While he was in Ireland Sir John was knighted, along with every other Old Etonian in sight, by the English commander the Earl of Essex, who by this act of arrogation pissed off Good Queen Bess good and proper. So Sir John was banished to the West Country again, where in due course he wrote his ingeniously boring book about toilets. He thought it would cheer everyone up and make the Queen think him smart, but it didn’t. And no one thought much about his plan for the flush with a trap either, or gave any thought to the U-bend or the S-parallel for generations. So that was that for another 200 years, back to buckets and chamber-pots and squatting in the nettle-bed, until another Englishman came along with an improved plan. Is it not a relief that it was an Englishman? He was a watchmaker called Jenkins and he lived in Stepney, which as it happens was a salubrious suburb in those days. Thus was the dawn of civilization. Of course, this was only the beginning, and a great many problems and improvements lay ahead before plumbing became what it is today. And it wasn’t ail pipes and lead poisoning, which is another subject altogether, but how to transport water, keep the clean from the dirty, keep the water tables from mingling, etc.
Why this interest in plumbing? It should be obvious really, but I’ll say it anyway. Because I don’t want to talk about Emma, and I’m not going to. When I’ve done my course on plumbing I’m going to offer my services to my homeland, strictly on an expatriate salary, so we can sort out those blocked toilets. I had thought I would go and see the Prime Minister again and say, OK, I’m ready, let’s get rid of the stuff, and he would rise and embrace me and we would go off to the renovated colonial hotel and celebrate my return to the fold, and put our umbrellas in the elephant-foot stand which Akbar would have found hidden in a disused store, or which would be a tasteful replica he had had made in London. But unfortunately the Prime Minister has gone after all. They locked him up for insulting the flag. One of his security guards saw him standing on his veranda wearing a flag as a loin cloth, and so, despite his wiliness and his ranting displays, off to the jakes with him.
Ajax. Age akes. Age breeds aches. I could have told her ages ago – that my father was Abbas and he left my mother before I was born, that he probably came to England, that Uncle Hashim was really my stepfather, my benefactor, that my father’s sister was really Bi Nuru, and that I made up the whole pack of lies which was my life with her because I could. I don’t even know if that is true, or if there are more complicated reasons for what I did which I do not have the wit or energy to analyse. Emma would have known how to put everything more clearly. If that sounds evasive then it will have to stay that way until I can raise the calories to return to it. I don’t care.
I try to think of her as dead, gone, extinct, but I am defeated by everything I see. The simplest show of affection between two people makes me want to cry out with bitterness at my loveless life, at the way she has taken almost everything away, so cruelly. I find myself constantly replaying our recent lives together, to see if that will deliver me to where I am now. I don’t know how I’m going to get through to the other side. I have to kill the person I know myself to be so as to find this other one I am going to become. She left and I so wish she hadn’t. How could she do it? Did I really fail her that much? I think it was her intelligence that made her impatient with me. As she became more sure of her powers, she became less tolerant, and all I could offer was a slow-witted, vegetable adoration. Now that she’s gone, I find myself living in England for reasons I no longer know. And sometimes I wonder whether this is what happened to my father Abbas, and whether I should make more effort to locate him. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Then what would I say to him? How has it been for you after all this time, Dad? Was it worth it?
Water is a gift to the dead. The soul of the dead is parched with thirst for life and craves to drink the water of memory, but can only drink the water of oblivion. This is an Orphic conceit. Yet what matters is not being dead. This is another place where plumbing comes into things.
I want to stop now, but there are still one or two other small matters to relate. This is not a fairy story, or a confession, or a tract of redemption, resolution or sublimation, and I am happy to concede that what I think I understand is overcome with dispute as I soon as I put it into words. Words are like that. Pregnant, sly, slippery, undiminishing in their rereadings as they make their ritual voyage into memory.
I meditate on my father Abbas. I like saying his name to myself. I meditate on the callousness, or the panic, or the stupidity that could have made him act with such cruelty. Is he perhaps living two streets away from me? Have I passed him by in the street, in the supermarket? I imagine him, in his sixties, sitting alone with his silences.
Amelia left six weeks after Emma. I don’t know what else I expected. I suppose it was predictable. At first she was as devastated as I was, and we sat weeping together evening after evening like lost souls. We stayed up until all hours, drinking and playing music, and talking tougher and tougher as the booze worked on us. Then she got a grip on her life, somehow. I think it was her friends who helped her do so. And she had things to do, people to see. Then after those first few weeks she watched me as I sat by the bottle every evening (I’m still sitting beside it) weeping at my loss and my buggered heart and my shattered life, and she could not disguise her exasperation and her derision. In the end she told me how contemptible I was, how much I disgusted her, and that she was going to move in with a friend who had a flat in Camberwell. It was the old Amelia, not the excited daughter who had wanted to be taken to the dark corners of the world because she belonged there through her father, not that romantic interlude in her life, but the hard, metropolitan creature who could take everything in her stride, and who despised my blunderings through life with genuine hatred. She rings me now and then, and one day she will come and see me, she says. It will be nice to see her.
Only one more thing. I did not want another twenty-year silence, so I wrote to my mother after Emma left. I wrote abjectly, expecting triumphant lectures, but instead I received a heartbroken reply from Akbar, dictated by my mother but with his commentary on her anguish and (as he put it) that of your whole family at the devastation that had befallen me. It was not what I thought any of them would say, after all the disapproval, though I don’t imagine that the Wahhabi grandee allied himself with this general goodwill. He had the world to think about. Come home, Akbar said, as he closed his letter. But it wasn’t home any more, and I had no way of retrieving that seductive idea except through more lies. Boom boom.
So now I sit here, with the phone in my lap, thinking I shall call Ira and ask her if she would like to see a movie. But I am so afraid of disturbing this fragile silence.
About the Author
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of seven other novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and The Last Gift. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.
Also available by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Dottie
A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and cultural past
Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history – or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain.
At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Building on her fragmented, tantalising memories, she begins to clear a path through life, gradually gathering the confidence to take risks, to forge
friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.
‘Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain’
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‘A captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss’
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http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dottie-9781408885659/
Pilgrims Way
An extraordinary depiction of the life of an immigrant, as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England
Dear Catherine, he began. Here I sit, making a meal out of asking you to dinner. I don’t really know how to do it. To have cultural integrity, I would have to send my aunt to speak, discreetly, to your aunt, who would then speak to your mother, who would speak to my mother, who would speak to my father, who would speak to me and then approach your mother, who would then approach you.
Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination. He composes wry, sardonic letters hectoring friends and enemies, and invents a lurid colonial past for every old man he encounters. His greatest solace is cricket and the symbolic defeat of the empire at the hands of the mighty West Indies. Although subject to attacks of bitterness and remorse, his captivating sense of humour never deserts him as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England.
‘Exile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is astonishing, superb’
Observer
‘His intricate novels … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide’
Guardian
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pilgrims-way-9781408885697/
Memory of Departure
Vehement, comic and shrewd, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel is an unwavering contemplation of East African coastal life
Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar’s family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape.
The arrival of Independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful of an exodus of its most able men, discourages young people from travelling abroad and refuses to release examination results. Deprived of a scholarship, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.
The collision of past secrets and future hopes, the compound of fear and frustration, beauty and brutality, create a fierce tale of undeniable power.
‘Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth’
The Times
‘Gurnah is a master storyteller’
Financial Times
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/memory-of-departure-9781408883983/
First published in Great Britain 1996
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Abdulrazak Gurnah, 1996
Abdulrazak Gurnah has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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