The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  How? She wants me to talk about how I ran away. I turned into a seabird and took to the air. I changed into a sea creature and picked my way over the crags and the boulders of the ocean floor. I floated out on a raft made from the broken timbers of my cowardice. How else could I run away from an island? I stowed away on a ship, that was how. Or I tried to stow away because the sailors found me as soon as I opened the door to come out of the hold. I must have set off an alarm. I was in there for three days. Everything blessed happens in threes, and on my third day I found my way into the open. They took me back down with a torch and made me clean up the mess I had made. These days they throw stowaways overboard, so we hear, but I was lucky because the ship was short of hands and I was signed on. That was how I became a sailor. The ship’s name was the SS Java Star. My first home on the sea.

  It was easy after that, because I liked the work and lived a hooligan life on ships and in all parts of the world. I was never short of work for long. Sometimes I lived in places for a few weeks and then found another ship, and there was so much of everything to see and do. When I met her I had been living like that for fifteen years. Just imagine how much life happens in fifteen years, and then to put that aside and begin another new life. When I met her I was thirty-four, twice her age, even though I told her at first that I was twenty-eight. I did not want her to think I was too old for her.

  How exactly did you stow away? She does not want to be spared the smallest detail. She does not want me to deny her the briefest moment of my cowardly flight. But I can’t live it all again, not like this. I have lived it for decades, until now my mind is numb with the story of that moment. Every time I open my mouth to speak, I hate what is going to come out of it. She won’t let me say no. She insists, you must say exactly how you stowed away, otherwise how can we know.

  Somehow I found the hardness of heart and the unexpected will to board a lighter that was headed to one of the ships anchored in the roads. The idea to go in this way came to me a few days before. In those days, everyone was talking politics and independence, and the air was filled with that kind of language, full of outrage and complaint. It was an exciting time, rallies and marches and long speeches about the hatefulness of the British. At about this time, an enormous aircraft carrier paid the island a visit. It was the HMS Ark Royal. This was how the British liked to soothe our nerves. The Royal Navy sent along a big warship and flew a couple of jets over the island, breaking the sound barrier and stampeding children and animals. Instructions were sent to headmasters of certain reliable schools, and groups of school children and students, the well-behaved and obedient ones, were selected and invited to a tour of the ship and an on-board tea. I was one of those chosen from the college, even though by then I had finished my examinations and left, because I had always been a respectful and reliable student.

  It must have seemed a good idea to our rulers, to awe the natives with British power and then soothe their children with jellies and cakes and pastries. What those who organised these events did not know was that every one of their young guests believed the food to contain pig products. That was what some of their parents had said, and the word was passed round to the rest. Haram, they put pig fat in everything. So the young guests either did not touch the food, or the more daring among them superciliously threw it overboard. I can see the sailors standing silently along the side, staring ahead with arms crossed behind their backs, while the juvenile monkeys spurned their party fare. We were all doing what we could for the war of independence. But before the feast, they had shown us round the ship. They showed us the fighter planes and the helicopters, some on the flight deck and some in the hangar below decks. They even allowed some of us to get into the cockpits. If the idea was to frighten us with their knowledge and their power, it worked with me. I was thoroughly frightened and intimidated by their knowledge and their power. But not every corner of my mind was cowed in this way. As we walked round the ship’s nooks and crannies, the idea came to me that it would be easy to find a place to hide in a ship.

  I had been thinking for weeks about how I might get away, but this thinking was theoretical. If I wanted to escape, how would I do it? How can it be done? That visit to the warship made the idea concrete. A few days later a large cargo ship anchored in the roads, and somehow I managed to get myself on board. Those lightermen on the early morning trip must have known exactly what I was doing, and must have chuckled to themselves when I said I had some business on board. They must have known what I was up to as soon as I appeared on that pier. It was not as if I was one of those ragged young men who hang around the docks, their bodies as sleek as seals, and who go back and forth to the ships for work. I was a student, about to become a teacher, thin as a worm, dressed as you would imagine such a person to be. I expect I looked as frightened as I felt as the lighter made out to sea.

  It was fear of ridicule that made me do what I did, made me do what now seems impossible to imagine that I did, but it was also anger at the way I had been trapped and the way my happiness had been ruined. I’ll tell you about that another time, before you hear this. Or she will tell you. She knows all about it. It drives her mad, the thought of that woman I married and then ran away from. And the child I abandoned. I tell her that she is my wife, and you are my children. But she says not according to the law. What law? She is my wife. According to the law it is the woman I ran away from who is my wife. I see it in her eyes, her anger. I was trapped into doing those things I did in my youth. They fooled me. They were getting ready to have a good long laugh at me. They trapped me. That rage kept me going for months whenever I trembled or felt foolish about what I had done. Why could they not have left me alone, the scheming miserable bastards? Why did they take away the simple pleasures I had found for myself? It was that rage that helped me keep my secret to myself, and for a long time it helped me to suppress feelings of regret and shame.

  Because the moment the engines of that ship started to turn, I was overwhelmed with regret and shame. What will people say about me? What will my father say? He will gloat at my brother Kassim and say this is what you wanted for him. This is what those khinzirs at the college have done to that boy. They have taught him to run away. What will happen to them all? But I raged at them too and learned to suppress my shame.

  Everything was new and the world was so big that I lost myself in it. I tried very hard to lose myself in it but the hardest was not to be afraid. I got used to it after some time, just letting events take me from place to place, just letting things happen to me. It did not always feel so bad. I lived like that for a long time, and that place I had left moved further and further behind me. I pushed it even further and further behind me whenever I could. The violence and cruelty that took place there after independence and went on for years made it easier to put to one side any idea of going back. It was impossible to forget anything, and the most difficult was to forget her or to feel that I had done right to abandon her. Sometimes, often, I wondered if I might have been wrong about her, and if the baby was really ours but maybe it was a monster that was growing fast inside her. If I was wrong about her, I imagined how my wife would have worried about my disappearance and how wounded she would have been when she realised I had deserted her. Sometimes I calculated the child’s age and wondered what it had grown up like. Then I would have to start all over again so I could feel once more the anger that had driven me away. Sometimes I dreamed that I returned and she did not recognise me, and was perplexed by my persistent stare. That was how I lived for years, never anywhere for long, roaming the seas in any direction where work presented itself, and without any idea how to make my life different. Then I met her in Exeter and all at once I saw something possible ahead of me.

  She says they know about Exeter. We have told them about that so often. Tell them about all those years before, when you were a hooligan roaming the world. She is a stupid persistent bitch. When I switch this machine off, she comes and listens, and then tells me say more about this, say more
about that. There is nothing more, they know the best of it, and what they don’t know is sordid and pathetic. Now they also know the big secret I had thought to save them the trouble of knowing. I ran away from my home and abandoned a wife and unborn child, a terrible enough crime in any scheme of things. I might say that what I did to myself was also bad enough. I was nothing but a little shit, a frightened little shit and I cut the heart out of my own life with what I did. What was there to tell about all that?

  When I left there I did not know how much I was leaving behind. Wherever I wandered or came to live after that nothing was expected of me. I was a man without responsibility, without a purpose. Nothing was required of me. I would have wanted to explain that to you, how I had lost that place, and at the same time lost my place in the world. That’s what it means, this wandering. That’s what it means to be a stranger in another people’s land. I would have wanted to talk about that with you, but now too much time has passed and I have not found a way of talking about these things. You would have wanted to know more, and I didn’t know how I could tell you more. I had not thought I would wait this long to tell you all this, but it worked out like that. I could not bring myself to do it and thought you would be better off not knowing. I thought we could all make something new and better for ourselves. Now that’s enough of this.

  She has switched the machine back on and put it beside me. Say more about Zanzibar, she says. I’ll go and make you some tea. She is a parasite, her teeth are sunk into my flesh. Every day and every night she is here beside me, tormenting the life out of me. She gives me medicine to keep me alive so she can go on sucking my blood. I wonder what has happened to them all, whether they survived the killings and the expulsions. If only one person survived, it would be my scheming sister. I do not have the strength for this. Have I not said enough? I don’t know anything about Zanzibar any more. It is no longer a real place to me. Whenever I hear the word I hurry away from there. Whenever I see the word I look away or turn the page. What more do you want me to say about that old latrine?

  I picked up the school bus on the corner of Hollis Road, which at that time was still a bridge over the creek. One side of the creek was being filled in. The other side eventually opened out to sea. When the sea was in, which it never was in the morning, the creek shone and glittered in sunlight. When the water was out, the creek bed was dark with sewage and human waste. People who lived by the waterside in Funguni built platforms over the water so they could sit in their houses and shit right into the creek. The bus followed the shore of the creek for about a mile before making another stop at Gulioni to pick up more students. Soon after that the bus was out in the country and it felt as if we had been let out of a crowded room. After Mtoni we could see the sea from the road all the time until we reached the college. That was my journey to school every day, and I missed it for years.

  In those weeks after I ran away, I was either angry or frightened, not of anything in particular, it must have been just panic. Even the people I was with frightened me. I had not so much as spoken to an English person before, and the only ones I had seen close to were the sailors on the warship and the principal of the college, and he had never had any reason to speak directly to me even once. Now I was to find myself surrounded by these people, with their red faces and untruthful smiles and their fearful aura. We stepped out of their way when we saw them coming, not only on that ship but everywhere. I don’t know how the world learned to fear them so, but I know I have still not learned to rid myself of it even now. I have to be firm with myself not to step aside, not to defer, to say I’m afraid of nothing.

  But nothing terrible happened to me on that ship, and that became the important thing as time passed, that I had survived my reckless treachery. I began to feel safe, safer than I had ever felt before, and there were so many surprising joys. It was all new to me, to see land alongside us as the sun was rising, to approach a great harbour like Calcutta or Hong Kong in daylight, and to think that all this had been going on, all that coming and going and commotion, while I had been sitting under that mfenesi tree, shelling groundnuts. Then there was the sea itself, so big and so rough, glittering with utter wickedness, I don’t have the words to tell you, I don’t know how to describe that to you. It is terrifying when it is in a rage, and it is terrifying when it is beautiful. The sea, it isn’t something I can ever forget, the grip of its terror.

  So the newness of everything, and that nothing terrible happened to me, those were the things that replaced the panic. Even the work they gave me to do at first was new, cleaning toilets, sweeping and scrubbing floors, fetching and carrying, dirty work it would have shamed me for anyone I knew to see me do. That thought made me smile sometimes, how before I would have imagined what I was doing as something demeaning, but I did not feel demeaned at all. The British officers were aloof and did not seem surprised to see me doing that dirty work. It was what they expected of me, and that helped me not to feel embarrassed myself. Not everyone on that first ship was British. There were some Malays and Filipinos, and two of them became my friends. Raja worked in the kitchen, and Alvin worked in the engine room. I have never forgotten those two. Alvin took me to the engine room with its giant clockwork cranks and shafts like the throbbing heart of a huge beast. He loved that engine, and he showed it to me like he was letting me into a secret. These two were my companions whenever we had a few hours to wander around a port city, but at first they left me to myself as I coped with the crew and their mockery. For if the officers were aloof and superior, their juniors were chatty and aggressive, full of abusive and scorning words. They were proud of their roughness and mocked each other and everyone else all the time. I did not understand that at first and took silent offence, but later I learned to respond just as roughly when I could, forcing myself to do so as if this way of speaking was familiar to me. That first ship took me to Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Singapore, Manilla, Hong Kong and then Jakarta and back to Singapore. My Malay friend, Raja, left the ship in Singapore, and I managed to manoeuvre myself into his job in the kitchen.

  I took a walk in Singapore, which I still remember today. I was on my own, walking down a tree-lined street downtown, and I remember thinking to myself: I am free. It was not that I had thought of myself as confined before, or at least not until those last few weeks before I ran away, and that was a special feeling of being trapped. What I felt in Singapore was something quite different, something I had not known before. I felt as if I could choose freely what I wanted, or what work I did, or where I lived. In any practical way, this was just an illusion. I had no money, no papers, no skills, but that did not stop me thinking I was free. I had lost my fear of the world. I thought that no one would be able to make me do anything I did not want to do again. Everything around me provided so much pleasure, the sights, the smells, even the anxieties. I even mistook an attempt to con me out of a few coins for an offer of friendship and welcome. That same night the ship left Singapore for Madras, Bombay, Durban, Cape Town, Freetown and Liverpool, and at the end of that journey I knew that my life was changed beyond recovery, beyond any chance of returning to what it had been before.

  I could have said something and hidden something. I could have told you about some of it even if not everything. Maybe I did not have the wisdom to do things by halves. By the time I might have told you about my treachery, I was used to living with my own silence, to managing the gap in my life. I committed an unkind and thoughtless act, and silence was a way of coping with the memory of it, offering a deadpan face to the burden of it. Our lives were full and complicated as it was, your mother, your childhood and this difficult place, and what I did in my teens was something for me to handle. Maybe it was because I was afraid you would be ashamed of me if you knew, and that you would lose respect for me. Maybe it was that, but I think it was also easier to say nothing and hope for the best. Well, that will do, I had not meant for my silence to make you afraid. I had meant to save you from this sordid knowledge so that you would look ah
ead and be brave and not be paralysed by these shameful memories.

  This morning I made a list of the places I lived in during those years. It is surprising how speaking about those times in my life has made me want to go back in my memory and how so much has survived my desire to suppress it. Sometimes when a job ended I was not ready to join another ship, and lived for a while wherever I found myself. That was how I lived in Durban for some months. I fell in love there, but that was not the first reason for staying. I did not like the ship I was on, and after an argument with an officer, I impetuously asked to be relieved of my duties, and found myself wandering the streets of Durban. I ended up in the Indian part of the city and immediately felt comfortable there. The cafés and the food were familiar. The buildings reminded me of my home, as had buildings in Bombay and in Madras and even Colombo. I heard the muadhin calling people to prayer, and was tempted, but decided to stay on at the café and have another mug of sweet tea.

  As I sat there, a tall man of about my age came into the café. He looked in my direction and then looked again as if he had recognised me. I began to smile because I knew what was going to happen next. He smiled back and came to my table. He asked me if we knew each other and I said no, but he thought we did. It happened to me all the time, in different places in the world, except in England. I kept meeting people who thought they knew me. That was how I met Ibrahim, and in no time at all, it was as if we did really know each other from before. He helped me find cheap lodgings and a few days later found work for me in his uncle’s scrapyard. In the evenings we went wandering the cafés and sometimes had a few surreptitious beers. He came from a religious family and did not want to embarrass his relatives by drinking openly.