Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘You have to think of someone else now,’ Mr Willoughby said as we walked back. ‘Serious business.’

  The flat smelled of scrambled eggs when we got back, and mother’s milk and tinned food and wet nappies, etc. These implacable tokens of the predictable and crushing quotidian wore down the novelty of Amelia’s arrival and eventually drove Mr and Mrs Willoughby back to Blackheath. They also drove Emma to decline and gloom, a depression which everyone from the district nurse to Dr Spock had warned her about and which she found impossible to resist. To my joy, I discovered that one of the few things which alleviated her misery was bracing and uninhibited abuse of my good self. I hurried home from school, knowing that I would soon be able to stretch my feet out while Emma exhibited my selfish thoughtlessness or analysed my intolerance. I did what I could to help, smiling in the wrong places, toying with the salad (instead of wolfing it hungrily down as I was supposed to), suggesting that I could cook if she wasn’t feeling up to it, lighting a cigarette in the same hemisphere as the baby. After bearing as much of this provocation as she could, she did herself a favour and described my several shortcomings.

  One day, sitting in this comfortable intimacy while Amelia guzzled at Emma’s breast, making her wince now and then with her greedy sucking, I told her of my earlier discomfort with the ecstatic occupation of the flat by Mr and Mrs (but not about feeling a stranger in their midst). ‘They can’t help it if your parents happen to be so far away,’ Emma said. She waited a long time before speaking, stretching out the silence to force me into a confession. I felt guilty about my silence, but I hung on. ‘They weren’t trying to deny them their share of the baby, if that’s what you mean.’

  Emma’s long accusing looks said more, although she was sure to say it all fully later anyway. The trouble with you is you only ever think of yourself. She’s their grandchild. They have every right . . . Your parents have not even sent us a card or a present for the baby. I’m not trying to impose our customs on them or anything, but I’d have thought just a little token . . . I know their lives are hard and they have all those terrible things to deal with, so I’m not just being critical out of irritation and pique. But honestly! Not even a card! Nothing was ever the same after Amelia came, and the subject of my parents and my home was no different.

  When we first knew each other, Emma was full of questions about me and about my home. She was so beautiful and so full of life (even her hair seemed quickened) that I could not imagine that she really wanted to know about the calloused and stiffened memories that attached me to my past. But she swore she did. What did my father do? (That question often seems to come first in England.) How many of us were there? Oh, so you are the eldest. How many rooms did our house have? There was nothing she did not want to know: how big was my school, how many times had we won the inter-schools football cup, the names of my childhood friends, my mother’s name. She listened with rapt attention as I poured out. At first it was sheer relief to be able to talk endlessly about things that were so far away and yet never seemed to stop causing me pains and guilts that were delicious despite the anguish they left me with. I realized with small stabs of shame afterwards that I had embellished my story to make it less messy, and had fabricated details where these had escaped me. The shame was intense for a few minutes but it soon passed and I became used to my lies. It made me happy, and above all it made her happy. No, above all was that it could do no harm. She never seemed to tire of hearing about my home and my people, and I confess that my fabrications were generally to repay her interest, although some were obviously to make us appear less petty to each other, to make our lives seem noble and ordered.

  Then after a while she stopped paying such intense attention. I am not sure exactly when this happened; I don’t think I noticed at the time. It must have happened slowly as we got used to each other. I’ve wondered whether it was because she had seen through my fabrications and could no longer bear to hear them, but to be honest I would have expected her to see through them from the start. She was dead keen on the shape of narratives (and went on to take it up as her PhD project), so she was sure to know that my stories had been adjusted to reward and satisfy me in the telling. Perhaps the stories wearied her with their sameness. If they hadn’t happened I could have invented them, and so could she. No, I think she must have seen and heard all she needed to complete the stories for herself, and then good-naturedly switched the lights off. After all, there were other things to attend to. When she referred to these places and people whom she had not seen or met, she did so with a familiarity I found pleasing. She talked of them as if they were predictable and ordinary, which was not how they felt to me. To me they were foreign, strange, different, as far away from where I was as night from day. So when she mentioned someone’s name and then explained to whoever she was talking to that that was my uncle, it made my uncle seem present, acclimatized to England’s curt self-regard, as fluent and comfortable in its chitchat as any other person. It made my uncle seem normal and unremarkable, not a stern, slightly irritable man who is always too busy making money, and who never fails to observe a single prayer every day.

  2

  I don’t have an uncle. Or a father. I created those two figures for Emma out of my one stepfather, more or less. My Uncle Hashim was my mother’s elder brother and had great influence over her. The difference in their ages was twelve years, for they were children of separate mothers. There was another brother in between, but he ran off to become a sailor, stowing away on a ship transporting coal from South Africa to Japan, and was never heard from again. There was a rumour that he had settled in Hamburg, and another rumour that he was a criminal in London, but at home we were discouraged from showing any interest in his whereabouts or his life, past or present. He was a same-mother brother to my mother, and his flight had caused great distress to his ma, who had cherished him with jealous pride. He was a mark of blessing on her marriage, which she sometimes suspected people scorned because of the difference in age between her and her husband. She had been married before to a younger man, but he had been impatient for children, and when she could not oblige to his schedule, he divorced her. May God rot his mean soul and plague him with boils in old age. If people despised her for the alacrity with which she had married a widower more than twice her age, the boy had come as a gift from the Almighty to scold their envious souls.

  Their father was still alive when my mother’s brother ran away, but because of the dishonour his son’s disobedience brought on him, he did not mention his name again in the few months that remained to him. When people in the streets asked after his son Abbas, he shook his head and was silent, and sometimes tears came to his eyes. Everybody understood that Abbas’s spurning of his father’s authority was too profound a misdemeanour for them to attempt to make the customary pleas of mercy and forgiveness for the delinquent. The father’s death so soon afterwards was naturally blamed by everyone on his son’s departure, even though they all knew that the old man had been steadily shuffling off this mortal coil for a while. It would have been cruel to refuse the family this bit of drama and scandal. When their mother surprisingly died a few months after that, having shown no sign of illness until two days before she gave up the ghost, the Hand of God was clearly evident, and those who remembered Abbas with any fondness trembled at the fate which awaited him when he came to meet his Maker. Uncle Hashim and my mother had no choice but to continue the silence about their brother. My mother sometimes mentioned him, describing something he used to say or do, but on these occasions she kept her voice free of sensation or regret, as if she had no need either to lament or blame his flight.

  Uncle Hashim liked to say that he had brought up my mother. She was thirteen when her parents died, and he was twenty-five, so (I can imagine) he ruled her life. When I knew him, he was a solemn man who liked to have his word taken seriously. By his appearance and demeanour alone, you could tell that he was a pillar of the community, a notable. There is no reason to suppose that he would h
ave been any different when my mother was younger, at least with her, even if his manner outside had not yet become assured and grand. It was Uncle Hashim who, in due course, arranged my parents’ marriage.

  He didn’t do it, of course, just to please himself and demonstrate his authority over my mother’s puny life, although he could have done. He himself was still unmarried and preferred this uncomplicated arrangement. They lived on the first floor over a row of three shops near one of the main roads to the docks, a prime site which their father had bought years ago and which, along with the house he built on it, was their chief inheritance. The rent from the three shops – three rooms fronting on to the road, each with a smaller room at the back which was the store provided enough for Uncle Hashim to conduct his business. Their accommodation upstairs was more than ample for two: a bedroom for each of them, a room for receiving visitors with shuttered windows in two walls, one of which faced the shore, a kitchen, a bathroom and a terrace where my mother hung out the washing every day and grew roses and lavender in rusting kerosene tins, and where at times she sat in the evening, listening to the noises of the street below and looking up at the crowded sky.

  Uncle Hashim had come home earlier than usual one evening, suffering from biliousness brought on by drinking yeast which had obviously lost its freshness. He was a man who favoured routine and order, a proclivity all the easier to indulge in a small place with few diversions. Usually after isha prayers he went from the mosque to the eating-house operated by the Yemeni baker for a drink of yeast and a small round of bread, and then on to the café on the main road to listen to the news on the radio before coming home for supper. He found my mother sitting on a mat on the terrace, her form in silhouette from the light in the kitchen. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark like this?’ he asked her. ‘We must have a light put out here.’ ‘No,’ my mother said, ‘I like it like this.’ He asked her to bring him some coffee but no supper, and because it was a cool March evening just before the arrival of the rains, he asked her to bring it out to the terrace rather than to his bedroom. Then he sat on the mat from which she had just risen. As he did so he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned to look he saw someone move away from the window of a house nearby. It was only a slit in the wall about nine or ten inches wide, neither shuttered nor glazed, an aperture to illuminate a turn in the stairs or ventilate a store. The house itself was obliquely angled from them, so the slit appeared even narrower from the terrace. The light in the room behind the window was dim and steady and golden, the light of a kerosene lamp. Yet Uncle Hashim was sure that the figure he had so fleetingly seen move away was a man, and he thought he knew who it was.

  My father had recently come from the country to live with relatives in that house so he could go to the teacher-training college in the town. He had completed Standard Eight the previous year, aged eighteen, but had failed to get a place at secondary school on account of his age, and because the competition for secondary school places was intense, and the town schools always did better than the country ones. Not only because town schools were nearer for the students to get to, were better resourced with teachers, books, toilets and sporting equipment, but because students in country schools were required by their parents to take time off to help on the land, and sometimes had to repeat the year. Most of the students in town schools would have reached Standard Eight at the age of fourteen. It was because of his absences at inconvenient times in the school year that my father was so much older by the time he finished, although he was by no means the oldest even in his own school. In any case, the best he had managed was a place at the teaching college. Uncle Hashim had seen the new neighbour, a slim young man with a lithe athletic look, who had greeted him as they passed in the street. He had been struck by his gentle manner, which he had thought close to meekness.

  Uncle Hashim sat on the half-lit terrace and realized with mild surprise that he could smell the perfume of the roses which my mother grew. He found that as he concentrated on the perfume, as he flared his nostrils and took a plunging breath, it evaded him, grew fainter. After a moment or two he gave up trying. None the less, he felt as if it had been a bit of cleverness on his part to have caught that subtle drifting scent so unexpectedly. When my mother came with the coffee, she would not stay, saying she would put some clothes to soak and then go to sleep. But she stayed long enough, and the light was clear enough, for Uncle Hashim to ascertain what he already knew with a disquiet which he firmly suppressed: that my mother had the body of a woman. It was not that he was unaware of that. She covered herself differently now in his presence to disguise her maturing shape, and there was a new secretiveness about the way she lived in their shared space. She became different when her visitors and friends called, all of them glowing with a kind of exuberance and playfulness which Uncle Hashim found distressingly shallow. Their perfumes and powders, their sandalwood and musk rising from hot flesh, made him heave for breath even though he sat in another room.

  Her lingering on the terrace within sight of an admirer filled him with alarm and with a sense that havoc was about to engulf his life again. He sat in the gloom, and was struck once more by the perfume of the roses. Only this time the smell made him think of corruption and chaos.

  After that evening, he kept an eye on the young man and asked some questions about him. He found little to recommend him apart from his good manners and his upright youthfulness. His father had a small piece of land near Bunge, a meagre holding that was enough to bring some bananas and mangoes to the market now and then, and feed a sizeable family for the rest of the time. He lived as a dependent with the relatives who were their neighbours. Uncle Hashim heard of his diligence, and his willing deference and subdued amiability, though he once heard him speak with surprising forthrightness at the café, on a matter he thought himself knowledgeable about. He seemed already the inevitable figure of a teacher, and Uncle Hashim thought that in time he would become respectably poor and increasingly pedantic, the way teachers did.

  So it was not out of liking for him that Uncle Hashim began to proceed towards my parents’ marriage. He just did not want to be encircled by shadowy intrigues and suppressed resentments which would one day erupt in reckless outbursts and a new shame. There was no female relative for him to turn to and suggest that she commence the subtle approaches that precede negotiation, and he could not speak to my mother for fear of seeming to encourage her in wanton behaviour. Who knew what might happen while he was out on business during the day if she thought he smiled on her affections? But Uncle Hashim was capable. He revelled in his capacity to deal with things. Abbas’s flight, his father’s shame, the funerals, my mother’s upbringing, all dealt with without fuss or neglect. This other little task proved equally manageable. He showed unmistakable friendship to my father, asking for his assistance in small matters and therefore putting himself in his debt, inviting him to eat with them when they had guests, and finally bringing up the subject of his marriage twice, once in jocular male company and the second time when they were sitting on their own on a bench by the road outside the house, taking the breeze. Who could resist such encouragement? Within a few months, when it was in any case clear that my parents spent their evenings ogling each other in the gloom, my father’s relatives made their first approaches. Uncle Hashim dealt with that as well, making the touchy matter of the meagre dowry for my mother seem a deliberate act of pious humility by everyone concerned. After all, he was a Wahhabi and such worldliness was distasteful to him. It was only the arrogant and the ill-bred who made a show of their wealth. Once the dowry was sorted out, there were no further obstacles to the arrangement.

  After the wedding, which, as is usual with weddings, was taken firmly out of Uncle Hashim’s hands by women who considered themselves better able to arrange such matters, my father moved into the rooms above the shop. In the evenings, my parents sat on the perfumed terrace and whispered, at least in the early days, while Uncle Hashim reflected on the return of equanimity
. Their whisperings late into the night charged the air and disturbed him at first, but he learnt to suppress his irritation about that and about my father’s relatives who took to visiting the house to greet their new sister and to size up Uncle Hashim’s money bags.

  Uncle Hashim had a reputation for wealth which he never bothered to confirm or deny. He dealt in anything which came his way, in life as well as in business – and after all the two were not that different – and somehow or the other came out safe. He bought and hoarded in times of plenty and sold when there were shortages. When the British were ruling, they let everyone get on with it, unless it was something they wanted or thought they needed, or its scarcity (because hoarded by some conniving banya or ruthless Arab trader) made them seem incapable of keeping their colony in good order. But then they got tired of all that ruling and the ungrateful bad-mouthing of the sullen and no longer silent people they had come to work for, and so they went away and left the unruly hordes to their own havoc.

  Later, much later, when times became harder under our own home-grown bullies, Uncle Hashim diversified. He changed money into foreign, knew how to satisfy shipping regulations and customs restrictions, could be relied on to smuggle in whatever was needful: an electric oven, a toilet bowl, a consignment of cement. He was able to do this because he procured these things for the mighty but impoverished officials too, the very ones who might have stopped him in his affairs. They had to live as well, and cook and flush toilets and build houses for themselves and for their mothers and sisters, even though they were the ones who made and upheld the idiot laws that created scarcity. But that was what they were there for, what they had put themselves there for: to make laws and issue decrees which would be seen to be obeyed by everyone – on pain of some barbarism or another – while they, the lawmakers and the bullshitters, squatted over everyone’s faces and issued their wastes on them.