Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘I didn’t leave the house for weeks. Bi Nuru did everything. I couldn’t see how that time would ever end. But it did. It did. Like a miracle. His mother never recovered from it. She became ill, and the hospital doctors had no idea what was wrong with her. Her heart was broken. She never went out, her curtains were always drawn. If it wasn’t for the food Hashim had sent to her from his kitchen every day, she would probably not have eaten. Whenever I went to see her, she cried and begged my forgiveness. She grew so thin and gaunt that you thought she would go any day. But she lingered on for five or six years. In the last of those years she was always terrified, leaping in fright at the smallest noise, crying all the time. She said there was a crack in one of the walls of her house, that it was getting bigger every day and that soon the house was going to fall down on her. She had heard it cracking one night. Datta. In the end she refused food, and she refused to be taken to the hospital. Her neighbours and her brother did what they could to talk her out of her madness, but she was determined. She starved herself to death.

  ‘He never wrote to her after he left. I don’t know if he ever wrote to anyone. Three months after Bi Habibi died, Hashim asked for me,’ she said, and then she smiled. ‘It was Bi Nuru’s work, and God has been generous to us.’

  I tried to imagine what could have made him leave like that. I had been trying to do so for years, but I was always defeated by the magnitude of the act. For it was a big thing he had done, leaving his whole life behind him to hide in the belly of a ship which would take him to an unknown wilderness. Was it to gain freedom or to escape that he had done it? Whatever oppression he was escaping, how could such a departure provide anything but an intolerable aftermath? If it wasn’t to escape, if it was for freedom that he ran, what was it out there he wanted so much that he could act with such callous self-assurance? I used to think there must have been someone else, that he had got involved in something which became too big for him, and that he had then just simply run away. Nobody ever mentioned anything like that, and in such a small place such a juicy item would have been hard to suppress, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.

  When I started to think that I would like to leave myself, I used to have a secret fantasy. I would find out his address, someone was bound to know if I was persistent enough. Then I would write to him and he would reply to say, OK, come. Those were the worst years of our oppression after the uprising, and we lived on fantasies of redemption and escape. I never did write, never mentioned him to anyone. Whatever I heard about him was volunteered to me by people who had known him, and perhaps wanted to remark on something in me that reminded them of him. When it came to my leaving, my stepfather did everything: the passport, the ticket, the money, even the distant relative of an acquaintance who would keep an eye on me and look after my allowance. And the story I told Emma about Ahmed Hussein, who was studying in Leicester and with whom I lived, was not too far off the truth of what that time was like. (Yes, I know I haven’t mentioned Emma for ages, but it is not because I wasn’t thinking of her.)

  ‘What are you up to with her?’ Akbar asked me the day after that last conversation with my mother. ‘And what are you doing to Ba?’ We were on our daily afternoon tour, after he had come back from work and had his meal and his mandatory siesta, and washed for an unbelievably long time in the revolting bathroom, and dressed himself in his strolling middle-best in the time-honoured way. I knew he had been restraining himself from speaking for a day or two, and I had seen the lingering hurt looks he addressed to his mother, but I also knew that he would not wait very long. We were strolling along the waterfront, his favourite walk, going nowhere in particular, the postcolonial condition.

  ‘What am I doing to him?’ I asked, and saw him frown.

  ‘What is so difficult about calling him Ba?’ he asked sharply, looking as if he would say more.

  ‘Ba,’ I said quickly, before he could begin on what I feared he was going to say, before he could start talking about my ingratitude and my discourtesy. He had never said it before, no one had, but it was what I feared they all thought. And I thought that once he started on that he would be unable to stop himself from talking about my other remissions. Akbar was eight years younger than me. I had spent all those years when he was small dragging him around from place to place, and laying down the law on whatever I could get away with. Now I could see and feel his assurance with me, that it was he who could act with unforced authority while I felt alien and at fault.

  I have been writing about the conversations with my mother as if nothing else was happening between them, as if we were Scheherazade and her monstrous Shahriyar, living the day in a blur before returning every evening to narratives that were really contests of life and death, to stories that neither of them wanted to end. But my mother was no Scheherazade, no virgin princess trying to save the life of a dissolute despot. She spent her day praying, helping Akbar’s wife in the kitchen, receiving visitors, hectoring, advising everyone within earshot, smiling. And after so many years away, my days were full of impact, full of intricate negotiations with people and places I had known differently. I felt that I had to be alert all the time, as if everyone was looking to catch me out in some dereliction, probing my account of myself, the way I spoke, my observance of social rituals to see how I would reveal my distance from them. I was keen not to be seen to have changed beyond recognition, not to be thought alien. But I wanted to tell my mother’s story of her abandonment, in one piece, as I reconstructed it in my mind afterwards, to deliver something of the force of the cumulative telling.

  ‘What am I doing to Ba?’ I asked Akbar.

  ‘You tell me,’ he said.

  On the day I arrived, after washing and eating as I had been instructed to do, I went and sat with my stepfather, and we talked in the desultory fashion I have described. He talked about the hardships they had had to put up with over the years, but not in the tone of personal grievance I was to hear later upstairs, but that of the man of affairs: the incompetence of the authorities, their mindless bullying, the endless fiascos, their irrational vengefulness. It was a public conversation, and as people stopped by, and after they had gone through the routine of wide-eyed greetings for the prodigal, they could sit down and join in without intrusion. My stepfather’s shop was on the main road, and this traffic of casual callers was heavy in the middle of the morning but gradually diminished as the sun grew fiercer. By the time the muadhin began calling the faithful to midday prayers, we were sitting on our own while I was giving a lightly discreet account of my life in England. We fell silent during the muadhin’s call, then my stepfather rose and put on his jacket and started to walk out of the shop and towards the side of the house. I walked alongside him for a few steps, picking up my story where the muadhin had broken into it, when my stepfather said without looking towards me, Go and say your prayers.

  He said this harshly, with something like disdain. I should have expected it. He was, after all, a Wahhabi, those lovers of the unadorned word of God, zealots of the Sunna, the muwahhidun. The original Wahhabis were the fundamentalists of fundamentalists, and could proudly take their place among the fanatical crazies of any religion. They banned music, dancing, poetry, silk, gold and jewellery, and probably a few other little pleasures which it would not become their holinesses to mention aloud. They abhorred begging and the veneration of holy men. If their greatest historical act of vandalism was to destroy the tomb of Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, at Kerbala, their most persistent persecution has been reserved for sceptics and philosophers, for the Sufi orders. Some of their modern ikhwan have doubts about whether God would have sanctioned the telephone or television, let alone rockets to the moon.

  My stepfather was not that kind of Wahhabi, but I should have known that there would be no messing about with prayers. I guess I was just trying to put off the moment. In any case, after he snapped his command I turned on my heels and made towards the mosque. It was only a few hundred yards behind our house, past the
old baobab tree which domineered over the clearing, and then a few steps down the narrow street on the right with its shut-in smells of gutters. I had not been in a mosque in all the time I lived in England, had hardly said a prayer except in parody. I knew this moment would arrive and feared that I would disgrace myself, would make a hideous blunder which would reveal my long neglect. I left my sandals on the wide, stone terrace and walked to the stone water-tanks to wash. I washed my hands, my face, my arms up to the elbow, behind my ears, my brow and my feet up to the ankles. The three steps leading to the door of the mosque itself were wet from the feet of others who had preceded me, and the mat just inside the door was dark and spongy from those same feet. People were scattered round the small space, sitting on their own, leaning against the squat pillars in the middle of the mosque, or sitting against the walls. Occasionally someone would get up to greet a new arrival and exchange a few words, but there was no conversation.

  I sat against the back wall, keeping my eyes on the floor, afraid that I would catch the eye of someone I would fail to recognize and who would take offence at my lack of greeting, or that I would greet someone I did recognize but who would have no memory of me, and who would look as astonished as the man at the airport had done. I sat there sinking gently with anxiety, awaiting exposure, ashamed of myself for my feebleness. When the call to rise to prayer came, we formed lines behind the imam, repeating his words silently to ourselves, then bowing and kneeling in satisfying unison. As I rose to leave after the prayer, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. And a moment later someone else I had known years ago also came to greet me, and others whom I recognized walked past with a smile or a word of welcome. The prayer and the mosque had brought with them a surge of the familiar, so that despite my anxieties about blundering I had been secretly smiling at the memories brought back by the smell of the mats on the floor, the bluish whitewash which covered the walls, the gentle hum of muttered prayers. I felt a surprising pride, for a man of my age and history, when I overheard someone saying in a loud whisper, That’s Hashim’s son. The first thing he did when he got off the plane was to come in here to say his prayers. They did not think me alien.

  After that I needed no encouragement to go to the mosque whenever the muadhin called, except I could never rise for the dawn prayers. I could not rise until ten in the morning, even though I had given up (had had to give up) my three rums in the evening and slept deeply and exhaustedly through the night. For years I had been used to waking up at six to finish off some preparation or marking before setting off for school. Now I found I was keeping adolescent hours and felt shattered when I got up. To get to the crusted bathroom I had to walk past my mother’s and stepfather’s room, and their door was always kept open all day and all evening, until they went to bed. My stepfather’s chair, with a coffee table and his transistor beside it, was positioned right opposite the door, so he could see the traffic that went up and down the corridor. My first visit to the bathroom inevitably (so it seemed) coincided with his final cup of coffee before he switched the radio off and went downstairs to watch the traffic that went past the shop. It was as if he was waiting for me to rise before he left his station. Because the bathroom was so loathsome, I undressed in my room and put on a bathrobe, to avoid getting my night clothes soiled. But the bathrobe I had with me was a skimpy, towelling number, the kind of thing you might wear on the beach (not that I ever wore it like that because I never went to the beach in England). Strolling past my stepfather’s room every morning in this state of undress, at my age, knowing that he would have been up since four and would have said his prayers before listening to news bulletins on half the world’s radio stations, made me feel that I deserved the disdainful look I imagined him casting on me as I hurried past. I never looked.

  But my regular attendance at the mosque did win me smiles and approval, even from him. And as the days passed and we sat together in the shop every morning, drinking endless cups of coffee from the huge thermos I was given to take down with me, our conversations changed. In the interstices between visitors, some of whom I began to understand were on a regular and daily round of calls, he spoke with a fullness I had not anticipated after our desultory beginning. It was not so much that he talked intimately or said things that were completely unknown to me (though some were), but that he spoke about them without intensity and in generous detail. And when I asked him to explain something, he seemed to do so without evasion.

  I hadn’t known that his father was a grave-digger, or that his family had been shunned for this. His father was hafif, feeble, and you wouldn’t have thought he could do work like that, wielding picks and shovels with such precision. But the mosques always came for him because grave-diggers were rare, and especially ones who felt a need to placate their betters, who felt such desire to deflect the contempt in which they were held that they did not argue about what they were given for their labours. His father carried a certain smell on him, and when he was younger my stepfather used to think it was the smell of death, maiti, the stink of flesh drying out and decomposing in the heat, or the high fragrance of the wet earth of the graveyard. That smell, and the clumsy tools, and the casual mockery with which he saw his father treated – those were the things that determined him to take on whatever work came his way, to find honour and prosperity in this life as well as God’s forgiveness and mercy in the next, but never to follow in the path his father had trodden.

  Later he found out that the smell was not that of death after all, at least not in the way he had thought it was, but of a tumour on the inside of his father’s right thigh, which he nursed for the last twelve years of his life. In the end the doctors cut the leg off – my stepfather said this with a brutal side-swipe motion of his flattened palm – but it was too late. He died right there on the operating table.

  My stepfather wasn’t at home when that happened. Business was bad in those years, and in some desperation he had found work on a dhow tramping along the coast towards the Gulf and Persia. He was away for nearly two years, living on scraps and millet, like the savage people of the interior. At least that’s what they ate at that time. Nowadays, these people we are not allowed to call savages any more eat whatever Europeans send them in sacks and tins. He left the dhow in Bombay, because the merchant who had chartered the ship wanted the nahodha to go on to Siam and Java, and my stepfather had had enough of working as a sailor for a while. After he was paid off, he spent three months sightseeing in India – Delhi, Agra, Hyderabad, Madras. Pictures of those cities were still very clear in his mind, even though it was such a long time ago and he had never had the opportunity to go back. At Madras he joined another dhow which was making its way back in the monsoons.

  It was not until the years just before the war that business began to pick up again, he said. And during the war itself, with all the shortages, an alert trader could always make something here and there. The real money was in the hands of the Indian merchants and creditors, of course. God has given them a gift for business but has denied them charity. They were the only ones who could afford to bring in the goods that were needed, which traders bought from them on credit, and repaid with interest. From the beginning, when the Omanis made themselves lords in these parts two hundred years ago, they brought Indian bankers to look after their affairs. The merchant Topan, in his day, was richer than the sultan, and half the petty princes of the islands had their land mortgaged to him. They knew their work, these merchants, and they knew the vainglory of princes and sultans. So they financed their extravagant display – lavish mansions and opulent weddings and grandiose schemes, pedigree horses and gilded scabbards for their long knives – and held the deeds to the lands the Omanis had granted themselves after the conquest of the islands. Sooner or later, the creditors owned the land and the princes and the lords lived in a pretence of prosperity which the Indian merchants prudently and wisely financed. While the sultans and their nobles arrogantly strutted in their tarnished finery, and intrigued and plotted endlessly, the mer
chants were in control of affairs. By the time the lords wanted their property back, the creditors’ lawyers had tied everything up and the British were here to ensure that the law was obeyed.

  When the war came it was possible to do a different kind of business. (He grinned at this point, and although he did not say so, I knew from somewhere I can no longer remember that in the early Forties he had spent a month in prison for smuggling.) Everything was short and rationed, the British needed it for their own people, who were far more important than us. So whatever you could find – rice, sugar, simsim, millet – even if it was of poor quality, there was always a good market for it. People learnt to eat jaggery and brown rice and shellfish when before they would have spurned such food as fit only for servants and heathens.

  It was difficult to get news of the war. There were no radios then, or very few, and those who owned radios kept quiet about it because they were afraid they would be confiscated. The British were nervous about everything, so we guessed that things were not going well for them. It was not a surprise. We knew the Germans and how they made war. Some of the riff-raff here joined up, and some young people who were still at school did so too, because they were promised that they would be sent to a big college when they returned, and would all become doctors and lawyers. It’s a good thing you didn’t become a lawyer, their business is to cheat. Or a policeman, because if you are a policeman and they order you to arrest your mother you have no choice but to obey, and God has said Honour your father and your mother after Me. So if you become a policeman, you are also saying that you are prepared to disobey God if the need arises. Anyway, they were sent to Abyssinia to fight the Italians and to Burma to fight the Japanese, and we didn’t see them again until the end of the war, those who came back. The ones who had joined up from school asked about their big college, and they were sent to the teachers’ college in Beit-el-Ras, and others became policemen after all.