Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘I’m not a failure,’ I shouted at the closed door. ‘I’m a tragedy. This dead-pan world is full of chaos and I am one of the lost.’ Through the door I heard a choking noise and hoped that she was hanging herself from the curtain rail. Adolescents do it all the time, disgusted by rampant materialism or demoralized by poor physique or sexual frustration. It was nothing remarkable.

  It couldn’t be helped that she was like that – it was just how she was. I had hoped otherwise – no special reason aside from the manic ambition we place on our conscripted progeny – but she has turned out no better than the rest of us, except that her line in pathetic egotism is set off by a sharp and squeaky insolence. All right, she has several other sides to her, probably, but for me she reserves a hurtful impudence to which I have no answer. Emma would glare at me during these outbursts as if I had fed Amelia gall when she was an infant, trained her and coached her through her endless childhood, and then torn her away from her homework to give her the latest in sullen bad mouth.

  Emma glaring at me! Demanding that I take the blame for my ineffectual love for a daughter willingly overwhelmed by the gloating self-assurance of the culture that had nurtured her. It was like blaming the hole in the ozone layer or the disappearing rain forests or leaking nuclear reactors for all the troubles which beset our stumbling world. Well, it wasn’t me who did all that, nor was it the North African migrants in France or Tadjik horsemen thundering across the plains of middle Asia or Winnie Mandela or a passing comet. How is the rottenness of Amelia and her generation to be passed on to me? Did I glut them with enriched vitamins and mushy love and fairy tales of the world and a self-importance beyond their means? Was it me who filled their heads with the beastly plebeian hubris which makes thought, art or principle equal to eating raw offal in public or indulging petty sensualities? What part did I play in persuading them that there is something witty in degradation and perversion?

  Emma grinned mockingly when I said things like that, which I did now and then when Amelia’s glares and charged looks overcame me. She didn’t always use to mock, and sometimes she had led the charge herself, but that was in earlier days when we were young enough to flatter ourselves that our little world was changing, and that in some indefinable way what we said and thought mattered to its direction.

  ‘Here we are again, decadent England in the dock,’ she would say after one of my outbursts. ‘For our child-rearing failures this time, as well as everything else in the universe. Actually, I’m not even sure that the child is doing anything wrong. It can’t possibly be your fault, oh all right, our faults. Well, it so happens that she’s your daughter, and that’s a responsibility you’ll never be able to evade by haranguing me about how corrupt we are and all those other things. There’s no need for you to repeat them! We’re all quite familiar with them by now, and I may even agree with one or two of them. But since you’re uninfected by all this pestilence, you save her. Teach her about nobility and principle and sacrifice and laughter and whatever else it is that our degraded culture is no longer capable of. Rescue her.’ Say, who else could return the memory of life to men with a torn hope? I used to quote that line by Leopold Sedar Senghor to her when we first knew each other, and sometimes she remembered it and threw it into her England-in-the-dock routine. There were times when I quite enjoyed this scene. It allowed me to bellow against the historical and cultural oppression under which I found myself. To her it sounded like a rant, but that’s how the savage’s critique of Europe unavoidably ends up sounding. (I read that in a book.) The general drift of these conversations was that I usually finished up being called intolerant, ungrateful, a fundamentalist, a raging mujahedin, a pig and a bastard. Just think about that. After these exchanges and against all the odds, we sometimes ended up in passionate late-night orgies of forgiveness and affection. I swear that those moments made the rantings seem worthwhile.

  I liked to dwell on differences – I still do – to reflect on how hubris and greed have eaten away the foundations without discrimination, and how the continent on which we live is now sliding on pools of slime and waste and sleaze, and how cynicism and exhaustion are condemning all of us to live on bullshit, and how the over-fed can sneer unreflectingly at the ones they have browbeaten and defeated. Emma called me narcissistic – or as an embellishment she decribed what I did as the narcissism of minor difference. She always was good with phrases, although this one she picked up somewhere. When she found a little phrase, she polished it and rubbed it until it was hard and glinting. Then she kept it by her in case she needed to blind me with her cleverness. I don’t think she did it to be cruel. It was just that she liked to win her arguments, and not always without charm.

  Anyway, she thought I gave these differences too much importance, especially since in the end I was only trying to say NO to stories that rose and swelled heedlessly around me despite my feeble refusal. My indignation and grievance were not going to change the way the story went: in it my maladies and inadequacies would be perpetually in the foreground, my churlish cruelties would not diminish in their pettiness, and when all was said and done I would still live in civil chaos given the slightest opportunity, would starve myself through sheer lack of foresight and would forever need the master’s firm guiding hand if I was to be prevented from being a danger both to myself and to everyone else. She waited for me, her eyes bright with cleverness. ‘Because, you see, you can’t change the story while you are in it, and therefore it follows certainly, without question or doubt, that you can’t achieve anything by saying NO to what happens in it. The story exists because it has to, and it needs you to be these things so we can know who we are. So your huffing and puffing is nothing more than a temper tantrum, and your indignant fictions are only corrosive fantasies. We need you too much, and we need you as you are.’ This was where my narcissism lay, I suppose, in my desire to insert myself in a self-flattering discourse which required that England be guilty and decadent, instead playing my part as well and as silently as Pocahontas.

  ‘What’s the point of dwelling on these things, anyway?’ she said. ‘You only make yourself feel impotent and oppressed, as if in some way you are uniquely victimized by history. We keep talking of horrible events that have happened, but that doesn’t seem to stop them happening again. It’s just that we got there first with the steam engine and the cotton ginny or whatever. So it fell to us to do the dirty deeds.’

  And our part of the deal was to be colonized, assimilated, educated, alienated, integrated, suffer clashes of culture, win a flag and a national anthem, become corrupt, starve and grumble about it all. It’s a good deal, and we perform our parts to the utmost of our humble talents, but not adequately enough to satisfy over-sensitive patriots who feel put upon by hysterical strangers squatting dangerously inside the gates. They got the loot and we got the angst, but even that is not good enough for this lot. So they work up their beastly plebeians with rousing folk-tales of past glory and present squalor, provoke an incident or two, perhaps an unavoidable death here and there, and back to the library shelves for more tales of resolution in the face of stubborn circumstance and the declamation of the undiminishing coda: the Triumph of the West. And all the while the hubshi find it harder to resist the tempting and shameful suggestion that they inhabit a culture of grievance, that they have grown dependent on the corrupting smell of their wounds, that they dare not face the truth of their limitations, that they are not up to whatever it is that would release them from their bondage to historical inertia.

  She grinned at this, acknowledging my overcharged ironies, and then continued, ‘But just think of all the things we gave you, that you might not have got otherwise. At least admit that. We may have taken away the odd trinket to exhibit in the British Museum, but we didn’t come empty-handed. We gave you individualism, the frigidaire, Holy Matrimony . . .’

  ‘Holy!’ This is what I used to like about her. When we first met, we cultivated an obnoxious hatred of everything that was part of the life we lived
. Holy Matrimony was one of these things, and slums, and tomato ketchup and sausages and Irish stew and cottage pie. We thought we were hilarious and anarchic, putting noses out of joint. But that Holy Matrimony also touched on a problem which was always with me, although she did not know it. I knew I would have to find a way of telling her before long; it was all becoming a little ridiculous.

  ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d have been marrying your third wife by now, a seventeen-year-old kid who should have been thinking of her homework instead of the tired penis that was coming to ruin her life,’ she said. ‘That’s what you would’ve been up to by now. Admit it.’

  Sooner or later I am going to have to go back to the beginning and tell this story properly. I can’t quite fix on the beginning yet, where it is as such. When I think I’ve found a good position from which to start, I am tempted by the possibility that everything would seem clearer if I began with what led up to it. In my mind, I take up various starting positions – some before I was born, some after, some yesterday, others in the living present – but after a few minutes of reflection I am thoroughly sick of each of them. They all seem calculated and transparent. I stumble about in this sullen thicket, hoping that I will bump into the moment of release.

  So, back to Holy Matrimony. The joke about that was that Emma and I were not married but had been living in increasingly fractious sin for the last donkey’s years. I mean, it wasn’t all fractious, but the peevish quota could sometimes be significant, and I am not quite sure how it got to be like that. As for Holy Matrimony, we did not just drift into this state of detachment from it, but chose to take it on glare for glare, brazenly outstare middle-class respectability and turn our faces to the freedom of the seas. It was mainly Emma’s idea. She had many ideas about middle-class respectability, by which she meant her parents, I’m afraid. Her blows against class were inbred in this way, intimate resentments against family Christmas celebrations, for example, or a loathing for the faintest glimmer of interest in opera, which her parents adored, or sneering contempt for matrimony. She loved music, and had played the piano with real seriousness throughout her years at university, and even now was still at her most intense when listening to a variant performance of a favourite piece. But the briefest snatch of opera made her reach for the power button, making disgusted faces and uttering strong words against the fascist Establishment as she did so. It was something like that with matrimony. I took my lead, as I did in so many things, from Emma. She wanted to be the anti-bourgeoisie rebel and that was fine with me. Everything about her was fine with me.

  She abhorred neatness and order, so she said, especially if her mother was around, which meant I got to do all the cleaning and clearing up. When she was irritated with me, she noticed that my obsession with order was a reflection of my authoritarian nature, an undeniable confirmation that I was a natural bourgeois. But for a few accidents of time and place, I could have been standing on Liverpool dock seeing off my slave ship as it set off for the Guinea coast, or could have been one of those cheering the troops as they murdered the strikers in Peterloo, or might have been observed tucking contentedly into a roast shoulder of mutton while concentration-camp chimneys smoked downwind. She only said that when she was really pissed off, or irritated with some stubborn defence I was putting up against what to her seemed manifestly indisputable, or if she was drunk, or most likely all three, but it gives some idea of what she thought of middle-class respectability.

  It was always roast shoulder of mutton I was tucking into contentedly while some horror took place under my nose. To Emma, this was the archetypal bourgeois dish; somewhere between the soup, the smoked mackerel, the boiled beef, the ham and the damson pie, there sat the shoulder of mutton, as greasy a lump of shame and reprehension as could be found anywhere, the very emblem of smug, coercive egotism. When someone monstrous appeared on the TV news, I sometimes thought – there goes another eater of roast shoulder of mutton. And if I thought Emma looked a bit fed up, I would shout it out to make her smile. I don’t think she has ever seen a shoulder of mutton – I’ll have to ask her – but I would not be surprised if this turned out to be the image which flashed through her mind when she accused me of harassing Amelia with capricious displays of authority.

  In any case, we did not marry, and Emma’s mother behaved with gratifying predictability on the issue, raising the subject in a voice of checked anguish at least once a month. It used to be more frequent than that, and battle would be joined, and mayhem and slaughter would ensue. Well, hard words and long silences anyway. But age, or exhaustion, or familiarity dimmed the spark of these clashes, and soon they were undertaken with only a hint of polite malice on the part of Emma’s mother, and quite casual insolence on the part of her daughter. They then became mere rites of being, mindless like the courtship dances of terns, whereas before they had been bitter encounters awash with bile and poison.

  I don’t think Emma was always like that with her parents. When I first met them – have I bumped into my beginning? When I first met them has the authentic sound of leather on willow. When I first met Mr and Mrs Willoughby, Emma and I were both students. Mr Willoughby had recently retired from a quiet life as a solicitor in the City, specializing in dealing with companies that traded in the dark corners of the world. Mrs Willoughby was, as I guessed she had been for many years, in active charge of his life. I could not help laughing as I was introduced to them, because of all the stories Emma had already told me. Perhaps I was nervous, in case they said or did something embarrassingly opinionated, something that would diminish me and which I would be unable to handle with the right degree of courteous indifference. My first view of them was coloured in this way. Their first view of me was coloured differently, and I think theirs was the bigger surprise. It appeared that they had had no idea . . . So I stood giggling in front of them while they took me in. Mrs Willoughby was the first to recover, as usual. She was a tall woman, in her late forties at the time, stiff and matronly, but in a pleasing way – although I wouldn’t have thought so then. Later I saw something of that look in Emma and I found it attractive.

  ‘Hasn’t it been lovely these last few days?’ Mrs Willoughby said. ‘I hope it lasts, though I don’t expect it will. Have you been in England long?’

  Long enough to know how to respond to intimate small talk of that kind. Murmur audibly, smile brightly, say nothing. In general that did not seem to me at the time to be a contemptible philosophy, and there were many occasions when I rebuked myself for failing to live by it more consistently. I felt Emma watching me, waiting for me to take offence about something. I had been well primed for this, to expect to be offended by something her parents were bound to say, or imply, or disguise in an apparently innocent commonplace. Mr Willoughby came up with the goods at once, casually, almost kindly, staring at me with bristly intensity, curious to hear my opinion. ‘I expect there are thousands of darkies in universities these days. It wasn’t like that in my day. Perhaps the odd maharaja’s son, or a young chief. The rest were too backward, I suppose. Now you see them everywhere.’

  I heard Emma heaving a triumphant sigh. Good old Daddy, trust him to come up with his predictable filth. Mr Willoughby was moderately constructed: of medium height, neither thin nor fat, slightly balding but not strikingly so. He was dressed in woollen trousers, cardigan and tie, and in this habit managed to look as if he was briefly taking time off from more public duties. He wore thick-framed glasses, behind which his eyes stared at their subject with little sign of humour or self-consciousness. Murmur audibly, smile brightly, say nothing! My mumbling made Mr Willoughby’s eyes brighten even more, as if I had said something witty. Or perhaps he was only responding to my smile. I could tell from Emma’s fallen jaw that she did not see anything to smile about. After such deliberate provocation could I do nothing more than twitter and smirk? But these were early days between us, and she expressed her horror at my spineless and unglamorous behaviour with long disbelieving stares rather than with a few choice an
d well-polished phrases. You have to remember that at that time it seemed that the black revolution was just round the corner, when everyone would get a chance to be a victim at last. Emma had already enlisted and was a bit of a Young Turk about it all, a zealot. She was quite ready to sacrifice her parents to the cause.

  I saw what I would now recognize as a punitive look appear in her eyes, and she twitched her eyebrows slightly in a gesture of incomprehension. Then, though she smiled a little before she did so, she abandoned me to Mr Willoughby and turned her full attention on her mother. If you like him so much you can have him. After a while she appeared to forget about me, or at least to forget about her disappointment with me, and I watched with envy as she chatted with her mother. Laughing, touching, rebuking each other’s mild misdemeanours, making vague plans about shopping for a silver cruet, exchanging promises to go to Portobello market one Sunday. I was filled with nostalgia and longing.