Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  And if I felt like listening to my mother as she lay in the dark, if I was not fidgeting and running about and making a noise, she would tell me stories of her life in the country, of her father who would not allow her to go to school, of her elder sister who had died in childbirth, of her beloved mother who had died soon after. Such calamities one on top of another had seemed like a judgement, like a curse visited on them. When she said this to one of the relatives who had come to mourn with her, she was asked Have you no faith in God’s mercy? That would make you an unbeliever.

  My mother’s father, whose name was Nassor Abdalla, was heart-broken and filled with despair by the loss of his wife, his companion for a generation. In an impulsive attempt to escape reminders of the life he had lost, he sold his land, and decided to move to town and go into business. He rented the apartment with the terrace in which they lived and then he started to trade. It was the first time my mother had lived in the town. There was so much to see, processions and music in the streets, the promenade by the sea, but her father would not let her go out of the house on her own because by this time she was too old to do that.

  There were only the two of them for a while, but then Nassor Abdalla decided to marry again. My mother suspected that he would. It was the way men were. It was done quietly, almost secretively, just a handful of guests and the sheikh to say the necessary words, then a small meal afterwards. Her name was Nuru, a widow in her thirties only recently out of mourning, a small, angular woman with a passion for jewellery and perfume. She came with her own portion from her first marriage, and therefore she could indulge her passion for gold and musk without consulting her new husband. I knew her later, of course, and heard some of these stories from her too, and I can imagine her effortlessly taking charge of the household. She was the kind of person who took everything in her stride, talking unstoppably in her measured way, and was never short of an opinion on any matter that came up. Even later, she talked to my mother as if she were a child who did not know what was best for herself, who was prone to carelessness with the world.

  But my mother’s father was too old to learn the new work he had chosen for himself and he never succeeded. He lost money on bad deals and even got into debt. There were too many sharks in the business, my mother said, and he never learnt how to deal with them. It was Bi Nuru who started talking about getting my mother married. It wasn’t right for a woman her age to be sitting idly at home (I think she was seventeen). She would only get into mischief. My mother’s father became obsessed with finding her a husband before he died, which he duly did and duly died.

  So Bi Nuru’s marriage only lasted a few months and then she was back in mourning again. I was around five or six when my mother used to tell me these things, too young to do anything but listen in the distracted way of a child. Later I found important details missing from my memory of her stories, details which had not lodged themselves firmly enough in my mind or which had simply slipped away under pressure from other events. Soon after that time, she was married to my stepfather, and never repeated the stories about her father and Bi Nuru again, hardly ever mentioned him except briefly and in passing. Bi Nuru had moved out of the apartment some time earlier. I don’t remember precisely when she left but it was not very long before we moved out. In any case, I shall always have a memory of the watery fish stew with large segments of slushy green mango in it that she served with lumpy rice every lunch-time. She left to get married again, this time to an ambitious young boat-builder severed years her junior, and because I addressed her as grandmother, I was required to call this dashing young man grandfather too. Though she left the apartment, Bi Nuru was never very far from our lives at first. She used to come back every day, and stay until after lunch, but her visits grew rarer and almost completely stopped after my mother remarried and we moved out of the apartment. Perhaps she was revisiting her time there as much as my mother and me.

  I knew who my stepfather was before he became that. Everyone did. His name was Hashim Abubakar, a merchant of means and reputation, with interests and contacts all over the world, as it seemed to us. His bearing and his carriage announced this knowledge, though there was no exhibitionism or vainglory in his self-importance. He never flashed money around and always waited for others to go ahead of him, until they insisted that he go first. He spoke with the care and modulation of someone who knew that people were listening, and he punctuated his speeches with occasional flights of poetry and soaring metaphors. But his greatest renown was that he was a rich and successful businessman. His most recent coup at the time when I came into intimate contact with him was the new electrical-goods shop he had opened, taking up the whole ground floor of a house he had built especially, and with an apartment upstairs in which he lived. Even a child could not help but be beguiled by the new shop and the gleaming gadgets which resided there.

  Some time during my seventh year my mother was married to him and we moved to the flat above his new shop. It was bigger than our old apartment, and instead of a terrace it had a veranda which looked over the main road. There was a kind of glamour in living in the house of the famous merchant, though I did miss the room with a view of the sea. Sometimes I went behind the counter in the shop and could not resist a proprietorial feeling as I stood among the exotic merchandise. My stepfather did not serve in the shop himself. He had a young man who did that, while he sat at his desk in a corner chatting with whoever dropped by, or dealing with his papers and the enormous account books. In the flat upstairs there were rugs on the floor, heavy wooden furniture, a ceiling fan in the reception room (which when no one was around could be made to whirl into a blur), a radiogram and a standard lamp, an object of hazard when I was young. The bathroom walls were covered with tiles and the toilet gleamed, so that you felt ashamed of the functions you had to perform in a room so exquisitely bright. My stepfather, whom I was instructed to call Ba but could never manage to, all my life, treated me politely, like a relative who was staying with them. I don’t think he worried much about me. He never said anything like that in my hearing, but I imagine he thought I was my mother’s responsibility. I felt like a guest there, as if I was on holiday.

  Then Akbar came, and then Halima, and after that my stepfather changed. He went straight to his children when he came upstairs, and never seemed to tire of watching them, his face covered with smiles, while they squirmed and wriggled and sang gibberish. He was a thin, usually tense man, with a grand and permissive air in public, as I have described, but he had been terse and precise when only my mother and I were around, as if his performances to the wider world were disguises against the burdens he had to bear in private. So when the smiles broke on his face they transformed him. Instead of sitting in the reception room listening to the news on the radio for hours on end, sipping coffee like a duty and frowning at interruptions, he crawled on the floor with Akbar and Halima, making nonsense noises and giving them kisses. My mother began to tease him, and I saw that their lives together had changed too. He even started to put on weight and was freer with his hugs and caresses, and seemed to forget himself enough in public to laugh with a kind of abandon which was obviously false and intended to reassure and disarm some unfortunate who had come to him for a favour or advice. Previously it had been for these customers that he had reserved his grandest manner. It was then that he began to seem like an uncle to me, benign and, well, avuncular, and Akbar and Halima like cousins I was often required to keep an eye on and look after.

  It was not to last exactly like that, with my stepfather as the besotted family man, but his silences in the house now had a new ease, a kind of contentment. And his persona outside was grander for the generosity his happiness now made it possible for him to extend. When his children threw themselves at him, he laughed and hugged them, smiling at his wife. He brought them little presents of fruit or sweets, and sometimes a cheap toy that had caught his eye. With me he was always gentle and, well, polite, as if I was an orphan he had accepted responsibility for. He was on
ly occasionally short with me, usually if he thought I was fussing about something which seemed clear to him or if I was not attentive enough to Akbar and Halima. The only time he ever hit me was when a bicycle barged into Akbar when he was playing in the road and I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, and my attention had wandered or Akbar had been reckless. I don’t remember. But I do remember my stepfather came to look for me when he heard the story, hours after this little fracas had happened, and he hauled me to my feet by grabbing my head and pulling me up, and then he gave me a luscious slap on my left cheek. I remember that.

  And of course I lost my mother, at least as I had known her before. She was now so busy, with her children, with my stepfather, with people who called on her to pay their respects to the merchant’s wife and the mother of his children, and to accumulate credit for a day (may God prevent it happening) when need might force them into a plea for assistance. One of the visitors began to grow into an intimate friend. Her name was Rehema, and she was a kind of relative to my stepfather. I am not sure of their precise relationship but I suspect they weren’t related by blood. It may be that her mother had been nursemaid to the family. With some people sharing mother’s milk is a bond which is almost fraternal. In any case, she looked very different from my stepfather and from his other relatives, and she lived in one room in the poor part of town, across the creek, on The Other Bank, with a husband who was a house-painter. When politics got going, she became a stalwart rabble-rouser for the nationalists, leading mocking chants at rallies and in the forefront of marches through opposition strongholds. It was she that I would find later in bed with the football coach, when I would be roused by the beauty of her body. Rehema came often, for an hour or two in the afternoon, and filled the house with laughter.

  My mother could only have been in her late twenties then, and at last her life was full. That is what I mean when I say I lost her. She was still soft-spoken and her warm laughter was never far below the surface, bubbling as always under almost everything she said, but to me she spoke mostly about the errands and the chores she wanted me to do. Somebody had to do them, and I suppose she felt as bad about them as I did. I went to the shop to buy bread and buns before going to school, I went to the market to buy salad and fruit when I got back from school, and I listened with a long-suffering superior air as my mother told me how much better she could have done, she who never stirred from the house, like a slug condemned to a piece of lawn where she slimed her daily existence, or where she lived like an animal captured from a forest and kept in captivity and made to perform tasks that animals do. Then I took Akbar and Halima out to play when I came back from Koran school in the afternoon, went to the shop for sugar, tea, soap powder, whatever, helped with the washing-up, swept and so on. And later, I would go to the prison every day to deliver my stepfather’s lunch and his change of clothing, every day after school, while the merchant’s children were stroked and had blessings called upon them for the evil that had so unfairly befallen their father. My mother wouldn’t have a servant in the house – I don’t think she would have known how to live with one – even though my stepfather kept on telling her she should. ‘A servant would steal, and I wouldn’t feel easy with a stranger in the house,’ she said.

  Sometimes she caught my eye with a look of recognition. Then she would say something anxious. ‘Are you all right? You’re very quiet. Why the long looks?’

  I would have no choice but to lie and tell her that something had happened at school, or that my stomach hurt and could I miss Koran school for the afternoon? or something like that, some small advantage I would gain from her concern. After a while I got used to the way things were, and played the part I was given as courteously as I could, even earning praise from my stepfather for my good manners and docility. Perhaps I even learned not to mind so much as my life became fuller away from the house, with friends I began to make at school, praise from my teachers, being selected for the school football team. But now and then I would remember my mother as she had been and I would miss the swift embrace that had sometimes been my reward for saying or doing something precocious or amusing, and the strangely abandoned way she used to lie in the dark on the terrace while her words mingled with the noises of the world we lived in. I know that I thought then that when I grew up I would not marry, and would not have a child. I could not imagine how a love such as my mother’s for me could be lost. It seemed so unfair.

  I didn’t act like a boy-victim-hero out of a Dickens novel, not that bad. But I could have done better. I could have been resourceful, charming, brave. I wasn’t brave, I could have done better. Perhaps that was why my stepfather left me to myself. I had the opportunity, the connection, the forbearance of circumstances, the contacts (his), and I chose to act like a stepson. Nor do I remember that time tragically. There were stories, in the first place, stories to fill the hours and the mind in the contest with life, to lift the ordinary into metaphor, to make it seem that the time of my passing was a choice in my hands, that there was method in the manner of my coming and my going. That is what stories can do, they can push the feeble disorders we live with out of sight.

  The walls of the flat looked grimier than they used to, everywhere in need of a coat of paint, and some of the ceiling panels in the hallway had swollen and warped from a leaking roof. But it was when I went into the bathroom to wash as I had been instructed that I saw how changed things were. The toilet was blocked and nothing in that bathroom gleamed. I had already been warned that there was no running water anymore, so I washed as quickly as I could out of the bucket and ran out, revolted to the pit of my stomach by that blocked, stinking toilet. Later, when I tackled Akbar about it, and asked him with a rage I had not felt since my arrival why it was that they did nothing about such squalor, he shrugged. ‘There is no water,’ he said. ‘The waste pipe itself is blocked, so are the sewers. Where do you want me to begin?’

  There was only electricity for a few hours each day, soap was short, as was pepper, sugar, toothpaste, rice, you name it. You should have brought us those things instead of the chocolates and the bottles of perfume, Halima said. She said it with a smile, but I could not help hearing the blame in her words, that for all these years they had been living like this and I had not even bothered to find out, or even think of doing anything about it. I expected a murmur of dissent from my mother or from Akbar at Halima’s gracelessness, but they kept silent, so perhaps they thought her words were well said. She was soft-spoken and full of smiles like my mother, though she looked nothing like her. But she also had an enthusiasm, a kind of confidence in life, which I could never remember in my mother.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ my mother said. ‘And even if you had brought something they would have taken it away from you at the Customs. They take anything they want, they do whatever they wish. There’s no law here.’

  ‘Even if you tell people outside about such things, they don’t really take it in,’ Akbar said, smiling too, being understanding, implying that he knew I would not be one of those people, or at least courtesy prevented him from saying so. ‘How can you imagine this kind of petty hardship when you live in a place where you don’t give any thought to the possibility of such shortages? If you run out of anything you go and get some more. If something breaks down you replace it or you call someone to fix it. How can you imagine what it would be like to spend a morning looking to buy a few ounces of salt? Or pursuing a carpenter for weeks to have him replace a ceiling panel?’

  I sat in guilty silence as they spoke of their deprivations and wretchedness. Despite everything the food tasted good, I said, which briefly made everyone smile. Then when the urgency of their grievance had been slaked, for the moment, they asked me to tell them about my life in England. The room felt crowded. Akbar’s wife, Rukiya, was there, with the youngest of their three children in her arms. Their other two children were sitting on the floor, listening to everything as if they were hearing it all for t
he first time. Halima’s husband worked on another island, she had come on her own to welcome me, and would be going back in a day or two.

  My stepfather did not sit with us when we talked like this. He went down to his empty shop every morning after listening to the news and sat there for whoever wanted to stop for a chat. The café down the road was not what it used to be. The customers had changed and the café radio was now only tuned to the state station, whose endless commentaries were alienating with their mendacities. I went and sat with my stepfather after breakfast, and we talked without trying too hard, touching on this and that subject warily. People stopped to chat and he asked them to guess who I was, which everyone did. It was a game he evidently enjoyed, because his face broke into smiles even before the question had passed his lips. Then we had the predictable astonished conversation. How long has it been? We thought you’d forgotten us. You were only a boy when you left us and now you return with a headfull of grey. Mashaallah. I had never seen my stepfather like this, smiling and frivolous amid the ruins of his life, all the tension and intensity gone. It made him seem capable of a generosity of spirit I had not seen in the stern man I had known as a child. When one of his callers had gone, he would sink for a while and then we would pick up our desultory conversation again, and maybe he would gossip a little about the man who had just left us.

  In the afternoons Akbar took me around, to visit people he thought I would like to meet, to exhibit me to his friends, to see places that had changed and those I had known before, where he would deliver me as if by magic, watching and waiting smilingly for my gratified words. One afternoon he took me to visit Bububu, and showed me the new houses people were building for themselves out of town. I remembered Bububu, I knew that my father used to teach at the school in that village before he left. For a while, at the turn of the century, a train service used to run between the town and Bububu, which was a kind of heartland of Omani occupation. Now, because the town had grown so much, Bububu was a suburb, a brief ride on the dollar-dollar, which was the deferring name for the fixed-fare bus. Akbar walked me past the new villas, some colonnaded and veranda’d and marbled, and described their provenance with a proprietorial air.