There was no question that she was sick again. She was tearful and weak, and had returned to her child-like manner. Even if there were no other grounds than that simple, uninformed diagnosis, Dottie thought, it was good enough to get her out of that pig sty. She had not asked Sophie for any details, but she could well imagine the humiliations she had been forced to submit to. There was nothing very much that she could do with the animal they called Warden. He was probably protected by the whole panoply of the labour laws of the land, but she would deal with Dr Newton in due course. For the moment she helped Sophie pack all her belongings while the latter alternately gasped with fright and spluttered with joy that she was being rescued in such outrageous fashion. It made Dottie cringe with shame for her own neglect to see her sister reduced to such infantile twitterings again.
‘We’ll go to another hospital next week,’ Dottie said. ‘And if we have any trouble from any of these swine, we’ll get the Reverend Mosiah to come along with us. I’d like to see any of them take any liberties with that reverend gentleman.’
Dottie had mentioned the name of the Pastor of the Sacred Church of the True Christ at Balham as a joke, but she saw a look of the terrified sinner cross Sophie’s face.
7
Dottie’s name troubled Michael enough to make him search it out. He came to announce the results, grinning at his own cleverness. ‘I’ve found it. I knew I’d heard it before. Princess Badoura and Prince Qamar Zaman, one of the stories in “A Thousand and One Nights”.’
‘What did she do? Was she brave?’ Dottie asked.
‘It’s a long story, but I remember that the Prince was imprisoned in a tower by his own father, Shah Zaman. The king wanted his son to marry, to secure the succession, but Qamar Zaman said he would only marry for love. He was put in the tower in an effort to bring him to his senses. Only . . . a beautiful genie lived in the tower, and she was so overcome by Qamar Zaman’s beauty that she boasted to other genies and an argument started. Another genie said there was a beautiful princess of China called Badoura, and there was no one in the world to compare with her. So the genies put the two young people in the same bed, thinking that if they put them alongside each other they would be able to judge more easily. Princess Badoura and Prince Qamar Zaman woke in the night and fell in love with each other, but by the morning they found themselves in their separate beds, not knowing who it was they had spent the night with. The story is about how they find each other again. I’m sorry, I’m not telling it very well.’
Dottie made a face but she was really quite pleased. How he must have laughed at the thought, the man who gave her the name, that in the midst of the squalor they lived in should be a child called Badoura, Princess of China. ‘And Fatma?’
‘Fatma was the daughter of the prophet Mohammed, I think, wife of Ali and mother of Hassan and Hussein. Oh, that is a grand name. Dynasties and crusades were named after her,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd name for a christening, though.’
She waited patiently while he pondered, and she took pleasure in the calm persistence with which he searched his mind. In his grey eyes she saw flickers of times passing and saw the flash and fading of tempting moments. ‘It could’ve been Fatima after the shrine, the town in Portugal, where three children saw a vision of the Virgin . . .’ he said uncertainly.
‘Whenever I asked Sharon she said Fatma was the name of a wicked queen who lived in the mountains. She was incredibly beautiful, like me,’ Dottie said with a grin. ‘She loved to sit by the road and pretend to be lost, and lure into her dungeons any travellers who took pity on her.’
‘You go on calling her Sharon when you know her name is Bilkisu,’ Michael said. ‘It must be hard to begin calling someone you know by another name.’
‘It isn’t only that,’ Dottie said. ‘It is the Sharon side of her that I know. Not to call her that, and to give her that other name, seemed like a sort of . . . escapism. As if I would be lying about the way our lives had been.’
She said no more, and perhaps would have left things there but she sensed that was not where Michael intended to leave them. It was not that she minded his insistence, not at all. The gradual learning about each other was the most surprising pleasure of all. There is something sensual about it, she thought, as the awareness arrives that you are on the verge of knowing something new. They were sitting on a bench by a window in his flat, looking across to the Common. Earlier, they had gone to tea with the old lady who lived on the ground floor. Her living room was cluttered with parcels and bundles of clothes. A row of bird cages stood on the floor under the window, occupied by budgerigars in different shades of blue. The old lady mumbled and muttered at them, and told them about the times she had spent in Romania and Russia. She said very little, but the very thought of such a frail and confused creature in those far-away places seemed incredible enough to Dottie. When Michael mentioned the doctor, the old lady smiled. Then her smile grew into soundless laughter, only her body shaking while her face beamed.
‘The garden. He loved that,’ she said, and told them of all the plants and bushes she had put in and tended. Sometimes they needed special soil, and she had to go to the woods or to the Downs to find exactly what she needed. But then she had got tired. Had they seen the garden?
‘Yes, Aunty, we have,’ Dottie said, even though it was still winter and the garden was full of skeletons and sodden evergreens, and the paths were littered with dead leaves and stained with dark mud.
‘Aren’t you tempted now to try and find out about the other name?’ Michael asked. ‘And about the man in the picture who might have been her father. Or to find out if the woman Hawa was her mother. They might still be there, in Cardiff. Aren’t you tempted to go and find them?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s taken me all these years to begin to find myself, to begin to know what to look for. One day I’ll go and look for them . . .’
‘One day they won’t be there,’ he interrupted, frowning a little.
‘Nor will I one day, in the long run,’ she said.
‘It sounds like selfishness to me.’
‘How kind!’ she said lightly, but winced involuntarily at his accusation.
‘What harm will it do?’ he persisted. ‘And it will be terrific to find out.’
‘One day . . . maybe. You’re just being a journalist,’ she said, refusing to give in to him. ‘You want to get to the end of the story. If the condition of our lives is not that moment on the forest path that you described to me, if we don’t just have to wait until the killer finds us, then it must be about what we do, how we live. That’s what matters. I know it’s only part of what matters, that there are others, but it’s the part I’m living now. And if he’s not there when I go to look for him, I can only pray that he’ll have lived his life well.’
Their voices droned on in a conversation that it would take many attempts to resolve. The light outside was beginning to die, and the shadows in the Common were beginning to thicken and solidify under the trees and against the walls of distant houses. Lines of cars dashed busily by in the Avenue and along the main road. Beyond the Common the immense city spread away into the dusk, lit by strings of small lights and the phosphorescence of the nearby river.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of seven other novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Admiring Silence, 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
Admiring Silence
Masterfully blending myth and reality, this is a dazzling tale of cultural identity and displacement
He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in Eng
land matters above that.
Things do not happen quite as he imagined – the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family.
Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life. ‘Through a twisting, many-layered narrative, Admiring Silence explores themes of race and betrayal with bitterly satirical insight’
Sunday Times
‘I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home, the impossible longing to belong’
Michèle Roberts, Independent on Sunday
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/admiring-silence-9781408883969/
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 1990
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Abdulrazak Gurnah, 1990
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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