Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  We knew the Germans and how they made war, but we didn’t know the Russians, and didn’t know that they were even more savage and brave. When the war turned in favour of the British, we began to get more news, and that was when we first heard about the Russians. Some people refused to believe that the Germans were losing again. We knew the Germans. Even after the war was over, and cinema vans went around everywhere showing pictures of the German surrender, of the destruction of their cities, of those camps where they had murdered Jews, some still refused to believe it. British propaganda, they said. Propaganda, that was a big word in those days. The end of the war was propaganda, the victory of the Jews in Palestine was propaganda, as were the killings in India and Pakistan at their independence. But the end of the war also brought prosperity, for a while, until politics came.

  ‘I’m not doing anything to him,’ I said to Akbar. ‘He talks about what he likes and I sit and listen. Today he was telling me how the family of Mohammed Thani persuaded the authorities to give them back their house. It was a blow-by-blow account, and he played all the parts himself: at one time he was the family, then he was some minor clerk at the Housing Ministry, then the Permanent Secretary, then the Minister, until eventually he was the President himself, the Seyyid Rais in person, the zimwi of Kiboni Palace.’

  Akbar grinned. ‘Has he told you the story of when they were summoned to Kiboni? It was at the time when girls from various communities were being forced to marry black Africans, especially fat old black Africans who were senior officers in the government, the Members of the Revolutionary Redemption Council, may God curse them.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I heard about it.’

  Akbar looked at me for a moment. ‘I wrote to you to ask if you could get any publicity for this . . . crime. I sent you some documents and photographs.’

  ‘I tried to. I wrote to newspapers but no one was interested.’ I had written to the Guardian anyway, which had replied guardedly, and sent the material to their correspondent in the region. Later I heard that he was a personal friend of our Federal Rais, and was a regular visitor at State House. So it was then easy to imagine what had happened to those documents when they reached him. For a while I had worried about Akbar, and whether the papers would all be traced back to him, but I should have known that the pathetic bullies who ran our security services were unlikely to be capable of such cleverness. Their real talent lay in plunder and torture and petty persecution.

  ‘You never replied to my letter,’ Akbar said, and then looked away and chuckled as if he was amused by me. ‘The sight of those beautiful young Iranian or Arab or Indian women who were unavailable to them drove the old lechers crazy. Their pale complexions and long, glossy hair tormented them. So they had one of their mad conversations in the Revolutionary Council for the Redemption of the Nation, and decided that these women were racists, God’s truth. That was what these racists to shame all racists arrived at as a way of forcing those women into their beds, may God strike them with vile diseases in old age. Racism is an evil which our nation cannot tolerate, the radio announced the same evening. This was the preamble to naming names and requiring the delivery of so-and-so to the house of Member of the Revolutionary Redemption Council so-and-so, where the marriage ceremony would then take place. The monsters even expected the parents and relatives to deliver their own daughters to this cannibal feast.

  ‘Anyway, as you may imagine, most of the women refused to go. Their fathers grumbled and their mothers wailed, and marriages were hastily arranged to pre-empt this catastrophe. But the old lechers, may God rot their mean souls, were having none of it, and army trucks came to collect the lucky brides from their homes. The Father of the People himself came to hear of these grumbles from the women’s fathers and mothers. He was marrying and unmarrying at will, without need of army trucks. Just a quiet word and the parents would deliver the lucky daughter to the beast’s lair, to be violated and dallied with at the Redeemer’s whim. But then the Rais had the power to torture and maim and worse, without stirring from his divan. When he heard of the grumbling, he summoned representatives from all the various communities, by locale, religious sect, country of origin or any other category they could dream up. His Chief of Protocol or Head of Security or whoever does these useless things must have spent a whole week at it. Of all things, Ba was summoned, though I don’t know who he represents, and his one daughter was already married. So there was this crowd of greybeards sitting around a banqueting table or something up at the palace, muttering their prayers while expecting God knows what. The Father of the People strolls in, and the sight of those cowering old men makes him laugh that rumbling, ghoulish laugh of his.

  ‘I hear some of you are grumbling,’ Akbar said, making his voice deep and menacing, and then bursting into laughter. ‘You should hear Ba do it.’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  ‘So then, while his voice is still rumbling round the room, the great man unzips his trousers, pulls out his cock and puts it on the table. He lets everyone have a good look before he says: What’s there to grumble about? It’s not that big. They can swallow that whole without any difficulty. Now go home and stop making trouble. Do you think you’re something special? Those days are over. My government abhors racism, and will remove it by any means at my disposal, including this. Then he taps his cock and puts it away, and gives his audience his rumbling, fiendish laugh before returning to whatever debauchery he had interrupted for that bit of fun.

  ‘That was our big man. Nothing was too much for him. No meanness was too petty for him. Perhaps those who cut him down with machine guns, mean bastards though they were themselves, will receive just a tola of mercy from God when their day comes. But I hope that right now our big man is burning in Hell, admitted early as a special privilege, and that he is already sampling those impossible punishments God has promised some of us in the next life.’

  Later, as we walked back home with the muadhin summoning everyone to evening prayers (no one stayed out too long after dark in these times), Akbar said, ‘You say he talks. I know he talks. He sits there with those other old men every day and does nothing else. But now when he comes into the house he says nothing. He just sits in his room. That’s not how he is usually.’

  I had noticed that when Akbar wanted to say something harsh he looked away, and his face became a grimace of ferocity and disdain. That was what happened now as he spoke. ‘I saw him sitting in there a couple of evenings ago and I went in and said to him, What’s today’s news? Something like that. And he gave me that long, mean look of his, as if I was the world’s biggest fool. Then he said, I’m just thinking. What about? I asked. Do you know what he said? Things that cause me pain. I’ve never heard him say something like that. Things that cause me pain, and with a blank look on his face. That’s what I meant when I asked what you were doing to him. And all those secret talks with Ma, I can hear you two rumbling away until the early hours. What’s going on? What are you up to?’

  I could see and hear his anger, and I guessed that what he wanted to say was something more brutal, something to make me stop unsettling their lives. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps he was simply wounded by the exclusion, by what might seem like the rekindling of old affections whose consequences would be alienating for him.

  ‘I asked her about my father,’ I said. ‘My father Abbas who ran away.’

  Akbar did not glance at me or break his stride. I expected him to turn to me, aghast, as if I had drawn back a curtain on an intimate embarrassment.

  ‘That’s what we’ve been talking about mostly,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to know about all that. When I left before, I was too young to ask.’

  He nodded, and although he did not say anything, I could feel his censure. Have you come back after all this time to make her rake over all that old stuff? Then he nodded again, so perhaps he was not disapproving after all, just uncertain what he could say about something so fraught with wounding possibilities. Unbeknown to him, his
face began to change. His frowning sneer gradually slackened, and I saw him take a deep breath and release it in a slow sigh.

  ‘I thought you’d come back to get married,’ he said with a grin. ‘Not to carry out an archaeological project.’

  ‘Cut out that getting married stuff,’ I said, and in this way we smilingly slid past the troublesome moment.

  2

  Sometime during my second week at home I received an unexpected visitor. He turned up just before lunch, full of apologies for the awkwardness of his timing, but he had just heard from Akbar that I was back and so he thought he would call on his way home from work, and he was sorry he had not had time to bring me even a small token to welcome me back. Just about all he had been able to pick up in the the rush were these few prints of the old waterfront before it was destroyed by the Royal Naval bombardment in 1890. Had I come across them before? A researcher from the university history project had found them in the Ministry archives and had had some copies made. In one of the prints, three barefoot Marines from an Irish regiment posed with their guns across their chests, in front of the trophy of a sprawled black body. One of them had his naked foot on the dead man’s head.

  My visitor said he had seen me at the mosque the other day, from a distance, and had been unsure, but this morning Akbar had confirmed that it was indeed I, and he thought he had better come and greet me, empty-handed though he was. How kind, but no, he would not stay for lunch, shukran. We were standing just inside the front door, and no, he would not come upstairs and intrude at such a time. Would I have time to call on him at his office the next day? Or the day after, if that was more convenient? It would please him very much if I would. There were many things for us to talk about. La, la, no, he really would not stay for lunch. His family would already be waiting for him to begin lunch, ahsante sana. Until tomorrow then, inshaallah.

  My visitor was the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Culture, and although I had heard his name mentioned and had been to school with one of his younger brothers or cousins, I had never met him before. I couldn’t imagine the many things we had to talk about in his office. No one upstairs was interested in my visitor, except Akbar.

  ‘He could be useful,’ he said. ‘I’ll come along.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You won’t know the way,’ he said.

  ‘What about your work?’ I asked.

  ‘What work? We won’t do any work here. We just turn up at the office and hang around and then go home.’ He worked at the Ministry of the Environment, and it was true that he did not seem to spend much time there. He turned up at the house two or three times every morning, on the thinnest of pretexts. He had heard that there was some good fresh beef at the market, so he was going to get some before it was all gone. Or one of the fishing boats had brought in a large catch of tuna out of season, and he was going to the beach to see if there were still a few slices going. Or he thought he would go and pay the electricity bill, or try to get the builder to come and have a look at the ceiling panels which seemed on the point of collapsing. He almost never went back to work after lunch, although in theory the working day did not finish until four in the afternoon.

  The Permanent Secretary’s name was Amur Malik. He was a short man in his early fifties, just inclining to plumpness. His office was in the former house of an Indian family. I didn’t know the family, but the house was near the Post Office, and years ago I had walked past it several times and seen the family at their affairs, coming and going, washing a car, chatting at the threshold with a caller who was not intimate enough to be invited inside. The house would have been confiscated after the uprising, as were so many houses and farms and businesses and cars and anything that was not paltry or useless. The state had an insatiable appetite for plunder then, and many barons and knights who convetously sought their portion. A wall ran round the front of the house, enclosing a courtyard that was paved but was also planted here and there with jasmine bushes and dwarf oleanders and an ornamental palm. Against the wall was a rampant creeper with tiny mauve flowers I had never seen before. I reached for a flower, but Akbar told me not to touch. Its sap will stain your clothes, he said. I was only going to pick one of the little flowers, not roll around in it, but I pulled my hand back in case he had meant something I had not understood.

  We went up the wide, stone staircase that led on to the veranda, and then into the sudden cool of the building. Amur Malik came out with hand extended, and if he was surprised to see Akbar there with me, he gave no sign of it. I doubt he was – government offices were like bazaars, and every transaction was conducted in the public gaze, as I had already discovered when trying to change money or ask about making a long-distance phone call. Amur Malik’s office was a large, comfortable-looking room with a view of the sea. Perhaps in its earlier usage it would have been the family room, where parents and children would have sat in the evening to catch the gentle breeze which blew off the water and to listen to the music on the radio.

  Amur Malik waved us to our seats and then sank back into an easy chair behind his huge and empty desk. For a moment he held a large, genial grin on his face, then with a look of concentration scratched the edge of his neatly trimmed moustache with a crooked index finger. I watched with mild envy as he and Akbar slipped effortlessly into a cheerful, light conversation. I knew it wasn’t something I would have been able to do, but perhaps that was because they were at ease with each other and with themselves. Living among strangers for such a time, I had long ago lost that casual assurance, that ability to lean back comfortably, scratch my moustache and chat.

  Akbar began talking about the project he was working on, the renovation of the old colonial hotel and the restoration of the European quarter around it to its period splendour. There were to be some structural repairs, but not many, considering the neglect of recent years. Eyebrows were raised here in mutual commiseration. They knew how to build houses in those days, Amur Malik said, and Akbar made a deep, rolling noise like a male pigeon on its lustful rounds. The real cost was in replacing the fittings and the decor. In that department everything was run down and neglected: frayed rugs, filthy showers, broken light switches, and you should see the state of the toilets. The kitchen was disgusting. The elephant-foot umbrella stand listed in the inventory had disappeared, the hotel library had been pilfered, and many of the books that remained were infested with bookworm. All those first-edition classics of English literature which so many visitors had been surprised to find there and had written about in newspapers in Europe, so many of them ruined. And that was only the hotel, let alone all those other houses nearby where people like Livingstone and Stanley and Burton had lived as they put together their expeditions to the interior, buildings which were part of history but which had been turned into hovels by people who cared nothing about their past.

  ‘It will take a lot of money to get all that sorted,’ Amur Malik said. ‘But it’s necessary . . . It’s a pity the Aga Khan Trust wasn’t interested in the project. I mean, there’s tourism potential in this.’

  ‘But we’re confident UNESCO will sponsor it. We’re expecting a fact-finding team quite soon.’

  ‘Hard work, it’s all such hard work,’ Amur Malik said. ‘There’s nothing tougher than attracting international sponsorship.’

  ‘We do our best,’ Akbar said.

  I kept my eyes on both of them, to see if there was any way in which the conversation was ironic, if they were making fun of themselves, or just taking the piss. Were they soberly talking about throwing money at colonial curios when the whole town was falling down about their ears, food was short, toilets were blocked, water was available for two hours in the middle of the night and the electricity was as likely to be off as on? And when the radio and television were blaring lies at all hours of every day and night, and for every simple thing that you wanted you had to lie belly-up on the floor and play the clown? I looked for a glint of cynicism or a tone of mockery in their faces and their voices, but they see
med absorbed by the weightiness of their concerns. Whose history was it they were renovating? Then suddenly it came to me that they were talking like this for my benefit, that it didn’t matter what was being said because it all amounted to the same thing: project, sponsors, UNESCO, the work of nations. Not to impress me as the visitor from Europe, but as an expression of their engagement with pressing and urgent problems of the world they lived in, we lived in. I don’t know.

  ‘Yes, we’re all doing our best,’ Amur Malik said, turning to me. ‘Which is why I’m so glad you’ve been able to come in today, akhe, my brother. There’s a lot to be done, and we need people like you to come back and do it with us. I am going to try my best to persuade you of that. All our capable people have left to work for other countries, leaving only us boneheads here. We need them to come back and help us rebuild the country, wallahi bwana. There’s a job right here in this Ministry which you can have tomorrow if you want. I hope when I tell you about it you will feel excited enough to want to return and join us.’

  I was flattered, of course – they need me here – but not for a second was it a suggestion to be taken seriously. My life was elsewhere, principally Emma was elsewhere, and I could not in my wildest imaginings picture her agreeing to give up her university job and the conveniences of Blighty to come and unblock toilets on a tumble-down raft floating on the edges of the Indian Ocean, with captain and crew that to an unimplicated eye could only seem like a cannibal rabble. None the less, I asked what the job was, and saw a small, cynical smile cross Akbar’s face. I could have done with that a few minutes before when they were talking so seriously about the elephant-foot umbrella stand and the history which was to be renovated by international sponsorship.