Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘We’re setting up a translation project,’ Amur Malik said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the desk, the dynamic ideas-man-in-action now taking on the gravitas of the patron with a job up his sleeve. His voice, which had in it a quality of genial clarity, now took on a husky timbre, a secretive, confiding intensity. ‘We’ve put in a bid to a Scandinavian cultural foundation and expect their agreement to come through any time now. They’ve helped us in the past, and they are usually very generous. They’ll fund the whole thing: staff, equipment, publication, marketing. There’ll probably be a couple of trips to Copenhagen as well, to coordinate the details. I’d like you to be part of that project.’

  Amur Malik glanced at Akbar and gave him a radiant smile, mischievously revelling in the bounty of his patronage. This, I imagined him saying to Akbar, is what it means to be a Permanent Secretary to a Minister. To be able to hand out such luscious prizes to the deserving of your choice.

  ‘But the funding hasn’t yet come through,’ Akbar said, speaking to me, cautioning me not to get over-excited about the prospect of a visit to sunny Copenhagen. Perhaps calling it funding made it seem less like begging and dependence, less like taking the guilty money of our betters to throw away on trinkets and petty exhibitionism. Funding. Words like that transcend hypocrisy. They become like liturgical language, solemn and layered with intimations, but no longer precise enough to resist proliferating meanings.

  ‘What will the project be translating?’ I asked. ‘Assuming that the Scandinavian cultural foundation comes up with the funding.’ I wanted to try the word aloud, to see if it soothed to speak it.

  ‘They will,’ Amur Malik said earnestly. ‘We’ve dealt with them before. I’m sure they will be understanding, akhe. Have no fear about that. The Scandinavians and the Dutch are among our most reliable donors. Actually we’ve submitted the same bid to a Japanese foundation as well. We’re trying to bring them into the picture too, though this is only a recent development and we don’t have any results. As I understand it, the Japanese are very generous once they’re convinced. But as I say, this is a new project for us, at least on the cultural frontier.’

  ‘So . . .’ I began, wanting to take him back to the object of this labour, but he cut me off with a bright, knowing smile.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he said, broadening his smile to take in Akbar and then the whole room with its demure light and the cool breeze off the sea. ‘You’ve struggled all these years to make a successful life for yourself, and now you have a good position, with all the comforts and conveniences you desire. Don’t think I don’t know how difficult it must have been to achieve that. Some people here think that living in those places is just a matter of turning up at the bank once a month to collect your salary, and the rest of the time you can put your feet up in front of the TV. Listen, I know it’s not like that, and that it required hard work and dedication to get to where you are. And now that you have, why should you give it all up and come back here to begin the struggle all over again?’

  His face was earnest again, an understanding man of experience. I would have liked to have told him that he was overestimating my success, but it felt good to be spoken to as a conqueror of circumstance rather than as one of its minnows.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you why you should come back,’ continued the tireless man. I felt Akbar stir beside me. I wanted to say to Amur Malik, You look vigorous and well fed. You have a neat, impressive moustache, and a pleasant face which is probably responsive to most of your commands. I’d say that you appear to be coping sensibly with the difficult and humiliating estate you find yourself in. This stolen room in which we sit, and in which you spend your days, is pleasant and even beautiful, and no one can prevent you from saying whatever you like, from weaving whatever fantasy appeals to you, from toying with whatever significances your words can accommodate. So why do you have to talk to me as if there is a purpose to what we are likely to do, to what you pretend you require of me? Can you not just say, Isn’t this a pleasant room I’ve acquired for myself? Have I not done well? Isn’t it a beautiful day?

  He couldn’t. ‘Because we need you here. Forgive me for saying this, but they don’t need you there. They have enough of their own people to do whatever is necessary, and sooner or later they will say that they have no use for you. Then you will find yourself in an alien land that is unable to resist mocking people of our kind. If you come back, you’ll be with your own people, of your own religion, who speak your own language. What you do will have a meaning and a place in the world you know. You’ll be with your family. You’ll matter, and what you do will matter. Everything that you have learned there will be of benefit to us. It will make a difference here, rather than being – once again, forgive me for saying this – another anonymous contribution to the petty comfort and well-being of a society that does not care for you.’

  I couldn’t have put it better if I’d tried, although of course he could not know the fertile subtleties and complexities that enriched my condition. Of course they needed me there. It helped them know who they were. Amur Malik glanced at Akbar, who took up his cue and said, It’s the truth. There they were again, after the truth. Amur Malik approved the terse concreteness of Akbar’s contribution, for he nodded firmly, once, and then leaned back in his ample chair and nodded again.

  ‘I might add’, he said, growing expansive now that he was content to have come so close to delivering the truth, ‘that this approach I am making to you was initiated by the highest authorities. I mentioned to the Prime Minister a couple of days ago that I had heard’ – a nod towards Akbar – ‘that you were back for a visit. He remembered you when you were at school together. He was several years ahead of you, but he remembered your reputation for brilliance. We all do, indeed we all do. He said to me, Do what you can to persuade him to return. We need people like him to come back, to rebuild the country to something like it was and to move it forward into prosperity. This project would only be the beginning. We would expect you to move to bigger things after a while, and that is no idle chatter.’

  Amur Malik sat still for a moment, his eyes lowered, contemplating what he had done, no doubt assessing in his mind’s eye whether it was enough. Yes, of course I was flattered. Brilliance. Well, anyone can do with a bit of that. It beats standing in a cold, muddy pool eating worms any day. And one of my fantasies in the early days of England’s cold depressions was that one day I would return to preside over my knackered land. At first I would resist the endless pleas to return and take charge of matters, but in the end duty would overcome my understandable reluctance and I would agree. The President-Elect, I sometimes named myself in my youthful day-dreams, before even day-dreams became too ridiculous to entertain in the face of life’s true decline. But I was also puzzled. What did they think I could do? There must be some mistake. I’m a schoolteacher, for God’s sake. I’m unfulfilled. I know that I perform this unthrilling task in the land of giants and wizards, and 24-hour porno TV channels on cable, and the mother of parliaments and the most exciting metropolis since Nineveh, and at the heart of the Holy European Empire, but none of that makes me deserving of such expectations. And in any case I spend most of my time there on buses, or waiting for buses, or in a smelly school building, or fretting in a bed with a woman I’m beginning to suspect despises me. Why such a heavy pitch to persuade someone as sunk in mediocrity as I to return to a squalor which was evidently beyond their powers and mine to do anything about? Was it just an irresistible desire for moral superiority? Give up your treacherous comforts and come and suffer like us? Perhaps if I told them about my buggered heart they would realize their error.

  Emma. How I missed her.

  ‘Please thank the Prime Minister for me,’ I said, and chuckled at the improbability of it all. ‘I am honoured by his invitation. It was kind of him to think me worth persuading.’

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ Akbar said, affronted by my levity. Yes it is, I wanted to say. It’s a joke. An
d isn’t this stolen room beautiful? I’d expect the Prime Minister’s to be even more lovely.

  ‘You can thank him yourself, in person,’ Amur Malik said, smiling to make light of Akbar’s intensity. ‘He’d like you to ring his office and fix a time when you can call on him. In fact, you can call his secretary right now.’

  He reached for his phone, ivory and silent for all the time we had been there, but I shook my head vigorously. He stopped in mid-action and looked at me steadily for a few seconds. No more Mr Nice Guy in a minute. I could sense his irritation, and for a gleeful second or two I thought he would threaten me, or start reading some miserable lesson of duty to me. It would have been amusing to see all that genial sliminess peel away to reveal the cynical bully I suspected dwelt beneath it.

  ‘What is it that the project will translate?’ I asked. ‘You still haven’t told me about the details yet.’

  ‘The great books of the world,’ he said, I think with some relief and certainly not with a triumphant bark of appropriation, but in a voice of mildly beseeching modesty. ‘We want to make the profound thoughts they contain available to ordinary people. Of course, the project will work out its own priorities but I would’ve thought it would probably want to begin with Shakespeare, Marx, Tolstoy and Hemingway. As perhaps you know, the Rais of our Federal Republic is very fond of Hemingway, and he is himself a translator of Shakespeare. Marx we need so that people can have a firmer understanding of the democratic socialism which is the governing ethos of our state, and Tolstoy for his sympathy with the peasants and the masses.’

  I should say at this point that the Rais of our Federal Republic is no relation to the cannibal lout who dangled his cock to the venerable greybeards at Kiboni Palace, nor to the somewhat more placid incumbent who replaced (after the abortive radio campaign) the man who replaced the founding Beast. The island part of our republic had been forced into marriage with the big state next door after the uprising, but we retained our own Rais, and our own Revolutionary Council for the Redemption of the Nation, our own jails and a myriad of picnic sites where our psychopathic authorities could play their dirty little games. We shared the same flag, though – yet another one – and used the same money, with a picture of the same man on the bank notes. And that man was the Rais of the Federal Republic, who had presided for decades over the crumbling state while his carefully modulated commentaries on the African nation soothed liberal consciences in Europe and North America (as well as in one or two advanced institutions in backward nations). In the earlier years of his reign, before he became seriously indispensable to the stability of the world, he had translated two plays of Shakespeare. In my last year at school (he was already on the throne then), we were required to put on a performance of his translation of Julius Caesar, which everyone from the stage hands to the leading actors sabotaged. Even the audience played their part, booing us and smashing louvre windows in their exasperation with our ineptitude. That was the Rais that Amur Malik had in mind, though I hadn’t known about his love of Hemingway.

  ‘These great thoughts all seem to be from Europe and its dispersals. Would you consider translating great thoughts from anywhere else?’ I asked.

  Amur Malik smiled. ‘I understand what you mean, but we have to be contemporary.’ He said the word in English. I nodded meekly and waited, mulling over contemporary. Perhaps that was another liturgical word, like donor and funding, perfectly understandable to Scandinavian cultural foundations.

  We left Amur Malik’s beautiful office with me promising to think about his proposition (I suggested that it would be best to leave it until the funding came through), promising to call at his office whenever I had a spare moment, promising to ring the Prime Minister’s secretary for an appointment, and just generally making promises about staying in touch, about caring for our people and their future prosperity. That, after all, was what mattered above everything else.

  ‘That man is just words,’ Akbar said, after he had got over the transition from the office to the heat of the streets.

  ‘I thought you liked his words. It’s the truth,’ I mimicked.

  ‘It is the truth. It’s just that with the bunch we have sitting over us here it would just be a waste of energy. Anyway, I had to say something. You were frowning so hard at him I thought you’d do something silly. And don’t forget to ring the Prime Minister’s office.’

  ‘Yes, he could be useful,’ I said.

  Akbar told and retold the story of our morning. My stepfather nodded uninterestedly and rolled himself another cigarette. That’s what government is now, begging for alms, he said. May God have mercy on us. My mother looked interested but then became afraid that it was a trick to get me to come back so they could lock me up. Why should they want to lock me up? I asked. You don’t know these people, she said. They’ve gone crazy with malice. Look at how dry their faces are. God has emptied their hearts of pity, astaghfirullah. On our afternoon stroll later that day, Akbar regaled every acquaintance with whom we stopped to exchange greetings with the story of the morning’s play, and everyone scoffed at the idea, telling me not to waste my talents and my opportunity. For God’s sake, there’s nothing here, they said.

  Later that evening, when the television had been switched off and the children had been chased off to bed, the talk once again returned to the offer of a job. By now Akbar was treating it as an inexhaustible joke, whereas I was beginning to think it had had its run.

  ‘Stay here with us, my akhe. We can then marry you off without any complications,’ he said.

  My mother looked displeased. It was not how she would have wanted the subject raised. As I glanced quickly around the room – at my mother, Akbar, his wife Rukiya – I knew I was about to be ambushed. This had been planned. They told me they did not want to interfere in my life, to intrude in my affairs. It was only concern that I should be happy, and who could be happy without a family? As the days had passed, I had begun to think that the subject would not come up, that having seen me again after all this time they had decided it was best not to raise the matter. I had determined, in any case, that if it did come up I would treat the whole thing lightly, turn it into a family joke and make my escape. So after the initial surprise of their sudden attack, I put on an amused grin and sat back to listen, not protesting overmuch, relying on my detachment and lack of enthusiasm to make plain to them that they were getting nowhere.

  My mother was the most earnest, determined to persuade. This project mattered to her. Rukiya put in dutiful words of support (in these early stages) and was full of encouraging smiles. Akbar was enjoying himself, being satirical and hectoring in turn, relishing my absurd situation but unable to resist acting the worldly man of experience, the responsible family man bringing a libertine brother to heel. You can’t go on doing those filthy things you’re doing out there for ever, he said.

  ‘Akbar, don’t be disgusting,’ Rukiya admonished, glancing at my mother.

  ‘Soon you’ll be too old, and then you’ll make yourself into a clown,’ he continued, taking no notice of his wife. ‘Chasing after young things who’ll spurn you and laugh at you behind your back.’

  I must say, I almost unclipped my superior grin at that point, so that I could say a few words to puncture his smug moralizing. But I couldn’t do that without talking about things I did not want to, or telling untruths. So I stayed with my detachment, chuckling knowingly, as if Akbar’s description of how I lived was not too far off the mark. Yeah, that was me, cruiser of filthy city streets. Then I saw the horror in my mother’s eyes and wished I had protested. Akbar too saw her look of abhorrence and laughed loudly. It’s only a joke, Ma, he said.

  ‘Soon you’ll be too old and no one will want to marry you,’ she said, giving me a long, truth-speaking stare. ‘Do you think her people jumped at the suggestion? You have been away so long, they had no idea what you had become. None of us had any idea. Then they were worried about losing their daughter. They were afraid that you would take her back there and that
would be the last they would see of her. But they were also worried about your age.’

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ I said, just managing to keep the facile grin on my face. Emma. ‘They’re reasonable concerns. So why don’t we just leave the whole thing right there and put an end to their worries?’

  ‘We talked with them,’ my mother said.

  ‘We talked them round,’ Rukiya said, wanting to be precise, not smiling this time. ‘You must let her study.’

  ‘God, how old is she?’ I asked.

  That was the deal, that if after she met me she wanted to be married to me, I would have to agree to see her through a medical degree. She had already done a year at the university medical school on the mainland, so she had all the entry qualifications. (You can imagine what the self-besotted over-achievers who run British medical schools would have to say about those entry qualifications.) She was twenty, by the way. I remembered Emma making fun of me, saying that if I had stayed at home I would be taking a seventeen-year-old out of school by now to make her my third wife. The memory and the thought of Emma distressed me.

  ‘We also told them what a brilliant success you have been in England,’ Akbar said, signalling with his loud laughter that he was about to satirize me. ‘How you write letters to the newspapers, travel in a coach and horses around London, have tea with the Queen.’

  ‘I wish you had not done this,’ I said, ignoring Akbar and addressing my mother. ‘I don’t need a wife. If I did I would’ve found one for myself. And I am too old. Her family should find a young man for her, someone her own age.’

  ‘She wants to study,’ Rukiya said. I thought I heard a note of indignation in her tone. At my ingratitude for all they had done? ‘She has already turned down two proposals from younger men, because she would not have been able to continue studying if she married either of them. What she wants is to study to be a doctor in England.’