed her eyes for a second, knowing how much she had dreaded this moment of contempt. ‘You are cringing all the time, expecting to fight people when it isn’t even necessary. Mum and Dad did their best to welcome you, but you managed to find them condescending and smug. Instead of making them comfortable and winning them over, you make them feel ashamed. They did not understand the tragedy of being you. Instead of taking charge of your life, you keep waiting for something to happen and then you get depressed when nothing does. You think you have unfulfilled ambitions but you don’t, all you have are desires, little fun-filled daydream desires.’ After a moment he said, ‘I’d better stop.’

  They sat like this for some time, not speaking, looking away from each other while Anna slowly calmed herself down. She did not know what time it was but it was dark outside. She would sleep in the study tonight and go to the letting agency tomorrow. Nick rose to his feet and came to where she was sitting on the sofa. He sat beside her for a moment while she sat tense with disbelief. His hand fell on her thigh, and he said: ‘One last time? For old times’ sake?’ He was smiling at her, inviting her to another naughty escapade, but his smile quickly faded when she began to laugh. ‘Oh come on, we’ve had good times,’ he said.

  She laughed even more, strengthening her defences. ‘You’re a greedy egotistical bastard,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

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nbsp; He tried one more time, reaching for her, smiling once again through her laughter, refusing to take her refusal seriously. She slapped his arm away and rose to her feet, no longer laughing. He rose too and picked up his shoulder bag. ‘I’ll come back for my things later. You can reach me on the mobile whenever you want.’

  That was that, he was gone. She was shaking with anger at the farewell pass he had made, as if he could just play with her, even after what he had done and what he had said. As if he could linger with her for one last fling as a farewell offering before leaving her with her regrets.

  She had not thought it would be that quick. Perhaps his love for Julia was already unequivocal and it was only a matter of when, not if, for him. Perhaps Julia was already expecting him that night. Nick being Nick, though, he could not resist going for one last fuck before departure, just to show her that he could have her whenever he wanted. She heard him start the car, and even under the circumstances that made her smile. He knew how to do that, just to take what he wanted. It was the colonial instinct, she thought, not restricted to proper English people either. There were people who just knew how to do that, just take what they wanted, or at least take what they could. Nick did it with a pretence of absent-mindedness, as he had just done with the car, as if he had forgotten to ask, but she was sure he knew what he was doing. Well, she told herself, she had better stop acting like an immigrant and go and take charge of herself. Her life was about to start again and she was twenty-eight years old, a good age, and she should feel full of vigour and hope. She locked the front door and put the chain on.

  In the hours before the dawn on 23 September of that year, Abbas suffered a stroke, and after this blessed third stroke he slipped away quietly as he had once done forty-four years before.

  Rites

  5

  I have lived longer than I ever thought I would. I don’t know if everyone thinks like that. I am surprised I am still here and I don’t know whose fault that is. I had not thought to be here this long, and I don’t know if that is luck or stubbornness. Maybe I really want to stay but will not admit it. What a dirty business dying is. You think you know what’s coming, but the pain still catches you out, and this helplessness and feebleness is embarrassing. Although I don’t think there is that long to go now.

  When I was much younger, I thought it would not be too long, that I would not be here for that much longer, that I would soon be on my way, make my exit in my twenties. Leaving was already a kind of death, and dying again did not seem unbearable. It was not because life was such a tragedy that I desired it to be short but there did not seem any good reason for it to go on as it was. But that was a very long time ago and I am still here, like a tiresome guest in my own life. It upsets her when I say that I would not have come had I been asked, not to this world, not to this life with its tiresome comings and goings. It upsets her because she thinks I mean that I wish for death, or that she has not meant anything to my life. I do not wish for death, and she has illuminated my life, but I am surprised that death has not yet come.

  There is a story someone told me in Mogadishu, a Lebanese man whom I met in the docks. This was in the days when Mogadishu was still a port and not a slaughter house. The man looked at me as if he knew me and came to greet me, holding out his hand and smiling, but it turned out he had mistaken me for someone else. It happened so often, in far-flung and unexpected places, people mistaking other people for someone they once knew. It must mean that we look more alike than we think, or more alike than we like to think. We laughed over the mistake, shook hands again, and then the Lebanese man pulled me into the shade of a warehouse to get us out of the bright afternoon sun. He told me this story.

  A man who lived in Jerusalem went to Haifa to visit friends and relatives. While he was there and was walking from one friend’s house to another, he passed another man who looked at him with surprise, as if he recognised him. He did not stop, though, and the man from Jerusalem walked on, searching his memory to see if he could remember who the tall powerful-looking man might have been. A short while later, when he was sitting in a nearby café having a coffee with his friends, the man from Jerusalem saw the tall man again. The tall man slowed down when he caught sight of him, as if he had been looking for him, and this time he had a good, long fierce look as he walked past the café. Even his friends were surprised at the man’s fierce look, but none of them knew who he was. The man from Jerusalem began to worry that this was someone he had once insulted or wronged, perhaps without even knowing he had done so. Such things can happen without intention. Some while afterwards, on his way to his relatives for lunch, he passed the man again, and this time there was no mistaking the annoyance in the man’s eyes. The man from Jerusalem panicked, fearing that the man who was following him was an assassin, and said a hasty goodbye to his relatives before heading back to Jerusalem. In the late afternoon he was sitting on the terrace in front of his house in Jerusalem, pleased to have got away from the unpleasantness in Haifa, when he saw the man again. The tall man walked purposefully towards him now, smiling, and then he said: Salam aleikum, my name is Azraeel. I have come for your soul. What were you doing in Haifa? I was supposed to come for your soul in Jerusalem half an hour before the evening prayer, and there you were fooling around in Haifa. I am so glad you made it back in time.

  I hope I told that right. The Lebanese man enjoyed his story so much I would hate to think I spoiled it.

  She wants me to speak, she tells me it will do me good. She says I should speak so the children will know the things I have not told them. She says they are afraid of my secrets. I tell her that parents always have secrets from their children, don’t they? How did they know I had secrets for them to be afraid of? My father grew up poor as a child but when I knew him he was hard and frightening, a small tireless man who always gave orders. I don’t think I cared what he was not telling me about his life. Even if I did care, I would not have known how to ask him to tell me anything. Even if I did care, and even if I did ask, he would not have told me anything just because I cared. I never heard my mother speak about her childhood or her past. I don’t remember wanting to know although that was not because I did not care for her, or she did not have her own stories. Everyone has stories. I had not thought of that before, but I cannot remember her talking about herself in that way, of things she did or wanted to do in her life. She was our mother, working and complaining all the time, as if that is how she was from her first day on earth.

  But she says our children are here, in a strange place, and all we have given them are bewildering stories about who we are. She thinks it makes them unsure and afraid about themselves. It makes them lose confidence, she says. As if we should be full of confidence all the time. As if we can know everything we want to know. As if we don’t all discover our own fears whatever it is we know. Perhaps even, I tell her, the less we know the more plump and content we become. I don’t know, I think we have given them more than just bewildering stories.

  After all these years, when she has known nowhere else, she still speaks of here as a strange place. I tell her not to be such a timid hen. This is the only place in the world where she should not feel a stranger. She tells me that is how she has felt all along, and now she feels like an old servant in a large household, allowed to go about her business so long as she is not a nuisance. I no longer have the strength to argue with her about this way of thinking. It has been too much for me, this illness, and I have made her so tired when she has been the happiness of my life. I am the one who has made her a servant, making her clean after my sick waste and repaying her with my sulks. I am too tired for this talking. Why does she force me to do this? Why does she not leave me in peace?

  She wants me to talk about my home, that little Unguja of ancient memory. She says this cunningly, so that I should not feel that she is forcing me to speak. Just tell them about the buildings and the streets and the sea, she says, as if I was a tourist guide giving information to strangers. There are two rainy sea
sons, the long rains and the short rains, and the fish market is best avoided in all seasons.

  I can’t remember anything, I tell her, but it is a lie. I remember many things and I remember them every day, however hard I try to forget. I thought I would keep quiet about all that for as long as I could. I thought if I started to talk I would not be able to stop. Or I would not know how to say don’t ask me about that yet. Or I can’t tell you about that now. I thought I would wait until the time came to talk about these things so they did not seem cowardly and shaming, but that time cannot come. I did not know it would take this long to realise that.

  It is now such a long time ago and I am caught out in my silences and lies. They keep catching us out in our lies, our betters, hardly listening to the stories about our tolerant, smiling, harmonious ancient civilisations. That is what I would like to have told my children if I had spoken about that little place. That we all lived together in peace, in a forbearing society built as only Muslims know how, even though among us were people of many religions and race. I would have known no other way of talking about it. I would not have told them about the rage that lay just under the surface waiting to break, or the rough justice the children of the enslaved planned to inflict on their sultan and on everyone else who mocked and despised them. I would not have told them about our hatreds, or about the way women were treated like merchandise, how they were traded and inherited by their uncles and brothers and brothers-in-law. I would not have told them how enthusiastically the women themselves performed their worthlessness. And I would not have told them about our tyrannical ways with children. Why are we such a lying, deceitful rabble?