I left the TV on and went back to my room to await my fate. Emma was waiting for me as usual when I got back to the room. Whenever I went back into it after I’d been out, it was as if she had been in there all the time, waiting for me to return. And then whole chunks of our lives together came to me and filled me with dread and longing. Sometimes I thought I heard her crying in the middle of the night, not loudly sobbing, but speaking with a broken voice while tears flowed out of her eyes. I don’t remember her crying very much. I was the one with the tears, and in recent times Emma had tended to become irritated by my loss of control. How fascinating!
I expected that after the anguished confab about the vile English woman, Uncle Hashim would hobble to my room and wave his cane at me as he pronounced his curses. But I should have known better. I should have known that even in old age and dosed up to his fingertips with valium, Uncle Hashim would not forget to act with his customary decorum, would not soil his honour over a wayward stepson’s misdemeanours with an English woman. That night I dreamed that the gas cooker had exploded in the flat in Battersea, and body matter was scattered in generous lumps all over the walls and floor. I dreamed that when I shut my eyes the scene disappeared, and when I opened them again there was the mangled metal and the bits and pieces. So I must have been in there somewhere, but I couldn’t see myself.
They sent me to Coventry, in that quaint phrase. They didn’t speak to me. When I went to kiss my mother good morning, she gave me her hand with slow reluctance and did not raise her eyes. Usually she sat with me while I ate breakfast (she did not eat in the morning, an old habit), but this time she remained in her chair in the corridor, from where she commanded a view of all the comings and goings in the flat. Rukiya stayed in the kitchen while I ate, and left without a word when I went there with my dirty dishes. There was no greeting nor the habitual struggle over who should wash up the dishes. It was time for a walk. I didn’t think I could face an encounter with the grandee in his threadbare emporium. So I went to the Kenya Airways office to confirm my flight, wandered the shops for a few presents and considered calling on the Prime Minister to offer him my congratulations. I didn’t care.
I walked on to the old golf-course by the sea, where British officials stranded on the island on call of duty used to play, and then retire to refresh themselves in the clubhouse, and hold forth on their plans for improving the condition of their charges, and plot and plan and continue their polite affairs. The clubhouse had been a wooden building raised on stilts, with a veranda running all round it and green straw blinds that were let down in the evenings to keep out the gaze of the curious. In the day it had looked like a humble wooden house, but in the evening it had glowed with the glamour of Empire, with the exclusiveness of colonial mystique, of abrupt dismissals and stern looks, of secret rites and strange foods, and of loud distant conversation and sudden ostentatious laughter. It had burnt down mysteriously after the uprising, and the pile of ashes and the blackened spurs lay on the ground for several weeks until the wind blew them away or people came to collect the wood for their cooking stoves. The golf-course was now several football pitches, an informal conversion that had required nobody’s permission or funding, as was evident from the variety of ramshackle goalposts and corner flags. On the beach, fishermen’s outriggers were drawn up under the cypress trees, in which hosts of crows wheeled and bickered and lingered for the fish offal which the fishermen discarded on the sand. In the time of the English, the beach had been a genteel promenade where the prosperous drove up in their cars and walked along the sea to be near their masters. And at night other cars would drive up and cut their lights, and sit in silence for hours.
A thatched awning on a dozen posts now dominated the site, under which an outrigger was in construction. The construction of an outrigger is crude technology, if you ignore the historical eye that is needed to locate the right tree to be felled, its transportation, and the brawny and sharp-witted business of hollowing it out and making it float and respond to the master’s guiding hand on the tiller. I was prepared to ignore all this as I looked around that mysterious trysting place we had loved to creep up to to anticipate the next scandal, and lamented its transformation into a ditch where crows and fish offal traded unequally. But this was postcolonial reality, where the living space of the people was appropriated from the marginalized élite who had reserved it for their dramas of sensibility – and the people fished and crows ate offal.
Don’t mistake me. I ate the fish, and crows had their uses, though I used to have nightmares about their piercing eyes when I was younger. I lamented that it was this old beach with complicated memories which had to be appropriated for them to get real. It was there, creeping up on a silent car that when you got near turned out not to be so silent, that I heard the Rolling Stones doing ‘Satisfaction’ for the first time, and saw my Chemistry teacher in an undignified clinch with an unknown woman (at least, unknown to me) who was to be his fifth wife. These things matter, although there is no gainsaying postcolonial reality. It was not just littered beaches that made me lament, not just mis-remembering what seemed a more orderly way of conducting our affairs than the reckless self-indulgence of our wordy times, when we can chat away every oppression and every dereliction, not just a nostalgia for the authoritarian order of Empire which can make light of contradictions by issuing dictats and sanitation decrees, but because as I wandered over the rubble of the damaged town I felt like a refugee from my life. The transformations of things I had known and places which I had lived with differently in my mind for years seemed like an expulsion from my past.
I returned to the house and went to seek out Uncle Hashim. He was sitting in the shop as was usual at that time of day, and for once he had no visitors, just the young man who ran the shop for him and whom I had hardly ever heard speak. Uncle Hashim accepted my greeting casually, and then looked out to the road for a long moment, his face hard and set, but his eyes brimming with hurt. He spoke suddenly, intimately, coming from a long distance. ‘At times like these, memories come back to cause me pain,’ he said, his face still turned away from me.
At times like what? It was what he had said to Akbar, and he must have liked the sound of it. But his misery was shocking. I had been used to seeing him impassive and calculating, always capably managing, even with the valium and the hollow days of his decline. Look how his day was ordered, how a morning in the shop was followed by prayers and lunch and a spell at the transistor, followed by a siesta and another spell at the transistor, back to the shop until early evening and then back to the transistor. His life was full of chat and worldly concerns, full of global speculation and rumours of intrigue and state treachery. He hardly had time in this unforgiving engagement with the world of affairs for frivolous conversations with his household. And now there he sat, anguished and old, tortured. It was shocking. He glanced over my shoulder at the young man who was probably lounging against the counter with his habitual look of ostentatious discretion, and said Coffee with the brusque discourtesy he reserved for employees and the beggars who came whimpering for pennies at the shop door.
‘You remind me of your father,’ he said, looking at me for the first time.
‘Ma said I look nothing like him,’ I said.
‘Not in looks. In the way you are both afraid,’ he said, glancing briefly into my eyes to check that he had hit home. ‘When your father left here, it was something incomprehensible. May God treat him with mercy. What was he running away from? Like a thief or a killer. It was not an act I could understand. I don’t think there was something he wanted out there, wherever he ended up. I think he just wanted to run away from his life, from us, from here. He could not imagine the hurt and shame he was leaving behind. And now you have done the same. For years you have been silent, I never thought I would see you again. Half a lifetime you have been away. Your return made your mother happy. It made her think that you would marry and be part of us again. But now you tell us that in all this time you have been livi
ng this life about which you have told us nothing. And now you are getting ready to run again, leaving us with the shame and disregard that will come from the miscalculations we have made.’
I could not help it. I began to sob. For the father I had never known, and for his desperate escapade which had filled everyone else with pain. But mainly I sobbed for myself, for the shambles I had made of my life, for what I had already lost and for what I feared I was still to lose.
Uncle Hashim broke into a broad grin, which in a moment grew into chuckles that shook his feeble body and made him struggle for breath, laughing for the sheer disdainful joy of seeing me abject. It helped staunch the tears, anyway. At your age, he said through his smiles. I was always prone to tears, from childhood. When we first moved to the flat after my mother remarried, I was ready to turn liquid at a long look from Uncle Hashim, or I would sometimes burst into tears just standing in front of him while he talked to me wisely about something or other. I suppose that was what he meant, and maybe it was the memory that made him laugh so much, that and the irresistible pleasure of drawing blood. In recent years I have learnt to sob, though not usually sitting in a half-empty shop by the roadside while being lectured on my cowardliness, more often sitting in the flat while words and memories of words jostled and rattled my feeble defences. Anyway, it was good to see him looking cheerful and sipping his coffee with some relish.
‘You’re lost now,’ he said. ‘Not only to us, but to yourself. Just like your father.’ It was obvious he liked the comparison, and perhaps he had been expecting to make it all along, whatever I might have said or done. I didn’t care. People like Uncle Hashim can say things like that, even if they are true. They can store them for years, hold on to them and let them harden and solidify, until the moment arrives when they can be delivered as they had been intended to, to crush a bone or bruise the heart. So I waited for more. That’s what I do. I’m a waiter. And I know that when hard words begin, there are always more crowding just behind them.
One of his cronies turned up before he could say more, a tall, slow-moving old man who carried his belly ahead of him as if it was something separate from himself. He had been a stalwart of the other party before the uprising, a joke figure in the area in the partisan politics of those days. Children had shouted abuse as they ran past his house, and on one occasion the outside walls, which were always covered with mocking graffiti, were smeared with human faeces. But after the uprising he was appointed chairman of the local party branch in a now one-party state, to rule over an area which had always voted massively for the government so forcibly ejected. He had a direct line to party headquarters, and to many other places besides. He was rumoured to be a personal friend of the President, the founding beast who had laid out his cock on a table to reassure the greybeards. It fell to him to translate and put into operation the government’s decrees – to some extent, anyway, because everyone had his say in those days, and every thug had a gun. And all of a sudden he was being called over to come and have a coffee as he passed a café, and children fell silent as they hurried past his house. He remarried and moved to a larger house, and grew a pot to add stateliness to the new distinction in his life. But he was no longer young when all this happened to him, and he never quite carried off the belly. And instead of disdaining the invitations to coffee as transparently stoogy and grovelling, he seemed pleased to be made welcome. It was no surprise to find when I came back that he had become one of my stepfather’s oldest friends. It was exactly what you would expect of Uncle Hashim.
He came by every day to bring news from high places. Even though he was now too old to be involved in the daily business of running his fief, he was still the branch chairman, and could rescind whatever he wanted to. He had become the notable of the area, and people went to him as they would to a wise and generous autocrat. To see the dignity of his walk and his address, it was impossible to imagine the days when grown men shitted into buckets and then transported them in the dark, giggling and smirking, to smear his walls while he slept.
He sat down heavily and began to tell the latest on the Prime Minister’s crisis. ‘It will be on the news tonight, he’s definitely out,’ he said with satisfaction. To the branch chairman the Prime Minister was a self-righteous meddler. He wanted to make rules about everything, interfere with everybody’s business, and as for allowing the establishment of other political parties, where was the need for it? Everyone was happy and satisfied, and what could not be helped could not be helped, and had best be left with God. Tell me, Bwana Hashim, tell me. What will other parties bring us that we don’t have already?
‘Funding,’ I said. I couldn’t help it. I would rather have sat in dignified silence, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Democracy is a big thing at the moment, and I am sure multi-party elections will bring more funding.’
‘It’s true,’ the branch chairman said thoughtfully. ‘That’s what the Prime Minister says and you can see the sense of it. But these parties will take us back to the bickering of the old days, when for so long now we have had nothing but peace and prosperity.’
It’s true we have had to kill a few thousand hooligans, and imprison other thousands, and rape and mutilate several dozens, and force a handful of women to marry some old codgers, and we don’t allow anyone to so much as fart without permission, humiliation and bullying, let alone vote, travel or speak the sedition that is in their minds. But unlike before, now everyone is in the same situation. Everybody is short of food, everybody is short of water, everybody has to creep and crawl for the smallest thing, and every school has no books and nobody has two pennies to rub together, and of course, everybody’s toilet is blocked – except for the senior officers of the government who have to keep the country running, and obviously they couldn’t do that if they were hungry, thirsty, poor and unable to use a clean toilet.
The branch chairman looked at me through blearily swollen old eyes, eyes that had seen contempt turn to trembling acquiescence, and waited for me to make noises of agreement. He felt the absence, I did too. His greatness needed them, the moment itself needed them. After an instant of this quivering silence, he twisted his head and spat with sudden violence into the road. Then he turned back to me, grimacing as he swallowed, and asked Do you understand? – still wanting homage and submission from me. Somehow I managed to prevent myself from nodding, but I saw as he brooded over my silence that it was flabby devils like him as much as the armed thugs, and the Permanent Secretaries and the Honourable Members of the Council for the Redemption of the Nation, and the Prime Minister and his Secretary, and the rest of the crowd of cannibal louts, who turned our lives into chaos and beggared our societies without clue or purpose. Why do I say our societies when we are all so different, from Timbuctoo to Algiers to Havana to East Timor? Because in this we are all the same, that we keep silent and nod – for fear of our lives – while bloated tyrants fart and stamp on us for their petty gratification. (I knew I’d be catching a plane in a few days. I didn’t care. But that didn’t mean that I would be able to get that our from my biography.) In the meantime, the moneybags who rule our world can continue with the anguished business of watching our antics on TV, and reading about our ineptitudes and murders in their newspapers, secure in the knowledge that a small donation here to fund a translation project and a modest shipment of arms there will keep the plague in the thirsty borderlands of their globe and away from their doors.
Uncle Hashim and his friend returned to their conversation about world affairs: the Prime Minister’s crisis, a new shipment of rice that had just arrived, the bizarre murder in a block of flats in Mchangani, the derailing of an express train in India, Gaddafi. Just as I thought it was time to withdraw from this discussion of weighty matters, and perhaps go and call on the Prime Minister with my condolences, the branch chairman turned to me. ‘How much longer will you be staying with us?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been away such a long time.’ I told him I would be going in a couple of days.
‘He had some n
ews for us yesterday,’ Uncle Hashim said to the branch chairman. I never thought he would. He had always been such a decorous, secretive man that I never thought he would talk about Emma. Perhaps the valium was having an effect after all. ‘It turns out that all these years he has been married to an English woman.’
‘Then you’re lost,’ the branch chairman said without any hesitation, making Uncle Hashim smile with recognition. ‘You’ve lost yourself, and you’ve lost your people. A man is nothing without his people.’
It was as if they had rehearsed it. I thought of saying that I wasn’t married to Emma, but I didn’t. I didn’t care. At that moment I didn’t think I was too worried about losing my people, if that meant those two cruel old men. I nodded meekly and turned to go just as the branch chairman began on the tragedy of mixing blood. I thought of Amelia and felt shame for the meanness with which they thought of her, even in the abstract. I thought of Emma and my heart sank with a sense of unending vulnerability, and my head churned with exhausted ructions. I realized that I had been hoarding the little things that had befallen me to tell to her, frivolous little things which can only be spoken about intimately. Not the curses and the accusations, You’re lost, you’re lost, but a ludicrous conversation I had had with the airline clerk earlier in the day, or the first time I walked again along the sea front on my first morning and felt the strong warm breeze blowing in from the sea, or a chance meeting with an old teacher who remembered me but whom I had no memory of.
Admiring Silence Page 19