Admiring Silence

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘That’s a question, not an answer,’ I said smartly, the teacher in me unable to resist such an obvious opportunity, but I said it nicely, with an exaggerated smile and a twinkle in my eye.

  ‘Which I’m just about to answer if you give me the chance,’ she said. ‘Though maybe I should reconsider if you’re going to be so pedantic.’ She was smiling too, and her eyes sparkled. I’m usually slow to take a hint, being naturally generous, but I got the point. It was that pedantic that did it, a terrifying insult for someone in my profession, which is popularly assumed to be prone to that tendency, let alone the feeling of personal unworthiness which accompanies it.

  ‘Everything was strange, obviously,’ she said. ‘Not frightening or anything like that, but strangely quiet and efficient. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing and went about their business calmly. That was my first impression, until I went to school. In Nairobi I had gone to a private Indian girls’ school, where we were taught in English and made to think of ourselves as better than the people around us, the Africans. You know, that they were stupid and strong and dangerous, but had no brains. Big penises but no brains. Our parents thought like that, anyway, but the school made us feel special, gifted and pretty. We thought ourselves as good as the Europeans. Well, not as good as, but more like them than not. I couldn’t have said that at ten, but I know I felt it, and my parents or some of the other people I knew quite probably said something like it. We even spoke in English half the time at home. So in a way – don’t laugh – I thought of myself as kind of coming home.

  ‘You didn’t laugh,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘You should have. When I started school . . . That was terrible. I couldn’t understand a word anyone said to me. There was so much noise and confusion, and the smells. Everybody smelled of sweat and steamed food. Dirty necks all around, creases of dirt, necks lined with rings of old sweat. Can you imagine it? All the other children seemed bursting with energy and . . . Then there were the names, of course. Most of them I’d never heard before: wog, coon, Paki bitch. I’d never heard bitch used like that before. The meanness was shocking, as was the casual violence and bullying. It’s a familiar story I suppose, but I burst into tears as soon as I got home and wailed to my parents that I would not stop until they agreed to return to Nairobi. My elder brother came home with similar stories, and the two of us must have kept them at work for several evenings like that, pouring out our miseries and demanding their sympathy and embraces. It never occurred to me that they would be hurting with guilt, not until much later. I got used to school, obviously, and when my father eventually got a job, we moved to Ealing and I went to a comprehensive, which was much better.

  ‘I don’t think I ever got over those early days, though. Even after all these years I can’t get over the feeling of being alien in England, of being a foreigner. Sometimes I think that what I feel for England is disappointed love.’

  She smiled again, apologetically, as if she had let slip something intimate and shaming. She looked so despondent that I suppressed the scoffing words which rose to my lips. Disappointed love for that self-regarding old bitch, mangy and clueless after a lifetime of sin! Then suddenly it came to me that I understood what she really meant. ‘Were you married to an Englishman?’ I asked.

  She stared at me, her eyes large with surprise. An instant later they moistened with pain. It was only momentary, then she looked away and looked back with a disbelieving grin. ‘How clever you are,’ she said. ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘It was something about the way you spoke of England as disappointed love. It sounded as if you meant more than just the place.’

  ‘I suppose he had come to mean England to me in the years we were together, though I didn’t think that at the time,’ she said, leaning back and tilting her head as if she was looking back into the distance, trying out my suggestion on the life she had lived. ‘I don’t seem to think very much about things when they’re happening to me, do I?’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, and wondered if I had asked for too much. She wondered too, but after a moment she spoke.

  ‘He left. About a year ago. He met someone else.’

  She gave me what was meant to be a brave smile, but I saw her lip trembling and her eyes turning moist again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And then she could not prevent the tears running out of her eyes. She reached into her handbag and dabbed at her face, and after a moment she regained enough control to stop the tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s so long ago, but sometimes it comes back and hurts so much. I’d better not talk otherwise I’ll start again.’

  The airline staff bustled around us again, retrieving trays and offering us more tea and coffee. I could feel the tempo of the plane’s engines changing and guessed we were beginning the descent. I thought I should say something to her about Emma, give her something back for the confidence she had given me, tell her that I felt an echo of that disappointed love in my own buggered heart, but I didn’t know where to begin.

  ‘My father was so opposed to the marriage . . .’ she said. ‘I told him that I was twenty-seven and could make decisions like that for myself. That what I felt for this man was something valuable and I had no intention of letting it go. He didn’t come to the wedding, and forbade my mother from coming, and then he refused to see me afterwards. I knew from my mother that he became so depressed that he just wasted away, and five months later he had another heart attack. I saw him in hospital a few days before he died. In those few months he had turned into a frail and feeble old man. Nobody said it, but it was I who had done that to him.’

  ‘He did it to himself,’ I said, softly, fearing to intrude into her grief, dreading to sound critical in matters that were too intimate for me to offer an opinion. But I don’t think she heard me.

  ‘Then after ten years he left,’ she said. She turned away, her chin cupped in her palm, and gazed out of the window.

  Don’t think that my fat neighbour was inactive throughout all this. I haven’t reported his brave deeds because I thought it would diminish the impact of Ira’s words, and to be honest I was becoming hardened to the smells, while still admiring the range, variety and potency of his production. When Ira fell silent, he released a heavy sigh that hung over our heads in a dense cloud for a few moments and then began to descend. He reached across me and touched Ira on the arm. ‘Armenian,’ he said to her, tapping himself on the chest. ‘I go round the world. Business. South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Switzerland. Everywhere I travel on the plane but not eat meat. Not on the plane. Headache, stomach, no sleep. No meat, not on the plane. My daughter live in Canada. I go there now. Pray to God, He will help. Not pray to cow or monkey, but God Our Father, He will help.’

  Ira smiled her thanks and looked away again. So the geyser had been there all along, sitting in his swamp miasma, listening in, making notes and preparing his little homily about Our Father. As he retreated into his haze of fumes, he gave me another snarling stare, his bulging face working with muttered words. I smiled my thanks too.

  ‘I’m sorry about the melodrama,’ Ira said, leaning nearer and speaking in a lowered voice. ‘I don’t know what made me speak like that . . . to . . . well, a complete stranger. I hate it when people do that to me. It must have been your clever guess. It just caught me completely by surprise.’

  I shook my head. ‘It was my frank, sincere and sympathetic face that did it. Don’t be sorry about that.’

  She composed her face for an instant, her eyes sharp with knowledge. The plane was coming in to land, and I leaned back in my seat, staring ahead and bracing myself. ‘Were you married to an English woman?’ she asked.

  ‘I still am,’ I said. I couldn’t be bothered to explain. ‘And while I was away I began to understand that that is how I think of England. My life with her. And I began to be afraid that we have allowed things to go too far between us, and when I came back she would no longer be there and she would have taken what I know of my life here away with her. It
’s more complicated than that, but what you said about disappointed love sounded familiar.’

  There was no more time to talk as I had to concentrate on preventing my soul from parting company with my body as the plane screeched and whined towards the hurtling ground. We exchanged telephone numbers in the chaos of descending cabin lockers and jostling passengers, all of whom were ignoring the repeated requests to remain seated until the plane came to a complete stop. We parted company as we approached passport control. I reached into my flight bag and could not locate the wallet in which I kept my passport and travel documents. I put my bag on the floor and knelt down beside it for a thorough search, only looking up to see Ira striding away unawares, unconcerned, across the huge Arrivals hall.

  ‘I’ve lost my passport,’ I said to a young Indian-looking woman in uniform who was standing nearby, instructing passengers on which queue to join.

  She was calm and sensible, uninterested in sharing or sympathizing with my terror. They could put me back on the plane, lock me up, throw me into the North Sea. Persona non grata. Illegal immigrant. Asylum seeker. Refugee. She passed me on to a security guard, who also looked Indian, and he marched me to the last counter in passport control. This was obviously where the dodgy cases were brought. As we waited for the immigration officer to finish with the passenger ahead of me (who looked Filipino), the security guard gave me a smile and said everything would be all right. How could he tell? My face was brown, I was on a flight from below the Equator, and I wanted to enter England without a passport. How could he tell that everything would be all right?

  Emma had promised to come and pick me up at the airport, and I thought maybe I should have her called in so she could tell them I was one of the good natives, not a drug-pusher or an arms-dealer or a white slaver. The immigration officer was a man of about thirty, clean-shaven, wearing metal-rimmed spectacles and a light-blue shirt. His full, oval-shaped face was composed and his eyes were unrevealing as he listened to me. ‘I’ve lost my passport,’ I said, expecting him to smirk. Yet another poor rat attempting to squirm into our sceptred isle. ‘I had it on the plane, because they checked it as I boarded the aircraft, but now it’s disappeared.’

  It was as if I had not spoken. ‘Were you travelling with a passport?’ he asked, speaking softly and directly, a man in no hurry, with nothing to hide, comfortable with himself.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What flight were you on?’ he asked, leaning on his elbows and inclining his head slightly, as if this could be crucial information.

  ‘The Kenya Airways flight.’

  ‘What passport were you travelling on?’ he asked.

  ‘A British passport.’

  ‘A British passport?’ he asked. I nodded, and he raised his eyebrows in an ambiguous gesture. Did he disbelieve me or was he just saying oh dear to himself? ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘I lost it, or somebody stole it. I don’t know. Listen, my wife is outside waiting for me. Is there a way of getting word to her so she doesn’t worry?’

  ‘Do you have any identification?’ A library card, a Visa card, my photocopying card for school; everything else was with the passport. ‘Please take a seat, Sir. We’ll have to see if the Passport Office have any record of a passport issued to you.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ I asked.

  He shrugged and went into the office behind him. So I sat, anticipating humiliations and delay, tormented by thoughts of expulsion or worse, worrying about Emma waiting outside, wondering what would happen to my luggage, to my life. I picked up a newspaper, and it was full of news of the murderous fatwa Ayatollah Khomeini had just issued against the novelist Salman Rushdie. He was another admirer of silence, the Imam.

  The young woman I had spoken to first of all came to speak to me. She took my name and went downstairs to make sure my luggage was kept to one side. She found a way to ring the aircraft, and found out that they had found a passport which they had handed in to the security office. She rushed to the office and came back with my wallet. Safe, not an illegal immigrant, not a refugee, not a homeless vagrant.

  I came out an hour after everyone else on the flight had been through, but Emma was still there. By this time she was so worried that I had missed my flight that she rushed towards me and embraced me deeply and long. It was wonderful. In the car I couldn’t stop talking, and touching her, stroking her arm, patting her thigh, feeling her hair. I couldn’t wait for the day to end so we could make love. When we got back to the flat, Amelia and I sat with her in the kitchen as she prepared a celebration dinner, drinking and talking about all the things that had happened to all of us in the last three weeks.

  We were a bit drunk when we went to bed, just nice for a jolly romp, but Emma said she was too tired to make love. After a moment I asked her if there was someone else, and she said yes, there was. Then as we lay there in the dark, she began to talk about him and about all the things that had been happening to her over the last several months. She told me her life was a narrative which had refused closure, that she was now at the beginning of another story, one which she was choosing for herself, not a tale she had stumbled into and then could not find a way out of. Clever Emma. I wish I could unhear what she said, so that my silences are not filled with her words and her voice. She told me how her feeling for me in recent times had changed from a fanged love that made her want to diminish and silence me, into something much worse, so that now she found the thought of being near me or being touched by me unbearable, and had spent weeks of misery dreading my return. She talked for hours, and I lay beside her, disbelieving, afraid to move. When I tried to persuade her, to explain, to defend myself, she stopped me with a torrent of abuse in an idiom unaccustomed to her, and went on pouring poisoned words in my protesting ear.

  At the end of the week she left. May God block her anus with clotted blood.

  2

  I plan to join an evening course on plumbing. I want to get to the bottom of the blocked toilets. I want to know what clogs up the works.

  The course I’m after is at the City Institute of Interior Design, a prestigious institution on plumbing, where they go into this matter in proper style. I say that so you don’t think it’s one of those two-month YTS-type things, or one of the probation-service programmes that are run for ex-convicts, redundant teachers and social workers who need to be retrained to do something useful for society after a lifetime of self-indulgence and false consciousness. On this course I’m after, they go into the technical and social history of plumbing, and study developments in design techniques using computers and up-to-date software, with simulation chambers and video reconstructions of seminal moments in the plumbing process. You don’t go anywhere near water or lead pipes or U-bends or ventilation shafts or any of that sort of sleaze and unpleasantness. It’s a proper intellectual engagement with the subject. Apparently the demand for the course is outstandingly, staggeringly high, so the secretary to the course convener told me on the phone, and there is no certainty that I’ll be impressive enough to be among the lucky ones to be chosen. I guess the one thing in my favour is that I have no practical experience of plumbing.

  Despite this uncertainty about my future, I have been doing some reading. You’d have thought you would be able to go into any library and look up plumbing and find a whole row of well-thumbed books on this vital subject, so intimately necessary to a quiet and contented life, essential, you might say, to civilized life as we know it. Not so, far from it. However, I found bits and pieces here and there to start me off on my studies.

  It was no surprise to discover that the first water-closet with a trap was proposed by an Englishman in the sixteenth century. Sometimes it seems that any idea of any value first occurred to an Englishman, especially (though not exclusively) in the era of Good Queen Bess: cricket, ale pie, the slave trade, table-tennis, colonialism, kedgeree, gravity, sociology, and, not least, the flush toilet. The name of the Englishman in question was Sir John Harington (sometimes spelt with two rs
), and he wrote a whole book on the topic, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, subtitled A Discourse on a Stale Subject (ha ha ha), a philosophical disquisition on moral dimensions in the production and disposal of what we in the plumbing interest call water-borne waste. It is a hilariously unfunny piece of wit, but you still can’t take away from him credit for the fact that he was the first person since the Romans to give the matter systematic thought and to come up with what turned out to be the solution. It had been an ongoing concern for centuries, of course, what to do with it all, but it took an Englishman to come up with the goods. He had plenty of time on his hands, it’s true, but so do orangutans, and you wouldn’t expect them to come up with a plan for a water-closet with a trap. Give the man some credit.

  Like Pocahontas, then, Sir John was around at the time of Good Queen Bess and jimbo Stuart. Unlike Pocahontas, who was only a pretty, savage princess whose destiny crossed with England’s and who died evilly in one of its many swamps, Sir John was a proper English gentleman. The Queen was his godmother, he went to Eton and Cambridge, and he fooled around at Court for a while before returning to his lands in the West Country. These lands, by the way, were given to Sir John’s father by Good Queen Bess’s dad, who had simply taken them away from a troublesome corruptor of souls, a Catholic or something. There Sir John wrote poems and translated Virgil, Plutarch and Ovid, descending on the city for an occasional binge. He went to Ireland as one of the undertakers for the repeopling of Munster after a bit of ethnic cleansing, and returned a dozen years later to fight in a full-scale colonial war. Like I said, a proper English gentleman. He knew Sir John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh and one or two of the other lovers of roasted shoulder of mutton of that time.