Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘Who? Khadija, who’s killed?’ my father asked, on his knees in front of her, trembling.

  ‘All of them,’ she said, gulping and swallowing as if she was drowning. ‘Everyone. Ma . . . Ba . . .’

  A neighbour who had managed to make the trip to town safely had brought her word. This woman had heard a rumour from some of the other people they had travelled with on the truck, but then she had received definite news here in town from someone who said he had heard it from one of the killers. They had entered the house on the first night of the uprising. It had been planned beforehand. They had killed her father, her mother and her two brothers, and had thrown their dismembered bodies in the well.

  My father sat down beside his sister, staring at her with disbelief, his lower lip trembling out of control. My mother turned to me, nodded towards my brother and sister and said, ‘Go to your room.’

  4

  The first time she took me to meet her parents, Emma said, ‘Don’t tell them those kinds of stories. They’ll just lap them up and start up on their racist filth. You don’t know what they’re like, they fatten up on that kind of thing. It makes all their obscene complacencies seem perfectly justified. I don’t mean you should make anything up or something, but don’t give them any more ammunition. They get enough of that off the TV.’

  ‘Ammunition for what?’ I asked, playing dumb, and earning a look of amazed disbelief.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what they’re like about these things.’

  Oh yes I do, I could have said. Unless they’re something special. But she needn’t have worried. Mrs Willoughby was not interested in hearing any stories from me, although she might have condescended to listen to a couple of anecdotes on torture or starvation or child marriage, or some vital and contemporary narratives about drugs, prostitution, illegal entry or armed robbery. Anybody would. But she had her own way of dealing with me. She made polite conversation when she had to, and did not seem at all concerned with my share of the exchanges, hardly ever raised her eyes to meet mine. It was not that she was rude or openly unpleasant – she has never been that, not in all the years I have known her. But she had worked me out to her satisfaction early on and left it at that. In her presence I often felt like a third person, as if I was absent and the conversation was being reported to me later. She had an idea of the degree of intimacy she wanted there to be between us and she maintained that without too much clumsiness. I admired this calm arrogance in her, which she made seem like tolerance, a mannered cultivation.

  Mr Willoughby was only interested in my Empire stories. It made me wonder how he could have got through his life so far without the steady supply I provided him with, but perhaps I misjudged his resourcefulness. I could see the hunger in his eyes every time we met, and before long he’d find a way of creating an opening for me. Emma and Mrs Willoughby raised satirical eyebrows, but that did not make any impression on him, or at least he pretended it didn’t. Sometimes, if we were expecting them to call, I’d work on one of these stories for days, but more often they just flowed.

  Under the Empire we had firm and fair rule, governed by people who understood us better than we understood ourselves. Even at the worst of times, when what seemed harsh edicts were being issued, we knew they were for our own good, to force us into the light of civil society, to teach us to defer to rational government rather than despotic custom. The modest and mild-mannered colonial rulers politely but firmly curbed our petty princes from displays of capricious authority. They brought medical knowledge and care, both to succour our ills and wean us from superstition and evil spirits, and to lift from our shoulders the yoke of the witch-doctor and his many devils. Those who were mentally ill among us were taken to asylums instead of being locked in by their families out of shame. The destitute and the indigent were taken off the streets and put in camps where they could learn a useful trade, or at the least find sanctuary. But above all, the Empire selflessly brought us knowledge and education and civilization and the good things that Europe had learned to make for itself and which until today we have still not learned to make for ourselves. Instead of being left in our degenerate darkness for centuries to come, within a few decades we were opened up and dragged into the human community.

  The magnanimity and sacrifice of individuals in the British imperial service were both legendary and commonplace, so it was fortunate for us that we were colonized by them rather than by unpredictable and impulsive foreigners. Our rulers did not spare themselves, building roads, hospitals, bridges, prisons. Some of our young men and women found work in their homes and learned to love them. Some of the greatest men in our communities were only able to achieve what they did because benevolent officials had (without show or fuss) given them a guiding hand.

  Mr Willoughby’s eyes would sparkle at these stories, his lips would part with poignant enthralment. And even when, at times, I thought I had misjudged a detail and expected the sparkle to cloud with suspicion and the lips to close, he made no sign that he had noticed anything. ‘Oh why’, he would say in the end, ‘did they abandon those poor people? It was a blockhead idea.’

  ‘I blame the Americans,’ I sometimes suggested. ‘It was their misguided talk about democracy in the post-war world that did the damage.’ Sometimes the blame went to someone else: Winston Churchill, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Labour Party. Mr Willoughby effortlessly accommodated himself to any culprit.

  ‘All it’s done is to let the few rotten ones among them turn their people’s simple minds against everything that happened before. Now look what’s happening: chaos, starvation, wars. We have to spend more money sending aid than we would have spent if we stayed and kept a firm hand on the tiller. Blockhead idea.’

  Emma laughed at first – He’ll believe anything about the Holy British Empire. Then she protested that I was overdoing it – You’re exploiting his gullibility and making a fool of him. Then in more recent times she stopped taking any notice – I think this just shows what an infantile imagination you have. In any case, Mr Willoughby and I entered into our own conspiracy, and we often waited until we were away from sceptical ears before we began, though at times of need the moment could not be deferred.

  Emma and I moved in together after we graduated. She got a brilliant First and stayed on to start a PhD on the semiotics of dedicated narrative. It was no surprise, her teachers had been predicting it all along. ‘What does the dedicated bit mean?’ I asked. ‘Not all narratives carry the burden of events,’ she said. ‘They are not all stories.’ She wasn’t sneering. She didn’t use to do it so much in those days but I could hear her restraining herself as she attempted an explanation. In three steps I was lost, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I was dumb or because she couldn’t make sense of what she meant. I got a middle Lower Second, which surprised my teachers a little but I was too drunk on love to care that much at first. I was pleased to get a job in a comprehensive school in Wandsworth. We rented a flat in Streatham, spent a happy weekend buying bed-sheets and table-mats, and settled down to a life of sin. Teaching was a nightmare, yet those first few years were the happiest of our lives together. In the morning I reluctantly left her beautiful warm body and took the bus to school. I found it hard to leave her, and returned to bed two or three times before finally tearing myself away. Once I got as far as the bus stop and went back for one more embrace.

  When I got to school I was too new and too anxious to take my time over a cup of tea in the staff room, and I would go straight to my form room to prepare for the day. I had been given a first-year class in deference to my inexperience, but they were hard work enough. I taught some other years as well, all of them restless and tirelessly mocking. Teaching brought out a violence and anger in me I did not know I possessed. It was fear of being humiliated, of being laughed at. I pre-empted that with glowering looks and a stern voice, and, I have to confess, an occasional well-meant blow, but to my delighted surprise it worked – on most people. I developed a dirty little la
ugh which somehow took care of them. Whenever they were in doubt, my laugh reduced them to incomprehension. They probably thought I was a pervert of some kind, but it didn’t matter so long as it provided small relief. I had my tormentors, but these were children with their own reputations to protect, and they did not succeed in inciting my more docile charges into rebellion. Not for long, anyway. I know I’m giving the best account of these times, so you can imagine how much worse it really was. Later I would learn ways of placating such radicals, but in those early days I had no idea at all how to deal with such sustained disdain. I knew they meant me harm.

  I rushed away from school as soon as I could, and on most days I would find Emma already at home. I can’t remember the precise order in which we did things, but I would find time to do some marking, then we would cook and talk or go to the pub and then make love. Even now, when I think of that time it recedes into a fug of contentment and intimacy and sex. We did not see very much of anyone, but some evenings we went in to her college because of some event – a dance, a talk, or just to have a drink with her friends. I wonder now that she did not get bored, staying at home with her books most days, and then spending the evenings at home with me.

  I told her about how I came to England. By the time I had finished school, the new authorities felt secure enough of their grip on power, and had cowed everyone to such an extent, that travel to neighbouring countries was once again allowed on a limited basis and on a temporary travel permit. The permit was valid for three months, so failure to return within that period meant arrest when or if you did. And you had to cringe and beg for the travel permit as you had to for everything else. The plot we hatched was deep and desperate. Uncle Hashim had been released from detention by this time, even thinner and greyer, but otherwise as capable as ever. I never heard him say anything about the eighteen months he spent in jail, except that it gave him a chance to repay the time stolen from prayer and reading the Book when he had been free and busy with his business. If my mother or my father asked him a question about that time, he waved it away and said Leave it. And he certainly never said anything about the daily meals and the weekly change of clothes I used to take to the jail for him. In a very short time Uncle Hashim was back in business again, bringing in – somehow – small quantities of whatever was in short supply, testing the waters. He got hold of livestock, cloth, small hardware items, and whenever he could he dealt in foreign exchange. It was all illegal, but Uncle Hashim knew who to pay to turn a blind eye. He even got his house back, and although when he reopened it his shop did not have its previous splendour – no gleaming table fans and imposing radiograms now, but bags of cement and piles of enamel bowls – he still looked a man of affairs, sitting behind his big desk.

  It was Uncle Hashim who suggested I should leave, though he had in mind a neighbouring country or the Gulf, somewhere where his contacts would help me find work and learn about business. Better than to wait here for something to go wrong, he said. The three of us, my father, my mother and I, were summoned to his house to discuss the matter. I said I wanted to study, and he nodded with his usual composure, but then could not resist a mildly mocking grin. Just like your father, he said.

  At that time, scholarships to study in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China or Cuba were easily available since our new state had aligned itself verbosely with socialism, and had accepted the fraternal assistance of several hundred technicians and technocrats in replacing all the people they had expelled or who had fled. The East Germans and the Cubans trained the expanded security forces, the Czechs and more East Germans taught in secondary schools, the Chinese took over the hospitals. Most of these teachers and engineers and doctors did not speak Kiswahili, or English, or Arabic, or even Gujerati, any one of which might have made it possible for them to be understood. It would be nice to say that this created an opportunity for a great deal of fun, but it didn’t, not if you needed your tonsils seen to or you were in a diabetic coma. Anyway, Uncle Hashim must have thought I was interested in a scholarship to one of these fraternal socialist states when I said I wanted to study, for he said that I would come back a communist and an atheist, and then murder my family and commit abominations against God. Communism is evil, he said, and God will cut its head off one of these days.

  ‘And the education is useless,’ my father said. ‘They train you to be a guerrilla and a drunkard, and that’s about all. Or if they can, they marry you off to one of their ugly peasant women, the ones they can’t find husbands for.’ He was now working at the department of education, a technocrat, and although he was not directly involved with the scholarships, he knew from gossip (as did I and everyone else) that only the children of party cadres and those most desperate to leave applied for them. Or at least that was what we all said.

  ‘He wants to go to England,’ my father said. ‘It’s the best place to go for an education.’ My father’s love for his teachers had not faded despite his eloquence on the evils of colonialism. Every night he listened to the BBC in both English and Kiswahili, then listened to the Kiswahili Service of Radio Cairo, and finally he turned to our local station, laughing with derisive laughter at the news it delivered. On the solidity of English education he had no doubts. ‘Even America does not compare,’ he said.

  Uncle Hashim nodded calmly, which I thought remarkable of him. ‘How will this be done?’ he asked, tilting his head a little with the patient air of a man of the world who was going to have to listen to some wild talk and then offer wise advice.

  ‘We have found an address for Abbas,’ my mother said, speaking softly but looking directly at her brother. Suddenly she could not help grinning. (When I got to this point Emma interrupted excitedly, Your Uncle Abbas lives in England! – but I waved her down. A narrative has to have its deferrals, I told her, as you well know.) Anyway, my mother mentioned Abbas and then grinned with minor triumph. For the first time, Uncle Hashim’s face registered dismay. ‘He has been in touch with some of the people who escaped to England after the uprising, all those people who say they are going to come back and liberate us one day. We got the address from one of their relatives, Habiba Mahmoud, whose niece married that journalist you hear on the BBC sometimes. If Abbas agrees to take him, will you help us with the fare?’

  Uncle Hashim was too stunned to say anything for a moment. ‘It may be a risky arrangement,’ he said at last, and it was obvious that he was thinking of Abbas, because he then turned to me and said, ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s like.’

  ‘Let him take the risk, before they put him in jail or shoot him here,’ my mother said. Uncle Hashim smiled thinly at the melodrama. I couldn’t imagine that anybody would be interested enough to want to do that either, but it was not the moment to quibble. They could shoot me by mistake. Anything could happen in the shambles we were living in at that time.

  Uncle Hashim would not commit himself for several days, but he wasn’t idle. He contacted a business friend in Mombasa who owed him favours, and who was the external associate in his deals. This friend was to have a Kenyan passport prepared for my arrival in Mombasa, apparently a small matter for such a capable person, and was to be ready to purchase a ticket at the most advantageous rates, which in their language meant some kind of crookedness. My mother dictated a letter to Uncle Abbas, who either did not bother to reply or did not receive the letter. The address was somewhere called South Shields, which at that time sounded an unlikely place, too explicit to fulfil the romance of an English sanctuary for an absconder, so I assumed it did not really exist. Then there came a piece of luck which nearly made my mother blaspheme: Perhaps God has not forgotten us after all, she said. One of my father’s colleagues at the education department, whose name was Ahmed Hussein, was awarded a British Council scholarship for an advanced administration course at Leicester University (the British government was in the process of rebuilding bridges with our government). He told us that I was young enough not to have to pay any tuition fees for a year or so, and that
if my family could find a way to send me money, he’d help me out in England until I’d sorted something out. It was a madly generous offer, but in the general secrecy and misery of that time, people took risks to help each other out. I like to think it was some kind of assertion of human care, a sort of tribute to what had been lost, and perhaps the only way there was to protest against our impotence and cowed submission. But, he said, we had to understand that if I left in this way I would never be able to return. It was mad, but that’s how I came to Blighty: a travel permit to Mombasa, a fake Kenyan passport, a tourist visa to England, and then secretly living in Ahmed Hussein’s college room for a year. At that time, despite hysteria in the newspapers about naked foreigners taking over the land, the immigration services were not as efficient and brutal as they were to become later. We lived in a college house with twelve postgraduate students, all of them foreigners, and nobody betrayed me, not even the cleaning ladies.

  Ahmed Hussein was only interested in work and saving as much of his allowance as he could. (He had come to some arrangement with Uncle Hashim which I was never party to, but the only money I received was from him, and that was just enough to buy books or a new pair of shoes.) We never went anywhere: we cooked for ourselves – mostly curry and rice, watched a little television and then worked. It was a bewildering picture of England. Most of the students at the technical college I went to were Asian, and most of the graduate students at the house, including Ahmed, were either Indian or Pakistani. Everyone shopped at the market and bought meat at the halal butcher. And although there was strict division in the kitchen between the vegetarians and the meat-eaters, the mingled aromas that rose from there were of spices and frying vegetables. The graduate students were all men, most of them with their families left behind. They talked of England with a mixture of derision and grievance, but gave their teachers and supervisors all their proud honorifics: Professor and Head of Department so-and-so, BA, or Senior Research Fellow Dr so-and-so, BA, MA, PhD, MMBA, RSAD.