Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘What did she think about it?’ he asked gently.

  ‘She was appalled!’ she said, her voice still hinting at the shock she had felt. ‘She was quiet at first and then told me to stop being so stupid. After a while she began to say the most grotesque things . . . I had no idea she thought like that.’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘Why should it surprise you?’ he asked. ‘Nothing surprises me about the racist confusions of the European mind.’

  ‘Not that!’ she said, shaking her head urgently. ‘I expected that. I expected her to feel revolted, to say something harsh at first. For all I know I might have said the same things myself in her place.’ She wanted to explain, to be truthful. She waited to see if he would say anything, if he would take offence.

  He waited, showing neither shock nor surprise. He wondered if she had considered that he might have asked himself what he was doing meeting someone like her. The thought made him smile. He knew the answer to that. But he also knew the pleasure he took in her was real, urgent . . . not something he would leave at the mercy of the sanction that other people felt they could give him. He wanted her to feel like that too.

  ‘I just said that I was going . . . to see this man I’d met recently. She told me to take care,’ Catherine said, smiling. ‘Then I told her that you were black. She asked me why I was going out with someone black, as if I was doing it deliberately, as if it was a principle. I said that I liked you. That you were like no one else I had ever met. She didn’t say anything . . . and then exploded with all these things. She called me disgusting, told me I’d always been filthy. She’d never said anything like that before. And then afterwards I thought I must have missed something, I must’ve misunderstood. What could’ve possibly made her think that? I only went out with one boy all the time I was at home. Why did she say all that?’

  He realised what it was that had wounded her – the opinion her mother had of her. Because she had answered her own question about him, he thought. She came to see him, and spoke to her mother about him, no less. Catherine turned round again to look for the waitress. The café was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, whole families crammed into impossible nooks and crannies. Daud’s frantic waving attracted their attention as well as that of the waitress. She hurried over to take another order of coffee. ‘I mean I don’t tell her anything about any men I see,’ she said.

  Who do you see? You disgusting, two-timing her. Who? It was the wrong place to be talking about these things, he thought.

  ‘Does it surprise you that she was distressed?’ he asked.

  ‘No, of course not. Well, I suppose I hoped she would surprise me. But it was the things she accused me of.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s something . . .’ he said hesitantly, conscious of the heads that were within earshot of them.

  ‘Something bad at home. That’s what I thought. She can’t mean to say this. Something horrible’s happened. That was my first thought.’

  ‘Ring again and find out,’ he said, squirming to end the conversation.

  ‘She would’ve told me,’ she said, her voice falling suddenly into self-pity. ‘She seemed so pleased at first.’

  ‘You should’ve told her I’m a Muslim,’ he suggested. ‘That would have reassured her.’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t know why I said anything. I always thought she liked to pretend that I never did anything like that, she had saved me from all that. Maybe that’s what is upsetting – after worrying about hiding these things from her, it turns out she thinks of me as some kind of a . . .’

  ‘Slut!’ he pronounced with relish.

  ‘I should’ve said that I was going to spend the weekend with this poverty-stricken black man who is a Muslim as well,’ Catherine said, leaning back to allow the waitress to put a pot of coffee between them. He was filled with pleasure. She did not care if the waitress heard.

  ‘Named after the slayer of the Philistine Goliath,’ he said, gently tapping his chest with a fist.

  ‘They would have been down here to prise me out of your clutches by the morning,’ she said, laughing and reaching out to touch his hand at the same time. The waitress glanced at them and then retreated with a smile of complicity on her face. ‘My father thinks we’ve become a society that no longer understands restraint, and that we’ll watch ourselves turning degenerate without having the faintest idea what to do about it. He’ll assume that I’m half-way down the slippery slope and come charging over to rescue me.’

  ‘The Colonel! Really?’

  ‘He’s not a Colonel,’ she said, laughing at the memory. ‘But he really thinks that. He has furious arguments with my brother. Richard accuses him of being a proto-fascist, whatever that is. And my father says that anarchy is always preceded by misguided liberalism. And yesterday I heard another explanation. There’s a new gynae house surgeon. He said he was from West Africa but he didn’t say exactly where. Anyway, he came to the ward to examine two girls who were having abortions today. He told me, in front of the two girls, that they were an example of the breakdown of modern western society. He said that we had all become too individualistic, that we had no sense of community any more.’

  ‘And then he asked you out?’ he enquired.

  She flushed with guilt and surprise. ‘Yes, he did. But men are always like that. If you exchange a few friendly words with them they make a pass at you.’

  ‘You should be so lucky!’ he said, grinning while vats of sulphur and envy bubbled in him. Would you like to come to the Yacht Club and catch a bit of community spirit with me? She looked at him as if she was considering saying something but then shook her head. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘To him? I told him that I was seeing someone else. He was very apologetic when I told him you were African,’ she said, beginning to collect her things and sort her bag for leaving. ‘Where do you do your shopping?’ she asked, folding her wrists across the handbag in her lap.

  11

  ‘This,’ he said, pointing to a chipped and grimy door. The brown paint had cracked and peeled in places. He noticed for the first time that a large crevice was beginning to appear in the door frame.

  ‘Is this where you live?’ she asked, the disgust palpable in her voice. She touched the glass in the door as if expecting it to fall off. With a fastidious toe she pressed the spongy weather-guard, and to her alarm felt the rotting wood give way under what was no more than symbolic pressure. ‘You live here?’

  ‘Oh, only for the moment,’ he said, but failed to persuade her to smile. Even as he watched her and felt guilty for his self-neglect, a part of him was doubled up with glee.

  As he let her into the house, the smell of damp and rotting wood was almost overpowering. He wondered if she would gag and choke, but she held on bravely, her discomfiture evident only from a sudden and sharp intake of breath. Her face puckered sneeringly as she looked round his living room. He could see she was becoming hardened, for she released her breath carefully and took several gentle sniffs to test the air. He had cleaned the room earlier and in his eyes it looked quite pleasant. He put down the bag of shopping and invited her to sit. As if determined to demean herself fully in her descent into urban squalor, she sat in the dilapidated, scabby armchair. He stopped himself from moving forward to pull her out of the chair. This is not necessary, he wanted to say.

  ‘It’s a bit small,’ she said with obvious distress. ‘Can I open a window?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said without the slightest sympathy. ‘The window doesn’t open.’

  ‘What do you mean doesn’t open?’ she asked, looking around her again.

  He drew the curtains aside to show her where the nails had been hammered into the window frame. Clouds of dust billowed away from the curtains and hung suspended in the airless room. ‘The window would fall down if you took the nails out,’ he said.

  She rose to her feet, and for a moment he thought she would leave. ‘Show me the rest of the house, then,’ she said.

  ‘You’d imagined something more
comfortable, no doubt.’ He stood in front of her with his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s not as bad as you think, unless you’re used to carpets and wallpaper and things like that. Come and see the rest of it if you want . . .’

  ‘It’s awful,’ she said when they were back downstairs. ‘It’s damp and dirty and stuffy. The furniture looks as if it’s been salvaged from a dump. Finger-marks down the walls! The kitchen and the bathroom are just too squalid for words.’

  He watched her fury with silent amazement, sitting at the table with his hands folded between his knees. He made to protest but was silenced by her hot, angry glare.

  ‘How can you live like this?’ she asked while his face quivered with sudden annoyance. ‘You could at least clean the fucking place. That would be a start! Or have the window fixed so you could get rid of that putrid smell.’

  He took her on another tour, this time pausing over the places that were the sources of the interesting smells: the damp bricks in the kitchen, the spongy bathroom and the rotting floor-boards everywhere. He conceded that the kitchen and bathroom in particular left something to be desired, but he vowed to attack their darkest corners with the most powerful chemicals known to man, to root out the filth and putrescence wherever it might lurk. Had she noticed the bedroom, though? Was it not large and adequate? Really quite a surprising room! When they went back to the living room, he noticed that she chose the other chair, glancing at the diseased one with a suppressed shudder. She looked at the walls with an appraising eye, and he wondered if she was planning his colour schemes for him.

  She asked if she could get dinner, which disappointed him. He had wanted to cook for her, to show off. He went out to buy a bottle of wine while she unloaded the shopping. When he returned he found her cleaning the cooker. Strands of hair were plastered to her sweaty brow, and dirty splashes stained her blouse.

  ‘What’s in that cupboard?’ she asked.

  ‘A kind of mould,’ he said with a tinge of fear. ‘I can’t stop it growing. Sometimes in the middle of the night I get this nightmare that it’s come out of there. I don’t know what it is but it’s grotesque. I can’t touch it . . . like huge flaps of white meat, fluted and filigreed on the underside, growing in layers and multiplying all the time.’

  ‘Yes, I saw,’ she said, echoing the awe in his voice.

  He opened the wine and fortified himself before he began to help her. He cleaned the sink while she battled with the cooker. She encouraged him with kisses and praise. He made trouble often, protesting and complaining about the futility of what they were doing, so that she would keep encouraging him. When she went back to the kitchen later to check on the food, she was disappointed that their efforts had not made the kitchen look much cleaner than before. He felt vindicated.

  ‘How long have you been here now?’ she asked. ‘In England, I mean.’ They had washed up the dishes and put them away, and Daud was beginning to think that the time had arrived to give lust its head, to invite it to open its innings. He watched her slide into the lumpy settee with the grace of a svelte sophisticate, and saw her wince with surprise.

  ‘Five years,’ he said. What a long time it had been. It seemed a time of such misery, even though he reminded himself of this or that event that had given him pleasure. He had stood by the mill, he remembered, and watched his soul rushing through the cogs and the wheels, and wondered what would come to save him. It was also there that he had kissed his Swiss girl goodbye and wrapped her round with his flimsy mac on the chilly September of her departure, promising to write to her every day. She had clung to him with gratifying abandon. While tears poured down her face she swore to love him for ever. A man in a leather jacket and with an Afro hairdo of serious proportions had walked past this dishevelled scene, glaring at him and raising a fist as both a salute and a rebuke.

  ‘It doesn’t seem so long,’ she said. ‘I would’ve thought you’d been here longer.’

  It was also there that the car had stopped to disgorge him the morning after the booze-up in the historical grounds of a stately home. How had he got there? They had lit a fire in an old quarry and spent a reckless night smoking pot and singing folk songs which meant nothing to him.

  ‘Do you miss your country?’ she asked.

  He sat beside her on the uncomfortable settee and caressed her face with both his hands. She drew nearer to him and then fell heavily into his arms, murmuring endearments and leaning on him. The warmth of her body and her breath made him growl softly with pleasure and excitement. She reached for his face with her hand and pulled his head down. She kissed him violently, roughly, muttering small sounds in his mouth. He held on to her, surprised by her passion.

  ‘I missed you all week,’ she said.

  He whispered to her that he had put clean, fragrant sheets on the bed. She smiled and shut her eyes, then held her hand out to him, inviting him to lead her upstairs. They lay on the bed exchanging caresses. Before long he found himself in sole possession of two handsome and stupefyingly soft breasts. This calmed him, and he settled down to his new toys as if he would never tire of them. She had to nudge him in the end, demanding his attentions elsewhere. She grumbled when he forced himself to stop moving, but he had to wait for his shredded nerve-ends to lose the intensity of sensation. Anxiously she asked him if he had . . . if he had. He answered her no and began again, but he knew that for his vainglory he would be unable to hang on. She held on to him while he shuddered and rocked. For a long time after, she would not let him move, her arms tightly wrapped across his back. In the end, laughing at him a little, she pushed him off.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said as he threw himself on his back.

  ‘Later,’ she said. She rolled over towards him and curled herself into his arms, stroking his damp flesh.

  ‘I should’ve played a few defensive strokes first,’ he said drowsily. ‘Up and down the line instead of charging like that.’

  He felt himself beginning to fall asleep but she started to talk. He dozed off for a second until she noticed and shook him awake. The drowsiness abated when he made himself sit up, turning to look at her and stroke her face, incredulous at her beauty. She showed him the mess they had made of the room and he grinned with satisfaction. The mess testified to their great passion, he suggested. She smiled pityingly. ‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said and got up to switch off the light. When she returned, she lay on one elbow beside him, tormenting him with conversation while he pleaded with her to go to sleep. In the end, she too became tired and drew herself close to him. He asked her if she was all right, and she mumbled something which he did not really hear.

  In the morning he woke suddenly, roused from deep stupor. The memory of Catherine came surging at him with the clarity of a vivid dream. In the grip of enchantment, he felt for her body beside him but no one was there. His hand, though, ran over the warm hollow where her body had lain, and he saw their clothes still scattered across the floor as they had left them. He smiled smugly and sank back to sleep. When he woke up again, he found her lying next to him, watching him. As his eyes focused on her, he expected her to smile or say something, but she lay watching him, the side of her face cradled in his right hand. He grunted contentedly and reached to shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses four.

  ‘You were snoring,’ she said, her voice breaking his customary morning silence with the unexpectedness of the hum of holiday mornings. It reminded him of waking up on days of Idd and hearing the distant sound of his parents talking and clanging pots and pans as they prepared the pleasures of the day.

  ‘I was putting it on,’ he replied, his voice thick with sleep. ‘Don’t tell me I actually fooled you.’

  She grinned at him. He rolled towards her and she gently gathered him in and wrapped herself round him. He felt himself drifting off to sleep again and did not resist. It seemed only a little while before she shook him awake. He went for her like a bull at first, but she calmed him down with long, lingering kisses. She made him lie back and think to please
her. They made love slowly, pursuing preferences and laughing at failures. He felt as if he had known her for a long time.

  ‘I miss the people I used to know. You asked me yesterday if I missed home,’ he said. ‘I relive scenes that I remember in detail, but I can’t test them against other people’s memories. If I misunderstood anything, if I read something wrongly, I can’t ask for reassurance. And I find that I only remember certain kinds of things.’

  ‘What kinds of things?’ she asked.

  ‘Things that make me feel guilty. I remember saying goodbye to my parents, how my father held my hand as if he did not want to let me go. How my mother said nothing but watched me as if incredulous at my departure. I remember those things. I don’t even know whether she was incredulous, but as time passes these things become true, because I think that’s how she would’ve felt.’

  He was quiet for a while, feeling his way, waiting to see if he should say more.

  ‘I think I understand,’ she said, leaning on one elbow over him. ‘I’d never thought about never being able to go over anything important. Perhaps small encounters escape because they come back too faintly . . . Do you know what I mean? But I do understand about giving people thoughts that they don’t even have. I mean . . . I think I’ve let my father down, and I imagine him thinking of me as a disappointment.’