The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  He lived in a large household, two brothers with all their families living in one house. They were Iranian. One of the brothers was the scrap-metal merchant whose yard I worked in. The other brother was Ibrahim’s father, who was an imam. The part of Durban they lived in was so densely packed with Indians that no one they did not want could find an inch of living space in there. That was how the Indians liked it. It kept the savages out of their midst, although they did not mind so much the Arabs, as the rest of the Muslims were called. That was the official name the government had for them. Even Muslim Indians were Arabs. It was important not to be called native, because then you would be subject to bad laws, and anyway, none of them wanted to be called African then.

  Ibrahim’s grandfather had been an Ithnaasheri imam, travelling huge distances in South Africa to see to the needs of his scattered congregation, conducting weddings and memorials and other holy rites. He was already gone by the time Ibrahim could remember anything, but the grandfather always felt nearby during his childhood. I never had anything like that as a child. I knew nothing about my father or my mother, and never knew any of their relatives or anything like that. But in Ibrahim’s family, the grandfather’s name was invoked every day, and some of his stories were repeated like ritual. One that I still remember was of the grandfather being called hurriedly to read for a man who had suddenly died. When he got there he discovered that the man had been buried too quickly. His relatives noticed on the morning following the funeral that the mound over the grave had shifted, and fearing desecration had opened the grave. They found his body twisted out of the trench where he had been laid on his side as custom required, and his mouth was full of soil, and so they knew that there would still have been a spark of life in him when he was buried and these were his last struggles to breathe. That story made a great impact on me, and sometimes when I remembered it I struggled to breathe.

  When Ibrahim’s uncle found out I could read and write, he moved me to work in the office, which was on the ground floor of the house they lived in. At lunchtime I was sent food from upstairs, and that was how I came to know Ibrahim’s sister and fell in love with her. Nothing could come of it, of course. They were a big family and I was a hooligan sailor passing through, and I already knew what came of exchanging longing looks with a rich merchant’s daughter. We hardly spoke a word to each other, but somehow Ibrahim knew about our hesitant smiles and the brief sparkle in her eyes when she brought my bowl of food to me. Perhaps these things are obvious to everyone except to the two people who believe they share a secret. Ibrahim took the trouble to tell me about his mother. I suppose it was some kind of warning, and I heeded the warning and left the job in their family business immediately, and moved from my lodgings on the same day. I left Durban a short while afterwards, as soon as I found a berth. This is the story Ibrahim told me about his mother, and I always associate Durban with it, in ways that I find impossible to explain.

  His mother, he said, sometimes became strange. Her mind drifted from its moorings, and her eyes turned blank and depthless. She broke things and hurt herself. She talked unstoppably, saying real words as well as gibberish, which made what she was saying very difficult to understand. It happened perhaps once a season, out of the blue without very much warning. There was a pattern to what she did when she became strange, but it was not predictable. Sometimes she broke things silently and stared with her unblinking gaze, at other times she talked without breaking a thing.

  As soon as the first sign of turning strange showed itself, her daughter (the one I had grown to like) or her husband or one of the servants tied her hands behind her back and her feet together, and gagged her. She never resisted this restraint unless she was too far gone to know what she was doing. In fact, she was often the one who called out when she felt the approach of a strange spell, calling for whoever was with her to tie her up. Then her eyes turned blank and her mind drifted away. She hardly ever went out and was never left alone for long.

  She was an intelligent woman, he said, but in her state she was likely to shame herself and her family with one of her mad outbursts. That was how they spoke of her, poor mad Zahra. No one needed to explain to her why it was necessary to tie her up and gag her, and restrict her as much as possible to the house. Madness is a cataclysm, an act of nature whose meaning is explicable only to itself, because it serves neither human nor divine purpose. Ibrahim’s father said this from time to time, invoking his own father, the imam, as the author of this wisdom.

  I understood that Ibrahim was warning me not to disturb these arrangements in his family, and not to bring shame to them with my attentions to his sister. I said goodbye to him that evening and took to wandering the docks like an old-fashioned water rat. Apartheid was well entrenched by then, but they did not bother too much with us sailors and I had my British-protected papers, which made me safe from harassment even from jinns and afreets, let alone boers. I wandered the streets of Durban for days, avoiding the places Ibrahim and I used to visit, and I felt once again as if I had been freed from the misery of human sanctimony. Perhaps, I told myself, I have a weakness for sidelong glances and lingering tremulous looks, and only merchants’ daughters who spend their youth locked away from shame can provide these. I regretted my eviction from the pleasure I had found in Durban, but I regretted even more the loss of Ibrahim’s friendship. I had even begun to think that I might seek his help to find a way to stay in Durban and put an end to my wanderings. There is always a way, but after he told me about his mother, I knew that was no longer to be.

  She told me I should not stop because talking is doing me good, but that I should say more about Zanzibar. My time in Durban is very interesting but they all wanted to hear more about Zanzibar, not about that little slut of a merchant’s daughter. I got angry with her, which is not hard to do when the bitch is being such a nag. Leave me alone, I told her. I don’t want to say more about Zanzibar, I don’t want to say more about anything. I threw the machine across the room hoping it would break and she would leave me alone, but I have no strength and it did not and here it is beside me again. Oh Maryam, I don’t want to think about that place any more. I have thought about it every day for all these years, even when I was not thinking about it. I don’t want to think about that woman I abandoned and what she had to cope with, or of the child and what it grew up to do and what it must think about me. I don’t want to think of my mother and how I did not have an opportunity to say to her how sorry I was that her life had been so wretched because of us. I don’t want to think about what happened to them, and what they must have thought of me as their world became ugly. Did you want me to talk about the breeze that blows through the trees at twilight or the murmurs of the silent lanes early in the morning? I don’t want to think about these things that cause me pain. I am going to switch this thing off and I never want to see it again.

  She insists I should try. She says I should try. She says I don’t realise how much good it is doing me, my therapist. I have agreed to speak into this thing one more time and then that’s it, whatever she thinks. I intended to talk about her, my tiresome harpy, how she found me just in time and what a lucky day that was for me. But I find I don’t know where to begin. How beautiful she looked when I met her, and how her laughter was electric? Shall I tell her that? I did not know how ridiculous and lonely my hooligan life was until I met her. Shall I tell her about the joy the children brought and how empty everything would have been without them and without her? Shall I tell her that I cannot imagine my life without her companionship? She knows all these things.

  Just now as I imagined how she looked when I first met her, I remembered another place I went through, and another woman I loved briefly. Maybe that is what happens to someone who leads a vagabond life. He catches glimpses of reprieve when he sees a woman he can love, a woman for whom he can end his wandering, and perhaps that is what happened to me in Port Louis. I haven’t thought of her for years, but I did think of her when I first met Maryam in Exeter. I
t was all the more strange when she told me that her foster mother came from Mauritius, because the memory that had come to my mind was also about someone I met in Mauritius. It happened to me several years before, when we stopped in Port Louis to pick up a cargo of sugar bound for Bristol. It was my first and only visit to Mauritius.

  There was a delay with the delivery of the cargo, so I went to explore the town and I got carried away with the sights. They reminded me of home. Many places reminded me of home, the look of the houses, the fruit in the market, a crowd outside a mosque. I could not stop seeing the similarities. On a beach in Port Louis I saw an old man sitting amid the reek of sun-burn fishscales, and I stood watching him for a few minutes, surprised by the familiar grace with which he pulled the needle through the sailcloth he was sewing. After walking for a long time, I found myself heading out of town, which was not my intention. As I passed a country lane, I caught sight of someone crossing in the other direction. I stopped and took a step back, and the other man did the same thing, so for a moment it was a funny sight, both of us taking a step back simultaneously across a country lane. The man laughed and waved, and I waved back. We both started towards each other and met somewhere in the middle of that country lane. I wanted to ask him for directions back to the port, although I was not particularly worried where I was. When you live that kind of life you stop caring about getting lost. The man was pleased when he found out I was a foreigner, and said that if I wanted the port I was heading in the wrong direction completely, which I had already guessed by then. He told me he was heading back to town and I could walk with him if I wished. So we walked back together, talking in the way you do when you have found a new friend. He told me I looked Mauritian and I said so did he, and we laughed so much we shook hands over it.

  He came all the way to the port with me. When we got there it was already dark and the gates were shut and the security guard said there was no launch scheduled until the morning. My new friend, whose name was Pascal, said I should go and stay with him and get back to my ship the following morning. As I said, when you live that roaming life, you stop worrying about many things. My friend’s house was a small bungalow, and we went in through the back door, which was in the garden. I smelled the perfume of the flowers before I saw that beautiful garden the next day. My friend explained what had happened to his sister and she smiled and fetched some food for us. She said they only ate a light supper in the evening and apologised for the modesty of the table. I remember that, because I had never heard that expression before or since, the modesty of the table.

  Her name was Claire and she was beautiful, although not as beautiful as this nag was when I first met her. The three of us ate our meal and then talked for hours. They told me about their father, whom they called Sir as if it was his name, and their mother who had died only just recently. Sir was a senior clerk in one of the big firms in Port Louis but he was also a renowned amateur botanist. It was he who grew the garden, which I would see and marvel at the next morning. I wished I could see it immediately. They made it sound so magical, describing for me the different flowers and fragrances that grew in it, but they said, no, wait until the morning. That is when it is at its best.

  That night I stayed awake for a long time thinking about many things but mostly about Claire, and the next morning, after I was shown the garden, I reluctantly left to go to the port with my friend Pascal without seeing her again. But the delivery was still delayed, so I rang the number Pascal had given me and went back to my new friend’s house for lunch. When I left late in the afternoon, I shook hands with Claire and I felt sad. I thought she looked sad too. I promised to write to them and to come to Port Louis again. At the time I thought I could not bear not to see her again. But I never did write, and never went back to Port Louis.

  When I saw Maryam for the third time in that factory, it made me think of Claire and how for many years I thought of her with regret. God knows what the old nag will make of this when she listens to it. I have not thought of Claire for a long time. Nor did they look alike or anything like that. It was the feeling that I recalled, a chance of happiness that I should not be stupid and lazy enough to miss this time.

  Anna played the tape on the hi-fi, and her father’s voice came out of the speakers like a public performance, like something on radio. None the less, she played it softly, as if she did not want to be overheard. She listened to it with strange pride and an unexpected elation. She had not thought he would be lucid. She had expected him to rant or whisper, muttering and grumbling to himself, the way he had so often in his last months. She had expected a broken-down tearful shambles of a voice and had dreaded listening to it for that reason. What good would it do relive that misery again? So she was surprised that his voice and what he had to say disarmed her so fully. His voice was clear and composed, most of the time, and even the difficult parts were calm and eloquent. There were moments when he talked as she had never heard him speak before, humble and reflective in a way she understood. Her own stream of thought sometimes took that tone, but she had never heard that from him before. She recognised it as a kind of unforgiving honesty, which she did not usually expect to hear in someone’s voice, let alone in her father’s. He was their father: he instructed, cajoled, encouraged and commanded when that was necessary. He did not sit and muse aloud on his blunders and his regrets, and on the slow moments of reprieve.

  She would have liked to hear more about that solitary walk in Singapore, or that reckless stroll in Port Louis. She would have liked to hear more of him, and it made her sad when the tape stopped. Nick’s departure had made her melancholy, and then Ba’s death on top of that was such an unexpected shock. She thought she was ready for the news about Ba, but when Maryam called to tell her, she howled on the phone like one of those demented women you see on the TV news. Listening to him talking on the tape made her wish for him, and she shed tears and mourned him for a moment, and felt sad that he had lived so long with such a feeling of wrong and such an expectation of disgrace. She took the tape upstairs and played it again on her radio cassette, listening to it through her earphones. This time she was not as much on edge, and she heard the long pauses between words and the catch in his voice in some places. She shut her eyes and she saw him sitting in his chair talking, and imagined him hurling the tape machine across the room, if he really did do that and was not just saying it to seem the capricious old man. She imagined her mother keeping him at it while he grumbled.

  She reached for the phone to call her mother and tell her that she had listened to the tape. She had not spoken to her for several days, and had planned to do just this, listen to the tape and then call her afterwards. But when she called there was no reply. She leaned back in her chair and replayed the story her father had narrated in her mind, and it came to her in a series of pictures that ran swiftly past her, many of them imprecise and out of focus because she did not know enough to make them concrete and still. Her mother Maryam had told them about his life at the college and the woman he used to watch from his storeroom. Again and again she went back to the image of a lonely youth looking out of a slit in the wall, over the top of trees at a glimmering sea. She said that was a happy time for him, and perhaps it was, but what she could feel in her image of him was his loneliness. She could not see the woman or the terrace, it was too much for her. Probably a skinny teenager just out of her childhood. She would have to read and look at pictures to get a better idea of that, to see what she might have worn or what kind of terrace it might have been. She had meant to do that, ever since her mother told them he came from Zanzibar, and told them about the woman he had abandoned, the poor, pregnant sad bitch. That was only a few weeks before he died, and she had other business to deal with in that time, and not much time for reading about Zanzibar women on their terraces. Then his death and her mother’s grief put her crisis about Nick in perspective. It forced her out of her wistfulness about him and returned her to all that she disliked about him and about herself with him. One fire p
uts out another’s burning, slowly.

  She had browsed the internet and read all the improbable descriptions of holidays and hotels, and excursions and festivals, and thought there was another place she wanted to find out about, not this one. She expected Jamal, in his methodical style, was already halfway through the appropriate literature, but he had a university library at his disposal and time on his hands. That was her excuse, anyway.

  She returned to the images of his story, and realised how much she was enjoying this way of thinking about what he had said. She imagined him on that bus ride to college that he had remembered so often later, and she wondered why that journey was so memorable. Perhaps it was the clarity of it as an image, an early morning bus ride, or the difference between the black stinking creek and the distant view of the sea as they rode out of town with the breeze blowing through the open sides of the bus. Maybe it was the feeling of it that was memorable, and not the sight. She herself had pictures like that, which came back to her for no reason, a street corner near the cathedral in Norwich or a train platform in London in early evening, but she did not think of these moments with the craving he described, and so perhaps she had never known such longing. Then she saw him walking down that tree-lined street in Singapore again exulting over his freedom, and then leaning against the ship’s railings as they entered Cape Town harbour. All illusion, of course, but she could imagine how the swelling moment could carry you away. She saw him at the college, a thin youth in shirtsleeves, strolling with other youths across the grounds. She had never imagined him a college student, only ever a sailor, and when she knew him he worked as an engineer in an electronics factory. She had thought of his reading and his knowledge as something he acquired on the side, out of interest, something he’d had no time for when he was young. She had thought of their going to university, Jamal and her, as a new high point in their family’s fortunes.