Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Then, with one of the grand gestures I was getting used to in him, he took me to visit the house of a Seyyid Hafidh, one of the old-time barons. There we met a man, a distant relative of the Seyyid, who had redeemed the old place by pleading and money. As we walked round the decaying old building with its silent fountains and stinking bath-houses, and its quarters for concubines and suriya, it seemed a clear metaphor for the changes we had gone through. Our new barons have turned out to be spendthrift robbers, dismembering such corpses as Seyyid Hafidh’s old house with joyous abandon, but they had their example to start with.

  But it was the evenings I looked forward to. My mother would say, Now tell us more. Every night we sat in the big room and took turns filling each other in about our lives. Who was dead, who had married who, who had said what or done something or the other. Who had cheated and betrayed, and led his family into shame and ruin. Bi Nuru died six years ago, Rehema has moved to Mombasa and found herself a new husband and so on. When my stepfather came upstairs, he went straight to his room and his transistor radio (the radiogram had died years before), where a tray of very light supper waited for him, which he picked at while he trawled the air-waves of the world. Nobody went to him at this time. The raised voices from his radio were like injunctions to keep away. My mother was always the last to leave, and only when I said it was time to go to bed. Then we would sit for a few minutes more on our own, while I would quietly begin to steel myself for a final visit to the bathroom.

  Late one evening, after I had been there for several days and the conversation had once again gone well, I said to her when we were on our own, ‘Tell me about my father.’

  ‘What about him?’ she asked, a smile on her face which she turned slightly in the direction of their bedroom and the booming voices there. She touched her hair in a gesture which suggested contentment, a lover’s display of memory.

  ‘My father,’ I said. I had assumed she would understand me from the first, and would dissemble cautiously. I did not expect her unguarded and self-absorbed pleasure in my stepfather. She understood me now, perhaps because I had spoken with a different emphasis. The smile instantly left her face and her eyes widened with surprise. After a moment she looked away from me, and we sat in silence for a long time. She sat there with her eyes on the floor and I felt I had hurt her in a way I did not understand. Yes, I understood something of it, that after all this time, after my silence, my long silence . . . I wished I had found a less solemn way of asking her, but I had been waiting to blurt this out for days and that was how it came out. I’m not perfect. I’m unfulfilled.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked at last, her voice soft and her eyes gleaming with surprised sorrow.

  ‘Whatever you want to tell me,’ I said.

  She rose and pushed the door to, not quite shutting it, and then sat down again. ‘After all this time you ask this,’ she said, an edge to her voice. She was silent for another moment, then with a look of resolution, her eyes looking directly at me and then away again, she said, ‘I’ll tell you. We were married for just over a year and then he left. I don’t know why for sure. He never said anything. He just left, just before you were born.’

  She clasped her hands together gently, and tilted her head slightly as if readying herself for a blow. ‘The house we were living in belonged to your father,’ she said, nodding towards their bedroom. ‘The father of Akbar and Halima. He let us stay there without paying rent, for years, Bi Nuru and I. You were born there. And Bi Nuru paid for the household out of her portion. I had nothing, no money of my own and no relatives to turn to. My father had left nothing but debts, may God have mercy on him.’

  I hadn’t known about my stepfather letting us stay in the apartment rent-free, or about Bi Nuru paying for everything. I could imagine my mother and Bi Nuru talking about it in front of me, but I had no memory of it. ‘Why do you think . . . he did that?’ I asked. ‘Why do you think he let you stay in the flat rent-free?’ I expected her to protest my stepfather’s honour, to say that he was a good man who had been sensitive to their predicament and had done what he could to help.

  She sighed and then smiled wearily, resignedly. ‘You really want to rummage into this, don’t you? Haya. Perhaps it’s better. You’ve been away a long time, and these things must have troubled you.’

  ‘I was too young to ask when I left. And maybe you wouldn’t have told me anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t speak like that,’ she said. ‘You make me think you’re blaming . . .’

  ‘No, no,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t think that. I only meant we didn’t talk about things like that. I would have found it hard to ask you, and I am guessing that you would’ve found it hard to say anything. Why did he let you stay in the flat?’

  ‘Your father was Hashim’s relative, his sister’s son,’ she said, and she paused and looked at me, to see if I had understood. ‘His mother was Bi Habibi. Do you remember her? We used to visit her sometimes when you were small. She used to live in Kikwajuni, just by the old football stadium. Do you remember?’

  I shook my head. A look of sympathy passed through her eyes. ‘Time has cheated you of so much,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you were very small, though I would have thought you’d remember her. She used to make such a fuss of you. She must have died when you were six or seven. Her husband had been a man of learning. He had studied at Al-Azhar in Cairo, and when he came back he became a renowned scholar of religion. But he died when your father was still at school, and left his family with little means. So, Hashim used to look after them, in every way.’

  She paused, and I thought she would say, Do you see what a good man he is? The air was heavy with the words, but she did not say them, and after a moment she resumed, ‘When my father moved to town, he traded with Hashim. And when things went bad for him, he borrowed money from Hashim. Then Bi Nuru came to live with us, and all the two of them could talk about was getting me married. So in the end my father went to Hashim and offered me for his nephew, and instead of a dowry for me Hashim agreed to forgive my father’s debt to him. It wasn’t a big debt, so everyone got something out of the arrangement. That was all, that was how it was.’ She smiled lightly, as if the words were not hurting.

  After a long silence, when I thought she would no longer continue, when I was about to suggest that we leave it for now, she started again. ‘I had seen him, of course. Your father. Although they lived in Kikwajuni, he had friends down here. I remember once Bi Nuru and I were going visiting somewhere, and he passed us in the street with his friends. Bi Nuru called to him and asked if he wasn’t Bi Habibi’s son. He was full of apologies and courtesies, saying he hadn’t seen us, though I don’t think he knew who we were. Or maybe he was just embarrassed in front of his friends. Afterwards Bi Nuru teased me about how he had looked at me. “That’s your husband,” she said. Perhaps that’s what put the idea in her head.’ My mother smiled at the memory. ‘He sometimes walked past the house after that time we met in the street, and if Bi Nuru caught sight of him, she would tease me for days. He was at the teachers’ college when he married me, just about to finish. Then a few months later he left. I don’t know why.’

  Tears flowed down her face for a moment, then she wiped them away carefully, without drama. It seemed grotesquely painful that a woman of her age should be crying silently like that, should be crying so for a man who had left her years ago. ‘My father was already dead by then, may God have mercy on his soul, and you were about to be born. Hashim told us not to worry about somewhere to stay, that we could live in the flat for as long as we needed to. And if we had any other need we were not to hesitate from going to him and he would do his best. He told Bi Nuru, who would have known how to make it easy for him to say those things. So we stayed, and whenever we talked of moving he would not have it. We were part of his family now, he told us, because of you. That was how it was.’

  And that was where we left it that night. I sensed her impatience the following evening, and thought that she
would not stay behind as she usually did. She scolded Akbar’s children twice, and at one point left the room for several minutes. But in the end, I think, her impatience was for everyone to go. She seemed edgy and I suspected she would be angry with me for the things she had said, for allowing me to rummage in her life, as she had put it, the previous evening.

  ‘I heard stories,’ I said when we were alone.

  ‘About your father? What did you hear?’ she asked, her eyes attentive and her head tilted with a kind of detached, professional interest. It was her habitual gesture of concentration.

  ‘That he had stowed away on a ship to England.’

  ‘That’s what we heard too. He used to say he wanted to study, and he loved talking about England. He had a picture on the wall that he had cut out of a magazine, English countryside with a lake in it and some palace or something beside it. He used to say he would go there one day. So it may be that the story is true.’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps somebody knows where he is, and you can go and visit him . . . and his English wife. But perhaps he never got there. You’ve heard stories of what happens to stowaways if they get caught, of people being thrown overboard or worse, though God forbid that anything like that should have happened to him.’

  ‘I heard another story that he was living in Germany,’ I said.

  My mother shrugged. ‘I don’t care if he is living in Hell.’

  ‘Tell me what he was like,’ I said.

  She must have been ready for the question, for she did not hesitate. ‘We were both very young. He was twenty years old when we married, and I was eighteen. Everything seemed possible then. I had lived all my life in the country, I knew nothing. And even when we moved to town, I just stayed in the house. I had never been to school, I couldn’t read a book. If by chance I listened to the news on the radio, I had no idea what was being said, or where all those places were. I just listened to what everybody around me said, and I had no choice but to accept it, like a beast or a child. He seemed to know everything. Lo, and he loved to talk. We used to sit on the terrace in the evenings and he would tell me about all the things he had read in books, all the things he had heard his teachers say. The radio said this, at the cinema he had seen that, in Europe they have such and such. Even Bi Nuru used to sit with us sometimes, interrupting your father with sceptical remarks although she was really just as ignorant as I was. But that’s the way she was, she would preach at the stars if the mood took her. Sometimes we used to lie in our room talking until the muadhin called the dawn prayers. He made me laugh so much. Usually he was quiet with people, you know, polite and retiring – kimya kimya. Like you were when you were younger. But when no one else was around, he was full of it, stories and jokes and mischief. Bi Nuru spoiled him. She treated him like a favourite son. Everything was for him, and I was always at fault in her eyes for not having thought of this or provided that. It was his courteous, laughing manner. She could not resist that. And his pleasant appearance . . .

  ‘What did he look like? He was slim, in the way young men are, and not very tall. A little taller than me. I used to tell him that he was still growing. His hair was soft and curly, almost glossy, not tangled and ropy like yours. His face too was slim, with a small round chin. When he smiled he looked so young, like a gentle innocent boy. It was that Bi Nuru liked so much, I think. Bi Nuru loved him. She used to tease him that whenever he tired of me she was always available to him. Then he left.

  ‘At first we thought something had happened to him when he did not come home that afternoon,’ she continued after what had seemed like an endless silence. ‘An accident on his way back from work, perhaps. He was teaching in a school in Bububu, so he had to take a bus there and back everyday, and you know what those buses were like. So at first we thought the bus had broken down and he was stranded somewhere on the way. But when he still had not come back after it got dark, Bi Nuru went to Rashid Suleiman’s house to ask for news. He was the headmaster of the Bububu school, I don’t know whether you remember him. He used to live just down there by Bondeni, near the petrol station. Rashid Suleiman told us that your father had not turned up for work that morning. He said that he had thought of calling round to ask after him, but he had heard at the café earlier in the evening that someone had seen him at the docks, and later seen him get in the launch which was heading towards one of the big ships that was in that day. We didn’t believe it at first, but then Bi Nuru heard other stories, so in the end we had no choice but to face the truth. It seemed as if he had died, and for months I wished I could die too, may God forgive me.’

  She sat in such dejected silence for so long that in the end I said we should stop if she was feeling distressed. I had heard my stepfather turning the radio off, and that was usually the signal for her to go to him. But when I mentioned the radio she shook her head. ‘Hashim knows I’m talking to you about all this. It’s better that you hear all you wish to know. You have been cheated of enough already. Do you know what I did after you were born? I destroyed everything of his that I could lay my hands on. His books, his photographs, his clothes. I didn’t want you to know anything about him or even think about him. I wanted him to be dead. I wanted him never to have lived.’

  ‘Bi Nuru told me things about him,’ I said, and I saw from her face that she had not known that. ‘Not much. Just a few stories, and then I imagined the rest. She said his name was Abbas and that he had died, but I heard people say different things outside, especially when I was older. Why do you think he left like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, suddenly, not wanting to be asked that question.

  ‘But you must have thought about it,’ I pressed.

  When she began to talk again, it was if she had forgotten my question, or had found a way of evading it. ‘We had been married for about three months when he was sent to that job in Bububu. It was a good school and near town, so we were pleased about that. Some of his friends had been posted further away and had to live in the places where they had been sent. He didn’t like teaching. The children tormented him and he could not persuade them to listen to any of those things he loved to talk about. When he came home he would sit quietly, going over the things that had happened to him. He said every day made him feel smaller. I couldn’t take it seriously. I was negligent. I thought he was just tired, and that when he got more used to the work he would become the way he had been before. I haven’t spoken about this to anyone. You come back after all these years and want me to live all those times again. I can’t bear the impertinence of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, before she could say more, before she could close the conversation for ever. ‘Let’s leave it. If you feel it’s not right . . . if you don’t want to. I’m sorry you think it’s impertinence, and I don’t deserve your truthfulness. I’ve been negligent too, but I’m glad of what you’ve told me already. Let’s leave it like that.’

  So we left it, but not for long. The next night, after the others had left, with Akbar giving me long looks, she stood up as if to push the door to as before – only this time she shut it. I could see that the telling and the listening had become compulsive. We were both in it for our own purposes, but I knew that I had found a reason to love my mother after all. Not as a child who had lost her embraces and had sulked with a feeling of abandonment, but because I saw she could not stop, and she could not hide the hurt of those years, and could not disguise the pain of the failure of her love. There was something genuinely tragic in the freshness of all that pain. Yes, there was. And in knowing that such pain never ends, that nothing which means so much is ever over. It was a hateful sight and hideous knowledge.

  ‘When he left, without saying a word like that, I couldn’t think what could have made him do it. I couldn’t imagine what might have gone through his mind. All I felt all day and all night was shame and loss . . . and terror. Then as I thought about it later, I began to put things in their place until I could arrive back at that moment when he left.’

  ‘Did you?’ />
  She looked at me curiously. I pictured the two of us sitting there talking about such things, and I was struck by the strangeness of it. We could have been sitting in that half-dark room talking about the beauty of the evening, or about how we managed to find ways of forgetting our ugliness and meanness, or how despite everything we could be free to talk about anything without a definite aim, without wanting to know. Instead I was forcing her to open old wounds that I would have no way of helping her close again.

  ‘Did you arrive at the moment when he . . . left?’ I asked, and I heard the word booming round the room.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I found a place for some of the things that had happened to us. I remembered how shocked he had been when I told him I was pregnant.’

  ‘Shocked?’

  She shrugged. ‘He didn’t say anything. Bi Nuru was saying enough for everybody and I suppose I took no notice of him. Then later I remembered that he started to go out for walks late at night at that time, and his silences became longer. Or when he spoke he was sharper than he used to be. Sometimes he just sat in the bedroom for hours, with his marking in front of him, doing nothing. I don’t know how these things are connected. I didn’t think much about any of it at the time. I thought it would pass. Then he left. I wanted to be angry with him, to hate him. But I couldn’t for long. I just couldn’t understand why he’d done what he had. It was as if he had killed himself, God forbid.