Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Apart from the teachers at the technical college, who did not seem real anyway because they were so mild and understanding in their treatment of us, not like teachers at all, the only English people I came across were passengers on the bus or comedians on TV. Ahmed allowed us to watch one comedy programme an evening, and then we both had to go upstairs to work. His regime was so severe, and my fellow students were such a diligent example, that our teacher persuaded six of us to attempt our ‘A’ levels in one year. This was only incitement for Ahmed to redouble his efforts to pin me down on the floor, which was where I worked and where later I slept. The comedy programmes would have gone if Ahmed himself was not so addicted to them. He was also addicted to giving me inspiring lectures, which in the new circumstances became more intense and more ambitious.

  ‘If you’re doing your ‘A’ levels this year,’ he said, ‘you might as well apply to go to university next year.’ What about money and a residence permit? My tourist visa had run out after six weeks and someone was bound to ask about that. There was no stopping him. He got the grant forms and the information booklets, was undaunted by the shattering news that if you were not a home student you needed to have worked for three years to qualify for a grant. “‘The Authority may, in some circumstances, award discretionary grants,”’ he read out to me from the booklet. ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have any ambition?’

  Because he was so passionate about studying education and about his profession, and because he thought I would have a better chance of getting in, Ahmed persuaded me to apply to do a teaching degree. It all seemed too fantastic to come about, whether I put down education or astronomy as my intended subject, so I did as he said. I applied for a discretionary award and was invited for an interview. And then the incredible happened. Oh yes, it did. The chairman of the panel that interviewed me had been an education officer in Zanzibar until the moment of the uprising. He told me this as soon as I entered the room, rising from his chair to shake my hand with an air of condolence. The rest of the panel was made up of two white-haired women, one a local councillor and the other someone who worked in the education office, and a small man with a bristly moustache who said nothing throughout the interview but whose eyes clung to every word I said. Later I was to see the same clammy look in Mr Willoughby. I was mostly asked to speak about the horrors of the uprising and its consequences. I did the best I could to make every atrocity as abominable as possible – I did not have to try very hard. The chairman did what he could to egg me on, and even added one or two stories of his own. A few days later, I received a letter informing me that I had been awarded a discretionary grant. ‘You see,’ Ahmed told me, ‘this is England. Anything can happen. Now the residence permit.’

  And I got that too. Armed with my grant letter, my university applications, glowing references from my college, a letter from a JP whom one of the graduates in the house was related to, and a letter from my local GP (Ahmed’s idea), we went to London for an interview at the Home Office. Ahmed came along, and discreetly but firmly insisted on being allowed to sit in. He was, after all, my guardian, he said. The plan was that I was to be calm for the first few minutes of the interview, and then, as soon as was decent, I was to break down in a flood of tears and Ahmed would do the talking. The man who interviewed us was in his thirties and wore dark-rimmed spectacles which made him look like Clark Kent before he changed into his Superman gear. I found this reassuring, and so it turned out to be. I don’t think it was the tears that did it, or Ahmed’s wheedling account of my diligence and utter brilliance, but Clark Kent’s innate sense of justice. Here I feel free.

  Although it seemed impossible that he could do so, Ahmed intensified his surveillance of me even further. He neglected his own work to sit and revise with me. He gave me endless advice and hectoring speeches, invoked God, my parents, a luminous future. I didn’t stand a chance, and passed brilliantly. Because Ahmed’s course did not finish until September, I was able to stay in the hostel until the last minute (working in a launderette which belonged to another relative of one of the graduate students) before I arrived at the Institute to start my course. That’s when I began to understand how much Ahmed had protected me, and how frightening England really was. I probably also understood then that I could have chosen something more interesting than education. It was all so unlikely – the grant, getting to university in that way, the course I was embarked on – that I found that without Ahmed around I was not all that concerned with excelling. I had proved myself to him, and his pleasure and praise kept me buoyant for longer than they should have done. Before I moved to London and the cramped room in Tooting that the university accommodation officer directed me to (after I told her what I could afford for rent), I had strutted to the admiring audience of the people I had been living with, who had treated me with the indulgence and flattery of a younger brother. But in no time at all after I moved, I was overcome by the enormity of my abandonment, like someone weeping in a crowd. I was astonished by the sudden surge of loneliness and terror I felt when I realized how stranded I was in this hostile place, that I did not know how to speak to people and win them over to me, that the bank, the canteen, the supermarket, the dark streets seemed so intimidating, and that I could not return from where I came – that, as I then thought, I had lost everything. Then Emma came and filled my life. I can’t describe that.

  So the middle Lower Second did not bother me too much when it came, though later I did think that I might have done more to take charge of my life, not have allowed everything to be consumed in a seductive brew of sentiment and a despairing openness to unpromising possibilities. And then I became a schoolteacher. I did not fulfil myself.

  It was a good story, and most of it was true. It made me sound a little heroic and a little weak. A nice balance.

  It was towards the end of the second year of her PhD, around August, that Emma became pregnant with Amelia. It was a time when the first delighted reception of the Pill was beginning to be replaced by gloomy forecasts of cancer of this and that (breast and cervix, I think) and unspecified damage in old age. Emma was converted to the new austerity and came off the Pill, saying she understood her body better than anyone else and knew how to prevent herself from becoming pregnant. But after too many ciders, or whatever we could afford in those days, the result was Amelia, and the end of the first Arcadia, although we did not know it at the time. I am still awaiting the second. In fact, after the initial shock and the agonizing over the timetable for completion of her thesis (it looked hopeless), we started to become excited about the pregnancy, playing with names, rearranging the furniture, making wild promises of unique cooperation in child-rearing. Nothing like what we were planning had been heard of before. In our lifetime we were going to lay low all the nasty mythemes about bastards and mestizos, expose the cruelty that attended the figure of the mulatto and the half-caste (our child). I even suggested we get married, for the baby’s sake, but Emma laughed at my bourgeois anxieties.

  Amelia brought Mrs Willoughby into our lives in a big way. We needed the help, we couldn’t have done without it. The baby turned out to be a sleepless, noisy brute, as I have already intimated, capable of consumption and excretion in a big way, and all the advice books we had been given did not work or seemed unworkable. Ignore her. Fat chance. We reassured each other, but Emma began to feel inadequate and miserable, no good as a mother, no good as a student, no good as a human being. So we made another plan. Emma no longer received a grant, but she would extend her registration period and take a year to write her thesis. This was what most people did anyway, it’s just that they did not have babies in their third year.

  Mrs Willoughby had been aghast when the news of Emma’s pregnancy was delivered. I was present, was required to be. She listened to Emma’s explanation, sat in silence for a long minute and then turned to me with a look of, well, hatred. I deserved that look, I suppose, though it wasn’t me that came off the Pill. To be honest, I don’t think I would have worri
ed whether she was on the Pill or not. I was just so in love with her that I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong, never thought any harm could ever befall us. But I thought I understood something else in that look: it wasn’t just to do with Emma’s PhD, or that she lived with me in moral squalor, but that now she would have to live with a kind of contamination for the rest of her life. She would not be able to be a normal English woman again, leading an uncomplicated English life among English people. I think even Mr Willoughby was affected by the tragic dimensions of what had happened, though he mostly smiled through Emma’s account. But after Emma and Mrs Willoughby had retreated to the kitchen for some hard talking (we had gone to Blackheath to break the news), there was no eager gleam in his eyes, no hunger for our usual transgressions. In the circumstances, it might even have felt obscene to give way to such a desire. He sat looking at me with his lustreless eyes, watching me with pity and disenchantment. I could feel the stirrings of a tragic story: confused offspring of mixed parentage (meaning European and some kind of hubshi) doomed to instability and degeneration as the tainted blood coursed through generations, waiting to surface in madness, congenital bone weakness, homosexuality, cowardice and treachery. But I thought I would sit this one out. He was bound to come round later.

  ‘What are you going to call him?’ he asked at last. His voice was without its usual crisp egotism, was almost feeble with uneasiness. It must have seemed to him that life at times could deal quite unfair blows.

  Shaka Zulu, I thought, or perhaps the Mahdi. Or Mau Mau. Was that what he was afraid of? Or was this one of his subtle flanking attacks, when what he really wanted was for me to say that we would name the baby after General Gordon or Captain Cook?

  ‘It’s going to be a girl,’ I said. ‘And we were thinking of calling her Pocahontas.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said and invited me for a stroll in their spacious garden. When we were outside, he stood for a moment staring at a flight of birds strung out across the sky. ‘They’re flying in the wrong direction,’ he said. ‘They’re going south. What do they think they’ll find there?’

  But this contention and dejection could not last, of course, and long before Amelia’s awaited appearance we had received several of the necessary items from them. When the time came for Emma to have another try at getting her thesis written up, Mrs Willoughby offered to come over to stay with Amelia for the day whenever she could, and on other days Emma would drop her off in Blackheath on her way to college. Several days a week I would come home to find Mrs Willoughby in full charge, the flat cleaned and altered in some subtle way, perhaps by the addition of a new ornament, or the removal of an old tin that we had used as a flowerpot, now replaced by something more seemly and expensive. She bought us gifts of frivolous foods that we would not normally think to get for ourselves, or thought we could not afford: a meringue pie, or a box of Danish pastries, or a pound of grapes (I suspected they were South African), or over-decorated cakes that she and Emma would then exult over. More likely than not, the evening meal would be cooking or only awaiting insertion into the oven, and Amelia would be crawling around the floor as contented as a slug in late spring. Sometimes Emma would be at home too, absorbed in baby business or knee-deep in arrangements. I tried to get into this stuff, I really did, to join in and seem unconcerned by Mrs Willoughby’s overbearing presence, to persuade my heart to melt at my daughter’s antics and roar with laughter along with them, but my smiles and chuckles were underlaid by bitterness at the havoc my life had become, and I guess my heart not only did not melt, but was not really in it. I say this with some degree of shame.

  It was not that I did not feel affection for Amelia, or disliked being left with her or resented caring dutifully for her, but she was a stranger who had taken my love away and brought Mrs Willoughby to mind and menace my life. And Emma’s thesis was not going well, she could not concentrate on it, was not convinced there was any value in it, could not imagine herself finishing it, and what was the point of it all, anyway? Her supervisor was a wanker, the college was such a long way away, but she could not work at home because of Amelia, she was fed up of being short of money, of having to get up so early, and why couldn’t I wake up more often at night? Because I was tired, and she was always out of bed before I had even stirred. My work was as nightmarish as ever: the endless malice of the pupils was depressing, the marking seemed relentless, the very idea of teaching in a school, of school itself, seemed senseless. And so voices were raised for the first time since we had known each other, and some nights we lay in bed bickering in lowered voices so as not to wake Amelia, who slept in the same room as us.

  In a burst of extravagance, Emma walked down to Tottenham Court Road one afternoon on her way back from college and bought a camera, a Pentax. It was a dynamic way of dealing with being short of money, but when I told Emma this she said that I was not the only one who worried about money, but maybe I should worry a little less. Listening to her talk about me, sometimes I felt that my life was a story and that I was playing my part in events that were beyond me, that were already set out in a pattern I had not been observant enough to comprehend. Yes, I worried about money, and about the bills that always turned up, which Emma would throw to one side saying, Let them wait. We’ll deal with them later. I thought everybody worried about money. We only had my pathetic salary to live on and it surprised me how many things Amelia seemed to need and how their cost seemed to mount. So I looked at this expensive object I was being introduced to with some dismay. This was long before the days of three rums, of course, but there was always an excuse for a bottle of wine at some stage during the week, and that camera represented several weeks of impending thirst.

  ‘We must take some pictures of Amelia, otherwise we’ll forget her as she is now,’ Emma said. ‘It’ll be fun to have a record of all the stages of her life, then we can all laugh together when she’s grown up. There aren’t any pictures of me before I started school, and I wish there had been, so I could see what I looked like . . . you know? And anyway, your parents will want to see pictures of her, won’t they? Or don’t you think they would? Have they written since you told them?’

  I shook my head. She snorted with disappointed hurt. And you complain about how my parents resent that you are the father of my child. She didn’t say it, she did not always then, but I guessed that was that she was thinking. She waited for me to say something, to put up a defence, and when I did not she returned to her new camera with an almost imperceptible sigh. I remember wounding moments like that which we did nothing to ease, and how later they festered and turned evil. This was one of mine.

  Because the truth was that I had not written home about Amelia, and the other truth was that I had not written home about Emma, either. As far as they were concerned back there in Nativity, neither Emma nor Amelia existed. It was to go on like that for years. I did not know how to tell Emma this – I still haven’t. I usually only ever wrote to my mother, but she can’t read and can only write her name. When she received my letters she would have to find someone to read them for her and then to write out a reply, some child who would be happy to do the lot for a shilling. Over the years, the exchanges between us had turned into a rare ritual: every several months she would send me a few words about everyone’s health and regards and best wishes, and some months later I would send something back. The weather has been very cold recently, my job is fine, and recently I moved to a house in a place called Battersea. In any case, I did not know how I could write to her that I was living with an English woman to whom I was not married. In the world I came from, such things were not spoken about. To my mother, Emma would be something disreputable, a mistress, and such matters, if they could not be avoided, were best dealt with discreetly. Not announced in a letter which would probably be read aloud to her by a gossipy child. I thought of lying, of writing to say that I was married to an English woman, but I never did, afraid of the havoc that would let loose, afraid of the litanies of blame that would follow. Now we have
lost you, she has stolen you away from us, and so on. God, home, culture, history would all come into it, boom doom, blah bah. As if I was not already lost and stolen and shipwrecked and mangled beyond recognition anyway. As if home and belonging were anything more than a wilful fiction when there was no possibility (at that time) of them being real again. As if they were anything more than debilitating stories that turned everything into moments of reprise that disabled and disarmed.

  So I said nothing. If Emma asked me how my parents might respond to whatever it might be about us, I reassured her as imaginatively as I could. With more complicated questions I was evasive or gave any kind of answer that would do. After a while she mostly lost interest in asking, she included them less frequently in her concerns, and in the end she forgot them, except as figures in a story. I think as time passed and our lives became fuller and more involved, it became harder and harder to imagine them living a life as real as our own. Anyway, I never told them about her, and the longer I remained silent, the harder it became to tell Emma.

  As I waited for Emma to come home on the day that I had been to see the doctor about my heart, I knew I would tell her as soon as she came in. I always told her everything, blurted it out like an idiot. Usually I got in first and would have started the cooking by the time she came home from the university. (No, she wasn’t still doing her thesis, she taught there.) On that day, she came home earlier than usual.