Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘They should lock up the dirty old man,’ he said about his newest tenants. ‘You don’t know these Indian people, but I’m telling you they sell their own children. They are so poor . . . That’s how an old man buys himself a young girl like that. But tell me darling, what are you doing with yourself these days? You want to come to the pictures? When is your sister coming back?’

  On that Sunday morning, Dottie heard the tread of Sophie’s step on the stairs and recognised it. Her knock on the door came seconds after Dottie had started to rise, smiling with incredulous expectation. As they hugged and kissed with joy, Dottie saw that Sophie had put on more weight. Her face was brightly made up, and she was wearing a tight satiny dress. She had brought her bags with her. Dottie registered all these things without pausing in her questions or her joyful welcome. Later, as they sat talking in the early evening, Dottie saw the marks that the good-time life had left on her sister. She saw the brash smile and the knowing, cynical look that Sophie gave her, and she heard the forced insincere laughter. But she was still the same Sophie, and before too long was curled comfortably in a corner of her old bed, smiling languorously as she listened to her sister. Dottie told her about the new tenants, and the story Andy had told her about them. Sophie made a face of disgust. Dottie teased her by telling her that Andy was always asking after her, which made Sophie smile. Before she went to sleep, as they lay with the lights out, Sophie told her about a man she had met. His name was Jimmy and he would probably come by for her sometime.

  Sophie’s presence lifted Dottie’s spirits immeasurably. She started cooking again, and realised she had been living too much out of packets and tins. The little stove in their room did not allow anything ambitious, but, with Sophie there, Dottie found herself thinking and managing again instead of just consuming whatever was easy or near to hand. They talked for hours in the evenings, finding pleasure in the things they learned from each other. Dottie proudly recounted her time with Ken, holding back many important details, and opting for simplicity as a way of heightening the dramatic impact of her story. She made one or two small changes as well, and felt only a twinge of guilt for doing so. Thus it was she who asked Ken to go in the end because she could not bear his indecisiveness any longer. Sophie sympathised, and quoted Jimmy on the matter. Jimmy’s general advice was simply not to trust a white man.

  He was equally adamant on a number of other issues, Dottie discovered from what Sophie told her. But it was on white men that he was most authoritative. He could smell a white man at twenty paces, even in the dark, through sweat, urine, manure, perfume, you name it. No disguise could fool him. He described this white man’s smell vividly. It was the smell a chicken gave off when it had been drenched by tropical rain, a mixture of steaming feathers, chicken dirt and wet fleas. Being close to Englishmen always made him homesick, reminded him of the rainy season in Trinidad, where he came from. But that smell was nothing compared to the odour an Englishman gave off when he was wet. Sophie could not get the words out for laughing, so Dottie never got to find out for certain what this smell was. She could not be bothered to ask afterwards, but she thought she caught snatches of the word ‘corpse’. Jimmy had views on the smells of English women as well, and on the other qualities they possessed, but Sophie did not pass these on, saying they were too disgusting.

  It was Jimmy who had told Sophie that she was too good to be associating with the low-class women who were her friends, and that she should go back to live with her sister. Low-class people are too envious, he told her. He had been seeing her for several weeks, and had promised to come and call on her in Balham after she moved back. He himself lived in Camberwell, sometimes.

  ‘What do you mean sometimes?’ Dottie asked.

  ‘He has to move around for his work. There’s no point him having a place when he’s not settled,’ Sophie said, sounding defensive, but smiling with a kind of pride for Jimmy’s free life. ‘He’s a welder.’

  ‘Why can’t a welder have a place to live?’

  ‘Oh Sis, because there’s no point,’ Sophie cried, becoming exasperated with the questions.

  In any case, Sophie was only too happy to take Jimmy’s advice and move back in with Dottie. She had been getting tired of the nightly carousing, although she had had some good times too. She said this with a hard-edged laugh that rocked her large body and brought a sudden glint of mockery to her eyes. Some of those friends who came round were mean people anyway, thinking they could live off the little money that others earned from the sweat of their brow. She was still working in the cafeteria in Victoria Station, wiping tables and cleaning floors, and she was not doing all that to have some useless man drink it all away. Why are we black people so useless? she asked. Dottie was taken aback by the question. Are we? she thought.

  ‘Only it wasn’t all like that,’ Sophie said, smiling again at the look of disapproval on Dottie’s face. ‘We had laughs, lots of laughs. And some of the men were really fine. It was just my luck, Sis. I always used to get the funny ones. Until Jimmy came, and he is funny in the best way. He just makes me laugh all the time. He’s fair too, did I tell you that?’ So when he said to her that she was too good for the company she kept, Sophie decided that the time had come to pack in the bacchanal and go back home. The weather was turning cold anyway, and winter in those rooms they had rented in Stepney was not going to be a joke.

  ‘Well, the sister’s here but the brother’s disappeared to God knows where,’ Dottie said, shocked by all the stories but determined not to annoy Sophie with her disapproval. ‘I haven’t heard from him since he left, have you? A couple of months, maybe. I suppose he’ll turn up when it gets cold enough.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure he’s all right, and he’ll have lots of stories to tell us when he comes back,’ Sophie said. ‘I had a dream that he was travelling in other countries. You remember how he always used to go on about America? Only I don’t think it was America I dreamed about. I think it was France. I don’t know why . . . He was in a crowd and he was laughing and having fun.’

  ‘He’s not even sixteen, and no one knows whether he comes or he goes, or what he lives on. He doesn’t go to school, he doesn’t do any regular work. You tell me, how is he going to end up? Even talking to him is impossible.’

  ‘You worry too much, Sis,’ Sophie said, looking unhappy. ‘He’ll be all right. He’s just a bit rough now but he’ll grow up. Maybe this trip will do it for him. You just got to give him the room to make his own mistakes.’

  Dottie said no more, because whenever she did she heard herself sounding like a tired and disappointed old harridan who was getting in the way of other people’s youthful adventures. It did not seem right that Hudson and Sophie between them should have silenced her so unfairly, and should have made her anxieties into something interfering and annoying. When she thought of Hudson on his travels, she did not imagine fun-filled adventures in gay Paree, or in whatever part of France Sophie’s dreams had deposited him, but violence and danger. In her mind she saw him with those other young men, the ones with whom he had languidly strolled the High Road, frightening shoppers off the pavement with their swagger and their noisy mockery. Only now they were desperados, relishing their cruelty, picking fights and pulling knives on people whom they sought to rob and terrify. It made her weak with worry when she tried to guess how Hudson would find money for food, or where he might be sleeping. Sophie considered herself worldly and knowing, and liked to think of Dottie as the innocent one, but all she saw for Hudson were laughing escapades in France.

  In the weeks that followed, the two sisters picked up their lives together with consummate accommodation, making room for each other and taking pleasure in the company. Sophie’s stories were always full of Jimmy, and of the hectic dramas of her friends at the cafeteria. Dottie talked about the things she had learned from the books she read, and from the newspapers and the radio. It was Sophie herself who asked Dottie to talk about these things, making flattering comments about all that her sister knew.
Dottie tried to be careful, telling herself not to get carried away by Sophie’s ignorance, nor to pretend that she knew more than she did. She admonished herself not to show off, but she could not resist the opportunity when it unfailingly presented itself. When the gaps in her knowledge loomed unavoidably, she had no choice but to invent, although she tried to keep her inventions modest and discreet. It did not matter too much in the end, for Sophie took in very little of what was said to her, listening with open-mouthed incredulity to all the varieties of bits and pieces that her sister was full of. Sometimes she laughed with appreciation, admiring Dottie’s zeal in acquiring this knowledge. What is it all for? she exclaimed, impressed by the very purity of what she took to be useless learning. She had no cynicism in her admiration, and could answer with honesty all of Dottie’s repeated pleas for reassurance that she was not being boring.

  Early in November, John Kennedy was elected to the presidency of the United States of America. It was a close-run contest, and the final counting in Illinois gave off a strong whiff of skulduggery and corruption, but none of this diminished Dottie’s pleasure at the young senator’s triumph. She explained to Sophie the significance of this joyous news. She could not avoid linking the new president with stories of race riots and protests that Ken had witnessed and described to her, and that she herself had heard about on the radio. In some way, she connected Ken with the president, she realised, even though she understood clearly that there was no conceivable comparison between them.

  ‘This is the man who will put an end to the suffering of black people in America,’ she said to Sophie. ‘At last they have found someone who will listen to them, and who will help them lift the burden of oppression from their necks. For hundreds of years they have borne this yoke.’

  Dottie’s description of the new president touched something in Sophie, and from then on she venerated him. In Stepney Sophie had rediscovered religion, and she relished its ceremonies and certitudes as she once had during the months she spent in the school in Hastings. The women she had lived with, her goodtime friends, went to church every Sunday morning, dressing up in tight flimsy dresses and large pale-coloured hats. Sophie had been tentative about the style of worship at first. The noise and exuberance, the yelling and hand-clapping in church were embarrassing and nothing like the services she had gone to in Hastings. The words of the songs were familiar, though, and as they started to come back to her she joined in lustily, and before long found herself calling for the Lord’s Mercy as loudly as anyone else, and streaming with perspiration and sin as the pastor lamented the world’s errent state. John Kennedy happened to Sophie while she was still in the after-glow of this bliss, and the language Dottie used to describe him meant that Sophie was able to admit him effortlessly into her gallery of saints.

  Dottie tried to tell her about the Congo as well, and the troubles they were having there. She told her about the man Tshombe, a shameful braggart who was selling his people to the Belgians all over again, just so he could swell himself up with booty and blood. Sophie looked at the photograph of Moise Tshombe which Dottie showed her and made a face at it. ‘He looks so cruel,’ she said. ‘Is this the man who is causing all the trouble in Africa?’ The Congo and Tshombe did not have the appeal for her that Kennedy did, even as a demon to Kennedy’s saint, and she sucked her teeth with emphatic disdain before giving the newspaper back to Dottie.

  In any case, there was something shameful about all the killing and chaos that was going on in Africa. She had to admit the people there sounded completely primitive. Some of the stories she had heard, and the bits and pieces she had seen on newsreels, or the newspaper reports that some of the people at work had told her about were disgusting. She thought of them with a shudder. Nuns being raped in the middle of the jungle. Rebels wearing skins and doing crazy dances, eating their own dirt and swearing to kill white people. All the progress that had been made was being completely squandered: churches burned, plantations looted and neglected. And the picture of the man that Dottie showed her confirmed everything. He was an ugly man with a pointed face, as if he had been hacked out of one of those jungle trees.

  Dottie understood her sister’s superior aversion to her stories about the Congo, and Nigeria and India. She guessed that Sophie’s apparent lack of interest was a deliberate rejection of the places her sister was talking about. Not boredom or ignorance, but a refusal to be put in the same camp as those foreigners with their primitive ways. This did not surprise her, for she too had felt that kind of disassociation at first. She had taken up the country’s prejudices about those places and held them defensively to herself, not wanting to be taken for one of those ridiculous foreigners. The memory embarrassed her – how ridiculous she would have seemed to anyone who understood what she was doing. Later, her own discovery of how complex the reality of those places was had given her more strength. She had found pleasure in learning an abundance of new things about people and times she thought she had already grasped.

  She discovered that her sketch of the world was little more than a tenuous and unstable metaphor, patchily blank and shimmery in the oddest places. What she learned made her more able to resist the feeling of unworthiness that her exposure to the English way of viewing the world had forced on her. She remembered Hudson’s angry tears when she had tried to get him to understand that the natives in those Tarzan movies were not intended to be any different from them. She herself had not understood the meaning of what she was saying, not clearly, and had simply been angered by his boastfulness about his American father. Sharon was dying of something vile, which for all they knew, was acquired from the same shameless American who had used and discarded her, and Hudson was singing of him as if he was a flawless knight out of an antique legend.

  Despite knowing that Sophie was quite satisfied with her picture of the world, Dottie could not resist turning the polite questions she asked her into opportunities for subverting her blissful ignorance. She knew that Sophie was only asking them to make conversation. It all went in one ear and out of the other, she told herself, but she could not curb her tongue. She knew that Sophie was listening really, but more often just did not remember the meaning of whatever it was that Dottie had told her. All attempts to make Sophie find out things for herself, take up reading or listen to the news, came to nothing. She dropped her head with a mixture of guilt and stubbornness whenever Dottie started. She could not read very well as it was, Dottie argued with her. If she did not try and improve . . . Sophie lowered her head and took her sister’s chiding with submission, but she did not read anything and the news was boring. She went to the library whenever Dottie went, to keep her company and because they went almost everywhere together, but she only browsed desultorily through the books. She liked going to the library because it was full of people bent silently over books and papers. She admired that, and thought of it as something wholesome and valuable, quite unlike what she did most of the time.

  In the street, one turning down from the library, there was a church. Sophie looked at it longingly whenever they went past, but Dottie was not interested. It was in a terrace of large Victorian houses, with steps and a balustrade leading to the front door. The downstairs windows had been extended so that almost the entire frontage of the house was glass, which made it look like a shop. Net curtains of impenetrable opacity draped the windows, giving the building a look of an undertakers or a disreputable medical practice. Between the upstairs windows hung a wooden cross, painted white and pinned to the wall by four nails which were weathered with rust. Above the front door was a painted board that declared the building to be The Sacred Church of the True Christ.

  The house to the left of the church had no curtains of any kind on the downstairs windows. At these windows, one on either side of the front door, sat two dark-haired young women. They paid no attention to the street although they were clearly intended to be visible to anyone who might have been strolling past on the pavement. Both women wore dressing gowns or house coats which wer
e only loosely gathered together and inevitably slid open as they saw to their knitting or sewing or whatever they were engaged in which was not visible below the sill. The house had a Bed and Breakfast sign on the steps. In warm weather Dottie had seen a fat, unshaven man in a singlet sitting on the steps, while his slatternly daughters or accomplices dangled their bruised wares out of the open windows. It was now late November, and the air was chilly and damp enough to dispirit more resourceful men than the sweaty brothel-master from unnecessary exposure, but not the scantily-dressed young women from their usual informality.

  Dottie barely glanced at them. On an earlier occasion, she had fastened indignant glares at them, and one of the women had pushed up the sash window and lashed Dottie with abuse for her insolence. She had not understood what the woman was saying because she was unfamiliar with the language she spoke, but she took in the look of fury. Her face had been dark with anger, shining with sweat as she shouted across the street at her. So now she kept her eyes away, but in her mind she pictured their shameless display and their gleaming faces.